horns of Africa

The morning after the kudu bull was killed by the lions who then lost its carcass to the hyenas, John and I return to Chudob waterhole to have a look at the yesterday's battlefield. It is all quiet now, with the ochre sand blowing here and there as the wind increases and an odd ungulate walks across the salt pan to get a drink. I look for the great kudu horns but they have already vanished, as if all traces of the battle had to be wiped off the stage to make room for another play. 

But these magnificent African horns haunt me. I grew up in Poland, at the time when the culture of hunting and rifles, trophies and venison suppers, was still very much alive. My father, a forester's son, grew up in the woods and remembered shooting his first hare one snowy evening before he was old enough to go to school. Like many kids in those days, he roamed unsupervised, learning the sounds and silences of the forest with every step: an only child, a boy alone, mesmerized. He told me he often returned home at night after having to find his way in the dark, and hearing the owls, the wolves and the wind talking to each other. And he learned to imitate animal sounds so well that when I heard the hyenas' battle cry yesterday I had little doubt he would have learned it, too.

He was a very good hunter, and I grew up with big mounted heads hanging on our walls. 

But these heads with their massive horns came from Africa. There was a Cape buffalo I did not like very much because it seemed too cow-like and graceless, and a lovely impala buck with its lyre-shaped horns, and a mysterious head I loved best for its delicate lines of its great horns. Many years later, in Kenya, I finally thought I found its origin: it was probably a topi, a big reddish antelope with sloping shoulders and tiny yellow eyes located so low on its beautiful narrow head the animal seemed blind. 

But why on Earth did we have African animal heads in a small city apartment?  Right after the war, Pecia, as we children called our father, was encouraged by Mister Antoni, another forestry engineer, to take a train to what had just become western Poland, newly liberated by the Allies and handed to Poland after the Yalta accords became final. Virtually all Germans who used to live there were deported or fled on their own, leaving behind an unimaginable wealth of their fully equipped homes, stores and outbuildings.

And some Poles, who still had to mourn their war dead, and whose own possessions were all but gone, and who were often hungry and penniless, quickly realized this was the best time to go and collect from the newly abandoned German houses whatever they could, from furniture to underwear. I remember this postwar Klondike rush was called "szaber." The new and chaotic phenomenon amounted to mass looting of properties no longer guarded or legally owned. And so the Second World War continued, as if its destructive course which already lasted six terrible years maintained its deadly momentum and could not stop on its own, perhaps never.

I dimly understood that szaber, if performed to benefit your hungry and ill-dressed family suffering through another bone-freezing Polish winter, was an honorable undertaking, which amounted to "taking what was rightfully ours." Yet if it was conducted solely to speculate and sell the loot to those in dire need, it was considered a plain and immoral robbery. This distinction and the final judgment greatly depended on who was talking.

So Mister Antoni, a refined and urbane man with slender wrists and wire-rimmed glasses, led our reluctant and somewhat bewildered Pecia to the szaber grounds out west. They soon came across a German hunting villa with well appointed grounds, and set to work. The absent owner appeared to be a wealthy man and an avid hunter. Perhaps -- and I can only speculate on this subject -- he even had a strong connection to the German colony of South West Africa, including parts of today's Namibia. And so the two intrepid engineers collected what they considered the most important, boarded a passing train full of similarly burdened passengers, and safely returned to their families. 

I remember Mister Antoni brought back a score of pots and pans, some fluffy down comforters, clean linen and heavy table silver, which could be sold to buy food. It was a hungry time in Poland, and precious metals were a common currency of need. He also brought some winter clothes for his family, all practical good stuff, hugely desirable and much needed.

And what did our Pecia bring? Three large sets of the above mentioned African trophy horns, all mounted. One native African hunting lance, 6 feet long, tipped with a sharp bit of metal. Two grass African plates, with nice muted designs in many shades of wet clay. And two heavy volumes of a German book titled "The Grave of Tutankhamun," describing an archeological expedition which discovered and excavated Tutankhamun's tomb under one of the pyramids in Egypt. The books had black linen covers with gold letters and were published in old German Gothic alphabet.

My mother despaired, albeit not for long. By then, she knew what she could expect from her husband, and I am sure she knew what she would have done if she had gone instead. She was born in the tsarist Russia, lost her father who was murdered soon after the Bolshevik revolution engulfed the country, and came to Poland as a refuge when she was 12, already hardened and endlessly resourceful.  Perhaps she also recognized that not everybody could be like her, madly courageous, hard driving, and kicking her priorities in a strange but logical order. When she saw a couple of straw mats she wanted to hang above our kid beds, she slipped off her ring and left it in the store to pay for it later, but the mats went home with her that day. And when our dog Czertez found a roast -- which someone miraculously procured and left on a high window sill outside until a gust of wind blew it down -- she would serve it for our dinner and let Czertez have his share. So, if she made a mistake of letting Pecia go, she should not have been surprised by the results of his szaber expedition.

And for me his esoteric loot became an instant source of delight. I loved waking up to the shadows of those great horns moving slowly across the room as the sun rose. I played with the lance and imagined I was strolling all alone across the savannah, ready to meet many animals who would accept me immediately as one of their own. The grass plates were wonderful to touch and very pretty. There were also the books. I could not read yet -- in German or otherwise -- but there were many pictures. Small, black and white, and beguiling. The pyramid, the camp, the bearded men digging and excavating one ancient chamber after another, all mysterious and dim. I still remember marvelous reliefs on the walls of the catacombs and finally the find, the sarcophagus, and the scary, strange and very dead mummy. Then the opening of the casket, shaped like a person and richly decorated, and a wrapped human shape, and the unwrapping.... 

All this was thrilling beyond description. I knew I did not want the warm clothes Mister Antoni's daughter just received: this is what I needed more than anything else. This, and the African animals' heads with their horns turned to the sky. And perhaps in my life's journey I traveled as determinedly as my mother did, and brought back the amazement my father would like.   ©Yva Momatiuk

the kill

Today carnivores rule, and the life and death drama visits the Chudob waterhole in Etosha National Park in Namibia. The waterhole is a pretty oval of blue water sunken in the ochre colored banks and, with its plume of tall green reeds, decidedly bucolic. It is also -- now that the dry season is riding on dusty sails of desert winds -- an open air theater where wildlife plays are performed. 

None of them are rehearsed or scheduled, but all involve a cast of characters arriving from the surrounding desert, sometimes heralded by a puff of dust, and at times hardly ever noticed. They may be gentle and soothing, as when a herd of thirsty impalas sip daintily at the edge of the pond. They may also explode with sudden ferocity and are blood curdlingly brutal. If programs of such plays were written, they would stress that the "brutal" label is strictly human-made: for the predators of Africa any moral judgment is meaningless. All plays speak about survival and leave human sentiments aside.

John and I, busy attending to elephant's tracks in dry mud of the Etosha pan, arrive too late to witness the opening act. But Marianne and Howard, our friends and fellow photographers who tend to appear at such events with an uncanny sense of timing, tell us about four young lions who showed up at Chudob soon after daybreak. The cats were playful and lively. They tried to chase animals while kicking up a whole lot of fine sand, but all that effort led them nowhere. Then they noticed a kudu bull -- that of a magnificent corkscrew horns and a tawny coat -- who after seeking safety in the deeper end of Chudob tried to sneak out and escape. Marianne thought his long wait made him stiff because after the lions gave chase he seemed to stumble. But who knows? Perhaps just the sight of impeding death closing the distance in smooth, long leaps made him unsteady and weak? 

