Ethics, Values, & Sustainability
Environmental Strategy & Sustainability
Systems Thinking & Sustainable Businesses
Last Updated 01/14/2006
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Brian opened the door and stood back. There were three men, all in dark suits, standing on the front porch. They were large but not fat, well built, with bodies in decent shape. One of them was slightly thinner than the other two.
“Brian Robeson?”
Brian nodded. “Yes.”
The thin man smiled and stepped forward and held out his hand. “I’m Derek Holtzer. These other two are Bill Mannerly and Erik Ballard. Can we come in?”
Brian held the door open to let them in “Mother isn’t home right now…”
“It’s you we want to see.” Derek stopped just in the entryway and the other two did the same. “Of course, we’ll wish to speak to your mother and father as well, but we came to see you. Didn’t you get a call about us?”
Brian shook his head. “I don’t think so. I mean, I know I didn’t but I don’t think Mother did either. She would have said something.”
“How about your father?”
“He…doesn’t live here. My parents are divorced.”
“Oh. Sorry.” Derek truly looked embarrassed. “I didn’t know.”
“It happens.” Brian shrugged, but it was still new enough, just over a year and a half, to feel painful. He mentally pushed it away and had a sudden thought of his own foolishness. Three men he did not know were in the house. They did not look threatening, but you never knew.
“What can I do for you?”
“Well, if you don’t know anything about any of this maybe we should wait for your mother to come home. We can come back.’
Brian nodded. “Whatever you want…but you could tell me what it’s about if you wanted to.”
“Maybe I’d better check on you first. Are you the Brian Robeson who survived alone in the Canadian woods for two months?”
“Fifty-four days,” Brian said. “Not quite two months. Yes – that’s me.”
“Good.”
“Are you from the press?” For months after his return home, Brian had been followed by the press. Even after the television special – a camera crew went back with him to the lake and he showed them how he’d lived – they stayed after him. Newspapers, television, book publishers – they called him at home, followed him to school. It was hard to get away from them. One man even offered him money to put his face on a T-shirt, and a jeans company wanted to come out with a line of Brian Robeson Survival Jeans.
His mother had handled them all, with the help – through the mail – of his father, and he had some money in an account for college. Actually, enough to complete college. But it had finally slowed down and he didn’t miss it. …
[But] here they were again. “I mean, are you with television or anything?”
Derek shook his head. “Nope – not even close. We’re with a government survival school.”
“Instructors?”
Derek shook his head. “Not exactly. Bill and Erik are instructors, but I’m a psychologist. We work with people who may need to survive in bad situation – you know, like downed pilots, astronauts, soldiers. How to live off the land and get out safely.”
“What do you want with me?”
Derek smiled. “You can probably guess….”
Brian shook his head.
“Well, to make it short, we want you to do it again.”
Brian opened the door and stood back
Everyone is born with some special talent, and Eliza Sommers discovered early on that she had two: a good sense of smell and a good memory. She used the first to earn a living and the second to recall her life-if not in precise detail, at least with an astrologer's poetic vagueness. The things we forget may as well never have happened, but she had many memories, both real and illusory, and that was like living twice. She used to tell her faithful friend, the sage Tao Chi'en, that her memory was like the hold of the ship where they had come to know one another: vast and somber, bursting with boxes, barrels, and sacks in which all the events of her life were jammed. Awake it was difficult to find anything in that chaotic clutter, but asleep she could, just as Mama Fresia had taught her in the gentle nights of her childhood, when the contours of reality were as faint as a tracery of pale ink. She entered the place of her dreams along a much traveled path and returned treading very carefully in order not to shatter the tenuous visions against the harsh light of consciousness. She put as much store in that process as others put in numbers, and she so refined the art of remembering that she could see Miss Rose bent over the crate of Marseilles soap that was her first cradle.
"You cannot possibly remember that, Eliza. Newborns are like cats, they have no emotions and no memory," Miss Rose insisted the few times the subject arose.
Possible or not, that woman peering down at her, her topaz-colored dress, the loose strands from her bun stirring in the breeze were engraved in Eliza's mind, and she could never accept the other explanation of her origins.
"You have English blood, like us," Miss Rose assured Eliza when she was old enough to understand. "Only someone from the British colony would have thought to leave you in a basket on the doorstep of the British Import and Export Company, Limited. I am sure they knew how good-hearted my brother Jeremy is, and felt sure he would take you in. In those days I was longing to have a child, and you fell into my arms, sent by God to be brought up in the solid principles of the Protestant faith and the English language."
"You, English? Don't get any ideas, child. You have Indian hair, like mine," Mama Fresia rebutted behind her patrona's back.
