Wild Chorus: Finding Harmony with Whales, Wolves, and Other Animals
by Brenda Peterson
240 pages, hardcover. $24.95.
Mountaineers Press
1001 SW Klickitat Way, Suite 201, Seattle, WA 98134
The very title of Wild Chorus: Finding Harmony with Whales, Wolves, and Other Animals sounds the first warning that this book, while rewriting many of the same anecdotes from author Brenda Peterson’s childhood, has precious little in common with her brilliant 2001 first memoir, Build Me An Ark.
(See The dolphin stories that made two authors famous.)
Build Me An Ark was not about harmony
Build Me An Ark was not about harmony, and was certainly not about pretending to acquire great insights through encounters with the most fashionable of species in the Pacific Northwest during escapes from West Seattle, where Peterson lives, to go whale-watching and to visit the Wolf Haven sanctuary just south of Seattle, in Tenino.
Neither was Build Me An Ark a long string of often self-consciously precious descriptions of this and that, seeming to scream “Look at me! I’m special! I play music for animals and commune with them,” between dropping the names of “my friend Jane Goodall,” among others.
(Beth Clifton photo)
We play music for a rooster
Thousands of people play music for animals these days and purport to commune with them, while the animals frequently cringe and run away, if they can.
Even Beth and I, here at ANIMALS 24-7, often turn on the radio to quiet our raucous rescued rooster, who may be chanting mantras to the neighborhood for all we know, but we do not pretend to understand them, let alone be spiritually enlightened by the cacaphony.
Brenda Peterson fans––and the success of her 18 books to date attests that they are legion––will no doubt find in Wild Chorus the sort of picturesque yet mostly non-controversial nature writing for which she is known. The issues with Wild Chorus are not with the often intensely introspective literary craftsmanship
Will not disturb meat-eaters & hunters
But unlike Build Me An Ark, Wild Chorus will probably not disturb meat-eaters or hunters, including those in Brenda Peterson’s own family.
Neither will it disturb devotees of the myth that we are in the midst of an extinction crisis, which Brenda Peterson duly salutes in passing, even while noting the recoveries of grey whales, wolves, grizzly bears, pumas, and other large, charismatic mega-species, the animal category with by far the highest percentage of endangered members.
Though Brenda Peterson seems to have little interest in animals who are not large, charismatic, and/or carnivorous, she may be justly credited with deep factual knowledge of the animals she writes about, and with concern for accuracy going well beyond that of most popular nature writers.
(YouTube screen shot from video)
Seal Sitters Marine Mammal Stranding Network
Brenda Peterson can further be credited with sincerity in her personal work on behalf of animals, as for example founder in 2007 of the Seal Sitters Marine Mammal Stranding Network.
The Seal Sitters are an organization which according to its web site “responds to reports of all species of marine mammals, dead or alive, along West Seattle’s coastline,” providing health and mortality data to “government agencies and biologists who monitor seal populations and emerging disease.”
One chapter of Wild Chorus, “Leopard & Silkie: A Friendship,” goes into detail about how Peterson’s work as a Seal Sitter began.
Lacks dynamic tension
What is missing in Wild Chorus is any of the dynamic tension among conflicting people and ideas that gave strength to Build Me An Ark as an exploration of evolving attitudes toward animals across generations, regions, cultures, and occupations.
Wild Chorus begins with the same anecdote as Build Me An Ark, but veers off in a completely different direction.
Born in a U.S. Forest Service fire tower in the High Sierras, doubling as the Peterson’s family home at the time, Brenda Peterson’s first memories were of a playpen surrounded by mounted deer and elk heads.
Brenda Peterson’s quest for deeper truths about animals and life began with her gradual realization that the animals she mistook for beneficent guardians were in fact dead victims.
Worse, Build Me An Ark recounts, those deer and elk were killed by her father.
Christian fundamentalists
The Peterson family, Build Me An Ark details, were Christian fundamentalists.
