The Word for Woman is Wilderness

by Abi Andrews

  The concept of nuclear deterrent is your castle cannot go on existing after ours is gone. Nuclear is the power to wipe out a civilisation (including a future one), to blow up its centre, destroy its institutions, its means of preservation, its universities and its libraries, like Kaczynski wanted rid of. The threat is against our ideologies. In this way the colonisation of space and the veneer of ‘survival of the species’ mask the real agenda, ‘survival of the nation’. It is the threat of inexistence and the retaliation of blowing away the web of everything of the other (but now we know that to do so is to destroy small parts of ourselves too).

  I used to think it very strange that the Nepalis did not try to climb all the way to the top of Everest, even though they obviously had the skill to climb because Tenzing Norgay must have been a skilled mountaineer before Edmund Hillary showed up, and so must lots of other Sherpas. But when they looked up at Everest in awe they did not think ‘I am going to conquer that mountain’, they thought, ‘ah, Chomolungma, goddess mother of the world’, and respected it and felt awe for it but no inclination to go about debasing it. Like presuming that there can’t be intelligent life on other planets or they would have made themselves known to us by now. Maybe they are already observing us, but they do not feel any drive to make themselves known to us.

  Edmund Hillary the mountaineer climbed Everest because it was there. Astronaut Gene Cernan of Apollos 10 and 17, when asked why he thought we went to the moon, said because it’s there. When Tenzing Norgay the Sherpa got to the top of Everest he got on his knees, buried some biscuits in offering and prayed to the goddess of the mountain for disturbing her. We should have gone to the moon like Tenzing Norgay.

  Maybe this really is the point in the age where everything changes, a rewriting of myths, a sort of coming-of-age in the human narrative. Remember that everyone mocked Copernicus at first when he said that maybe Earth did not sit at the centre of the universe, hey, guys, maybe it does not all revolve around us. Which is what Lovelock and Margulis were saying too.

  These ideas do not instantaneously propagate. They resonate only once a situation occurs that prompts their germination. They are little seeds we carry with us through life and which remain inert until the perfect conditions arise.

  All these thoughts kept me busy for the hours and hours that I walked back. I had to stop to rest up and take off my shoes and let my blisters fill up so I could pop them. I fell asleep under a tree with my shoes off and slumped against it.

  STRANGE MATTERS DARK MATTERS

  It is peaceful, with the forest humming from everything busily making the most of the time before the rains come again. The sky is milky with a benevolent cloud, and the eagles are capital-ising on the vantage before they can’t see again. They hang under the cloud like mobiles.

  I have spent an inordinate amount of time just looking. Standing at the open windows of the tower and looking out at all the stuff just gathered beneath me for contemplation. You can’t see a lot from the fire tower and a lot can’t see you, the trees grown tall around through its years of disuse. Before you might have seen it from all over. Only from the mountain could you see everything.

  But what I can see is still a lot. I can see the ocean of trees and I can see on and on to its edge. Boreal forest, the world’s lungs. Sometimes in the morning a mist hangs over like smudged chalk and it strikes you vividly that this is it breathing. Like the vapour you exhale on a cold day but a whole atmosphere respired. I drink it in deeply through my nostrils, all the newest oxygen all for me. I can see the river winding through to meet the tundra, or just about, I see it glinting in slithers. Over the millennia of that river’s course it will have snaked side to side, the trees clambering up or falling with the soil torn from under their feet. And the trees growing, dying, falling, rotting, each to feed another in its place.

  And inside the forest the light spills green through the leaves as if through coloured film so that the light is green on my arms and on my face. The smell of spruce, and the spruce needles making the floor spongy like a play mat, dry and comfortable so that you can lie down on it to breathe it all in stronger.

  I just listen. Can you hear the sound of the forest breathing? Underneath the ground is the forest’s brain. Can you hear it thinking, ticking away? Tiny threads of mycelium one cell thick branch out like neurons and link up to form a living network underneath the forest, miles long. The mycelium connects to trees’ roots, giving them a larger surface area and a higher absorption of nutrients and minerals, then breaks down with enzymes it excretes and reabsorbs from the soil, and in return the trees give it metabolised carbohydrates, the fruits of photosynthesis.

  The tendrils of the mycelium are synapses and through them information travels. The mycelium is thinking and what it is thinking about is the health of the life around it. It is conscious and responsive to changes in its environment. It is planning for the long-term health of its environment.

  Mycelium has inherited Earth several times over. It always surges after mass extinctions because it can metabolise and recycle the debris. It makes life-sustaining soil out of this debris, and so lays the ground for other life to follow, initiating the ecosystems that will diversify its food chain. Is it self-interested or is it just lonely? You can’t really say. Loneliness is a kind of self-interest anyway.

  Mycelium is a half-being, an in-between shape-shifter. It looks like a plant but it breathes out carbon dioxide. It comes from the kingdom Eukarya, from which we branched hundreds of millions of years ago. Mycelia are more animal than plant really. But they bridge the kingdoms like diplomatic interpreters. They translate between organisms and their environments.

