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Posted on by Dave Bonta

End of the rifle

The plane banked and swung low over the treetops — so low, we all dove for cover, thinking the pilot must be suicidal. (Has Al Qaeda begun hijacking Piper Cubs?) Its engine roared and sputtered like a teenager’s badly tuned GTO, and we held our breaths as it banked again and went into a steep climb. Maybe this is some kind of mating flight, I thought, peering at the cockpit through the scope of my .338 Winchester.

The plane leveled off at about five hundred feet above the forest canopy and began to circle. I think we were all getting a little peeved — we’d paid $8,000 a head for a quality, wilderness hunting experience, and goddamn it, we wanted some peace and quiet! But the next thing we knew, four parachutes were opening in the sky above us.

“You’re not going to believe this, guys,” I said, still looking through the Trijicon AccuPoint. Jim grabbed his .30-06 and followed suit. Four chairs were floating down toward us. “What the hell?”

As the engine’s roar died away into the distance, three of the parachutes lodged in the treetops around the camp, dangling their strange cargo just out of reach. I headed for where I thought the fourth had come down, forgetting about grizzlies for the moment as I smashed through the alder.

There it was, sitting slightly askew in the middle of the thicket. It was a camp chair, all right, with a light wood frame supporting long strips of some kind of leaf. Additional items were tied across its arms: a rolled-up hammock, a long, bamboo tube and a bundle of dart-like things. A blowgun?

When I unrolled the hammock — cunningly constructed of vines and plant fibers — a piece of paper fell out. The message looked as if it had been typed on an actual typewriter.

“Dear Friends,” it read, “We send you these gifts as tokens of our goodwill. We bring good news about the grace of God and his victory over the giant anaconda, which will bring peace and love to your war-torn lands at last. Welcome to civilization!” It was signed simply, “The Waorani.”

Someone had added a postscript in pen at the bottom of the page. “P.S. Awfully sorry to inform you that the subsurface rights to the forest in which you have been hunting belong to Shell Oil, who will begin bulldozing for an oil sands mine on Monday. Peace.”
__________

Based on a real dream, after seeing the movie End of the Spear (official website with trailers and merchandise – Rotten Tomatoes). For a series of articles exploding the myth of the pacified Waorani, see here.

Tags: End of the Spear, Waorani, Waodani, Huaorani

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Mackerel sky

transformer

Can you read the sky? This one is a sign that means “unreadable” — a mackerel sky.

An altocumulus mackerel sky or mackerel sky is an indicator of moisture (the cloud) and instability (the cumulus form) at intermediate levels (2400-6100 m, 8000-20,000 ft). If the lower atmosphere is stable and no moist air moves in, the weather will most likely remain dry. However, moisture at lower levels combined with surface temperature instability can lead to rainshowers or thunderstorms should the rising moist air reach this layer. There is an old saying, “Mackerel sky, mackerel sky. Never long wet and never long dry.”

Beautiful, isn’t it? Let’s face it, stability and uniformity are boring.

talus rock 3

Take rocks. Rocks are far from the paragons of stability we imagine them to be. Go for a walk across a boulder field sometime — it’s easy to lose your balance. Some rocks like to rock, some rocks like to roll, and you just have to keep movin’ and groovin’, as the song says. There are boulder fields in eastern Pennsylvania full of rocks that ring when struck, emitting clear, resonant tones. People come with mallets and go rock-hopping in search of a perfect pitch. Here on the mountain most of the rocks play dead, but some sleep with one eye open.

talus rock 2

If you can’t put your trust in a rock, what else is there? A cipher, perhaps. The abstract truth of numbers. But somehow the mind rebels, and the numbers begin to take on completely extraneous qualities: sexy 6, owlish 8, 55 a pair of drummer’s brushes. 49 seems inexplicably tastier than 48. We could paint by numbers, green and green and green.

numbered laurel leaves

“It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know,” Thoreau once wrote in his journal. “I do not get nearer by a hair’s breadth to any natural object so long as I presume that I have an introduction to it from some learned man. To conceive of it with a total apprehension I must for the thousandth time approach it as something totally strange.”

Total, totally: as if from heterogeneous reality to derive some unity, some gestalt. That too, says my inner Ecclesiastes, is so much empty grasping at the wind.

