Is Nokobee really worth saving? by Bill Finch

Nokobee, it seems, is meant to be a portrait of the natural world of south Alabama and adjacent areas of northwest Florida. That’s not a part of the country people visit often, and except for some moderate-sized cities, much of it is rather thinly populated.

But when someone says “Alabama” to you, what is the first thing that comes to your mind? Come on, give me your first impression. Even your second one will do.

Maybe you remember hearing about Alabama from the recent news accounts of tornadoes. If you follow football, you may recognize the name of the college team. Many people’s first lessons about Alabama, I expect, involved stories about racial conflict or stories about Alabama’s importance to the civil rights movement. These are important stories to tell, but if it’s not a disaster or a conflict or a national championship football team, you don’t seem to hear much from this part of the world.

If I asked most people to name a plant most associated with Alabama, I suspect their first inclination would be to name an agricultural crop like cotton, since farming cotton was once so important to the history and the legends of Alabama and the Deep South. Some might think of kudzu, that legendary vine introduced from Asia that supposedly grows a mile a minute.

But racial conflict, cotton, kudzu — these are all things we humans have recently introduced to Alabama. They are some of the more conspicuous things we've done TO Alabama.

Anthill, in its description of Nokobee, begins to reveal a part of Alabama we’re not used to thinking about, the Alabama that existed before humans started scribbling their stories across it.

If you peel away our initial impressions of Alabama, we can discover some surprising facts:
— Alabama, according to a seminal report by NatureServe, is rated as having the greatest biological diversity — the greatest diversity of native plant and animal species — of any Eastern state. That means Alabama has more species of plants and animals than places like Florida, which has a long leg dipping down into the tropics, and North Carolina and Virginia, which are famous for their central Appalachian forests. Only two or three states nationally have significantly more diversity than Alabama. One of those is California, which is more than three times larger than Alabama. The other is Texas, which is about 6 times larger. (No, neither Hawaii nor Alaska come close to Alabama in total biological diversity.)
— If you’ve always suspected there must be something in the water that causes Alabama to be like Alabama, you know, you’re right. A significant portion of Alabama’s exceptional biological diversity is the result of the richness of its stream systems and wetlands. Alabama has more species of fish than any other state, and a single small river in Alabama can have more than twice the number of fish species as the entire state of California.
— Scientists have recently calculated that the greatest concentration of turtle species in the world is centered on southwest Alabama, the area celebrated in this novel. (A river drainage basin below the Himalayas in northern India has a comparable number of species, but spread out over a much larger area.)
— The diversity of oaks, hickories, magnolias and other broadleaf trees is much higher in Alabama and immediately surrounding states than it is in the central Appalachians. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and North Carolina, often considered one of the country’s most diverse national parks, has 12 species of oaks on some 500,000 acres. A 100-acre patch of the Red Hills of southern Alabama may have 15 to 20 species! And yet, Alabama’s most diverse forest is the longleaf pine forest, a forest dominated by only one species of tree, but with a forest floor that can support one of the richest assortments of wildflowers anywhere in the temperate world. Some people have counted 60 or more plant species in a single square meter (about one square yard) of Alabama longleaf forest.
— Amazingly, Alabama’s diversity is hanging on even though it has one of the lowest percentages of conservation land of any large eastern state, and only a tiny fraction of the publicly held lands that exist in places like the central Appalachians, California or Montana.

Does any of this surprise you? Why would Alabama be so much more biologically diverse than many other states? Why do you think people aren’t aware of this part of Alabama? As you read the rest of the book, consider how preconceptions about Alabama will present challenges to Raff as he goes away to school, and then returns to protect the place he loves.

Nokobee: The Character and Characters of a Landscape (Chapters 2-14) by Bill Finch

We are introduced to many new characters in Section II of Anthill. But two of the most important aren’t formally introduced until the last half of this section. The first of those “characters” is the landscape of Nokobee, along with the plants and animals it supports. That swirl of wild creatures, that neighborhood of trees and meadows and lakes, seems at times to be an odd mirror of the communities of people Raff grew up with.

The second important character we’re introduced to here is “ a kind of ant” whose anthill colonies are “special to the history” being related in this novel.

Raff, at a young age, begins learning from his encounters with these characters. His attempt to shake hands with a cottonmouth leaves a deep impression on him, and the description of that meeting with the cottonmouth recalls his search for the Chicobee Serpent and his run-in with the Frogman. As Raff explores this world of Nokobee and its many characters, in particular the creatures of the anthill, it seems they’re already influencing how he sees the world of people he grew up with.

But at this point in the book, it might be just as interesting to ask whether Raff’s circle of human acquaintances, his experiences with people, may have influenced how he sees the wild world of Nokobee. How much of what he sees in ants is colored by the people and social circumstances he grew up with? How much of what you see of nature is affected by your dealings with people?

Is it useful to see the people and the wild species of Nokobee as similar, so that the actions of one can illuminate the actions of the other? Are there limits and cautions if we try to make these comparisons?

Life in a Strange Place (Chapters 2 - 14) by Bill Finch

The title of Section II, The Citizen of Nokobee, is a little odd.

Raff, after all, is a citizen of the cities of Clayville and later, Mobile. Much of this section revolves around his relationships with the people of those communities — his family, their rituals, and the peculiar rules, customs and beliefs of the people there.

