Category Archives: The Other World

La Jungle Part 2

Chiapas state, in Mexico, can be a pretty dangerous place sometimes.

Part Two of the Chiapas story, by popular demand!

“You’ll see your children again,” I whispered, “I’m not worried.”
But the men kept talking, louder and louder, throwing their voices and their scorn over the thin plywood wall that separated us so precariously. On one wall a picture of the Virgen de Guadalupe, cloaked in blue robes and thin, white outstretched hands, stared mournfully down at us. Fernando listened wide-eyed to the chatter and every now and again peered over at us and mouthed a few noiseless words, trying to convey some sense of what the latest threats could mean for us. M lay in the corner and shuddered from fear and from the pains that wracked her belly. Until eventually the voices slowed, then dimmed, and then with the light on the other side, disappeared altogether.

None of us slept that night.

And in the morning the man returned to wake us. He knocked gently on the door and swept inside.
“They’re waiting for you,” he said.
“Who is waiting?” we asked.
“El pueblo,” he said. The village.

So we stumbled outside into a morning that was gray and wet. The whishing palms were quiet. The grasses smelled fresh. The dogs had been heeled in and wandered along dirt roads, sniffing for the refuse of the night before. The man led us to a field. I stopped short at the sight.

A giant circle of men stood silently waiting. The diameter must have been a hundred meters wide. Every man in the village seemed to be standing there. It was 7:30 in the morning.
Refuse from the night before was scattered across the ground. Bottles, plastic, cardboard and clothes, and a few women and children were slowly making their way through the village starting the cleanup. But the rest of the crowd was focused soberly on us, and it suddenly dawned on me just how disruptive our visit must have been. Whatever wretchedness the night before had produced, in their minds our ours, in their bellies or ours, it was nothing compared to the force, the sense of solidarity that drew them here in the dawn hours to confront the people who had come uninvited and unimpeded into their midst on such a holy night. Because now there they stood in judgment of us, and our trial was about to take place within the circle of their community, ringed by nothing more than the ground and the men who stood upon it, and the machetes those men carried.

A looming maple tree, hundreds of years old, stood at one end. No one was talking. They stared at us, ushered us into the center of the circle, equidistant from one and from another, and for a very long time they said nothing.

Some of the men had machetes at their sides. They did not look friendly at all, even though some of them were speaking quietly among themselves, and a few of them laughed. Off to one side, in the shadows of trees or leaning next to some small shacks were the women, dressed in bright gowns, shoeless, and holding their babies in tightly wrapped cloth sacks strapped to their backs. And they swayed.

A man of medium height with strapping arms and a fierce scowl stepped forward into the circle and addressed our translator.
“Tell us who you are, and what you want here,” he bellowed out, “You have told us you are journalists. What is it you are doing here?”
The crowd nodded its silent assent at this request. The machete blades gleamed like dead fish in their hands, caught in the silver of the morning sun.

“We come as friends,” Fernando told them. “We come in peace.”

He addressed their fears as he had heard them expressed to him on earlier visits. We were not part of the government, come to take their lands, he told them, nor their water or their wives. This had happened before, we knew, and maybe those hard men of the night before were the ones who had made it happen.

The government had tried to quell these villages in the dark of night. And because of that these villagers had known war. It wasn’t too far from here that the rebel leader, El Sub Commandante Marcos had staged his uprising, and his soldiers were known to live in the nearby forests. But we were not the government, Fernando said in his quiet voice, we were not here scouting for energy. The water was theirs. The land was theirs.

There was a shifting among the crowd and some of them were nodding their heads and smiling. Some laughed. But they wanted to hear it from us. Daniel and Fernando took turns reassuring them of our good intentions. Then it was M’s turn and she apologized and told them she only wanted to take pictures of them “so that the world can understand.”

No one asked me to speak, and I didn’t. I was too foreign, perhaps, too white.
I watched them and bowed my head and felt contrite.

And slowly, the circle began to dissolve and disappear and the women at its edges turned away and began walking back into the wide green palms of the morning, disappearing.
As if the world had opened once more, we were left in that open field with nothing but the sky above our heads, and the massive tree that rooted it to this earth, and all I wanted was to rush to it and lie on the ground beside its great, enduring weight.

