by Brian Keenan
That evening Charlie seemed more amenable, perhaps because he had got out of the cabin and was driving his boat and tending to his fish and seal traps. As we all wearily languished around Charlie’s bedroom-cum-living room, I broached the subject of his unique powers of healing and how he had learned it. Charlie said something about the power of the blood, about how the journey of the blood through the body must be allowed to take its course. It was rudimentary medical science, but Charlie was not a scientist. He had no formal education apart from a few years in a mission school as a child. He explained that he had been a nomad and a hunter all his life. He had taken many creatures because he had to, and had used their bodies for many things. In all his years of cutting up and dissecting so many different creatures he had become something of an anatomist. He knew the function of every organ and the bloodlines and arteries of every bird or beast. He knew the cause of illness in animals and could diagnose the cause of illness from the carcass of his kills. No books had taught him this; only the life he’d lived and his close observation of the network and cycle of cause and effect had led him to certain fundamental conclusions about how the body worked and why it might cease to work.
I wanted to be pushy with Charlie. He had not been so open to questions before. ‘But where does the power come from? What is the magic you possess that enables you to heal people others have failed with?’ When I asked these questions I slightly emphasized the word ‘power’ but did not highlight the word ‘magic’. After all, these were my words and Charlie’s Inupiat language and culture understood them in a very different, even more mundane way.
Charlie answered quietly that he had had visitations from the spirit to guide him in his understanding.
‘What spirit?’ I asked softly, not really knowing what to expect but assuming he might make some reference to an animistic spirit world.
‘The Holy Spirit.’
His answer was just as softly delivered. This was not what I’d expected and I felt I couldn’t pursue the matter further. I sat silent for a moment. Debra was obviously aware of my plight and asked Charlie about what he was doing when he was performing a healing. I listened, trying to follow him. Charlie was not only a uniquely gifted and renowned healer, he was also an elder and therefore was entitled to the utmost respect. Even though he knew I was writing a book about my travels I felt uncomfortable with notebooks and tape recorders. I felt they might diminish him somehow by ‘stealing’ his power. These were the artefacts of my art, but talking with Charlie I felt I would have been happier with a handful of bones and feathers.
Through the conversation between him and Debra, I gathered that Charlie’s ‘power’ lay in how he manipulated the body so that the blood’s trajectory to the heart was not impeded. Charlie had evolved and had been ‘shown’ by the Holy Spirit how to manipulate and massage the whole body to release the dammed-up ‘power’ in the blood to energize the heart. The heart was at the centre of all healing and all pain. And just as humans had a physical body, they also had a spiritual or a non-physical body. Illness in the physical body was often caused by distress in the spirit, so Charlie sometimes treated the spiritual body to relieve the physical. I knew of Charlie’s reputation among his own people, and among the medical doctors who had referred patients to him. His spiritual healing had been powerful with patients suffering from varying degrees of what is in the modern world described as mental health problems. I could only sit and listen, picking up the fragments that I understood. But Charlie tired quickly, and I got the impression that trying to explain these things to me was burdensome to him.
I went to sleep that night thinking over what he had said. His reference to the Holy Spirit had stopped me dead in my tracks. This was a Christian concept, out of place in the vocabulary of a shaman. I thought what a clever old wolf trapper Charlie must have been in his time. The best trappers know how preternaturally intelligent the wolf is. Anything different or unnatural troubles him. To be ahead of the wolf you have to use his intelligence against him. So hunters will leave something on the wolf’s trails that will make the animal turn immediately from its chosen path and veer into the bush, where several trap lines are set for it. I wondered if Charlie had done the same thing by laying the Holy Spirit in my path, thus making me veer away from the subject of the spirit world entirely. Could I blame him if he had?
The next morning Debra and I went for a walk and I brought up the subject of the Holy Spirit with her. She smiled at my confusion. She explained that many native peoples accepted the ethics of the Christian world because they were close to their own, but they never relinquished their own spiritual understanding. Charlie spoke of the Holy Spirit because he saw me as a Christian; the idea of the Holy Spirit was the nearest he could come to help me understand. ‘Charlie was being polite and helpful,’ Debra said. ‘He felt you might not understand if he explained openly and honestly according to his own tradition and experience. Charlie has lived and worked in the white man’s world for a long time. He knows it as well as he knows his own.’ Many white people think of the native spiritual understanding as primitive and unevolved, but it is really the reverse. They absolutely know by experience that there is an invisible reality out there which coincides and interacts with our own. In comparison, the Christian view of spirituality is far removed.
We walked on, talking about our hosts. Debra was concerned about Charlie’s demeanour. ‘He is really not himself,’ she said. ‘Old age and being cooped up like a battery hen does not suit him. I suppose, for a man like Charlie to feel a loss of his “power” must be deeply frustrating.’ Debra signalled inverted commas with her fingers in the air at the word ‘power’.
I had noticed that Debra had openly referred to Lena as her ‘other mother’, or ‘my second mother’. At first I’d thought it was simply an affectionate name given that the two women had not seen each other for a long time and that Lena was indeed old enough to be her mother, but as the days passed I sensed there was something deeper to the exchange. I asked Debra about this.
