Having Everything Right. Kim Stafford

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СКАЧАТЬ a single organism maintaining its own life in a way impossible anywhere else. This is home. We must not defile or annihilate this planet, for we are inseparable from it. “It’s everything.”

      On the other side are those who begin with the assumption that we will destroy the Earth, and that we must scramble into some kind of exodus very soon. Edward Gilfillan, a scientist once associated with NASA, writes that the Earth should be seen as “merely an overnight campsite along the way; confused, troublesome, unsatisfactory, but unimportant; an untidy place to be abandoned and forgotten.” The writer Ray Bradbury told an Italian reporter,

       Homer will die. Michelangelo will die. Galileo, Leonardo, Shakespeare, Einstein will die, all those will die who now are not dead because we are alive, we are thinking of them, we are carrying them within us. And then every single thing, every memory, will hurtle down into the void with us. So let us save them, let us save ourselves. Let us prepare ourselves to escape, to continue life and rebuild our cities on other planets: we shall not be long of this Earth.

      The most chilling word here is Bradbury’s tiny preposition: “not long of this Earth.” Bradbury could have said, “not long on this Earth,” implying that departure would be a movement from this place to another. If we are “not long of this Earth,” however, our identity is fully independent of it. Ray Bradbury is a careful writer. He knows what he says: the Earth is our campsite only.

      And Pope Pius XII told Wernher von Braun (who helped Hitler, and later the United States, to develop rocket technology), “The Lord . . . had no intention of setting a limit to inquiry when He said Ye shall have dominion over the earth. It is all creation which He has entrusted to man and which He has given to the human mind, to penetrate it.” According to these views, certain human problems will not be solved on Earth, and the Earth may become the victim of our inability to solve them.

      In Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, a character announces that “Humanly speaking, every possible precaution has been taken to bring this rash experiment to a successful termination.” Later in the novel, we learn that the scientists did think of everything—except how the projectile with three men inside might return to Earth.

      “It is all very well to go to the moon, but how to get back again?” says one of the three as they hurtle outward into space.

      “The question has no real interest,” replies Barbicane, president of the Gun Club which has sponsored the mission. “Later, when we think it advisable to return, we will take counsel together.”

      So stories go. So our lives go, unless we take counsel together.

      We need to take counsel with Cicero before his head is nailed to the rostrum, with Jules and Buzz and Raphael. We must take counsel in many languages. We must speak sternly to our heroes, and listen to our children.

      The splashdown of American astronauts far out at sea, their welcoming by a President, a commander, a team of doctors and soldiers to guard their quarantine—all the modern version of Barbicane’s Gun Club—is shockingly different from Titov’s return. Titov landed on the ground, at the heart of Asia. No one knew where he would come down, and every citizen was out to find him. When Titov’s parachute bumped his capsule back to earth and he opened the hatch, a woman ecstatic with blood on her face leaped from her car to kiss him. Driving, she had seen his little ship descending. She had driven into the ditch by the road in her haste to touch him. She ran toward his ship. He lived on Earth again, and she welcomed him.

      Three days after Apollo 11 landed on the moon, I made it to Denmark. It was good to stop in one place a few days; it was a relief not to hitchhike, not to climb into anyone’s machine and live at the mercy of their speed. Near the town of Århus, I met a girl named Helle. From her parents’ house we took bicycles along the path that wove past flashing streams, dark woods, through meadows thick with sunlight. The grasshoppers still had something to sing about, after so many generations. We were young, foolish, happy. As I drifted ahead around a long curve above the water, she called out, “Wherever heaven is, it must be like this.”

      I turn to look.

       A FEW MILES SHORT OF WISDOM

      A few nights in your life, you know this like the taste of lightning in your teeth: Tomorrow I will be changed. Somehow, in the next passage of light, I will shed reptilian skin and feel the wind’s friction again. Sparks will fly. It’s a hope for the right kind of fear, the kind that does not turn away.

      A few miles short of Wisdom, Montana, I flipped open my sleeping bag at the top of Lost Trail Pass. Starlight prickled my shoulders with cold’s tattoo. At midnight there, August meant less than altitude. A long day’s winding drive from La Grande had left me numb with the car’s buzz, and abrupt dark silence was impossible to believe. But the tall stems of the trees made no sound. My ears were clouded with engine throb and tire whine. The whisper of stars I thought I heard was only a tune my head-bone played. Where I slid into the thin summer bag, I felt a bump of rock dent the small of my back. Sleep blurred my eyes, but I begged the rock to keep me wakeful. Tomorrow, I would drive down a valley that had burned my imagination, a place early trappers called The Big Hole. Tomorrow, Wisdom. The trees’ utterance was a pitchy fragrance.

      Why did I wish to stay awake? Sometimes stories from thoughtful travelers you trust, or some old book you believe, or the mind’s own credulous pilgrim named Imagination will make a place dazzle in anticipation. Tomorrow, The Big Hole. And there was the battlefield that books and travelers and my mind made shine like an icon. Tomorrow, wisdom—if my hunch could be true. Where Joseph and the Nez Perce band were attacked at dawn one year after Custer died, I meant to stand apart from my own life and listen. I meant to stand apart from my century, if I could. The people who raised me would recede, and I would stand apprentice to the place itself. If wisdom could be portable from history, I might read it there in some configuration of the ground. Then sleep.

      Midmorning of the next day, I sat faint in the car parked at headquarters for the Big Hole National Battlefield. By the rearview mirror, pine-scattered hills were a blur of heat. Revelation was not going as planned. Dawn had come and gone. On my sleeping bag flung over the back seat, the dew had long dried, and sweat now trickled off my nose. Traveling alone, I had taken the exploratory vow: I will not eat until I learn from this place. I was untaught, and faint.

      The personnel at headquarters, the tan-suited rangers inside their buff museum built to suggest a Nez Perce tipi, had tried hard to prepare an experience for me. Beyond the glass-cased photographs and furs, the guns and arrows, they had ushered me into a little auditorium for my command performance of the slide show. I had sat alone among the gray folding chairs while an artist’s sketches of the battle flashed before me scene by scene, and a strident male voice on the tape loop told what the sound effects were to mean—the pulse of firing guns, a woman’s scream, hoofbeats from invisible horses—while the watercolor faces of the stern and the doomed went flickering through their show. Then suddenly the music came up and it was over. A little motor whirred, and curtains were automatically drawn aside from the windows facing west. There was the battlefield below, on a flat place by the river. Sun had bleached the replica lodgepoles gray. One cloud dragged its shadow toward Canada. On the sill of the view window, two flies had died side by side.

      Now, in the car, leaning back against the hot head-rest, I understood the chronology, and the battlefield’s topography. From my vantage point at headquarters, I had seen the signs strung out along the river where named warriors had fallen, and the pine-thicket knoll where the U.S. Army had been surrounded and pinned down when the tide of battle turned against them. I saw where they had their all-day chance to think on Custer’s СКАЧАТЬ