From the decks of the Peace I look down on kelp beds but see only the top of a great watery forest home. Under the golden canopy, opal-eyes, Norris’s top snails, and red abalone dine on drift kelp—fronds that have broken off and are making their way to shore. Kelpfish, camouflaged to resemble kelp blades, advance on their prey in wavelike movements, and blood sea stars tiptoe across the sea floor, shedding sperm and eggs from holes between their many arms. On summer evenings like this one, schools of bat rays mate: the male swims under the female, rubbing against her stomach until she accepts him, then they mate in an all-night physical feast, resting during the day. Harbor seals, sea lions, mako, and sand sharks all find refuge in these hundred-and-fifty-foot underwater trees, and the rarely seen giant pelagic jellyfish, with its fifteen-foot-long tentacles, bobs up like the sea’s penis, exposing its head to the female envelope of air.
Three hundred thousand million years ago, bits of microcosmic plant life—single cells—began clinging together, then took purchase on rock. Single-celled plants evolved into multicelled plants, developing holdfasts, leaves, and bobbing gas-filled floats. Finally, the migration from hydrosphere to lithosphere began, and horsetails, fungus, and ferns gave way to orchids, grasses, flowering shrubs, and majestic stands of trees that produced fruit, nuts, needles, syrup, and leaves.
Midnight. I lay out my bedroll on the wheelhouse deck. Behind red curtains, James, Brendan, Ivan, and Scott play cards. While we traipsed across the island all day, they went diving. Their wet suits and spears hang from hooks at my feet. When the moon rises, James emerges and walks around to the bow of the boat. He doesn’t have to ask if I’m all right—he can see me smiling. I watch the moon throw his shadow up; he stands with arms akimbo and one leg bent back as the Peace swings on her anchor.
The Chumash say the moon is a single woman with a house near the sun. She is called alahtin, and Fernando says she has cleansing powers, that her “forces move the sea, extend all the way to the stars and control the menses of women and all creatures, even the oak tree.”
Lying on my back, I feel the tide change. Waves travel as swells, giant ripples that glide toward shore, where they demolish themselves. If islands have to do with boundaries—or the loss of them—here, the rind of earth rubs itself down into water, and water and air become the same thing, always exchanging chemical and physical balances, like trading clothes, so that sea and atmosphere are one caldron from which weather is brewed.
Geophysicists tell me Earth is an island which has two oceans: the one we are floating on, that thin film clinging to the rocky surface of the planet; the other interior, a molten ball of iron the size of Mars, which forms the earth’s core. It is in this hot ocean that inverted mountains of mantle material intrude like upside-down cones.
Now waves roll under the Peace, pulled by a Chumash moon. The lights in the wheelhouse have gone out, and the boat rocks from side to side. I can’t sleep. The channel’s cyclonic eddies spin me, half awake, my feet turning like a clock’s second hand. A seal barks. In Wyoming, when a single coyote yips, he is trying to locate himself, to find home. On the water, floating continents of vegetation undulate, and red threads hang down: kelp bed, water home, holdfast deeper than I can see.… Will I be cut loose during the night? Will I drift free?
Morning. The engines rev, and we pull out of the harbor. Glancing homeward across the channel, I look for signs of the drought that has embraced California for five years. The Chumash knew periods of drought too. During one, all the streams dried up, the grasses died, and the animals. Even in this abundant paradise, malnutrition appeared. One day a whale beached and died on shore. Runners were sent all over the Chumash nation to tell people that there was food, carrying the sick and elderly on their backs.
The great whale was carved up, meat was distributed, and everyone was fed. During the ceremony held immediately after to thank the gods, it started to rain. Rain continued for weeks and the drought was over. No whale has beached on California shores, and hot winds from the desert blow yellow strings of smog out into the ocean.
In unusually calm waters, the Peace glides around the western end of San Miguel. We pass Harris Point, where the Lesters are buried, Wilson’s Rock, Richardson’s Rock, Castle Rock, and we come to Point Bennet, where three major shipwrecks have occurred. Moving slowly, James eases the Peace shoreward. A wonderfully pungent guano smell fills the air, and the beach is covered with sea lions, harbor seals, fur seals, elephant seals—perhaps ten thousand of them—back to back, nose to nose, flipper to flipper, packed together Coney Island style.