What we see is act two: a carcass, with its bright magenta guts spilling and the magnificent kudu horns in repose. And the lions, now satiated, resting nearby. The day drags hotly throughout the bland afternoon hours, and the lions take turns lapping the pond's water and flopping down again, their muscular shoulders relaxed and soft. The dense ranks of springbok, zebra, impala and oryx, well aware of the lions' proximity and patiently waiting, slowly begin to descend toward the water's edge. A young male elephant comes, too, and smelling the lions he advances toward them with his great cabbage ears flapping, the trunk sneaking, the feet pounding. 

He puts on a good show and the great cats retreat a short distance to placate him, but return as soon as he leaves. 

Then from a thicket of mopane trees a new shape appears: a massive head, a long neck, low hunches. A spotted hyena. It comes slowly, obliquely, as if that pile of meat on the ochre bank meant nothing at all, but it comes closer and closer, pulled by the string of a scent we cannot detect. 

Then, as the third act opens, the singing begins. Loud, piercing and steady call of the clan, summoning its own. And very soon another shape appears, a twin of the first. And another. We try to count the shapes but as more arrive, the cats stir, and the largest lioness runs over, perhaps trying to intercept and stem the flow of hyenas which multiply as if by some dark desert magic. 

I quickly do the math: four lions, dozen hyenas... that's three hyenas per lion. Three pairs of steely jaws against one cat, however powerful he is. But the math fails as soon as the invaders reach the carcass and their song changes: it is no longer a summoning call but a steady raucous growl of intimidation, and threat, and triumph. 

THIS CARCASS IS NOW OURS

The lioness knows it, too, but tries to rewrite the play's inevitable ending. Boy, does she try!  While the smaller cats retreat far enough to be safe, she grabs one hyena by the throat, slashes another, then turns and pounces on several rushing shadows. But the hyenas are too quick, and now there are two dozen, and they know they are winning. Some attack the lioness from behind and aim at her genitals, unprotected by her teeth and claws, and she crouches low to protect herself, the same way we saw grizzlies in Alaska trying to escape the fangs of a family of wolves. And in this crouch she suddenly looks vulnerable and submissive, even though she still tries to bite, and slash, and grab, and rescue what she can.

The dust stirred by the fight rises fast, and the hyenas heads appearing from the flying dirt remind me of taxidermy trophies, great theatrical props devoid of bodies and suspended in space. The lioness retreats, then turns and tries again, but nothing can be done:

the kudu carcass is now entirely covered with so many spotted bodies that only one hoofed foot pokes from under the mass of tearing, snapping and chewing hyenas. 

We look in silence. The play has ended. There is no applause and no flowers are tossed for the best actors. But we know we have just witnessed a great performance, illuminated by the brave and the athletic and the determined, who just want to hold on to life. At whatever cost, with whatever it takes.

©Yva Momatiuk

at the waterhole

John and I drive across the parched skin of Botswana, passing small farm dwellings resembling round bird nests made of clay and crooked branches closely embracing each other. Then we sail across open grasslands, following a narrow track deeply carved in the bed of sand. The darkness comes way too soon -- it is winter -- and we need to stop, for these roads at night are alive with people and animals walking, resting, and just being there. 

We turn into a simple bush camp serving mostly overlanders like us, but even its rough edges do not hide a flat TV screen over the bar, and a curio store, and an array of drinks served to parched travelers. There is also a waterhole, filled nightly, which attracts a family of elephants, by now well habituated and marching through the camp day and night, often within feet from flimsy tents. 

I go to the bar to grab a beer, and see the elephants drinking muddy water so close I smell the digested grasses and leaves of their giant droppings, a pungent horse scent I always loved. Yet not all is well, and before I finish my beer the matriarch turns abruptly on her great soft feet and, with her trunk raised, takes a few steps toward the people on the wide terrace of the bar.  They move back quickly, I hear some nervous laughter, and she slowly retreats, but the illusion of her acceptance of the emotional price her family must pay every day is shattered.

The day closes well, the night air is smooth, and the camp is simple and nice. But suddenly I feel that our human presence and our cabins, our cold beers and our laptops planted right where the elephants must come to drink in order to survive, is deeply obscene. I know this is Africa, where bush camps and lodges are often constructed near such life-giving holes and even supplementing them with water during dry season. I know that considering the absence of poaching in such locations makes them a pretty safe place for animals. And I know that visitors traveling from all over the world to behold these huge pachyderms and other famed animals of the continent come to such waterholes to have a great experience and bring home pictures and memories. And if not for these visitors and their tourist dollars, there would have been no desire and no funds to protect these lands and these animals. 

Yet I feel shamed and also angry, and not at all resigned to "that's the way it is." We should not be here, and I am not just talking about a couple of hard drinking bike riders who just arrived in a posse of roaring motors and now make fools of themselves and annoy others. I am talking about myself, and quietly whispering and respectful people, and silent onlookers, and families with small kids, and everybody here, assembled in this camp at night and paying to watch a spectacle, a circus act, a great awesome show Africa is putting on to entertain us. 

I suspect I may get over my sorrow. I may see there is nothing I can do for this depleted, dissected, and war-torn continent, and its scattered and ever diminishing groups of animals which still survive, restricted by fences, roads, plowed fields, depleted forests, sucked out waterways, and rapidly mushrooming human dwellings. But I hope this deep sense of shame will not leave me for as long as I walk the earth. 

©Yva Momatiuk

Kubu Island, Botswana

Somewhere in the enormous expanse of Makgadikgadi Pans in central Botswana there is a sickle-shaped island of pale rocks piling up like waves on its raised beaches formed by an ancient lake. It is called Kubu Island, and since in Setswana kubu means a hippopotamus, perhaps this old lake used to be kind to the biggest of all aquatic African mammals, who need water to protect their poorly pigmented skin from the burning sun. The salt pans form the driest and the most desolate part of the Kalahari Basin but after much rain they can turn into a milky blue lake of still water and reflect billowing sails of passing clouds.

But this is a dry season, and the pans are bone-white with salt and very dusty. We arrive late, welcomed by a whole family of big-bellied baobabs growing on the rocky ridge and resembling hugely oversized potatoes crowned with a bundle of roots. Some of them may be several thousand years old but, since they do not develop typical sequences of growth rings, no one knows how old they really are. You can carbon date then all you want, and still come up empty. 

But their actual age is not everything: it is the importance of a baobab that matters. If I were a Bushwoman, I would know that this tree had once offended God who, seething with anger, grabbed it by the top and planted it upside down, so its convoluted roots became the sky-scratching branches. And that if I ever picked its flower after it blossomed during a warm spring night, I would soon be torn up by lions. Yet there is also a faint hope of salvation: if I soak the tree's seeds and drink the infusion, all crocs will avoid me forever.

No water anywhere, and no crocs tonight. The evening sky flares up orange, and then deepens into a pewter soup with shimmering lights of the Milky Way. The air cools. We find a baobab which hugs the most stars and settle for the night. John disappears among the rocks to ponder the sky and tree spectacle, and I play a luxurious animal and savor the cold, some red wine, and the desert breeze.

Next morning we wake up well before dawn but the baobab which embraced the night sky is already glowing ruby red. It is an old tree, its trunk scarred by the sand blowing from the winter-dry salt pan we slept on, and by the mind blowing length of time it took to raise it from the seed against all waterless odds. And some of its broken branches, heavy enough to flatten any living thing passing under their falling weight, litter the ground below: a battlefield of growth and gravity.

