The local biologist had assured me last night the monkeys would react that way, "You can be sure they'll howl when you play," she’d said, "But it would be a mistake to call it an interaction. Howling defines personal space. They're warning you to back off." I ran off a few arpeggios which got several of them howling, "chchchchchcoooo chchchcaaaaa" in throaty, Hebraic consonants, and at a volume so outrageous my ears seemed to crack into shards for the ants to carry home. The wall of sound didn't last long. Maybe two minutes, ending on a de-crescendo “cooooo” that seemed to alert the fractured jungle to zipper itself into one piece again.
Standing ten feet behind me, the four man film crew sighed together, prompting me to whirl about with an index finger pressed against my lips so they wouldn't start giggling and break the spell. It was evident to everyone that the mandolin wasn’t the right choice of instrument, its pinprick bursts of melody were too ephemeral for these heavy metal monkeys. I stowed it in its case, reached for the metal globe called a waterphone I sometimes use to play around dolphins, looked it over for a long minute, then put it back on the ground without playing a single note. Too effete.
I sat quietly for nearly half an hour, watched the ants, ate some cashews offered silently by the cameraman, then decided to try again. I pulled out a harmonica I'd brought along mostly because it's the only instrument I know of that produces sound by sucking air. Howler monkeys are reputed to be the loudest land animals (louder than elephants but not as loud as some great whales), and they produce many of those edgy whoops and roars by sucking air across their throats.
I tried a few things softly, then a bit louder, eventually landing on the first six notes of Prokofiev's well known theme to Peter and the Wolf. With my face craned straight up into the canopy, I initiated a simple game, repeating the same six notes only when that furry little face showed itself and pausing the moment it hid behind the branch. On and on went the peak-a-boo game, until another monkey suddenly leapt straight onto a branch directly over my upturned face and casually started a long thick arching pee. The fluid cascaded over twigs and leaves, down and down out of the high canopy until it transformed into a glittery mist that landed on the wide-brimmed Panama Hat I'd bought the day before in Panama City. That the crew made nary a peep, convinced me they were more professional than I would have been——filming the pathetic image of a monkey pissing to tell me he was fed up and wasn’t going to take it anymore.
That may be a valid interpretation, but it’s certainly not the only one. Some animals, ravens and grizzly bears among them, treat the presentation of their body wastes as a form of gift-giving. Or who can say for sure it wasn't applause? Human beings slap their palms together to produce an aggressive crackling sound that their socialized brains somehow have learned to interpret as appreciation. We shake hands in greeting while dog's smell each other's assholes. To each its own.
As if substantiating the applause hypothesis, the entire troupe now decided to show itself. They sidled out onto a high branch, started moving their faces in jerky little increments to carefully examine the film equipment, the crew, and me playing the leitmotiv of Peter and the Wolf. Something must have satisfied them, for they next set out to depart the high canopy, shinnying down the outsized tree trunk and leaping across six feet of thick tropical air to catch the lower branch of a smaller tree located just in front of my impromptu bandstand. There, they sat and watched and listened as I fluttered my cupped hand over the harmonica to enhance both the vibrato and the drama, segueing from Prokofiev to the classic harp riff in Muddy Waters "I'm a Hoochie Coochie Man". The monkeys never made a sound in response, not a coo, not a roar, although one of them let go of the branch to sway back and forth from his tail. Their attentiveness finally coaxed my musician’s mind to retreat into the performer’s altered state of pleasant derangement when time drops its moorings and sails away into timelessness. But musicians must never forget when it’s time to stop. Watching their eyes made it possible for me to sense my audience’s short attention span. I ended the music. It couldn’t have lasted more than eight minutes. The monkeys sat quietly awhile, then turned about to catch branches hand over hand back to their canopy home.
