She stood out vivid and present in the temperature-controlled half-light of her glass coffin, upright and at full human stature, her cloak hung to give the impression of a human figure underneath. She radiated epiphany. She filled the room with a smell like the seal-fur blankets Naaja’s mother gave us and an undertone of perhaps honey. It was strangely familiar and pleasant, not at all sickly. Her staff with the two-pronged antlers, still velvety with fur, sashed to it. On little fronds she had tiny bird skulls and shells. If she weren’t so very still they would click together like a cartoon skeleton falling to pieces. Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack.
In the park centre where I waited for the bus, there were displays on the natural and cultural history of the park. I floated around the room; there was movement from nothing but me. Time had stopped, looking exactly about to happen. There were irides-cent wings clamped open, feigning flight, above italicised names I could not get my tongue around. There were eyes, but we had taken the real ones out to put glass ones in and they stared from inside mounted skins, on placarded walls, from under glass domes, contorted majestically on rocks, on wooden plates, in awkward glory. There were tiny mottled eggs in counterfeit nests that looked as though they were about to burst out into life. And there were Dall sheep horns, a grizzly’s paw pad, skulls which though dry had all once held tiny brains, capillaries and veins.
There were artefacts of the original human inhabitants too: Athabaskan shawls, pipes and pottery. A model of a traditional toboggan and a crusty, worn dog harness. Grainy photographs of vacant-looking Eskimo men and women stood limpidly side by side with priests in robes. The plaque said missionaries won their trust with magical gifts of tobacco and medicine.
Prior to the arrival of Christian missionaries to the New World, indigenous religion was animistic, comprised of a worldview where humans are part of an on-going spiritual interchange between all manifestations of organic matter, often including the inanimate matter of the elements. A shaman was a human who was a seer into the spirit world.
Both men and women could be shamans, but many of the shamans were of female form as the idea of creation was sacred and bestowed to the feminine. However men could also have ‘feminine’ attributes. Gender was considered fluid, and there were thought to be at least four genders approximately: masculine men, feminine men, masculine women and feminine women. People who embodied the two opposites were known as Twospirit People.
In the rest of the world Eskimo is a pejorative term and Inuit is preferred instead, but in Alaska the Eskimos prefer to be called Eskimos. There was a poster, a kind of family tree of the Alaskan indigenous peoples. Eskimo and Inuit are both the collective terms for distinct but similar cultures like the Yupik and Inupiat. Other natives of Alaska of separate cultures mostly distinguished by language are the Athabaskans, Aleuts, Eyak, Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian.
The distinctions are complicated because there are overlaps between the different cultures, and although they are distinguished by language, some of the languages are maybe not entirely separate languages. And why would the indigenous people care about absolutely distinguishing cultures if souls can transmigrate to rocks, are forever in animal-mineral-plant continuum?
On the 9 a.m. bus into the park, before disembarking, I kept my eyes porous out of the window, funnelling it all in. There were just two other people on the bus, a pair of middle-aged day hikers, and I could feel them staring at the gun leant against my seat while I jotted in my notebook.
I was waiting for the mountains to begin on the left and the treeline, which I knew to be mile 52 of the Park Road and the calculated point of my disembarkation.
The scenery flickered. It was gradual, like well-thought build-up in a feel-good coming-of-age story about a girl like me getting close to something sought. It was layer on layer. Each breaching hill might have been the one to reveal the mountains like a shroud, ghostly, slipping down. Each pre-emptive revealing was excited pressure hoarded.
Finally they were there. Mountains as turnstiles, thresholds to becomings. What do these ones mark? The ground crawled meekly to them, green and a blemished kind of red like blood soaked into moss, up and up until it rendered at rusty brown and rocky tips. Behind, another sort of brown, and behind still grey and white-capped. Each row of mountains was coloured a little differently. Layered and assembled like a collage, foreground in green. But no background of sky, instead clouds that hung and panelled forward as an overlay, disturbing the order of the layers. The mountains encroached into the sky, a challenge to its separateness.
I do not remember stepping off the bus, in a way that slightly alarms. But I do remember the light and colour: dappled impressions of moss and blood. Like Monet. Up close and in cardinal parts, tiny flowers and perfect tiny tear-shaped leaves of purple. Tiny but integral parts of a bigger whole. Micro/macro and indivisible. The timid parts actually prettier, like my own lone small journey to me. At the same time whole and partial, sublime and obscure but sentimental.
A couple of hours after disembarking from the bus and I am caught. Until that point I had been plodding along absent but receptive. Then it hits me very suddenly as I stop to drink some water from my bottle and sit on my haunches and look up at the sky, where a huge bloody eagle of some kind is wheeling about. This is it. This is everything. This is my moonwalk.
After the Apollo missions lots of the astronauts would talk about a similar sudden awareness of self. After giving all their concentration to lift-off and getting up there without exploding and feeling tense and so overridden by adrenaline that they were not even that aware of where they were and what they were doing, so that when it did hit them the feeling was potent and alarming. Others never experienced the feeling because they did not ever stop putting all their resources into the functionality of the mission. Many of the Apollo astronauts experienced their time in space not as selves but as detached scientists.
The tundra is always whistling and it is very empty. I have enough freeze-dried food as base rations to sustain me with hunted stuff for four weeks – the ecologist Aldo Leopold said that three is enough time to get to grips with real solitude and become truly immersed in wilderness. To get into the rhythms of it. Technically past two is classed as ‘settling’ rather than a camping trip and is against park regulations, but I have it from Stan that no one will notice. Stan showed me how to use a radio like the one that would be in the cabin to get in touch if I need him. He has one back in his house for when nobody is in the warden’s office.
It took me around nine hours’ marching with only a slight deviation. Stan told me, ‘If you hit the river where it leaves the forest then you are too far north,’ but I couldn’t see the river and had to just hope that this was because I was south of it. I was.
The cabin is everything I dreamed it would be. When I finally saw it from across the tundra I yelped and felt proud of my own tenacity. It is sat just left of some evergreens and looks out onto the tundra. There is an empty smokehouse outside and a tiny toilet shed, a collapsed and moss-covered pile of logs, and a broken pair of skis. Inside there is a mounted fox head, a row of gun mounts, where I have mounted Stan’s gun, some pots, a canvas cot, a fire grate, the radio on a desk with a chair and the supplies I bought. When I move about and unsettle the dust that is uniform and thick I have a sneezing fit. I fitted the radio with the batteries I bought first thing, but I turned it off this evening and intend to keep it so.
Of course, I also brought loads of books to the woods from a bookshop in town, a pile of the canonical texts on wilderness to help me decipher it. I have some Thoreau, Emerson, Hemingway, the Unabomber and a biographical book about various young male runaways. A heavy but a necessary burden. When Jack London went to the Klondike he read Origin of the Species (which explains a lot) and Paradise Lost.
Stan didn’t show me how to shoot the gun and I obviously did not ask. I have looked it over and it is pretty similar to a rifle I used to shoot with an ex-boyfriend whose family liked hunting. He used to say he was sad about hurting all the animals, and that was why he would just be the scarer that ran into the grass to get the pheasants up. The real reason was he was a terrible shot; he just didn’t want to say it to me because he was sore that I could shoot better than him. I would not shoot animals, mind, we just used to practise on targets in a field behind his house.
I am the only human being for miles around as far as I am aware. At least, that is what I was told by the bus driver, who thinks I am a day hiker too and was concerned enough for my welfare as it was that I did not correct him. He told me to look out for reindeer, caribou, foxes, pine martens, hares, wolves, wildcats and bears. Most are technically edible but I only fancy the smaller things. I have seen Bear Grylls killing and gutting many large animals and it always seems so unnecessary and superfluous. I mean, Bear Grylls obviously eats bears, that is where he gets his name from, right? He eats bears because it is essential to his identity as a born survivor. If he did not eat bears he would not have a job. I am only killing for one and I am only small. I think a hare a week will be more than enough to sustain me with the freeze-dried stuff.
Is it cheating to bring the ‘just add water’ survival packs? I had to really think about this before coming out. If I did not have them I would have to hunt for all my food. But people who do this kind of thing always bring supplies. Ernest Hemingway, writer of manly short sentences, took canned pork and beans. Inuits have supplies in the way of preserved foods. Modern Mountain Men buy sacks of pinto beans from Fairbanks. And if bringing supplies was cheating, maybe I should not really have technology like a gun or a radio. And that would not be survival technique, but a probable death-experiment. This thing, this authenticity, how close can you get to it? How pure can it be?
I also would not be able to make the video diary, which would undermine the entire point of the trip. The diary might seem a bit false, might add an inverted voyeurism so that it is really like I have company out here, but I don’t really know how to avoid this. When Bear Grylls cut open a camel to demonstrate how to sleep inside it I doubt if he actually stayed in there all night, snug in his authenticity, with his cameraman asleep in a tent pitched next to him.
How do you really front the essential facts of life authentically? Probably it is not even possible in our time of saturation. I can only try my best. Maybe writing is less inauthentic than the audience of a camera. But even then I am writing to be read, so again the ‘solitude’ is tainted by the inverse voyeurism. Go tell that to Thoreau and Heidegger and the Unabomber.
LITTLE SHORT SENTENcES
I went for a walk around yesterday to get to grips with the area in order to draw my first rough map. I had taken for granted that it would be easy to find something to eat, but after a few hours it started getting dark so I had to head back without finding anything (I did find a water source, though, a spring that is only a ten-minute walk from the hut but took me hours to find). It is difficult because I spent a lot of time singing to myself so that the bears would hear me coming and keep out of the way but that also scares away the food. When I got back I settled into the hut, arranged all my blankets on the cot, and got a little fire going in the fire grate.
I tried for about fifteen minutes, rubbing sticks together, then gave up and used the gas lighter, and cooked some instant noodles. I did feel kind of fraudulent with my lighter and my sachet of flavour, but if it is good enough for Hemingway then it is good enough for me. I sat and watched the noodles bubble, then I sat and watched them cool as I fed Stan’s map to the flames in the grate, watching it curl to cinder. With it gone a pressure released; like McCandless I am alone, it is again a wilderness to me, the places I had not seen yet still to be discovered. Like vaporising Voyager 1 out of the sky with a laser beam, zap!
Today I tried again, but I headed out first thing in the morning to give myself plenty of time, thinking immaqa. I was awake for most of the night anyway. I had not given any thought to how it would feel the first night and alone. There was too much sound to sleep, sound I could not place, the cabin being saggy with age. Mostly I stayed awake because I had a feeling like something was about to happen, or like it had happened and I had not yet put my finger on it. Like everything for a while had been hyperreal sets and stage props but now I was in real real-life, everything with a shining core. It was so bright I could not sleep for it. It was not danger and I would not say I was scared. Just very, very awake.
Tips for being not-scared at night:
– Always sleep in tight corners facing outwards, towards the door
– Fill a rubber hot-water bottle with boiling water and curl around it like it is a live, heat-giving companion
– Hum songs to trick yourself into feeling calm
– Think of the cabin as a living guardian, then its creaks and groans will comfort not unnerve you. It affords you shelter. It is your best friend
– If you hear an alarming noise, imagine it over and over again until it no longer alarms you
– If you are still alarmed, try being just as alarming. Go outside and confront everything. Yell at it all. Send any wild animals scurrying into the night. Look at it a while, to convince yourself it is still and unthreatening
I went out as soon as the sun was up enough. I did not do any of the singing this time so that I could go in stealth. First thing I came across apart from the things that ran away before I could see them was a caribou. She was standing behind a tree just ahead of me and had not noticed me, but as soon as I saw her I stopped and must have drawn in breath or something because she looked right at me. She stood there looking at me and kind of puffing cold air out and looking nervous. I thought about shooting her and just living off her for the whole four weeks so that I only had the guilt of one soul on my conscience. But then she stepped forward slowly and her little baby stepped out from behind the tree after her and I was shaking so bad I do not think I would have hit her anyway. They both trotted away and the baby tripped a bit in panic and I had to sit down for a whole minute to stop the shaking.
After I had been out for a good five hours, although I could not really say because I don’t have a way of telling the time apart from on the laptop, and the sun moves at a pace I am still not accustomed to, I started feeling tired, hungry and irritable and began to carry the gun less half-heartedly so that I could just go ahead and shoot the next thing I saw. I wound myself up being all stealthy and peeking round the trees and jumping out, when I saw something dark move just ahead. I shot it before I even had time to worry.
I had not accounted for how loud the shot would be in the still air, how much the force would shock me backwards, how the jolt would hurt my shoulder. After the shot everything seemed to go really quiet, all the birds shut up as though they thought they might be next, and I ran over to where the thing was and got on my hands and knees by it. I was amazed to have even hit it because I had been knocked off balance by the force, and because I had only been half-truthing when I told Stan and the bus driver that I knew how to use it. It was very dead, which I was glad about, I did not want to see it half dead, twitching or whimpering.
I had never killed a thing before and had made a pact with myself to be stoic about it, not to drop the gun and stare at my hands in horror, all ‘what have I done?’ But as much as I wanted to make it a point of pride not to cry, because a Mountain Man would not cry, certainly, I cry very easily so of course I burst into tears.
When you are a young child you cry for yourself, you cry for the attention of your parents. Growing up is feeling for the first time for the outside world, it is evolving out of your juvenile solipsism (if you are a girl anyway). I remember the moment it happened to me for the first time clearly. It was when the Columbia rocket blew to pieces over Texas on re-entry.
It was a really sunny afternoon in England. I was in the car, sat in the back behind Dad, so it must have been a weekend because I was school age. They announced it on the radio. The radio presenter’s voice was all choked up. I looked up at the bright blue sky, where there was an airplane making candyfloss trails, and I cried. They played David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ on the radio and I felt like I was mourning the Columbia rocket with the whole of the rest of humanity. I remember my dad’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. As I remember it he looked moved, misty-eyed, to see his young daughter cry for the first time at something so outside herself.
So girls as a very general demographic cry more. Maybe you can say this is weak. Or maybe you can say that it takes a lot of strength to admit you feel so much all of the bloody time. Like how our pain threshold is higher from tidal womb pain.
I recognised it from my fauna and flora book as a large snowshoe hare, its blood all stark on its side and in a little pool beside it. It was pale brown and looked paler in a different way, from its loss of animation. My impulse was to cover it with dirt and leave it be. It affected me greatly to think that the blood had been making its way to its heart moments before and now it was outside it, going sticky.
I felt myself shaking, like all my feelings had turned to energy, buzzing around my body instead of turning into something I could understand. It felt like that with no causal link. Before there was a brown hare and now there is this corporeal object. The object is still and cold and looks like a hare, but different.
What is a thing? Is it a different thing without the essence that makes it what it is? Is an essence a soul? Before it was a hare and now it is a body and soon to be a piece of meat. This is why I have to do this thing that I am apparently going to find very disturbing. I need to know that I have it in me to live by acknowledging that I am living where living = not dead. And again for that intangible thing this authenticity, for the documentary.
Back at Stan’s I shot a video of him skinning, and I have it to watch back on the laptop. He said something snide about it but I really do not see the problem. I have never known how to do it because I have never lived in a place where I have had to learn, and it annoyed me that he was being smug when I was trying to rectify this.
The first thing to do (I will gladly be the oracle because I believe in communal knowledge) is to squeeze the animal’s bladder area, for obvious reasons. Then you make a little V shape at the top of the breast to get the knife under the skin, and you cut right down its belly. When this opens up all the bits are just there like you have unzipped a purse full of guts. I have only gutted fish before and it made me feel unusual. I was expecting lots of blood to spurt out and it all to be chaos and mess but it is not at all. You let a little blood out then it is neat, as if the hare was made just for you to eat it.
When the belly is open you just pull the guts out by running two fingers from top to bottom, which is a very odd sensation, and I don’t think I will be able to get the smell off my fingers for days. Then you take off the legs and head; without a meat cleaver not as easy as Stan made it seem. After that you take off the skin, disconcertingly easy, just like pulling a tight sock off apart from a few places that have to be picked apart with the knife.
You are left with a naked, headless, pawless thing, which then needs the remaining entrails taken out, including the duct the poo goes through, which made me feel kind of embarrassed for the hare. I did make a bit of a mess of things but still did well for a first time, I think. I cut it into three pieces, two to keep inside the Tupperware box covered in the salt I brought, and the other to boil tonight then take off the bone and eat with some form of vacuum-packed carbohydrate. I made a fire pit for the guts and set them on fire because that is how you make sure the bears do not smell them.
I had to stop myself from using up too much of the antibacterial hand rub to get rid of the death smell on my hands. I am going out to get some firewood and then I will cook and after some reading I will be very ready for bed, I am exhausted after not sleeping last night. I feel very resourceful. Like a bird must feel when it settles into its nest that it built with its own beak and claws. Birds must be capable of feelings of sorts. When a little bird settles down into its self-built nest and fluffs up its feathers and burrows into its own neck, it is the very image of immense satisfaction.
My plan is to make my map over four days. I already have my rough diagram but need to walk to each place to hone it and add finer details, like where is good for a lookout, or somewhere to maybe practise trapping. I want it to cover the area I am likely to use on a regular day so I will walk for half a day then turn back on myself. On day one I will head north, on day two east, and so on. I think I can walk about twenty miles in a very long day, so the map should cover approximately ten miles in radius from the hut at the centre.
Stan criticised Chris McCandless for the fact that he did not have an official map. If he had had an official map he would have seen that just downriver from where he could not make his crossing back to civilisation because of floodwater and subsequently ate the potato that killed him, there was a pulley system for transporting things and people across safely. But if Chris McCandless had had an official map, it would not have been his wilderness and he might as well have died anyway.
I am not in danger of that because I know exactly how to get back to the road to get the bus back to the visitors’ centre, and I also have radio contact if I want to turn the thing back on. It would not take them long to find the cabin if they needed to, because they know I was headed out without camping gear. I am conceptually isolated and alone, but in trouble I could radio Stan for help. Although I had thought about going further in and leaving the radio behind, finding somewhere else to sleep. With each day I feel a little more certain that Stan will try to rescue me. Actually I am thinking about it a lot.