I see -- with the sun still under the flat horizon -- that I am shadowless, with only my feet touching the ridge. This is a magical time, with the colors saturated and strong, and I want it to last forever, even if I must donate the rest of my life's daylight hours to anyone who wants it. Here, in the blinding light and deep shadows of Africa, such moments are rare.

I walk up and touch the tree. The baobab is smooth and dense and cold, like a column of steel, and as I rest my back against it I feel the night's coolness radiating from the core of the trunk. I look across the miles of the white salt pan toward a huge expanse of Chobe National Park with its many animals and the people who come to see them. But here, in the raw center of the country, all is quiet, remote and self-contained. And when the sun emerges, faster in the tropics than anywhere else, all the birds -- did I mention the birds?--go silent, too. 

©Yva Momatiuk

God's gift to this country

It is noon, and getting hot, and very sunny. John, the devoted practitioner of the impossible, is sprawled on the baked gravel near the fence surrounding an active oil well with methane-fed flames spluttering behind wild sunflower blossoms, and spies on various insects with his long lens.  We are attempting to photograph a visual outline of the fracking industry, which in the last decade stood this hardscrabble prairie region on its head.

As many people already know, the recently perfected hydraulic fracturing method which allows for extraction of oil trapped in thick beds of shale buried deep underground is anything but perfect. In fact, it has an enormous potential to pollute drinking water resources, turn fertile fields into trampled arenas supporting tons of monstrously large and noisy equipment and supply trucks, fill the air with dust, produce toxic and carcinogenic waste, and forever change the way of life for hundreds of rural communities.  And just the way its detractors stress the darkest side of the boom, its proponents see only the glory. New jobs. High wages. Revitalization of many dying towns where all businesses had to close and family houses have been selling for under $30,000. The promise of the anticipated profusion of cheap gas for all.

Yesterday, while rolling down a dirt road near Williston, ND, a Wild West oil boom town which tripled its population in the last decade, and where the smallest apartments rent for $3,000 a month, we met a man driving a white pickup which kicked up a fair amount of silky dust. We stopped. He stopped. Then he rolled down his window and without any prompting he proceeded to lecture us on shining virtues of the American rough and ready individualism. And according to our white pickup man, these virtues are flourishing now in North Dakota, thanks to our mineral rights laws which allow ordinary citizens to purchase these rights and extract whatever their owners are after. 

"And no one can stop you here, no one!" he proclaimed, adding that in England (an obvious dig at John's not-English-but-it sounds-foreign-so-it-may-be-English-after-all accent) the state owns all such rights and can make sure no one can get his rough and ready hands near them.

He was wrong: just like in the US, mineral rights in the UK are not tied to property ownership and can be purchased separately. And recently residents across England have started receiving letters from the Land Registry, informing them that the Church of England plans to register the mineral rights to the earth beneath their properties. If approved, the claim could allow the Church to profit from fracking, even though the Diocese of Blackburn has warned parishioners in Lancashire that fracking could threaten “God’s glorious creation”. 

Yet the roadside lecturer sounded as if our freedom had no equal anywhere on Earth, and only we, the citizens of the U.S., could enjoy our private Klondike if we only wished to grab it. We asked where we could see a lot of oil drilling activity and he waved his hand toward the east.  "Go to New Town," he suggested. "As you drive, you will see God's gift to this country: wheat, oil, wheat, oil, wheat, oil...."

Seeing that God may be actively involved in the fracking controversy in more ways than one, we simply try to chase what we can. Right now, there are butterflies and flames. Earlier, there were wheat fields and blue plastic pipes resting on dark soil. Yesterday there were bigger flames and tall derricks nodding their mule heads near isolated farmhouses, dark shapes of oilmen servicing drilling rigs, a giant waste collection pit lined with acres of black plastic and gaping darkly in the middle of the prairie, old emergency vehicles with peeling patriotic stickers reading "SUPPORT OUR TR...." and hundreds of iron caterpillars of oil-laden railroad cars, winding slowly across golden wheat fields under the blazing blue sky.

Hot and filthy, we find a "men camp" to score a shower. Hundreds of prefab dorm boxes stand side by side, leashed to their individual propane tanks and satellite dishes not unlike dogs to their owners. The red gravel driveways are empty, as if the oilmen who reside here were forever absent, and the boxes held only dozens of their tube socks silently watching television screens. But the communal laundry room is busy, and as I enter every man comes over to help. They fetch the manager, add find some badly frayed but clean towels -- old white for me and pale blue for John --  and escort us to a clean private shower. We splash and scrub and rinse.

The men remind me of the Great Slave Lake fishermen, the Dogrib and Slavey natives we sailed and lived with while doing our first magazine story for North/Nord in 1975, and Wyoming's Jeffrey City uranium miners who saved my ass during one awful winter blizzard a long time ago and later pulled my rented VW bug stuck in a snowdrift in Red Desert, and frostbitten Alaska pipeline workers who told us about all the wildlife coming on shore in Prudhoe Bay. They are lonely, for their families and sweethearts do not usually follow them to boom towns, which are too expensive and too "hot" and too remote. A young road supervisor -- one of many drivers who stopped to chat with us --- shyly asks to be photographed playing his guitar on the back of his service pickup.  Anything for company, anything to stove away this nagging home sickness which no job can fill.

I read a North Dakota job website:

North Dakota fracking jobs growth is off the charts. Right now, North Dakota and cities like Williston have become “ground zero” for those seeking employment in the fracking industry. Stories abound of new arrivals to this economic powerhouse in the Plains finding work within mere hours, and reaping large paychecks from endlessly available overtime. Plenty of opportunity awaits those willing to travel to the North Dakota landscape in search of fracking jobs, and away from the economic distress so common in other states.

I also see that most of these jobs require a high school diploma or GED and call for:

*  Ability to bend, stoop and lift objects of up to 75 pounds for extended periods of time.

The website also lists typical employment benefits:

* Medical Insurance -Premium is 100% company paid for employee or family coverage.
* Teladoc - A benefit that gives employees access to a Doctor 24/7/365 for visits by phone/video at no cost to the employee, including getting a prescription written if appropriate. It is not insurance, but helps employees get the most out of their benefits.
* Dental Insurance - Premium is 100% company paid for employee coverage or 50% company paid for family coverage.
* Vision Insurance -100% employee paid.
* Life Insurance - Company paid life with AD&D policy with the option to buy up.
* 401(k) - Employees are eligible for 401(k) after 1 year of employment and 1000 hours with a company match of up to 4%.

So, if you are a high school graduate, or a dropout with your GED in hand and no savings and even less prospects, and can bend and lift up to 75 pounds repeatedly, and do not mind working up to 90 hours a week, and sleep in a prefab box next to your tube socks, and see no one you really know for months on end, this may be your chance to live an adult life, with your efforts translating into a decent paycheck. And medical and life insurance. And a sense of purpose.

Environmental concerns? The potential degradation of water, soil, air, and traditional life here, and in Pennsylvania, and in Illinois?  This is for you and me to worry about. This is our job. It really is.

It is our job because we drive our cars, heat our houses, eat cheap food transported by innumerable trucks, and use the oil these men bring to the surface in thousands of different ways. And because we participate in oil consumption even when we fly or drive to Washington, DC, or Albany, NY, to protest -- wholeheartedly, and rightly -- the very abomination of fracking.  And because many of us have some investments and hate to see our stocks sink, even though their robust performance is often tied to the very oil orgy we abhor but also embrace.

