About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory (7 page)

Time accelerates very suddenly as we turn into the driveway at the Nishibe farm. Mr. Taketazu is waiting there to take me to his home for dinner. (Though we know few words in common this strikes neither of us as a problem. He has also asked a translator to join us later.) It’s a short drive. Raccoon dogs, Japanese hares,
and red foxes reside in pens outside the two-story, log-frame house. Inside and upstairs in Mr. Taketazu’s study we settle down across from each other at a low table, a
kotatsu
, that has a heating element underneath. We draw its quilted cover over our legs and around our waists and then open out a dozen or so large books in front of us, filled with pictures. For the next hour they serve as guides and references as we mimic the movements and sounds of various animals in order to frame our conversation.

Initially our two worlds are drawn together in a discussion of birds. At Lake Notoro, I ask, were those ravens or Japanese fish crows scavenging so artfully in the fishermen’s nets? “Ravens,” he says, smiling in an amused but disapproving way at the thought of them. The level of communication in our conversation is good; it occurs to me to try to convey something subtle. In Japanese folklore the fox, with which Mr. Taketazu is so familiar, plays a role similar to the one the coyote plays in Western American folklore—a trickster. I often think of ravens, also trickster figures in North America, as “flying coyotes.” I wonder if it’s possible to draw on Mr. Taketazu’s understanding of the similarity between fox (
kitsune
) and raven (
watarigarasu
), and then to introduce the idea of air coyotes, of airborne
kitsune
, and make the joke carry. I page quickly through my English-Japanese dictionary.
Tondeiru
seems to do it for “flying” and I try, tentatively,
tondeiru kitsune
. For a moment there is nothing but consternation in his attentive face. Then a broad smile of recognition.

The translator eventually joins us, but Mr. Taketazu—he is very voluble, very passionate for a Japanese—and I are getting on well. To be sure, the translator allows us to be more precise. I ask the translator to inquire which bird, of all the ones he knows, Mr. Taketazu most looks forward to encountering. “The fish owl,” he answers solemnly. I’m puzzled. In North America the owl has a contradictory image. It’s seen as both a wise creature and a sinister animal, a night hunter. Among native peoples in North America the owl is generally associated with death. Mr. Taketazu elaborates when he notices my knitted brows. The fish owl, which once guarded the entrances to Ainu villages, has godlike
qualities, he emphasizes. To meet it in the woods today, he says, is to rekindle the ancient relationship of interdependence between man and animal. The bird’s aura is still imposing, he tells me, an encounter with it electrifying.

Ten of us—Mr. Taketazu, his wife, two of their children, two of his eldest son’s friends, myself, the translator, and, later, Naoki and his father—all have supper in Mr. Taketazu’s study on tables set up for the purpose. I fall out of the conversation. Early the next morning Naoki and I are to travel south across the Konsen uplands and along the Kushiro River past Lake Toro to a great marsh. On the northern fringes of that marsh we might see Japanese cranes,
tsuru
, in their first mating rituals of this season. That night we’ll fly back to Tokyo from the city of Kushiro.

As I brought the pieces of fresh fish to my mouth, the crisp vegetables, I recalled the storm surf pounding in from the Sea of Okhotsk, the twirling descent of bright fall leaves along the road, the soles of my feet burning on Mount Iō. I imagined
kuma
, the brown bear, moving through forests on a path indicated by an older Ainu’s expressive hand.

At the door where we stand to say good-bye, I try to make my gratitude to Mr. Taketazu clear, not simply for his hospitality but for his bearing as a human being, his compassionate attitude toward animals. When I finish speaking, Mr. Taketazu holds up a gift in the half-light of the hallway—a fish owl’s speckled primary feather. I extend my hand toward the perfect form.

I follow Naoki and his father through the darkness to where the car is parked. The smells of farmed earth in the damp, cool air are familiar and comforting. I try to imagine the books I will send to Mr. Taketazu, ones with the wildlife drawings of Olaus Murie, or with stone lithographs of the polar bear and bearded seal from the Inuit at Cape Dorset, or the portraits Karl Bodmer made of Blackfeet men with the white fur of the ermine wound up in their hair. I imagine him finding all this in his mailbox one day, like a flock of birds.

