The Word for Woman is Wilderness

by Abi Andrews

  I have test-walked to the lower slopes to judge how long it should take. North-west for around five miles the forest stays dense until reaching the slopes of the mountains when it starts to thin. I walked up high enough to see way out over the forest, to where it mottled out on to the tundra, and the braided river which glinted back the blue-silver sky, spread across the sediment like veins of mercury. On the mountainside above, the trees stopped and scree wound like lightning scars through the smoky green and purple skirting. Life waned up the mountainside and the peak was white and dead and here the crows had their kingdom.

  Lower down where the plants clung still, bleached shapes poised spectral, luminous in the glare from the white sun. There were Dall sheep; they looked happy on the mountain and elegantly strange. I walked west across the ridge below the sheep until the afternoon, watching the colours change as the cloud ran its textures under the sun like a shadow puppet.

  So I have rationed everything exactly and I have pared my rucksack down to the barest essentials so that there is not even a spare tampon of extra weight. I have just enough food to summit over the two days or two sleeps before coming back down, depending on hunger, but right now I have no appetite whatsoever so perhaps I will stay longer. I have sticks and a piece of tarp and some cable ties with which to construct some kind of shelter. If the rain comes again it will be miserable but there is nothing to be done about that. But please, spirit of the mountain, please don’t let it rain.

  THE ABSTRACT WILD

  We do not use mountains as metaphors for challenges for no good reason. It serves me right for being stupidly under-prepared for this and life and everything. Halfway through the day I left off wading through the snaring purple carpet of alpine tundra vegetation to hit scree and from then on I was stuck in a laborious cycle of climbing tentatively twenty metres or so only to slip back ten. I felt like Sisyphus without a boulder or the lustful in Dante’s inferno, doomed to swirl around in a stormy circle for eternity. Maybe if I kept on I would come across Damon’s soul too, both of us so lustful and hungry for something that we were doomed to keep after it for ever on this scree-skelter. That he just fell and died on his way to the top; that ironically he did not even get to make his one statement because the universe made it for him. But then that could have been his perfect death; willingly dead but not by his own hand, which means he did not have to feel bad about being selfish and breaking his mother’s heart (although it would still be broken because she would not know any better, I suppose).

  Each slip on scree I would fall on my knees shaking and weak and too terrified to move in case I slid further. Where I had to sit to get everything back under control I would sit facing upwards, not really looking around me because I was looking at the ground to centre myself and so as not to trip up, and not wanting to look at everything below me until I was at the very top. I wanted this to be a grand revealing, velvet curtains drawn until the finale and for the finale to be one of those moments in life that needs a soundtrack with a loud and euphoric chorus followed by a quiet and melancholic bridge in a new key.

  I kept at this for hours, slipping and crying and crawling and just lying where the scree left me on my side, gasping and sweating, sometimes laughing at how stupid and futile a figure I had made myself in each moment and in general, ready to give up only to get a second wind and an angry burst that would propel me upwards like a turbo boost on Mario Kart.

  And then I got into a rhythm with it, perfecting the amount of pressure to put into each footstep to stop from upsetting the loose rocks. And once I had this it got easier again. I had gashed my knees up terribly and I had cuts all over my hands that smarted when I moved my fingers or when the salt from my own sweat got into them and they were full of grit but they felt good. Like the pain and difficulty made it more worth it. Like wanting to come out of the wreckage with a visible wound, wanting an impact with some tangible effect. Something to show for it all.

  I came across some of the mountain sheep and they sprang off away from me barely dislodging a pebble, then turned to look back as if to say you, trunk-legged creature, are not made for here, before loping on. They really are ridiculous animals to look at until you realise that being wrapped in cotton wool makes falling on a mountain like falling over in a spacesuit in zero gravity; inconsequential. That rather than clouds with legs they are ingenious inventions of nature.

