I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place (11 page)

It was to be far less a pilgrimage than a chance to begin some sort of new journey. Mathilde had gone to her Maker; I needed to look at her photograph to recall her face, since even dreams seldom provided that now. I had a photograph of her at what I considered her most ebullient, bright self, laughing, seated at a wedding banquet, and when I looked at it in the plane, I smiled at her comment about her pronouncedly angular nose: “I cut a swath through the day.” Also, I remembered really liking the dress she had on that evening. The earrings, too. How she was inebriated, giddy, whispering to the woman who sat next to her. And how she'd danced every dance with someone, including me in my rented tuxedo. I'd turned twenty-one in March. Her twenty-seventh birthday would have been June 7.

To get to the site of the wreckage was simple. At the landing strip in Kyle there was a car and a pickup truck for rent by the day or the week. I chose the truck and put twenty dollars in the hands of the attendant. That was commerce in those days. On a road southeast out of Kyle, I found the six-cottage motel where Mathilde had been staying and asked the owner, “Can you please direct me to where the plane crashed last year?” He drew a rough map on a napkin. No questions asked except, “Will you be needing a room?” It took me less than fifteen minutes to get to the spot he'd marked with an X.

It was a beautiful day. There were some birds, but I didn't bother to identify which kinds, since I just wanted to take in the sweep of the landscape. Open fields along a creek, with cattails waving and slightly bent in the wind. As I started to walk, with no destination in mind, I suddenly saw that someone had put up a wooden cross, decorated with plastic flowers, near a small marsh. This had to be in memory of the pilot, or Mathilde, or perhaps both. There were no words on the cross, but it was built solidly and seemed to be planted deep in the ground.

It occurred to me that I should find out who had done this, but then I thought that would make for detective work the result of which would have little meaning. I wasn't there to write about Mathilde's fate, I was there to write about birds, and that was that. The wreckage had been mostly cleared, but not completely. I noticed a charred seat with its springs exposed, sections of a wing, blackened pieces of glass, and what looked like photographic film cases lying about. There also was part of the fuselage with decaled numbers on it, but I didn't care to touch any of this. I just needed a place to begin.

I ended up staying at the small motel that night. It was only me and the proprietor and his wife; we had hamburgers together in their cottage. Nice people, all seasoned hospitality and grateful for the patronage (twelve dollars for the room), but they thought I wanted to talk about the plane crash, and I may have been snappish and blunt in saying that I didn't. Later, we watched a half-hour sitcom on TV. Having slept fitfully with the bedside lamp on, I left at five
A.M.
to drive back to Kyle.

From Kyle, in harrowing crosswinds, I flew with three others to Last Mountain Lake, beginning the second day of what would be an exhaustive, two-month tour of Saskatchewan's bird preserves, during which I worked myself to a near frazzle, sleeping at most three or four hours a night. I took detailed notes and snapshots with a Polaroid Instamatic, pictures hardly professional enough for publication, meant only to later help me distinguish, along with my journal, one preserve from the next. In my inexperience, I didn't know how to go about these commissions, except to chronicle everything I could. When I got home, I would figure out how to tailor my pieces to satisfy each editor. In the end, I succeeded in getting only one published.

But along the way, something unforeseen occurred. I began keeping a “life list” of birds, a process that I later came to see as distasteful, reducing the natural world to a kind of arithmetic. Yet during those summer months, keeping a ledger of bird names, each one like a found poem, allowed me some purchase on quotidian life.

I'd wanted to begin with Last Mountain Lake because it was the first designated bird sanctuary in North America. In autumn, a visitor could see as many as fifty thousand sandhill cranes there. Still, it being early summer, I saw peregrine falcons, piping plovers, burrowing owls, ferruginous hawks, loggerhead shrikes, terns, grebes, and pelicans.

