RAVEN RE-MAKES THE WORLD by Marilyn Sigman
A Norse myth tells of two ravens, Hugen and Munin, Memory and Thought, who sat on the shoulders of Odin. He sent them out into the world each day so they could re-create the world in his mind each night.
I have a geographic affinity for ravens. I grew up in Billings, Montana, at the edge of the Northern Great Plains, in the territory of the Indian people who became known as the Crow. But in their own language, they are Absaroka, the “Raven People.”
In Alaska, where I have lived for nearly thirty years, Raven is both creator and trickster. The Native stories tell how he stole the light and gifted it to us. But some say he also tricked us into believing in the solidity, persistence, and passionate color of what we can see. In the tales of Raven, he is vibrant but mocking, divine but yet so human. His comical acts signal the inevitability and poignancy of human appetite and desire.
In the place that became Montana, the Crow, or Raven People, were eventually forced into a reservation on the plains, but their homeland was the range of mountains to the southwest that now bears the Absaroka name. One set of fingers of the range are the high, jagged Beartooths, spilling off a high plateau just beyond the town of Red Lodge.
The Beartooths are my homeland, the place where I hiked, first as a complaining Girl Scout, later to burst from the box of summer jobs in Billings baking on the Plains, to tromp sun-dazed, drugged, and beflowered; and where I tested out boys and men to see if they could sense the fierce holiness of the place. None of them passed. After moving away from Montana, a place I loved better in memory, I returned to the Beartooths, after the deaths of my father and mother.
Ravens are associated with death. In the Bible, after the Flood, Noah first sent out a raven to find land. The raven never returned to the Ark, because it found such good pickings after the flood waters. So the dove got the credit and the raven’s reputation suffered. In medieval Europe, to see a raven was a bad omen, for they were the scavengers that showed up at battlefields and at the gallows. Alaska’s Koyukon Athabascan people associate ravens with death, but also with good luck. If a hunter sees a raven, he should entreat it. If the raven hears, and if the hunter already has the luck that comes of following the rules of conduct toward natural things, the raven will lead the hunter to his prey.
In the fall of 1995, I received a call from my mother that my father’s liver was failing and he had gone into a coma. It took me an entire day, traveling as if suspended in a bubble of not knowing, to get from Juneau to Billings. A couple who had been friends with my parents all of my life picked me up at the airport. They talked to me about the weather and rather cheerfully but firmly avoided being drawn into a report on my father’s condition. Their silence pushed against the bubble, threatening to burst it into certainty. When I arrived at the hospital, it was my mother who told me he had died several hours before I had arrived. His body was still in the hospital room so I could go see it. His doctor led me in. I was stunned by the whiteness of his face and his rigid stillness. I had the sense or hope that some part of him was hovering, waiting for my live presence in the room before departing it completely. I reached out to hold his cold hand. “Dad,” I said, “I feel that your spirit is still here.” I fixed my eyes on the glaring ceiling light where something seemed to be vibrating. I spoke loudly and clearly as if he would hear me better that way, feeling just the least bit silly in front of the doctor and nurse. Their faces were unreadable. “If you are still here, good-bye,” my voice quavered. “I love you so much. I know you have to leave now.”
My clearest memories of my father were on fishing trips. As long as I can remember, he worked six days a week and had his list of chores on Sunday, so the trips were rare summer events. He drove the family station wagon for what seemed like forever to places he remembered driving to with his parents as a kid growing up in Montana. The roads got narrower and rougher, with traffic so light that everyone waved at each other in passing. At some hidden signal known only to him, he would stop and ask a rancher if he could fish on one of the streams that ran through his ranch. Most were still friendly to fishermen from the big city of Billings, especially ones who had their family in the car. Then it was a slow drive over rough roads, trying not to get the station wagon high-centered on the tall ridge of grass in the middle of the road, to some of Montana’s smallest and most obscure streams.
He left me on the bank with a proverbial can of worms so he could have his own rare hours of solitude with his fly-fishing rod and the trout hidey-holes. I had terrible luck with the worms. The only fish I can remember catching were suckers. I wondered later why he never taught me to fly-fish. The long hours alone by the stream convinced me that fishing was boring and rarely rewarding but it led to a lifelong fascination with everything that moves in and around streams and ponds. I wandered away every time from my seemingly purposeful fishing to be transfixed by birds and dragonflies and once, the spectacle of a moose.
