The World Is on Fire Page 15

  Blow a witch-ball to hang by the fire and stay the devil; shape a hollow rolling pin to fill with salt and give to a bride. In the great Chicago World’s Fair, in 1893, Libbey Glass Company’s exhibit included a glass dress made for actress Georgia Cayvan. “The dress would have proved too uncomfortable, heavy and irritating to wear for long,” reports the history book Fire and Sand I read, “but it shimmered with a luminescent beauty that made the lady visitors catch their breath.” Not mass-produced or even useful, just a gorgeous idea made physical.

  When the World’s Fair came to New York City, in 1939, Berry Pink wanted to build a house of marbles there. I can’t find pictures, but I like to imagine the scene. No mortar, just marbles poured into wire forms to hold them, the sun shining brightly through, and bits of color snagged inside the first cat’s eye marbles manufactured in the United States. You could call Berry Pink the ultimate end-of-day maker. He fashioned himself from scraps of truth and made a new man, whole cloth.

  Somehow the end of the day expands to hold what precedes it: rising from the crumpled bed, driving to the shop, your hand pulling the time card from its slot. There’s your name, typed at the top. The day’s first piece a little reintroduction to the work, clumsy but hopeful, dew still on the grass. By midmorning the familiar routine reasserts itself, and you’re a different person than you were at the start of the shift, closer to who you were yesterday. The stack of boxes grows. There is a dread inherent in 3:00 p.m. that nobody mentions. Here’s what we’ve contracted to do: trade our hours of luminous possibility for wages. What choice do we have?

  But even though sweat darkens your shirt and oil smears your goggles, though your legs shiver from standing and your eyes burn from checking measurements, you could still have some of that morning optimism left in the tank. Could decide to use up that last little bit and finish the day off right. The coreless sulphide marble cools in its nest of sand as you carry yourself off, to the promise of shower and supper. The end-of-day piece spans the gap between work and home. Making it, you remake yourself.

  And work can be a gift. I read an interview with an old-timer who called whimsies “off-hand work,” and I like that. “Off-hand” speaks to the worker’s casual mastery; it makes it sound easy. If you know how to make the most of what you’ve got, you’ll always have something to spare. Give the figured spittoon bowl, glowing like amethyst, to Grandma. Give the girl the tin pendant reading TO BETTY FROM GRANDPAP in trade for the hours you spent away from her. It’s not enough, but you’ll make it do. With something to sell, something to swap, something to pay yourself back for being so damn good.

  The man dressed in animal skins glowers and moans as he dances through town. There’s no salamander in the fire, he knows; the men who left were stolen away by better jobs, not monsters. But if it comforts the townspeople, let them blame the creature instead of the foreman, who could well be someone they know. What’s this philosophy that takes me, he muses, cobbles cool against his bare feet, body damp inside the suit. Children crying but that’s old too, he knows. They’ll relish it someday, that acquaintance with a fear that’s strange to the younger ones.

  And after all, idleness is the monster everyone fears, what he tries to frighten away with holler and hair shirt. Let the furnace dim for the time it takes to break the old pot free, but relight the flame quick as you can, lest necessity depart. Dead ashes, cold grate. He sacrifices to the fire with scarred hands: hours, oak, treading the siege floor.

  All the vases, goblets, bowls he’s made are a blur. But for that one pitcher he favored. Its thin lip where water streamed. Out in the world somewhere, resting on a table. Half-full of water and forgotten, perhaps, yet protecting its house from burglary just by being there.

  A soothsayer passed through town long ago, dancing like this and swinging lit firebrands. He’d tell your future by reading the sparks. What would he have said of me, divining pine knots’ fatty bursts and kicks? Something of the fallen world in this trading of time for lucre, and something of the divine. To make, even of particulars not of your choosing; to start a job without knowing quite where it may finish. As even the good Lord makes score after score of people, minor changes on the great mold.

  INTERMISSION

  My strength was that of a giant!

  I tell you ladies, you don’t know how good it feels till you begin to smash, smash, smash.

