Ravings – by Linda J. Clarke

“Ravings” are a series of essays written by my sister Linda J. Clarke. It was her hope that people who read them would gain a “tenderness and appreciation for the animals and plants who share this world with us.” For more on Linda and her book, “On A Planet Sailing West”, click here … Linda Clarke.
In December, friends took Joanie and me to visit the Bok Tower Gardens in Lake Wales. It is Florida’s highest point of land between the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico at 324 feet. The tower rises 205 more feet in the air and houses a carillon of sixty bronze bells and when the carillonneur is out of town, a digital recording plays his concerts twice a day. After wandering around the gardens, I found myself sitting under a live oak tree listening to these bells playing Christmas carols.

There were few tourists, but near me a young squirrel was eating his lunch. This must have been his first Christmas season because he only weighed about half a pound. He was carrying on an excited conversation with himself in a bright pool of sunlight, a pile of acorns at his feet. His powerful little shoulder muscles were hunched over and his jaws worked furiously.

I couldn’t help noticing that every now and again he cocked his small head to one side and grimaced at some of the higher pitched tones pealing from the echoing bells. As I watched his delicate expressive ears wavering disdainfully to “What Child is This”, I had to tentatively reassess these gardens created solely to inspire and impress the visitor.
It is always surprising when others do not comprehend the greatness of our species even when the proof is right under their nose. But this was the animal’s backyard. Generations of gray squirrels had lived here before him,
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even before this tower was built in 1929, and he had a right to be ambivalent about the efforts of the great architects, landscape artists, and civil engineers who, in creating something extraordinary, had permanently displaced and disrupted the life of his ancestors.

He shared these serene grounds with ninety other squirrels. No lynx, bobcat, wolf, weasel, or coyote had ever disturbed his peace of mind. Nor were there any fast-moving cars roaring through the meandering paths and walking trails. Great horned owls and red-tail hawks were more of a threat, which is why he constantly scanned the skies during my visit with him.

Having observed this creature’s nonchalance toward the splendor around us, I couldn’t help being a little blasé myself about the eagles sculpted on the tower, the colorful ceramic tiles, the wrought iron gates leading to the brass door with its complicated design depicting the biblical story of creation. Frankly, it was easier and more natural to focus on the clear blue of the sky, the softly falling oak leaves, the warmly comforting sun, and the pleasant fact that on this agreeable day we had nothing much to do.

Rather soon after I had taken my seat, I realized that this cheerful squirrel had a spark of greatness in him. He had built a nest twice the size of a football in the fork of the tree I was sitting under. For such a young squirrel this huge nest was a remarkable achievement: leaves and twigs lined with dry grass and shredded bark and even feathers, some of these materials having fallen out of the nest as he no doubt had snuggled into it. He was presently attempting to create a balcony. Every now and again he raced up the tree carrying a particularly textured piece of bark in his mouth and disappeared into the construction site. Then he returned to resume his meal, leaving behind no carbon footprint at all.

There was just something about his boldness and fearlessness leaping from canopy to canopy and branch to branch, his mouth filled with supplies; something about the brightness of his dark eyes, the steady thumping of his heart as he finally sprawled peacefully against the bench I was sitting upon, after finding the little pile of almonds I had placed there. He was as intelligent and fearless and appealing as a puppy.

He seemed so superior to his young peers who were running around chasing and scolding each other in endless games of tag, that I felt it necessary to compare his life and accomplishment to someone of my own species who was also exceptionally ambitious and bold. ‘Angels We Have Heard on High’ boomed across the grassy slope scaring the crowd of sparrows sunning themselves on the grass. It seemed quite natural that Larry Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, came to mind. Perhaps because he had recently told an interviewer he was doing God’s work.

My squirrel’s great gift besides his unique architectural talent is his athletic prowess. Mr. Blankfein, on the other hand, has an extraordinary talent for accumulating wealth. Whatever happens to our economy, this man, dressed in a gray suit and a Hermes tie with red bicycles on it, can always get back on his feet and make money. His innate passion for money-making is simply unequaled. He is head of one of the most successful banks still standing. And for that he is both revered and despised, just as my squirrel, tail flicking up and down, muscles working with incomparable agility, is despised for being able to get into any bird feeder ever made, and respected if not revered for his persistence in doing so.

Mr. Blankfein was recently named Person of the Year by the Financial Times. The newspaper named him as much for his personality as for his banking expertise, identifying him as tough, bright, funny and quick. Although one can imagine that the FT will someday recognize even a corporation as Person of the Year, since they have all the rights and privileges of persons, unfortunately, there is no niche at this time for Squirrel of the Year though a singular woman at the Museum of Natural History assures us that squirrels are very individualistic with varying characters, complexes, and idiosyncrasies.