  The wind would come very suddenly and with such force that it could knock me off balance so I found myself bracing for this, flinching for it like a bad puppy to a raised hand. It would scream like a Tolkien wraith when it came and rattle me so that the best I could do was to get close to the ground and stay down. One time doing this I came face to face with a delicate yellow flower struggling to grow isolated and friendless and I cried a little for it all alone on the crag and no way of knowing how by its loneliness it was diminished.

  I kept on going with the snowline as my carrot until I let myself stop around one hundred metres below on a little forgiving plateau. As soon as I got to the mental place of ‘I will stop here’ my legs gave way and my knees were further damaged but I did not even feel it because the relief of a resting point was so great and it felt so good to be horizontal with the promise of a long interlude.

  After a little nap I drank deeply from my water, leaving just enough to see me over in the morning, before I got to the snowline and could refill from melting the snow. Then I went about making my tent, forcing the sticks into the ground with difficulty and pegging the tarp on two sides so that it made a humble pentahedron, open at both ends. I tried to angle it so that the wind went over and not through it, but this made the sides whip back and forth.

  I must have been walking for over ten hours. The light dimmed after what felt like not much time, just enough time for me to sit about recuperating and to warm up my meagre dinner on the propane. It was bitterly cold once the sun had dipped, even though it did not ever disappear completely. There was still the vague idea of sunshine, the sun hovering somewhere near by, but the wind undermined it ruthlessly.

  I tried to sleep but the wind blew just so and rattled the tarp, which rattled the pebbles in a motion like a Mexican wave all around the perimeter, and this made it sound as though there was someone or something scuttling around outside, making circles around me. I would poke my head out and be reassured, then it would happen again a little later and I would think come on now, Erin, we have been through this numerous times, then, no, there really does sound like there is something, best go check, oh, no, all clear, okay, cool, time to sleep, but what was that? That wailing? Is it Damon, has he come for me? Like this so many times that I gave up and just went outside to sit sentry for myself and put the propane back on even though I needed it for cooking tomorrow because I was just so cold even with the ski jacket and there was not a scrap of wood to be found for a campfire.

  But there I was alone and enduring and from outside my own head to any observer of course it would seem like I could do this as well as any man. I was ticking all the boxes and besides, Jack London’s men all had dogs and a dog is an invaluable asset in that scenario.

  A dog like Buck, who gleams with the magnificence that inspired a cult to bask in him. It is the ghost of Buck that remains in Big Mountain gold country – Alaska, the Yukon, the wilds of North America. But anywhere can have its own Big Mountain Country. The philosophy of the cult can be transplanted onto any place and translated into any language. Russians have their own breed of Mountain Men from the days they tried to colonise Alaska. They called them promyshlenniki.

  Buck sits by my side exuding pride and vitality and power and kingliness because he knows he is king of the dogs. But he is a dog and a dog is not a person. Jack London never meant to say that men should act like dogs, at least not so literally.

  He must master or be mastered; while to show mercy was a weakness. Mercy did not exist in the primordial life. It was misunderstood for fear, and such misunderstandings made for death. Kill or be killed, eat or be
eaten, was the law; and this mandate, down out of the depths of Time, he obeyed.

  Okay, this primordial thing is in us all. But the call that came from the wild was specifically addressed to you, a dog. Dogs can regress back into the wild because they are just tame wolves. Big dogs are anyway. Specifically wolfy-looking dogs. You were a dog running round catching and killing and living by tenacity. There is no Neolithic man running round howling in the woods. Jack London only spent one bloody winter in the Klondike! And the call that brought him there was a siren song; it was a promise of gold, and a little house in the big woods on the banks of Plum Creek by the shores of a silver lake on the prairie.

  To be a MAN was to write MAN in large capitals on my heart. I played what I conceived to be a MAN’S game, this future was interminable. I could see myself only raging through life without end like one of Nietzsche’s blond beasts, lustfully roving and conquering by sheer superiority and strength.