  CARRIE NATION, COFOUNDER

  OF THE WOMAN’S CHRISTIAN

  TEMPERANCE UNION, 1900

  Girl Power:

  Ode to the Demolition Derby

  For my mother-in-law

  “I’m going for Dr. Death,” the little boy next to me said. We’d gone to the fair with my in-laws specifically to watch the demolition derby—the only reason to bother. The rattrap midway wasn’t worth much; one year, my sister fell out of the Tilt-A-Whirl and had to get stitches. I could’ve skipped the livestock, just a couple of goats in makeshift pens, and a sad-looking elephant kids pelted with treats. Worst of all was the clown, a sleazy character working the dunk tank. Eyes ringed with dark, cigarette stub parked in the corner of his mouth, laugh ratcheting like gunfire. He had an angle, insulting women so men bought softballs to throw. Wolf whistle: “If my mommy looked like that, I’d never’ve left home.” Hoarse undertone: “Gimme a flashlight and a bottle of whiskey. I’ll do it for my country.” Mocking singsong: “Mommy’s little moron, mommy’s little moron.” The whole time I watched, nobody could dunk the clown. They were too mad to aim.

  We found a spot in the stands and sat down. The man behind us said, “All day long this fair made money.” In front sat a skinny kid, bald already, and a girl I sensed was pregnant even before I saw her belly—that resigned look. The teenagers leaned close together. Part of the racetrack had been sectioned off with concrete barricades; using the whole track would let the drivers build up too much speed. A man hosed down the pit to make it slippery and to reduce the fire hazard. The announcer said, “Are you ready for some smashin’, bashin’, and crashin’ at the Upper South Carolina State Fair, this annual upstate tradition?” We sure were.

  The cars lined up, twenty or so, with names like Kat Dog, Just a Little Crazy, Punisher, and Doom. I noticed an ’84 Cadillac and a Ford LTD, but the others were too beat up to identify. The drivers faced off in heats of four or five while the others waited. The last car moving won each heat and became eligible for the finals.

  I learned later that most derbies have lots of rules. No windows, windshields, or headlights; no hearses, 4x4s, or filling your tires with cement. No hitting on the driver’s side—first time warning, second time removal. No cars over forty-eight hundred pounds (“No pre-1973 Lincoln Continentals”) and, obvious as it sounds, no cars under twenty-six hundred pounds (Gremlins, Pintos, Datsun 280Zs). Passions run high over the 1960s-era Chrysler Imperial; some drivers swear by it, but many events specifically ban the Imperial because of its subframe, which has no weak spots or “crash zones.” One expert said that if an Imperial crashed into a contemporary SUV, the SUV would be inoperable while the Imperial could drive away. Not having a crash zone actually makes the car more dangerous in a collision; the driver’s body bears most of the impact.

  Finally, after a guy in a tiger suit led the crowd in a weak rendition of “Tiger Rag,” the derby started. It looked like a free-for-all at first, and although some patterns emerged, luck mattered: ricochets, chain reactions, misfires. Sometimes two cars faced off, only to be interrupted by a third, joining forces with one to batter the other. It was either complex or chaotic; I couldn’t tell which. All I knew was that there was something very satisfying about seeing one of the cars get a running start and ram into another. Like pitching a softball and connecting with the clown’s bull’s-eye. My mother-in-law and I clutched each other’s knees and squealed; the woman beside us gave us a mean look and put her fingers in her ears. A female driver from North Carolina, the first woman to compete, won her heat (fifty dollars and a trophy) landing blows that crumpled fenders an
d crashed trunks. A good strategy, I read, is to back up into your opponent and smash his hood with your rear. She was expert at that, but during the finals, two other cars sandwiched her big gold Caddy—Girl Power—until she couldn’t move. Teamwork is against the rules but impossible to enforce. When Girl Power had to forfeit, we were disappointed, but cheered for the driver when the announcer called her name. Then it was all over and everybody scrammed. Tow trucks lined up on the field to load the wrecks.

