Terrarium

by Scott Russell Sanders

  “By watching us they keep tabs on the condition of the environment,” she said.

  “But suppose they find out all they want to know about Whale’s Mouth, and then decide to haul us away to quarantine?”

  “Why would they want all of us malcontents back inside?”

  “They could just burn us out,” Phoenix suggested bleakly.

  “And waste perfectly good test animals?” Teeg walked ahead of him on the trail, flinging answers back over her shoulder.

  Phoenix slogged along, unconvinced. A few minutes earlier they had passed the charred site of Zuni’s home village. The blackened image of it was seared into his mind. “Still,” he persisted, “they’re watching us, and they could descend on us at any moment.”

  “Sure they could. And a tree could fall on you.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “It’s exactly the same.” Saying this, Teeg swung round on the trail and he nearly stumbled into her. She stared fixedly into his eyes. “You’re going to die, aren’t you?”

  Here it was broad daylight, trees festooned with bearded moss were arching overhead, Salt Creek was purling along beside him—and he was seized by midnight panic. “Eventually,” he admitted.

  “Death’s going to come, sometime, somewhere. And what do you do about it?”

  Her eyes were extraordinarily green today. Oregon eyes. “I … just …”

  “You keep on living, is what you do. You can’t do a thing about death, so you just nod at it, and go on about your business. And you can’t do anything about the Enclosure, either. It’s simply there, and it’s going to be there regardless of what we do, unless humanity pulls up stakes and goes shipping off into space. So we stick out our tongues at the spy satellites and keep on planting trees and raising fish and seeking the center.” She was breathless when she finished speaking.

  Turning back around she continued on along Salt Creek, one boot shoving against the steep bank, one sloshing in the water. Phoenix scuffled behind, the rucksack tipping him first to one side, then the other. It seemed intolerable to him, never knowing from one hour to the next whether the black gliders would swoop down from the sky. But Teeg was right, death was also intolerable, an outrage, and yet he kept on living. Was the Enclosure inevitable? He could not accept that. Deep down he still wanted to save humanity from the Enclosure, even though Zuni had insisted that the desire to make things over was the root of human ills.

  Let things be, Zuni had told him. Seek to live truly yourself, and others, seeing you, will do likewise. It sounded very noble. But if they could not see you? If they were locked inside their opaque bottle? What then?

  Whenever he was tempted to despair, he remembered his own example—Phoenix the wary, the reluctant, the befuddled cityman. I have made the journey. Here I am. It is possible to break free.

  They heard the purr of Salt Creek Falls for half an hour before they reached the brink of the cliff, where water fumed down into the meadow. Zuni had told them about arriving at this same point and seeing only fog. Phoenix imagined what she must have feared. He felt as though he had spent his own life venturing out and circling back, always hoping to find the beloved face, the familiar place, waiting for him on his return.

  There was no fog this day. Jonah Colony was luminously visible. It radiated from the center of the meadow, gossamer domes and fretwork towers and pathways of glass, seeming as vulnerable as ever. The sight of it made him feel the way he always felt when he noticed the delicate blue veins under the skin in Teeg’s wrist.

  Lifting her voice to be heard over the bluster of the falls, Teeg cried, “It’s still there!”

  The look of exaltation on her face was so intense that she seemed to cast a light around her. The same passionate look had set his heart dancing months ago, when she first loomed into view like an unpredicted planet on the pedbelt outside his door. She was the original green-eyed siren. He vowed to follow her into blizzards or quicksand or gaping jaws. For the moment he merely had to trail after her down the steep path beside the waterfall and across the meadow.

  Someone must have spied them coming, for welcoming faces crowded out of the domes—Marie with a smudge of dirt on her cheek, Coyt holding a chunk of circuitry, and Zuni with her cobweb of wrinkles tugged into the shape of joy.

  Five voices spoke at once. Foreheads kissed, palms touched, hands eased them out of their backpacks. The talk was a jumble of Portland and seedlings and health patrol and broccoli.

  Mention of the HP rang alarm bells in Phoenix, who asked, “Where are the others?”

  “Up at the lighthouse,” Zuni replied, waving her arm in the direction of Whale’s Head.

  At mention of this everyone suddenly grew hushed, and Teeg said anxiously, “Someone’s died?”

