Gary Jennings: Smut, History, Purity, Coincidence, and Torture

I'm re-reading "Aztec," the Gary Jennings book that I first read many years ago, and I have a few things to add to my previous post about the Jennings formula (at least as it applies this novel and "Raptor").

Yes, Jennings does his research, and combined with a perfect sense of pacing he manages to convey a realistic impression of what it was like to live at the time (in this case, to be an Aztec before, during, and after the Spanish conquest). I'm re-reading this particular book because I want to learn a bit more about Central American civilization, and "Aztec" is telling me a hell of a lot.

But Jennings isn't content to write 750-page books about dry old history, he must also introduce characters who are almost Ayn Rand-ian in their purity: the loyal and innocent servant, the battle-hardened and kind-hearted soldier, the intelligent and noble protagonist, the honest craftsman who pours his entire soul into his work.

These characters would be the first to disappear in an Ayn Rand novel, though, because they are so noble and pure that they can't even be CAPITALISTS (what sort of craftsman would give away his work for free simply because he is proud of what he does?), but they do share the Rand-trait of being such focuses of ideology that reality seems to WARP AROUND them. Thanks to their unswerving characteristics they form impossible alliances, get out of impossible (but clever) traps, and discover impossible things...you know, like Mayan eyeglasses.

During all of this they engage in meticulously-described sexual acrobatics, and they also witness meticulously-described tortures that make even the most hardened reader (me) physically ill. When reading either "Aztec" or "Raptor" you can rest assured that if things are getting a bit bogged down in philosophy or natural beauty, a flaying or an orgy is right around the corner.

As amazed as I am by Gary Jenning's audacity at writing historical novels which are simultaneously accurate and wildly exploitative and impossible, I have to admit that he's an incredible writer. In the pauses between the lesbian couplings and the guys whose guts splash out, his characters meditate on civilization and love, on warfare and writing, on the beauty of the universe and the beauty of the flowers. I have never read any other author who could pull this off so seamlessly that it becomes a genre unto itself...and for 750 pages, no less!

Here's to Gary Jennings. I wish I knew more about the man who wrote these books. In fact, I wish I could read at least one other review that bothered to mention this curious juxtaposition of brilliance and cheap smut.

Four Strangers in the Park

On Wednesday I suddenly snapped: I was overtired, confused, and frustrated. I was making too many mistakes. When I asked my manager if I could have the rest of the week off she said "Sure!" and the world suddenly became a better place.

One thing I wanted to accomplish during my long weekend was to get my taxes done, so today I sorted all my papers and started the long walk to Conestoga Mall. I could either take a ridiculous detour along impersonal major streets I already knew...or I could finally explore Hillside Park., whose network of trails goes there almost directly. Thank goodness I decided to do the latter.

Ever since I've moved here I've known the park was on my doorstep, and I'd seen aerial views of it on Google, but I'd never actually been inside until today. Its unspoiled lushness (complete with marshes, branching trails, crumbling 19th century foundations, and -- apparently -- foxes) makes it appear much larger than it is...I assume the illusion of total wilderness will be complete once the summer leaves grow.

It was while walking one of the trails at 11:30 this morning that I spotted a plaque of some sort located about 40 feet down a small secondary path. Wanting to read it, I started down the path when I noticed a woman sitting further down, mostly obscured by the bushes. "Hello!" she shouted to me.

You don't spend long exploring these trails in Kitchener/Waterloo before you discover the makeshift camps of homeless people. I've never had any problems, but I'm understandably wary about stepping into a home where people have been drinking all day, and probably pooping in the corner.

But this woman sounded sober so I shouted "Hello!" back, and walked down the path towards her, thinking I was just going to be briefly trapped by a gregarious person who wanted to chat.

As I got closer she said, "You know that saying, 'I've fallen and I can't get up?' Well, it's just happened to me." She was sitting on the ground next to an electric scooter. She'd driven down the path to pick up a blanket that somebody had left there -- she's a great lover of the trails and doesn't like to see them used as a junkyard -- and her scooter had hit a muddy pothole, throwing her down. She'd been sitting there in the dirt for a long time, without a cel phone, invisible to the people on the main trail, listening to the birds and totally unable to get up.

We tried a few things but I simply wasn't strong enough; she was quite heavy and had almost no lifting power in her legs. After a bit she got exhausted, so we sat back down and chatted and tried to come up with a plan.

Since *I* could look over the bushes I was able to see the main trail, and when an old man walked by I ran after him and asked him to please help. He came back and we both tried to lift her...no chance.

I saw a hiker and brought her back as well. So there we were in the bushes, four people trying to accomplish a heavy-lifting task, and us lifters were hilariously ill-suited to the job: I've got a torn-up right shoulder, the old man was wiry and somewhat frail, and the hiker was small and couldn't even lift half of what I could.

We jostled and pushed and pulled, rested, chatted, and jostled and pulled some more. Eventually the woman got discouraged and said we'd simply have to call the police...but not only were we unable to LIFT anything, none of us even had a PHONE.

Meanwhile I'd been toying with a big log, and I reasoned that the woman's problem was that she couldn't expend the strength necessary to BOTH stand AND position her legs. We couldn't raise her up to a standing position while she was sitting on the ground...but maybe we could divide the job in half by getting her to sit on the log first, THEN -- with her weight already off the ground -- pull her into a position where she could get her legs in gear.

It was worth a try! The old man and I rolled the log over, and with some pushing and pulling we got her onto it, squashing a large number of beetles that I thought it best not to mention. Then we found some broken wooden planks and wedged them under the log to keep it from moving, and the old man pushed from behind while the hiker and I pulled from the front. Amazing! Within minutes she was back in her cart and we were almost as dirty as she was.