Chiapas, Mexico 2003

The Okanagan

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Up in Okanogan country, far from most of the other settlers, far from the Midwest where her mother, Katherine Euphemia Tripp was raised, my grandmother spent her first six years. Her home lay on the western edge of the Columbia Plateau in Washington State, a remote highland northeast of the Cascade Mountains. It was lonely, vast country, isolated, singed with the last vestiges of a world that would never exist again. Her home consisted of a four-room cabin, two barns and several acres of land. The nearest town, Havilah, sat at the end of a long valley where she went to school in a one-room schoolhouse that had once been an Indian’s cabin. Her sisters rode their horses, a white filly named Bess and a bay named Bird, to school each day. There was a small general store, which also served as a post office, and a Lutheran church and its parsonage. A flourmill followed later.

It was a dangerous place sometimes. The valley was remote, so when problems arose, and they often did, there wasn’t much in the way of help. It took more than a day by horse and carriage to reach the nearest heavily populated area. But there were a few neighbors, and they looked after each other. One night, a neighbor came to ask my great grandfather to join a posse to search for a horse thief known to be in the area. So he grabbed a rifle and joined the search. My grandmother waited nervously at the door, occasionally casting a worried glance outside for news. Eventually her father returned with the news that the thief had been cornered in a neighbor’s barn. The posse’s solution was to set the barn on fire and watch it burn to the ground. They weren’t sure whether the thief had burned or managed to escape, and little effort was made to find out.

Marjorie’s father was called Jesse James. He was a Quaker from Florida who wanted to be a farmer. He had a big mane of curly white hair and a large, hawkish nose and wore round wire-rimmed glasses and even then, in 1915 or so, people said he looked like Mark Twain. He had an uproarious laugh, never touched alcohol or smoke and frowned on those who did.

Up there in the Okanagan country, he worked the fields in front of their house and took Marjorie along for the good company. They pulled the wheat into bales, shaped the rows, and worked it into the grain silo that stood to the side of the house. Jesse James tried to raise wheat, and the effort eventually drove him out. But they were self-sufficient, with milk cows for cream and butter, a garden, some chickens and hogs and, of course, the horses. Jesse James shot deer each year. The farm was too cold to grow apple trees, but they raised and canned peaches and tomatoes and rhubarb.

Winters were harsh, and long. And in those years, native Indian tribes were still spread across the forests and mountains of the area. Some were open to the white encroachment, but many weren’t. Hostilities between whites and Indians still occurred, and there was a great deal of fear among white settlers about what awaited them should they fall into the hands of the savage Indians. Why Jesse James chose to take his family to such a remote corner of America to become a farming family – he had never farmed before in his life – was a mystery in itself. But he did.

If there was ever an “olden days,” it was there, so distant from the rest of the changing world. Her memory is of an Indian named Edward St. Paul, who used to come and work the fields with Jesse James.In the spring and the fall, when it was time to harvest or seed, Edward came down from the Colville Indian Reservation. Nothing heralded these arrivals. He was just suddenly there. Marjorie would look up one day and see Edward standing there beside her father, working as if he had been working that way for as long as anyone could remember, and would continue for as long as they lived. Looking back now, over 90 years into her past, she recalled these moments and placed them perfectly before her like small, shimmering objects, and gazed upon them once more.

Edward was peculiar in many ways, at least to a small white girl living in the wild. In the mornings, he never touched another living thing until he had washed his hands and had a glass of water, which he did in a washroom near the kitchen, out of sight of the others. He waited patiently while Katherine made breakfast and while the other kids came downstairs. My grandmother always sat on Edward’s lap in the mornings before breakfast, and he asked her questions, about her school and her dreams and her distractions. She was resplendent and gifted, in her white sleeping frock, her curly red hair spilling out like bushels of raspberries. Edward would tell her stories, “grisly, gruesome stories,” about a world she could never know. One of them told of an Indian who, having committed some terrible act, was rolled down a river in a barrel that had been spiked with inward facing nails. He told her other stories, but she tells my father that she can’t remember them, that they’ve been lost forever to time.
“That’s all I can remember,” she says.

Nor did she remember whether Edward participated in food gathering or whether he taught them the Indian ways. Most whites didn’t adapt readily to Indian ways and Jesse James was probably no exception. What she did remember was that Edward was a tall, thin man, gentle and kind, who didn’t talk much, and so fit well with her father. She didn’t know why Edward chose to spend his winters with her family, rather than with his own people; nor did she know what became of her father’s farm after the family left. She didn’t remember much of anything now.

