A Tale for the Time Being (9 page)

“So it wasn’t a crow, then?”

“No, it was. I think it was a Jungle Crow. It sat there for a long time, studying me, so I got a really good look at it, too. I could swear it was
Corvus japonensis
. But
what’s it doing here?”

He was leaning forward now, his pale blue eyes fixed intently on the bedcovers, as though he were trying to locate in the sheets an answer to the mystery of this geographical displacement.
“The only thing I can think of is that it rode over on the flotsam. That it’s part of the drift.”

“Is that possible?”

He ran his hands across the blanket, smoothing out the mountains and valleys. “Anything’s possible. People made it here in hollowed-out logs. Why not crows? They can ride on the
drift, plus they have the advantage of being able to fly. It’s not impossible. It’s an anomaly, is all.”

2.

He was an anomaly, a sport, a deviation from the mean. “Fries his fish in a different pan” was the way people sometimes described him on the island. But Ruth had
always been fascinated by the meandering currents of his mind, and even though she often grew impatient, trying to follow its flow, in the end, she was glad she did. His observations, like those
concerning the crow, were often the most interesting.

They’d met in the early 1990s at an artists’ colony in the Canadian Rockies, where he was leading a thematic residency called End of the Nation-State. She had been invited to the
colony to do postproduction on a film she was making at the time, and he was a passionate devotee of midcentury Japanese cinema, so they soon became friends. He used to visit her in the editing
room with a six-pack, and they would drink beer, and he would talk about montage and assemblage and borders and time while she carefully pieced together the frames of her movie. He was an
environmental artist, doing public installations (botanical interventions into urban landscapes, he called them) on the fringes of the art establishment, and she was drawn to the unbridled and
fertile anarchy of his thinking. In the flickering darkness of the editing room, she listened to him talk, and soon she had moved into his room in the dormitory.

After the residency ended, they parted ways and went in opposite directions: she, back to New York City, and he, to the island farm in British Columbia, where he taught permaculture. Had they
met even a year earlier, their affair would probably have ended then and there, but these were the early days of the Internet, and they both had dial-up email accounts, which allowed them to keep
the immediacy of their friendship alive. He shared a party line with three other island households, but he would wait until the middle of the night, when no one else was using the telephone, to
send daily dispatches with the subject line
missives from the mossy margins
. In the summer, as the heavy moths beat their powdery wings against his window screen, he wrote to her about the
island, describing how the berry bushes were laden with fruit, and where the most succulent oysters could be found, and the way the bioluminescence lit the lapping waves and filled the ocean with
twinkling planktonic forms that mirrored the stars in the sky. He translated the vast, wild, Pacific Rim ecosystem into poetry and pixels, transmitting them all the way to her small monitor in
Manhattan, where she waited, leaning into the screen, eagerly reading each word with her heart in her throat, because by then she was deeply in love.

That winter, they tried living together in New York, but by spring, she had again yielded to the tug and tide of his mind, allowing its currents to carry her back across the continent and wash
them up on the remote shores of his evergreen island, surrounded by the fjords and snowcapped peaks of Desolation Sound—the tug of his mind and of the Canadian health care system, because
he’d been stricken with a mysterious flulike illness, and they were broke and in need of affordable health insurance.

And if she was perfectly honest, she would have to acknowledge the role she played in their drift. She wanted what was best for him, wanted him to be happy and safe, but she was searching for a
refugium for herself and for her mother, too. At the time, her mother was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. She had been diagnosed just a few months before Ruth’s father had died, and
on his deathbed, Ruth had promised him that she would care for her mother after he was gone, but then her first novel was published, and she embarked on a book tour that took her around the world
twice. Caring for a demented mother in Connecticut and a chronically ill husband in Canada was clearly impossible. The only option was to consolidate her remaining family and move her mother to the
island.

It seemed like a good plan, so when moving day came, Ruth was content to exchange the tiny one-bedroom apartment that had been her home in lower Manhattan for twenty acres of rain forest and two
houses in Whaletown. “I’m just trading one island for another,” she told her New York friends. “How different could it be?”

3.

It could, she learned, be very different. Whaletown was not really a town, per se, but rather a “locality,” defined by the province of British Columbia as “a
named place or area, generally with a scattered population of 50 or less.” Even so, it was the second-largest population center on the island.

