by Iris Smyles
At Wyoming’s Little Sandy River, the eighty-seven members of the Donner Party diverged from the well-traveled California trail to follow Hastings Cutoff, a new shortcut named for its founder, Lansford Hastings, who advertised the route without ever having traveled it. The “short pass” proved more difficult than the long way though, setting the group back a crucial three weeks, so that when at last they did reach the Sierra Nevada, a snowstorm blocked their passage.
An impassible winter upon them, the travelers were stranded. One by one, they died of starvation and exposure while the survivors, eventually, began cannibalizing the dead.
“Even the wind seemed to hold its breath as the suggestion was made that were one to die, the rest might live,” says an actress in voiceover, reading the journal of Eliza Donner.
All PBS documentaries are structured similarly. A narrator guides us through the artifacts—black-and-white photos, journal entries and letters, testimony from survivors if there were any, remarks from members of the rescue party, commentary from historians looking back.
“Then the suggestion was made that lots be cast and whoever drew the longest slip should be the sacrifice.”
Of the original eighty-seven members of the Donner Party, only forty-six made it out alive.
1
It was on one of our first dates, when we were deciding what to order, that I asked Billy if he liked shrimp dumplings. “Oh, yeah, I love shrimp,” he said. But then when the shrimp dumplings arrived, he didn’t have any, and when I asked him why he wasn’t eating, he told me he never ate shrimp, that he hated shrimp.
“Then why did you tell me you loved shrimp when we were deciding what to order?”
“I was kidding,” Billy answered. Then, taking my hand, he told me it was okay that I didn’t understand humor. “A lot of people don’t. That’s one of the hardest parts of working in comedy today, dealing with audiences that don’t know when to laugh. You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve performed before a silent room.” Billy patted my hand. “Let’s just leave the laughing to the professionals.”
“Okay.” I smiled, blushing from his touch, laughing when he told me a few minutes later about his inner child, which he’d named “Velvet.”
“You’re so funny, Billy,” I said, happy because the date was going so well. He looked so handsome.
He was wearing a modest blue button-down shirt with crisp khaki pants, having come straight from an audition. I didn’t know he was in costume.
I think of that moment often now. I think: how often the effort of knowing someone is undermined by one’s wish to. I mean, it can be quite hard to see or hear a person amid the bright bellowing of one’s own projections. The world is a negotiation of wishes after all, and where desire is strongest, so are illusions.
I was counting the silver grommets on his embroidered shirt a few dates later—“finally you get to see me in my real clothes!” he said—when he got to talking about politics. He considered himself a Libertarian, he explained.
Brightening, I encouraged him to tell me more. So what if his shirt has a little too much fringe? He and my dad might get along great! (I can’t help it. I’m always thinking about the men I date meeting my parents. I’m old-fashioned—romantic—and the idea of one day getting married and not having to work for the rest of my life is never far from my mind.)
I gazed at Billy dreamily, as he told me the war in Iraq was all about oil. Oil was important, he explained, and control of oil is a good reason to go to war, which is precisely why our government had to fly those planes into the World Trade Center on September 11th.
“Come again?” I said, nearly choking on my Diet Coke, before I smiled. “You’re kidding again, aren’t you?”
“Of course not,” he went on, eyes aflame. “You can’t possibly believe that a plane was flown into the Pentagon and there are no pictures?” He shook his head and sniffed.
I laughed lightly then looked around, half believing I was the subject of a hidden camera program.
Billy went on and I thought hard. I thought about how far we’d come already, how seeing things through had to be easier than turning around, how he looked quite handsome, how on the bright side his eyes showed bluer when they got that crazy gleam. Focusing on the blue, I took a deep breath and said, “Let’s not talk about politics.”
He was pretty worked up though and didn’t want to let it drop, so I did what anyone would do. I began perusing the dessert menu and suggested he order the peach cobbler. “I’m going to have a banana split!” I said ecstatically.
The next morning, Billy wanted to remain in bed in order that we might hold each other long into the day. I was dozing in his arms when he began whispering about “Velvet.” And then, something called “Reversion Therapy,” and then “the Linguistics Institute,” where he’d taken classes last winter.
He’d mentioned the institute on our first date, I recalled. I’d responded enthusiastically, telling him I was an avid reader of Chomsky, too, that I found the idea of a generative grammar impossibly exciting. We had so much in common, I remembered thinking. I couldn’t believe my luck.
Billy continued to describe his work at the institute, explaining how through “behavioral linguistics,” he’d finally begun to heal the wounds from his childhood.
“I’m sorry,” I said, jumping out of bed, “but I can’t lie here all day.”
Billy followed me into the kitchen to tell me more about Velvet while I made breakfast. I led him back to the bedroom and pressed Play on a documentary about the whaleship Essex.