‘I called Lena my other mother because of the link to my childhood and the homestead,’ she answered. ‘I grew up very much like what you see at Charlie and Lena’s minus the cultural difference and the rotting meat lying around. Lena is very much like the image I had of an ideal woman as a child. Women who knew how to dress and put on make-up never, ever impressed me. But a woman who can do what Lena does impresses me greatly. She is also a warm, smiling woman, and if I had a choice I would choose her before anyone else to be my mother. Imagine, a woman who can truly clothe you (by cleaning, tanning and sewing hides), truly feed you (by fishing, hunting and picking plants) and cook for you (she can cook on anything) – she doesn’t even use, let alone have, tin foil! She’s the kind of woman I grew up around, and there aren’t that many of them in the world. They are very precious.’
I thought I understood what she meant by Lena’s being ‘very precious’; I too had spent days in her dazzling company utterly bewitched by her. She was a seamless part of the fabric of this landscape. She lived a life of joyous equanimity in it, existing in intuitive harmony with the world she inhabited. You sensed that there was an invisible light shining around her and everything she did, the same way light catches a precious stone.
I continued talking with Debra about her own growing up in Alaska. She was very precise about her childhood and spoke of it with a sense of wonder. I could appreciate her connections with Lena.
‘As a child, starting at two years old, I had some pretty amazing numinous visions, but when I tried to tell anyone about them they didn’t know what I was talking about. My mother just laughed. When I finally realized that no-one could help explain them to me, I resigned myself to becoming a child. I didn’t feel like one at the time. I shut down the visions and made an oath that when I was old enough I would return to them to find out what they meant. The visions retreated, recurring occasionally to keep me from forgetting.
‘During that time, every time we drove to our
house in Anchorage we had a magnificent view of Mount Susitna, the Sleepy Lady in the distance on the far side of Cook Inlet. Somehow I came to believe that the land of the Fairy was on the other side of the mountain. I really believed it. When I was seven we built our homestead out in the bush on a land grant scheme for incoming settlers. We piled our gear in a boat and Joe Reddington took us across the inlet to the mouth of the Big Susitna River, which flows directly in front of the mountain. I had been so busy looking at everything along the banks that I didn’t realize we were so close to the mountain. When I finally looked up and saw her, she was at an odd angle and I got it into my head that we were passing around the mountain and entering the far side, the land of the Fairy. I was amazed and delighted because I really believed it. I believed that Joe was one of those magical people who conducted people from the regular world into the land of the Fairy. I knew not just anyone could do it, and I was in awe.
‘It got better. We left the river for a small, winding creek that eventually took us into the lake, Flathorn Lake, and the most amazing moment of my life took place. Stretched out along the lake, the mountain was mirrored perfectly by the lake. It was a stunning sight, and I knew that the lake was linked magically to the mountain and we were going to live there. It was years before I realized what had happened, but what arose from that was a firm belief in magic and fairies. Because I believed the world I lived in was the land of the Fairy and magic, it was magical. It still is. Everyone needs to realize that the world they live in is magical. A spiritual realm co-exists with our own. It acts upon ours and we can enter into it. So nature was my constant companion, and I regularly talked to the mountain about all my problems and feelings. She was my confidante. I knew she watched over me and kept me safe. I sent her lots of love and she sent a coverlet of love back to me. I regularly talked to all of nature – the lake, the plants, the bugs, the sand and dirt. It wasn’t as if I saw any spirits, it was more like a communion. Everything was alive and friendly. I never thought I could come to harm in that place because the world itself protected me. I hated to leave it.’
Though she spoke with such warmth about her childhood, I wanted to know more. What else could she recall about life on a homestead? She remembered how hard life was. But that was forty years ago. Her parents had practically no money. They took whatever work they could find, which was little enough at that time. The homestead was so far into the bush that it meant her father would be away for weeks at a time. When he returned, he worked long hours trying to build their home, which was no more than a cabin with compartments for cooking and sleeping. She had brothers and sisters and they all slept together. Because they were older than her and had no idea of the world she inhabited she was left pretty much to herself.
I pictured her remote cabin way out in the bush with no radio or communication link to the rest of the world. Her brothers would have had no time for their ‘dreaming’ little sister. Alone with a young family, the burden of survival must have been a great hardship to her mother. I imagined I could see Debra as a young child standing alone at the edge of the tree line her father had cut as a firebreak. Her mother would be too busy washing clothes in an old aluminium bath in which they also took turns to wash. Father was away, and the boys were off trying to catch fish to eat. Young Debra looked back on this human world from the edge of her own special world.
‘Were you very lonely?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she answered, her soft voice breaking with my reverie. ‘I was always alone, but I was never lonely. I don’t even remember having new clothes or special presents. But that was the way life was. I didn’t know anyone else so I thought everyone was like us.’