South of the hut the forest becomes dense and backs all the way to where the mountains start, in the south and arcing west. In the lower foothills the trees stop growing from the altitude, then just behind the mountains rise higher and are sooty black with stripes of white where the meagre snow is. Further behind still somewhere is Denali, the highest point in North America.
Mount Denali was until very recently named Mount McKinley, and is still called that by some bitter Ohioans. It was called Denali from the Koyukon-Athabaskan Deenaalee, which means ‘the high one’. The Russians, when they owned Alaska, called it Bolshaya Gora, which means ‘big mountain’. Then an American gold prospector came along and called it McKinley, which means ‘President William McKinley’, bequeathed in a curious naming ritual used by colonising white men whereby the conquered entity is named after the conqueror or an adulated public figure.
The gold prospector called the mountain McKinley because William McKinley was a proponent of the gold standard and the prospector wanted to get one over on the silver miners, who wanted the president to be William Jennings Bryan, the proponent of the silver standard.
Then President William McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist called Leon Czolgosz because he was the ‘president of the money kings’ willing to exploit the poor to benefit the rich. So the name got officially etched into all of the maps in President William McKinley’s memory by the American government in 1917.
Years and years and they will not stop arguing about it because for America Alaska is still very much in the process of construction. Alaskans want the name to be Denali from Deenaalee, maybe mostly because they do not want to be out-Alaskaned by the Ohioans, who keep blocking the change because McKinley came from Ohio and they want their namesake on the biggest mountain in North America. In real life in Alaska people mostly just call it Denali. The Athabaskans never stopped calling it Deenaalee and maybe do not know what all the fuss is about, because they did not draw maps.
In 2015 President Barack Obama officially finally changed the name to Denali to show honour, respect and gratitude to the Athabaskan-speaking people (as if naming is owning and he was giving it back). Donald Trump declared this ‘an insult to Ohio’ and vowed to change it back, so let’s see how long that lasts. Does an orca care if it gets shunted from one entire species to a separate species dependent on how it hunts (which is what Larus said may be the case)? Probably the Athabaskans just shrug and say you do what you want, we are going to just carry on calling it Deenaalee under your shouting chins. The orcas say yeah, whatever, we are just going to carry on swimming and flipping seals or not flipping seals.
The tundra is always in soliloquy. Mostly it whistles and sings, but now and then the wind will die down suddenly and in the utter silence and still it feels like you are on stage. As though you did not know there were curtains until they just suddenly opened. Then the cacophony of noise again like applause.
From where the tundra and taiga meet you see right across to the east, but you do not see the road because it is too far. The sky was very blue and clouds dragged shadows over the tundra, dimming the glare of the lake.
In the forest I worried about getting lost, but heading due south-west by the compass, towards the steeper foothills, I stayed on track fine. In this area the trees were dense. This route leads to a perfect fishing spot, where the stream is shallow enough to cross and brimming with fish. I headed further on past this in order to get to the foothills because I wanted to climb past the timberline to get a better look. The ground started to slope and the trees thinned so that I had a slight vantage, and I could see what I took to be a radio mast just a mile or so away in the east. I headed there instead for no reason other than that it intrigued me.
The radio mast is really a fire tower. The foliage around it is thick overhead, and after going back into the thicker trees I could not really get a view of it until I was almost directly underneath. There was a little clearing, and when I came into it the sudden view of the tower shocked me. A radio mast was benign in my mind but a watchtower reeked too much of people. It isn’t that I am hermitised already, just that I do not want to lose this game I am playing with myself so soon.
I hid back in the trees, where I was sure I could not be seen from above, and hunkered down to watch for movement in the lookout at the top. In real-life terms, I was also concerned that a park warden might ask to see my permit. Stan gave a resident permit from lost property to me, which he advised me to leave in my hut on the days I went out; that way if anyone dropped by they would leave me be thinking I was ‘P. S. Aldridge’. He did not actually explain what I should do if I met a warden while I was out, he just told me that where I was going was so far away and off-trail I would not meet one at all.
I stayed still, hunkered and watching for a good ten minutes. The tower was rusted and wind-battered. As I watched it, it gradually changed its appearance, began to seem hollower as its potential to expose me withered. But then the fire-watcher could just be sat where I could not see them, reading or sleeping or watching for fires. I decided the only way to know was to yell up. I would yell like some kind of animal from inside the trees and see if anything changed.
I yelled stupidly. Only crows noticed, lifting off from the tops of the trees and cawing at me because they were annoyed at themselves for startling so easily. Then I felt less stupid. Nobody came to the window.
At the base of the tower, with my foot on the ladder, I shouted up again just to make sure. This time, in a human voice, I asked hello? Nothing. The steps were made of sheet metal, like the steps to a lifeguard’s chair, and were rickety. They wound around the four legs of the tower in an angular spiral.
Towards the top the tower groaned against the slow wind. I came into the lookout through a trapdoor. The floor was coated with a coarse gristly dust, prints left where it came away on my hands. Apart from my marks it was print-less. Nobody had been up there for a very long time. I clambered inside and crawled to sit with my back to a wall.
There was nothing inside and the glass in the windows was grimy. I looked around for a sign for when there was last a person in there. The dust was felt-like on the floor. Light came up through the boards, rendering all my movements gold-dusty and ethereal.
I had the thought to maybe check the walls for some kind of graffiti. I imagine they turn up all over the place in spaces like this. There were two; they read:
Johnston Wills, 1952
P Harris, 1999
If I had not found them I could have been the first person to set foot in there since whenever I wanted to imagine. Maybe not objectively, but that would not have mattered. Like how a scientific discovery is a discovery until a new discovery is made that refutes the original one, like how Denali stays Deenaalee to the isolated Athabaskans, who choose not to read maps. Really in this way no one ever discovers anything, they only invent things (we invented nuclear bombs but we say we discovered them because that sounds less evil). I could have invented this place as an unpeopled wilderness for myself. I sat down cross-legged and looked at them and wondered if maybe P Harris had thought the same. Maybe he wrote his name in defiance: you can’t have this place all to yourself, Johnston Wills.
Then I remembered the rock in the Greenlandic tundra that stood to hold me and Urla and Naaja until enough rain, time and rock plants had eroded our names. I wondered what they were both doing right then. If Urla had really thought Larus and I were close in the wrong way, if he let her think that, if she hated me.
If I came back with supplies I could camp out in the tower for a few days. I did not want to cook any food and use the portable propane so soon, so I would have to bring it already cooked and cold. I only have one kind of container for bringing it so I could do maybe two nights if I filled the tub, before I got hungry again. I was brain tired, and my legs ached, and it felt safe to be so high up off the ground, rocking gently, a bird in a tree. I thought of all the canopy creatures; bees in hives, pine martens in tree hollows, porcupine sat in branches, everyone safely elevated from the prowlers, a hovering biome. I felt a comfort like fellowship, and decided to stay put until the morning.
In my dream I am sat at the bottom of the mighty Mekong river talking to a giant catfish, who tells me he is one hundred years old. His eyes and scales are the same dirt-brown as the river, like over time the dirt that settled on him crawled underneath his skin and became his skin. His voice sounds like bubbling custard. All the dead men that fell in the water in the Vietnam War had sheened themselves with DDT to keep mosquitoes away. Agent Orange collected in the waters and the soil and the bodies of the living things.
The bodies got eaten by the little fish, bigger fish ate the little fish, the catfish ate the bigger fish, all the DDT and Agent Orange from all their livers built up and up in the liver of the catfish. Now the catfish is poison. A hook and line plop and sink into the brown river to where I sit with the catfish. He takes the hook in his crêpe-like fin and pops it through his blubbery lip. Above, a little Vietnamese boy reels in his dinner.
I was sleeping deeply and was jerked quite suddenly awake by a strange, long noise. A bell. I shook all over and my teeth clanked from panic. I imagined looking over the spruces like a crow sees them, stretching on and on, an unbroken sea of green and dark shadows. And then the tower.
A bell needed somebody to ring it. From a vantage of anywhere over the forest, from the ridge or the semicircle of higher ground from the north, you need not be a crow. Had I lit the tower up like a beacon when I used the torch? Somebody had rung a bell.
I sat up when it came again, peeling away on the wind. It sounded distorted this time. Then right away, it came again. Only this time it sounded nothing like I thought it at all. It was unmistakable: a mournful warble as timeless and familiar as the pentatonic scale.
I grabbed the camera and scrambled to open up the window and look down into the dimly visible clearing. It was empty but the wolves were near. The howl had come so clear, and besides I could feel them. The forest was heavy with anticipation, the spires of the evergreens whispering like a crowd as the lights dim.
The howl came again, and it went right through me, could have been in the tower. It made my whole body shudder in a way that made me grin; a tingle of pseudo-fear like looking down from an airplane. My hackles raised of their own accord. Into the clearing came a dark shape, one, two, three, and then a white one, then one more black. They fanned around the base of the tower with their noses to the ground. I could hear an excited kind of whimpering.
Wolves are an animal I can trust. Their packs are hierarchical, but they are spearheaded by a male and female breeding pair, who rule together in equality. Wolf Wives are absent from The Call of the Wild. Two she-dogs are friendly so get killed, and the only strong female sled dog – Dolly – goes mad and has her head smashed in. Mercedes, the sole female human character in the book, spends her cameo crying and complaining. This has left a lasting impression on men-who-think-like-dogs like Stan.
For a moment of delicious fear I toyed with the vision of the wolves staying put and waiting for me. Sitting on their haunches and looking up at the tower with hungry eyes.
But they did not look up. One of them cocked his leg to the tower then yelped, and they filed away quickly into the trees with such a purpose I knew I would not see them again that night.
When I returned to the cabin I was glad to find everything as I left it. My permit was in the exact same place on the desk, so I am pretty sure nobody came by. I will go back to camp in the tower at some other point but I need some proper food and my mosquito net. Stan was smug when he added it to my list and I had thought it an arbitrary appendage to make him feel like he had had one on me. I have to give him credit now as actually I would have been fucked without it. In the tower so high up they were not so bad, but in the cabin and outside on evenings they come in swarms. I can slap my arm and kill four at one time. I feel a little bad doing this because I know that only female mosquitoes bite and they have to do it to get enough iron and protein to make their eggs. They are only trying to feed their babies, just like everything is trying to feed its babies.
I decided to try fishing as I figured it would affect me a lot less than shooting a thing dead. I had bought some fishing line and hooks in Fairbanks, and for the rest I found a sturdy stick as my rod and tied the line to the end, where it splayed, so I could attach it around the adjoining part to make it more secure. I made the line long enough so that I could yank it out the water fast, but with no reel I can only use it in relatively shallow water.
I was stumped for a float until I remembered a redundant tampon at the bottom of my bag that I’d brought just in case I lost my Mooncup. It was still sealed with all the air in so it worked a dream. I attached this to the middle of the line before tying the hook to the end with a little ribbon of foil from a noodle packet just above it to act as the little fish-attracter thing. Then I upturned a log and collected myself some grubs and worms for bait in a rusty tin can.
I found salmonberries (they look a little like raspberries, more seedy and juicy) and harvested as many as I could carry inside a clean sock. Along the way I managed to find lots of dandelion leaves that I washed in a stream and nibbled. There was also a plant I came across that looked like the plant the pamphlet called goosetongue, but it warned that it also looks like arrowgrass, which is poisonous. I have learned enough from Chris McCandless to know that eating anything I was not sure of would be a no-no, but it felt wholesome to be learning the things by their names just to look at and touch, their tactile truth.
Although to be fair to McCandless it does not seem he confused a lethal plant for another, it was just his own fauna and flora book did not tell him that this certain potato he was always eating actually contained lethal toxins. It was a taxonomical failing and not ignorance that killed him, as I said to Stan.
The course of the stream widens out where another joins it. The water runs clear and shallow; underneath it you can see the shadows of the fish holding themselves against the current. They hold then dart away suddenly for reasons kept from you by the mirage-making surface. I watched one fish that seemed to enjoy holding itself against the exact point where the two waters met and did not move from this meditative state for a whole fifteen minutes. Do fish feel meditative? Without awareness, just some primitive state of tranquillity?
I set up the rod to dip into the water where shadow from the trees hung over. The forest was awake to me and gave its alarm call. I made sure the rod was wedged into the ground firmly and rested my leg against it so I could feel any movement. It is like all my senses are intensified, sounds are so loud they make me jumpy and my body reacts nervously to the slightest movement. I feel like an acrobat, every body part accountable for something.
After not too much time the birds took up their usual quarrels with each other and ignored me, and the sound came thick from the trees. For some time I lay on my side with my ear to the cool, damp ground. I could feel how far down the layers of earth went below me like vertigo, with soil and crust and mantle, lithosphere and asthenosphere, all the way down to the fiery nut of the earth. I could almost hear it, a mellow, churning grumble.
You can’t feel that in a built-up place. In a built-up place the ground is thick with artificiality. In a place that has been built and rebuilt many times over, old towns fallen, redeveloped, retarmacked, returfed, that turf in ready cylinders like grass-and-soil Swiss rolls rolled out, plastered new again and again; it feels too structured to feel dizzying. This is a part of the reason I like my lime quarry so much. All its layers. At the lime quarry the earth is bare and cut open like a quiche and inside the quarry you can feel closer to the heart of the earth, like touching the pit of someone else’s scar.
The tundra is so big and open that animals are exposed everywhere, so they keep one eye on me warily, but go about doing their thing as I walk on past. How crawling with life the rough grasses are. Hares rush around and stand sentry, ground squirrels run in little bursts, stopping to gather fruits and buds in their cheeks. A weasel slinks through the grass after the voles, so frantic to gather food for the winter that they let their guard down. Summers are so short that everything is fighting against time to prepare, the predation of winter overshadowing that of everything else.
In Britain we used to have wolves and bears and lynx and bison and even elephants and rhinos a long time ago, but we are such a tiny island that we quickly killed them all and became kings of our little kingdom. Accounts for some of our colonial hubris?
The tundra is specked with water where the frost melts. The permafrost lies underground, starving the drier parts. Lusher grass surrounds waterholes, and elsewhere the grass is hardy and coarse and shrubs are dead-looking. It gives the tundra muted but multifaceted colour. The way the light plays on it from the big sky makes its depth and tone flicker.
As soon as I felt a tug I jumped up and had it over my shoulder before I even knew it and I am glad no one was around to see because the force from flinging it back brought the fish back at me and it hit my front as I turned to it, making me yell. The sound zigzagged away from me into the forest and took several birds with it. It took me a second to remember that there was no one around to hear, but when I realised I was alone, so utterly and completely alone, I laughed and laughed to myself, trying to hold the writhing fish.
And I could feel all of Jack Kerouac’s ghosts of the mountain cursing at me for desecrating the art. But if the art is to demonstrate skill rather than a simple utilitarianism then I don’t want to be a part of it. It is a man’s sport, a battle just to collect its name, possess its specificity, like the Enlightenment exotic specimen collector (one for the collection, a big one for the wall). And to do so skilfully, whatever that means, probably with minimal splashing and squealing. They can keep their art.
Once I had it still against the ground I had to stun it to knock it out before I bled it, like Larus showed me on the pilot whale boat. I worried about this part because perhaps it did have more culpability than pulling a trigger and watching a thing drop. The fish lay still for me, looking up at the sky through the canopy with its empty orb of an eye. I have thought for a long time that anything I am willing to eat I should be willing to kill. And although I back the philosophy all the way, in practice it is as hard as I hoped it wouldn’t be. I am not sure I will ever be able to kill anything without crying at least a little bit.
After it was bled I laid it out flat and took out the Fauna & Flora of the Denali Wilderness book to identify it. It was an Arctic grayling, I could tell easy from the fin on its back like a Chinese fan. It was quite little for a grayling, but I can make it last me two meals.
In the tundra I stumbled onto a spruce grouse sat on a clutch of eggs. It occurred to me that I could take her eggs to eat. She looked at me imploringly through one beady eye. I left her.
Osprey
American kestrel
Pintail ducks
Snow geese
Tundra swans
Ring-necked ducks
Grey jay
Horned grebes
Plovers
Mourning doves
Cuckoo
In the south the mountains stood resolutely, still and intangible as a painting, until at one point a light aircraft cut across them, a slow and deliberate finger through perfect dust. When this happens there is a noise with it, a loud droning that I noticed for the first time while watching the first plane. It was lucky that I did because I might have spooked from hearing it without knowing what it came from. I threw myself to the ground on impulse but it was too far away to make me out. From here you could not tell the cabin from the treeline.
On the way back to the cabin I found my first bear print. It made my hairs stand on end; a first encounter. Its print a symbol of its self. A warning, a promise, a truth. But really it is just an imprint a big animal left without meaning to. How strange.
It confuses me to have nightmares about a thing I can barely remember now. I had thought it over so many times before that I could no longer tell what was memory and what got added or taken away. Then I stopped remembering it at all, but it came back last night in a bad way.
In the nightmare I found myself cold and dark. I was in an ice cave. In the Arctic. The walls were blue and jagged. It smelled like damp old fish and dead things. My breath billowed in silvery wisps in front of me. Then it would crystallise and fall to the floor in tinkles. On the back of my neck I felt my hair brushed to the side and hot sticky breath ran across it slowly. A hand came from behind and clasped over my mouth, a stubby, sweaty troll hand.
You are not in an ice cave. You are in the meat fridge at work. The hand is clasped tight over your mouth so your whimpering is muffled. The other hand fumbles with your small breasts over the top of the polka-dot starter bra your mum bought you because you are starting to blossom now. You can feel something hard pressing into where your thighs meet the crease in your arse. You know it will make it worse if you squirm but you want to get free. Then you get a chance because someone shouts at him from outside the fridge, his grip loosens and you dig your elbow into his bloated troll belly.