  And mycelium is a shaman, a seer into the spirit world, or into death. It turns the inorganic into organic, can dismantle chains that otherwise tangle, smoothing the mess that might upset its system by processing pollutants and radiation. There are no clear polarities for mycelium, no life or death, no organic or non-organic, but inextricable interconnectedness. It is the dark matter of the organic world.

  Everything we know and can see is called baryonic matter and this is made up of the atom. Dark matter does not emit or absorb light but we have to assume it exists until the Large Hadron Collider tells us so for sure because there is something that we can’t see exerting gravity on baryonic matter. We can’t ever see it, this strange dark thing, but computer simulations of what it might look like if visible show it as a web that interweaves with baryonic matter like a connective tissue between the infinite everything. Literally everything in this tangled web like sliding spaghetti. I am a strand being pulled through other strands of spaghetti, only the spaghetti is not a strand, it is an infinitely long tangle, a snake swallowing itself. The very fabric of being denies solitude!

  The web-like pattern of dark matter is an archetype found anywhere information is organised. It is the same shape you see in diagrams of mycelium, neurons, of the internet and the universe. So is mycelium a kind of brain and is the universe conscious? All of the above are governed by the laws of physics, and this pattern recurs simply because it is the optimum way to organise and share information.

  Mushrooms are the fruits of the network under the forest; the mycelium is the root system to colonies of mushrooms. Mushrooms at Fukushima are growing out of the contaminated forest. They are hyper-accumulating the radioactive waste out of the soil. They can be picked, burned, and the ash can be put into glass. And then the radiation is only as difficult to dispose of as all the other nuclear waste we have bottled up. Perhaps the universe wants to help us to help ourselves. Perhaps it leaves us clues. The particular shape of the cloud from a nuclear blast is a dome on a column. A mushroom.

  And so Sylvia Plath was being especially clever when she chose mushrooms as her vehicle for inheriting the earth. Mushrooms offer the chance of renewal. And the wilderness can always be renewed if we only stop sending Voyagers into it. The wilderness can be given back to itself. New Zealand has given the legal status of personhood to Te U
rewera National Park and the Whanganui river and its tributaries, which means they now have all of the rights and autonomy that a person does and cannot be exploited and are not owned.

  As I lie on the forest floor, an ant or some small fast thing runs across my face and onto my lip and it tickles but I do not want to brush it off in case it gets crushed. I let it carry on making a planet of my face, running all directions, acknowledging its contours and using the information to paint itself a picture of my terrain, like the rover on Mars, like me here in Denali.

  HOW TO SAY GOODBYE

  SOLASTALGIA

  So really why am I out here and what am I looking for? I am looking for something that is lost and kept from me but I do not quite know what it is. When I find it I know it will be broken and that I need to fix it but I don’t know how to do that either. What I want right now is to be able to go back in time and talk to a younger lost me and tell her some things that I have found out.

  You are sixteen years old and you are confused and lost and numb. You do not know your body or yourself and you mediate them through a little pill that you think is doing you good, reshaping you to fit in a world that will not otherwise accommodate you. You are told at the same time that it is yours now finally; you are lucky to be a modern woman. But it feels otherwise.

  How do you feel about the place you call home? Crumbled industrial spaces, shiny new mega-stores, rivers yellow at the lips like disease with Coke-can flotsam, no space to be alone so that you can even know what it is to be together. You feel about it like you feel about your body, as though forces from outside are keeping you apart from it. You are helpless to possess it and you don’t understand that others have no right to. What is this homesickness?

  Every time you switch on the news you are overwhelmed by the weight of the bad in the world. You cry because you feel so helpless about it. A whole aboriginal community is put on antidepressants because they are suffering from PTSD. They are suffering from PTSD because there was an oil spill off the coast of British Columbia and the oil washed up and it killed everything that was beautiful in their home. You think this is the saddest thing in the world. How big is home? How atomised? How atomised are you?

  It makes sense that you are a little psychotic and sad. You have got raging hormones and fake ones too and you are living in a shattered world. If your body is not yours to put in the wilderness, then without choice you can only ever feel lonely; unhomely; displaced. And you have been trained, socialised into mega-empathy like a dolphin is. That is not to say you feel it more because you are closer to it by virtue of some innate characteristic. But you feel it a little when a whole forest on the other side of the world is felled, or when another animal becomes extinct, because you see a shard of your lost self in it.

  To know yourself you need to know what you are not the same as, but there are shards of you everywhere. According to Greenlandic Inuits, you have many souls. As many as seven. The souls are tiny people scattered through your body. The tiny people are shards of bigger people that can be found in pieces, in places outside of you.

  You are made up of webs of relation which are always in the process of reconfiguration, but it is when you tear away too quickly and too much that you uproot, like a plant can be transplanted if you are gentle and slow but if you rip it up and put it in a place that is hostile, it withers. Like the taking away of identity cards or the sticking of a little aboriginal girl into foster care or the extinction of animals; it is then that there is homesickness and there are fewer shards of a lost self to be found.