My father died during one of the glorious hot stretches of Indian summer in Montana that we both loved. After the funeral, I took my hike in the Beartooths. The bright light, rustling yellow aspens, and sparkling flowing water of the perfect Montana river which were usually my balm, suddenly overwhelmed me. I crawled into a willow thicket, seeking its tangled embrace. But there, exactly where I chose to enter, the shed skin of a snake festooned the branches. Raven’s gift shifted in that moment to illumine the trickery. My shining image of the web of life was just as surely a web strung taut by death, each living node dependent on the impermanence and recycling of so many other beings who were no longer whole.
My mother died in a nursing home in a suburb of Washington, D.C. after two decades of decline in the twisted clutches of Parkinson’s disease. I had visited her a month earlier. I did not fly across the country again when her muscles became too weak to swallow food and water and, finally, to support the intake of breath.
On my last visit, she became agitated when she saw me.
“Marilyn died,” she said, looking at me as if I were someone playing a cruel trick. “The ship went down.”
Her words took my breath away as if I were actually drowning. She thought I was an imposter for the several days of my visit. On my last day with her, I gave her a catalog to pick out what she would like for Chanukah. My mother wouldn’t choose from the three colors of slacks I kept directing her to. Instead, she recalled a boating accident she decided had taken my life and which she believed was written about on that page in the catalog. I sat with her awhile longer, put my arm around her, and looked into her eyes. I think there was a moment when she believed I was her live and only daughter. Recognition passed over her face like a sudden gust of knowing that she was the one who had just surfaced but was going down for the last time.
For our family fishing expeditions, my mother would carefully make hard-boiled eggs, then tuna salad sandwiches, then pack the picnic hamper with the sandwiches, a thermos full of lemonade and ice, and then fruit. These preparations usually put us on the road late in the morning and later, after my father’s predictably long drives, coming home in the dark, but her routine never varied. If you tried to help her, she would get angry because it was always too late to offer. Once we took off, she began to chatter about the passing scene. I gazed resolutely outward.
When we arrived at our middle-of-nowhere place eager to begin fishing, she spread out a blanket beside the car and we all sat together and were required to eat the lunch at a leisurely rate and make conversation. Lunch finished, my father began to fiddle with his fishing gear and waders, and she moved back into the car. No matter how hot it was, she closed the windows and closed and locked the doors, then read her women’s magazines or slept until we were ready to head back many hours later.
My mother read a lot, mainly magazines and best sellers, hiding the ones with more explicit sex, which she favored, in the same places she hid chocolate candy. She was hiding the candy from herself as well as us kids, trying vainly to save it for her bridge club. She ate most of it anyway, so I, who knew all of her hiding places, became adept at eyeballing the level in the candy box and gauging how hard it would be to see that the level had dipped. I also learned to speed-read through the “good parts” in her books when she was out of the house. The resonance around the forbidden but securely indulged chocolate and the possibility of steamy sex acts was part of the atmosphere of the house, along with her moods. When my mother was angry or brooding, her dark weather filled the house.
This was a side she rarely showed to anyone outside the family. She gossiped for hours with her friends on the phone. Her women’s bridge club met for years through babies and divorces and cancer and grown-up kids gone wrong in ways I wasn’t supposed to hear about. She arranged a constant round of reciprocal bridge parties where my father was the fairly reluctant fourth.
I chafed at her endless dictates about the things that girls should do to become young ladies, retreating to the world of books. By ju-nior high, she and I argued about what I could wear, how I could style my hair, where I could go and who I could go with. I was sent to cotillion, with my brother, to suffer through Billings’ idea of debutante training, to learn ballroom dancing, table manners, and when to take off your white gloves. I couldn’t go out to dances with rock bands, one of the few places to meet boys, if I didn’t have a date. By high school, we even argued about what classes I could take. My mother insisted I take bookkeeping, which was practical, instead of Latin, which was a dead language.
My time with the books paid off and I went to Stanford University, arriving on a sunny California day in 1969. At my first freshman dorm meeting, Cindy, the dorm’s Resident Assistant, introduced herself as a senior who had just spent the summer on a Venceremos work brigade in Cuba defying the U.S. government’s ban on travel. She explained the dorm rules.
“This is a women’s dorm. But all same-sex dorms became open dorms this year, so basically, they’re open to men twenty-four hours a day.” This boggled my Billings, Montana mind.
“Oh, and if you want to get a prescription for The Pill, you can go across the street to the college health center. It’s free. The drinking age in California is twenty-one. Don’t ask me to buy wine or beer for you. But you’re all invited to a wine and cheese party at the men’s dorm next door after this meeting. It’s not cool to smoke dope. But if you’re going to do it, be sure to place a towel at the base of your door so I won’t smell it and have to do something about it.”
