The Word for Woman is Wilderness

by Abi Andrews

  The understanding that humans are just animals is maybe already there in children, who feel a kind of empathy towards animals because they see them as furry, scaly, feathery people. But of course children’s understanding of animal experience is not perfect because they take human-like responses to mean what they would mean in people.

  When I was little I went to SeaWorld and loved every second of it. I thought the whales were happy and had a genuine best-friendship with their human trainers. You expect a super-friendly place like Florida where they invented orange juice and Mickey Mouse to be really good to their animals. And they are in the biggest pools you had ever seen and they really love what they do – look at the way they leap and smile and splash, all obvious expressions of joy and excitement.

  YAAAAAY, goes the internal monologue of the dolphin. And the whales are far from home but they have each other and they love to be a family. They get the tastiest fish and the best care and fun toys and stimulation from people that they would not get in the wild and they are safe from those nasty Japanese poachers. Shamu has been alive for ever so they must have long, happy lives in captivity.

  You would never guess that the big one they get out at the end to do the big splash is not really called Shamu and would go on to kill lots of people because he is so emotionally traumatised from being masturbated by humans so his sperm could be sold for millions and being stuck in a concrete box with strangers who do not speak his dialect of whale and who rake him with their teeth for being different.

  Cetaceans are intensely social. They have coded clicks that they use around each other. We can’t decode what they are communicating, but they seem to be repeating a pattern. These clicks seem to be social affirmations. If they are saying anything it might be HELLO HELLO HELLO in their specific dialect. The sad whales of captivity could just be repeating HELLO HELLO HELLO in mutually unintelligible dialects.

  Cetaceans are women’s allies in the war against patriarchy because patriarchy holds the cetaceans down with us. Orcas travel in matriarchal pods. The root of the word dolphin, delphus, means womb.

  SO LONG AND THANKS FOR ALL THE FISH

  Either I won Jon over or he invited me to watch the second haul because he was worried I would tell Larus they neglected me on the boat. He was hesitant in everything before I got out there, though, taking ages over giving me a bright orange anorak that drowned me already in case I fell in the water. He pointed out where the whistle was built into the collar and made me blow on it.

  It was obvious as soon as I followed him out why he was being so cagey. A couple of the guys swore blatantly, one of them being Logan, who came straight from the other side of the deck and pushed past me back into the cabin, to go into his quarters, take his shoes off, put them back on again and masturbate in frustration over my pillow or something.

  When the netted fish break the surface of the water they seem to be dead already and the gulls appear from nowhere to hover over and peck at them until they realise they can’t lift them from inside the net. All pouched up inside the net, they spiral jaggedly but still quite mesmerisingly into each other because they are slippery and they swirl from the squeeze of the net and the pull of the water. It is the kind of movement that if you concentrate seems self-perpetuating, like a siphon flow, and you can’t imagine how it might have started or when it will stop. A perpetual motion machine. (But this is an illusion. A perpetual motion machine is an epistemic impossibility; energy always dissipates. Second law of thermodynamics.)

  AN ANALOGY: Once upon a time a bunch of people were on a ship too and they went hubris crazy from their own seamanship and they steered their ship into more and more perilous waters in order just to test their ever more brilliant feats of seamanship. Then the people on the ship started to argue amongst themselves, complaining about conditions on the ship. A lady on the ship complained that ladies do not get as many blankets as men. A Mexican on the ship complained he did not get paid as much as his Anglo counterparts. A Native American on the ship complained that he was owed compensation for the theft of his ancestral lands. A gay man on the ship complained at being called names for sucking cock. An animal lover on the ship complained that the dog on the ship was frequently kicked.

  A lowly cabin boy piped up that everyone should stop arguing because really the issue was that the ship was headed for wreckage in the more perilous waters and that none of their problems would matter if the ship was wrecked, but nobody listened to him because he was just a lowly cabin boy. They called him a fascist and continued to argue amongst themselves about their personal issues, and nobody turned the ship around. Meanwhile the captain distracted them with condolences (an extra blanket for the lady, for example) that were always slight enough to placate but never for long, in order that they would not revolt and the ship could keep steaming ahead.

  The ship went on sailing north until it was crushed between icebergs and sank to the bottom of the sea.

  This is an analogy of civilisation written by Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Obviously it has some major flaws. Why is the captain suicidal? Is there really one malicious captain steering the helm of civilisation? If we sabotage the ship, like he wants us to, then wouldn’t we drown in freezing waters? But mostly my issue with it is that he does not seem to see that the problems of the people on the ship stem from the same place that built the ship badly (hint: patriarchy!). That to address the root of all their problems is to also steer the ship responsibly. As though the people on the ship were separate from the ship, as though the ship were sturdy and eternal, not contingent and always in the process of being reconstructed. I decided I should demonstrate this to Logan when the guys finally broached the subject of my presence on the ship.