This was all my father had left to grasp.

Of the hundreds of memories still available to her, why did she cling hardest to Edward St. Paul? Was she trying to tell my father something? All the roads of her lifetime lead, again and again, back here. And then one day Edward would be gone, as seamlessly as he had come, no goodbyes or salutations or parting gifts or remembrances. But she remembered.

Nearly a century later, as she approaches the end of her own life, my grandmother wants to recall where Edward St. Paul in buried, and laments that she never went up to visit his grave.

“Up there on the Okanagan,” she says one day, looking over at my father, who is sitting on her couch, “You know where that is, Keith, in that cemetery by the tribal town.”

My father nods as if he’s trying to figure something out.

“Up by Nespelem?” he asks, and she nods and fades away again. He gets up and walks around the room. His cell phone rings. He raises his phone hand and nods.

“Keith,” she drawls in a Western twang from a century ago, looking vaguely in my father’s direction and smiling, “Would you please turn the thermostat down?” She lifts a thin arm up and points in the direction of the wall.

The afternoon light shines delicately off her glasses. She can’t see us. No matter. What she does see is enough.

The memory comes back, vanishes, returns again. Each time, it becomes more acute, brings her more pleasure, more mystery. Her brow creases in meticulous concentration, as if she is trying to recall its exactitude, some fundamental truth caught therein, a butterfly stuck inside a pane of glass.

– Washington State, 2009

Dead in Alaska — Part 2

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People just keep wanting to drill in Alaska.

So it might not always look like it did back in 1997.
The fishing story continues…

He had lost track of the hours. They had been here for days, he didn’t remember how long, up and down along the coast. They slept in their clothes, ate when they could. Miner was covered in the rank of halibut. He stank guts, and he hadn’t taken his boots off since they started. There was one small yellow light in the galley that was always on, a single bulb above the flexi-stove that hammocked in its bolts as it cooked. In the fatigue he stared at it for long moments, in a daze until it was time to work again, to feed and bait and cull, until the belly of the boat was full and there was nothing to do but return to port and offer the flesh to somebody with a mind to distinguish color and size, to match them to desire.

Out the galley window he could see Jim, his red hood pulled up over a mat of white hair and his knees bent gracefully against the bulwark, watching the horizon. His hand was hanging down limp by his side, loosely holding a red metal cup. When the boat dipped he reached out lightly, as if to touch his own sense of equilibrium.
Miner abandoned the stove, stepped through the open galley door out onto the deck. Butler was there, smoking a cigarette and watching the flotilla of sea-birds that followed them, hovering over the long-line and the occasional wash of innards that got sucked their way.

“I’d like to shoot them fuckers,” said Butler, gesturing to the birds with his chin.

His clear blue eyes bridled with a cantering beauty. But he shouted at them, waved his arms. He picked up a starfish and hurled it skyward, the loopy arms trundling over themselves like some fast-moving galaxy, but the birds glided effortlessly away, extensions on a careening mobile, and the creature in its dead orange blipped into the green sea and returned to its depths.

The sea was icy and green, fed by a northern coastal stream that brought berg water down from Kodak, galoshing and wild. The rollers glided by in trilobitian majesty. An unbound pulse, a substantive and quiescent thing cascading in shivering arcs across itself.

Miner and Butler moved to the stern where Jim was standing, next to the hydraulic spool and near where the gear line had been coiled. Jim was fiddling with the knots on the two floating pink buoys. He looked up when the boys approached.

“Paul wants to lay another couple sets,” he said.

“Jesus Fuck,” said Butler, taking a final drag and flicking his cigarette in a long arc out towards the birds.

Jim looked up to the cockpit.

“We’ll lay these here now, just up ahead,” he said, indicating some invisible smear of current toward which they were moving, “Then we’ll go pick those two sets we laid this morning.”

“I don’t know where the fuck they are, but they ain’t here,” Butler said.

“They live on the bottom,” Jim said, “They suck the bottom.”

“Scum suckers,” Butler said, “Just like us.”

“Just like you, maybe.”

“Shit.”

Paul came out onto the rear deck of the top house and looked down at them and then scanned out to sea and lifted his face into the wind and like a dog his eyes lulled. He looked down at Jim.

“Ready?” he shouted.

