Hold the Enlightenment

by Tim Cahill

  “What? No more beer?”

  “Not for a year and a half.”

  The last day Atlatl Bob drank he was driving south, down Interstate 5, on the way to the Valley of Fire State Park to participate in the world atlatl competition. His van broke down somewhere south of Mesquite, Nevada, which is still over one hundred miles from Las Vegas. It is desolate country, with sage-littered hills rolling out forever, in all directions.

  Bob, of course, had Buddy with him in the disabled van. Now, the sad fact is this: no rational driver is going to pick up a big, Neanderthal-looking hippie guy leading a lamb on a leash. Hitchhiking was out of the question. But there was a dirt road into the rolling hills which must have been a ranch access. Bob figured he could walk to the ranch and call a tow truck. He began moving west, and the rising sun cast shadows before him: there on the ground was a long, pastel-pink silhouette that was Bob, and a shorter one that was Buddy. They walked for half an hour. Buddy gamboled out ahead. He leapt and ran and circled Bob and then, about a mile and a half from the road, Buddy decided he was done for the day.

  So Atlatl Bob picked up his lamb and put him over his shoulders. Carried him back to the van on the interstate, walking directly into the sun, and into, what was for Bob, a new day.

  He’d been considering joining the Mormon Church.

  A few years previous, he’d been driving down the same road, going to the same event, and stopped at the casino hotel in Mesquite, where he gambled for a time while his girlfriend chose to sleep in the room. When he came up, she’d made it clear that she wasn’t interested in anything that Bob might have in mind. Not entirely happy about this turn of events, Bob had slunk off to the bathroom and read the Book of Mormon, which he had found in the drawer of the bedroom table. A lot of it had made good sense to Bob Perkins.

  So there he was, out in the cool of the morning desert, carrying Buddy back to the van, thinking about Mormonism and reflecting that, with Buddy over his shoulders, he must look a little bit like the depiction of Jesus he’d seen a lot. Christ carrying the lost lamb back to the fold.

  In the midst of this divine perception, Bob felt a spreading warmth flowing down over his shoulders. It felt like Revelation until he realized that Buddy had pissed on him. I wonder, Bob thought, if this ever happened to Jesus?

  And then another, much stranger, and more life-altering thought occurred to Atlatl Bob Perkins.

  He thought: I believe I ought to stop drinking and become a Mormon.

  The last full day of Rabbit Stick featured various events on the “weapons range.” Bob and a dozen others tossed atlatls at a paper target on stacked hay bales from distances of fifteen and twenty meters. Bob scored the only direct bull’s-eye, but lacked winning consistency. “At least I didn’t embarrass myself,” said the Neanderthal Mormon with painted toenails.

  Later, we all stood around tossing rabbit sticks at fuzzy toy bunnies of the type carried about by toddlers around Easter. A rabbit stick looks a bit like a boomerang elongated on one end, and American Indians used them as throwing sticks in order to brain bunnies and other small game. The stick is thrown underhand, in the way you’d skip stones across water, and it spins low over the ground like a horizontal airplane prop. At twenty meters, most of us proved that we’d have made excellent Paleolithic conservationists. The toy bunnies sat before us, motionless and mocking. After several dozen attempts, one fellow actually hit the largest of the toys and literally knocked the stuffing out of it. We whooped and howled out of that portion of our souls that still resided in the stone age.

  On our way back to the campsite, I asked Bob about his toenails.

  “Oh, some women staked me out on the ground and painted them,” he said.

  “Women?”

  “They were from Canada,” Bob explained.

  Atlatl Bob is a star at Rabbit Stick and women, inexplicably in my view, seem to find him irresistible. As we strolled through camp, Bob talked about a type of atlatl that cut through the air in such a way that the act of throwing and the flight of the dart were very nearly silent, and so would not startle grazing animals. “It’s stone-age stealth technology,” Bob said. He was very excited about it.

  I considered the terrifying prospect of Australia. I’d have to sit next to Atlatl Bob for a fifteen-hour flight, another four-hour flight, and a six-hour drive. The payoff was that, in the end, we’d meet someone Bob had studied and admired all his adult life. It would be as if an art historian was offered an opportunity to meet Michelangelo.

