On the other side are those who begin with the assumption that we will destroy the Earth, and that we must scramble into some kind of exodus very soon. Edward Gilfillan, a scientist once associated with NASA, writes that the Earth should be seen as “merely an overnight campsite along the way; confused, troublesome, unsatisfactory, but unimportant; an untidy place to be abandoned and forgotten.” The writer Ray Bradbury told an Italian reporter,
Homer will die. Michelangelo will die. Galileo, Leonardo, Shakespeare, Einstein will die, all those will die who now are not dead because we are alive, we are thinking of them, we are carrying them within us. And then every single thing, every memory, will hurtle down into the void with us. So let us save them, let us save ourselves. Let us prepare ourselves to escape, to continue life and rebuild our cities on other planets: we shall not be long of this Earth.
The most chilling word here is Bradbury’s tiny preposition: “not long of this Earth.” Bradbury could have said, “not long on this Earth,” implying that departure would be a movement from this place to another. If we are “not long of this Earth,” however, our identity is fully independent of it. Ray Bradbury is a careful writer. He knows what he says: the Earth is our campsite only.
And Pope Pius XII told Wernher von Braun (who helped Hitler, and later the United States, to develop rocket technology), “The Lord . . . had no intention of setting a limit to inquiry when He said Ye shall have dominion over the earth. It is all creation which He has entrusted to man and which He has given to the human mind, to penetrate it.” According to these views, certain human problems will not be solved on Earth, and the Earth may become the victim of our inability to solve them.
In Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, a character announces that “Humanly speaking, every possible precaution has been taken to bring this rash experiment to a successful termination.” Later in the novel, we learn that the scientists did think of everything—except how the projectile with three men inside might return to Earth.
“It is all very well to go to the moon, but how to get back again?” says one of the three as they hurtle outward into space.
“The question has no real interest,” replies Barbicane, president of the Gun Club which has sponsored the mission. “Later, when we think it advisable to return, we will take counsel together.”
So stories go. So our lives go, unless we take counsel together.
We need to take counsel with Cicero before his head is nailed to the rostrum, with Jules and Buzz and Raphael. We must take counsel in many languages. We must speak sternly to our heroes, and listen to our children.
The splashdown of American astronauts far out at sea, their welcoming by a President, a commander, a team of doctors and soldiers to guard their quarantine—all the modern version of Barbicane’s Gun Club—is shockingly different from Titov’s return. Titov landed on the ground, at the heart of Asia. No one knew where he would come down, and every citizen was out to find him. When Titov’s parachute bumped his capsule back to earth and he opened the hatch, a woman ecstatic with blood on her face leaped from her car to kiss him. Driving, she had seen his little ship descending. She had driven into the ditch by the road in her haste to touch him. She ran toward his ship. He lived on Earth again, and she welcomed him.
Three days after Apollo 11 landed on the moon, I made it to Denmark. It was good to stop in one place a few days; it was a relief not to hitchhike, not to climb into anyone’s machine and live at the mercy of their speed. Near the town of Århus, I met a girl named Helle. From her parents’ house we took bicycles along the path that wove past flashing streams, dark woods, through meadows thick with sunlight. The grasshoppers still had something to sing about, after so many generations. We were young, foolish, happy. As I drifted ahead around a long curve above the water, she called out, “Wherever heaven is, it must be like this.”
I turn to look.
A FEW MILES SHORT OF WISDOM
A few nights in your life, you know this like the taste of lightning in your teeth: Tomorrow I will be changed. Somehow, in the next passage of light, I will shed reptilian skin and feel the wind’s friction again. Sparks will fly. It’s a hope for the right kind of fear, the kind that does not turn away.
A few miles short of Wisdom, Montana, I flipped open my sleeping bag at the top of Lost Trail Pass. Starlight prickled my shoulders with cold’s tattoo. At midnight there, August meant less than altitude. A long day’s winding drive from La Grande had left me numb with the car’s buzz, and abrupt dark silence was impossible to believe. But the tall stems of the trees made no sound. My ears were clouded with engine throb and tire whine. The whisper of stars I thought I heard was only a tune my head-bone played. Where I slid into the thin summer bag, I felt a bump of rock dent the small of my back. Sleep blurred my eyes, but I begged the rock to keep me wakeful. Tomorrow, I would drive down a valley that had burned my imagination, a place early trappers called The Big Hole. Tomorrow, Wisdom. The trees’ utterance was a pitchy fragrance.