The concept of audience is not altogether uncommon in the non-human world. Bull elk bugle to announce they're in rut. The call is so otherworldly, so intensely emotional and yet so soothing, that it mesmerizes most humans fortunate enough to hear it. The bull with that extra special something in his voice also mesmerizes all the cow elk within earshot. That’s right, all the females in the vicinity mate just with him, leaving the other contestants out in the cold until tomorrow when they start again. Humpback whales do much the same thing, although their eighteen minute songs are more like symphonies than reveille. The actual tone produced by the males accentuates his body's resonant frequency, conveying essential information about size and overall vitality. Humpback mating songs are not just musical, they’re lyrical as well, possessing an internal rhyming scheme that some behavioralists speculate conveys information about the lineage of the singer.
That same evening, over a dinner of beans and fruit salad with both the crew and Smithsonian World's host, historian David McCullough, the show’s field producer Dave Clark informed the biologist that he’d just witnessed heretofore undocumented monkey behavior. After all, she'd already explained to him that under no circumstances would the monkeys drop out of the high canopy. She'd hardly ever seen it herself in ten years of study. As she listened to the producer's account of the day’s events, she first appeared stumped, then turned wide-eyed, announcing that, assuredly I possessed a special talent with animals. "Oh come on," I shot at her from across the table, "Haven't you read Curious George?" I was clearly out of line, an ill-mannered musician quoting a children's story to dispute one of the world's greatest authorities on monkey behavior.
A debate ensued. Latinate words like “anthropomorphism and “species-specific behavior” were tossed across the table in an academic version of a food fight. The sound man turned bold, asking how monkeys who sing all day could possibly be immune to a song as beautiful as Peter and the Wolf?” No one could provide an answer, although his poetic question served to cool down the heated rhetoric. The discussion eventually settled on the subject of the biologist’s working methods. We learned that her long-term study consisted, not of patiently observing monkey society in the footsteps of the gentle saint of ethology, Jane Goodall, but of routinely shooting monkeys out of the trees with a sedative dart, caging them, poking them with needles for blood samples, tagging them through the ear with a pair of pliers, and eventually depositing them, drugged, ear oozing, buttocks prickling, at the base of the ceiba tree. When the soundman muttered that he wouldn’t come out of the canopy either under those circumstances, the biologist responded with an exasperated sigh, a nonverbal human communication identifying us as laymen who could never comprehend the rigors of the scientific method.
I play music with animals, granted an unusual vocation, and the executive producer of Smithsonian World had hired me to elicit a response with this group of howler monkeys which were then the subject of a Smithsonian-funded research project. But as this anecdote demonstrates, playing music with animals sometimes has little to do with playing music with animals. For instance, the sound man later confided that my music had shown him that the world’s greatest authority of howler monkeys——our chief ambassador, as it were, whose job and responsibility it was to keep the human community informed about the essence of monkeyness——knew many things about monkeys although she had not yet considered that monkeys might also possess an innate appreciation of Marshall MacLuhan’s famous aphorism that the medium is the message.
As a performer, I learned long ago to let the audience reinvent the performance however they wish to comprehend it. As monkeys are clearly capable of learning who their friends are, artists have to learn that even if they’re making money at it, true art is always a giveaway. That tidy axiom may explain my reluctance to pick fights with critics and debunkers, but it doesn’t clarify why I play music with animals in the first place. Historian Barbara Tuchman offers one good answer when she writes that in the year 1348, while a third of Europe was dying from the Black Plague, French villagers “were seen dancing to drums and trumpets, and on being asked the reason, answered that, seeing their neighbors die day by day while their village remained immune, they believed they could keep the plague from entering ‘by the jollity that is in us. That is why we dance and play’.
A less circumspect answer demands more attention to physiology. Long before we humans started appreciating music with our rational minds, vertebrates experienced it on a cellular level. The pattern of nerve excitation in the mammalian inner ear is apparently as orderly as the keys on a piano, with equal steps along the chromatic scale mapped out as equal distances along the basilar membrane. Neurological studies demonstrate that four month old human babies——as well as rats and starlings——prefer consonant musical intervals (major and minor thirds) over dissonant intervals (minor seconds). And the song of the canyon wren relies precisely on the twelve notes of the chromatic scale. The auditory pathways humans utilize to perceive music, other species like the aforementioned elk and whales use to communicate individual and sexual prowess. Bantam chickens, vervet monkeys, and beluga whales, take it a step further, using these same pathways to produce genuine words that identify objects and disclose predators. Play the bantam’s word for hawk on a tape recorder, and you’ll get an entire barnyard craning their necks sideways to scan the sky.