It had once been a whaling station, from whence it derived its name, although whales were rarely seen in nearby waters anymore. Most of them had been hunted out back in 1869, when a Scotsman
named James Dawson and his American partner, Abel Douglass, established the Whaletown station and started killing whales with a new and extremely efficient weapon called a bomb lance. The bomb
lance was a heavyweight shoulder rifle that fired a special harpoon, fitted with a bomb and time-delay fuse, which exploded inside the whale just seconds after penetrating its skin. By
mid-September of that year, Dawson and Douglass had shipped more than 450 barrels of oil, 20,000 gallons, south to the United States.

The primary source of oil in those days was blubber, and the only way to obtain it was to mine it from the bodies of living whales. When the technology for extracting kerosene and petroleum from
the prehistoric dead was commercialized in the latter part of the century, the order Cetacea stood a fighting chance of survival. You could say that fossil fuels arrived just in time to save the
whales, but not in time to save the whales of Whaletown. By June of 1870, a year after the station was established, the last whales in the area either had been slaughtered or had fled, and Dawson
and Douglass closed up shop and moved on, too.

Whales are time beings. In May 2007, a fifty-ton bowhead whale, killed by Eskimo whalers off the Alaskan coast, was found to have a three-and-a-half-inch arrow-shaped projectile from a bomb
lance embedded in the blubber on its neck. By dating the fragment, researchers were able to estimate the whale’s age: between 115 and 130 years old. Creatures who survive and live that long
presumably have long memories. The waters around Whaletown were once treacherous for whales, but the ones that managed to escape learned to stay away. You can imagine them chirping and cooing to
each other in their beautiful subaquatic voices.

Stay away! Stay away!

Every now and then, there’s a whale sighting from the ferry that services the island. The captain cuts the engine and comes on the PA system to announce that a pod of orcas or a humpback
has been spotted on the port side at two o’clock, and all the passengers flow to that side of the ship to scan the waves for a glimpse of a fin or a fluke or a sleek dark back, rising up from
the water. The tourists raise their cameras and mobile phones, hoping to capture a breach or a spout, and even the locals get excited. But mostly the whales still stay away from Whaletown, leaving
only their name behind.

4.

A name, Ruth thought, could be either a ghost or a portent depending upon which side of time you were standing. The name Whaletown had become a mere specter of the past, a
crepuscular Pacific shimmer, but the name Desolation Sound still hovered in a liminal space and felt to her both oracular and haunted.

Her own name, Ruth, had often functioned like an omen, casting a complex shadow forward across her life. The word
ruth
is derived from the Middle English
rue
, meaning remorse
or regret. Ruth’s Japanese mother wasn’t thinking of the English etymology when she chose the name, nor did she intend to curse her daughter with it—Ruth was simply the name of an
old family friend. But even so, Ruth often felt oppressed by the sense of her name, and not just in English. In Japanese, the name was equally problematic. Japanese people can’t pronounce
“r” or “th.” In Japanese, Ruth is either pronounced
rutsu
, meaning “roots,” or
rusu
, meaning “not at home” or
“absent.”

The home they bought in Whaletown was built in a meadowlike clearing that had been hacked from the middle of the dense temperate rain forest. A smaller cottage stood at the
foot of the drive where her mother would live. On all sides, massive Douglas firs, red cedars, and bigleaf maples surrounded them, dwarfing everything human. When Ruth first saw these giant trees,
she wept. They rose up around her, ancient time beings, towering a hundred or two hundred feet overhead. At five feet, five inches, she had never felt so puny in all her life.

“We’re nothing,” she said, wiping her eyes. “We’re barely here at all.”

“Yes,” Oliver said. “Isn’t it great? And they can live to be a thousand years old.”

She leaned against him, tilting her head all the way back so she could see the treetops, piercing the sky.

“They’re impossibly tall,” she said.

“Not impossibly,” Oliver said, holding her so she wouldn’t fall. “It’s just a matter of perspective. If you were that tree, I wouldn’t even reach the bottom
of your anklebone.”

