Death on the Barrens

by George James Grinnell

  On the morning of August 6, 1945, more than nine thousand Japanese children on their way to school were thrown down the Grotonian garbage chute, to say nothing of seventy thousand other Japanese civilians. All told, about four hundred thousand Japanese died as a result of the two explosions, the fires, and the radiation—twenty times the number of people killed by all German bombs dropped on London during World War II. What a triumph for Groton and Harvard!

  O merciful Father… grant that we receiving these thy creatures … in remembrance of His death and passion, may be partakers of His most blessed Body and Blood, who in the same night that He was betrayed took bread, and when He had given thanks, He broke and gave it to His disciples, saying, “Take, eat, this is my Body, which is given for you.”

  As I ate the caribou, I began to feel “lucky,” as an old trapper once said, although the word I would have chosen is more like grateful—grateful that this majestic and beautiful creature had sacrificed its life that I might live.

  The Groton creed rests like a burden in my arms; its legacy became the voyage I could not complete, so I turned and began to travel down the path Art had traveled, away from the corridors of power. I began to search for that place of inner peace in the wilderness—a peace that all the order of Groton could not bestow upon my father. For him, “perfect” freedom was gained by the cry of a gunshot, a numb, rapid sound that was the only expression his anguish about “whom to serve” ever made.

  My father had not been the first Grotonian to commit suicide, nor would he be the last. Another Grotonian, John Bigelow, who was destined to become my father-in-law, had escaped into the army during World War II, where he attempted to get himself killed in battle. He succeeded only in becoming a hero, in receiving a battlefield commission, and in being promoted to major. After the war, he tried to escape into the mountains of Wyoming, where he found a job as an elementary school teacher. He was immensely popular with his students and drank himself to death in the wee hours of the morning.

  When I was a sixth former at Groton, I fell in love. Groton was designed along monastic lines, but we were not monks, and occasionally a visiting parent would bring a daughter along to the school. Such an event occurred in the spring of my final year.

  Generally, boys in the sixth form did not associate with boys in the lower forms, but exceptions were made in athletics because good athletes from any form could be promoted from the clubs to the varsity teams. Such was the case with John Parkinson.

  In a football huddle, the quarterback issues instructions such as “two-three on four,” to which we would clap our hands in unison, line up, and crash into the opposing team on the count of four. “Two” in this case refers to the left halfback, “three” to the slot off-tackle on the left side of the line, and “four” to the count when the ball is snapped. Conversations in a football huddle tend to be brief, and in male circles, the melee that ensues passes for intimacy. I was the number “two” back and found myself one time under a pileup with a broken arm, another time with a dislocated knee, and, finally, in a familiar embrace with John Parkinson.

  In the spring of my final year at Groton, John’s mother and sister came to visit and were invited by the headmaster to join the school at lunch. They were patiently waiting outside the dining hall, surrounded by silently gawking male adolescents. The masters were all delayed in a faculty meeting so I, as a sixth former, and in the absence of any masters, felt it was my duty to make them feel welcome. I introduced myself and did my best to carry on a conversation.

  When the dining room doors opened and the boys flooded in to take up their positions and wait for grace, neither the headmaster nor any of the other masters appeared. I stayed politely with the Parkinsons until finally the faculty meeting was over and the headmaster arrived with apologies. He led the Parkinsons up to the head table, and I wandered off to find a seat lower down.

  After grace, everyone was allowed to speak. As usual, the dining hall was soon full of chatter and clanging dishes, but suddenly there was total silence. Zaidee Parkinson, John’s younger sister, had left the head table, in defiance of all protocol, and was crossing through the lower dining room toward me. Every eye was on her.

  Leaving the head table was considered a direct insult to the headmaster, and at Groton no one ever insulted the headmaster. Zaidee’s father and brother were both Grotonians; she knew the rules, but she was no more intimidated by the Reverend Jesus Christ Jr., who looked alternately bemused and perplexed, than by any other male. If the Reverend John Crocker was not going to be polite enough to invite me to the head table, when I had been kind enough to keep the visitors company while waiting for him to close the faculty meeting, she was not going to be so rude as to allow me to sit alone at a lower-form table. I stood up, pulled out a chair for her, and, by the end of lunch, was hopelessly in love.

  I did not get to see much of Zaidee for another year or so. By that time, I had graduated from Groton and had already managed to get myself thrown out of Harvard (which is not as easy as one may think). I had passed the courses of the U.S. Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps, despite my best efforts not to. The navy could not believe that anyone smart enough to get into Harvard could be stupid enough to flunk the navy, but my other professors had been more realistic.

  Having received some unflattering letters from the administration, I left Harvard and went home. My father had just committed suicide, so, out of compassion for me, the dean of students invited me back. My father had gone to Harvard, as had my mother’s father, who went on to become a professor of economics there. Like Groton, Harvard tries to be a family, even if it is a family of power-happy, rich snots. Although I loved my father, I did not want to follow in his footsteps. Instead, I took up painting.

  In the mornings, I painted a mural up the stairs from the third to the fourth floor of my family’s house in Manhattan, not far from the Metropolitan Museum. The mural was an allegorical representation of a pilgrimage from the Garden of Eden through the rise and fall of empires to a Buddhist Nirvana. (A psychiatrist who purchased the house shortly thereafter took a second, more professionally inquisitive look at me after viewing the mural.)

  In the afternoons, I visited Zaidee in her studio. She was studying at the Juilliard School to be a concert pianist. I loved her music, and I loved her. She loved Peter Matthiessen of the Paris Review, but he was too busy jet-setting over to Paris to spend much time with her, so she was glad for my company. When she was tired of practicing the piano, we would go for walks in Central Park and talk of Rilke and poems of sweet sadness while the cherry blossoms fell.

  George Plimpton, an editor of the Paris Review, liked to festoon his armchairs with Vogue models. Zaidee took me to one of his parties, and I approached an elegant girl without much meat on her bones while Zaidee was busy elsewhere with Peter Matthiessen. The conversation was brief; the model looked at me as if I were an interesting breed of cockroach. A few days later, Zaidee took me to a dance and bet me ten dollars that I could not bed the accessories editor of Vogue, whom she pointed out to me. It was a bet that neither I nor anyone else could possibly lose, which is undoubtedly why Zaidee made it, but it was poor consolation for my unrequited love.

  The affair with the Vogue editor was a brief one. I retired to the woods of New Hampshire and kept company with the porcupines and the woodchucks, who were kind enough to die that I might eat. After living off the land for six months, I volunteered for the army and then went to the Arctic.

  In the beginning of the trip, the women of my dreams resembled Zaidee and the Vogue models: there was not much meat on their bones. As the trip progressed, the women of my dreams filled out and began to provide me more food than sex. Then the women dropped out altogether, and I just dreamed of food.

  While we consumed forty-two caribou steaks that evening, there was a reverential hush. Maybe we were just too busy stuffing our mouths to talk, but the words still ring in my ears: “These are my body and blood, which are given for you: eat, drink in m
emory of me.” The miracle of transubstantiation was taking place inside my belly, and also inside my soul.

  Art had taken me to a place where I could love the god of the caribou more than I loved the wealth of the American empire—and even more than I loved Zaidee.

  CHAPTER 13

  Tundra Time

  Nobody sees a flower, really it is so small

  it takes time—we haven’t the time—and to see

  takes time, like to have a friend takes time.

  —GEORGIA O’KEEFFE

  Under clear blue skies and a warm sun, and with the feeling that there was no longer any urgency, our thoughts turned to the pleasures of lunch. We had stuffed ourselves the day before with caribou steaks and were still chewing bits of charred meat as we paddled toward that distant horizon, but hunger is a strange thing; no matter how full our bellies were stuffed, we still looked forward to our lunch ration of hardtack with cheese, peanut butter, and jam.

  My watch read 1:30, indicating that lunch was long overdue. Art’s watch read 11:43, indicating that it was still early, so in the absence of any more pressing issue, we began to squabble over the time of day.

  At the beginning of the trip we had all set our watches to “Moffatt time,” but, one by one, each watch had broken down except Art’s and mine. Earlier in the trip, I would have reset my watch to agree with his in deference to his position as our leader; but ever since the United Bowmen’s Association’s revolt, I had refused to reset my watch, and now the discrepancy between Grinnell time and Moffatt time had widened to nearly two hours. Thus the bows of the canoes found themselves in a different time zone than the sterns. According to the United Bowmen’s Association, it was time for lunch; according to Art, it was not. (“He who controls the food…”) Art still traveled with the lunch pack between his knees, so the discussion about the “correct” time for lunch was purely academic, but Moffatt’s time was running out. The majority of our tundra food would now be procured by us bowmen, who possessed the firearms.

  About a week after killing the first caribou, there was nothing left of it but bones, which Art boiled up into a delicious soup. Since coming into this new food source, the urgency to get to the Hudson’s Bay post at Baker Lake had diminished. We all—all but Peter Franck—voted to take a holiday. (Peter never voted for a holiday during the entire trip.)

  While Bruce went hunting, Skip, Joe, and Art picked blueberries, and that afternoon Art baked up a delicious blueberry johnnycake in his reflector oven. We feasted that night on caribou soup, johnnycake, some of the dehydrated mashed potatoes Art had brought along for celebrations just such as this, and freshly butchered caribou steaks from Bruce’s successful hunt. Every belly was full; everyone was happy. The feeling around the campfire was much as it had been early on in the trip.

  To celebrate the return of good times, I tried to remember some old army jokes of Korean War vintage. They fell flat, so Art trotted out his from previous wars:

  Two cavalry officers were overheard talking on a train. The first one said, “I hear old Cholmondeley was discharged.”

  “Oh, what for?”

  “Sexual intercourse with his horse.”

  “Was it a mare?”

  “Oh yes, nothing queer about old Cholmondeley.”

  We all laughed, but I think Art’s jokes were even staler than mine. They were recycled either from World War I or from the days when Art’s father tended horses for his gay patron. Nevertheless, we persuaded him to tell us another:

  A Native American chief goes to a white man’s doctor complaining about a pain in his stomach. The doctor prescribes a laxative and tells the chief to come back the next day.

  “Move?” the doctor asks, to which the chief shakes his head, and the doctor prescribes another laxative.

  The following day, the chief returns. “Move?” Again the chief shakes his head. More laxatives are prescribed.

  The next day: “Move?”

  “Had to. Tepee full of shit.”

  It was time for us, as for the Native American chief, to move on. In the spirit of reconciliation inspired by our full bellies, we decided to come to an agreement about the time. We sat around studying the sunset and joking about our past squabbles.

  The date was August 12, and the sun was setting much farther to the south than it had when we arrived at Stony Rapids near the summer solstice. Then, the sun had just dipped briefly below the northern horizon, where it cast a pink glow before rising again in the northeast. Now it had migrated to the south, like everything else, and the night sky was again black.

  The river seemed to be carrying us in the wrong direction. We watched songbirds gather in flocks, circle, and then fly south. The caribou were also migrating south, yet the river was carrying us north. We had already passed the main herd, and there were only stragglers left to hunt. The faster we paddled, the sooner we would be out of meat. It had seemed to make more sense that day to take a holiday and hunt caribou than to continue down the river in the wrong direction. As the sun sank beneath the horizon, we tried to joke, in a good-natured fashion, about our circumstances, but our laughter rang hollow. We wanted to be happy and to feel secure, but beneath the surface we knew we had miles to go before reaching civilization again—maybe too many miles.

  Staring at the setting sun, we tried, with the best of intentions, to decide whose watch was correct, Art’s or mine. His was the same cheap “dollar” watch that he had carried in his pocket on all his trips. Skip and Pete remembered it from previous trips, affectionately, as they remembered Art. Now that the food situation was no longer critical, it was time for reconciliation.

  Still, my watch was a fine Swiss timepiece bought at the Army Post Exchange shortly before coming on the trip. Logic and bowman loyalty favored my watch, but sentiment, a desire to return to the good old days, and Art’s blueberry johnnycake swayed some opinion.

  One by one, we left the campfire for our tents. Art lingered by the fire, the issue unresolved.

  August 12: Cold now, but I love these evenings alone by the fire, late at night and early in the morning. I smoke, drink tea, think of home, Carol, Creigh and Debbo, of my study, and the children there with me when I get back, and the stories I’ll tell about my adventures in the north—shooting rapids, and the time I saw the wolves, white ones, and the caribou and moose and fish and birds.

  Already, as 2 AM approaches, the fog grows lighter, and dawn approaches. We may move tomorrow when the fog lifts. It might be wise to get some sleep.

  When I awoke the next morning, the hands of my watch indicated five minutes to twelve. I held it to my ear and heard nothing. I shook it; the hands moved a bit, then stopped.

  At breakfast I was silent.

  Art was silent also.

  Finally Joe asked the time. Art and I each continued to eat our oatmeal in silence, prompting everyone to look back and forth at us quizzically. At last, Art mumbled that his watch had stopped in the night. I admitted the same.

  Suddenly it occurred to me that I had forgotten to wind mine. I wound it, and it began to tick. We looked at the dawning sun and tried to guess the time. I set my watch again, but from that day forward we no longer ran on Moffatt time, or on Grinnell time, but on “Tundra time.”

  CHAPTER 14

  The Widening Gyre

  Prophets do not come from cities, promising riches and store clothes. They have always come from the wilderness, stinking of goats and running with lice and telling of a different sort of treasure.

  —ANDREW LYTLE

  A few days after we had killed our first caribou, our bellies full, sitting under skies of purest blue, overlooking a flat calm lake, Joe informed us all that he was bored. He had come on the trip to do some writing, he said, but there was nothing to write about; all we ever did was eat, portage, paddle, and squabble, and now that food was plentiful again, we were not even squabbling much.

  Art suggested to Joe that if Hemingway could create a major literary masterpiece about a weekend fishing trip i
n Spain, Joe also must be able to find something interesting to write about.

  Joe just grunted. He was not the only one who felt bored. The excitement, danger, and heroic acts of courage we had imagined were not proving to be the reality. Instead, we discovered clouds of black flies on the portages, irritation with one another, and pettiness in ourselves. This was not the stuff of epic poems to be sung through the ages, celebrating our everlasting glory. Better to write nothing at all than to tell the truth about this expedition.

  After a long, boring paddle down another lake, we finally felt the pull of current on our canoes and began the descent toward yet another rapids. Art pulled to shore so that he and the other sternmen could scout ahead. While they were gone, we bowmen climbed the steep bank and made ourselves comfortable on the caribou moss and leaned against a ledge to be out of the wind. We were supposed to be watching the canoes, which had been pulled up on the rocks. The gray canoe, Art and Joe’s, had been pulled up away from the wash of the rapids. Pete and I had followed Art’s example, but Skip and Bruce had pulled their green canoe only partway out of the river; the stern was still afloat in the wash of the rapids, causing the canvas bottom at the bow to abrade against the rocky ledge. We bowmen could see the canoes below but were paying little attention to them, least of all Bruce.

  “Say, Joe, how many spoonfuls of oatmeal did you get this morning?” Bruce asked.

  “Three and a half,” Joe replied, “not counting seconds.” Joe’s appetite for oatmeal had been acquired on the trip, but Bruce’s was of longer duration.

  “How many did you get, George?”

  “About the same.” We doled our own oatmeal with a large serving spoon into standard size bowls. The unwritten rule was that we could pile as much oatmeal into our bowls as they would hold, but God help anyone who let the milk run over the edge. After we had filled our bowls, Skip would glance at the pot and announce how many spoonfuls we would be allowed to take for seconds. The dishwasher was awarded the privilege of licking the pot, but there usually was not much left to lick.