Under the sway of a musical performance, we humans intuit things about ourselves and our world that defy time and space. Like the jollity that swept through the streets of medieval Paris. Or feeling fine attracting howler monkeys out of the canopy. But it’s not just vertebrates. Studies with house plants conclude they grow stronger under the influence of Bach than hard rock or even silence.
I haven’t played with primates since that Panama date. Today, after twenty-five years of musical interactions with many different animal species on land as well as in the sea, I’ve become a specialist of sorts, devoting the lion’s share of my interspecies music making to toothed whales, the family of sea mammals that includes dolphins, belugas, orcas, pilot whales, and sperm whales. Although many people have heard the courting songs of the humpback whale, most have no more conception of the acoustic wonderland that lies beneath the sea than Rabelais’ Pantagruel, who exclaimed that the eerie noise he heard through the hull of a ship at sea originated from conversations that occurred inside the cabin months before. The sounds were frozen in place, and only thawed when a new crew came aboard. In fact the underwater environment is a veritable hotbed of call and response. Several species of fish grunt and tap and squeal to attract mates. Shrimp click every time they flex the abdominal hinge that propels them through the water. A million shrimp passing by a hydrophone sounds like radio static. Walrus clang like a bell. Bearded seals chant spiraling crescendos of tone that would serve admirably as the sound track for flying saucer films. According to Lorus and Margery Milne, the repertoire of dolphins includes:
buzzing, cackling, chirping, clucking, crackling, croaking, drumming, grinding...coal rattling down a shoot, the dragging of heavy chains, a loose bearing on a reciprocating engine, the irregular put-put of an outboard motor about to stall, steaks sizzling, the dull roll of a soft shoe dancer on top of an empty barrel.
I started my cetacean career with spinner dolphins, swimming off the big island of Hawaii striking a homemade gong 200 yards from shore. Some days the dolphins swam within arm’s length. They seemed born performers, jumping higher when the assembled audience on shore hooted louder. A year later I tried banging a tuned wooden drum with migrating gray whales northwest of San Francisco. I tethered my foot to a floating AM radio transmitter, and became the headliner of a California state government-sponsored winter whale celebration. In the years since, I’ve shaken rattles with bottlenose dolphins in South Australia, sung with orcas in western Canada, and plucked a Jew’s harp to accompany a Mongolian overtone singer in Japanese waters teeming with humpback whales. For the past several years my instrument of choice has been the electric guitar, played through an underwater sound system with pilot whales off the Canary Islands, blue and fin whales in the Sea of Cortez, orcas, humpbacks, and some unknown species of beaked whale in the Bering Strait. To learn more, read my last book, The Charged Border, Where Whales and Humans Meet.
Although I often rely on the observational techniques of field biology, I’m not a scientist. My music neither avows objectivity nor pursues data. A collaborator once described what I do as “just two warm-blooded mammals out on the water getting into a groove.” Actually, that description fails to acknowledge my intellectual underpinnings. A whale musician must learn to revel in counterintuitive phrasing, surreal obbligato, and boundless stretches of silence. The slightest hints of synchronized rhythm are treated as a veritable Rosetta Stone of correspondence. Most musicians find the sonic rewards too few and far between and the intellectual rewards too unmusical. Those who remain to join the interspecies bandwagon are as fascinated by the slippery truths that spring from the performance of interspecies communication as by the music. This work generates metaphors about animal intelligence, conservation, totemism, communion, cognitive science, behavioral biology, the place of art in the ecology movement, animal rights, the politics of extinction, co-evolution, shamanism, data-collecting, avant-garde music, deep ecology, etc. It’s all of that.