He grunts a troll grunt. He puts his hand around your neck and calls you a little bitch. But then you know it’s over because she is shouting to him from the kitchen. He lumbers to the door and as he closes it he leans his face in and runs his tongue over his fat wet lips. The door bangs shut.
You can’t cry you can’t cry you can’t cry because they will shout and send you home, and then what? If you yell Sandra will hear eventually and she will open the door from the outside and let you out and laugh at you for being scared of the dark and getting yourself stuck in the fridge again.
Was it as bad as the dream felt or was the dream just a collage from things the other girls had told you? No matter what you remember, it is nothing special, of course. Almost every girl you know has a troll to remind her that her body is not her own.
It tipped it down today so I stayed cooped up inside. The cabin is cosy with the little fire going, the tapping on the roof and sides adding sound contours that make it feel particularly safe, so I felt better. Because I had the time I made the fire with sticks from my kindling pile. I am very proud of the fire. It took me about ten minutes to get smoke, then another five to get it going properly. I have guarded and fed it all day like a little pet. Kaczynski complained in his diary that he failed to consistently make fire without striking matches and that it annoyed him greatly. I am more authentic than Ted Kaczynski!
I did go out just to see how bad it was and got a headache from the hammering of icy raindrops on my crown. It was too heavy to see much and I got soaked through, so I will have to stay put until it slackens off. I have enough food to last and a bit of fish. Hopefully it will have stopped overnight, though.
I watched back and edited a lot of footage and it is coming together but in a way I am not quite sure about. Mostly when I watch things back they do not feel like I remember them. People seem to be very different to how they really seemed at the time. There is so much responsibility in putting the pieces of what has happened together to follow a story. And there is Rochelle, who will not fit into my story. And then there are the things that can’t and do not say anything at all and lie vacant for my projections.
Am I pulling them out of the water like fish to look at? Like they are specimens and I am writing them into my field book? There is a gap between what they are and what I think they are and I am trying to talk about this gap with authority, declaring I know what I see and it is this.
I did a lot of reading. Then I did a video diary entry. Then I got bored and decided to search around the hut for hidden things. I had figured it must be at least fifty years old, maybe even one hundred. I had not bothered to check it properly for signatures like I had the tower, aside from a quick sweep. I felt sure I had missed something.
I checked all the obvious places again first, the walls around the cot, the desk with everything taken off it. Then I found them in a corner of the room. Now I have found them I do not know how I did not notice them before. It was not an obvious place, sure, and most are really faint, but there were enough of them. They are mostly names and dates, the earliest being 1929 and the most recent P Harris again, 1999. I counted seven authors of six signatures and five quotes. Some of the classics:
‘Going to the mountains is going home’ – John Muir
‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived’ – Thoreau
I checked, out of curiosity, behind the fox head (there is also the compulsion to leave a mark that no one will ever notice). It just said Caroline, in very tiny print, with no date. It was the only obviously female name in here. Even where the names were ambiguous, the handwriting on the wall was all very masculine. What I mean by this is that maybe the men who wrote on the wall had learned to express themselves as men, to express their man-sized ideas in a handwriting that was reflective of how they held and thought of themselves.
Because they author these ideas like they belonged to them by virtue of being men. Thoreau and that bunch always talked, of course, in lofty terms of Man and He. In search of some inspirational wilderness quotes from women before I started the documentary most to be found came from low-brow memoirs of the self-help kind and had to do with inner journeys rather than the outer objective Truths of the Mountain Men, and had titles like The Single Woman: Life, Love and a Dash of Sass or Pink Boots and a Machete: My Journey from NFL Cheerleader to National Geographic Explorer.
I wanted Caroline to know, if she ever came back, that I liked that she had hidden herself. I drew a little smiley face next to 
her name.
INT. CABIN, AFTERNOON – Erin is sat on the cot – daylight bleeds inside, casts light over dust motes – camera is hand-held – in shot are cabin cot, Erin from shoulders up, and window – it is raining heavily –
ERIN: So this morning I found something really interesting.
After the autograph wall that I found yesterday. And the signature behind the fox head. I was sure there could be other more hidden things but I wasn’t sure where else they could be. I was actually under the desk—
– camera view turns towards the desk as Erin gets off the cot and directs the camera to it –
ERIN: As you can see, there isn’t anything there
– camera sweeps the underside of the desk –
ERIN: But. In checking under the desk I found something else. If you look here—
– camera view turns to the floor – Erin is kneeling, her right knee moves against the floorboard, which gives – the opposite end of the board rises, around one inch – Erin prises underneath with her free hand –
ERIN: Oh. I can’t do it one-handed
– camera is placed on the floor –
ERIN: And underneath. I hadn’t thought to check under the floor because I was sure there was just the foundations underneath there. But here, as you can see—
– camera is picked up and view is directed towards the floor – the floorboard now removed and placed to the side – camera takes two seconds to focus in low light –
ERIN: Someone has dug out the ground underneath the floorboards. And they have left a little parcel
– camera is now in focus – in the hole there is a package wrapped in tarpaulin, about the size of a shoebox – Erin takes the package out of the hole –
ERIN: Isn’t this exciting? So I found this little package. And now I suppose I should open it
– camera is placed on the desk with a view of the cot – Erin sits cross-legged on the cot with the package on her lap –
ERIN: It’s like Christmas
– she looks down at the package with her hands placed on top – pushes hair behind her ears –
ERIN: I’m kind of nervous. I hope it’s not a letter bomb
– she looks at the camera – pulls one corner of her mouth down in mock-nervousness –
ERIN: Okay, then
– she starts to unwrap the parcel – carefully, particularly –
ERIN: I wonder how long it’s been down there
– having undone the parcel string and peeled away each corner of the tarpaulin she takes out a fabric bundle – she carefully unwraps the fabric bundle –
ERIN (ABSENTLY): I suppose they wanted to make sure it kept dry
– inside the fabric bundle is a parcel wrapped in newspaper –
ERIN (ABSENTLY): It’s like a game of pass the bloody parcel
– she stops with a piece of the newspaper in her hand – studies it –
ERIN (ABSENTLY): Oh, I’ll check afterwards
– she lifts the objects from inside the paper one by one and lays them out on the cot very carefully –
ERIN: Okay, we have a roll of paper. A book. It’s maybe a diary. A folded piece of paper. Some postcards from Alaska
– she picks up the book and opens it –
ERIN: It’s a diary. The first entry is dated the 14th of May 1986. It’s signed Damon. Then inverted underneath. Nomad
– she brings the book towards the camera and holds up the name, pointing with her forefinger – in spidery handwriting DAMON is written, then backwards underneath its mirror image – DAMON –
ERIN: I don’t know if that’s an alias or just a happy coincidence. Or a self-fulfilling prophecy
– she sits back on the cot and picks up the scroll – unscrolls it –
ERIN: Okay. This is a manifesto. I won’t go into it now. We’ll look at it in detail later
– she studies it for a second then turns it to face the camera, holding it closer for inspection – then she turns it around and considers it again –
ERIN: Some kind of Ted Kaczynski manifesto
– she carefully rescrolls it and places it back on the cot – picks up the folded paper –
ERIN: And finally
– she unfolds it and pauses, brow crumpling – studies it for seven seconds –
ERIN (ABSENTLY): Damn it. I should have known it. (REMEMBERING THE CAMERA) Erm. It’s a map. Predictably
– she frowns at it some more –
ERIN: It’s better than my map (LAUGHING). Goddammit
– she folds it pedantically and tucks it into the back of the diary – she places the diary back on the cot – she sits with her hands in her lap then distractedly places the newspaper over the top of the diary –
ERIN: That’s exciting. What an exciting find
– she looks directly at the camera, holds her gaze for four seconds – fidgets –
ERIN: I’ll have to take a look at it all in more detail. Figure out this guy’s story
– she touches her face absently –
ERIN: Try and figure out if anyone found the package before
– she twists her hair round a finger –
ERIN (ABSENTLY): Yeah
– she stops twiddling her hair and stares into space, caught in a thought – five seconds – snaps out of it –
ERIN (SUDDENLY/BRIGHTLY): Anyway. Today is day three of the floods and the rain is still relentless
– looks out of the window –
ERIN: Doesn’t seem like it will subside very soon so no meat for Erin for a while. I’ll have to get outside today, though, because I’m almost out of water. I’ll wear my anorak. It will be nice to go outside. Yes
– she sits for a few seconds looking out of the window then snaps to – approaches the camera –
ERIN: Okay. Over and out. (MUTTERS) That was stupid
– she fumbles with the camera to cut –
I attempted a video diary entry and retook it about five times. None of them seemed right to me. I am thinking about how far I have come now and whether I am passing Leopold’s test yet. I certainly feel more ‘in tune’ with the ‘rhythms of life’. It is hard to talk about something so personal and unspecific. I was shooting a sequence on the map that was in the parcel. In the first cut I was saying that I had to burn this map too, like I did Stan’s pocket map, had to burn it as quickly as I could before it embossed on my mind and corroded the claim of pure invention so that this place could still be mine. Then when I had the lighter to it I just could not do it. And the more I held it out with my thumb, scratching at the friction wheel, ready to light it, the more I looked at it. And the more I looked at it the more it embossed on my mind. Then the integrity was gone anyway so I figured I might as well not burn it. My thumb hurt from rubbing and rubbing the lighter without actually striking it.
So then I had to soliloquise about why I was not going to burn the map. But the map glared at me, making itself more and more familiar, and as I got madder at it I thought that I might still get rid of it like I did the other map, because I had seen that one too. Besides I could not just leave it, knowing it was so heavy. I mean like the heaviness you must feel when you find Roman vases in the dirt and you just know that they are not any old broken pottery because you can feel their heaviness from just looking. I had to acknowledge it, like holding a tiny funeral for a mouse that the cat brought in because it does not feel right to just let it be.
But Damon had made it and it was his time capsule and yet he would never know any better. And then again he left it here in the eighties and he could very well be planning on coming back for it one day. Maybe he really never meant anyone but himself to find it.
So I could not burn it. I had to put it back in the ground and pretend I never found it. I left out the diary and the manifesto for now because I need to study them. I do not think there is hypocrisy in this. He will never know I read the diary and the manifesto wants to be read and the map I could just try to forget.
A thing I did notice is that our maps are different. He marked different features on his to those I drew on mine. He marked some that I have not found, and some of mine were missing. I just have to be careful not to let seeing his infiltrate on my personal wilderness.
INT. CABIN, MORNING – Erin is sat on the cot – camera is on desk opposite – in shot are cabin cot, Erin sat cross-legged, and the window – it is raining heavily still –
ERIN: I have been sat inside the cabin for five days now without leaving except to use the toilet. The rain is relentless. I have been thinking lots about what it’s like to be alone for so long. It feels like right now the whole experiment is being intensified because I am not even outside and around nature. The only time I am solitary really is when I am inside alone. This is the biggest test
– her voice is low and sleepy – she yawns –
ERIN: It’s just me, myself and I
– she frowns as if she does not know why she said it –
ERIN: Oh, that was stupid. Reshoot
– she stares at the camera long enough so that she can cut out the first part in editing and begin talking as though she were just starting –
ERIN: It has been raining now for five days and I have been isolated inside the whole time. I don’t have much stimulation in here apart from these guys, who are sort of helping
– she nods to her pile of books –
ERIN: I can pretend we are in conversation. In here I don’t have nature to make me feel small. I am surrounded only by all this male intellect. It is the only thing that stops me from disappearing. But it is maddening because their words are not mine. They keep reminding me that. The wilderness is not mine. And at the same time it is all I am. I keep thinking zone of middle dimension. I keep thinking, okay, Newton
– her eyes keep darting to just next to the camera’s eye – she touches her face and hair, as though she is looking in a mirror, checking reflection – the viewfinder of the camera is probably turned towards her –
ERIN: I am so wholly excluded from the communion. And without being outside all I have is these abstracted unattainable thoughts on nature. Why the fuck am I even reading this. URGH
– she throws Emerson across the room –
ERIN: Am I doing it right? I need to get back outside
– she pauses then exhales suddenly through nose – puts face into hands – sits still, rubbing her eyelids with her fingers –
ERIN (TO HERSELF): Maybe I can’t do this. Will the spirit of the mountain disqualify me for wishing I just had someone female to talk to? Is a lone bird on a tree on a lonely mountain singing to itself? Oh, for fuck’s sake. Reshoot
– she rubs her face with both hands – slaps her cheeks – takes a deep breath – looks right into the camera –
ERIN: It’s okay to not be content one hundred per cent of the time. Right, mountain spirit? If it were easy then it wouldn’t be hardship. And maybe it’s right to feel lonely. I can do this. I am strong enough to do this. This is the hardest part. The rain will stop soon. The only time I am lonely is when I am inside too long. Besides. I am not lonely. I have the camera and my books
– her resolute smile lingers and then fades –
ERIN(MUTTERING): Oh, I can’t use that. This is useless
– she gets up from the cot and reaches over for the camera –
I am confused about the postcards in Damon’s parcel. The postcards are written in Damon’s handwriting but are addressed to different people at different addresses all across North America, Canada and Alaska. They are all dated September 1987 and are all of the same kind of sentiment. Damon is thanking people for their hospitality, help and friendship. He is telling them they are beautiful people with room for improvement. Then he is telling them they can improve by living for themselves. He is telling them to cast off their chains and live like he will live, purposefully and free. Then he ends with an ostentatious phrase about casting out into the unknown. He insinuates that they might never meet again.
I suppose this is what he would have liked to say to these people, as though they were parting words, but something stopped him. The strange thing is that the postcards are stamped and bent at the corners and marked like they have travelled. I think maybe he did more than one journey like this, and he brought them to the cabin with him as some kind of token.
It is still raining. Last night I had the epiphany to leave out one of the cooking pans to fill up with rainwater so I did not need to venture out to get water from the spring. The rain battered against the hood of my anorak in a way that was exhilarating, an overload of stimulation after endless days inside the muted dry. I ran about in it yelping and laughing for a few minutes before retiring back inside like a fish that comes out from under its rock to dance a little in a flurry of excitement then catch itself and slink off back into the shadows. It was exhausting and after I wanted the stillness of the cabin again.
Inside I peeled off my anorak and my sodden leggings and hung them up next to the grate. Then I coaxed a fire and set myself on the cot in view of the pan through the window, with my books. I quickly forgot about the pan, though, and did not remember it until late afternoon, when my mouth was feeling suddenly dry. My clothes had dried and I was loathe to get them wet again, so I took off my trousers to fetch the pan in just my anorak. It was brimming with water, with a couple of drowned insects for good measure. I picked these out and put the pot on top of the fire to boil.
I filled my canteen with the boiled water and set it to cool. Then I made a broth from the rest of the water with one of the flavour packets from the instant noodles. I curled up on the cot and wrapped myself in the blanket and my sleeping bag with a tin mug of the hot savoury water. I smelled must from the blanket, and savoury, and me. The little excursion earlier in the day had made me overwhelmingly sleepy. I fell into it and slept for the rest of the day and long into the evening.
I usually like to rise early and keep myself busy but with the rain I have been dead heavy all the time and dull and lethargic, but I wake in the middle of the night and I have an interlude of energy before falling back to sleep again. I use this time to read and write and draw, and wish the rain would stop so I could go night walking. I am dreaming lots again.
A thing I have noticed is that they are all in the present tense. As in I am not dreaming about things from before here, no memories or other people or anything. No one I know, at least. Kind of spectral figures. Familiar strangers.
LOCATION: wooden cabin; Denali wilderness; Alaskan tundra; Alaska; Earth; 3rd planet of Sol; inner rim of Orion Arm; the Milky Way; the Local Group; Virgo Supercluster; The Universe; Everywhere Ever and All Over Again.
The tundra is always whistling. wwwwWWWWWhhhHHHHhhh. The tundra is empty. The tundra is partitioned by colour. There is the green-grey flat ground that I am on, the cabin, then the white-blue mountains. The mountains look like a backdrop. I feel like Truman Burbank.
If I sit still for long enough the whistling sounds like words. Big snowflake tumbleweed rolls just under my line of focused vision. I blink and it is gone.
If I sit still for long enough my eyes go blurry like a mirage. Like heat waves but cold, cold. It is hard to focus even when I blink hard.
Another sound starts behind the whistling. It sounds like a plane; I look around for one. Negative. It sounds like a person humming; I look around for a person. Negative. It sounds like bees. My hand tickles and there is a bee on it. Affirmative. The bee sits happy. I must be dreaming. The humming is louder.
In the shimmery mirage there is a dark shape coming closer. There is a figure in a cloak, furs, beads, skulls and with a staff. Her voice is very strange. I can’t see the features of her face because of the bees, which swarm in a flat mask. As if her face has no shape; no pits, no curves, no nose. It is hard to tell where the sound comes out from. There is a vibration on her voice, as if she’s speaking through a laryngophone, as if her voice emanates from all the tiny mouths of the bees in unison. It gives her what you might call an otherworldly aura. Almost techno-human. Like Professor Stephen Hawking. It is authorial.
Stephen Hawking has a daughter called Lucy and she grew up to be a writer. She wanted to inspire children to get excited about space and physics and all the things she grew up in awe of. She writes adventure books about a little boy called George who likes space. Isn’t that frustrating?
She moves to sit by my side on my log, which does not budge under her, as though she is weightless. I look at her closely and, sure, she has this shimmering quality, buzzing and wavery and nearly not there, like a model of an atom spinning on its axis, just slow enough for you to see the falter, its constituent parts flickering visible. I reach out to touch her and can’t seem to, her contours blurring as my hand gets close, but hovering just above I can feel her. A kind of soft quivering, a pulsating that feels like sound, low sirens in my temples. She draws in the dirt with the end of her staff. The gravelly sound makes me hungry. Like Coco Pops without milk. Her voice has an ungraspable familiarity to it; it is hard to concentrate on what she is saying because of her bee beard.
