A Language Older Than Words (25 page)

"Then the anger turned over to love. And that's because of my mum. She loved me without question, even when I was hard on her. I won a lot of prizes in school, and my mum was proud of me; she helped me a lot. But on prize-giving night in sixth form, when I was seventeen, I made myself sick because I didn't want anyone to see my mother. I had kept her a secret for a long time because I thought her darkness made her ugly. What sort of a system would make a boy ashamed of his mum?

"My mother never said a word. Just loved me. That's why I say she's my greatest teacher. I never heard her running down the pakehas, which probably she should have. She realized what was happening; that's why I have a pakeha name. She told me, 'If people go down a list and see a Maori name, straightaway you're not going to get this little privilege.' Bruce Stewart looked good on the list.

"My mother died when I was 17, that same year. I saw her with all my schoolmates, and she asked me for a kiss. I said, 'Not in front of my friends.' And I never saw her again.

"I went through a lot of grieving, and later went into the bush, and spent many lonely years, savoring and trying to understand. And one of the things that emerged is this house, which is designed as the mother. My mother, and the great mother."

He paused again for an even longer time, but I had learned my lesson, and just waited. A deep sigh, and he continued, "As we built this marae, we realized that we were actually building ourselves. People who've done a lot of work here have changed. We rescue a piece of beautiful wood out of an old building, and as we restore it and put it in place, we rescue and restore ourselves." Another sigh, and I knew he was finished. There was another question I had to ask: "Do the trees and grass speak to you?"

"They don't at this stage," he answered. "I wish they would. They did to the old people. I think a lot of things spoke to the old people. I'm just taking it a stage at a time by instinct.

"The most important thing for me is to go down to the nursery and walk amongst all those little trees. Some of them you have to wait for the seed, and get it at the right time; some seeds have to hibernate for two or three years before they can grow."

He became once again more animated. "Little nurseries like this are springing up everywhere. And they're done not by the government but by ordinary people. That's why they work. People come here when we're planting, to get their little seedlings. And you see the children come back. The children are more aware than their parents, and the younger children know more than the older ones.

"The biggest thing that stops us is ourselves. When ancient Maori warriors were defeated, they were ready to go again two weeks later, because they were warriors—made up of battling stuff. And along the way they tapped unseen forces. We can still do it. All of us.

"We are suffering from a great illness, and the way to get better is to serve others. We should all be in service. It makes us well. I serve the birds and trees, the earth, the water.

"Anybody can do it. They can do it in their way. Its action time."

I looked at Jeannette. She looked at me. We smiled. I turned off the tape recorder. That was enough for one day.

Metamorphosis

"Between living and dreaming there is a third thing. Guess it." Antonio Machado
(translated by Stephen Mitchell)

WHEN I MOVED INTO this house, lawn surrounded it on three sides. One of my great pleasures these last eight years has been to watch Kentucky bluegrass give way as wild plants moved in to take its place. The first year saw an explosion of thistles, all green and spikes and purple flowers. I feared they might take over, their thorns keeping me from stepping out the door. I needn't have worried; they thinned out two years later. Then vetch, dalmation toadflax, scotch broom, each of these noxious weeds moved in and moved just as quickly out, each one preparing the ground for what was to come next, and each one teaching me that noxious weeds are at least sometimes a sign that disturbed ground is trying to heal itself. I realized, too, that as with everything else, our lawns manifest our cultural desire: they are static, they are artificial, and they are kept sexually immature. Yet with the lawn now gone, the natural scenery changes every day, as new flowers bloom and old ones form seedpods, then die. It changes every season. It changes every year. Each spring and summer different flowers, grasses, bushes, trees. Mullein ("nature's toiletpaper"), Queen Anne's lace, native grasses of a dozen different types and names, wild roses, pine trees.

This summer a nine-year-old boy has taken to visiting me—or more accurately visiting the birds, dogs, and cats— nearly every day. One day I asked him if he knew the name of a huge bush that over the past several years had sprung seemingly from nowhere to hide a good portion of my gravel driveway. He asked, "Does it have purple berries?"

I looked at him, then looked at the bush, then back at him. "I don't know. I never looked that closely."

We walked to the bush, and it did. Huge sprays of them. I don't know how I missed them before. He said, "I don't know the name—Grandma would—but I know those berries make great paintballs. When you throw them, the juice makes an awesome stain."

I made a mental note. He continued, "The seed for this bush probably came from one of those other three bushes back there."

He saw my incredulous look—I've lived here nearly a decade, consider myself reasonably attentive, and never noticed the bushes—and he said, "I was trying to see where the geese go on their paths through the wild roses, and I saw a bush there, there, and there." He pointed to each bush, clearly visible from where we stood.

There is a lot to learn.

This summer I was fortunate enough to witness an outbreak of aphids on a maple tree outside my door.

Because summers in Spokane are hot, then dry, then even hotter, several years ago I planted a half-dozen deciduous trees on the south side of the house. They've grown and spread to the point now that they make passable shade for the dogs and birds. Maybe in another few years they'll cool the house as well.

About six weeks ago, I noticed some aphids on the leaves of the maple tree's lower limbs. I watched them shake their tiny bodies as they seemed to settle into more comfortable positions from which to suck the tree's juices. A few days later I noticed more aphids, and then more, until nearly every leaf revealed a score or more of the little buggers. The leaves were covered with honeydew—a sweet substance exuded by aphids—which dropped to splatter where the tree overhung the porch.

Were I an employee of the Forest Service, I probably would have declared a forest health crisis, and used the opportunity to cut down not only that tree, but all trees of merchantable value within a couple miles. Were I otherwise a typical resident and consequently more interested in chemical control than observing processes, I would have sprayed the tree with an insecticide. As it was, I asked my mom what I should do. She said I should spray the tree with water to wash off the aphids. I thanked her, then did nothing at all. How much richness, I wondered, do we deprive ourselves of by accepting the default decisions handed to us by our elders? It should be said that my mom's plants are healthier than mine.

