Free Generations and Other True Stories by Bryan Woolley Page B

peek at the Kinkster from behind the stacks. He waves at them. “Would you like me to sing Ol’ Ben Lucas Had a Lot of Mucus?” he asks. “Do you know that song, boys and girls?”
    â€œNo,” says a shy young girl.
    â€œWell, it’s one of Kinky’s songs for children. I wrote it when I was eleven.”
    He removes his hat and shows the TV camera his long, kinky hair, which he calls his “Lyle Lovett starter kit,” points out the Star of David and the star of Texas on his belt buckle, tells Pam that his new book is about “old ladies being dispatched to Jesus on their seventy-sixth birthday,” then it’s back to the hotel.
    The Kinkster’s room is ready. He and Lenore go over his schedule for the next two days, which includes such nightmares as a 5:30 a.m. TV show in Fort Worth followed by a 7:00 a.m. flight to Austin. We make arrangements to meet again for his evening gigs at Borders Books & Music and another show at KRLD, and we leave the Kinkster to get some rest.
    But when we see him again, he seems wearier than when we left him. His face is clouded in a grief newer than those that we’ve spent the day discussing. He has had a phone conversation of the unhappy kind, he says. A romance has soured. A sweetheart has told him goodbye. “I am semi-brokenhearted,” he says.
    But the shows go on. All of them. And the Kinkster leaves everybody laughing, as usual.
    Nearing midnight, we say goodbye and do the Kinkster’s good-luck handshake.
    He smiles wanly. “I really learned it from Mexican parking lot attendants in L.A.,” he says.
    October 1994

If you’re ever fortunate enough to see a whooping crane, you’ll never forget it. The magnificent white birds, some of them five feet tall, seem like creatures from another world. Despite their size, they seem delicate—fragile, even—and somehow sad, as if they know how precarious their existence is in this world .
    Working on this piece gave me a new and deeper understanding of the crisis around us, and the incalculable value of the treasures we’re losing to our stupidity, ignorance, and greed .
    The Long Journey
    Through the telescope, sunlight turns the ripples of the stream to mirror shards almost too bright for the eye to endure. Heat rises from the water, making the air ripple, too, like a gauzy curtain in a breeze. On a sand bar in the middle of the South Saskatchewan River, nine huge white birds pace with slow deliberation. Isolated in the wavy round image of the telescope, on their sliver of sand in the middle of the broad river, they resemble priests of some lost religion, performing a ritual long forgotten by all but themselves.
    â€œThey’re early this year,” Brian Johns says. “I don’t know what that means. An early winter or something?”
    It’s late September. The wheat harvest is under way in Saskatchewan, and so is autumn. While the daily highs still range into the nineties in Texas, the leaves of the mottes of trees that dot the prairie here are already a blaze of red and gold.
    And the whooping cranes have begun their annual journey from their summer home, only four hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle, toward their winter quarters in the warm bay waters of the Texas Gulf Coast.
    The first whoopers usually don’t arrive in Saskatchewan until the first of October, but this year Mr. Johns, a Canadian Wildlife Service biologist, already has spotted eighteen, these hanging out on the river, others in a few small lakes around Saskatoon.
    They travel in pairs, or in family groups of three, or in bunches of five or six, like human families taking their vacations together. The largest single group ever spotted near Saskatoon was thirteen, Mr. Johns says, and the largest he has seen was eleven. So the tall white birds preening and pacing along the sand bar in the river are, as whooping cranes go, a sizable conclave.
    â€œThey leave their