That up means up the stairs, up the hill, and a whole lot of other places too, and that its meaning may depend on where you are at the moment, is important information. A child needs all the help she can get in learning to take that vast variety of meanings into account.
Lying, of course, isn’t the same as pretending. Leila and a grownup might have a fine time imagining the horsies in the bedroom, with Hank hogging all the blankets and Perla kicking him and Mel saying, Where’s the hay? But for this to work as imagination, the child has to know that the horsies are in fact in the horse barn. In this sense, truth to fact, insofar as we know what fact is, must come first. The child has to be able to trust what she’s told. Her belief must be honored by our honesty.
I brought in Santa Claus for a reason. I’ve always been uncomfortable with the way we handle him. We had Santa Claus in my family (in fact my mother wrote a lovely children’s book about Santa Claus in California letting his reindeer graze on the new winter clover). When I was a kid we read “The Night Before Christmas,” and we set out milk and cookies by the fireplace, and they were gone in the morning, and we all enjoyed it. People love pretense, and love ritual, and need both. Neither of them is counterfactual. Santa Claus is an odd, quirky, generally benign myth—a real myth, deeply involved in the ritual behaviors of the one great holiday we still have left. As such I honor him.
Very early in my life, like most kids, I could distinguish “Pretend” from “Real,” which means I knew myth and fact were different things and had some sense of the no-man’s land that lies between the two. At any age I can recall, if somebody had asked me, “Is Santa Claus real?” I would, I think, have been confused and embarrassed, blushed red in case it was the wrong answer, and said no.
I don’t think I missed anything not thinking Santa Claus was real the way my parents were real. I could listen out for reindeer hooves with the best of them.
Our kids had Santa Claus; we read the poem, and left milk and cookies out for him; and so do their kids. To me, that’s what’s important. That the bonding ritual be honored, the myth reenacted and carried forward in time.
When I was a kid and other kids started telling about “when they found out about Santa Claus,” I kept my mouth shut. Incredulity is unlovable. I am opening my mouth now because I am too old to be lovable, but still incredulous when I hear people—adults!—mourning over the awful day they found out that Santa Claus wasn’t real.
To me what’s awful is not—as it is usually presented—the “loss of belief.” What’s awful is the demand that children believe or pretend to believe a falsehood, and the guilty-emotion-laden short-circuiting of the mind that happens when fact is deliberately confused with myth, actuality with ritual symbol.
Is what people grieve over the pain not of losing a belief but of realizing that somebody you trusted expected you to believe something they didn’t believe? Or is it that in losing literal belief in our fat little Father Christmas, they also lose love and respect for him and what he stands for? But why?
I could go on from here in several directions, one of them political. As some parents manipulate their children’s beliefs, however well-meaningly, some politicians play more or less knowingly on people’s trust, persuading them to accept a deliberately fostered confusion of actuality with wishful thinking and fact with symbol. Like, say, the Third Reich. Or Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom. Or Mission Accomplished.
But I don’t want to go there. I just want to meditate on the horsies upstairs.
Belief has no value in itself that I can see. Its value increases as it is useful, diminishes as it is replaced by knowledge, and goes negative when it’s noxious. In ordinary life, the need for it diminishes as the quantity and quality of knowledge increase.
There are areas in which we have no knowledge, where we need belief, because it’s all we can act on. In the whole area we call religion or the realm of the spirit, we can act only on belief. There, belief may be called knowledge by the believer: “I know that my Redeemer liveth.” That’s fair, so long as it’s fair also to maintain and insist upon the difference, outside religion, between the two things. In the realm of science, the value of belief is nil or negative; only knowledge is valuable. Therefore, I don’t say I believe two plus two is four, or that the earth goes around the sun, but that I know it. Because evolution is an ever-developing theory, I prefer to say I accept it, rather than that I know it to be true. Acceptance in this sense is, I suppose, the secular equivalent of belief. It can certainly provide endless nourishment and delight for mind and soul.
I’m willing to believe people who say they couldn’t live if they lost their religious belief. I hope they’ll believe me when I say that if my intellect goes, if I’m left groping in confusion unable to tell the real from the imagined, if I lose what I know and the capacity to learn, I hope I die.
To see a person who’s lived only two years in this world seeking and finding her way in it, perfectly trusting, having her trust rewarded with truth, and accepting it—that was a lovely thing to see. What it made me think about above all is how incredibly much we learn between our birthday and last day—from where the horsies live to the origin of the stars. How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.
First Contact
May 2011
I HAVE SEEN many rattlesnakes, I have eaten fried rattlesnake; but only once have I ever been in contact with a living rattler. Though contact is not the word I really want—it is metaphorical and inexact. We did not touch. Maybe it was communication, though of a very limited kind. As communication between alien species is perhaps doomed to be.
