About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory

by Barry Lopez

  Our next stop—the two-lane roads we are traveling all look as if they’d just been paved, and Mr. Nishibe contends that these sleek, new roads simply encourage visitors to Hokkaido to drive too fast, that they actually cause more accidents than the old roads—is at a caldera (the basinlike depression left after the collapse or detonation of a volcano), which Mr. Taketazu tells me holds the clearest water in the world and is called Lake Mashu. He also adds that we are most fortunate: the lake is almost always blanketed with fog, but today it glitters under a cloudless sky. The reflection of sunlight on the water is too dazzling for us to see anything beyond its surface from our vantage point on the rim. Mr. Taketazu assures me, however, that from the right angle it’s possible to see the bottom contour at about 130 feet.

  I’ve been trying all day to put my finger on an essential difference between Hokkaido and similar landscapes in western Oregon and maritime Washington. From the rim of this caldera I sense part of the answer. It’s more domestic here. In the distance are family farms, herds of Holstein dairy cattle, and rows of windbreak poplars. The maples and beeches in the woods are beginning to turn. In all this the landscape more resembles the Berkshires or the Adirondacks: the individual setting of each farm, the pursuit of small-scale agriculture hard by the haunts of wild bears, and autumn spreading like fire across the forest.

  Mr. Taketazu must leave—he’s a veterinarian and has to attend to some animals at a nearby farm. But we’ll all meet later for dinner. Naoki, Mr. Nishibe, and I continue the trip over a high pass, driving beneath the shelter of extended snowsheds along a sinuous road that clings to the mountainside to my left and affords a view to the right of great stretches of evergreen forest and steep-pitched mountains standing alone, a scene reminiscent of views in the American Cascade Range. We descend after little more than an hour to Akan-kohan, a tourist town at the edge of Lake Akan. The shop windows are filled with Japanese kitsch. A variety of watercraft stand ready to take visitors out on the lake.

  But Mr. Nishibe has other ideas.

  I should know by now that a thought offered only in passing might as well be a formal request as far as my host is concerned. I’d mentioned earlier that I was not eager to seek out remnants of the aboriginal culture of Hokkaido, that of the Ainu. I find their modern predicament painful to consider and believed witnessing the roadside scenes here—a few Ainu dressed in traditional costumes performing faux rituals for tourists—would be depressing. (The southwestern peninsula of Hokkaido, south of Sapporo, has been occupied by the Japanese for four hundred years. It was not until after the Meiji restoration in 1868, and with American help, that the Japanese settled the rest of Hokkaido, virtually destroying Ainu culture in the process. This extirpation of a native culture, for some attempt at conveying a sense of Hokkaido’s atmosphere, prompts a comparison with the nineteenth-century American frontier. The presence of great bears in the mountains, unruly public celebrations in some of Hokkaido’s small logging and fishing towns, and the freshly settled appearance of much of the countryside enhance the image.)

  Mr. Nishibe parks the car and we begin walking through the streets of Akan-kohan. He asks for directions frequently and is finally able to locate the small curio shop he is looking for. The local carver who works there is out. We eat lunch and return an hour later. A man named Kazuo Sunazawa, burly and accommodating, has returned. What is arranged in the ensuing conversation I cannot guess. All Naoki says, rather cryptically, is “Ainu eskashi” (Ainu elder).

  The three of us follow Mr. Sunazawa’s car north out of town. Lush, nearly junglelike growth around Lake Akan gives way to evergreen forests as we climb the flank of Mount Oakan. In little more than an hour and a half we arrive at a small town at the edge of Lake Kussharo, where we are ushered into a small, unpretentious home. The only person present is an elderly man sitting on the floor in the central room, smoking a cigarette in a long cigarette holder. He wears white socks (the Japanese tabi with soles and sewn so as to separate the big toe from the others), black cotton pants, and a gray sweater with a black-and-white diamond pattern on the chest. His house coat is also black, with scrolled yellow threadwork designs, suggesting the ornate floral patterns done in beadwork that distinguish North American Indian clothing from around the Great Lakes. He has a long, narrow beard, bushy eyebrows that flare winglike above his eyes, and thin, gray hair. His eyes are blue. A cataract is prominent in the left one.

