Now this is a sweet read. I don’t know what the term is for eye candy that you read, but this is pretty darned close. I guess if you’re going to be famous for doing something, writing about beavers isn’t too shabby. Just look at what it’s brought Mr. Goldfarb.
How local environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb turned his love of beavers into a surprisingly successful book
Even before Goldfarb moved to Spokane, accompanying his wife when she took a nurse-midwife job shortly before his book was released, he was a fan of the bucktoothed creature.
“I was fishing in upstate New York,” he recalls, “and had one swim between my legs.” At first, it was startling. But then the sense of wonder hit. “It was spectacular,” he says, “watching this animal glide past you in this beautiful, translucent water.”
Still, Spokane, he says, is a near-perfect location for a journalist on the nature beat.
And there are, of course, plenty of beavers. They chomp at trees at the city’s central Riverfront Park, diving into the Spokane River into the lodge next to the DoubleTree Hotel. One waddles up to the Auntie’s Bookstore downtown, practically serving as a living advertisement for the Goldfarb books inside. Goldfarb recalls watching a couple lounging on the beach at Bowl and Pitcher campground of Riverside State Park when a beaver suddenly hauled itself out of the water and plopped itself down about 15 feet away from them.
Oh Ben! We are so happy that you set your eye on beavers. I mean you might have been writing about bugs or coyotes and this is SO much better.
Writing for High Country News in Seattle in 2015, Goldfarb found himself at a beaver restoration workshop, full of biologists, activists and tribal members who thought the animal was just as incredible as he did. His articles showcasing his “proud love of the beaver” caught the eye of some folks at Chelsea Green Publishing, who pitched him on the idea of writing a book about beavers.
“They basically said ‘Beavers: Go,'” Goldfarb says. “‘Whatever you want to write about beavers, knock yourself out.'”
What a dream job! If I weren’t such a big fan I might be jealous!
In fact, Goldfarb says, he’d raised the exact same objection while on his book tour in Britain. And, in a quintessentially British development, that comment got transformed into a culture-war story in the Daily Mail, the right-wing British tabloid. Their lengthy and sensationalized headline proclaimed: “Environmentalist blasts Chronicles of Narnia author C.S. Lewis for ‘mis-educating’ the public with Mr and Mrs Beaver’s fish suppers because the animals actually only eat plants.”
And yet, that trip also gave him one of his favorite experiences, when he gathered with a bunch of beaver fans in the Cornwall region of England to witness a sighting of the once nearly extinct European beaver.
“It was twilight. And we’re all sitting around being silent … And then the beavers emerged and were gliding across this pond,” Goldfarb says. “It was incredible. People had tears in their eyes. Here was this part of their biological heritage that had been absent for so long and is now finally back.”
You can get so familiar with an animal, that, at times you lose sight of their majesty. But a moment like that brings it all back.
“They’re these enormous rodents with these bizarre paddle tails that, you know, cut down trees and build walls out of them,” Goldfarb says. “For them, it was like seeing the Loch Ness Monster.”
This is how I felt every fucking time I saw a beaver, And I live in California.
