San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE ANIMAL KIND
Rachel Levin’s book “Look Big” tells how to survive encounters with animals from moose to skunks.
“This disgusts me,” Rachel Levin says, transfixed, inching closer to the raccoon.
Levin is standing in the Randall Museum, in San Francisco’s Corona Heights Park, to see some of the animals featured in her new book, “Look Big.” There’s a wall of glass between her and the raccoon, which now appears to be scooping snacks out of the faux pond in its cage, and Levin is clearly happy about the physical barrier. “Look how human its little hands are,” she says with a mixture of revulsion and excitement.
If you were to make a short list of Bay Area writers likely to write a book about animals and our interactions with them, Levin probably wouldn’t be at the top. She’s a longtime food and travel writer, a contributing writer at San Francisco magazine, and last year she became Eater.com’s first San Francisco restaurant critic. Levin is genuinely fascinated by animals, but that fascination is comingled with fear (of mountain lions and coyotes) and disdain (for lice and ants and, yes, raccoons). She is not exactly an animal person.
“She wants to know the animals are out there and safe and happy and leave it at that,” says her husband and longtime hiking partner, Joshua Richter.
It’s fitting, then, that “Look Big: And Other Tips for Surviving Animal Encounters of All Kinds” isn’t quite a celebration of animals. The book (Ten Speed Press; 144 pages; $14.99), a charmingly illustrated, zippy little paperback, is a how-to guide for surviving animal encounters, both in the wild and the home. Attacked by bees? “Run. You’re just as fast as a bee, but it’ll usually give up before you do.” Ticked off a mountain lion? “Whatever you do, don’t lie down or play dead — or they’ll eat you for dinner.” Jelly fish swipe your legs? “Peeing on a jelly fish sting just makes it worse.”
The idea for the book came to Levin at Colorado’s Breckenridge Ski Resort a few years ago, she says, when she nearly skied into a stately looking moose. Rather than feel any fear, Levin was awed into stillness. And then stupor. What do you do when you see a moose? she thought. “I’m outdoorsy but not super hardcore” says Levin, who runs trails in her free time and used to edit outdoor coverage at Sunset magazine. “You’re supposed to look big, right? That’s all I know. Don’t run?
“I don’t know why I didn’t know what to do with a moose. I feel like I should have known that,” Levin says later, over a BLT she’s customized — Texas toast instead of ciabatta — at Cole Valley’s Bacon Bacon. “And I bet other people didn’t know either.”
The resulting book is part biology lesson and part scout guide, told with humor and gusto — a modern guide to life in a world where animals and humans can live in close proximity. “Whether you live in the city or on Mount Tam, it’s happening — coyote sightings are increasing, bears are rummaging through trash all over,” she says. “It’s their world, we just built on top of it.” And what about those moose? “They can really do damage!” Levin says. “Back away slowly, palms up. If its ears pin back and its hackles raise and it starts smacking its lips — or peeing — expect a charge,” she writes in the book. “Unlike bears, when it comes to a moose, run like mad . ... If you’re attacked: Now’s the time to play dead.”
Levin lives near Sutro Forest in San Francisco
‘Look Big’
with her husband and kids, where most of her worries revolve around skunks and raccoons, both of which get entries in the book. She moved to San Francisco in the late ’90s, after a childhood outside Boston and college in New York. Quick to tell a yarn, she shares that she stands 5-feet-9.
Or, at least, that’s what she’d like to see printed here. “Say I’m really tall,” she says.
Levin is joking, but the reticence about her physical description is real. She’s gone so far as to ask The Chronicle to not include her face in the photo with this story. The discretion is a side effect of what many would consider a dream gig.
Last year, over breakfast at Boulettes Larder in the Ferry Building, Amanda Kludt, the editor in chief of Eater.com, a national food and dining guide, hired Levin to become Eater’s first San Francisco critic. “I wanted someone fresh — not embedded in the food scene,” says Kludt. “Not a famous critic out there already. And I’m just really a fan of Rachel’s writing,”
As such, Levin now guards her face jealously and dines anonymously. And she dines a lot these days, since each restaurant review requires three visits. “I won’t wait in lines anymore,” she says.
In her 20-plus years in the city, Levin has worked herself into its small writers’ community and spends her workdays at the Grotto, where the city’s literati congregate to scribble. At the Grotto, Levin aimed to write one animal entry per day, alphabetically, and fellow writers would pop into her office to check on her progress — “I’m only on ‘deer,’ I’d despair,” she recalled — and pick up new quirky animal facts.
“Her branching into books is a really exciting way to get that Rachel-ness out in the world,” says Bonnie Tsui, the author of “American Chinatown” and Levin’s self-proclaimed work wife.
Levin tapped her connections at the Grotto to cajole a host of esteemed writers into writing about their personal experiences with animals. As a result, “Look Big” is littered with funny and endearing essays from writerly friends and acquaintances.
At an April reading at Green Apple Books, Tsui and other local writers and contributors piled in and shared their stories. (Tsui’s reading, on cockroaches and their enthusiastic consumption of a dead mouse, may have been the grossest.)
“Everyone has an animal interaction — especially in San Francisco,” Levin said, from the peanut-butter sandwiches snatched out of hands by seagulls to the raccoons fed by Muni drivers in the Sunset to the coyote in Salesforce chief Marc Benioff ’s backyard. Levin has always been afraid of mountain lions, she told the crowd — maybe, she joked, it stems from her mother’s fear of house cats.
At the end of “Look Big,” Levin delves into this fear. The book concludes with a list of how many people are killed by wild animals each year in the U.S. It is mostly comforting: bears and sharks each take down one person per year; black widow spiders and coyotes kill under one. (Cows, though — cows are somehow responsible for 20 human deaths each year.)
In light of this information, Levin, the unlikely animal author, ends the book on a command: “Note to self and readers,” she writes. “Love animals. Don’t fear them.” For more information, go to byrachellevin.com or follow @lookbigbook on Instagram. On June 14, Rachel Levin and guests take part in “Golden State Nightlife,” a live storytelling event. 6 p.m. Thursday, June 14, California Academy of Sciences. https://bit.ly/2Hto0Ft.
David Ferry is a Bay Area freelance writer. Email: style@sfchronicle.com