No, the book’s title wasn’t The Call of the Wild, but—Gentle Tweeter—my Nana Minnie was happy. I was excused from shelling peas. That’s what mattered most.
The author was not Jack London, but who really cared? If I were to read slowly enough, this book would fill my entire desolate summer holiday. To tedious, odious upstate it would deliver all the joy and excitement of a bygone canine universe. Already, my head was nodding over the open volume, engrossed in the words and perceptions of some long-deceased narrator. I was seeing a vanished past through the alien eyes of that dead man.
Flipping to the title page, I read, printed there: The Voyage of the Beagle.
DECEMBER 21, 9:00 A.M. EST
Papadaddy Three
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To help alleviate my tedium, Papadaddy Ben suggested we construct a housing unit for the indigenous birdlife. A sort of avian Habitat for Humanity, minus Jimmy Carter and his ilk. Actual architectural planning played a very small part in the project. We sawed boards to fashion rudimentary walls, floor, and roof, cobbling these together with nails. A not-unsatisfying process. Last, we applied a coat of sunny yellow paint.
Brush in hand, my papadaddy asked, “You remember me telling you about Leonard? Your ma’s guardian angel.”
I feigned deafness and concentrated on my painting technique, avoiding leaving brush marks and drips. I worried about the paint smell, concerned that I might be contributing to the birdhouse equivalent of sick building syndrome.
Oblivious, my papadaddy forged on. “What if I was to tell you the angels call your nana as well?”
I dipped my brush and dabbed yellow around the invitingly round door of the house. I wondered whether the birds who’d set up housekeeping would migrate, as did my parents, between similar dwellings in Nassau and Newport and New Bedford. Likewise, would their migratory patterns be determined by the income tax rates of each location?
Papadaddy took my silence as encouragement. “I don’t want to scare you none, but do you remember how I mentioned your big showdown? From what Leonard tells your nana, the forces of good and evil will be testing you.”
My Chanel playsuit felt snug in the hips.
“On some island,” he added. “Your big test will come on an island.”
Despite Ctrl+Alt+Hurtling my nana’s cuisine out the kitchen window, I was gaining weight as if by osmosis. Genetics or environment, I worried that my body-fat percentage was nearing double digits.
“According to your nana, somebody’s going to die pretty soon.” Papadaddy dipped his brush and resumed his work. “Just so you know to be careful, the one who dies might be you.”
DECEMBER 21, 9:02 A.M. EST
Charting a Course for Glory
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Contrary to its merry title, The Voyage of the Beagle is not a picaresque yarn about a small, plucky dog who embarks upon a madcap over-the-waves maritime adventure. If I were compelled to write the CliffsNotes summarizing the book, that distillation would go as follows: Stupid wild fish … dumb wild bird … big rock … Snake! Snake! Snake! … slaughtered animal … another rock … turtle. Imagine such a series made long enough to fill almost five hundred pages and you’ve more or less written the Beagle book for yourself. In half a thousand pages hardly a dog is mentioned, and nothing exists in the spotlight for longer than the duration of Mr. Darwin’s ten-second attention span. Instead of evolution, Charles Darwin seems to have invented attention deficit disorder, and his focus is constantly distracted by a different fungus … a novel, new arthropod … a brightly colored pebble. Reading along, one hopes to see a pretty señorita catch the narrator’s eye. The reader expects a romance to blossom among the pampas followed by a lover’s quarrel and the introduction of a romantic rival, kissing, fistfights, drawn swords—but it’s just not that kind of book. No, The Voyage of the Beagle seems more akin to watching five years’ worth of vacation snaps, shown by an Asperger’s sufferer compelled to narrate incessantly.
The title of the tome is a blatant misdirection. The Beagle cited is actually the ship upon which Mr. Darwin and Co. are sailing, apparently christened by some long-ago dog fancier. Nonetheless, it’s within these brittle old pages that I found my destiny.