Perhaps because you and me do not have to bend and lift heavy objects over and over again in order to make our living, we can, instead, take on the job of making sure this new wave of extractive activities does not get out of hand. And it does matter that we argue, sign petitions, donate to environmental organizations, elect politicians who pay attention to environmental warning bells, and otherwise keep our minds alert and knowing and balanced.

And maybe this winter, after we process our pictures and look at them critically, we may throw them into the cyberspace to make our point or two. But today we just watch that butterfly trying to land on that particular wild sunflower.

The blossoms remind me that recently they turned out to be the only plausible toilet paper I could find in the arid, hard landscape. John departed with our camper, I could not wait, the ditch was there, but every plant I considered had pointy spikes and rough sandpaper leaves. So in the end the sunflower petals became my garden of Eden in the fracked desert.

© Yva Momatiuk

the biggest fish

We are standing in a verdant potato patch planted near a windbreak of scraggly black spruce trees. The sea of St.Mary's Bay, one of these broad-shouldered Newfoundland coves which for centuries protected small fishing boats from North Atlantic gales, is bright in the late summer light, and the man we followed to the patch is turning his nearly blind eyes to its glare. He is standing still, breathing the evening air pungent with sea smells.

"I took them stones out and threw over there," he says, and points at round rocks heaped behind the garden. There are many rocks in this thin soil which did not yield good crops unless you yanked the stones out the best you could and nourished the patch with armfuls of rubbery kelp. And even then, the weather -- the fog blotting out the sun, the wind tugging at young plants, and the cold keeping them from growing -- could eat away at your harvest and leave you with nothing but more rocks to pick. 

Lawrence Gibbons is 89 now, and lives in a nursing home a dozen miles from his old house in St.Vincent and a vegetable garden he cultivated for much of his life. He used to be a commercial fisherman, one of many men whose small brightly painted houses huddled on the shores of the Rock -- as the natives called the island of Newfoundland -- and who expected nothing but the staggering hardship of their daily toil. When he was young, men often died at sea, women in childbirth, and kids in infancy. The boats were small, and doctors too far to reach them in howling sea storms and winter blizzards. There was no money, few roads, and Newfoundland was the poorest province of Canada.

We are back on the Rock because our 1988 book, "This Marvellous Terrible Place; Images of Newfoundland and Labrador," was recently adapted by Petrina Bromley for the Rising Tide Theatre in Trinity, and we loved seeing it on stage.  But when we first came to St. Vincent quarter of a century ago, we walked the beach looking for humpback whales. The sand underfoot was soft with a thick layer of capelin, small forage fish grazing on plankton near ice shelves and later devoured by whales, codfish, seals and seabirds. In early summer, they spawned on sandy beaches and then died in teeming millions. Lawrence was there, gathering their silver bodies in a bucket to fertilize his potato patch. We were working on a National Geographic magazine article at that time, and over the years we kept returning to hear his sea stories where each sentence formed a separate and distinct tale.

We would fish in shoal water.
A steel hook, stuck into a big fish.
Twenty pounds of wild fish, just five fathoms down.
You haul in 150 of them, your hands wet and line slipping on your fingers.
By and by, the skin comes off, and then the salt water eats away your flesh right into the bone.
You talk about sore.
Oh, blessed Virgin who is dead.
Oh, misery.

But that all happened many years ago, when his eyesight was clear and his muscles supple. Today he is very old and he cannot see much except for some slivers of dim shapes way to the side of what used to be his field of vision. He is dressed with great care in scrupulously ironed blue shirt and trousers, a neat small hat, and well polished shoes: a man treated with due consideration by the nursing home's staff.  We learn that from time to time his son Jerry roars in on his shiny red motorcycle and carries his father -- always dressed as if heading for church -- to St. Vincent and his old home.

But this sense of decorum does not last. "Dad comes with me, says something about just wanting to sit inside a bit, and then he disappears," Jerry says. "He goes down the ditch and scratches some dirt to let the water flow. He pulls the weeds. He sits on the ground and digs. By the time I am ready to drive him back, he is dirty from head to toe. He just cannot help it but work."

We are still standing in the potato patch with Lawrence and swatting mosquitoes which arrive on the wing of the cool evening air when John asks him about the biggest cod -- called "fish" in Newfoundland -- he has ever caught. And we sense the encounter comes back to him in a bright flash because he is suddenly quiet, with no more small talk left in him.

He spreads his arms. "It was a calm, calm water," he says, and his palms, now flat, smooth the sea he remembers.  "Not a good thing for catching fish: you need a ripple, a wave. So we tried and tried and no fish, and the guy I was with got sleepy because we were catching nothing. So I said:  'fine, you sleep, I will try some more.'  And a little while later, bam!  I caught something with my jigger but it was so heavy I was sure I hooked the bottom."

He spins his hands close to his chest, pulling the fish in: wild, strong, fighting for its only life. He switches to present tense because it is happening now, right in front of him.

"I move my jigger this way and that way, and then I feel the thing I hooked is running this way and that way like crazy, heavy as anything. A shark? Must be a shark! So I yell at my buddy to wake up and we are both pulling and tugging and getting the fish tangled in heavy bull kelp, and then it comes out, a monster cod!  Where is the gaff? the gaff!  but we don't need it; the fish swallowed the whole jigger, all the way down his throat. He is not going nowhere. He is so big the boat is tipping, but we try and try and pull him in."

"How big was it?" asks John. Lawrence spreads his arms as wide as they would go, and we see the span is still too short because his fingers move about as if feeling the tip of the slippery fish nose and the end of the flapping tail. "He was clear across the boat," he says, "and hanging over both gunwales. Ninety six pounds. A monster."

The fight to land the big fish is done, the dusk thickens, and we slowly walk back to Lawrence's nursing home. Just before we reach the first step I try to take his hand but he waves me off: he will find the steps himself.  It is not difficult, really, just another hardship which needs to be tackled. And as he reaches the landing he turns and waves -- at us? or at that faraway day when the bottom of the sea moved and came into his dory, muscular, glistening and full of life?

©Yva Momatiuk

processionary life

Round and round we go in the red hot center of Australia, circling the monolith of Uluru - once known as Ayers Rock - while looking for chinks in the armor of the rules governing Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. We want to walk away from the crowd-containing thoroughfares just far enough to photograph the Rock under the arch of the Milky Way spilling across the indigo sky at night. Yet we are not allowed to leave the park road which is looping around Uluru too close for what we have in mind, or depart from the base trail which even closer, so while hiking along its meandering course we can touch the warm sandstone cliffs rich in a coarse mineral called feldspar.  We need to walk into the bush far enough to uphold the entire bottle stopper shape of the Rock and the flat land around it to capture the essence of Uluru's singularity and its apartness from all other rocks in the world.

The land was given back to the Anangu people, the Aboriginal families of the region, in 1985, and they in turn leased it to the Australian government for 99 years. Now the park is administered jointly, and its managers are restricting access to sacred areas which should not be photographed or even seen. The non-Aboriginal administrators are sharing the glory of this World Heritage site with the original owners whose ancestors have lived here for more than 50,000 years.

