The Word for Woman is Wilderness

by Abi Andrews

  ‘Don’t take this the wrong way but I usually only pick up girls. You can’t always trust the guys. Especially if they look like bums.’

  I tried to compute the ethics quickly as I collected my things from the ground as slowly as I could.

  It would be completely hypocritical to take advantage.

  Well, if I didn’t take the lift he certainly was not going to pick up the guy. I raised my hand to the guy in what I hoped was an apologetic salute, but I do not think he took it that way because he threw his rucksack to the floor and started kicking it.

  ‘Don’t worry too much about him, he’s just another bum trying to get to Alaska. They’re usually younger and sometimes they look sweet so someone picks them up. I reckon he’ll wait maybe a week. Maybe his luck will come in and it will rain, then some old dude might take pity on him.’

  The driver’s name was Ron. Ron said sometimes there are ten hitchhikers at any one time trying to get to Fairbanks. He asked me where I was heading and I told him, Fairbanks. This made him laugh. I told him about the documentary.

  He said, ‘I like that. And why not ladies, hey? I got a little clue for you, though. You might not get a great reception when you tell the folk you meet in Alaska what you’re doing. Alaskans hate these guys.’

  ‘Why do they hate them?’

  He said they are hated because they flock from all over North America and some from Europe too. He said they hear the call of the wild and they come running like apostles to it. Usually they get themselves in trouble somewhere and some rescue team has to bail them out.

  Is that not everyone’s problem the whole world over? Shall I call it saturation? Like Larus’s yoga-mat tourists. We live in an overpopulated world now, much to the annoyance of Ted Kaczynski. There is almost not enough space left for the Mountain Men. Back when there were just a couple of hapless truth seekers then maybe they were viewed with a kind of affection. Maybe McCandless of hapless potato fame was viewed with a kind of affection, before his followers followed him.

  When we crossed into the Yukon after Fort Nelson Ron pointed out the little white sign and said ‘Welcome to Yukon!’ just as I read it. I pointed the camera at everything I was seeing, not much, just a long, long road lined with tall thin trees. I think he found it endearing or something. He started to talk pointedly, like he was giving me something useful for the camera, so I directed it at him. He spoke like an overly trained actor.

  ‘You know the real pull of the north has always been minerals. You know the Klondike Stampede, right? In the 1800s? Well, there’s a brand-new one going on right now.’

  He nodded confidingly.

  ‘Not just gold, mind. Zinc and copper and uranium. It’s all different now, of course. Mostly the work’s done by big Chinese companies, with GPS and bulldozers. Ain’t as many beardy guys with pans. That’s what the north was built on. Guys came seeking their fortune and the hardy ones stuck around. But a bunch came and couldn’t hack it. Like these young guys now, they had this romantic idea of what it’ll be like. But it’ll kill ya. They went running home to the sunny south with scurvy and their toes missing.’

  He paused for a bit to whistle and look out of the window. The trees to our left began to slope down and behind them a whole other sea of them rose up. Then we had a view of the mountains in the distance, the green trees blanketing right the way over them.

  The first Klondike gold rush was in 1896. Adam Smith, the amoral moral philosopher, wrote The Wealth of Nations a century before that. Adam Smith saw the wilderness as if it were made of bricks of gold and timber, to be utilised to create wealth, and he saw the creation of wealth as a moral agenda and he reduced complexity to simple constituents as though the illusion of things could be stripped away to reveal their basic and authentic and truthful essences. But what he was doing was taking paper and cutting it to shape, saying ‘Look what shape I found when I trimmed away the excess, a chair!’, when what he really did was to cut the paper to the shape of a chair.

  He broke the world into mechanical pieces and put the natural world outside the world of man so as to justify a particular form of economic and political organisation (capitalism) and philosophical position (individualism) as natural. He was trying to morally justify selfishness. A sperm whale is so called because stabbing one in the head with a harpoon makes it spurt forth oil in a way that reminded whale hunters of ejaculation. And if a sperm whale is just an oil ejaculator and not an emotionally complex being then it is okay to go about slaughtering them.

