polygamy

I've been thinking about polygamy lately. Not in the sense where I want to take it up as a hobby, but in the sense where I sit naked in the snow and hemmmmm about it as a concept. This isn't the first time - it probably came up as far back as my early teen years. I was a missionary kid being brought up in a very reserved environment where sex was “tee-heed” or “poo-pooed” but almost never discussed in a frank manner, and I was looking for loopholes.

It doesn't really matter whether you are the clean-cut child of straight-laced missionaries or the illegitimate son of a prostitute named Maria being raised in a Mexican whorehouse – at the age of early teen you have got sex on the brain, toes, and everything between. Sex leaks out your very pores, and in Yarinacocha we were taught to stop up the holes until we were old enough to experience IT in the appropriate context.

I am a big fan of appropriate contexts. I have always known that human passions need to be channeled or you end up waging wars or overpopulating the earth. In this matter, however, GI Joe is dead wrong: knowing is not half the battle – it’s not even an opening sword stroke. For those who happened to have skipped over the years between eleven and, say, fifteen, know this: developing primary and secondary sex characteristics is hell.

What’s polygamy got to do with it? Well, I'll tell ya. Polygamy, in this painful interior landscape, seemed like a golden sunrise. I might have to wait forever for sex, but when I got old enough I could marry eight or nine willing vixens and have sex pretty much all the time. It’s in the Bible, for the love of Pete! King David of Israel, author and subject of a whole bunch of verses, had a mess of wives and concubines, right? And the Bible says that David was “a man after God’s own heart”, right? Granted, David had a bit of an advantage. He was a king and could therefore afford more diamonds and chocolates than the average Ezekiel, Hezekiah, or Zebulun. Still, the point is the same – you should try to grab as many wives as you can, cause God’s cool with it, and if God were a guy he’d be doing the same thing.

While this line of “reasoning” about women and sex seems fairly elbow-slappingly funny to me now as a married man – at the time it was serious stuff. I mean, there had to be some sort of sex pot at the end of the chastity rainbow to make it worth the wait, didn’t there?

I tried the argument out on Mr. Burke, my eighth-grade teacher, and when he stopped laughing he said that it was a nice try, Josh, but the Bible expressly forbade polygamy. I had been doing some pretty extensive reading on the subject and was pretty sure he was wrong, so I demanded scriptural corroboration.

“Don’t you remember, Josh”, he replied, “Jesus himself said it very clearly – ‘no man can serve two masters’”. At this he doubled over in paroxysms of mirth. Mr. Burke was always doubling over in paroxysms of mirth when I was around – reveling in the foibles and fumblings of my youth – but he was married and had fathered several children, so it didn't help. Polygamy remained a blank, open book, and I was happy to take up a pen and write it.

A lot has gone on between my floppy ears since then. These days, I am not too keen on multiplying wives unto myself. I am much too poor for that and have enough trouble as it is staying out of just one doghouse. Still, I can't help but wonder where the whole “one wife or go to jail” thing came from in our culture – was it just a by-product of our economic reality?

Let's look at the flip side: In many of the patriarchal societies of the past every man was a little king or tyrant and women were not allowed to have regular jobs. What with the men running around smiting each other with swords and hand grenades and what have you, there were a lot more women available than men. If a man couldn’t have more than one wife, then a lot of women would have starved to death. Starving to death, while very noble and poetic, was probably not a lot of fun. And in many indigenous societies today, women still hate starving to death. Go figure.

Now granted, I would be one of the first to argue that patriarchy is not all that and a bag of sex toys; but who’s to say we’re all that much better off with our own state of legislated monogamy, where domestic violence and insolvency reign supreme? Isn't it better to have a man with six wives who is committed to loving them all than a monogamous man who wouldn't know love if it walked right up and kicked him in the teeth? Granted, neither situation is ideal; but where in this mixed-up, backwards, loopy, fallen world are you going to find an ideal? David was probably overdoing it (the Bible does make it clear that his weakness for the ladies is what brought him down), but what right have we earned, with our divorces and our Hollywood-bankrupted version of marriage, to point fingers?

