The West Will Swallow You

by Leath Tonino

  What it comes down to is the liminal mode, the edge-of-unconscious state of being, the twilighty threshold. Sometimes a winter wren’s mad crackly song mixes with babbling human voices rising from the depths of my psyche. Sometimes sandhill cranes visit me, pausing for a second—or an hour, or a season—to rest on the flooded fields of my insides. Sometimes (as with the goshawk work) I wake groggy, confused, and there’s a predatory monster, blood on the curved beak, so close.

  Am I still asleep? Does it even matter?

  An admittedly odd activity, yes, but that’s not to say oneiric ornithology (oneiros is the Greek word for “dream”) lacks sympathetic friends. As a motto or mission statement, I borrow the following from Nan Shepherd, a Scottish author who was devoted to experiencing the Cairngorms, her chosen range, via every possible angle: “No one knows the mountain completely who has not slept on it. As one slips over into sleep, the mind grows limpid; the body melts; perception alone remains. These moments of quiescent perceptiveness before sleep are among the most rewarding of the day. I am emptied of preoccupation, there is nothing between me and the earth and sky.”

  Birdnapping is special for countless reasons: It invites a prolonged engagement with particular beds (forests, meadows, those overgrown corners of San Francisco, etc.); it counterbalances the rush-go-strive mentality that in our culture too often infects purportedly “chill” hobbies; and it embraces everybody from the tired toddler to the somnolent senior by deemphasizing the importance of skill and expertise. If I had to choose one single aspect to celebrate, though, it would definitely be Shepherd’s “nothing between me and,” her notion of the discerning, objectifying, separating intellect dissolving away so that a new appreciation of connectivity can emerge.

  Which reminds me of another quote, this from Robert Aitken, the late Hawaiian writer and Zen priest who I suspect would have enjoyed the playful adventure of a nap with his local mynahs and waxbills: “Drowsy contentment may be a condition close to realization. It is a kind of emptiness, of nondifferentiation, where the ten directions melt: inside and outside become one.”

  Wait a second, you might be thinking. Did this kooky guy just liken Buddhist enlightenment to yawning with the aves? Fair enough. It’s probably time for a scene, an anecdote to return my highfalutin theorizing back to earth.

  April. The Sonoma coast. Toes sifting sand. I’d been panning with binos most of the morning, picking surf scoters out of curling green waves, teasing pelagic cormorants from the glinting, sun-struck Pacific. Squinting hard, I spotted a wavering line about half a mile from the shore, so faint as to be nearly invisible. With considerable tuning of the focus and furrowing of my brow, the line eventually resolved into a fluid chain of birds, hundreds of them, bill to tail to bill to tail to bill to tail. Pacific loons? A tingle zipped the length of my spine. Pacific loons migrating south from Alaska! I hadn’t identified this species in the field before. In my life as a conventional birder, it was a personal achievement, a distinct satisfaction.

  I watched until my brain hurt, fifteen or twenty minutes, then took a break to ponder. Regardless of whether I spotted them, those loons would be out there, tracing the coast, pushing south at the limit of sight. How much is flying past us all the time? How many of nature’s thrilling spectacles are we missing? A lot is missed because we fail to look, because we fail to pay attention. But perhaps a lot more is missed because we look too hard, because we avoid that edge, that border where the noticing takes on an entirely different quality. Says the narrator (a natural historian) in a short story by Barry Lopez: “I developed methods of inquiry, although I appeared to be doing nothing…. I appeared completely detached…. I appeared to be asleep. But I was not.”

  Tucking the binos into their case, I settled my head against the beach, welcoming that wild spectacle—that flow of feathers along the continent’s margin—to pass through the part of me I do not own, control, understand, or need to understand. And when I woke a while later, having dreamed something powerful, something important, something that was made of parts but moved as one, something that was ultimately old and yet ultimately new, something I couldn’t quite remember, couldn’t quite name—there it was. Still flowing. A wavering line connecting the faraway to the now, the here.