Jim nodded and Paul turned the boat back around away from shore and soon the engine picked up and they began to make a slow five knot line into the rollers and out to sea. Jim hooked up the two floating pink buoys and tossed them off into the wake. The seagulls scattered from the splash but settled back again when the buoys had passed. Miner looked up and saw the sun was moving up again, shining off the starboard aluminium of the top-house, the streaks of shaved mite glinting vibrantly along its surface.

They were one on each side of the now trolling line, and as it sped out from the hydraulic spool they snapped and baited and hooked lanyards onto it, and stepped quickly back out of the way as the cutfish flicked at them from the rebound. The small lines flung about on the stiff wire until it dragged them under and down. Sometimes the gulls tried to loop in and steal one before it disappeared but the wire was quicker and they retreated upwards in squawking fury. And then it was done, the line exhausted, the lanyards too, and Jim strapped on two more floating pink buoys to mark the other end of the line and tossed them over the side where they began to drift, and soon they were the only two floating things out there. Underneath, along the floor, lay the thousand hooks.

Paul turned the bow once again and this time headed south, back towards the two remaining lines they had set the previous morning.

They wandered around the deck as they waited, waiting for the sea to turn in their favor, for it to unloose something from its skin, its wandering patterns in the currents. The lines were out and they had very little.
Butler paced back and forth between the two sides of the boat, his shoulders squared, and Jim watched him without moving his head.

“Why don’t you sit down?” he asked.

Butler turned his head slowly.

“Why don’t you shut up?”

“Wouldn’t be anything interesting to listen to then.”

“Shit.”

“See?” said Jim.

– Alaska, 1997

Banditry

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There have been outlaws in Mexico for a considerable long time.

Pete spent most of his life on the other side of the law. He had smuggled drugs and run planes. He only once gave up his freedom, and not for very long. He lived on the Mexican coast, somewhere, far enough not to be found, far enough to feel safe enough for another day on the run. He was a kind of sheepherder, operating outside the law for the benefit of those who wanted to live comfortably inside of it.

One day, many years earlier, one of Pete’s long lost daughters managed to track him down in Mexico. She walked up the driveway and into his house. He invited her up to his living room and sat her down on the couch.

“You’ve got fifteen minutes,” he told her, “You’ve got fifteen minutes and you can ask me anything you want and I swear to God I won’t lie to you.”

And then it would be over. When, a few years later, another daughter came down, Pete told her the same thing. You’ve got fifteen minutes and you can ask me anything you want and I won’t lie to you.

I wondered what I would have asked a long lost father if I’d had only fifteen minutes. Have you ever killed anyone? What’s the saddest thing that’s ever happened to you? Naturally, Pete’s daughter had asked him why he left her and her mother so many years before. He swayed in the memory of it, as if the recollection was as difficult as the decision itself. His eyes glassed over and a thousand-year old grin swept across his face like a frozen ray of sun.

“He doesn’t have to tell me shit, does he?” I said to Pete, as he rolled a joint. He dropped his hands into his lap, not letting go of the joint, and stared at me with a look of great surprise. His mouth formed a small O. A rill of sea light shone off the lenses of his reading glasses. He shook his head.

“Hell no he doesn’t,” he almost shouted, irritated at my impertinence, “It’s his own goddam business.”

Just harmless old criminals sitting around in Mexico, getting stoned and joking blackly about the man who lived next door.

“They’re not all bad, you know,” Pete said, referring to the lawmen he had clashed with his whole life, “I’ve spent my whole life in criminal enterprise but people are just people, any way you cut it, I swear to God, that’s the truth.’ It was the voice of moderation and restraint, coming from the other side of the law, coming from the dark recesses, pleading for understanding, for forgiveness.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I’m lying I’m dyin,” he said, and took a shot of back alley tequila he had gotten from a friend, forty barrels worth sitting in plastic jugs by his feet. The crow lines at his eyes were long and weary, worn from use and smiles, the creases tanned into life.

“Here,” he said, “Have another shot of this, best damn tequila you ever had, I swear to God, make you cry.”

– Mexico, 2006

Choptikwl

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An interesting article in the New York Times about the Choctaw tribe.

Washington state has more native reservations than any other in the union. Its history is rich and sad and well-worth knowing. My father and I explore it now and again.

