In September of 1821 a young farm laborer named Joseph Smith found golden tablets buried in the drumlin country a few miles north of Canandaigua, near the town of Palmyra. A guiding spirit enabled Smith to read the treasure text that lay close beneath the surface of the low-spun glacial hills.
Although the authority of Smith’s revelation lay in the realm of the unsolved mysteries of antiquity—the lost tribes of Israel, the hieroglyphic alphabet with its spooky symbols: the severed head, the pervasive eye—the substance of the revelation was recognizably local.
As The Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics recounts in 1951, “Having dug for fabled treasures among Indian mounds on the western frontier, Joseph Smith found a peek-stone . . . whereby ‘Joseph the Seer translated the reformed Egyptian of the plates of Nephi’ . . . The Nephites in their actions were the modern Redmen in disguise; in their mental habits they more closely resembled the local sectarians. Thus the speech of Nephi contains quotations from [a contemporary] Confessions of Faith and the speech of Lehi the heretical tenets charged against the Presbytery of Geneva, New York, in whose bounds Joseph himself lived.”
In 1848 two young girls heard noises in the night in their family’s rented house in Hydesville, a small farming village between Palmyra and Lyons. The noises, they said, were like the noise a hand makes rapping on the wall, the hand of a body buried in the basement. The ghost, whom they called Splitfoot, rapped out the answers to their questions in code. Quaker abolitionists in Rochester, believing that spirit manifestations were part of the natural human contact with the divine, heard about Kate and Margaret Fox and put the sisters on public display in a lecture hall in the dark. Strange knocking sounds were heard in the room. The word went out that in the Finger Lakes region there were “mediums,” natural conductors to the spirit world.
The spiritualist movement, which the Fox sisters unwittingly initiated in upstate New York, coincided with the popular perception of the discovery of electricity. The ritual of the’séance, described by Ann Braude in Radical Spirits, ensued as a sort of contemporary parody of an electrical schema, with a dozen men (natural positive charge) and women (negative) seated alternately around a table in the dark, creating a circuit. The ceremonies took their cue from the followers of the Viennese physician Franz Mesmer, who a hundred years before had investigated what he called animal magnetism, electrical currents that run through living things, and concluded that everything exists within a glittering field of magnetic electricity. Spirits were instinctively felt to manifest in much the same way that electrical currents traveling through conductors mysteriously created light.
In the 1850s thousands of people (usually women, with their potently receptive negativity) discovered that they too could be mediums, and conducted spiritualist’séances across the country, claiming to be able to draw back the dead in a theatrical whirl of clatter and flashing lights. Such ceremonies won converts throughout the scattered setdements of the West, in the concentrated intellectual circles of Boston and New York, and even in the White House, where Mary Todd Lincoln frantically tried to bring back her dead son.
By the time the Fox sisters confessed that Splitfoot was a joke, that they made the sounds themselves by cracking the bones in the knuckles of their feet, the spiritualist movement they had founded had spread around the world, giving rise to Madame Blavatsky’s theosophy and the Society of the Golden Dawn.
In the autumn of 1848 the Smithsonian Institution in Washington sent a group of men to the Finger Lakes region to report on what was left of the Seneca ruins. E. G. Squier wrote back that on the Castle Creek at Kanadesaga, where the grass was beautifully green, the apple trees of the Seneca Indians still grew. Though they had been girdled or cut down by Sullivan’s army, shoots had grown up from their roots and turned back into trees.
3
Hector
THE ROAD SOUTH along the east side of Seneca Lake traces the path of Sullivan’s march in reverse, through fields of corn and wheat, under the old black Lehigh Valley bridge, past our cottage row, and then the dark government signs warning the curious away from the officers’ quarters at the nuclear arms depot. A man I know lived in one of these houses when I was growing up, when his father worked as a munitions expert at the depot, where neutron bombs were secretly buried. Like his ancestor Joseph Smith, Gene Smith went on to bring treasure texts into the light of the world. He became a scholar of obscure languages and ultimately the Library of Congress representative in Asia. Smith was later credited with rescuing what has been called the largest body of philosophical writing on earth: thousands of manuscripts smuggled under the ragged clothes of refugees escaping over the mountains into India from the monasteries of Tibet, where the books were being burned. Smith arranged for the Indian government to trade them to the United States in exchange for shipments of surplus American grain.
As children we knew the depot chiefly for its imprisoned herd of white deer. Behind the high mesh fence along the highway we would see the strange deer slip out from between the trees, a vivid white in the soft blue light of evening. Scott Sampson, who wrote a hunting and fishing column for the local paper acted as game warden for the depot. Sampson once told me that the whiteness bred out of the streak in the tail. When the area was fenced in by the military in the 1940s a gradual mottling occurred over the yearly generations of trapped deer, until they were born white. This is what Sampson said, but we secretly believed that what was in the ground had altered them.
