Hold the Enlightenment

by Tim Cahill

  So the platypus hunt was a personal exploration into what I’d been and what I’d become. To that end, I had scouted the Yea River during the day, looking for likely platypus habitat. The river flowed through a forest of mountain ash eucalyptus, the tallest hardwood trees in the world. Some were well over three hundred feet high, and the leaves were concentrated at the tops of the trees, so that a good deal of light fell on the forest floor, which was consequently covered with chest-high grasses and prehistoric-looking tree ferns.

  The Yea was only five feet across and four feet deep where it burbled through its narrows. As it wound through the forest, it created cut banks five and six feet high, and these were places where a platypus might dig a burrow, which can be one hundred feet long.

  Fallen trees, in various stages of mossy disintegration, spanned the Yea, and the river was a muddy golden color, its waters essentially a strong tea made of eucalyptus leaves. Shafts of sunlight fell on the water, and in those places the Yea looked like a golden mirror. Caddis flies were hatching out of the sun-dappled river.

  These were the places I marked in my mind’s map, the places I’d spotlight well after full dark.

  And so, in the Hour of the Platypus, and for reasons that seemed obscure even at the time, I chose to drop to my belly and crawl through the night toward the river. No lights. At one of my intended observation sites, just off the trail that paralleled the river, a newly fallen tree formed a bridge across the Yea. I knew I was in the right spot when I found myself entangled in the exposed root system. Crawling through a big muddy root ball in the dark is an annoying and time-consuming task. It took fifteen minutes to find a position on the trunk, over the river. I took a deep breath, held it, and hit the trigger on my spot.

  And, by God, there he was. The very first time I spotted the river: a platypus! Or at least something furry, swimming. A dark swirl and it was gone. The creature might have been a water rat, I suppose, but water rats don’t sport beaverlike tails. At another site only two hours later, I saw another platypus.

  The great dark wing has flapped once again, and here’s the wily Platypus Hunter returning from the river, yet another year older and perhaps one quest wiser. Suns have not precisely collided in an explosion of white-hot light. In point of fact, the rechargeable spotlight carried by the Hunter is rapidly running out of juice. Its beam has become feeble and yellow, totally inadequate for the task at hand. Presently the damn thing simply sputters weakly and dies.

  This makes walking difficult, and the tallest hardwood trees on earth assault the Hunter at every step. Stringy bark snakes litter his path.

  He resolves that, in the future, he will carry two sources of light into the forest at night. And that’s it, he thinks. That’s the extent of the evening’s epiphany, Lesson Number One out of Platypus High: Anyone who aspires to see into the Very Core of the Universe is advised to bring along two sources of light.

  Fire and Ice and Everything Nice

  Iread the sentence a total of, oh, maybe twenty times the night before it was to be discussed in a class I was teaching on the techniques (if not the art) of travel writing.

  “An initial priority for composition facilitators is to peruse, for context analysis, the local papers, and taking it seriously.”

  It was, and remains, the very worst lead sentence I have ever had the misfortune to read, and I remember it to this day, over fifteen years later, word for ghastly word.

  Worse, I recall with a shudder the cruelty I visited upon the author, a sincere young woman who was a high school composition teacher, only a few years out of college.

  This was at the University of Indiana, and the woman was taking my summer writing class because, she said, my articles on travel and adventure were popular among her students. She intended to absorb my lectures, such as they were, and convey the information to her fellow English teachers. Thus, composition instructors could inspire students to produce assignments modeled, to some degree, after the sorts of articles they preferred to read.

  In an initial lecture, I’d said that travel didn’t necessarily involve distance. It was a process of discovery, and could as easily be accomplished in one’s hometown as in the Congo Basin. Where might a potential writer find local travel-writing ideas? Well, there were dozens of them every week in the local newspaper.

  It was my first experience teaching writing of any kind, and I am afraid that clemency and compassion were not then among my small arsenal of virtues.

  So there I was, standing in front of a class of twenty, all of us holding this woman’s paper as if it had been used some time ago to wrap fish.

  “Any comments on this before we start?” I asked. There was a silence so complete it had an odor about it. Something just vaguely sour, if not to say actually putrescent.

  And then—degenerate beast that I am—I destroyed this woman, completely, and in public.

  “Mr. Jones,” I said. “Could you silently read the opening sentence and tell me what you think it means?” Jones was a retired history professor, and, it was obvious, a brilliant man. I stood at the front of the class, ostentatiously staring at my watch while he read.

  Finally Professor Jones said, “I think it means writing teachers ought to read the newspapers.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “But it took you forty-five seconds to come to that conclusion. You know why? Because the sentence had to be translated. It is not written in the English language.”

  The author sat in stunned silence. She rose slowly, eyes glazed over with what would soon be tears, and commented, quite cogently, I thought, on my teaching technique.

  “You … asshole,” she said.

  This was something of a surprise since the woman was a lay teacher in a Catholic high school. Then the author of the worst lead sentence I’d ever read turned her back to me and walked toward the door. She was attempting to outrun her tears.

  “Wait,” I called. “Please. Let’s talk about this. We want to learn how to communicate effectively with people.”