  Jack London wrote Call of the Wild when he was young and healthy and full of his own electricity. It is easy to be an individualist when you are a winner and you are too caught up in glory to think about how the losers fare, or how your conquest undoes the very thing that drew you out there.

  There is not enough bounty for everyone to claim a piece, so for Big Mountain to keep on working it had to be understood that Man has no obligation to the happiness of anyone but himself. That to have the right to pursue happiness was to be free, even if free was only to be forever in pursuit.

  This is what the Mountain Man was born from. A healthy white man’s ideal. What Ted Kaczynski does not acknowledge or maybe realise is that he is his own worst enemy; it is this rampant freedom to pursue which propagates the Machine. It is as though Ayn Rand wrote both their bibles.

  Jack London was remembered only as a writer of macho survival stories for boys. A fascist. It was just that one story! What about the story he wrote about the woman who gets Thoreau? The voice he gave to class struggles? So maybe you were his young ego but you were not his only one.

  He was in a bad place, you know that. His father had disowned him a second time. He quit Berkeley and ran to the Klondike because he was forced to be an individualist. But he realised something in the wild. He realised in its contrast how lacking he was. It is different for you, Buck, because you are a dog. They just cling to you, Buck, Stan and all these boys. They want a strict moral code. Something to believe in. Primordial truth. Sad, unhappy, suggestible people reading the works of sad, unhappy writers and taking their words as gospel.

  They cannot take his oeuvre for its transgressions, his corrupted values; Wolf House, all those bedrooms. They want a noble truth, purity from their gods, and so they choose to hear you. You outlive him as a negative imprint, a Voyager he later regretted sending.

  But you are just a dog. An imaginary dog at that. All your masculinity, it is a literary embellishment. Most wolf packs are headed by a male and a female breeding pair, who rule together in equality.

  The dog is unnervingly blank. As though he feels indifference towards his creator now that he has his own life outside of him. Then the Call sounds from up out of the belly of the forest and Buck pricks up his ears to it. He rises and lopes to the limit of my night vision, turning with a look of contemptuous pity. He pads into the night to answer the Call and he will keep on answering as long as the Call sounds or until the paradigm shifts, because he is not quite immortal and it is this that will end his reign.

  And after all, only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf. Aldo Leopold said that. But man says I am civilised, and the rest is woman and wilderness. So what is woman? Is she where the symbols aren’t? Woman is wilderness, if she is man’s unwordable other. Woman is closer to the mountain and the wolf than man even if only because he put her there. Therefore, woman can listen better than man, if not as well as the mountain, to the real howl of the wolf.

  MY MOUNTAIN MY MOON

  WHATEVER PARTICLE OF THAT SPIRIT IS IN ME

  So I hardly slept and I was exhausted but this felt right, to struggle the last part as a disciple of asceticism after Thoreau’s own heart, like a monk head-butting the ground to nirvana. Like how they say that if something was easy it would not be a challenge and if something is not a challenge then it is not meaningful; so make every day a struggle and lo! you will feel the richer for it, like all those who struggle in poverty are really the richest and most meaningful people in the world, god smiles down on their suffering and they feel the radiance of his smile on their sunburnt backs.

  I kept on thinking I was about to summit when looking up I would see the ground stop and sky behind it, but each time I got there I would be faced with another slope to climb. I learned not to be tricked in this way so that eventually when I reached the genuine last slope I was dubious, like yeah, right, that old hat, so that when I did clamber over and see the final point, stood alone and jaunty with an actual landscape beneath it, not just another mosaic of rocks, I felt like I had been hit in the stomach with a football.

  I said no no don’t look yet not just yet get to the very top first so that you can drink it all in savour every last drop of it. So I took my rucksack off to make things easier and I kept my eyes down until I could not find a higher place to be. I settled down into my crossed legs and let myself look the whole place over and squealed like a proud eagle.

