Loitering: New and Collected Essays

by Charles D'Ambrosio

  There’s not now nor was there probably ever a shortage of love for Indians in the noble and rhetorical abstract, but even more abundant and pressing has been a heap-big annoyance at the nuisance created by Injuns who are actually alive and walking around and scratching their bellies and grumbling about what’s for dinner or listening to the radio or reading books or arguing over the rules of Monopoly and especially those who are rather clamorous (uppity) about their needs. It all gets so queer and drifty and hard to track these days. Eco-Elements on First Ave. downtown has been instrumental in gathering signatures for a petition against the Makah, and it’s one of those New Age emporiums with a syncretic, boutiquey approach to spirituality, a sort of travel agency specializing in tourism for the soul, emphasizing past lives, future lives, every kind of life but the really incompliant and unruly present, where tarot, runes, goddess-stuff, astrology, Native American spiritual resources, healing soaps and oils and aromas, candles that calm you down and bells that strike a special, particularly resonant and congenial note—where all this totally creeps out the stodgy Pauline Catholic in me, and yet—yet!—this reaching out to the arcane holy world, this Luddism of the soul, however fey and preposterous and apostatic and pagan it might seem in my eyes—you’d think this grab bag of atavistic practices would put the New Ageists in deep and direct sympathy with the Makah.

  But it doesn’t. And not so weirdly, a lot of the attacks on the Makah seem to gut and hollow out the “Indian” and take that rhetorical material and use it as stuffing, which in turn is packed into whales. The clichés about Indians transfer easily into clichés about whales, similar in substance and similarly hackneyed, yet housed in different vessels. The noble savage qua noble mammal. This can’t be flattering to the Makah, while I imagine metaphor in general is probably a matter of oceanic indifference to even the most poetic gray whale. And the rhetorical violence—the stealing of language, the silencing—shouldn’t surprise anyone even remotely versant with white/Indian history. Captain Watson likes to footnote his superior credentials as an Indian enthusiast from way back—Wounded Knee!—and yet somehow without tearing his brain in half he’s able to plunge ahead with low, vicious, even paranoid attacks on the Makah as people. A small measured dose of irony should prevent this kind of mental sloppiness, but doesn’t, probably because people in the environmental movement, like holy folks everywhere, don’t make real keen ironists. I can pretty well guess that these sort of merit-badge Indians aren’t entirely or enthusiastically embraced by your average enrolled tribal member, especially as they listen to Watson float pseudo-arguments that asperse the character of the Makah and accuse them of being liars, frauds, cheats, racketeers, colluders, and, of all things, fake Indians.

  Abstract love is the nosy neighbor of abstract hate; they see right into each other’s windows and they always agree on everything. And neither one of them really tests disinterestedness, the ability to make tragic choices between things of equal worthiness and legitimacy—which to my mind explains why so much writing and discussion about whales tends toward melodrama, where right and wrong are always clear, where only one of the terms is justified. “The opposition are not nice guys,” Captain Watson has written. Nice? That seems a simpy word for a big old jackpot of a problem, a lazy and sinister trope suggesting that to oppose (Paul Watson) is to lack niceness, by definition. “I have no time for the arguments of tradition,” Watson, the honorary Indian, has written. And further: “I have no wish to understand them. I have no wish to argue the pros and cons of whaling.” He says, “The tradition of whalekind is of far more value to me.” And this tradition comprises what? “They [the whales] grace the azure blue with a majestic intelligence wedded to an amazing tactile grace. A profound, elusive, ephemeral sentience, they deify the abysmal depths with their regal presence.” If you can love abstractly, you’re only a bad day away from hating abstractly. Somehow mere difference has been torqued up and given a moral dimension; by way of solution we know the next step—wearying to think of as another century wanes away—is to call for the annihilation of all distinctions.