What was particularly strange about this is that we had to spend so much time with each other -- twenty minutes, I'd say -- but we were almost a random sample of people. To add to the social barrier we'd been intimately grabbing a perfect stranger, meanwhile trying to figure out exactly what she was capable of in terms of movement and strength. By some fluke the four of us were so darn POLITE: there wasn't a take-charge, natural leader among us, so it was like "Well, I was thinking that maybe this would work--" "Oh, you think? Would that help?" "I'm not sure, here, we can try..." "Oh, excuse me, sorry..."

In terms of social rewards, I think we were all happy in our own ways: the woman was thrilled that she didn't need to call the police, and the rest of us -- none of whom had been in any sort of hurry -- felt awfully good about saving the damsel in distress. I was also happy that I'd seemed nice and genuine enough to convince total strangers to follow me into the bushes.

The old man went his own way, and because the hiker and I were both going in the same direction but had never been in the park before, the suddenly-mobile woman gave us a guided tour of her favourite spots. Gradually we split off until it was just me in a gorgeous forest, under a warm and cloudy sky, in no particular hurry and walking on my own again. So nice!

---

Oh, yeah, my taxes: "It's busy," said the tax people. "Come back on Sunday."

Eena, Deina, Pitera, Pimp

I'm reading "Lost Country Life" by Dorothy Hartley, based around Thomas Tusser's famous 16th century farming calendar.

Being totally unsourced and written in a know-it-all tone, some of the book seems a tad dubious; you wonder if, being 87 herself when the book was written, she held more stock than she should have in her own intuition, memories, and the homey parables of her mysterious gardener.

But at the very least the book is full of beefy (if scattered) information about the smallest tasks of the medieval farmers. If this isn't really how it was, then it is how it SHOULD have been.

Many of her insights provoke interesting questions, even if you don't exactly believe her answers. For instance: how did people with no education manage to separate a specific number of animals -- say twenty -- from a herd? With "shepherd counts," apparently, regionally-specific "four-finger" counts that used words instead of numbers. "Eena, deena, dina, das; catiler, weena, winer, was," you'd say in the West Riding, or -- if you were in Rochdale -- "Eena, deina, pitera, pimp."

She also explains how all those beautiful British hedgerows were built, and the crazy methods for making rennet, and the various uses of both cows and oxen.

It's taken me a week to actually start enjoying this book (due to its informal and poorly-organized preface), but now I'm learning all sorts of things I've always wondered. I'll never USE these tips for plowing a strip of land or washing a sheep, but it's fascinating to learn how medieval mind explained the mysteries of land and animal, and how they slowly began to innovate.

"The Beothucks or Red Indians"

As children, we Canadians are taught a bizarre and shameful footnote to our history: immediately after settling in Newfoundland, our ancestors began a three-century project of informal extermination. And I'm not talking about the auks, I'm talking about the Beothuks.

Their story is a sad one of brutality, stupidity, missed opportunities, and belated reparations. The Beothuks (called "red Indians" because they covered themselves with red ocher) were the dominant tribe on the island, living mainly in the interior but coming to the coasts during the summer in order to fish.

European settlers began to arrive in the 15th century, and though there are some stories of goodwill between the cultures, the Beothuks and the settlers REALLY got off on the wrong foot. The Beothuks, probably angry about incursions into their fishing grounds, stole the possessions of the settlers, and the settlers -- meanwhile -- were shooting Beothuks out of some combination of fear, hatred, and sport.

In addition, the French were giving guns to the Mi'kmaq in Labrador, resulting in a serious military imbalance with the Beothuks. Attacked on two fronts, the Beothuks became increasingly evasive, retreating almost entirely to the interior by the 19th century.

It was around this time that philanthropic groups were organized to try to make belated peace with the Beothuks, but the European powers-that-be had a bit of a credibility gap, especially since settlers were still quietly killing Indians. Ultimately the plan of the philanthropists was to find out where the Beothuk were hiding, give them presents, convince one of them to return to town with them, and show the Indian all the joys of civilization. It was thought that when the Indian returned to his tribe, he'd gush about how wonderful the settlers were, and everybody would smoke a peace pipe and get down to some serious fur-trading.

Twenty years later and all the Beothuck had quietly disappeared. Forever.

Right now I'm reading "The Beothucks or Red Indians" by James P. Howley, originally published in 1915. It was Howley's attempt to gather all the information about the Beothuck as possible, and it's basically a reprint of the letters, journals, and proclamations he found.

This format isn't entirely successful. Decades go by without a single update, and then a hundred pages are devoted to material from just a year or two. If an expedition to the Newfoundland interior involved more than one person, he prints ALL their journals about the trip...and then he prints the recollections of people who HEARD about the trip...and then he prints newspaper articles written about the trip a few years later.

It's annoying to read the same thing over and over again, but it does illustrate the unreliability of memory and biography. Everybody describes the situations differently, and as time goes by the stories get more and more inflated. Howley sidesteps this aspect of his book -- simply pointing out in a footnote when somebody is "unclear about" or "misunderstood" the history -- but it's one of the many ironies that a modern reader is able to pick up on.

Another odd thing about the book is how absolutely bungled the whole philanthropic enterprise was. The do-gooders would march into the woods, scare the heck out of some Beothuck by sneaking up on them, accidentally kill one or two, and then kidnap one or more women. They'd spend a year showering the women with gifts. Then, just before returning them to their tribes, the women would die of consumption.

Hey fellas, A+ for effort, but WHAT THE HECK DO YOU IMAGINE THE BEOTHUCK THOUGHT ABOUT THIS? And while acknowledging that the tribe was in danger of complete extinction, did it not occur to anybody that STEALING WOMEN OF CHILDBEARING AGE was the worst thing they could do?

To be fair it seems they really WANTED to kidnap a man, but the women were just easier to catch.

I'd feel more charitably about these heartfelt schemes if the people involved -- even at their most idealistic -- didn't qualify their "reconciliation" plan with the need to "bring the poor brutes to civilization." In the first meeting of the surprisingly liberal 1827 Beothuck Institution, the participants speak highly of the Indian's right to life and land...but they always slip in the verb "to civilize," as though the Beothuck were unable to decide for themselves.

But none of that mattered anyway because the tribe was already dying (if not dead).

Some of the most interesting parts of the book are the vivid accounts of Shanawdithit and Demasduit, two of the captured females who responded to European life in a somewhat delightful way (before dropping dead).

MOST fascinating, however, is the apparently complete narrative of William E. Cormack's east-west journey across Newfoundland. Over several hellish months he pushed through parts of the island that even the Indians wouldn't stray into, and his descriptions are engrossing: every detail about the geography, botany, wildlife, weather, and inhabitants during a trip that nobody had ever taken before, and no sane person would ever do again.

I don't have romantic ideas about Indians OR Europeans, and in this case especially their relationship seemed doomed from the start. Reading this book, though, I'm getting a strangely haunting impression of the situation as seen by both peoples. To the European settlers, living precarious lives in an enormous unmapped wilderness, the Beothuck must have seemed almost devilish, the way they disappeared into the interior, leaving behind deserted wigwams and tumble-down storehouses, coming back only to steal things silently in the night.

And imagine what the Beothuck thought, hiding in the interior that they knew so well, always aware that more and more settlers were living on the fringe. Occasionally the settlers would intrude down the rivers, and the Beothuck would quietly slip away, leaving their villages deserted and starting up elsewhere, further and further from the resources they required.

Eventually, undetected, the last Beothuck died in the middle of all that uncharted forest, and nobody else ever knew.

PS: As I said, this is a romantic impression based on a book written in 1915. Reality suggests that some of the Beothuck DID survive, mainly by mingling with settlers and other tribles.

We and Kyle

We travel north to study the newly discovered insects. Kyle Borrowman is assigned to us, and we respect him because the dossier says that he can survive. He's not an entomologist, of course -- there's enough of us here already! -- but he understands how to climb hilltops, and how to find fresh water on the top of the hilltops he climbs, and he can also make a special kind of dirt-food that is edible if not always tasty. Kyle Borrowman has ensured the survival some very important people, says the dossier that we pass around, disinterested. OUR survival is not the first thing on our minds.

We have never learned to preserve anything larger than a bug. We're accustomed to sterile conditions where food and water are always available, sometimes fed to us automatically when we're busy. Apparently, for this journey, we NEED somebody like Kyle Borrowman, and since most creatures are in some way dependent on others we like to imagine that he needs us too.

We're not sure of that, we've done no studies.

The north is a difficult environment and our research skills are not very useful. As we travel, Kyle Borrowman saves each of us in turn from a rock slide, a flood, and an infection which spreads from foot to shin. Doctor Feeler almost dies from a snake that she tries to investigate with a stick. Borrowman sucks the venom out and says crude things about her leg.

In light of this we recognize our collective debt to him, and we decide unanimously that Kyle Borrowman is the only member of our party who actually deserves a name. He disagrees, brandishing his handmade axe, and says we're being darn foolish. If we don't stop doing this stuff, he says, he'll go back south and leave us here alone, damnit.

We reclaim our names and we acknowledge that there are certain things we do not understand. Kyle Borrowman approves and offers us tobacco, which we decline because it hurts our lungs. He says "What a bunch of pussies!" and spits.

---

Researchers are too weak and impractical to survive in the wilderness. Even amongst peers we have trouble with things like public transportation and grocery stores. Some of us have gotten lost in hallways while trying to locate the researchers from other facilities, and even stairways of more than one storey give us trouble.

Kyle Borrowman tends us with a down-home type of tough love; he's dependable but sometimes frightening. The songs he sings have uncouth lyrics and he uses the fat of still-living mammals to waterproof his canoe. Every time we set up our campsite he stores our food high up in a tree, and then he hollers that he's not coming back down to give us any until one of us manages to hit him with a rock. He's the only one who's really good at throwing rocks. Maybe this is his way of encouraging us to try new things. We are never sure when Kyle Borrowman is joking or when he is trying to tough-love us.

He has a sensitive side that is not always apparent. During restful times he listens to waves sloshing against the shore, and he says they remind him of his home by the Lake Of No Name. We, by comparison, listen to the quiet buzzing of microscopic wings in our specimen jars. Kyle says that small things like that are not worth listening to, he is more interested in The Large.

Our camp is scattered with jars made of crystal, and each jar holds something that's very, very small. In a rare mood, far north of the timberline, Kyle Borrowman asks us what all of our junk is for and we don't really know what to say, but after a bit of discussion we try to explain it to him.

"Studying the insects is exciting," one of us says, and the rest of us applaud him. When Kyle Borrowman looks unimpressed, Doctor Feeler reads him some untranslated excerpts from her research notes. "This is what we do," she says. "We study."

Kyle Borrowman doesn't care. "That's fine," he says, "but can any of you do this?" He takes off his shirt and flexes his biceps, which are so massive and hairy that we can't believe we have similar biceps of our own. He turns around and flexes again so we can see him from the back. Doctor Feeler says that she doesn't think she could do such things personally, but she can't speak for anybody else. We agree.

His laugh is meaty, like his smell and like his hands. We can only keep his attention for a short time and we worry that he'll grow bored of us, forget the contract he signed, and leave us in the north to die.

He goes hunting with his axe and brings back rabbits, otters, and bears, all dead. He can drag a monster home by its antlers without sweating more than he usually does. We appreciate the effort but we insist on eating dry rations out of ziplocked bags, and he grunts, annoyed. He has begun brewing his own beer with cheesecloth, tinfoil, and tiny pieces of moss. Sometimes he looks at us and we wonder what he's thinking about.

---

It becomes terribly hot and the trees are poor shelter. Our little crystal jars reflect light-beams. Our tents steam, the beer ferments with a rich dungy odour, Kyle Borrowman sits drunk and naked on the rock which he calls his throne.

His torso is covered with mosquitoes but this doesn't seem to bother him. When he stares at Doctor Feeler like a lascivious killer, her sunburned face turns perceptively redder and she devotes extra study to her insects.

Our anxiety increases as the heat gets worse. Unable to look directly at our bright thermometers, we estimate the temperature from the oscillations of midges. The radio transmitter no longer works, but on cloudless nights we can hear German opera, and Doctor Pop sings along.

We run out of dry rations but we are afraid to ask Kyle Borrowman to bring some down from the tree-top, which for days has been surrounded by eagerly-fighting crows. We have heard about hunger before, but we have never known it personally. This is not within our realm of research and it is experienced without first setting down a proposal.

"So," says Kyle Borrowman one morning, addressing Doctor Feeler as usual, "you ever DONE IT with a mountain man?"

Nobody answers. It's terribly hot and we stare at our ragged shoes.

He points to the mound of mosquitoes on his crotch. "We gotta get it on."

That night we gather in Doctor Feeler's tent and hold a vote: we will no longer answer any questions which make us feel uncomfortable. We pack the delirious Doctor Pop in formaldehyde put him to bed, and in the morning he dies.

Our weaknesses infuriate Kyle Borrowman, who rarely stirs from his mosquito blanket. He says that Doctor Pop was a useless man who should have drank more fluids to prevent dehydration. He threatens us in a fuzzy voice and his threats, as always, are effective. By simply sitting on his throne and waving his axe around, Kyle Borrowman is more powerful than the rest of us combined.

That afternoon the heat breaks and a downpour floods our tents. We run to Kyle Borrowman for help and we discover that he is gone, and so is Doctor Feeler. She left her notes behind.

---

One day our savage children see an equally wild old woman stalking our burrow. The woman's lab coat is patched with fur and she is holding a knife in her hands, something tough and made of bone. Instead of fighting, our children jump and holler, and eventually the old woman goes away.

"The Conservation of the Wild Life of Canada" by G. Gordon Hewitt

I have previously mentioned how much I love reading books from the "Coles Canadiana Collection." These thick, meaty volumes are exact reprints of Canadian nonfiction books written before the 1930s, many of them journals, reports, and memoirs. Unabridged, they contain all the antiquated dullness and dried-out warts of the originals...just the way I like them.

I just finished reading C. Gordon Hewitt's "The Conservation of the Wild Life of Canada," a 1921 report which dared to state the obvious: "Hey folks, if we keep killing all these animals, we're going to RUN OUT of animals...and that could be BAD!"

It's impossible to evaluate this sort of book without taking into account the time it was published, but much of it sounds awfully current. Hewitt had a real love of wild life for its own sake but he recognized that he'd need to sell his policies in practical ways: preserve the birds so they can eat the insects which damage our crops; protect the elk so that the Native Americans will have something to eat; save the goats because they make our parks prettier; domesticate the muskox in order to breed hardier cattle.

Except for the muskox thing his ideas were pretty good. Animals such as muskox tend to die when you move them around.

Much of the book is a dry and repetitious accounting of the habits of wildlife and the terrain of conservation areas, and for that reason I found myself focusing on Hewitt's amusing quirks. I loved the way he always described bad animals as "noxious," and whenever an animal was described as "fur bearing" I found myself picturing an animal who could barely tolerate its own fur.

I particularly enjoyed his "elk/wapati" hang-up. Hewitt's sense of order was obviously offended by the incorrect application of the word "elk" to the Canadian animal, so he constantly described them as "elk, or wapati," as though he could train us dumb readers to use the proper word.

Sorry buddy, we still call them "elk." And "cattalo," his proposed word for a buffalo/cattle hybrid, never stuck either (I guess somebody figured that "beefalo" sounded less silly...ahem).

Also amusing was Hewitt's intense hatred of cats. Lest you think he was a lover of all creatures, Hewitt constantly exhorted people to exterminate the "alien" cats because of their "cruel" slaughter of birds. Likewise he hated "market hunters." Nobody knows his opinions about ALIEN FELINE market hunters, but I think we can guess.

The book contains many photographs of Canadian animals, most of them carefully posed in front of explicitly fake backdrops. At first I was baffled, thinking that a photographer had herded trained polar bears, moose, and elk (AKA wapati) into large studios and forced them to pose for pictures. This seemed like a lot of effort to go through. Eventually I realized that the pictures were of stuffed animals in MUSEUM exhibits. Aha.

I've learned a lot from this book. I now know that a cow will apparently run AWAY from storms, but that a muskox will stand bravely (or stupidly) and face inclement weather. I learned that the arrival of the railway impacted buffalo in more ways than just transporting hunters: it also broke up the herds and caused lots of forest fires. I learned that New Brunswick really sucked when it came to animal preservation in the 1920s. I also learned that I'm still childish enough to laugh at the following sentence:

It has been calculated that a pair of tits and the young they rear will consume about 170 pounds of insect food a year.

This is certainly not the best or most informative Coles Canadiana book, but it is a slice of undiluted zeal from a well-intentioned and very wise man who died too soon.

Sir John Franklin, Unforgettable, Dead

William T. Vollmann's novel "The Rifles" is about John Franklin's northwest passage expedition. Except that John Franklin is really the time-traveling twin of Captain Subzero, who is also sort of William T. Vollmann himself, and all of them are in love with a crazy Inuk woman named Reepah, who was part of the greater tragedy of the much-maligned 1950s relocation of Inuit families to Resolute, and everybody has been impacted by the properties of lead, you see.

The book is best when it is describing Vollmann's impressions of the far north; the shambolic yet warm settlements, the sparse beauty of endless tundra, and the sheer superpower of wind, ice, and cold.

It's also good when Vollmann writes about Reepah, a hearing-impaired, gasoline-sniffing, poverty stricken, utterly damaged woman who cheerfully ping-pongs between Subzero and Franklin, past and present, chopping blubber in the kitchen and screaming drunkenly in New York City. Her affairs with her Caucasian lovers are typically Vollmann: lopsided, crazy, impossible, doomed.

But what does all this have to do with "rifles?" I missed it the first time I read the book, but this time I took note of the introduction, in which the author tries to find the source of a river on Cornwallis Island...he keeps following it, trying to find its source, only to realize -- after an exhausting journey -- that

...these lakes were from permafrost melt; the whole island was permafrost; when you were on the island you were in a world of rivers that came from everywhere.

In his "Seven Dreams" series (of which "The Rifles" is book six) he is following tenuous paths through history, following his inspirations in directions that are symbolic and meaningful. "The Rifles" is about starvation and lead, which killed the Franklin expedition (partially through lead-contaminated food), which is killing Reepah (who sniffs gasoline), and impacted the entire north when rifles and European contact turned the ecosystem from one of sheer survival to one of fur-for-profit.

But Vollmann knows that this is a messy river to follow, and he acknowledges that this is too simplistic. The book sinks into necessarily long descriptions of starvation which make the reader understand both the protracted nature of Arctic death and the sheer emptiness of the landscape. As difficult as it is to read, and as spongy as its "permafrost" can occasionally be, "The Rifles" gives a personal glimpse of the far north as experienced by Vollmann himself.

It makes you want to go there and go very far away, all at the same time.

Immediately after this, I finally roused myself to read one of Vollmann's sources: "Frozen In Time" by Owen Beattie and John Geiger, about Beattie's own trips north to exhume the bodies of Franklin's crew.

The book is dry and clunkily sentimental, and it is so repetitive that you wonder if you aren't reading the same chapters over and over again. It's written, in fact, as though it were the awkward offspring of a research paper and a journal, which is exactly what it is.

Beattie was the man who developed and (it would seem) supported the theory that Franklin's expedition was debilitated early on by lead poisoning, mainly due to hastily-manufactured tinned food. Most of the bodies and relics from the 1840s are long gone -- scattered by the elements, lost under the ice, acquired by the Inuit -- but the bodies of three crewmen have remained buried on isolated, inhospitable Beechey Island.

So Beattie and his team went there with a portable laboratory and dug up the corpses. They were amazed to find that the 140-year-old bodies of John Torrington, John Hartnell, and William Braine were almost perfectly preserved...and it's the gruesome pictures of the men that are the real stars of the book. Bulging hands, rubbery lips, gritted teeth, staring eyes, emaciated bodies, all dressed in period clothing and looking barely dead. The bodies are downright eerie...if you want nightmares, here are a few online shots.

That's it for me. No more Arctic stories for a while. I'm plunging into Sherlock Holmes because I much prefer reading about that smug bastard than spending another week perpetually icebound.

Quick Thoughts About Two "Up North" Books

I'm not even going to TRY to come up with a coherent thought, but somehow I can't leave these two books unreviewed. So here you go:

"Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade" by John Hawkes

My university PoMo teacher included John Hawkes in his "required postmodern reading" list, so I picked up a few of his books...but at the time I didn't understand how he fit into the category; his writing was far too straightforward for my rough little mind to accept.

I can't speak for Hawkes' other books (yet), but I can certainly understand his pomo chops now. "Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade" is partly a wild adventure story, but it is mainly a love-letter to language, in particular the telling of stories.

The book's characters often break into long, detailed, fascinating monologues about their adventures...but they don't do this to impart information or to soothe others...they do it to BLUDGEON their listeners. In this book, stories are weapons; they help to maintain the status quo. When two new characters meet each other for the first time, they attack each other with stories, and the loser is permanently scarred.

What's amazing about Hawkes is his ability to get this across in a subtle, ambiguous way, and to combine it with stories that are more gripping and unusual than you'd find in the best "boy's adventure" book. For that reason, "Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade" could be seen as a lot of different things (and that's also why, the first time I read it, I had no idea what the point was). But now I see it as an evil, uncomfortable, vicious tale about the passive ways that people abuse each other, presented through the metaphor of storytelling.

"Hunting with the Eskimos" by Harry Whitney

It's difficult to read an autobiography written by a man you don't like, and such is this book by Harry Whitney. He wasn't EVIL or anything, he was just a selfish, egocentric, dim-witted rich guy who decided on a whim that he'd like to kill musk ox, and then wrote a book about his year sponging off the Inuit.

His writing style is atrocious. The book is a long string of pseudo-facts that barely rise above the level of a point-form journal: somebody sees a walrus, everybody sets out to kill the walrus, the weather turns bad, they return home with only one walrus. It's all like that except when Whitney sees something beautiful, in which case he'll describe it to us as being "indescribable." Thanks, Harry.

What's more, Whitney spent the entire Arctic winter amongst the Inuit, who were forced to babysit him. What the Inuit got out of this exchange is never stated, though they did seem to like his biscuits.

Even before he got off the boat Whitney had begun to hurt himself. It seems like every week he was suffering some new injury and that some new part of his body was frozen, swollen, or both. He kept wandering off, getting stuck in storms, and coming home again with frozen feet, which the Inuit women would stick between their breasts and rub back to life.

Whenever they went hunting, Whitney insisted on getting his trophies. To hell with the fact that the Inuit needed to, like, EAT, Whitney would hold them off so that he could take the first shot, or so that they could find the musk ox with the biggest horns, and meanwhile the Inuit hunting dogs were getting slaughtered and the game was escaping. Whenever he did this the Inuit hunters would become, in Whitney's words, "sulky and disagreeable."

You understand why I didn't like him.

On the positive side, however, he provided many comical accounts of the Inuit "going problokto," which he described as a form of insanity that the "Highland Eskimos" were prone to. Right in the middle of cooking a meal or spearing a walrus, somebody or other would run screaming around the ice floes, tearing off their clothes. This happened more often even that Whitney's frequent injuries, and I suspect that the Inuit did this to amuse Whitney, or more likely to distract him while they stole his biscuits.

