Their return has been captained for more than 20 years by biologist Juan Vargas Velasco and his partner María Catalina Porras Peña, a couple who long ago moved away from the comforts of the city to endure extreme winters living in a tent or small trailer, to manage the lives of the 48 condors known to fly over Mexican territory. Together — she as coordinator of the California Condor Conservation Program, and he as field manager — they are the guardians of a project whose origins go back to condor recovery efforts that began in the 1980s in the United States, when populations were decimated, mainly from eating the meat of animals shot by hunters’ lead bullets.
This whole phenomenon is very American; deep pagan and agricultural traditions were adapted by a newspaper editor, businessmen, and groundhog hunters into a spectacle and pageant. Everyone knows Punxsutawney Phil, the Coca Cola of groundhogs, but even his well-trod history has got some strange darkness: Phil saw his “blackest shadow in history” in 1938, ominously had an “unfortunate meeting with a skunk” in 1937, and apparently got so sick of fame that he blasted off in a “Chucknik” spacecraft in 1958. That’s right: Punxsutawney Phil was involved in the Cold War.
But beyond Phil, there are so, so many other hogs cursed with a vision of the world to come. So many that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration keeps track of the most accurate groundhogs and ranks them by their track record.
I was a bit of a weird little kid, from a palate point of view. While my friends were eating 1970s peanut-butter-and-jam sandwiches and Chef Boyardee pizza from a box, I was devouring beef tongue dipped in sweet-hot mustard and chicken necks boiled until the meat fell off the little bones. I liked oily things and fishy things: shmaltzy grieven made from crispy fried chicken skin, smoky lox that my parents ordered from British Columbia by the side, sardines from a can with a big squeeze of lemon. For something lighter, I ate flaky homemade potato knishes or cheese blintzes, fried to a crispy gold and smothered in sour cream. Best of all were August’s wild blueberry varenikes, boiled and ready to squirt their purple juice into your mouth.
We Do Not Part is both act of witness and a beautiful poetic object. There are repeated images of birds, candle flame, trees. Even as family relationships become tangled or undone, the novel is bound together by a secret web of lines, of nerves “like silk” and cotton threads, and this lacework expresses the theme of connection in the title.
With brutal dialogue and an exploration of what it means to be successful, “I Am Not Jessica Chen” is a firm reminder to those wishing to be someone else that being someone you are not is far more difficult than loving yourself.
At its core, Old Growth Forest Walks is presented as a fun, educational guide for a hiker interested in the immediate area. For the right reader, it could be the basis of a wonderful year-long project: take one of these hikes every other weekend with this book in hand to enhance the experience. But it is also a gift for the reader who curls up on a winter night with the aim simply to escape from the drear and enjoy a journey of the mind.