The Word for Woman is Wilderness

by Abi Andrews

  ‘Why Alaska? What’s Alaska got that New Brunswick doesn’t?’ ‘Gold fever. The mythology of gold rush country. Frontiers land. Jack London land. I don’t know what it has but that’s what I’m going to find out.’

  She laughed. ‘You going to disappear into the wild, then?’

  I told her about the wilderness plan. She smiled and laughed and grimaced and seemed altogether perplexed about her feelings towards it all. Like with the story she had told me, I could not tell if she was being encouraging or cautionary. I asked her why this was.

  ‘I don’t mean to patronise you, but you’re so young! And I surprise myself. See, you remind me of a younger me, I was around your age when I did similar things and was sure of them while I did them and when I look back on them now even. But you also remind me of my daughter and that makes me worry for you. Of course I worry for her because she is my daughter. Isn’t that messed up? You’ll understand one day when you are a mother. Where is your mother anyways?’

  And from out of nowhere and without hesitation I said,

  ‘She’s dead.’

  Maybe because I thought she would not press any more after that, but in her uninhibited New World way she said softly,

  ‘And what about your dad?’ ‘He’s dead too.’

  I stared right ahead after that but could see her taking snatched glances at me, searching my emotionless face to find the vulnerability there. When she could not find it we sat in silence a while, between us the sombre reverence of the orphan, so young and so blameless and yet wizened beyond years.

  After some time had passed she said, ‘Won’t you get lonely out there?’

  I asked her did she think Henry D. Thoreau was ever lonely. He was not, he was in a state of solitude. And besides, even that state was not ever pure. I will bring the camera with me, and this presumes an audience. Thoreau meditating on solitude by conversing with a diary is a paradox if you think about it. There is never solitude, only degrees of separation. You have to know something to know it is not there.

  No man is an island, not even Ted Kaczynski, the man-island of all man-islands. When Ted Kaczynski was a boy genius at Harvard he was used as a subject by Henry Murray as part of the CIA’s secret illegal MK ULTRA mind control programme. The aim of the programme was to find methods and drugs that could be used in interrogations and torture, to weaken the subject and elicit a confession. They chose geniuses because in theory their minds would be more resilient to intrusion. His code name was ‘Lawful’ and he was seventeen years old. Murray used ‘vehement, sweeping and personally abusive attacks’ against the child Unabomber’s ideas, beliefs and his ego.

  After such an attack on his idea of his self and his place in the world, is it any wonder he subsumed himself into something bigger (nature) and so different from the institution of Harvard (civilisation)? Ted Kaczynski was no island. He was another product of the Cold War.

  After Jules dropped me in the city centre and I walked away feeling her tear-filled eyes on my back I found a bench right away and rang my parents because I felt so bad that I killed them like that. I have been keeping my promise to email weekly, but that was the first time I have heard their voices in fifty-two days. At the start they texted almost daily, like a check-in to make sure I made it to the end of the day; it would come always around 9 p.m. They must have adjusted based on my time zone so that they would always catch me just before I settled down. But they are becoming less and less persistent with it.

  ‘Oh, there she is!’

  ‘I’m sat on a park bench in Moncton in New Brunswick.’

  ‘Where’s that, love?’

  ‘Canada.’

  ‘She told you before she’s in Canada now.’

  ‘Well, I never heard of New Brunswick! What can you see, lovely?’

  ‘Lots of tall buildings, a neat little park, no pigeons.’

  ‘What time is it there?’

  ‘It’s about six p.m.’

  ‘And are you on your own?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, love.’

  ‘What time is it in England?’

  ‘It’s one fifteen.’

  I skirted around the hitchhiking aspect of the journey and told them I had been getting coaches and, yes, my budget was doing all right, it is pretty cheap out here actually. We chatted for a while about things at home, how one of the neighbours had got a new dog that seemed to disagree with our own dog, how the weather had been especially hot for May and how the house was empty without me. And then there was a long pause with lots of little gasps that meant she was crying.

