Sharon Pywell's Blog: Sharon Pywell's blog, page 2
February 21, 2012
How Catholicism led me to Crazy Horse, who landed me in an Orthodox Yeshiva
There are pre-Vatican II Catholics, who are the folks whose liturgical calendar is stiffly inflexible (and full of fasting and masses) and then there are post-Vatican II Catholics, who are more like Episcopalians, except for that transubstantiation thing (meaning, the belief that the priest has power to transform the host and wine into Jesus Christ’s actual body and blood). I was a pre-Vatican II eight-year old when I stumbled onto Crazy Horse, and he made perfect sense to me.
It was the vision quest thing that hooked me-the perfect intersection of magic and religious practice. I could only do better if I joined a coven! Medicine men in Lakota society retreated from society (not necessarily into the desert or on top of a mountain) and fasted until a vision materialized. Their spiritual guides helped them interpret the vision, and that interpretation shaped their adult lives. In Crazy Horse’s vision, he charged into battle on a lightning-painted horse with a pebble behind one ear. He was told that if he rode into battle like this he would be untouchable, and he was. He developed a reputation as the first to volunteer as a decoy, the first in the charge of battle. Just as the vision said, he did not die in battle but because of a betrayal from one of his own people. The vision was True.
I closed the book, went to the back yard, climbed the biggest tree I could manage and sat there, waiting for my own vision. After a while I got hungry, climbed down, made myself a peanut butter sandwich and read CALL OF THE WILD. Novels, it has turned out, have always been my vision quest. I still believe that they might not be real, but they are the truth. Not everyone agrees.
I teach in an orthodox Jewish day school–which given my rulebound religious past feels oddly familiar to me. But there’s a place where the world I grew up in clashes with the world I teach in. There’s just so far you can go as a reader or writer if you don’t truly have a feel for metaphor–for the way one thing stands for another in a way that reveals its truth. It’s the old problem: believe that what we see is merely the skin of forces that control the world, or believe in the material world. It’s hard to be a passionate reader if you fall into the more practical category. .
And my students tend to be pragmatists, following a faith that for centuries was a body of law more than a spiritual discipline. To be religious, to most of them, is to follow law. And they believe that there is a “right” interpretation to narrative, though they can see that there’s disagreement about what that is.
At the end of his senior year a young man finally turned to me and said, “I don’t mean to offend you, Ms. Pywell,but why do we do this?” Do what? I asked. “Read these things. He held up a novel. “I mean, none of them is true. None of it happened. So why bother?”
This is actually a good question, but I thought I’d spent the preceding eight months with this group wrestling with this very question, so it was disturbing to hear it put out there quite so baldly.
A couple years before that I’d asked some students to read Barbara Ehrenreich’s NICKEL AND DIMED . One of my brightest young charges came to class pretty irritated. “This Ehrenreich woman knows so much stuff about all the inequities and problems she knows about. Why doesn’t she DO something about it?” I suggested that writing a book was doing something, and my student looked at me blankly. “That’s what I mean,” she said finally. “I mean, she only wrote a book. Like I said. . .”
When parents come to me and ask me how I can make their children readers, I think, but don’t say, “Why would you want to do that?” Passionate readers are, according to research, one of two kinds of people. If the first, they read because they think it’s good for them and they came from families that modeled reading as a productive use of time. If the second, they read because they didn’t really fit into the families they were born into and they turn–will always turn–to characters in books and to authorial voices for intimate company.
In a country where the books that used to be part of our landscape are now text message screens, I’m getting lonely. But I know there will always be some of us–the ones who believe it’s all run by invisible (and true) forces.
