It was a hiker's paradise--the highlands of Papua New Guinea, where my family lived in those days: here were mountains and plenty more mountains, and thick forests that hid their famous birds of paradise like aces up a sleeve, and rivers with rapids and lots more rapids, and orchids in the woods, and on the hillsides: artesian springs and waterfalls. At night there were stars to beat the band, just multitudes of them--softly, collectively glowing. I loved passing by a thatched roofed villages. I loved seeing the smoke from inside the huts seeping up through the thatch, and inveigling itself with the morning mist. Also near every settlement would be sweet potato mounds planted sometimes on inclines so steep as to beggar belief. Occasionally you might hear of someone "falling out of their garden," and even being killed in the fall. Quite a way to go: falling out of your garden.
The locals, when you passed them by, always enjoyed the white-guy parade. Of course they would all be speaking Enga, but you knew the gist of it: "Would you look at that! What's he huffing and puffing about? Why, my old lady can climb faster than he can!" Even the older folks seemed so vividly alive. Their calf muscles, from having to negotiate the slopes of the place, were thick as fists, and their toes all splayed from years of gripping the muddy paths. We Bjornstads have a dyed-in-the-wool respect for competent walkers, and we're not often outclassed in our native country in the art itself; but let me tell you--there, in spite of our longer legs, and our water bottles and provisions--those folks easily had us licked.
It was a bush spirit--or depending on your point of view, a man-sized carving of one, deeply incised on the bark of that tree. Was the carving meant to invoke that spirit, or keep it away? To flatter him? To give that spirit some way to look at himself? What? Well I would never find out. Some things we never find out. In fact, most everything we most deeply wish to know, we never find out for sure; at least that's my experience. Why do I think this? Well because on one or two occasions, I've been lucky enough to touch the edge of the world I knew and found folks there who saw things differently, really differently, from me; and for the life of me I don't see why their view of the world holds any less of a claim to being real, than mine. Which kind of puts the kibosh on dogma and certainty. Nor for that matter, do I think that we properly credit the strangeness of what we ourselves claim to have discovered. For instance in spite the advanced state of our physics, most of us still talk glibly about an inert, solid, generic stuff called "matter," even though physics cannot find anything here or there or anywhere by that description, but only waves of probability and energy, governed quite possibly by the observational intentions of Consciousness itself, whatever THAT might be. So that, say, the stop sign I see there on the corner, is far more a happening than an item, and no more solid than a cloud of gnats, and every bit as active.
All this is important. It points us to the fallibility of our senses, as well as the limits of language when applied to the task of describing the world, as well as the stubbornness of our minds in clinging to the easier (because familiar) categories; not to mention a profound resistance in our culture to imagining the world as an absolutely interactive and energetic reality, in which easy oppositions such as dead and alive, and in-my-head and outside-my-head, are questionable at best, and misleading at the worst. Why? Well in the first place, because they might just be dead wrong--in fact almost certainly are--but in the second place because they direct us implacably away from the description of the world most likely to keep the human race sane and safe these days: namely, an imaginative reality in which everything resonates with everything else, and in which one being's pain is another's too; a universe in which reverence and silence and leaving well enough alone ought to be the going strategy, as my guides treated the image on the tree. Most folks reject the notion of Gaia, that is, of the planet as a whole living being. But what if seeing the earth as a living being was not just an pretty fair reflection of the reality, but also, again, the obvious road to sanity in our relationship with that being, of which we seem to be a rebellious portion? Questions questions.
Mud made the going that afternoon particularly hard. How many times did I slip on the path? who knows? dang it all though, the stupid rain. Not that I should have expected any different. It was rainy season after all, in one of the most lavishly rainy places on the planet, and you'd be a fool to go on a walkabout in that season with the expectation of keeping dry. Still, for some reason, we all keep wishing don't we?
Well, after all that slogging, finally, finally, we came to the edge of those woods and out. And there in front of us was a wide valley of grasses and giant tree ferns. Tree fern here. Tree fern there. Grasses between them. I want to be precise. The ferns amounted to light and tasteful punctuation on the dense lush text of the grass. Hundreds of yards separated most of the ferns. And I couldn't say why, in that area, the vegetation proved to be grass and ferns as opposed to woods; it may have been altitude, or soil chemistry, or periodic burns in the past. But in any case, right at the demarcation between the woods and the grassland, we set up camp, which is to say we pitched our tents, ate a bit of dinner, and crawled into what you might call bed. Overnight it rained pretty heavily.