  The real high-ass muck-a-mucks of the pro-whale debate like to think they cut somewhat quixotic figures, noble, paladin, but the environmental movement in the matter of the whale hunt hasn’t represented the best thinking by the best people; it’s been a disaffecting display, at least for me. Where are the eloquent American saints, where is Thoreau, where Emerson, Muir, Marshall, Leopold, Olson, Abbey? Even David Brower, for God’s sake! It’s too bad Watson’s so blinkered because the man knows cetaceans, as a student of the species and a hands-on advocate, better than anyone. He sees the situation, globally. His knowledge of whales is compendious and compassionate, but in public, dealing with people, he comes off as a bullying prig—his manners on the talk show Town Meeting were particularly appalling. With broader vision—a vision that extends to people even an ounce of the generosity he lavishes on whales—he might really help sort this mess out. He might even be able to broker a deal. He could wangle concessions. But Watson seems paranoid whenever he’s writing about whales; in one astonishing sort of Christic psychomachy (Sea Shepherd Log, spring 1997) he relates the tale of his conversion, his Damascus experience, his baptism in whale blood, and puts himself across as a persecuted man, a prophet and savior. This messianic aspect of the movement, its higher, holier purity, is hard to stomach. It’s theocratic and imperial and arrogant, and because of it Watson comes across as just another flawed man and broken reformer hiding his human failings behind another lofty and immaculate and inviolate cause.

  The acronymic groups—PAWS, AFA, SSCS, PETA, etc.—who’ve organized opposition to the Makah hunt don’t go for killing sea mammals under any circumstances. That’s really their stance, and, boiled long enough, the irreducible core of their case. This intractability has lent a sullen and futile feel to the debate, a mudslinging, lie-swapping, smug, accusational tone that, rather than clearing the air, actually just fouls and debases anybody and everybody who joins in. These people have made up their minds; there’s never been any room to maneuver. They’re into whales, and not real fond of humans. In fact they seem to favor any of God’s creatures over the malignant cancer of humanity. Their misanthropy takes the metaphoric exuberances of the late odd brilliant crank Edward Abbey literally, which is always scary. I mean, from Christ to Nietzsche we know it’s one thing when the rich voice of a solitary radical shouts out and it’s another thing when the echo of the ochlocratic chorus comes roaring back in agreement. Suddenly a certain kind of valence is gone. Abbey was a philosopher, wit, pisser, and prose stylist, and one of the first qualities sacrificed by his adherents is the anarchic soul of a man who claimed the Peace Corps was a “piece of insolence,” “an act of cultural arrogance.” The kind of man who could litter and make the act seem deductive, radical, and exemplary. The kind of man who strongly advocated population control and yet fathered four children himself—but by five wives, he argued, which was, when you did the math, only 0.8 children per woman, well below the national average. But when the lesser souls pick up the program, they smooth out the saving contradictions, flatten the subtleties, excise the humor, empurple the prose, hoist the flag and recite the pledge, and then march forth like fanatics and disciples and crusaders everywhere, ready for jihad and genocide.

  Watson’s been assigned the task of interpreting the psychograms sent to him by whales and apparently he’s heard from the whales that they’d rather not be harpooned. His stated claim is that he’d like to return whales to some state pre-everything—Eden, the womb—while the Makah in an obvious clash would in some measure like to return themselves to a pre-contact world, before Captain Vancouver, before Puget, Rainier, etc., and certainly before Captain Paul Watson showed up on the scene.

  Myself, I really doubt the efficacy of the Makah project because generally I’m skeptical about movements to restore culture. Whether the project’s conducted by Hitler or Mussolini, Yukio Mishima or Ronald Reagan, or fundamentalists in Iran, Lybi
a, or Idaho, or by Wovoka and the Ghost Dancers, or by modern communicants who raise their heads heavenward to receive the body and blood, I just don’t think the hoped-for resurrection or the dream of a return to glory is viable. Randall Jarrell once wrote that even in the Golden Age people were always griping about how everything looked yellow; all our hopes elude us. Just as shadows fall across lives, history falls across cultures. Things unravel never to reknit again and contact quite likely brings with it the entropic doom Levi-Strauss talks about in Tristes Tropiques. Our complex intermingling kills. We wake out of our dreams and wonder where the blood on our hands came from. Knowledge happens just about as often as shit, while innocence is probably returned to by taking yet another bite of the apple, not by pretending there never was a Fall in the first place.

  But my despairs are Western despairs and I really don’t know a thing about the restorative capacity of the Makah soul.

