I would not be able to share that realization with anyone because I hadn’t told anyone he was here in the first place. But on the other hand, no one was going to tell me, Animals die! Death is inevitable! Nature is cruel! And I was grateful for that.
dr. and mr. frankenstein
A simple blue flower waved at me, reminding me that one insignificant fox would not be pestering me anymore. Never mind the time; I could sit wherever I wanted. Where I wanted was next to that wild forget-me-not. It had been Fox’s seat.
The nylon bottom of my sleeping pad scraped across the rocky ground as I dragged it over to the flower. Clipping the top side straps into the bottom side clips, I transformed the flat sleeping pad into an L-shaped legless chair. Pulling my knees to my chest, I faced the flower. Doesn’t it feel good to be alone? I asked myself. And since it wasn’t a rhetorical question, I thought about it and replied, Yes, entertaining guests is especially trying for those of us who are particular about where we sit. But that wasn’t really an answer.
You would call the day “cloudless” if you used the description casually. I didn’t. You would call the day “cloudless” if you were insensitive to the valley’s mourning. I wasn’t. Far to the east, barely visible faint streams of clouds hovered above the truncated peak of a classic volcano-shaped mountain. Two clouds, just dense enough to be visible to someone who was grieving, were converging at the same altitude on the opposite horizon.
A lightweight paperback with a deeply creased cover balanced on my thigh. Inhaling its musty smell, I pressed my thumb into its most brutal scar, trying to smooth the rough edge. Dozens of different implements had highlighted its passages; comments filled the margins. Fifteen years earlier I had purchased the book as a throwaway. Now I suspect the dog-eared novel and I will remain together until one of us disintegrates.
I’d found the book at Blanton’s grocery in Packwood, Washington, the gateway to Mount Rainier National Park. It was hiding between the bakery and the registers on a circular bookrack missing so many screws that when rotated, it bobbed and dipped like a merry-go-round. None of the half-priced books belonged to the typical grocery-store book genres: no romance, thrillers, or spy-n-die. All the books were pre-owned, seemingly the singular donation of someone’s great aunt, long blind or recently deceased. As each book came around, I freed it from its cage and assessed its suitability. I handled all the stained books on the rack before selecting a dark-covered novel half as thick as my ham and rye, and a good bit lighter.
The next day, I backpacked eight miles to one of my duty stations, a three-sided rock shelter perched above the Ohanapecosh River. A great sandbar called Indian Bar split this section of river, trapping twisted, silver fir driftwood and supporting a dense population of pink monkey-faced flowers. An old settler’s term, Indian Bar lent its name to both the rock shelter and the surrounding meadows. Indian Bar shelter—a man-made cave—faced a wide-tongued glacier that licked the river’s far shore. A snowfield several feet thick yoked the cave and softened the steps for resident mountain goats.
Weeks went by, and despite the desolation—or maybe because of it—I was pretty pleased with the whole situation until the night a couple stumbled in after dark. I was deep inside the candle-lit cave, lying on a wooden plank suspended by thick, soot-blackened chains. A rustling sound called my attention to the front of the shelter, and I looked up from my grocery novel to see a woman step inside, look around, and back out.
Several pages later, loud incomprehensible voices filled the cave; the husband had arrived. He came over to introduce himself, frowning at me and my book. “Doesn’t weigh much,” I said, waving it at him. The man, who was German, pointed out my uniform hat to his wife to reassure her and unhooked his sleeping bag, rolling it out on one of the lower wooden planks. I jumped down from my perch, set my book on the graffitied and fuel-stained table, and explained to them how I came to be reading Frankenstein.
I noted, as they unpacked their food for dinner, that they had divvied up their gear such that each of them had half the essentials: he had all the canned goods, and she carried the only can opener. Expecting that a stove would appear, and that they wouldn’t be eating from cold cans, I handed them a plastic needle container—collected from a diabetic colleague—with my stash of dry matches. She transferred a pack of wet matches from a pocket to what I hoped was their trash sack. “You know this is not normal—to pick your reading according to its weight,” she said.