Why did I wish to stay awake? Sometimes stories from thoughtful travelers you trust, or some old book you believe, or the mind’s own credulous pilgrim named Imagination will make a place dazzle in anticipation. Tomorrow, The Big Hole. And there was the battlefield that books and travelers and my mind made shine like an icon. Tomorrow, wisdom—if my hunch could be true. Where Joseph and the Nez Perce band were attacked at dawn one year after Custer died, I meant to stand apart from my own life and listen. I meant to stand apart from my century, if I could. The people who raised me would recede, and I would stand apprentice to the place itself. If wisdom could be portable from history, I might read it there in some configuration of the ground. Then sleep.
Midmorning of the next day, I sat faint in the car parked at headquarters for the Big Hole National Battlefield. By the rearview mirror, pine-scattered hills were a blur of heat. Revelation was not going as planned. Dawn had come and gone. On my sleeping bag flung over the back seat, the dew had long dried, and sweat now trickled off my nose. Traveling alone, I had taken the exploratory vow: I will not eat until I learn from this place. I was untaught, and faint.
The personnel at headquarters, the tan-suited rangers inside their buff museum built to suggest a Nez Perce tipi, had tried hard to prepare an experience for me. Beyond the glass-cased photographs and furs, the guns and arrows, they had ushered me into a little auditorium for my command performance of the slide show. I had sat alone among the gray folding chairs while an artist’s sketches of the battle flashed before me scene by scene, and a strident male voice on the tape loop told what the sound effects were to mean—the pulse of firing guns, a woman’s scream, hoofbeats from invisible horses—while the watercolor faces of the stern and the doomed went flickering through their show. Then suddenly the music came up and it was over. A little motor whirred, and curtains were automatically drawn aside from the windows facing west. There was the battlefield below, on a flat place by the river. Sun had bleached the replica lodgepoles gray. One cloud dragged its shadow toward Canada. On the sill of the view window, two flies had died side by side.
Now, in the car, leaning back against the hot head-rest, I understood the chronology, and the battlefield’s topography. From my vantage point at headquarters, I had seen the signs strung out along the river where named warriors had fallen, and the pine-thicket knoll where the U.S. Army had been surrounded and pinned down when the tide of battle turned against them. I saw where they had their all-day chance to think on Custer’s fate, before the Nez Perce slipped away by night, ending their thirty-six hour siege, abandoning their joyless victory for flight. I could follow the events and feel, in my faint of hunger, a shred of what the original cast of this drama lived. But where I sat in the car, all this was nothing. The windshield wore the small debris of shattered yellow bugs.
What did I expect? The past wears an armor that thickens, and I was a fool to think hunger and a wish could pierce it. I had learned the dates and the map, had seen in photographs a
long-braided woman and the anguish of old men. I had browsed on books in the National Battlefield gift shop, and I was fed full with history, with news that stays fact:
During the morning of August 9, 1877, . . . 163 soldiers of the U.S. 7th Infantry and 33 civilian volunteers endured a 36-hour siege as the final scene in the Battle of the Big Hole. The battle began with a dawn attack by the military force upon a camp of 800 Nez Perce men, women and children encamped in 89 tipis on the grassy bank across the river. . . . Follow the trail and explore the military defensive positions. Recreate the struggle of the besieged men and the hostile feelings of the surrounding Nez Perce warriors.
I folded the brochure, and closed my eyes. My government was trying hard to help me. They had made a building and a show. They had scratched out a trail and numbered it, had given me a brochure with matching numbers. I would follow the path. I was grateful. Still my head was a vacant room. Before I took the trail, I had one more try.
Inside, at the headquarters reception area, a ranger with his flat-brim hat on the desk beside him was tallying information from the guest register.
“I bet you get people from all over.” I faced him over the glass display case filled with books and souvenirs.