The circle is the antithesis of the triangle, because the circle stands for cycles which are even and infinite. In the centre of a circle you are always the same distance from the edge.
The ghost of Adam Smith sits on a triangle that is held upright by the shoulders of his crawling subordinates. He is hoarding all the power, and as it grows exponentially, the growth of others is depleted. But as the others are depleted, they are harmed to the point of abandonment (the bees are the first to leave him). As such, he loses his sense of self, which depended on a sense of the others.
So that is where the bees have gone. Around a week and a half has passed since I left Stan’s. I cannot be completely sure because I put a bit of tape over the date and time on the laptop for now and I have spent a lot of time sleeping when I should be awake and waking when I should be asleep. I have been inventing people for company, to talk to and mitigate the loneliness. Are invented people a corruption of solitude?
I have bathed once in the stream in all this time, little splash washes on my smelliest parts now and then. I smell but I only notice this when I take off my pants in the toilet shed. The rest of the time my smell is enveloped into me by my clothes. It worries me when I take off my pants that I may attract bears.
My face itches a lot because I keep touching it; I keep touching it because I think I am growing a beard; I think I am growing a beard because of the itching. There is not a mirror and the camcorder is just illusive enough to make me think I can see hair.
From the bee-figure dream I can pinpoint exactly in my subconscious the fodder for it. Back in the visitors’ centre at the entrance to Denali Park there were displays on all of the cultures indigenous to Alaska. I remember a diagram explaining the position of the individual in the Yupik Eskimo belief system in relation to the animals and plants it shared its home with, termed Cosmological Reproductive Cycling. In the diagram the human was part of a sort of energy transferral web, in the shape of a circle. It made me think at the time of a diagram we had in biology class, a food pyramid used to describe energy transferral in the animal kingdom. On the biggest pyramid and at the top sat the human, the unchallenged dominant omnivore at the top of the food chain.
Adam Smith casts himself as the dominant creature of the triangle and food chain and propagates this as the natural order of things. He eats a mass of lesser creatures who have themselves eaten a mass of even lesser creatures who have been grazing on chicken nuggets and apathy because their natural food source is inaccessible to them (these are the crawling subordinates). All of their power accumulates in Adam Smith. He uses this as an economic analogy, substituting for food or energy wealth or money.
The triangle food pyramid is used to explain hierarchy in nature and justify Adam Smith’s dominance. But it only looks that way because he said it does. The wolf does not sit on top of a pyramid. The wolf is dependent on the grass because when the grass dies the deer dies and when the deer thrives the wolf thrives and when the wolf overreaches the wolf is brought into check by its own hubris because the deer disappear and after a short period of thriving the wolf does too.
For the Yupik, like Naaja’s Inuit, nothing alive died but was reborn, and this was honoured in hunting ritual so power could never be accumulated but only transferred.
The orca and the wolf were seen as highly spiritual creatures that aided humans in hunting, and so offerings were made to both to maintain good relationships. The spirit that resided in each was interchangeable, in winter it was embodied in the wolf that brought the deer and in summer the orca that brought the walrus.
When an animal was killed as prey, it was returned to the wild to become complete again. To aid this, the bones of the carcass remained unbroken, and there was a farewell ritual where the animal would be entertained with drum music. If the animal was pleased with its treatment as a guest, it would return again in the future.
I am surprised Stan could retain his survival-of-the-fittest worldview when spending so much time in the park centre. I suppose he must not pay too much attention to the plaques.
During the night the rain stopped! I woke up to its lack of noise. It took me a while to realise it had not stopped completely. The gentler rain was white noise. I fell to sleep again feeling looser.
The rain was slack still when I woke up and I decided to try some fishing. It has been days since I have eaten anything that is not beige and the urge to get outside was so great that I twitched with it.
Walking through the forest the rain was less dense still. It fell in fatter drops and at a different tempo to the rain as it hit the canopy above. The noise of rain inside the forest was both dulled and intensified, like a storm from underneath a high church roof. It was much more peaceful in the forest and I felt a stillness come over again for the first time in days.
I decided to try out on the lake in the tundra. I had been stupid to think I could just fish from the lake with my shoddy short rod. But lucky for me there was a rock that worked a bit like a jetty and let me sit with my short line in the deeper water. In the still water where the rod dripped, the beads skimmed on top for seconds like water beetles skating, before sinking.
It was luckily an okay spot. It took less than an hour to hook something and I wished I had a way to make the fish keep better so I could stock up and get all the death over in one go for a while. I stunned the fish against the rock jetty, trying to do it without thinking too much. A large ant struggled a tiny caterpillar that was twice its size over my rock and back to its queen. I attached the dead fish to the hook so I could walk it back without having to carry it in my hands. I wiped my hands on some damp grass with lake water to get rid of some of the sticky smell.
When I looked up I went stiff. On the opposite side of the lake there was a bear come out of nowhere while I was busy with the fish. A bloody big grizzly. I forgot my entire body and the rod fell out of my hands and the bear stilled too. It watched me watch it from my plinth on the rock, its fur flittering in the wind. It was close enough to see that but it was still small across the big lake. There was a potent unreality to it. It was still and mysterious in an accidental way and I felt very suddenly that something in me was going to be different from then on.
I put my hand on my chest to feel my heart beating vigorously but it was not. In fact I did not feel like I thought I would at all. Since I had got out to the cabin The Bear had existed like an aura, since before that even on the ice sheet, the Greenlandic tundra. It had felt conspicuous for not being there; lingering like a promise and quivering with anticipation and fear. And I had thought back then that it would feel like opening up, that I would see that Fire burning in its eyes and recognise myself in it. But instead after all there it was so suddenly. It looked so benign and abstract, an apparition. I wondered if perhaps it was.
I want to see myself in you.
But we are very different.
I felt like if I turned away it might disappear, and although some flight response was tugging me gently, telling me to get away, I did not want to turn my back on it. It seemed to be thinking the same of me. I started to think maybe we would be trapped like this for ever, perpetually watching each other watching in wary fascination.
My blood tingled vigorously and I could feel it filling me up all the way to the tips of my fingers and toes, so that the sensation of my feet in my shoes felt like containment, like what it must feel like to be liquid and formless but held in shape, my hands like rubber gloves full of water. Like zero gravity. Like proprioception.
I put one foot behind the other on the rock, using my heel to feel out the stable parts, and climbed down off it without ever breaking contact with its eyes. I put down the rod in case it thought I was brandishing it. Then I started to tiptoe, desperately slow, closer towards it following the lakeside. I was trying to move so slowly that it might not even notice. To get closer to it and really feel its presence. To commune.
I have never felt such an acute kind of instinctual consideration of what it is to not be alive. It became clear then that any nostalgia that we feel from The Call of the Wild is the pang of what we remember but do not have, from where we are before we go in search of it. It is all of the prospects of having life taken and of not being and of things that you can never possess or control or put into words. In that moment I forgot the anxiety of having a body, I forgot the need to possess it.
While I was thinking all this I had got a lot closer and I could feel my heart then where I could not before, throbbing in my throat like a pulsar. I was shaking badly from concentrating so hard on my stealth. The grizzly bear stared at me, transfixed. Unmoved and hypnotic stare. We were both fixed on each other in fear and desire or morbid fascination. Or none of that. Just purely under spell.
But in that way I see me in you, in what I am not.
Then it jerked its head. A sudden lurch snapping the thread that had formed between us. It peeled its black lips back to show its teeth and it jolted me to notice I was so close as to see its teeth clearly. It padded one front paw behind the other, walking its front legs backwards into itself, then using the weight of the rest of its body and jumping a little to bring its forelegs up and stand bipedal, unfolding to its full height and stature. Huge. Fuck.
I could see the matting of its fur where its underbelly was wet. It huffed through its nostrils, short, deep grunts.
What am I doing what the fuck am I doing.
Abruptly out of trance now. I suddenly see myself from right up above, as though looking down. I am small and it is big and the lake is huge blue glass beside us and the grass goes on on on around us and there is nowhere for cover.
I keep absolutely still and try to think. What did the pamphlet say what did the pamphlet say. Direct eye contact. Did it not say never to make – very dangerous. I avert my eyes, lower my head, still trying to see it. Keep one hundred feet between you. Was it one hundred? Five hundred? Maybe fifty. How far is fifty feet? Either way it is too late now. What else? Do not go without pepper spray. Well, that one’s out. It said calm, monotone voice. Let it know you are human.
Hi bear. Nice bear. Gratey-shrill with fear. Be submissive. Shoulders down. Bow head. Respect respect, bowing like a Tibetan prostrating, bow-crawling a pilgrimage. Slowly slowly up the mountain. Back away slowly.
Where the bloody hell am I?
Rocks under heels making me unsteady. Cannot turn around cannot make it look like fleeing and initiate a chase. It does not come after me. It stands, watching me go. When I have reversed, undone my journey back where I started, let’s not do that again, it lets itself fall limply to its feet. Thud.
And then it walks away. And I have to say that I did not see the Fire and that its eyes were vague from where I stood. It has nothing to give me apart from its just being and its bear-ness. Probably it will never think of me again and I will remember it always. But that is because the bear does not have sensibilities because it does not need them. It already knows all of this. I did not have the camera for any of this so as far as the documentary is concerned it did not happen. Which makes me think, funny, it was the most happened to that I have ever felt.
I think a boreal owl?
This morning the strangest thing happened. I was sat around in the cabin doing a video diary entry when my back started to tingle and the hairs on my neck and arms stood up, and I got the sure feeling that I was being watched. At first I put it down to being on the camera but then I felt I could feel its direction, as if it were coming from behind.
I turned very carefully, as though whoever it was would not notice me turning if it was just slow enough. Outside the window, just inside the trees and standing half beneath a shadow, a reindeer was stood still as anything, its legs so straight the wind could knock it over. It just stood there looking and I stared back at it through the window and it just went on like that, looking right at me and not flinching a muscle.
Now I know there are not many reindeer in this part of Alaska at this time of year but here was this reindeer looking at me with an intensity and persistence. I went outside to it to see if it would turn and run away from me because it was creeping me out just standing there. I needed to get closer to see it was real and solid and breathing. I walked slowly towards it and my blood clunked in my ears every step I got nearer because it really was not budging any. Then, as I got within around five metres, it suddenly huffed and took a step backwards. It came to as if from out of a trance and started to back away, baby-step by baby-step. Then it half-circled around me as if at the distance of a force field, and loped slowly out towards the tundra. The whole time it kept looking back at me warily.
But the strangest thing about it was that the reindeer came to me first in a dream. Last night I was outside just kind of staring at the forest moving in the wind, waving like water, at the pinkish tundra evergreens dotted like Christmas cake decorations, at the rust-red mountains glinting back the sun in streaks, the clouds behind their own snowy mountain range, just gently spinning round to get everything in panorama, when the figure appeared in front of me again.
Child must have a comrade animal in order to be protected from the bad spirits.
My head reeled a little from the spinning. I must have looked scared at talk of bad spirits.
Not all spirits are bad. Most are good and watch over us. Besides, you will have the reindeer. I will find you one.
Who are the bad spirits?
The bad spirits are spirits without forms. Just spirits that are waiting to be in bodies again. They are not really bad. Just envious. They like to cause mischief to keep themselves occupied. Sometimes that mischief is death but really death only means to be made to change form again.
I was incredulous.
But I quite like my form.
And this is the tragedy of death. But it is a short-lived one.
She dissolved back into the forest, then promptly reappeared leading a reindeer.
This will be your reindeer. She is a herd mother so her imprint is very heavy.
Imprint?
All things have an imprint. It is the weight of the energy. Some are heavy and others are lighter.
What does it do?
It defines your potency. A heavier imprint leaves more of an effect. But an imprint can be positive or negative. If you have a heavier imprint you have a responsibility to be positive. But you must also remember that others with a weaker imprint are just as important but in different ways.
The bees droned around her. They bustled over each other, to the very edges of her eyes. I thought I knew those eyes, like a word trapped behind the tonsils. I touched the reindeer. Its fur was soft and downy like a kitten’s tummy and its skin hummed underneath with its charge.
You can find imprint everywhere.
Seeing the reindeer today brought it all back. What is going on here? Women are after all irrational and mystical, so maybe I was just being a girl about it? Would an actual real-life visitation feel any different to a hallucination anyway? If a hallucination is a work of your subconscious, it is already a message from another realm in a way. How do you tell the difference? For human society I was obliged to conjure up the former occupants of these woods, said Thoreau of the days real people did not pop into his cabin by the pond at Walden.
The reindeer kept on loping and looking and stopping from time to time to turn and stare back at the hut. I stayed out there shivering in my pyjamas, watching it go.
After the reindeer incident the bee-figure keeps appearing to me in animal form. I will be walking through the woods and she will appear to me, for example as a brown ermine, springing from behind a tree so very suddenly there and sitting on her hind legs in a way that says I am no mortal brown ermine. I can always tell it is really her, sometimes by ways like this, as though me and the animal are communicating, and sometimes even when she chooses not to acknowledge me in this way, by signs from the physical world. I would call this other kind maybe an increase in density, like Roman-vase heaviness, for example the sudden pick-up of the wind when in the presence of the golden eagle, or a sudden stillness, or anything else that feels like it is hinting at significance.
I went far into the tundra today for more food. I saw another golden eagle, or the same golden eagle, and a gyrfalcon. I had been hungry for the taste of meat that was not fish and had to kill by my own hand again if I was ever to build up enough karma points to eat meat back at home. I thought about what she had said and it gave me motivation to take full responsibility for the transferral that maintains my own energy.
The clouds were moving fast in the direction I was walking and if I stood still with my head up to face them they would glide over and I would feel my belly go as if I were still moving too. The sun was hanging evening-low and its angle filled the clouds up with colour, so that they were pink in its face and purple in shadow and it was a big ball of orange, opaque enough to look at, leaking its hue onto the grass and making it orange too. The sky felt close and low like a projection inside a planetarium, the tundra wide and empty, and walking north as I was, they went on together uninterrupted until they disappeared behind the curve of the earth, and it made me feel big and small to look at it all.
I did it like she says to. This time when I saw the hare I wanted, and I saw more of them because of the flat of the tundra, I considered my shot carefully and struck it in the hind. It had seen me and stood semi-wary, but I suppose it did not bolt because it was too unused to the sight of me to understand. It looked me in the eye before it took my bullet. I ran over to where it dropped to witness the magnitude of what I had done. It was still alive, like she said I should hope it would be. I picked up its warm limp body and held it up to face my face, and looked in at the life fading there. I poured some water from my bottle into its mouth so that it would not be thirsty. I shook from the sobs and tried to share in its suffering. And I am sure that its was much worse than mine, but it felt less like cheating to let it see me cry.
I told it I was sorry. I thanked it for giving me its body. And I made a promise to it that when the time came I would offer my body back to the earth for it as nourishment and that I would be happy to do so. And in that moment, I knew it and I meant it and I felt the gravity of what it meant to say it.
INT. CABIN – VIEW THROUGH WINDOW – camera is in hand-held – position: on cot facing out of the window – outside a reindeer is stood, grazing, very close to the window –
ERIN (EXCITEDLY): Look. Look, there it is again
– the camera jerks with her hands and she moves to get a better view, cot squeaking – camera is steadied – focuses in on reindeer –
ERIN: I’m going to go out to her
– view of camera scrambled, bed, ceiling, floor, as Erin clambers off the cot – floorboards – padding feet – pause – readjust – door –
ERIN (WHISPERING): Got to be really quiet and careful. Don’t want to scare her
– door is pushed open and outside light spills in – camera adjusts to light – camera moves around the door – reindeer in view from behind, about five metres distance – it can be heard huffing into the dirt as it tears the grass up – door creaks –
ERIN (WHISPERING): Shhhhhssh
– reindeer suddenly picks up its head – turns to look directly at camera – bolts forward in surprise –
ERIN: Oh no oh no come back don’t go
– camera jolts side to side with her movement – jogging after it as it trots away into tree cover –
ERIN: Hahahaha
– she stops running after it, watches it go – reindeer disappears into the black of the dense trees –
Your power animal may come to you in a dream or meditation or in its actual physical form in waking life. Have you noticed unusual behaviour from a particular animal? Or do you keep encountering the same animal or the same animal species an amount that surprises you? Maybe you are noticing them regularly, as an image or as an object. Does the orca, for example, appear to you in the image form, emblazoned on everyday objects like T-shirts? Did you hear someone talking about going to watch Shamu at SeaWorld? Was Free Willy on when you turned on your television?
What animal intrigues and captivates you? What animal do you notice most, not only out in wild nature, but also in your everyday life as an image? If you feel attracted to an animal and it keeps appearing, in the physical world or in a dream, it may be a sign that the animal is seeking to reveal itself to you.
How does the animal make you feel? When you see the animal how does its presence make its impact on you? Do you feel its presence before you see it? What emotion does it evoke? Does it scare you? Does it elate you? Do the feeling and the apparitions/appearances coincide with particular situations in your life? Is there a sense of déjà vu? Do you feel about the animal as you feel about the situation?
The power animal could represent your feelings, or a situation that recurs in your mind, or a person or an event from your past, present or future.
If you answered mostly yes to the above in relation to a particular creature, then you have found your power animal! Learn to honour your power animal.
Another thing Sam said that I had never stopped to think about was that it is actually pretty offensive that suddenly young people on the internet want to know their ‘power animal’, a New Age corruption of a particular native belief, through an online quiz. What I wanted to say back but didn’t was that maybe aside from being appropriative and corruptive in its associations, this signifies a suppressed and lost desire for closer affinity with the animals. That rather than stealing a tradition because we think it sounds enlightened, maybe there could be a more careful way to go about remembering a connection that was always there before?
