A Field Guide to Getting Lost (17 page)

I
was carrying the tortoise in both hands, holding it out in front of me like an altar boy’s Bible or a divining rod as I walked around the periphery of the room. Each plate of its ruddy shell was distinct. It leaked as I carried it. More water came forth than a tortoise that size could possibly store. The creature was a fountain, a cleft rock in my hands, and when I awoke I realized that the room in which I paced was my childhood bedroom.

I had been wandering through that house every now and again ever since I’d left it at age fourteen. A quarter century had passed, and I still wasn’t out of it, in my dreams. It was a classic suburban house of its era, single-story, L-shaped. The houses children draw look like faces with upstairs windows for eyes and a door for a mouth. They have a solidity and a centrality that makes them home as the head is home. This house, with its public rooms that opened one into another as though they were only distended passageways and its bedrooms appendix-like cul-de-sacs, had no center, but my psyche was stuck in it. The previous owners’ plantings all around it were strange, exotic, bottlebrush and artificial strawberry tree, a spruce the same powder blue as the corduroy pants boys wore then, succulents and other plants that were nameless, unrecognizable, inedible, with shiny leaves or spiky ones. One plant up a narrow side plot in perpetual shade bloomed annually with a single colossal lily that looked as though it were made of crumpled black leather from some thin-skinned creature. In front of each of the two children’s bedrooms facing the street was a misshapen juniper, and at night the headlights of passing cars made the shadows of their branches whirl around the walls like pterodactyls. Awnings, eaves, and patio roof prevented sunlight from reaching in directly to this place made of formica and tile and linoleum and dark green wall-to-wall carpeting with a nap like aerial photographs of forests. Everything about it seemed to be made of chilly alien materials, and the swimming pool was strangest of all.

The pool was unheated, too cold for skinny kids to jump in most of the year, but it always needed sweeping and skimming to get the dirt and debris out, and the tools for doing that were fantastically long, like cutlery for a Behemoth with its head up in the clouds. It was the usual pale turquoise with a pink cement rim that abraded bare feet and the sharp smell of chlorine emanating from its waters. There’s something fearful and mysterious about every body of water, murky water that promises unseen things in unseen depths, clear water that shows you the bottom far below as if you could fall into it, though the water would buoy you up in that strange space neither air nor ground. The term “a body of water” is apt, for here was a mysterious body thirty feet long, eight feet tall at the far end, a transparent captive into whose depths you could throw yourself. Even the lightest breeze patterned the water on the surface, and the sun turned those patterns into strange skeins of light that fled across the bottom, endless nets cast across a fishless sea. Afterward I dreamed over and over of the pool as well as the house. It was as though I couldn’t find my way out of the house, as though I was still lost in it, but the pool was less part of the labyrinth than its holy well.

Terrible things happened in that house, though not particularly unusual or interesting ones; suffice to say there’s a reason why therapists receive large hourly sums for listening to that kind of story. Or maybe there’s one thing to say, about the capitalism of the heart, the belief that the essences of life too can be seized and hoarded, that you can corner the market on confidence, stage a hostile takeover of happiness. It’s based on scarcity economics, the notion or perhaps the feeling that there’s not enough to go around, and the belief that these intangible phenomena exist in a fixed quantity to be scrambled for, rather than that you can only increase them by giving them away. A story can be a gift like Ariadne’s thread, or the labyrinth, or the labyrinth’s ravening Minotaur; we navigate by stories, but sometimes we only escape by abandoning them.

Some years ago, I dreamed that my mother had fixed up the house, or had done so in dream terms, heavy-handed ones: the swimming pool was surrounded by broken glass, the bathroom had two sunken tubs shaped like coffins, and my own small bedroom had been brightly repainted with a line of dancing skeletons on one wall. I dreamed of my father every now and again too, and long after his death, not long after the hermit taught me to shoot, there was a period in which I told him to stand back because I was armed. After this series of victories, he became harmless. Clearly, I was getting somewhere over the years. I took over the master bedroom and decided to move, I drove the family out of my own room, and then came the dream of the tortoise.

