The Rabbi of Lud (20 page)

Well, what do you expect? A guy tells you he was drawn by the almost human stink of your shit. This could be someone important. This could be … All right, this could be the Messiah. Or, for this little Rabbi of Lud at least, maybe just a big-deal, big-time genuine mystical religious experience. Anyway. Even if I wasn’t absolutely convinced. That this was the man. I’m going to let some fourth- or fifth-rate pilot, who makes his living hustling Torahs and letting drunken cowboys from Texas strafe holes in the bears as he does bombing runs at them or circles over their heads in holding patterns, pass remarks and dish out shots to such a person?

So I looked him in the face. Stared him right in his beard. All first impressions confirmed. This was him. As far as I was concerned. And made a little welcoming curtsy in his direction, losing my footing, almost dislodging the pines, only at the last minute recovering myself, running in place on the logs like a lumberjack.

“I was wondering,” said the great teacher when I had my balance again, “do you think there might be room for me in your airplane? I’m not looking for something for nothing and would make it worth your while. A wealthy man I’m not, but I’m willing to pay.”

(“I’ve heard about this character,” Philip told me. “There are legends about him from Valdez to the Pribilofs. From Natchez to Mobile, from Memphis to St. Joe. He scares the shit out of the natives. Everywhere he goes there’s trouble.”) He turned to the man. “Oh, sure,” Philip said, “that’s how we do it. We collect our party as we go along like Dorothy loose in Oz. What do we look like, mister, a taxi rank?”

“Philip,” I cautioned him, and thought, My God, a fellow like this, with heightened, sky-high senses that can not only pick up men’s scents but evidently rehabilitate them out of the very air right back into the compost for his beard, this is somebody to whom you give lip? “I am Rabbi Jerry Goldkorn of New Jersey,” I said, wiping my hand off on my parka, extending it. “I am honored to meet you, sir.”

“I’ve been meditating for almost an entire winter solstice now. From ice field to ice floe. From glacier to iceberg. I’m getting a little antsy—may Shaper-of-the-World, Blessed-Be-He, take it in His Head to forgive me—waiting for spring to come on.” (So, I’m thinking, who is this guy? He seems to have ruled out Shaper-of-the-World, Blessed-Be-He. Maybe he ain’t God either. And ha ha, I’m joking, relieved, because as I always say, I/Thou or no I/Thou, you don’t want to go one on one with Him.) “Too much darkness just isn’t good for you,” he said. “Let there be light. Know what I mean?”

“And what’s all this ‘almost human odor’ of our crap crap? He still hasn’t said.”

(“Philip,” I said, “please.”)

“No, no,” Philip said, “I mean it. I don’t have to take this kind of garbage from a hitchhiker. Boy,” he said, “you run into these guys every time you set your plane down in this country. I don’t know where they come from. You could be lost, you could be behind the beyond, wherever, and there they are. Waiting for you. Cadging rides. Oh,” he said, even more agitated now than when he’d lost control of the plane and we were about to crash, “always hair-trigger and up-front with their worth-your-while’s and willing-to-pay’s. But drop the fare off on his turf and you find out quick enough just what their worth-your-while is worth.”

(“Philip, please, did you see his beard?”)

“A fad.”

(“Philip, his whiskers
are flowers!”)

“So? A passing fancy. Once crew cuts were in, then it was sideburns down to your lips.”

“No,” said the man with the beard made out of flowers, speaking as if he hadn’t heard a word of Philip’s pouted rant, my own whispered admonitions. As if they’d never happened. “So much dark … After a while you forget why you’re out there. On the ice, on the glaciers, ice fields, ice floes and icebergs. Why you came in the first place. Exercising the fancy-shmancies, holy adaptations and dreamy propitiaries that it takes to live. The kill-only-what-you-eat commandments, practicing, I mean, all the waste-not/want-nots and wearing your food for fur and leather too. Doing the live-off-the-land economies—feathering your nest with the rare sea-bird’s jewelry, the ptarmigan’s, the jaeger’s, the eider’s cushy down. At one with the seal and musk ox, with otter and bear and whale modalities, recycling very calcium itself to scratch a scrimshaw into teeth, into shell and bone. Habituating yourself to all the conservationist’s far-fetched recommended daily allowances, the cosmetics of environment, giving yourself over, I mean, to the elements—the flavors of air and temperature, the shading of salmon and the bushel-per-acre yield of the tundra.”

“These are among my favorite things,” Philip said.

(Philip!)

