Baby Geisha (14 page)

Getting to know porpoises will convince any skeptic that animals can talk. That's why it didn't seem far-fetched to me when this sprout I germinated began to make noise. I just brought it into a quiet corner of the house so its sounds would bounce off the walls and be magnified.

My weed's first word was
water
. It took me a week to figure out what she was saying. It sounded like a two-syllable high-pitched hum:
mra mur
. It could have been a fly talking. Since then her voice has deepened. By the time she was a month old, she could say in elfin intonation,
Get these gnats off me.

 

I took my leafy friend along to my new home because this is no ordinary plant. Sure, I will smoke her when she reaches maturity, but in the meantime she has been teaching me what it means to be herbaceous. I see her wilt with fatigue or perk up when misted. I nicknamed her The Shrub of Emotion.

Since when did it take hours for my bush to form a sentence? Maybe it was because we were on the airplane, and my potted friend disliked cabin pressure. Maybe she was shy. For a female bush, she is easily intimidated. Someone gave me a look from across the aisle. For a minute, I didn't know why.

“
Ohh
. They think I'm talking to myself,” I said. My weed was making me look bad.

It was like this for the duration of the flight. I kept her in a duffle bag under my seat, so only her leaves peeked out. Don't ask me how I weaseled my way through customs.

My shrub and I escaped the airport and taxied two hours to our new rural Swiss abode. She was back to her chatty self after requesting an extra dose of fertilizer.
Put me in the window sill
, she said,
that artificial light was torture
.

 

My emotional shrub forms sentences by bending her stems and buds into a series of squeaks, wheezes, and bursts of air. She sounds like a child mimicking a choo choo train. I can hear her plainly now, being well attuned to her needs, but I might offer you an ear trumpet to magnify her words until they become recognizably audible. As with any new language, her creaks and whispers are foreign jumble until you learn the words. It's a mistake for humans to personify plants, but it's also a mistake to assume plants don't try to communicate with us.

 

Translated to English, this town is called Milk of the Wise Man. This rented farmhouse in the Alps is clean and sparse. Its windows crank open and closed, and exposed wooden beams line the ceiling. The bathtub used to be a trough—hopefully no livestock had used it as their hot tub. I bathed and put on a nightgown, even though it's still light out. It's tweaky how the sun doesn't set until midnight. This residency will be a challenge. A neighbor just dropped off a strudel.

Goats are roaming through my yard. I'm here on a grant to study how alpine flora and fauna feel about living above the tree line. Do rams enjoy it when their horns ice up? Is living on the side of a cliff satisfying? Do ferns like having their brackens pelted by hailstones? I have lists of questions, and a trunk full of equipment to record and transcribe my wildlife interviews. My grant application was entitled:
Middleman
. My main duty, as I see it, is to ease negotiations between the plant and animal kingdoms.

 

It all started with a choking Sinaloan donkey. My boyfriend at the time and I stopped to help it. We were in a dusty marketplace, traveling in a border town below the Rio Grande. There were donkeys all over, standing idly, packed with heavy loads. This donkey's owner yelled for help as his donkey coughed something up. I wasn't dying to put my fingers down that animal's throat.

When I finally grabbed a stick and inserted it into the donkey's mouth as my boyfriend, Francis, held its jaws open, a baggie full of seeds fell out. The donkey gasped for air and we gave it some water. People clapped and the owner—not the donkey—yee-hawed. No one wanted to touch the seed pouch, so I snatched it up, rinsed it off, and pocketed it.

“Yuck,” Francis said. He was wearing walking shorts and rope sandals, so with his big beard he looked like a saint.

“See how they're bundled?” I asked. “Someone was smuggling them.”

“Drugs,” Francis said. He always restated the obvious. Sometimes I admired this, but this time it was annoying.

These Donkey Seeds reminded me of small jumping beans. Would they grow donkeys?

Francis and I were taking a trip to forget that we were sick of each other. When we met, I loved his gentle demeanor and simple approach to complicated topics, like love. “I love you,”
he'd say. “That's all that matters.” He wasn't sidetracked by excess psychological baggage. He never doubted my intentions, for example. But his idealistic naïvete irked me. I felt like hurting him. When it started affecting our sex life, I decided it was time for a vacation.

To my mind, these seeds added a lot of excitement to an otherwise dull trip. I brought the seeds home with me, in hopes that they'd continue to work their mojo on our life together, which needed spicing up.

 

I snuck the seeds across the border in my bra, and then germinated them in wet paper towels. Day by day, I'd enter the kitchen and find another sprout dead. But my Shrub of Emotion was thriving. By the time I transferred her into soil, she told me that if I harvested her in a year, I could smoke her for a pleasant high. Francis the Skeptic came over to see her.