  The unfortunate woman stood in the open doorway, turned her now tear-stained face to me—to the class at large—and said:

  “I don’t want to communicate with people. I want to impact on educators.”

  With that she slammed the door, hard, and was gone. Exclamation point.

  …

  I was thinking about this peculiar contretemps recently. In fact, I think about it every month or so, especially when things are going well for me and I am in danger of imagining that I might be an exemplary individual. I think about it more intently when I teach travel-writing seminars, because I always use that hateful sentence as an example of a bad lead.

  Now, where I live, in Montana, there is an infestation of writers. In general, those authors on the western side of the Rocky Mountains are associated in one way or another with the University of Montana and its world-class creative-writing program. These men and women generally produce highly literate and well-reviewed tomes: essays, poetry, novels. No writing down to the lowest common denominator for these folks: because they are partially funded by teaching, they have the luxury to produce literature.

  Those of us who live on the arid, east side of the mountains, however, make our livings—such as they are—directly from the sales of our books or articles. When our friends from the west accuse us of pandering to the masses, as they habitually do, the usual and purposely ungrammatical reply (attributed, I believe, to Tom McGuane), goes something like this: “I done a lot of things in my life that I’m not proud of, but I never taught no goddamned creative writing.” Well, I can’t say that anymore. I teach one or two creative-writing courses a year, and they are all about travel and/or adventure.

  I was just returning home from the Book Passage Travel Writers’ Conference in Corte Madera, California. The drive took me through northern Nevada then up into southeast Oregon, and I was looking for a story. Something about travel. Or adventure. Whatever.

  In Winnemucca, I glanced at the local paper, as I st
ill advise students in search of a story to do, and found a free lecture to be given that night by “a popular short wave radio personality.” I would learn “things not taught in school.” The address given turned out to be in a church basement, and only about half a dozen people arrived to learn things they hadn’t been taught in school. We discovered that September 9, 1999—9/9/99—was pretty much going to be doomsday. It would start with computer crashes—early computer code used four 9’s to signal that the program had ended and was to be terminated. Stoplights wouldn’t work. Cars would stall on the interstate, miles from anywhere. Banks would fail. People in the know—which now included the half dozen of us in the church basement—should take our money out of the bank, stock up on both food and weapons, and then begin digging out a bomb shelter. We only had three more days.

  Was there a story in the end of the world as we know it? Could be, but I wasn’t inspired, and drove north, into the parched cowboy country of southeastern Oregon, specifically to Harney County, a land of high-desert sage flats and sparsely timbered mountains; of fleet herds of antelope and cattle ranches. Harney extends over 10,228 square miles, which makes it the largest county in America. It is bigger than Rhode Island and Massachusetts combined. A mere seven thousand people are privileged to call Harney County home, so there is less than one person per square mile. A good place, I figured, to wait out the end of the world, now just two days hence.

  I had what might be the last chocolate malt of my life at the café in Fields, Oregon, because a sign on the wall said the concoctions were “world famous,” and I didn’t want to die with a bad taste in my mouth. Fields is located at the southwestern edge of Steens Mountain, locally called the Steens. The mountain, a checkerboard of Bureau of Land Management, state, and private land, is a 30-mile-long fault block that rises gently from the west to a height of 9,773 feet, and then drops off precipitously, in what amounts to a sheer cliff face. From a distance, it looks like a giant wedge rising up out of the sagebrush.

  This great block of land was thrust a mile above the surrounding land by pressures created in the mists of geological time when the earth’s crust cooled. Millions of years later, glaciers formed near the summit of the Steens, and they slid down the western slope of the mountain, carving out verdant U-shaped valleys and deep rocky gorges so elaborately sculpted they seemed the monumental work of some mad and alien culture.

  On the day the world was to end, I drove east, up the Oregon Scenic Byway, which leads to the summit of the Steens. Sage-littered antelope country gave way to juniper, and, at the higher elevations along the Blitzen River, aspen groves shivered silver and gold in a gentle aureate breeze. Toward the summit, aspen gave way to grassland matted with hearty wildflowers: asters and daisies and lacy white yarrow. September 9 is springtime at eight thousand feet on the Steens.

  Presently, I found myself at a parking lot a few hundred feet below the summit proper. It was a steep, breathless climb to the top, but it took only twenty minutes or so. There was no one else there, and I sat on the summit of the Steens, staring down the abrupt and perpendicular eastern edge of the mountain’s wedge.

  I was looking at the Alvord Desert, which was three miles distant and almost exactly one mile below me. It was a round, flat, sandy, alkaline playa, completely uninhabited. Dust devils spun across its surface in strange and contradictory directions. It must have been well over 100 degrees down there on the sand. I, on the other hand, was cold. What had been a gentle breeze a few thousand feet below was now a gusting wind that whistled and boomed over the summit at about 50 miles an hour. The vegetation all about was of the fragile sort one finds in the high north tundra: sparse, fast-growing mosses, orange lichens on the rocks, and dwarf shrubs, inches high, hunkered down in crevasses against the wind and cold.