  ‘We thought you might be a spy that Larus sent to try and dig up the dirt on our whale data,’ said Jon.

  ‘I just need to get to Canada, and Larus said you’d take me. I can’t say I disagree with how he feels about the whales, though.’

  ‘That’s exactly the sentimentality a woman would come up with,’ Logan piped up from nowhere.

  Everyone paused for a second with cutlery midway to mouth because it was the first thing he had said directly to me the whole trip.

  ‘I’d kill a whale catch if I had my way. I’d stab it in the jugular and let it bleed out slowly. It’s how we’ve always done it. No amount of squeals from folk like you will stop it, as much as you like to think it does.’

  Thinking I would meet him on his own territory, I said, ‘A curse on you and your boat,’ which I thought was quite funny. I did not think he would take it so seriously. He called me a witch, said something about how the catch had been bad and the boat was headed for doom now and slammed out of the room.

  There was a big old awkward silence until Ethan, the warmest to me, said, ‘You really shouldn’t have said something like that,’ and a few of the guys exhaled loudly and let out low whistles.

  Logan is like Ted Kaczynski in that he does not realise it is his own issues with me that was sending his ship to imaginary doom in the first place. It comes from inside him. It is a thing they have both imposed but are thinking is an essential thing.

  The ‘curse’ will be lifted, so I suppose I did cast a spell on the boat in a way. Because when Logan realises it is he who is cursing the ship he will have to change his views on women (although there my own analogy falls down; Logan and the Unabomber are not synonymous because Ted Kaczynski would never kill whales).

  I am partially onside with the Unabomber on the green issues, but like a lot of primitivists he believes in a Darwinian world of individual strength and combat where women have a subservient role because that is just essential human nature. And he really does not like feminists.

  What he says: feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong and as capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may NOT be as strong and capable as men.

  What Charles Darwin the sexist Victorian naturalist said: the chief distinction in the in
tellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman.

  What is ‘strong’? Why is it ‘good’? They are as superstitious as Logan. They believe in the perpetual motion machine, without seeing that something started it, something gives energy to the machine. What the Unabomber needs is a feminist revision.

  What YOU need is a feminist revision.

  Get off my ship you witch-whore.

  THE RECEDING HORIZON

  GO CAREFULLY BRAVE SPACE PROBE FOR MY DREAMS GO WITH YOU

  I had to steer clear of the northernmost mainland of Canada because it is sparsely populated and so logistics would have been difficult. It made more sense to go south to Saint John’s, North America’s oldest city. It’s on the bigger-sized chunk called Newfoundland just off the bottom tip of Labrador, near where they excavated a Viking settlement that could have been Gudrid’s. Means I have to ferry over to the mainland again across the Gulf of St Lawrence.

  Thank god for the Trans-Canada Highway. I can use it to get all the way across the country to Yukon near the border with Alaska. You can get the whole way using Greyhound buses but they are way too expensive, so I am hoping to be able to do most of it with carpools and just a couple of coaches.

  If I get completely stuck I suppose I will just have to hitchhike. I keep bringing up pages on the computer about women going missing while walking near the highway. A guy got beheaded and eaten on a Greyhound from Winnipeg, though, so none of my options are perfect.

  The whole dynamic and landscape of the journey is to change now completely. Physically, it is all so lush and green and so many trees, such big trees! So weird to not be on rolling water. I think for the first few days the sensation will carry through, like how liquid that has been shaken about carries on sloshing even when its vessel has stilled. And it is also strange to think that now for the first time I am really on my own, because all the way so far I have been with Urla or kind of passed between adult guardians. Now it is just me and the whole of Canada, each leg of the journey a level to complete, bonus points carried over to the next level for novelty and amount of budget spared. And something else as well. Perhaps velocity. Because I have a vast space to cover and not much time or budget to do it in.

  The internet tells me that Voyager 1 has left the solar system after all. It is now 12 billion miles away from Earth. That is 121 astronomical units or 121 times the space between Earth and the Sun. There has not been much fanfare to accompany this, maybe because it does not fit into our dogma of linear time, there not being a point where NASA could sit cheering and giving high-fives. They figured it out by comparing the number of protons around it this year with those around it last year, and from that estimated that it must have crossed the heliopause in around August last year.

  So before I even left England it was already gone. In retrospect we will slot it into the history of our progressive forward march. Like when Columbus accidentally discovered a world that had already been discovered, several times over. Convinced it was India, he called the people he found there Indians, but more embarrassing is that we still preserve that mistake in our speech today. Europe did not hear about it until he got back afterwards and then the spread of the news would have been slow compared to our instantaneous world. It was an event that set into motion the beginnings of Western world domination, so from our perspective I suppose we are bound to distil it. Is this the drive behind time capsules? Are they a way to feign control over time by chronologising, a way of saying I MARK TIME THEREFORE I AM in order to assert existence?