The book does manage to shed some light on Inuit culture, but moreso it exposes the strange mindset of the turn-of-the-century "professional sportsman," men who travelled the world in order to kill the biggest animals they could find, usually with the invaluable assistance of "sulky, disagreeable" natives, just so they could nail something to their wall and bludgeon their children with adventure stories.

"I Married the Klondike"

For the last few months I've been on a Klondike kick. I've read all about the social, political, and historical significance of the event. I've learned intimate details about all the gold rush archetypes: prostitutes, dance-hall girls, con men, Mounties, miners, and opportunistic businessmen. I've followed the history of Dawson from the first pan of gold to the start of the town's decline.

What more was there to learn? Obviously something, because Laura Beatrice Berton's autobiographical "I Married the Klondike" has been an eye-opener even to this jaded reader.

Berton, a school teacher, went alone to Dawson in 1907. The town was already in mid-decline but the unique social life of dances, teas, recitals, and endless gossip was still entrenched. Berton's book is a unique perspective of a 29-year-old woman's adventures in a dying mining town, including her marriage and the upbringing of her two children (one of whom, of course, was author and historian Pierre Berton).

The first half of the book consists of her detailed memories about the town's social stratification.

The social level began, of course, with the commissioner and his wife, and worked its way down through the judges and officers of the police, the high civil servants, the heads of the large companies, the bishops and church people, the bankers and bank clerks, lawyers and nurses until it stopped with us teachers, who clung to the charmed group by our finger-nails... The Mounted Police, noncoms and constables, were not admitted to Dawson's social set... Below the first social level came the merchants, who were known as "the downtown crowd", and below them the labourers, policemen and so on, who were, in turn, several steps above the dance-hall girls and the prostitutes of Klondike City and the half-breeds and Indians.

We also learn something about what it was like to be a single, unescorted woman living in the Yukon at the turn of the century. She describes riding an open sleigh from Whitehorse to Dawson, a week-long trip in the middle of winter, crammed in with thirteen other passengers, two of them amorous.

I sat in the rear seat, squeezed between a Swede on one side and a French-Canadian miner on the other... For five days I parried their advances, which followed much the same line.

"I mak' you present ermine skin, hey?" murmured the Quebecker, affectionately pressing my arm. "Two, t'ree, yes, enough for nice collar. How you like dat, hey?" Another squeeze.

Then from the other side--this time pressure against my leg and the Swedish voice: "In Dawson you go mit me to show, yah? Ve haf a good time, yah?" To all of which I smiled demurely and maintained a discreet silence.

Reading this in the midst of my furnace breakdown, I was particularly thankful that I wasn't currently Up North.

We could never quite keep the cold or frost out of the house. It seemed an animate thing, creeping insidiously under the crack of the door in a long white streak. Each nailhead in the strapping around the kitchen door was covered by a little coat of ice... A thick line of frost marked the lower edge of the door, and we could judge the temperature by gauging the distance this white line crept up along the door's edge from the floor to ceiling.

The environment kills many of her friends. They succumb to cold, incompetent medicine, animals, and drowning. Some go crazy, some just disappear. But most of them gradually trickled away as the city emptied, and eventually she left as well.

It's not all sad, though; far from it. She describes scenes of incredible bliss, spending summers floating around on the Yukon, picking an uninhabited island and living there for a month. She talks about the necessary acts of charity and kindness in a city where the smallest weakness could lead to death. She eloquently, breezily, and matter-of-factly describes the love that many people feel for small towns and the people in them, and the fact that Dawson was such an impossible place makes it all more fascinating.

Klondike

I have just finished Pierre Berton's book "Klondike," and I've actually had -- yes -- some epiphanies!

Once you pass the age of 25 epiphanies become more and more rare. Eventually you know enough about the world that very few "connections" remain to be made in your mind. Sure, you can still LEARN new things, but rarely do you get those "aha!" moments when pieces of the world puzzle suddenly fit together.

I guess I'm lucky because I learned very little history when I was in school, so the historical timeline is still full of these little puzzles that need to be resolved. I've pretty much filled in the geopolitical gaps from 1920 on, but the turn of the century has remained a mystery.

Thankfully, Pierre Berton's wonderful sense of scope and organization has brought me the perfect overview of that period, and explained to me some questions that I didn't realize were vexing until I really thought about them: why did so many people rush off to the Klondike, even though the chances of staking a gold claim were next to impossible? How did so many of them become rich anyway? Why did those people notoriously just "throw their gold around" like it was worth nothing? And why was it so HARD to get to the Yukon, anyway?

There is no single answer for any of those questions, which is why the period has never seemed real to me; it was like a cartoon where people just did crazy things for no reason I could possibly relate to. But Berton's "Klondike" spends so much time answering all of those questions from every possible angle that...well, I had epiphanies. Lots of them. It's almost INDECENT, to suffer so many revelations in one's own armchair.*

Regarding the last question -- why was it so hard to get there -- I suffer an inability to judge the impossibility of physical tasks, and without actually undertaking the task myself I'm bound to be deluded for life. Last year's books about the Arctic impressed on me the horrible ordeal of walking on a glacier, Anton Money's "This Was the North" gave me a good sense of what solitary survival up north was really like...and now Pierre Berton has taught me about muskeg, swamps, mosquitos, and the impossibility of getting horses through such places.

Here's a simple equation: no horses, no supplies. No supplies, sickness. Sickness, slow movement. Slow movement through the sub-Arctic, forced to "winter in" repeatedly, in which case only the Indians were able to keep you from total starvation. Demoralization, disorientation, you finally make it to Dawson City only to discover that everybody's up and left.