The state mental institution just south of the depot at Willard spooked us far more than the neutron bombs. We sometimes went to the town hall there for public hearings on the Indian land claims. The Cayuga were trying to get back the Finger Lakes National Forest, and, just north of Willard, Sampson State Park. The Indians would not have to follow state fishing regulations and everyone feared they would use gill nets and fish out the lake. A naval barge stationed offshore did depth tests on the elusive bottom, which was seven hundred feet down through layers of mud and sludge, making Seneca one of the deepest lakes in the world.
The road bends away from the shoreline at Willard along a cornfield sloping up to the town of Ovid and the roadside bar, the Golden Buck, where, in 1985, a girl wandered out into the night and was found the next day, stripped and dragged through the corn, her throat slit from ear to ear.
Farther south the land rises and becomes the Hector Land Use Area and the Finger Lakes National Forest, where once my father bought fifty acres as a kind of hunting camp on the Searsburg Road, the road that runs over the high escarpment tilting up toward the south between Seneca and Cayuga Lakes. The narrow lakes, a dense slate blue, lie embedded in the deep downward folds of the land, which rises up in the far distance on either side in a bluish-gold patchwork of terraced vineyards and sloping fields. It was, as my father liked to say, “God’s country”—a primitive place. Not many people lived there. Some who did lived in little tin-roofed houses made of doors.
On our land a mud path led through tall white pines, deliciously fragrant in the sun, to a shack of weathered boards in a wooded dip beside a creek. A dozen hives belonging to a migrant beekeeper who came through once a year were hidden back away through the trees. The place was so quiet that the sound of insects buzzing in the sun seemed to belong to the light itself, and I felt, walking in, the rare and wonderful sense of being utterly alone.
Hector was far enough away from people to see wild things. On the dry stony side of the creekbed in spring were efts the color of cinnabar flecked with gold, their eyed skin as soft as wet sand. The solitary stalk of a cardinal flower, its rare deep red the true scarlet of nature, would stand in the fresh green light of the wet wood like a hidden flag.
In such a place one was always concerned with what was hidden in the dense layered coloring of the forest, like a woodcock in a pile of dead leaves. We used to go to visit the bird carver, in his house near where the landfill is now. We had heard he had almost been beaten to death as an undercover narcotics agent for the state polic
e. When he was forced to retire on disability, his wife suggested he take up carving birds, sensing that for a hunter who had watched birds closely around the lake all his life carving would be an absorption much like hunting—a mental focus that would take him beyond restlessness and physical pain.
The first time we went to see him we asked if he had a blue heron. My mother had an affinity for this particular bird. We were always watching for herons on August nights when the sawbellies jumping for flies made liquid arcs of silver all across our shallow bay. The herons would fly by two by two just after the sun went down, moving low over the water like gigantic gray-winged bats in the dense orange light.
The bird carver had a heron, but he and his wife had hidden it away in a trailer outside. It was almost as though they were startled that the carving had come out so well—an original yet completely realistic representation that could only come from long familiarity and a dear individual perception of the bird itself. There was something precious about it, as there sometimes is about small things. The heron stood on its mirror patch among reeds they had made from wood peels and dried grass. I asked if he would make me a woodcock, and he did, hiding it as it is hidden in nature in a pile of leaves, looking like the leaves themselves, though in miniature the bird had a jewel-like quality, faintly tinged as though shadowed over with blue—the kind of bird only a local hunter would know where to find.
My parents got a letter last summer from a man who wrote, “You probably don’t remember me, but I knew your son David twenty-five years ago. I am writing this at 4:00 in the morning. I just woke up from a dream. In the dream I saw David, still young, and said to my wife, ‘That’s the guy I told you about from Philmont.’ It just made me so sad.”
The man told the story of how one day, when their scout troop was camping in the mountains of New Mexico, they were being taught how to fly-fish. None of them could catch anything, though they tried for much of the day. When they were resting in their tents in the late afternoon he heard someone shout. My brother David, who had brought his own tackle, was pulling trout out of the stream every time he threw in his line. David said, pointing to the place in the stream where he was casting, “This is the kind of place fish like.”
The man wrote he’d never seen anything like it—a boy who was just like the rest of them, but saw something in the landscape that they didn’t see.
This was the kind of hidden thing one came to Hector to find. For years I thought I would make the place my home, and gradually assembled a heap of supplies in the shack—a kerosene lamp, a shovel, matches, an ax. I kept a little black notebook there for over a decade.
A deer path on the edge of the woods led to a small lake where aspen trees, the pale silver green of lichen, stood in a line on a narrow tongue of land in the water, the white undersides of their leaves tipping up in the wind. One night I brought my sleeping bag down to the lake near the mass of cattails on the shore. The ground was damp and cold, and I lay awake with a sense of the impenetrable hardness of the white, cold stars. In the middle of the night, a pounding vibration rose in the earth beneath me in the dark. I lay rigid as I felt it grow steadily stronger through my skin. As the running animal neared the place where I lay, it stopped and pawed the ground, then galloped away. In the morning I saw its track: a large buck on its way to the water to drink.
In Hector I sometimes saw a dozen or more crows settle on the branches of a tree in the forest, surrounding some large light-feathered bird. The crows would call out sharply in a circle, as though the sharpness of their voices in chorus could hurt the solitary hawk or owl, which sat silent and still in their midst. It was the mirror image of a line I knew, and it delighted me to think that what I saw was a common sight even in the fifth century B.C., for the line was from Pindar:
Sophos o polla eidos phua
Mathontes de labroi pagglossia
Korakes os, akranta garueton
Dios pros ornika theon.