  The sky was cornflower blue, streaked with the long, thin clouds some people call horsetails. A BLM brochure had promised that, on a clear day, I would be able to “see the corners of four states.” It was a clear day and there were no conflagrations in any of the states that I could see. Late on doomsday afternoon, things were looking just peachy.

  Still, I tried to contemplate the death and dissolution of civilization as we know it. Here I was, freezing in the tundra and staring down at the desert. Robert Frost had written a poem about the destruction of the world in fire, or in ice, whatever, take your pick. But, quite frankly, I wasn’t inspired.

  In fact, my mind was whirling with student manuscripts I had read over the years.

  …

  “There are no words.”

  Last year, one of my writers’ workshop students had led off her nonfiction travel piece with that sentence, which I thought might be improved. She wanted to describe her feelings upon first landing in Antarctica. The piece as a whole was awfully good, I thought, combining, as it did, a problematic relationship with her father, who was along on the trip, and the desire to see a massive ice ridge named after her grandfather, who had been in Admiral Byrd’s party. It was a real quest, filled with real emotion, and the woman had the talent to make it work.

  But the lead? “There are no words.”

  “This,” I suggested to the students at the writers’ workshop, “does not fill the reader with confidence in the writer’s ability to describe the interior or exterior landscape of her journey.” I stifled an impulse to put my objection more bluntly. I would be risking another tearful exit if I said: “There are no words and here they aren’t.”

  I carefully polled the other seven students in the class. “There are no words.” Good lead? Or bad? And the fact is, most of them liked it.

  A few nights later, my friend and colleague David Quammon came to my house for dinner. David has won awards for his essays and criticism, and for his science writing; I think he’s won awards he doesn’t even remember anymore, or doesn’t care to talk about because he’s pathologically modest. David’s news was that he was building a new house, probably (I thought with that total lack of envy writers are noted for) to hold all his damn awards.

  He asked me how the writers’ conference was going. I said it was exhausting. I couldn’t get certain manuscripts out of my mind, not because they were so bad, but because they were so close to being good.

  David shook his head. He believes that no one can teach writing, that it is a solitary endeavor you do over and over again until you start getting it right.

  “Tim,” he said, “I think that if you just went to church and prayed real, real hard, you’d have the same effect on your students.”

  Gretel Ehrlich, a writer whose books I greatly admire—especially her lyrical evocation of the West in The Solace of Open Spaces—is of much the same opinion. Once she and I were featured speakers at a writers’ conference in Montana. She gave the keynote address to the crowd of eager would-be writers, and was not at all encouraging. The speech had been written out in essay form. Gretel read it well, and with passion. Writing, she said, cannot be taught. Some teachers, she said, will tell you that there are matters of craft you can learn. This, she averred, is not so.

  “Any question or comments?” she asked at the conclusion of her remarks.

  The students, who’d all paid a substantial amount of money to learn to write, sat in a kind of poleaxed silence. Now, my own opinion is that elements of craft—matters of structure, organization, lead-ins, and walk-offs—can indeed be taught, and are, in fact, the only substantive principles professionals can impart to beginning writers.

  So, in the silence following Gretel’s request for comments, I raised my hand and said, “I thought the piece you read was very well crafted.”

  And now Gretel Ehrlich, in company with a certain Indiana Catholic high school lay teacher, thinks I’m a dickhead.

  The sun set over Steens Mountain, and I drove down to the remote cattle town of Burns, where I lingered for days, looking for stories. As usual, my initial prioritization was to peruse, for context analysis, the local papers, and taking it seriously. It was in one of these publications
that I found a short article in the foreign news section that fired my imagination.

  It seemed that three Indonesian cult leaders were beaten to death by disaffected followers after their 9/9/99 doomsday prediction failed to materialize. The cult members had been told to sell their possessions and to prepare for the end of the world at 9 A.M. on September 9. But the day came and went without incident. The sun also rose on September 10 and, according to Saadi Arsam, village chief of Sukmajaya, east Java, “the members were really mad.”

  I wondered if the shortwave-radio personality was still in Winnemucca, or whether he’d gone into hiding. It might be worth driving back and looking for him.

  “Hey, what happened to doomsday?” would be my first question.

  If the disgraced doom-monger had any sense at all, he’d decline comment. Into each life, I understood finally, there falls a time when there are no words.

  The Caravan of White Gold

  “Teem, wake up. There are some bandits.”

  An Italian—I don’t recall which one—was standing over my sleeping bag and nudging my foot with his. It was about ten o’clock on a cool, clear February night in the Sahara, and I had been asleep for half an hour.

  “What?”

  “Some bandits have followed us up from Kidal. We have to go back to Aguelhok.”

  “Tuaregs?” I asked.

  “Muhammad said they came from Kidal.”

  Muhammad, our recently hired security consultant, was a Tuareg himself. Kidal was a Tuareg town. But then again, so was Aguelhok.

  I struggled out of my sleeping bag and stumbled around for a few groggy minutes in the dark. We were about three miles west of Aguelhok in the West African country of Mali and a couple hundred miles north of the Niger River, camped near the central trans-Saharan road leading north to Algeria. This was to be the last stop before a high-speed run to the historic and formerly forbidden salt mines at Taoudenni, which—we didn’t know—might not even exist anymore.