  The Anthropological Aesthetic

  Over the past couple of months, I have galloped across Comancheria with the Texas Rangers, discovered lost Epicurean manuscripts in the company of the Renaissance humanist Poggio Bracciolini, and contemplated the cloud-reflecting Yangtze alongside ancient Chinese poets. I am an omnivorous bibliophile—sonnets, satires, you name it. So long as the words sing to the heart and the lines click together in the mind like puzzle pieces—so long as it’s “good” writing, painstakingly fashioned to generate some intellectual-emotional movement within me—I’ll read and read, regardless of subject.

  Strange, then, given this appreciation of literary artistry, that the best book I’ve encountered in some time is a monotonous, encyclopedia-style academic text originally published in 1933 as part of the decidedly obscure Bulletin of Milwaukee Public Museum series. Miwok Material Culture: Indian Life of the Yosemite Region, written by a pair of University of California anthropologists and based on interviews with “Native informants,” should be a total snooze. Outside of a few ivory tower–dwellers, primitive-skills enthusiasts, and families descended from Miwok stock, who cares that a decoction of skullcap was utilized as a wash for sore eyes? Or that acorn mush was deemed “insipid” without an accompaniment of seed meal? Or that the Plains, Southern, Central, and Northern dialect groups each had their own unique terms for the twined burden basket?

  Turns out that I care, intensely, and if you’re an omnivorous bibliophile, that’s big news. There’s a certain aesthetic at work in Miwok, what I’ve taken to calling the Anthropological Aesthetic. This is über-nonfiction, nonfiction that goes so far into reality it becomes a subspecies of art, a poem-myth about methods, knowledges, possibilities. Not merely beautiful—it’s useful.

  I don’t want to oversimplify things by saying that the American Empire is collapsing, dragging much of nature down with it, but I can’t deny that, looking around, absorbing the news and the sights, it often feels as though I’m falling. What to reach for? Melville? Tolstoy? Vanity Fair? Calvin and Hobbes? How about a book that gazes forward and backward at the same time? To borrow a phrase from the late Arizona writer Charles Bowden: “memories of the future.”

  I found Miwok at a yard sale three years ago and bought it for a dime, mostly because the cover—a black-and-white photograph from 1880 of two painted, deadpan, headdress-wearing fellows—was intriguing and a little spooky. Over the past handful of summers, I’ve explored what previously was the core of the Sierra Miwok’s territory (a swath of “Gold Country” running from Mariposa in the south to Placerville in the north), but I never intended to formally study the landscape or its residents. The book was one more volume on a crowded shelf, that’s all.

  Last winter, needing something to browse at the breakfast table—and why not something with pictures of obsidian blades, deer-bone awls, soaproot brushes, willow cradles, and dance skirts made of magpie feathers?—I gave Miwok a try. To my surprise, I was swiftly transported to a vivid world, one that sprang from the empty spaces between the dusty facts.

  Women wearing hides chatted as they milled nuts in a bedrock mortar, coppery sunlight on their bare shoulders. An entire hungry village circled a meadow for a grasshopper drive, beating the insects toward pits and smudge fires. A hundred pairs of hands worked sinew and milkweed fiber and grapevine withes and steatite and soil, crafting from raw earth—from nothing but raw earth—a richly nuanced way of life.

  Manzanita cider.

  Walnut dice games.

  Shamans shaking butterfly-cocoon rattles.

  By the time I finally made it from the breakfast table to the couch, I was hooked, my plans for the day shot. Come evening, the book was finished and I was exhausted, most every page dog-eared an
d exuberantly underlined.

  Wanting to better understand the word-magic of the Anthropological Aesthetic, I picked Miwok up recently and reread it, cover to cover. As with the fantasy and sci-fi stories that captivated me as a kid, for the bulk of twenty-four hours I inhabited an alternate reality. But here’s the wondrous thing—it’s a real reality, not a make-believe realm. Visiting the quarry at Lotowayaka, observing the tattooing of an adolescent girl, these allow for the most expansive, important, and enlivening thought a person can think: There are other ways to live, to be. Our way right now, with its glowing screens and nature-deficit disorder, its drone strikes and La-Z-Boys, its Republicans and Democrats, its dollars and distraction, is not the only way. That may seem obvious, but it’s depressingly easy—and dangerous—to forget.