It was the vision quest thing that hooked me-the perfect intersection of magic and religious practice. I could only do better if I joined a coven! Medicine men in Lakota society retreated from society (not necessarily into the desert or on top of a mountain) and fasted until a vision materialized. Their spiritual guides helped them interpret the vision, and that interpretation shaped their adult lives. In Crazy Horse’s vision, he charged into battle on a lightning-painted horse with a pebble behind one ear. He was told that if he rode into battle like this he would be untouchable, and he was. He developed a reputation as the first to volunteer as a decoy, the first in the charge of battle. Just as the vision said, he did not die in battle but because of a betrayal from one of his own people. The vision was True.
I closed the book, went to the back yard, climbed the biggest tree I could manage and sat there, waiting for my own vision. After a while I got hungry, climbed down, made myself a peanut butter sandwich and read CALL OF THE WILD. Novels, it has turned out, have always been my vision quest. I still believe that they might not be real, but they are the truth. Not everyone agrees.
I teach in an orthodox Jewish day school–which given my rulebound religious past feels oddly familiar to me. But there’s a place where the world I grew up in clashes with the world I teach in. There’s just so far you can go as a reader or writer if you don’t truly have a feel for metaphor–for the way one thing stands for another in a way that reveals its truth. It’s the old problem: believe that what we see is merely the skin of forces that control the world, or believe in the material world. It’s hard to be a passionate reader if you fall into the more practical category. .
And my students tend to be pragmatists, following a faith that for centuries was a body of law more than a spiritual discipline. To be religious, to most of them, is to follow law. And they believe that there is a “right” interpretation to narrative, though they can see that there’s disagreement about what that is.
At the end of his senior year a young man finally turned to me and said, “I don’t mean to offend you, Ms. Pywell,but why do we do this?” Do what? I asked. “Read these things. He held up a novel. “I mean, none of them is true. None of it happened. So why bother?”
This is actually a good question, but I thought I’d spent the preceding eight months with this group wrestling with this very question, so it was disturbing to hear it put out there quite so baldly.
A couple years before that I’d asked some students to read Barbara Ehrenreich’s NICKEL AND DIMED . One of my brightest young charges came to class pretty irritated. “This Ehrenreich woman knows so much stuff about all the inequities and problems she knows about. Why doesn’t she DO something about it?” I suggested that writing a book was doing something, and my student looked at me blankly. “That’s what I mean,” she said finally. “I mean, she only wrote a book. Like I said. . .”
When parents come to me and ask me how I can make their children readers, I think, but don’t say, “Why would you want to do that?” Passionate readers are, according to research, one of two kinds of people. If the first, they read because they think it’s good for them and they came from families that modeled reading as a productive use of time. If the second, they read because they didn’t really fit into the families they were born into and they turn–will always turn–to characters in books and to authorial voices for intimate company.
In a country where the books that used to be part of our landscape are now text message screens, I’m getting lonely. But I know there will always be some of us–the ones who believe it’s all run by invisible (and true) forces.
July 26, 2011
Interview re: MY OTHER MOTHER
An interview with Sharon Pywell on the subject of her book, MY OTHER MOTHER.
Interviewer: How did this book begin?
Pywell: It began, actually, not as a book about mothers and daughters but about the Hunkpapa Sioux medicine man Crazy Horse. I was obsessed with him as a kid. It was his visions, and the way they actually carried him through his life. I was a very worried Catholic kid, so mysticism in any form made sense to me. At first the confidence he had in battle if he only wore the regalia that he wore in his dream appealed to me. It worked, too. He volunteered as a decoy more often than any other warrior in his tribe. In his first battle, at fourteen, he charged directly into a hail of bullets and didn’t get scratched. He was sure it was because of the lightning bolt on his cheek and his pony’s rump, the small stone hanging behind one ear, the feathers. . . the image of himself in his vision that his father told him would protect him in battle.
Interviewer: How did you get from fourteen year old Sioux charging into battle to a book about parenthood?