  ‘Don’t go getting all upset, she’s fine. Listen! She sounds so happy! Aren’t you happy, Erin?’

  ‘Yes, very happy.’

  ‘You see, she’s doing just fine.’

  I went to wrap it up then because I was about to start crying too and if she heard me cry, well, that would just be it, she would set in with her mantra that I had made a terrible and malady-driven mistake. But then she said in a very small voice, ‘Yes, I know she’s doing just fine, of course she is,’ and that did me in. I waited until we were off the phone and then I sat and wept quietly alone on that park bench in Moncton, New Brunswick, for a full minute until I had exorcised those cumbersome feelings from me and I got up to find a hostel for the night.

  THE POLLINATOR HEALTH TASK FORCE

  QUEBEC CITY: This whole couch-surfing thing is really novel. All Lucie gets out of it is someone to show her city to, and I suppose a little cultural exchange. Seems to run on a backpacker mentality that sees meeting new people and sharing as the ultimate human rewards. I keep thinking of it like outside your customary social sphere you do not have any prerequisites and can be yourself more than you are yourself at home, become a really exaggerated version of yourself or whatever self you choose to accentuate for a short while.

  It feels so natural that the strangest thing about it is that there will be a point in just a few days when it is all undone and I am a stranger to these people again. That we will stop existing to each other apart from in rare and passing thoughts.

  She and all the friends I met identify as ‘Pure Laine’; of pure French descent. We did not stop at the Citadelle, the massively serene City Hall or any of the other strikingly majestic/oppressive buildings of the British colonial era, but she lingered at anything built before the British took Quebec in the Seven Years’ War: the Notre-Dame de Quebec, the cobbled architecture of the Haute-Ville and the Basse-Ville of the Old Town. The ramparts are the only fortified city walls north of Mexico. It is like the architecture itself is vying for prominence, a physical manifestation of historical egos. But a thought kept bugging me: it forgets that the sparring ground was appropriated and the fighting was imperial on both sides.

  Lucie told the story as if it began with France and that is how the exhibition at the Musée de la Civilisation told it too, which I suppose it did in terms of written histories we can understand.

  Cultures indigenous to the Americas had no written history before Europeans came and Latinised (or in some nicer cases invented a new syllabic alphabet for) their speech. Writing is the time-capsulation of language, pinning it so it can’t float away on the wind. (An airborne language is the kind of which Ted Kaczynski would approve.) Their history is oral, is ‘prehistory’. So in a way it is as though they did not exist.

  Museums are time capsules. Sometimes they are time capsules of the other but by what taxonomies do they become ‘of the other’? The Golden Records time-capsulised different cultures and species under the umbrella of ‘life on earth’. It could be that the relics of past civilisations that we sanctimoniously preserve and curate were meant for the future anyway. Maybe this is the most basic human impulse. (I mark time therefore I am, I marked time remember me, this is how I marked my time.)

  At the time-capsule museum in Oglethorpe University, Atlanta, Georgia, there is an underground chamber sealed in 1940 by the founder of the university, the ‘father of the modern time capsule’, Thornwel
l Jacobs. It is called the Crypt of Civilisation. It contains all the great literature, voice recordings of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Roosevelt, Popeye, objects like a toaster and a typewriter, scientific instruments, the contents of a woman’s purse, a black doll. By ‘our civilisation’ they meant ‘the United States and the world at large during the first half of the twentieth century’, according to the inscription on the door. Next to this is a ‘language integrator’ based on the Rosetta Stone, for teaching a subset of English called ‘basic English’ in case it is not spoken any more (a gesture towards solving the Forever Problem).

  This is taxonomy of sorts; an order to say this culture is different from that culture. They are because I have known them. A discovered animal exists but an undiscovered one does not. Divided they can be ranked. And if not denying the existence of native cultures we are at least able to say, they are behind us, primitive, not-quite-there-yet like animals.

