by Robbi McCoy
“For Jennifer’s sake,” Faith promised, “I’ll stay away from tales of disembowelment and cannibalism.”
“Oh, Christ!” Jennifer winced.
“How about this one? The ancient Syrians put the bodies of their dead in huge pots of honey as a way of preserving them. Honey kills bacteria, so the body never spoils.”
“Interesting,” Cassie said. “Similar to the Egyptians with the embalming. But why, exactly? I’ve never thought much about that. Why did they care if the body decayed?”
“Good question. In the case of the Syrians, they thought that if the body decayed, the spirit would die. They thought there was still a connection between the spirit and the body after death. It’s an interesting idea. Not unique in the world, but rather foreign to us. In our culture, and I mean the Judeo-Christian tradition, the spirit completely detaches from the body at death.”
“In Buddhism too,” Cassie said. “We just heard that on a tour in Beijing.”
“Yes, quite a few cultures believe that. But there are so many variations. In some South American tribes, they believed the spirit was free to come and go while a person was alive, and while the spirit was away from the body, the person was asleep. If the spirit left the body and didn’t return at all, the person died.”
“Are you talking about the soul?” Jennifer asked, pulling her knees up and wrapping her arms around them.
“If you wish,” said Faith. “The thing that’s interesting to me about the idea of a permanent link between the body and the spirit is that it has ramifications while the person is still alive. In a belief system like that they don’t think of the body so much as a vessel, as a disposable container. The body, like the spirit, is also considered sacred. Our culture has traditionally viewed the body as unimportant and transient. That has consequences.”
“I never even thought of that before,” Cassie reflected. “Very interesting. What’s another one?”
Faith was thrilled with Cassie’s interest. She glanced at Lauren, who gave her an encouraging smile.
“This is one of my favorite stories,” Faith said. “It’s not in my book because I haven’t been able to visit the site yet, but maybe it will be in the next one. There’s an island in the Pacific, one of the Solomon Islands, used for generations as a burial ground. The island was never inhabited. It’s small, the top of an old volcano. The people who used this place, which they called Sky Mountain, lived on a larger island several miles away. From their island, the top of Sky Mountain was frequently in the clouds, seeming to touch the sky. It was the tallest point around and, in their view, closest to the next world where the spirits of the dead went for rebirth.”
“You mean Heaven?” Jennifer asked impatiently.
“That’s a Christian concept,” Faith said in her patient teacher voice. “These people weren’t Christians. In their belief system, there were four phases of being. We’re occupying the third. The fourth and last was ascension to the sky spirit world which they believed was literally in the sky. When someone died, they carved a dug-out canoe for the deceased and tied it to their boat, then rowed over to Sky Mountain. They carried the canoe up to the top of the mountain, where they left it.”
“They didn’t bury it?” Cassie asked.
“No. They left it open so the spirit would have no trouble rising into the sky. The carrion birds took care of the rest.”
“Oh, my God!” Jennifer said, closing her eyes. “This is horrible.”
“It’s fascinating,” Cassie said, wrinkling her face playfully at Jennifer.
“The practice was abandoned in the seventeen hundreds,” Faith explained, “but the story of Sky Island persisted in the people’s lore, which is how it was rediscovered in the twentieth century.”
“Where is this island again?” Cassie asked.
“Solomon Islands. Off the coast of Papua New Guinea.”
Cassie reached for her glass. “Why do you like that story so much?”
“It’s a very clean and simple representation of several universal archetypes. It makes a good illustration. But, mainly, I think the idea of the mountain in the clouds is beautiful and romantic. It’s such a pure example of how people transition to the afterlife. It’s not muddied up with any notions of penance or sin or even evil spirits. There’s no purification ritual involved. Everyone who died automatically got taken to the mountaintop and ascended into the sky.”
“Faith is a scientist,” Lauren said, “but she’s not immune to beauty and romance.”
Faith put her hand over Lauren’s. “When the island was discovered by researchers in the nineteen forties, it contained hundreds and hundreds of these coffin canoes. The mountainside was littered with the bones of all of the bodies that had been left there. It was quite a find.”