Pywell: Through Crazy Horse’s love story, I think. He’d always been in love with a young woman who was married off by her family to a Bad Face—they were a “better” family than Crazy Horse’s apparently. But a few years into her marriage she abandoned her husband and two children to run away with Crazy Horse. A Sioux woman only needed to push her husband’s stuff out of the teepee to announce that she was done with him, and the husband was supposed to accept it and move along. But in this case, her husband followed them and shot Crazy Horse in the face. The tribal elders ruled that Crazy Horse had disrupted the peace of the group and should lose his place as a Shirt Wearer, a spiritual and political elder of the group. And they ruled that his lover should return to her husband. She did, but she set up a separate teepee and refused to live as the Bad Face’s wife again. Nine months later she gave birth to a baby girl, who died in childhood.
Interviwer: So the connection is lost children?
Pywell: Yes. And matriarchal inheritances.
Interviewer: But the object that’s inherited in this novel is a Scalp Shirt, which is a man’s war record. How is that matriarchal?
Pywell: Most of these shirts were sewed by women, who also decorated them with beads. But the actual scalps that were used on the shirts were supplied by men, and the pictographs painted on them were done by men, usually depicting battle scenes. The shirt in this book depicts a woman’s loss—Crazy Horse’s lover, actually, watching her own child disappear.
Interviewer: So it’s a realistic artifact?
Pywell: Nope. No such thing has ever been found. But a Native American artifact specialist helped me determine how such a shirt would be constructed and decorated if it were made in the year I needed this particular shirt to be made. Except for the fact that the painting is of a woman’s life instead of a man’s, and the subject is the loss of a child instead of a battle scene, it’s entirely historically accurate. The guy who helped me actually assessed for the Antique Road Show. That’s how I found him.
Interviewer: Really? So how much was it worth?
Pywell: I couldn’t resist that question. With a story, meaning a photograph or written documentation tying the shirt to a family, about one and a quarter million. Without a story, about three quarters of a million dollars.
Interviewer: So where do I go to find one of these that hasn’t been snatched up by a museum yet?
Pywell: Nowhere. Most were buried with their owners, who regarded the shirt as a sentient being made up of the spirit of the animal whose skin was used and the man whose sweat permeated it. Bill Mercer told me that a few are probably in attics in England—in the mid- nineteenth century a lot of English nobility thought it would be fun to play cowboy and some took these shirts home as souvenirs. Most of what’s still in this country would have been traded out of the market, mounted in a museum or buried. They’re deeply expressive objects, very personal and very important to the family group that generated them. It’s not so much a shirt as a member of their group, a written history of the battles they engaged in.
Interviewer: But the shirt in this novel has a love story painted on it?
Pywell: A failed love story.
Interviewer: Do those appeal to you more than successful ones?
Pywell: I think sexual romantic love is the hardest thing to write about because the subject is a powerful cliché magnet. It pulls storytellers, especially modern storytellers who live in a world saturated wtih graphic sexual data, into real narrative swamps. Most story audiences now are more accustomed to film, where no real argument for love needs to be made. All you have to do is have a shockingly beautiful actor on screen, everybody falls in love on sight, and the dialogue goes by the wayside.
Interviewer: What about the entire romance novel genre?
Pywell: My point exactly.
Interviewer: So the love story you focus on is love between parents and children.
Pywell: Yes. For better or worse, I think it’s the more enduring, mysterious, overwhelming bond. It’s the one that the later bonds—romantic or otherwise—rest upon.
Interviewer: This is an e-book?
Pywell: It will be available for Kindle through Amazon very soon, and it’s in hard copy at the Harvard Book Store.
Interviewer: Thanks for your time.
Pywell: Of course. Loved talking with you. Thanks so much.
Interviewer: How did this book begin?
Pywell: It began, actually, not as a book about mothers and daughters but about the Hunkpapa Sioux medicine man Crazy Horse. I was obsessed with him as a kid. It was his visions, and the way they actually carried him through his life. I was a very worried Catholic kid, so mysticism in any form made sense to me. At first the confidence he had in battle if he only wore the regalia that he wore in his dream appealed to me. It worked, too. He volunteered as a decoy more often than any other warrior in his tribe. In his first battle, at fourteen, he charged directly into a hail of bullets and didn’t get scratched. He was sure it was because of the lightning bolt on his cheek and his pony’s rump, the small stone hanging behind one ear, the feathers. . . the image of himself in his vision that his father told him would protect him in battle.
