My Natural History (17 page)

19. Sea otter

Enhydra lutris

T
he art of travel is the art of sanity. It’s an exercise in clinging onto your soul in the face of mighty
opposition
. It is not easy: mostly because people who do a lot of travelling tend to be, to a greater or lesser extent, neurotic. You have to be slightly nuts or the constant changes of the travelling life would have no appeal: on the other hand, if you start out slightly nuts, the job of keeping sane is all the more challenging. You have to master logistics, and you have to master personal comfort.

Each traveller has his own method, tested over time until it becomes a matter of curious pride. The
methodology
of travel is an extension of the self, an expression, at least ostensibly, of all the better parts of one’s personality. And unfortunately for everybody else, it is something most
travellers talk about ad nauseam.

Oh yes, always get the last flight of the day out of JFK, and before getting the cab, have an early supper; I always used that place opposite the Lincoln Center. I would check in, requesting an aisle seat, and then consume two Wild Turkeys on the rocks in the bar. Once on the plane, I would pull a hoarded sleep-mask from my pocket and, refusing all food and drink, attempt to sleep until we were told to stow our tray tables and place our seatbacks in the upright position. I could give you a great deal more detail, in the unlikely event that this were of the slightest interest, most of it designed to tell you how fabulous I am and how provincial and inadequate most other people are in
comparison
. For I was, for a while, fairly utterly fabulous: a
Times
-lord, a
Times
-traveller exploring the far reaches of sporting space and time for my newspaper, jaywalking at my ease across the stratosphere.

So I had a special place for my travel documents, and another for my wallet with credit cards, and still another for the accreditation I needed to get into the sporting events. And I would have my carry-on baggage
meticulously
filled with things that could not be trusted to the hold (laptop, binoculars, latterly phone charger) plus
journey
comforts (books, Walkman, tapes, latterly iPod) and on and on and on.

Then to the hotel. You must establish some kind of claim over your room, somehow plaster your name over
its anonymity. If I was staying more than a couple of days, I would always unpack a few things: certainly the books, for I always travel with an inordinate number. Thus I would cruise about the sporting world, the Goldberg Variations on the headphones, a guidebook to the places I was visiting and a raft of heavyweight literature which I read even when people weren’t looking, all the time
worrying
about departure times and connections and
reservations
and taxis and deadlines and the question of being able to write anything at all.

And there would be great days and there would be OK days and there would be days of nightmare: all of them coming in that exaggeratedly high relief that comes with being away from home. And I loved it: I loved the
adventure
, I loved the self-importance, I loved the sport, I loved the writing. But increasingly, that wasn’t enough: because I also loved the birding.

The books were always the heaviest part of my baggage, and I would always take a bird book, sometimes two if I were travelling, say, to the eastern and to the western United States. I remember visiting Foyle’s before my first long-haul sporting trip, and buying for a
wince-making
£
25
A Guide to the Birds of Trinidad and Tobago
by the majestically named Richard ffrench. I went to Trinidad to write the final chapter of a biography of the England cricketer, Phil Edmonds, and to write some pieces for
The Times
. The publishers bought the plane
ticket, the rest I found myself.

The year was 1986; the West Indies team were both dominant and ruthless; the England team were in disarray and on their way to a 5-0 defeat in the series: a blackwash. I reported fragments of this story with some enthusiasm, while the
Times
cricket correspondent, John Woodcock, gave his own measured censure. And no matter how hard we tried, everything kept coming back to the
extraordinary
Ian Botham: brilliant, inspired, impetuous, a man with no self-critical faculties whatsoever, raucous,
pigheaded
, a strident alpha male with a taste for assembling a court of admirers around himself, a hugely likeable man when he turned on the charm, as I was to discover later, but also a man to beware of, always a man with a hint of danger about him.

In those quaint old days, the press and the players stayed in the same hotel. (Not me: I was staying in a guest house up in the hills of Malabar.) Journos and players would mingle amicably in the bar of an evening, in a
manner
unthinkable today. But Botham was never among them. He was the first cricketer to attract the tabloid news hounds on a regular basis, and he decided that the best way to avoid trouble was to lurk in his room with a few chosen companions. This self-incarceration was torment to him, and it didn’t work, either, for he found scandal in the next leg of the tour when the team went to Barbados. (As a point of information, Botham always denied that anything
untoward took place between himself and Miss Barbados, and says that the story that they broke a bed together is untrue.) He was a man oppressed and unhappy, out of sorts with himself and out of touch with his game. At the second Test of the series, played in Port of Spain, Trinidad, Botham made two in the first innings, one in the second. He was out at the moment when England looked as if they might just make a decent fist of things. It was a blow from which England never recovered, in the match and in the series. Botham knew he would be condemned for his
failure
, and as he walked off the pitch, he turned towards the press box and made a mime of a man suspending himself from a noose. Go on then, you bastards, hang me. It was the big story of the day: of the match.

A news cameraman caught this exit on camera and then had the wit to pan towards the press box to capture the stony faces of his judges, all turned solemnly and sadly towards the failed hero. The film was shown on the national news back in Britain, and the nation observed that one journalist was not gazing at Botham. Alas, the camera clearly showed someone hanging out of the press box with binoculars trained on something at 90 degrees to the action. I even remember what bird it was: a crested
oropendola
. You can see it on the cover of the old editions of Ffrench’s book: a chunky black thing with a blazing comet-tail of yellow.

In that moment, I was skewered for ever, caught
exactly as I am for all time: a man stuck between two worlds. Just like the human race, really: one half wrapped up in the affairs of humankind, the other half swept into the wilder world beyond. As a writer, too, I was neatly sliced in half in that instant, as if by a magician: Botham holding one end of the saw and the oropendola the other.