The Lakes People, called the Sinixt in Salish, emerged from paleo-Indian times more than 9,000 years ago. Their ancestors used black argillite to craft small tools and quartzite for chopping. By 6,000 years ago archeological evidence shows the Indian proto people were accomplished hunters of fish and game and gatherers of plants, roots and berries. About 2,000 years ago the Salish speaking Sinixt people came south from the inland rain forest of present day British Columbia as far as Kettle Falls, in Washington, and then reached out nomadically in all directions. They followed the seasons, fishing in the several waterways that brought salmon from the sea and were homes to other fresh water fish; they hunted bear, deer, elk, small animals and bison, taken on the plains across the mountains to the east, where they competed and fought with the Blackfeet. In the winters the Sinixt, who lived primarily in what is now Canada, returned to village sites, where they lived in circular pit houses, dug into the ground below the freezing level, with above-ground coverings made of tules and other barks. Later they used skins, both for their winter houses and tepees during summer nomadic journeys. Over time the Sinixt pushed south as far as present-day Addy, roaming on both sides of the Columbia River and east beyond the Little Pend Oreille Lakes.

Most of the Sinixt became Catholics, in part due to the missionaries and the French trappers with whom they had early and generally agreeable contact on the upper Columbia. Later, fishing declined due to commercial harvesting at the mouth of the Columbia, a decline the Sinixt blamed on the failure of their ancient religion. They were susceptible to the new creed. As the religion took hold, the priests discouraged the Sinixt from building pit houses, probably because they thought the communal nomadic culture might be antithetical to Christian values. As was the case elsewhere, they also discouraged the use of the Salish language, forbidden at St. Maries School at Disautel.

In the summers the band would split into specialty groups as they ranged across the land. Women picked berries, including huckleberries, service berries, wild raspberries, wild strawberries, Oregon grape, gooseberries, elderberries, thimbleberries and several others, and prepared them with meat brought back by the hunters. Others would fish, concentrating on the abundant catches at various falls, where the salmon had to pass through narrows and jump to continue upriver. They used both nets and spears to take in thousands of pounds of fish each season, though they were careful not to take fish that could successfully jump the falls and continue upstream, thus protecting the strength of the stock. Others would gather roots, such as the Camas root commonly used by all the Northwest Indians.

The Sinixt People suffered familiar privations as the white men first entered, then took over, their world. Disease brought first by trappers decimated their numbers and caused them to disperse from their Canadian forests, a strange inland rain forest microclimate with lush vegetation, herds of animals, including wild sheep and goats, and abundant streams. That is what first brought them to the missions and forts, where they lived peacefully with the trappers and the Colvilles, the kelto-to-ko-tewis, with whom they frequently intermarried. From there they moved over the Kettle Range in the lands of the Okanogans in what is now the northern half of the Colville Reservation, where Havillah lies. From early times the Sinixt and the Okanogans also intermarried.

Over time, there developed a very large body of “coyote stories”, called “choptikwl” in Salish, origin myths integral to all the northwest tribes. Like oral traditions everywhere they can vary from tribe to tribe and even from one storyteller to the next, but they remain essentially the same through time. They explain creation and the relationships of all parts of the ancient Indians’ world – the rivers and the salmon, the birds and the animals, wind and rain. In some ways they are reminiscent of the world of the young Arthur, before he was king. Like much oral tradition, they are morality tales. From Coyote Stories, a book by Mourning Dove, an Okanogan Indian born two years before Edward, also on the Colville Reservation, is this short explanation:

“The Animal People were here first—before there were any real people. Coyote was the most important because, after he was put to work by the Spirit Chief, he did more than any of the others to make the world a good place in which to live. There were times, however, when Coyote was not busy for the Spirit Chief. Then he amused himself by getting into mischief and stirring up trouble. Frequently he got into trouble himself, and then everybody had a good laugh—everybody but Mole. She was Coyote’s wife.” People came later, but they are no more important than the animal people who preceded them.

– Washington, 2006
(A special thanks to Keith for this post)

Dancing Girls

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U.S ambassador to Libya lost his job after revealing that Colonel Moammar Khaddafi was scared of flying, loved his Ukranian blond nurse and enjoyed flamenco dancing.

The room was cold. The gypsy was talking to a white-haired man. She laughed, her mouth opening wide over the red rim of her lips and white teeth. The man bent over to kiss her and she turned her head down and the man searched for her head and laid his lips on the break of her forehead. He looked again at her and laughed. At the bottom of his cup were chunks of fruit. He took them in his mouth and sucked the alcohol out and then ate them. Apples.

