3. Pets and Wildlife
The Kanes in Levittown
Muriel, recounting their drive home from a camping trip upstate: "We see two skunks in roadway. They were babies, we didn=t see their mother. She must have been killed by a car. We stopped out of curiosity, but then got to thinking they would die without [us doing something] They were just a few days old, so we thought maybe to put them in woods."
Another "lady stopped and got out..." She told us she "had one already and asked for another; she said they were going to die without mother anyway. Why don=t you take the other one [home with you;] they make wonderful pets...the skunk had fallen asleep in the palm of my hand..." It was too young to be able to spray anyone, but when it got older they could have its spray gland removed.
The "skunk grew and lived with us happily...[for] eleven years...it died in the Levitt house..[we] buried it in the garden..[and] we both cried so much" when it died.
The Burnetts in Ronek Park
Eugene: Jimmy [a friend of his from working at Lockheed] took me out there to show me how to get clams from shallow part of bay. You felt it with your foot and then pulled it out
Bernice: He was a real country boy...
Eugene: ..but nobody [I knew] worked [as a bayman]. Jimmy was born and raised here. We went out off of Amityville somewhere...in shallow part of bay...
The Murphy's in Old Field
From the book:
The Murphy’s dog sustained a special bond with Grace Murphy. Nearly deaf since childhood, she relied on him as “hearing-ear dog,”“not let[ting] anyone come near me without telling me.” Her bond went beyond the dog’s usefulness, to companionship. Though in part standing in for a husband who traveled often, the relationship had no precise human counterpart: “My dog is my comfort...The marvelous relationship between a dog and its owner can be comprehended only by actual experience.”
The Murphy’s named their dog “Quis,” after the Latin for blackbird, highlighting the wilder side of this most domesticated of species.
The Rynersons in Lakewood
Bud Rynerson: We didn't have a pet at that time. Well, we did, too. Part of the time we had a Siamese cat. We have a Siamese cat now, but it's not the same one. We had a Siamese cat, and then for a while we had a dog along with this cat. Then we had a little cockapoo. Then we had two cats.
Janet Rynerson: One of them is left. The one that came in here and meowed.
Bud Rynerson: ...Our first Siamese lived to be nineteen, and I ran over him. That's how he died.
Janet Rynerson: He's always made that sound so terrible.
Bud Rynerson: Putting the car in the garage, I honked the horn--he was laying in the driveway, and I'd honk the horn, and he'd always move. So I thought he'd moved. I couldn't see him. So I just ran over the guy.
Follow-up Interview with Jackie: For a while they had a little bird as a pet: he “had a broken wing. We tried to rescue him because he just couldn=t do anything. So we brought him in and tried to make him comfortable, and gave him some food to eat. Hopefully, it=d be the right thing. And we called him AChirpy.@ And then one day, Chirpy flew away. But the children really enjoyed it. He sat on their shoulder, each one in turn, and so everybody had part of that adventure.”
“…we have mockingbirds that sing beautifully, and they=re around, they=ve come back. The crows chased them out for a while and then they came back. They=re wonderful singers. We had mockingbirds at first; that=s why we missed them so. Because apparently, I don=t know what happened, but it was just as if the crows had driven them out somewhere in our midlife, and then they were gone for quite a while and then just recently, the birds are coming back singing beautifully.”
The Alvas in San Gabriel
Alva: I think the city started to put in more homes. They needed the land. Well, naturally they needed the land for the homes. But they started to tell us that we couldn't have maybe only so many chickens. We had rabbits. Of course, we didn't have a house back there then, but we got rid of those before they told us we had to. But the chicken business, they started telling you you could only have so many and just so many, and finally it just kind of wore out. You can still hear roosters, so maybe some people have maybe one or two chickens.
Sellers: Still?
Alva: Yes, still. You can hear them in the morning, early morning. One other here and then they answer over there. It kind of takes you back. But I think it just died down because the laws and regulations of the city. You couldn't have goats, you couldn't have anything like that anymore, cows, or anything like this. Then I think people, it wasn't so full of homes, so that if they had an extra lot next door, like we did, you could probably put in a cow there.
Sellers: ...some people did do that?
Alva: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Goats. Especially goats, because they didn't take too much room.
Sellers: Right. And they're easy to graze?
Alva: Yes. Yes, ours was a pet. Her name was Clara. [Laughter] We had a n____. It was black. It was a beautiful goat. Yes. We had quite a few things here, a pig.
The Lillards in Beverley Glen
From the book:
Lillard’s personalized conservation not only guided his gardening, it spurred a waxing recognition of the wilder plants and creatures living nearby. Compared to those in either Lakewood or San Gabriel, yards like his, on the edge of a capacious, unplowed spread of chaparral, invited a greater diversity of birds and other wildlife. In the vicinity of houses, the chaparral was not exactly pristine, but easy to know, since Lillard could watch it year-round and close up. By the mid-fifties, his diary entries revolved ever more so around the coyotes, deer, raccoons and many others, that strayed into their yard or that he surprised while walking in the surrounding brush.
He also began to ruminate about creatures he never saw, but which he knew once lived there: ringtails, cougars, and condors. His fascination grew with how, as wild creatures and people adjusted to one another, some species could actually become semi-domesticated, drawn into a less timid dependence on human neighbors. A pair of blue jays nesting near his house, as he and his family started to feed them, lost much of their fear of humans. To his and Louise’s delight, the birds eventually learned to eat out of their hands. His awareness dawned of how other, errant flora were making themselves at home among his cultivated plants. Whereas in 1955 his plant list for the yard included only what he and others had planted in his yard, by 1960 he had started a separate list of weeds, the natives as well as the imported invasives.
His more intimate and detailed knowledge of the wild brought new appreciation of how it could prosper not just in distant, isolated reserves, but, at least in pieces, alongside or within the civilized. By the same token, the wild’s intrusions also helped tame his own “frontier bent.” When deer wrought havoc in his carefully tended yard and garden, Lillard’s first reported response was to take up a gun against them, as his farmer-father might have. But “a bureaucracy stood in the way of my revenge,” requiring a “depredation” licence. His wife and neighbors were even more dead-set “against any gunplay on Quito, any killing of animals.” “Since I didn’t own a gun and didn’t want to buy one and have it around, I gave up on the whole idea...” and put up a five-foot high fence instead.