What brought polygamy to mind at my advanced age of twenty-seven was not, however, the desire to move to Utah, but rather an odd little question: as in, why is it always, always, always guys who do the polygamizing? I know it seems obvious – men being possessive, power-hungry, sex-obsessed, machismo addicts and all – but how come you never hear tell of a woman getting dragged before the magistrates and penalized for polygamy? We are in a new era in which women have been economically liberated. Aren’t there any power-hungry, possessive, sex-obsessed women out there who want to run a bit of a man-pack?

Come to think of it, a girl did once ask me and a couple of other guys if we, as a group, would like to be in her harem. She was joking (of course?) but she was also very attractive, and since I always take things way too seriously I (jokingly) pointed out that her husband might take issue with the idea. She replied that “he’s not the jealous type”.

Now at this point, a guy with moxie would have called her bluff. “There are a few things I’d like to get cleared up first”, he’d say, “like, who gets procreative priviledges with you, and how often? And even more importantly, what about fiscal responsibility? Do we get an allowance, or are you expecting us to work for you?” I, of course, have always been a man more of words than action, so I dropped it.

Does it happen, though? Should it? Probably not, I think. For one, we haven't had a good, wholesale “girls-only” war in well nigh on forever, so there are plenty of women to go around. For two, you only need one nominally functional male to get a woman in a condition to fulfill her biological imperative and pop out a baby, so from a “preservation of the species” point of view, it doesn’t make sense. For three, with the women of North America allowed out into the sweat-of-their-brow workforce in the last while, wouldn’t a woman who gathered in a bunch of men to buy her candy and baubles just seem sort of greedy? And finally, is there any woman in her right mind who would want to put up with more than one of us at a time?

Still, who is to say what a determined and possibly insane woman should or should not do? I certainly don't claim to understand even my own motivations, so why should I judge a member of that alien species, “Women”. Besides, morality is a slippery eel. Those who try to capture and control it often get a nasty shock as they realize they’re messing with things undreamt of in their philosophy. I think the truth about all this is real, and perhaps graspable (if not necessarily by naked reason alone), I am just saying I am not entirely sure we are quite as bang-on as we think about sex and marriage.

I will have you know, though, that if anybody tries to horn in on Anya as a second husband, I will exercise my inherent right to go ape-excrement on their heinie. Unless, of course, they plan to stay out of our sight in the barn and do all the chores. It would be hard to object to a second husband if he was just going to be a sort of indentured servant. Who am I to mess with time-hallowed tradition? Hmmm.

cold inside and out

Sometimes you read something and you have to just say - yup, they done said it the best. This morning I had that experience with something written by my freind, Ben Miller. Ben, whom I've mentioned before, lives in the Brazilian favelas in "City of God" country. So without further ado, here are Ben's words, clipped totally without permission from the public domain of his web page:

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So it’s midnight-thirty on the coldest night of the year in Rio. I’m bundled up in a fleece and a blanket, just finishing a cup of hot chocolate and trying to keep warm.

I think of Rafael and Bruno and Viviane and Jessica on the streets tonight, and shudder. The mothers with children – the children without mothers – out in the cold. While I hate it, I am also strangely numbed and desensitized. We see things day in and day out that should not be, and we do what we can, but we can’t change everything. I think the danger is that when we see we can’t change everything, we eventually stop trying to change anything. We have to stop and remind ourselves that though this is reality, it isn’t normal, and shouldn’t be accepted. It is not meant to be.

I see the eleven year old boy high on glue and smoking. I see the young teens selling and using drugs, bored to death. I see the mothers whose children are hungry. I see the gunshot wounds and knife cuts. I see fear and exhaustion and despair. I see young people with no future. I see people I know told by society they have no value because they are dirty, smelly, ugly, and stupid. I see children believing these lies. I see the lack of hope.

And because I see it day in and day out, I accept it as normal. But it’s not meant to be this way...


