WALKING CHAUCER by W. Scott Olsen
Here is a question –
What must the angels think of the earth?
Imagine, for just a moment, the leap of their arrival. In the moment before – they are ethereal, weightless, timeless and light, the moral sparks of eternity. In the moment after – they have atomic weight. They have mass. They have capillaries and tympanum and knees. They have synapses that do and do not fire. When they inhale, they smell juniper or sage.
What must that moment be like, I wonder. To come suddenly into a body, into a physical world, and then be faced with Everest, Atlantic, Sequoia, Rift. Bearing whatever message, do they tremble in front of a prairie thunderstorm? What sense do they make of le vent rouge? What must that first gasp mean? Is the first emotion of the arrival humility? Fear? Awe? Gratitude?
We live on an unsteady planet.
Every day forward from the last Big Bang, the material that is us has been moving. Light-years in microseconds at first. Then slightly cooler. Then slightly slower. The gas cooled to dust. Gravity, the weakest force in the universe, arrested everything. Dust collected onto other dust. Stars became stars. Galaxies lit up the void. Planets got themselves together. The whole inexorable dance. Dark matter. Radio waves. Creation versus Entropy. The tug and pull of being.
Movement became everything. Animate means alive and it means able to move. Temperature is a measure of movement. Absolute zero, the coldest possible temperature, is the point where all molecular motion stops. The hottest temperature is the “come hither” look of the beautiful other.
Our landscape seems stable, the grocery store remains where we left it yesterday, but we know it is not. Underneath our highways, our lawns, our soccer field and oceans, we live on a sea of molten rock, a fluid in motion, thrusting and strike-slipping our tectonic plates around the globe. The air above us roils from one season to the next. Tides rise and fall. Sparks turn to fire and the wholesale exchange of matter into energy.
The magnetic poles wander around their landscapes, sometimes as much as 85 kilometers in one day. More than once, the whole magnetosphere has slipped the whole way round. More slowly, but inevitably, the planet wobbles – the geographic north pole points toward Polaris, and then does not. The earth orbits. The earth spins. Every middle school student learns about the Coriolis effect and the deflected paths of storms.
Our language is filled with the ways the earth resists the stationary. Mudslide. Rockslide. Downpour. Torrent. Tremor. Cataract. Conflagration. Inferno. Blaze. Tornado. Hurricane. Gust front. Blizzard. Earthquake. Fault. Rip tide. Whirlpool. Maelstrom. Volcano. Flood. Cold front. Storm. Tsunami. Cyclone. Monsoon. And our stories carry the tremulous weight of the gods.
In Norwegian, Tordenvær, literally Thunderweather, or better as Thunderstorm, is the sound of Tor (in English, Thor), the god of thunder, and his hammer. Thunder is rare in Norway, and the sound of it rattles marrow.
In the Caribbean, Jurakán was a god of the Taínos, who lived on what is now Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti, the Leeward and Windward Islands. He had a temper, like Zeus and Thor. The Spaniards heard about him and called him “huracán” and from there “hurricane.”
In the Book of Job, God speaks from a whirlwind. Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said, “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Now gird up your loins like a man, and I will ask you, and you instruct Me! Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”
In West Africa, the Hausa people refer to a particular wind as iska zahi, the hot wind. Iska, which means wind, also means ghost. It also means spirit. It means the movement of the air has meaning.
Beyond the gods, this same Harmattan wind is the source of the famous le vent rouge – the red wind. Red quartz from the African deserts is carried aloft, and then north, and then falls in rain across southern Italy, France and Spain. There are stories about rain gutters along the streets of Marseille running maroon after rain that blows in from the Sahara across the Mediterranean. There are stories of le vent rouge turning the snowfields of Scandinavia pink.
There is a proverb in Japanese – a list of the four most fearful things. Jishin, Kaminari, Kaji, Oyaji. Earthquakes, Lightning, Fires, and Father.
In German, Donner and Blitzen are not just cute reindeer. They are thunder and lightning. Donnerwetter means thunderstorm, and it is also what you say when what you mean is damn it all.