It is hard to feel a connection with any animal in a spiritual way as a British person when the only animals you are surrounded by are domesticated cats, dogs, cows, sheep, horses and then symbols or images of animals. If symbols are mostly what we have to go on, is this uselessly inauthentic, just too far removed? A symbol of a symbol, not a direct one like a bear track in the mud? Do they lose their potency when you take them from an advert on television?
But if we are to feel affinity in order to care, which we must, then symbols are all we have to work with. And if we each held an animal in affinity, a comrade animal, wouldn’t we care more about the continuation of its species? Maybe at birth we should all be given a comrade animal selected at random from a vast database. If you knew that a sea cucumber is an echinoderm from the class Holothuroidea and you were born into symbolic kinship with it, you would likely care more that it carried on slinking along the sea floor. You would feel the responsibility to help it along.
An animal’s symbolic meaning can be as potent an acknowledgement of our shared invention of that symbol as the animal itself, and maybe more so. Ted Kaczynski made a comrade of the snowshoe rabbit. He called it Grandfather Rabbit. Whenever he shot a snowshoe rabbit he would say ‘thank you, Grandfather Rabbit’. He would get a mystic desire to draw them. He drew and thought about them so much that he actually began to think like a rabbit.
I am back on the old estate. As in most of suburbia there are always a lot of cats. Maybe every third house has a cat and almost all the rest have dogs. Only everyone is gathered around a fire pit that has been dug out of the concrete in the centre of our cul-de-sac. The limp little cat bodies are thrown into the pit because they are full of an invisible death.
There is a potion that has brewed itself from all the chemical run-offs, the Roundup and the Miracle Gro from every impossibly green lawn, trim as porn pubes, then the bleach from the sparkling toilet bowls, the suds of Fairy and Colgate, the nail varnish remover on cotton buds, the Dettol-soaked cloths. Carefully measured so as to be harmless alone but altogether in the cesspits under the roads forming new chemical combinations, transmutations, chance alchemies augmented by years of accumulation. Then pouring over the tarmac when drains fill up in rain, distributed as anomalies in the chain, distilled and distilled up and up, a fusion of the inorganic that leaves its mark as a negative imprint like she said, malignant and unseen, the tick that sucks the mouse dry.
But no one knows where the invisible death comes from because they can’t see it so all the dead cats must be burned to save the live ones. Some of the afflicted cats, the ones still alive but coughing, are also thrown onto the fire. Children are kept inside.
The voice comes from beside me, and I recognise it immediately, without the humming mediation. It is the voice that I had in my head the whole time I read Silent Spring, scrapped together from a brief interview Larus showed us; undeviatingly calm and certain, a little drawling, with a trail of whistle to the end of every word. She holds a staff in her right hand; the tiny bird skulls and shells go clack-clack-clack. A few singular bees crawl about the lichen of her skin. ‘Cats, who so meticulously groom their coats and lick their paws, seemed to be most affected.’
‘It’s you, I knew it was you!’ but she says nothing.
We stand and watch as the last of the cats disappear into the flames. Some of the owners are weeping. Other cats watch from behind closed windows. The air smells that horrible smell, the one the adults would not answer for when you asked as a child, when all the pigs and cows had foot and mouth, and the significance makes you retch now. People file away back to their houses.
‘In central Java so many were killed that the price of a cat more than doubled.’
I don’t know where Java is but I know it is far away. I wonder if the Javanese burned their cats too, to keep their problems atomised. Treating the maladies, treating the maladies like a very rational physician.
Then I woke up. The fact that the light inside was moving might have infiltrated my dream and brought about the fires. It was darker, but still light with the midnight sun, a dusky twilight. Shadows toned up and down and across the floorboards. My first thoughts on waking: The world is burning down! The coloured lights of nuclear holocaust!
What she has been saying about negative imprints and energy; we are a very potent species, we have a very heavy imprint. I think about what Larus said about aliens leaving messages in our DNA and, well, we have already left our own messages in the earth at Hiroshima. We made rockets to go to the moon and look at ourselves. But the technology that built the rockets to go to the moon was adapted from the same technology that the atom bomb was made from. Nuclear radiation is the negative imprint left by our glorious inventions. We did it! We made something to give us immortal remembrance!
What is the message of this, our most enduring time capsule? Its content is senseless, it is a messageless symbol, a dead language. But even where a message fails, the time capsule itself still conveys an intent. It is a pointing finger, you just can’t see at what it points. What is the prerequisite for intent? Just a self-conscious marking? With the Wow! Signal they were looking for a pattern repeated enough for it to seem unlikely to be a coincidental and natural occurrence. In his whale graphs Larus was looking for the frequency with which certain distinct data occurred. Maybe these graphs could not be used to interpret our waste depository sites because we use pictorial symbols rather than language as language is one more degree of symbolism removed. But the pattern and symmetry and frequency of the pictorial symbols should also suggest intent.
So the symbols at the waste depository sites would have to be something that can’t occur naturally like giant sculptures, rock carvings, detailed pictograms. Something with the human stink about it (patterns suggest a maker). But if you don’t know what is the human stink, then maybe you will not smell it (there are patterns and symmetry in nature and these have already been used to argue for a teleological proof of god, which I know to be misleading).
The occurrence of the waste depository sites would be infrequent, making them anomalies, and suggesting unnatural origin, unlike signs that are said to point to intelligent design, which are everywhere, so the intent would be recognised, and would colonise and corrupt the epistemological wilderness of the future. It says without saying SO THAT WE MAY LIVE INTO YOURS. Any attempt to share meaning and a message with the future will probably fail but what probably will not fail is this meaningless scribble. It is a desire that manifests itself a lot in our culture, the desire to leave a mark; graffiti in a bathroom stall, vandalism, a signature: all a defiance of time. We have sown our signature into the soil. We have survived time.
And what is your message?
The light shapes shifted only slightly, it was their vague wave of intensity that had woken me up. As my eyes came to, their change in colour, at the shadows borders, dancing around the edges, rendered the billows of light like a petrol rainbow.
The T-shirt I had tucked into the window to keep the light out was clinging on by one sleeve where the stitching bunched the fabric, like it does sometimes when the wind makes the old latches slide down a little.
After having only seen the Northern Lights in time-lapse that is how I thought they moved. Licking the sky like a green flame. In real time they hardly move at all. Serves me right for knowing a natural phenomenon only by watching it on the internet. It jarred me, I had to move to check I was not having a sort of stroke and seeing everything in slow motion; a momentary lapse like climbing the last stair that is not there. They moved, but not in big winding ribbons, more rapid little flames within big ribbons that moved more slowly. There were different states of focus; a school of fish that ribbon like a sea serpent.
Eskimos think the lights are the spirits of the animals they hunted. Beluga whales, deer and seals. Native Americans from Wisconsin think that the lights are manabai’wok, giants who are the spirit form of great hunters and fishermen. Other natives see them as the spirits of ancestors, and all interpret them as a benevolent force. And in a way they are all right, given metaphoric licence. The lights are the physical manifestation of a magnetic field that deflects high-energy solar radiation, protecting life on Earth. The lights are particles that have made it through where the magnetic field is weaker at the poles, and collide with gas particles.
Cultures see in the constellation of stars things that feature in their vernacular of images. Carl Sagan said that when the ancient Egyptians saw the Big Dipper they saw a horse carrying a man leaning back followed by a hippo with a crocodile on its back. What will people of the future see in the nuclear trefoil? It looks a little like a peace sign, or an X-marking-the-spot.
In the narrative of conception the egg is the conquest, but in a photomicrographic image of sperm cells meeting an egg, what really looks like the most ‘powerful’ on a comparison of constructed scales of significance? Why do we talk of sex in terms of penetration, rather than a cave mouth swallowing? What is our own significance against the vastness of space?
Take something vague like the Lights and make it into something very specific depending on your myths. We are all saying the same thing in different ways. But that is just it; a vernacular. Aliens who find our time capsules would not share any kind of vernacular with we who are under the anthropological umbrella of ‘Life on Earth’, so Larus is wrong to be looking for pi in space. The Human Interference Task Force were wrong to try to find universal symbols.
Ah, Larus. The Northern Lights are super-rare in the Alaskan summer. I thought I must have still been sleeping. But then I remembered like an echo what he had said, that there was going to be a magnetic supercharge this year. He said that the sun’s activity goes in cycles that peak every eleven years, and that this year is the eleventh. I forgot everything for a second and got an urge to talk to him and tell him. He would have liked to know.
In a way I am starting to feel a little bit better about the betrayal, because the flaws it gives him free me from his tether. He taught me a lot, but he is still quite blinded by his man-vision. John Lilly did not treat the dolphins with the reverence he preached they deserved, he was a hypocrite and he brought a lot of discredit to the study of cetaceans. But that can’t undermine the few really pertinent things he also said about other-than-human consciousness. Larus and his ulterior motive do not make everything that I did learn from him null. Because imagine if we took the personal lives of great thinkers as their oeuvre. Sure, we should hate them for it, but if we ignored all of the wife beaters, all of the wife silencers, all of the wife killers, wouldn’t we have some gaping holes in history?
My comrade reindeer came back again. I know for sure it is real now because I have pinched myself when I have seen it and I have filmed it on camera and watched it back several times over just to make sure. I find it very strange that the reindeer is always alone. This is not the usual behaviour of a reindeer, and this fact makes me think it really is my comrade. But then, this is the part that cannot be theoretically tested. The reindeer could just be a lost and lonely reindeer.
It has not tried to talk to me or tell my future like she said it might. But I do not know if maybe I am looking too hard and thinking too literally. Like looking too hard with my actual physical eyes instead of looking more indirectly with my third eye, which really only means feminine perspective, as in admitting there is not one truth, there are many narratives, there are many names for mountains, and by taking on the perspective of the reindeer I will actually see myself and my future. It is simple and rational, like how Jung said that you can predict the future if you just know how the present has evolved out of the past.
INT. CABIN, SUNLIGHT – Erin on cot, camera on desk opposite – in shot are cabin cot, Erin and the window, legs draped over edge of cot, her hands stiffly under the diary as if at a lectern – she looks up from it and directly at the camera – there is something unsettling in the way her eyes look – wide, imploring/haunted –
ERIN: ‘KACZYNSKI IS GOD’ is scrawled in capitals on the title page of the diary. I have read the first half. Like the title suggests. Damon is pretty much Kaczynski
– she looks down at the diary and pauses with a hand hovering over her bookmarks, little scraps of paper – she picks the first and carefully turns to its page – pages are stiff from years sat pressed together –
ERIN: So like here he says
– she takes a breath –
Once upon a time there was a land covered with pristine virgin wilderness. Where colossal trees soared over lavish mountainsides and rivers ran crazy and free through deserts. Where eagles wheeled and beavers beavered at their dams and people lived in concord with bare nature. Achieving everything they needed to achieve by the day using only rocks. Bones and timber. Padding softly on the Earth and living to full personal potential. In a peaceful state of anarchy
– she looks back at the camera –
ERIN: Which is lifted right out of Kaczynski. And then this
– she turns to another page –
That summer there were too many people around my old cabin so I decided I needed some peace. I hear there are handlebars and viewing plateaus specifically plateaued for viewing at Yosemite now. They think that wildness can be put in a box and looked at. John Muir was a douchebag
ERIN: Saturation again. Damon must have been in another cabin somewhere a bit less remote before he came to this one. Kaczynski did that too. He got upset when some bulldozers tore down his favourite thinking spot and that’s what sent him further out into the wilderness and into madness and made him send the letter bombs
– she sits looking at the diary in her hands with slumped shoulders – she looks back at the camera –
ERIN (QUIETLY): It’s really fucking sad if you think about it
– then she smiles weakly, turning to another page –
ERIN: And then this. Before the forgetting existence was a mosaic of beauty. It is the iron fist of technology that has smashed that to smithereens. And we are the shards. Each just a remnant of this beautiful mosaic. Discordant from our true nature
– she stares at the page – looks up –
ERIN: And it’s all very hyperbolic but I get it
– she turns to another page –
Technological society is a leech on the soul. Existentialism is its result. Primitive man had a challenging existence. He had to fight off predators and other men and hunt and kill. He was raw and fully alive. He was not safe from failure but he was not hopeless to all of his threats. He could act on them. Modern man is under constant threat by things he has no power to control. Nuclear weapons. Pollution. Carcinogens. Our environment is already radically altered from its natural state. Soon man will be as radically different as his modern environment
ERIN: He man he. Of course. But he goes into this more. He says that
– she turns to another bookmark –
Nature is not a feminist. Nature is ruled by chaos and competition. Strength and cunning. Nature made a human creature that must fill the roles of care and duty to offspring. So that the species may flourish. They are weaker and domestically minded. This obviously makes them social beings and so more suited to civilisation. This is why the mountains are not peppered with women. They will be more cumbersome during the revolution and will also fare worse. But of course they will be necessary after the revolution. So we must take care to recruit them
– she frowns down at the diary – makes a kind of ‘huuumph’ sound – bounces the diary a little in her hands, absently – chews the inside of her lip – she turns to another bookmark – the pages stick together – she peels them apart –
The enemy is the machine. We should not make enemies of ourselves
– she looks back to the camera, bouncing the diary in her hands again – the stiff pages hardly move –
ERIN: You can see the way his philosophy develops. He starts going then into how the revolution should work and what his idea of utopia after will be like. All the time going back to this idea of freedom freedom freedom, which he always writes in capitals. He wants to destroy everything institutional and symbolic. Factories, of course, but also hospitals. And libraries. And he says there will be many casualties. He says that death and chaos are the sacrifice needed. That freedom and dignity are more valuable than a life free of pain. That to die fighting for survival is more fulfilling than a life void of purpose
– she is absorbed in her trail of thought – she does not notice the book in her hands – her hands play with it absently – apparently she does not notice because she does not treat it with the delicate reverence she did before –
ERIN: And then if you follow his logic. And you end up with this post-technological society. Then doesn’t feminism have what it wants anyway? Because if like I believe there is no natural way of being. And patriarchy is just scaffolding. Then does taking down the scaffolding not solve the problem?
– the diary slips from her hands and lands on the floor face down – a page is dislodged and slips across the floor with the gust the book’s landing made – Erin looks reproachfully at the piece of paper – she bends and reaches to pick it up, gathers the diary as she does – she sits back on the cot and looks at the paper, places the diary besides her – then she unfolds the piece of paper – her lips move silently as she begins to read –
– her face caves in on itself – she brings her hand to her mouth and the other begins shaking – she lets out a whine that is broken and animalistic –
– then her eyes dart suddenly to an area behind the camera and to the left – she brings away her hand as though to talk – her face has a receptivity to it now, like it is in the act of communication, all parts expressive in a way that had not been in evidence to the inanimate camera – as though there is someone in the room with her whom she is addressing –
ERIN: He… He killed himself
– and then, shaking her head desolately –
– in the background through the window looking out into the trees that get denser and denser until they are forest a dark shape comes forward from the obscurity – it is small because it is in the distance, it would be easy to miss – Erin slowly shakes her head at the point behind the camera with her mouth a big ‘O’ – eyes are drawn to it because it is sudden movement in a previously inert space – in contrast to the space around it it becomes clear – a large animal with long spindly legs –
– Erin’s expression droops and her eyes slip diagonally down to the camera – she blinks at it then slowly rises, slowly, like her body is almost too heavy to lift – she leans across the floor and reaches out –
After I read it I went a bit dizzy like I had to sit down and get moving acutely at the same time. I got the fear/adrenaline that perhaps a rabbit feels being run into the ground by a fox; a chemical consolation prize for its oncoming doom. And there must be one, a payoff, I think, otherwise the rabbit would just lie down and let the fox take it, not prolong its own suffering. There must be a small part to the death chase that feels good.
I packed up my bag to move back out to the fire tower. Damon’s quest and the distance he went on it had put my own feeble experiment into perspective; in contrast a glorified camping trip. He too saw the hypocrisy of the Mountain Man but he actually followed through on it with frenzied sincerity. A distance so far and so absolute as to never come back. In fact the only absolute solitude.
An event horizon is a place in space-time and events beyond this point can’t reach an observer who is outside of them. It is a point of no return and on the other side of this point the gravitational pull turns so intense that escape is impossible. This is a black hole.
Here in the cabin there is always looming the possibility that Stan will come to find me. This is reason enough to leave for somewhere more authentically distant. And I shall not take my map. A map is a corrupting thing, an imposition on the wilderness it tames, translates to the symbolic. And it is a mapping for others to follow, like Thoreau mapped for others to follow him on his philosophical terrain but by talking about it he took away its agency, its pure wildness. Because pure wildness is the absence of words, is self-willed. Damon found this out and had to give up all of his words.
I cannot take the camera because it is more than the documentary now. Documenting too throws a quadrant on a thing, pins a thing down like a specimen for dissection. You cannot document a wilderness because that undoes its wildness, its being apart and for itself, and now I understand this. To document is to litter, to litter photographs of the tundra in the tundra behind you. And besides, it diminishes the directness of the experience, which becomes once removed via a superficial lens of viewing. Can you even have a feminist documentary on wilderness? Can you even have a word for wilderness? Do the Eskimos and the Inuits have one?
It is like Sam told me; the categorising of indigenous people is a colonial pursuit that controls their identity with words. Like in the Indian Act. It is a way to distinguish in white law who gets status or non-status, who gets what.
We map them out, draw out their boundaries, like when I entered Denali Park or you enter any park and there is a visitors’ centre roping off the inside from the outside, nature from non-nature. Gender is another act of division, deciding who gets what admirable qualities. There are no Mountain Women because the Mountain Man will not call her Mountain Woman. The Mercury 13 were ready for space flight, but NASA wasn’t ready to call them astronauts. (Side note: Athabaskans had a matrilineal society before rights were given to their men in white law.)
