Yesterday was was a fun and oddly familiar day spent sharing the Martinez Beaver story with very busy author Ben Goldfarb who laughed often at the story, took notes on a little pad, and recorded the interview with his phone. Ben kindly brought me a treasure of immense value: A beaver chewed stick from the sanctioned Scottish beavers in Argyll – which of course I will treasure. We reciprocated his generosity by giving him a poster, one of Sherri Tippie’s sculpy beaver families and a beaver tie for all his important beaver lectures he will be asked to give soon.
He was delighted about this tie and a good sport about putting it on for this photo.
After brunch and the interview he went through the scrapbook slowly, pausing at particularly interesting or important stories and really enjoying the whole drama of the Martinez beavers. He definitely seemed to understand the politics involved, and said he was planning to do a whole chapter on California and our stubborn beaver resistance. He was fascinated by the historical papers and had spoken to Rick Lanman already. He had also heard from Damion about the Placer county depredation rate and was interested to hear that we had been the ones to process them and get one of my psychology friends to run some stats on the numbers to find out that Placer county was issuing 7 times more depredation permits than anywhere else in the state – significant at the .02 level! On his tour with Jon they met some local color that asked about beavers it it made him remember that it was still a big part of Martinez history even today.
Ben told me that he had been nipped by a beaver in Cornwall, and very surprised to hear it growl sooo loud and ferocious. He was not offended and took it as a badge of honor. After all the time we spent in close quarters with beavers in Alhambra Creek, we were surprised. But Ben is very tall, so maybe that factored in to the yearling’s (I’m guessing) reaction? He’s very polite and careful not to be imposing in anyway, but it still makes an impression. Ben indicated that he reads this website often and in addition to finding it very useful to his work he seemed fairly affected (scarred?) by my confrontation of that NPR show host whose guest suggested that a good solution for beaver problems was to eat them. (Remember that?) Ben was the expert that talk show host cited in background for the story. And then proceeded to host a show of mostly beaver-ignorants. Yes, I did rattle the cage bars a bit after that. What can I say? Sometimes things get under my skin, and when National Public Radio chooses to be stupid about beavers, even after interviewing some very smart people, I get riled.
Anyway, it was a long, interesting, day. I got to hear some great stories about the fascinating people he’s been talking to, a little about his dream of being an apprentice to Mike after it’s published and opening up his own beaver solutions one day in CT after his wife finishes nursing school. I must have been working hard while he was here because I slept like a flat stone at the bottom of the river all night, and right through the fireworks.
I was a little shocked to hear him say that he thinks of me as a key player in the beaver story – especially since I just make up everything I do! But one of the fun things about this work is its a pretty rag tag field with a lot of holes and any one with can break in.
All of Ben’s work is going to result in a GREAT book!