  ‘It’s beautiful, ain’t it? Don’t it look quiet? The last great wilderness.’

  He took it all in, sucked it all in through his nostrils. I am so close now and I can feel it. It feels like humming in your mouth, but masked by something loud like engine noise so no one else can really hear it but the vibrations take over your whole face and throat.

  ‘But we got things like the Peel Watershed. Places like pristine wilderness. Mines’re leaking arsenic and crap into the water. Some folk think it’ll be a shame if the Peel gets contaminated. But Yukon is mining. It’s kind of its soul. It’s a place the little guy can make something of his lot. Cut down some trees, build himself a cabin, live a simple life. You know, still now in theory anyone can stake a claim to mine someplace out here. It’s a free country. Libertarian. And it won’t stop. Them people are crazed. They’re thinking, “I gotta go get it cus if I don’t then some other asshole will”.’

  He chuckled to himself. Then a song came on the radio and he stopped talking to half-sing to it. He sang it quietly, and only the words he knew, which were not many, and the rest he kind of mumbled. He whistled the bridge to the chorus.

  While he whistled I looked out of the window. Beautiful, yes, but in a different kind of way, with a creeping melancholy to it. My first felt elation had sapped away and left something hollowed out. I thought about the ghosts of miners that Jack Kerouac wondered about. What would they have said to Kerouac if they could have talked? Would they have told him that the emissions his exhaust was pumping, driving all over America and not giving much of a damn about anything but himself, were poisoning the air like the coal did their black lungs? That their mines had dug up uranium and mercury and cadmium, making bonds in his nostrils each breath he took? If we’d have known then what we know now, maybe they would have said.

  And what would I have to say to the ghost of Jack Kerouac? It was all very well and good for you, Jack Kerouac, but things were different then. The not giving a damn thing is harder to get behind now. Not just because I am a woman, but because the yoke is not so easy to throw down when you know the weight just gets transferred to the many other beasts of burden.

  ARE MUTUALISMS A FORM OF LOVE?

  My first lift took me as far as Haines Junction, where I had to wait only another couple of hours for a lift all the way to Beaver Creek. The roadside trees cloaked pools of water that held their own strange colours. Behind them the mountains grew again, some in the far parts ephemeral and almost-there, the snow on top like cut ice against the sharp sky today but probably gone tomorrow.

  Then the road ran straight towards a big mountain, washed out by the sun, the huge long lake at its base luminously blue, bluer than the sky blue. Kluane Lake grew wider and wider as we got closer until it was as wide as an ocean and we were right on top of it. The water almost touched the road but just kept away, lapping against the gold sand for miles and miles. The road then curved over the sand towards the mountain, and for a moment there was so much of the sand that you could squint so as not to see the vague plant-life in it and pretend it was a desert and the rest was mirage.

  Then the road ran brassy under the foot of the mountain and around the lake edge as if to brag about what it had tamed, as though this great feat of engineering should be lauded for its arrogance. But the mountains and the lakes do not care because they can’t. And under the road the rivers flow on and on back to the sky.

  Online, a little yellow envelope flashed itself at me, from Sam. I did n
ot open it. It is best to leave it for now. Soon I cross into Alaska. There is nothing to do but feel glad that things are back the way they were always supposed to be. And this evening the mountains look rich and blue and fully dimensional.

  ENGLAND, JUST LIKE AMERICA, BUT DIFFERENT

  TO REMEMBER: A deer on the road running from our vehicle, confused and running with the road, not from it. We slow the vehicle to a crawl, honking, trying to throw it off. It half turns, its eyes bulging in fear and confusion at its entrapment. And then its epiphany; it breaks away to the forest.

