“How do you know this,” I asked politely, “if you have never been there?”
“El Negrito told us,” he said.
The drunk man at the cantina had mentioned El Negrito too, and in another village someone else had told me that the only spirits he knew about were the ones El Negrito spoke of.
El Negrito was from the coast, I had been told. A slight, intense, black man with green eyes, he had worked for a while as a janitor at the observatory. He had access to certain keys, and at night would range freely around the place, pushing buttons. El Negrito was said to be the apprentice to a curandero, a white witch, also from the coast, who had sent him on a mission to find out about the observatory. The curandero did not like it that the place seemed to have a magical power, people said.
El Negrito would frequent the local bars and tell people what he saw at Arecibo. There were dogs inside the observatory; chickens were sometimes sacrificed; electrical forces were attracted to the central dish and could bring dead things back to life. Throughout the day and night the scientists would search the skies, trying to attract spirits.
El Negrito himself seemed to have become something of a folk hero, at least in the more remote villages. He told people he could walk on air; he told them his teacher could raise the dead, and he said that he had spoken to Jesus on many occasions. He was a skilled drummer and had played at some of the local Pentecostal churches.
“Some of what El Negrito says is not true,” Ramón told me, “but much is fact. This I know. For example, I have heard the dogs howling. And if you ask any person here, he will tell you that there is an area inside the observatory where no outsider has been. None but El Negrito.
“You be careful,” Ramón said, as we parted. “They will be nice to you, but don’t ask too many questions.”
The observatory is surrounded by a high hurricane fence topped with barbed wire, and the entrance is an immense, electronically operated slide gate controlled by a uniformed guard. I spoke to the guard about getting a tour, and he made a phone call and then pushed a button. The gate slid open and I was greeted by my guide, a svelte young Puerto Rican woman who told me she had grown up in Queens, New York. She would be taking me and a group of Colombians through the observatory. Fluent in English and Spanish, she rattled off technical information with machine-gun rapidity, alternating between the two languages.
The actual radio telescope, the largest and most sensitive device of its kind in the world, consists of a 100-foot reflector covering the floor of a crater. Hovering 450 feet above the great dish of the reflector are 40,000 adjustable aluminum panels mounted on a 630-ton suspended framework.
The telescope presents an ironic contrast to the surrounding landscape, with its savage karst hillocks, lush tropic vegetation, and the constant, unending call of the tree frogs. The reflector dish collects natural radio signals emanating from galaxies, erupting stars, clouds of gas, pulsars, and quasars. The radio energy given off by these bodies is detected, amplified, and passed through cables to a control building, where the information is analyzed. The whole system can be reversed so that a transmitter in the carriage house above the dish sends radio energy to the reflector, which then beams the signals to space or to a specific target. Data extracted from the radio emissions from the far-off regions of the universe allow astronomers to measure distances and masses of galaxies and gather information about the stars in our own galaxy.
Periodically the system closes down its normal research operations and searches the sky for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. So far, no messages have been received.
I had arranged to talk to the public relations director, the man responsible for disabusing the local people of their myths concerning the observatory. The interview was desultory. As we talked, he perched on his desk, picking his teeth, flirting with the tour guide. He didn’t know anything about spirits.
“It could be some of the old people back in the little villages believe that sort of thing. Not the school kids though. They know more about space than me. They’re into it. And there are no dogs here.”
I asked him about the sections of the observatory where no visitors are permitted.
“The computer room,” he said. “We keep people out simply because scientists work day and night in there and don’t want to stop every ten minutes to explain to the tourists what they do. Anna takes care of that, don’t you, Anna?”
“I take care of those tourists,” she said.
“Anna takes care of everyone.”
“I’ll take care of you, big boy, unless you shut up.”
He tried to grow serious.
“I go around to the schools. I must do fifty tours a year. Kids come here. There’s no controversy.”
I asked him about the woman who had miscarried.
