I Like to Move It

“Don’t move,” the technician named Molly says. Then she squeezes my ankle and leaves the room. Move? I’m supine, with a thick white semicircular cage locked across my entire face. Rubber chocks immobilize my neck and head on a table so narrow I think one deep breath could topple me. Even if I weren’t dizzy. But I’ve been dizzy nonstop for thirteen weeks and six days. When I lie, sit, stand, move. When I look up or down, left or right. When wind stirs the maple leaves outside my bedroom window or birds fly by or images flash on the television screen. I can’t drive, need a cane to walk, have fallen in grocery stores and on sidewalks. Persistent dizziness and vertigo are why I’m here, in a remodeled former cake factory, about to be drawn into the bore of a giant magnet. The magnet will force hydrogen atoms in my brain to line up neatly, then bombard them with radio waves so a computer can identify what’s causing the problem in my brain or inner ear. Movement is something I’m no longer good at, and no longer do without careful planning. So, okay, Molly, I won’t move.

Suddenly her voice is in my head. “Earphones work?”

I force myself not to nod, and risk a shallow-breathed whisper: “Unless I’m having aural hallucinations.”

“Good. Now what kind of music do you like?”

Like most people, my head is often filled with music. Broadway, 1950s rock, the pop crooners, dance music. A random word can trigger a whole string of melody and lyrics, which explains why the song running through my brain now, triggered a moment ago by Molly’s telling me not move, is Reel 2 Real’s 1994 hit “I Like to Move It.” It’s been a sticky song—an earworm—for me since my wife, Beverly, and I watched Julianne Hough and Apolo Anton Ono samba to it on Dancing with the Stars. I like to move it, move it. I like to move it, move it.

“Music?”

“Yeah, we can play music through your earphones. Helps distract you. Some of the scans can be a little noisy.”

A little noisy. I’ve had two brain MRIs before, twenty years ago, and remember feeling as though I were stuck inside a jackhammer.

Without thinking, and overriding the crazed tune in my head, I tell Molly, “The old standards.” That seems to confound her. There’s a click in my earphones, then silence, then another click.

“Name a singer you like.”

I doubt she’d know who Vaughan Monroe was. Or Matt Munro, either. “How about Michael Bublé?”

“That’ll work.”

She reminds me about the squeeze ball she handed me to use if I need help, and re-reminds me not to move. Then the table is moving backward and I know enough to close my eyes so I won’t have to see the tiny space where I’ll be spending the next forty-five minutes. Molly’s view of me now: the pale blue paper shorts I’ve been issued, from which protrude my legs and feet, held absolutely still.

Photo: Jon Olav

A poem by Douglas Kearney

The prisoners released before me had flown home from The Hague in airplanes sent for them by their states. I was the first one who wasn’t a national hero. The guard just handed me a train ticket to Sarajevo and some pocket money for travel expenses. I greeted him with “Tot ziens” and he answered with “Tot nooit, hopelijk!” —an unsubtle indication he didn’t want to see me again.

In the train I couldn’t take my eyes off the window: moving, everything was moving. Houses, cities, gliding by, going away, a constant flow of change after eleven years of immobility.

Waiting for another train in Düsseldorf, I felt like a ghost returning to the world for the first time. I moved out of the way of a person talking to himself, a sure sign of madness at the time of my imprisonment, whereas now everybody had headphones and their mouths were empty of cigarettes.

After Munich the landscape got more and more orderly. Austrians took symmetry and tidiness for beauty, their windows vomiting carnations from houses built to last forever. The train entered the tunnel and came out in Slovenia. I expected to see the big steel factory, once the pride of Yugoslavia, but only one chimney still stood, covered with ads for supermarkets and foreign brands.

Nobody entered my compartment—Slovenia was now part of the EU and there were no more border policemen or customs officers in Europe. But at the Croatian border I was asked for my papers. A pair of Slovenian officers browsed my documents: “Den Haag—The International War Crimes Tribunal for crimes committed on the territory of the former Yugoslavia.” They looked momentarily bewildered, until the policeman, still a kid, sucked air into his spreading chest, soaking his words in venom. I looked into his eyes and the air left him. His partner, the customs officer, elbowed him out the door. The Croat officers didn’t know how to react and quickly went away; they had their own war with the Muslims and some of their heroes had been my prison buddies.