During the 1976 Bicentennial, a group of mixed-blood Chumash descendants who called themselves the Brotherhood of the Tomol made a canoe trip to the islands. A waterman and a friend of the tribe, Pete Howorth, helped them build a tomol called the Helek. “We’re urban Indians. We don’t know how to do these things,” Frank Gutierrez told me. Pete taught them to paddle, then hauled their tomol to San Miguel, where the trip would begin. They offered up traditional songs: “Give room. Do not get discouraged. Help me reach the place. Hurrah.”
Paddling was difficult. In the choppy passage between San Miguel and Santa Rosa, they almost gave up, then found a way to paddle that worked. “A spirit lifted us up, and we flew across the top of the water,” Sespe said. “Five miles went by before we knew it, then the cliffs of the island were above us. When we passed an old Chumash village site, we felt the People watching us.”
They suffered sunburn and blisters, ran out of cigarettes, and had a shark scare. “But all the time we were out there, the women at home, our wives, told us they could hear us singing. At night they heard our voices. We may not have looked like traditional Chumash, but something was happening, something we can still feel.”
Calm seas, clear skies, hot sun. We back out between rocks and shoals and begin our trip homeward. With wind and current behind us, the Peace surfs forward, almost planing from the top of one wave to the next. We slide by San Miguel and Santa Rosa. A Navy “listening station” erected after World War II to protect the coast from enemy submarines is a white ear on top of Santa Cruz. I stand in front of the wheelhouse and cup my ears. Diesel engines roar; I listen for singing.
ARCHITECTURE
Late fall in Wyoming is the end of barefoot days, of nights under single cotton blankets, looking at stars; it is the end of carelessness. “Survive,” my body calls out as the first blizzard whips by. No human shelter seems sturdy enough. Why didn’t I fly south with my bachelor duck or dig into a steep mountain slope and sleep with the bears? The horses turn tail to oncoming storms and huddle in a clump of cotton woods. The cattle go down-country, finding shelter in low-spreading junipers.
Walking home from hunting camp last week, my foot fell into a bear track. Not a perfect fit, but my heel pressed into the sow’s heelprint as if I were her twin. Her tracks led up a hill into pine trees where I knew from other years, she’d had a den. Bears are particular about their winter quarters. They like a steep slope facing away from prevailing winds, and deep snow, and sometimes an overhanging boulder or log under which to dig. When denning time comes, a bear may travel hundreds of miles to return to a site that stuck in her mind months before as suitable winter quarters. My question is, what is it that brings a bear back? The sound of a waterfall, the scent of whortleberries, the way the breeze brushes her fur coat smooth?
Dens vary, as human houses do. There’s an entryway, a long tunnel, sometimes straight, sometimes angled, then one or two sleeping rooms, small enough to trap the bear’s body heat, and a sleeping platform laid with the soft tips of pine boughs. The bear smooths the walls with her paws, as if smoothing mortar. Because she bears her young inside the den, she’s careful about disclosing her whereabouts. She’ll wait to start digging until a good snow begins to fall, filling in her tracks. One biologist saw a bear actually back away from the den using her own tracks so whoever came along would think she was still there. Some sites are hidden, some so spectacularly precarious as to pique o
ur imaginations, such as the den three quarters of the way up an almost vertical wall next to a three-hundred-fifty-foot waterfall.
Orientation, room shape, slope, wind direction, weather: what moves a bear to select a site? Does the idea stay firm in her mind all summer, or year after year? What does the idea look like? Is it a blueprint, a landscape description, a scent? Where in her mind do room designs evolve?
Wyoming has no indigenous architecture, unless it’s the outlaw cave. The log cabin was an idea imported in the 1600s by Swedish immigrants in what is now Delaware, and it moved west along with the settlers. In the mountains I often come on trappers’ cabins—tiny structures built close to the ground, with one window and a small door so low even I have to bend over to enter. Homesteaders who arrived just as winter was setting in made do with what they could find: some lived in wall tents or tipis, others in tiny one-room cabins made of logs or adobe, where husband, wife, children, and relatives could only have huddled.