  Zuni beamed, like a child trying to contain a secret. “Oh no, quite the opposite.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” demanded Teeg.

  “Come see.” Zuni grabbed her by the hand, Marie grabbed Phoenix, and Coyt limped after them on his uneven legs. Along the creek to the beach, over the squishing sand, up the lighthouse trail—even without the rucksack Phoenix was beginning to feel misused by gravity. Along the way, Teeg reported on her mother’s transformation. Like a visitor from the past, she said, my own mother, a stranger, keeping sheep and disciples in an eighteenth-century house. Zuni and Marie, two wise old ones who had swallowed quite a lot of bitterness themselves, were consoling her.

  Coyt was telling Phoenix how the receiver had finally picked up HP broadcasts, from which they had learned that Jonah Colony was already on the surveillance map. “It turns out there’s places like ours all over the earth. And they just watch us, like they’d watch a radiation spill or an earthquake fault.”

  Still finding it hard to believe, Phoenix said, “After all our secrecy, and risking our necks in the ocean—they don’t even care?”

  “Don’t give a damn, apparently, so long as we mind our business,” said Coyt. “We’ve talked with some colonies that have been going since the Enclosure. Twenty-six, twenty-seven years, and the HP’s never touched them.”

  “You actually talked with them? Other exiles?”

  Phoenix could hear the pleasure in Coyt’s voice: “It’s not easy, let me tell you. Most of the old colonies have got pretty crude equipment. And the HP jam my channels about as fast as I generate them. But a few words get through.”

  A network of wilderness settlements, an anti-Enclosure: the idea delighted Phoenix. Maybe they could spin another sort of web around the planet, a web of dirt paths and rivers instead of glass tubes, connecting tiny settlements like Jonah Colony, open to weather and the shimmering universe. Unlikely, but possible, and that was hope enough to live on.

  Teeg was just recounting her meeting with the deer, much to Zuni’s delight, and Phoenix was wishing he had brought his antlers along, when they reached the grassy shelf where the ruins of the lighthouse stood. Jumbled stones, wind-bent shrubs, mountain rising steeply behind, ocean spreading out forever beyond the lip of land in somber green. For Phoenix the place still burned with Sol’s presence. The grass owed a measure of its brightness to his ashes.

  At the edge of the cliff, where the land fell away dizzyingly a hundred meters to the breakers, the other five colonists sat facing the sea. Like a rock in the midst of them, Jurgen held binoculars in his great paws. Hinta, yellow hair tugged back to keep the wind from blowing it across her mouth, was speaking close to his ear. Indy, Josh, and Arda pointed at the ocean and talked gaily among themselves.

  What were they seeing? Phoenix wondered. Birds? HP gliders? Ships?

  “Look who came back!” Zuni sang out.

  Startled, the five turned round, and their faces broke open with pleasure. Come, come, they waved, handing binoculars to Phoenix and Teeg. “Out there,” said Jurgen, pointing, “where the greenish patch of water looks like it’s boiling.”

  Phoenix gazed through the binoculars. Blank water. What on earth was he supposed to see?


  “There it goes!” Teeg cried. “And another!”

  Everyone was yelling and leaping on the brink of the cliff, and Phoenix was staring himself blind at empty ocean. He lowered the binoculars in dismay. What on earth? Zuni came over then, sat him down on the grassy lip of the continent, and with her fingers on his cheeks she aimed his gaze delicately, saying, “Look there, bright eyes.” At last he saw the spouts, five of them … six! … like tiny fountains. Broad flukes thrust above the surface, waved mightily, then swept downward, stroking the ocean, with a movement as delicate as Zuni’s touch on his cheeks.

  “Whales!” he said wonderingly.

  “They’ve found their way back,” Teeg said with joy.

  “Did they ever lose it?” said Zuni.