She explained more about the struggle to survive the winters and how the family lived off the land for shelter and sustenance. I kept thinking of the people who inhabited John Steinbeck’s novels: families pushed economically and emotionally to the margins of existence; people who were more shadow than substance, walking skeletons, clothed in destitution and despair. But Debra and her family finally made it. The family has long since left the homestead and created new lives for themselves far removed from the hardships of those early years. Her brothers are successful fishermen in Sitka, her father has retired to Hawaii and her mother and married sister live in Anchorage. Debra trained as a nurse and worked for many years with Third World charities. But only Debra ever returns to the homestead. It’s still there, just as she remembers it from her childhood. She likes it there, and she likes to be alone there. The magic is still there, more real and more tangible than in the past. And this time she knows and understands the veil through which she often passed. The homestead remains her home in more ways than one.
Debra and I decided to take a long hike inland, climbing up the gently sweeping landscape that led us away from the coastal fringe and Charlie’s fish camp. It was new territory for her, as it was for me. Our conversation hopped from one thing to another; it was like feeling out stepping-stones to cross a strange river. We crossed soggy tundra from which it was almost impossible to extricate your feet. We walked through a long tract of woodland that I was surprised to find so far north. When we cleared the trees the ground cover revealed a patchwork of exposed rock, dwarf conifers and swathes of low-growing sedges. Tussocks of cotton grass and the flowers of crowberry and bearberry bushes added texture and colour. The openness blew away the scavenging swarms of mosquitoes. The climb up through the trees had been more demanding than I’d expected. The strain on my legs and thigh muscles from dragging myself through the down-sucking wetlands had taken a lot out of me; the next climb through this patch of boreal forest with its bands of marauding mosquitoes had me suffocating in my own sweat.
We both sat on a great boulder with years of lichen and decay growing on it. It looked like a very faded old map that years of Arctic weathering had left almost indecipherable. It told us nothing of where we were or where we were going, only ghostly outlines of headlands, mountain ranges, dried-up courses of riverbeds and blue patches where imaginary seasonal lakes might have been.
‘Do you know where we are, or better still, how to get back?’ I asked.
Debra answered that she was pretty sure that if we returned by this route – she pointed at a different direction to the one we had taken – we should arrive back at the camp without too many problems. ‘You’ve just got to know your limitations in the wild,’ she added. ‘That way you always find your way back. Never believe that you are bigger than the bush. It can swallow you up faster than you can blink.’
I confessed I was glad she was with me. Navigating was something I was hopeless at.
For a while we sat still, letting the cool breeze fan us. The landscape stretched out before us was magnificent, the colours blurring up from it like strange fire, the burning reds and hot oranges and yellows of the forest floor; then out across the empty expanse of russet, soft browns and blends of green, and beyond the black blur of spruce stands the snow-covered mountains with their hints of pink and smoky blue. It was as if the aurora had dissolved down into the earth and was staining everything with its presence.
‘You haven’t told me where you want to go with this,’ Debra said out of the blue.
For a moment her query threw me. It seemed not in her nature to put herself forward with questions, but I sensed that what she was asking me was not about where our hike was taking us. We had been discussing many things as we negotiated our way upland; now here we were with the way ahead clear and inviting. It was still an upward climb, but the air was cooler and we could see the distance in front of us.
Debra and I had not really had much time to talk during our stay. She was always talking and ‘working’ on Charlie, or I was working for Lena or else off on my own, tramping around the place. In the evening we all sat together sharing food and stories. Yet something beyond my knowing or planning had impelled me to come to this place. And here I was, as lost psychologically and intellectually as I was geographically. I had planned to come here to live wit
h the Eskimo and learn something about their life and cultural understanding, but now the focus was away from them and on me.
‘I don’t really know, Debra,’ I said. ‘You are my guide on this trip in more ways than one.’ It was all I could think to say, and I knew Debra would understand.
‘Okay,’ she responded. ‘Maybe if I begin first with a healing it may help.’
I knew Debra’s proposal was only a step on this journey. She had remarked to me days ago that she saw I had some trouble with my back. It was true. I had had back pains come and go for a long time and had simply put it down to age, lack of fitness and being overweight. I jokingly remarked that maybe Lena was not working me hard enough.
‘I have seen you with her. You enjoy doing anything she asks, so don’t blame Lena. And all those things you mention might contribute to your problems. Remember, I was a nurse in another life, Brian.’
Humour was not going to let me off the hook, and before I could say anything else Debra suggested we find a place somewhere. I had no idea what kind of place might be suitable for a healing ceremony, but I suggested we climb further.
The going was easier now, without fallen trees or the dense growth of high summer to impede us. But, noticeably, a raven stalked us as we climbed. Occasionally I thought it was trying to attack us, making sweeping dives out of the sky and screaming some abuse just feet above our heads before flapping off to some rocky outcrop to monitor our ascent. Then he would be up in the air again, cawing out to us, before settling back down once more to watch. He did this several times over and I forgot my ideas about him attacking us. He seemed rather to be continually calling us onward. Every time we approached him he flapped up into the air and flew about backwards and forwards in front of us, as if tracing out an imaginary path while all the time seeming to be calling out with his throaty cackle, ‘C’mon, c’mon, slowcoaches, c’mon, c’mon!’ We climbed after him and his antics reduced our effort and speeded our progress.