The next morning we hadn't been walking for more than an hour, when it became obvious that something was wrong, and that this something had to do with me. At first the trouble showed up in whispering among the guides. But then, as if by collective subconscious consent, and not by any spoken order, the whole party stopped, and the guides conferred aloud with Steve. They kept pointing, and soon enough Steve came over to me, asked a few questions. Sure I was limping a bit I said to him. Sure my back hurt a bit. It didn't matter though, no, I wanted to go on. Like the good doctor he was, he nodded and sympathized, but then told it to me straight: there wasn't a whole lot of time for the hike, he said, not if we were going to make it back to camp by sundown. Now, if we didn't make it back by sundown, we'd have to sleep out in the open on the grass, and it was cold out in the open in the grass. There was nothing to burn. No firewood etc etc. Long and short, I'd be holding the party back. I had to go back to camp.
I don't think I managed to hide my disappointment, my chagrin. I was eighteen. I ought to have been able to hack the hike. Steve was doing fine. His wife was doing fine. His two boys, age ten and eight were doing fine. Little legs pumping away. My brother too, was doing fine. What was it with me? But the real disappointment, the deep stuff, had to do with giving up on the destination itself, having to accept the fact that I wasn't going to see the lake probably ever. I was headed back to the States in a month or two, and probably would not be returning to New Guinea.
"You know there's no way you'll get lost," said Steve. "Just follow the trail back. Simon's back there. He'll take care of you." Simon was one of the guides.
"Better luck next time," said Steve next, hand on my shoulder, pushing off like a boat from the dock. Then off they all went. Within minutes the whole party was out of sight.
There are times in life when, knowing the destination, you just have to slog on and get through. THAT had been the challenge of the previous day, in getting through the woods. Other times, the challenge has more to do with letting go gracefully, and saying "okay here's my limit, now what do I do?" It's that second category of challenge (often the far more painful one) that I was up against that day, and not to beat a dead horse, but it's also the challenge we're up against right now as a civilization. Here we are dreaming of robot "caretakers" for the elderly and of stock markets that only go up and nano this and nano that and mining asteroids and founding colonies on Mars, meanwhile here on earth our home the honey bees are dying of pesticide-laced seeds and the price of the crude oil is running over a hundred dollars a barrel and the fisheries are collapsing and the topsoil's blowing away and many of us don't know what to do with food unless it comes in a package to be microwaved. Look folks, it's time to bite our collective lip, lay aside the fantasies of omnipotence, and make the best of it. Time to revert to bona fide personal competence. Time to build up a world in which we recognize that we are not in control and never really were. Time to get along cheerfully with less. Time to suck it in and man it up. Time to share and get along. Time, in short, to get down to work on something called progress, and I mean real progress. Defined as a mental, physical, intellectual, social capital which has nothing to do with how many computers per capita, or how much money in the bank per capita, or how tall our buildings are, and everything to do with knowing where a potato comes from, or walking over to your neighbor and to have a chat across the fence and the blackberry bushes, or the simple happiness of a child at school learning two times two. All that's all tied together with our treatment of the earth, believe me. Or at least, if you continue to read this blog, I hope to convince you of that. Ecological progress is human progress too. Treat the earth as inert dirt, and we will die.
I cannot tell you how quickly disappointment dissolved for me that morning--once I realized that the lake was not for me, and never had been. That was when, literally and figuratively, the sun came out, and it struck me in the first place that I was alone! Truly, magnificently, stupendously alone! Baby, forget the lake. I'm going to enjoy this wide open country! I am going to be who I am! Out here in this amazing place!
So, first of all, under the beaming sun, under a sky most clear and blue and limitless in beauty, under a fern tree indistinguishable from its ancestors in the Jurassic, I lay me down in the soft grass and snoozed. When I woke up, maybe an hour later, I started back. But slowly slowly. Slowly enough to sing. One song after the next. Swing Low Sweet Chariot. Tis a Gift to be Simple. Hard Times Come Again no More. Mrs. O'Leary. All the Pretty Little Horses...Summertime and the Living is Easy...