  It is cool that something made in the 1970s is still sending us signals from so far away when you consider what computers looked like in the seventies. On his way back from the New World Columbus threw a bottle overboard, with a message inside addressed to the Queen of Castile detailing what he had found in case he drowned in a storm (I MARKED TIME THEREFORE I WAS). Voyager 1 will carry on sending messages for maybe ten more years until its plutonium runs out, after which it will carry on into interstellar space without us for a billion years before disintegrating.

  In Port aux Basques I found a cheap hostel. I was invited out to drink with two obnoxious American boys I met in my dorm but I passed because they were obnoxious and because I was tired and had arranged already to Skype Larus.

  WOMEN’S BLOOD MYSTERIES

  I had decided to ask for a lift just to Truro so that if I ended up in the car with a weirdo I could get out in plenty of time before it got too late, then if the driver happened to be taking the route on to Moncton I could decide to stay with them or not to. I won’t pretend I was not uncertain as I stood with my thumb out at the side of the road feeling small. When she pulled in for me she did it almost erratically as though on seeing my small uncertain self up close she could not sail past and just leave me there. I am very aware that in this context my youth and gender will be a blessing and could also very easily be a curse. As it happened, Jules was driving back from seeing friends in Sydney to her home in Riverview just outside Moncton.

  Jules: long brown hair speckled with grey and a denim pinafore with a roll-neck sweater on underneath. A big voice and a way of asking questions that makes you think she genuinely wants your life story, as though she collects them. I told her everything about the documentary, about the journey so far. She told me to go ahead and get the camera out if I wanted to ask her anything, she would love to be a part of it.

  She told me about how when she was a bit older than me she had done the entire Trans-Canada Highway from British Columbia to Newfoundland with her boyfriend. She spent some time after that living in a commune near an Indian reservation learning about Native American spirituality under some white New Age spiritual leader reborn as Raven-Wildheart or something. Then when she was hiking back home to BC alone afterwards she took a ride in a van. The guy was jittery and kept licking his lips, which were cracked; she had a bad feeling from the offset but his was the only vehicle she had seen in hours because she was in backcountry. It got dark fast and she had no idea where they were when he pulled over and took his cock out for her to suck.

  She got out of the car but it was prairie land and she had nowhere to run or hide. The flat, indifferent plains lay out before her on every side. She started to walk as fast as stoicism allowed but she heard the gears crunch into reverse and he rolled down the passenger-side window to ask her ‘where ya goin’, little lady?’ as he crawled her. She ran back off the road so that he would have to turn the car around to chase her.

  The moon was behind a cloud. She was out of the beam of the tail-lights, and by the time he had aligned the car to the way she had gone, he could not see her running. And besides, his eyesight was bad, she had seen him squinting at the road signs. She turned and could see the car had stopped from the still of its lights, stiffening to the sight of his figure hunched in the car under the weak glow of the interior light. He took something out of the glove compartment and straightened up, holding it out ahead of him. The torch stammered feebly, he tapped it on his palm and it flickered out completely. She heard faintly the clunk of its loose parts as he kicked it into the dark.

  Jules did not know which way to head. She had tried to aim herself away from the road in a westerly direction, but in the opposite direction to which they had come so as not to stumble onto a road he might still be following. After walking half the night she curled exhausted into a dip in the ground and let the grasses wash around her. She lay awake all night, whispering to the prairie dogs for comfort and listening for the sound of an engine, until it was light enough to make out a farmhouse not too far away. The people inside were sympathetic to her, giving her breakfast and then a ride all the way home, a three-hour drive.

  The pervert had a generic van and for years afterwards when she saw a similar van she would go clammy.

  ‘But all the other amazing journeys I had apart from that one stupid one… I never let it stop me. It’s the kind of thing that just happens sometimes.
You gotta roll with it. Assert your freedom!’

  Yes. Like Sylvia Plath said in her journal, why should women be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of infants, feeder of soul, body, and pride of man? A consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar-room regulars – that is what Sylvia Plath had. To be part of this scene, anonymous, listening and recording. We can’t because we are females, always in danger of assault and battery. Oh, to be free to sleep in an open field! To travel west! To walk freely at night!

  Looking out of the window and thinking, in this part of the world there are so many spaces between people that are just for trees. Conifers tower over the highway, making flashing striped shadows, and eagles are in the sky above them. Grass creeps back into the rubble fringing the asphalt. Lakes start to appear as flashes in gaps between the trees, like looking inside a zoetrope. There are spindly top-heavy trees that stand twice the height of the tips of the conifers. We are entering taiga land now, boreal forest.

  ‘You know if you just drive through this you miss it all?’ Jules said. I told her yes but I have to get all the way to Alaska before half of my money runs out, then head back on the rest. She asked, ‘Why’ve you got to do that, sounds like a lot of pressure?’ I told her I have to do it for the project, and that it is constructive pressure.