  I saw, in my mind’s eye, that artist’s image of God and Man, reaching out to touch one another, as on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, except in my vision, God was an Australian aboriginal and Man was a big, Neanderthal-looking hippie guy, an ex-Marine and teetotaling Mormon whose toenails were painted all sorts of different colors.

  I decided that, like Atlatl Bob Perkins, I shouldn’t ever let simple sanity stand in my way.

  Stutter

  Grant Thompson, the head honcho at Tofino Expeditions, a kayaking outfitter in Seattle, sa-sa-sa-sa … stutters. We were paddling together in the Queen Charlotte Islands, about fifty miles off the coast of northern Canada, and had set up our camp for the night. I went for a solitary walk in the thick, temperate-zone rain forest, and—duh—fell off a cliff about fifteen feet high. Landed on my head. Grant bandaged up the worst of my wounds and called in a medical evacuation seaplane on his emergency radio. Because the connection was scratchy and intermittent, it was necessary to state our location quickly and without delay.

  He was absolutely flawless.

  I thought about this. As a young man, he once told me, he’d “used” his verbal hitch when talking to young women, because it made him seem su-su-su … sensitive, and hence da-da-da … desirable. And now, as a kayak guide, driving a van full of boats into Mexico, he allowed himself to stutter so helplessly when dealing with Mexican customs officials that the officers just gave up and waved him through the border with only a minimum of hassle.

  “So,” I said after Grant finished the call, “you don’t stutter at all in an emergency.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “but that’s ba-ba-ba-”

  “Between you and me,” I suggested.

  “Easy for you to say,” Grant said, without the hint of a stutter.

  Fully Unprepared

  Televised baseball. October play-offs. Someone hits the ball and there it goes out into center field, caroming off walls and various players before rocketing toward home, where two men in different-colored uniforms collide in a cloud of dust, and the ball comes whipping out of the flying debris and whirls around the infield so that it seems as if I’m watching a kind of giant human animated pinball machine.

  For someone mainlining morphine, baseball proceeds at an exceedingly expeditious pace.

  Immediately, and without preamble, something else indescribably complex was happening on television and it had to do with lizards and frogs and beer. A nurse, I noticed, was standing by the side of my hospital bed.

  “How are we feeling this morning?” she asked.

  “We’re a little,” I glanced up at the ceiling, looking for a suitable word, “fuzzy.” I was not capable of saying: “We’re intensely apprehensive less than twenty-four hours after our back surgery because our career, such as it is, will be over if, in fact, it turns out that we can’t goddamn get up and walk.”

  “The physical therapist will be here soon,” the nurse said. She promised that I’d be standing up within the hour. Standing straight and taking my first baby steps. The nurse had ginger-red hair, and was beautiful.

  I always liked looking at women with red hair. Even married one once, a long time ago, when I could walk. Didn’t last long, that marriage. She liked the idea of writers, if not my own peculiar manifestation of the ideal. I wasn’t what you’d call a literary writer anyway; I was a travel writer, specializing, I suppose, in remote journeys and rough accommodations. Tropical forests. Bugs and butter worms. Eighty-pound backpacks. Glaciers.
I was gone a lot.

  She, on the other hand, had a degree in comparative literature and admired the works of sedentary French men, like Marcel Proust, who only needed the aroma of fresh-baked pastries as inspiration to scribble up mountainous reams of dense, evocative literature. Guy never went anywhere.

  So: Proust. Wake up and smell the madeleines. Didn’t matter if you couldn’t walk. Not really. Didn’t mean your career was over. Just one phase of it. One could always write Remembrance of Things Past.

  The major problem seemed to be that there was a narrowing, a stenosis, in my lower spine, and this, so the doctors told me, is often the result of injury—a traumatic fall, for instance. Bone spurs are sometimes formed as the spine attempts to rebuild and strengthen itself. These knobby irregularities can touch and irritate the very nerves the spinal column exists to protect. Bone-strummed nerves twitch and twang in a merry galvanic polka. They trace their path through the body in a more or less constant flow of low-voltage currents that throb or sizzle or explode along their length like bolts of lightning.