2
On November 20, 1820, two thousand miles west of South America, the Essex was struck twice, seemingly on purpose, by a sperm whale it had been hunting. The ship sank, leaving twenty-one sailors to decamp quickly to three small whaleboats. Eventually, they landed on the uninhabited Henderson Island. After only one week, they exhausted the island’s resources, and all but three, who opted to remain on the island, got back into their whaleboats to take their chances at sea.
The three boats were soon separated. “Malnutrition led to diarrhea, blackouts, enfeeblement, boils, edema, and magnesium deficiency, which caused bizarre and violent behavior. As conditions worsened, the sailors resorted to drinking their own urine.”
The first to die were sewn into their clothes and buried at sea according to custom. But eventually the starving men took to consuming the corpses. When all but bones were left, another measure was suggested; they decided to draw lots.
“Owen Coffin, Captain Pollard’s young cousin, whom he had sworn to protect, drew the black spot. Lots were drawn again to determine who would be Coffin’s executioner. This time his friend Charles Ramsdell drew the black spot. Ramsdell shot Coffin, and his remains were consumed by Pollard, Barzillai Ray, and Charles Ramsdell. Later Ray also died, and they consumed him, too.” In the second boat, Benjamin Lawrence and Thomas Nickerson had survived through similarly desperate measures.
Ninety-three days after the Essex sank, the British merchantman brig Indian came upon the survivors, nearly dead. The three men who’d remained on Henderson were rescued shortly after, while the third boat was never found. Of the original twenty-one sailors, eight survived. Seven were eaten.
It was ninety-five days after the sinking of the Essex, when the whaleship Dauphin came upon the small whaleboat carrying Pollard and Ramsdell. Still gnawing on the bones of Coffin and Ray, the two were so delirious, they didn’t even notice the great ship as it came up alongside them.
3
“Whatcha thinking?” Billy asks before, during, and after sex, and also sometimes over the phone. He’ll call me in the middle of the day, demanding to know what I was thinking before he called. Finally, at a restaurant a few nights ago, I told him:
“I’m thinking that instead of us asking each other all the time what the other person is thinking, we just volunteer our thoughts as we have them.” I picked up this way of speaking from Billy. It’s part of his self-help argot. He’s always sayin
g “we” when he really means “you.”
“Okay,” he said, and then looked at me for a while, back and forth from my right eye to my left eye. “Is there anything on your mind?”
I stopped fiddling with my spinach and began telling him about my idea for a fictional sequel to the Donner Party documentary called “The Donner Party in Manhattan.”
“Exterior: Night. It’s snowing in lower Manhattan as a small band of revelers leave a nightclub and head home. There are no cabs. It’s blocks between bodegas. It’s been hours since their last meal and, in desperation, they draw straws.”
“That’s crazy. There’s a bodega on every block.”
“I know. It’s a joke.”
“It’s really insensitive to the survivors to make light of it that way.”
“But you’re a comedian!”
“Exactly,” he said. “That’s in really poor taste, Iris.”
We were both silent. Then he told me about the mistakes his parents made in raising him and how that led to him becoming a hoarder. How when he was eighteen, just after his first summer of doing stand-up, he found himself crying in the shower one morning and didn’t know why, which is why he took a four-year hiatus from comedy, needing, he felt, to embark on a search inward, which he did while selling Mizu Salon coupons to tourists in Times Square, until he was able to come to grips with this twisted impulse to make people laugh, which really, he now understands, comes from a place of deep hurt; his inner child and what his parents did to it.
“What did they do?”
“They raised me in Westchester.
“Only in the last year have I come to grips with myself as a comedian and learned to accept it as my particular cross to bear,” he continued, on the street, after we’d left the restaurant.
“My god. I had no idea comedy was so little fun.”
“It’s a nightmare.”
The walk home seemed an eternity. When we arrived, I popped in a PBS documentary: Shackleton’s Voyage of Endurance.
4
Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition would be the last major quest in what scholars now call “the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.” Its mission: to cross the Antarctic continent from sea to sea. While the expedition itself would fail, the story of the crew’s three-year survival would make history.
Setting out from Buenos Aires, the Endurance would sail the Weddell Sea and land near Vahsel Bay. The crew would then walk across the South Pole to the Ross Sea. Because Shackleton’s group would not be able to carry enough provisions, however, they’d have to access a series of supply depots laid out across the Ross Ice Shelf on their way to the Beardmore Glacier, which would be deposited by the Ross Sea party, who’d travel to the opposite side of the continent in their own ship, the Aurora, before establishing camp in McMurdo Sound.
But the Endurance never reached Vahsel Bay. Caught in the pack ice before it even got close, it drifted north for the rest of the winter. When spring finally arrived in September, the breaking of the ice put pressure on the ship’s hull and water began pouring in. On November 21, 1915, nearly sixteen months after the ship set out, the Endurance sank.