I agonized throughout the fall and winter about my degree of participation in all of these suddenly possible activities, experimenting with drinking Gallo wine out of jugs, attempting to smoke dope but coughing too hard to get high, taking The Pill but pulling back at the last heavy-breathing brink of needing its protection.
Everything changed completely in the spring when the university went into siege mode. Anti-war protests and strikes shut down much of the campus after the U.S. invaded Cambodia, which Nixon called the Cambodian incursion. The protests provided me with a surreal social life. I joined the dorm’s “political action cell” organized by Cindy. We went out each night to listen to speeches, to protest, and to get chased by the police, moving fairly slowly across the campus in heavy riot gear accompanied by a symphony of plate glass windows being shattered by rocks thrown by our comrades. I couldn’t bring myself to throw a rock but joined in the shrill yells of “You fucking pigs!” The cops looked like alien cockroaches, dressed completely in black, with black helmets and face shields. They moved in phalanxes with their riot batons cocked out in front, sweeping us toward the hiding places we knew so well. I was thrilled by our daring, especially when Joan Baez came and sat down beside me in front of the Physics Building where we were taking a stand against the military-industrial complex. Someone brought the hard-working student strikers trays of strawberry shortcake. Joan and I munched away, while a Physics grad student had a meltdown because we wouldn’t let him in the building to defend his Ph.D. thesis.
These were heady times. Everything was being questioned by earnest young people in shredded clothes and wild hair, side by side with graybeard professors–from the morality of the Vietnam war to the overpopulation of the planet to patriarchal white culture. These were all topics I had barely heard about growing up in Billings. Just as my world expanded, it became incredibly complicated. I began to feel personally responsible about changing the unequal distribution of wealth in the world and to question everything.
“Who’s in charge of the U.S. government?” Cindy quizzed us. “The military-industrial complex” was the correct answer. Venceremos, I learned, was a Cuban expression for “We will win.” She confessed she had only taken the R.A. job to radicalize us. The idea of the political cell, she explained, was a Maoist one–to have small groups of radicals who would only have a few names to give up in the event of arrest or torture.
“Recycle!” I was exhorted on the first Earth Day for which Stanford was Ground Zero. “Women’s Liberation!” and “Gay rights!” read other flyers plastered on the many kiosks across campus amid the psychedelic art of the next Grateful Dead concert at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. There were evidently a number of parallel worlds to the middle class American existence I had been living. There were alternatives like communes and collectives and lesbians.
Melody and Kim, my best friends and members of my political action cell, occupied the Administration building one night. I was among the large group of students milling around in a party-like gathering in the courtyard outside the locked building. A series of people ascended a hastily-erected stage to make anti-war speeches. Then Fred, a black man with an outstanding wild Afro, stepped up to the microphone. I recognized him as someone that was rumored to be an outside agitator, not a Stanford student at all.
“Why don’t you all just go home?” he jeered at us. “Why don’t you nice Stanford students all just go home? You aren’t fighting this war and you aren’t poor and you don’t get gunned down in East Palo Alto. Go home.”
As his taunts continued, the crowd got restless. The crowd began rumbling and finally surged toward and then into the building, breaking in. I hung back, torn between taking a serious political action and hanging out with my friends who were still in party mode. We would stay in the courtyard in solidarity with those who were inside breaking the law, we told each other, as the wine and beer and joints continued around and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young sang Suite for Judy Blue Eyes in their sweet harmonies. Around midnight, my group in the courtyard came slowly to the conclusion that we had run out of rolling papers for joints. Someone had to walk back to the dorm and I volunteered. When I returned, everyone inside the building was being hauled off to jail. Kim and Melody had already vanished into the police van and the last students were being marched out with bright streaks of red running down their faces. As my sweet high evaporated, I felt I had failed an important test.
In the Beginning Times, so some Native tales go, Raven was pure white. Raven became black during a mutual painting party with Loon, also pure white. The results, although striking for both birds, were not those intended, but Raven became impatient. Other versions of the tale begin with Raven’s theft of fresh water and light. Raven flies up through the smoke hole and is singed to blackness. He spills the fresh water out his mouth as he flies crookedly, creating all the rivers of the world.
That summer, I returned to Billings to work in my father’s furniture store and its succession of long, hot hours without air conditioning, surrounded by matching room ensembles. One July morning, however, instead of driving me to work, my mother stopped the car at a corner where my father was waiting.