  For once I am without any sort of present, but Naoki, seemingly always prepared, offers our host a box of delicacies and graciously indicates that it is from both of us.

  Zenjiro Hikawa is seventy-six, an Ainu, the eldest of eight children. A long conversation follows, to which I mostly listen. Occasionally I am able to introduce a simple question, through Naoki, about Ainu home life or about the bear ceremony, the central religious celebration among the Ainu, or about the actual hunting of that animal. With hand gestures and pencil drawings I am able to participate somewhat more in the conversation, which is managed by Mr. Sunazawa, the only one present fluent in both Ainu and Japanese. It is Mr. Sunazawa who begins to make the first drawings in a notebook that moves around the wood-plank floor among us, part of his effort, it seems to me, to draw out a reluctant Mr. Hikawa. Some of the drawings show the placement of poisoned arrows used in bear hunts (the poison is derived from a species of Aconitum, a plant related to wolfsbane and monkshood). Other drawings depict the traditional arrangement of guests around an Ainu hearth and the patterns of facial and hand tattoos among Ainu women.

  As the afternoon progresses, Mr. Hikawa takes up again the work we have interrupted, the carving of dry willow sticks about ten inches long and a half inch in diameter. The rhythm of his stroke gradually terminates our conversation. With the draw of his knife he creates thick bundles of thin shavings which remain attached to the stick at different points. He either gathers them in bunches like tresses and cinches them with one of the shavings or leaves them flared, a rampant array. He stops once or twice during his work to explain the two figures he’s carving, one a hearth god, the other a house god. Beyond the supple movements of his long fingers, at his feet, is a birdcage in which two redpolls perch, watching him. They haven’t made a sound.

  Later, Mr. Hikawa brings out an aboriginal longbow, a present from someone who purchased it from Indians in the interior of Brazil. I am able, solely because of the coincidence of some of my own reading at the time, to say a few words about two of those tribes, the Kréen-Akaróre and the Yanomami; and to describe the great cedar logs carved into totem poles which still stand on British Columbia beaches before the abandoned villages of Tlingit and Kwakiutl people. But, to my obvious distress, true conversation is not possible. I must be satisfied with what I can see in the room, and with a few words and drawings. I feel I have offered nothing of substance to the conversation. As we are departing, Mr. Hikawa, with a hand at my shoulder, gently turns me around. He meets my eyes, smiling, and hands me the two figures he has carved.

  On the road back to Naoki’s farm I watch dusk descend over the countryside. A nearly full moon rises yellow-orange in a deep blue sky. Stout-legged horses graze in fields along the road and herds of Holstein cattle drift toward the milking barns before sharp-voiced dogs. Over long distances I am relieved of the urgent sense of time. So much of northeastern Hokkaido seems to stand quiet at the edge of human endeavor. Nowhere here is the scale of human enterprise large. It meshes easily with the land.

  Time accelerates very suddenly as we turn into the driveway at the Nishibe farm. Mr. Taketazu is waiting there to take me to his home for dinner. (Though we know few words in common this strikes neither of us as a problem. He has also asked a translator to join us later.) It’s a short drive. Raccoon dogs, Japanese hares, and red foxes reside in pens outside the two-story, log-frame house. Inside and upstairs in Mr. Taketazu’s study we settle down across from each other at a low table, a kotatsu, that has a heating element underneath. We draw its quilted cover over our legs and around our waists an
d then open out a dozen or so large books in front of us, filled with pictures. For the next hour they serve as guides and references as we mimic the movements and sounds of various animals in order to frame our conversation.

