PART ONE
Birthing
To know the spirit of a place is to realize that you are a part of a part and that the whole is made of parts, each of which is whole. You start with the part you are whole in.
—GARY SNYDER, The Practice of the Wild
Chapter 1
1. Endlessly Rocking
It’s true that on the day Eryn and I decided to have a kid we had been drinking quite a lot of gin. Gin, the product of fermented juniper berries; juniper, the wild trees that surround our home in the high-elevation, western Great Basin Desert—Juniperus osteosperma, the seminal one. It is best to achieve a state of extreme lucidity before making a sober determination about something as weighty as the eternal fate of one’s sperm or eggs.
After many years of wandering in the glaring sun and desiccating wind of the Great Basin, I had come, as we all eventually must, back to the sea, to the cradle Walt Whitman rightly described as “endlessly rocking.” The sea here was the late-winter Pacific, gray-green and breaking gently along the rocky shores of Monterey Bay, on California’s central coast. In addition to the harbor seals, sea otters, and sea lions that hang around the wharves and rocky islands, you see here a variety of shorebirds and occasionally notice the rolling of dolphins or the spouting of whales—mostly gray whales this time of year, though the big humpbacks and hundred-foot-long blues will return come summer. What remains invisible is even more remarkable, for not far offshore is a submarine canyon of incredible proportions. The top of the walls of Monterey Canyon are a mile beneath the ocean’s surface, and from there the canyon descends another mile—the approximate depth of the Grand Canyon—to the frigid darkness of the seafloor far below. This remarkable canyon was cut by a giant river, and though the river hasn’t run for eight million years, its massive canyon remains, a precipitous chasm snaking from the bay out to the broad Pacific beyond. What swims in the nearly 12,000-foot-deep ocean in and above this grand submarine canyon? Better to ask what doesn’t swim there, so wild and vast is that invisible labyrinthine world beneath the waves.
My main objective in leaving my home desert to visit this place was to sit on the chilly beach and stare at the horizon. Maybe study the tip of a surf rod stuck in a sand spike by the cooler. Maybe unwrap a C harp from a green bandana and bend a few blues lines around the booming G-ish bass of surf on sand. Maybe decide, once and for all, who would take the National League pennant in the upcoming season. Maybe resolve to have a child. It was a modest agenda, but I have always believed that with enough gin and time all problems are solvable. Or at least soluble: capable of being diluted with equal parts distilled juniper berries and seawater.
Hiking on an exposed expanse of bare beach in February, squinting into the wind, pelted by flying sand, buried beneath the sound of roaring waves—these things are surprisingly comforting to a desert dweller. If you can excuse there being water present, the rest is keenly familiar: leaning into the gust-driven gyre that lifts surging blasts of sand, you tilt toward a deep gray horizon of dusty green swells that rise like shiny billows of mountain mahogany and creosote bush and bitterbrush—breakers undulating like shimmering waves of Artemisia tridentata, big sage, each desiccated three-lobed leaf reminiscent of Neptune’s trident. Even the distant battleship clouds rise in broken, serrated ridgelines like desert mountains, low ranges lipping an overflowing world-round cup that contains both gray whales and pronghorn antelope.
It is best to visit visited places when they are unvisited, both to avoid the throng of folks who shatter the solitude necessary for problem solving—and questions of pennant races and procreation promise to be close calls this year—and also because we sometimes enjoy people’s presence most when we register their absence. The best kind of solitude is created when people not only aren’t around but might have been around and aren’t. Even in praising the beauty of a “deserted” beach we reveal the awareness that it was once inhabited—betray the recognition that its charm is created not by its beauty alone but also by the people who once were there but have now moved on, blown away, deserted.