It takes but a single remarkable victory to cement the reputation of a budding scribe. For my nana’s favorite, Jack London, it required only six months of mucking about in the gold-rush towns of the Klondike. For Mr. Darwin the transformative episode in the Galápagos Islands lasted at most four weeks. Both men had begun their adventure in resignation: London had been unable to secure gainful employment in San Francisco; Darwin had dropped out of college, failing to earn his degree in theology. Both men returned to their ordinary lives while still young, but milked inspiration from their short-lived adventures until they died.
There was no reason why the summer of my eleventh year need be wasted. I had only to find some as-yet-undocumented species of disgusting creature—fly, beetle, spider—and I could write my own ticket back to civilization. Scientific acclaim would be mine. I’d reinvent myself as a world-renowned naturalist who need never kiss and hug her evil, heartless parents ever again.
The morning I’d resolved to begin my fieldwork, I sat at the table in my nana’s kitchen. The dawn light shimmered, brown-orange, through the jar of stagnant water and sodden tea bags that she kept on the windowsill above her sink. I feigned spooning some vile porridge to my mouth, tasting nothing except the bovine growth hormone in the milk. Still, I smiled winningly, my Beagle book open beside my breakfast, and asked, “Nana, dearest?”
My Nana Minnie turned from her stovetop chore—stirring a wooden spoon in some simmering glop—and considered me coolly. Her eyes narrowed with suspicion, she said, “Yes’m, June Bug?”
Keeping my voice laconic, my tone breezy and nonchalant, I asked whether there were any tropical islands within a walkable distance.
Her stirring hand lifted the spoon from her witch’s cauldron and brought it to her crooked mouth, where a darting, furtive tongue tasted the concoction. Smacking her lips with great gusto, my nana said, “Did you say ‘islands,’ baby girl?”
My mouth fixed in a smile, I nodded my head yes. Islands.
Her requisite cigarette smoldered between the fingers of her free hand. This morning as every morning the sunrise found her gray hair wrapped around curlers and pinned tightly to her pink scalp. Papadaddy Ben remained abed. From the world outside the farmhouse resounded the racket and squawk of fowl announcing their successful ovulations.
My Nana Minnie continued to muse over the bubbling production of her noxious cookery. One could almost discern the click and whir of cogs within her head. The tick-tock of gears meshing was nearly audible as she searched her memory for any facts concerning a local island. Giving a short cough, a snort, she said, “No real islands,” adding, “not unless you count the traffic island out in the middle of the highway.”
What she proceeded to describe was a nearby traveler’s comfort station which was sandwiched between the numerous traffic-choked southbound lanes of a major highway and the equally congested northbound lanes. I had seen the place: a squat building of concrete blocks cowering in the center of a parched, lemon-yellow lawn spotted with the dried feces of domesticated dogs. I’d glimpsed the place only in passing, from the tinted window of a Town Car en route to my exile on Nana’s farm, but the concrete hovel seemed to shimmer with the acrid stink of human waste. A small number of cars and trucks had occupied parking spaces along the edge of the ragged lawn, abandoned by the various persons who rushed to void their bowels and bladders.
This place qualified as an “island” because it was isolated, cut off from the surrounding upstate countryside by the slashing rivers of high-speed vehicles. In lieu of a more conventional island, perhaps this one might serve my purpose.
I lingered over my breakfast. Regarding The Voyage of the
Beagle, I’d read up to the point where Darwin drinks the bitter urine of a tortoise. Clearly I was not the first reader challenged by the idea of our hero quaffing a frosty mug of turtle pee, for a previous reader had underlined the entire passage in pencil. In the outer margin of the page a different reader had used blue ballpoint pen to write, Pervert. Occasionally these comments seemed fortune cookie–cryptic. Occluded and coded. For example, listed in a column down the outer margin of one page, noted in pencil were the words If I ever have a baby girl, Patterson says to name her Camille. Elsewhere, jotted in blue ink were the mysterious words: Atlantis isn’t a myth; it’s a prediction.
These two fellow travelers—the pencil scribbler and the blue-ink vandal—had become my reading companions, always present to share the Beagle book with me. Their snide, insightful comments leavened my own reaction to the many otherwise tiresome depictions of lizards and thistles.