“It’s true. Once in a while someone loses it, and the old superstitions resurface.”
“She was a loca,” Anna said. “I was here that day. She was screaming and yelling about bad waves. Just another loca.”
“No story here, I guess, about spirits and cargo cults and conflicts with the locals, that sort of thing?”
“No story. The big story’s out there.” He glanced toward the sky.
I left Arecibo on a Sunday night and drove to San Juan on back roads that twisted through the hills past small villages, each with a church service taking place. Many of the villagers in that section of the island were Pentecostal, and they had transformed the services into something on the outer edges of the traditional Christian church. In each village I heard maniacal drumming spilling out of the brightly-lit hillside church buildings, echoing through the hot night. Most of the churches kept their doors and windows wide open, and in some I could see crowds of people standing just inside the doors, swaying. Occasionally I could hear singing, a high descant chorus sung in fifths, with atonal melodies and a distinctly African flavor. The songs intertwined with the relentless drumming and the sharp whistles of the coqui. At a turn near one of the churches my headlights illuminated a woman standing in the road. Dressed in a long skirt, with gray hair falling about her shoulders, carrying a long staff, she looked like a witch or a madwoman. When she saw the car, she glared, ducked off the road, and hid in the bushes.
I fell asleep on the plane back to Boston and had a short, brilliant dream about Ramón and the witchlike woman on the road. They seemed to be involved in some sort of ritual associated with the chain link fence in front of the Arecibo observatory. I was disoriented when I awoke. It took me a minute to accustom myself to the quiet lights of the plane, the sleeping passengers, the murmur of voices, and the dull roar of the jet engines. Streaking across the night sky toward Boston, suspended thirty thousand feet above the sea, I felt at that moment a great rush of gratitude for the airplane and for the pilot and his crew. This was followed by a strange feeling of affection for technology—quite out of character for me. Technology reminded me of home and the Digital plant and Uncle Kenny and his workers, and suddenly all the opposing forces on the ridge seemed to merge into a grand pattern in which nothing really mattered. The great sweep of geological time would resolve all, and ours seemed such a lovely, dualistic, yet essentially benign period in which to be alive.
I shifted in my seat. I looked out at the black passage of the night, and then I resolved to renew my effort to get inside the Digital plant—not because I wanted to explore and expose some enemy, the despoiler of pear orchards, but because I had become genuinely interested in the way in which the world works.
Henry Thoreau used to leave his cabin at Walden from time to time. He often had dinner with family or friends, and he moved out while he was plastering the walls before his first winter there. He also left one afternoon in July 1846 and did not return for the night. He had gone into town to pick up a shoe and while he was there happened to meet Sam Staples, the local tax collector and jailer. Staples reminded Henry that he had not paid his poll tax in several years and that unless he paid sometime soon, Staples would hav
e to do something about it. Henry announced, with characteristic acidity, that he did not intend ever to pay his poll tax. Staples said that if he didn’t pay, he would have to lock him up. There was another little exchange, and then Henry was escorted to the jail house, where he spent the night in a cell with a man accused of burning down a barn. During the night someone in a nearby cell set up a chant. “What is life?” he called out again and again. “So this is life?”
It was a good question, just the type of thing that interested Henry Thoreau. He listened for a while and then put his head to the bars and shouted back, “Well, what is life, then?”
The fellow prisoner ceased his chant; silence returned to the jail. There were no answers as yet.
Henry was released from jail the next day; a woman, probably his Aunt Maria, had undermined his act of civil disobedience by paying Staples the required amount. Reluctantly Henry left jail, picked up his shoe at the cobbler’s, and was seen berrying that afternoon with a group of children on a nearby hill. By night he was back at Walden.