“But it wears you out,” he said. “Concentration breaks down, breaks up in the dark. (The
dark
! Not some proper, heroic blackness you could rub yourself against like braille.) You can’t
remember
color. You’re too busy yogi-ing over your bloodstream and rearranging your metabolics so you can see what it feels like to move at a glacier’s pace, a few inches a day with the wind in your face. Isn’t this so, Rabbi?”

“Well, I …”

“Don’t worry,” he said, “it’s so. I stake my reputation it’s so. So, when I caught that first, unmistakable whiff of what was almost certainly ka-ka and quite possibly
human
ka-ka, I perked up pretty quick, I’m here to tell you.”

“Yeah, well,” Philip said uncomfortably, making the first shuffled, awkward cues of leave-taking, the preliminary gutturals and throat-clearings of departure, though clearly there was nowhere to go in that wilderness.

“I started out three days ago,” said the man with the beard made out of flowers.

“Three days ago. You’ve been tracking our scent for three days? That’s some discriminating whiffer you’ve got.”

“Well,” he said, “I’m anxious to get back to civilization.”

“Oh,” Philip said,
“civilization.
Sorry. We’re not headed in that direction.”

“Because,” he said, “I’d had enough of darkness now, and of found frozen shelters carved right out of the very bottom of wind and temperature. Of my fur and leather ways and deprivations and being perched in such high-up altitudes of the world like a stylite on a column. So naturally when I first smelled your feces, Rabbi Goldkorn”—he pointed to the side of the plane where I’d been relieving myself—“and yours, Philip”—he pointed to the pilot’s little mound—“I asked myself: ‘Human? Is it human? Could it be human? It
smells
human.’ Oh, there were trace elements of digested fish and game, of course, but you’d expect that up here. So I broke camp and started out. I followed your trail and, sure enough, the closer I came the stronger the spoor, until I thought I could make out the freeze-dried vegetables, cashew mix, dried, high-energy fruits, beef jerky and chocolate of your emergency, survivalist meals. And, what do you know?” he said. “Here we are!”

“That’s amazing,” I said.

“Tell me,” he said, “Rabbi, you observe kashruth?”

“No,” I said, “why?”

“Nothing. The Checkerboard Square’s all right, but most other survival chow’s trayf.”

“We don’t keep kosher even in New Jersey.”

“Well,” he said, “you’re consistent. It’s a point in your favor.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“It depends,” he said. “It’s also a point against you.”

“Are you,” I asked, “are you kosher?”

“Oh,
me
,” he said, “I keep house on an iceberg. Well,” he said, “fellas, I’m looking forward to getting back. What’s with the airplane?”

“We crashed in the trees,” Philip said. “The engine won’t turn over.”

“Maybe the battery’s dead.”

Philip rolled his eyes.

“Give it a while. Maybe the engine’s flooded.”

“Sure,” said the pilot, “and maybe it got all bent out of shape when we crashed. Here,” he said, “look,” and raised the cowl to reveal the bashed, stricken metal underneath. “That lake ice isn’t firm enough to hold us anyway.”

“Well,” said the fellow in the flowers, “I won’t say I’m not disappointed, but now there’s three of us. When you’re looking forward to civilization again, three at least is a beginning.”

We were back in the plane. It was night and the man with the flowered beard was talking. Loading us up on Alaska, her legends and lore. (Without once alluding to the mystery right there on his jaw. That filled the cabin with fragrance, actual individual pulses of scent that flashed on and off like some code of the botanical. Freesia, rose, chrysanthemum, fern. Lilac, carnation, orchid and iris. Peony, jonquil, spearmint. How, I wondered, had he ever tracked us? Distinguished between the rival claims offered up beneath his nose?)

He told us of a night so cold fire froze. The flames, he said, were like icicles, you could break them off. And of a summer when the light was so intense that a little of it continued to brighten the night sky into the dead of winter. He related a story about a muskeg swamp he once came upon in the tundra country above the Arctic Circle where the moss was so thick whole herds of caribou and reindeer were drawn to it, entered it and remained there, unable to move in the deep, soft muskeg (now effectively a sort of quicksand), feeding in place until they died. And spoke of bonanzas you
don’t
hear about—the great salmon, king crab, fur, timber, musk ox (for its qiviut, its remarkable underfur, four times warmer than wool but a quarter wool’s weight), seal, scrimshaw, whale and totem-pole rushes. There were tales of the Indian tribes: the seafaring Tlingits who had amassed not only a fishing fleet but a navy as well, who had first smoked salmon and discovered lox, the Haida Indians of Prince of Wales Island, and of the Athapaskans, and of a tribe whose men speak one language and the women another. He spoke of the Aleut Eskimos and of their great bush pilots who, as a matter of pride, not only refuse to use the radios, radar equipment, and other navigational aids the FAA requires they carry in their planes, but won’t even refer to their compasses, or even to the stars, to guide them, relying, to find their way, on the simple fact that they are natives, that they were there first.