I put my hand to the cold chrome of the door handle. For so many centuries, the exchange of gifts has held us together. It has
made it possible to bridge the abyss where language struggles. One travels as far for this as one does to stand before a wild brown bear, or to put hands on the enduring monuments of a vanished culture. Here, in an owl’s long flight feather, is the illiterate voice of the heart.
Arigatō
, I say, quiet gratitude to the heavy night air of Hokkaido.

F
OG, MELANCHOLY AS
a rain-soaked dog, drifts through the highlands, beading my hair with moisture. On the path ahead a vermilion flycatcher, burning scarlet against the muted greens of the cloud forest, bursts up in flight. He flies to a space just over my head and flutters there furiously, an acrobatic stall, a tiny, wild commotion that hounds me down the muddy trail, until I pass beyond the small arena of his life. Soon another comes and leaves; and afterward another, tiny escorts on a narrow trail descending the forest.

I had not expected this, exactly. The day before, down below at the airstrip, I’d looked out over a seared lava plain at the thin, desultory cover of leafless brush and thought, In this slashing light there will be no peace. How odd now, this damp, cool stillness. Balsa and scalesia trees, festooned with liverworts and
mosses, give on to stretches of grassland where tortoises graze. Blue-winged teal glide the surface of an overcast pond. The migrant fog opens on a flight of doves scribing a rise in the land, and then, like walls sliding, it seals them off.

Beneath this canopy of trees, my eyes free of the shrill burden of equatorial light, my cheeks cool as the underside of field-stone—I had not thought a day like this would come in Galápagos. I had thought, foolishly, only of the heat-dunned equator, of a remote, dragon-lair archipelago in the Pacific. I had been warned off any such refreshing scenes as these by what I had read. Since 1535 chroniclers have made it a point to mark these islands down as inhospitable, deserted stone blisters in a broad ocean, harboring no wealth of any sort. A French entrepreneur, M. de Beauchesne-Gouin, dismissed them tersely (and typically) in 1700:
“la chose du monde la plus affreuse,”
the most horrible place on Earth. Melville, evoking images of holocaust and despair in “The Encantadas,” viewed the Galapagean landscape as the aftermath of a penal colony. A visiting scientist wrote in 1924 that Isla Santa Cruz, where I now wandered, “made Purgatory look like the Elysian Fields.”

Obviously, I reflected, feeling the heft of the mist against the back of my hands and the brightness of birdsong around me, our summaries were about to differ. And it was not solely because these writers had never ventured far inland, away from the bleak coasts. Singularly bent to other tasks—commercial exploitation, embroidering on darkness in a literary narrative, compiling names in the sometimes inimical catalogs of science—they had rendered the islands poorly for a visitor intent, as I was, on its anomalies, which by their irreducible contrariness reveal, finally, a real landscape.

G
ALÁPAGOS
, an archipelago of thirteen large and six smaller islands and some forty exposed rocks and islets, occupies a portion of the eastern Pacific half the size of Maine. It lies on the equator, but oddly; the Humboldt Current, flowing up from the
Antarctic Ocean, has brought penguins to live here amid tropical fish, but its coolness inhibits the growth of coral; and the freshwater streams and sandy beaches of, say, equatorial Curaçao or Martinique are not to be found here. The Galápagos are black shield volcanoes, broadly round massifs that rise symmetrically to collapsed summits, called calderas. Their lightly vegetated slopes incline like dark slabs of grit to cactus-strewn plains of lava. The plains, a lay of rubble like a storm-ripped ocean frozen at midnight, run to precipitous coasts of gray basalt, where one finds, occasionally, a soothing strip of coastal mangrove. Reptiles and birds, the primitive scaled and feathered alone, abound here; no deerlike, no foxlike, no harelike animal abides.

The tendency to dwell on the barrenness of the lowlands, and on the seeming reptilian witlessness of the tortoise, as many early observers did, or to diminish the landscape cavalierly as an “inglorious panorama”—an ornithologist’s words—of Cretaceous beasts, was an inevitability, perhaps; but the notion founders on more than just the cloud forests of Santa Cruz. Pampas below many of the islands’ calderas roll like English downs serenely to the horizon. Ingenious woodpecker finches pry beetle grubs from their woody chambers with cactus spines. The dawn voice of the dove is as plaintive here as in the streets of Cairo or São Paulo. Galápagos, the visitor soon becomes aware, has a kind of tenderness about it; its stern vulcanism, the Age of Dragons that persists here, eventually comes to seem benign rather than aberrant. The nobility that may occasionally mark a scarred human face gleams here.