When the train stopped in Zagreb, I bought myself some newspapers. The Croats had buried one of their fascist commandants from the Second World War. In his camp they had killed at least seventy thousand people. Though he fled to Argentina after the war, escaping hanging, he had been in prison, unrepentant, for the past decade, after having finally been extradited. At the funeral the priest said the prisoner had slept peacefully throughout his life, since he knew that God had forgiven him everything.

The train entered Bosnia on the Serbian side of the country and when I offered my papers to the officers, they stood at attention, saluting me like windup toys, while they retreated backward. The staff of the small border station started walking up and down the platform, pretending to be running errands, stealing glances through my window.

I dug into the corner and shame covered me like an icy blanket.

The Sarajevo train station looked forlorn, as though no one had used it since the war began, sixteen years ago. Cigarette smoke drifted from the cafés in front of it. I waited on the abandoned platform until my bus arrived and I almost ran for it, my head lowered.

I had not called anybody in my village to let them know I was coming. The last time I had seen my former wife was in court, on the witness stand. She was talking about how she had begged me to dissolve the factory but I had beaten her into silence. I stopped listening to her. The knowledge that this must be the same lie my daughters were hearing from her dripped from my heart through my body like acid, leaving just burnt hollowness inside. For her testimony she got a change of identity and money for them to start over. I received the divorce papers in prison, signed them, and put a letter on top asking her not to ever mention me to my girls. She didn’t answer.

Photo: Gremlin

Five hundred miles from the mainland, obscured by the curve of the earth, the islands of a nameless archipelago dot a patch of blue tarpaulin sea. Barren, old, crumbling, the islands are the only defined points on a watery plain that is as vacant and forlorn as sky. Cargo ships chugging across the sea leave wakes of foam, and the wakes crisscross like pick-up sticks, but purposeless currents dissolve these lines. Jet trails across the sky repeat this behavior, the perfect lines, the breaking apart. Clouds of fish drift below, clouds of rain above. Sheens of oil. A stray, melting iceberg from the south. A fishing net torn loose. Nothing holds fast. Not even the islands of the archipelago. They are old and chalky, and they are crumbling into the sea; most have eroded to fewer than a hundred yards wide; the lowest ones are submerged during storms. Someday, the islands of the archipelago will wash away.

A poem by Doug Van Gundy

Like anything, it begins with a collision. Two hours south of Portland, Oregon, in the belly of that tar-black leviathan, I-5. Spring has been quietly replaced by a heat that draws reflective mirage from the empty road ahead. Lewis and Clark loom from a 3-D painting on a roadside historical marker, the single point of interest in twenty miles. Their gaze is of hope and invention and falls upon a gas station where, this humid morning, a van and its human contents have stalled.

A young man crouches outside the station store, smoking a B&H and eying the attendant. He spits small wet drops to the left of his feet between drags and lifts his head toward the road. The attendant waves a slip of paper at the boy and the boy nods, stubs his cigarette in the pool of saliva, and follows him inside.

A minute later he is adjusting the rearview and shifting his ass in the plastic bucket seat. He considers a sandwich, a bath, and turns the key. Empty Coke cans, small collections of ash, and torn-open cigarette packs litter the unoccupied passenger seat. The boy lifts two fingers at the attendant as he pulls away but the man does not see.

Soon the highway has collected a steady stream of cars. The day has stretched into a flat heat, the sun just drawn to half-mast; he is thick in thought. When the steering fails the boy wakes from his stupor and looks wildly around. He pulls on the wheel firmly, first right, then left and curses. It won’t work. He pulls again both right and left, and sounds an awful moan, a caged moan. It’s no use. He’s moving too fast. The van glides into the right lane smoothly, clipping a Camry at the nose. He says, “Shit,” as if to rescue his heavy body from sleep, grabs back hold of the wheel, commits the frantic correction.