I have told the story often as a comedy, a story in which people behave ridiculously, with a happy ending. Here it is:
We were at the old ranch in the Napa Valley and I was just about to sit down on one of the 1932 iron chaise lounges (carefully, because if you sit too far toward the end, the whole unwieldy thing stands up and throws you off like a bronco) when I heard a noise I recognized. That was the first communication. It was the hissing buzz of the rattlesnake’s rattles. Startled by my movements, it was heading off into the high grass, rattling away. About fifteen feet away it looked back, saw me looking at it, and stopped there, its head up and facing me and its gaze fixed on me. As mine was fixed on it.
I hollered for Charles. The rattler paid no attention. I believe they are deaf. I suppose they “hear” their own rattle as vibration in their body, not in the air.
Charles came out and we discussed the situation—not calmly. I said, “If he goes off into the high grass there, we’ll never dare walk out in the pasture the whole time we’re here.”
We thought we had to kill the rattlesnake. That’s what you do, generally, in the country, at a place where little kids come and run around.
Charles went and got the big heavy long-handled hoe my father called the Portugee hoe, with which rattlers had been killed before, by others. Not by us. Charles got close enough to strike.
The rattler and I had never taken our eyes off each other, or moved.
Charles said, “I can’t.”
I said, “I couldn’t either.”
“So what do we do?” we said.
The rattler was probably thinking the same thing.
“Go see if Denys is there?” Charles said.
I said, “I don’t think it’ll move so long as we keep staring at each other, so you go.”
And Charles went up the driveway and down the road a couple hundred yards to our only near neighbors, the Cazets. It took a while. All that while, the snake and I did not move and looked steadily into each other’s eyes. They say a snake’s gaze is hypnotic, but who was hypnotizing whom?
We were like people newly in love who “can’t take their eyes off each other.” This was not love, but it was something equally intense, and even more immediately a matter of life and death.
It is this brief time, five or six minutes I suppose, ten minutes at most, t
hat over the years I have thought of again and again, always with the vividness of the moment and always with a sense of its importance, or import: of there being a great deal to learn from it.
During this time, the rattlesnake and I were alone together. Alone in all the world. We were held together by common fear—bonded. We were held in a spell—entranced.
This time was outside ordinary time, and outside ordinary feelings; it involved danger for both of us; and it involved a bond between creatures who do not and cannot ordinarily relate to each other in any way. Each would naturally try not to relate—to just get away—or to kill in self-defense.
In all these respects, I think it isn’t amiss to think of this time as sacred.
The sacred and the comic are not that far apart, something the Pueblo Indians seem to know better than most of us do.
Charles and Denys came panting down the driveway with the big galvanized garbage can and a piece of semirigid white plastic tubing about fifteen feet long. Denys had the tube; he knew what to do because he’d done it before. A distinguished artist/author of children’s books, he was a year-rounder in the valley. And his house was on a pretty little property which, before the house was built, we used to call Rattlesnake Clearing.
The snake continued to look at me only and I at it only, while Denys set the garbage can down on its side with the opening facing the snake, maybe twenty feet from it and very visible to it. Then, coming quietly round behind it at full tube-length, he flicked the end of the tube near its head. That broke the spell. I looked away from the snake at the tube, the snake looked away from me at the tube, and then flowed hurriedly away from the thing flicking about in the air behind it and made straight for the welcoming dark cave of the garbage can. It flowed right into it—at which Charles ran to upend the can, and clapped the lid on.
A mighty and wrathful commotion took place inside the can. It shivered and trembled and all but danced. We stood in awe and listened to the rage of a truly angry rattlesnake in an echo chamber. It finally quieted down.
“Now what?”
“Anywhere a good ways away from the house.”
“There’s the millionaire up at the end of the road,” said Denys. “I’ve turned several snakes loose up there.”
A pleasing thought. The millionaire was never there, nobody lived on his lovely hilltop. Excellent rattlesnake territory. The three humans and the garbage can all got in the car and drove up the road, the snake in the can making some vicious criticisms in a low, hissing buzz along the way. At the end of the road we got out and laid the can down, knocked the lid off with the invaluable plastic tube, and watched the split-second disappearance of the snake into a thousand acres of wild oats.
It was our garbage can, the one that still stands up at the top of the driveway where the garbage company can collect on Mondays. I have never looked at that can since, in all these years, without thinking of what it held, once.
A teaching, a blessing, may come in strange ways, ways we do not expect, or control, or welcome, or understand. We are left to think it over.
The Lynx
November 2010
LAST WEEK MY friend Roger and I went out to Bend, the eastern Oregon city where a lot of retired people in search of sunlight and a dry climate have been settling since the 1990s. From Portland the shortest road is over Mount Hood and through the vast Warm Springs Reservation. It was a bright late October day, with the big broadleaf maples making masses of pure gold in the evergreen forests. The blue of the sky got more intense as we went down from the summit into the clear air and open landscapes of Oregon’s dry side.
Bend is named, I guess, for the bend of its lively river in which it sits. The Three Sisters and other snow cones of the Cascades tower up over it in the west, and the vast expanses of the high desert sweep on out eastward. In recent years the city grew and thrived with the influx of settlers, but it hit hard times with the recession. Too much of its prosperity depended on the construction trades. Downtown is still pleasant, but there are gaps, with several fine restaurants gone, and it looks as if some new resorts out toward Mount Bachelor are paralyzed at the platting stage.