In what was clearly a child’s hand, another penciled notation read, Patterson says to start collecting flowers for my husband’s funeral someday.
A squiggle of blue pen said, Leonard wants me to pick some flowers for my dad.
As if to illustrate these notes, pressed between the pages were buttercups. Yellow buttercups. Purple violets. Proof of long-ago free time and long holiday strolls and fresh air. Brown ribbons of ancient grass. A record of sunshine. Bits of physical evidence documented a vanished summer. And not just the colors of summer … here were the smells as well! Dried sprigs of rosemary, thyme, and lavender. Rose petals still pungent! These layers of paper and words had preserved them, like an armor. Each primrose and morning glory I came across I was duly careful to leave intact.
From her station at the stove, my nana said something, her words ending on a high note, a question.
I responded, “Excuse me?”
Taking the cigarette from her lips, exhaling a plume of smoke, she repeated, “How are you liking that The Call of the Wild?”
I looked at her, my eyes wide with incomprehension.
“The novel?” she prompted, nodding at my book opened on the kitchen table.
Obviously she hadn’t seen the cover closely enough to know its actual title.
She asked, “Did you read to the part where the dog gets himself kidnapped and took to Alaska?”
Yes, I nodded. My eyes returning to my reading, I agreed that the dog lived a very exciting life.
“Did you read to the part …,” she asked, “… where the collie dog gets took by Martians in a flying saucer?”
Again, I nodded, saying the scene in question was quite thrilling.
“And,” my nana prompted, “was you scared when the space aliens impregnated the Irish setter with radioactive chimpanzee embryos from the Crab Nebula?”
Automatically I agreed. I said that I simply could not wait for the film version. I glanced up just to check the sincerity of her expression, but my nana merely stood there, her dour peasant body garbed in the usual calico apron worn over a shapeless gingham Mother Hubbard, the latter liberated from all style and color by a lifetime of launderings. I made a mental note that this Wild book must be a real humdinger.
As she dipped a second taste from the bubbling pot, lifting the spoon to her pursed lips and blowing to cool its steaming contents, the telephone in the parlor began to ring. As she’d done countless times, my nana set aside her dripping utensils and waddled out the kitchen door and down the short hallway. The springs of the divan squealed as she settled herself. The ringing stopped, and she coughed the word “Huh-lo?” Her distant voice dropped to a conspiratorial hush, and she said, “Yeah, she went and grabbed the evolution book, all right. That Maddy’s a pistol.” Between coughs, she said, “Yeah, I told her about the island.…” Choked and breathless, she said, “Don’t you fret none, Leonard. That girly is more than ready to do battle with evil!”
Here, Gentle Tweeter, I turned a page in my Beagle book and discovered more ancient words. Handwritten down the margin in blue ballpoint pen, they said, Leonard promises that one day I’ll raise a great warrior as my daughter. He tells me to name her Madison.
DECEMBER 21, 9:05 A.M. EST
Now, Voyager!
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So it was, that summer of my exile to tedious upstate, that now-vanished sunny yesterday, I found myself standing at the fraying asphalt margin of State Route Whatever, the outer edge of six northbound lanes packed densely with horn-blasting, gear-grinding tractor-trailers. The morning air smelled wretched, polluted with axle grease, tar, hot oil, and the smoke of burning dinosaur juice.
No explorer had ever set forth to ford more dangerous seas.
My own path would lead at cross-purposes to the flow of automobiles, their momentum, the hiss and growl of their radial tires, the stuttering thunder of exhaust brakes. Through this deadly parade of speeding metal I could see the opposite shore, my destination: the island where vehicles parked to void their occupants, and those occupants hurried to the cinder-block restrooms to deposit their own excremental contents.
With one step I would be committed to cross the entire roadway. A single step, and I would be fully invested in taking the half hundred additional strides needed to deliver me to safety on the distant restroom isle. There, pet dogs strolled, leisurely staging their feces in small piles, as judiciously as any endangered tortoise laying its precious eggs.
