The Flight of the Iguana (37 page)

•   •   •

Beneath a soft fleshy hood that covers what might loosely be called its face, the nautilus has jaws like a parrot. With those jaws it crunches the carapaces of crabs and lobsters; in captivity it will feed like a geek on raw chicken. It gapes at the world through a pair of large empty eyes, almost as blank as Orphan Annie's. It has more arms than ten octopuses. It propels itself horizontally by jet power, farting water out through a flexible funnel and steering on sound Newtonian principles. A creature, then, of many bizarre charms—but none of these is so notable as its buoyancy system. The nautiloid buoyancy system is responsible for a seemingly paradoxical feat: allowing the animal to grow bigger and heftier without changing its weight.

The nautilus does grow more
massive
as it matures. But weight is a measure of gravitational force, not of mass, and for a nautilus that gravitational force depends on its own average density, relative to the density of seawater. The spiral shell is made of very dense material, and tends therefore to sink. The buoyancy system compensates, enabling the nautilus to levitate. The shell is constantly being enlarged, constantly getting heavier, and so every five or six weeks the nautilus slides its soft body toward the opening and secretes another septum behind, sealing off another abandoned chamber. Then it begins pumping heavy fluid out of that chamber, by means of its siphuncle, and refilling the same space with buoyant gas.

To rise toward the ocean surface, it replaces more fluid with gas. To descend again, it exchanges gas for fluid. None of these transfers is accomplished quickly. To build a new septum and
empty the space behind it requires time and energy. To refill a chamber with ballast once it has been emptied was thought by scientists, until recently, to be impossible. Most of its life a nautilus spends in the middle depths, along the steep seaward slopes of drowned reefs in the Pacific, between a thousand and two thousand feet down, scavenging there along muddy ledges. Or simply hovering.

The pressure at those depths is enormous. A human body would be squashed. It might seem logical that such pressure would also drive seawater back in through the siphuncle, flooding all chambers of a nautilus shell despite any resistance the animal might try to offer.

This does not happen. A nautilus is immune to nostalgia.

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For me there have been a number of compartmented phases, and a number of lucky fortuities. I was fortunate enough to escape the future that seemed to await me, quite manifestly, as an assistant professor of English whose turf was Faulkner. I was fortunate enough to get untangled from the ivy and sneak off without punching the dots for a doctorate. I evaded the looming Volvo and the corduroy jacket with leather elbows and the unfunny early marriage. Any complacency sensed here should be understood in the context that I managed to make my share of other good roaring mistakes instead. But at least those weren't manifest in advance. I spent three years at menial labor while writing a novel about the death of Faulkner, a novel that no one at the time or for years afterward wanted to publish, and by now I don't either. But it took much time and energy to seal that one behind a wall. Then for reasons of rent and groceries I drifted into being a science journalist, sort of. By what seemed an accident of disposition I found myself working the fringes, the flea circuses and hog-calling fests of the realm of natural history. Probably if you had asked me about influences, though, I would have mumbled the names Ardrey, McPhee, Gould.

Like a recovering alcoholic I can brag that it's now seven years, a record, since I last reread
Absalom, Absalom!
Life is short and eleven times is probably enough.

A few months ago I got a letter from Hughes Rudd. He had seen a small bit of my science writing in the
Washington Post
and called the editors for my address. He was now with ABC, Hughes told me, though planning to retire this autumn and move to France with his wife, Ann. He was glad to hear I had fetched up in the northern Rockies, of which he had fond memories from many years back, when he had rattled through Montana and Wyoming in his old Chevy pickup. “No gunrack but a WWII Walther P-38 in the glove compartment. I used to go out in the semi-desert around Rock Springs, Wyo., and fire it at rocks, pretending they were newspaper publishers or book publishers.” It was vintage Hughes, the whole letter, and it made me smile widely. I had forgotten over the years how much I cherished this man. I had forgotten how much I had learned from him. Even owning a television might have been justified, possibly, on the merits of Hughes Rudd alone.