  Regardless, right or wrong, it’s not up to me to judge the eventual cultural outcome for the Makah of killing a whale off the coast, and not because I’m indifferent to the fate of the environment, or because I agree or disagree with what the sloganeers for either side have to say about whales, but because the Makah are an independent people who ought to be able, for once, to fail on their own, without the encouragement of white folk. Or, vice versa, sort of, they ought to be allowed the chance to succeed without a boost from the BIA, HUD, HIS, Department of the Interior, missionaries, social workers, tourists, etc., on terms they’ve developed by and for themselves. They might like for once to be free of the entangled bureaucracy of being Indian. Or they might like to paint their asses green and play hacky sack by moonlight. I don’t know. I can’t say. The intestine affairs of the Makah don’t really interest me, although I’m certain within the community there are factions, pro and con and even indifferent, but probably what’s not needed now is a lot of high-minded refereeing from the outside. They have a treaty, and really the hunting of this whale is about our honor. We need to think about ourselves.

  Killing a whale the Makah way is a highly specialized undertaking, and I can’t imagine anyone doing it for kicks or as a show of bravado or even as an incautious stab at reviving culture. There are other ways to go about getting your daily bread, most of them drier and warmer.

  At the Makah Museum there are a couple of bow and arrow sets but they’re really pathetic-looking and I thought, seeing those flimsy toys, man, it’s a pretty good bet these Makah didn’t eat a whole lot of bear meat. The arrows were hardly longer or stouter than hot dog sticks; the bows didn’t seem flexible or tensile enough to generate enough velocity to puncture hide, let alone find the heart of a bull elk from forty feet. But then you walked around and saw the whale and seal harpoons and the massive halibut hooks and the fishnet ingeniously fabricated from nettles—nettles!—and you realized that here was the sphere where these people really kicked ass.

  Even in the long-gone Ozette olden days, five centuries ago, they had little baby harpoons for kids to play with, complete with mini-fingerholds, a kind of bridge or granny stick crotched for launching harpoons, so these little Makah boys would get the exact right feel of the weapon and begin to perfect their stroke from the moment they reared back and stuck their very first—I don’t know—tree stump. What little Willie Mayses developed their form and a sense of the world’s exact rightness playing with these sticks on the sandlot beaches of what’s now the Makah Nation? And the big-league harpoons their daddies used—what fantastic inventiveness it must have taken to figure out the logistical details of that first hunt, what holy-making number of Makah bones are buried and scattered beneath the sea around Cape Flattery, what lives were lost, what women cried, what children wondered, what brothers went silent, while these men worked out the kinks in their whale-killing prowess. Some amazing man, some Moses of the Makah, had to have had a vision powerful enough to lure and lead the others on. That magical moment alone should be saved from extinction. Think on it—you take the biggest body of water in the world, and it’s the edge of winter, it’s maybe lonely and horrifying and you’re melancholic in some affective-disordered way and all around you there’s an extra-heavy-duty cobalt rain battering down, and there at your feet on the beach you’ve got a pile of old bones and a couple of tree branches and somehow, looking at them, and looking out to sea, somebody comes up with the idea of sticking a thirty-ton whale? It stuns the mind, it blasts and levels the imagination.

  Up to my knees in nature, I get mighty cold, naturally. I shiver in paroxysmal fits and feel what’s possibly the onset of hypothermic derangement, and so I head back to the tent, dry off, do ten jumping jacks, then ten more, pull on a pair of clammy jeans and a fleece jacket and a goofy crushed duck-cloth cap I favor in the fall, and start a fire. Twigs and bark and moss and a few credit card receipts to kindle the flame, larger sticks of driftwood propped tepee-style to keep it going. As I work and warm myself the sky lightens from one shade of unhopeful gray to another. I collected and chopped wood half the night, hoping to exhaust myself and hold bad thoughts at bay. It didn’t work. Poise and stability are not about never moving but rather about nimbly keeping step with the world as it pitches and rolls below your feet—one of several Hallmark-isms I try to live by.

