A Million Years with You (37 page)

In the late afternoon, Ruby grows more restless. Soon she is jumping on and off the furniture, which she dwarfs. Next, she nervously paces to and from the window, growling and switching her tail. Judging from my voice on the tape, her agitation must have been making me nervous. I keep asking what Ruby is doing. Lissa's voice is very gentle and soothing. Soon a silence falls. Lissa has offered Ruby her arm, and Ruby, stretched at full length, starts to suck it. Her massive paws knead alternately, slowly, making bread. Ruby is like a kitten and has even aligned herself to Lissa by heading in to Lissa's side as a kitten aligns itself to the body of its mother.

In a low voice, Lissa asks if I'd like to let Ruby suck my arm. I whisper yes, I would. Lissa shows me how to take her place in front of Ruby, and I do. My arm slips under Ruby's mouth. Feeling the change, Ruby slowly opens her great, yellow eyes and looks up, but by now I am deeply moved by her tenderness and vulnerability, and I just wait, not speaking. In perfect silence, we all wait. There is no tension in the moment. Ruby again begins to suck. Then she purrs. The room fills with her purring.

Little Yehti creeps out from under the chair and leaves the room. She will later deliver two kittens on a rug behind the bathroom door. Ruby no longer minds that Yehti is having kittens. She lets her velvet eyelids shut. On the skin of my arm I feel the slow, gentle rasping of her rough tongue, which gradually turns as smooth and slick as a piece of raw liver. Has she turned her tongue over so that I am feeling the underside? Has she collapsed her papillae? I mention this to Lissa, who nods. She knows what is happening, but not why. It doesn't matter. Ruby drowses, her black lips and smooth tongue gently pressed against my arm. And that's all. We stay a long time in the peace of Lissa's quiet room, not talking or whispering, just relaxing, purring, dreaming, gently breathing, mildly aware of cloud shadows, of the afternoon sun, of a light breeze from an open door, of being alive there together.
³

 

The next cougar I came to know—although not nearly as well as I knew Ruby—was a wild male cougar whom I saw in Utah. I had joined a wildlife biologist and some of his helpers who were studying cougars, and one day we came upon a cougar lying on the thick branch of a tree. The biologist and his helpers wondered what subspecies of cougar he was, and we stared at him until lunchtime, when everyone but me went back to the vehicle, ready to return to camp.

I didn't join them because while the cougar was watching the other people—his body tense, his ears half turned, the tip of his tail slowly flicking—I lay down on the ground and covered myself with dry leaves. He was preoccupied with the other people and wasn't looking in my direction, so he didn't notice. I thought that when he believed himself to be alone, he would come down from the tree, so I waited.

But when the other people left, he relaxed. He had no thought of leaving. Alone at last, or so he believed, he was perfectly happy on his branch. With eyes half shut, he dreamily enjoyed the sunshine. I knew the other people were getting hungry and might drive back to camp without me, so at last I reluctantly stood up.

The cougar was dumbfounded. He'd thought he was alone. Never before or since have I seen a more amazed expression on anyone's face. That's all that happened—he stayed where he was and I walked away. Maybe he was a
Puma concolor kaibabensis
or maybe he was something else, but that would be just our name for him and had nothing to do with his actual persona. Actually, he was someone unprepared for a huge surprise, so I treasure the memory of that moment.

15

I
F RESEARCH IS REWARDING
, so is writing. I start before dawn, and the next thing I know, it's dark. I wake up anxious to get back to work because while I'm asleep, my mind keeps going and I'm anxious to write it all down. My hope of seeing another cougar will never fade, so my desk faces the field where I saw the first one and later found the doe's carcass. As a deer looks up often when she's grazing, I look up often when I'm writing, but I also keep typing, and if nothing interesting is in the field, I go right back to my sentence without having lost my thought. It gives me great serenity, to be able to write and watch the field at the same time.