“I can’t imagine seeing a real live human skeleton without freaking out,” Jennifer said.
Lauren snorted loudly and Jennifer looked confused.
“You said ‘live skeleton’” Cassie pointed out, her amusement tinged with affection.
Jennifer frowned. “You know what I mean.”
“You get used to it,” Lauren said. “I have. There’s even a human skull in our house.”
“Are you serious?” Cassie asked, her eyes wide.
Lauren nodded. “We call him Yorick.”
Cassie laughed. “Of course you do!”
Jennifer looked frustrated now. Cassie put an arm around her shoulders and said, “It’s from Hamlet. He picks up a skull and says, ‘Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well.’ Famous line.”
Jennifer nodded uncertainly. Faith began to wonder what these two had in common.
“So they did that just so the dead people were closer to their spirit world?” Cassie asked. “To give them a boost into the sky?”
“That and to remove them from their own island. Primitive people had some interesting ways of dealing with the problem of soil and groundwater contamination. I’ve always been interested in the way people build their mythology around real, practical concerns. Myth isn’t arbitrary, usually. It’s based on some fact or serves some useful purpose.”
Cassie looked thoughtful, leaned back, and said, “So you’ve never been to Sky Island?”
“No,” Faith said. “I hope to go, eventually. It’s a place I’ve wanted to visit since I first heard of it.”
“It’s not quite so high on my list of vacation spots, though,” Lauren said. “I mean, a rock covered with old bones? Not quite Tahiti.”
Cassie laughed. “By the way, Faith, what’s the title of your book?”
“Paradise Lost.”
Cassie looked intrigued. “Like Milton?”
Faith nodded.
“Do you talk about original sin?”
“In a way, yes. It’s about how human societies face their mortality. In many cultures, including Christian ones, there’s the idea that humans lost their immortal status at some point and are struggling to regain it. In most belief systems, that can only happen after death, as if human life is some sort of digression, even punishment, rather than the truly important thing.”
Faith realized she was dominating the conversation, but Cassie seemed genuinely interested and Lauren, she knew, was happy just observing and listening.
“Isn’t all of this death stuff depressing?” Jennifer asked.
“Not to me. Death customs are really all about life, aren’t they? Life after death for both the deceased and the loved ones left behind. The afterlife, in any of its many forms, is the main source of hope for billions of humans since we first became human. There’s almost no society without a tradition of an afterlife in some form or another. With the rare exception, like the Maasai of Kenya, every culture we know of believes in something beyond this life.”
“So, really,” Cassie concluded, “your specialty is life after death?”
“You could say that. I don’t happen to believe in it myself, but I think it’s an endlessly fascinating concept. As soon as humans became conscious of the
ir mortality, at least as far back as Neanderthalensis, and maybe even further, they started to create realities beyond this one.”
Cassie looked skeptical. “How can we know that?”
“Because of burial practices. Because, if there was nothing after death, there would be no reason to prepare for the afterlife. The earliest known burial sites show evidence that the dead person would be going on to something else.”
Cassie sat back, her glass in hand, looking satisfied.
“I believe in it,” Jennifer said firmly. “I believe in Heaven.”
They all turned to look at her. She looked mildly defiant, leveling her gaze at Faith, as if she were preparing for an argument. But Faith merely smiled and raised her glass to Jennifer. She suddenly felt neither superior nor disdainful, but, just for that moment, she felt envious. That was an admirable accomplishment in its way, the ability to believe something for which there was absolutely no tangible proof. The vast majority of humans were apparently capable of it, but Faith never had been, not since she was a small child. Like other children, as she grew older, her myths left her one by one: the Easter bunny, Santa Claus, the tooth fairy. And God.