I did not know. I had selected my stove, sleeping bag, jacket, and food based on their mass. I dried my own fruit, venison, and tuna and packed my food according to calories per weight. Still, with eleven years of professional backpacking behind me, I refrained from defending myself. My definition of “normal” probably differed from that of a German woman who had been lost, limping, hiking after dark, ill-provisioned, and essentially alone in one of our nation’s largest Wilderness areas.
In the morning, the Germans and I hiked into the heath meadows above the snow yoke. Although we stayed on narrow dirt trails, long branches and heavy dew left fuchsia petals clinging to the bare skin above our ragg wool socks. I showed off my wallowa, the single box toilet I’d built to replace the shelter’s suffocating outhouse. I’d designed and built the box toilet myself with two caveats in mind: one, nothing was too good for Indian Bar’s visitors, and two, Indian Bar almost never had visitors. Creating a wilderness experience for backpackers preempted insurances of privacy; I dug the wallowa into an exposed spot with open vistas. Enchanting scenery surrounded anyone who entrusted his or her naked thighs to my polished pine wallowa seat: wild blue river, mossy cliffs, mountain goats so close you could hear them sneeze.
Years later, the Washington Trails Association reviewed Indian Bar and wrote: “It’s also worth noting that the single most spectacular backcountry toilet in the state is found here.” Thank you, WTA, tausen dank.
The park service did not maintain trails in the subalpine meadows above the wallowa, so we hiked cross-country, edging around an archipelago of waist-high twisted firs. Pointing to a lovely little circle of fir, I called out, “Krummholz,” but my companions, upon hearing me use the German term for “twisted wood,” did not react. “Krummholz,” I repeated, grabbing a clump of short, soft needles. We kept plodding along, and I stopped interpreting for them. Finally, the white corkscrewed bark of a fir with branches all flying off in the same direction claimed our attention. Only a meter high, the fir was probably hundreds of years old. The German man loudly proclaimed some word that sounded vaguely like krummholz. I struggled through their German lessons until we were laughing too hard to make any further progress.
Below us, the Ohanapecosh River braided itself around several shoals and curved around an oxbow. We paused to watch mountain goats scuffle down pigeon-blue rocks, and I asked the Germans if Indian Bar reminded them of the Swiss Alps. They said it very much did, and that they lived near the Alps.
“Gesundheit,” I said to a chuffing nanny goat.
“Gesundheit,” the Germans repeated, trying to mimic my American accent.
They were nicer than I expected, so I identified subalpine flowers as my way of apologizing for spooking them the previous night. “Lupinus,” I said, pressing one Pivetta between two clumps of purple lupine, “like Canis lupus. Wolf. And Lupus, autoimmune disease.” I ruffled a clump of short wolf-faced flowers, pestering two torpid bumblebees reclining on the stalk. “People didn’t used to like wolves.” I waited while the man dug out the close-up lens for an Olympus SLR the woman had been wearing around her waist. “Not sure they liked lupine all that much either.”
I told them about Victor Frankenstein because I thought it might help them feel at home. “When Victor is a boy, he and his family summer in the Alps. He calls the mountains sublime. That’s his exact word: sublime.”
“Yes.” She smiled. “Two the same, I think—you and your new friend.”
“Dr. Frankenstein,” her husband ad
ded for clarification.
“No, Dr. Frankenstein is not my friend. Maybe someday he will be. I am only on chapter 3.” If I had known then that Victor Frankenstein never earns his doctorate, I would have corrected him.
“Chapter 3?” She turned to me, laughing and letting her head fall back. Maybe I was a slow reader; Mary Shelley’s archaic vocabulary saw to that. But I don’t think the German was laughing at my plodding reading pace, but just to be breathing Indian Bar’s wild, clean air.
We waded back downhill through a meadow of tuba-shaped flowers that flexed aside gracefully but too slowly to dodge my eager hand. “Look at its fuzzy tongue,” I said, and she poked a finger into the purple penstemon’s throat and stroked a thick strip of false anthers. Holding the flower’s tongue for her husband, I explained that penstemons belonged to the Figwort family, which was known for weird-looking flowers. After glissading down the snowfield with the German woman’s hand on my shoulder, I recited the names of some common figworts: snapdragon, elephant head, bearded tongue, parrot beak, owl-faced clover, monkey flower, fox glove, paint brush.
