Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything

by Ehrenreich, Barbara

  So what I would like to believe about that Saturday morning conversation when I was sixteen or seventeen is that he knew exactly what I was talking about, knew far better than I, in fact—and that he rejected the dodginess of electrons as a matter of principle in the same way that Einstein rejected the idea of a God who played dice with the universe. Maybe he even accepted quantum mechanics as long as it was cordoned off in the realm of the tiniest things, like some kind of biochemical quirk peculiar to dwarves. But when you started messing with the substantiality of matter and the possibility of reproducible measurements—well, it was not only science that was at stake. The work that had made him a man among men years ago in the mines had been the backbreaking encounter with the hardness of things. When a man swings a pick at a rock, electrons do not dance obligingly out of the way, and however loopy it gets at its far mathematical fringes, science always has to come back to that fact.

  The more likely possibility is that he didn’t really know what I was talking about. Maybe he just hadn’t kept up. I don’t know what he did at work or in the hours after work when he didn’t show up at home, but I was beginning to sense that L.A. held possibilities unknown in Lowell or Butte, and they didn’t involve going to lectures on the structure of atoms. Once or twice I had glimpsed the inside of cool, dark lounges where men in suits enjoyed the attentions of the sly-looking women who glided from table to table selling cigarettes from trays attached to their waists. My father seemed at home in these places—Hollywood-handsome, as you could tell from the way people turned to look at him, steady into his fourth martini and ostentatious with tips. Obviously, there were two L.A.s—the pastel suburban one and this other noirish place he liked to retire to. These were not the fancy mahogany-walled restaurants where actual movie stars might be sighted, but they were still many levels of comfort above the scruffy taverns I was used to seeing my parents stop for a drink in. With their perfect twenty-four-hour gloom and soundtracks of recorded crooning, they made the bars of Butte seem like makeshift contrivances to keep out the children and the light. Maybe that’s what he was thinking of when he turned away from me at the dining room table that Saturday morning: a nocturnal retreat where a man didn’t have to do anything to prove he was smart because he’d already transformed his intelligence into money and could start drinking, if he wanted to, in the middle of the morning.

  What I understood, and he may have understood, was that the “new physics” was a mockery of the whole Cartesian, Newtonian edifice of knowledge that both he and I had grown up with, in which one thing inexorably leads to another and nothing is going to leap out and poke you in the eye. If the behavior of the smallest particles was indeterminable, then, in some way that he would also have to admit, everything else was up for grabs too. You could spend your whole life making precise measurements, plugging them into equations, repeating experiments, and never for one moment letting your mind drift toward the unseeable and incommunicable. You could be the most sober, straight-arrow scientist in the world, utterly intent on your work and immune to religion or fiction or whimsy—and still, what you’d finally see at the bottom of it all, in the highest-resolution photomicrograph or telescopic image, was a grinning monkey face staring back at you, the face of your own incurable ignorance, if you like, or the face of something infinitely alien.

  Sometime after the conversation with my father, though I cannot say as a result of it, the fantasy took a further turn toward the dire. Practical problems multiplied, leaving me little time to read or contemplate the strange beauty of things-as-they-are. I could not figure out how to drain the pool I intended to capture rainwater in. In another version of the fantasy, I could figure it out, but there wasn’t enough rain and the small amounts I collected quickly turned slimy and undrinkable. If I’d had access to one of today’s chain drugstores or supermarkets, my life would have been a whole lot easier, thanks to bottled water, “wipes,” and freeze-dried food. But none of those things existed in the fifties, at least at the retail level. As the months went on I became—as any deterministic science could have predicted—grubbier, skinnier, crustier. And what did you do about shit, for example, in the era before plastic bags—just keep digging fresh holes to bury it in or look for a new feces-free compound to occupy?

  Then there were the animals, whose presence had not occurred to me when the fantasy first took form. I had imagined that the removal of humans would leave the world empty of jostling and nattering life forms to distract me—an error that can be attributed to the collective solipsism of the human species, which persists in believing itself the only kind of creature worth taking into account. I had enough trouble believing in the conscious existence of my conspecifics; how was I supposed to extend my imagination to lizards and cats? But here they were, and in growing numbers as the human grip on the landscape loosened. I have mentioned the tragic and annoying former pets, some of which, either clinging to the obsolete association between humans and pet food or catching the scent of my canned tuna and meat, gathered outside the walls of my compound at night to howl. Then too, the cessation of the vast and compulsive human project of lawn mowing opened up fresh habitats for snakes and other crawly things, which in turn brought raptors swooping down from the sky. I had to look down to see what I was stepping on and up to see what might be coming down on me with claws outstretched.

  And then, a couple of months after the disappearance of people, came the lions. You might think that without humans around, the lions would have plenty of deer to eat in the hills, but they may have been lured into the city by its rich supply of ignorant and defenseless former pets, many of them still fattened on garbage. Some of the new arrivals were indigenous mountain lions, but a spectacular minority of them were maned—escapees from the cages they had been kept in between movie roles. This was my worst childhood fear, going back to the age of about four: that lions would find their way out of Africa or wherever they were and chase me down streets, over hills, and across fields until I fell, as I always would, and became the red on their teeth and claws. The lions could go almost anywhere they wanted in posthuman L.A., and I would glimpse them skulking around supermarkets and other possible sources of carrion. Once I opened the gate in the morning to find a half-eaten puppy outside my gate, its lovable little face still intact, and I had no way of knowing whether this was a warning or, what was almost worse, a lion’s idea of my share.