Biologists call Galápagos “exceptional” and “truly extraordinary” among the world’s archipelagoes. They pay homage to its heritage by referring to it as “the Mount Sinai of island biogeography.” But these insular landscapes give more than just scientific or historical pause. With flamingos stretched out in lugubrious flight over its fur seal grottoes, flows of magma orange as a New Mexican sunset percolating from its active volcanoes, towering ferns nodding in the wind like trees from the Carboniferous, and with its lanky packs of bat-eared, feral dogs some two hundred
generations removed from human contact, Galápagos proves unruly to the imagination.

A departing visitor typically recalls being astonished here by the indifference of animals to human superiority. Sea lions continue to doze on the beach as you approach, even as you come to stand within inches of their noses. Their eyes open with no more alarm at your presence than were you parent to their dozing child. Mockingbirds snatch at your hair and worry your shoelaces—you are to them but some odd amalgamation of nesting materials. While this “tameness” is not to be forgotten, and while it is an innocence that profoundly comforts the traveler, Galápagos imparts more important lessons, perhaps, about the chaos of life. A blue-footed booby chick, embraceable in its white down, stands squarely before an ocean breeze, wrestling comically with its new wings, like someone trying to fold a road map in a high wind. An emaciated sea lion pup, rudely shunned by the other adults, waits with resolute cheer for a mother who clearly will never return from the sea. You extend your fingers here to the damp, soft rims of orchids, blooming white on the flanks of dark volcanoes.

S
ANTA
C
RUZ
, in whose highlands I had gone to hike, lies near the center of the archipelago, some 590 miles west of Ecuador. Almost half of Galápagos’s permanent population of 16,000 lives here, on farms, in two small villages, and in the large town of Puerto Ayora. The geography of this island is typical of Galápagos; the character of the vegetation changes, rather sharply, as one gains altitude. Candelabra and prickly pear cactus, dominating the lowlands, give way to a transitional zone of dry brush. Higher up, this scrubland turns to forest, then to heath and open country, where sedges, grasses, and ferns grow. It was while climbing up through these life zones on the slopes of an extinct volcano, hearing wet elephant grass swish against my pants, that I first became aware of my untempered preconception of Galápagos as desolate. And it was here, along a fence line meant to
restrain cattle, that I initially encountered that immense and quintessential animal of Galápagos, the giant tortoise. In those first moments it seemed neither a dim nor a clumsy beast. In its saurian aloofness, in the wild shining of its eyes as it ceased its grazing to scrutinize my passage, I beheld a different realm of patience, of edification, than the one I knew. Tortoises hesitate and plunge across the highlands like stunned ursids. The spiritual essence of Galápagos clings to them.

It was also on Santa Cruz, in the streets of Puerto Ayora, that I first sensed the dimensions of something disturbingly ordinary—the difficulties the people of Galápagos confront today: an erratic economic development that has come with the growth of tourism, and the disaffection of local farmers, fishermen, and lobstermen with the distribution of wealth here.

Galápagos seduces the visitor with the complexity of its beauty; but, like any mecca of wonder in the modern era, its beauty, its capacity to heal the traveler from afar, is threatened by the traveler himself, and by the exigencies of modern society. In 1985 a huge, man-caused fire burned nearly a hundred square miles of forest and pampa on southern Isla Isabela. The fire began on the rim of Volcán Santo Tomás and burned for months before an international team of forest-fire fighters finally put it out. The press in North America and Europe exaggerated the havoc (penguins, for example, did not flee before the flames, nor did flamingos turn gray from a fallout of ash)—and the exaggeration precipitated an indictment. While the cause of the fire remains undetermined, it was widely assumed in the United States and Europe that it was started, accidentally but perhaps on purpose, by residents of the small village of Santo Tomás. The charred landscape was viewed, by some, as a dark statement of economic frustration, of the village’s irritation with officials of Galápagos National Park, who will not allow them to extend their croplands and small-scale ranching operations into the—to them—“unused” interior of the islands, or to cut timber there.