But who knows how long, really? And who can fully comprehend the huge effort it took to extract sustenance from this land, sandblasted by winds and baked by the sun? There are some precious oral accounts, documentaries and illustrations depicting the never ending toil of survival, but who knows how the original Australians managed to squeeze small bits of nutrients from tough-skinned wild fruit, gritty grass seeds and gnarled serpentine roots? How they transferred the energy of light-footed kangaroos, slithering snakes, darting lizards, fat grubs, and fluttering birds they caught and gathered in sandy ravines, among tumbling rocks and under tree bark -- into their own bodies? We learn that some Aboriginal languages had several classes of nouns, one depicting men and all animate objects, another including women, fire, water and violence, and  -- astonishingly -- a separate group for those including edible -- non-poisonous -- foods. This way, the Aboriginal children could learn what may not harm them and walkabout in the desert with this thin sliver of protective knowledge. But what if they were poor grammarians?

We already know we are poor rule breakers. The only time I drop off John after dark by the side of the road so he can sneak into the bush of mulga, river red gum and spinifex, I get a park's ranger knocking on our van's window almost immediately. Painfully polite, he asks if I am alone, and I say that I am not.  Is it the clear desert air and the canopy of stars which enhance my desire not to lie?  For my answer, I know, will unleash some disciplinary action. The ranger leans on his car horn repeatedly and summons John who eventually appears from behind, all innocence and round eyes: "I was just down the road, looking for stars." And so he was.

But there is more to it than better planning, for we know how we can wiggle around many rules. I can drop John off and drive away only to return some time later. Or we can park a mile down the road and walk in: no one but snakes, lizards and fat grubs would know we are lurking in the bush. Yet something is bothering us. The hulking massif of Uluru is veiled in the ancient traditional knowledge which is obscure and therefore absent to us, but ever present and sacred to the people who lived (and still do) around here, with formidable spiritual powers locked in these rocks, vegetation and dry stream beds.

This is where the Aboriginal Dreamtime and all its creation myths, laws of the land and the necessity to respect their wisdom wrestle with our vision of the world, circumscribed by what we like to call logic, rationality and science. Our modern mantras, balanced on these seemingly tangible foundations, tell us this is just a land and the rocks and spindly trees, and we should be able to go where we want, and explore and experience this place our way, with no impediments. We understand restrictions governing areas recovering from erosion, willingly adhere to garbage disposal rules, and cherish the no-noise policy, but not being able to enter the scrubby bush for an hour or so because of some restrictions created by the traditional culture already spread eagle and panting on its deathbed?

Then something happens and takes shape, vague at first but stubbornly there, and we gradually begin to understand that how we move and with what intent may upset some delicate balance.  And that's all we know. We do not know why, but it seems wrong to do just as we please. We see hikers, often led by park rangers, climbing the steep flank of Uluru by the only secure and marked route, and read the words of a traditional owner printed in the park's brochure:  "That's a really important sacred thing that you are climbing. You shouldn't climb. It's not the real thing about this place. The real thing is listening to everything." And what strikes us is that the appeal does not forbid, just asks to try to consider something uncommon and important which, because of its secret nature unknown to others, we cannot understand at all. Just: stop. Consider. Please.

We go back to our daily circling of the Rock, working out the legally accessible angles and imagining Uluru's dense night shape floating between the Southern Cross and the end of the universe.  If we come too close, the shape flattens into a featureless blob. Too far, and the noble mass becomes too small. We change our lenses, consider this and that, look longingly into the forbidden bush and keep circling, but it is leading us nowhere. Suddenly, a gray, elongated shape enters the road in front of us, and we pull over. A snake?

It is a long freight train of Processionary caterpillars, Ochrogaster lunifer, hundreds of furry animals walking nose to tail, perfectly following one another as if pulled by some invisible puppet strings, orderly and unhasty, but so determined that when I place my foot in front of the leader, it merely circles my hiking boot and keeps on going without slowing its stride.

We follow the procession into the grass, flop on the gravel to photograph its progress, and wonder. Do these hairy critters, whose touch can produce a nasty skin rash and -- or so some sources claim -- a spontaneous abortion in pregnant mares, also obey some social order and a hard-wired history they derive from their DNA, the way we circle Uluru while obeying the rules of our kind? Nocturnal foragers, these caterpillars usually hide during the day in large communal nests hanging on bushes and weaved of silk, old skins, and other debris, which earned their offspring the name of Bag-shelter moth, and emerge when they must find a suitable food tree full of tasty leaves. Every individual trails a thin strand of silk as it moves along, and when other caterpillars encounter such strands they follow them until the string of animals becomes long, invigorated and full of purpose.

The purpose, as usual in nature, zeroes on survival. Small birds who would not hesitate to grab a single caterpillar may be reluctant to attack what looks like a snake, and even bigger and bolder predators may be deterred by hundreds of spiky hairs. When disturbed, the caterpillars quickly curl up into tight hairy spirals until no danger is evident, but they soon reassemble and march on.

After our first encounter near Uluru we start to photograph them everywhere: near King's Canyon, in the McDonnell Ranges, on some small trails. The Milky Way would be just another picture of its glorious wings,  enhanced by the clear air and particularly prominent in the Southern Hemisphere, and these moving gray specs in the desert dust are our consolation prize. Their sense of purpose is contagious. In the next several weeks we look for subjects to photograph as if they were great food trees, already glistening with silky webbing of those who know it, too  -- a hungry community of animals, forever  searching for our sustenance.

When my silken thread suddenly reappears in the city of Canberra many days later, I almost trip on it. I am looking at the Milky Way painted with natural earth pigments on eucalyptus bark by Malawan Marika, an Aboriginal artist. The painting was done in Yirrkala in North East Arnhem Land, circa 1965, and the bark slab, rough-smooth and dark ochre all over, shines with the multitude of stars I know. But there is something else disturbingly familiar about this image, one of many paintings comprising the National Gallery's Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islanders Art exhibit. I read the "surface story" offered to satisfy the curiosity of non-Aborigines who want to know the meaning of all symbols presented, from small sandy dots to luminous circles and bold cross-hatchings, but the story predictably glides on the surface and hides all meaning.

I see Baru the crocodile, apparently a mighty creation ancestor -- or how else could he appear in the middle of the desert where rivers hide under towering folds of sand dunes at will?  I see the the Milky Way dissecting the night sky and read about two brothers fishing in their canoe which capsizes in strong wind, and the hungry croc finding their bodies. Nothing nasty happens here: the brothers and Baru ascend into the night sky and became constellations. So far so good. Then some Possum ancestors playing clapsticks nearby also join the others in the night sky, followed by dancing women, a Native Cat, the submerged canoe, and the Scorpion who once happened to be a man. This is a nice A-B-C story, but it amounts to little more than comings and goings of various characters.  I do not understand its hidden meaning, which hovers around silently: a spiritual thicket I can never enter.

I look closer at the painting, and suddenly I see our caterpillars. They turned into in the stars of Malawan Marika's Milky Way and shine like mad, ready to look for their food trees in the desert sandblasted by strong winds.

©Yva Momatiuk

salmon

The small Adams Lake country store is dim but noisy, with the radio pumping some jumbled rock-and-roll music and local announcements. Move right, and a plastic ghoul on the wall shrieks in your face. Faint left, and a bleached skull mask mounted on the freezer screams in your ear. Long strands of Halloween wigs hang everywhere, tangled and dusty: the last year's stock trotted out just in time to feel a bit pagan.