Oliver was overjoyed. He was a tree guy and had no use for tidy vegetable gardens or shallow-rooted annuals, like lettuce. When they first moved in, he was still quite ill, prone to dizzy spells
and easily tired, but he started a daily regimen of walking and soon he was running the trails, and it seemed to Ruth as if the forest were healing him, as if he were absorbing its inexorable life
force. As he ran through the dense understory, he could read the signs of arboreal intrigue, the drama and power struggles as species vied for control over a patch of sunlight, or giant firs and
fungal spores opted to work together for their mutual benefit. He could see time unfolding here, and history, embedded in the whorls and fractal forms of nature, and he would come home, sweating
and breathless, and tell her what he’d seen.

Their house was made of cedar from the forest. It was a whimsical two-story structure built by hippies in the 1970s, with a shake roof, deep eaves, and a sprawling front porch overlooking the
small meadow and encircled by the tall trees. The real estate agent had listed the house as having an ocean view, but the only glimpse of water it afforded was from a single window in Ruth’s
office, where she could see a tiny patch of sea and sky though a U-shaped notch in the treetops, which looked like an inverted tunnel. The real estate agent pointed out that they could cut down the
trees that were blocking their view, but they never did. Instead, they planted more.

In a futile attempt to domesticate the landscape, Ruth planted European climbing roses around the house. Oliver planted bamboo. The two species quickly grew up into a densely tangled thicket, so
that soon it was almost impossible to find the entrance to the house if you didn’t already know where it was. The house seemed in danger of disappearing, and by then, the meadow was beginning
to shrink, too, as the forest encroached like a slow-moving coniferous wave, threatening to swallow them completely.

Oliver wasn’t worried. He took the long view. Anticipating the effects of global warming on the native trees, he was working to create a climate-change forest on a hundred acres of
clear-cut, owned by a botanist friend. He planted groves of ancient natives—metasequoia, giant sequoia, coast redwoods,
Juglans
,
Ulmus
, and ginkgo—species that had
been indigenous to the area during the Eocene Thermal Maximum, some 55 million years ago.

“Imagine,” he said. “Palms and alligators flourishing once again as far north as Alaska!”

This was his latest artwork, a botanical intervention he called the Neo-Eocene. He described it as a collaboration with time and place, whose outcome neither he nor any of his contemporaries
would ever live to witness, but he was okay with not knowing. Patience was part of his nature, and he accepted his lot as a short-lived mammal, scurrying in and out amid the roots of the
giants.

But Ruth was neither patient nor accepting, and she really liked to know. After a few short years (fifteen, to be exact—brief by his count, interminable by hers), surrounded by all this
vegetative rampancy, she was feeling increasingly unsure of herself. She missed the built environment of New York City. It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines and architecture, that
she could situate herself in human time and history. As a novelist she needed this. She missed people. She missed human intrigue, drama and power struggles. She needed her own species, not to talk
to, necessarily, but just to be among, as a bystander in a crowd or an anonymous witness.

But here, on the sparsely populated island, human culture barely existed and then only as the thinnest veneer. Engulfed by the thorny roses and massing bamboo, she stared out the window and felt
like she’d stepped into a malevolent fairy tale. She’d been bewitched. She’d pricked her finger and had fallen into a deep, comalike sleep. The years had passed, and she was not
getting any younger. She had fulfilled her promise to her father, and cared for her mother. Now that her mother was dead, Ruth felt that her own life was passing her by. Maybe it was time to leave
this place she’d hoped would be home forever. Maybe it was time to break the spell.

5.

Home-leaving is a Buddhist euphemism for leaving the secular world and entering the monastic path, which was pretty much the opposite of what Ruth was contemplating when she
pondered her return to the city. Zen Master D
ō
gen uses the phrase in “The Merits of Home-Leaving,” which is the title of Chapter 86 of his
Sh
ō
b
ō
genz
ō
. This is the chapter in which he praises his young monks for their commitment
to a path of awakening and explicates the granular nature of time: the 6,400,099,980 moments
⁴⁰
that constitute a single day. His point is that every
single one of those moments provides an opportunity to reestablish our will. Even the snap of a finger, he says, provides us with sixty-five opportunities to wake up and to choose actions that will
produce beneficial karma and turn our lives around.