When her younger sister Hope died at the age of ten, she had tried hard to believe in Heaven. Everybody told her that’s where Hope was. She had desperately wanted to believe that Hope was still somewhere, anywhere. She had been a sickly child since birth and Faith had always felt protective of her. She had loved Hope in a way she never loved her older sister Charity. She managed to convince herself briefly that Hope was a happy, healthy girl living in Heaven, but with no reinforcement, she eventually lapsed into non-belief. She didn’t know why she didn’t believe. Charity, older by only a year, had grown up in the same Christian family, had attended the same church and been taught the same things, and she had emerged as steadfast a believer as her parents.
Faith, ironically, couldn’t comprehend blind faith. She’d been researching it for decades, but it remained a deep mystery to her. She was no more capable of believing in the God of her parents than she was of believing the moon was made of cheese or that everything happens for a reason, as people were fond of saying at times of incomprehensible tragedy.
Last year, at her mother’s funeral, relatives thought they were offering comfort with statements like, “Now your mother will be with her little Hope again.” That thought was comfort for her father and Charity, she supposed, but it held no meaning for her.
“What do you think happens after you die?” asked Cassie pointedly.
“Nothing,” Faith replied. “End of story.”
“That’s so sad,” Jennifer remarked, looking genuinely gloomy.
Cassie slipped an arm around her shoulders and gave her a heartening squeeze.
“Not really,” Faith said, “depending on what you do with that idea. It definitely makes me appreciate life. This is my one shot and I try to make the best of it. Live every day with determination to make it a good one. I’m grateful to be alive, every day.”
“It’s true,” Lauren said. “She lives like that, like today is always the most important day there is. Not to be wasted.”
Cassie raised her glass and said, “To today!”
The four of them touched glasses.
Faith drained the last of her margarita. “I’m afraid today is over, girls,” she said. “At least for me. But I think we did a damn fine job of using it up.”
Chapter Six
It seemed Jennifer was nervous, even fearful, as the four of them left the cruise ship and boarded a motor-driven sampan to take them deeper into Shen Nong gorge. She had said something earlier about going off on their own, as if it were reckless. Lauren couldn’t blame her, really. They were far from home in a tremendously foreign place and had left the security of their structured tour. Lauren had spent some of the early years with Faith being similarly uneasy. Faith never seemed to be concerned about all the ways in which an adventure like this could go wrong. Lauren had learned, in time, to worry less, though she had never become so carefree as Faith. She decided to tell a story as the four of them sped between high rock walls on the Shen Nong River.
“We once missed the sailing of a cruise ship,” she said to Jennifer. “In Alaska. We were on an Inland Passage cruise and we decided to rent a car in Skagway because there was a Tlingit site Faith wanted to visit. None of the tour buses stopped there.”
“What’s a Tlingit?” Jennifer asked, her face peering through the circular opening of her tightly-cinched hood.
“Native of Alaska. One of the tribes. There’s only one rental car place in Skagway. We got our car from a cranky old woman there named Birdie. The day turned out beautiful and we made it to the site with no problem. We had plenty of time and no worries as we drove leisurely back to town.”
“But then?” Cassie asked.
“But then a moose appeared right in the middle of the road. Faith was driving. She swerved to avoid it and ran us into a ditch.”
Jennifer gasped.
“Nobody was hurt,” Lauren said.
“Not even the moose,” Faith added.
“We’d been seeing buses all day from the various cruise lines, driving up and down the road. But by then the tour buses had already headed back to the dock. The road was deserted. It’s hard to get how isolated that place is until you’re standing on the side of a highway for an hour and not a single vehicle comes by.”
“Lauren thought we were going to freeze to death out there,” Faith confided.
“And we could have! It was getting late and really cold. Finally a guy in a tow truck came along. He said Birdie had sent him out to find us because we hadn’t come back. Well, I took back all the nasty things I’d said about Birdie at that point. The guy pulled our car out and we rode back to town. But the ship had sailed.”
“Oh, no!” Cassie said. “What did you do?”
“We asked Birdie if we could keep the car for another day,” Faith said. “We figured we could drive south and catch our ship at the next port, which was Juneau. Not that far, right, I asked Birdie. Nope, not that far, she said. About ninety miles as the eagle flies. So, we’re thinking, fantastic. We’ll be there in no time, have a nice dinner, just wait for the ship to arrive.”