Melville observed that all paths lead to water—that an irresistible force constantly and silently pulls us benighted terrestrials back to our watery home. Even in the desert it is true that all paths terminate at either a glistening spring or a pile of powdered bones. Like everything else in life, it’s simply a matter of choosing the correct fork in the canyon’s sandy wash-bottom game trail. But there is something compelling about this limitless mass of life-filled water, roiling around the globe, pulled by moon and pushed by wind. It is a truism that we carry the ocean in our veins and tears, but that seems a thinly clinical way to measure the affiliation. My body is a gin-powered carbon-based flesh satchel that is essentially saltwater—so far so good. But think of the wildness of the sea, with its innumerable underwater canyons and mountain peaks, its turreted and gabled reefs, its fissures and crypts, vents and vaults. Think of a myriad of minute life-forms spiraling around towering spires of swaying kelp, of the high-pressure, frigid, eternal darkness above which bright, fish-filled rivers of animated current run. Think of the battle between whale and giant squid that is raging in the depths at this moment somewhere, the giant cephalopod frenetically twining its eighty-foot tentacles around the snapping jaws of a hundred-foot cetacean that is glaring, coldly, out of its tiny eye.
But think, too, of ourselves. Of how we crawled, frame by time-lapse frame, out of the pond, rose to our feet, grabbed an ash or maple stick just as our flippers became hands with digits, and smacked a soaring dinger into the left-field bleachers—or invented the quadrant, or wrote Hamlet, or created the smartphone, or whatever you think of as the pinnacle of hominid evolution. And just when a giant squid seems the ultimate nasty neighbor, try living on land for a while, always worried about finding shade and fresh water and paying rent and taxes, flinching constantly at all the looming things that can spear you through the back of the neck while you’re only trying to grub a few roots. Maybe the whale and its air-breathing marine cousins got it right when they crawled back into the drink: any sensible terrestrial mammal will tell you that leaving the pond wasn’t exactly a cakewalk.
I slice another lime with my bait knife, thinking to myself that what would be wildest—and what would connect us with the wildness of our watery home even more powerfully than knowing that we cry salt tears—would be to crawl back in. Not in an underwater robot, like Jacques Cousteau, or with an oxygen tank on our back, like Sean Connery’s Bond, James Bond (impossibly cool even in those British secret agent diaper-white swim trunks), but silently and unassisted, simply breathing water as we once did, returning quietly to the calm of our coral caves, leaving the windy beach without regret. Deserting.
Since this doesn’t seem possible—although the seals and dolphins have managed it rather gracefully—I’ve been contemplating the terrestrial mammal’s best alternative: my wife’s suggestion that perhaps we should give birth to a tiny human. This proposition seems at once perfectly natural and extremely reckless. For us nonmarine mammals, being a fluid-breathing fetus floating in the amniotic ocean of our mother’s uterus is as close as we’ll ever get to turning our backs on this troubled land and sliding back into the silent sea. Still, I can’t help but think of the more mundane implications: How long does it take before a thing like that can run a Weedwacker, cut stove wood, or slice limes, even? My father always said that the perfect age for a kid is when they’re old enough to run the lawn mower but not old enough to drive the car. Fair enough, but think of the magnitude of the investment, given the extremely narrow preautomotive mowing phase of child development. And these infants—what, exactly, do they do all day? And doesn’t much of what they do smell? I’ve heard poet Galway Kinnell’s scatophilic assertion that those who don’t poop don’t live, while those who do do doo doo do. But still.
As I look out over Uncle Walt’s endlessly rocking cradle and consider this question further, I no longer picture the epic battle of cetacean and ceph
alopod or the spiraling, undulating towers of kelp, but instead imagine a pudgy little human baby, rosy cheeked, bulging eyed, wide smiled, wearing bunchy diapers attached with those big pins (for some reason) and doing the breaststroke underwater as a curtain of bubbles periodically covers its fat face like a belch. An amphibious cherub, more monstrous than cute and not at all as advertised. As the thing swims slowly toward me with its sweet, trusting grin, I think how unlikely it is to survive very long down there, with all the hungry fish folk, so red in tooth and fin—and it so corpulent and awkward and slow-moving, and probably not too chewy. Do I really want to take responsibility for this defenseless monster, neither fish nor ape, that can’t hide in a coral nook, or out-swim a shark, or even cut a lime? I’ll mow my own damned lawn.
