The Flight of the Iguana (36 page)

After the Red Ace agreed to come on a swamp odyssey, it was Wilderness Southeast that I called. “The Okefenokee,” I said. “Have you got a good guide? Somebody who could show me the reptile life?”

They said, “Do we ever.”

•   •   •

There was more. There was much more swamp and many more stories and quite a few other arrestingly beautiful reptiles. We drank all the antivenin. The Red Ace and I did a reprise of “Never Hit Your Grandma with a Shovel,” first performance in eighteen years, and Crawfish, having sat through it, was made an
honorary member of our high school class. Late at night, as we lay on a platform near Big Water, we heard the unforgettable bellow of a very large alligator, throaty and low and prolonged. It was a deep bass rumbling, so deep that we felt it through the planks of the platform almost as much as we heard it, and at first Red and I took it for the sound of a big outboard motor held at very low idle, in the distance at least a mile off. Then it was answered by another outboard, much nearer us. This wasn't anyone's low idle. It was a living sound, a sound with the same magisterial quality as a lion's roar heard after dark on the East African savanna. And for the Okefenokee, it was the precise equivalent: king of beasts.

After five days we had completed our loop and were headed out. Somewhere in one of the prairies south of Big Water we had turned against the current and begun paddling back upstream, toward the point of division between those waters destined for the Gulf of Mexico and those waters destined for the Atlantic—but it was impossible for us to know just where that divide stood. We never saw it. From where we sat, so close, this was a single mandala of black water, moving around counterclockwise. That's always the way it is at the time.

Finally, reluctantly, we swung the canoes out through a gap between bushes and onto a wide thoroughfare called the Suwanee Canal—which was, being man-made, the least attractive stretch we had seen in the swamp. The Suwanee Canal would carry us straight back to the blackwater cove at Harry Johnson's gift shop and boat landing.

The canal was too deep for Crawfish to pole against the bottom, so he was reduced at last to using a paddle. Paddling his canoe up beside ours, he told a last story:

In October of 1889 the Georgia legislature passed a bill that decreed that the Okefenokee Swamp be sold to the highest bidder. It went for twenty-six and a half cents an acre. The buyers were a consortium of businessmen calling themselves the Suwanee
Canal Company. Their plan was to cut a canal from the east edge of the swamp to the St. Marys River, a monumental engineering feat that was supposed to result in draining the Okefenokee like an unclogged sink. The waters would rush out to the Atlantic, leaving behind thousands of acres and millions of dollars' worth of timber and fertile land. The digging began in 1891 and continued for four years. The main canal was cut thirty-two feet deep and eleven miles long, including the stretch along which we three were presently paddling.

Then in 1897 the work ceased. The project was abandoned, never to be revived. In those days some few things were still beyond the technological will of humankind. At roughly the point in the effort when water was expected to begin surging toward the St. Marys, toward the Atlantic, widening out its own channel with the inexorable force of its call to the sea, the opposite happened. The waters began flowing back into the swamp.

Chambers of Memory in the Ocean of Time

The past is not dead, Faulkner told us, it is not even past. Or words to that effect. I'm quoting from memory. Memory believes before knowing remembers, Faulkner told us, another way of making the same point. It was his central and abiding theme: The past is not dead, is not gone, cannot ever be completely escaped or erased or forgotten; the past
is.
This of course was the heresy of a self-educated Mississippi crank, an axiom more Confederate than American, but probably (and despite the fact that Freud agreed) he was right. William Faulkner himself has been in his grave twenty-five years now, and
he
certainly isn't dead or gone. I got to thinking about—got to remembering—his words this week as I considered the chambered nautilus, an animal that carries its own past evermore forward through life and history, sealed off behind a wall of pearl.

For a living nautilus, the past literally provides balance and buoyancy. And the animal stays in touch with that past, remotely, inextricably, through a long tubular organ known as the siphuncle. This nautiloid siphuncle is a conduit of blood and memory.

The nautilus itself is a staggeringly ancient beast, a marine creature that has remained almost unchanged over 450 million
years, since before life on Earth had even climbed out of the oceans. Five species within the genus
Nautilus
survive today, last remnants of a line that once produced 10,000 different species to dominate the ocean environment as emphatically—and at the same time—as dinosaurs dominated the land. This ancestral line was the chambered cephalopods, including nautiloids and their close relatives the ammonoids. They seem to have been the first successful marine predators, preceding such other cephalopod predators as the squid and the octopus. Like the squid and the octopus, though, nautiloids were soft-bodied animals with multiple tentacles. Long before backbones and toothy jaws and scales came into fashion, the nautiloids and their kin had solved the problems connected with making a living as carnivores in the ocean depths. They did it by secreting ingenious shells.

The shells were most typically spiral in shape, flattened on both sides and coiling gracefully outward from an axis, very much like the shells of surviving
Nautilus
species. The animals secreted these structures progressively as they themselves grew—adding wider extensions to the spiral, vacating ever outward as they needed more elbow room, living always in only the outermost chamber and closing each earlier chamber behind them with a calcareous wall. Of course the shells afforded protection, for the early nautiloids, but they also did something more. Like the wings of the first true bird, those chambered shells allowed nautiloids to rise up off the substrate, defying gravity.

Controlled buoyancy may seem a modest feat to us, by hindsight, but the extent to which it expanded nautiloid horizons would be hard to overestimate.

The shells of living
Nautilus
species serve the same function today. Actually they perform less like a bird's wing than like a hot-air balloon. The successive chamber walls are known technically as
septa,
and behind every septum is a space filled with either liquid or gas, or with some balance of both—depending on whether the individual nautilus is seeking to rise or descend
through the levels of water. Behind every septum is a sealed chamber representing either ballast or lift. Behind every septum is a phase of the animal's history.