Henry left his cabin a little more than a month later for an excursion with a cousin to the Maine woods. Coincidentally, perhaps, he departed on the same day that, seven years earlier, he and his brother had left for their Concord and Merrimack river trip, the account of which he was writing in book form while he was living at the cabin at Walden Pond. His intention on the Maine trip was to climb Mount Katahdin, which, in 1846, had been scaled only four or five times before. He was now twenty-nine. His brother was dead; he was living alone for the first time in his life, and he was embarked on a path as a writer.
Henry left Concord, traveled to Bangor by rail and boat with his cousin, and then continued some sixty miles north to the Indian village of Oldtown, where he met with several of the inhabitants. He pushed on, and on one of the islands in the Penobscot River—most of which were inhabited by Indians—he met a couple of moose hunters who planned to leave the next day for the north, heading in the same general direction as Henry and his cousin. Thoreau persuaded them to help guide him, and the group arranged to meet the next day at a dam site farther north on the West Branch of the Penobscot. They picked up two more for their party at Mattawamkeag and pushed upstream to the house of a local pioneer, a man named Uncle George McCauslin. There, in the rain, they waited, and when the Indian hunters never showed up, they persuaded Uncle George and another local to accompany them into the unknown country beyond the rivers to the slopes of Katahdin.
They were now about thirty miles southeast of the mountain. There were six in the party; they had a few barrels of pork, fifteen pounds of hard bread, a frying pan, a kettle, blankets, and a strip of cotton cloth to rig as a tent. They loaded everything into a batteau, a large, dorylike vessel, and pushed off. Henry was no novice when it came to boat handling, but he was especially impressed with the work of the two local men. Uncle George stood in the stern, his companion, Tom Fowler, in the bow. Working in concert, with long spruce poles tipped with an iron shoe, they forced their way up the Millinocket River for some two miles over rocks and rapids. The group came to Quakish Lake and rowed another two miles across to the river on the other side.
A forest of spruce and cedar lined the shore, overhung with gray lichen; ducks rose and sailed across the sky, a loon settled and laughed maniacally, and the still atmosphere had, according to Henry, a ghostly prospect. The trees were mere spirits of themselves. Beyond they could see Mount Katahdin, its summit lost in the clouds. To Henry it looked like “a dark isthmus—connecting the heavens with the earth.”
They reached the dam at the end of the lake and pushed on to the head of North Twin Lake. Night was approaching, but because the lake was still and the rowing easy, they decided to keep going. The sun went down, the sky turned red, and the moon rose. They began to sing as they rowed, old traditional tunes of the French voyageurs who first pushed into this wild country. The moon crossed the sky, and at the head of the lake the island where they intended to camp appeared in the moonlight. They rested on their oars, ceased their singing, and listened for the answering call of wolves, a common sound in that country—and, as Henry says, a dismal and unearthly sound. There was only silence; and then, from somewhere in the forest, a deep-voiced owl called. They watched for moose and bear and caribou, took up their oars and songs again, and early in the night they reached a camping site McCauslin knew about.
There in the dank forest they built a fire, set up their tent, and prepared to sleep. The wind came up; sparks drifted from the fire and the tent caught and burned. Seemingly undismayed, they hauled the boat up on the shore and slept under it. Periodically someone would get up and feed the fire, which, in spite of their earlier disaster, they kept burning all night. Grotesque and fiendlike shadows were thrown up against the surrounding trees. The men lay there, each presuming the others to be asleep but all of them wide awake.
The moon and stars were still shining when they finally got up just before dawn and pushed on across the lake. The day was clear and the water was calm, and the surrounding mountains were reflected in its surface, all dominated by Katahdin, with its flat, high tableland. All that day they rowed over lakes, pushed up the rapids of small, hard-running rivers, came to lakes again, crossed, rested, ate, and rowed, portaging their heavy batteau around waterfalls, and at one point warping it over a set of falls. With great difficulty they forged through stiff rapids, the batteau almost perpendicular to the stream. One of the poles snapped at a critical moment on that stream, but Henry snatched up a spare and passed it back to the sternman just in time to save the crew. Finally they reached the mouth of Murch Brook, about fifteen miles from the summit of Katahdin, and here, on level ground, they made camp and fished until dark, hauling in a good mess of trout and roach.
