Q. Is "eftsoons" used anymore?

A.    No. The word was split in two after the seventeenth century, and we have used only half of it ever since. Remember, they used to say “Zounds!” a lot back then, and a simple expression like “Zounds! I’ll be over eftsoons” tended to confuse “Zounds” with “soons.” So they gradually dropped the “soons” part for about 150 years, saying “Zounds! I’ll be there eft” before hanging up the telephone, even before they had telephones. But in the middle of the nineteenth century, just before Alexander Graham Bell invented the cracker that bears his name, they shifted back over to “soon,” leaving off the s, which they really didn’t strictly have to do because they had dropped “Zounds,” both with and without the exclamation mark, entirely by then. Linguistic change is so skittish.... “Eft,” by the way, dropped the t by animadversion and became ef, the sixth letter of the alphabet.

The Turtle

The turtle lives on and on, years, decades, a century or more in prominent cases, but he is sad. He is clumsy and yet he can swim; doesn’t that cheer him sometime and lift his gloom in some favored seaway or lovely reef? No, he is always melancholy, everlastingly glum. What is so bad that he is so sad?

            

Is it his shell? the burden of his bone-house toted and carried, pulled and dragged wherever he goes, so that it’s a minor miracle he swims or rows at all, schlepping that inescapable surrounding weight all over the place, the bulk bearing down, brute force on his shoulders, heavier and heavier as he grows older. He labors under his leaden dome, feeling the increasing, encompassing freight. Oh yes, it’s his fortress against some attack, but how would you feel if you could never leave home? But: isn’t it buoyant, helping him float? So, it is also his life-saving durable coat, a principal reason that he thrives—and thrives. He may be immured but he endures—and endures and endures.

            

That’s it, it’s not the shell as shell. It’s existence and durance inside the cell. The shell is not the burden, but life itself is, the monotonous routine, repetitious sights, unvarying scenes. After the first hundred years nothing is as wondrous as first appeared—time and time again the tiresome tides, the flooding sea, the ebbing gulf—boring rhythms no sane turtle abides without turning morose.

            

No excitement can relieve the sheer repetition of even disasters and calamities—another eruption on the ocean floor, another duel between marine animals, a beaching of whales that have lost their direction again and again; another iceberg sloughing off a cliff sending it into the lashing main, one more giant island set adrift; another melting, another freeze; another upheaval or huge retrieval—enormities as boring as peace.

            

Do I make himself clear? He craves release. He is sad from over-long exposure. His mournful eye and stern composure say: life’s gift has become this curse I bear.

            

Moral: Above these waters on the land scientists work ceaselessly to extend human life. Woe to woman. Woe to man.

Q. How come frigate birds are found in Montana?

A.     They are male frigate birds, the ones with the big red throat sacks that fill up like balloons during sexual arousal. Some of these birds become so excited, with such great expansive balloons, that they rise straight up, their wings pinned back, floating clear off from the whole Galapagos archipelago. They drift helplessly on upper wind currents all the way to places like Arvada, Montana, where the coolness of the jetstream produces gradual contraction and they waft gently down. A frigate bird was also in North Dakota once, where it was mistaken for a turkey with a goiter and sold to Wisconsin for Thanksgiving.

The Lowly Weed and the Royal Rose

“We are all basically common, you included,” said the chortlewort to the disdainful rose, “so don’t flatter yourself. You’re pampered is why you’re well-petal’d and pretty.”

            

“I beg your pardon,” said the rose, “I’m a Beauty, even a national one. ‘Pretty’ is a put-down word, and it shows you’re jealous.”

            

“Well, we have flowers and florets too,” said the weed, “but not so much of the show-off kind. Don’t you know you’re just a simple sport? Apart from odd, you’re fragile and frail, none of you can stand hard rain or hail, your stems are weak and you lack firm rhizomic foundation.”

            

The Caribou

Professor:      "I am here on the North Slope recording a bilingual caribou, who speaks a unique Eskimo dialect . . . Will you illustrate, please?"

Caribou:         "drzlyfumnpxksrccbggujalkr”

Professor:      "Meaning?"

Caribou:         “One o’clock”

Professor:      "May we have another example?"

Caribou:         “gxh.”

Professor:      "Translated how?"

Caribou:         “The place where two oceans meet in a bay that goes inland through a purple fjord that turns pale and then not so pale and goes on and on, in and out and then narrows somewhere but floods in May and maybe part of June.”

Professor:      "Any other expression, not so nuanced, that we may be interested in?"

Caribou:         “landscapeintruisionsinthenameofcivilizationalloverthespillspoiledplace

                        bypropernounsexxonandbritishpetroleumforimproperpurposes.”

Professor:      "We can almost decipher that."

Caribou:        " In plainer English: 'Men come now and dig dig and pump pump and lay down big pipe and seep and soak the land with poison, and may they go to blazes without taking us with them.'”

Professor:      "Thank you very much."

Caribou:         "You are not welcome."

            
Moral: Enough said.

Lions and Zebras

On the African plains there is a question: why are zebras feeding, heads bent as they browse, relaxed, uncaring, casual prey only to the flies and gnats in the air, while lions loll by, just over there?

            

Here is a lioness lazily walking, and another upside-down, pawing the sky, scratching her back in gravelly sand. And cubs are hilariously, perilously playing with ears and mane and tufted tail of a lordly male they’re bedeviling, but all he does is gigantically yawn and go on grazing. Peace, no domestic or any other kind of violence in this utterly placid scene.

            

Zebras meander and go on grazing, none of them remotely spooked. Some lions even hang in mimosa trees, prominent in their elevated torpor. And the zebras amble at their ease, unabashed, unconcerned, utterly casual.

            

Now, of a sudden, there is a change. Lions draped on boughs begin to clamber down. The great-maned lion who gazed unseeing, blind to the superfluous horde ahead, shakes himself, winks away his drowse. Other lions stir. They are hungering, no longer benevolent, lenient, relaxed. They are undergoing currents of re-animated appetite. And then they see, they see, innumerable zebras as—zebras—now.

            

Here is how: in that intervening placid stage, when they had fed, gorged more than enough, the lions saw their neighbors as a kind of horse, a horse with stripes or—they thought, in such a satisfied state—bars.. Each zebra-horse was in a cell or a cage, inside mobile metal enclosures. Who would charge iron bars, pounce on four-footed moving cars impervious to fang or leonine claw?

            

But then, after a while, a pang of risen hunger gnaws, releasing an efficient hormone secretion, called tapetum, in the iris of the lion’s eye. This whole pride can no longer detect or distinguish the color black—the color of the bars, or stripes. Staring at the zebras, the lions growl, “They are out!”—free for the taking, loose on the plains, in the sudden transforming blink of their eye.

            

The zebras sense something new in the air. They tremble; their skin ripples, quivers, you could say crawls. The adrenalized herd is preparing to flee, to follow old courses of flight and chase. Something in the wind, in the landscape, appalls them. They move in a body, restless, nerve-taut, escaping this place, away from hollow fellowship, feigned peace, false love. They no longer shuffle, they run, they prance, they flee.

            

The zebras never master this recurrent disaster, the sudden change from friend to foe; they tend to forget what they otherwise know.

            
Moral: A friend’s not a friend, tried and true, if half the time he turns on you.