Next day, I persuaded them to admire elephant-head flowers growing along the Ohanapecosh River. Each fuchsia-colored flower consisted of one tubular petal curling upward like an elephant trunk. On either side of the trunk, broad petals flapped open like fully extended ears. From there we parted ways, they to cross and follow Ohanapecosh Glacier up and over its saddle before descending into another valley, and me to set up a two-door tent in a wind-catcher grove of fir and hemlock not three hundred meters from shore. My most-prized piece of backcountry gear, the tent was a North Face geodesic Ve24, spacious, gold, and so beautiful that when I shook it from the stuff sack, I committed the first deadly sin.
“If you are going to travel with vital items like food and water divided between you, then you need to stay together, not twenty minutes apart.” That piece of advice was not my only parting gift. “Pedicularis groenlandica,” I said, pointing to elephant heads bobbing along the river on their long, thin stalks. Her husband could not have heard; he was already crossing the shoal. “Be careful with that book,” she said grabbing both my forearms. “It gives you nightmares.” Winking and clicking her tongue, she added, “Big monster.”
Frankenstein, which I finished that summer, rode in the trunk of my twenty-year-old Volvo when I left Mount Rainier, and for a long while it seemed that she was wrong about the nightmares.
I had been napping and woke to find myself in a darkened laboratory, wearing a white cotton coat, facing a lab bench heaped with bloody body parts and coagulating blood. A year had passed since my Germans had crossed the Ohanapecosh and left me alone in Indian Bar’s paradise. Yellow eyes the color of Mr. F.’s monster dangled from a rancid carcass, and the air’s green miasma clung to my face. A light ray, filled with dancing dust, escaped through the lone window’s thick and dirty glass. With a bloodstained glove, I lifted a test tube into the light, spellbound by the cobweb-like substance swirling in the alcohol-filled vial.
I was extracting the DNA from carcasses for my doctoral dissertation addressing the conservation of bald eagles. After putting away lab tubes and bloody gloves and returning body parts to the walk-in freezer, I went back to my dorm room to sleep.
Frankenstein nightmares woke me.
They were not monster nightmares. Frankenstein’s scariest scene occurs long before the monster shakes to life: Mary Shelley’s account of Victor sitting for his oral doctoral exams. In my nightmares, I transposed myself into Victor Frankenstein’s quaking shoes as they rattle on the dark wood floor and he stands facing the seated Professor Krempe, “a little squat man, with a gruff voice and repulsive countenance.” Krempe insults Victor’s preparations for his doctoral work, much of which includes reading old and obsolete textbooks. Victor stutters an unacceptable answer. Krempe “slam[s] his hand on the table” saying, “Every instant that you have wasted on those books is utterly and entirely lost. . . . Good God! In what desert land have you lived?”
Like me, Mr. F. suffers arrogant professors, produces chimeras, and lives in a barren landscape bereft of elegant reading material.
Naturally, I admired him.
Unlike me, Mr. Victor Frankenstein doesn’t write a dissertation and does not earn a doctorate. While some American universities allow students the option of submitting a project in lieu of a written thesis, Mr. F. lives in Switzerland in the 1800s, and, despite his talents, creating a monster is not tantamount to writing a dissertation. Ingolstadt University does not offer an Ogre Option.
During my university years, if I wasn’t in the library or the wildlife genetics lab, you could find me perching on the armrest of a puce vinyl sofa looking out the dormitory window at yellow-flowered foothills and mountains too far away to reach with an uninsured Volvo missing its reverse gear or a broken bicycle lock missing its three-speed red Schwinn. I would reread the merry-go-round bookstand copy of Frankenstein from Packwood, Washington, highlighting relevant sections with a thin pink marker. Like me, Victor loved nature, heard his calling before he left elementary school, and failed to receive any advice from his father. As Shelley tells it, “[Victor’s] father was not scientific and so [Victor] was left to struggle with a child’s blindness, added to a student’s thirst for knowledge.” The book comforted me when I stood at the crossroads of science and intuition trying to figure out which way to turn.