  When I go to feed the dog I find I’ve forgotten to bring her bowl; I pull off my cap and fill that with kibble. The waxed cotton holds water nearly as well as it repels it and she laps up a cool hatful after eating. I smack the hat against my thigh and set it back on my head. For entertainment and edification I’ve got Field Guide to North American Weather and Pascal’s Pensées, but right now I’m not in the mood to sit in the fog and read about fog, nor do I, feeling skeptical and doubt-ridden, much care to read what the brilliant transit planner has to say about skepticism and doubt. My mood? Fuck the whales! This too is nature—all of it, and maybe when I get back to Seattle I’ll place a personal in the Weekly, truthfully saying, like most do, that I’m into nature, the woods and long walks, red wine and fires and poetry, philosophizing and fucking, the dawn light and the starry night, and all the other inadequate and hugely depressing analogues for unique and heightened sensitivity.

  The real tragedy in this state isn’t the healthy run of migratory whales that hug the coast in October/November but the passing of the salmon, the magnitude of which is equivalent in scale to the disappearance of sixty million buffalo from the plains in one short murderous span of the nineteenth century. Fewer and fewer people in the region have any memory of real, living salmon and seem satisfied with the bullshit touristy display of tossed fish at the market, and so nothing will ever actually be done and those coho and kings—kings! Tyees!—are gone and gone, it’s horrible to say, with a whimper. No single salmon is big enough to be a cause célèbre on its own, whereas one whale the size of a Winnebago is, and so people notice. And, noticing, they get all drippy about whales, remotely enlivened and stirred to abstract opinion, when, in fact, the loss of salmon should rouse them to enormous, cetacean-sized outrage, and doesn’t, since who cares where it comes from—salmon raised on farms! in frog ponds!—as long as filets and steaks of it are still served on plates around the city? Nary a salmon fighting to spawn in your local stream, but down the street there are plenty cooling on beds of ice behind the local grocer’s display case.

  I had no luck getting any whale. I asked. I did. I made phone calls and inquired at the museum and stopped strangers on the street and said to my waitress at the diner, you don’t have any whale, do you? I even checked the freezer section of the grocery store. Along the way many, many Indians—men, women, and children; the old and the young; workers and loafers; thin, fat, tall, and short; braided and shaved—laughed right in my face. They weren’t unduly snickering or snide about it; generally the laughter was big, hearty, frank, and guffawish. They seemed to find in my question a new comical low point, even after months of talking to journalists.

  No whale—so the meager larder I laid in for this trip includes a supply of Well
butrin, Mylanta, ground coffee, a gallon of fresh water, a package of Hostess cupcakes, kibble for my dog Kala, and a fresh filet of salmon off a small resident silver I caught in the Sound the day before.

  Communion

  we worship

  the salmon

  because we

  eat salmon

  —Sherman Alexie

  I prop open the hood of my truck, pull out the dipstick, burn the excess oil off in the fire, and skewer my salmon by interlacing four or five clumsy sutures through the skin. (Better prepared, I would’ve baked a few potatoes on the engine manifold. A woman in Montana told me I should always keep a can of black pepper in my tool kit, because in a pinch it’ll plug a radiator leak. When I asked her if there were any other spices I ought to store in the car, she said an onion in your glove box isn’t a bad idea for your DUI situations. Had I heeded her advice, my truck would’ve been pretty much as fully equipped as my kitchen.) Anyway, I get my unadorned filet sizzling over the fire and the skin instantly starts dripping gobbets of crackling fat on the coals. I set some coffee on my stove and crank the flame. I lean back against a log and look at my watch, angling the face into the firelight. It’s a quarter to five.

  The men in my family have undone themselves in some kind of grand westering impulse gone awry. We ran out of land and then went one step farther, west of the West. We’ve shot ourselves and jumped from bridges and lost our minds and aborted some of our babies and orphaned others, and now reproducing and carrying on the family name is down to me, and the truth is soul-wise I’m likely a bigger monster than either of my broken brothers or my father. As the extant capable male in my family I either perpetuate our name or wipe it off the earth forever. The hints about what I should do haven’t been so awfully subtle that even a mental clodhopper like myself can’t catch the drift. Nature in me has come up empty, and so be it. I figure it took thousands of years to make Irish and Italians of my grandparents; America undid that in a scant generation. We’ve come to nothing—so soon?