Movement is everything. The slow and subtle movement of waves grinds rock into sand. A molten layer bubbles and shifts the cooler crust. Plates collide and create the Himalayas. Plates pull apart, ram back together, pull apart, ram back together, pull apart again and eventually make an Atlantic Ocean. The Gulf Stream carries heat from St. Croix to Rannoch Moor. In the North Atlantic as well as the Southern Ocean, deep water is formed – dense cold water sinking into deep basins. This deep water creeps along the ocean floors, mixing and warming, finally rising to start it all over again. The great engine that keeps us alive.
The great engine also smacks us down. If this moment, the moment you are reading this sentence, is an average moment, there are a bit more than two thousand thunderstorms hammering the planet. Two thousand cumulonimbus clouds, anvil-shaped at the top. Two thousand cells or super cells. Each of them dropping hail, wind, rain. Each of them announced by a gust front. A few of them birthing tornadoes.
If this day is an average day, lightning will strike more than three million times.
If today is a summer day, there are anywhere from five to forty large incident fires burning in the United States: 100 acres or more in timber, 300 acres or more in grassland.
If today is usual, ordinary, unspectacular and mundane, the earth will quake and move its shell fifty-five times. More than 20,000 times a year, every year, the plates buckle and shift. In 2005, 13,917 out of the 30,478 recorded quakes were 4.0 to 4.9; 864 were listed as “no magnitude.” Ten were magnitude 7.0 to 7.9. Only one was 8.0 or higher. In 2005, 82,364 people were killed by the moving earth.
The plates press against each other. The plates move apart. The Indian plate pressing against the Eurasian plate creates the Himalayas. The Australian Plate pressing against both the Indian and Eurasian Plates, at a place called the Burma sub-plate, moves under water. On a completely unusual day in 2004, it moved a lot. Tsunami. A pressure wave in the ocean where it was displaced by the moving earth. A pressure wave, moving outward, reaching continental shelves and then beaches. 227,898 people dead from just this one event on the beaches of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Somalia, Myanmar, The Maldives, Malaysia, Tanzania, The Seychelles, Bangladesh, South Africa, Kenya. The passports of the dead included the whole world. And beyond the dead, there was horrifying damage. Indonesia. Thailand. India. Sri Lanka. Malaysia. Myanmar. Bangladesh. Maldives. Reunion Island. Seychelles. Madagascar. Mauritius. Somalia. Tanzania. Kenya. Oman. South Africa. Australia.
Movement is everything. It can smack us dead. It defines our life.
What must the angels think when they arrive and their physical eyes see thunderstorm, cliff face, a miniature rose? Move, they think. Keep going. There are so many stories and my time is short. Be ready.
* * *
I have a dog named Chaucer.
A tri-color collie, he looks at me, his long nose resting between his legs on the wood of our back porch, and wonders when we are going to leave. His desire is as plain as it is profound. He wants nothing more than to head out, to rush into the world, to see what is new and what has changed. Today, he knows, is a fine day for a walk. Today is a perfect day to visit the stories once again.
Sitting on the porch, a cup of coffee in my hands, I see beyond him the springtime prairie of North America unfolding uninterrupted until it fades over the curve of the earth. We live in a border town: between Minnesota and North Dakota; between lake country and high desert; between dust storm and blizzard. Between a summer light so gentle you swear you can rest your head on the air to sleep and a winter darkness so cold you swear you can trace the orbit of electrons in every breath. Border towns are edge places, meeting places, and there are days when it seems the best thing to do is sit quietly on a porch and watch the universe come visit. The sun and then the Milky Way orbit overhead. The water in the ground moves north toward Hudson Bay. In the yard beyond the porch this season we have seen the ordinary sparrow and nuthatch, killdeer and cowbird, robin and barn swallow, as well as sometimes a red-tailed hawk and, more rarely, a large owl we have not been able to identify. Ash trees. Maple trees. Evergreens. Two apple trees, their fruit from last year stored in our freezer for baking still to come – the warm smell of hot springtime apple pie. We have seen and talked with neighbors as well as strangers, people at work and children at play. It would be easy to sit here, almost grotesquely comfortable, with coffee and collie and simply watch the show and believe in deep ideas.