  From Beaver Creek the highway crosses the border and goes on a long way before it splits to Fairbanks or Anchorage. I took a lift across the border to get out where the road forks so that I could hitch with the traffic that was solely headed for Fairbanks. The geographical border had a ‘Welcome to Alaska’ sign and four flags erected. They were Canada, America, Alaska and I suppose the other must have been the Yukon’s flag. I almost forget that Alaska is a part of America; it seems to me a far nobler place.

  I caught a ride with a young couple who seemed to have had an argument about picking me up. The man at the border inspection station was wearing a blue uniform instead of the nostalgic red one. He said, ‘Welcome to the United States of America,’ just to be pedantic. Ahead the sign read Fairbanks 298.

  After a couple of hours the road splits at Tok. I walked a little way out of Tok, where the couple dropped me, up the highway until I got to a layby and set down my bag. Right down the road, where it shrunk to a dot at the centre of perspective, with the line of trees dragged into it on either side, real Alaskan snowcapped mountains stood still behind and waited blue and moody. The sky had dimmed grey and heavy with rain and suspense and I hoped out loud that it wouldn’t fall.

  It felt colder already and different, as if every place becomes itself by virtue of how it is collectively imagined. It felt like Alaska. I tried to explain this with the camera but could not figure how. There is so much important feeling to it that is frustratingly unquantifiable. Words come closer to it because they can dance around it, etch it, bring it out in relief like a lithograph. Vast, empty but full, potent and good, full of understanding and unfathomable fathoms, deep, enigmatic, but everything you want of it absolutely. It is harder with images.

  The very next car gave me a lift. I swung my bag into the open back of the truck, next to some animal skins, and covered it with the tarp. We arrived in Fairbanks at around three. I rang my next host, Stan, to let him know I had arrived and went to grab a sandwich.

  Stan is a guy I have been in touch with on the couch-surfing website. He had offered me a place to stay for a week while I figure out my little adventure. I am consistently surprised at the ease of finding a free place to sleep when I approach young men online. I just had to wait until the French girl he was hosting had moved on. Stan said he would come to pick me up from my spot just south of Fairbanks.

  CHIVALRY ISN’T DEAD, GUYS JUST GET SICK OF UNGRATEFUL BITCHES

  Stan works in the Denali Park Centre. Got the job through his uncle, who is a park warden. Told me how he would come to Alaska as a child to live with his uncle in school holidays (he’s originally from Florida). He said even as a child he could not deal with the way of life down there. Said his father and he were nothing alike. He said his father has a Chevy and two jet skis and a speedboat on the lake they live on and that he wished his uncle was his father.

  In the house there are trophy pictures of Stan or his uncle with big fish and stags. There is one of his uncle with his foot on a dead grizzlie’s head. His uncle the stereotypical Mountain Man, wearing buckskin and a coonskin cap, carrying a rifle and a scalping knife and with a big old bushy beard. Not forgetting the pipe.

  It turns out that Stan is the douchey kind of Mountain Man, the exclusionary, self-righteous kind. It started when I saw Stan had Jack London on the shelf and I thought I would try to make friends by letting him know I really like London. He had a pretty reductive interpretation of him, so I bated him a little.

  ‘Don’t get offended, but Call of the Wild is not really a girl’s book.’

  ‘Well, whose book is it? Is it a dog’s book? It’s a really good imagining of what’s going on in a dog’s head and it works because it is eerie when dogs howl at wolves on TV. And because they do look like they are dreaming about primitive things when they snarl in their sleep.’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s not just a story about a dog, is it?’

  ‘Well, it’s about a dog that wants to be a wolf.’

  ‘You really think a book would be timeless and never out of print because it just makes people think about what their dog is thinking? This is what I mean, you just don’t get it because you’re a girl.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Girls are just naturally social. You could never know what it means to be called on by nature. Society is unnatural for men, it’s damaging for the spirit. The call of the wild is the call of the ancestors.’

  ‘There is nothing more primordial than childbirth.’

