Amazonian Ruminations

We can as much control our feelings as the rains. Yet we can flee from them, or shelter from them under a thick roof in a cozy sweater... or dance in them, which is the most challenging, dangerous, and rewarding path.

The Way of Flight

Erika flees south. But not for Palm Springs, that oasis of green golf courses where plump Northwestern snowbirds strut and old ladies ferry pomeranians about in baby strollers. It’s too… fake. No, she seeks the authentic California experience; the mythic, redemptive spirit of California. The Kerouac sort of San Fran, the Fante flavour LA. Or perhaps Santa Cruz, where polite, enlightened folk in moccasins stroll forest trails, chatting about the Tao and Kundalini Yoga.

She thinks about this as she sits in stale Seattle traffic. Clouds cling to the sky like dead moss. A few hours earlier, she awoke in the single bed of her old childhood room, dim even with the curtains open. Downstairs, cold porridge sat on the stove.

“Eat before you go,” her mother said. “I’ll warm it up.”

As Erika ate, her mother tried again: “You’ve only been home a month.”

“It was a mistake,” she answered.

“Leaving won’t make you feel better. Maybe if you saw Doctor Karlsson again, you’d --”

“No!” Erika’s voice squeaked like a spoiled child’s.

In Olympia, she leaves I-5 for Highway 101, which runs along the coast, quiet and curvy. She plays peek-a-boo with the ocean. Beneath the hum of wind and distant gull calls, the morning’s conversation beats like a broken record in a far-off room. Leaving won’t make you feel.… Erika flicks on the radio and finds a soft rock station. She isn’t sick -- she knows that much. She’s just been… unhealthy.

At a gas station south of a lazy little town called Lincoln City, she fills up, though her gauge shows half a tank left. Her gaze through the back window falls on a bruised banana lying next to rumpled grocery bags full of her clothes, books, and herbal tea collection. On a brown lawn beside the highway, she unravels the banana from the bottom before biting off and spitting out the black bits. A dense canopy of barren branches obscure any view of the ocean, but there’s a gap farther along. Erika saunters over and, sure enough: Peek-a-boo, Peaceful. Out over the water a cluster of clouds break apart. One thin sunbeam stumbles down to the water.

Beyond the Words: An Ode to the Retiring Art of Handwriting

The Old God Dog

When Little Alf was eight years old his father Isaak, the Laughing Man, Son of the Ocean, took him out with sandwiches and lemonade to their beach’s first sandbar. Midway through their picnic, Little Alf spotted a mutt chewing a crab and trundled over to it with half his sandwich. Isaak grinned. When not only the proffered sandwich was taken, but also a chunk of flesh the size of a blueberry from the boy’s ring finger, between the first and second joints, Isaak laughed and laughed and wrapped his sweaty shirt around Alf’s bleeding hand. The boy’s grandmother Elisabet boiled stale herbs and dressed his wound; after his tears had dried, and he drifted towards the seas of sleep in her lap, she told him the tale of Fenrir the Wolf and Odin’s last battle. She had sensed Isaak’s quiet disgust for the boy’s weeping and shared his proud shame. So she moved, like a queen upon a pawn: perfectly timed to Little Alf’s final moments of consciousness, she declared: “True Warriors of the North never cry. Aren’t you a Warrior, little one?” Little Alf dreamed as Odin. All others, even his laughing father, had fled or perished; alone, Alfred Isaaksson stalked through a silent winter forest, seeking the mythical wolf.

It was a sixty-year hunt. The next morning, the dream forgotten, he awoke having shed his Littleness, donning with exhausted vigilance the nimble Boots of Restlessness and the sturdy Spear of Anger. He not only made war with canines, but perfected a quiet disgust for all those too weak for the mythic battle with Fenrir. Dogs stampeded through his sandcastles, pissed on his cars, kept him awake at night -- and he so fought: physically, kicking them away; politically, for leash laws and dog catchers; and socially, sharing every nasty story he heard.

One cold February day during his sixty-eighth year, a hundred-pound brown mongrel lept into the bed of old Alf’s truck as he drank coffee in the local cafe. The proprietor, a genial, perpetually-exhausted man named Rick, pointed out that Alf had left his liftgate down; Alf nodded, thanked Rick, and promptly forgot.

“You seem off,” Rick said. “Never seen you so quiet.”

“It’s nothing.”

Ever since his dream, Alf had been on constant guard against dogs -- and wolves (though he’d never met any) -- and monitored their every movement about him with keen hostility. However, as he got in his truck and drove home, he was so absorbed with the stench of Fenrir emanating from a piece of paper given by his doctor the day before that he didn’t notice a minion of his enemy had slunk aboard. At home, the dog watched the aging man trundle into the cabin and sit in a rocking chair in the living room. The fire next to him mingled with the emerging sunlight to throw orange streaks upon his pale face. The mongrel lurched down to ground and trundled right on after him, through the front door he’d left open, past his knees, to lie down before the fire and sleep.

Olivia noticed the front door had been left open (which only later did she classify as distinctly odd), and promptly closed it. She then turned to the living room. She clapped a hand to her mouth before a cry could escape. It wasn’t the sight of the dog itself that sent the blood from her head and forced her to reach out with her other hand for a chair-back, though the beast’s sprawling bulk in a living room that had been a dog-free sanctuary for as long as she’d known it did shock her. Her first thought upon sight of the scene was that her husband was dead. His gray eyes stared directly at the dog. The light made up his wrinkled white face into that of a corpse. But his foot twitched to rock the chair and he absentmindedly rubbed the hole in his finger and shivered. Olivia sighed in relief. Death skulked her mind: she too had seen the paper.