He didn’t ask about the paint because he knew her answer was that she didn’t care. In the end, they would be proven wrong she would say.

The gypsy was sitting in the front row, a beatific smile on her face, staring at the flamenco dancer. She slipped one hand into the other and cupped it vulgarly. The lips of the dancer’s skirts flung out from her and floated in the room until she yanked them away and they fell, filets, pulled back into the dark. She lost track of time, and then she was gone and as she opened her eyes from some reverie she saw the dancer half-stalled before her. The people stopped clapping, and the small flames rose on the tables, and the heads turned back to the now empty stage, and the blued curtain.

Antonia was behind the man now. She circled his waist with her hands.
Where did you go last night? she whispered.
You?
No, where did you go?
When I came back from the toilet, you were gone.
It takes you an hour to go to the toilet?
He stared at the wall.

Now he looked over his shoulder at her. The gypsy was looking out at the tables. The sleek hair of the women turned in the soft light, absorbing glasses. He squinted into the crowd. The curtain shuffled slightly against the wall. Purple shown there, dark purple and a tigred yellow on the off weaves. Her collar bones rose with her breath. She touched his arm on the spit part and she could feel the bone turn on the skin.

What’s wrong, she said.
He looked at her. Nothing
Oyé chica, she laughed, looking at her friend Olivia.
Olivia dragged on her smoke and flipped the leash back and forth in her hands.
“What are you looking for?”
She had on a long white waist coat that reached down to her ankles.
Two kids on the opposite side of the table stared at them.
“You need me to teach you to be sexy?” said Antonia, laughing.
Olivia stared at the kids as if they were produce.
“I need you to shut up,” she said, looking away.
“What?”
“Nothing.”

Now he put his foot next to the weave and felt the small warmth there like a soft egg. But the top was closed and dark. He looked up and Olivia turned to him.
“And you,” she said
He watched her play with the leash. Antonia had stood and was stretching.
“What about those bags?” she said.
“What bags?”
She pointed to his eyes.
“I’m getting a refund.”
She snorted.

When she moved he could smell her breath, like candied pears in rust. He reached down and put his hand on the dogs head. The skin was smooth. Hairless. The mistress of Diego Rivera kept hairless dogs, he remembered. When he went to see them, they came racing out from the back door of the white montana where their lady lived, tore out the gate where he stood and jumped up at him through the bars. All they had were poiles and the ugliness of the dogs of war. She had the only hairless dogs in the country, maybe even the world.

On the walls of her house she had paintings that her lover Rivera had confided to her above the sufferings of his wife, and then one day she acquired the dogs and they protected her.

But say the dogs died, rotting skyward, the pictures would surely find the roof suddenly open to the sun. The house guard had told them this, tweaking a horse-switch he trailed along the ground flicking leaves like flies. The sun shines here too much not to break these rooves, he said, pointing up at the talc tiles in gray red that lay on the roof. But now the sun was hidden behind a wall of white clouds that had obscured the distance and the whole sky had turned white. Still hot against the black iron, and the heat of their breath seven times his own. The hairless dogs rendered themselves and snarled away. One of them had small black eyes and a tiny shut mouth and its ears perked up and back, like a horses. He looked down into the wicker basket and pulled away one of the lips. The dog looked up at him and licked its pink gums.

He told her this story.
“He’s not hairless,” she said.
“Nearly.”
“No such thing as nearly.”

The Story of the Flood

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Europe is preparing for floods this week after a long and early freeze.

In the American northwest, 15,000 years ago, there was a flood.

All of this used to be buried in ice and snow. Fifteen thousand years ago the land here, and far up north into Canada and south to the middle Rockies, lay dormant and frozen under 4,000 feet of slowly creeping rock and ice. This ice sheet stretched thousands of square miles across the North American west coast from Canada into the upper reaches of Washington, Idaho and Montana. Divided into three distinctly rounded lobes, each dipped south of the 48th parallel like three diamond earrings. The most easterly of these dredged the valleys of western Montana’s Bitterroot Mountains, where it lay atop the source of the Clark’s Fork River, which gushed from there down into the continental plains of the American west. The slow progress of the glacier had plugged up the Clark River with ice and boulders. As the glacial ice expanded and thickened, it dammed the river waters entirely behind a 2,500-foot high valley wall of ice, called an ice-dam. Behind the dam, over the centuries, the waters had deepened. Eventually they no longer formed a river at all but a massive, ponderous lake. The lake, called Missoula, was filled with snow and ice and the resting currents of a stillborn ocean.

