Post 599 - April 17, 2024
It was raining in San Francisco a few days ago. It wasn’t poring, it was just steadily draining down from the sky, drenching everything.
As I walked through Union Square Park I saw, perched on a railing, a line of bedraggled pigeons. They were soaked through and looked utterly miserable. They all had their heads hunched down into their shoulders in the same way we do in the rain. As if cringing from the drops will make us less wet.
I took a few pictures of them. If it had been dry, they likely would have flown off as I got near them. As it was, they were so over it all, that they just sat there and eyed me suspiciously as I came in for the shot, every so often shaking the water off their feathers.
It is estimated that there are about 400 million pigeons worldwide. They can be found in almost every urban area on the planet. As our population expands, so does theirs. Where did they come from? We bred them and put them there.
The first recorded evidence of domesticated pigeons is found in cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia that are five thousand years old. Researchers, however, think that we started breeding them as long ago as five thousand years before that. The ancient Egyptians built huge dovecotes that could house vast numbers of them. They would sacrifice tens of thousands of birds at a time during a single ritual.
They were brought over to North and South America by the early European colonists as a food source but also to serve as messengers. Pigeons have an innate homing ability. Release them almost anywhere, and they will manage to find their way back to their nests. Once this ability was noticed, humans began to selectively breed them to improve it. Individual flights of over a thousand miles have been recorded. When they head home, they don’t dawdle. They tend to average a speed of 60 miles an hour although they can go even faster than that.
During wartime, military leaders relied on pigeons to deliver intelligence. The Egyptians used them that way. Pliny the Elder describes them being used during battles in Ancient Rome. Genghis Khan used them.
The modern-day use of pigeons to communicate continued right up into the eighteen hundreds. At that point, the telegraph was invented. Messages could be sent instantaneously. The equipment didn’t need to be fed or cared for. The telegraph machine fit into a box and could be easily transported. Suddenly the pigeon began to lose its usefulness to mankind.
Pigeons still played an important part throughout both World Wars. These days, however, they have become obsolete as information carriers. We still eat them, of course. Squab, which are usually young pre-flight pigeons are considered a delicacy.
After millennia of breeding and caring for the animals, we’ve now just abandoned them. Their ability to live in the wild has long since been bred out of them. With nowhere else to go, they continue to follow us around.
They live in our cities and forage for our scraps. They build nests in the nooks and crannies of our buildings and do their best to survive against our indifference or, in some cases, outright hostility.
“Rats with wings.” “Something should be done about them.” “They’re so gross.”
I hadn’t been in San Francisco since before the pandemic. We spent a lot of time there during the Jersey Boys years. The production at the Curran Theatre ran for nearly two years. It became a place where we could store casts and let them perform before their ultimate destinations – Las Vegas or Chicago – could accommodate us. By the end, I think, we’d installed three fully different groups of performers into the show there.
The Curran Theatre has quite a history. When Eve stands by the stage door waiting for the legendary Margo Channing in All About Eve, the door the filmmakers used was the one at the Curran. Later in the film, Marilyn Monroe sat on the steps inside the lobby. The classic noir drama, The Maltese Falcon, opens with a car chase that careens down Geary past the front of the theatre.
Three blocks to the west and south of the Curran lands you in the Tenderloin district. Even when we were there a few years ago, it was not a place you would likely venture unaccompanied. These days, passing through there is like suddenly finding yourself in a war zone from a post-civilization dystopian future movie.
Like everywhere else post-shutdown, buildings have been abandoned and stores closed. People live on the sidewalks in tents that look as if they’ve been there for a very long time. There’s a tragic air of permanence to the make-shift shelters.
I was meeting a friend of mine for a meal in the Castro which is the historically gay district of San Francisco. Our group was staying in the Four Seasons on Market Street. (One of the perks of my jobs is that I end up staying in some very nice places.) So, of course, me being me, I decided to walk to my dinner date. My hike took me right through the heart of the Tenderloin.
