Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [51]
48
It is piquant to me that one of the greatest poets and one of the greatest playwrights of this century would both deny that they were from the Middle West, specifically from St. Louis, Missouri. I mean T. S. Eliot, who wound up sounding like the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Tennessee Williams, a product of Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Iowa, who wound up sounding like Ashley Wilkes in Gone With the Wind.
True enough, Williams was born in Mississippi, but moved to St. Louis when he was seven. And it was he who named himself Tennessee when he was twenty-seven. Before he did that to himself, he was Tom.
Cole Porter was born in Peru, Indiana, pronounced PEEROO. “Night and Day”? “Begin the Beguine”? Not bad, not bad.
Kilgore Trout was born in a hospital in Bermuda, near where his father, Raymond, was gathering material for a follow-up on his doctoral dissertation on the last of the Bermuda Erns. The sole remaining rookery of those great blue birds, the largest of all pelagic raptors, was on Dead Man’s Rock, an otherwise uninhabited lava steeple in the center of the notorious Bermuda Triangle. Trout was in fact conceived on Dead Man’s Rock during his parents’ honeymoon.
What was particularly interesting about these erns was that the female birds, and not anything people had done, so far as anybody could tell, were to blame for the rapidly dwindling population. In the past, and presumably for thousands of years, the females had hatched their eggs, and tended the young, and finally taught them to fly by kicking them off the top of the steeple.
But when Raymond Trout went there as a doctoral candidate with his bride, he found that the females had taken to bowdlerizing the nurturing process by kicking the eggs off the top of the steeple.
Thus did Kilgore Trout’s father providentially become a specialist, thanks to the female Bermuda Erns’ initiative, or whatever you want to call it, in evolutionary mechanisms governing fates of species, mechanisms other than the Occam’s Razor of Darwin’s Natural Selection.
Nothing would do, then, but that the Trout family, when little Kilgore was nine, spend the summer of 1926 camped on the shore of Disappointment Lake in inland Nova Scotia. The Dalhousie Woodpeckers in that area had quit the brain-rattling business of pecking wood, and were feasting on the plentiful blackflies on the backs of deer and moose instead.
Dalhousies, of course, are the commonest woodpeckers in eastern Canada, mainly, ranging from Newfoundland to Manitoba, and from Hudson Bay to Detroit, Michigan. Only those around Disappointment Lake, however, identical with the rest in plumage and beak size and shape, and so on, had stopped getting at bugs the hard way, digging them out one at a time, from holes the bugs had made or found in tree trunks.
They were first observed gorging on blackflies in 1916, with World War One going on in the other hemisphere. The Disappointment Lake Dalhousies, however, were not subjected to observation year after year before that, or since. This was because the clouds of voracious blackflies, often resembling little tornadoes, according to Trout, made the apostate Dalhousies’ habitat virtually uninhabitable by human beings.
So the Trout family spent the summer up there dressed like beekeepers night and day, in gloves, in long-sleeved shirts tied at the wrists, and long pants tied at the ankles, in wide-brimmed hats draped with gauze, to protect their heads and necks, no matter how hellishly hot the weather. Father, mother, and son dragged the camping gear and a heavy motion picture camera and tripod to the marshy campsite while harnessed to a travois.
Dr. Trout expected to film nothing more than ordinary Dalhousies, indistinguishable from other Dalhousies, but pecking at the backs of deer