Missoula was more than 2000 feet deep. It had more water than two of today’s Great Lakes, Ontario and Erie, combined. The immense blue sea sat and grew, buttressed by thousands of feet of steely deep freeze. If there were any humans at all in that part of earth at the time, Missoula must have seemed an end to all ends to them, an incalculably vast expanse of water beyond which life simply did not, could not, exist. To the south the Bitterroot mountains rose up jagged and barren, their folded sides covered with ice and granite, their ragged lips eyeing the arcing sun as if they were rising for water in a geologic breach. I imagine it as a quiet world, almost entirely imagined.

And then, on one of those interminable days, the lake flooded and the ice dam broke and changed the face of the American west forever.

Raging, Missoula’s waters shattered the great columns of ice and spilled into the old riverbed. Hundreds of feet below, the base of the dam splintered, cracking and breaking as it fell, unleashing the single largest and most cataclysmic flood that has been discovered in the earth’s memory, dwarfing anything Biblical. Four hundred million cubic feet of water ripped through the freshly made gash in the land and thundered down the valley like a tsunami, a wall of water a thousand feet high in places. It ripped and shredded and tumbled, as if the ocean had come alive and had begun to walk, and then to run, trammeling the earth as it went, running wild back to its source. Inside so much water was the land – boulders and silt and soil, and as the flood roared it gathered speed until it was rushing south, and then west, like a rabid mastodon flinging itself towards the plains.

Over the next few days, as the waters drained and the lake that had taken thousands of years to form began to vanish, another equally epic transformation was taking place below. As the flood gathered speed and volume and intensity, it carved. The floodwaters ripped down the western slopes of the Bitterroots and molded the land to their form. Just as shore currents leave soft sandy beaches rippled with fine, evenly-spaced ridges, so the floodwaters shaped the land there into massive 50-foot hillocks, evenly spaced 500 feet apart. The flood sped on, ripping and gouging and carving the land into shapes never seen before anywhere on the planet. It swept through modern day Idaho and west into Washington where it found the existing draws and gulleys of the Columbia River, which it filled and flooded to hundreds of times their normal size on its race to the Pacific Ocean. The flood swept south and carved deep into the basalt bedrock below the Columbia. It gouged out loess islands and flood channels as if the bedrock were as soft as mud. The undercurrents formed great coulees and cataracts along the ground and in the walls of tributaries. It swept into small canyons and made them huge, and as it did the water braided the rock together like reeds of swamp grass, twisting solid forms around each other and into each other, the pressure stronger and more powerful than heat. In places where water lingered, the undercurrents grew to the size of giant ocean swells and created eddying pools many acres in diameter in whose deep recesses car-sized boulders swirled and bumped and rubbed against each other. Today the grounds are smooth and worn like the natural pools where children play with pebbles. On and on the waters went, traveling over 400 miles, south along the Columbia line through Washington and down to Oregon where it ripped from the earth the Columbia Gorge, leaving it a wind tunnel. It continued south to flood the Wilamette Valley and plains where the city of Eugene now sits, until it bumped and rushed its way to the Pacific where it emptied and churned and finally lay still.

– Washington, 2006

swimming on the train

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There is no news about the past today.

It’s a long way to the end of the pier, where he’ll make his turn. In the water, their white bodies look like bits of marbled fat in a flank of meat. At the pier he comes dangerously close to a barnacled piling and feels its pull before kicking away. He raises his head a moment, sees Dan in front, heading on a course parallel to the beach. From the left, the Pacific pushes. Adam dives his hand in, like he was taught, slicing the water. He has to remember to kick; Dan says it’s how you free your speed.

Later that day, with Joe, he stands on the pier and watches the large, browned bodies – boogie boarders on the right, surfers on the left – sliding down the waves, creating bright green and white arcs. On their feet the boogie boarders wear V-shaped flippers; some have attached razors to the fins on the bottoms of their boards. Joe is wearing the UCSB tank-top that Adam let him borrow, a gift from Dan. Joe is too pale to be at the beach, Adam thinks. Even with a tan, which he does not yet have, the paleness will only shine out stronger. Adam does not know how he knows this, he just does, and so he doesn’t say anything. It is the same way he knows that Joe doesn’t know how to swim, even though the two of them have never spoken about it; and even though the two of them spend most of their lives at the beach now, it has never been an issue. They’ve only been in the water once together.