  Chapter 6

  Encounter in Lone Pine

  It seemed like a good idea at the time—celebratory in spirit, since the school year was about to come to an end, and rational in plan. My brother, myself, and a high school friend of mine would go skiing on Mammoth Mountain in Northern California, where the snow had lingered late, and stay with my uncle Dave and his family in Lee Vining near Mono Lake, which is as close to a lunar landscape as you can find on this planet. But as I try to reconstruct the trip today, I find many puzzles in the narrative, extending to the geographical route. Why, for example, stay in Lee Vining, which was about an hour drive north beyond Mammoth? Then there is the greater mystery of why we didn’t drive straight back to L.A. after skiing, but instead spent the night in the car and devoted the next day to an eastward loop into Death Valley. Were there no motels in those days, or none that we could afford?

  And even if the itinerary made sense on a map, no representation could have prepared me for what was about to happen. I had no idea, when we set out for Mammoth, that my quest was about to come to a shattering climax, which I would spend the rest of my life, or large chunks of it anyway, straining to understand.

  Skiing in my family was a completely normal recreation, when available, passed down to me by my father; the women in my family being more likely to favor ice skating. Norwegian miners had brought skiing to Butte, and working-class kids, as well as the mine bosses and their families, kept it going. Evel Knievel, for example, who was raised by a grandmother who happened to be a friend of my own maternal grandmother, had excelled in ski jumping at Butte High and w
orked as a copper miner before becoming a famous motorcycle daredevil. My father had also learned ski jumping at Butte High, and it was he who taught me to ski when I was about twelve. It wasn’t difficult: Get to the top of the hill, either by rope tow or, in the early days, climbing sideways step by step, bend your elbows and your knees, point the skis downhill, then lean on into it—and woe to anyone who failed to get out of the way, because swerving or stopping were not among my secure skills.

  I imagine that this is more or less how he learned ski jumping at Butte High School—get up, go down, get up again. No special clothes were required in those days; we wore flannel pajama pants under our jeans and layered sweaters under our Windbreakers, since parkas, so far as I know, were not widely available to civilians. Yes, there was an aspect of the suicidal in the way my family approached skiing. But that was part of the attraction, as I wrote in my journal a little before we left Lowell and just after a ski trip to Vermont, though I was embarrassed to mention anything as trivial as a sport in those pages otherwise reserved for the most high-minded speculations:

  I have become an ardent devotee of a sport, something unexpected. I love skiing. There is no sport comparable to it, no pastime or entertainment rivals it. In perfect honesty I can say the greatest pleasure (as distinguished perhaps from happiness) I have ever experienced has been while skiing. What I like is the speed and, even more keenly felt, the danger.…

  It must have been Uncle Dave who suggested the trip, because otherwise, given the available information technologies, I don’t see how we could have known that the snow was still deep on Mammoth at the beginning of May. Dave, my mother’s only brother, was my favorite of the two surviving uncles, always quick, sarcastic, and teasing. He thought it was hilarious, for example, on one of the occasions my mother and siblings and I drove the seven hours up Lee Vining for a visit, to let me drive his California Highway Patrol car while he sat in the passenger seat, just to see the looks on the faces of other drivers when they noticed that a sixteen-year-old girl with a ponytail had apparently seized state power, or at least one of the state’s own cars. All that avuncular jolliness would come to an end a couple of years later when his oldest son, who was about eleven at the time, got swept off in a spring-swollen river and drowned. Dave got mean after that, starting to use words like “nigger” and “spic” to describe the people he stopped on the highway and eventually becoming estranged from his mother, his sisters, and the rest of us.

  I brought up the possibility of a skiing trip sometime in April in a conversation with Dick, who was the only one of my little circle of friends who showed any interest in outdoor adventure. He had thrilling stories to tell of road trips and hitchhiking, ranging all the way down to Mexico, undertaken without any adult participation. One day, in a burst of unwonted expansiveness, possibly inspired by the approaching end of the school year and all the associated tests, I mentioned that I had an uncle who lived not too far from Mammoth, and the plan moved on from there. Dick would have to do the driving or most of it, since, whether due to inattention or sloth, I still had only a learner’s permit. My parents, or maybe Dick, provided the car, a decrepit black Volkswagen, and my brother came along with us, either enlisted as some sort of chaperone or because he was eager to ski—possibly both. I didn’t know Dick well and suppose I could have prevailed on my mother to do the driving, but I was exhilarated by the idea of traveling a long distance on the open road without any grown-ups in the car.