Back at camp, sure enough there was Simon, who, full of concern, made me a stew and a bed of branches and ferns near the fire, so I could take it easy some more, like the freaking king of Sardinia after a really hard day in the harem. And he and I talked, which was a thing no one, whiteskin or national, had really done that whole time, since after all, the goal had been the lake. His pidgin was very good, and mine was good enough, and I remember asking him the Engan names for this and that plant or flower or fern, and about how you planted the sweet potato, and I remember him asking me about life in my homeland too--what they did with old people there, and whether everyone had cars. I remember trying to describe how far away America was. How big the ocean was that you had to cross to get there. How, if you could walk on the ocean, you could walk for days and days and days and days, and never come to the end of it...
Simon was an expert stewmaker and an entertaining and plant-savvy guy, I was just me, the world (where I was) was all beauty, and there was nowhere else I needed to be, and nothing else I needed to do, and how could anyone ask for more? Except for maybe a song to top it all off. I asked Simon, would he mind if I sang? Simon said he would not mind, and so I sang. Kind of crazy-like, even. I kind of fell out of my garden and sang.
HB
Even back in my youth I never aspired to adventure, not in the Lewis and Clark sense anyway; only in the nine volt inner sense. No week-long hikes into the deepest bush for me. No expeditions to see the forty-foot long alligators of the Sepik. Still, I did enjoy the occasional two-day walkabout with a friend or a guide, and this particular day marked such an occasion: a hike with a missionary family of four, organized by the father in the gang, Steve (he also happened to be the local doctor) as well as two or three local guides. My younger brother was also going with. Our destination? Well that would take us a day and a half to reach. It was a lake, which maybe when we got there, at least if we weren't afraid of leeches and could deal with the coldness of the water, we'd swim in, or maybe just go pole fishing in. Steve and his boys were bringing poles.
We drove out as far we could, out on a red dirt road, and at the trail-head, hitched on our packs. It was late morning when we entered the woods. A drizzle was falling. Already wet and cold, I can recall wondering what I'd gotten myself into. A little walking warmed me though, and soon enough we had a pace. Pace is important. You forget about distance when you have a rhythm going; then everything gets easier. Our guides were leading us along some of the traditional paths that ran between valleys, and these paths connected with others further on, and still others beyond that, so that eventually, you could get to the sea. Though mind you, back in the day, and even into the present, the Enga had never wandered far from their own valleys and clans. No, the paths were all for trade. And there had been plenty of that, as evidenced by the shells that people wore, even up there in the highlands, even in the era before first contact was made with the larger world.
You couldn't have called it a pleasant stroll. The woods were dark, damp and mossy, the air thick and primeval-feeling.
"Dispela samting, em i wanem samting?" I asked one of the guides, nodding and not pointing toward a certain tree. What sort of a thing is this? I didn't get very far with the question though. Translated, the conversation went something like this:
"What's what?"
"That."
"Oh that."
"What is it?"
"Something."
It was clear from their discomfort that they didn't want me to go near it. So I contented myself with the view that I had. Then we moved on.
We drove out as far we could, out on a red dirt road, and at the trail-head, hitched on our packs. It was late morning when we entered the woods. A drizzle was falling. Already wet and cold, I can recall wondering what I'd gotten myself into. A little walking warmed me though, and soon enough we had a pace. Pace is important. You forget about distance when you have a rhythm going; then everything gets easier. Our guides were leading us along some of the traditional paths that ran between valleys, and these paths connected with others further on, and still others beyond that, so that eventually, you could get to the sea. Though mind you, back in the day, and even into the present, the Enga had never wandered far from their own valleys and clans. No, the paths were all for trade. And there had been plenty of that, as evidenced by the shells that people wore, even up there in the highlands, even in the era before first contact was made with the larger world.
You couldn't have called it a pleasant stroll. The woods were dark, damp and mossy, the air thick and primeval-feeling.
"Dispela samting, em i wanem samting?" I asked one of the guides, nodding and not pointing toward a certain tree. What sort of a thing is this? I didn't get very far with the question though. Translated, the conversation went something like this:
"What's what?"
"That."
"Oh that."