Interviewer: How did you get from fourteen year old Sioux charging into battle to a book about parenthood?
Pywell: Through Crazy Horse’s love story, I think. He’d always been in love with a young woman who was married off by her family to a Bad Face—they were a “better” family than Crazy Horse’s apparently. But a few years into her marriage she abandoned her husband and two children to run away with Crazy Horse. A Sioux woman only needed to push her husband’s stuff out of the teepee to announce that she was done with him, and the husband was supposed to accept it and move along. But in this case, her husband followed them and shot Crazy Horse in the face. The tribal elders ruled that Crazy Horse had disrupted the peace of the group and should lose his place as a Shirt Wearer, a spiritual and political elder of the group. And they ruled that his lover should return to her husband. She did, but she set up a separate teepee and refused to live as the Bad Face’s wife again. Nine months later she gave birth to a baby girl, who died in childhood.
Interviwer: So the connection is lost children?
Pywell: Yes. And matriarchal inheritances.
Interviewer: But the object that’s inherited in this novel is a Scalp Shirt, which is a man’s war record. How is that matriarchal?
Pywell: Most of these shirts were sewed by women, who also decorated them with beads. But the actual scalps that were used on the shirts were supplied by men, and the pictographs painted on them were done by men, usually depicting battle scenes. The shirt in this book depicts a woman’s loss—Crazy Horse’s lover, actually, watching her own child disappear.
Interviewer: So it’s a realistic artifact?
Pywell: Nope. No such thing has ever been found. But a Native American artifact specialist helped me determine how such a shirt would be constructed and decorated if it were made in the year I needed this particular shirt to be made. Except for the fact that the painting is of a woman’s life instead of a man’s, and the subject is the loss of a child instead of a battle scene, it’s entirely historically accurate. The guy who helped me actually assessed for the Antique Road Show. That’s how I found him.
Interviewer: Really? So how much was it worth?
Pywell: I couldn’t resist that question. With a story, meaning a photograph or written documentation tying the shirt to a family, about one and a quarter million. Without a story, about three quarters of a million dollars.
Interviewer: So where do I go to find one of these that hasn’t been snatched up by a museum yet?
Pywell: Nowhere. Most were buried with their owners, who regarded the shirt as a sentient being made up of the spirit of the animal whose skin was used and the man whose sweat permeated it. Bill Mercer told me that a few are probably in attics in England—in the mid- nineteenth century a lot of English nobility thought it would be fun to play cowboy and some took these shirts home as souvenirs. Most of what’s still in this country would have been traded out of the market, mounted in a museum or buried. They’re deeply expressive objects, very personal and very important to the family group that generated them. It’s not so much a shirt as a member of their group, a written history of the battles they engaged in.
Interviewer: But the shirt in this novel has a love story painted on it?
Pywell: A failed love story.
Interviewer: Do those appeal to you more than successful ones?
Pywell: I think sexual romantic love is the hardest thing to write about because the subject is a powerful cliché magnet. It pulls storytellers, especially modern storytellers who live in a world saturated wtih graphic sexual data, into real narrative swamps. Most story audiences now are more accustomed to film, where no real argument for love needs to be made. All you have to do is have a shockingly beautiful actor on screen, everybody falls in love on sight, and the dialogue goes by the wayside.
Interviewer: What about the entire romance novel genre?
Pywell: My point exactly.
Interviewer: So the love story you focus on is love between parents and children.
Pywell: Yes. For better or worse, I think it’s the more enduring, mysterious, overwhelming bond. It’s the one that the later bonds—romantic or otherwise—rest upon.