In dreams, nothing is lost. Childhood homes, the dead, lost toys all appear with a vividness your waking mind could not achieve. Nothing is lost but you yourself, wanderer in a terrain where even the most familiar places aren’t quite themselves and open onto the impossible. But the morning after I carried the leaking tortoise, I knew I was no longer stuck in the house. The weight of a dream is not in proportion to its size. Some dreams are made of fog, some of lace, some of lead. Some dreams seem to be made out of less the usual debris of the psyche than bolts of lightning sent from outside.

I wondered where the tortoise came from. I remembered riding a Galapagos tortoise in a zoo when I was two, remembered a box turtle my middle brother had as a pet, and the small red slider turtles painted up for Easter back when animal cruelty standards were lower, read about how the Zuni think of turtles as the spirits of the dead returned, noticed that every image of turtles and tortoises had a sort of pull on me. Months passed before I remembered an encounter with a desert tortoise almost a decade earlier, when I was camping in the Mojave with a few other women. I saw the full-grown tortoise in the center of a secondary road near Death Valley and stopped my truck. We got out to look at it, and I recited what I knew: that it is bad to touch these creatures, because they are stressed by the transformation of their environment, vulnerable to illness and to infection, particularly to a respiratory disorder, and touching could contaminate them. In crisis, they sometimes void all their stored water, water slowly extracted from leaves and gulped up from puddles after hard rain, water that can make up to forty percent of their body weight, and losing their water is a crisis itself.

But they are also prone to being run over by cars and off-road vehicles throughout their territory, the Mojave and western Colorado deserts. We watched the tortoise, which had stopped when we did, watched a few approaching cars in the distance, and then I took out a clean dish towel and, with the dish towel between my hands and its shell, lifted the creature. It had retracted its head and limbs, and so I carried a heavy dust-colored dome with each plate etched in concentric lines, a mosaic of mandalas. Holding it before me, I strode about fifty feet into the scrubby desert and set it down facing in the direction it had been going. Put down, it walked again with an odd tipping motion, its shell lurching a little with each step. One of the most famous Buddhist tales is about a pair of monks sworn to keep apart from women. One day they come to the edge of a turbulent river. A woman there implores them to help her cross—old fables are short on athletic women—and one of them carries her through the waters. After the two monks have been walking for some time on the farther shore, the other monk reproaches him for breaking his vows. His companion replies, “Why are you still carrying her? I put her down on the far side of the river.” Several years after that little encounter in the desert, I was still carrying the tortoise, but it had become a compass, a visa, an amulet.

The desert tortoise is in danger of extinction—it officially received “threatened” status from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1990—because of human encroachments. The causes of its diminishing numbers are many. Nonnative plants have disrupted its diet, and grazing animals, dogs, vehicles, development, military bases have all had their impact, as has the widespread capturing of the creatures for pets. An increase in garbage dumps in the desert has vastly increased the raven population, and ravens prey on young tortoises during the five years or so before their shells harden sufficiently to protect them. (The hermit once found a young tortoise with severe pecking wounds in its shell; he brought it home and called in a zoo veterinarian he knew to try to save it with kitchen-sink surgery—I was away then, and he delivered telephone reports on “Miss Tortoise” for a few days, then told me that “Miss Tortoise didn’t make it.”) The desert tortoise can go for more than a year without food or water, hibernates several months a year in its colder northern reach, stays in its cool burrow during the hottest part of summer, seldom roams more than a mile from its burrow, walks slowly, lives slowly, to a great age, upward of a century. They have existed for sixty million years or so. The plan to save them is designed to give them a fifty percent chance of existing in five hundred years. The government is unwilling to dedicate more resources or curtail more activities than make the odds even.

In 1919, a young ethnographer fell in love with a blacksmith from the Chemehuevi tribe whose large territory is the heart of tortoise habitat. The blacksmith, George Laird, was already forty-eight, and as a boy he had learned much lore that was being forgotten and lost and diluted. The winter he was sixteen—about 1888—he nursed a man in the agonizing last stages of syphilis, and the dying man taught the boy a purer form of their language and “filled the long, sleepless nights with tales of the Immortals, the pre-human Animals Who Were People, told with great style and elegance.” During the twenty-one years the Chemehuevi man and the ethnographer, Carobeth Laird, were inseparable, she learned the language, the songs, and the stories he knew, and long after he died, when she herself was old, she turned her notes and memories into a book of ethnography. Of the tortoise, she recorded, “This reptile was desirable for food, but it also had a peculiar aura of sacredness. It was and is to this day symbolic of the spirit of the People. ‘A Chemehuevi’s heart is tough, like the turtle’s.’ This ‘tough-heartedness’ is equated with the will and the ability to endure and to survive.” But the tortoise is not surviving us well.