"What is it?"
"Something."
It was clear from their discomfort that they didn't want me to go near it. So I contented myself with the view that I had. Then we moved on.
It was a bush spirit--or depending on your point of view, a man-sized carving of one, deeply incised on the bark of that tree. Was the carving meant to invoke that spirit, or keep it away? To flatter him? To give that spirit some way to look at himself? What? Well I would never find out. Some things we never find out. In fact, most everything we most deeply wish to know, we never find out for sure; at least that's my experience. Why do I think this? Well because on one or two occasions, I've been lucky enough to touch the edge of the world I knew and found folks there who saw things differently, really differently, from me; and for the life of me I don't see why their view of the world holds any less of a claim to being real, than mine. Which kind of puts the kibosh on dogma and certainty. Nor for that matter, do I think that we properly credit the strangeness of what we ourselves claim to have discovered. For instance in spite the advanced state of our physics, most of us still talk glibly about an inert, solid, generic stuff called "matter," even though physics cannot find anything here or there or anywhere by that description, but only waves of probability and energy, governed quite possibly by the observational intentions of Consciousness itself, whatever THAT might be. So that, say, the stop sign I see there on the corner, is far more a happening than an item, and no more solid than a cloud of gnats, and every bit as active.
All this is important. It points us to the fallibility of our senses, as well as the limits of language when applied to the task of describing the world, as well as the stubbornness of our minds in clinging to the easier (because familiar) categories; not to mention a profound resistance in our culture to imagining the world as an absolutely interactive and energetic reality, in which easy oppositions such as dead and alive, and in-my-head and outside-my-head, are questionable at best, and misleading at the worst. Why? Well in the first place, because they might just be dead wrong--in fact almost certainly are--but in the second place because they direct us implacably away from the description of the world most likely to keep the human race sane and safe these days: namely, an imaginative reality in which everything resonates with everything else, and in which one being's pain is another's too; a universe in which reverence and silence and leaving well enough alone ought to be the going strategy, as my guides treated the image on the tree. Most folks reject the notion of Gaia, that is, of the planet as a whole living being. But what if seeing the earth as a living being was not just an pretty fair reflection of the reality, but also, again, the obvious road to sanity in our relationship with that being, of which we seem to be a rebellious portion? Questions questions.
Mud made the going that afternoon particularly hard. How many times did I slip on the path? who knows? dang it all though, the stupid rain. Not that I should have expected any different. It was rainy season after all, in one of the most lavishly rainy places on the planet, and you'd be a fool to go on a walkabout in that season with the expectation of keeping dry. Still, for some reason, we all keep wishing don't we?
Well, after all that slogging, finally, finally, we came to the edge of those woods and out. And there in front of us was a wide valley of grasses and giant tree ferns. Tree fern here. Tree fern there. Grasses between them. I want to be precise. The ferns amounted to light and tasteful punctuation on the dense lush text of the grass. Hundreds of yards separated most of the ferns. And I couldn't say why, in that area, the vegetation proved to be grass and ferns as opposed to woods; it may have been altitude, or soil chemistry, or periodic burns in the past. But in any case, right at the demarcation between the woods and the grassland, we set up camp, which is to say we pitched our tents, ate a bit of dinner, and crawled into what you might call bed. Overnight it rained pretty heavily.
The next morning we hadn't been walking for more than an hour, when it became obvious that something was wrong, and that this something had to do with me. At first the trouble showed up in whispering among the guides. But then, as if by collective subconscious consent, and not by any spoken order, the whole party stopped, and the guides conferred aloud with Steve. They kept pointing, and soon enough Steve came over to me, asked a few questions. Sure I was limping a bit I said to him. Sure my back hurt a bit. It didn't matter though, no, I wanted to go on. Like the good doctor he was, he nodded and sympathized, but then told it to me straight: there wasn't a whole lot of time for the hike, he said, not if we were going to make it back to camp by sundown. Now, if we didn't make it back by sundown, we'd have to sleep out in the open on the grass, and it was cold out in the open in the grass. There was nothing to burn. No firewood etc etc. Long and short, I'd be holding the party back. I had to go back to camp.