“Your father has taken time off work,” she said, suddenly very angry, as she slid out from the driver’s seat. “He’s taking you to a psychiatrist.” My father slid in, as calm as he ever was. He explained that my mother had read my diary. “She thinks you are crazy,” he said matter-of-factly, looking at the road and not meeting my eyes, “if you did all the things you said in the diary. Or maybe you made them up,” he said, implying I would be crazy in either case. The rest of the ride was silent, as tears washed down my cheeks, and dripped onto my neck.
I was speechless. I felt that I had run full-tilt into a wall, been stunned senseless, and regained consciousness to a view of the world in a funhouse mirror. It sunk in that my mother had read my diary. The sheer wrongness of that! A part of me went underground, seeking survival in the bunkers while the bombs were going off. The part left aboveground had nothing to say that wouldn’t only make things worse.
The doctor’s first act was to have me take the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. He warned me that it was designed so I couldn’t cheat. My brain was seething and I was still shell-shocked but I could still tell how I should respond to statements like “I frequently hear voices” and “I often feel like killing myself.” I wanted to avoid being committed before the end of the day. As I waited in the next room, feeling numb, he scored the test. He admitted that the only thing it showed was that I had some strong negative feelings about my parents.
My parents grounded me for the rest of the summer and scheduled weekly appointments for me with the doctor and family sessions. The doctor would talk sympathetically to me for a few minutes, then bring my parents into the room. He would then turn to the stack of journals at his elbow and open up the one on top to show me an article. “Have you read this?” he asked me, then read a title like “Marijuana causes brain damage in mice.” “Marijuana causes memory loss.” I almost laughed out loud, but my parents were watching for my reactions so I struggled to keep my face neutral. They told me the promises they wanted me to make to persuade them that they should send me back to Stanford and heard my silences. Since my summer employment was at my father’s store and my meager earnings did not begin to meet the cost of tuition, they held all the cards.
The doctor, it turned out, wasn’t really a psychiatrist. He was a pediatrician who had taken a few classes in adolescent psychology. Years later, I happened to be in Billings when the newspaper story came out that he had lost his medical license over allegations of sexual abuse of his patients. I had a sharp, clear memory of his hands examining my breasts. At the time, I was so numb to the world that I hadn’t thought to question his statement that he needed to rule out physical causes for my problems or that he conducted the exam after his nurse had left for the day. I felt powerless again, just thinking about that time. “Who would she tell?” he probably thought. “And who would believe her?”
My mother and I never discussed the Nietzsche quotes or Robinson Jeffers poems that I had copied into my diary or my ruminations about peace and war. Just like me reading her hidden novels and eating her hidden chocolate, she read my diary for the good parts. I didn’t disappoint her–there were silly dope riffs, the place where my handwriting tailed off after “Dropped mescaline today!” flowed across the page, and even sex scenes. In the mixed-up events of that spring, one of the events had been the night I lost my virginity to Robert, which turned out to be the beginning of my first serious relationship. The fact that leaped out at her, to the roots of her Alabama upbringing, was that Robert was black. Or Negro, as she would always have it. It was as if her gaze at my words changed the scenes in the movie from a Technicolor love story to a horror film, shot in harsh black-and-white.
In the midst of the turmoil, the whole family began to get ready for a trip to Alabama in August to attend the wedding of my eighteen-year-old cousin. This meant a solid week of gatherings among my mother’s extended Sephardic Jewish family culminating in a formal wedding. My mother wanted to make sure that we both had the right clothes to wear. Left to my own devices, I favored cutoffs and embroidered Mexican shirts and going braless. She stayed up late at night sewing me cute summer dresses, matching outfits, and a formal.
One hot night, as she was working on my formal, we began an argument over one of our usual subjects. I can’t recall exactly what started this one, but soon we were shouting at each other. Maybe that’s what made her lose her concentration and run the sewing machine needle into her finger. She screamed and jumped up, dripping blood all over the white eyelet fabric. My father came running in with a towel and wrapped her hand. She was hysterical and nearly incoherent. Everything was wrong, I gathered. Why couldn’t I be the one marrying a nice Jewish boy? Isn’t that why they had sent me to college?
Suddenly, she dropped to her knees. She was crying and begging me to promise I would never see “that boy” again, that I would stay away from “those people.” She kept begging me to promise. In the midst of blood and hot tears, I was being asked to make a choice that chilled me to the bone. I realized this was her price for my going back to college. It was also the price of her love for me. I went down on my knees and begged her right back to let me live my life. As I sank down, I sensed that we were crossing an invisible line and altering our relationship forever. We had both gone too far to turn back. We were locked together in the still center of an emotional tornado, but I caught a whir at the edge of my sight. My usually gentle father had raised his arm. As it descended to slap me across the face, I grasped the geometry of the situation and where his sympathies lay. Just before he hit me, he stopped himself.
