I was in my late fifties when I shot a documentary for a wealthy man with a particular interest in the indigenes of the Bering Sea. My first film on Learned Man and my two on Eritrea had drawn the attention of this fellow, and it was apparent even to me now that I sought to have other worlds than my normal, suburban one somehow enlighten and enliven me.
The filming was a pleasant enough task despite its slightly doleful focus: the parlous condition of the native peoples of the region. The toxin that contact with the outside world had introduced into their lives. I shot the first half at a number of locations in the Arctic during one northern summer. This second summer Cath was accompanying me to Anchorage, where I was to meet up with a California crew headed by a fellow called Angelo Rugis, who was good enough to be his own director. I’d worked with Angelo and his crew previously and had trust in them. I would shoot my own footage and combine it with theirs – using the same modus operandi Andy and I had devised, and which I’d used ever since.
The other crew was bringing the lighting and other gear. I felt I was getting away with murder, letting others do the heavy work of formal shots and setting up. I had been lucky enough to have persuaded the world into wanting my eye.
After staying in a pleasant hotel in Anchorage we were bused to the airport, where I waited for the plane to Nome talking to Rugis and his crew about our intentions and the style we had attempted to implement in the first film the year before. There would be a fair number of slanting shots of Inuits, Yupiks, Chukchis – taken from below, perhaps, to get the light on the planes of their faces. But full-on, too. The angled shot, though, would suit the Arctic places in which, for example, we would see whale jawbones raised as monuments against the sky. Honest visages were important to the person who had commissioned the film, though. A lot of them. Visages shot against the lines of bare terrain. Fraught visages. Visages with dark blooms and the harrowing of alcohol in them. Our man didn’t want us to capture the picturesque, though Arctic indigenes trying to be picturesque for a living was part of the story and couldn’t be avoided.
While Angelo and I were conversing in fairly general terms I saw a woman wheeling a fine set of hand luggage, and all the angles of her limbs and even the manner of her toting luggage seemed familiar. Suddenly words stuck in my throat. For this was Louisa Wanstap, the avowed love of my later life. This was a woman I’d once, not many years before, declared myself ready to die for. I wondered if she was here to make good on the pledge. When Louisa saw me, she smiled at me as if I were a fondly remembered item in a history. A phase. And she was lovely. I thought, Then I wasn’t utterly mad. Yet I had been. I was embarrassed that she had encountered me only in an over-blown location like this, not in a city where we could meet for coffee and I would be able to apologise for my earlier and flawed ardour. And apologising to her would mean a parallel apology to Cath.
I nodded and smiled sociably as myself. I did not wish to die for her anymore. I had said to her one morning in Denver that I wished I could be associated with her at a cellular level, to be organic to her, and so to laugh, sing, cry and die with her. The excessiveness of that ardent compliment was the thing that, in remembrance, rankled the worst, apart from having started the affair in the first place. But to say that was to try to excuse the inexcusable. Obviously, I had not been granted cellular identity with her and, despite the lack, was getting on fine.
There was that in our exchange which said, ‘We’ll talk later!’
I wondered how to talk later. The bombast of emotion was gone. Would plain words serve?
This film on the Bering Sea was the suggestion of an executive of an elegant adventure travel company, the man at the head office of the Frederick and Gloucester Travel Company, who had been in correspondence with me now for nearly two years. He didn’t want a cruise documentary. He wanted us to see the places we visited, including the Bering Strait and its lack of ice, as a symptom of crisis. Subject to what I chose to do, he wanted the images to speak for themselves. Where possible, without artificial three-point lighting. That would mean interiors would be dim, and that would be fine, he said. I discussed the spirit of the thing with him, the narrative pace, the emphasis on silences between speech. He wanted unpretentious, matter-of-fact narration, too.
‘I’m no heroic sojourner,’ I told him. ‘I’m not Robert Flaherty.’ Flaherty had been a miner and gold seeker, who in 1922 somehow managed to film, in nearly impossible conditions, the supposed (it’s disputed) first documentary –Nanook of the North. They also called his style of film, the people who studied film, ‘salvage ethnography’.
All the people at the airport that day were travelling from Anchorage to Nome on Alaska Airlines for one of only three purposes – the first was to travel on our ship, the second was to return home after medical treatment or other business in Anchorage, and the third was to work in the Arctic mines along the east coast of the Bering Strait. It was easy to tell who was who: the Eskimo mummas and their diabetic children were obviously returners, and the mad-eyed tattooed smokers were equally identifiable. It was clear that someone as skilfully made up and discreetly accessorised as Louisa Wanstap was going on the same ship as us.