  He thinks I can’t understand what a dog feels because I am a girl! He thinks dogs and human men have analogous feelings! Stan is talking Darwin like Ted Kaczynski talks Darwin to shut up women, but Darwin was writing to justify capitalism! He wrote Origin of the Species eighty-three years after Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations. They are all cutting paper into chair shapes. They are talking large organisations, interpreted in terms of self-interest and the maximisation of personal well-being, like in the free market, where firms or individuals succeed or fail based on ‘survival of the fittest’. They think personal maximisation side-handedly benefits the rest of the society or ecosystem. Adam Smith called this the Invisible Hand. Darwin was channelling Smith like a medium; he was a product of his time and primed to think in terms of competitive individuals.

  Russia called their automatically launched assured nuclear destruction machine the Dead Hand. The nuclear Dead Hand will automatically and amorally dish out justice to Russia’s enemy. It now behaves without them. Perhaps they were saying, well, if that is how you want to play it, this is where your Adam Smith’s logic takes you. Could be they were trolling when they called it the Dead Hand. (Dead hand also means an undesirable and persisting influence, which it is also.)

  But there were other theories of the origin of the human species and it took thinkers who were outside the shadow of Adam Smith like women and communists to come up with them. Russian botanist Konstantin Mereschkowski came up with symbiogenesis, the evolutionary theory that complex life came about because of a symbiosis of separate single-celled organisms. It takes symbiosis like the symbiosis of ectoparasites and sweetlips one step further and says that a whole new species can come out of the evolutionary dependence of two or more species. Darwin could not think like this because he was thinking too much Adam Smith.

  In the 1960s Lynn Margulis, the microbiolo-gist, expanded on Mere-schkowski and revitalised his and the ideas of her predecessors like they were all the collective author (in this way she not only lectured symbiosis but also lived it). She argued with all the neo-Darwinists like omniscient god-denier Richard Dawkins, who gave her the condescending, goddess-invoking nickname science’s unruly earth mother.

  Eukaryotic life is organisms with larger cells that have a bounded nucleus and organelles. Prokaryotic life is organisms without a bounded nucleus and these are the most abundant life forms on Earth. All eukaryotic life has a symbiotic relationship with prokaryotic life – think bacteria in your stomach.

  What Lynn Margulis said was that the emergence of eukaryotic cells billions of years ago happened because of symbiogenesis. That a prokaryote + a prokaryote in symbiosis = a eukaryote. That a prokaryote + a eukaryote = a more successful eukaryote. That a more successful eukaryote x 2 = multicellular life (us). That the image of the tree of life should be reimagined to include the inosculation of its branches.

  Lynn Margulis was Carl Sagan’s first wife and they had two sons together. After her second div
orce Lynn Margulis said ‘it is not humanly possible to be a good wife, a good mother and a first-class scientist, something has to go’, so it is not hard to imagine the kind of husband that Carl Sagan was. I think I have a girl-crush on Lynn Margulis.

  On the Golden Records there is a sound piece that is like a load of firecrackers going off. It is a famous love story; Ann Druyan was thinking about how in love she was with Carl Sagan and now a token of their love floats for ever into the void with the Voyagers and will outlive us all. Carl Sagan volunteered her when it was suggested they put an electric reading of human brainwaves on the record. Then he called her up the night before the EEG to tell her he wanted to be with her, which was very coordinated of him. What is often missed out from this love story is that Ann Druyan had a boyfriend and Carl Sagan had a second wife, Linda Salzman; a forgotten and left-behind wife of history.

  To rub it in a little bit further the couple were very public about their love token. Ann Druyan said, ‘For me Voyager is a kind of joy so powerful, it robs you of your fear of death.’

  Note: fear of death; immortalisation; conceptual colonising of Carl Sagan to usurp any future wife he may decide to have (our love will live for ever). They sent their love seed to pioneer into the absolute wilderness of deep, deep outer space, and it unravels this wilderness as it touches it. If Ted Kaczynski was thinking tactically he might have sent a letter bomb to Carl Sagan, who has maybe of all men ejaculated the very furthest.