After Last Mountain Lake I traveled to the “hummingbird capital,” the St. Walburg area; the Battlefords, especially to see the black-crowned night herons; Lloydminster for the yellow-headed blackbirds; Saskatchewan Landing for the belted kingfishers and Clark's grebes; Quill Lake for the red-necked phalaropes and American avocets; Swift Current for the merlins and American kestrels; Grasslands National Park for the greater sage-grouses, prairie falcons, and golden eagles; Weyburn for the chestnut-collared longspurs; Moose Mountain Provincial Park for the great crested flycatchers and ring-necked ducks; Leader (where, sitting near the Leader Bridge, I got bitten on the hand by a prairie rattlesnake and was administered antivenom at the Park Service clinic, and became only mildly nauseous, though my fever spiked to 103 for a few hours; my hand was puffy, achy, and black-and-blue for a week) for the willow flycatchers, long-billed curlews, and violet-green swallows; Chaplin Lake for the thousands of Baird's sandpipers, and the black-necked stilts and tundra swans; Duck Mountain Provincial Park for the barred owls and rare golden-winged warblers; Good Spirit Lake Provincial Park for the pileated woodpeckers; Douglas Provincial Park for the veeries, Cooper's hawks, and migrant thrushes; Gardiner Dam and Danielson Provincial Park for the great horned owls, hairy woodpeckers, and gyrfalcons; Pelican Lake for the American white pelicans; Buffalo Pound Provincial Park for the LeConte's sparrows and Say's phoebes; and finally the long journey north to Wood Buffalo National Park to see—mostly to hear—the whooping cranes.

All summer, while my mind filled with birds to try to push out every other thought, discussions with park rangers and ornithologists, the Cree Indian woman who'd referred to the lifting of cranes from the water as “God-flight,” and the thousand traveled miles, I kept thinking of Mathilde (“She would've loved to have seen all this”), though perhaps less and less as the days went on. What helped was the practical philosophy of Robert Frost, from his poem “A Servant to Servants”: “the best way out is always through.”

In my case, I was working my way through an entire province of birds in order to emerge into whatever came next, and pretty much succeeded. Yet on my last evening at Wood Buffalo Park, I was out by a marsh, the light hazy, the full moon pale under clouds, as if borrowed for the night from a Japanese scroll, when a boisterous flock of about two dozen geese, not in the customary V shape but a more ragged formation, approached the marsh. Painted by the light of that particular dusk, they looked like grey geese descending.

I
OFTEN THINK BACK
to my Grand Rapids summer of 1964, that confusing time when, as a means of escape, I obsessively studied three or four photograph-filled books on the Arctic region of Canada—its polar bears and foxes, its sea birds and narwhals, its Eskimo (before the word
Inuit
was in proper use) people living in those vast reaches. Had the few months in the bookmobile launched me on a trajectory that led to the Canadian Arctic? Such connections are all but impossible to assume, of course. Life does not travel from point A to point B. A whole world of impudent detours, unbridled perplexities, degrading sorrows, and exacting joys can befall a person in a single season, not to mention a lifetime. First at McGill University, and then at Western Michigan University, I took, sometimes one per semester, courses in various subjects—philology, zoology, literature—finally earning a degree from the Folklore Institute at Indiana University. And I had to keep finding ways to pay tuition. With assistance from professors and museum directors, and a willingness to live in remote places, I signed up for postings in half a dozen Arctic locales in order to record Inuit life histories, medical histories, and folktales. Looking back, I suppose I had some vague notion of writing about all of this, but mainly I needed the money. And these were the kinds of jobs few people volunteered for. To reduce it to practical terms, it was ready work, where and when I needed it. In the end, I think it's fair to say that nearly a decade of piecemeal Arctic jobs and traveling provided an apprenticeship in writing and thinking. The ubiquitous blessing was that I got to experience the languages, cultures, and spirit presences that verified the assertion set forth in a poem by Paul Éluard: “There is another world but it's in this one.”

 

In December 1980, I was in Eskimo Point, in the Canadian Northwest Territories. On the eighth of that month, I wrote on a page of my journal, “Today John Lennon died.” That afternoon, in the Arctic's crepuscular light, the Inuit pilot Edward Shaimaiyuk stood next to his Cessna on the hard-packed snow landing strip, which had been sprinkled with crushed coal for traction, and said, “I'm going south to Canada.”