As might be expected, some biologists frown on this metaphorical impetus. They advise greater rigor to the long-term study, recommending that I excise the subjective elements by limiting sound transmissions to a few tones monitored on an oscilloscope, and modulated to the whale’s behavior and environment, for instance a specific direction of travel, or coinciding with the turning of the tide. They insist that improvisation is no way to conduct science. It compromises control And therein lies the problem. Scientific control is like virginity. You either have it or you don't.[iv] I counter by quoting words attributed to Miles Davis, that jazz means you never repeat yourself. Yet I make only one claim. If a musical interaction between species is happening, you simply hear it. It’s music. It’s cellular. This is hardly revolutionary.
I was trained in music for theater, eventually joining the so-called new music scene that erupted in San Francisco during the early 1970’s, inspired by the Dadaists, Beats, and especially John Cage, who railed that art is “anything you can get away with.” But I disagreed with a dirty little secret of Modernism that insists artists bear no responsibility to the communities they inhabit. To the contrary, art provides context for understanding the human condition, and artists traditionally served their communities as arbiters of perception. During the past Modernist century, when things fell apart much more often than they ever came together, artists bore a responsibility to offer new templates to replace dangerous and abusive patterns of perception. One might argue whether 20th century art merely reflected that trauma or actively sustained it. Welcome to a new century.
Cultivating a dialogue with the cetacean species I have come to regard as members of my own extended community can alter the context of human animal relations for anyone who opens themselves to it. Orcas living off northern Vancouver Island vocalize up and down the chromatic scale like a beebop saxophonist. Because other orcas in the same pods sound rather plebeian and demonstrate no interest whatsoever to interact with human musicians, I conclude that individual orcas, like individual humans, possess varying levels of musical talent and enthusiasm. This observation recommends a more ecumenical aesthetic than the species-specific calling that rewards a bull elk with all the cows. The only reward for an orca that responds to my guitar is an impromptu musical bond with a human being.
Beluga or white whales are the only cetacean species to commonly vocalize in air as well as underwater. Called “sea canaries” by old time whalers who often heard them chirping on the surface, the species makes more different kinds of sounds than any other cetacean. Communication authority, John Lilly, has described belugas as the animal world’s most likely candidate for possessing a language. Listening to them communicate with one another has been described as overhearing several voices speaking at once through a wall. An attentive human voyeur can’t quite make out individual words although, clearly, someone is talking to someone else in an animated fashion.
The Moscow-based Shirshov Oceanographic Institute has established a beluga research center on an island in the Russian White Sea adjacent to Finland. The biologists erected a tall log tower at the tip of a skinny, boulder-strewn glacial esker that all but disappears at high tide. This vantage offers a stunning view of the pods that congregate to exploit a tidal upwelling that attracts schools of herring. The whales visit the area in small groups, always led by a so-called “scout” who signals the rest of the pod if the fish are thick and the humans aren’t acting offensively. The director of the project is the dean of Russian whale studies, Vsevolod M. Bel’kovich, a soft-spoken man in his 60’s who agrees with Lilly that beluga whales have a language. He first knew it for certain, while witnessing a group of females surround a whale giving birth. They offered her “vocal encouragement”. When the healthy baby finally emerged, the group expressed “joy”, then turned to the new mother to offer “congratulations.”
One of Bel’kovich’s assistants, Vladimir Baranoff is developing a hi-tech approach to interaction, placing a video monitor and camera in a waterproof housing, then hanging it from a buoy underwater near one of the whale’s primary feeding areas. The whale’s approach the camera and screen, and sometimes stop to admire their own image. On two occasions, individual whales lingered to study their own faces, then spoke the same unique call not documented before or since. The whales have even watched cartoons onscreen, favoring Casper the friendly ghost, a beluga look-alike if there ever was one. A Shirshov bio-acoustician, Anton Chernetsky, has isolated literally hundreds of unique beluga calls comprised of twenty-four identifiable phonemes.
Russian scientists have always been more keen about extrasensory phenomena than their American counterparts and the White Sea contingent postulates that belugas communicate telepathically among their own kind. This hunch has led Bel’kovich to collaborate with a Moscow police psychic to plumb the hidden depths of beluga consciousness. According to the psychic, one pod’s scout has explained that belugas believe humans are both dangerous and insufferably boring. The whales will never communicate with humans until the local fishermen stop shooting them.
