On my Katmai trip I had an experience of the kind that Lakota or Sioux people would probably call a vision. Left to myself, I would probably have just called it an "understanding." But then again, if I hadn't been reading about Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions, I might not have called it anything -- I would have just experienced it, and would have been left, like before, with a deep unidentified desire to go back to Katmai and experience it again.
In fact, one aspect of my "vision" is that I realized that I have had very similar experiences before, experiences that I remember vividly but did not until now consider very significant. When I first went into Katmai backcountry in 2006, I stayed in a creek mouth camp where two days running my midday meal was interrupted by a family of four bears walking along the shore. The first time I retreated in a minor panic, honestly quite frightened. The second time, after inspecting their tracks and the chew marks on my wetsuit, I got out of their way much more calmly -- even, you might say, politely. The third time, it was me who walked up on their meal: the four of them, cubs almost as big and fat as their mother, were calmly sitting in a bunch of bushes and munching placidly on leaves, inspecting me carefully but without alarm as I walked around them at maybe 100 feet or less. They noticed me, I noticed them, and what I really, really should have noticed, was that it all seemed as normal as nodding to someone you pass on the sidewalk.
In my small gringo way I had entered their world, which is a natural, wild, undomesticated world as pregnant with meaning as it is beautiful to the senses. Though I didn't see the full meaning of it at the time, I knew it felt good. I fished the creek mouth in a sort of mild euphoria (admittedly, a common sensation while fishing) and paused in my casting when I saw a moose poke its nose out of the trees. Again, that animal (the moose) noticed this animal (myself) and vice versa, and the moose carefully waded across the creek mouth in front of me before folding back into the trees.
Now, without the vision, that just sounds like a guy doing some fishing and wildlife viewing. But no, really, it is more. The animals weren't special things I went out expressly to view, like someone going to a zoo or a gallery. It was more like they were my peers, and we were all cautiously sharing the area around the creek mouth for our own particular purposes. Necessarily, we were aware of each other. But I was not a big bad human with a gun or a noisy flying machine or a crowd of menacing cohorts; and they were not big scary beasts making me run indoors for cover. To be this way in this place for a few days was only a tiny glimpse of the larger, richer world of living together continuously in a sort of "natural culture" with animals like Lakota or other native Americans did in the precolombian world. But a glimpse it was.
In 2008 I paddled out into a zone miles across the lake from that creek, and I left in the evening because a storm was forecast to blow in the next day. This left me looking a little frantically for a campsite as the few mild (but disconcerting) summer hours of half-darkness came down on the lake. The second or third spot I checked turned out to be perfect: a broad, short peninsula, with a rocky headland at the end and nice long beaches on the East and West sides, plus a perfect grassy tent area smack in the middle. I am no religious man, not then nor now, but I remember feeling like there was some kind of "grace" involved in finding this perfect camp exactly when I needed it. Maybe that feeling was an initial clue that the ground was good for vision-seeking.
Little did I know how perfect a camp it would be! I started finding out the next day when I started hooking 34 inch rainbows a quarter mile out of camp. There was a secret pike spot nearby that felt similarly perfect. After waiting out the storm in the nice tree-sheltered tent spot, I spent a couple more blissful days before paddling across the lake, motivated mostly by a sense of duty to continue my trip as planned. Almost as soon as I set out, I felt that camp pulling at me to return. I got nine miles across the lake, looked at the situation, and paddled straight back. All ten nights of my trip were passed there. The words that occurred to me then were "at home." I felt at home at that spot, in a novel and powerful way.
And yes, the animals were there. There were new bear tracks on the beach every morning, all the same size and punctuated by plant-filled scat. I concluded that the bear was shy and at least for the moment, not particularly carnivorous. I took care to keep my food safe and watch out for him, but he remained invisible, walking well around my camp when I was either fishing or asleep. One afternoon I was somewhat shocked to find a half-eaten fish on the beach. Dang! Almost reflexively, I tossed it out into the deepest water I could reach from the beach, and moments later an eagle flew into the trees nearby and gave me a good, hard look. The "noticing" was happening again, and certainly not for the first time on this trip: I had seen the resident eagles every day, and I'm pretty sure they got a half-filleted fish or two from me by diving into the relatively shallow water where I tossed them. Sometimes when I was fighting a nice fish up to the side of the kayak, I'd notice them circling close or settling into a tree, noticing me. Wanting my fish. Probably not taking it personally when they didn't get it -- though the one whose fish I stole must have been pissed off at some eagle-ish level.
I consider that ten-day chunk as more of a glow than just a glimpse.
On this most recent trip, the glow cleared to sharpness at my American Creek camp, a place I have already mentioned in a fishy blog. Wolves howled and left prints all around my camp, and the eagles were ever-present there, "noticing" both me and the ospreys, and regularly stealing fish from the latter. And rather than try to describe my sharp vision in any detail -- probably an impossible undertaking -- I want to focus on the eagles and how they became a point of contact between my environment in camp and my readings in Lame Deer. The significance I have been hinting at is what Lame Deer thought of as "symbolic" significance, and his text has a nifty riff on the eagle as a symbol of American nationalism. He points out that an eagle represents powerful things like freedom, and grace, and shrewdness and fierceness -- but that somehow white Americans, carrying pictures of eagles around on their money and trotting effigies of eagles out on national holidays, are not really sensing that meaning. To contemporary whites, the eagle is there, and we know it is associated with our nationalism; but its significance ends there. The richer, stronger meaning of the eagle is absent.
To me, in my hammock camp surrounded by eagles and wolves, the meaning was present. Very present. I felt it when I woke up in the morning and when I went to sleep at night, and to some degree I acted it out when walked upstream into wild country at night, after all the jet boaters had disappeared and left the wilderness intact. The wind blew hard over my head, and the current was very very strong on my legs as I crossed the creek in areas where I probably shouldn't have done, and deep parts of my brain clicked and flashed when I touched a beautiful wild fish and slipped it back into the water while an eagle circled overhead.
I was at American creek smack in the middle of my 16 days in the bush, and camping, fishing and hiking or paddling were the "ordinary" activities that filled my days. But Lame Deer's narrative points out something very important about ordinariness:
"We Sioux spend a lot of time thinking about everyday things, which, in our minds, are mixed up with the spiritual. We see in the world around us symbols that teach us the meaning of life. This is funny, because we don't even have a word for symbolism, yet we are all wrapped up in it. You have the word, but that is all."
As wondrous as that quote is, and as happy I am with my faltering efforts to write about my vision, the fact remains: these are just words. It will take many more of them, and more references to Lame Deer's philosophy, to keep trying to convey the Katmai "vision." Hopefully I'll get some of them down in this blog, or somewhere -- and hopefully covering the thing with a bunch of words won't do too much violence to it! But actually, I think the bigger risk is to kind of forget about it, and let it get snowed under by the prosaic, sterile unmeaningfulness of my everyday life in California (sad but largely true, and it does no good to pretend otherwise). So I guess the right thing to do is keep writing. Though, if you can sort of "grok" these three photos of wolf tracks, bear trails, and tiny bugs on tinier flowers in the same way they appeared to my "clarified" mind on the trip, then none of these words really would have been required.
2 comments:
Wow, EG. Just wow.
Cool Mary :) Glad to know you are still reading!
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