Mayan head

If each morning you could forget everything, including language itself, and could be reborn in a world free of signs, what would you see? Faces. Everywhere. We make the strange familiar simply by coming to dwell in its fishy midst. We cast our lines skyward, in hopes of landing the elusive holy mackerel.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Farewell to dial-up

snail 1

This weekend, we bid a fond farewell to dial-up Internet. With the invaluable assistance of my cousin-in-law Jeff, we’ve swapped 28 kilobytes for 3 megabytes per second.

For years now, Jeff and my father have been scheming about ways to get high-speed access to Plummer’s Hollow. They didn’t think that the phone company, Verizon, would be laying fiber optic cables anytime soon. But last month, a telephone line repairman out on a service call informed us that they had indeed installed a local fiber optic network this past winter. It seemed a little odd that Verizon would go to all that trouble and expense and then neglect to inform eligible customers, but once contacted, they shipped the new DSL modem willingly enough. It only remained to wait for Heidi and Jeff’s next visit — fortunately already scheduled for Labor Day weekend — since we figured we wouldn’t be able to reconfigure on our own the wireless system that Jeff had set up for us between the two houses.

We were right. On Saturday morning, Jeff muttered and puttered around for a couple hours while the sorry remnants of Hurricane Ernesto kept us all indoors. Dad and I were on hand with what you might charitably call color commentary: advice, perhaps, but only of the fatuous kind offered up by the guys in the press box who couldn’t throw a pass to save their lives. It took Jeff a little while to figure out what he had done before and undo it, but suddenly there it was: the new version of Firefox downloading from the web in seconds rather than taking half an hour. “Gee, look at that, Paw!” To say we were stunned would be an understatement. After lunch, a couple more hours sufficed for Jeff to install a new wireless network.

snail 3

On Sunday, while Jeff and Heidi’s six-year-old daughter Morgan went off to explore in the woods with my mother, the laptops came out in the living room. That’s the funny thing about computers: since they tend to be less absorbing than books, somehow their use doesn’t preclude social interaction quite the way reading a book does. On the other hand, when my parents sit together in the evening reading newspapers and magazines, they also frequently share aloud from what they’re reading, so maybe there isn’t a huge difference.

Suddenly, Morgan was back, in a state of high excitement: “There’s a snail! We found a snail! You HAVE to get pictures!”

And so I did. This was a distinctly unsluggish woodland mollusc — a snail on speed. They had picked it up somewhere down along the road, and it emerged from its shell almost immediately and began exploring my mother’s hand. While I snapped pictures, it glided rapidly from finger to finger like a circus performer, switching to other hands as they were offered.

snail 4

Ironically, living out here in the boondocks far from cable TV, we now have a faster connection than many folks in town. Jeff explained that since we’re tapping into a node less than a mile from our houses in a rural farm valley with, presumably, fewer than a dozen other Internet users, we don’t have to compete for space on the cable. In his suburban neighborhood in New Jersey, by contrast, hundreds of people might be downloading files off the Internet at any one time.

Needless to say, this has left us all feeling a little breathless and barely able to believe our good fortune. But high-speed access probably isn’t going to change our lives. Like the snail, I’ll still remain fairly slow moving and low-energy by most people’s standards. I’ll still retreat into my shell from time to time. But I’ll relish being able to explore things like Flickr slideshows and Internet radio, and I’m already appreciating the ability to dispose of mundane tasks, such as reading and answering email, more quickly.

Best of all is the fact that I no longer have to keep my computer on all the time to avoid breaking the wireless connection between the houses, as was the case when it ran through the modem in my Dad’s computer. Now, I can turn the computer off before going to bed each night and wake up in a quiet house. More than anything else, it is that new access to silence that feels luxurious.

snail 6

Click here to see all six snail pictures. If you have favorite sites on the Internet that you think I’d enjoy, I’d love to hear about them. My tastes in music run to blues, jazz, roots/world music, and modern classical.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Running the dogs

You don’t want to write. You want to have written, I admonished the overgrown puppy straining against the leash.