There were chores to do around the house, and Olivia quickly returned to them. She busied herself, shaking her head and muttering in wonderment under her breath. She cleaned the kitchen and bathrooms, vacuumed all the bedrooms, did laundry, dusted, tidied -- all while avoiding the living room. Two questions harried her, one so terrible that she focused solely upon the other in hopes that the first might disappear or go bother someone else. She wondered and wondered: What to do about the dog? She considered sending it back out to the streets, or taking it to the pound, or offering it to family and friends, but in her whirlwind of wonderment, something else surfaced… a yearning she had buried ever so long ago and thereby assumed dead. It’s unearthing, not as some rotten skeleton but a fierce and stubborn passion, both confused her and made her resolute in a course of preposterous action.

Guilt also accompanied her on her duties, and she moved with a nervous agitation, certain that pandemonium would erupt at any given second. All day she cleaned and worked all day, finding tasks long put off. Finally, at sunset, as she sewed her grandchildren’s torn clothes from the summer, physically and mentally exhausted, she sighed a great, sweeping sigh to clear the rubble from her mind, and there sat a tidy little path forward amid the detritus.

When the explosion finally came, she was prepared.

Alf sat in a trance, rocking, for the whole day. At points he made toast and coffee, or stoked the fire (avoiding kneeling on the dog with the patience of a lifetime owner). He had rarely been able to be quiet or still for even a single meal, and yet that day he sat and sat and sat while Olivia, normally a bastion of tranquility, scurried about finding little projects in a way that everyone associated with Alf. If their children had been present, they would have been so rocked by the whole scenario that they too would each have gotten embroiled in a day of odd action and thoughtful consternation; the confusion could have rippled out through the entire family, but was contained by the elderly couple’s isolation.

The sun set.

“Who the hell…?” Alf muttered. He had dozed off during the afternoon, all the time rocking, rocking. He had dreamed his old dream: stalking Fenrir though the twilit forest, closer than ever before. He smelled the beast’s fur; he listened to its slow breaths. Upon awakening, he saw the dog.

“WHO THE HELL LET THIS IN?” Alf bellowed, staggering to his feet. The dog looked up at him. “‘LIVIA!”

Olivia, with all the dignity of French culture in the face of Nordic barbarism, entered from the kitchen. “Yes, dear?”

“How could you let this beast in?” Alf was shaking, eyes narrowed in a bed of wrinkled skin.

Olivia looked him up and down. Smell being her strongest intuitive sense, she sniffed the air. He was afraid. She had held fast to a view of him as he had seemed the day she met him: immense, ever-fierce, with a laugh that rattled through other people. For fifty years she had not known that this was an act, a farce, a facade. She was content with it; she had not bothered to look -- or, rather, smell -- deeply enough. All that time ago, Olivia, broken and adrift upon a private sea of fear, had sought the shelter of the prosperous, bustling port of Alfred. But now? She no longer felt afraid.

“You let it in, Alfred.”

He sagged. “Wha…?”

Olivia feared he might drop, but he simply swayed and blinked. “And we’re keeping it, Alfred. I always wanted a dog. Also, dinner’s almost ready.”

She exited.

Alf gaped at the space she had vacated, then glared at the dog.

Olivia busied herself in the kitchen. An old nursery song her Grandmother sang to her drifted into her head, and then out of her lips: A louetta, jounte a louetta…. She listened with some amusement to Alf’s hoarse shouting resume. He was shouting at the dog now.

“How dare you enter my home, mutt! I should kick you to the curb! There’s no--”

One bark -- one booming, thunderous bark -- exploded from the living room. The silverware and china in the kitchen clattered, the walls reverberated, the rooms and hallways echoed until it became a cascading dirge. An echo, and….

Silence.

A shuffling. Then Alf sat at the table, wide-eyed. They ate together quietly. Alf did the dishes when they were finished and, skirting the living room, brought Olivia a glass of wine on the enclosed porch. They sat in the gathering darkness and watched the stars appear.

“We’ll call him Thor,” Alf said.

“Who?” asked Olivia.

“The mutt.”

“Oh. Yes, Thor seems appropriate.”

Alf took her hand and their hands trembled together before settling. “You always wanted a dog?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry, I never asked.”

She didn’t answer immediately, looking back and back over fifty years of timidity, strolling her graveyard of buried desires. She felt excited, like a kid in a candy shop. “That’s okay,” she said, “I prefer it this way.”

Rootlessness

For a long while I have believed that in every generation there are a few souls, call them lucky or cursed, who are simply born not belonging, who come into the world semi-detached, if you like, without strong affiliation to family or location or nation or race; that there may even be millions, billions of such souls, as many non-belongers as belongers, perhaps; that in sum, the phenomenon may be as "natural" a manifestation of human nature as its opposite, but one that has been mostly frustrated, throughout human history, by lack of opportunity. And not only by that: for those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainty, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anit-social force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not feel, we hide our secret identities beneath the false skins of those identities which bear the belongers' seal of approval. But the truth leaks out in our dreams; alone in our beds (because we are all alone at night, even if we do not sleep by ourselves), we soar, we fly, we flee. And in the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks. What we forbid ourselves we pay good money to watch, in a playhouse or movie theatre, or to read about between the secret covers of a book. Our libraries, our palaces of entertainment tell the truth. The tramp, the assassin, the rebel, the thief, the mutant, the outcast, the delinquent, the devil, the sinner, the traveler, the gangster, the runner, the mask: if we did not recognize in them our least-fulfilled needs, we would not invent them over and over again, in every place, in every language, in every time.

- Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet -