A Language older than Words Read online

I turned around, and the class laughed. I laughed, too, but before I could shrug a woman slammed her hand down on her desk and cried, "I get it! The point is that he can't tell us the point. The point is that we have to get it ourselves!"

  I walked to the empty seat next to hers, sat down, placed the chalk on her desk, and said, "There's nothing else I can teach you. Thank you. Have fun."

  I was raised a fundamentalist Christian. Many of my best memories happened because of our belief that one should not participate in secular activities on Sabbath, that is, from Saturday sundown to Sunday sundown. No shopping, no television, no movies, no sports (although made-up games were acceptable in my family). No books were allowed that weren't either about the Bible or nature.

  The observance of Sabbaths was admittedly a little too legalistic in its implementation. We often counted the minutes till sundown on Sunday so we could watch the end of a baseball game or pick up a novel, and my siblings often left early for movies on the rationale that the theaters were in the shade of a mountain, and therefore the movie did not technically begin till after the sun had gone down on the spot where they sat.

  Fortunately my family did not adhere to the dictionary definition of secular, which is pertaining to the world or to things not spiritual or sacred. It is a horrifying definition. But the natural world was considered sacred enough in my family to permit me to take long, rambling walks among Creation, for which I am thankful. In retrospect my childhood Sabbaths became a time to think and not think, a time to wander, a time to sit. They became a blessing, a joy, a refuge.

  I often spent Sabbaths in the pasture, looking at ants and grasshoppers, or wading through the irrigation ditch catching crawdads and garter snakes. I would like to say my intentions were always benign, but they were not. Most times I was content to watch, but sometimes I mixed ants from different hills to watch them fight, or threw caterpillars in to watch the ants swarm. Often I caught grasshoppers to feed to the toads who lived in our window well.

  Each spring brought new shoots of plants to nibble and taste, new tiny toads who danced in the grass, chest-deep water (icy cold from mountain glaciers) in the irrigation ditch, clumsy wasps on fresh spring wings, the reawakening of anthills, the return of robins and meadowlarks, the reemergence of my old friends the venerable window well toads.

  Summer. Russian olives turned silver and cottonwoods dropped their fibrous snow. Flower followed flower, each one feeding bees and wasps and beetles for a week or two, then drying, losing petals, closing in on itself, and hardening to a seed-pod. Willow, dandelion, sweet clover, alfalfa. Thunderstorms day by day, then no moisture at all, until grasses yellowed to brittle stalks in the heat of August. The irrigation ditch drained to pools, puddles, mud, dust, and the crawdads went away—I never knew where—for another year.

  Sundays during fall I took long lone tramps with rations of peeled raw potatoes and apple bits my mother had cut for me.

  Always I looked at bugs: at ants and their hills, more frenetic now; at wasps turned desperate and ill-tempered by the shortening of days and almost certainly the knowledge of their own impending deaths. I loved to look at the hard double, treble, or quadruple barrels of mud dauber nests; it never occurred to me to break one open to see inside, instead I just ran my fingers along them. In boggy shadows, armies of spiders dashed from plant to plant in miniature forests of mint.

  And winter. Sundays then were mostly spent inside, with books, or talking to my pet turtle. Sometimes I went out, to be with the horses or cows, insects no longer being available. I looked close at the bark on trees, knobby or smooth, and felt the trees' cold-stiffened limbs. Warm winter days I got down on my knees .to look at the still-living sheaths of last year's—and next years— grasses, and moved the gritty soil between tongue and foreteeth, tasting sharpness, sweetness, and the gifts of next year's life.

  It is spring. Today I took two chicks out to the coyote tree. Both of them so young to die, four days old, or perhaps five. One of them hatched with a crossed beak and only half a head, and had struggled from the beginning. It learned how to eat, how to drink, and then how to die. The other, in all seeming respects normal, thrived three days, began to cry on the fourth, and died later that night.

  I carried them in the warm spring noontime. I walked past nuthatches beginning to nest in the birdhouses I attached to stacks of dead beeboxes—I think I'll choose this one. No this one. But this one is so near to all these twigs. I walked into the rocky woods to the east, past the fine white feathers of a goose dead a couple of weeks and through a broad meadow jumbled with volcanic rock, buttercups, and camas. I arrived at the coyote tree, half-mast relic struggling to survive, her top lying jagged and still green in the slough near her base. I touched her trunk—How are you?— and placed the dead chicks among the feathers of past offerings. I said to each chick, quietly, Now you get to be wild. Go, little one, go. I touched the tree one more time and climbed back to the rocky meadow.

  In addition to the flowers, yellow, purple, I saw also surveyor's stakes and the yellow of their flags. They're going to build here. Hundreds of houses and thousands of apartments. They. Developers, I guess you'd call them. I don't. Nor do I call them speculators {speculate: to meditate; to contemplate; to consider a subject by turning it over in the mind and viewing it in its different aspects and relations). Killers is probably the best name for them, because that's what they do. Developers. My dictionary defines develop as to cause to become gradually fuller, larger, better. A child develops into an adult; a caterpillar develops into a butterfly; a baby nuthatch—tiny, featherless—develops into an adult who can survive the winter by eating insects and insect eggs that if left alone would develop into adult insects, and a baby hummingbird—even more tiny and just as featherless—develops into an adult that can fly south, past pesticide-laden fields of monocrops, clearcuts, and poisoned waterways, to a warmer home for the winter, and then find her way back next year to make her so-tiny nest in the same boughs of these same pine trees, saying, like the nuthatch, I think I'll choose this one. But a beautiful rocky meadow, ripe with flowers, full of the coyote tree's struggle to survive, full of the dailiness of tiny flies and anthills and coyotes and deer and baby pine trees and the decaying feathers of chickens and ducks and geese and the falling snags of pine tree elders who died in last decade's fire: all this fullness does not develop into green-lawned and sterilized houses, or white box apartments.

  I sometimes wonder if the coyote tree gave up last winter, if she used the ice storm as an excuse to leave behind a life she knew would no longer be so rich. Did she know what was coming? Do the salmon, too, and the frogs, and the salamanders, do they all know, and are they giving up to become ghosts because they no longer enjoy, no longer can tolerate what we have become?

  Two weeks ago I had a dream, the worst of my life. I heard the voice of the Dreamgiver, resonant and caring. It said, "You work so hard to make a better future. Would you like to know what lies ahead?" I nodded ever-so-slightly. Then—how do I say this?—I saw nothing but black, nothing at all, and I heard nothing but my own screams, of horror and despair. I know from this dream that it is possible, in fact quite likely, that the future will be far worse than I can imagine, worse even than I can dream.

  Perhaps bull trout, blue whales, and manatees wish as little as I to see this future.

  It will not long slow the machine, but if I am not going to blow up dams, which for today I am still too frightened, too bound, too small in my own person to yet do, the least I can do is remove these stakes. I removed them, each and every one, and removed the flags from bushes and dead trees and the limbs of tall standing pines. After removing all these, I returned home to where the baby chicks, out of the bathtub where they stay through the chill of the too-early-spring nights and into the sunshine of the yard, were doing their dances of joy, leaping into the air and dashing back and forth, glad to be alive, glad to peck at the soft dust beneath their feet.

  Heroes

  "If I were permitted
to write all the ballads I need not care who makes the laws of the nation." Andrew Fletcher

  STORIES TEACH US OUR social roles, and the people we look up to as heroes help validate who we are and what we feel. They help determine whom we become. When I was young, I watched the movie Lawrence of Arabia more times than I could count. Early in the film, Lawrence snuffs a match with his fingers. Another character tries this, and yelps that it hurts. At eight years old, I identified with and was profoundly encouraged by Lawrence's response: "Of course it hurts. The trick is not minding that it hurts." Among all the storybook characters I encountered, I unconsciously sought out one who supported my perception of reality, which was that in order to survive, one must not mind the pain. Other people, with different perceptions of reality, will choose different heroes. The heroes chosen, both personally and culturally, say much about who we are.

  I went with Jeannette Armstrong to New Zealand. She is working on a book about what community feels like to indigenous people. She wants to understand how some indigenous communities have survived the dominant culture's onslaught while others have not. The Maori culture has. She asked me along because of my facility for asking questions, and because I do not understand community in my bones, and never will. As water may be transparent to fish, and as air is normally transparent to us, community is transparent to her. Similarly, although her culture has been devastated by civilization, my immersion in this culture gives me understanding and perspective forever denied her. I might think of questions she would not.

  While there, we were to stay in maraes, or Maori common houses, and speak with Maori activists and artists. I was anxious about the sleeping arrangements, because the Maori, as is true for most indigenous peoples the world over, often sleep in huge rooms on pads strewn about the floor. I am a painfully light sleeper. With this in mind, I warily gauged each person's potential for thunderous snoring. I need not have worried: with the exception of the first night, when I covered my head with two pillows, a duffel bag, and a backpack, and still heard the rhythmic rumbling of the fellow next to me through my earplugs, I slept comfortably, well, deeply, and securely. The act of sleeping communally engenders communal intimacy.

  The first evening, we went to dinner at Tapu Te Ranga, a marae built by the Maori writer Bruce Stewart. Probably sixty people were preparing or eating stews of seafood and greens, the latter picked from a nearby ditch. I was one of the few nonindigenous people there.

  As we stood in line, Jeannette introduced me to another Maori writer, Witi Ihimaera. He looked at me closely, then said, "You're not indigenous. Are you white?"

  "It's the culture of my birth."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean, I see it for what it is."

  He looked to Jeannette and I followed his gaze. Her face was hard to read. He looked back to me and asked, "What are you, then? Do you want to be indigenous?"

  I laughed. "No, and I couldn't be if I wanted. I suppose I'm a nonwhite white."

  He nodded, then said, more a comment than a question, "And you're a writer."

  I nodded in return, then reached to fill my bowl with stew.

  He continued, "Then I have a question for you. If someone were to help you see and experience something powerful and inexplicable, something considered impossible by most Westerners, would you write about it?"

  "That depends on whether the people who helped me gave their permission."

  He smiled, somewhat formally, then asked, "What if they weren't authorized to do so? What if they gave the experience to you as a gift, yet their tradition as a whole was not open to outsiders?"

  I thought for a long time. Finally I answered, "There is so much in this world that belongs to all of us, so much I can experience and learn for myself, that I can't see why I should write about something another considers secret."

  He smiled again, even more formally, and before turning away said, "Ah, so you are a nonwhite white."

  I didn't know what to make of this conversation. On one hand I admired his directness, but it also seemed that he'd been trying to put me into a box, and had, disquietingly for him, been unable to do so. Watching him later I realized that he had precisely three boxes in which to place people: good indigenous, wounded indigenous, and white. There seemed room neither for bad indigenous people nor for whites who can't be lumped as either "Indian wannabes" or as those who mine indigenous traditions the way multinationals mine their land.

  I need to be clear about this. Although there is much I admire about many indigenous cultures, and much I despise about my own tradition, it would serve neither me nor the world for me to turn my back on the dominant culture and attempt to be something that I'm not. I'm white, of Danish, French, Scottish descent. I'm civilized. I'm not and will never be from an indigenous culture. That doesn't mean I cannot establish a relationship with the land where I live, based not on indigenous beliefs and practices but instead on my own primary experience. Nor does it mean I cannot help bring to a final halt the pervasive destructiveness of our culture. On the contrary, it seems traditional indigenous people generally have their hands full maintaining their cultures under the social, ecological, economic, religious, and military stresses placed on them by our culture, which means it falls primarily to those of us born in the dominant culture, those of us who know it most intimately, to eat away at it from inside, to break it down, and ultimately to destroy it before it takes down with it the rest of the planet in its final act of other- and self-consumption. Our culture has created this mess, and it seems only appropriate that in attempting to rectify it we begin by looking inside.

  I wasn't thinking about this when Witi walked away. Instead, I was both intimidated and put off by this first major interaction with a Maori person, and was thinking that I faced a long and trying week.

  But not all Maoris were like Witi, and having once been interrogated I seemed to vanish from his notice. Other Maoris made me feel welcome. Having witnessed my discomfort, several came to make conversation, and later, during a reading, an elder poet pointedly brought his eyes to meet mine whenever he spoke of family, greeting, community, and love.

  One of the people who made me feel most welcome was Bruce Stewart. He is a large man, with round belly and wide white beard. His long hair is pulled back in a topknot. He is stunningly gentle, and just as stunningly honest. He's the only writer I've encountered who has been able to fashion a story about a fart into a piece of literature: in his story Thunderbox a teacher asks her students to write a paragraph about honesty, and instead of giving the teacher the platitudes she'll reward ("My father is the most honest person I know. He donates money to the poor every Christmas. And God knows, and God blesses him abundantly and he is very rich"), the story's protagonist is starkly honest ("When I let off a good loud fart everyone knows who it belongs to"), and for this he gets into trouble. I felt a certain kinship to Bruce and his fictional characters. Often when I speak out at public meetings, my comments—as at the debate between candidates for Commissioner of Public Lands—often have the same effect as an explosive fart at a genteel dinner party: noses wrinkle, people look and lean away, and nearly everyone tries to ignore the deep breach of etiquette.

  Bruce welcomed me with a warm hug and by bringing his nose to touch mine in a traditional Maori greeting. We talked, about the marae, a beautiful huge house built almost entirely from discarded materials, about his work running a nursery for endangered plants, and about what it will take for us to survive. But he was too busy for us to talk extensively then, and he, Jeannette, and I agreed to talk later in the week.

  Jeannette and I stayed a few nights at another marae in Wellington, and when we returned to Tapu Te Ranga it was nearly empty: Bruce was there, and his wife, their many children, her sister, and perhaps a dozen others. One of his children, a tiny boy, wandered in and out during our conversation.

  I asked Bruce, "What will it take for us to survive?"

  He motioned us to follow, and led us outside to a beautiful vine reac
hing out to shade a planked walkway. Large white flowers hid in the recesses of the foliage. He said, "This vine no longer has a name. Our Maori name has been lost, so we'll have to find another. Only one of this plant remained in the world, living on a goat-infested island. The plant could go any day. So I got a seed and planted it here. The vine has grown, and although it normally takes twenty years to bloom, this one is blooming after seven."

  He continued, "If we are to survive, each of us must become kaitiaki, which to me is the most important concept in my own Maori culture. We must become caretakers, guardians, trustees, nurturers. In the old days each whanau, or family, used to look after a specific piece of terrain. One family might look after a river from a certain rock down to the next bend. And they were the kaitiaki of the birds and fish and plants. They knew when it was time to take them to eat, and when it was not. When the birds needed to be protected, the people put a rahui on them, which means the birds were temporarily sacred. And some birds were permanently tapu, which means they were full-time protected. This protection was so strong that people would die if they broke it. It's that simple. It needed no policing. In their eagerness to unsavage my ancestors Christian missionaries killed the concept of tapu along with many others."

  I looked at Jeannette. Her face was hard. Bruce continued, "To be kaitiaki is crucial to our existence. So while I am in agony for the whole planet, what I can do is become kaitiaki right here. This can spread, as people see this and say, 'We can do that back at home.' Perhaps then everyone can, as was true in our Maori culture, become caretakers of their own homes. Children will say to their parents, or to others, Tm sorry, but you can't do that here.'

  "I'm more of a practical man, so rather than write papers about being kaitiaki, I just do it. I don't trust words. I'm frightened of the intellectualism that can insulate us from action and turn the problems and solutions into puzzles or fantasies. As Maori we already have the words, the concepts. But we can't rest on what our ancestors gave us. The work has got to be done." I thought about the question I ask myself each day, about whether I should write or blow up a dam, and asked, "Where do writers fit in?"