All along I have been catching butterflies, pinning them in a glass case and putting a name to them: my own name. I had thought it so innocent, the calling of things by their real names. The good truth of speciesism; helping me to see difference. But it is not, it pins the animal to a system that pretends to be truth, static and mechanical, it reduces the luminous and the complex. This makes the thing, the animal, lose its deeper truth. William Blake the poet got upset at Newton and the Enlightenment scientists for ‘Unweaving the Rainbow’. I have been trying so hard to put it into words but I have been struggling because it can never really be worded without making its immediacy dissipate. I have been unweaving rainbows.
I set fire to the pile of man books like I did the animal guts, because I do not want The Bear to smell them either. In words they keep the wilderness from me. I am sick of their authority. I am sick of their exclusion, their air of expertise, their colonial intent. I am sick of their wording that which should not be worded. Maybe we need some gaping holes in history! I hate them! And I hate them all the more for being so hypocritical, with Damon so painfully true!
I watch the guts crackle but the books do not light because I threw them on whole in anger and the flames lick at them but do not take hold and snuffle and die. Are they fucking immortal? I pick them up one by one and tear the pages from them, reignite the flames, feed them in gently. They curl to black in my fingers, page by page.
But I have to do something with this, running away like a little squirrel who takes a strange object to its dray, and what to do with it when I have it there? A voyage that leaves everybody else behind. A voyage to see the moon’s second face.
Mike Collins was the astronaut left behind to see to things in the command module while Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. He drifted for a day in a hunk of metal that he had little control over, alone in the dizzy void, velvety infinity making him sick with perspective or lack of, no anchor for his soul and a brain telling him that whatever he thinks he can see he is probably still falling. And when he got to the dark side of the moon and he could not see Earth any more, he lost radio contact with Houston for forty-eight minutes.
Not since Adam has any human known such solitude, the loneliest man at the beginning of the world or in the world or out of it. Only, Mike Collins says he did not feel loneliness but awareness, satisfaction and exultation. The most crystalline and private solitude. Oh, Eve, why did you have to show up and tamper with the clarity?
We always had a preoccupation with the moon as this symbol of a philosophical island. A man is an island on the moon. It is so far away it is definitive exile. Is that Cain on the moon? Is he lonely? Is he drunk?
The moon has not been an island since Apollo, or it is an island like Crusoe’s but after the footprint. Someone already flew up and touched it and saw it from all sides and figured out there are no green men and no cheese. A solitude to be felt by no one since Adam and now Mike Collins.
And yet it could always have been purer still. If Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong had died like they easily might have, and Collins had to do a return journey to Earth on his own, first the dark face then the burden and relief of being the survivor, the only one to escape the shipwreck, returned without the heroes empty-handed. But how pure would have been the level of solitude on that return? Does that thought corrupt it? Like it could always go deeper still? Like smashing the atom of solipsism to find out it does smash and it is actually made of weird squiggly things.
In Chinese mythology there is a woman on the moon and she has a whole band of moon rabbits for company. I felt spacey as I left the cabin, but much less heavy than when I walked out here. A flock of geese made a ‘V’ in the sky. This is called a skein.
I stayed up all day and part of the night reading Damon’s journal to its end, only leaving the tower a couple of times to pee and just to stretch my cramping legs. I was sore all over from just sitting still, and so exhausted from crying and reading that I fell into a nightmare sleep that I could not pull myself out of until late this morning. The diary does not elaborate on how he chose to do it. It only suggests that he would not ever be found.
Damon is hanging by the neck from a tree, its branch groaning against the pull of his body, but it groans less and less with his diminished mass. The bears and the wolves found him before the ranger, like he planned. His legs are torn away where the lower-standing creatures have managed to reach, from his waist down, a hula skirt made of strands like earthworms, which wriggle as the torso sways. It takes a big bear to stand on its hind legs and wrench the forlorn body to the ground, where the lower-standing creatures wait with yelps and warbles that sound like ecstasy and pain at once. They feast on his body, frenzied but harmonious, creatures great and small.
Humankind has been the biggest leech on this planet. No creature has ever dominated so unanimously or pervasively.
It had crossed my mind that maybe his suicide was faked so that he could truly cast off all ties and live in his wilderness with no one ever coming after him. To be dead and mourned as the most unconditional form of liberation. But reading the diary, and especially towards its end, he writes so convincingly about how it feels to follow the deduction of his philosophy all the way to its conclusion, and know there is no way back, that I really have to believe he was there.
We are heading for collapse. Eventually the fortress we built will cave in on itself. But not until everything outside of it has been absorbed into it, remodelled in its image. Not until we have corrupted everything that is beautiful and whole and pure.
He talks and talks about how there is this innate thing, this selfishness in us, and that no matter our good intentions it always overrides. And it gets me thinking about the parallel on a macro-cosmic scale. That really, if there is no changing the course of our ‘advancement’ and its inevitable conclusion, why even struggle against it? Maybe we should meet it running, we should just run at death and the death of civilisation yelling and flailing like Damon did. The planet could regenerate with new interpretations of life, like after the dinosaurs or all the sea creatures in the Silurian period or everything in the Great Dying in the Permian period when 96 per cent of life forms perished and the 4 per cent that did not went on to become all life as we know it now.
And if at that end of it, when all the glittery dust motes settle and the black mushrooms start to metabolise the fallout, if there is nothing left that could contemplate our loss, then is nothing really lost? Even those with the capacity to feel, would they even care? Would the dolphins be sad to see us go if any of them survived?
The Doomsday Clock is a clock whose time is agreed upon by a group from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Midnight represents the apocalypse. The clock indicates the planet’s vulnerability to apocalypse from human-made existential risks, their main concerns being nuclear weapons and climate change.
Nuclear contaminates time and future wildness and will outlive us as a time capsule. Climate change permeates the now, every fibre of being on the surface of the planet touched and corrupted by it, even if only by the colour change of its cast shadow. Human-made change is already written into every little bit of wilderness.
No part of the planet will be untouched. Not the deepest ocean trench, not the never-seen portion of Siberian forest, not the unknown and unnamed underwater cave or the blind crabs living in it. All will bear our dirty fingerprints. We have left our negative imprint everywhere. And the first and worst felt of the human species losing their identity and culture will be the Eskimo and Inuit, who did very little to bring it about. The rocks will testify against us to the future, speaking of us as geomorphic agents.
The Mountain Men are dead now. All purity has been proved untrue. Alaska is owned privately, by natives, or is federal land. Can a wilderness ever be wild if it is owned? Does the wilderness reserved lose its self-will, its wildness? The human stink is everywhere, the smell is enough to almost paralyse me and at the same time frenzy, make me want to limp-run away, run towards, a cliff-lemming suicide tendency.
The clock has recently been set at three minutes to midnight, the closest it has been since the Cold War. In a press release, when they moved the clock hand, the scientists said the probability for global catastrophe is very high.
They sat around in a board meeting with other minds representing the frontiers of scientific knowledge, sitting around with dozens of Nobel laureates agreeing on that conclusion and feeling the full weight of its implications. How do the people building the way we know the world manage to stagger on with the weight on their shoulders so heavy?
There are just too many people on this finite planet now. I can only dream that there will be some virus, some superbug, a disaster, an earthquake along the fault lines of civilisation. Something to restore equilibrium.
And yet one cannot orchestrate this. One cannot inflict this philosophy onto others and remain sincere. Kaczynski got this wrong. For to be a human being is to be part of humankind. And to be part of humankind is to be in the ranks of the enemy. And so what is to be done? What can an individual do but quit the army that fights for a cause he does not believe in? He cannot hurt his brothers in arms whose only fault is their ignorance.
He is right and Kaczynski was wrong and even Thoreau was inauthentic. Thoreau’s writing was a time capsule and with it he colonised his wildness. It is to write intent everywhere, to sow it around like bad seeds. Wilderness is an absence of these seeds, or more than absence – the inexistence of them. A dead Damon is wilderness. Even more absolute wilderness is a Damon never born.
In the opinion of Stephen Hawking if we can just cling on for long enough to wait for the technology that will take us to space, we will come out okay. We can bugger off to Mars and live happily ever after. A select group of us on even finiter finite resources. As though moving the problem elsewhere could solve the problem. But we can’t escape the problem when it is inside us, plaited through us, inextricable.
After all I have said and thought about his diary and the parcel I really have to reassess because they were not left there as his intention. And without intent they can’t really said to be his time capsule. More an archaeology of him. There is no ego in an accidental archaeology.
The postcards were an obvious giveaway. I feel stupid for not having clocked it at all before. Of course he would not have sent them all and then collected them back. Somebody else had collected them for him, and along with his diary, brought them to his holy place as a little shrine.
It pains me to be here at the edge but I would fail my beliefs if I were not to do this. Is this not really the meaning of life and everything? Is it not the end of the quest, to have found your own truth and really lived by it? I feel fulfilled.
From what is said in the diary I think what must have happened is he left a letter for his family, presumably inside the cabin with a postal address to which it should be sent, for the next person who found it, or for the search party sent out for him.
He believed in something so hard that it undid him and he loved it so much he had to give it up. Maybe in part so he could not see it diminish (gouge out eyes, see less suffering). A lover’s suicide before the fervour subsides and a death in innocence before the debasement and a perfectly embalmed and beautiful corpse.
He came to the wilderness in the first place to claim his freedom and then found the only thing he could do to be true was to renounce it. He took his own life to repent for our sins, like Jesus minus the wide-open arms and the preaching and the son-of-god complex.
There is a sad kind of beauty in it, like a deep blue bruise that came from nowhere and you want it to go away but then again you don’t because you like how it makes you feel sad to look at it, and more real to touch it and hurt. And in his last days of life he must have felt so free finally of the burden, once he had made up his mind, so cathartically pure. So free of the burden of being because he had decided to do the one and only true thing he could do to live by what he believed in. He had found his truth.
I want to try to conjure what he did near the end so that I can try to live it too. If he went wandering, where he went wandering. From the window of the tower the mountains sit pink blue grey behind the trees, always chameleon to the sky. Was he drawn to them, sat impassive and anchored and true, did he climb to the top to see the world he had let go of, the entire world over?
He will not ever know that there was a girl from a small town in middle England to know and understand the sacrifice he made, because he did not want it to be known. What he wanted was an act of nothingness.
And I feel a little fear at the danger of my quest now. I am a little scared at the intensity of the ache and camaraderie I feel for this man I never knew. I find myself thinking by proxy about how I would do it, hypothetically, if I wanted to do it in the most sincere and poignant way.
What it would need: personal significance and the least amount of suffering and the fewest traces left behind. A desire to be eaten back up by the earth, to dissolve back into the quantum soup that you came from with the smallest smidgen or trace. Rocks on your feet to join Rachel Carson under the water and nourish the fish kingdom.
But what does personal significance matter if the act’s sole purpose is to deny completely your individuality? The one thing I have to lay down to offer is me, bye-bye, me, bye-bye. But then, if you are going to underwrite your life with that one act, and no one else is ever to know about the circumstances of it anyway, you might as well allow yourself poetic justice, right?
Did Rachel Carson choose not to intervene in her cancer to underwrite her whole life’s work for ever? Or did the universe perceive so much charge in her as a pinnacle figure in her sphere of existence that it attached this significance to her dying?
And the burning question: how do I go back from here? When I can see it so painfully wither to touch, and when just by my presence everything is undone? I am not alone here, there is something I bring with me. My bad seeds, and this place so easily inoculated.
Alfred Worden of Apollo 15 wrote a poem about the moon that went: she is forever moving just out of reach and I sail on/never touching, only watching and wanting to know.
Alfred Worden wanted to stalk, wanted to get his sticky fingers on that coy temptress, wanted to word the moon. I think of my map and my documentary and all of my lists, my collecting. Because the map is not just not the territory, it is also something rather sinister.
When we draw a map we are sewing our signature into it. When we map we divide and parcel. When we divide the forms of life in taxonomy and name them in our image, we set ourselves outside, omniscient. We structure our difference; we say, we are the only animals that name and order the other animals, the rest of them just exist. But how do we know the dolphins are not swimming around shouting ‘coral’ at coral in sonar?
And naming the animals and knowing the animals, it did not make us look after them better. It is another way for each ‘namer’ to survive time. Our separateness allowed us to bring everything to the brink of mass extinction, to say, oh well, we can do without them.
I might have learned to don a fraud penis to go to Scott’s Antarctica, but why would I want to now that I know what that entails? What Thilda was saying when she said you don’t need a penis between your legs is that you don’t need one there to make you a good coloniser, but why would I want to be a coloniser at all?
My documentary is a sinister and selfish one, a fraud penis. That is just it. There is a point of footage specifically that I watched back where Rochelle said ‘the freedom to roam free like a white man’.
I am wearing a big heavy robe and walking around and there is a line of faceless people trailing behind me and they are all dressed in white tunics. I am at the head of a glorious procession: roll up, follow me, throw off your imaginary shackles, the world is your oyster! Quit your job, sell your stuff, you can conquer the world, life is too short for regrets! They follow me everywhere in a long winding file like ants, my followers. There are so many of them. When we walk through grass the grass gets trampled to a dirt-dry path. When we walk through snow there are only sludge dirt tracks left after. When we walk through the deserts there are wagon tracks in the red sand.
The trail has been opened, stomp stomp stomp. Best-guarded travel secrets, too good not to share! Secluded beaches, untouched forests, pristine crystal mountain streams! And despite the lack of authenticity there are those that come to seek it anyway. In trying to find something authentic of their own they leave a well-worn trail behind.
My own time capsule, my documentary, my baby, like President Carter’s baby sent into space to colonise the wilderness of the future. The reason Damon’s legacy is different to Chris McCandless’s is that there was no time capsule sent out by or for Damon. This is the tragedy of Chris McCandless, because it was not him who wrote a book and made a film and brought the crowds to his wilderness. If I were to make one with the documentary then Damon too would become a mecca, and that would undermine his entire point. And mine.
I guess I knew deep down but I could not admit it to myself because it was my baby and no one thinks their own baby is ugly. And it gave me purpose-propulsion-direction in striking out and living vividly when I had none. And I did not want to kill my baby.
For the Eskimos secrecy holds potency and is essential in the continuum of magic. For example, if a hunter were to witness a singing animal, and the animal were an omen of good hunting in that area, the hunter could not tell other people of his or her discovery because this would make the magic lose its power.
Inside the forest where the trees are densest and the air is damp with exhumed gases condensing like inside closed windows, Damon had dug himself a hole. He got rid of the spade once the hole was dug, took it away from the grave so as not to leave a marker. Then he buried himself to the shoulders with dirt. His right arm stays outside to bury the other with. It is not perfect but it is the best he could do on his own. He knew enough botany to know which of the plants are poisonous.
Weeks later a whole ecosystem of microbes has made good work of his meat and tendrils of plants are redirecting his nitrogen to their leaves and ants march off, shards of him on their backs. Wasps have made a nest of his brain, they enter and leave through his nostrils and his eye sockets and the gateway to his soul becomes a wasp flyway. The buzzing and humming and pulsating are the sounds of rage and passion, of nature claiming back her flesh voraciously. It is exactly as he wanted.
I am too confused and upset to reason over it any more, so I go for a walk. When I jump-turn down from the last rung of the ladder there it is, stock still as always. I have never seen it that far from the tundra, never. And right at that instant I hate the bloody thing, for being so illusive and taunting me so, and how fucking dare it appear with nothing to say when it knows I am struggling.
I yell at it. I bend for a stone and throw it at it. It is a pathetic throw, it bounces on the ground to the side of it and the reindeer flinches and sidesteps, eyeing me warily.
I yell at it some more, shouting, go on, then, go. Then sob.
But it doesn’t. It does not move. It stands just grazing a little for minutes on end with me just watching and sniffling snot onto my sleeve.
And then I think to myself that multiple exposures to coincidence accumulate into destiny. It must have something to show me, I only have to try my very hardest to follow it this time. Why else would it keep coming back and standing so persistently? It is ready to speak to me.
Sometimes it runs so then I run, only I can’t run too far until I get a stitch, but then it slows too, as though waiting for me to catch up.
Hours of this through the forest finds us out on the tundra and by the river, where it cuts deep against the banks before it becomes braided with sandbanks further down. The sun is in the centre of the sky. The insects come up from the grass in little clouds. The reindeer lopes into the river without even stopping for a thought.
It only takes it around ten seconds to make it across, being moved at a diagonal by the water only slightly because it is gliding so fast, then it struggles a little out the other side, its bandy legs tremoring slightly, a forlorn old man trying to lift himself off the floor with crutches. When it has heaved itself out, it turns to face me. There it stands, shakes itself down, and looks at me. It lowers its head and snorts.
So I hold my breath and jump in before I can think any better. The water is cold as hell, from running off the mountain after sitting around as ice up there. It is much harder to swim when your ears and mouth are full of ice water that makes your brain freeze and there are sirens in your ears and the water in your mouth makes you gasp and choke. And the sudden and real shock from the water brings me rapidly into the reality of the situation. For all of ten seconds I am flailing in the water in panic, being dragged along and not much able to sort myself out.
Flapping my arms down to bring my body up, I try to turn my head to where the reindeer had been but I cannot see it. Obviously it is not going to jump in for me, we are not about to have one of those inter-species rescue moments of empathy and connection. My comrade reindeer has renounced its one job, and I lose all hope.
I have thoughts like I had better think about my life in retrospect like you are supposed to and remember the time I found an injured squirrel and fed it water from a syringe and wrapped it in socks in a cardboard box but it died in the night. I wonder if my mum will feel a psychic maternal twinge, stop stirring her tea and drop the spoon. I see her ears prick up like Beethoven the St Bernard dog from the film franchise, when the little girl falls in the swimming pool ten blocks away. Thinking about things like this I feel so far away and apart as though I am in another life altogether, having a look through the eyes of some girl called Erin.
And in an instant I realise it is the first time I have really thought about elsewhere since being here. And in an instant I see everything all at once. ‘It was in this state that I experienced “myself” as melded and intertwined with hundreds of billions of other beings in a thin sheet of consciousness that was distributed around the galaxy. A membrain,’ said John Lilly from his isolation tank.