Of course, it doesn’t matter if people generally tend not to think so; non-human reality is too mysterious for us to grasp. Yet because the consensus of people usually assumes that only human beings are significant individuals, most of my friends are psychologically and spiritually detached from squirrels and other creatures generally. Even so, this aspiring little individual, so unwelcome at fundraisers, art openings and boardroom meetings, though a master of his own small universe, finds our neglect inconsequential. Why should he care? His reputation as a tough, bright, funny and quick young squirrel of the new generation is intact with all who have come across him, even though he is unknown to the editors of the Financial Times. He hardly feels impoverished since he lacks nothing for his own happiness and well-being. He is supremely satisfied with his life.

Unfortunately, the Person of the Year, though presiding over the richest financial enterprise in history, though surrounded by leathery chairs and innumerable human artifacts his wife picks up all over town, seems to have many dissatisfactions, the chief one being that the government wants more regulation in the finance industry and his company could no longer sell dubious investments to pension funds and then immediately bet against them, raising enormous profits when they failed.

He is also upset that he is developing an unsavory reputation for greed which is embarrassing to his daughter, the one who gave him the tie with red bicycles. Even though he has explained time and again to her that the collapse of our economy was due more to the rise of China than anything Goldman had ever done, and that he was quite blameless, she has decided when she grows up that she does not want to work for her father’s company. Apparently, she saw a book at Barnes and Noble called Plunder and Blunder in which her father was mentioned prominently.

There is no peace. His wife is fuming because she is beginning to be treated casually by sales clerks. But what has most startled and disheartened Mr. Blankfein is that Jamie Dimon, the CEO of J.P. Morgan, is liked more by the Senate subcommittees: as if Jamie doesn’t put profits above everything else as well, as if markets are about morality and not about risk. The subcommittees also think Mr. Dimon, who has a thick head of hair, is very witty, which annoys the balding Mr. Blankfein because he prides himself on his repartee and has always been the funniest person at Goldman.

These are all his current little dissatisfactions and troubles and of course one day he has to apologize to the widows and old people whose savings have been destroyed, but that is for another day. He has already rehearsed what he is going to say. “Whatever we did, it didn’t work out well. We regret the consequence that people have lost money.” That should do it.

My squirrel has never had to appear before a subcommittee for fraud, perhaps a prerequisite for very important persons, and so the world is unimpressed with his achievements. Though I do not personally know the deft and savvy Mr. Blankfein, I became friends with my impressive squirrel when he accepted an almond from my hand.
The Person of the Year and his wife would find his nest absurd even if it was enlarged and the balcony was finished. It doesn’t have a travertine bridge over a koi pond or a spectacular Murano glass chandelier. Wealthy members of our species have acquired gargantuan appetites for comfort. And who can blame them? Even for the rest of us, the universe is simply too frightening: best to insulate oneself from potential apocalypse. My squirrel too possesses that instinct; I noticed that he seemed to be creating an awning of small twigs over one overhanging branch. And recently the Blankfeins have purchased a 13 bedroom summer house in Southampton for $41 million dollars. They also have a $27 million dollar apartment on the Upper West Side where some of my squirrel’s distant cousins live nearby on a fire escape.

My squirrel is not as steely as Mr. Blankfein. I have seen him sharing acorns from his carefully amassed pile with a neighboring squirrel who has only half a tail. That squirrel left him in turn a bright blue jay feather for his new home. They perfectly understand the idea of loans and credit and what is expected of them in squirrel society in an emergency.

His world was all about trees and sky and rolling grassy hills and a community of other squirrels and birds who all understood the wisdom of sleeping late if the weather was bad and getting to bed early if there were ospreys, eagles or hawks flying above and around. It was about eating and playing and climbing and leaping from canopy to canopy and using shoulder muscles like any superb athlete and, for him especially, it was about building one’s home. He had practiced his jumps and acrobatics ceaselessly and could get any building material he wanted even at the tops of the tallest trees. The enviable success of his life, his general confidence and satisfaction and élan, his faith in the future, cheer me enormously.

Of course, we hardly ever notice squirrels because, unlike us, they do not live inside a civilization. Only seventeen and a half million years old, their modest society is not even in the earliest stages of being persecuted by government, laws, trade, social hierarchies, or culture. Because they are not big charismatic mammals, nobody bothers to put a radio collar on them and study their movements, dispositions, and scat. They are just simple gray squirrels whose Latin name means “sitting in the shadow of its tail”.

But for some reason, even though my little squirrel is uncivilized, what he hopes for, what he wonders, what he knows, all this is full of mystery and promise while the Person of the Year seems oddly like a closed book. It makes me think that the evolution of adult members of my own species is generally stuck. We are mired in the dirt of meaningless commerce and worry, mostly indoors.