  Afterword

  Although filled with futuristic gizmos, Terrarium was hammered out on an ancient typewriter, the kind powered by fingers. I began work in November 1978, the month of my son’s first birthday and his first solo walk, a couple of months before my daughter turned six. The keys kept jamming on the typewriter, and baby Jesse kept thumping on the walls of the ticky-tacky house we were renting in Eugene, Oregon. The bedroom where I sat dreaming of the Enclosure was not big enough to swing a cat in, as my father would have said. The only window, set high in the wall, revealed a slab of sky, more often gray than blue in that season. I holed up there in the mornings, while my daughter was away in kindergarten and my wife rode herd on Jesse. Then around noon each day, Ruth lowered her guard, and Jesse used his new legs to stagger down the hall to my room. He pawed on the door and babbled in his own invented language, every day the same message: Come on out, Daddy, it’s time to play. He pawed and babbled until I quit typing, then he raised his volume until I opened the door and hoisted him into my arms.

  Every afternoon, rain or shine, we did go out and play. We strolled the sidewalks of Eugene, sat beside fountains, paused in parks to examine ferns and bugs, watched herons hunt along the Willamette River, patted the trunks of trees, contemplated clouds. Home from kindergarten, Eva often joined us on our rambles. With Jesse swaying in the backpack, we hiked in the nearby hills, my feet laced into the cracked leather boots that I would loan to Zuni Franklin for her own hike through the Oregon woods. Like the young Teeg Passio, Eva posed questions and made up stories about the creatures we met, while Jesse sang in the backpack and kept time by swatting me on the head or yanking at my beard.

  So my life was divided, like the world of Terrarium, half indoors and half outside. I earned time in the open air with my children by putting in solitary time at the desk. I had the luxury of writing and fathering all the livelong day because I was on leave that year from my job as a teacher at Indiana University. The move from our settled home in limestone country to this temporary home in the country of spruce and fir was as liberating and bewildering for me as the move outside proved to be for Phoenix Marshall. The novel was on my mind in the afternoons as I roamed with the children, and the children were on my mind in the mornings as I wrestled with the novel. Jesse and Eva tugged my thoughts into the future. What sort of earth would they inherit? Would they suffer from nuclear war? From pollution? From hunger? When they were my age, would they be able to breathe the air or drink the water? Would they have confidence enough to bear their own children? If so, would those children still be able to see whales or wolves? Would they meet any wildness at all?

  On weekends during that year in Oregon, Ruth and I often bundled the kids into our rusty Fiat and drove out through green mountains to the coast, where we moseyed along the edge of the sea. The bay we visited most faithfully was known as Devil’s Elbow, named for the volcanic rocks that rose like charred bones from the waves. When I sent my conspirators there to found a colony, I changed the name to Whale’s Mouth Bay, but everything else about this haunting place I kept the same—the meadow and creek, the headland with its lighthouse, the bearded moss, tidal pools, and cobbled shore, the dark and looming cliffs riddled with caves.

  On other weekends we drive up the Willamette Valley to Portland, to walk along the riverfront where Phoenix and Teeg would come upon the groaning mill, or to admire the roses and rhododendrons in Washington Park, where Judith Passio would establish her pastoral community. I borrowed pieces of Judith’s patchwork house from the handsome home of Charles and Ursula Le Guin, with whom we stayed on several trips. Their hedges and flowers, multiplied a thousandfold, would lead Phoenix up the hill to his reunion with Teeg. I have long since apologized to Ursula and Charles for dismantling their beloved Portland, a city I admire; but Judith needed some ruins, and so I chose a place whose contours I knew.

  When we stuck around Eugene on Sundays, we usually worshipped with the Society of Friends, those Christian mystics known to the world as Quakers. Their religion appealed to me then and appeals to me now because it is communal, it dispenses with doctrine, it seeks the source of all Creation in a holy center. It is also risky, because, instead of hearing God in the silence, you may hear only the Id, or the grumbling of your belly, or the static of the day’s news. My conspirators derive their own religion from the Taoists and Buddhists and Sufis, as well as from the Quakers. Like the spiritual seekers in all those traditions, Teeg and her companions hunt for the holy ground together, in suffering and celebration, in work and prayer, and in the greater life of nature. Without some shared faith, I figured, no community would long survive in the wilds.