I’d been a sinner and a lunatic, and was about to be punished. It was an old story but I’d found, when the fever for Louisa had first overtaken me, that it was entirely novel. I was at an age when a man still feels full of skill and potency. He finds though that he has assembled a definite and far from infinite bag of tricks, and that there are no limitless possibilities. He develops an abhorrence for his calm and finite life. He and his wife are busy in all areas of life other than those that serve their love. The wife is depressed by falling hormone levels and fear of falling desirability. What an opportunity for her true lover to be attentive, a consoler, as at altars and other venues we swore we would be. This is the moment of which Camus writes that we must imagine Sisyphus, the rock-roller, happy. Yes, happy! Knowing that all is falling and even absurd, but saved by devotion. I understood none of this then. The drive in me was primitive. And there is a panicked feeling common to many men in my situation that we don’t feel we’ve had, or are going to have, enough sex. We have reached thus the plateau of life: and humankind claims to desire the plateau of security with the same energy that it abominates it. We have a feeling there must be a richness beyond. So we are looking for someone to wreck a life over!
On the plane to Nome, the mountains crowding out the horizon in impossible numbers, exposing even in these days of Arctic warming improbable bowls and densities of snow on their haunches, I said to Cath, ‘There’s a publicist on board from Ocean Films. You know, the crowd in California. She worked with me on the Four Corner States film.’
‘Is she that young creature with the fancy bags?’ Cath asked.
‘Yes. I haven’t spoken to her yet. Waved to her at Anchorage.’
I felt that the fake casualness of dropping personal pronouns might itself proclaim guilt.
Cath seemed more interested in the immensities of snow below.
The light in Nome was Arctic in its way, at best pearly, part white-out, part overcast, with air that might at any time turn itself into stinging little pellets of ice. Angelo and his crew and I gathered at the luggage carousel looking out at the daylight, discussing it, how to make a virtue of it, this atmosphere ungenerous with shadows. We would go with it, and with the other options that were sure to present, the bright sunny evenings on isles of tundra.
At the carousel, I saw Louisa across from us talking to a couple of other women.
In a sort of daring, feeling despicably cunning, I said to Cath, ‘D’you want to say hello to Madame Wanstap?’
‘You go. I’ll say hello on the ship,’ Cath replied.
I set out and rounded the carousel. Was there any sense in which this was a renewal of approach? I wondered. Did I want in any way to again toss up into the air my defined and settled-upon life. Even now, as I approached her, and could see the indefinable aptness between her brown hair and the way she bore it, I could see again that she was justifiably worshipful.
Louisa took my approach very leniently. She smiled but did not excuse herself to step aside from her friends as if we had anything private to say. She wore my acquaintance lightly, saying, ‘Shelby, hello! Don’t tell me you’re with this film crew.’
‘Collecting some shots. I’ve got my own Sony 4K. And then there’s the crew.’
‘So … still the king of cinéma vérité?’
‘Still presuming.’
‘How are you?’ she asked emphatically, and her two friends turned their attention to looking for their luggage on the conveyor belt.
I mumbled something and then said to her meaningfully, ‘I hope you’re well.’
‘I sure am,’ she replied. ‘I’m married, you know. A production exec at Highgate Films. Nice fellow.’
Was she lying about him? The ageing boy in me half hoped so.
‘Of course, he couldn’t come, but I always wanted to see the North,’ she said with a shrug, which was beguiling of course, without any effort from her.
‘Your wife’s here?’ she asked, nodding towards Cath.
I briefly wondered if she wanted to get an indication from me as to whether there’d been confessions which, in implicating me, had implicated her?
I lowered my voice. ‘I don’t know when I realised I had to work things out with Cath. But I remember, you were talking about your exec even then. You’d already met him.’
‘I’m glad it all worked out,’ she said. ‘You were so cute. I never believed a word you said, though. I’d love to meet your wife.’
As in her first smile in Anchorage, there was no hint of accusation. And yet I had the responsibility now to apologise to her. Because I had seen her amiable soul and her beauty, and had presumed to use it to subvert my own life.
‘You are on the ship, aren’t you?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I said. But then residual vanity made me rush to say, ‘We’re not shooting a tourism documentary, though.’
‘So, no dinnertime pictures of us Americans knocked out by the entrée!’ she replied with a laugh. ‘And no silhouettes of held hands at the stern railing?’
Just then two Inuit bus drivers, a man and a woman, presented themselves at the carousel. The male said in a baritone voice, ‘Transport for the folk on the Nunatak just outside, folks.’
When I went back to Cath, the male bus driver already had her suitcase in hand.