But today is a fine day for a walk. Today is a perfect day to make that pilgrimage once more, to leave the home in search of something troubling and something sacred, to visit the places we know, as well as the ones we do not, and smile when the world is larger than our ability to imagine it. Chaucer, of course, is named for the author of The Canterbury Tales, the first great travel story in English. You’re on the road, his Innkeeper said. Tell me a story. And if it’s a good one, we will all buy you dinner.
Exploration, said Apsley Cherry Gerard, is the physical expression of intellectual passion. Every good impulse is an impulse outward. Tell me a travel story? Chaucer gets up, stretches his forelegs and then his hind legs, and looks at me. Waiting. Wondering. Wishing. Let’s go, he thinks.
Leaving is really his only question. He knows he will be fed. He knows he has shelter. He knows he has people to scratch his ears and rub his sides and tell him he is an astonishingly good-looking dog. And he knows we will leave. He knows that every day I will gather my cap, retie my laces and head toward the back door. Together we will walk the circuit we’ve come to know as intimately as our own desire – the streets, the park, the pond, the river shore – but he does not know when. It could be morning, twilight, full dark midnight. We do not wait for clear weather, so it could be windstorm, blizzard, summer heat. Every day his eyes watch me, looking for the signs that now, now is when we will go. Now is when we will see how the world has changed since yesterday, listening for each small new story. Now is when the old story gets told again. He lives his days in anticipation of departure, waiting for that heart-leap joy in the moment of setting out. And so do I. There are new stories in the world. It’s time to get going.
Destination has nothing to do with the joy of travel. Destination is accomplishment and rest. The dance to get there, however, is everything. The journey is where the stories come from. Destination is the place where you tell them. And it does not matter if the excursion is the first ascent of an unnamed peak in a badly-mapped wilderness or a familiar walk with a happy dog – there is as much of the universe in every leaving.
So three miles, more or less. We begin in the backyard and, this April evening, we stop at the apple trees first. The buds have yet to open, but they are fat and dark and swelling with the sap just now reaching them. Each bud the promise of a flower, the invitation to a bee, the shaping of a fruit that will feel my hand twist it from a stem. Chaucer sniffs at the tree’s base. Our neighbors have dogs, a set of golden retrievers, and they leave scent messages for each other here. I cup some deer-eaten branches in my palm. Not twenty steps from home and we’re already in the questions that point toward story. Who has come to visit? What have they eaten? Why did they eat from this tree and not the other one? What did they need?
A red-headed bird (later, I will be unable to find it in my field guide) flies past us and lands on the porch. Chaucer and I walk past the ash and maple trees. Even here there are stories. The Fallgold Ash trees struggle, insects having come to visit last year, while the Patmore Ash trees nearly leap into the season. Beyond our yard there is a berm and then a county ditch, and there are deer prints in the soft soil there. Chaucer bounds from one tree or tuft of grass to another, loping with the gait of a happy dog. Killdeer try to lure him, dragging a wing in faux injury, then flying away.
Every story has a beginning before our entrance. The grass on this berm is ragged and torn, large sections just dirt without green. And there is a reason for this. Last year the river flooded. Famously. The Red River of the North, which flows through Fargo and Grand Forks, North Dakota, had its second 500-year flood in ten years. Sandbag walls and earthen dikes were built by students and volunteers – people driving here from Tennessee and Maine and Washington State to help – at a speed just a foot faster than the river’s rise. Homes were lost, though most were saved. In our backyard, the clay wall rose nearly eight feet higher than the yard it protected. When the flood receded, the wall was removed. The missing grass is the only remainder.
I know this story because I was here. But how many stories, how many small remainders of something huge and deep do I pass each day without the insight to ask? Where I live was once a Pleistocene sea. Where I live was once the home of dinosaurs. I have a porch on the unsteady earth.
