Homeland Security
Caroline Van Hemert
It’s 6:30 in the morning, and my hamstrings are relearning, as they do after every sleepless night, how to release some unnamable tension that creeps in uninvited. Last night, I lay awake in bed for hours, a captive to sounds of my body’s internal cadence. Blood passing from atria through veins and tissue and back again pounded rhythms into the night that refused silencing. I shut my eyes against the clock and its incessant motion forward. I clenched my fists and released them slowly. I focused on the silhouettes of glass balls I’d collected on remote Aleutian beaches, washed up from Asian fishing vessels, and imagined the seas on which such ships now rode. I turned to Pat, sleeping beside me, and examined the upturn of his lips, his lashes pressed gently against skin. He laid his arm across my shoulder, without stirring from sleep, until I couldn’t stand to be still for a moment longer and had to pull away. As always when I can’t sleep, renewal comes only through movement. If my muscles can stay engaged, toes splayed open against pavement, skin bracing goosebumps against cold air, I can stave off my desperate need to sleep. And so this morning I find myself, once again, sucking deep in the relief of running and grant my body the luxury of not sitting still.
But today it’s hard to find a rhythm, even in motion, and the tread on the instep of my shoes keeps connecting clumsily with the opposite calf. When my stride is off, or I’m getting tired, I’ll kick myself accidentally in this manner, repeated missteps leaving a muddy slash painted on the insides of my running tights. I’m distracted by what I don’t want to face this morning so I run harder, past clumsiness and cracked pavement toward the inlet shining under the distant edge of a streetlight.
Pat’s dad called yesterday evening and I heard, through the whooshing of blood rushing in a panic to my head, “And so what does this mean? I know, Dad, I’m just trying to understand.” Richard is a physician, a family doctor with a small New York office that has been alternately moved and painted and cleaned by Pat and his siblings over the years. Disease is no stranger to Richard, obviously, and though he doesn’t talk much about his patients’ ailments, no doubt he’s seen his share of stricken faces when lab results return a dismal verdict. I don’t suppose he ever considered what his son’s face might reflect back at him when he broke the news of non-Hodgkins lymphoma two years ago.
I hadn’t heard from Pat since he’d left to visit his dad and brother in California for a long weekend, other than a quick message that his flight was on time and he’d see me soon at our friends’ small chicken-coop turned guesthouse where we were living temporarily. But when he walked in and hugged me, he didn’t let go for a long time. I began to pull away, headed for the woodstove in need of another log, until I saw his face, blotchy and wet. “My dad has cancer.” The same words that thousands of sons and daughters have had to choke out had found us. I don’t recall exactly what we said to each other that night, but I remember distinctly the feeling of being cradled in wood. Echoes of mutated cells and lymphoma and terminal illness bounced around old growth Doug fir walls, shimmied up the curved stained glass window that once hung in a university library, found their way out through the stovepipe and back in through gaps in the flooring. I remember how rough-cut boards felt as they pressed tiny splinters into my bare feet and the color of moonlight shining through waist-high windows onto the floor’s textured grain. It’s only through this memory of flesh against wood that I recall any details of that night at all.
Thinking back to the chicken coop, I run through the tunnel leading to our muddy coastline and hear a single, quiet “wheedle-dee.” Then, a moment later, there’s another and another. The calls rise as I round a corner, and soon the many voices blend into a single chaotic din backed by the rhythm of my footfall. As I step onto a bridge that spans the tiny river delta leading into Cook Inlet , the chorus rises from beneath my feet. It’s slick out this morning—we had one of the first frosts of the season last night—and I pad gingerly across the wooden slats, their crystalline surfaces dancing. I stop to investigate and as I bend over, hanging my torso across a metal rail, I find myself suspended above dozens of feeding yellowlegs. Cut deep into the silty substrate, the stream is overrun with shorebirds, packed so tightly that I can’t make out the boundaries of their bodies, where one wing ends and another begins. Beyond the yellowlegs, stocky, long-billed silhouettes of dowitchers probe sewing machine-like into the soft ground, as white rumps flap rapidly out of my view across the mudflats. The air lies perfectly still beneath the bridge, and I hear the birds’ voices, some more than a hundred yards away with the same clarity as the blood pulsing noisily through my temples.
Though each year thousands of shorebirds gather throughout Alaska in predictable locations at relatively predictable times, I am always startled to stumble across them in mass gatherings, as though I’ve arrived, yet again, at a surprise party to which I was not invited. Today, I stop to watch on a small step of grassy flats so translucent green in the glow of the sun’s low angle that the blades appear to shiver as light passes through their ranks. The simple knowledge of where these birds travel provides just enough connection to their lives that I feel somehow included in the migratory fervor. The fact that I could not survive a trip across Cook Inlet , much less the North Pacific, matters little to my imagined sense of belonging. I’m stunned by the weight of their annual goal that demands every physical resource, usurps each hard-won ounce of fat and greedily gathers protein for shiny new flight feathers. Perhaps most of all, I’m envious of the certainty of motion that comes with migration, under sole guidance of the body.