“I took Ann to Oxford four or five years ago,” Hughes wrote, “so she could see the Faulkner house, and the ole burg didn't look the same at all: they were remodeling the courthouse! Insanity. When they get started they don't leave a fellow nothing, as Hemingway said somewhere.” Hughes knew that I knew that in many ways that old courthouse, with its Confederate monument facing stubbornly South, had been a symbol of Faulkner's world and Faulkner's central idea. But of course the civic beavers who give face-lifts to historic courthouses can't obliterate the essence of recollection, and in even his cynical moments Hughes would admit it. “I've lost track of all the Faulkner relatives and friends I knew in those days,” he added.

People come into our lives and then they go out again. The entropy law, as applied to human relations. Sometimes in their passing, though, they register an unimagined and far-reaching
influence, as I suspect Hughes Rudd did upon me. There is no scientific way to discern such effects, but memory believes before knowing remembers. And the past lives coiled within the present, beyond sight, beyond revocation, lifting us up or weighting us down, sealed away—almost completely—behind walls of pearl.

Stenothermal Waters and the Remorseless Flow of Time

I've been reading Heraclitus this week, so naturally my brain is full of river water.

Heraclitus, you'll recall, was the Greek philosopher of the sixth century
B.C
. who gets credit for having said: “You cannot step twice into the same river.” Heraclitus was a loner, according to the sketchy accounts of him, and rather a crank. He lived in the town of Ephesus, near the coast of Asia Minor opposite mainland Greece, not far from a great river that in those days was called the Meander. He never founded a philosophic school, like Plato and Pythagoras did. He didn't want followers. He simply wrote his one book and deposited the scroll in a certain sacred building, the temple of Artemis, where the general public couldn't get hold of it. The book itself was eventually lost, and all that survives of it today are about a hundred fragments, which have come down secondhand in the works of other ancient writers. So his ideas are known only by hearsay. He seems to have said a lot of interesting things, some of them cryptic, some of them downright ornery, but his river comment is the one for which Heraclitus is widely remembered. The full translation is: “You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing on.” To most people it comes across as a nice
resonant metaphor, a bit of philosophic poetry. To me it is that and more.

Once, for a stretch of years, I lived in a very small town on the bank of a famous Montana river. It was famous mainly for its trout, this river, and for its clear water and its abundance of chemical nutrients, and for the seasonal blizzards of emerging insects that made it one of the most rewarding pieces of habitat in North America, arguably in the world, if you happened to be a trout or a fly-fisherman. I happened to be a fly-fisherman.

One species of insect in particular—one “hatch,” to use the slightly misleading term that fishermen apply to these impressive entomological events, when a few billion members of some mayfly or stonefly or caddisfly species all emerge simultaneously into adulthood and take flight over a river—one insect hatch in particular gave this river an unmatched renown. The species was
Pteronarcys californica,
a monstrous but benign stonefly that grew more than two inches long and carried a pinkish-orange underbelly for which it had gotten the common name “salmonfly.” These insects, during their three years of development as aquatic larvae, could survive only in a river that was cold, pure, fast-flowing, rich in dissolved oxygen, and covered across its bed with boulders the size of bowling balls, among which the larvae would live and graze. The famous river offered all those conditions extravagantly, and so
P. californica
flourished there, like nowhere else. Trout flourished in turn.

When the clouds of
P. californica
took flight, and mated in air, and then began dropping back onto the water, the fish fed upon them voraciously, recklessly. Wary old brown trout the size of a person's thigh, granddaddy animals that would never otherwise condescend to feed by daylight upon floating insects, came up off the bottom for this banquet. Each gulp of
P. californica
was a major nutritional windfall. The trout filled their bellies and their mouths and still continued gorging. Consequently the so-called salmonfly so-called hatch on this river, occurring annually during
two weeks in June, triggered by small changes in water temperature, became a wild and garish national festival in the flyfishing year. Stockbrokers in New York, corporate lawyers in San Francisco, federal judges and star-quality surgeons and foundation presidents—the sort of folk who own antique bamboo fly rods and field jackets of Irish tweed—planned their vacations around this event. They packed their gear and then waited for the telephone signal from a guide in a shop on Main Street of the little town where I lived.