Beluga whales adapt poorly to captivity and are notoriously uncooperative at performing oceanarium antics. Nor does the species breed well in captivity. Of nine belugas born in tanks, only two survived the first year and watching the video of a beluga birth and subsequent death at the Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma Washington, I was struck how much the event had the look and feel of a mercy-killing administered by its mother.
At some point in my interspecies endeavor, I started collaborating with a Canadian drummer and outdoorsman, Jonathan Churcher, who announced one day that any whale capable of prompting scientists to blubber with superlatives about “the animal world’s most likely candidate for possessing a language” was well worth meeting. I agreed, and so the two of us began researching North American beluga demographics. The estuary of the MacKenzie River, on the Arctic coast of Canada, seemed the most promising place to visit. Jonathan and I flew to Inuvik in Canada’s Northwest Territories in July of 1987, then chartered a flat-bottomed boat taxi to shuttle us a hundred miles across the MacKenzie delta to the river’s estuary on the Beaufort Sea where several thousand belugas were reputed to inhabit the sloughs for three to six weeks each summer. Our objective was twofold. By playing music through a battery-powered underwater sound system, we would try to coax the local whales to draw close to our boat and then jam with us. Jonathan is a student of psychic phenomena. He wanted to learn whatever he could directly from the whales.
The first beluga whales either of us ever glimpsed in the wild were sighted just a few hours after our arrival on the estuary. We heard them long before we ever saw them, chortling and snorting from a half mile off. We ran down to the peat beach to observe the pod of four foot-wide, gray/white Casper the friendly ghost oblongs chugging up the coast toward us. They seemed to be pushing themselves along the shallow bottom rather than swimming, appearing more like hippos wallowing in some equatorial mud hole than any whale I’d ever seen spouting on the open ocean. Each animal gave a single snort into the air before sliding beneath the surface with nary a splash. Because the sea water was so muddy, whenever the pod slipped below the surface they simply vanished. As seconds turned to minutes, we started staring at one another as if it was hard to recollect precisely what it was that prompted us to be standing there facing the sea. Then the whales rose again, this time fifteen feet directly in front of us. We gasped, they snorted, one blew a weird sound like violently rattling a tin cookie pan, then surged forward.
Besides it’s Arctic cousin, the narwhal, The beluga is the only whale possessing a flexible neck. Now, one of them bent its head sideways to look straight me into my eyes. The animal screamed, then violently heaved itself out of sight, a behavior that implied I was someone to be feared. When the whales surfaced again, they were a half mile beyond camp, heading straight out to sea. This response was troubling. I wasn’t used to cetaceans fleeing for their lives at first sight of me.
Six hours later, I lay in my newly-assembled tent mesmerized by the pitter-patter of mosquito bodies bumping against the ripstop fabric as they sought access to the motherlode of my circulatory system. I heard the brassy bleat of a whale, once, and then a second time. I sat up, pulled a mosquito hood over my head then unzipped the interminable layers of tent zippers, stepped outside, carefully rezipped everything, stood to gaze offshore, and nodded to Jonathan who also stood in front of his tent, at attention, hands shading his eyes from the glare off the water. We remained there a long time, two gore-tex and denim pillars saluting a procession of nude, white-on-white Rubenesque mermaids at the bath. The belugas took their sweet time to splash and toot past our vantage point, always straining their pliable necks above the surface to scan the land. Then I noticed a three feet long juvenile swimming between the adults. Unlike the creamy-white mature whales, this one was mottled gray. The largest member of the family let loose with a long sliding wail, like a trombone blowing Dixieland on a hot summer afternoon.
Except this sighting did not occur in the afternoon. It was two AM. The sun glared directly from the north, and the landscape appeared lit from inside with an otherworldly glow I knew only from Albert Bierstadt paintings depicting the American wilderness as a paradise of orange light. It was bright enough for me to pull out a pair of sun glasses without drawing a comment, although I quickly slid them back into my pocket to take in the full measure of the tinted landscape, then turned about to follow my own slate-gray shadow undulating across a golden meadow, through a golden slough, my pointy head finally coming to rest in a golden willow thicket. In a far northern land filled with several species of large mammals, a permanent sun offers an unexpected measure of security. There is no night for dangerous beasts to go bump in. I turned back to face the whales. During the slow moment of my distraction, their apricot backs had cruised two hundred yards past the outlook.