For almost two months, Shackleton and his party camped on a large ice floe, hoping that it would drift toward Paulet Island, 250 miles away, where stores were cached. It didn’t. After a few failed attempts to march across the ice, Shackleton decided to set up camp on another floe, praying that the ice would drift toward a safe landing. But on April 9, that ice floe broke in two. Back in the lifeboats, the crew headed again for land. After five more days, they reached Elephant Island and set foot on solid ground for the first time in 497 days.
Elephant Island, however, was far from any shipping routes, so, as long as they stayed, there would be no hope of rescue. Thus Shackleton decided to risk an 800-mile journey to the South Georgia whaling stations. For fifteen days, they sailed the waters of the southern ocean amid stormy seas and hurricane-force winds, until they landed on South Georgia’s unoccupied southern shore.
There, after a brief rest, Shackleton began to cross the island on foot. Leaving three behind, he and two others traveled thirty-two miles over mountainous terrain and eventually reached the whaling station at Stromness. Immediately, a rescue mission was dispatched to pick up the remaining men on the other side of South Georgia, those who had stayed on Elephant Island, as well as the surviving members of the Ross Sea party.
All survived.
When the film was over, Billy said he was glad to finally see a movie in which no one had been eaten. “But maybe next time we could watch, like, a comedy or something?” He hugged me tight, like a stuffed animal that’s lost its shape, and told me he was starting to feel really close to me. He suggested he might pick the movie on our next date. Perhaps Beethoven with Charles Grodin, he said, and then began to laugh as he remembered a scene. “It’s hilarious . . . about this family and their dog, who gets into all this trouble.”
5
Last week, we almost broke up. We met in the late afternoon for coffee, after he called and told me he was just around the corner: “Come out!”
Twenty minutes later, the espresso machine was screaming, the barista was banging some jar, and because the shop was so quaint, it was all very loud. Billy and I had to yell just to hear each other, which prompted annoyed looks from neighboring patrons, students typing quietly into their laptops, unbothered by the ruckus but clearly by us.
The conversation was about manners, how I thought they were important. Billy disagreed and thought I was being critical of him because he chews with his mouth open on account of his deviated septum. I could stand to be a little more understanding, considering he’d had to have an operation because of it (his nose job in high school, actors . . .), and he walked out, making a scene, leaving me all alone among the patrons who hated us.
Embarrassed, I collected my purse and left right after.
I walked around the block and felt really bad: It was finally over. And now I wouldn’t be able to have sex with him anymore.And now my number of sexual partners was higher. And now I was single and would have to work after all . . . I cried as I made my way through the curvier streets of the West Village, nearly getting lost on my way to the Hudson River.
When I reached the river though, the wind rose and an unexpected sense of relief blew through me: yes, it was over, over at last!
Then my phone rang. “What are you thinking?” was the first thing Billy said.
I explained that after he left, I’d assumed we were through. He asked why I would think that. He said, “Of course it’s not over,” and asked me where I was. “Stay there!”
I was standing at the end of the Christopher Street Pier, staring at New Jersey, when he arrived. I told him I was tired of arguing, that it seemed like he was tired, too.
Billy admonished me for wanting to quit. “Relationships are about work, Iris!”
“But we’ve only been on five dates!” I said in a moment of rare clarity. Indeed, it had been only five Friday nights, with countless phone calls in between and a few daytime meet cutes. It just felt like much longer.
“We’ve been seeing each other for over a month!” he countered, which was also true. “I’ve been inside you! How can you say that?” he asked, his voice cracking with emotion. “Can you just stop this breakup talk, please? Our relationship is never going to get stronger if you keep talking about breaking up all the time!”
We walked for a while inland, before he stopped and pulled me close. The wind came up again, catching my hair and blowing it around. “Iris,” he said, sweeping it from my face, which he held, tightly, between his hands. “Iris,” he said again before he kissed me. Then, pulling back, searching my eyes: “What are you thinking?”
I began to cry. “I recently read an article about how people who have sex regularly tend to live longer. Billy,” I told him, “I want to live!”
Billy took my hand and we walked for a while in silence, ignoring the co
ld Hudson as it rushed alongside us.
6
After sex, when we lie together, when I look into his eyes, I feel so warm and happy. “What are you thinking, Iris?” Billy will say then. Maybe he’ll begin to stroke my hair. And I’ll say, “Billy, I adore you,” and wonder if he’ll run away; he’s never said he adores me. His eyes will widen before he averts them, and I will become excited by this idea of his running from me, excited and afraid that I might finally be rid of him.
7
Billy calls me every day. I hate talking on the phone but feel bad if I don’t answer, so I answer reluctantly. “Hello?”
For a moment all I hear is chewing. Then, “Hey, it’s Billy,” followed by more chewing.
“What the fuck, Billy?!” I yell. I never used to curse. “You can’t fucking finish fucking eating before you fucking call me?”
“You should take it as a compliment,” Billy says calmly, still chewing. “I couldn’t wait to hear your voice.”
“What!”