  Who can trace all the sources of a novel? The pedbelts of Oregon City owe something to the conveyors of a Louisiana factory where I drove a forklift during my college summers. The domed city itself is an exaggeration of the shopping malls that I first encountered in Indianapolis, consumer nirvanas hermetically sealed against weather and history. Teeg’s glass tank, brimming with plants, is a smaller version of a terrarium that I saw, years ago, in Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. The fossil that she gives to Phoenix resembles one I found in an Ohio creek bed. A visit to Disney World lurks behind my image of the appalling gameparks. The chemmies derive, of course, from the drugs sold over the counter and on the street in our own society, but they also derive from booze, that elixir of oblivion, which destroyed my father. Behind Zuni’s glimpse of her Oregon village burned to cinders by the health patrol, there are images of torched villages in Vietnam. The grief that Zuni feels over the desolation of her beloved country is the grief I felt over the flooding of my childhood landscape by a government dam. I could trace a public or private source for every detail in the book, from Teeg’s bare feet on the opening page to the California gray whales on the final page; but I see no need to multiply examples. When I pluck at any line in Terrarium, I am liable to find it connected through memory to the whole of my life.

  At the end of our year in Oregon, I had not quite finished one full draft of the novel. We camped our way back from Eugene to Bloomington, the roof rack of our Fiat loaded with playpen and trunks, my files stuffed with photographs and notes, my mind filled with images of mountains and rivers and ocean.

  We pitched our tent in the Badlands on a night when Jesse was cutting a new tooth. He was so fretful that I gave up on sleep and eased him into the backpack and the two of us went out walking under a full moon. Soothed by moon and motion, he soon grew quiet, riding along with his fingers hooked into my hair. I could have walked forever among those dazzling hills, in that splendid light, with my boy on my back and this ground under my feet. From the pressure of his grip, I could tell when Jesse was looking this way or that. I found myself gazing through his eyes, and they were utterly clear. Stone, snake, burning bush. We walked in beauty, my son and I. We saw that these Badlands were unmistakably good, as the Lakota had always known. What we glimpsed there, I realized, was a glory that runs through all places and all creatures. No words could ever capture it. Yet no story could ever be true without witnessing to this beauty and power.

  Back home in Indiana, I kept dreaming of Oregon. Over the next three years, while the nuclear arms race accelerated and the environment d
eteriorated and my children grew, I completed the first draft of the novel and then a second and a third. Those were the early years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, when the Secretary of the Interior announced that we need not preserve the forests because God would be coming soon to end the world; when the Secretary of Agriculture declared that we could replace topsoil with chemicals; when the head of the Environmental Protection Agency approved of drilling for oil in wilderness areas and along the continental shelf; when the President himself remarked that trees are a major source of pollution and that, in any case, when you’ve seen one redwood you’ve seen them all. I was at work on the fourth and final draft of Terrarium when President Reagan unveiled his Strategic Defense Initiative, which soon became known as the “Star Wars” plan, and which he invited us to think of as an invulnerable shield over our vulnerable heads. It was a time when anyone who loved the earth might well have despaired.

  I strugged with despair, for I did not see how we could keep on piling up weapons, using up oil and iron and ozone, annihilating other species, paving the soil, fouling the waters and air, adding to our own swollen numbers, without eventually rendering the earth uninhabitable for our descendants. I still do not see any way of sustaining the industrial binge, let alone of extending that binge to the whole globe. There were just over four billion human beings, many of them wretchedly poor, when I began making notes for Terrarium; as I write these lines, the human population is nearing six billion, and the number of those suffering—from starvation and pollution and war—is rising even more rapidly.

  The novel was finished in 1984, a year rendered ominous by George Orwell, and it was first published in 1985. Reading Terrarium again on the occasion of this new edition, I find that the most disturbing trends I projected into my imaginary future have, if anything, only intensified over the past decade. More and more people jam the world’s highways and cities, fill the countryside, crowd out other species. More and more drugs ease our aches and compensate for the madness or futility of our lives. We keep transferring our talents to machines, leaving less and less meaningful work for humans to do. Our impulse to create an enclave where nothing can harm us, an infantile paradise where we need only eat and play, has achieved an apotheosis of sorts in the Mall of America. Our enclosures become ever larger, more sumptuous, more perfect refuges from the planet. We move ever deeper indoors, into the sealed boxes of our houses and offices, into domed stadiums and air-conditioned cars. Within these boxes, we retreat farther and farther into the twilit zone of television, tapes, and cyberspace.