  It was stupidly windy so that my hair unwrapped itself from my hairband and made little Medusa-snakes of itself, licking me in the eyeballs. I scraped it back, making an Alice band of my hands and using them as a sun visor also. The sun was almost unbearable so high up and with no cloud cover, but it made my vision heavenly bright and ecstatic. The clouds were thin and wispy and some stalked underneath me, motionless but transitory; still, ephemeral jellyfish taken by the current.

  I felt giddy from the sheer euphoria of it all and also from vertigo at being so high and the world so tiny. I could see everything, my whole map over for what it really is. I mean, I could not see the cabin per se but I could see its vicinity, the place where the trees wound between me and it. But I could see my tower or I fancied I could just about, a spire amongst the deep green spruce of the taiga, and the tundra to the right of it spilling on, multi-faceted and textured and connoting so many things at once; fat salmons, a clutch of speckled blue eggs, the ripe and gravid feeling of harvest-time and the hazy nostalgia that distance gives to space as time does to memory.

  There is so much colour, even on the bare mountains so much colour. They are rust and lilac and ochre and pink, all hues of deep contrast, the bright sun bits too bright to look at almost and the shadows so deep they look dimensional like mouths to deep caves. Each piece of contrasting colour is like its own object, can be taken alone like pieces of a paint-by-numbers, but take a step back and they come together and make something breathtakingly complete. If I am right in my bearings then they call these the Polychrome Mountains.

  My Olympus, my castle in the sky, and down below my queendom all poured out. I feel good and full, brimming, like a fountain all full up and pouring over, like melting. And if Damon did come up here it is hard to imagine how he could climb back down and go through with it, renounce all this beauty. I feel accomplished. It is the feeling that I did it, all of this; they have not succeeded in keeping it from me.

  But then, directly after, following it through the door like a fast black cat, the feeling of did what exactly?

  A sudden pang of something when I realise I can see the road, far away but definite, barely visible yet I can feel it like an animal does a scent trail, an invisible ribbon through its terrain. A mixture of things, first like being Simba in The Lion King when Mufasa tells him everything that the light touches and beyond is the shadowy place, the road my perimeter of light. But also a vague kind of yearning, a sharp little tug.

  The light starts to dim and the mountains’ shadow gets longer. He could not very well have stayed up here for ever, not alive anyway. So perhaps for
someone in his state of mind it would be perfectly logical for this place to be the end of the story. After going to the moon some of the moonwalkers could not come to terms with the feeling of its climax, all of life after dulled in its light, made ugly under the scrutiny of this spotlight that would not leave them.

  As the sun moves from off the peak the wind picks up, stinging and pulling at the skin of my face and arms, sore with sunburn. My lips are chapped and hard and my nose raw to touch. I take the ski jacket from around my waist and curl into it. I am suddenly and crushingly tired, with sunstroke maybe, and it becomes perfectly sensible to just stay put here, just curl up to sleep on myself, a tired eagle on its lonely scarp, its nose tucked under its own wing.

  A DECLARATION FOR THE RIGHT OF CETACEANS

  Damon and the Mountain Men, like old scientists, were searching for an absolute and true reality. They went about it by dissection, peeling it back in search of its kernel of truth, a foundation to build up from. The Greeks saw it in the Euclidean geometry they found recurring in nature. From the solid geometry of three dimensions Newton constructed a constant description of the world in his classical mechanics. The fourth dimension was uniform time, which flowed smoothly. Matter was full: indestructible particles moving through space, the void. From these separate unquestioned planes knowledge could be built deductively and a uniform map of matter and life could be built.

  But then along came Einstein and said we must forget the Lapse of Time. He said Newton’s planes do not work on Newton’s planes, you can draw a square but space is really like a balloon not a flat plane, and you can’t draw a perfect square on a balloon.

  It is considered very old and pagan yet new and post-Enlightenment to think of ourselves as not masters or stewards but members of the universe. We forgot this in the first place because Descartes would cut open dogs and when they would scream he would say ignore the screams, they are merely the creakings of a machine, and we ignored them.