Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World (24 page)

Even George and Yvonne—international organ connoisseurs—seem dumbfounded. This isn’t any ordinary instrument. No, not by a long shot. George clutches the sheet music he’s brought close to his chest. Yvonne has her hands clasped tightly at her chin. Ann-Mari continues: “And here is the midwife, helping to give birth. This sound is warm and calming.” The organ pull for the note depicts Sárákkhá, midwife goddess of the
lávvu
hearth. She is, the artist has said, mother to us all.

Ann-Mari stops on an image of smoke rising from the tip of a
lávvu
, which looks not unlike a volcano. “This is the quinta three,” she says. “The smoke, it carried us along between the mountains. It carried us home.”

The sultry note curves around rafters. It dances against the moon-painted ceiling. It hits leaded windows, with their wavy patterns revealing a liquid past. The quinta’s vibration travels over the frozen landscape beyond, a scene that will—just months from now—completely transform with thaw. Come a warmer season, the sky will be as still as the Torne is now, but the river’s currents will be murmuring; the ground itself will rumble with seeds breaking ground.

Ritual is important because it gives physical form to abstract ideas, as Newberg’s research indicates, but it was physical form—phenomena like thunderbolts and auroras and cave-digging rivers—that gave way to those abstractions in the first place. I’m starting to feel like I’ve been a prisoner in Plato’s cave—being taught that shadows are more real than what casts them. But maybe all I need to do is turn around, not be so afraid to step outside, to forge my own spiritual path.

Symbols have the potential to conjure the sense of
unus mundus
that seems to reveal itself far too infrequently in day-to-day life, and I’m increasingly feeling emboldened to use symbols and signs as personal guideposts. But, despite their worth, symbols—hieroglyphs as well as words themselves—still seem, to me, fragile reminders of an overarching, visceral story greater than what will fit on the page, a spontaneous song of universal creativity that cannot be contained.

All religious rites are, at root, human interpretations of phenomena. They are most valuable to us when—for whatever reason—we’re having difficulty experiencing the source of their original inspiration for ourselves. They’re most dangerous when we forget that our culture is not the only one from which interpretations spring.

Increasingly, I believe mystery speaks to us each, directly, all the time. But only if we let it. This belief is partly born of the fact that my phenomenal journey is somehow singing me back to believing in the communicative, rhythmic, whole-world holiness to which I’ve always belonged.

Ann-Mari walks her fingers across the organ until they reach the cymbal star, a brass feature characteristic of European organs. “The cymbal star,” she says,” is actually a symbol here.”

“A symbol of what?” I ask, but she’s already struck the note. It sounds like razor-tipped snowflakes tumbling over each other in midair, like bells on a reindeer harness, the twinkling of a distant star, a crackling hearth, the fiery sun.

“I heard it once when I was a long way out of town,” Ann-Mari says. “It sparkles, doesn’t it?” Sure, it shimmers. But I’m confused. How could she have heard an organ note out in the Arctic wilds?

I lean in to study the Sámi-born symbol for the sound. The etching depicts a reindeer migrating toward mountains. A human figure on curve-tipped skis follows. Above them, as if the world’s been turned upside down, a river flows through the sky.

I ask you: What is a miracle if not the manifestation of light where darkness is expected? I am a child of God, many gods, and—with improbability that makes my beating heart ache—I just heard the northern lights.

June 2012

I AM COCOONED IN A MOSQUITO NET. MY HEART IS BEATING
RAPIDLY,
inconsistently. There is a monkey on the tin roof of my rented-for-the-night hut in Arusha, Tanzania, and I cannot sleep. I’ve spent the last week of my life obsessing over the preschool superbugs that invaded my house in the three months after I returned from Sweden. I’ve been worried about traveling, alone, in ill health, about navigating sub-Saharan Africa in search of the world’s largest mammal migration by my little, lonesome self. And, as luck would have it, on my transatlantic flight from New York to Amsterdam, the woman sitting next to me vomited into a bag the whole way.

I do not want to be here.

I’m writing, pen mashed to paper, as if I’m trying to write my way home. I miss Archer. I miss Matt. I am too far from them. The journey to get here was arduous. It was awful, and I want to turn straight around and do it again.

I want to go home.

Was it a bad idea to drink that water hotel workers told me was safe? The bottled water I was given at the Kilimanjaro Airport tasted like chemicals. Was it full of chemicals? Is
that
why my heart is beating like this, or am I having some sort of panic attack?

My hut is lovely, but I don’t really care. I want my family. I have spent twenty minutes weeping into my pillow from exhaustion and emotion. I have been awake for nearly three days straight, following a sleepless night in my house, where I rose—at 2 a.m. and 4 a.m.—because Archer was crying out.

But why am I not asleep now?

My bed is comfortable, though my nerves are being rattled by diesel trucks on the road beyond the hotel grounds, where, in morning light, women will filter by with barrels balanced on their heads and men will cart drying grass for cows that do not have room to graze. But tonight, it is dark. I am desperate for sleep. It reminds me of how I felt in Archer’s first, nonsleeping year. But my baby is now nearly three. And I’ve just turned thirty-four. Yet I feel like a giant toddler myself, nervous and weepy. I’m crying for my son instead of my mommy. I am a middle-aged baby.