In this light from which all vigour had been sapped, Nome looked a dreary former gold rush town, but the Inuit driver showed its grim saloons along Front Street to us. Passengers photographed each other at the Iditarod finish line, the end of the yearly dog sled race from Anchorage, commemorating a delivery of diphtheria vaccine to the children of Nome in 1925.
Angelo and his crew, and Cath and I, got a lift back to the community centre, where we set up lights and installed a sound boom for the dancers who were gathering to welcome our boat. Angelo and I had another talk about what we were after, though I remained preoccupied about having both Cath and Louisa in the one Arctic vessel with me. As I chatted with Angelo a crowd of Eskimos turned up – boys and girls, hefty pre-diabetic mothers, old men with walrus-skin drums, Yupik and Inuit. Despite my research, I could barely discern who were Yupik and who were Inuit in the smocks and designs the dancers and singers and drummers wore. I knew the two peoples were related, and that this was Inuit country so the Yupik must be here for jobs or perhaps schooling. The subtlety of the symbols was lost on us, but not on our cameras. Angelo didn’t seem to be afflicted by much consideration or doubt. He seemed, that is, to have the message. He had also seen the footage I’d taken during the previous northern summer.
The walrus skin drums began to pound. The Yupik and Inuit in their ornamental parkas and mukluks began their dances – drum dances, walrus dances, kayak dances, court-ship dances. Long shots, close-ups, close-ups simply of pounding mukluks. In this strange latitude, and its endless Arctic summer evening, under storm clouds, we filmed Eskimos going home on foot or by car from a church parking lot whose puddles were threatening to freeze. I was able to advise Angelo on getting acres of meaning out of the reflective puddles.
Packing up after, we delayed the bus, but at last climbed aboard, apologising to the other passengers. As we approached the dock next to our ship, the Nunatak – which looked to be about 8000 tonnes, no egregious cruising vessel but a purposeful one – some squalls began, raking the beaches. There were hovels and lights on in the sand dunes. Beach miners, who washed the grey sands and gravels for gold. There again was the story, the story some filmmaker would want to garner. From beside the bus, where we were preparing to identify our luggage, I saw Louisa walk up the gangway of the Nunatak in a heavy parka. Cath had left the event earlier than me and I found her in our excellent cabin. Though I could happily live out of a suitcase, she had dutifully unloaded my underwear and socks into drawers, and she showed me my share of the drawer and closet space.
As the ship pulled away, I looked out of the spacious port and saw a light in one of the onshore hovels. There, I believe, was some soul as transparent as mine. His panning for gold in sea-grit would have made utter sense to any woman he had known, and the better she had known him, the more sense it might have made.
The next morning, under a grim Arctic sky which had never got dark, Cath and I ran into Louisa Wanstap outside the dining room. I made the introductions, and soon Cath and Louisa were talking about the Bering Sea and other travel like old friends, Louisa lamenting that she had heard that because of the weather we weren’t landing on King Island, which she seemed to think was some apogee of Eskimo-ness.
I heard Cath ask Louisa if she was sitting with anyone for breakfast, and telling her she was welcome to join us. Louisa said she would be very happy to. I floated on this sea of polite language and knew not what it meant or where it would lead – an enriching of acquaintance or of warfare.
From our table in the dining room we saw the abandoned island under the lash of a summer squall, all of its ghost houses full of flitting phantom presences moving on stilts on the cliffside. Despite the visual distractions that had briefly halted conversation, I was pleased when the demographic of the table was complicated by the arrival of Angelo and his crew. And then a bearded man, who hung around the film crew discussing lenses. Louisa seemed to know him, though her raised eyebrows might have suggested she thought him harmlessly quaint. ‘Leon Silver,’ said Louisa, ‘The renowned Shelby Apple.’
Louisa had met him on the plane from San Francisco. It turned out that he was a professor of semiotics at Stanford. Cath, who knew what semiotics was, asked him if he was working on Eskimo symbols and their meanings, and he said that though he had done some work on that sort of issue with the Hopi and Navaho, this was pure holiday. We had after a while to excuse ourselves and set up on deck to take our wistful footage of the uninhabited island. It encapsulated, in its way, what we were meant to narrate.
In the wonderfully threatening light the next morning, the ship’s crew dropped us off earlier than the other passengers on the landing stage at Little Diomede Island, the last island before Russia. There was plenty to film. At the skiddy landing stage, dogs dining on seal intestines barked us ashore. A husky, tall Eskimo named Warren, in jeans and a puffer jacket, welcomed us. He then guided us through the steep, seemingly crowded town where drying carcasses of fish and seal hung from frames in air of authoritative grey density. Long walrus-skin boats, draped with seal skins were stored on their frames as well and were photogenic. We talked to women and rowdy kids and reflective men, most with unmarred, ancient Asian features, but little more than pleasantries were exchanged. Pointing at me, Angelo told the eager-eyed kids, ‘He’s not from the Lower States. He’s a kangaroo!’ After gazing at me the kids improbably hopped kangaroo-style across the slick slope, the mud and binding rocks of home.