As the tiny beast paddles yet closer, a huge mushroom cloud of brown bubbles suddenly bursts from beneath its diaper, blowing the cloth to shreds in underwater slo-mo. I suspect that sharks can smell this. I wince in disgust. Lifting the fruit jar from the sand, I take a healthy belt of sandy gin and tonic, then slowly raise my eyes and look out across the sea again. Somewhere beneath its rocking green cradle is a hypothetical baby—an amphibious infant that, like me, has saltwater in its veins and tears. I look beneath the surf again: against a trailing curtain of brown butt chum the child is still swimming at me placidly, still approaching land, ready to crawl out and stand up and swing a bat. And it is still smiling.
The woman who calls me her husband is from California. But Eryn isn’t blond, and she doesn’t surf. (As it turns out, California is loaded with brunettes, several of whom don’t even know how to surf. Who knew?) She’s one of the Crackers of the West, that sturdy Okie stock whose kin came across the Great Basin and Sierra like Ma and Pa Joad, piloting a ramshackle jalopy and looking for the endless orchards of what everybody from Moses to Chuck Berry called the Promised Land. Eryn is the kind of woman who makes you want to do a rash thing like get married, even if you’ve had a good, long run of knowing better than to enter what I once disparagingly referred to as “the condition.”
Make no mistake, marriage is one of the few institutions I respect. Ralph Waldo Emerson was right that most institutions are dead forms: ossified, impersonal, ineffective, inertial, disingenuous, self-promoting, tautological, hermetic, superficial, and fucked up (Emerson didn’t actually say “fucked up,” but that’s what he was thinking). In front of a bus stop at a remote rural crossroads in central Nevada I once saw an old drunk preaching, most righteously, into the vastness of the glaring desert: “Beware the institution, for there’s two things, two things that it never can do, never can do, and that is anything, anything, for the first or the last time . . . first or last, brother, first or last, beware!” There are prophets everywhere. But I don’t think the crazy wise man intended his divinely inspired admonition to apply to the institution of marriage, which is, as none less than lascivious old Ben Franklin recognized, a fine condition into which even freedom-loving men should rightly enter. But it somehow never seemed a good idea for me to enter it. Marriage wasn’t like baseball—a game meant to be both played and watched—but rather like horse racing, something you watched, wagered on, and drank at, but didn’t actually participate in.
Even with the weight of the evidence regarding “the condition” on the other side of the question, I married Eryn—or, more accurately, she was generous enough to marry me. Eryn is smart, patient, and generous. She’s also witty, stubborn, and optimistic. And though she is Californian, her peach-picking lineage in the Central Valley is substantially redeeming. She’s a good friend, and she’s resourceful and interesting, which is saying something. It would have been good if I had thought of some of this stuff to put in my crappy, bootlegged, eleventh-hour wedding vows—if you’re hung over and you end-run the Bible you’re left with crap for vows, as it turns out. I love being married to Eryn.
But just as I’m feeling at peace with my new and improved life, the specter of the swimming diaper-blasting insanely grinning non-lime-slicing not-yet-lawn-mowing amphibious proto-dinger-smacking belching cherub has come upon me from right field—a place things should go to rather than come from. Somehow this strikes me as unfair. I’ve just taken a deep breath and said, yes, I’m quite pleased with this whole marriage condition, when this fat-faced hypothetical baby comes along, with all its expulsing bodily fluids, to sour my gin and trouble the wide oceans and attract poop-sniffing sharks. It’s like sliding safely across home plate and then being tagged out—and by the umpire. But safety, so hard to come by in this world, is especially elusive when freakish babies are paddling around the juniper juice in your noggin.