Faith looked at Lauren, wordlessly handing the story over.
“No, said Birdie, you can’t do that. There’s no road to Juneau.”
Cassie’s mouth fell open. “What? Juneau is the capital of Alaska.”
“Right,” Lauren confirmed. “But no road to Juneau. Not even by a roundabout way. So Birdie hooked us up with a bush pilot for the next day. We stayed in Skagway that night and flew to Juneau in the morning.”
“I loved it!” Faith said. “I’d been wanting to fly with a bush pilot every day since we arrived in Alaska. Seems so adventurous, you know. “
“It was fun,” Lauren said. “We were actually glad we missed our ship. The pilot gave us a fascinating tour on our way to Juneau.”
“You were lucky you weren’t eaten by a grizzly bear,” Jennifer said. “Are there any bears here?”
Faith laughed loudly.
“Things do sometimes go wrong,” Lauren said, “despite Faith’s unflinching optimism. But usually not irrevocably. And sometimes something unexpected turns out to be the best thing of all.”
“Still,” Cassie said, “I’d just as soon not miss our embarkation time today.”
“Plenty of time for our little excursion before that,” Faith assured her. “As long as we don’t run into a moose.”
The multi-hued cliff walls narrowed as they went further upstream. The color of this river was a deep green, not the muddy brown of the Yangtze. It was a gorgeous place, Lauren thought, craning her neck to look high above them to the open sky, blue and cloud-free. No chance of rain today.
“Look!” Faith said, pointing high up on the left river bank. “You can see them!”
They all followed her finger up the sheer cliff two-thirds of the way to a spot where th
ree hunks of wood protruded from the rock wall.
“Those are just tree trunks,” Jennifer said after looking through the binoculars.
“Right,” said Faith. “They are. That’s what they made the coffins out of. But as you can see, there are no trees growing on these steep cliffs, especially no trees of that size. Those things were carried up there somehow.”
“Why here?” Cassie asked. “These cliffs are practically vertical. Why choose a place so hard to reach?”
“You have to assume that was the idea. We don’t really know. To keep something away from the bodies.”
“Something?” asked Jennifer, grimacing.
Faith grinned, but didn’t offer an explanation. Their guide cut the boat’s engine and pulled over to the river bank, gliding gently to shore. Now that the boat was stationary, they could feel the warmth of the sun. It was a fine day for a hike.
“Leave your coats,” Lauren suggested. “It’s going to warm up once you start walking. You’ll probably just want a vest, if anything, over your shirts.”
They peeled off their outer layers, down to short-sleeves, except for Jennifer, who wore a sleeveless top. Lauren admired her muscular arms momentarily before unzipping the legs of her convertible nylon pants. Both Cassie and Jennifer pulled on ball caps, Jennifer threading her ponytail through the opening in the back of hers. Faith put on her Tilley hat and Lauren tied it for her under her chin. Once they were dressed the part, they piled out of the boat to begin their hike.
The guide was a small man, shorter and thinner than all four of the women. He was gaunt, but quick and agile, moving rapidly along the rough terrain in open sandals. He never said his real name, but they were instructed to call him Joe. They followed Joe in single file, Lauren first, then Cassie, then Jennifer, with Faith bringing up the rear.
The path alongside the river started out flat and easy, but soon began to climb, getting steeper and sometimes slippery. Most of the time it was wide enough to give them a sense of safety, but in a few places, the trail became a narrow ledge on the cliff face. They slowed down considerably at those spots and picked their way carefully, aware of the peril of plummeting to their deaths. Faith and Lauren were used to this sort of hike, but it was clearly an unaccustomed adventure for Cassie and Jennifer. From what Lauren had gathered, Jennifer’s finely-toned body was the result of daily trips to the gym rather than sports. The going was much slower with the two of them along, but Lauren decided it was nice to have them anyway. Cassie at least, because she seemed to be so delighted with the day.