  It bothered Thornwell Jacobs that there was so little preserved of ancient cultures. He wanted to make future archaeologists’ jobs easy for them. He thought of it in 1936, and figured that date to be the halfway point to the future, 6,177 years after the Egyptian calendar had been established at ‘the beginning of history’ in 4241 BC. So he set the date for the crypt to be opened at AD 8113. And he based the idea of the crypt on the 1920s openings of Egyptian pyramids and tombs. (But still he was the father?)

  The crypt is an old underground swimming pool built in the bedrock underneath one of the university buildings. Buried in the bedrock underneath Eurajoki in Finland is the world’s only deep geological depository for nuclear waste. It is called Onkalo, which means cave. There are tunnels excavated from the bedrock. The tunnels will be filled with nuclear waste and sealed with concrete. Then the sealed tunnels will be marked with warning signs, or maybe they will not be marked at all; Finland has not decided yet. Because surely to mark them with symbols that will die is only to draw attention to them. And if a future civilisation digs up the Crypt of Civilisation then they might expect Onkalo to contain similar archaeological delights.

  At the Musée de la Civilisation there was an exhibition on the very first French settlement in Canada, which had been excavated in 2005. The settlement burnt down but they have not figured out whether the scorch marks told of accident or arson. The exhibition does not speculate much about the arsonists. I got so caught up in Lucie’s turbulent history that I forgot that it erased thousands of years of culture, indigenous Canadians killed or cultivated or penned up by Europeans as if they were livestock or an unfortunate feature of the landscape.

  AND LIVE ALONE IN THE BEE-LOUD GLADE

  Sat in a diner eating on my own, waiting for the coach to Ottawa. I am thinking about how the small autonomy of just being alone in public for a woman is also a right that needs to be claimed and kept on being claimed until it is a given. In order to do away with the anxiety that is shaping you from outside, like the deer in the glade that twitches its ears as it grazes, looking up and behind itself always in anticipation of predatory eyes. Women can’t eat alone unless we claim it, can’t go to a bar and sit alone, be in solitude in social places, as though always the female body is a lonely body, an invitation.

  But tonight I sit in a diner on my own and nobody has looked at me. There are not many people in here, granted, but nobody has questioned or tested my being there with their looks. The waitress brought me a complimentary basket of bread and a jug of water without me asking, and smiled, as if to say, you are welcome here, this table is your own.

  Growing out of the girl and into the woman sitting in cafés alone, libraries alone, anywhere alone, really, without feeling the itch of the out-of-place, displaced, mistaken. With the self-assuredness of the intentionally-put-in-place. I am starting to feel that now. A body that says, before they think to ask, no thank you, I am where I intend to be.

  IS THERE WATER ON MARS CUS WE’RE THIRSTY

  I have showered and put my least dirty clothes on, and looked at my reflection properly for the first time in weeks. I looked different, perhaps just dirty or tanned, or perhaps I have forgotten myself a little.

  Now that I am not on the ice sheet or the ocean or moving in a car it is like I am back in real life and that before was unreality. It feels uncomfortable. Like the velocity is gone and now I am at standstill. I feel restless.

  I have been on the move now for two months so I need to get to Alaska ASAP but I am about on target. So far I have spent about £470, just under a third of my original budget. I also have an extra £200 I won in a travel-writing competition for a thing I wrote about sledging in Greenland, so I am doing all right, but it still makes sense to stop and work while I am in the more populous part of the country and work is theoretically easier to come by, before I move back up north and west. I found a job in a hostel in Ottawa city on a helpshare website so I will stay put for a few weeks and come up for some air.

  A girl called Jackie who is hitchhiking to the west coast of America, following in the steps of serial narcissist-road-trip-writer Jack Kerouac, keeps a blog I have been following closely. She has a big following, and some of them are other girls doing similar things, an online-feminist-adventure-blog-vanguard. It is exciting to feel like I am a part of something bigger. I reckon feminism would have worked a lot faster if Annie Peck could have connected with all the other unnamed women who were taking on man-roles, mountaineering and shit, and realised she was not as remarkable as her male counterparts said she was. I think she would have liked that. What Annie Peck was missing was the internet.