Mr. Blankfein is now having a lot of trouble selling his old house in the Hamptons (which one neighbor privately said looks like a hellish Swiss chalet) before he moves into his new one. And now he has to worry about the government not allowing him to make speculative investments that don’t benefit his customers. He suddenly feels very lonely and trapped in his office and spends the days fidgeting in his swivel chair trying to appear above it all. Secretly he has doubts about where he fits into the scheme of things. Close associates miss his wisecracks but how can he pretend it’s everything as usual when a certain London banker has recently wagered millions of pounds to the effect that he, Lloyd Blankfein, will not last two more years on the job. And The Wall Street Journal has dared to publish such effluent! But the worst of it is that Jamie Dimon is getting a 17 million dollar bonus while the compensation committee voted to only give him a mundane 9 million, the same as a second-rate trader. He didn’t want to go home; last year he had gotten 69 million and he told his wife he was getting 100 million this year. What a mess.

What else is there to say? It seems that squirrels will always be with us. Most of their predators live in remote wildernesses up North in the few remaining forests of Maine and Canada. Of course, squirrels do have a lot of trouble in our parts with fast-moving cars. When a confident high-wire trapeze artist squirrel tries to cross a road, it feints and lunges and changes direction in order to confuse the on-coming car (a strategy which would probably work if the car were a coyote) and then reverses itself and races across, invariably getting hit. Huge numbers of squirrels die this way. But as long as there are trees, there will be squirrels scrambling from branch to branch, their brains gradually evolving from the size of a walnut to perhaps a big brazil nut in the far future. No car will be able to touch them then.

As for the ambitious and successful Blankfeins of the world, no doubt their kind will always be with us as well. We are told that their amoral excesses raise opportunities for everybody else. While generations of squirrels will happily live out their daringly athletic lives under the sun and stars, generations of Blankfeins (except perhaps his daughter and her children) will continue to successfully navigate all future global financial debacles from Wall Street, pouring all their energy and intellect into making money, which we are told, has become the meaning and glory of human civilization. What other species could ever invent credit derivative swaps? The things my squirrel knows are, after all, only the realities of the earth: the feel of rain on his face; the danger of the hawk bearing down on him; the scent of acorns; the taste of bark in his mouth.


No doubt a lot of negative commentary will always follow a Blankfein being named Person of the Year by the FT; not only from the elders of the financial community, but also from the great Persons of the Bear, Wolf, Dolphin, Elephant, Whale, and Leatherback Turtle clans who are all such patrician souls. I can already hear the planet’s Great Persons pooh-poohing the whole pompous human spectacle. Their brave and adventurous lives have disproven the whole idea that being without funds is the worst thing that can ever happen to any individual.
But nobody pays any attention to squirrels. Their lives are preposterously simple and underachieving. How could they possibly comprehend bundled mortgages? I finally got off the bench where I had been mulling these things over and watched my new friend, energetic and cheerful as usual, always thinking ahead, race up his oak tree with all the rest of my almonds stuffed inside his cheek. A furious flicking of his tail and a series of clucking sounds seemed to be his way of saying good-bye. I felt oddly blissful that he had enjoyed my company throughout this sunny afternoon.

The sun set behind the tower. It was finally quiet; the crowd of sparrows huddled together taking their late afternoon nap. I was grateful at last for all the thoughtful labor of those long ago architects, gardeners, and engineers. Heading toward the exit with the other visitors, I could feel my squirrel carefully watching me. I turned around. The young prodigy who had poured so much of himself into his tattered creation was sitting bolt upright on his balcony holding the precious blue jay feather in his mouth.

Epilogue
The winter of 2010 in Florida was the coldest one on record and many small animals did not make it to spring. Fortunately, the squirrel with only half a tail had bunked down with my friend, architect of the spacious nest. There was a storeroom of acorns piled on the leafy floor, plus a considerable pile of almonds acquired from my afternoon at Bok Tower and they spent the freezing days and nights comfortably, my friend’s bushy tail wrapped around both of them.

Mr. Blankfein, on the other hand, continued to be oppressed by various subcommittees who believed he had encouraged his traders to sell investments designed to fail. Clients and shareholders were filing their own lawsuits against Goldman. There was no way he could salvage his reputation. He was now only the ‘Person of Last Year’.
Thankfully, the exuberance and bubbling energy of spring has arrived as usual, successful and undaunted and completely indifferent to the dreadful foolishness of the Great Persons of our species. Baby squirrels are everywhere. All the patrician souls in nature, focusing as is their way on survival and reproduction, incapable of fraud and graft, are once again enjoying their young families and the hope of a new season.