At work later that morning, I watch red and yellow arcs curve across a computer screen, materializing under direction of my clicking mouse. Sharply angled arrows trace direction along bright lines reaching arms from Southeast Asia to Alaska . The red, orange and yellow paths on my screen are color-coded by species, each illustrating a slightly different route from the Asian continent to western Alaska , hopscotching across thousands of miles of open ocean. The maps look tidy and predictable, though so much of what appears on the screen amounts to little more than an educated guess. These sorts of displays are both our nemeses and our rewards—frustratingly simplified and often based on too little data to be certain of anything but thrilling in that they offer a large-scale perspective on population movement and distribution. Often, in field work, any sense of the grandiose becomes obscured by physical and immediate tasks of beating through brush and listening to hour after hour of rain on the plastic roof of a duck shack, hoping that perhaps today will bring the arrival of the first migrating flocks. Only months later, after painstaking hours logged in front of the monitor’s blinding gaze, do larger population patterns begin to unfold. The anecdotal becomes mathematical and appears in the form of colored lines and estimates of abundance—the simple question of where birds go is astoundingly complex and, for many species, largely unanswered.
The maps that I am creating today track an unusual sort of bird inventory, one that interests folks far outside the circles of bird biologists and park managers. Though this work traces the migration patterns of several species of shorebirds, the organism of interest is in fact no bird at all, but a stowaway hitching a free ride across the thousands of miles of open ocean separating East from West. Although disease, contaminants, and nutrients have passed through populations, across borders, and between continents for as long as birds have made their seasonal journeys, humans rarely experience any obvious ill effects from such movement and, thus, little heed has been paid to seemingly esoteric details. In our current regime of terror-fighting and international insecurity, however, a mysterious virus, currently known as “Avian Influenza,” or “H5N1,” has led to several dozen human deaths and a surge of international interest. Several species of shorebirds move seasonally between Alaska, eastern Russia and Asia—across what once constituted the Bering Land Bridge and presently comprises the Chuckchi Sea—over the Bering Sea and across the Pacific Ocean. Recently, these birds’ movements have become of utmost national importance, and knowledge of their behavior has been elevated from the ranks of ailing Fish and Wildlife Service budgets to a robust Homeland Security fund. Like their avian hosts’ reliance on movement of wind and water currents for migration, tiny viruses lodge themselves in the unsuspecting bodies of long-distance travelers.
On my map, neatly forged down the center of the oceans dividing Europe , Asia , and Africa from the Americas , the International Date Line draws a dark vertical down the page, slashing across the curved paths of migration. No matter what function is plied, the line won’t disappear, forging an artificial barrier indelibly between diseased and non-diseased lands. Though our borders are patrolled with ever-increasing vigilance, no amount of national security will deter migration-driven dunlin, plovers and godwits. Bright arcs launching bravely across a screen of blue remind us of these birds’ tenacity, their airborne journeys in which everything is at stake. When a storm rips across the Pacific, driving hard and low, birds weighing no more than a few ounces drop slender heads into the wind, adjust their bearings and flap harder. Their colorful jetstreams streaking from continent to continent offer a view in which the façade of sovereignty from the rest of the world shatters in a wingbeat.
It’s an odd prospect to have my salary paid by Homeland Security. Each year funding is spotty at best for our line of work, as wildlife species—particularly those too flighty to offer a decent view—don’t regularly top the list of concerns in Washington D.C. The idea of money coming from a federal organization created post 9-11, its mission to keep America safe, seems extremely unlikely. In the wake of a time when terrorism threats rise and fall according to a color-coded system that greets me each morning as I walk into the main entrance of our joint U.S. Geological Survey-Fish and Wildlife Service building, my response to such funding falls somewhere between ironic humor and horror. Wildlife tracked for national security purposes?
I recently attended a lecture at the local university that addressed health concerns of Alaskans, particularly those living in rural communities. Maps of contaminant detection were projected onto the overhead: crosses indicated presence of heavy metals, red dots highlighted areas with greatest particulate emission, black stars pointed fingers to military waste sites, and dioxins stamped pink triangles across the state. I wondered what a map of cancer and other illnesses would look like overlaid on the existing screen. Would we see associations that remain otherwise invisible? Likely, patterns would be statistically insignificant in most cases; it’s not easy to pin effects on sources, even those that are known. But perhaps speculation should play a larger role when it comes to the health of our communities. I thought of my aunt, living in Oregon , who also has a form of non-Hodgkins lymphoma. What might her geographic history look like, or Pat’s dad’s, if they could be traced through decades of contaminants maps?
The images remind me of avian influenza maps sent as attachments to emails circulating in increasing numbers around our office. These visual depictions of H5N1 distribution light up hotspots of infection, where hundreds of thousands of domestic birds have been destroyed and a smattering of humans have fallen ill. More recently, this strain of avian influenza has been detected in wild bird populations, and a massive die-off of wild waterbirds in northern Mongolia sent a quiver of apprehension across international borders. Biologists, public health officers, government officials and bird enthusiasts across the world have begun to act quickly, launching Homeland Security funds and massive monitoring programs. The fear, of course, is that the next set of maps will depict much more than the eradication of poultry.