Conditions there are so much worse now than they were then, that I almost don’t have any words for it. People strung out on meth zigzag through the empty streets. Others sleep in overturned shopping carts or cardboard boxes or simply out on the sidewalk up against the cement walls of an empty high-rise. I passed several people vomiting into the gutter.
Many of these people are veterans of the United States armed services. They’ve come home from fighting our wars and cannot figure out how to rejoin society. The trauma of what they’ve seen and endured has left them paralyzed. Some have been physically compromised but all of them have suffered mentally and emotionally.
We needed them while they were fighting for us. Now that the conflict is over, though, their usefulness has vanished. If anything, they have now become a burden.
Like the pigeons, they find themselves living on our outskirts feeding off our scraps. Like the pigeons, they are ignored by all of us. I took all of what I saw with me to my delicious meal with my friend. I don’t know what to do with it. Afterward, as it was dark, I Uber’d back to the Four Seasons watching all of that through the window of the warm, dry, and comfortable car.
The next day, we flew to Scottsdale, Arizona. I prefer to sit on an aisle, but this time I ended up at a window. On an aisle, I can get up and go to the bathroom as often as I like. Inside a row, I just feel trapped. Anyway, it was a short flight from San Francisco to Phoenix, so I just sat in the window seat and got over myself.
Phoenix sits on a large plain called the Valley of the Sun with mountains on every side. As we flew over the peaks, the city appeared in the bowl beneath us. The entire valley is filled to the brim with human habitation. From the air, the ground looks scabbed over as if it has suffered a horrible burn and is trying to heal.
From 10,000 feet you can tell which areas have money and which don’t. The wealthier the area, the more exposed water there is and the greener the ground. There are several developments sent on enormous artificially created lakes. The water is a very strange color of blue. It cannot possibly be fit to drink.
Nobody seems to live as if they are in a desert. Great lawns and swimming pools are almost everywhere. Lush golf courses dot the landscape like stars in the sky. How can this be sustainable?
There are countless articles online about how Phoenix is not in any danger of running out of water anytime soon. There has been enough rain recently that the underground aquifers are full. Most of the water used by the good people of Phoenix is not coming from the aquifers, though, it is coming from the Salt and Verde Rivers and from the Colorado River. The Colorado River is definitely in danger of running dry in the not-so-distant future from overuse.
We were just in Palm Springs in California last week and they, too, seem to be living in an ultimately unsustainable way. Green grass and swimming pools consume a huge amount of water. All the fountains dotted throughout these desert cities are doing is helping the water to evaporate.
The climate operates in cycles. We may be getting rain now, but what happens when we slide back into a drought?
As human beings, we seem to use whatever we want, whenever we want and cast it aside when it’s no longer of use. It doesn’t matter if it’s animals, people, or even the land, itself. We are voracious.
I am sitting in my hotel room in Scottsdale. We are being picked up to go to the airport in a few minutes. We are staying at a resort with nine different swimming pools and a gigantic multi-story water slide. In between the water features are gorgeous cactus gardens and broad well-kept lawns. It’s lovely. The bed is the most comfortable I’ve slept in for a while and I finally feel caught up on my sleep.
Once you start looking at how we are living as a species, it becomes nigh on impossible to unsee it. There is such a cost to how we’ve chosen to live. Even knowing all that, though, I’m not turning any of this down. I’m going to wheel my little roll-aboard down to the front desk in a few minutes, get our big cases from the bellman, get them loaded into our SUV, and head off to the airport.
On the way down, I’ll stop and get a cup of coffee in the lobby and enjoy the stunning design of the buildings. There are fountains throughout. The sound of running water invariably makes me need to pee.
How much longer can we all live like this? I would like to think that with awareness we may start to take better care of our animal friends, our environment, and each other, but I’m not sure that’s true. There are certainly people who do, and we end up venerating them as saints. They are altruistic so that the rest of us don’t have to be. We can worship them while we get on with our lives consuming everything in sight.
I hope that the pigeons in Union Square Park in San Francisco have gotten dry and found something to eat. Given what we all throw away each day, I am sure that they have.