Interviewer: This is an e-book?
Pywell: It will be available for Kindle through Amazon very soon, and it’s in hard copy at the Harvard Book Store.
Interviewer: Thanks for your time.
Pywell: Of course. Loved talking with you. Thanks so much.
June 15, 2011
When Water Bottles Were Made of Dogs
When Water Bottles Were Made Out of Dogs
I didn’t realize there was a trend until a former student of mine asked me what I was reading and they all sounded like books I stumbled upon in my elementary school library—which they could have been.
True Grit was on the list. Then Once There Was A Farm, then the books of Ralph Moody of his childhood and younger days in Colorado ranching: Little Britches, Man of the F amily, The Field of Home, The Home Ranch.
What’s happening to me?
I was stopped dead by Moody’s cheerful description of the container that the Mexican cook sent him to the creek with to fill for the cowboys working during branding season: a skinned dog. It’s around 1910 and Moody describes his twelve-to-fourteen hour days lugging water and pushing large animals around as the best luck a nine year old boy could have! The water container: “It was a dogskin, and I don’t know how in the world they ever got the dog out of it, because there wasn’t a break in it anywhere, except at the neck, tail, and feet. It had been tanned and polished until it was a smooth as a lady’s glove, and a brownish-yellow color. The legs hung down on each side of the saddle. They were the drinking tubes, and I had to fill it through one of them. To close them tight enough so they wouldn’t leak, all I had to do was fold them over and clamp on a split stick, like a clothespin. The breaks at the neck and tail were sealed so they didn’t leak, and were hand sewed with double rows of find cord that Hi said was catgut.”
Meow. Woof.
What strikes me about Moody’s account is its happiness—how a turkey and parsnips (they ruined the potato planting with too much manure. . .oh, well-no mashed potatoes this year) was one of the happiest days of his life, ending with the entire family re-enacting Hamlet around the pot-bellied stove.
Imagine your family considering themselves the most fortunate of living beings because they are not hungry, they have one another, and at least half of them know enough of the lines in HAMLET to get through the play with some speed and accuracy.
Even in my childhood in the early sixties I can remember being astounded when I read, in MY FRIEND FLICKA, that Ken had been sent off to a valley that was an entire day’s ride in order to capture and retrieve a stallion. That was fiction, but it was based firmly on the ways families and children once worked. Ken was about twelve at the time in the scene, and he managed to find his way through untracked Wyoming landscape, get attacked by an eagle, catch his horse, fry up his oatmeal cakes and fatback, and trot home in two days. I remember setting that book down and standing to look out into the back yard of my home on Dormar Drive, its few hundred yards of weeds bordered by lilacs and maples, a brother swinging desulterally on the rusting metal set behind the clothes-line, another brother digging to China in the dirt pile at the back of the property.
My own kid is finishing a college degree and is spending the summer in a cubicle in a large concrete building in the nation’s capital. She’s happy to have the job but still mourning the alternative offer (outside work in the Grand Canyon) that she turned down because it wouldn’t give her as many possible future job connections. She is happiest, she tells us, in woods, and though she appreciates the museums we took her to, she says that if people don’t go live among trees and know how to stay dry and happy there, they will never be dry. Or happy.
Maybe it’s coming back, but I think she’s an exception. Maybe I’m increasingly obsessed with these stories because the social network sort of repulses me, and definitely confuses me, and definitely seems to me, to be a strange place to find work.
Perhaps it’s a phase I’m going through. But I think not—I think I might be feeling, looking for, the same things that the 3.3 million people a day who hit on the blog for that ranching woman who’s the Queen of the Blogosphere at the moment. We’re going there because we want her life.
What’s wrong with the ones we’ve got?
I didn’t realize there was a trend until a former student of mine asked me what I was reading and they all sounded like books I stumbled upon in my elementary school library—which they could have been.