Every other day, we took the two mutts on chew-proof chains to the dead end of the street, then cut across the yard of an unoccupied house, went through a hole in a grown-up hedge and came out onto the concrete lot of an abandoned warehouse, where we let them loose. It was November in Mississippi. The right-angled insurgency was yellowing in the cracks. Seeds sprang from pods at the slightest provocation.

The lot was bordered by a watery ditch (they called it a bayou, rhymes with “hey you”) across which someone had thrown a narrow board bridge. The trick to keeping the dogs out of the mud was to lead by example, dashing eagerly over the bridge and up onto the old railroad bed beyond. It usually worked.

The railroad bed was a wide no-man’s-land dividing what used to be the exclusively white side of town from the black side of town; the yards and houses on the far side of the former tracks remained noticeably poorer and more brightly colored. The right-of-way — if you could still call it that — bore signs of an on-going struggle over its fate: here, some ambitious speculator had planted survey stakes. There, someone from the far side had planted and half-harvested a small plot of okra. Two private visions of paradise. But what about the public?

The dogs raced back and forth, got into everything. The white one was dumb as a bucket of rocks. Sometimes her front legs couldn’t go fast enough to keep up with her strong hind legs, and she went rolling, ass over teacup. But the brown one — an adopted stray — was plenty smart, and had learned a basic version of hide-and-seek. Eva would duck down in the tall grass and have me yell, “Where’s Eva?” in a panicked voice, and the brown dog would come barreling like a runaway locomotive back from wherever her nose had taken her. Sleuthing consisted of running in circles until the quarry made some exasperated noise.

Work on your listening. School yourself in surprise. That’s all there is to it! The white dog squatted and assumed a thoughtful look.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Shirts and skins

beech graffitiIt’s the back-to-school season, and I wake up with cold knees thinking, shirts and skins. Touch football. Wishful thinking on the part of our high school gym teachers, that latter term. We were not there to touch, much less to be touched — a popular euphemism for insanity when I was a kid. Manliness meant playing rough, rejecting all gentler forms of physical contact. To be a man meant to carry a switchblade in the front pocket and a can of chewing tobacco in the rear, to be always ready with a lightning-swift jab or a stream of spit.

Even for a pacifist such as I was then, showing fear or pain would’ve wounded my pride, that golem, that reservoir of touchiness. I learned to stand still and smile when someone punched me in the chest with all their strength, and to show up at the appointed spot for an after-school fight ready to turn the other, defiant cheek. I got good at it — maybe too good. My skin — I like to say when people wonder whether they should venture to criticize something I’ve done — is a mile thick.

But perhaps the operative measurement is not thickness, but proportion of surface to volume. In which case, I must’ve been nearly as sensitive as one can get, since I was always very ectomorphic — i.e., skinny. Unlike now, when my heart and my gut — that moral lodestone of our president — are much more insulated from direct contact with the world.

Even though I hated team sports, the symbolic aspect of the contest between shirts and skins fascinated me. The Skins: lord, how we white people have always loved to play at savage, stripping for the Boston Tea Party, wearing blackface, getting “tribal” tattoos. Naturally hairy, how we have alternately loathed and adored the shaved skin, the tattooed skin, the pierced skin! And then to make such a commotion about its color, because the eyes at least can hold another at a distance and still take her measure, unlike the sense of touch. Once upon a time in white America, ultimate humiliation wore a thick skin of tar coated with feathers. Soft, sticky, tar-baby-dangerous, it represented everything a man must reject. We need so badly to steel ourselves against the treacherous vulnerability of the Other.

Nakedness in European culture has long been confused with an existential withoutness. The naked savage by definition lacks civilization, refinement, even — yes — sensitivity! But boys’ pick-up sports, even in a school without uniforms, may show the folly of this conception, because in fact it is the shirts who are defined by what they cannot be: nude. In a situation where nakedness is elective and clothing is otherwise compulsive, it is the clothed who are without that most precious of possessions, freedom.

In other situations, of course, the opposite may be true — under slavery, for example. In that case, the skin itself became a uniform, and a single value — blackness — was imposed on a wide range of colors. One way or another, the infinitely attractive and subtle skin challenges those who would enforce uniformity of behavior. For Westerners, and for anyone else who aspires to modernity, your shirt is the one thing you don’t want to lose. However much we fetishize the naked skin, clothed remains the standard, the flag, the team colors that inspire allegiance to the rules of the contest. Clothed and closed.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Attack of the giant nature carnivals

I know, it’s Friday, and maybe you were planning on dinner and a movie tonight. Why not give joint surfing a try instead? You could wow your date with a trip to the virtual carnival … actually, several carnivals.