The oropendola set a pattern, and I have followed it throughout my professional life. I would watch sport with delight, but with my eyes constantly escaping, attracted to a movement in the sky. I like to think that my involvement in two wildly different worlds has been an advantage, each side informing the other, taking away the strait and
blinkered
vision of the specialist. But I wonder also if my life as a professional writer has not been fatally split: perhaps a too-wide fascination with too many different things has compromised any ability I might have.

These thrilling but slightly ludicrous collisions between the sporting life and the wild have happened all over the world, and I have always treasured them. I have a long shelf of field guides, comparatively few of them bought for purpose-built wildlife trips. Instead, I have lugged them around in the hope of chance encounters in the midst of all those sporting journeys, in search of moments that would lift the day beyond the human and the humdrum. I remember receiving not one but two phone calls during the football World Cup of 1994 in the United States, after a match at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena: both from
colleagues
on other papers wanting to know what bird it was that had flown so ominously across the stadium with a dead lizard in its claws. I was delighted to tell them it was a red-tailed hawk: disappointing them, I suspect, because they wanted it to be a vulture or an eagle, for this was a match fraught with significance. Colombia, pre-
tournament
favourites, were eliminated after their match against the United States, in which it seemed Colombia didn’t try a yard. Pablo Escobar scored an own goal and was
assassinated
when he got home to Medellin. An augury is, by etymology, a truth revealed by the behaviour of birds.

But more often, the encounters with birds and other forms of wildlife have been pleasingly random. I have always savoured birds that entered the stadium and became participants in the drama: a shikra at the Wankhede Stadium in Bombay; a lesser kestrel at the Stadium of Light in Lisbon; alpine swift over the Olympic complex in Athens; red-rumped swallow in the Bird’s Nest Stadium in Beijing.

Whenever possible, I would seek relief from the
intensity
of travel, the pressure of work and the thrilling
self-regard
of sport, of humankind and of myself, and play truant. I would cease to be a swaggering hard-travellin’ professional sportswriter and become a birder: a nerd, in the eyes of all save myself. I would enter the phone box and willingly emerge as Clark Kent. And so I found
roseate
spoonbill near a rubbish incinerator in Florida, New
World warblers in Central Park, cinnamon teal in LA.

My New York rituals changed. For some years, I had a dizzying if one-sided love affair with New York: oh yes, ten minutes in the place and I was a tough-talking New Yorker myself. I knew special places to eat and drink, remarkable places to buy stuff, fabulous places to walk and hang out. New York became a kind of Venice to me, an impossible, magical and utterly romantic place in which exoticisms could be found at every step. The enthralling bookshops seldom saw me pass them by, and I bought a many books about the wild world: Gould, Singer, Moss, Schaller, Ridley, Tudge, de Waal, Wilson.

But in the midst of this love affair, I found an
intoxication
beyond the 50-block strolls down Fifth Avenue, the hanging-out in East Village, the pavement beers as I watched New York’s endless parade of the gorgeous and the mad. I found an escape: one which both nullified the city and made it still more wonderful. I would get the
subway
. I would take the clanking A train away from Manhattan, away from my hotel on Central Park West, fancying myself no end of an intercontinental adventurer as I did so, a train going either to Rockaway Park or Far Rockaway, wonderful romantic destinations, but I would get off before the line split, at the more prosaically named Broad Channel, and walk through an utterly changed landscape of wind-blasted wooden houses with plastic bags rolling down the street like tumbleweed, a lost sad
place in which you constantly expected to meet Kurt Vonnegut heroes selling storm windows.

The big sky was filled with planes, for this was almost beneath the flight path of JFK. I would walk briskly through these streets, as far, it seemed, from downtown Manhattan as the moon, and make my way to Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, and there I would see birds: the more beautiful, the more remarkable, for their proximity to the city. The refuge covers getting on for 10,000 acres, and more than 300 species have been seen there: and I saw plenty on various visits in various seasons: redstarts,
willets
, night herons, egrets, scaups.

But I remember it best on a wild winter’s day when the wind whistled through the canyons of Manhattan, and leaving the bars, or even my hotel room, seemed an act of folly. But acts of folly have always been something I am good at, and so I walked, trained, walked: and then stumped around the refuge, collar of my townie coat around my ears, relishing the birds, the scenery, the big sky, my own bravery, my own folly. And then, just to reward me, just as I was turning to leave, the dusk came and birds began to fall from the sky: big white birds with black-tipped wings. The snow geese were coming: and my heart rejoiced: bird after bird after bird, a wild world with the most citified city of them all just a train ride away. My crazily split professional life seemed validated in that long moment as the fine plump birds descended
in their fine fat numbers.

Other days, other journeys, other truancies. Ground hornbills on a lightning trip to the Masai Mara, when I had been in Nairobi writing about Kenyan runners. Black kites over a Zen temple in Japan during the World Cup of 2002. Painted stork in a trip to Bharatpur during a cricket
tournament
. Great crested grebes, seen during a break in the cricket at Nottingham. During the Olympic Games of 2008, I even wrote my weekly wildlife column from Beijing. In the three and a half weeks I compiled a list of 13 birds, later amended to 12; I decided later that the barn swallows I claimed were all red-rumped. Even here, even amidst the enthralling craziness and the glorious wall-
to-wall
16-hours-a-day action of the Olympic Games, I found the odd moment to look skywards. The sky was mostly filled with smog and dragonflies and those
red-rumped
swallows, but on two occasions I saw a falcon: a hobby, a dashing and thrilling killer that eats both
dragonflies
and swallows.