Wow.

If you google the single word 'otters', my website now ranks #8 on the #1 search engine in the world! And since two of the higher-ranking results are sports teams, and another two pages are strictly about sea otters, this means my site is the #4 river otter resource on the web now.

I'm both surprised, and pleased! :3

 

I just saw wild river otters at Trinidad for the 4,800th time! Or maybe this evening's sighting was #4,801. Whatever, it's been so long since the last time, I've kind of lost count. ^^

 

Over last night, I upgraded all of the photos on my "official" website, An Otter Family Album. For some time, I've wanted to make the pictures larger, and do away with the unsightly (and now unnecessary) copyright watermarks. Overall, I think the visual appeal of the site is significantly improved. Have a look, and let me know what you think.

I'm surprised to learn that the Family Album is now the #8-ranked site on Google for the search term "otters." I remember a few months after I launched Otters.net in 2001, I couldn't find it at all via Google. I still don't think many people read it, though. I only get maybe a dozen email inquiries a year from the site. I'm glad it's easier to find in searches now, anyway.

 

When I was a teenager, there were two movies that had a profound influence on me. One was Ring Of Bright Water (1969) which was about a man and his pet otter, and the other was the original Willard (1971) about a young man who befriended rats. Actually, it was the combined effect that both movies had on me that led me to the life I've lived for the past quarter-century.

Ring Of Bright Water planted a seed in me that didn't actually sprout until 1976, but Willard's effect on me was much more immediate. I identified strongly with the main protagonist, Willard Stiles. Willard was the son of a steel-industry man; so was I. Willard's mother was domineering and sickly, and demanded complete devotion. So did mine. Willard's working life was made a living hell by his duplicitous general manager and harassing co-workers. Mine, too. And, as I did, Willard turned to the companionship of animals as a psychic refuge from his tortured daily existence.

Because of Willard, rats became my favorite creatures – my first animal "archetype." I studied animal psychology in college in large measure so I could work with rats. While most behaviorists exploited their animal subjects, however, I would make my lab into a rat's paradise. By 1976, though, my attention was captured by another animal archetype – the river otter – and the rest was history, or rather, my future.

But otters led me back to rats, if only for one momentous afternoon. You see, after college, in 1980, I started a conservation group to champion the plight of the river otter. I self-published a newsletter called The Brightwater Journal, and the person who did the layout for my newsletter was a fellow otter-lover named Jan Gildersleeve. Jan moved her office twice while I was doing the otter newsletter, and when I was ready to give her the copy and graphics for issue #3 in autumn 1981, she gave me the address to her new place.

Her new office was in an old mansion just off Wilshire Boulevard in L.A. I was impressed! Jan was definitely moving up in the world if she could afford to rent this place. Anyway, I trotted up the front stairs, opened up the huge carved wooded door, and stepped inside. Right away I saw it wasn't just one office, but many. I walked through the main hall seeing a large parlor then a large dining room to my left. To my right was a grand staircase. Then, just as I spotted Jan's office door straight ahead at the end of the entry hall, it struck me.

I've been here before.

But no, no way. I'd never been in this house, obviously. But that front room, the room next to it, that staircase. Holy. Shit. This is the Willard house! Talk about a chill running up my spine! I was completely dumbstruck. This was nothing less than a miracle. The path I'd been following for the last 9 years had led me to the precise scene of my first animal awakening. Then I approached Jan's office. I walked through a doorway, and there, again, to my right was another staircase – Willard's mother's staircase, the one in the movie that had the invalid's escalator chair on it. And Jan's office was in the former kitchen, where Willard prepared the poison for Ben and the rest of the rats!

This is almost too much.

So before I even said "Hi" to Jan, I asked her, "Is this the house where they filmed Willard? "Yeah! How did you know that?" "I just walked in and I recognized it from the movie." Then I looked out the back windows, and there was the overgrown garden and the cement pond, again, just like it was in the film. I don't even remember us talking about my otter newsletter, I was so "high" on the experience of being in that house.