For my birthday a few months back, I told Matt I didn’t want anything other than trees. It was a strange impulse, but he obliged. Our yard was historically forest, then a cabbage field, then pasture for horses. Now it’s our home. And the only thing that would make it better, I told him, would be some native eastern white pine trees. He figured that, on our two acres, we could probably plant fifty. I agreed to the bulk, concerned about the fact that, when Archer walks through woods, he sometimes pretends he has a saw, influenced by Matt’s occupation. Guilty because, in the chaos of my kitchen, I sometimes use paper towels.

For every tree that’s cut down, I tell Archer, we have to plant a young one. But each time I’ve uttered the words, I’ve been reminded that—in order for him to really get this—I have to show him. Those birthday trees were an admittedly ambitious way to do it, and the gesture was made even more ambitious by a confused worker at a nearby nursery. When Matt went to pick up the celebratory trees, he was given a bag of 500 seedlings. He protested, but he was told that, because of the confusion, he could have them for the same price as 50. The trees were already giving.

Matt dug holes in our land, first with a shovel, then with an auger. Archer and I went behind him, wrangling roots. When we were done, we had exactly 450 left. We mentioned our abundance to our next-door neighbors, who said they’d love a few. This went on and on, neighbor to neighbor, until it became clear that Archer’s beloved pine forest would soon be a lot bigger. And I want nothing more than to sit and watch it grow. Starting tomorrow.

In my can’t-sleep discomfort, I start scheming about how I might go home to do just that. But, even in my desperation, I cannot begin to imagine trying to rebook my flights. And, what—I’m going to abandon a week in the Serengeti chasing wildebeest because I miss my family? Because I had a gross plane ride? Because I’m alone, and I can’t sleep, and any minute now I might actually have a monkey on my back?

Buck up, camper!
I tell myself. I hardly ever get homesick. But my last two trips have been too close together. I am tired. I want to go back to my comfortable little house, with my comfortable little bed, and my happily snoring husband. But I’ve got eight nights before I can sleep in a familiar place.
Game face.

I pull out a notebook and string words together like pearls on the page. I craft sentence after sentence. I begin to calm myself with the rhythms of writing. Pen up. Pen down.

Outside, traffic slows.

I have looked forward to this trip for a long time. But my discomfort here has been amplified by the realization that the people in the group that rode from the airport with me this evening, also here on safari, were not of my tribe. They made jokes about suing our transport driver over lost airline luggage. They told me they were here to get away from the real world. I am here to find it.

There are dying flowers on the table next to my bed. In the corner of my room sits a broom ready to clean wooden floors streaked with gold. The whole place is constructed of exotic wood Matt would know by name. If only he were here.

Tomorrow, I will try to see it all with new eyes. I will resume faith in the journey. Ever since I conjured the idea of this phenomenal pilgrimage, it has felt like something beyond me, bigger than me, something I am supposed to do. And I am doing it. Nature will bring me what I need.
Won’t it?

 • • • 

The next day, I am charged by an elephant.
Nature, this isn’t exactly what I had in mind
. But here it is, a giant bull’s head barreling toward me. My safari guide, David Barisa, has maneuvered past a line of elephants skirting this red-dirt road. He started out slowly, testing boundaries, and the animals seemed comfortable. But then, out of nowhere, this guy bolted from behind.

The bull’s face is fully framed in the huge open windows of our Land Cruiser. He’s coming close. Fast. I watch until all I can see are his tusks, and then I turn forward, as if doing so might push us along. I grab my seat, bracing for impact. I am sure the animal is going to roll our vehicle. But then, suddenly, we lurch forward. The elephant steps back.

David is shaking. I am, too.

“I had not engaged the gear,” he says, falling into a fit of nervous laughter.

“Has that ever happened to you before?” I ask. I’ve been in the Serengeti National Park for all of an hour.

“No,” he says, “but it makes me wonder what people have been doing here lately.”

Elephants, as it turns out, really do have long memories. David says, “Their families have been killed and they are wary. They remember human beings are not always friendly. They know about poachers. You have to have an escape road.”

When we’re farther out, he pulls over to inspect the vehicle. “The trouble is when they give you a warning—with a swinging trunk and flapping ears—and you don’t move quickly enough.” David’s fingers find an indentation near the roof. “There is a tiny mark here,” he says, running his hand across metal. “He pulled back.”

The secret language of elephant-produced infrasound has been detected ten kilometers from where the emitting animals stand, and, when sent through the earth, it has the potential to travel much farther. If the bull’s infrasonic capacities are sensitive enough to allow him to experience cries of his kin from miles away, it must be awful to feel a motor running thirty feet from his face.

“Elephants are gentle unless they’re provoked,” David says as we ride along. This seems a reasonable philosophy. I’m upset I’ve unwittingly done any provoking, but what I can’t stop thinking about is this: That irate, 25,000-pound, possibly grieving animal pulled back. What a show of mighty restraint.