It happened this way. Eryn and I had just come back from a nearly ideal lovers’ evening walk along the chilly, deserted strand of beach with my dog, a thick-headed mystery mutt Eryn generously characterized as “good-natured.” I should explain that I had vexed my family by foolishly naming the dog Cat, which I thought sounded cool (as in “cool cat”) but which I bestowed primarily, and smugly, to illustrate the power of behavior modification and operant conditioning. “This dog doesn’t think about the fact that it’s a dog,” I philosophized over an IPA one summer afternoon after returning from the SPCA with the new addition to the family. “I could call him Cat, and he’d still come when I called him, so long as he was trained, like Pavlov’s dog, through use of a clearly structured series of rewards and punishments.” By the time the words tumbled out of my mouth I was already in trouble. First of all, it should have occurred to me that this sort of conditioning had failed when my parents tried it on me. In characteristic form, that morning at the campsite Cat had licked the coagulated bacon grease out of the bottom of the frying pan while I was peeing on the other side of the dune, and when we later walked him down to the ocean he immediately rushed into the surf and attacked the first wave he could reach as it broke on shore, shotgunning a bucketful of ocean as a chaser for his slimy breakfast, after which he dragged along all morning, hacking up sand and saltwater as he went.
So we had just come back from a wonderful evening walk along the beach, and we were sitting comfortably in the tent as a light sea breeze rippled the sloping nylon walls and the glow of the rising moon poured through the mesh windows. We were half-tucked into our sleeping bags when evening damp began to fall, and we were on the sandy shoulder of the infinite sea, and we were laughing, and we were simultaneously playing and drinking gin. Cat, who was curled up in the corner of the tent, snoring happily and occasionally farting, had even stopped yacking. I was fully inhabiting the role of the proverbial happily married man. The situation was as close to ideal as it is likely to get on this side of the vale of tears.
“Do you ever think about having a baby?” Eryn asked, absolutely unprovoked. I could hear her voice winging in from right field as I stood, incredulous, once again tagged out after safely crossing the plate. At that exact moment I was slicing a lime, and I damn near cut my finger off, though it did flash through my mind that if nine and a half fingers was good enough for the Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, it ought to be good enough for me.
“Huh?” I replied. Before she could rephrase the question I rebounded, wittily: “I’d like to, but I don’t think it’s anatomically possible. Perhaps you’ve mistaken me for a sea horse?”
“Michael, be serious,” she said. My long first name plus a command, encapsulated incisively in a three-word sentence. This was clearly inauspicious. Happily married man meets buzz-crushing topic of adult conversation.
“Hey, feel free to call me Mike. Besides, what do you want with one of those?” I asked, desperately invoking levity where it had so little chance of success. “I hear they’re expensive and noisy and they smell bad. Really, things are so perfect right now.”
“But maybe they would be more perfect if we were a real family,” Eryn said with disturbing sincerity.
I objected, grasping at semantic straws. “You can’t have ‘more perfect’—‘perfect’ is as good as it gets. Besides, we are a
real family. What are you talking about? Look at us: happy family!” At this moment I spontaneously spread my arms wide apart, gesticulating grandly to suggest the impressive expansiveness of said happy family, when the gin-soaked gyroscope in my inner ear caused me to lose my balance and, as I fell over, snag my hand on the taut laundry cord above me, spilling my icy drink in my crotch while catapulting a pair of boxer shorts, formerly on the line, onto the extended snout of the sleeping Cat, who snuffled loudly.
I looked up at my sweet wife, who looked back in silence at my undoubtedly plaintive expression, and my soaked crotch, and my strewn underwear, and my flatulent dog, and then dropped her pretty forehead into her open palm to hide a smile. She had to be fantasizing about what her life was like before she married me.
“Let me think on it some,” I said.
“OK,” she replied, looking up with a labored straight face. “Now cut the lime—the round green one, not the long brown one with the fingernail on it. It’s your deal, Bubba.” I freshened our drinks; removed the boxers from Cat’s snout and placed them, officiously, upside-down on my head, waistband-as-headband style; and began to deal a hand of gin and to sing an old Sleepy John Estes song:
When that wind, that chilly breeze,
Come blowin’ through your BVDs,
You gotta move, you gotta move child,
You gotta move.
Inspired by my flapping lid, I was belting out the blues with what I took to be the accent of a French chef.
I was pretty sure that adults didn’t sit in tents, half-drunk, wearing underwear on their heads, losing repeatedly at gin, and singing the blues in Franco-phony. Adults, I had been led to believe, made mature, considered decisions about things like whether or not to have children. Long after Eryn fell asleep I was still singing mournful old Sleepy John:
Raising Wild Page 3