  Other ways? To live? To be? Sweet blessed breath of fresh air and perspective! Miwok provides what Malcolm Margolin, publisher of the magazine News from Native California, has described as “glimpses of almost forgotten aspects of our own selves.”

  Still, the question remains: How does a basic text—not a masterfully told narrative or entertaining yarn—cast such a compelling spell? The answer lies, I think, in another quote, this from the Montana writer William Kittredge: “Listings are attempts to make existence whole and holy in the naming.”

  The no-frills Miwok—essentially a 150-page ladder of paragraphs with rungs labeled “Salt,” “Ear and Nose Piercing,” and “Dogs,” to mention but a few—is surely meant to be consulted, not read straight through. When we do read it page by page, though, its thousands of super-specific details create a pattern of daily life, of cycling seasons, of humans in place. This survey of material culture isn’t limited to tools and ornaments; it encompasses everything from the proper technique for harvesting Pinus sabiniana’s cones (twist them off when they’re green), to how people should treat their hair during a period of mourning (cut it and bury the locks beside the deceased). There’s a hypnotic, incantatory quality to the relentless iterations: X was stone-boiled or roasted in ashes, whereas Y was exclusively boiled, whereas Z was parched, pounded, and eaten dry.

  On the other hand, what this survey of material culture omits (in addition to characters, plot, and similar devices) is any commentary on the meaning of the artifacts and techniques documented. I’ve come to believe that this absence of interpretation—this vacuum around the bare, skeletal facts—is actually integral to the functioning of the Anthropological Aesthetic.

  George Saunders, the lauded contemporary fiction writer, says he aggressively cuts from his stories so that readers are forced to fill in the gaps and engage. In Miwok, the novelist’s imperative “show, don’t tell” is pushed to an extreme. For example, the section “Taking of Fishes” offers a tantalizing reference to rainbow trout “caught by hand in the holes along the banks of creeks and rivers.” That’s it. No thoughts. No daydreams. No hint of interior life, of a real individual standing motionless in cold water, performing what most of us today consider an impossible task.

  Critics might accuse a book like this of draining a culture’s vitality by presenting its flutes instead of its tunes, its bead necklaces minus the ceremonies they adorned. But this spare treatment is precisely what can spark a whole and holy existence in the imagination. How does it feel to stare for hours into a swirling eddy, waiting for a shadowy piscine flicker? And what is it like to snap awake, the trance of focus broken, a rainbow trout glittering in your fist? To find out, Miwok insists, we must wade into the current ourselves.

  As mentioned earlier, the highest pleasure of reading is, for me, a synchronized movement of the intellect and the emotions. The epiphany of “other ways” is primarily mental. What of that red muscle pulsing inside the chest?

  In the introductory pages of Miwok, a truth most of us would rather avoid forces itself upon the heart with words like “disrupted,” “impacted,” “depleted,” “vanished.” Of the numerous California tribes displaced and decimated by white settlers and soldiers, we learn that the Sierra Miwok were arguably “the greatest sufferers because the principal gold-bearing regions lay in their territory.” It’s a familiar story, one of intricately textured inhabitation and catastrophic violence. Miwok doesn’t tell it outright, moving briskly to the fire drills and arrow straighteners and coyote-skin pillows, but nonetheless the story haunts the margins of each page.

  I encountered this very ghost during a June backpacking trip in the Stanislaus National Forest, on the Sierra’s western slope: Douglas firs, granite outcrops, northern flickers galore. Back in the day, these ridges and valleys were also home to an animal called Homo sapiens. Now the land is a federally protected wilderness area where a guy needs a permit to walk and sleep. Times change, as they say. And cultures, for sometimes ghastly reasons, disappear.

  On that trip, there were moments charging uphill when I felt as if my heart would explode. It’s just the exercise, I told myself, just the cardio. But then, hitting some incredible vista, I’d want to both weep and laugh: for the beauty of the land, for the sadness of the land, for the memory—which is the future possibility—of humankind living on and with and as a part of the land. At those moments, I pulled out a certain dog-eared, exuberantly underlined book, took a seat, and read a page at random.

  Brush assembly house.

  Digging stick.

  Warriors in grass caps.

  Thank you, I said aloud, remembering that morning at the breakfast table, the cover falling open to reveal a whole and holy world I didn’t yet know that I badly needed to read, and read again, and keep reading.