  I’ve never gone looking for a crash, but as I watched the woman in the gold Cadillac I wanted to be her, driving hard with nothing to lose, rich as a dozen junkyards. What if you coasted down the mountain into a foothills town? Shift past the others and hit your enemy hard, dodge and veer as hot wind roars past your helmet. A scrim of other bust-ups as from the corner of your eye you see him barreling toward you. He hits and the impact shears your tire, rim skidding out showers of sparks. Burned rubber and blue exhaust, humid air, and afterward everyone walks to the parking lot, saying words they can’t hear, deafened by ruck, raw-throated. Here’s the secret: to crash in a derby is to gull the bloodthirsty road gods. It’s a bluff, a gin, an empty sacrifice, a tinsel death. So bust what’s careful in yourself and see what comes. See if there’s any play left in the wheel.

  ACT THREE

  If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

  GEORGE ELIOT,

  MIDDLEMARCH

  What the Body Knows

  I will say to the north, Give them up, and to the south, Do not withhold; bring my sons from far away and my daughters from the end of the earth.

  —Isaiah 43:6

  In the beginning, waiting outside the Fairbanks train station, I had the feeling the whole thing could fall through. When our guide Carl showed up, we shook hands, slung our gear into his van, and headed up the Haul Road before anyone could stop us. We were bush-leaguers, my husband David and I, lugging grocery bags full of canned stew, Chef Boyardee, boil-in-bag rice. All night Carl drove as the sun shone through burned-over black spruce, the Alaska sky glowing an apocalyptic red behind charcoal trees. A blur of jolt and jounce, the silver pipeline always leaning over my shoulder, big rigs barreling toward us, skidding on gravel. Midnight, and after midnight. Could he stay awake? Past 4:00 a.m. by the time he pulled into Coldfoot and killed the engine. We made camp beside the skinny airstrip and crashed into sleep.

  I had tried to prepare—trained, researched gear, plotted distances—but, as the little plane surfed and dropped in the thermals, I saw that it wasn’t enough. “What made you want to visit the Refuge?” the pilot asked, and my throat closed. Cliffy mountains on either side, and below. Snow caught in their creases, and marks where hooves had struck stone. “Got a bee in my bonnet,” I said, and as soon as I heard the words I wanted to take them back. Why did I want to go? I wasn’t sure. More than just curiosity, although I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Wanted to see a place with a bounty on its head, a place outside my ken, a place with no trees or roads or (now, midsummer) darkness. In the cockpit, a locket swung from a knob, and a picture of the pilot’s kids covered a dial. He belonged here, not me. But the truth was, I had to see the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for myself; if we waited, I somehow knew that it would be too late.

  The plane touched down on a flat place littered with bones, and after we unloaded our equipment, the pilot slammed the door and took off, making for a cleft between mountains.

  Time to inflate the raft, rope down the gear, and go. If you fall in, point your feet downstream, and protect your head from the boulders with your arms. Let the current carry you into a side channel where it will be shallow enough to stand. Six inches or more and you’ll be swept off your feet. Carl tells us this as we’re separating our stuff into drybags with HULA HULA and GOLDEN EAGLE and KONGAKUT inked on the sides. I’m trying to hide how nervous I am—I’m a decent swimmer, but white water scares me—and after all, this is what I’ve signed up for, scrounged and plotted and saved for; we’re 140 miles south of Bird Camp, and there’s only one way to get there. No road but the river, and two weeks to reach the edge of the world.

  Perched on the raft’s edge, one leg wedged beneath the taut rubber roll and the other splayed for balance, I clench the paddle in my hands and shove into glacial water opaque with rock flour, so cold I can feel my bones inside the dead meat of my hands and legs. I squint in the bright sun on the water, looking straight ahead as David and Carl banter in the back of the raft, their words blurry in the steady stream of wind and water.

  At night—I need no flashlight—I write in a notebook with a waterproof pen, a frail stay against the onslaught of detail that threatens to swamp me. Can you draw up Leviathan with a fishhook? Not here, in this place out of time, where the sun never sets and our passing leaves no mark. Everything tends north: following the river, we paddle from the mountains, where the current is swift and deep; to the plateau, where the Upper Marsh Fork and the Canning River join to make a wide trunk; to the coastal plain, where the water spreads out thin and silted, draining into the ice-clogged ocean. Along the way, we spot shorebirds and raptors, caribou and earwigs; see the riverbank strewn with the tracks of many beasts. Moose scat like marbles. Cast antlers beneath low, stiff bushes. We spend hours on the river, soaked and shivering, and one night when we haul out, I ask David, “Have you ever been so cold you think you’re going to puke?”