True Grit was on the list. Then Once There Was A Farm, then the books of Ralph Moody of his childhood and younger days in Colorado ranching: Little Britches, Man of the F amily, The Field of Home, The Home Ranch.
What’s happening to me?
I was stopped dead by Moody’s cheerful description of the container that the Mexican cook sent him to the creek with to fill for the cowboys working during branding season: a skinned dog. It’s around 1910 and Moody describes his twelve-to-fourteen hour days lugging water and pushing large animals around as the best luck a nine year old boy could have! The water container: “It was a dogskin, and I don’t know how in the world they ever got the dog out of it, because there wasn’t a break in it anywhere, except at the neck, tail, and feet. It had been tanned and polished until it was a smooth as a lady’s glove, and a brownish-yellow color. The legs hung down on each side of the saddle. They were the drinking tubes, and I had to fill it through one of them. To close them tight enough so they wouldn’t leak, all I had to do was fold them over and clamp on a split stick, like a clothespin. The breaks at the neck and tail were sealed so they didn’t leak, and were hand sewed with double rows of find cord that Hi said was catgut.”
Meow. Woof.
What strikes me about Moody’s account is its happiness—how a turkey and parsnips (they ruined the potato planting with too much manure. . .oh, well-no mashed potatoes this year) was one of the happiest days of his life, ending with the entire family re-enacting Hamlet around the pot-bellied stove.
Imagine your family considering themselves the most fortunate of living beings because they are not hungry, they have one another, and at least half of them know enough of the lines in HAMLET to get through the play with some speed and accuracy.
Even in my childhood in the early sixties I can remember being astounded when I read, in MY FRIEND FLICKA, that Ken had been sent off to a valley that was an entire day’s ride in order to capture and retrieve a stallion. That was fiction, but it was based firmly on the ways families and children once worked. Ken was about twelve at the time in the scene, and he managed to find his way through untracked Wyoming landscape, get attacked by an eagle, catch his horse, fry up his oatmeal cakes and fatback, and trot home in two days. I remember setting that book down and standing to look out into the back yard of my home on Dormar Drive, its few hundred yards of weeds bordered by lilacs and maples, a brother swinging desulterally on the rusting metal set behind the clothes-line, another brother digging to China in the dirt pile at the back of the property.
My own kid is finishing a college degree and is spending the summer in a cubicle in a large concrete building in the nation’s capital. She’s happy to have the job but still mourning the alternative offer (outside work in the Grand Canyon) that she turned down because it wouldn’t give her as many possible future job connections. She is happiest, she tells us, in woods, and though she appreciates the museums we took her to, she says that if people don’t go live among trees and know how to stay dry and happy there, they will never be dry. Or happy.
Maybe it’s coming back, but I think she’s an exception. Maybe I’m increasingly obsessed with these stories because the social network sort of repulses me, and definitely confuses me, and definitely seems to me, to be a strange place to find work.
Perhaps it’s a phase I’m going through. But I think not—I think I might be feeling, looking for, the same things that the 3.3 million people a day who hit on the blog for that ranching woman who’s the Queen of the Blogosphere at the moment. We’re going there because we want her life.
What’s wrong with the ones we’ve got?
June 7, 2011
What the Bottom of an Elephant's Foot Feels Like
What the Bottom of an Elephant’s Foot Feels Like
Like the bottom of an unfired pot---that’s what the bottom of an elephant’s foot feels like: rough, firm, dusty in places, thick flesh cracked in places like desiccated clay. It’s about the size of a bathroom trash can but four of them can support between ten thousand pounds, and carry it all around in almost total silence.
I know this because when my twenty-year old daughter casually mentioned that she had always wanted to touch the bottom of one, something in me came alive. Wouldn’t such an opportunity make the perfect 21st birthday present? And don’t I want to touch one myself? Yes, and yes.