  In my case, the nerve that sputtered and spit fire ran down my left leg, all the way to certain toes. It was possible to relieve the pain by bending forward at the waist, while I supported myself with a walking stick. The staff I used was hand-carved and highly polished. People who hadn’t seen me for a while always commented on it. “Beautiful stick,” they said. That way they didn’t have to say what was obvious on the face of it: that I appeared to be in substantial pain and that, even with the stick, I couldn’t walk more than a few steps at a time.

  “Have you injured your spine recently?” one doctor asked.

  “Not recently, no.”

  …

  Falls are almost always occasions of profound and uninvited contemplation. A slip on the ice, a quick pratfall off a child’s toy, and here we go again. There’s instability, disbelief, denial, a sudden sense of powers beyond human control, a short, helpless wait followed, bang, by impact.

  One lies still, waiting for the pain. “Did I do it this time? Am I really hurt? Which parts still work?”

  The bad one was in the Queen Charlotte Islands, fifty miles off the coast of northwestern Canada. Every time I look in the mirror, I see that fall. It is written across my forehead in a pair of scars three and four inches long.

  The Queen Charlottes are covered in a temperate-zone rain forest that must have been connected to the mainland twenty thousand years ago or more, during the various ice ages, when great quantities of the world’s water were trapped in vast, advancing glaciers. As the glaciers began to melt, and sea level rose, the Queen Charlottes were divided off from the mainland by a body of water called the Hecate Strait. Certain animals and plants survive there and nowhere else on earth. The islands are Canada’s answer to the Galápagos.

  My friends and I were kayaking the Queen Charlottes, and no one wanted to explore the interior with me, mainly because we were paddling past elephant seals and killer whales every day. The on-water experience should have fulfilled anyone’s wildlife wow quota. But there was an endemic subspecies of black bear on the island I wanted see, and there were orchids and woodpeckers that existed nowhere else on earth.

  And so I went for a walk in the dense cedar and spruce forests. I went alone, God help me, bushwhacking off trail, and I didn’t see bears or even woodpeckers, though the orchids were plentiful enough and the ground was covered in several inches of soft green moss. The Queen Charlottes must be the moss capital of the earth.

  At one point, a mossy cliff face blocked my path back to camp. It was an easy climb of about fifteen feet. I had to dig my hands through about ten inches of the spongy moss to find handholds in the underlying rock. Mostly, I pulled myself up with my arms, while I kicked steps into the moss as mountain climbers kick steps into steep snow slopes.

  At the summit of the cliff, there was a small tree, twenty feet high, that would hold my weight if I could get a hand on it. My feet felt secure in the moss. I was standing on some kind of long, thick root set deep in the moss. It ran horizontally for over ten feet. I’d felt it with my hands on the way up, a thick, unseen thing, festooned with tendrils, and about half as big around as my wrist. Standing on it was like balancing on a thick, sagging rope.

  I reached for the safety of the tree in a sweeping grab, just as the root I stood upon broke and the bottom dropped out of my world. The tips of my fingers just barely brushed against bark, and I felt myself drop away from the cliff, astonished and empty-handed. And then I was falling—somehow face first—toward the moss below, thinking all the time, “But this is totally unacceptable.”

  There was sense of plunging, a swan dive into the moss, and my arms were out in front of me to break the fall. My head hit something: a protruding rock. The moss muffled most of the sound, so what I heard was internal, something in my own body, and it sounded like the sharp crack of several twigs being broken at once. I pushed up off the moss, and my hands were covered in blood from the head wound.

  I wanted to lie still and assess the nature of my injuries, but I needed to staunch the blood flow—tie a bandanna around my head—and I had to start moving, before my back completely seized up. There was no trail nearby, and I was wearing green and black rain gear under the heavy forest canopy. No one would ever find me here, and I had to move.