I don't think I managed to hide my disappointment, my chagrin. I was eighteen. I ought to have been able to hack the hike. Steve was doing fine. His wife was doing fine. His two boys, age ten and eight were doing fine. Little legs pumping away. My brother too, was doing fine. What was it with me? But the real disappointment, the deep stuff, had to do with giving up on the destination itself, having to accept the fact that I wasn't going to see the lake probably ever. I was headed back to the States in a month or two, and probably would not be returning to New Guinea.
"You know there's no way you'll get lost," said Steve. "Just follow the trail back. Simon's back there. He'll take care of you." Simon was one of the guides.
"Better luck next time," said Steve next, hand on my shoulder, pushing off like a boat from the dock. Then off they all went. Within minutes the whole party was out of sight.
There are times in life when, knowing the destination, you just have to slog on and get through. THAT had been the challenge of the previous day, in getting through the woods. Other times, the challenge has more to do with letting go gracefully, and saying "okay here's my limit, now what do I do?" It's that second category of challenge (often the far more painful one) that I was up against that day, and not to beat a dead horse, but it's also the challenge we're up against right now as a civilization. Here we are dreaming of robot "caretakers" for the elderly and of stock markets that only go up and nano this and nano that and mining asteroids and founding colonies on Mars, meanwhile here on earth our home the honey bees are dying of pesticide-laced seeds and the price of the crude oil is running over a hundred dollars a barrel and the fisheries are collapsing and the topsoil's blowing away and many of us don't know what to do with food unless it comes in a package to be microwaved. Look folks, it's time to bite our collective lip, lay aside the fantasies of omnipotence, and make the best of it. Time to revert to bona fide personal competence. Time to build up a world in which we recognize that we are not in control and never really were. Time to get along cheerfully with less. Time to suck it in and man it up. Time to share and get along. Time, in short, to get down to work on something called progress, and I mean real progress. Defined as a mental, physical, intellectual, social capital which has nothing to do with how many computers per capita, or how much money in the bank per capita, or how tall our buildings are, and everything to do with knowing where a potato comes from, or walking over to your neighbor and to have a chat across the fence and the blackberry bushes, or the simple happiness of a child at school learning two times two. All that's all tied together with our treatment of the earth, believe me. Or at least, if you continue to read this blog, I hope to convince you of that. Ecological progress is human progress too. Treat the earth as inert dirt, and we will die.
I cannot tell you how quickly disappointment dissolved for me that morning--once I realized that the lake was not for me, and never had been. That was when, literally and figuratively, the sun came out, and it struck me in the first place that I was alone! Truly, magnificently, stupendously alone! Baby, forget the lake. I'm going to enjoy this wide open country! I am going to be who I am! Out here in this amazing place!
So, first of all, under the beaming sun, under a sky most clear and blue and limitless in beauty, under a fern tree indistinguishable from its ancestors in the Jurassic, I lay me down in the soft grass and snoozed. When I woke up, maybe an hour later, I started back. But slowly slowly. Slowly enough to sing. One song after the next. Swing Low Sweet Chariot. Tis a Gift to be Simple. Hard Times Come Again no More. Mrs. O'Leary. All the Pretty Little Horses...Summertime and the Living is Easy...
Back at camp, sure enough there was Simon, who, full of concern, made me a stew and a bed of branches and ferns near the fire, so I could take it easy some more, like the freaking king of Sardinia after a really hard day in the harem. And he and I talked, which was a thing no one, whiteskin or national, had really done that whole time, since after all, the goal had been the lake. His pidgin was very good, and mine was good enough, and I remember asking him the Engan names for this and that plant or flower or fern, and about how you planted the sweet potato, and I remember him asking me about life in my homeland too--what they did with old people there, and whether everyone had cars. I remember trying to describe how far away America was. How big the ocean was that you had to cross to get there. How, if you could walk on the ocean, you could walk for days and days and days and days, and never come to the end of it...
Simon was an expert stewmaker and an entertaining and plant-savvy guy, I was just me, the world (where I was) was all beauty, and there was nowhere else I needed to be, and nothing else I needed to do, and how could anyone ask for more? Except for maybe a song to top it all off. I asked Simon, would he mind if I sang? Simon said he would not mind, and so I sang. Kind of crazy-like, even. I kind of fell out of my garden and sang.
HB
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