It is in the nature of things to be lost and not otherwise. Think of how little has been salvaged from the compost of time of the hundreds of billions of dreams dreamt since the language to describe them emerged, how few names, how few wishes, how few languages even, how we don’t know what tongues the people who erected the standing stones of Britain and Ireland spoke or what the stones meant, don’t know much of the language of the Gabrielanos of Los Angeles or the Miwoks of Marin, don’t know how or why they drew the giant pictures on the desert floor in Nazca, Peru, don’t know much even about Shakespeare or Li Po. It is as though we make the exception the rule, believe that we should have rather than that we will generally lose. We should be able to find our way back again by the objects we dropped, like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, the objects reeling us back in time, undoing each loss, a road back from lost eyeglasses to lost toys and baby teeth. Instead, most of the objects form the secret constellations of our irrecoverable past, returning only in dreams where nothing but the dreamer is lost. They must still exist somewhere: pocket knives and plastic horses don’t exactly compost, but who knows where they go in the great drifts of objects sifting through our world?

Once I found a locket with a crescent moon and star spelled out in rhinestones on one face, unreadably intricate initials on another, and two ancient photographs inside, and someone must have missed it terribly but no one claimed it, and I have it still. Another time, traveling down a river in one of the last great wildernesses, a roadless place the size of Portugal, I lost a sock early in the trip and a pair of sunglasses later, and I think of them littering that wilderness so clear of such clutter, there still or found by someone who might have wondered as I did about the woman with the locket. On that trip I leaned over the side of the raft and stared straight down for hours at the floor of that river whose name almost no one knows that flows into another little-known river, stared at thousands of stones, hundreds of thousands of millions of stones sliding by, gray, pink, black, gold, under the clearest water in the whole world, floating for miles and days on water I drank straight out of the river. Material objects witness everything and say nothing. Animals say more. And they are disappearing.

That things should be lost to our knowledge is one thing, in which we don’t know where we are or they are; that things should be lost from the earth is another. There is a strange crossroads these days, between the actual and the known. Biologists estimate that about 1.7 million species are known, but that there are between 10 and 100 million on earth. Our discovery and categorization of species increases at a manic rate, but so does the disappearance of both known and unknown species. More is known; there is less to know; we lose both what we know and what we don’t. It is certain that species are vanishing without ever having been known to science. To think about this is to imagine the space inside our heads expanding but the places outside shrinking, as though we were literally devouring them.

In dreams I have been an eagle and a green finch, have met a three-headed coyote, wolves, foxes, lynxes, dogs, lions, songbirds, fish, snakes, cattle, seals, many horses and cats, some who talk, a woman giving birth by cesarean to a full-grown stag that ran away, still wet with the juices of birth, down a dark, tree-shrouded road, a gazelle fawn that a woman breast-fed, a brown bear who married a woman. “They are all beasts of burden in a sense,” Thoreau once remarked of animals, “made to carry some portion of our thoughts.” Animals are the old language of the imagination; one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech. A man once told me that much of my writing was about loss, that that was how I imagined the world, and I thought about that comment for a long time. In that sense of loss two streams mingled. One was the historian’s yearning to hang onto everything, write everything down, to try to keep everything from slipping away, and the historian’s joy in retrieving out of archives and interviews what was almost forgotten, almost out of reach forever. But the other stream is the common experience that too many things are vanishing without replacement in our time. At any given moment the sun is setting someplace on earth, and another day is slipping away largely undocumented as people slide into dreams that will seldom be remembered when they awaken. Only the continuation of abundance makes loss sustainable, makes it natural. There are more sunrises coming, but even dreams could be emptied out.