  Initially our two worlds are drawn together in a discussion of birds. At Lake Notoro, I ask, were those ravens or Japanese fish crows scavenging so artfully in the fishermen’s nets? “Ravens,” he says, smiling in an amused but disapproving way at the thought of them. The level of communication in our conversation is good; it occurs to me to try to convey something subtle. In Japanese folklore the fox, with which Mr. Taketazu is so familiar, plays a role similar to the one the coyote plays in Western American folklore—a trickster. I often think of ravens, also trickster figures in North America, as “flying coyotes.” I wonder if it’s possible to draw on Mr. Taketazu’s understanding of the similarity between fox (kitsune) and raven (watarigarasu), and then to introduce the idea of air coyotes, of airborne kitsune, and make the joke carry. I page quickly through my English-Japanese dictionary. Tondeiru seems to do it for “flying” and I try, tentatively, tondeiru kitsune. For a moment there is nothing but consternation in his attentive face. Then a broad smile of recognition.

  The translator eventually joins us, but Mr. Taketazu—he is very voluble, very passionate for a Japanese—and I are getting on well. To be sure, the translator allows us to be more precise. I ask the translator to inquire which bird, of all the ones he knows, Mr. Taketazu most looks forward to encountering. “The fish owl,” he answers solemnly. I’m puzzled. In North America the owl has a contradictory image. It’s seen as both a wise creature and a sinister animal, a night hunter. Among native peoples in North America the owl is generally associated with death. Mr. Taketazu elaborates when he notices my knitted brows. The fish owl, which once guarded the entrances to Ainu villages, has godlike qualities, he emphasizes. To meet it in the woods today, he says, is to rekindle the ancient relationship of interdependence between man and animal. The bird’s aura is still imposing, he tells me, an encounter with it electrifying.

  Ten of us—Mr. Taketazu, his wife, two of their children, two of his eldest son’s friends, myself, the translator, and, later, Naoki and his father—all have supper in Mr. Taketazu’s study on tables set up for the purpose. I fall out of the conversation. Early the next morning Naoki and I are to travel south across the Konsen uplands and along the Kushiro River past Lake Toro to a great marsh. On the northern fringes of that marsh we might see Japanese cranes, tsuru, in their first mating rituals of this season. That night we’ll fly back to Tokyo from the city of Kushiro.

  As I brought the pieces of fresh fish to my mouth, the crisp vegetables, I recalled the storm surf pounding in from the Sea of Okhotsk, the twirling descent of bright fall leaves along the road, the soles of my feet burning on Mount Iō. I imagined kuma, the brown bear, moving through forests on a path indicated by an older Ainu’s expressive hand.

  At the door where we stand to say good-bye, I try to make my gratitude to Mr. Taketazu clear, not simply for his hospitality but for his bearing as a human being, his compassionate attitude toward animals. When I finish speaking, Mr. Taketazu holds up a gift in the half-light of the hallway—a fish owl’s speckled primary feather. I extend my hand toward the perfect form.

  I follow Naoki and his father through the darkness to where the car is parked. The smells of farmed earth in the damp, cool air are familiar and comforting. I try to imagine the books I will send to Mr. Taketazu, ones with the wildlife drawings of Olaus Murie, or with stone lithographs of the polar bear and bearded seal from the Inuit at Cape Dorset, or the portraits Karl Bodmer made of Blackfeet men with the white fur of the ermine wound up in their hair. I imagine him finding all this in his mailbox one day, like a flock of birds.

  I put my hand to the cold chrome of the door handle. For so many centuries, the exchange of gifts has held us together. It has made it possible to bridge the abyss where language struggles. One travels as far for this as one does to stand before a wild brown bear, or to put hands on the enduring monuments of a vanished culture. Here, in an owl’s long flight feather, is the illiterate voice of the heart. Arigatō, I say, quiet gratitude to the heavy night air of Hokkaido.

  3

  ORCHIDS ON THE VOLCANOES

  FOG, MELANCHOLY AS a rain-soaked dog, drifts through the highlands, beading my hair with moisture. On the path ahead a vermilion flycatcher, burning scarlet against the muted greens of the cloud forest, bursts up in flight. He flies to a space just over my head and flutters there furiously, an acrobatic stall, a tiny, wild commotion that hounds me down the muddy trail, until I pass beyond the small arena of his life. Soon another comes and leaves; and afterward another, tiny escorts on a narrow trail descending the forest.