While on family vacation at a fancy hotel in Thonon Baths, Victor opens the bureau drawer and finds an old, abandoned book written by an unusual natural philosopher, Cornelius Agrippa. Pleased with Agrippa, Victor goes on to read Albert the Magnificent. Albert and Agrippa believed in magic and alchemy—ideas anathema to the academic establishment in Ingolstadt in the late 1700s. Two hundred years later when I entered college, only medieval and Renaissance history students were reading them. A chemistry text might mention that The Magnificent discovered arsenic, or a women’s studies class might assign Agrippa’s treatise on the superiority of women, but generally the twentieth century’s American academy denigrated the pair as madmen, mystics, occultists, and alchemists.
Master Waldman, another one of Victor’s professors, wrestles him away from mysticism, introducing him to equally dangerous obsessions: chemistry and math. “Chemistry is that branch of natural philosophy in which the greatest improvements have been and may be made,” says Waldman. “If your wish is to become really a man of science, and not merely a petty experimentalist, I should advise you to apply to every branch of natural philosophy, including mathematics” (emphasis mine). Victor capitulates, changing his concentration from biological to physical sciences. He lives to regret that decision. In fact, Victor blames his reliance on physical science for his big disaster. I guess we know what he means by “big disaster.” Waldman gets one thing right, though. After the “disaster,” people all over Europe call Victor some pretty vile names, but “petty experimentalist” is not one of them.
Chemistry and math are fine for people who love chemistry and math, but they don’t speak for nature; and neither do magic and alchemy. Frankenstein’s apparent dilemma—mathematics or alchemy—was really a trap; Mary Shelley had set him up. Both of Victor’s options involved the physical world. Chemistry and math are physical sciences; alchemists and magicians seek to alter physical states, for example by turning lead into gold, or animating cadavers.
I was toying with an option outside the reach of science and the physical world: intuition, the knowledge that comes without conscious reasoning. When I asked questions about Fox—Did he have a personality? Did he care about me? Had he wanted to be my friend? Should I mourn him the way we mourn people?—science and intuition gave me different answers. I couldn’t decide between them. Was I being set up too?
The German lady from Indian Bar was right, not only about nightmares, but also that Victor and I were “two the same.” Before he designs the monster, Victor is just another confused waif who loves nature, limps through sch
ool without mentors, and faces science with naive but honest skepticism. He loves mountains and high-altitude lakes and spends too much time alone (especially after the monster begins offing his friends). In the margins of his books, he scribbles things like “better living through chemistry.” He lives to regret that too.
Outside my cottage, sitting in my camp chair next to Fox’s forget-me-not and missing the fox, I again felt close to Victor. When the blue sky was gone, I closed Frankenstein and shrugged a brown Carhartt jacket up around my jaw, pulling its hood against the late afternoon wind. Murders of ravenous clouds were gathering at both ends of my valley, devouring molecules of water as they coalesced. Directly above me, converging clouds were telescoping into a tight circle, spinning inward on me. TBall, freed from the responsibility of incubating eggs, was dive-bombing me along with Torn Tail, the pair apparently unhappy about the lack of egg yolks. For the first time in months, I had skipped breakfast and canceled my morning egg-delivery service.
Fox had left my pasture a mess, crimping my reading meadow’s only flower. The forget-me-not drooped, exposing its browning wound. I remembered Fox brushing his muzzle against it when I read aloud to him. I cupped the inflorescence in both hands and unfolded the petals with my thumbs. The adulterated stem, already shriveling, would sacrifice its lone flower before the end of the day so that the main body of the plant could continue living.
Doing nothing, I stayed at the rendezvous site past 4:15. At 5:00 p.m. the earthbound cloud vortex was trying to suck me down with it. Even the magpies were sheltering. I needed to learn more about how Fox had lived. Although I was afraid of what I might find, I decided I would explore his den site. But not now. Not in a cloud vortex.
Fox and I Page 15