I tense as we approach another herd, but David remains calm. He’s going to be more cautious this time. Unfortunately, he cannot control the cries of the wildebeest. These are the bearded, ever-migrating, famously unattractive animals I’ve mainly come to see. And there are thousands of them between us and the elephants.

Each year, roughly 1.3 million wildebeest make a circular trek around the Serengeti in what’s known as the Great Migration. They are joined by roughly 200,000 zebra and 350,000 gazelle. It’s a fine orchestration, with the zebra eating the hardest grasses, the wildebeest following to consume nutrient-rich leftovers, and the gazelle dining on the fresh sprouts that rise from fertilized plains. This composes the largest remaining mammal migration on earth, and it is loud.

The wildebeest sound like they’re all simultaneously squeezing comical clown noses:
Honk, honk!
It’s a strange sort of snort-laugh, and it’s dorkishly endearing. “They do that to find each other,” David says. “The babies are calling the mother, and mother calls back.”

Behind them, an elephant lifts her trunk. Her baby has somehow ended up on the opposite side of the road. The mother begins to wave her head and flap her ears frantically. It looks like she might pick off a few wildebeest. We’d be next.

“Let’s leave them,” David says. “You don’t ever want to get between a mother elephant and her baby.”

No, I don’t. But the scene is introducing me to the notion that the migration isn’t just about the three core species that compose it. Elephants and giraffe do not migrate, but they do travel to be close to the migration when it comes around because it means there are plenty of wildebeest—i.e., easy prey—which means a safer scene for them. Predators hang around because it’s like an all-you-can-eat buffet. Bugs and birds like the prolific poop. It’s a system refined by evolution. But it is changing. Even David, who has been here for only two years, can see it. “The pattern, it is different. It is delayed because the wildebeest stayed longer in the south. There were rains there. The storms, they did not move ahead.”

There’s a lot that scientists don’t know about the migration—exactly why it happens or how it’s sparked—but they generally believe it is related to the weather. Studies have shown that wildebeest can anticipate grass-growing storms from miles away, possibly drawn by lightning. It’s an instinct that has led to the peculiar migratory tradition of backtracking at times, following rains. These animals are not focused on a destination or goal; they are simply, always—no matter what direction it takes them—headed toward life, greenery, steadily enough to ultimately move them forward, toward wherever they seasonally need to be.

David and I come across yet another herd of elephants, their hairline-fractured tusks caked with mud from mineral digs. Their walking is surprisingly quiet. Two of them greet each other, their trunks twisting in embrace. David cuts off the engine and I hear the delicate
whish whish
of grass parting as they walk. Their harvesting of grass bouquets makes a surprisingly loud noise. The ripping oats sound like cotton sheets being cut with dull shears.

“Look over there,” David says, pointing toward an open field. “You can’t see the end of it. Some people call the Serengeti an endless plain, but I call it a sea of grass.”

In surrounding countries, where violence often erupts, there are usually a few major tribes struggling for power, David tells me. But, in Tanzania, there are 120 tribes, with Chagga being one of the largest and Maasai—famed for their beautiful beadwork—one of the most visible. Though David’s family walked away from the traditions of their Chagga ancestors two generations ago, he still knows what the animals meant to his ancestral tribe. “Chagga chiefs,” he tells me, “used to wear leopard skin to represent intelligence. A leopard can read your mind. It knows things, because it sits and watches.”

Wearing animal skin is a way of inhabiting other species, of gaining their strength and knowledge. It is something that Johanna and her Sámi ancestors have always done, loving, wearing, and eating reindeer not as products to consume, but as soulful extensions of themselves. Art critic John Berger has suggested that the first paint was likely animal blood, and that the first painting was of animals. “Animals first entered the imagination as messengers and promises,” he writes. “Everywhere animals offered explanations, or more precisely, lent their name or character to a quality, which like all qualities, was in its essence mysterious. What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet the first symbols were animals.”

It’s a tendency we have not given up in a secular sense.

“There are some animals they use to represent countries,” David says. “Kenya uses the lion in their emblem. It is fierce, but you can tame it. In Tanzania, you have the giraffe. It is calm and peaceful. In Uganda, they use the crane.”

David peers over his sunglasses to ask: “Why is it that your country uses a bird of prey?”

“The bald eagle? I think it’s meant to represent power.”

David nods, as if this makes complete sense.

Animal behaviors ultimately, always, remind David of human ones.

I ask him if there’s an animal he gravitates toward. He does not hesitate: he favors the lions. And it’s not because he wants to seem macho. It’s because, recently engaged, he’s thinking about fatherhood. “The lions make a good family,” he says. “The lions stay together. Their social structure revolves around females. Young ones can suckle from any of the mothers. The males also participate. They share parental care so more of their young survive. It’s the female lions that hunt. The males are built more for defense. I think this is like African culture, too. In some communities, like the Maasai, women build the huts, they milk the cows, they take care of the young ones. The man does nothing but take the cows to graze and then come home to eat. But they are also protectors.”

To our left, we see another lion family sleeping in an acacia tree. There are six cubs. One raises its leg to lick its foot. Two momma lions are asleep in the tree. But there is one standing out on a limb, a lookout.