The shelves are crammed with merchandise, from moose jerky in plastic bags to dark Belgian chocolate, small armies of colorful booze bottles, moss-green pickles, fishing equipment, cheap plastic toys, an array of hardware and a bunch of videos. The films' titles hint of violence and fairy tales: there is Defiance, Hell to Pay, Massacre at Fort Hollman and God's Gun, but also The Swan Princess.

"Do you have any lead weights, the kind divers use?" asks John. A small blond woman behind the counter says she sure hopes so, and if John waits two minutes she will check her ex-husband's gear: he is -- or was, since his gear is still here -- a diver. We wait, and she returns, shaking her head: no.

"Your ex, he is no longer diving?" I ask. "I don't know, " she replies. "He left me in April, didn't even take any of his stuff. I have been kind of numb all the time, but now I am thinking this: if he left me, maybe I do not really need him?"

I touch her sleeve and ask her name: it is Connie. She is smiling but not really. Maybe she does not need him, or maybe she does. Maybe the loud radio music is pushing the void he left behind into the corner of the store they used to run together, from 8am until 9pm, every day. "This is hard," says Connie, "these long hours, alone." We agree, tell her our names, and she shakes our hands over the counter, hard. Life is what it is, take it or run away from it, screaming, into the big dark woods of British Columbia right behind the store, or anywhere else when this void catches up with you. It is your choice.

"Anything else you need?" Connie asks, and I look around for some food. We have been on a river full of salmon for a good while now, and are running low. Bananas? One dollar each, Connie warns me, and then puts a bunch on the counter and says: let's make it 50 cents each, OK? so you can have them for breakfast. Tomatoes? Again, one dollar each, but hey, you can have them for 50 cents. No discount on chocolate or moose jerky, smoked by a native family living downstream, but we buy them, too, as well as some sandwich bread and a carton of milk. We also pump plenty of drinking water into our camper's tank using Connie's garden hose outside, free of charge. And: yes! Two pairs of swimming goggles for John, adult size, four Canadian bucks each. A pink pair and a black pair, the last of the season.

We return to the Adams River to photograph red waves of migrating salmon, shimmering in the swift current. Watching the largest sockeye run in the century in British Columbia has a Zen quality to it, and we often stand on the river bank and slip into the pulsing rhythm of the swimming fish, hour after hour after hour. John says their red skeins skirting large boulders resemble Andy Goldsworthy's garlands of leaves he sets afloat in streams, working -- according to the sculptor -- "in a quiet and subversive way."

By now, the fish have traveled hundreds of miles from the sea, up the silty Frazer and over the rocks and the clean gravel bottom of the Adams, their primary breeding habitat where they were hatched a few years ago. They have not eaten for many days and have been swimming hard, and as they lose their strength and immunity their smooth skin becomes mottled with infections and a flesh-eating fungus. Fishermen avoid them now, for their once succulent flesh is no longer edible, but black bears, coyotes, wolves, foxes and birds do not mind: good protein does not have to be pretty and sweetly scented to fill their needs.

Pulled by their genetic memory and a sense of smell, the salmon have been swimming by us every day and night for two weeks, alone and in large multilayer groups, swirling around in eddies and jumping as if trying to gain more speed. Their ruby-red sleek bodies are slicing the river, with green heads pointing upstream where -- soon, soon -- the females will turn on one side and twist-flop their bodies to excavate a nest in the gravel for the safekeeping of their eggs, and their mates will spill their milky fish sperm over the eggs. Then the pair will move upstream to repeat the process, until -- utterly spent, their hormones and bodies exhausted -- they will die.

Some sockeye die right by my feet as I slosh across small creeks. They take a running start upstream, struggle with the current, float hopelessly backwards, skitter sideways, struggle upright in the shallow water, and try again and again, until the effort becomes too huge and they lie down, motionless, with their fish mouths opening and closing, opening and closing. At first, stuck on dry land and in shallow water while John snorkels and wades in the river, I try to prop them up so they could swim again, but there is no use and I stop.

We are here because David, who was diving in British Columbia, sent us a glowing message a month ago when we were still in Alaska:

... have you heard about the RECORD sockeye run in the Fraser River...the biggest in at least a century, over 35 million sockeye expected, possibly the greatest migration of any vertebrate on Earth. Peak will be in about six weeks, best place to go is the Adams River.

Let me know if you need more info; I will be going in four weeks.

Four weeks and dozens of messages later, we bushwhack to a small tributary of the Adams and embrace Gayle. David and Conor, a marine biologist from Vancouver, crouch in a shallow pool among slowly circling sockeye and look in their drysuits like a pair of fishing black bears. It takes us one day of scouting the river to get hooked, but we need some underwater equipment: a $100 underwater bag we quickly procured is a bit better than a ziplock bag and about as efficient.

The wheels turn quickly. Gayle and David, a master underwater photographer who took some good images in a couple of days, soon return to the Catskills where we all live, and Gayle raids our basement. She sends us two large parcels of John's underwater gear and more boxes are expedited by B&H in NYC. Aware that the Canadian customs will sit on our equipment for weeks while wrapping it in tons of bureaucratic red tape, we drive across the border to the US, and intercept all parcels in the house of our old friends. Andre and I go back to 1962 and our climbing days in the Polish mountains; Anne walked into our lives only a bit later.

Their living room is soon turned into a messy tinkerer's dream, since John is missing some crucial pieces of equipment and must make them from whatever he can procure. And in spite of his novice status as an underwater photographer, he also wants to build some extra devices to -- no doubt -- impress the sockeye. Days pass, and he labors from dawn to dusk, raiding hardware stores to buy many astonishing items and changing his design often. Anne and Andre feed us, their dogs -- Moopy and Sophie -- walk us, and one day we collect John's contraption we call gulgutiera -- from the "gul-gul' sound made by large sinking objects -- and sprint back to the Canadian border.

The red tape appears instantly, and after the compulsory timeout in the customs' office we are asked two questions, one designed for Alzheimer's patients to test their memory ("name all states of the Union you have lived in since you were 18") and another to see what grade of elementary school we could attend safely ("so, what were you thinking when you woke up one day and said to yourself: 'I want to go to Canada'?")

Eventually the scrupulous Canadians let us in, but it is already dark and BC mountains pile up like beached whales. We detour into a narrow valley and crawl into our bed -- used twice before, as we crossed and recrossed the border -- at Ladyhawke Vineyard in Keremeos. We come another full circle here because we have known the owner, Joann, since 1975: she was a girl then, and lived in the Northwest Territories. Her father, Willy, a legendary bush pilot, flew us to the Arctic and into the laps of the unsuspecting Inuit of Umingmaktok for our first National Geographic magazine assignment. Willy and his Bandits, as he and his pilots were called, infuriated a multitude of aviation regulators, but the people living in the remote Arctic communities he served -- loved him. Joann inherited Willy's grit and before she planted her first Marechal Foch grape stalk in Keremeos two years ago she managed her father's airline.

Next morning we drive further north, and soon kiss the Adams River on both cheeks: the sockeye are still there, swimming, red and glorious. I scout the watershed for the best spots, photograph the river and endless graphics of salmon carcasses, and stumble among mossy boulders. There are many photographers combing the river, including some feisty Japanese divers occupying our favorite pools and acting as if they owned the Adams. Yet at dusk, as they emerge from the bushes along the river, they suddenly become docile. They bend sideways and beg: "Please?" while I open heavy zippers on the backs of their drysuits and set them free.

John is never free. He loves the salmon, the way the fish press on with their dramatic and short lives, but every day his mind chases new possibilities of improving his gulgutiera or the images he is striving for. He photographs all day, every day, and at night he improves or repairs whatever has failed. I list items he has made and altered.