After asking Warren if we could film him he asked us to his kitchen for coffee. We crowded in, and were greeted warmly by his wife, a majestic fat woman with a phenomenally flat face, who smiled at us like two-dimensional mercy as she served us coffee. I think, from the little I know, Warren’s totem must have been an Eagle, for there was an Eagle Beer bar clock on the wall, Philadelphia Eagle placemats on the table.
Out of the window, the outline of Big Diomede – or Ratmanova, as the Russians called their Arctic island. It was tomorrow there. The dateline ran between, through that murky intervening water.
‘The Russians took most of the people away to the mainland,’ said Warren. ‘They made them send us messages. In my father’s days they were always saying, “Come across to us. Eskimos are allowed to oil machines and to drive them here, and date white women.”’
One could make a drama about Eskimos on Little Diomede crying out about American glory to the inhabitants of Big Diomede, who sang of Marxist glory back to them, and of course, of love across the barrier, an ice-crossed Romeo and Juliet. A great political and ethno-graphic comic-tragedy! The diabetic and Bourbon-blighted indigenes of the States – for we had seen the grey, booze-ravaged faces at doors and windows as we set out for the community hall – in contest for the ideological laurels with the diabetic and vodka-blighted indigenes of Russia.
By mutual consent Angelo had lit the room dimly to suit the pale blue light of the day outside, and by now the other passengers on the Nunatak were landing in Zodiacs. I went out to meet up with Cath to protect her from falling on the skiddy seal-guts at the landing. She was not in the first boat, from which the first off was the enthusiastic Professor Silver festooned with photographic equipment cases. To his credit, he helped an elderly couple ashore, and then ranged up the path into the township on its cold slope.
The last one to land was Cath.
After the filming, I met Cath back on the ship and we had a brief rest before we got ready for the evening meal. As we left Cath said, ‘By the way, I asked your friend, Louisa, the Californian woman, to have dinner with us so we can have a proper talk.’
Whatever that meant. When we arrived in the dining room Louisa was already there. I steeled myself but after the greetings Cath and Louisa immediately launched into conversation. Looking around desperately for Angelo and the film crew, I heard Louisa start talking about her husband’s job with Highgate Films.
‘They do great work, of course,’ she said, ‘but he’d love to be an independent producer, even if the pickings are slim. He was executive producer on that Michael Chabon film, Wonder Boys, and co-producer of Bergman’s Flush. Just loves the business!’
‘He’s fortunate,’ said Cath. ‘And you’re still working for the same crowd? Ocean, was it?’
‘No, I’m on my own now,’ said Louisa, with her lovely shy smile – a mile-long smile as I thought of it. ‘I’ve been working flat out for the last three years and recently I just realised I needed a break. I don’t know what it is, but I’ve wanted to see these places since I was a kid. I’m a big fan of that very butch Arctic fishing show too, the one on cable. I had to really clear my books to do this.’ She grinned more broadly still. ‘I had to be selfish. I have an understanding business partner but there’s not a lot on at the moment, mainly festivals, and she’s covering for me.’
I indulged a two-second daydream, myself the Arctic cinematographer, she the Bering Sea publicist. Me Tarzan, you PR woman!
‘And Cath,’ Louisa pursued, ‘I believe you have many production gifts.’
Itching in my soul, as if condemned by a deity to wear an eternal spiritual hair shirt, I rushed in to answer. ‘She does a lot of my production scheduling as well as her gifts as an editor. I’m hopeless at it. In the past I hardly even scheduled things; just let what happened happen.’
‘Well, a production schedule is no work of art,’ said Cath in her flat, take-it-or-leave-it manner. Sometimes I found it admirable and even alluring. I didn’t know what I thought about it now. I just wanted everything to come to a close and resolve itself into a quiet night. I improperly desired both of them, but not in a proximate, breathless way. I was, for the rare moment, their aesthete.
‘How do you like your cabin?’ asked Cath, changing the subject, for the truth was that she did think production schedules a lesser art, where to me anyone who could put one together seemed to have gifts beyond my imagining. But Cath, as always at sea, was very interested in cabins – we had had some hard ones off West Africa, great heat and a barely three-quarter bed, and closet space befitting a woman of only two kaftans and two shifts. That was when I was filming … Christ, I couldn’t even remember. Oh yes, heading for Namibia after the Mali elections, 1992!