A lone whale appeared briefly the next morning. This time I lay in the tent exhausted from lack of sleep caused by a stubborn internal clock unwilling to reset itself to the different drummer of twenty-four hour daylight. Hearing a single whale sound for the third time in just a few hours buoyed my spirits. The call started out as a friendly warble that made me search the shore as if I might find a canary flitting among the flock of terns feeding there. This high-pitched song slowly morphed into a deep overtone-rich groan which started as one- long note but then began to pulse, mutating into a hair-raising sound like Darth Vader letting loose with a loud belly laugh before heaving his guts. “It’s great there’s so many of them,” announced Jonathan from inside his tent.
I took out my notebook, jotted some notes about the beluga’s bizarre vocalizations, and that so many of them were pitched precisely in the key of D. One set of sounds reminded me of the slithery solos David Lindley coaxed from his lap-steel guitar while accompanying Jackson Browne. I ran a finger along the zipper of the sleeping bag, and imagined rhythms and timbres to entice that beluga to draw close. Nothing too sudden or too loud. Start on the D note, slide down to the minor third F, then glissando up to the fifth, A. My head fell back onto a lumpy pillow composed of a down vest, yesterday’s wool socks and a sweatshirt, stuffed into a sleeping bag sack. Lying halfway between sleep and wakefulness, I imagined the belugas tooting in between the beats, one AND two three AND four. I must have nodded off because I recalled dreaming about the TV show, Nightline. Ted Koppel teased the audience: “Is it interspecies communication...or is it just one man’s fantasy?” Carl Sagan’s head appeared on a giant video screen whining, “It’s not replicable. It’s not communication.” The camera panned to a frowning Miles Davis. “Hey man, get a life.”
Snug inside my sleeping bag, I listened intently to a “canary of the sea”, far off now, warbling a ballad over a random back beat provided by copious mosquito bodies bumping against the tent fabric. I turned the pillow over to avoid a wet spot, and wondered if everyone else drools when their mouth rests against ripstop nylon. “Life is good,” Jonathan cooed from next door. “Lots of whales, the inflatable boat is assembled, the sound system’s ready. I say we play the next time we hear a whale make a toot.”
But Jonathan’s sense of well-being soon proved as much an illusion as the mirages that shimmered all day and all night along the blue-gray horizon. The belugas next chose to disappear. We never saw or heard a whale again, although we spent twelve more days camped on that remote beach, motoring our inflatable boat far and wide across the sea in search of them.
When I returned home, I started calling marine biologists to ask their opinion about our abrupt lack of sightings. One beluga specialist pinned the whale’s disappearance on the greenhouse effect. The heat wave that barbecued the northern Great Plains that summer caused unusual flash floods throughout the MacKenzie basin. The inordinate amount of mud spewed into the Beaufort Sea kept the beluga herds twenty or more miles offshore for the rest of that brief season. When I reported this theory back to Jonathan, he replied in a whisper that everyone on Earth was responsible for the disappearance. Developers in Brazil did it by burning down the rain forest. I did it by driving my car. You did it by turning on your lights. But I wasn’t so sure. Something else was going on, something local. I let my concern eat at my insides for a month, then called Jonathan again. He’d been thinking about it as well and argued persuasively that the two of us needed to return to the MacKenzie estuary to investigate further.
In fact, his own commitment to returning to the estuary was already a done deal. Jonathan hadn’t joined me on the plane ride back to the Pacific Northwest. He was now living in Inuvik. How did this happen? The first week out on the estuary, Jonathan often talked about being an artist with no art to show for it. Then one morning at the start of our second week on site, he suddenly became obsessed with taking photos of wildflowers, and stopped fussing over how he was going to pay for the developing. I sat with him on the beach one evening, listening as he pitched grant proposals my way. In the course of the conversation, he metamorphosed into a radio talk show host, a video producer, and an environmental troubadour.