But Eliza's birth was a forbidden subject in that house, and the child grew accustomed to the mystery. It, along with other delicate matters, was never mentioned between Rose and Jeremy Sommers, but it was aired in whispers in the kitchen with Mama Fresia, who never wavered in her description of the soap crate, while Miss Rose's version was, with the years, embroidered into a fairy tale. According to her, the basket they had found at the office door was woven of the finest wicker and lined in batiste; Eliza's nightgown was worked with French knots and the sheets edged with Brussels lace, and topping everything was a mink coverlet, an extravagance never seen in Chile. Over time, other details were added: six gold coins tied up in a silk handkerchief and a note in English explaining that the baby, though illegitimate, was of good stock-although Eliza never set eyes on any of that. The mink, the coins, and the note conveniently disappeared, erasing any trace of her birth. Closer to Eliza's memories was Mama Fresia's explanation: when she opened the door one morning at the end of summer, she had found a naked baby girl in a crate.
"No mink coverlet, no gold coins. I was there and I remember very well. You were shivering and bundled up in a man's sweater. They hadn't even put a diaper on you, and you were covered with your own caca. Your nose was running and you were red as a boiled lobster, with a head full of fuzz like corn silk. That's how it was. Don't get any ideas," she repeated stoutly. "You weren't born to be a princess and if your hair had been as black as it is now, Miss Rose and her brother would have tossed the crate in the trash."
We hiked till
five and camped beside a tranquil spring in a small, grassy clearing in the trees
just off the trail. Because it was our first day back on the trail, we were flush
for food, including perishables like cheese and bread that had to be eaten before
they went off or were shaken to bits in our packs, so we rather gorged ourselves,
then sat around smoking and chatting idly until persistent and numerous midgelike
creatures (no-see-ums, as they are universally known along the trail) drove us
into our tents. It was perfect sleeping weather, cool enough to need a bag but
warm enough that you could sleep in your underwear, and I was looking forward
to a long night's snooze--indeed was enjoying a long night's snooze--when, at
some indeterminate dark hour, there was a sound nearby that made my eyes fly open.
Normally, I slept through everything--through thunderstorms, through [Stephen]
Katz's snoring and noisy midnight pees--so something big enough or distinctive
enough to wake me was unusual. There was a sound of undergrowth being disturbed--a
click of breaking branches, a weighty pushing through low foliage--and then a
kind of large, vaguely irritable snuffling noise.
Bear!
I sat bolt upright. Instantly every neuron in my brain was awake and dashing around
frantically, like ants when you disturb their nest. I reached instinctively for
my knife, then realized I had left it in my pack, just outside the tent. Nocturnal
defense had ceased to be a concern after many successive nights of tranquil woodland
repose. There was another noise, quite near.
"Stephen, you awake?" I whispered.
"Yup," he replied in a weary but normal voice.
"What was that?"
"How the hell should I know."
"It sounded big."
"Everything sounds big in the woods."
This was true. Once a skunk had come plodding through our camp and it had sounded
like a stegosaurus. There was another heavy rustle and then the sound of lapping
at the spring. It was having a drink, whatever it was.
I shuffled on my knees to the foot of the tent, cautiously unzipped the mesh and
peered out, but it was pitch black. As quietly as I could, I brought in my backpack
and with the light of a small flashlight searched through it for my knife. When
I found it and opened the blade I was appalled at how wimpy it looked. It was
a perfectly respectable appliance for, say, buttering pancakes, but patently inadequate
for defending oneself against 400 pounds of ravenous fur.
Carefully, very carefully, I climbed from the tent and put on the flashlight,
which cast a distressingly feeble beam. Something about fifteen or twenty feet
away looked up at me. I couldn't see anything at all of its shape or size--only
two shining eyes. It went silent, whatever it was, and stared back at me.
"Stephen," I whispered at his tent, "did you pack a knife?"
"No."
"Have you get anything sharp at all?"
He
thought for a moment. "Nail
clippers."
I made a despairing face. "Anything a little more vicious
than that? Because, you see, there is definitely something out here."
"It's probably just a skunk."
"Then it's one big skunk. Its eyes are three feet off
the ground."
"A deer then."
I nervously threw a stick at the animal, and it didn't
move, whatever it was. A deer would have bolted. This thing just blinked once
and kept staring.
I reported this to Katz.
"Probably a buck. They're not so timid. Try shouting at
it."
I cautiously shouted at it: "Hey! You there! Scat!" The
creature blinked again, singularly unmoved. "You shout," I said.
"Oh, you brute, go away, do!" Katz shouted in merciless
imitation. "Please withdraw at once, you horrid creature."
"Fuck you," I said and lugged my tent right over to his.
I didn't know what this would achieve exactly, but it brought me a tiny measure
of comfort to be nearer to him.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm moving my tent."