And yet, the title celebrates Raff as the citizen of a very different kind of community, the community of the wild land known as Nokobee. Nokobee is a fictional place, but it appears to be a condensed portrait of a real place, southwest Alabama, in the area of the country known by that half spooky name, the Deep South.

Think back on all the things you’ve heard before about Alabama, its people and its places. Jot those thoughts down, in the order you think of them. We’ll come back to them.

When we think about places we don’t know a lot about, we often nurture overly simplistic impressions of those places. So if you say "Florida" to people who only visit there, they might think of beaches and orange juice. But folks who live in Florida know it is far more complex and interesting than white sand and orange groves.

We may also harbor the suspicion that people in other places aren’t quite like us, that they may experience life in a way we don’t.

"Tell me about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all?" a character asks in Faulkner’s novel, Absalom, Absalom, another famous story about the Deep South. The character who asks those questions sounds like he has just discovered a strange new species of insect running across his floor, and is amused and perhaps a little annoyed by the creature’s mysterious rituals and behavior. I imagine Raff engaged in a very similar discussion when he went to Harvard.

Did these chapters of the book confirm your impressions of Alabama? How would you have felt or reacted, growing up in those communities where Raff was raised? Would it have changed the way you see things? How do the people and customs and beliefs of Clayville and Mobile resemble the people, customs and beliefs of your own community? How do their prejudices and assumptions and beliefs differ from your own?

Making a Mountain Out of an Anthill - E.O. Wilson's Anthill Discussion - Chapter One: "Frogman" led by Anne Post, Chief Librarian, NCTC

"What to make of Anthill? Part epic-inspired adventure story, part philosophy-of-life, part many-layered mid-century Alabama viewed in finely observed detail, part ant life up close, part lyrical hymn to the wonders of earth, part contribution to the growing genre of eco-lit..." (Margaret Atwood's review - "Homer of the Ants" in the NY Review of Books)

Why spend eight weeks discussing E.O. Wilson's Anthill (see schedule)? We knew the book would appeal to young adults. We knew the story would resonate with both the Aldo Leopold essay and the Curt Meine essay and further enrich the WILD READ discussions so nobly led by Curt Meine and Will Stolzenburg here these last two weeks. We knew Anthill had the potential to shed light on the visioning process to discover bold ideas and ask deep questions about the future of conservation and with a focus on our beloved wildlife refuges. However, Anthill was chosen first and foremost because it is a story and as Jimmy Fox with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Fairbanks, Alaska, so eloquently commented via this discussion blog, "Humans are deeply influenced by stories...If we conservationists want a land ethic to flourish, we must tell stories that convey what we know and feel in our hearts - a noble, unselfish concern for others and this planet we call home. If we can't tell these stories, then we must find those who will tell them for us." The power of the story can really stir our imaginations even as we look hard science in the eye and envision our conservation future.

Anthill is about the life and times of Raff Cody growing up in the last of the longleaf pine-filled Alabama wildlands, his education, the mentors who inspire him, the ant colonies that connect him to a better understanding of the natural world and the magnifying glass view of human nature too. We are along for the ride through his many rites of passage and epic encounters - from his exquisite connection to the Noxubee Tract (see Noxubee NWR), his career choice and a climactic ending with the Frogman, the Cyclopean character who vigorously defends his property, a dark and iconic creature from the woods, of the woods. There is even Frogman’s Chickopee Serpent that asserts its epic head into the story (“gnashing his terrible teeth” – remember that childhood quote?) Raff is a young Ed Wilson in a way and clearly has caught the "bug" literally and figuratively. The nature "bug" meant Raff left no anthill unturned in his exploration of the natural world which lead to his scientific focus on ants and ultimately the interesting career choice made to effect the change and exert the most power to protect the places he loved.

This week we focus on Chapter One “Frogman.” We are introduced to 15-year old Raff and cousin Junior. They are rough and tumble young people who know the Alabaman "back forty" like the back of their hand and Wilson in his own autobiographical way sets the stage for the young men’s clear and deep connection to the land. The plot immediately thickens however as Frogman is introduced into the landscape and his presence carries that seminal moment in the wild outdoors that carves a deep niche in our life – that fear-ridden, but enchanting archetypal figure that emerges from the swamp of our greatest fears. Many of us experienced that vicariously through fairy tales when fear wore wolf clothes, or the trickster fox, or many ogre-like, extinct perhaps creatures of the wild. That archetypal figure is wildness gone wild, fear incarnate, primordial and always nagging and sometimes dangerous.

Our WILD READ questions for you:

What happens when we look our fear of the unknown, the wild in ourselves, directly in the eye?

Is there any relationship between that “Green Fire” referenced in “Thinking Like a Mountain” and the predatory nature of the “Frogman” character in Anthill? Does overcoming fear have a place in establishing our sense of connection and purpose or does it inspire supremacy?

How critical is the connection between a child and a natural place to ultimately incite action to protect that land and build a strong environmental ethic?

See also our Anthill Discussion Guide.

Note: I will respond through our comments but our WILD READ team members will continue to post here this week to tease out more questions. Check out our Schedule including the grand finale week July 3-9 when Margaret Atwood, Canadian novelist, poet and essayist, will join our discussions. These discussions all lead up to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's wildlife refuge visioning conference July 10-14 in Madison, WI.

*Photo image used by permission of Associated Press