“I don't hear
her
talking, if it's a her,” he said.

“She only talks at night, and it is a
her
because her hairs are crossed,” I told him. (If the hairs point straight out, you've got a boy, and if they make an X, it's a girl.)

“I think you already smoked her,” he said.

“Stoners can't train dolphins,” I said. “But this is an exception. If a plant tells me to smoke it, I'd be dumb not to. It's my scientific obligation.”

“You're spending too much time with dolphins,” he said.

“They're the only other animal besides the bonobo that has sex for pleasure,” I said.

“If you'd rather have sex with a dolphin than with me, go right ahead,” he said.

I was shocked that he stood up for himself. It made me like him more. For a split second, I thought that I'd made a mistake. He was a nice guy, the solid down-to-earth type. But that was the problem. You can re-evaluate somebody on the spot, but
usually your previous assessments are correct. Someone can be wonderful and still not be right for you.

We don't keep in touch. I was sad, but the plant had already replaced him, in a way. I couldn't wait to roll up a fatty and taste her.

 

A few days after my split with Francis, Mike (the dolphin) tried to attack me underwater again, so I resigned. It was the fifth time this had happened, and each time my supervisor, Ron, said it was natural, even good, a sign that Mike accepted me as a true mate. Ron is a twirp; he probably likes getting accosted by dolphins. But I don't like being violently pumped from behind by a large rubbery creature. It's discomfiting and painful.

Ron offered me a sabbatical and recommended me for this grant. I packed my clothes and bought a ticket to Switzerland.

 

So here I am in this Swiss chalet. European life has its advantages. Each morning I eat cheese and bread, and feed Shrubbie with compost from a nearby turkey farm. Women hang clothes on twine clotheslines, and kids carry water buckets. Cows moo constantly, I guess because they're happy it's summer. The other day, I saw a man in lederhosen pulling a wagon full of chickens. Everyone here drinks beer and plays the accordion. There's a street festival dedicated exclusively to white asparagus. What century am I in? I've been thinking more about schnitzel than this science project.

 

Shrubbie suggested that while I wait for alpine animals to show up, I might research cannabis not only for her benefit, but to better my understanding of marijuana's magic. Here are selected excerpts from
The Alpine Weed Research Journal (dedicated to Shrubbie).

Day One: Reading medieval herbals for hemp's medicinal cures. In Culpepper's
Complete Herbal
(1649), the seed emulsion,
dropped into your ears, is said to “draw forth earwigs and other living creatures.”

Day Two: I smoked a bit of Shrubbie. Snipped a bud with newly purchased Swiss Army knife. She winced. Went to sleep trying to decode words I imagined in scrambled cursive, words like
uphill
and
reinstated
.

Day Three: Read about Fitz Hugh Ludlow, 19th century American writer who documented his addiction to THC. Once sober, he satisfied his cravings for hash by blowing colored soap bubbles.

Day Four: Pruned Shrubbie. Sang her a birthday song, said, “Make a wish,” and blew some candles out for her. Sometimes, when I smell Shrubbie, I get the munchies. But I so admire her palmate leaves and her strong pungent stems that I don't have the heart to kill her. Last night I told her I loved her. She is, at present, my closest friend.

 

Three months later, I've finally made owl contact. I think all it said is,
Stay away from my babies
. I stashed a dictaphone in its nest and caught its hoots on microcassette. When I played the tape for the lady next door, she seemed only momentarily impressed. It's easier for me to talk to animals than to the people here. Swiss-German sounds like spitting and rolling spoons on one's tongue. Maybe humans experience nature in the same way we experience being in a new country. I am merely skimming conversations. Are all humans missing 99% of the forest action? I don't feel like I'm missing that much when I hike.

Plants and animals communicate differently than humans, namely they don't hide their feelings. It's documented that animals and humans share emotions: rage, fear, curiosity, sexual attraction and lust, separations distress, social attachment, and happiness. But only humans can think ambiguously; only humans can have malintent towards something they love. I think
about this when I think back to Francis. I loved him, but only sometimes.

Shrubbie loves me unconditionally. I know what Shrubbie needs because she's learned English. She needs a lot more than just water. Once she told me that she's lonely when I leave the house. Another time she said,
I'm so healthy
,
maybe I will live forever.
Her enunciation sounded like Haiku. That was our most poetic moment.

 

The fourth month into research, my first big breakthrough occurred with a pine marten. His coat was four kinds of brown.

I went home and played Shrubbie the tape. She swayed breezily when she heard it, claiming the marten sounded like a dolphin, so I checked to make sure I had the right tape in. We both had a good laugh. But then when I told her what the marten was saying, she said,
All that small mammals think about is their stash
.