Festival of the Trees #3 is full of new faces and some old ones too — check it out. And while you’re at it, be sure to take a look around Burning Silo if you haven’t visited it before. Bev’s great insect photography, graceful writing style and depth of knowledge about nature have few parallels in the blogosphere.

But don’t stop there. The latest edition of I & the Bird is unique: all links are in the form of haiku!

And as if that weren’t enough, the Circus of the Spineless celebrates its first anniversary with a highly entertaining format comparing the parade of invertebrates with a normal circus, for example: “Normal Circus: Trained Lions. Our Circus: Trained Aphids. … Normal Circus: Bearded Lady. Our Circus: Hermaphroditic Snail.”

So those are the features. Now good luck finding someone you click with.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Bracing for Ernesto

wood turtle with its head drawn in

We are bracing for Tropical Depression Ernesto and the possible six inches of rain that have been forecast starting tomorrow night. So my brother and I have been busy cleaning drains in the road. I didn’t have a whole lot of writing time today, and what time I did have I spent trying to write a rare piece of literary criticism. It was awful, depressing. I feel unclean.

While I was working on the essay, about two hours ago, I glanced down at my office chair’s left armrest and saw blood. My elbow was bleeding, but from what, I couldn’t tell. I went into the bathroom and washed it off, then got out the Band-Aids. But when I started to put one on, peering at my elbow in the mirror, the bleeding had stopped and I couldn’t even find the wound. Elbows are a strange business.

A little later, a female ruby-throated hummingbird came and hovered just outside the window next to my writing table, watching me for close to fifteen seconds, which is almost an eternity for a hummingbird. A half hour later, I deleted the essay. It was well past time for a tactical retreat.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Bees on bull thistle

bumblebees on thistle

I took this picture two weeks ago, right before sunrise — click to see the full-size version, as usual. The following poem is a good example of the sort of exercise I engage in to stay in practice, on days when inspiration utterly fails to strike.

Night stops them cold
where they cling
to the green thorax
of the mother of bumblebees,
that bed of nails.
They hang
lifeless but not dead,
sleepless but very far from waking
to the vast meadows that blaze
above their heads.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Mahfouz’s pen finally stilled

Naguib Mahfouz is one of the few contemporary novelists I’ve actually read, so when I saw the New York Times headline — Naguib Mahfouz, First Writer in Arabic to Win Nobel Prize, Dies at 94 — I clicked on the link.

Mahfouz’s politics and brand of Islam (heavily influenced by Sufism) made him many enemies, and in 1994, he narrowly survived an assassination attempt.

Though he continued to write in his later years, Mr. Mahfouz was in failing health. He was diabetic and nearly blind, and lived quietly in an apartment overlooking the Nile. After the 1994 attack he largely abandoned his old habit of walking daily to a coffeehouse to meet friends, and to the offices of Al Ahram, the newspaper for which he had written occasional columns. And the injuries he suffered in 1994 made it difficult for him to hold a pen or pencil.

Still, he said, every day a writer must write something, anything. In a 2002 interview, he said he could still manage to write vignettes of his dreams. “They are very, very short stories, like this,” he said, indicating the tip of his index finger.

Though 94 certainly fits most people’s definition of a ripe old age, with a writer like that, it’s hard not to feel that he must’ve left a lot unfinished at his death, just as he left a lot unsaid in what he did write. Here’s how Mahfouz ended his book-length parable The Journey of Ibn Fattouma:

With these words ends the manuscript of the voyage of Qindil Muhammed al-Innabi, known as Ibn Fattouma.

No history book makes any further mention of this traveler.

Did he complete his journey or did he perish on the way?

Did he enter the land of Gebel? How did he fare there?

Did he stay there till the end of his life, or did he return to his homeland as he intended?

Will one day a futher manuscript be found describing his last journey?

Knowledge of all this lies with the Knower of what is unseen and of what is seen.

Rest in peace.