  I had not expected this, exactly. The day before, down below at the airstrip, I’d looked out over a seared lava plain at the thin, desultory cover of leafless brush and thought, In this slashing light there will be no peace. How odd now, this damp, cool stillness. Balsa and scalesia trees, festooned with liverworts and mosses, give on to stretches of grassland where tortoises graze. Blue-winged teal glide the surface of an overcast pond. The migrant fog opens on a flight of doves scribing a rise in the land, and then, like walls sliding, it seals them off.

  Beneath this canopy of trees, my eyes free of the shrill burden of equatorial light, my cheeks cool as the underside of field-stone—I had not thought a day like this would come in Galápagos. I had thought, foolishly, only of the heat-dunned equator, of a remote, dragon-lair archipelago in the Pacific. I had been warned off any such refreshing scenes as these by what I had read. Since 1535 chroniclers have made it a point to mark these islands down as inhospitable, deserted stone blisters in a broad ocean, harboring no wealth of any sort. A French entrepreneur, M. de Beauchesne-Gouin, dismissed them tersely (and typically) in 1700: “la chose du monde la plus affreuse,” the most horrible place on Earth. Melville, evoking images of holocaust and despair in “The Encantadas,” viewed the Galapagean landscape as the aftermath of a penal colony. A visiting scientist wrote in 1924 that Isla Santa Cruz, where I now wandered, “made Purgatory look like the Elysian Fields.”

  Obviously, I reflected, feeling the heft of the mist against the back of my hands and the brightness of birdsong around me, our summaries were about to differ. And it was not solely because these writers had never ventured far inland, away from the bleak coasts. Singularly bent to other tasks—commercial exploitation, embroidering on darkness in a literary narrative, compiling names in the sometimes inimical catalogs of science—they had rendered the islands poorly for a visitor intent, as I was, on its anomalies, which by their irreducible contrariness reveal, finally, a real landscape.

  GALÁPAGOS, an archipelago of thirteen large and six smaller islands and some forty exposed rocks and islets, occupies a portion of the eastern Pacific half the size of Maine. It lies on the equator, but oddly; the Humboldt Current, flowing up from the Antarctic Ocean, has brought penguins to live here amid tropical fish, but its coolness inhibits the growth of coral; and the freshwater streams and sandy beaches of, say, equatorial Curaçao or Martinique are not to be found here. The Galápagos are black shield volcanoes, broadly round massifs that rise symmetrically to collapsed summits, called calderas. Their lightly vegetated slopes incline like dark slabs of grit to cactus-strewn plains of lava. The plains, a lay of rubble like a storm-ripped ocean frozen at midnight, run to precipitous coasts of gray basalt, where one finds, occasionally, a soothing strip of coastal mangrove. Reptiles and birds, the primitive scaled and feathered alone, abound here; no deerlike, no foxlike, no harelike animal abides.

  The tendency to dwell on the barrenness of the lowlands, and on the seeming reptilian witlessness of the tortoise, as many early observers did, or to diminish the landscape cavalierly as an “inglorious panorama”—an ornithologist’s words—of Cretaceous beasts, was an inevitability, perhaps; but the notion founders on more than just the cloud forests of Santa Cruz.
Pampas below many of the islands’ calderas roll like English downs serenely to the horizon. Ingenious woodpecker finches pry beetle grubs from their woody chambers with cactus spines. The dawn voice of the dove is as plaintive here as in the streets of Cairo or São Paulo. Galápagos, the visitor soon becomes aware, has a kind of tenderness about it; its stern vulcanism, the Age of Dragons that persists here, eventually comes to seem benign rather than aberrant. The nobility that may occasionally mark a scarred human face gleams here.

  Biologists call Galápagos “exceptional” and “truly extraordinary” among the world’s archipelagoes. They pay homage to its heritage by referring to it as “the Mount Sinai of island biogeography.” But these insular landscapes give more than just scientific or historical pause. With flamingos stretched out in lugubrious flight over its fur seal grottoes, flows of magma orange as a New Mexican sunset percolating from its active volcanoes, towering ferns nodding in the wind like trees from the Carboniferous, and with its lanky packs of bat-eared, feral dogs some two hundred generations removed from human contact, Galápagos proves unruly to the imagination.