  We hadn’t gone thirty miles beyond L.A., though, when things began to go wrong. Dick had been excited by the prospect of the trip and still friendly enough when he arrived at our house in the morning. But once we got going he seemed to wrap himself up in some kind of personal rage, as if he were being abducted to a destination he didn’t approve of by people he found morally objectionable. If I’d known him better, or if I’d had the confidence and skill, I might have said, “Hey, what’s the matter? This was your idea too.” But his anger shamed me into silence, suggestive as it was of some sort of intimacy. As far as I had ever been able to determine, anger was the principal emotional bond between husbands and wives and possibly the only thing that held them together. How would they maintain their mutual interest without the daily drama of resentful silences, screaming arguments, and vicious putdowns? But between me and this boy, whom I had never even talked to alone except to plan this trip and who was, after all, a half year behind me in school, anger was shockingly inappropriate and totally mortifying.

  So a very short way into the trip I revised my expectations downward from comradely adventure to another long, solitary exercise in endurance. Any anger I felt was directed not at my inscrutable companion, but at Joseph Conrad and all the other novelists who had been urging me to reach out, take a chance, carpe diem, and so forth. I should have stayed home and read Kafka, whom I’d just discovered in a paperback bookstore and found agreeably disorienting. The pleasures of human company had been exaggerated, I realized, like “only connect,” which may suggest something cozy like hand-holding, but should more accurately bring to mind the hazard involved in putting one wet hand on the anode while the other reaches for the cathode.

  I dealt with my disappointment by sheer force of mind. I erased Dick. I suspended belief in him. Who knows if any other person really exists? The great advantage of my slippery, on-and-off form of solipsism was that I did not have to live with the burden of other people’s inexplicable anger or rejection. During the next few hours I gave myself over to the remorselessly flat, dun-colored Mojave Desert and the familiar question: What is the point? I mean, if you tried to put it all together—the imaginary numbers and probably equally imaginary electrons, the mystery of antimatter, my mother’s unending frustration, The Magic Mountain, my first exposures to rock and roll, and all the other data coming my way—what did you get? Because this is what it would mean to find “the truth”—to discover or fashion a mental vessel capable of containing the whole thing in its entirety, every part of it, every loose end and ephemeral impression. In other words, I was looking at the job of condensing the universe into a form compact enough to fit in my head, maybe as some kind of equation or—who knows?—an unforgettable melody or gorgeously intricate mandala. This was the great challenge before me, to make things small enough to get a grip on, while leaving nothing out.

  But the desert stood in the way of this project. It was too big to be compacted down into anything manageable, too smooth and slippery to be stored in words. I wanted to file it under “terrain,” for example, and move on to some livelier topic, but whatever category I tried to squeeze it into, the desert just kept leaking out and forcing itself on my attention. Even numbers seemed to evaporate here, because there was nothing around to count. That whole long ride, no one spoke unless it was my brother in the backseat, demanding a restroom or a Coke.

  We must have been a pretty surly bunch when we got past the desert and into the mountains and arrived at the confusion of Dave and Gina’s little house in Lee Vining. They had three kids then between the ages of about three and nine and, I seem to recall, some dogs. There were hugs for my brother and me and handshakes for Dick. I poured the milk and set the table while Gina fried up burgers or whatever we ate, all crowded around the kitchen table. All this has a certain glow in retrospect, because it was the last time I would see Davy, the oldest of these cousins, alive. There was some talk about the snow on Mammoth, which Dave assured us was still adequately deep despite the late date. Then we went to bed, my brother and Dick on the floor of my male cousins’ room, me in the same room as my three-year-old cousin Cathy.

  I woke in a sleeping bag to a sense of alarm and the faint scent of urine from Cathy’s direction. I knew I should get straight up if I wanted to take a shower before a line formed for the bathroom, because this was to be the big day of skiing, but I was impaled to the floor by the residue of a shocking dream. The dream consisted of a single image: the human brain, my brain in fact, projected onto a screen in what appeared to be a cla
ssroom. There it was—the whole thing, the only instrument I had, all that I really was, in fact—a densely corrugated bulb attached to a stem. And this is what I expected to contain the universe in? Just in case the message wasn’t clear enough, there was a caption or maybe a voice-over, saying: This is what you are—a sac of tissue enclosed in membrane, a thing like anything else.

  Ordinarily I was well defended against this kind of insult, which, as I would later come to understand, has been taunting Western thinkers since the rise of science and the alleged “disenchantment” of the world: the idea that all lofty thoughts and noble ambitions aside, we are nothing but of clusters of particles and charges, tissues and cells. This is the crushing downside of science, at least for those who get so bedazzled by it that they lose sight of their own subjective existence. Why should we—the observers and scientists—be different, in any important way, from the objects we observe? It was my intermittent solipsism that generally saved me from the horror of this thought and, at some hard, rational kernel of myself, saves me still. If someone were to come along and say, “You, Barbara, are nothing but a collection of atoms and cells,” I would have said, “Fine, but understand that those cells and atoms are themselves nothing but concepts in my mind. And so, for that matter, are you.” A solipsist can never be reduced to “nothing but”—“nothing but” atoms or electrons or synaptic firings—because she knows that all these are flickerings of the mind and that she alone is mind.