I did go back to college that fall but I lost some things in the bargain. As Neil Young sang, “It’s hard to make arrangements with yourself when you’re old enough to repay but young enough to sell.” I can’t remember all the promises that I made, although my brother says he remembers I promised to only go to protests if I really cared about the issue. I didn’t promise to give Robert up, but my mother had painted him black and stood in the way, blotting out all of the light that he carried and diverting all of the life-giving flow that spilled from him. I wrote in a journal now and then, but it was as if my mother was looking over my shoulder. When I return to some of the fragments of writing from that time, it’s as if they were written in code to which I have lost the key. I gained an internal censorious voice that sounded a lot like my mother fighting it out with rebellious impulses which raged without voice. It took me a long time to figure out that rebellion was not really a choice.
I never became the daughter my mother had imagined. I have a set of skills she taught me–like setting a table with all of the types of silverware in the set, or ironing–that I rarely use. I don’t really “keep house.” I robbed her of her grandmother career plan.
Once when I returned for a visit after I had gone off to Alaska, she tried to arrange to have me interviewed by a local reporter to help me publicize Alaskan environmental issues. “If she wasn’t my daughter, I’d think she was a very interesting person,” she was quoted as saying in the newspaper. I was supposed to know what she meant, she said, that a mother always worried. She wasn’t the only disappointed one. During a later trip to Billings, I ran into my high school bookkeeping teacher.
“So what are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m a wildlife biologist in Alaska,” I announced proudly.
His face fell. I had been his A+ student. “You’re not an accountant?”
She never became the mother I imagined, the one who would become my best friend, understand the real me, and apologize for her mistakes as a mother. I realized that I held that fantasy, buried down deep, when I finally had to let it go as her personality slipped away into its own labyrinth and the brain chemistry of Parkinson’s disease tortured her body. As it diminished her, I began to appreciate the vibrant woman she had been and to see her chatter and long phone calls as the social threads that wove her and her family into a larger world of community. But I could never forget that I had seen the limits she placed on who she could love and how she drew her lines.
She died near Washington, D.C., but had left instructions that her ashes be buried next to my father’s grave in the small Jewish cemetery in Billings. I returned to Billings for the memorial service in April and in accordance with Jewish tradition, to a ceremony for unveiling the headstone more than a year later in July. It was that July that I stole an extra day away from my over-busy Alaska summer to hike in the Beartooths again.
For a part of the hike, the landscape triggered the state of mind I was in when the hikes were my escape. I replayed grievances. But then I thought about her last years, her pain and limitations. Now, after her death, I saw her whole. Having a family and making a home was exactly what she had wanted to do with her life. She had been a flawed parent, but surely all parents are. I could see clearly that she was separate from myself, and just as human.
The sun got so warm on my body that it seeped into my bloodstream and bathed my brain. The conversations in my head dissolved. I stripped down and tied layers of clothes around my waist. My leg muscles flexed and got stronger with each step. I tucked flowers behind my ears and plunged my toes into the creek. This was the landscape of the mountain-king stone sentinels, green-furred boulders, water shape-shifting from flow to clouds, and aching hues of fragile petals. As if summoned, ravens appeared, wind-playing at the edge of a cliff, hurling themselves upward to release, hanging suspended in the updrafts, then diving down to do it all again.
Finally, my naturalist training overcame me. I began looking more closely at the flowers. I was astonished to see lupine, fireweed, cinquefoil. I had learned them by name in Alaska. I had also learned them as Lupinus nootkatensis, Epilobium angustifolium, Potentilla fruticosa, glorious Latin descriptions that rolled off my tongue. And then yarrow–Achillea borealis, harebell–Campanula lasciocarpa, twisted stalk, shy maiden, death camas–Zygadenus elegans. Pussytoes. In Alaska, when I learned my plants, I thought I had been seeing them for the first time.
During my years of escape to the Beartooths, the unnamed flowers had soothed and feasted me. But as I wandered to where I hoped or feared was so far away that my mother would never follow, I had always sought out the same type of place. It had Raven’s tracks. Once I found it, I never really left my home range. Every turn in the trail was a cusp of something remembered and something yet to grasp – the alternating whispers of Hugen and Munin murmuring their ravenous views of the world.
This is Marilyn Sigman’s first publication in a national literary journal.