“Excuse me one moment,” he said. “1984 to date, out-of-state 87 percent total.” His tanned fingers worked the blue ballpoint as if it were a shovel, scooping figures off one page and tossing them neatly onto another. Then he looked up at me. “Yes, from all over the world. Have you had a chance to sign the register?”
“Right here.” I pointed to the word “Oregon.” The space for my remark was blank, but the column above that blank was filled with “Beautiful display,” “Very moving,” “Worth the drive,” “Howdy from Texas,” “My third visit and better than ever.” The ranger glanced at me, then turned away to usher a couple wearing identical sunglasses into the small auditorium for the slide show. I could hear the music begin as he closed the door behind them.
“I’m curious,” I said. “How many Nez Perce people visit the battlefield?”
The ranger turned to the register, then to his tally. “We had a woman from Iowa last year who said she was one-quarter Nez Perce.” He looked into the air between us for a moment, then back at me. There was a pause, and I could hear the muffled pulse of gunfire from the auditorium. My eyes asked the obvious question, and he answered it.
“We know others visit the battlefield itself,” he said. “They just don’t come here to the Visitor Center to sign the book.” He looked into the air again. We both knew this was the part of the show about the Nez Perce warrior named Rainbow—how he was shot as he ran through the dawn mist, how his comrade Five Wounds would have to die the same day by the vow they had shared. We heard the tapered scream of Rainbow’s wife, a century distant through the auditorium wall. My eyes asked him again. This time he paused. I had to ask it aloud.
“When do they visit the battlefield?” I looked out the window behind him, as he studied my face.
“They come at night,” he said, “and no one sees them.” He paused again. “They have their ceremonies in the place, and we respect that.” Something brushed my sleeve. He turned. A woman held out four postcards and a dollar bill.
“This has been marvelous, just marvelous. I must tell my daughter. Her children would love this. They’re in Chicago, you know. Don’t get west very often.” The postcards in her hand hovered over a huge open purse, like hawk wings over a nest. Suddenly they plunged inside and her hand escaped just as the purse snapped shut. “But maybe with these pictures I can get them to come. We could drive down from Butte, make a day of it. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“It beats Chicago. I’ve been to O’Hare,” the ranger said.
“O’Hare!” The woman glanced at the ceiling with a smile, crossed herself, spun around, and moved gradually away. The ranger picked up his pen, but I waited. I could tell from the music the slide show was almost over.
“The ceremonies,” I said. He held his pen up like an artist’s brush. Now the question was in his eyes: how can I trust what I tell you to be safe? Perhaps I have said too much already.
“We don’t know much about the ceremonies, just that they happen.” We both looked into the air, not at each other. We looked into a box of wind from another time, a box suspended between us, a wind blind to his uniform and my traveling clothes, a box of storm air where the real voices resided and centuries made a number with no meaning. I asked the inevitable question.
“How do you know about the ceremonies? Is there evidence left at the site?”
He looked hard at me, then away. In the auditorium, the little motor whirred to pull curtains aside from the west window. “In certain places,” he said, looking toward the auditorium door, “they leave ribbons hanging from the trees.” The door opened, and the woman came out before her man. The skin around their eyes was pale. In one smooth motion, they both put on their sunglasses.
On the trail to the battle overlook, the sharp-toed print of a doe’s hoof was centered on the print of a woman’s spike-heeled shoe. The woman came yesterday, the doe at dawn. I stepped aside, leaving that sign in the dust.
But where were the ribbons? Now hunger-vacancy sharpened my sight instead of dulling it. Wind stirred every pine limb with light, green urgency flickering in the heat, flags of color calling every tree a monument. Ribbons? Ceremony? The wind was hilarious and sunlight a blade across my forehead. All along the trail, numbered stakes held cavalry hats of blue-painted wood to mark known positions where soldiers suffered or died. On the high ground above the trail, stakes painted to resemble the tail feathers of eagle marked the known positions of Nez Perce snipers who held the soldiers pinned down all through the afternoon. Feather Feather. Hat Hat Hat. Feather. Tree. Wind. Straw-pale brochure in my hand. Brochure folded into my pocket. Vacancy. Tree. Wind. Ribbon.