Next morning, he announced that the Arctic solitude was responsible for unlocking his creative flame. But two weeks was not enough time on the Arctic plain for the transformation to take hold. He worried he’d lose the key to his creativity the moment he set foot on the airplane. And then what? Return to a vapid job driving a taxi on Vancouver Island? He dropped his eyes, stared at his large hands, then confessed something I never expected to hear. He was toying with the idea of staying on. But he didn’t mention it again until we returned to Inuvik. That final night, over a dinner of arctic char, chocolate cream pie, and many margaritas, Jonathan calmly told me he wasn’t coming with me. The next afternoon, he bid me farewell at the airport.
A week after my departure, Jonathan hitched a ride on a flat-bottom boat to a remote area at the far western edge of the hundred mile wide MacKenzie Delta and spent several weeks wandering the estuary without seeing another human soul. The air was growing colder by the day. On August 19th, the midnight sun dropped below the horizon for the first time since May. Venus appeared, albeit briefly, as the unfamiliar darkness of evening settled over the land. The Delta took on a different sheen. Next morning, Jonathan observed the first frost of the season glistening the brown cottongrass husks. The drop in temperature proved a blessing from heaven, sweeping away the burden of mosquitoes in its wake. He stayed there, alone, into September.
The Arctic autumn is not so much a season as an interlude. One day the leaves on every willow tree turned yellow, seemingly within a few hours time. The next night was colder still. The yellow leaves were already losing their pliability. Then the frost stopped melting in the morning. One rime-encrusted afternoon Jonathan hiked up a muddy bluff overlooking a vast lake lying on the northwestern edge of the Delta. At the top, he was greeted by the unforgettable sight of Arctic tundra rolling away towards the far northern terminus of the Rocky mountains. Whereas the Delta was marshy, all willow thickets, spindly spruce, and boggy meadows of cotton grass and wooly lousewort, the tundra was dry, composed of sedge, moss, and prickly sub-shrubs, lichen-encrusted boulders, an undulating country made treacherous by potholes dug by veritable cities of lemmings and marmots. Jonathan hiked across this prairie for several days before turning about. He glimpsed snowy owls. Caribou. Ptarmigan. Fox. Grizzly bear. Wolves. Took glorious photos.
Jacob MacPherson, the taxi skipper who serviced our previous trip, picked up Jonathan at a designated spot in mid-September. Jacob was a full-blooded Inuvialuit “Eskimo” and a thoroughly modern man, treasurer of the local native association and wealthy from his delivery company that serviced the Delta outposts. During the eight hour boat ride back to Inuvik, Jonathan stood next to Jacob at the helm, describing his month-long hike as a prelude to a longer commitment. Jacob smiled knowingly as Jonathan articulated a gut connection between his own well-being and the Arctic solitude. By the time they arrived at the dock, Jacob offered Jonathan a job driving one of his company’s delivery trucks. Jonathan accepted on the spot.
The procession into Arctic winter is not measured by the tenuous fits and starts we Southerners call Indian summer, but by the steady forward movement of an army on the march. That autumn, the temperature first dropped below zero Fahrenheit in late September. And when the river froze to a depth of eight feet, Jacob taught Jonathan how to drive his truck onto the ice to make deliveries to Aklavik and Tuktoyuktuk, two Inuit villages not connected to Inuvik by road.
The first heavy snow of winter fell on the second of October that year, 1987. Jonathan wrote that he stepped outside as the snow subsided to reveal the rosy dawn of ten AM reflecting off dwindling storm clouds. He had rented a studio apartment in a shoddy housing project just off main street and was doing his best to cope with the creeping darkness and cold, the predominantly red-meat diet, and the ennui, the epidemic alcoholism that pervades so many Arctic communities in winter. Yet he remained buoyant by writing in his journal every day and had started piecing together a scrapbook of newspaper clippings that focused on the struggle of Native people trying to keep their traditions intact despite the grinding colossus of Western civilization. He had started hosting a talk show on local radio that focused on the intersection of ecology and culture. The show was finding a following.