In a trance, other drivers have fixed on the vehicle’s swerving, they pull onto the shoulder. One man believes that he’s made eye contact with the boy: the face of horror he will never not-see again, and a collective gasp between them as the van first flips into the median sending clumps of earth and grass soaring above. Each subsequent flip incites the scream, the turning away of spectators at a circus, the spectacle and its swelled physical comedy. The van and the earth are drawn together magnetically before them, and then bounce—repulsion. They exit their vehicles and gather in a cluster, already touching, already deep in the meaning of it. They move as a unit toward the flame and the smoke, issue orders, move with cohesion.

The scene of the crash plays as Miss Eva Stark prepares for sleep. In the anxious dark of her bedroom, in the heat of the bed and her tossing, corpses parade past her lidded eyes, but his is largest. His obstructs the center, cracks in the legs and the ribs and folds over itself backward. She calls, “Charles,” to the dark of her room and, “Charles,” to that other place.

He didn’t die in the road. He was wheeled to a white room made appropriate for dying. It goes on and on like this automatically.

The Funeral

Eva is tired at the funeral. She does not slow for not sleeping; she quickens. Her heart speeds and her fingers won’t stop moving. The cadaver is in its box like a metal rod, cold and conductive. She joins her hand with the iron pew of his palm, a simple thing with lines and weight, while the funeral director watches from the corner, calm as a ceramic saint in his pure black rag.

Charles is bloated, at least ten pounds richer in liquid and not calm exactly, more like ever-so-slightly surprised. You’re dead, thinks Eva. Never again, she thinks, and imagines ribs exploding from the torso, moaning, rolling on the concrete, pleading for his mother or help-God, or just please. He appears as wax but is much worse than that; inside he is steel and, in one still moment, draws the last of her heat.

Charles

His family home is in a suburb of Portland, a large modern house on a trimmed lawn. People meet there after the funeral to drink among his things. His books occupy a single shelf and bear titles seemingly unrelated to one another, the library of a young man who didn’t have time enough to develop his taste. His old punk rock records lean against the foot of the bed and there is a photo of him in a white T-shirt and a Hawaiian-print tie at the airport, wearing huge plastic sunglasses and looking bored.

The objects make her a stranger. They knew him better.

Eva Stark drinks whiskey, tells a newspaperman in khaki pants that Charles was a guy who could talk the shirt off your back. Someone else tells a story about Charles double fisting forties and driving at high speeds through the hills. It is meant to be funny. Spectacular, funny stories all around. Briefly, she considers grabbing someone by the throat.

Photo: ThatswhatIam

A poem by Marvin Bell

I took my chances on a perilous path, along which my steps zigzagged, resembling a spiral lightning bolt.
—Robert Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty”

I blink in the sun.

Yellow sunflowers called mule’s ears gather in small towns along the flanks of the Bear River Range, raucous bursts against a brilliant green. They remind me of the first time we took Aidan, our older son, hiking. He was six weeks old, and the sunflowers were in full bloom, banging their heavy heads against our legs as we walked the trail. I held Aidan against my body in a front pack and worried I would stumble, fall to the ground, that I would somehow swing him into a tree, lose him in the river, let him slip from the carrier. Turns out I should have been worrying about hail, the kind that arrives unannounced in the late spring and pelts your body with rough, jagged balls. When the storm hit, both shelter and car were far away. Michael bushwhacked a path straight up the side of the mountain, into a small forest, and I followed, wondering what kind of mother I was to bring a newborn into the wild, cursing my stupidity.

Within minutes, though, I was nursing Aidan under a towering pine near a fire Michael had built out of nothing while the hail grew in piles like stones. Our tiny family huddled in a refuge ringed by sunflowers; the warmth of the fire matched the warmth of my son’s skin. Every spring when the mule’s ears bloom, their bodies bending toward the sun, I think of that first hike, the hailstorm, the shelter, and the emerging knowledge that we were responsible for a being who could not even lift his head.