That night Henry dreamed that he was trout fishing. The dream must have been intense. It woke him up, and in the dark mystery of the new territory he could not be sure what was dream and what was life, so he got up, baited his hooks, and began fishing in the darkness. In the moonlit night, the dark image of Katahdin stood distinctly outlined against the sky. Close at hand the dark stream rippled past; the wilderness stretched around him. He cast; a fish struck; and there, in the black night, he hauled in speckled trout and beautiful, silvery roach. They cut an arc against the black silhouette of the mountain; they flew across the air like mystical flying fish. Henry “found the dream to be real.”
The next morning the men made a cache of their supplies, hanging everything from the tops of saplings to save it from the bears, strapped on their packs, and hiked toward the mountain. They were in new territory now. Neither McCauslin nor, in all probability, any other white man had passed through this area, and they navigated mainly by Henry’s compass orientation. All day they pushed through the forest and up the slopes of Katahdin itself, until finally, about four o’clock, in view of the summit, they made camp.
They must have been tired by this time; they had not brought much food and were living mainly on fish and berries; they had slept little, and they were traveling through what must have been a difficult and in some places nearly impassable forest. Nevertheless, while the others made camp, Henry continued up the mountain slopes. He followed the course of a stream bed, and at some points had to climb around waterfalls, pulling himself up by roots and tree trunks. Once he had cleared the tree line, he could look back across the countryside below him, a great wild and houseless land. The stream he was following, about thirty feet wide in places, rushed past him in a great washing tide. He came into an odd, broken land strewn with immense boulders. Black spruce trees grew in the crevices between them, so thick and ancient they were able to support his weight. More or less walking on the tops of trees, he climbed upward. Below him in spots he could see into the dark crevices, where he was convinced that bears, “even then at home,” were sleeping. At sunset he came to a spot where gray, silent rocks surrounded him like sheep. The skirt of a cloud filtered ahead of him. He stopped. And then he turned around and went back
to his companions and the light of the fire. They were awakened that night by a horrific scream. One of the party had dreamed that the world was on fire.
Ever since they had left the rivers and headed into the woods, Henry had taken the lead. The next day once again he led the way, and soon he had left the others behind. He was intent on making the summit. Once more he ascended the great stepped shelves of the mountain slopes, quickly passed the altitude he had attained the previous evening, and walked into the bank of clouds, traveling upward but now surrounded by the swirling mists.
Long before he even began the ascent of Katahdin, he had been thinking of the otherworldliness of the mountain. He had asked Joe Neptune, one of the Indians he had met earlier, if he thought that Pomola, the avenging spirit of Katahdin in the local Indian mythology, would allow them to attain the summit. As he had moved upward the day before, he had imagined Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost struggling up out of chaos. Now, almost at his destination, the mystic image sharpened. The clouds thickened and swirled, broke to reveal the sky, and then closed in again, sweeping across the rocky wild scarp. Dank crevices and crags surrounded him. In such a place, he thought, Prometheus was bound while eagles tore at his liver. In such a place Atlas stood. Here an altogether indifferent nature had got human life at a disadvantage. The gentle image of nature, the kind, quiet-flowing waters of the lily-strewn Concord River, the pastoral landscape of fields and woods was banished. Here was the unfinished, wild planet, a place of the gods, not yet tamed for their human children. Entering this realm was an insult to them, he thought, and suddenly, there on the heights, amid the charged mists, they shouted out at Henry Thoreau, “Why came ye here before your time?”
He had not yet reached the summit. It was still morning, and his companions below him were still struggling up the slopes. Yet, on the excuse that they should get back to the river before dark, Henry Thoreau, the bard of wilderness and untamed nature, turned around and descended.
Living at the End of Time Page 16