  Snowberry.

  Moccasin.

  Grizzly bear.

  Thank you, I said, standing up, shouldering my pack, pushing deeper into the range—into that world and this world and the next world, all at once.

  Thoughts after an Owl

  Yesterday, wandering at dusk in the brown hills that rise from this condo-sprawl called Palm Springs, California, I spent half an hour with a long-eared owl. I tell you most sincerely that there are few creatures as stirringly strange and spookily stirring and mystically mystical as birds from the order Strigiformes. Very much the griffin of legend, these birds—that is if the griffin of legend upped its weirdness by a factor of 15.

  Dinosaur feet. Shaggy sheep legs. A body of feathers and fur and leaves and twigs and shattered bits of light and shadow. Of course, the face is part human, part cat, part seal, and affixed to a head that seemingly twists 360 degrees. If that’s not enough, this vision, this being, this power, my how it launches into the air and glides silently on—no, can’t be possible—on forty inches of wing!

  I hate to make a bold statement (hyperbole, my nemesis, my temptress), but it feels more and more that every single time I go outdoors I am buckling up for a borderline hallucinatory experience. The natural world just does not fail to provoke in me awe, wonder, vibes of fear, tingles of trepidation, and a kind of meditative drift-state wherein all the senses knit all their sense-data together to form a kind of synesthetic carpet, a magic rug on which I sail off to who knows where. Did I tell you about the desert blister beetles I met recently, Lytta magister in nasty gooey sexed-up swarms? As Harvey, my old jolly antique-tractor-collecting neighbor from childhood in Vermont would say, Sheeeit. To spend ten minutes with these beetles, sheeeit, you better be buckled, maybe even helmeted.

  A week ago, hiking solo in that same dessicated, rugged, so-brown labyrinth of hills, that topographic maze flanking the Palm Springs shitstrip (sheeeitstrip) of megachurches, payday loan pawnshops, car dealerships, windborne litter, bearded men masticated by a brutal economic system and subsequently regurgitated onto the street with only junk-filled shopping carts to call home—hiking solo in them thar wacky hills, I couldn’t even put my hand down to touch things, like curious rock-things or plant-things or stick-things.

  The reason I couldn’t touch, say, a funky stick that drew my attention, and that a part of me did badly want to touch, was because my hand, my flesh, my integumen
t, was scared to do so. It was like these hands, which are so friggin’ sensitive, would gather too, too, too much information, too, too, too much vital presence and place-specific truth. My feet were sheltered by leather, soled with rubber. My body needed that mediation. The hands, though, were and are naked, literally naked, naked nonstop.

  It’s interesting, don’t you agree? We all recognize that if you show up at work buckass birthday-suit nude, the entire experience will get awkward, intense. Pause here. Consider. That’s what your hands do each day! They live outside, with nothing to hide behind. Bushwhacking around last week, as mentioned, was odd indeed: I was nervous to even lay a wee digit on this dry freaky earth.

  Granted, there was probably one more thing at play, which is the prickliness and poisonousness of the desert, the possibility of camouflaged snakes and spiders and scorpions and whatnot (the equivalent in the mossy green Vermont of my youth would be putting your hand down on an obese slug, a rotting possum, a sodden deer carcass). And that right there loops to my initial point regarding the nearly hallucinatory quality of a simple, routine, back-of-the-sheeeitstrip-at-dusk walk: Any moment it can feel like some griffin or mystical face is about to pop out and zap you with huge yellow eyes. It can feel like a stick beneath your hand might not be a stick but rather the body of a serpent, or a mass of writhing ants, or some small somebody who has a soul and a voice and will speak across the self/other boundary. It can feel like you might be encountering—the divine?

  Once, camping on and with a blocky Colorado mountain, heart of winter, blue moonlight washing over snow, me sitting in that snow, no tent, no plan, just sitting there in the middle of the clear-cold night’s vast crystalline silence, a fox pawed up within five feet, looked me in the eye, hung out, swung its tail, then walked away. I will repeat that: A blue moony fox faced my face, eyed my eye, hung out, came rushing in (the sparking electric current of unadulterated perception!), then walked away.