(There was another memorable thing about Jan's office. It was the first time I ever saw a computer used in an office environment – an Apple II, of course. ^^)

Anyway, just tonight, I finally found the Willard house online! I came across my old index card with Jan's multiple addresses on it, and there at the bottom was "637 S. Lucerne, LA 90005." Google Maps street view to the rescue! And there it was. First time I'd laid eyes on the place in over 25 years. I'm amazed it's still there! I really expected to see an office building or apartment complex in its place...



Google Maps link

Once I had the address, I then found this webpage confirming that the house was, in fact, where the interior scenes for Willard were filmed.

Quite a journey, eh? There and back again on multiple levels. Here I am, at the end now, looking back at my beginnings. The circle is truly closed now...

 

I'm hereby guilty of re-using an old Christmas card. :-)

( My Holiday Greeting from Winter, 1982. )

 

Something else that's dawned on me lately. I was much happier when I had much less: less money, less material things in general. There was a time when I and everything I owned occupied one single room.

The place where I was the happiest in my whole life was the first place I lived after moving out of my parents' house. In 1983, at the age of 28, I moved 700 miles away from my L.A.-area birthplace, and rented a room in this recently-restored 115-year-old farm house in Arcata, California. My room was on the bottom floor at left, and my rent was $100 a month. That's my Toyota truck there in front - the only vehicle I ever bought new.




click image to enlarge

( Enter my otter shrine... )

I was such a pure human being then. Pure in mind, pure in spirit, and mostly pure in body. I drank less back then than in any period of my adult life; didn't smoke pot at all because I couldn't afford it. I still smoked cigarettes, though. The thought disgusts me now, but I did manage to quit in 1986, after smoking killed my father.

My "personal hypocrisy index" was also the lowest of my life back then. I lived exactly what I believed in, every minute of every day. I was on what Carlos Castaneda called "a path with heart." I lived in the spiritual and physical presence of my zootheistic Deity. It was literally my Heaven on Earth.

But today, I've veered away from my old path. The material has entirely replaced the spiritual in my life, and corrupted me. I feel lost now. I yearn to return, but I can't find my way home anymore...

 

I realize my writings of late have been on the rather morbid side. It won't always be like that, I assure you. It's true, though, that morbidity and mortality are subjects I've long been used to, because my father made his living manufacturing steel burial caskets.

I recently found this family relic on eBay:



Dad kept one of these in his pants pocket for years after he had them made in the early '60s. I distinctly remember he had scratched his initials "E.M.S." on his tape measure. I don't recall exactly when he lost it, but it was long before his death. (It was nowhere to be found among his personal belongings.) So I was glad to find this one as a keepsake.

Incidentally, it may surprise you that there is a religious connection between otters and caskets! You see, Cuthbert of Lindisfarne was the Catholic patron saint of both otters and the funeral industry. (He began the practice of Christian burial in pagan Britain.) I'll leave it to this page to explain the connection between otters and St. Cuthbert.

 

For a few brief moments, I could truthfully say that I was the "top" otter biologist in the world...




click image to enlarge (460k)

Group portrait, V. Int'l Otter Colloquium, Otter-Zentrum, Hankensbüttel, W. Germany, 6 September 1989.

 

Stumbled upon this nice sculpture of the extinct Sea Mink (Mustela macrodon):


Click pic, then click once more for a lovely enlargement


Less-pricey Sir Otter is also sweet, but even the littler ones are still way beyond my budget...

 

I obtained a very rare image via eBay this past week. It's a century-old photograph of Trinidad harbor – the otters' home.

The picture was taken from the side of Little Head on the bluff where the whaling station would be built c.1920. The present pier extends about 350 feet out from the notch in the foreground, passing just to the left of those offshore rocks (which still look exactly the same today).

In the background you can see the remains of the old Ryder Wharf on Trinidad Head. That burned in 1914, so this photograph has to be at least 93 years old.



Here's a closeup:

( Cut for width (image is 1152x1152, 220KB) )

I don't believe there were any otters living here then, though. The nearby Yurok village of Tsurai was still settled in the first decade of the 20th century. This tribe made its arrow quivers out of land otter pelts, so I very much doubt that the kind of stable and visible population I witnessed here in the '80s-'90s could have existed in this area during the period of aboriginal settlement.