Each day I watched closely, rooting unsuccessfully for the arrival of ladybugs to trim the aphid population. The tree started dropping leaves. My mom again suggested the cold water wash. I again demurred.

A week passed and no ladybugs arrived, but the tree began to buzz with wasps, yellow jackets, hornets, and flies, all coming to lap up the honeydew. The tree dropped more leaves.

About a week later I saw first one ladybug, and then another. Other bugs arrived, too, at first singly, and then whole hordes of quarter-inch-long orange-and-black torpedo-shaped insects that sent me scurrying to the library to see what they were. I found out that they, too, were ladybugs in the larval stage.

Many times I witnessed what may have been the conversation of death as larvae passed their mandibles over first one and then another aphid before grasping a third or fourth to pull from the leaf. Or maybe what I witnessed was no conversation at all, especially one of mutual choice, because I also saw the front legs of aphids moving frantically as the bodies disappeared into the mouths of their captors.

Watching, it was hard for me to maintain the level of abstraction that had allowed me to root for the arrival of ladybugs. I am also aware that nonarrival would have meant the eventual death of the tree: just because a herbivore does the chomping doesn't make it any less a killing.

A friend asked if after watching the doomed aphids struggle, I still thought the world was cooperative, and I said that I didn't know. But watching the profusion of bugs—wasps and flies who continued to arrive to eat the honeydew, caterpillars who arrived to carve flesh off leaves, a dozen species of spiders who came to eat anything they could get their palps on—I told her what I did know. The tree had made it clear to me that the price of diversity is death: without the death of the leaves there are no aphids, without aphids there are neither wasps nor ants nor spiders nor ladybugs nor their voracious larvae.

There is something else I wanted to understand. What does the ladybug larvae think as it passes over one aphid for another, and what thoughts race through the aphid as it races across the leaf? What does the maple tree think and feel as the first leaves begin to drop? Does it feel pain and resentment, or anticipation at the new community being built up? Does it feel as though it is giving an offering? Maybe it doesn't feel any of these things. Perhaps all. Or maybe it feels something entirely different and unfathomable to anyone not a maple tree.

As the larvae fatten and get ready to pupate, they search for the undersides of leaves or boxes or pieces of wood from which they can hang and metamorphose: become tubby and hard and sexually mature. They don't form cocoons, but hang exposed, and I have seen a larva bite into a pupa. I have seen them also now change slowly into adults.

Looking more closely around this land, I can find the chrysali of moths and butterflies. They hang from eaves, limbs, overhangs where I've sloppily stacked boxes of beekeeping equipment. I wonder what their metamorphosis feels like to them: what it feels like to go to sleep an infant and wake up an adult, with new wings, a different body, and an entirely different set of motivations.

I remember my own growing pains as a teenager, the ache of bones stretching me eight inches in one year, and I wonder if these insects, too, feel deep pains from their process of maturation. There is no faster nor more radical transformation I know in nature than the process of pupating, and I wonder if the level of pain corresponds.

Transitions by definition involve pain, loss, sorrow, and even death. But I wonder—staring at a stumpy black-and-orange blob, legless, headless, eyeless, that will soon be a ladybug—if perhaps during the transmogrification these creatures are aware. Perhaps they sleep, and dream. I wonder if they dream of flying. I remember my dream of cranes, and wonder if someone will appear to them, too, to say, "We may not yet fly very well, but at least we aren't walking."

Again I look over the tree—the aphids are gone, but the spiders and ladybugs remain, cleaning up after the party, as it were— and again I wonder if these dormant pupae feel, and if they dream, or if perhaps they sleep dreamlessly as one way of life passes and another takes its place.

Insatiability

"We need everything
that's
out
there. We don't log to a ten-inch top
or an eight-inch top or a six-inch top. We log to infinity. Because we need
it all. It's ours. It's out there, and we
need it all. Now." Harry Merlo Chief Executive Officer Louisiana Pacific

EVERY DAY NOW I hear heavy machinery as it comes closer to my home: the clank of treads, the rumble of diesel engines, and the scrape of steel blades on volcanic rocks. I don't know how much longer I can take it. I may soon flee, run down the path followed by so many before me—Indians and wolverines, buffalo and beavers, even my own ancestors, the indigenous of Europe: outcasts and refugees, each and every one. The dispossessed.

I don't know how much longer we can keep running. For the indigenous of Europe, there was always north, and east, directions they could go to try to maintain their way of living for another generation before falling to a people bent on subduing the planet and all its members. No matter that my ancestors' flight pushed them into the homes of others, disrupting and making refugees of community after community as each tried to avoid their inevitable extermination. For the first Americans to be contacted by Europeans, in the Caribbean, there were other islands to which they could escape, and for those met later there was always west. Never mind, again, that one dislocation leads to another, and an expanding wave of refugees thus always precedes the march of our culture. At least back then there was someplace to go.

Where can we go from here? There is nowhere left to hide. And where we do try to hide, there we will always be found. Found also will be excuses to continue to pick away at whatever autonomy and integrity—ecological and otherwise—remains, to grind away until we've nowhere and nothing left.

As if we need another example, we can find one without looking so far as the now-melting icecap in Antarctica, or the plummeting populations of krill and penguin, nor toward the other pole, where transnational oil companies melt the tundra and destroy caribou calving grounds to extract oil and make a buck. I can open my window, or simply listen with window still closed to hear the encroachment of bulldozers: the sound of money being made. Or to choose one more absurd and wasteful example among too many—one or more for every place and person and creature on earth—I can look at Mount Graham in Arizona.