  The campsite was about two miles to my south, maybe more. The South Island, Moresby, is long and narrow, shaped like a scimitar, with a spine of ridge running down its length. I was about halfway between the ridgetop and the beach. Numerous creeks poured down off the ridge to the ocean, forming deep rocky ravines the nearer they got to the ocean, and it was often necessary to stumble far up the steep, mossy slopes in order to find a narrow crossing I was able to negotiate. It was easier to move uphill bent from the waist, my hands on the moss. To crawl, in other words.

  The forest was an obstacle course of downed timber. Sometimes I had to climb over great fallen cedars; sometimes I belly-crawled under them, always moving, never resting. The temptation was to lie still for a time, to rest, but I knew, with overwhelming certainty, that if I stopped, even for a minute, I would not be able to get up again. So I struggled to my feet, and each time I tried to stand erect, there was the abrupt and annoying sound of a human being screaming.

  Moving overland, up and down the drainages, was impossible. I allowed the slope of the island to lead me down to the ocean, where there were sandy beaches to walk upon, for a time. The beaches all ended in rocky points, projecting far out into the ocean. I tried climbing the piles of jumbled rock that separated one beach from the other, but decided in the end that I didn’t care for all the screaming involved in the effort.

  Without pause, or even a great deal of conscious thought, I waded out into the ocean, still wearing my open-topped rubber boots, which immediately filled with water and weighed me down. I felt I needed the boots and didn’t want to lose them in case I had to walk again.

  And so I swam around the rocky points, despite the 50-degree water. It took five or ten minutes to get out beyond the breakers, which were exploding off rocky headlands. Beyond each point, there was another sandy beach. Once I built a driftwood fire and warmed up. I swam three times.

  Meanwhile, my kayaking companions had initiated a search, and they found me toward dusk. I was out at the tip of one of the rocky points, dragging driftwood logs to a central location for what I hoped would be the mother of all signal fires.

  Back at the camp, I lay down for a while, then found I couldn’t walk, not at all, not without assistance.

  My first wife was named Susan, and, toward the end of her life, she couldn’t walk at all. She used to say she was five feet twelve inches tall. I think she was five-thirteen, because that is how tall I am and we saw eye to eye. We were together twelve years. Later, after the divorce, a disease she didn’t deserve twisted her fingers and wrists; it dissolved the bones of her legs and left her confined to a wheelchair. She wrote poetry and published a small book. When the
local paper ran an article about her that she found sentimental, she sent me a copy, with her own fanciful headline: “Crippled woman writes poetry!”

  Doctors replaced her ankles, her hips, and each operation was less successful than the last. When I last saw her, she could still lift herself from the chair and even walk a few steps. I held her and her head lay on my chest. She had lost six inches to surgery. The doctors had just told her she had six months to live.

  She wouldn’t consider assisted suicide. As a poet, she wanted to realize the sheer astonishment of death. It was rumbling toward her, like a big, slow freight train, growing ever larger in her field of vision, and she couldn’t keep her eyes off the son of a bitch. “I will be more than I once was or am now,” she wrote, “fully unprepared to be dust.”

  After my last visit I drove back toward home through a town where the president of the United States was giving a speech. There was a massive traffic jam, stop-and-go traffic at noon, cars on either side of me. People glanced in my direction, then shifted their gaze. I was crying, in that helpless fashion in which your forehead contracts as your mouth expands. Here’s a guy, I imagined people thought, with an incredibly low tolerance for heavy traffic.

  The physical therapist got me up quickly enough, and though the incision hurt, as well as the places where they’d whittled on my spine, the nerve no longer sizzled and popped. I was walking upright for the first time in six months.

  “Will I be able to do my work?” I asked the surgeon.

  “Should be able to,” he said. “If it hurts, don’t do it.”

  The doctor was named John Lonstein, and he is a genius, or, as another surgeon explained, “the guru” of the sort of operation I needed.

  “I’m supposed to fly to Chile in two weeks,” I said. “It’s a thirteen-hour flight.”

  “It should be no problem.”

  “There’s a glacier. I want to walk up to the face of it.”