  Likewise as part of the web you can feel its reverberations, and you can feel how everything you do too warps the fabric in some small way. You have to be aware of these reverberations. You have to be aware of the placement of your body, your specific viewpoint, your Observer Effect. To begin healing is to realise this and to make amends and to remember.

  Sam said you should not just go off in search of something better for yourself. He said water protectors are living in a camp at Standing Rock where they want to stop an oil pipe being built through sacred land. And they must feel the most hopeless feeling of the panic of loss, but they will not just take themselves off alone somewhere quieter to be in peace and converse with their ego. They will stay and try to resist what is a corruption to the very core of their being, even if their resistance can only end in failure. Sam, I am so sorry I did not see it.

  And how it must have seemed to him, my project of staking a claim to solitude and autonomy, trying to emulate the Mountain Men while at the same time there are other women being violently reminded of their lack of even more. It is all a game to you, he must have thought. I saw his resentment as a man-shackle, a reminder of myself as a dragged-around woman, and thought I was casting this off by ignoring him. I have been emulating and my whole journey has been compliance. I can Buck as well as any man, but now I understand it better, why would I want to be like them, the Mountain Men?

  So this morning I have to say goodbye to the tower and the ghosts of P Harris and Johnston Wills and the wolves, leaving the spider to its flies, taking the little wooden boat from the side of the ship used for getting to the island back to the main ship again.

  And probably I will never come back here. And probably nobody will for a long time. I am pulling myself back from deep space and into orbit, feeling sad and happy like the moonwalkers.

  I have slept all those nights alone and far away, and I have proved to myself that I can be the kind of person who does those things and there is nothing in my biology stopping me. The documentary as proof never mattered. Maybe that is all but it feels enough, to know that if I wanted to I could be the kind of person who can handle it, that my character is strong enough to endure itself alone as a Mountain Man.

  Even if at first it was terrifying and I thought maybe I could not do it and my nerves were so wound up that I had to act to myself, act to the part of me that was shit scared and lonely and in a continual feeling of fight or flight.

  But the fight half-fought and in the end it overcame and it won. And this is the hugeness of my small voyage. Something has been stretched in me that makes the general elastic of my life more malleable and I will be able to always feel and notice this new plasticity.

  Thoreau decided that as important as it was to be alone in his cabin he still did not want or need to do it for ever. No matter how Walden reads he still went back to Concord. Chris McCandless decided this too if his diary is anything to go by; he just died accidentally before he could do anything about it.

  THE KNOWING SELF IS PARTIAL

  When I got back to the cabin I crawled into the cot and slept for a whole day. I was so tired I felt like I might never be able to move again, but eventually hunger got me up, I made some rice with salt and ate it and then slept for some hours more. When I woke up I decided what was to be done with my time capsule.

  I gathered together Damon’s things neatly and reparcelled them in the tarp, then I put them back beneath the floorboards and left them exactly as I found them. And I hope hard that no one else ever finds them and that, if they do, they believe they are the only person to have found them, and that they are a woman (or Eskimo) too, because everyone knows girls are well versed at keeping secrets.

  I laid everything out on the floor and sat cross-legged looking over it: the camera, my diary, the laptop, my notes. The collection felt like a snowshoe hare without a soul inside, an empty vessel. Now that I can’t use it for what it was for, what I wanted it to be, a feminist Golden Record, because there can be no such thing.

  And then one of those last days I walked out onto the tundra in the evening when the sun was unusually orange like an extremely orange egg yolk, the kind of orange yolk that you know is full of goodness, and it spilt across the tundra making everything yolky and big. And on the tundra right behind the cabin, as if I had felt them and the inclination to go outside came to me because of this, there was an entire herd of reindeer just stood about together, munching on tundra grass
and being reindeer.

  And in that moment it occurred to me that my reindeer did not die because it was not my reindeer at all. It had always been this herd; it had been one after another crossing my path, the scouts to the herd, the forerunners preceding the main migration.

  And I thought to myself, that is the point of reindeer, that is what she meant by my reindeer telling me my future. My reindeer tells me that I cannot follow it; it is the proprioception I need to know myself. Thoreau again: ‘We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.’

  The reindeer tells me that my future is the linear continuity of whatever I build it from because I build and then preserve my own history. It is never complete or completely true but I have to hold on to things that relate to an idea of myself and what I am doing; my cloud castle. It is important to have a story. And this, my history, can be encapsulated in my time capsule. There is pushing a time capsule into the stratosphere and there is the utter negation of symbols, annihilating completely. Somewhere in between I know there is something meaningful. It is what I do with the time capsule, its intent, and not the time capsule itself, that matters.

  Do you know the difference between a caribou and a reindeer?

  No, I do not.

  A caribou is larger and more slender and part of a wild herd. A reindeer is semi-wild but it has been domesticated. They are the same species. Reindeer were domesticated in Eurasia over 2000 years ago, then brought to Alaska by colonisers as food, in 1892, as part of the Reindeer Project, created to replace whale meat in the diet of indigenous peoples. The colonisers thought that the geography of the land would prevent the domesticated reindeer leaving to join the caribou herds. In 1997, all of the reindeer joined the Western Artic Caribou Herd and disappeared.