We stayed at a motel there on the west side of the river, which is built up at intervals, with bits of juniper forest and sagebrush plain in between. The long, wide boulevards go winding around in curves, crisscrossing each other at three- and four-exit roundabouts. It appears that the people who laid out the roads wanted to imitate what happens when you drop noodles on the floor. Though Tina at Camalli Books had given us careful instructions with all the road names and all the roundabout exits on the way to and from our motel—and though a western skyline of six- to ten-thousand-foot mountain peaks would seem to provide adequate orientation—we never once left the motel without getting lost.
I learned to dread the Old Mill District. As soon as I saw the sign saying OLD MILL DISTRICT I knew we were lost again. If Bend were a big city instead of just a far-flung one we might still be there trying to escape from the Old Mill District.
Roger and I were there to do a reading and signing of our book Out Here at the bookstore Friday evening and at the High Desert Museum Saturday afternoon. The museum is on Highway 97 a few miles south of town. A bit farther on is Sunriver, one of the earliest and biggest resort developments. Roger suggested we have lunch there. Given the money that flows through those residential resorts, I was expecting something on the gourmet side; but the bar and grill served the same huge piles of heavy food that you get at a bar and grill anywhere in America, where the idea of a light lunch is a pound or two of nachos.
I haven’t stayed at Sunriver but have spent a few nights at other high-end resorts in the area. They are laid out artfully to blend into the austere and beautiful landscape. Built of wood and painted or stained in a repetitive range of muted colors, the houses are unobtrusive, with plenty of space around them and trees left standing between them. All the streets curve. Straight streets are anathema to the resort mind. Right angles say City, and resorts are busy saying Country, and that’s why all the boulevards west of the river loop and swoop about so gracefully like noodles. The trouble is, since the juniper trees and the sage bushes and the buildings and the streets and the boulevards all look pretty much alike, if you don’t remember just where Colorado Drive connects with Century Drive before the roundabout exit to Cascade Drive, if you don’t have a good inner or external GPS system, you get lost.
Staying a couple of years ago at one of these resorts in a granny flat in somebody’s condo, I could get lost within a hundred yards of the house. All the curvy streets and roads were lined with groups of houses in tasteful muted earth tones that exactly resembled the other groups of houses in tasteful muted earth tones, and there were no landmarks, and it all went on, over and over, sprawling out, without sidewalks—because of course the existence of such a place is predicated entirely on driving, on getting to it, from it, and around it by car. I don’t drive.
Bend is, I believe, the largest city in America with no public transportation system. They were fixing to do something about that when the bottom fell out of the building trade.
So after getting lost a couple of times walking, because I couldn’t tell which tastefully muted house on which curving road was my house, I was uneasy about going out again. But if granny didn’t go for a walk she was trapped in the granny flat. And that was pretty bad. When you first walked in, you thought, Oh! very nice!—because the whole inner wall was a mirror, which reflected the room and the big window, making it look large and light. In fact the room was so small it was almost entirely filled with bed.
The bed was piled with ornamental pillows. I counted them, but have forgotten how many there were—say twenty or twenty-five ornamental pillows, and four or five enormous teddy bears. When you took the bears and pillows off the bed so you could use the bed, there was no place to put them but on the floor around the bed, which meant there was no floor space, only pillows and bears. There was a tiny kitchen on the other side of
a divider. No desk, no chair, though there was a blessed window seat to sit in, with a big view of trees and sky. I lived in the window seat, making my way through the bears and pillows when it was time for bed.
A door, which could not be locked, led down a corridor to the owners’ apartment, which was occupied. I put my suitcase and eight or ten of the pillows and the hugest, most obese teddy bear against the door as a barrier against absent-minded intrusion by my unknown hosts. But I didn’t have any real faith in that bear.
Roger and I kept passing that very resort on our noodly way to refinding our motel, and I winced every time I saw it, afraid we might somehow get into it and get lost in it again.
I feel vaguely guilty about preferring a mere motel to a carefully planned, upscale residential resort. But the guilt is vague while the preference is clear and categorical. I like motels. Exclusivity isn’t my bag. “Gated communities” are not communities in any sense of the word I understand. I know that a great many of the people who own or time-share or rent places in these dry-side resorts go there not for the exclusive company of other middle-class white people but for the marvelous air and light of the high desert, the forests, the ski slopes, the spaciousness and silence. I know. That’s fine. Just don’t make me stay in one. Especially not one equipped with giant teddy bears.
But all this is merely preparation for getting to the lynx.
The lynx lives at the High Desert Museum. Briefly, when he was a kitten somebody pulled out his claws (“declawing” a cat is the same as pulling out a human being’s fingernails and toenails or cutting off the last joint of each toe and finger). Then they pulled out his four great cat fangs. Then they pretended he was their itty-bitty kitty. Then they got tired of him, or got scared of him, and dumped him. He was found starving.
Like all the birds and animals at the High Desert Museum, he is a wild creature who can’t survive in the wild.
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