I see a bright light every time I go under the water and screw my eyes shut hard and watch the green shapes like in a lava lamp then emerge and the sun bursts through for my having been starved momentarily and therefore malnourished and more susceptible to its intensity.
But then the adrenaline kicks in and my body takes over and being the rational one manages to get me right and make me swim with my head up. My rucksack has the dry-bag inside, which is full of air along with all my valuables and is buoyant so keeps me from going too far under. I had the foresight to pack it in case I got caught in the rain. I am heavy with all the water in my boots and it crosses my mind to take them off to stop them dragging me down. But I cannot stay out here without shoes. I honestly think in that moment that I actually would rather die than give up and go home without having found out whatever it is I am trying to find out.
The crew of Apollo 13 did not get to land on the moon. An oxygen tank exploded and they had to abort their landing, spending almost a week in space trying not to die. They had limited power, only enough to propel themselves around the moon back towards Earth then float on unaided, hoping they would hit the exact angle they needed so as not to skim off the atmosphere like a flat pebble off a placid lake. They essentially had to catapult themselves and hope for the best while steadily running out of oxygen and freezing.
While I am gulping water I wonder if they thought about making a suicide mission to the moon instead. With sudden clarity, as if seeing the moth that had been camouflaged against the tree’s bark, I get it. Looking down on the surface as they circled around, this place that they had seen as their life’s pinnacle, and everything built up to that promise of standing on the moon’s face, basking in majesty and in singularity; it might have seemed worth abandoning living for. To end at the crescendo.
But for whatever reason they chose to try to go back, even at the risk of miscalculating and veering off into the void. They said ‘Let’s go home’ and the whole world stopped turning to wait to see them tearing through the roof of the sky. It is strange how it is framed as what could have been the loneliest death in history. Not a death in solitude for the envy of Mike Collins and Adam.
The difference is the element of choice, of intent. It is not a casting out with purpose but a getting lost. It is the difference between solitude and loneliness. Newton’s ball was lonely because he drew it, the ball did not will itself there. And like Newton’s ball a woman’s body like Rachel Carson’s body is not her own to choose to keep in chastity or solitude.
Marianne Moore said that solitude is the cure for loneliness, which was very crafty of her, and perhaps my trip’s whole mantra. She was saying take your lonely body and reclaim it as your own, think it solitude!
But drowning is hardly reclamation. That is why I do not want to let the river take me, or give up my shoes. After clambering onto the grassy bank, I lie panting on my back, trying to get steady, watching the clouds pass overhead in indifference. The mosquitoes are quick to jump on me like carrion. I am too tired to swat them away and get bitten to a pin-cushion through the fabric on my forearms.
It is a long walk back because I was dragged downriver quite fast, and my body is lead-heavy and stiff from cold. I fall over in the mud that goes slick when the rain starts pouring. I have to laugh at the sky opening up minutes after I start walking. I could wade my way back up the river and end up drier than I am. I go despondently back to the cabin and not the tower because in the cabin I can make a fire.
It takes me into the evening to get myself there and then it is all I can do to make the little fire in the grate to try to get warm by, because once I stop moving my body will not really do what I want it to. I just about peel off all my clothes and shake them out at the door, then place them on various surfaces and protrusions next to the fire. I lay down a makeshift rug and dry myself with my scanty micro-towel, not allowing myself the blanket until the fire has properly dried my skin off. My hair is matted with river bits in.
The panic starts when I notice that my feet are blue, like really blue, and it dawns on me that I have not yet stopped shaking. I remember reading a survival manual that went into the stages of hypothermia. The first stage that signals the onset of the severe and death-causing kind of hypothermia is called Paradoxical Undressing, where a person’s brain tells them wrongly that they are really warm, so that they take all their clothes off and seek out snow to roll around in. I try to decide if I feel warm or cold, and if my undressing could be classed as paradoxical. It is hard to tell when you feel so cold and yet your limbs are very definitely burning.
The survival handbook also said things about delirium, and the final stage to look out for has a sinister name; it is called Terminal Burrowing. When a dog can feel death coming it takes itself somewhere quiet and solitary to die if it can. The final stage of hypothermia triggers the same response; the afflicted will look for a small and enclosed space to curl up in.
I am just going outside and may be some time is what Lawrence Oates said, perhaps as a prelude to burrowing. Some German researchers decided that this is an automatic process triggered in the brain which sends us into a primitive mode that thinks up burrowing as a protection behaviour, the same trigger that sends animals into hibernation. So it is possible Lawrence Oates did not have cryogenics in mind. He could have instead been undone to the most basic level of his humanity (benefit of the doubt should be put into practice here, in fairness).
It hits me that Damon’s odyssey to this cabin was an elaborate Terminal Burrowing, was a dog’s death. After the onset of the burrowing mode it is already too late. It would not have been possible for him to change his mind.
I figure that as long as I am aware of this final stage and avoid it, I will not end up dead in a hollow. Just have to stay warm, warm. I scramble to put as many layers on as possible. I tell myself, even if you feel hot leave those clothes on. How hard can it be to stay dressed? I consider maybe tying my hands together to stop this, then think better of it. I settle for attaching a little note with a paperclip to the zip on my ski jacket. The note says ‘paradoxical undressing’; I hope that this will suffice to remind me to stay dressed. I put my hands in my pockets because they are making me anxious with how dead-looking they are, skin like tracing paper and all the veins blue crayon.
I feel so very tired. But sleep is hibernation, hibernation is burrowing, so sleep could not be a good idea. I try to think of ways to stop from sleeping. I so badly want to lie in the cot but instead I sit upright on the chair, so that if I slump I might fall off and wake.
How do I find a way back and do I even want to?
In the visitors’ centre were relics and photographs, each attractive in some visceral way that made a magpie of me. Sometimes an object appears before you and seems to fit itself into your chronology like a fusing cell.
There were eerie masks with grimaces and rectangular grins, on animal and people faces. The masks were worn for rituals and then destroyed directly after. They were an immediately physical way to don an identity for the expression of something particular and temporary. An uttering of varying identities.
When the Eskimos gave a name to a matured spirit, after the danger of childhood had passed and the spirit of the young person was thought to be well and truly lodged inside, the name given was always the name of the last departed person, because the spirits were thought to transmigrate through the generations. Young children were brought up in mind of the gender of the last person to have their ancestral name, and then usually reverted to roles based on their biological sex when they reached puberty. They have a very rudimentary taxonomy – animals have names so that they can talk about them but are not separated into families in such detail, are not unwoven. A person could don a mask and become any gender, any life form. Transmigration allows them to do away with taxonomy; a queering of the animals like their queering of gender that is really a way to acknowledge symbiotic association; like Lynn Margulis said, we cannot live apart from each other.
And then along came the white Christian missionaries! They reorganised their society, imposing patrilineal names and social customs. They undermined the Eskimo women’s respected positions. They saw this animism as evidence that the Eskimos worshipped bad and ungodly spirits, that they needed to be saved from the burden of their devil worship and impure customs. In the missionaries’ myth, women were blamed for the mortality of Man, for even daring to eat an apple, which stood metaphorically for their knowledge or heaviness (myths are so easily inverted). Men were ambassadors for the people now; the missionaries’ one male god told them to go forth and fill the world and subdue it. To rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and everything in between. This god said SEW YOUR SIGNATURES INTO THEIR NAMES. Adam named the animals, and in so doing, he thought himself apart.
The stewarding approach to the natural world took the Eskimos outside of their circle and tried to make their thinking linear. The missionaries made them speak a language which divides everything into opposites, and pitches each against the other and categorises them good or bad, masculine or feminine. In this language the differences between each opposing pair justify the subjugation of one to the other. Better is determined by what is associated with masculine: rational, civilised, intellectual and strong, so anything that connotes these categories holds value. Worse is the opposites: natural, primitive, spiritual and all their associates. Masculine is better just because masculine is better. This is not a reflection of reality but a structuring of it. A breaking apart and stacking of what could otherwise be fluid and fluctuating, but languidly.
Once you divide things into constituent parts you can stack them and you can subdue some parts with others, and this way those doing the building can sit on the top. The missionaries had already trialled this technique in Europe. Casting shamans or strong female figures as demon worshippers and witches scared people into thinking that women who deviated from their new subordinate function were evil and bad. In a theft of body, women were burned at the stake for practising birth control and midwifery. We were enclosed at the same time the commons were enclosed. And women feel connection to what came before even if only because they are made to feel more vividly what has been lost or kept from them.
Like the animals were atomised by species and set apart from Adam, the physical world was stable and geometric and absolute. But now this myth is being undermined with a new one. Science is our rational way of seeing and knowing. We have been looking very hard, very closely, with new aids to vision. Now a new science is falsifying our apartness. A queer science of approximations and non-objectivity. Things are not absolute Mountain Men either/or. Another book that Larus gave me that I have been reading is The Tao of Physics. It told me that when Niels Bohr the physicist was knighted (Order of the Elephant) in Denmark in 1947 he had to choose a coat of arms and for it he chose the t’ai-chi symbol, the yin-yang, and that his inscription read ‘opposites are complementary’.
Bohr said that dualisms – is it a particle or a wave? – do not describe exactly the true nature of things, but that the interplay between the two poles brings us closer to their reality, because everything is always both things at once depending on how you are looking. He said that ‘only the totality of the phenomena exhausts the possible information about the objects’. Much like objectivity in naming animals or peoples does not describe exactly, leaves something diminished.
I think about Rochelle and all the words I can never find for her. I think instead of finding many, many almost true words for her. Then it all ties together in my head so suddenly, coming to shape like the image that emerges with just one missing puzzle piece and abruptly you know exactly how it will be. Now science, quantum physics, is our ally in the war against patriarchy because it says you can’t ever touch the atom of another thing, Alfred Worden, not really; there will always be a force between the electrons of you and it which repel each other on an unfathomably small level. Nothing is solid. Can you feel the hollowness of things as you touch them?
Rochelle is a little to me like the moon is to Alfred Worden. She does not want to be spoken of. I did not know if the best way round her was to omit her from the documentary completely. I did not know before why I could not just be a man about it. Just say it like I think it and possess it when the whole reason I set out was to make this documentary just to prove I could.
In the quantum realm this is called the Observer Effect. Your measuring of a thing alters the thing itself. The very act of measuring forces the universe to make a decision at random from a bunch of probabilities. When we measure, the probabilities become a single actuality and this is called a collapse of the wave function.
This is the reason I did not know what I wanted my documentary to say. I can’t talk about Rochelle without talking about my own subjective observation of her. I do not want to collapse her wave function and so I just should not talk about her at all. And the same of this place, this whole experience.
Maybe ‘a feminist documentary on wilderness’ is a semantic impossibility. A woman knows the burn of the power and impact of eyes on skin, she knows the observer effect, she feels herself behind the eyes when a man does not because a man does not know the burn, never has his vantage as detached observer brought into question.
The instant you speak about the thing or you try to pin it down it slips from your hands like soap. The thing can’t be pincered. Matter is a particle and a wave all at once. Both aspects are valid, it just depends on how you look at the matter. And the problem with symbols like words in place of things is that as time passes, like matter in entropy, a symbol will move away from the source at accelerating speed. The markers for nuclear waste sites are never truth, even before the language dies.
Now she is again vivid and present, so fully formed I could walk over and actually touch her if only I could muster the willpower to move. We are at the bottom of an ocean or maybe the moon, because the space is dark and heavy, the sand or surface is chalky-looking and grey, and in front of me is what I took at first to be an astronaut. It is Rachel Carson, without her shaman disguise this time, like an astronaut in her old diver’s suit. It is loud with bees, she is humming and nodding along to the bees but I can’t see where the bee noise comes from until I get near to her and realise that I have found the bees: they are inside the fish bowl of her diving suit.
Her voice has a new strange quality to it, as though it were song. It was always her voice in many guises, many mouths to help carry it along. Many layers all at once instead of one pulse. How do I explain it? As though the air moves with it, as though when she speaks the trees rustle and a hundred birds sing with her and the air blows leaves across the room, only the windows are shut and everything is still, no pages rustle on the desk, but I feel it in my temples, this vibration. She was a witness for them and they now a witness for her, reanimating her. Like her bees, tiny mouths in unison. And if it comes from inside my head, her thoughts, my thoughts, what does it matter? I am contaminated.
Why is my reindeer trying to kill me?
Why would you think that?
Because it led me into the river, and I nearly drowned, and now I don’t know if I am awake or asleep or dead or what. My hands and feet are blue and my head is filled through the ears with ice water.
It was not trying to kill you. It was trying to show you something. Then why would it go where it knew I could not follow?
Precisely.
I stare at the ceiling some. She goes shimmery, shimmery in the corner of my vision. My head starts to fizz, like it actually starts to fizz as though it is full of fizzy pop. The ceiling spins a vortex. It goes round in a swirl like a galaxy. Like the shape of a galaxy that is also the shape of a hurricane and a shell, it is a recurring shape, a pattern repeated throughout nature, also found in the ratio of your uterus. What does it mean? The Golden Ratio. It is a cosmic constant. It might make up space-time itself. I think I am fainting.
Waking up I was cold and confused. For a whole five seconds I took in the sound of the hammering rain, smells of damp wood and glowing ash, with dust in my nostrils and grit on my face, and had no idea where I was. I lifted up my head and figured my position on the floor of the cabin, next to the fire, and registered that I must have been unconscious. I rubbed the dirt from the floorboards off my face. The bites on my forearms itched and my skin and my scalp especially tickled with the hundred tiny bits of plant and animal from the river. Where I scratched grime collected under my nails.
My head throbbed and was heavy to lift like it had taken in the water. Memories of the river came back to me and I laughed in the sudden appreciation that I was still alive. But then as quickly I felt stupid and vulnerable and vastly under-prepared. Apart from being gluey with cold and maybe some mental scars in the form of future dreams of cold dark rushing water I did not have much to show for my nearly-death. But so easily I could have been another stupid kid Stan’s uncle had to fish out the river with a wooden pole and wire noose. I coaxed the fire up again to heat some coffee.
And now I am back everything is okay again. As in I am a normal colour if a little pale and my fingers are their usual dexterous selves. But I can feel her now like anti-matter. I can feel her lack like an invisible density.
I like the way the plaques talk about the beliefs of the Eskimos like they are truth, because they are. They are narratives as science is a narrative and is both belief and truth also. Animist or mystical, i.e. non-linear, non-absolutist, ‘truths’ and knowledge are reduced to the feminine, seen as inferior, irrational, a cloud system knitted into being, induction over deduction. This is pitted against the masculine Mountain Man’s absolute foundational Truths. But a feminine mystic knows it is lying to say ‘I know that Truth’ when you can’t. That it is more accurate and honest to say that opposites are complementary. It does not matter if she is real or not. I am a mystic because owning a vagina is mystical.
What next? There is one more thing, a small envelope with Damon’s name on. I hesitated over it for a while because I thought I knew what might be in it and it felt just that little bit more intrusive. But then I reasoned I had gone through with it so far I might as well see the whole thing to its end. So I read the letter that his mother left when she built her shrine for him, all the things she wanted to say to him but could not because he was dead.
My son, my parasitic twin.
I stare up at the cobwebbed ceiling and feel hollow at the futility of it all. His mother’s voice reminds me of mine and now I miss her terribly. I feel a whole new size of emptiness, it amazes me I even have the processing space for all these feelings. For the very first time appreciating that I am like a Russian doll she made inside her as every baby girl is to its mother, each a little like the preceding but different, with the potential to birth another if she wishes, and my mum has watched me grow, warily, into her mannerisms and her image and then away from them, until eventually I abandon her and become less her and more myself. And this is a transmigration and I carry many shards of her with me always, as she does me.
And all her hopes and dreams and expectations for me are something that I am leaving behind, but to her they will always be there. And she had a mother that she came out of and that woman I hardly even knew but I am sure had similar sorts of feelings, because that is what can happen when you give something so many parts of yourself. This is a contamination also, and you can’t be mindful of it and still find an intact apartness. Even in death you are still felt in tremors. Even Damon’s purest act was not entirely pure, because he left his negative imprint with his mother.
I feel a change has come because even a few months ago I would have found these thoughts unacceptably sentimental. I am not sure if I am crying on my cabin bed and missing my mum because I am a girl and I was never going to be able to hack this odyssey of solitude for that reason, if it was always biologically determined, or if I have figured out truths about my life by my own will.
And they are all laughing, all of the Mountain Men of history laughing and chanting DARWIN WAS RIGHT, WE TOLD YOU SO, WE TOLD YOU SO, their voices echoed by the mountains, giving them a god-like veracity, and for them I have no answer. Did I cast out or did I just get lost and does it matter either way?
I can’t get to sleep tonight although I am exhausted. Not from the wakefulness that has kept me up often here; when I get that I can be content just reading or writing or toying with thoughts, because I know it does not matter too much when I do or do not sleep what with the days being all wrong anyway.
This time I can’t sleep from a feeling; that the sky is too big and the space between it and me is heavy like deep water; the deeper down you swim the more pressure there is pushing you down and up at the same time, and the more I think about how far there is between me and the sky the more my head feels the same pressure on it. And the space between me and the road, me and Fairbanks, me and every place underneath a big red arrow stretching from here all the way round the world and back again like on some old public service animation where I go black and white and zoom out and out until the tower is just a speck on a cartoon image of the world and the arrow makes a noise as it elongates like ‘vrrrraaaaawm’ going up in pitch with onomatopoeic tautness.
For almost all the times I have slept in my life until these weeks, that is around 6,935 sleeps, I have been comforted by the thought that in the room next to me are my parents sleeping, in the houses next to me are my neighbours sleeping, in the town around us people are sleeping, in fact the whole of England is sleeping and the Australians are keeping the world running by doing the day shift.