Poetry by Niels Hav

Jack Stephens nursed the Toyota HiLux pickup truck along the unpaved mountain road above Thule Air Force Base in Greenland. In this austere, rocky expanse, we had just passed, of all things, a traffic sign—a yellow diamond with the black-lettered word Slow—and I asked Jack to stop. I wanted a picture of it, for, in the distance below, amazingly, strangely, lay the brown fell-fields and, farther on, like a permanent cloud, the Greenland ice cap. I got out of the truck. Just where metaphoric cloud and literal cloud met was hard to discern. The world turned white there, and for seconds I could not move. Was there a faint blue line separating earth from sky? I twitched my head, framed the shot, pressed a button. Hundreds of miles north of the Arctic Circle, on a mountain with just two humans, here I was taking a picture of a traffic sign, of a single word—exact and evocative—that, much later, would lead me to muse on some unexpected and strange evolutions of language. Mesmerized, I kept looking at peeled yellow paint and the unfamiliar world thereafter, that caution and panorama. Jack waited patiently.

I hadn’t exactly come for this. Working on a book about meteorites, I would travel soon with researchers from the Peregrine Fund, which operates a scientific enclave at this American air base. I’d travel by open boat—it would take three trips because of mechanical problems and a biologist’s rock-gashed hand—but we’d find the obscure locations where explorer Robert Peary had retrieved three massive meteorites in the 1890s. While P-fund researchers surveyed for falcons, I’d retrace footsteps in order to explore obsessions with meteorites. But before the Barb (“Big Assed Red Boat”) was ready, I had time to explore land beyond the metal-and-pipe-laden base. Jack, the Thule meteorologist and P-fund site coordinator, showed me ice cap, icebergs, glacier, bay and ocean from on high, broken foundations, and cables flung along the ground because they could not be buried in the frozen earth. They stretched everywhere, like the filaments of a spider web.

Alone one day, I would watch storms over Dundas, a now-empty village that was once home to commerce—a trading post. Those red-and-green buildings, squat, wooden, and simple, were then the only bright human colors in the landscape. There was orange lichen on rocks and on a single headstone for a long-dead, forgotten sailor. Pre-storm dark seemed both to mute and to vivify the orange.

I had wanted, almost desperately, to write about something that did not touch, let alone ruminate on, ecological relation and ruin. For years, those words seemed to go hand in hand, like desire and shame. As Aldo Leopold wrote, once you know a landscape ecologically, you see not only its beauty but also its wounds. After years of researching extinct birds for my first nonfiction book, I needed to move beyond such losses. My fascination with the night sky had helped me cope (surely we cannot sully every planet), and watching shooting stars led me to write about them and their larger kin. I found the science and stories of meteorites a delight—and an escape.

I

That was long, long ago.

Your bed was maple, the color of brown sugar, and upon the small round posts of it in the darkness some moonlight danced in the hush, in the quiet. Your mother had rustled away, far away and bright and legendary, and your window stood open to the great stars and the wide dark snow. It was so quiet, and the air of the night and the snow came through the window and smelled so cold, so sweet, and of faraway sad promises. What was it you wanted so? From miles and miles away you heard a late train breathing across the countryside, hurrying distantly through the white winter night to the yellow lights and the little quiet towns. Its whistle blew, so far far away, three times, Ah, Ah, Aaaah . . . You longed for something, lying still between two smooth slices of sheet, but you could not think what it was, and now you will never know what it was.

Photo: Nancy Hale, circa 1930s, courtesy of the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College

David Gessner: I reread Ill Nature over the last two days. One of my own complaints with most writing about the natural world is that it is too precious, lyric, mannered. That is not your approach. I found it so refreshing to read sentences that were funny, wild, opinionated. At one point (in “Why I Write”) you talk about developing a style/persona for your nonfiction, a style “unlike the style of my stories—it was unelusive and strident and brashly one-sided.” Could you say a word or two about the development of that style? Did you have any models? Outside of Ed Abbey, I don’t know of anyone who has pushed it as hard in this direction. You mention the reactions you got. Did they bother you at all? Will you keep writing this way? (You should.)