The sun disappeared for good during the first week in December, and didn’t return again until early February. During the season of twenty-four hour darkness, noon possesses the gray-blue light most of us associate with early evening. Jonathan wrote in late December, expressing good-natured puzzlement over the celestial semantics of Arctic winter. Is one PM referred to as daytime because the clock says so, or evening because the sun says so? I wasn’t there, couldn’t offer a sure answer, so lamely suggested he eliminate both words, day and night, from his vocabulary.
He phoned one morning in late January to tell me in a shaky voice that he’d been woken up the previous night by men shouting in the apartment next door. He heard a door get thrown open. The men were out in the corridor. Insults became pointed as the volume dwindled to a rhythmical hissing and whispering. The sound of shuffling, circling, grunts, a woman’s scream, a struggle. Standing tensely behind his locked door, Jonathan realized he was listening to a knife fight. The men were outside on the landing. A long moment of silence followed by the horrible moan of a human being in mortal pain. Then another scuffle and another moan. The thump of a body falling down the stairs. Screams erupting through the apartment house. Jonathan called the police. When they arrived, he finally unbolted his door, and was shocked by the sight of blood staining the walls. A dark pool of it dripped down the stairwell. An ambulance arrived. Both men had stabbed and been stabbed. One of them, his next door neighbor, a man he’d bumped into only once, died the next morning from a stomach wound. No one could explain the cause of the fight.
That afternoon, Jonathan drove his delivery truck out of town, then walked far out onto the frozen river. He lay down in two inches of fresh snow, spread his arms and waved them up and down like a child leaving the impression that an angel had stopped to rest. He stayed there for half an hour, breathing deeply, arms outspread, watching the green and red ribbons of the Aurora Borealis slither across the gray sky through the long tunnel of a hood rimmed in traditional wolverine——a fur the Inuit favor for it’s capability not to ice up. Inner turmoil slowly turned to contemplative analysis as he recognized the two month long night as more darkness than a normal person could rightly endure. To prosper above the Arctic Circle, a person needed to adopt a bit of the grizzly bear’s metabolism, regulating sleep and wakefulness by the sun rather than the clock.
The traditional Inuit apparently knew this answer quite well. For them, winter was a period of prolonged sleeping, big eating, lusty love-making, epochal story-telling; a life-style as close to hibernation as a human being can hope to muster. By contrast, the European insistence that no matter what the sun does, people must conform to a schedule of eight hour work “days” followed by a few hours of recreation and then eight hours of sleep, molds a society woefully out of balance with natural cycles, which of course, abets chronic alcoholism, madness, violence, and suicide.
In a roundabout way, he’d finally answered the question he’d asked me earlier, about discriminating between day and night. The logic of this revelation lodged in Jonathan’s brain amidst the murky images from the previous night. Although he lay spread-eagled and lonely on the frozen MacKenzie River in forty degrees below zero conditions, he suddenly felt unimaginably happy and unaccountably warm. He described this sensation in his next phone call as “going comple-e-tely out of body,” an altered state he attributed to the Aurora Borealis flashing its static electricity, not just in front of his eyes like a strip mall at Christmas, but inside his brain as well.
“Well...it sounds like you had a spooky experience.” I stammered through the harsh white noise of a bad connection. I fell silent, wondering if it was possible he didn’t know that the surest sign of freezing to death is an unwarranted perception of warmth and well-being. When I finally asked him directly, he was insulted. “Don’t you understand?” He exclaimed in pointed cadences. “My body felt like an oasis of heat in a desert of cold! It was incredible!”
The phone crackled as we soon said our goodbyes. I hung up and gazed out the picture window of my home office on a island north of Seattle into the bright amber sunshine of four PM reflected off the tall Douglas fir trees. Days latter I was still thinking about Jonathan’s sharp answer. His “oasis of heat” may have underscored his poetic rebirthing, but it also underscored my concern for his well-being in that hostile environment. Both the violence and Jonathan’s naive response to it made me wonder for weeks afterward if I was doing the right thing to return to the MacKenzie Delta.