There was a slight rain that day, and the workers waded through mist as blades of wet grass lipped the sides of their boots lazily, as if half-asleep, just in the process of waking up. Sam watched from underneath the spread of an oak tree where the ground was dry. He smoked a cigarette, cold air, looked at the ground where a few roots had broken through, a smattering of gray ash appeared there, fragile and beautiful in that early morning light. They usually did the unknowns before six. There was a public record book in the foyer, near the concierge. This one, Roger, he hadn’t been able to get a look at his face, too bad. They wouldn’t open it up today for the rain.

It was beginning to get dark, and the sky outside was marked with low-hanging brows of pink clouds. Through the wires of the tracking poles, the lights of passing cars receded by slowly. He was staring out the window when another train going the opposite direction appeared. There were two stories to the train, and both were lit by yellow lights and he could see through the windows to the hills on the other side. They were watching his train, seeing a similar sight. He stared out the window. And then he saw a face. Cursed between his lips, cold pick of metal, the hesitancy of his tongue, against the rocks of his teeth, like an anemone, clutching stone against the waves, giant muscle seeking shelter. Motionless, needle in his mouth, watching her, and she, stuck by this sudden cold pin, watching him. And there they sat with their reflections holding them together in their respective trains.

Spawn and Beast

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A Columbian shaman was arrested last month coming into the country with ayahuasca.

One night in Peru, 2002:

One of the boys had a baby tiger, and he passed it around to the group. A drug dealer got it in a buy, one of them said, in exchange for coke, and not too long ago by the looks of it, because the little beast couldn’t have been older than a couple of months. One by one they cradled it, cooed and stroked it, and listened awestruck to its tiny roar. No one knew where it came from; tigers don’t live here, in Peru, or anywhere in South America. The only big cats are jaguars who haunt their ayahuasca fueled visions, sleek dark cats that speak to them about those things they could never admit to themselves.

You can buy anything in these markets, one of them said.

They all seemed to agree on this. Snakes, exotic birds, even young children could be found, for a price. People disappeared in these jungles all the time. The traffickers came and went with their machetes, their beards. Sometimes people emerged from the jungle with nowhere to go, and no one to claim them. Had they gotten lost? And how long ago? So it was no surprise to find a baby tiger here, in this little human circle, among these wooden shacks lit by kerosene and candle and covered by thick netting

Some of them had just come off the plant that morning. Some were planning for their next session. They sat in a circle and watched one another, and it was understood that only those who had imbibed the plant could see what they saw, the way they wanted to be seen. They lived in this world only halfway, and half the time.

In their visions they saw long chains of mighty elephants bedecked with gold tiaras and brass chest-plates, they saw great battles from their vantage point in the clouds, or swam into the mitochondria of plants that lay along the jungle floor. Each of them saw two animals, always: the black jaguar and the python, and it was decided that these two animals must be among the guides who shepherd the uninitiated into the invisible world. One evening, an entire entranced group saw the very same thing — a short and bald dwarf doing magic tricks in a broad, sunlit plaza.

In the visions, the shamans sometimes did battle, the one against the other, or sometimes more, the good against the bad, the ones who had retained a foot in that other world against the one who remained there alone, all the time, in the world of the jaguar and the snake. The doctor, they said, for that was what they called him, came back once and he looked as if he might not make it. The fight had been long and very difficult, he told them. He needed rest. Spiritual war was a terribly frightening thing. They all believed this, and they all desired it. This was what they searched each other’s eyes for every night, in that circle, with the tiger prowling their corners, taking stock of their progress — had anyone taken that step onto the battlefield yet? Had anyone gone to war?
No one had, not yet. They would have to learn more. The plant would teach them. This is what they said. The icaro will call you, and the plant will teach you what you need to know. — Tarapoto, Peru, 2002

Curiousir

stories lost and found

Category Archives: The Other World

La Jungle Part 2

The Okanagan

Dead in Alaska — Part 2

Banditry

Choptikwl

Dancing Girls

The Story of the Flood

swimming on the train

Spawn and Beast

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