Sleeping with someone does things to your trust. As in by sleeping in close proximity to other people you are making yourself your most vulnerable for them, and maybe the proximity of trust could extend to all the people asleep in all the houses around you. It is a thing I am very aware of lacking right now.
But if I concentrate I can invert the deep pressure feeling, can make it feel safe and still and like the space is filled with Styrofoam. Because sometimes when I lie in the centre of suburbia falling asleep I have other thoughts. That lying down en masse to sleep makes you gravely vulnerable, a whole flock of sitting ducks, and it is then that I start to think in particular about nuclear dawn.
Everyone still and asleep and so much trust being channelled around, seeping out of pores and windows as a gaseous thread and into nostrils and mouths connecting them like string on a tin-can phone. And no one is thinking to look at the sky where an object is getting closer and closer silently. And then it happens and at ground zero most people do not even know any better because they are vaporised before the electrical signals even reach their brain to tell them so, but maybe some come to for just an instant of absurdity, to be confronted with a helix of colour and pain while their soul or their energy or whatever it is departs and then that is it, snuffed out, nothing.
To feel like I am in a box of Styrofoam here is to feel like safety-in-singularity. It is to not be afraid of all the crazy shit that I badly wanted away from, that affects me for being part of a macrocosmic world, that I do not conceive the complexity of because here I am in a world of my own, all on my own.
Really suddenly, like the clunk of a clock’s first chime, this makes me feel deeply sad. A night bird makes a noise outside and a small rodent probably scurries away from it and a shadow passes the gaping windows and the trees are hushing and maybe back home everything could already be blown away. My head throbs and my teeth will not fit together properly. If I try to keep them slightly apart they feel like magnets yearning for each other.
I could be the last person on Earth, or I could be the last person in my vicinity with any hope of ever finding the other last people in their vicinities, all of us running around frustratingly like little bugs that are lost and you want to yell at them ‘IT’S RIGHT THERE’ until you think about it and actually they are worlds away from the place you plucked them out of, from their perspective, which means the same thing anyway when you have no way of knowing any better.
And I realise if it is all gone I want to be gone with it. I want to throw myself onto the sand like a dolphin embracing death on the beach with its family by dehydration and the suffocation of its own chest crushing its lungs under the pressure of gravity. I want to be blown up in the big stupid mess that it is. I do not want to be a Born Survivor.
I could take my phone from the bottom of my bag, just try to call Mum, just to check the world is still there. We do not even have to talk. I could just get her on the phone just to hear her say ‘Erin?’, then hang up and turn it off again. Just to hear the sound of her alive and speaking.
It must be around midnight at home. She is probably asleep. Although she is my mother so there must be that thread connecting us, although we might not be so consciously aware of it. Like mother bonds and sister bonds and dolphin bonds. Like we are spooky action at a distance. And it is not New Agey if you are thinking analytically Jungian. Girls are just a little more aware of the secret power of bonds because being connected to them is part of being woman. Jung’s anima was a lady, not because the anima has a vagina but because she is an archetype we all agreed on.
And besides we observe something like it in other animals. A connection to something that is not what you would call direct experience. Like water buffalo in Thailand that looked out to sea half an hour before the 2004 tsunami hit, and just bellowed like mermaids with conch shells, and ran for higher ground, with villagers scrambling after.
There’s a suggestion we could make an early warning system for natural disasters based on this sense, a hotline people can call if their pets freak out. This data gets logged and if enough pets are freaking out in a particular area then the hotline sends out the warning and everyone runs for the hills. And even if it is only because the animals can ‘hear’ seismic activity in a literal sense, isn’t it the same thing really? Isn’t telepathy just listening to another plane of ‘sound’?
I fish for the phone from the bottom of the bag. I move into the beam of the dusky light from a slither of the window that is uncovered. In my head I say her name over and over and I imagine her face and I imagine her where she might be, her present, maybe awake on her back in bed and listening to the rhythm of Dad’s breathing. I press the button to turn it on.
I imagine her face twitch. She sits up in bed then looks at Dad to see if she woke him. She rubs her eyes then goes still, straining to hear. She slowly swings her legs out of the bed and slides herself off and moves towards the cabinet that has her phone on. It is really dark so she goes slowly, feeling with her feet and hands before bringing her body forward.
I clench my toes to try to squeeze some of the warm blood into them. I stare at the phone really hard. Another animal outside makes a sudden whooping noise and I flinch. It powers on but no signal. I wait ten seconds then twenty, staring at the gap where the bars should be, willing them to come. Of course there is no signal in the Alaskan tundra.
I exhale heavily and deflate. Then I turn the phone off, return it to the rucksack and crawl back into my sleeping bag. The bag is still a bit warm from my body before. I spend a few minutes fidgeting, imagining the friction of skin on fabric making heat like lots of little sticks and fires.
On the ceiling there is a spider that always has at least three carcases wrapped in mummy bundles on its silvery web. I have noticed that it rotates them, that its oldest kill is always the one it chooses to eat and then it is usually replaced and the next-oldest is eaten. I admire the spider’s diligent forward planning. The spider is always preparing for the future even though it consistently gets new things to eat. The spider knows that the world can always change in an instant; that the future is not to be counted on. It lives in a very delicate microcosm that can be blown away also, by a gust of wind, but that does not stop it weaving.
Back at the tower and I am preparing for the final voyage. Like Ishmael in his spiritual malaise casting out into the ocean to escape it all or else end it for good. Because that is the only thing for it, to give yourself up to the waves. And of course I am holding out for a coffin raft yet.
On my way to the tower I came across a sign. It could not have been more imbued with meaning if it had been written for a film, or more climactically timed, or perhaps I am weaving everything into a myth of myself. My reindeer is dead.
Some of the flesh had been stripped or pecked off but the flies were still in the process of infesting and their maggots had not hatched yet. It could have been brought down by wolves the very day it forsook me in the river. It sat warm in the sun and all around it smelled sickly, the buzz and the smell making the air dense so that I felt it way before I saw it. The antlers sat perfectly on the eyeless head that grinned mockingly, jaw chattering, laughing to itself like it was some macabre joke, leading me on all along when really it had nothing for me.
As if to say, ah, how easy it is to die. Just like that, so blunt and final and so very, very dead, a dead end and no clues or directions left behind. Whatever it was I was expecting the reindeer to tell me it very definitely was not going to tell it now. Its silence was corporeal and absolute.
No companion, no comrade and no project to give me purpose and nothing to guide me, just my naked self. And with it power in a way; I am real and vulnerable; there is no one watching over me; I am a self-willed woman.
I have never seen death so up close before. It was different to the hares, and the difference is not just scale. I would say it is familiarity and the fact that I imbued it with significance. Like in nature documentaries when David Attenborough puts a personified spin on things and you end up rooting for the baby tapir and then it goes and gets killed by a jaguar and it is not just the circle of life because David Attenborough went and made it personal. This is more than that still.
I did not even see the body of our first dog when he got put to sleep because I was ushered out of the room to sit on my own in the waiting room, surrounded by sympathetic-looking people with their sympathetic pets all whimpering along with ten-year-old me until my parents came out carrying just the worn brown dog collar. That had been death to me; just a dog collar without the dog in it. And this was it in concrete; the abrupt end to mystery and innocence that I had hitherto in life mostly evaded. And then I knew that the only thing that I had left now was to climb that mountain and see what Damon saw from up there.
I have been looking at the highest point of the range nearest to me. The ones behind look like they might be bigger and somewhere out there is Denali, the biggest of all, but the one I have been watching is tall and has snow on the very top and the clouds obscure it sometimes so that it looks like Olympus with its feet in the clouds and Olympus is plenty momentous enough for me. It just calls to me. If Damon went from here then I am sure that is the place he went to.
From its snow and the clouds I know it must be around two thousand metres. I remember reading in the park centre that the snowline starts at one and a half thousand metres. Two thousand metres is twice the size of Snowdon but it is still not high enough for altitude sickness. That is how tame the British peaks are. I climbed Snowdon and that took us five hours. So I am hoping I can do it in two, maybe three days. That is one day getting as high as I can, to just under the snowline if possible, then sleeping for the night. Then the next day I can head out with perhaps enough time to summit, and failing that spend one night in the snow and cold. Then the descent should take me no time.
I have test-walked to the lower slopes to judge how long it should take. North-west for around five miles the forest stays dense until reaching the slopes of the mountains when it starts to thin. I walked up high enough to see way out over the forest, to where it mottled out on to the tundra, and the braided river which glinted back the blue-silver sky, spread across the sediment like veins of mercury. On the mountainside above, the trees stopped and scree wound like lightning scars through the smoky green and purple skirting. Life waned up the mountainside and the peak was white and dead and here the crows had their kingdom.
Lower down where the plants clung still, bleached shapes poised spectral, luminous in the glare from the white sun. There were Dall sheep; they looked happy on the mountain and elegantly strange. I walked west across the ridge below the sheep until the afternoon, watching the colours change as the cloud ran its textures under the sun like a shadow puppet.
So I have rationed everything exactly and I have pared my rucksack down to the barest essentials so that there is not even a spare tampon of extra weight. I have just enough food to summit over the two days or two sleeps before coming back down, depending on hunger, but right now I have no appetite whatsoever so perhaps I will stay longer. I have sticks and a piece of tarp and some cable ties with which to construct some kind of shelter. If the rain comes again it will be miserable but there is nothing to be done about that. But please, spirit of the mountain, please don’t let it rain.
We do not use mountains as metaphors for challenges for no good reason. It serves me right for being stupidly under-prepared for this and life and everything. Halfway through the day I left off wading through the snaring purple carpet of alpine tundra vegetation to hit scree and from then on I was stuck in a laborious cycle of climbing tentatively twenty metres or so only to slip back ten. I felt like Sisyphus without a boulder or the lustful in Dante’s inferno, doomed to swirl around in a stormy circle for eternity. Maybe if I kept on I would come across Damon’s soul too, both of us so lustful and hungry for something that we were doomed to keep after it for ever on this scree-skelter. That he just fell and died on his way to the top; that ironically he did not even get to make his one statement because the universe made it for him. But then that could have been his perfect death; willingly dead but not by his own hand, which means he did not have to feel bad about being selfish and breaking his mother’s heart (although it would still be broken because she would not know any better, I suppose).
Each slip on scree I would fall on my knees shaking and weak and too terrified to move in case I slid further. Where I had to sit to get everything back under control I would sit facing upwards, not really looking around me because I was looking at the ground to centre myself and so as not to trip up, and not wanting to look at everything below me until I was at the very top. I wanted this to be a grand revealing, velvet curtains drawn until the finale and for the finale to be one of those moments in life that needs a soundtrack with a loud and euphoric chorus followed by a quiet and melancholic bridge in a new key.
I kept at this for hours, slipping and crying and crawling and just lying where the scree left me on my side, gasping and sweating, sometimes laughing at how stupid and futile a figure I had made myself in each moment and in general, ready to give up only to get a second wind and an angry burst that would propel me upwards like a turbo boost on Mario Kart.
And then I got into a rhythm with it, perfecting the amount of pressure to put into each footstep to stop from upsetting the loose rocks. And once I had this it got easier again. I had gashed my knees up terribly and I had cuts all over my hands that smarted when I moved my fingers or when the salt from my own sweat got into them and they were full of grit but they felt good. Like the pain and difficulty made it more worth it. Like wanting to come out of the wreckage with a visible wound, wanting an impact with some tangible effect. Something to show for it all.
I came across some of the mountain sheep and they sprang off away from me barely dislodging a pebble, then turned to look back as if to say you, trunk-legged creature, are not made for here, before loping on. They really are ridiculous animals to look at until you realise that being wrapped in cotton wool makes falling on a mountain like falling over in a spacesuit in zero gravity; inconsequential. That rather than clouds with legs they are ingenious inventions of nature.
The wind would come very suddenly and with such force that it could knock me off balance so I found myself bracing for this, flinching for it like a bad puppy to a raised hand. It would scream like a Tolkien wraith when it came and rattle me so that the best I could do was to get close to the ground and stay down. One time doing this I came face to face with a delicate yellow flower struggling to grow isolated and friendless and I cried a little for it all alone on the crag and no way of knowing how by its loneliness it was diminished.
I kept on going with the snowline as my carrot until I let myself stop around one hundred metres below on a little forgiving plateau. As soon as I got to the mental place of ‘I will stop here’ my legs gave way and my knees were further damaged but I did not even feel it because the relief of a resting point was so great and it felt so good to be horizontal with the promise of a long interlude.
After a little nap I drank deeply from my water, leaving just enough to see me over in the morning, before I got to the snowline and could refill from melting the snow. Then I went about making my tent, forcing the sticks into the ground with difficulty and pegging the tarp on two sides so that it made a humble pentahedron, open at both ends. I tried to angle it so that the wind went over and not through it, but this made the sides whip back and forth.
I must have been walking for over ten hours. The light dimmed after what felt like not much time, just enough time for me to sit about recuperating and to warm up my meagre dinner on the propane. It was bitterly cold once the sun had dipped, even though it did not ever disappear completely. There was still the vague idea of sunshine, the sun hovering somewhere near by, but the wind undermined it ruthlessly.
I tried to sleep but the wind blew just so and rattled the tarp, which rattled the pebbles in a motion like a Mexican wave all around the perimeter, and this made it sound as though there was someone or something scuttling around outside, making circles around me. I would poke my head out and be reassured, then it would happen again a little later and I would think come on now, Erin, we have been through this numerous times, then, no, there really does sound like there is something, best go check, oh, no, all clear, okay, cool, time to sleep, but what was that? That wailing? Is it Damon, has he come for me? Like this so many times that I gave up and just went outside to sit sentry for myself and put the propane back on even though I needed it for cooking tomorrow because I was just so cold even with the ski jacket and there was not a scrap of wood to be found for a campfire.
But there I was alone and enduring and from outside my own head to any observer of course it would seem like I could do this as well as any man. I was ticking all the boxes and besides, Jack London’s men all had dogs and a dog is an invaluable asset in that scenario.
A dog like Buck, who gleams with the magnificence that inspired a cult to bask in him. It is the ghost of Buck that remains in Big Mountain gold country – Alaska, the Yukon, the wilds of North America. But anywhere can have its own Big Mountain Country. The philosophy of the cult can be transplanted onto any place and translated into any language. Russians have their own breed of Mountain Men from the days they tried to colonise Alaska. They called them promyshlenniki.
Buck sits by my side exuding pride and vitality and power and kingliness because he knows he is king of the dogs. But he is a dog and a dog is not a person. Jack London never meant to say that men should act like dogs, at least not so literally.
He must master or be mastered; while to show mercy was a weakness. Mercy did not exist in the primordial life. It was misunderstood for fear, and such misunderstandings made for death. Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, was the law; and this mandate, down out of the depths of Time, he obeyed.
Okay, this primordial thing is in us all. But the call that came from the wild was specifically addressed to you, a dog. Dogs can regress back into the wild because they are just tame wolves. Big dogs are anyway. Specifically wolfy-looking dogs. You were a dog running round catching and killing and living by tenacity. There is no Neolithic man running round howling in the woods. Jack London only spent one bloody winter in the Klondike! And the call that brought him there was a siren song; it was a promise of gold, and a little house in the big woods on the banks of Plum Creek by the shores of a silver lake on the prairie.
To be a MAN was to write MAN in large capitals on my heart. I played what I conceived to be a MAN’S game, this future was interminable. I could see myself only raging through life without end like one of Nietzsche’s blond beasts, lustfully roving and conquering by sheer superiority and strength.
Jack London wrote Call of the Wild when he was young and healthy and full of his own electricity. It is easy to be an individualist when you are a winner and you are too caught up in glory to think about how the losers fare, or how your conquest undoes the very thing that drew you out there.
There is not enough bounty for everyone to claim a piece, so for Big Mountain to keep on working it had to be understood that Man has no obligation to the happiness of anyone but himself. That to have the right to pursue happiness was to be free, even if free was only to be forever in pursuit.
This is what the Mountain Man was born from. A healthy white man’s ideal. What Ted Kaczynski does not acknowledge or maybe realise is that he is his own worst enemy; it is this rampant freedom to pursue which propagates the Machine. It is as though Ayn Rand wrote both their bibles.
Jack London was remembered only as a writer of macho survival stories for boys. A fascist. It was just that one story! What about the story he wrote about the woman who gets Thoreau? The voice he gave to class struggles? So maybe you were his young ego but you were not his only one.
He was in a bad place, you know that. His father had disowned him a second time. He quit Berkeley and ran to the Klondike because he was forced to be an individualist. But he realised something in the wild. He realised in its contrast how lacking he was. It is different for you, Buck, because you are a dog. They just cling to you, Buck, Stan and all these boys. They want a strict moral code. Something to believe in. Primordial truth. Sad, unhappy, suggestible people reading the works of sad, unhappy writers and taking their words as gospel.
They cannot take his oeuvre for its transgressions, his corrupted values; Wolf House, all those bedrooms. They want a noble truth, purity from their gods, and so they choose to hear you. You outlive him as a negative imprint, a Voyager he later regretted sending.
But you are just a dog. An imaginary dog at that. All your masculinity, it is a literary embellishment. Most wolf packs are headed by a male and a female breeding pair, who rule together in equality.
The dog is unnervingly blank. As though he feels indifference towards his creator now that he has his own life outside of him. Then the Call sounds from up out of the belly of the forest and Buck pricks up his ears to it. He rises and lopes to the limit of my night vision, turning with a look of contemptuous pity. He pads into the night to answer the Call and he will keep on answering as long as the Call sounds or until the paradigm shifts, because he is not quite immortal and it is this that will end his reign.
And after all, only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf. Aldo Leopold said that. But man says I am civilised, and the rest is woman and wilderness. So what is woman? Is she where the symbols aren’t? Woman is wilderness, if she is man’s unwordable other. Woman is closer to the mountain and the wolf than man even if only because he put her there. Therefore, woman can listen better than man, if not as well as the mountain, to the real howl of the wolf.