I went to the National Zoo, pled my case, and was told that if I really wanted to touch an elephant foot my best bet was to fly to Thailand where there were lots of people with casual attitudes about their elephants being touched, unlike here in the United States. They reminded me that elephants are large and can kill people. I knew that—it was why I wanted to run my hand down an elephant toe.
I kept calling, asking for advice about my situation: perhaps there was somewhere else I could turn? The elephant curators kept talking back, curious themselves about someone who wanted to touch elephant feet. Their curiosity about us led to a final, deeply generous concession: we could come and touch a foot if we promised to obey all directions. Marie would be our guide.
The internet made it possible for us to learn that Marie had started out in primates, a converted baboon person who had spent most of the last quarter of a century with elephants. We asked about the relationship between the humans and their charges. The elephant house staff were all Animal People—devoted to their charges, happy to end their days smelling of elephant and thinking about blood samples for zoological studies. They considered themselves part of the elephants’ social world.
Marie introduced us to Shanthi and Shatnthi’s mother, Ambika. Shanti came when called and lifted her foot when asked to, raising it and dropping it lightly on a bar at about the height of my chest. She balanced there calmly on three feet as we touched her. She did not treat us as if we were strange or unreasonable. Uninteresting, perhaps. Nothing to get cranky about, though.
Thanked and told that was enough, she plucked the foot smoothly away and settled it on the ground. Shanthi was offered a few carrots, each no bigger than a little finger, and she plucked them up deftly. Marie asked her to turn and she swiveled smoothly, nine-thousand pounds revolving as gently as if it were balanced on a divet. Her ropy-fuzzed skin felt like heavy luggage but when I pressed my hand against her flank I felt gurglings from her stomach and, if I moved it a bit to the left, a thump from a twenty-five pound heart. Shanthi swept her trunk down to flick another one-inch carrot into the pincer-like end of her trunk.
She didn’t have to do any of this, of course. If the elephants don’t feel like participating in human games, there is no forcing here. Yet they typically accommodate us, decoding our movements and spoken language without demanding the favor in return. We have yet to plumb their minds or speak to them in Elephant, but they keep listening to us—hopeful optimists, perhaps. Lots of animals do the same. Dogs can tell a human companion that an epileptic seizure is on the way, evidence that animals have access to much more of us than our minds. Cats were manipulating us long before we tried to get them to eat kibble instead of canned tuna. My family once had a hamster that came when called. A mere meatball living at the bottommost point of the food chain, still she flung herself against the side of the cage facing us and chirped if she heard my footsteps approaching. She disliked hamster balls, a human invention designed quite specifically for her delight.
In the next enclosure Shanthi’s 63-year old mother Ambika tossed dust on her back and sides before strolling over to a hose that was propped up to direct a stream of spraying water into her enclosure. She swept her trunk through the mist, capturing enough for a quick head-rinse. When elephants age their bodies loosen and get baggier. Ambika’s thighs reminded me of my own mother’s legs when she reached Ambika’s age. Mine are moving in that direction as well.
Though I’ve never been able to imagine a divinity making Adam out of dirt and breathing life into his human form, an elephant, particularly an older elephant, seems to have just been breathed to life from the ground where she sprang. Lumpy. Thick. Slow. Gracious. A creature just a millisecond beyond the stone age, as we ourselves are if geological time is the yardstick. Yet in many essential ways they are as foreign to us as dragons. It made me feel a little lonely, actually, standing this close to them as they waited patiently while we touched their toes and sides and feet bottoms.
What’s an elephant’s favorite toy? my daughter asked just before we left. Marie answered in the matter-of-fact tone of an expert, which she was. She sounded a little resigned. That would be other elephants, she said. That’s what an elephant loves.
Like the bottom of an unfired pot---that’s what the bottom of an elephant’s foot feels like: rough, firm, dusty in places, thick flesh cracked in places like desiccated clay. It’s about the size of a bathroom trash can but four of them can support between ten thousand pounds, and carry it all around in almost total silence.