"Oh, good plan. That'll really confuse it."
I peered and peered, but I couldn't see anything but those
two wide-set eyes staring from the near distance like eyes in a cartoon. I couldn't
decide whether I wanted to be outside and dead or inside and waiting to be dead.
I was barefoot and in my underwear and shivering. What I really wanted--really,
really wanted--was for the animal to withdraw. I picked up a small stone and tossed
it at it. I think it may have hit it because the animal made a sudden noisy start
(which scared the bejesus out of me and brought a whimper to my lips) and then
emitted a noise--not quite a growl, but near enough. It occurred to me that perhaps
I oughtn't provoke it.
"What are you doing, [Bill] Bryson? Just leave it alone
and it will go away."
"How can you be so calm?"
"What do you want me to do? You're hysterical enough for
both of us."
"I think I have a right to be a trifle alarmed, pardon
me. I'm in the woods, in the middle of nowhere, in the dark, staring at a bear,
with a guy who has nothing to defend himself with but a pair of nail clippers.
Let me ask you this. If it is a bear and it comes for you, what are you going
to do--give it a pedicure?"
"I'll cross that bridge when I come to it," Katz said
implacably.
"What do you mean you'll cross that bridge? We're on
the bridge, you moron. There's a bear out here, for Christ sake. He's looking
at us. He smells noodles and Snickers and--oh, shit."
"What?"
"Oh. Shit."
"What?"
At the undulating line where the waves licked the sand on Sanibel Island, our three pairs of human footprints wove a long, sinuous path behind us. Littoral zone: no-man’s-land, a place of intertidal danger for some forms of life and of blissful escape for others. The deliberate, monotonous call and response of the waves – assail, retreat – could have held me here forever in a sunlight that felt languid as warm honey on my skin. So we moved in a trance, my mother, my daughter, and I, the few sandblasted clamshells and knotty whelks we had gathered clacking together in the bag that hung carelessly from my fingertips. Our practiced beachcombers’ eyes remained on high alert, though, and eventually my daughter’s eye caught the first true find of our day: a little horse conch, flame orange, faceted, perfect as a jewel. Treasure.
My daughter wanted to take it home, I know. She turned it over, already awed like any lottery winner by the stroke of sudden wealth and the rapid reordering of the mind that tells itself, Yes! You did deserve this.
And then her face fell. “Uh-oh,” she said. “Already taken.”
“Oh, shoot,” my mother said. “Is it alive?” There are laws on Sanibel, about taking live creatures from the ocean.
“Well, not the conch – that’s gone. But a hermit crab’s in the shell.”
Two small white claws protruded from the opening. The sluggish gastropod that had been architect and builder of this magnificent orange edifice had already died – probably yesterday, judging from the condition of the shell- but as any house hunter can tell you, no home this gorgeous stands empty for long. A squatter crab had moved in.
“Oh, they don’t care if you take those,” my mother reassured her. “There are thousands of hermit crabs on this beach.”
She was right, of course, though I could not help thinking, “There are thousands of us on this beach, too- at what point do we become expendable? But I said nothing, because I had nothing sure to say, anyway I was more interested in hearing how my daughter would respond. I decided to watch my leggy, passionate ten-year-old walk into the jaws of this dilemma by herself.
She looked up, uncertain.
I imagine you putting on your glasses to read this letter. Oh, Lord, what now? You tilt your head back and hold the page away from you, your left hand flat on your chest, protecting your heart. “Dear Mom” at the top of a long, typed letter from me has so often meant trouble. Happy, uncomplicated things- these I could always toss you easily over the phone: I love you, where in the world is my birth certificate, what’s in your zucchini casserole, happy birthday, this is our new phone number, we’re having a baby in March, my plane comes in at seven, see you then, I love you.
The hard things went into letters. I started sending them from college, the kind of self-absorbed epistles that usually began as diary entries and should have stayed there. During those years I wore black boots from an army surplus tore and a five-dollar haircut from a barbershop and went to some trouble to fill you in on the great freedom women could experience if only they would throw off the bondage of housewifely servitude. I made sideways remarks about how I couldn’t imagine being anybody’s wife. In my heart I believe that these letters- in which I tried to tell you how I’d become someone entirely different from the child you’d known- would somehow make us friends. But instead they only bought me a few quick gulps of air while I paced out the distance between us.
I lived past college, and so did my hair, and slowly I learned the womanly art of turning down the volume. But I still missed you, and from my torment those awful letters bloomed now and then. I kept trying; I’m trying still. But this time I want to say before anything else: Don’t worry. Let your breath out. I won’t hurt you anymore. We measure the distance in miles now, and I don’t have to show you I’m far from where I started. Increasingly, that distance seems irrelevant. I want to tell you what I remember.