There are clouds to the west, low and grey and stormish, and there will be rain later tonight. More troubling, however, is the rising plume of black smoke to the north. Something is on fire. All I can see at the moment is the effect of some cause on the ground. When I get home I will learn there has been a backyard accident. A young boy is badly burned. A neighbor who came to his rescue is dead.
We turn from sidewalk to bike path and Chaucer’s head comes up. This is normally where we meet Angus, a small black terrier on a walk with his owners, a biology professor from the college and his wife. Our routines match nearly enough that we expect each other here. This place is made by the history of our meeting and by the anticipation of it happening again. But Angus is not here today, and Chaucer sniffs the grass to see what news there might be.
This walk is familiar in the best sense of the word, something close to family and relations, something intimate and protective. Another friend works in her backyard garden. Children play at a city park. A spaniel named Bailey chases a ball and runs up to greet Chaucer, tail wagging. Red-winged blackbirds perch in the reeds at the pond while a loon dives and surfaces in the water. A judge turns dinner on a backyard grill while her dog, a black dust mop named Bear, feints and charges us.
At the same moment, this walk is fresh ground, terra incognita, evidence of both entropy and genesis in every step. Homes I have seen for years have been lifted from the earth and placed on steel beams – relocation after the floods. The river, still in flood stage though receding, remakes its banks. Storm clouds shape and filter twilight just this one way once. Birdsong arrives unexpected and fresh. Lights inside houses begin to come on, making shapes in the neighborhood that shift and dance. The landing lights of an airplane appear next to Venus. I can feel the arch of my own feet against the earth.
In other words, I have history in this place. But I have never been in this moment.
Chaucer and I turn a corner and see a man walking the same path, walking faster than we are. And when he is close enough I see he is a man I have known for years, another colleague at the college, a religion scholar, though through a thousand variations I have never seen him on this walk before. He slows his pace so we can say hello and talk for a few steps. I learn he is about to leave, a three-week trip to the holy land. He can’t wait, he says. And soon enough he regathers his pace, the appeal of departures lifting his feet. Godspeed, we say. Bon voyage.
A row of lilac bushes fronts the home of friends and a Gordon setter named Emma. If dogs have friends, then Emma is Chaucer’s very best. But Emma is not out today. For the remaining mile, Chaucer’s walk grows slow and I slow my own walk, too. We are inbound now. What stories there are have been collected and placed alongside the stories of yesterday and the day before, next to the open space for the stories of tomorrow and the days after that. If coming home is a sign of commitment and love, then setting out is a sign of hope. The arc between setting out and coming home is what keeps us alive.
Our lives are grounded by history and science and empathy. Our lives are lofted by how those things meet each unexpected sight. Sometimes the leaving is only to walk my dog. Sometimes the hope is a good bit larger. Tell me a story, the Innkeeper said. Tell me a story.
I have come to believe that my dog understands the idea of a story. Collies are herding dogs. Every molecule in every muscle is tuned to the act of meeting the flock, or collecting the stray, of heading out alone to come back with more. Every day, what he finds is the change from the day before. Someone new has marked the trail. Someone he expects has failed to appear. Deer, rabbits, turkeys and moose have scented this day’s chapter. The trees are a different color. The wind carries news from some other part of the territory. The North American plate has moved a millimeter west.
Heading out is an act of desire. If I want my dog to leap to his feet, all I need to say, softly or not, is “Ready?”
I always ask it as a question. The answer is always an adrenaline yes.
W. Scott Olsen is the author of four books: Never Land: Adventures, Wonder, and One World Record in a Very Small Plane (University of Nebraska Press, 2010); Hard Air: Adventures from the Edge of Flying (Bison Books, 2008); At Speed: Traveling the Long Road between Two Points (University of Nebraska Press, 2006); Gravity: Allure of Distance (University of Utah Press, 2003); and Meeting the Neighbors: Sketches of Life on the Northern Prairie (North Star Press of St. Cloud, 1993).