Edward was about sixty years old. Leaning against his plane, he began to shout what to my ears were desperate-sounding implorations in his language, the Quagmiriut dialect spoken along Hudson Bay. It had begun to snow hard, and the snow was mixed with slanting sleet. The sky was shifting dark clouds west to east. Edward was addressing Sedna—I distinctly heard the name—who is the ancient and powerful woman-spirit who controls the sea and to some extent the air and ice over the sea. For centuries, ever since she was betrayed by her cousins and exiled to the sea bottom, she has maintained an entourage of sea spirits who do her retributive bidding, and has comported herself with severe and unpredictable moodiness, exhibiting an uncanny repertoire of punishments, some lethal, in response to the cruelty, greed, and spiritual trespasses of human beings. To say that Sedna can act in a capricious manner is to say that there are stars in the sky.

One consequence of Sedna's behavior is that Inuit people have a provisional relationship with her, and must constantly be vigilant not to offend. Sedna has to be appeased daily, and prayer is one way to do this. Prayers as in what Edward Shaimaiyuk was shouting—he knew she was causing weather hazardous to fly in. He was apologizing, seeking forgiveness, although I didn't know for what, exactly.

In its intensity Edward's wild prayer was both mesmerizing and disturbing. He had worked himself nearly to tears. Again, I didn't know for which trespass he was asking pardon—with humankind there were so many and they occurred so frequently—nor did I know if I should even have been looking at him. What is the proper decorum in the presence of such a dramatic and intimate petition for mercy from invisible forces?

Meanwhile, I helped his son, Peter Shaimaiyuk, load five electric guitars and several sacks of mail into the cargo hold. The guitars were going to Winnipeg for repair.

Yet something was very wrong here. Something was not going well. Edward was now staring at the horizon. Studying it. Looking over now and then, Peter, in turn, studied his father's expression.

Though he'd calmed down a little, Edward kept repeating a phrase in Inuit, and finally I asked Peter what it meant.

“It's my father's biggest fear,” he said. “His biggest worry. And it's the reason he's not going anywhere today. He's not going to fly, I'm sure of it.”

“Would he mind if I knew why?”

“It's hard to put in English,” Peter said. “But my father believes that radio airwaves—not sure what word to use. Radio airways—frequencies—from the cities can catch his plane and pull him in like a fishing net. Sedna can cause this. And he's very afraid of this. He doesn't want to be pulled down to a city like Winnipeg or Montreal. He's seen cities in magazines and doesn't want to go there. He doesn't want to go where rooms are stacked up on each other, like in a hotel. He doesn't even like it that rooms are stacked up on each other in the Churchill Hotel, just down to Churchill. He goes to Churchill a lot. He's had bad dreams about having to sleep high up off the ground.”

“He flies up in the air, though,” I said, as if reason could abide.

“Not the same thing to him. You won't figure it out. Just take it as fact. It's how my father thinks when Sedna gets angry—she's angry today. He thinks she'll make radios from the cities net him and drag him off course. He'll have to land in a city and he'll never get out. He'll die in a city. He doesn't have a lot of fears, my father. But the ones he has, they're big. That's why he's so upset now. That's why he's definitely not flying today. When he gets like this I just step back. He's my father. I've seen this a lot of times. One thing's for sure, my father is not flying. Let's get the guitars off, okay?”

 

For some fifteen years Peter had a band called Nanook the Gook. The band's name originally was Turbulence (I wonder if it came from his father's experience flying mail planes or from some inner turmoil Peter himself felt), but they decided to change it when the Vietnam War was at full nightmarish cacophony and
gook
was the derogatory term used by the U.S. military for a Vietnamese person; this was the Inuit band's satirical identification with, as Peter put it, “small brown folks.” (Nanook was the Inuit fellow who had been featured in the famous ethnographic film
Nanook of the North.
) The Vietnam War came to be referred to as the first television war, but in the Arctic it arrived almost exclusively by radio, via daily bulletins on the CBC.

Anyway, I'd heard Nanook the Gook play four or five times and knew that their repertoire consisted entirely of the songs of John Lennon. Peter, who was about thirty-five, wore round wire-rimmed glasses when he played guitar and sang—no corrective lenses, just clear glass. He had ordered them after he'd heard a commercial for “John Lennon granny glasses” on the radio or seen an ad in some magazine or other. I think maybe it was in
Rolling Stone,
back issues of which were delivered by mail plane every three or four months, depending on the weather.