I'm so thrilled with my revelations that I plan to follow up this book with three others. The first, "Good Time Girls of the Alaskan Gold Rush" by Lael Morgan is one I've read before. It elaborates on the histories of the dance-hall girls and prostitutes, who were very odd characters indeed. Berton covers this topic as well, but in a somewhat scattered way. Plus Morgan's book is beautifully illustrated, showing not just the women themselves but also their houses, streets, and men.

Then I'm moving on to another one I read but couldn't contextualize: "American Vaudeville" by Douglas Gilbert. It covers 1880-1930 and I hope will give me a sense of what entertainment was REALLY like during the period.

Finally, to solidify my grasp of the Yukon, I'll come full-circle with "I Married the Klondike." Written by Laura Beatrice Burton -- Pierre's mother -- it looks to be the sort of pioneer story that I love to read.

* I admit that I still don't really understand WHY gold is so precious. How did that all come about anyway?

Michael Palin, Adventurer

I am laying around at home in a relaxedly ill state, while the world outside my window is gloomy and motionless. In both my old apartment and this new one, the transitional seasons -- spring and fall -- are constantly chilly; through quirks of the heating system and the poor insulation most of the rooms are just cool enough to be unpleasant.

What better time for watching Michael Palin's "Pole to Pole?"

My brain is too foggy to come up with anything insightful, but Michael Palin's travel documentaries make me feel very, very good. He's a benign everyman, genuinely interested in every aspect of every culture, with a strange combination of extroversion and reserve.

He deals graciously with language barriers, often winning through with sheer force of persistent goodwill. He never seems condescending. Most people like him, even when he's a burden, but it's also enjoyable to watch the many people who DON'T like him. When forced to share close accommodations with a person who despises him -- as often happens -- Palin just ironically natters on at them, a form of passive-aggression that is fun to watch.

Most gratifying is the total lack of sensationalism. The film crew don't try to seek out dangerous situations; with only six of them operating with few (if any) allies in the vicinity, they can't afford to be foolhardy. Instead, the documentaries tend to be about ordinary hardships in extraordinary places; how to buy vodka in the Soviet Union, how to avoid the crazy Russian lady who is passionately in love with Palin, how to get the vehicles through hundreds of miles of thick mud, how to find running water in a decrepit hotel.

Films Go Wild, then ABBA Goes Wild

Movie-goers in the late 20s just LOVED to watch pseudo-documentary footage of safaris and expeditions, even more than they loved watching gangsters drive their cars around. On the release of yet another safari film -- "Simba: King of the Beasts" -- the New Yorker film reviewer suddenly cracks on February 4, 1928, and he gives us a wonderful catalog of jungle-film stereotypes:

What with one movie and another I have seen more of Africa than Trader Horn. Victoria Falls is as familiar to me as Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, thanks to the Fifth Avenue Playhouse, where they will not show pictures of battleships but where they will and do show at least twice a month a picture of Victoria Falls. Thirty-two thousand natives have cavorted before my eyes in honor of the Rain God, or the Sun God, or just for the fun of it. I have seen countless crocodiles slip into every known river in Africa, and then have watched most of them waddle out again. There isn't a monkey in Africa that has not flitted across some of the screens that I have looked at. Hartebeests, wildebeests, and allmenarebeests have shyly rushed across every horizon of the Dark Continent while I have peered at them from theatre seats. As surely as I know my bootlegger's name so surely do I know that a lion can be chased twice without its developing any hard feelings, but that the third time he (or she) will get irritated and eat you up. N'koko incoge ke wa kirria ambwini ngogudema. With the proper incentive I could lower Stanley's time for finding Livingstone by six months, three days, and one minute to change pictures.

I'm unable to find a reference for his "N'koko" native talk, so can only assume it's his transliteration of something he saw on-screen.

Then ABBA Goes Wild

ABBA made a lot of baffling novelty songs in their early years. One that really takes the cake is "What About Livingstone." Agnetha berates some poor people at a newspaper stand who are questioning the worth of the space program, and to teach them a lesson she shrieks out:

What about Livingstone?
What about all those men
Who have sacrificed their lives to lead the way?
Tell me, wasn't it worth the while
Travelling up the Nile?
Putting themselves on the test,
Didn't that help the rest?
Wasn't it worth it then?
What about Livingstone?

We never learn how the people reacted at the newspaper stand, unfortunately, but somehow the song was never a hit.

The Book Sale

UPDATED: Beers' connection to the eugenics movement is spurious at best, so I've removed the "e" word from this post.

Every SPRing the Unitarian Church in Waterloo holds its annual book sale, an event they've been hosting ever since I was a small child. Their book collection is enormous, largely unsorted, and stacked in ways that make it difficult for even the most avid reader to find what they're looking for. I think the sale is somehow linked to the Canadian Federation of University Women, but the Unitarians get their fringe benefits too: a sprinkling of strange religious books are always to be found in the most mysterious of places.

The sale often attracts crazy people, or the guardians of crazy people. Last year a man was endlessly playing "chopsticks" on the piano. This year they'd hired young adults of dubious functionality who roamed around listening to their MP3 players. Their job seemed to consist of alternately leaning against the book tables looking bored, and lunging at you to snatch books out of your hands, saying "I'll put that away for you."

Most of the books are cheap discount self-help paperbacks, but the real gems are to be found in the "old books" section. Sometimes they have interesting handwritten inscriptions on their flyleaves, making an already interesting book even more interesting. This year I escaped with four nifty ones:

1. "Klondike" (1958) by Pierre Berton. Vanilla asked me if I'd be looking for "Ice Lit," and indeed I was. Considering the joy I got from his "Just Add Water and Stir" collection -- and knowing that he grew up on the jolly tundra -- I figured I couldn't go wrong. The inscription: "To pop from Charlene & Frank, Christmas 1958."
2. "I Married the Klondike" (1961) by -- you guessed it -- Laura Beatrice Berton. Owning these two books is sort of like owning the husband and wife themselves.
3. "A Mind That Found Itself" (1927), an autobiography by Clifford Whittingham Beers. Credited as the founder of the mental hygiene movement, this promises to be a bizarre read. The inscription: "To Mrs. Lucy E. Beach, secretary of the Child Guidance Council of London, with the compliments of the author Clifford W. Beers, founder and secretary of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, 370 Seventh Avenue, New York City, January 18, 1928." So this copy is signed by Mr. Eugenics himself, a dubious treat. Looking online it seems that he was fond of signing copies of his books, many of which go for an excess of $150 USD. This copy is pretty ratty, though it does include an odd printed addendum pasted in the back.
   