I know this because when my twenty-year old daughter casually mentioned that she had always wanted to touch the bottom of one, something in me came alive. Wouldn’t such an opportunity make the perfect 21st birthday present? And don’t I want to touch one myself? Yes, and yes.
I went to the National Zoo, pled my case, and was told that if I really wanted to touch an elephant foot my best bet was to fly to Thailand where there were lots of people with casual attitudes about their elephants being touched, unlike here in the United States. They reminded me that elephants are large and can kill people. I knew that—it was why I wanted to run my hand down an elephant toe.
I kept calling, asking for advice about my situation: perhaps there was somewhere else I could turn? The elephant curators kept talking back, curious themselves about someone who wanted to touch elephant feet. Their curiosity about us led to a final, deeply generous concession: we could come and touch a foot if we promised to obey all directions. Marie would be our guide.
The internet made it possible for us to learn that Marie had started out in primates, a converted baboon person who had spent most of the last quarter of a century with elephants. We asked about the relationship between the humans and their charges. The elephant house staff were all Animal People—devoted to their charges, happy to end their days smelling of elephant and thinking about blood samples for zoological studies. They considered themselves part of the elephants’ social world.
Marie introduced us to Shanthi and Shatnthi’s mother, Ambika. Shanti came when called and lifted her foot when asked to, raising it and dropping it lightly on a bar at about the height of my chest. She balanced there calmly on three feet as we touched her. She did not treat us as if we were strange or unreasonable. Uninteresting, perhaps. Nothing to get cranky about, though.
Thanked and told that was enough, she plucked the foot smoothly away and settled it on the ground. Shanthi was offered a few carrots, each no bigger than a little finger, and she plucked them up deftly. Marie asked her to turn and she swiveled smoothly, nine-thousand pounds revolving as gently as if it were balanced on a divet. Her ropy-fuzzed skin felt like heavy luggage but when I pressed my hand against her flank I felt gurglings from her stomach and, if I moved it a bit to the left, a thump from a twenty-five pound heart. Shanthi swept her trunk down to flick another one-inch carrot into the pincer-like end of her trunk.
She didn’t have to do any of this, of course. If the elephants don’t feel like participating in human games, there is no forcing here. Yet they typically accommodate us, decoding our movements and spoken language without demanding the favor in return. We have yet to plumb their minds or speak to them in Elephant, but they keep listening to us—hopeful optimists, perhaps. Lots of animals do the same. Dogs can tell a human companion that an epileptic seizure is on the way, evidence that animals have access to much more of us than our minds. Cats were manipulating us long before we tried to get them to eat kibble instead of canned tuna. My family once had a hamster that came when called. A mere meatball living at the bottommost point of the food chain, still she flung herself against the side of the cage facing us and chirped if she heard my footsteps approaching. She disliked hamster balls, a human invention designed quite specifically for her delight.
In the next enclosure Shanthi’s 63-year old mother Ambika tossed dust on her back and sides before strolling over to a hose that was propped up to direct a stream of spraying water into her enclosure. She swept her trunk through the mist, capturing enough for a quick head-rinse. When elephants age their bodies loosen and get baggier. Ambika’s thighs reminded me of my own mother’s legs when she reached Ambika’s age. Mine are moving in that direction as well.
Though I’ve never been able to imagine a divinity making Adam out of dirt and breathing life into his human form, an elephant, particularly an older elephant, seems to have just been breathed to life from the ground where she sprang. Lumpy. Thick. Slow. Gracious. A creature just a millisecond beyond the stone age, as we ourselves are if geological time is the yardstick. Yet in many essential ways they are as foreign to us as dragons. It made me feel a little lonely, actually, standing this close to them as they waited patiently while we touched their toes and sides and feet bottoms.
What’s an elephant’s favorite toy? my daughter asked just before we left. Marie answered in the matter-of-fact tone of an expert, which she was. She sounded a little resigned. That would be other elephants, she said. That’s what an elephant loves.