The signal would say:
It's started.
Or, in more detail:
Yeah, the hatch is on. Passed through town yesterday. Bugs everywhere. By now the head end of it must be halfway to Varney Bridge. Get here as soon as you can.
They got there. Cab drivers and schoolteachers came too. People who couldn't afford to hire a guide and be chauffeured comfortably in a Mackenzie boat, or who didn't want to, arrived with dinghies and johnboats lashed to the roofs of old yellow buses. And if the weather held, and you got yourself to the right stretch of river at the right time, it could indeed be very damn good fishing.

But that wasn't why I lived in the town. Truth be known, when
P. californica
filled the sky and a flotilla of boats filled the river, I usually headed in the opposite direction. I didn't care for the crowds. It was almost as bad as the Fourth of July rodeo, when the town suddenly became clogged with college kids from a nearby city, and Main Street was ankle deep in beer cans on the morning of the fifth, and I would find people I didn't know sleeping it off in my front yard, under the scraggly elm. The salmonfly hatch was like that, only with stockbrokers and flying hooks. Besides, there were other places and other ways to catch fish. I would take my rod and my waders and disappear to a small spring creek that ran through a stock ranch on the bottomland east of the river.

It was private property. There was no room for guided boats on this little creek, and there was no room for tweed. Instead of
tweed there were sheep—usually about thirty head, bleating in halfhearted annoyance but shuffling out of my way as I hiked from the barn out to the water. There was an old swayback horse named Buck, a buckskin; also a younger one, a hot white-stockinged mare that had once been a queen of the barrel-racing circuit and hadn't forgotten her previous station in life. There was a graveyard of rusty car bodies, a string of them, DeSotos and Fords from the Truman years, dumped into the spring creek along one bend to hold the bank in place and save the sheep pasture from turning into an island. Locally this sort of thing is referred to as the “Detroit riprap” mode of soil conservation; after a while, the derelict cars come to seem a harmonious part of the scenery. There was also an old two-story ranch house of stucco, with yellow trim. Inside lived a man and a woman, married then.

Now we have come to the reason I did live in that town. Actually there wasn't one reason but three: the spring creek, the man, and the woman. At the time, for a stretch of years, those were three of the closest friends I'd ever had.

This spring creek was not one of the most eminent Montana spring creeks, not Nelson Spring Creek and not Armstrong, not the sort of place where you could plunk down twenty-five dollars per rod per day for the privilege of casting your fly over large savvy trout along an exclusive and well-manicured section of water. On this creek you fished free or not at all. I fished free, because I knew the two people inside the house and, through them, the wonderful surly old rancher who owned the place.

They lived there themselves, those two, in large part because of the creek. The male half of the partnership was at that time a raving and insatiable fly-fisherman, like me, for whom the luxury of having this particular spring creek just a three-minute stroll from his back door was worth any number of professional and personal sacrifices. He had found a place he loved dearly, and he wanted to stay. During previous incarnations he had been a wireservice
reporter in Africa, a bar owner in Chicago, a magazine editor in New York, a reform-school guard in Idaho, and a timber-faller in the winter woods of Montana. He had decided to quit the last before he cut off a leg with his chain saw, or worse; he was later kind enough to offer me his saw and his expert coaching and then to dissuade me deftly from making use of either, during the period when I was so desperate and foolhardy as to consider trying to earn a living that way. All we both wanted, really, was to write novels and flyfish for trout. We fished the spring creek, together and individually, more than a hundred days each year. We memorized that water. The female half of the partnership, on the other hand, was a vegetarian by principle who lived chiefly on grapefruit and considered that anyone who tormented innocent fish—either for food or, worse, for the sport of catching them and then gently releasing them, as we did—showed the most inexcusable symptoms of arrested development and demented adolescent cruelty, but she tolerated us. All she wanted was to write novels and read Jane Austen and ride the hot mare. None of us had any money.