No architectural legacy has taken hold. Housing has a temporary look: sheep wagons, section cars, trailer houses. As one old-timer said, “Everything from the old days has burned down at least once.” Here and there are hermits’ huts or a basement house whose presence is revealed only by the pickup trucks parked around the roof. New houses built from Boise Cascade kits are perched aboveground and face the highway with an unopenable picture window, so that a passerby can see the cool glow of the television screen at night, but the hermetically sealed residents can’t reach out to the world. And throughout the state, there are hundreds of miles where there has never been any human habitation at all.
Warm days return. On the lake at the ranch, ice cracks and thaws in a wavy line across the middle, then a long chunk breaks out like a leg and floats alone in the water as if trying to stand, to make its escape before the arrival of winter. Elsewhere, imbricated plates of ice have thawed and re-frozen and are layered like fish scales, while beneath in the mud, fish and frogs sleep.
Nearby I come on a grackle’s nest suspended in the forked branch of a currant bush. Ingeniously placed, it uses the running water from a ditch as a moat to protect the eggs from ground predators. A nest is a cup of space and represents the transformation of the stochastic natural order to the social one. The sins of human architecture—the ways our houses barricade us from natural forces and all human feeling—send me to the dictionary to look for answers, and I find this: the German word for “building” is derived from a word, bin, that also means “to be,” and the Japanese for “nest” can be read doubly as “to live.”
The house should not be separate, a hollow sculpture conforming to an architect’s ego. Rather, it should invoke something of how a human moves and breathes; it should be the flexible casing for metabolism. The first house is the uterus—or else, the neck: in one species of frog, tadpoles incubate in the throat of the father, and when they are big enough, they swim out of his mouth to freedom. All animals are natural builders. Ants of one genus use their bodies architectonically, functioning as both doors and doorkeepers. Flattened in front, with enlarged heads, they fit into the entrance of the anthill with a carpenter’s precision. They’re color coded to match the soil and savvy enough to allow entrance when secret knocks and smells are emitted.
How desultory most human shelters must seem: all padding and armor, with wall-to-wall carpets, curtains, extraneous decor. I see houses, schools, hospitals built with windows that can’t be opened. How can a child understand the rhythms of life if he or she is sealed away from seasons and weather? The new parts of our cities are mirrored and self-referential facades. How can I see into the soul of a building when it has no eyes? Everywhere, unforgiving materials are used, which can’t absorb human sweat or hold, warmth, or the drumlike beat of sobbing, singing, or laughter. Who wants to make love on the wrong side of mirrored glass?
After breakfast I ride my colt. He is tall and good-looking and likes to put his head down low and set out at a fast walk. Down in the valley, I ride by a field where the shadows of trees have turned white. The rising sun has burned away all the frost on the field except where tree trunks blocked the rays. All that is left are white images of trees lying flat on mown grass—ghostly apparitions—as if matter had borrowed from spirit, and spirit from matter. Later, when I ride home, the frost has melted and the shadows the trees made are black again.
I put my horse away and climb a low knob where I’ve often thought of building a house. Facing east, I can see up and down this long valley: eleven-thousand-foot peaks to the north, red mesas and another distant mountain range to the south. Directly below my feet, an irrigation ditch curves around the hill like a moat, and beyond are the island and the lake. I sit on a granite boulder sloughed off the face of the mountain who knows how many thousands of years ago. The lichen on its surface is green and black, and the ground is gruss—rotted granite—scoured down into pale red soil.
To start, but how? I think of the Lost Woman of San Nicolas Island, off my hometown in California, who wore cormorant-skin dresses and built a house of whale ribs. The ribs of a horse, cow, or buffalo would make a much smaller house, too small, in fact, but what a wonderful thought: to live in a shelter made from skeletal remains, a body inside a body—but then again, logs and rocks are another kind of bone. Frank Lloyd Wright says: “From nature inward; from within outward.” I want to break down the dichotomy between inside and outside, interior and exterior, beauty and ugliness, form and function, because they are all the same.