  Benny runs the hostel. He takes on backpackers because they attract other backpackers and also work for a pittance because they mostly don’t have work visas. I cover shifts on the bar, reception, kitchen, wherever there is work, for about £5 per hour. On top of this I get my own single room, food and drink. I have to work eight-hour shifts every day so that is £200 per week with a couple of days off. If I keep it up for two weeks I can make a little bit of money to tide me over.

  Everyone who works at Benny’s is under thirty and the hostel is full with travellers. You’d almost call it a melting pot if it weren’t so homogeneous. Maybe let us say it is a bunch of at-least-onetime-Europeans but some of them speak differently.

  An Ottawan guy, a friend of Benny’s called Tom, has stayed at the bar talking to me every night I have been here. Tom is quite attractive, I would say. He has deep-set eyes that bore in a bit in a sexy way when I am talking. So far, though, even though he has had opportunity to try it, he has not suggested coming back to my room. I am glad about this. I have a few weeks and it is more fun to be stretching it out, but also should it be an ill-suited pairing then I have less time left to dwell in the regret of it.

  I did do a few interviews with people around the hostel. I got onto this topic that everyone seems to bring up without really knowing that they are. Lots of the interviews come back to the same elusive thing and this is coming from people from all sorts of nationalities. It makes you think that the world is really a very small place after all, if everyone can be saying the same thing that is not really saying anything, without knowing it. It has something to do with what freedom feels like, and how it is always just ahead of you, a bright little light like an orb, but if you run hard enough at times and in places like this, you catch it up and you can float it in your hands.

  Otherwise I suppose everything documentary-wise is on the back burner because I am keeping the laptop in a safe and there is hardly ever time to get it out. It is making me agitated; sometimes instead of sleeping I am thinking of all the things that are waiting to be captured. Like gathering butterflies, and butterflies are really slow and plentiful so I won’t run out or anything, but I might miss a good one while I am not looking. And maybe there is someone else out there butterfly-gathering, gathering them quicker and better.

  It makes me empathise with the anxiety that must have been felt on both sides during the space race. The not knowing where the Russians were at, and oh my go
d, what if they get there first, what if tomorrow even they announce it, we made it here, the moon is ours. This panic drove them, it rushed them into cutting corners they should not have. Russia had many people die in the process. A fire burned up over one hundred spectators in a launch-pad accident. This was kept classified until the nineties. But what else do we not know? Maybe Yuri Gagarin was not the first cosmonaut. Two Italian brothers with a home-made radio claimed they were picking up transmissions from other, abandoned cosmonauts. They thought maybe Yuri Gagarin was just the first to return alive.

  But besides what we don’t know, we do know perhaps the most heart-breaking best-friend-sacrifice story in history. When Yuri Gagarin inspected Soyuz 1 he found 203 structural problems and he urged his superiors to delay the mission but they would not. Scheduled to fly the mission was his best friend, co-pilot Vladimir Komarov, and Vladimir Komarov would not back out of this mission he knew to be a suicide mission because his back-up was Yuri Gagarin. On the day of the launch Yuri Gagarin tried to halt the mission, demanding that he go in Komarov’s place. Of all the design flaws Komarov overcame it was the very last hurdle that got him. After surviving the multiple perils of space he died as he hit the ground in Russia when his parachute did not unfurl.

  And then even where they pulled it off, if you look at the minute details they are embarrassingly botched. Like when cosmonaut Alexey Leonov became the first human being to space-walk, he nearly could not get back inside because his spacesuit was badly designed and it inflated. He went up in a spaceship made for only one person, with co-pilot Pavel Belyayev. When they had to calculate re-entry it was so cramped in their shuttle that they could not go through the motions in time and their orbital module did not disconnect from their landing module when it should have and they ended up landing 386 kilometres from where they intended in a forest on a mountain in the taiga, where they had to spend two days fending off bears and wolves frenzied in mating season before help arrived on skis.