He built a long arm for his strobes, using aluminum bars wrapped in dark pipe insulator to eliminate their reflections; modified his quick-release L-shaped bracket and altered the underwater camera housing's attachment to allow vertical and horizontal formats without repositioning the strobes; stripped and carved the plug and removed the casing to get his wireless remote inside the housing; modified the said housing to accommodate a lens no one else is using underwater; used a commercial window cleaning squeegee with a 15-foot telescopic handle to construct a movable platform for his camera, allowing him to lower it to the bottom of the river and move it around without scaring the fish away from the lens; wrapped a Styrofoam block carved from the sheet yanked from under our camper mattress in a black plastic bag and attached it to the squeegee to gain buoyancy for his under-and-over images.

He also wrapped his wireless transmitter in a ziplock bag while protecting its antenna with cardboard cut from a cereal box and using a neck strap from a nylon cord which traveled with us for 30 years; replaced a flash battery compartment lid (held by a flimsy washer which got lost right away) with a piece of a yogurt container lid; used plenty of electric tape purchased in New Zealand 15 years ago; employed a monopod head and quick-release clamps for controlling the angle of the camera and the arm holding the strobes. Lacking a drysuit, he opted for his water-repelling kayak suit (not fully waterproof) and to prevent drenching he slipped on his rain pants and jacket before the suit went on. He also borrowed a diving hood and mask with a snorkel from Conor.

John's kayaking gloves and a pair of khaki colored Crocs (the fish hated his yellow ones) completed his river attire. And the lead weights, necessary to keep his feet from floating up as he bent down to stick his head underwater? He stuffed ziplock bags full of coarse gravel into his suit's leggings and placed some rocks around his waist.

Yet John's inventions are put aside when another old Arctic friend, Margo, and her family come to see us on the Adams. Margo and her husband Howie flew down from Qurluktuk, an Arctic community in Nunavut: they wanted to be around while their younger daughter gave birth to her first baby, and the little girl -- Pitikhi in Inuktitut, Zasha in English -- arrived safely. John, still dripping, emerges from the river, and we attack the fried chicken the family brought, finishing the feast with our moose jerky.

The dark aromatic meat remind us of 'mipku,' dry caribou strips we carried in our pockets many years ago, when young Margo and the two of us, also young, went fishing for trout in Arctic Sound where her parents had their traditional Inuit camp. After midnight the wind dropped and ferocious Arctic mosquitoes descended on us in dense unforgiving clouds, but we caught our fish and returned triumphant. Little Pitikhi has not met these mosquitoes yet, but if our vaguely articulated plans work out, we may all go to Arctic Sound next year. Who knows? And who knew we would still be rushing across the continent to see each other, admire the new baby, watch the sockeye, and suck the bones of BC chickens and dry moose meat -- together?

On our last day on the river we hike to a beautiful "fisheries pool" hidden behind scraggly conifers and ancient yellow birches. Here rapids veer toward one bank of the Adams, leaving a quiet eddy on the side where young workers of Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans congregate to count, sex, tag and release hundreds of sockeye, trying to approximate the size of the run. It is their day off and we have the pool to ourselves, so John shuffles into the river and begins his aquatic gyrations: bending motionless with his snorkeled face in the water to watch the fish, quietly floating on the surface above the salmon, and raising his squeegee handle like a Volga's river raft guide wielding his push pole.

After several hours he sends me a happy thumbs-up, for today nothing got stuck or malfunctioned. Smiling, he sloshes ashore carrying his impossible gulgutiera, but soon his mood darkens: the dome protecting the lens rotates but fails to unscrew. Still dripping and trapped in his suit, John tries to free the stubborn acrylic bubble, but nothing works.

"I am screwed," he declares and tires again. No go. Exasperated, he inspects his gulgutiera made of many modified parts and says: "I need a crowbar."

A crowbar? To attack the fragile acrylic dome and, since John's bigger model would not fit inside, bang on my poor camera trapped underneath it? And I suddenly remember how 35 years ago John dismantled his large format Linhoff with a small hatchet and a screwdriver, fixed it, put it back together, and when I asked what he was planning to do with some parts he left out, replied confidently: "you do not need them." And we didn't.

Quietly, I walk into the bushes and return with one of the 5-foot long iron spikes the fisheries' crew pounded into the river's bottom to hang their sockeye nets.

John's eyes light up. He slides the rusty end of the bar into the bowels of his apparatus, finds the right spot, hits the other end with a rock, and something inside the gulgutiera shifts. "Now I need a really narrow and hard object," he says and we are lucky again: my car key set includes just the right key, which after some pushing, prodding and banging finishes the job. John unscrews the dome to change his lens, and we laugh like crazy and hug on the river bank, with the red salmon swimming right by us, undaunted and unstoppable, to their destiny. And we realize the embrace of our friends who helped us see and admire the fish feels like a safe eddy must feel to the salmon: restful, reassuring, important.

©Yva Momatiuk

birthday animals

I am walking on an old logging trail which branches off Lower Cache Road, a tributary to Alaska Highway in British Columbia. Thin strands of morning fog soften scraggly black spruce and float among white aspen trunks. A long time ago, during his trek to the South Pole, Roald Amundsen used to order his men to get up before sunrise, get out of their tent, and breathe in polar air and the morning light in to make the rest of the day meaningful. I am doing my Amundsen thing now, and this is August 18, my birthday. I am 70 years old. When did it happen, and how?

The question is unnecessary because I know the answer: I lived that long. And possibly much longer, cramming life in, at times heedlessly: take much, climb that, try what beckons. The family legend has it that ever since I could walk, I refused to hold anyone's hand and just bolted off to find what would surely remain out of reach if I just walked nicely next to some protective grownup.

Even after many years, Marynia, my old nanny who died recently just short of her 100th birthday, remembered with dread her chases after the disappearing child who never looked back, just ran. Eventually Pecia -- my father -- refused to take me anywhere, because he could never relax and just enjoy a stroll with his little daughter, the way many parents in Warsaw walked with their small but already mannerly children. He hated to imagine I would get run over by a streetcar, and deeply feared my mother's wrath should he allow that to happen. 

My mother --called Mek by me and my brother -- was probably somewhat concerned but must have pretended to be upset when Marynia and Pecia reported my escapades. For her, I was a small chip of her own large spirit. Raised in Russia, she came to Poland at 14, after her father, a white general, was murdered in the turmoil of the Revolution, and her mother, who lost everything and melted into the countryside like many other landed gentry at that time, kept her two young daughters alive by running a small orphanage full of starving children and digging out potatoes left behind by farmers who already finished their harvest.

They eventually came to Poland on a cattle train, which took 6 weeks to reach the border. My mother was wearing old rags, her head was shaved to prevent lice, and she did not speak any Polish. Twelve years later, she was a young lawyer with two degrees, one from Warsaw University and another from Sorbonne, which used to have its extension program in Poland.  She was well versed in several foreign languages, married, living and working in Warsaw, and helping to support her mother and her older sister, who "lost her way," never finished high school, and became a cabaret dancer and a mother of two sons out of wedlock whose fathers disappeared. Then the war came, and before six million Poles and Polish Jews died and the war ended, Mek went ahead and had her two children, first me, and then my brother Jeremi. When I asked her later why she decided to have kids right in the middle of these terrifying and deadly times, she told me it was her affirmation of life. 