Joy Williams: In 1987, I was asked to write about the Florida Keys in a small guidebook series Random House was developing. As a concept the series quickly evaporated, but the Keys guide chugged along. I had no monitoring. It was weird. I had a number of editors but they never edited anything. One said she thought it was too “environmental” for a guidebook but her heart wasn’t really into making it less environmental. The Keys were still quite pleasant and peculiar in the 1980s. I explored a lot—the waters and streets, the gardens and bars, and spent many hours in the coolness of the Key West Library. I discovered terrible things about John James Audubon—a mass murderer if ever there were one. He found it an unhappy day in Florida if he didn’t shoot at least a hundred birds. I discovered how sick Florida Bay was, how diseased and damaged the once beautiful coral reef. I was on a very long leash for some reason and I found I could write about anything I wanted in whatever way I wanted. The book wasn’t written for people who wanted to know where to eat. This went on for years—through ten editions—and each edition got gloomier and wilder until I stopped “updating” it and wrote a terminating afterword in which I quoted the great Ed Abbey, who, in his forward to his great misanthropic hymn, Desert Solitaire, said, “This is not a travel guide but an elegy. You’re holding a tombstone in your hands. A bloody rock.”

An Interview with Mark Doty

You would need to have been living in a cave—and a mighty dark one, at that—not to have heard about Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma over the course of the last two years. First published in April 2006, the book quickly did for food what An Inconvenient Truth did for climate change: it framed the terms of the debate about a crucial environmental issue, and in so doing, became the touchstone text for an emerging social movement. But while Pollan has spoken often about the subjects of his books—subjects that include not only food but also botany, architecture, and gardening—he has rarely discussed his craft: his identity as a nature writer; his influences, goals, and style; and the personal, cultural, and geographical context for his writing. These are the subjects we discussed with him by phone for about an hour on the afternoon of May 9, 2007.

Philippon: In the past you’ve described yourself as a kind of nature writer, although some writers balk at that label. Are you still comfortable with it?

Pollan: I know that the term “nature writer” scares people off, because it immediately tells you that the writing is going to be solemn and humorless and religious. But as I’ve often told people, I think of myself as a nature writer who doesn’t like to go camping. I like to write about nature very close to home. But nature is my subject; I don’t know that nature writing is necessarily a mode. So I’m a nature writer in the sense that I’m very interested in nature as a subject, but I don’t know that that interest dictates any one particular approach. In so far as nature writing implies that your set of ultimate questions have to do with man’s relationship to the natural world, then I am a nature writer. In so far as saying you’re a nature writer implies that you sit around and have large thoughts about wild places, no thanks.

Nichols: How else might you describe yourself—as a journalist, essayist, a memoirist, or some other type of writer?

Pollan: I think my identity as a writer depends on the circumstance. Sometimes I work very much as a journalist—often when I’m writing for the New York Times—and I feel like I’m carrying around that persona. It imposes certain obligations, and also affords certain opportunities in terms of the kinds of questions you can get people to answer. But then I do other pieces where I don’t feel like a journalist at all. For most of The Botany of Desire I felt like a writer, an essayist, someone who follows a thread of his curiosity, and combines what he’s reading with whom he’s talking to, with what he’s feeling. I love that aspect of the essay. It’s such a catchall; you can put in so many different kinds of discourse, and journalism is just one of them. And it becomes a very small one in that context. So it really depends: sometimes it’s essayist, sometimes it’s just plain “writer,” and sometimes it’s journalist.

Philippon: Who are some of the essayists that you find interesting or that you consider part of your tradition?

Pollan: Thoreau is a very important writer for me. And although he is often thought of as a nature writer, if you actually read him—which hardly anybody does since he’s one of those writers that you don’t really have to read to use in various ways—you realize that he’s writing about a lot more than nature. There’s tons of stuff about architecture, clothing, politics—every aspect of life. The fact that he’s using his own experience as a laboratory, that he’s willing to range so freely and widely from his immediate experience to what he’s read, what he’s heard—he’s definitely a key person in the tradition.

More contemporary, Wendell Berry, for sure, both his prose and the way he constructs his arguments. I find him a constant source of inspiration, even though I think my writing is very different than his. Humor is more important to me on the page than it seems to be to him, and I don’t come out of that Christian tradition that he’s clearly in. There’s a whole complicated relationship between the sermon and American writing about nature, and all of us who write about these issues are borrowing from the American jeremiad and the sermon-essays of Emerson. But Berry seems to me really rooted in that tradition. He’s spent time in a church, and I haven’t done that.

Edward Hoagland is another writer who’s really very important to me, how flinty and unsentimental he is about nature. All of us have a handful of writers that we pick up when stuck or trying to get going in the morning, and he’s one of the ones that I’ll often reach for.