Leaving It To Beavers

MY DENTIST happens to be surnamed after a certain large North American mammal which builds dams, and has throughout much of the past two hundred years been gravely mistreated by human kind. I love my dentists office, because the walls of the waiting room are outfited with huge flat screen TVs, and on them motion picture vidoes of incredibly gorgeous natural scenery, usually taken from on high, float constantly, hypnotically, in high def. Scenes of culturally rich European cities are thrown in, narrow, winding brick streets in places like Florence and Venice, and I am often tempted to arrive terribly early and to stay after my appointments just to watch TV, and to drop in unannounced, but that would be uncouth. On the partition between the waiting room and the administrative assistant's desk is a great big, light tan beaver, forever frozen with its head upturned in a look of rapt attention, a taxidermitological masterpice to be sure. Its sheer size is amazing. I had never had any idea that beavers got that big; it must have weighed a hundred pounds. I wish it were alive, and in the wild, or at the very least had been allowed to live out its full life thusly; I'm not a big fan of taxidermy, under any conditions, no matter how skilled the artist. This, notwithstanding that one of my best friends forsook a career as a building contractor to pursue a career in taxidermy. I admired his gumption, if not his profession. My friend died early of a rare form of cancer. I wish he were still living, and doing whatever he damned well (no pun intended) would like to do. During the eighteen thirties and eighteen forties was the era of the "mountain men", when pioneers like the famous Jim Bridger made a living trapping beavers in the Rocky Mountains for the market in Europe and the U.S. East coast, in which a beaver hat craze was raging. The mountain man era only lasted about fiftten years; the beaver were trapped and killed nearly to extinction, settlers looking to farm and mine moved in in droves, and the beaver hat craze gave way to other forms of human cultural craziness. The books I read as a child about the American frontier west and the mountain men intrigued me and filled me with wonder, if also a vague sense of misgiving about the way the pioneers treated each other, native Americans, and nature, misgivings I harbor to this day. Humans relented, and the beaver returned to the land. Then, as the west got partitioned off into farms and ranches, Farmers and ranchers once again began besieging the beavers, who had the audacity to build their infernal dams where people didn't want them, upsetting the agrarian economy. However, now, sanity is once agian prevailing. Beavers are being allowed to thrive, and their numbers, depleted in recent decades, are again on the increase. Environmentalists have successfully convinced our rapacious culture that beavers are great irrigationists, that their damming projects, which range from modest stream blockades to huge constructions miles long, are a desirable part ot the natural process, providing water collections in a western United States growing increasingly dry and thirsty and water depleted. Farmers and ranchers are working with the beavers, not against them. Lord willing and the creek don't rise, this is indicative of mankind's future relationship with nature, generally. I'll keep going to my dentist, not only because he does a good job with my teeth and accepts Medicare, but to watch a little TV, although I'll probably henceforth only glance at the dead beaver quickly, partly sad, partly happy.