Was my mother a survivalist by nature, or the events of her early life left her no other choice? I do not know. But I know she was an ardent feminist -- even though she did not know the term -- and did not want me to be still, which later translated into her well articulated life lessons designed to prevent me from getting hooked on any womanly activity which may, in her understanding of freedom, clip my stride: an excessive attention to my appearance ("good looks don't need any artificial help")  an early marriage ("first, get your university degree, then travel, and then, and only if you really want to, get married") and even cooking ("I hope you never have to do it.")

We fought throughout all our lives together. She was a severe critic, a relentless judge, and she needed more overt and cozy love than I, busy to escape her guiding hand, had time or inclination to deliver.  As she grew older, she became less of the crazy and flamboyant Russian I loved, and more of the demanding, angry and disappointed German Frau I feared. I knew I did not want to be like her, but I did get my university degree, traveled, married late, avoided cooking as much as I could, and had my first pedicure ever -- courtesy of our daughter Tara, one of her birthday gifts -- last week in Colorado. 

And today the sunlight licks the trees on the logging road and a grouse rises noisily from the ditch, flapping madly away. I gather wild raspberries, tasty but small and misshapen: not enough rain?  and see that John is already awake. I return to the camper and he asks me what I want for my birthday. Animals, I say, many animals. He reminds me I already had two pre-birthday moose crossing the road last night, and a family of deer in a ravine, and many ravens soaring over the forest. I want more.

Over the course of its nearly 1,600 miles from Dawson Creek to Fairbanks, Alaska Highway parallels some of the largest and most rugged tracts of land in North America, scarred by mineral exploration and logging but also unfenced, heavily forested, and largely devoid of human presence, with large rivers, Peace, Liard,Teslin, Hyland, Rancheria and Yukon, creating abundant animal corridors full of nutrients.  As the day unfolds and we drive North, I get the following:

-- an immature Golden eagle, flying low
-- a squirrel crossing the road suddenly right in front of us and surviving
-- a Snowshoe hare, whose round eyes remind me of my father Pecia who I am sure reincarnated into a hare
-- ravens and more ravens
-- a young coyote, loping toward us for a while
-- Stone sheep -- bighorns' cousins -- licking dry mineral deposits along the highway in the Northern Rockies
-- a young caribou bull with very dark fur and loudly clicking leg tendons
-- large groups of bison, also feeding in a ditch and resting

And then it rains black bears. A mother bear bending small trees to browse on their leaves. Her cub, suddenly startled, climbing a tall aspen trunk with determination and speed, and perching there for a while only to descend just as fast. Another velvety cub with brown cheeks and big round ears following his mother. Another bear grazing steadily not far away.

My birthday animals. All of them.


©Yva Momatiuk

stars and crows

We wake up in dense fog with eucalyptus trees leaning close, their branches shedding long tendrils of bark. It is a surprising warm morning, fragrant with their scent. Ah, and here is some soft daylight, too, so sweet after long dark hours spent in our small van. These are the shortest days of the year, racing toward the austral winter solstice not many days away. In the last week or so, dusk comes on the heels of dawn with almost no time in between, so we grab this brief daylight and try to fill it with what we want to do.

The soil here is sandy, as if the Southern Ocean was just beyond the eucalyptus grove instead a hundred miles away. We love these sandy farm fields we sometimes select for our camping spots, usually after much bumping around on unpaved country roads well after dark. Even after torrential rains which come in the middle of the night out of nowhere as far as our weather maps are concerned, our van does not get bogged down in a Wyoming-type gumbo, but drives out smoothly as if gliding on silk.

This morning we glide toward the sea, but the fog is beautiful and we spend hours trying to find our different objects of desire. I am chasing pale trees which pop out of the milky light, and John is after large spider webs, luminescent with dew and draped on farm fences like drying diapers. Whose diapers, though? We did read a mile long list of Australian snakes, ranging from some non-venomous giants to their smaller but highly poisonous kin whose fangs could lay us low in 5 minutes, but are there also "5-minute spiders" lurking in tall grass underfoot, ready to defend their lacy webs. These concerns bring me back to my python.

Some days ago, frustrated by elusive wild animals we manage to find only to watch them hop or fly away, I dragged John to a place which specialized in a rehab of reptiles, and persuaded the snakeman in charge to let me handle a beautiful olive python, whose high scale count made it iridescent as the animal moved. It was a mere 6-foot baby, with gloriously smooth, mother-of-pearl skin with a hint of green and an undulating, lively body of a bored youngster. When fully grown, this non-venomous constrictor may measure 12 feet and weight up to 50 pounds.

I allowed the python to glide along my arms and shoulders, and she (for I was sure it was a she) soon draped her muscular coil comfortably around my neck, investigated my ears and resting her head on top of my head as if it were the most comfortable rock in northern deserts of Kimberly or Arnheim Land, her ancestral home. I thought about the way she would hunt in the wild, secreted among hot rocks near a game trail, or submerged in a water hole and waiting for an unwary animal to come for a drink. Once fully grown, she could grab, slowly strangle and devour a whole rock wallaby, enough to sustain her for several months. She would deal death to animals large and small, but she would be vulnerable, too: unless the temperature was warm enough for her to digest her prey, the meat she swallowed may decompose in her stomach and poison her.

But this morning there are no snakes or spiders around. The fog burns off, and we drive to the sea near a small town of Denmark, where a collection of enormous boulders, called Elephant Rocks, crowds a cove. John gathers his equipment and descends down a narrow passage between the rocks to work with their large reddish bodies at close quarters, while I photograph aquamarine sea and red lichens decorating the Elephants.

Later the shadows deepen, and we head for the hills and their dense cover of eucalyptus to find another camping spot. We do not like commercial campgrounds for many reasons, but traditionally all trees drive us nuts, too. They obscure our views, cut off the light, and hide all animals. In many countries we know, there are forests, groves and single trees, but there are also many open clean places of light and possibilities. But not in southern Australia, where trees line most highways, obscure rural roadlets and even walking trails. And between many adult trunks grow young trees with their spindly clusters of branches, effectively sealing off all vistas and forcing us to drive or walk in endless leafy and twiggy tunnels.

But the eucalyptus trees have grown on us by now. There are more than 700 species of them in Australia, from a lemon-scented eucalyptus, to a broad-leaved peppermint kind and a blue gum. The eucalyptus range from rough stringybarks to red shiny Henry Moore sculptures and white-skinned "ghost gums" with iron-hard wood so smooth I sometimes rest my cheek on their glowing trunks and close my eyes: here is a tree I know I love. There are also giant karri trees, the second tallest in the world, whose wood -- this we learned from a karri forester we once met -- paved many London sidewalks.

Tonight we have a camping choice: it is either a patch of red earth encircled by trees, or a wheat field with its bright ceiling of stars and night calls of birds. We walk to meet the farmer who just finished his planting for the day, and ask his permission to spend the night in his field. We mention the stars we cannot see in the forest, and the birds.

"I know what you mean," he says. "Once they planted all these road strips of trees everywhere, I cannot see anything, either.

I drive, I want to look out and see what's out there, so I crook my neck and all I see is these trees. Then I find myself on the wrong side of the road. This is crazy."

The darkness is coming fast, and the birds are everywhere now, flying under the stars and calling into the night. "There are these two crows who have lived here for years," the farmer says. "I hear them every day, and always wonder: what are they saying to each other? I would just love to know."

©Yva Momatiuk