Southern Baptist faith held the Peterson family together as they crisscrossed the U.S., following Brenda Peterson’s father Max Peterson’s career advancement opportunities to his eventual tenure as director of the U.S. Forest Service from 1979 to 1987.
But Brenda Peterson found no answers in religion. The story of Noah seemed to speak to her, as she first heard it at a small church in Montana. Then her sister asked their father what the animals on the ark ate, if the lions truly did lie with the lambs.
The lions “probably ate rodents or small rabbits, which were multiplying faster than the ark could hold,” Max Peterson guessed.
Recalled Brenda Peterson in Build Me An Ark, not nearly as vividly or critically as in her account in Wild Chorus, “I was never again as easy in my mind. What were all those animals in the ark actually eating? If some of them were eating each other, then was Noah’s family also eating some of those animals, even though God told Noah to save them?”
Genesis verse 9:20-22
Eventually Brenda Peterson read the Biblical version of the Noah story, and in Build Me An Ark proclaimed herself shattered by Genesis verse 9:20-22. This verse recounts that Noah celebrated safely landing the ark on Mt. Ararat by sacrificing and burning the remains of one of each kind of animal he had saved.
Wild Chorus includes no significant discussion of religious influence, soft-pedals whatever criticisms Peterson felt about hunting and hunters, either then or now, and turns directly from the discovery that Max Peterson shot the deer and elk whose heads were on the wall to discussion of watching him butcher a deer, eating the venison with her family, and continuing to secretly eat her father’s venison later in life, among quasi-vegetarian friends.
Missed opportunity
The stress Brenda Peterson examined in Build Me An Ark between herself as a young environmentalist and her father’s role in facilitating clear-cut logging on a vast scale is mentioned only in passing in Wild Chorus.
This, in Build Me An Ark, was also brought out in discussion of Smokey Bear. Smokey Bear also appears in Wild Chorus, but only as an anecdote, not as a prism for intensely felt moral conflict.
Of course Brenda Peterson might understandably not want to say anything casting a negative reflection upon her now 97-year-old father, but that does not inherently preclude even re-examining previous conflict.
Brenda Peterson in Build Me An Ark forthrightly confronted many cultural dilemmas that are still very much with us, and will especially be with us during the forthcoming 2024 national elections.
Escapist
In Wild Chorus, Brenda Peterson might have re-examined those cultural dilemmas through the lens of subsequent experience, including her encounters with animals.
Brenda Peterson might perhaps have de-emphasized the glamor species––whales and wolves––to pay more attention to the raccoon, who gets barely two and a half pages, as the sole representative of urban wildlife in the book.
Raccoons, as the most intelligent, adaptive, heavily and cruelly hunted, hounded, and trapped, and yet resilient and friendly member of the the order carnivora, except for domestic dogs and cats, might furnish an excellently applicable metaphor for the whole of the 21st century animal/human relationship.
Wild Chorus in the end comes across as disappointingly escapist, giving Brenda Peterson fans what they want, echoing shibboleths and paeans, but not really making anyone think disturbingly or deeply about anything resembling problematic paradox.
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Having been raised in a multicultural extended family by parents who experienced dysfunction therein, I was protected, much loved, and comforted, but also not shielded from the truths of my parents’ and families’ lives and observations. So I guess one could say I grew up wanting the former but being well aware of the latter; and I have never believed that glossing over harsh truths or telling only some of them while hiding others benefits any of those I care for and about.
That includes my downstairs neighbors, the adorable, much loved, noisy and often exasperating raccoon couple currently making the crawlspace and yard their refuge. They disturb my sleep and work frequently, but I would not think of consigning them to the fate the ACC would have for them. We, including raccoons, oppossums, skunks, squirrels, rats, mice, birds, insects and others, live close to foothills, and they certainly have equal, if not more, right to live here than my human neighbors and I do.
Sharing with gratitude.