…rage, rage against the dying of the light…”

you can never come back

Last night I was the life of a party. I was the party, in fact, since the balloons and drinks and snacks and festivizing was occuring pretty much entirely in my head as I slept. I think. Movies have told me I need to be unsure about that.

It was a good party - full of glowing warm colors, bright lights and lively conversations. I was in the middle, of course, doling out wisdom and witticisms to a flock of admirers. I glanced out the window and noticed it had started to snow. It was blue and cold outside and that was OK. Until people started grabbing tree planting gear. "C'mon" someone said. "We've gotta get going - I don't know how to get to the block so we've got to follow Rich".

I did not like where this was going. It was my dream, right? "Um, no." I said. "I think we should stay here where it is warm and cozy and fun and I am the life. It's cold out there and you may recall from that hilarious story I just told you that I retired from planting this summer. I think we should stay here and drink tepid, non-alcoholic dream drinks." I kept protesting as I was inexorably pulled through the door.

One of the most unforgettable lessons I learned in nine years of treeplanting is that I hate being cold and wet. Unfortunately, though, nine years has brainwashed me to a point where I think I have to plant and suffer and take it where the sun's a stranger because that's what men of grit and character and Louis Lamour"esque" panache do - they bend over.

Despite this brain bashing I've given myself I have learned a fair few worthwhile things. Like my first week of planting back in '98 when my life was as close to not-comfortable as it has ever been. The bugs were thick or thicker than sin, I had ingrown-hair boils on my feet, it rained and hailed most every day, and nobody seemed to be particularly concerned. That first week of purgatory I learned that life is sometimes difficult and I could either suck up and buck up and get a move on, or not.

As glad as I am that planting forced me to scratch the surface of what it means to have the courage to change the things I can and the serenity to accept the things I can't, I hope to heaven and all King David's concubines that the dreams will stop. Tree planting sure is a whole lot less pleasant when you do it for free.

Michael and the Caiman

You remember Michael, right? The wiry kid with the scruffle of brown hair clinging desperately to the top of his head? The insane little mowgli who so far on this website has nearly been the death of me by rapid deceleration after a fall from a tree and a deranged motorcycle cliff-drop? The yo-yo whom the Pater Noster of the U.S. military has deigned to designate manager of missiles?

Right, then. Believe you me this, freind, it gets worse. This is the story of how I almost died, and how a bright light came at the last moment and delivered me, and how Michael has not to this day (ten years later) ever admitted that it was his fault.

It would be more fitting, I think, if the tale started on a dark and stormy night. Unfortunately, it started as we (that is: myself, Michael, and Michael's family) were flying in a Helio Courier float plane to a house on Lago Tipishca. While the Helio is a nifty little machine (flies as slow as forty miles per hour, lands and takes off of a... very small thing), it does not do well in storms after the sun's down.

It was, however, a day of stacks of thick greyish clouds lumbering around the sky like groggy bears in spring, just waiting for something to piss them off. Tawny sunbeams slashed through as we flew, igniting rainbows and illuminating the endless emerald basin below. Looking down we watched as sunspots caught the occasional flowering tree and lit these giants up in flashes of yellow or eruptions of crimson. It was a breathtaking day and turbulence was tossing us all over. The weather gods are bipolar in the jungle. It was the sort of day that could go either way.

Michael's dad, a pilot and former green beret ("I could kill you with my bare hands" he said, grinning) banked once around the dark waters of Tipishca, looking for logs or native fishermen napping on the job. Satisfied that our landing was clear, he dropped the flaps and brought us roaring in, plopping down gently on the lake as the sun began to make overtures to the tips of the giant virgin jungle trees.

We pulled into the "dock", a home-built affair of logs lashed together with vines, and tied on next to Tom Hough's speedboat. Tom came down and helped us move food and sleeping gear up the slippery bank to his house. He would guide us for the next few nights as we slipped into the dark to hunt the dreaded caiman. Tom had been raised in this very jungle as the child of missionaries and had returned to carry on his parent's work of planting churches in rural communities along the tangled web of rivers and streams that veins its way throughout the entire Amazon Basin.