I liked to translate the Greek:
The one who knows is one who knows much in his own nature,
Those who learn are like crows, squawking at an eagle,
The silent bird of God
but it wasn’t especially accurate, for in Greek, as usual, the words meant more than one thing. Sophos, for example, later comes to mean philosopher, but Pindar was using it here of himself, in its original meaning of poet. Pindar was a professional poet, working on commission, but what he was after here was the archaic sense of someone who is privy to some mystery or secret and can crystallize that secret into words—poet in the sense of its origin in the Greek poiew, to make, to make out of thin air a mirror, a name to catch the soul of a living thing.
Sufi is commonly thought to come from suf, the Arabic word for wool, for the Sufis were essentially a wandering monastic order and like the early monks wore wool as a constant torment against their naked skin. But Sufi can also be traced to sophos in this original meaning of one who has a mystical inner knowledge. In Pindar’s terms this knowledge was of nature, the living world. The sophos was “a man who with a bird finds his way to all his instincts / he hath heard the Lion’s roaring, and can tell / what his horny throat expresseth and to him the tiger’s yell / Comes articulate and presseth / On his ear like mother-tongue.”
Eidos could be translated as knowing, but it is the participle for the primary verb “to see.” “The sophos is the one who sees” is the literal meaning, who knows how to see, while the crows, Pindar’s rivals and critics, can only hope to learn the imitative superficial knowledge suggested by the word mathontes, math, and hence are of one plain common voice, their coarse unmusical cries clumsily going after a mystery that remains to them forever silent, like the large light-feathered bird hidden in the forest tree.
The empathy of crows was a remarkable thing to see. I once lay in the grass having just come out of the lake and was muddy and smelled of the mossy green water when I heard a strange long plaintive call from the trees. The trees were filled with crows. The voices of two or more would stretch and bend, then blend together and be answered by crows all around, as in a kind of beautiful mourning.
One day as David and I walked in the woods a flat red sun burned through the trees. We came to the edge of the forest where it opened onto a broken old apple orchard we had never seen before. The smell of damp earth, the sweetness of maples and pines in the air rising in the cool of evening impressed themselves upon me with a vividness that I remember with utter transparency, as though it were freedom itself.
There are three jewels in its forehead like kernels of amber, and a white sticky powder on it at first. The joints of its wings are turquoise. Its wings are wet and folded back like the ridges of oyster shells. There are little fine hairs on its face and back. Its feet are struggling hard now. The thorax heaves and curls. The new legs unbend and feebly scratch.
The cicada and the chestnut come out of their shells in the same way. She makes a platform on the breakfast table for the cicada to pull itself out of its shell. It bursts its shell very slowly, by breathing. Like labor in reverse.
Out beekeeping today with Bob Kime. He tells me in winter they dive into the sun-streaked snow, mistaking it for the sky and skid across it on their wings until they die of exhaustion or bury themselves, the little golden bulbs of their bodies throbbing as they sting the air.
Today we swept them into clouds with our new air-gun but they were too lethargic to react and mob us, and they crawled into knotted heaps on the ground, spinning up piles of dead leaves. We sat in our netted helmets under the young beech trees and met some hunters going by with terrible-looking arrows.
“I love making you talk.
Why, you could be run over by a hippopotamus
and you’d never say nothing about it,
n’less somebody said ‘Was you run over by a hippopotamus?’
and you’d say, ‘Yeah. I was.’”
The white, thready form of an infant squirrel
was being eaten by the stream
.
Day after day it trembled back and forth
over the bed of rock in the cold, wrinkling water,
that, drying up in the late spring
never quite carried it away.
I saw an otter in the snow today
and crows on the ice
and thousands of geese.
Everything is blue and gold
and blue and gold
with berries stuck like drops of blood
to the trees.
Oh, Adam, shall I show you the tree of eternity
and a kingdom that does not pass away?
“Glorious isn’t it—the trees. I love trees.
I could drive all day and look at nothing but trees.
Those sumacs a few days ago were bright scarlet.
Now they’ve had it.
‘The sumac army climbed the hill . . .’”
Aunt Dorothy pulls my hand and with her cane goes
down the path to Otter Lake after some gorgeous
pink-red maple leaves.
“This is the last I’ll see of the autumn leaves,”
she says. “Look at that desolate countryside–
all those rocks.”
“I love to see the leaves on the ground. They look like
they’re hugging the ground, keeping it warm
for the winter.
All of one’s life is a beautiful pattern, like any kind of growth. I have the image in my mind of a plant that eats light and things invisible to us and, materializing them, branches forever away from its core, yet is bound to it, and has its ultimate predictable boundaries: invisible, yet where the growth will go. Always in spasms it blossoms and leaves in fragile fast-fading forms, then withers back into itself with only a tracery, the subliminal skin under the new bark, of what was.
Wolves & Honey Page 3