How strange I must’ve appeared to the drivers, an eleven-year-old girl wearing denim trousers and a blue chambray workshirt, the tails of which hung to my knees, the too-long sleeves rolled back to my chubby elbows.
My arms were crossed over my chest, hugging the Beagle book and a frail, unwieldy gallon-size jar of my nana’s windowsill tea. The murky tea sloshed and shifted, heavy inside its fragile glass. Prior to requisitioning the tea I’d dropped untold sugar cubes into the golden liquid, and as it leaked along the jar’s ill-fitting lid my hands and forearms grew sticky. The skin of my fingers gummed together as if they were webbed, as if I were evolving for some new aquatic purpose. So thusly was I glued to the heavy jar that even if my grip failed I suspected the sloshing glass vessel would remain fixed to the chest of my blue chambray shirt.
Once I entered the flow of traffic the smallest pause would place me dead center in the path of pulverizing impact, to be hurtled through the hazy, torpid summer air, my every bone broken. Or to be overridden, the girlish blood crushed out of me and tracked for miles down the highway in the zigzagged, lightning-bolt tread patterns of mammoth black-rubber tires. Any hesitation would mean my death, and in those bygone days I was still highly prejudiced against being dead. Like so many living-alive people I aspired to stay breathing.
Drawing one deep breath, quite possibly my last, I plunged forward into the chaos.
My Bass Weejuns slapped the hot pavement as garbage trucks raged by on every side. Sirens wailed and horns blared. Vast tanker trucks brimming with flammable liquids … roaring log trucks … these behemoths blasted past me, buffeting my tiny self with such force that I spun like a cork in heavy seas. Dragging their great waves of stinging grit, humongous Greyhound buses peppered me with a buckshot of sharp gravel. In the wake of flatbed trucks, blistering siroccos tore at my skin and hair.
People with happy home lives do not board ships bound for Alaska and the Galápagos. They do not take leave from their loving families in order to sequester themselves in lonely workshops and studios. No psychologically healthy individual would expose herself to X-rays, Marie Curie–style, until they poisoned her. Civilization is a condition which unsocial misfits impose on the rest of popular, easygoing, family-oriented humanity. Only the miserable, the failures, the outcasts will crouch for days to observe the mating habits of a salamander. Or to study a boiling teakettle.
The avant-garde in every field consists of the lonely, the friendless, the uninvited. All progress is the product of the unpopular.
People in love—with nurturing, attentive non-movie-star parent
s—they would never invent gravity. Nothing except deep misery leads to real success.
The preceding observations steeled my spine even as tractor-trailer combos hurtled past, not a hand’s length away. If my mother had been happy living as Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm she’d never have become a glorious icon for the moviegoing world. If my life’s dream were to boil innocent apricots into a vile jellied condiment, alongside my nana, I wouldn’t now find myself dashing across the hostile congested lanes of State Route Whatever.
My chubby legs scampered, advancing and retreating in the flurry, dodging lest I be run down and tatters of my chunky childish flesh be pasted to an assortment of chrome bumpers and radiator grilles, bound for Pennsylvania and Connecticut, my denim-chambray ensemble reduced to sodden rags ironed flat against the searing blacktop. One stumble and I’d perish. One forward misstep led to two backward steps. My burden of tea shifted, heaving me off balance. I reeled sideways into the path of an oncoming long-haul monster. Blaring its mighty air horn, the looming tires squealed and skidded. A cargo box of doomed cattle slid by my side, so close I could smell their bovine musk, too close. Their thousand large brown cow eyes stared down piteously upon me.
Without pause other trucks bore down, herding me, prompting my stubby legs to scurry hither and yon, my mind blind with frenzied self-preservation. I darted. My eyes squeezed shut, I raced, ran, flitted, and cowered. I pivoted, slid, and dived with little idea of my direction, mindful only of the howling automobile horns and swerving near misses. Pursuing headlights flashed their indignant high-beam strobes at my jiggling belly fat.