Along the way, Cath, as my companion, had learned to cherish a good cabin, and had one on this journey, and was willing to discuss it with people.
‘Are you sharing?’ asked Cath of Louisa.
Louisa laughed. ‘No, I lashed out on a full cabin,’ she replied. ‘It’s an indulgence, I know. But I’m starting to get too old to share a cabin like a teenager with another woman.’
I’m starting to get too old …
Her journey was thus costing her the equivalent of a mid-size sedan car. That’s how much the Arctic and the Eskimo meant to her.
I saw across the dining room, at a bigger table than ours, Silver had found a chair and was talking with Angelo. I noticed the professor’s abnormally well-developed shoulders, although I suppose they weren’t abnormal by Californian standards, where people ‘worked out’.
‘I do love my cabin,’ said Louisa with sudden exuberance. ‘I think I could live in it forever if they let me. All the Arctic explorers would have loved my cabin.’
‘I admire ours, too,’ said Cath. ‘And I agree with you. A person could happily live in that ship-borne stupor …’
Across the room, Professor Silver was backing away from the camera crew’s table with his arms raised in an appeasing gesture. The production assistant, Sue, seemed to be the cause, and our pleasant soundman half stood, as if to avenge a slur.
Louisa had noticed it too. ‘Oh God!’ she said softly, as if she had a stake in what was happening.
Cath put a hand on my shoulder to prevent me rising to whatever offence had been given or compliment misinterpreted. Louisa said, ‘He’s such a simpleton for a clever man. People get him wrong all the time.’
‘An idiot savant?’ I asked cruelly. Across the room the potential for a fracas looked to have diminished, and I saw Silver with his hands extended begging for tolerance.
‘He’s brilliant,’ Louisa said. ‘But maybe not gifted at ordinary things.’
Cath was examining not the drama across the room but Louisa, who shook her head tightly. ‘All I know is that he means no harm.’ And then she laughed. ‘I suppose George Bush would say the same.’
‘Kind of you, to be so understanding,’ said Cath. I was thinking the same. I was thinking: noble, kind, whimsical, gentle, ample-hearted woman! Divine legs, divine ankles too! A concatenation of the graces physical and spiritual! I was right to perceive in her a special deliverance for someone. The problem was that once I had convinced myself I was the intended subject for rescue.
When the dinner ended, I found I had in my nervousness drunk the main share of two bottles of wine and was exhausted. The strain of having thrown myself at, embarrassed myself with, Louisa, of knowing that I had once used her in a demented attempt at some sort of escape from my life, and of knowing that Cath did not know that, and of spending a night with both of them – all that wearied and jaded a man. And I realised that to allow Cath to talk to Louisa Wanstap from a position of ignorance was criminal. But how could I tell her here, on a ship in waters that were Arctic ice melt, in a place from which a brisk and angry departure was impossible?
The awful, desolate Chukchi Peninsula was our nearest port. The easternmost and least populated corner of Russia, it had no buses, no planes, not even a train, and nowhere to link up with a quick flight home. Not even an amiable bar to sit in, absorbing anger while waiting for the cab to the airport. Especially after they closed the gulags of the region, and decided that liquor was bad for the Chukchis, the mainland relatives of the people at Diomede.
If there was no escape for an outraged Cath off the coast of the Chukchis, there was no escape for me either.
Next day our landing was at dismal Cape Dezhnev, the easternmost snout of Siberia, from which we gazed out at the Bering Sea. It seemed spiritlessly empty in a way the Australian deserts never were. I would need to be a Chukchi to see its value, but the abandoned village on the foreshore seemed to say they didn’t see much value in it either. The truth is that, as with King Island, the indigenes were sad to go and needed to be forced from this barren shore and its bounteous sea, and enter a state-organised indigenous village somewhere else!
I went ranging about the hill behind the cape, for the dinner had reacquainted me, even in Cath’s company, with my infatuation for Louisa. My mind and this murky air was pervaded by her. Out of the blue, she had become the universal question.
Ashore, we filmed Yupik kids doing their best with the grim summer day, sliding and swinging on the play equipment in the grounds of the school. In the Palace of Culture, I got some footage of the Yupik and Chukchi dancing, then aimed my camera at ravaged Eskimos, men and women, looking hollowed and deathly as few alcoholics, even poor ones, did in the West, and who gathered by the door of a nearby communal kitchen.
And through it all I madly believed I was once again enchanted by Louisa. I was returning to the crime. Did other men of my generation do the same? Yes. But I had believed I had repented.