“Among Salvador Dalí’s many obsessions—sex, time, death, himself—one of the longest-lasting was giant anteaters. The Spanish painter began sketching the creatures around 1930, and decades later strolled the streets of Paris with a leashed live specimen. A surrealist couldn’t have chosen a more appropriate pet. Massive front claws force anteaters to walk on their knuckles, giving them the shuffling gait of a gorilla holding a fistful of steak knives. Entirely toothless, Myrmecophaga tridactyla possesses a two-foot-long tongue, an organ so prodigious that it’s anchored to the sternum and furls, Fruit Roll-Ups–style, into its owner’s tubular mouth. Anteaters use their tongue to probe anthills and termite mounds like moths at an orchid, lapping up prey with a sticky lacquer of saliva. These sieges are brief, ending when the insects flee or sting. Giant anteaters are thus rotational grazers, endlessly circuiting their bug-filled pastures. A few termites here, a few there, and by day’s end they’ve slurped down 30,000 bugs.

To wander in the 21st century, unfortunately, is to court death. The giant anteater’s range, which runs from Honduras to Argentina, is bisected by BR-262, the highway that cuts across the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul as it winds from the Bolivian border to the Atlantic Ocean. Along the way, the road knifes through two ecosystems: the Pantanal, Earth’s largest tropical wetland, and the Cerrado, the savanna that covers more than 20 percent of Brazil. Eucalyptus, iron, cattle, and cocaine pulse through this infrastructural aorta, transported in trucks against which soft-bodied, naive animals stand no chance. Researchers who have tallied BR-262’s roadkill consider the highway Brazil’s deadliest, and one of the worst in the world.”

Sniff.

These remarkable two paragraphs begin a champion 5000+ word article in this month’s Atlantic, It’s a beautiful and terrifying read and you should spend part of your holiday weekend appreciating the entire thing. But just like that the pale young man who jaunted at our festival two years ago becomes a star. The Atlantic is the Big-Leagues baby. I used to have a subscription at the office. The bright lighthouse beam that guided the way for beavers through the foggy night has suddenly turned its sweeping eye. Its now lighting the way for the next story. And the next.

We’ll always have Paris?

“giving them the shuffling gait of a gorilla holding a fistful of steak knives.”

You see it don’t you? That same heady prose turning its powerful thunderbolt Like Zeus on the cloud from one subject to the next. I’m suffused with that vague feeling of delight and resentment you have when you’re sitting up late at night smoking and watching that comic you dated in college debut on the Tonight Show. That guy once met your parents! He’s gonna be famous. Like Jerry Seinfeld and Norman Mailer famous. And you used to know him.

But he traded in beavers for Road Kill.

This is obviously a splendid section from Ben’s new book. As with Eager he is able to sell segments to magazines  to help keep the bread buttered. July of 2018 was the time Eager came out. How long away is this next tome? We don’t know. The first copies of Eager were delivered to our home for the festival and his west Coast debut. The big box sat sealed in our living room until his arrival. We were there when he and his excited wife cut open the box and got to see his hard work in book form for the first time.

It surely won’t be the last.

Congratulations Ben! Beavers are proud and not at all surprised by your success. We are grateful you told our story, and will always read your name with fondness and remember our time together. But we’ll miss you and all the dignity and attention you threw in our direction.

The Atlantic! What a Thanksgiving present for you and your parents! You deserve it, It couldn’t happen to a nicer former beaver writer.