Not quite dead

         I didn’t really think about it until I saw them wheel one of the bodies out ahead of me, that that was going to be me, laying in the same position, not dead, but dead to the world.  The procedure was described to me as something relatively simple, an endoscopy, from the Greek tendon meaning “inside” and skopein, meaning “to look”, a procedure during which the gastroenterologist would push a long flexible tube with a tiny camera mounted on it down my digestive tube and into my stomach to attempt to discover the root causes of my persistent heartburn, and see if there was any sign of the cell damage that can be a precursor to cancer.  I was told that the procedure would involve an anesthetic, and it wasn’t until the day before that I felt some sense of giddiness and excitement at the thought that I was going to be knocked out, if only for a brief time.  I have never had any kind of surgery, except for a few stitches here and there when out of clumsiness or distractedness I’ve cut myself.  I do however have an interest in altered experiences and what can happen to the body and consciousness with the introduction of a foreign substance.

            While numbing substances have been used in primitive surgical procedures since time immemorial effective anesthetics are a product of modernity and Western medicine.  The Inca were highly skilled at a procedure called trepanation, used to treat disorders ranging from epilepsy to scalp diseases, which involved drilling a hole in the skull with silver chisels and obsidian knives.  During the procedure the patient would chew on coca leaves to numb the pain, as would the Incan surgeon, spitting into the wound as the operation proceeded to numb the surrounding area.  The Chinese used the plant henbane, which contains scopolamine, later isolated and extracted and found to have an amnesia-producing effect, partly blocking the memory of the pain of surgery.[1]  Ether - called “oil of sweet vitriol” by the 16^th Century botanist who found that the distillation of sulfuric acid and ethanol produced a substance whose vapors caused a dizziness and light-headedness - wasn’t used as a full body anesthetic until the middle of the 19^th Century, when it revolutionized the potential of surgery and the medical exploration and treatment of the living body.

     

Killer of sheep

            The coyote paced in her enclosure, deeply uncomfortable with being displayed in a cage for a crowd of humans: milling around, watching, rustling bags of popcorn at hand, making a cacophony with their murmuring, the rub of fabric, the static crackle of a nylon windbreaker.  She traced a broad figure eight in her nervous pacing, keeping up a steady fast trot, her eyes darting, trying to spy any opening, any missing links in the fence or unlocked door that would allow her to bolt.   She was a 2 year old female, barely adult and inexperienced or she might have smelled the trace of human scent on the trapper’s cage or noticed the knife marks on the fragrant hare.  She was unhappy, her skin crawled at the sensation of human eyes on her, and her sharp senses were overwhelmed - ringing with a static buzz.  Full of nervous energy, her hot breath making her nose wet, she walked a fast trot, her pacing forming a deepening trench in the loose soil.  She had been trapped and put up for display at a state fair, likely to face an ignominious end looking down the wrong end of a rifle barrel held by one of the whiskered trappers who ran the “Wild Animals of Your Backyard” display.  Nearby, in an overgrown and untended byway adjacent to the rambling Olentangy River, a pack of her relatives lurked, guarding their privacy in the bush.  

            As a species the coyote has undergone an historic expansion of range - once confined largely to the Southwest coyotes are now well established across the North American continent, having adapted to a wide variety of climates, and established habitats even in densely packed urban environments.[1]  In 2010 a female coyote somehow made her way to Tribeca, in densely packed Lower Manhattan, where she darted through traffic and tried desperately to find adequate cover, hiding under parked cars and in the sparse bushes of the little vest-pocket public parks.  Somehow she must have ventured down through the backyards and parkways of Westchester, perhaps fording the Harlem River, or running across the Third Avenue Bridge in the cover of deep night, ambling through Central Park and down the long wide avenues until she finally was caught, sedated and hauled off by emergency services not more than a few blocks from the site of the former World Trade Center.

River float

The northwest corner of Arkansas was hazy with dust as August crept towards its end after a summer of one hundred and two degree days. We were visiting a friend who invited us to join her and her family on a river float, in the hope that the cool water and the lazy current would be an antidote to the dry and austere heat that enveloped that part of the Ozarks.  From Fayetteville we drove west on Route 62 to Tahlequah, Oklahoma, before taking a side road where a bend of the Illinois River shelters a cluster of businesses that sell access to the river: guided fishing trips, rental of inflatable tubes, rafts and canoes; the stores cluttered with displays of cheap sunglasses, floppy hats and sunscreen that everyone wishes they bought more of.  Northwest Arkansas in where Bentonville is located-- the seat of the world headquarters of Wal-Mart, the retailing giant -- and that corner of the state has a slight polish, the roads are in good condition and the housing stock mostly looks decent.  Driving from Arkansas into Oklahoma it becomes noticeable immediately after crossing the state line that things are a little more rundown -- ragged trailers and impromptu ranch houses with cheap siding and tin roofs line the roads, and in late August the hills are the color of burlap.

The other rafters were largely in groups: families, some couples, and crews of friends carting picnics in an assortment of coolers with cans of beer hidden in the ice -- there were signs everywhere warning the consequences of drinking while rafting, including the possibility of being banned from that stretch of the river.  Visitors park their cars in the gravel lot and then are driven in buses to an embarkation spot -- a flat and sloping bank created by the slow movement of the river’s course over time. The long open bend floods in the spring when the water is high and rushing with snow melt and runoff from the surrounding Ozarks but in the depths of August it is exposed as the diminished Illinois River gently winds its way southeast  -- across Oklahoma, through Arkansas and Tennessee, down through Mississippi and Louisiana, changing names along its wending path until it finally empties out into the Gulf of Mexico, after a wash through the delta that lays by New Orleans.

Guided by stars and currents

It is the first long story that I have attempted to write, the first novel, and I picked a story that takes place in a historical setting.  So far it has been rewarding but also a slow and challenging project that is difficult to fit within the contours of my life.

One of the characters is a navigator and needs to be able to speak authoritatively on the subject so I had to learn more about navigation.  One of the books that I read was “Early Man and the Ocean” by Thor Heyerdahl, a series of essays where Heyerdahl lays out his theories of navigation and ocean-going activities in the ancient world.  Heyerdahl was a Norwegian zoologist best known for the Kon-Tiki expedition of 1947, when he and a group of hearty fellow-travelers constructed a balsa raft and drifted with the ocean currents to land in the Tuamotu Islands in Polynesia, a journey of 4,300 miles that took over 100 days.

In the book Heyerdahl makes an argument for early contact between Africa and the Americas, showing that ships woven out of reeds used by the Egyptians and the Phoenicians in the pre-Christian era could possibly sail across the Atlantic.  He mentions the Sea-People, a mysterious group of maritime traders described by ancient Egyptian and Greek sources; speculating that they sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar to trade along the West African coast, crossed the Atlantic by following the Westward current that begins off of the Canary Islands, and engaged in commerce with the peoples of the Americas.  Heyerdahl expands on his theory of the American origins of ancient Polynesia, mustering the supporting data and theories that he can within the small format of the book.  There was something about a central image that he used that I found hugely resonant: the idea of a small group of people, impelled by the boundless human capacity for exploration and adaptation to undertake a perilous voyage across thousands of miles of open ocean, living off of the sea, reading the stars and the ocean currents for signs, with no clear sense of destination or purpose.