“Yeah, well, that’s bullshit about the Eskimo bush pilots,” Philip said sourly. “It’s right up there with the crap you hear about igloos. I’ve been in lots of them and never found a warm one yet.”

Which led to a discussion of Alaskan architecture, Philip speaking of his preferences, the Quonset hut, the trailer, even the sod house. “Something solid,” he said, “more substantial. That you know it ain’t going to melt on you the first sign of spring.”

“I don’t know,” said the man in the flowered beard, “would you really want to be tied down like that?” And began to tell of his travels: of the summer he spent among millions of brood seals on a beach in the Pribilofs, and of another summer, on Little Diomede Island in the Bering strait, not two miles from the international date line, contemplating time. He’d been to regions where you could see blue glacier bears clinging to the ice, wide and spread as rugs, embracing the sides of the ice mountains with their powerful claws. And to great potlatch feasts and ceremonials all along the Inside Passage and up the high Yukon where the host provided great quantities of grizzly and musk ox and moose meat.

“Tons,” he said, “literally. All you could eat.”

“Is that stuff kosher?” I asked. “Bear meat, musk ox?”

“Go know,” he said.

And told of one spectacular potlatch to end
all
potlatches.

“It’s the custom, as you know, that at the end of these feasts the host gives valuable gifts to his guests, and sometimes actually destroys his property just to show he can afford to. It’s a lot like the beautiful, graven chopped-liver swans you see at some of our affairs. Well,” he said, “but what do Indians really have? Their artifacts, of course, their gorgeous, custom duds and decorated furs. The whale’s carved-up bones and etched ivories. Their blankets, certainly. Well, John Lookout, the founder of the feast I’m speaking of, was a particularly rich man. He even had, don’t laugh, a refrigerator. (You’ve heard the saying—‘It’s like trying to sell a Frigidaire to an Eskimo.’ As far north as I’m speaking of, Indians too.) Though the village where he lived had no electricity.

“Well, let me tell you, Father Lookout decided to go all out on this one. And we all knew it, too. Just to give you an idea, the potlatch took place on a day that commemorated nothing, absolutely nothing. Not the opening of the canneries, or the liberation of the Indian slaves—oh, yes, the Indians kept slaves; for that matter so did the Eskimos—or some battle, defeat
or
victory, in the Russian and Indian wars of the early nineteenth century. It was no one’s birthday. None of the Lookouts had made a rite of passage. He’d had an ordinary year, neither fat nor lean. Ordinary. The potlatch was neither to celebrate nor propitiate the gods of hunting or fishing. You couldn’t even say it was a celebration of ostentation itself, because John didn’t even bother to invite more than one or two people to come to it. Maybe it was the incense from his fires that drew us. The burning polar bears and king caribou, the greasy lava flow of shlepped blubber. Or the overnight skyline of the bright, patiently carved but hurriedly planted totem poles out there on his lawn like so many decorative flamingos or jockey hitching posts. Maybe just rumor.

“The food was like nothing anyone had seen before. The sheer amounts of it, I mean. Oh, what a spread! It could have kept entire villages well fed for a winter. And the drink! Not just the ordinary Black Label Scotches, imported beers and French champagnes, but sparkling reindeer blood, horned sheep ales and moose liqueurs, fermented lichens, spruce wines, and the cedar sherries.

“Oh, and that thermostated, G.E. frost-free, fresh-fruit-and-vegetable-crispered, makes-its-own-ice-, butter-trayed and egg-nesting icebox of his had been filled up with packaged white bread. (A great delicacy among the Indians, he was going to serve them toast for dessert.)

“So there we were, seated politely, our hands folded in our laps, mouths salivating, stomachs rumbling with hunger, our very noses watering from the delicious sights and wondrous smells of all that fabulous food, all the guests waiting for John to rise and make his toast so the feast could begin. He never made a move, and we might be sitting there still if some wise old man from a different village altogether hadn’t somehow suddenly divined the point, risen, flip-topped a beer, and offered, offhandedly as he could—‘To Nothing at All!’