Far uphill, at mirage distance, a ribbon shimmered orange from a twig of pine. Off-trail, pine duff sank softly beneath my feet. Trees kept respectfully apart. Earth sucked dry by roots from other pines made them scatter. A gopher had pushed open a hole, and cobweb spangled the smallest dew across it. Then the climb thinned my attention to one small spot of color the wind moved.
Orange plastic ribbon crackled between my fingers—the kind surveyors use to mark boundaries. Not it. Not the wisdom of the place. Not the secret her sunglasses obliterated, not the message that family from Iowa went home without. Not the secret the ranger guarded, then whispered.
A girl’s voice spoke from the grove: “The Nez Perce had only ten snipers on the high ground, but the soldiers weren’t sure how many were there.” She stopped and looked about, then led her parents and sister on along the trail, reading to them from the brochure in her hand. Somehow, she did not stumble, and they padded away through their little flock of dust and disappeared toward the river. A bird’s call broke from the willow thicket where they had passed, a watery trill. Patience settled into my mind, like a fossil leaf pressed between centuries. I threaded the trees like a memory. A crow drifted over. A single pine bough stirred, as if the wind were a compact traveler roving before me.
When I found the ribbons they were red and blue. Five strands flickered half a fathom long from a single branch of the pine growing where Five Wounds died. The ribbons knotted at eye level swung new in the breeze, and between my feet a single strand of older ribbon had fallen, bleached white by snow and sun. The age of this custom made me dizzy. The five ribbons on the limb were new as the soft needle-growth sprung from the pine candles. The faded ribbon on the ground lay among sun-bleached needles. The sun-white ribbon on the ground took me back to the hopeful recollections of bead, fur, and photograph cased in glass at the museum, while the five new ribbons conveyed me to the ceremonies of night. I stood so long the sun moved, and a cool shadow rose out of the ground.
Beside my left foot a red ant carried some white crumb by an intricate path: all the long length of a pine needle, careening impossibly over a shattered cone, the
n up a thin tongue of grass to tumble and rise and struggle on. Following the ant, I saw flecks of blue in its path, and then I was lying down to see tiny blue glass beads strung out along the path of the thread that had held them until it rotted to nothing. So. Before the ribbons marked this place, an older ribbon. Before an older ribbon marked this place, the beads. And before the beads? The ant was skirting around a gray sphere half-sunk into the ground: a round musket ball of lead.
A century collapsed into this moment of ground, where generations of private celebration grew outward from one story. This square yard of pine duff bound a guest register that could never be tallied, only renewed, only inhabited by the night-faithful memory that walked in the form of the people. Twenty steps east from the tree with the ribbons a ton of granite, hewn to a block and polished, was carved with the story as the U.S. Army had lived it through. That was one way to remember 1877: carve the truth in stone and draft a platoon of guardians, write books and print brochures and script slide shows and build a hall to house them all, then carve a trail with numbers like a tattoo on the hill. I was grateful for all that. All that can make a visitor ready to know. But that public way is not knowing in itself, only a preparation for knowing. Knowing is a change of heart, physical, slower than the eye’s travel across a page of text, or across a stone dressed with words.
The books, the message on stone, the trail’s configuration would all have to be revised by an act of will; the ribbons were either renewed or lost by the very nature of their fragility. Sun and rain destroyed them. Pine budded, and grew. Flowers withered, and the ribbons.
Suddenly in the heat a kind of fear chilled me—fear about my fellowship with the sometimes acquisitive tribe of patriots named America. Even in small things, we wish to map our conquest of the planet and the past. My own childhood collections flickered through my mind: stamps, stones, leaves pressed in a Bible, insects stilled by cotton soaked with alcohol and pinned to styrofoam in a box. And arrowheads. Smoky obsidian and blood-red flint. Modern habit is to lay such things away safe behind glass, and I had learned that habit well. I knew how to lift each bead with tweezers, plot and take each bullet up, sift them all out from the dust and alter them from a part of the world to an illustration of it. Could I leave the bones of the story still, and carry only its breath away in my mouth? Or would I thread five beads on a pine needle souvenir, saying softly to myself no one would know them gone?
Having Everything Right Page 3