In a deep bathtub I read about cosmic strings. Dense, invisible, high-energy threads, they unwound from the nuclear explosion at the moment of the Big Bang and function as cosmic two-by-fours, building matter into galactic neighborhoods. But unlike studs, cosmic strings, besides being invisible, are in constant, flexing motion. The physicist Alexander Vilenkin describes them: “Wiggling violently from tension, curved strings often cross themselves and one another. They break at the point of intersection and join again in different configurations. A closed loop splits when it twists on itself. Long coiled strings cross themselves many times over and closed loops get lopped off at intersections.” A house is not an empty shell but a path that crosses itself.
It begins to snow. I’m in my own eighty-year-old house, which is uninsulated and made of a poured gypsum block that is crumbling like aspirin. Cold rises through a thin pine floor and pours through the walls. Soon fat flakes will line the arms of trees. All is white except for the thawed circle at the center of the lake, a blowhole through which the planet breathes.
Cosmic Strings are flaws that occurred in the featureless vacuum of space; they look like the cracks in lake ice as water freezes, or like fault lines in the earth. From the beginning, the universe was built on symmetries undoing themselves into asymmetries: from the symmetry of featurelessness to the asymmetry of texture and topography. Design is a form of imperfection. It comes from within, it is dictated by the unruliness of nature. A house is bent into shape by space, topography, and prevailing winds; in turn, its captured space reshapes what is beyond its walls.
Another blizzard comes. As I walk, I try to make out which is the lake and which is dry land. Blowing snow “vanishes” me. What I can see is only snow pouring through bronze reeds onto ice like snakes, and as I try to find my way, I think how much a house is like a body, trying to point its feet the right way, trying to see, trying to let in light. House building is a process of locating oneself on the planet, about reading landscape, bending branches down and lifting a structure back up.
When I finally reach the house, I sit on the veranda. Snow stings my face. The walls of traditional Japanese houses open onto verandas that face on gardens, streams, bamboo forests, mountains, or ocean. A house is a platform on which the transaction between nature and culture, internal and external, form and formlessness occurs. Too often “inside” is equated with a static sort of security, a blockade against the commotions of nature, against the plurality of ourselves, while “outside” has come to signify
everything that is not human, everything inimical.
A blueprint should be a spiritual proposition: walls and windows become a form of discipline, an obstruction that liberates space and spirit by giving it form. Space is viscous and visceral. It can be held in the hand or in the mind; a body can curve around it, or a room. It starts right here at my lips. I gulp it in, and it oxygenates my blood. I swallow space; I wedge it into my psyche as a way of lifting the roof of the mind off the noise of thoughts, so that in the intervening silence, any kind of willful spirit can express itself.
I come up with this: If I built a house, a stream would trickle through the main room, then continue on, threading together gardens, studies, bathrooms. A rock wall made from the granite strewn across the house site would bolster the house against prevailing northwesterly winds. A dense forest of bamboo or aspen would frame the twisted entrance, thinning out until it opened into a room. Walls, ceilings, floors jutting out beyond sliding doors, would be made of local materials: cottonwood, pine, fir, granite, willow branches braided with sage. Floor levels would change with topography, function, view, the way the basins of waterfalls do, catching pools of activity, then spilling them again. Rooms would not have common walls. Covered verandas or corridors would link bedrooms, bathrooms, studies, and on the way, an alcove might invite the passerby in to sit and look at a hill where swifts and swallows nest, or open onto a tiny garden. Passageways would lift me up or down, alter my pace, my sense of self. A granite boulder would burst through the wall of the main room to remind me that a wall, like a thought, is a flexible thing, that a house is not a defense against nature but a way of letting it in. In the kitchen, polished granite slabs would serve as counters. I might spread gruss under my feet near south-facing windows to absorb heat; I might have trees growing next to books. I’d let fault lines tell me where to elevate or drop a floor; clouds might shape the ceiling. The way the house moved over the contour of the land would be the way it speaks.
Islands, the Universe, Home Page 11