But the seal isn't absolute. At the center of every septum is a small hole. Only the siphuncle penetrates backward in space and time.

•   •   •

In July of 1962 William Faulkner died suddenly, under somewhat mysterious circumstances involving whiskey and a steep flight of stairs, possibly also a heart attack or a stroke. He was buried quickly and rather quietly (for a Nobel Prize winner) beneath blasting summer heat in the town of Oxford, Mississippi, where he had lived his life. Roughly a year later an article entitled “The Death of William Faulkner” appeared in
The Saturday Evening Post.
I remember seeing it. There was a photograph of a fierce-looking little man with a stiff mustache and the eyes and nose of a peregrine falcon: this person Faulkner, evidently, of whom I knew nothing. I was fifteen. In the background of the photo, I recall, was a house that looked imposing behind its tall neoclassic columns. I read the Ogden Nash in that issue of the
Post,
and probably much of the rest, and glanced at the cartoons, but I ignored the article about the dead man, whom I understood only vaguely to be some sort of notorious curmudgeon, maybe a segregationist governor. I was chiefly preoccupied at the time with football and bass fishing and the banjo, and no one had yet so much as forced me to read even “Barn Burning” or “The Bear,” thank goodness. The article was by someone named Hughes Rudd, which fact I took note of not at all.

Six years later much had changed, and my life was spiraling around William Faulkner the way a miller spirals around a summer lantern. I had consumed all the novels and was well launched on an obsession that would go beyond appreciative rereading, beyond critical pedantry (and a graduate thesis describing “Centripetal and Contrapuntal Structural Patterns in William
Faulkner's Major Novels”), beyond the demented self-assigned task of trying to translate
Absalom, Absalom!
into a film script; beyond all that, I say, and straight on into cultic veneration. Junior in college now. Late one evening I got a call from a buddy who said I should scutter right down to a certain bar and meet this wild man from CBS News, who was waving tumblers of Cutty Sark through the air and talking about my favorite subject, Faulkner. The man's name was Hughes Rudd.

It turned out that this Mr. Rudd was now a correspondent for CBS, and that he was leaving soon for Oxford, Mississippi, where he would film a documentary about Faulkner and Faulkner's country. Within the elapsed time of one Cutty Sark, I found myself hired. When I protested earnestly that I hadn't come to ask for a job, that I was just genuinely interested, that I didn't want to bust his budget, Hughes Rudd said: “Don't be a fool, David. CBS has money falling off it like dry leaves.” And he fluttered his fingers through the air. “Dry leaves.”

A few days later I was AWOL from college, camped at a motel in Oxford along with Hughes and a film crew. For two weeks there I lived the exalted life of an editorial consultant and gofer. I stood by while Hughes interviewed the chairman of the English Department at Ole Miss, a blindingly tedious man who considered himself chief curator of Faulkner's memory but whom Faulkner certainly would have loathed and Hughes had no patience for either. I stood by while Hughes talked with Faulkner's old hunting chums and the blacks who had tended his horses. I stood by throughout long days of filming inside the small ramshackle house on the south edge of town, beyond the driveway chain and the huge magnolias, the same house that from a distance looked so imposing behind its neoclassic columns. And sometimes, though not for many hours, I stayed at the motel to work on a script. But Hughes wasn't really shooting this program according to any script. He was shooting from his gut; he was shooting from his memory of what certain phrases, certain
scenes, certain novels could mean to a person's life. Clearly Hughes himself was still a writer at heart, despite the CBS business, and he cared about Faulkner in a way that no mere TV commentator ever would. Hughes Rudd was in those days (and remained) an anomaly in the sleek world of network news—a jowly man with a bloodshot glare and a fast, sardonic wit who stubbornly worked the fringes of American culture, the flea circuses and hog-calling fests and tattooists' conventions by which he could illuminate, with his dour deadpan, the important truth that life itself was a benign but very ridiculous practical joke. And the notion of putting a thoughtful contemplation of Faulkner and Faulkner's Mississippi before a prime-time CBS audience was itself so mischievously improbable that it suited Hughes perfectly. Meanwhile there was no need for a script. Faulkner himself had written the script; it was
his
words we would use. For now, Hughes just wanted to capture the flavor of Faulkner's place—which happened to be rural and small-town Mississippi. Get a shot of those mules. Get a shot of that kudzu. Get a shot of this derelict plantation house with the roof fallen in and the columns awry and the thistles growing up between the porch planks. I stood by.

We ate steaks every night and I learned to drink and Hughes and I talked about Faulkner. We talked about writing, the craft Hughes had abandoned and I was just hoping to begin. We talked about sleekness versus fringes. It emerged that my real job on this assignment was to keep Hughes good company and to prevent him from getting himself into trouble—so Hughes said—when the Cutty Sark piled up over his eyebrows. I was fired and rehired three times within the first week. One harrowing evening at dinner I sat between Hughes and Faulkner's sister-in-law, a middle-aged woman still seething with outrage over something Hughes wrote in that
Post
piece six years earlier, and I was obliged to referee. Then it was over. I went back to college and
heard six months later that the whole project had been scrapped, because CBS News was a half million dry leaves over budget.

I visited Hughes once in New York, where he took me out to a dauntingly fancy lunch. Then for sixteen years I didn't see him again, except occasionally on the tube. Mississippi had been wild good fun, but for me it seemed a closed compartment of the past.