  “Here,” he says, “have some tea.”

  A friend who’d visited the Refuge years before spoke of the place reverently, but with few specifics. “The landscape there is . . .deceptive,” he said, and as we paddled the river, I saw that he had spoken well. I’d sweep my eyes across the rolling tundra and would have sworn the place was deserted, until caribou or musk oxen emerged from a line of bright green willows. Things were sewn up in seams there, and while sometimes we saw the animal itself, more often we saw its mark, which we read as best we could. On our day hikes, I’d consult my field guides, noting what I’d seen and when, but soon realized that science was not enough for me to make sense of the place. I needed something more, something like magic.

  The river shapes us and our days. We sleep on its banks, drink it in chalky quarts, dip our cook pot into it to boil our noodles, soak our feet in the raft’s self-bailing bottom. We bear right when we can and read the water ahead, trying to dodge the shallow places that send us swinging, or shelves where water pours strong over submerged benches and snagging there means getting dumped. Water slides quick against ice banks sharp enough to slice your hand. Pay attention! The mountains don’t move and neither do you, paddling hard for hours in an unwieldy current, and when finally you stop, you can’t tell how far you’ve come. Sun high in the sky but it’s nigh on midnight. Time to make camp; time to eat, macaroni and cheese mixed with canned chicken, a chewy, salty feast. Open a can of spinach and cram it down, dark juice and all.

  The doctrine of signatures, which once dominated medical thought, holds that a plant’s appearance reveals its use. Nettle has milky sap, so it’s good for lactating women. Pine needles resemble front teeth, so a tea made from them promotes healthy gums. This is the same idea behind what anthropologist Sir James George Frazer calls “sympathetic magic” in The Golden Bough, his landmark study of belief and ritual. The key tenet of sympathetic magic, he says, “is that like produces like . . . an effect resembles its cause.”

  So if shape indicates purpose, what to make of the Alaska cotton blooming outside the tent? I roll it between my fingers; downy and insulating, it could be a buffer against cold, or with its white hair, a bulwark against early death. That’s not far off, my field guide reveals. Nursing caribou rely upon it for protein, their milk-warmed colts staving off weakness and wolves, at least for a little while.

  Like produces like, and certain images repeat themselves. The vole track pressed into the gray ri
verbank sand is shaped like the grizzly’s, but smaller. A willow twig swaying in the wind leaves a jagged scribble, and the gull above us teases the jaeger by flying up and down, up and back. The fine mat of grass roots is lank and brown as musk-ox hair; clouds over the Brooks Range pile themselves into a second set of mountains in the sky. And as I stand there on the bank, the river leaps along, slicing a new channel for itself, carrying ancient meltwater and grit, catkins and leaves, swelling after rain, tugging the valley this way and that. I cup my hand and drink, wipe grime from my face. Make me different is the thought I can’t put into words. I don’t want to be the same after this trip. Bolder, maybe, less concerned with things I can’t control. I turn a blue cobble over in my hands; it’s honeycombed with chalky white, fossil coral. Individuals do best in community, it says. I tie it to a line and guy out the tent, in case of rain.

  We’re rocketing down the river, balanced on the edge of the raft. Dig deep and pull, front to back, torquing with the belly and not the arms, making for deeper water on the right, the banks blurring past, mountains above them unmoving, and then we’re caught on a boulder the size of a recliner, solid in the current. The river pushes the back of the raft; we’re perpendicular to the bank now, and the water’s lifting my side of the raft higher. If it flips, we’re all going in, and the current is strong enough to sweep us all downriver. I’m riding high, trying to press myself and my side of the raft down, wrestling water as Carl works the paddle, trying to dislodge us. The riverbed is too deep to touch, but he searches the side of the boulder we’re stuck on and leans against the paddle with all his weight, and then the blade slips against slick stone, the raft moves a tick, he keeps pushing until the aluminum paddle bends double and breaks, and then we’re over the hump, sliding down the other side.