4. "The Guide Handbook" (1965), the prep guide for Girl Guide Recruits. I was a bit confused by the chapter headings "To spread and Mount," "Stalking," "What To Do If Clothing Catches Fire," "Burping," and "Diagonal Lashing," but I'm sure it will all be clear in time. The inscription: "Barbara L. Gratton, May 4/66, 7 Riverside Drive W." which has been clumsily pasted over with a printed address label saying "Hayman, 141 Woodhaven Rd., Kitchener, Ont, N2C 1V2."

The third book is by far the most curious, especially since it's from the "MENTAL WELFARE LIBRARY," according to the notice pasted inside the front cover:

THIS LIBRARY is intended for the use of mental health workers and teachers of defective children. Subscription: 10/' per annum [postage extra.] For more information apply to:-- MISS EVELYN FOX, Hon. Sec., Central Association for Mental Welfare, 24, Buckingham Palace Road, London S.W.1.

The address has been crossed out and a new stamp added: "39 Queen Anne Street, London, W.1, Tel: WELbeck 1272." I bet that phone number doesn't add up anymore. There's even a sign-out sheet on the following page, covering dates from 22.10.36 to 18.9.47. The notice at the bottom says:

This book must be returned within one month of date of issue. It may be re-entered for a second month, on application, if no other demand for it has been made. If retained without permission, a fine of 6d. will be imposed for each week or portion of a week in excess of the month.

Fathers and Crows

Hot on the heels of the book on polar exploration (appropriately called "Ice"), I had a yen to re-read William T. Vollmann's "The Rifles," the sixth volume in his "seven dreams" series. I remember loving it and being moved by his descriptions of Resolute Bay and John Franklin's horrifying attempt at finding the Northwest Passage. "The Rifles" probably nurtured this tiny seed of my fascination with the Canadian north.

But no...that would mean skipping "Fathers and Crows," the second volume of the series. So I've decided to read it instead, which is a real treat because it's my favourite of his books.

I stumbled across William T. Vollmann when a University friend ("The Fantichrist") loaned me "You Bright and Risen Angels." I read it and fell in love with it, but the only other Vollmann books I could find were these strange historical fictions...and at the time, non-fiction was definitely NOT my thing.

But "Fathers and Crows" really opened my eyes. Majestic in its scope, somehow taking in the beauty of the landscape, the justifications of both the Jesuits and the Huron, the establishment of Lower Canada...this single (huge) book made me realized how much I had to learn, and how little of it I'd learn by reading Dean R. Koontz.

I've read it twice now, and when I think of it I get a little chill: scurvy, Ignatius of Loyola, political intrigue, exploration, the saving of souls, the Indians getting sick and the Jesuits being martyred. Beautiful and rambling and crazy, exactly the way it happened, and exactly what Vollmann pours heart and soul into.

Oh yes, and a sea monster.

Pain at the Poles

I just finished reading "This Was the North" by Anton Money, and it was absolutely wonderful. Particularly striking was the account of his first winter on Frances Lake, where he spent five months without another human being within 100 miles, building his own log cabin and waiting to start panning for gold (which eventually made him extremely rich).

Just before Christmas he realized how intensely lonely he was, and he started going a little batty. He watched herds of caribou wander across the ice of the lake, and he decided that he NEEDED to meet the caribou on Christmas day. So for several days he took huge quantities of salt from a distant mountain and spread it on the ice, letting the caribou get used to his smell on the salt that they apparently craved. On Christmas he went and stood motionless on the ice, and after a bit of uncertainty the caribou herd surrounded him to eat the salt. Within hours he was walking among them, feeding them out of his hands...hundreds of wild caribou. That was his Christmas miracle, and it got him through the winter.

But now I'm reading a somewhat less happy book: "Ice: Stories of Survival from Polar Exploration." The editor (Clint Willis) has found all the most harrowing and gruesome excerpts, perfect for a person like me who -- for some reason -- NEEDS to know how terrible and unforgiving nature can be. And also likes to hear gory stories.

In 1912, Douglas Mawson went on an Antarctic expedition with two other men and a dog team. Far from shelter, one of the men and most of the dogs fell into a glacial crevasse, taking most of the supplies with them. If there's one thing I'm learning it's that glaciers are really frightening places to be, and if you fall into a glacial crevasse you're never coming out.

During Mawson's 100-mile walk back to shelter, alone, starving, he starts noticing an "awkward, lumpy, squeltching feeling" in his feet. The following description is not for the faint-hearted, and it's kept me in a state of low-level anxiety for about 24 hours:

The sight of his feet was a hammerblow to the heart. The lumpy, awkward feeling came from underneath--where both his soles had separated into casts of dead skin. The thick pads of the feet had come away leaving abraded, raw tissue. His soles and heels were stripped; an abundant, watery fluid filled his socks, and it was that which had caused the squelching feeling. A wave of despair rode over him. He sat aghast, staring at the ruined feet he had trusted to carry him to Aurora Peak. He was to write later: "All that could be done was to heavily smear the red inflamed exposed flesh with lanolin--and luckily I had a good supply--and then replace the separated soles and bind them into position with bandages. They were the softest things I had available to put next to the raw tissue."

This man walked almost 100 miles with the soles of his feet detached. And you know what? He made it and lived another 40 years.