I do other things too. I have always loved Peterborough, the town I live in, where much of the work of the town is done by volunteers, so I joined in by volunteering at the library, then served for many years on various boards and committees, and wound up by being elected five times to the Board of Selectmen, on which I still serve at the time of this writing. Why do I do it? Because Peterborough has been home to me since I was five and I want to advance everything that's good about it, everything from open space and clean water to the success of the downtown businesses, as these are the lifeblood of the town and give us our sense of community. For this, I'm happy to take time out from writing.

But for every hour I've worked for the town, I've worked dozens of hours on my writing, and during all that time, real life has eluded me. It is almost as if I went to sleep in the 1980s and woke up in the next century with gray hair and three or four grandchildren.

I've been told that working like that is an addiction, like the misuse of alcohol or drugs. There is a similarity, of course, in that full-time concentration on work removes you from your troubles. It also feels good. The difference is that if you work all the time you could become rich and famous, while if you drink or drug all the time you could find yourself under the proverbial bridge. So I'm not sure that anything is wrong with continuous writing except in the eyes of those who don't see it as work. An acquaintance, a psychiatrist, once told me rather snippily that she wished she had time to write, as if writing were some kind of recreation and only for people with leisure. I won't say I wasn't miffed. I wish I had time to psychoanalyze people, but I don't because my time is taken up by figuring out where the paragraphs go and composing topic sentences.

 

Now I am close to the end of my story, having described all my problems and nonverbal adventures. Yet ever since I began to write again after a hiatus, writing has been my life, as important to me as my family. So the next part of this book is about words, sentences, and paragraphs, and if you, the reader, are bored by such things, you can safely skip to page 260 if you like, to read the last two chapters. But when Freud said that marrying the right person and doing the right work were important, he was right, and in my case, given a good husband, writing is not only essential to me, it's who I am and always was. Without it, I'd be nothing. Why bother to write an autobiography if you omit what's most important to you, the very center of your life?

 

I have always admired Marcel Proust. His great opus,
A La Recherche du Temps Perdu
, has seven volumes, 14,000 pages, and 1.5 million words. And the whole thing came from his unconscious mind after he took a bite of a madeleine—a little muffin which he had dipped in tea. My writing too comes from my unconscious—not as prolifically as Proust's, of course, but it explains why real time disappears while I am working.

Thus my brain is like two people, one who's in view and does her best to keep things going and one who's hidden but keeps toiling and every so often coughs up a useful surprise. I'll never forget a surprise that came when I was reading Kipling's
The Jungle Book
to my youngest grandson. The book was read to me and my brother when we were children. Thirty years later I went to Baffin Island, where I watched the white wolves and noticed things about them that my scientist friends found unusual. I mentioned how hard wolves work, for instance. “No scientist would say that,” one scientist friend told me. “They don't see animals in such terms.”

I had no idea how I'd come to this conclusion except from the seeming reluctance of a wolf to get started on a hunt, as if she foresaw the hard job ahead of her, which of course she did. I was intrigued to think I'd seen what a scientist wouldn't. It's because I'm so smart, I decided.

Again, thirty years passed. I read
The Jungle Book
to my grandson, and lo and behold, in an opening scene in the first chapter a wolf returns to his den, worn out with hunting. I knew immediately why I'd surmised that the Baffin Island wolves worked hard—that was the first thing I ever heard about them.

The unconscious is filled with things like that—old images that come up unexpectedly and also new ideas that would never appear without its help. I got my all-time favorite sentence just by looking out the window, mindlessly zoning. Then suddenly I got this:
The Woman Ohun starts the char, out in water as deep as the sky and almost as far as the Camps of the Dead from our river
. Isn't that a nice sentence? Char are fish related to salmon, but to explain the rest would take forever, so never mind what it means. But did you notice the progression of vowel sounds and how the sentence moves in metered steps with a sense of reach in the middle and a sense of distance at the end? Tragically, a copy editor screwed it up when the book was first published so the effect was lost. But even so, it was a good sentence.