In work spanning across Alaska , I’ve swabbed cloacas and pierced the swollen jugulars of seaducks whose only perceived threats are the hands that hold them firmly as they are poked and harassed. But as I cradle a racing bird heart in my palm, the known threats for these birds, and so many other members of the ecosystem, including ourselves, run much deeper. Internationally, toxicologists and epidemiologists assess levels of disease and contaminants across all trophic levels, ranging from phytoplankton stocks that feed small species of fish to polar bears, whose consumption of marine mammals makes their bodies veritable toxic waste dumps. Alaskan biologists anxiously await results from national laboratories that process thousands of viral swabs from across the state. Each project provides only the tiniest sliver of information that may help us to understand how toxic compounds and disease travel and what effects they have.
Too often, painstaking weeks of chasing birds—frequently catching far fewer than we’d hoped—yield only inconclusive results. Factors contributing to the spread of disease or movement of toxins are incredibly complex, making the tracking of invisible, microscopic threats only slightly more scientific than a game of lucky guesses. For example, how, other than careful (and fortuitous) scrutiny by Brussels customs officials, would biologists know that H5N1 could have arrived in Europe by means of smuggled hawks? A man was accosted at the airport while in possession of two infected birds bought at an open market in Bangkok , and destined for a Belgian falconer. Sources of infection confirmed at a remote lake in northern Mongolia , in parts of Kazakhstan and at a nature reserve in China , however, have no known source. The impossibility of tracking every human and wildlife movement, of tracing the origins of unknown chemicals and their many byproducts, often makes our efforts at this worldwide investigative work seem futile.
But I convince myself over and over again that, in the name of homeland security, we can’t afford to give up, to accept results as inconclusive and thus not worthy of further study. By this, I refer not the capitalized version of Homeland Security that prides itself on flashing alarming colors in order to alert citizens to threats from distant lands and foreign peoples. Instead, I mean a version that recognizes our homeland as synonymous with an ecosystem. And just as an individual component of an ecosystem is not a discrete, self-contained unit, our homeland exists as integrated and intertwined—connected to every other homeland on earth.
Pat’s dad calls and reports that the test results aren’t what he had hoped. The two tumors have become five, and the likelihood of treatment hovers. “It’s going to get him eventually, in 5 years or 10.” Pat speaks aloud the facts that we carefully talk around, afraid to give voice to what we’d rather pretend isn’t happening. How does one make sense of a disease with no known cause or cure? I can wrap my head around viruses, even in their very horrific forms, perhaps because contagion and transfer, though frightening with rapid pathways and epidemic speed, seem intuitive somehow. Mutated cells attacking one’s own body do not. Though the origins aren’t known for lymphoma, I can’t help but speculate, to consider imaginary links between Pat’s dad and my aunt. They have no shared history, medically or geographically, other than growing up in American suburbs during a time when DDT and other toxins now banned from use were viewed as a modern solution to age-old problems of bugs and blight. Now we know them as a contemporary legacy that continue to show up in living bodies—ducks, whales, humans—long after circulation has ceased.
The next morning I head out to the bike path again, this time armed with binoculars instead of running shoes. I hear the birds before I see them, and follow their voices to the coast. It’s nearly high tide, and just enough mudflat remains for the birds to feed. The water draws them nearer to shore where I have crisp views of bright yellow legs and slender bills, tawny feathers on fire in the dawn peeking across the inlet. Several hundred birds chatter and feed, moving about the area in small increments so that the mass of feathered bodies appears to shiver in place. Throughout the flock, individuals flap up sporadically, rising just above their companions in a motion somewhere between jumping and floating, setting down again in a complex game of musical mudflats.
The tide continues to rise, and I watch silty gray water creep higher and higher up a beached log on the mudflat just beyond the birds. Soon, it’s lapping at the feet of the flock’s periphery, and the sporadic shorebird dance increases in frequency. Desperate to exploit every opportunity for feeding, the birds pack together in tighter bands, congregating in an impossibly small area that remains unflooded. It appears that the birds have nowhere left to go, short of stepping off the flats and onto the trail. They’re feeding frantically, focused only on the ground beneath them. I am content to sit and watch all morning.
But suddenly, in half a heartbeat, they’ve alighted en masse, and float for a moment above the now-submerged mudflats. Then the flock turns, as if their hundreds of bodies had been molded into a single winged form, banks to the right and rises over the inlet. Perhaps they are headed to other feeding grounds; perhaps I’ll see the same birds again tomorrow. Or, maybe, this time, they’ve left Alaska for the season and will set down again somewhere in Asia . They’ll return next year, at least some of them, bodies nourished across borders, spread between continents.
I pick up my binoculars, turn away from the water and begin to run. I run toward Pat, toward Richard’s cancer, toward the maps waiting at the office, toward contaminants analyses with no answers, toward funds that might, at least for a time, stem the spread of avian influenza. I run home and I run because it is the only thing I know to do.