Sunday Morning Meds--An old CA

The earth is full of your creatures.  

There is the sea, vast and spacious, 

teeming with creatures beyond number—

living things both large and small.

There the ships go to and fro, and the leviathan, 

which you formed to frolic there.  

These all look to you to give them their food at the proper time.

Psalm 104

The highest I ever arose on my summer job during college was about five feet off the ground aboard an old, war-surplus caterpillar. I’m not sure why the boss made me the designated driver, but he did. So I was, most days, at the hand levers that controlled the old beast, an ancient, faded yellow wonder whose huge engine banged, banged, banged along the beach as if it had but one mammoth cylinder.

Four or five us, me aboard the CAT, the others armed with rakes and shovels, set out to clean up dead fish. Lake Michigan—or at least our corner of it—was a mess. Alewives by the millions constantly washed up on the shore, the heftier ones left bloating on the sand. Swimmers hated them, and so did the boss. A couple hundred thousand little silvery no-good alewives washing up on the beach each day wasn’t good for business.

So three or four guys would rake ‘em up, and two of us would follow—a guy with a scoop, and me at the controls of that tank of a CAT. My sense of smell isn’t acute, but I don’t remember a stench. It was the boss’s concern that we get those tiny silvery fish picked up pronto, then dumped way back in the dunes. During the height of their spawn, we started the whole work day on the beach, which bugged us because there were no bikinis out at nine on the western shores of Lake Michigan. It wasn’t a bad job really; we just found the attractions of mid-afternoon more engaging.

I remember of that long-ago experience because of the psalmist’s line “teeming with creatures beyond number.” We thought they were—the alewives. For a month at least, the waves rolled them up continually and turned the beach into a dump full of the shards of a million mirrors. The lunkers were six inches, but most of them were no bigger than your finger. The seagulls ate only their eyes.

The lamprey eel, a hideous looking thing, was the culprit, hitching itself to game fish then riding out the host’s torturous death. Not pretty. The disappearance of game fish in Lake Michigan in the 50s created a population boom among the alewives.

Today, the lamprey eel is at ten percent of its peak population because, fifty years ago already, researchers discovered a chemical to kill the larvae. Game fish have made a dramatic recovery, and that army surplus caterpillar has been quietly retired, the descendants of those lowly alewives devoured by teeming trout and salmon.

Psalm 104 is grand and glowing and inspiring, a cyclorama almost; but here and there it could use a footnote, I think, and I’m not even an ecologist.

The psalmist is not wrong. There’s a great circle in nature, and I’m no more of a Lakota than I am a bona fide tree-hugger. But I can't help thinking that something there is that links us and them—two-leggeds, four-leggeds, and even those silvery alewive multitudes.

Something there is that loves this world so greatly he gave his son. That’s what the Bible suggests in 104, a long and stunning portrait of the natural world.

Still, occasionally, I guess, somebody’s got to drive an old cat.