 

It is often worthwhile to trust your unconscious. I didn't at first, because when we lived in New York I was seeing a psychoanalyst. At the time, I was swamped with housework and a go-nowhere job that had nothing to do with writing, so I became the patient of a shrink in hopes of dealing with my angst and stress. The shrink was quite famous, even though I didn't know it then. He was called “the dean of American psychoanalysis.” And he had power over me because he had probed my unconscious and found the self-doubts and inhibitions that were trying to hide there. Like a broken-legged deer who has asked a leopard for a physical evaluation, I accepted his power until the day I told him that William Shawn at
The New Yorker
wanted me to write about pastoralists in Uganda. The analyst never asked what that meant to me or how much it would do for my career. Instead, he told me not to go. I should stay home, he said, explore my unconscious, and finish my analysis.

I should not go to Uganda? I should relinquish this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? Astonished, I asked him why. He didn't tell me why because back then, I believe, the ethics of confidentiality excluded the patient. I said, “Well, why can't I continue when I come back?” But he was adamant. If I ignored his instructions and went to Uganda, I could never go back to him as a patient.

I might have been a broken-legged deer at the beginning of all this, but at that point my legs felt fine. I told him I'd write to him from Uganda, and then I went home to pack.

Interestingly, this analyst had also written a book. Why didn't he see that I might want to do the same? The answer, I think, is that much as he might have known about the mind, he had no idea what the hidden part can do other than make trouble for its owner. To him, I think, the unconscious was like a mental colon, filled with matter to be cleaned out and flushed. To me, it's like a mental lung, to breathe things in and absorb for later use.

Then too, he didn't understand writing. His book was offered as an “elementary text,” but the word
elementary
was false advertising. The book is unreadable—hundreds of pages of psycho-speak in twisted sentences going on forever with no thought that someone might be trying to figure out what they meant. Too bad he's dead. He could have learned about clarity from the next section.

 

I compare my unconscious to the swamp near our house. Beavers made it by damming a stream, so it has large areas of open water, dark and smooth, perfectly still. You stand there and wait. The swamp is quiet. But suddenly a bubble comes to the surface and gently pops. What caused it? That's hard to say. Swamp gas, probably, from something down at the bottom. But there's no need to understand it. Whatever is down there is far from stable, and sooner or later, another bubble will come.

Those who find fault with this book might use the image against me, believing that a swamp is an unpleasant place. Perhaps I should have likened my brain to a salt marsh or a wetland, as these conjure slightly better images. But in reality, swamps are places of fascination and wonder, filled with life, filled with more species per square meter than, say, upland forests, let alone the much-touted mountaintops. I love my real-life swamp with its otter and beavers, with the great blue heron who hunts there, with the jelly masses of frogs' eggs and salamander eggs that appear there in the spring. You can see the dark eyes of the tadpoles inside the jelly. So many lives, so much happening. It encourages me to imagine something like that going on undetected in my brain.

Interestingly, the effect is canceled by antidepressants. I took some once for a week or two, and my mood leveled out quite noticeably—without the highs, to be sure, but at least without the lows—but I couldn't write anything. I'd sit at my desk for a while without results, then go off and do something else. That wasn't good, so I threw away the pills, waited a day or two, and sure enough, that mysterious swamp in my head began to bubble again. I started writing, and out came the last few chapters of the book I'd been working on before I got depressed. The inability to work is more depressing than anything else, so I never again took antidepressants.

 

If the back brain is where it all comes from, the front brain must organize the material, and for this one needs rules. The first rule I came up with for this memoir was not to follow a timeline. Everyone's life story has enough events to require 1.5 million words and fill seven volumes like Proust's lengthy novel, but my life story would be tedious, even to me, if presented sequentially—plodding along like the ant who carried out a grain of wheat, followed by another ant, and so forth. Better to organize by subject matter, picking out whatever seems interesting, then connecting the subjects by a theme or two in which events can be shoved as they arise. So I have not put the events in order, confident that no one will care.