Tom was a powerfully built man with a bent, squashed nose - a souvenir of several years spent as an amateur boxer. He had a square jaw, a gravelly voice and a twinkle in his bright blue eyes that often sparked off a hearty laugh. That night after supper he regaled us with stories of hunts gone by; of mammoth reptiles and terrified tourists who chose just the wrong moment to fall overboard; of youthful nights spent hunting caimans with his bare hands in a dugout canoe with only an old flashlight for company. His eyes shone in the flickering light of the oil lamps as he recalled how he and his high school buddies would split up and whomever could bring back the biggest one alive (the caiman, that is) won.

Tom explained to us that the caiman is a relative of the alligator and just as dangerous to any prey (that's you) foolish enough to get close. It grabs you in a crushing grip and torpedoes you down to the bottom of the lake, disorienting and gnawing as it goes. If that doesn't kill you it repeats the procedure, bashing you against a submerged log for good measure. Then it eats its fill and stuffs you under the log for later.

At fifteen years old we had seen Crocodile Dundee at least eighteen million times and all this talk was whipping us into a fervor of reptiliodillic bloodlust. Tipishca seethes with the wriggling reptilian death-machines, so with many a hearty cry we tromped down to the speedboat, motored up and headed out - pointing our million candlepower spotlight at the shore and looking for the widespread glowing orbs that would signal the presence of a large caiman. The wider they were, the greater our chances of getting limbs torn from their respective sockets - which, to our jungle-warped minds - meant more fun for everyone.

This is the point where I pull an ensteinian time shuffle and hop forward about fourteen hours. I do this because I have been using real names here - most notably my own - and I'm not too keen on being tracked down and harpooned in the side by an environut. See, hunting caimans isn't pretty. It involves steel-barbed harpoons and machetes and frothing, bloody lakewater. To my own credit I have labored since I left Peru to avoid killing anything that was not trying to kill me first. (With the exception of spiders. Of course. Because they are the spawn of Satan.) I don't even eat any meat at all that hasn't been hygienically relieved of breath and blood in an antisceptic factory somewhere and chopped into little unrecognizeable chunks so I do not have to think about it. Aren't I a super?

Anyways. The next day Michael and I were scrambling around about fifty feet up a gargantuan mamay tree gorging with the monkeys and Michael swung over and said, "we should go for a swim." I thought about that a bit. I thought about the night before and the teeth and the blood and the writhing. Still, it was a muggy jungle day and the sun was beating a cannibalizing jungle rhythm on our sweating skins. From our high vantage point the lake looked seductively cool and inviting. Besides, caimans mostly just sleep during the day. Right?

"Sure" I said.

We grabbed air mattresses and headed down the bank with Katy in tow. Rank dark mud squished between our bare toes, but Katy was Michael's sister and a jungle girl, and therefore game for anything. We decided that the game should be "paddle really fast and lose Katy". We went for the island.

In the middle of Tipishca there was long, narrow clump of trees and bushes. Old Tom had told us that in low water season it was connected to shore by a spit of dirt and monkeys would go out there to eat fruit and get landlocked by the Flood. The Amazon Basin is really, really flat and when the rains come the water table goes up about twenty feet and a lot of crazy stuff happens. Rivers change courses, lakes swell and change fish species, and poor silly little squirrel monkeys try to swim for it and become a tasty midnight snack.

It was the perfect place to hide from Katy. Our arms were getting tired as we paddled our air mattresses in behind the first few bushes and began wending our way through the brush. "Guys?" Katy hollered "Josh!?! Michael?" and then gave up and turned around. The trees closed in overhead. We paddled further and further into the shadows. Vines and branches gnarled around us as we kept a sharp eye for venomous bugs, frogs and water snakes. Gradually light began to once again stream through the foliage. Kingfishers flashed in the sunlight and water-skimming dragonflies flirted with fish and water plants. We kept paddling and soon broke through to the other side.

We were now completely out of sight of the house and the sun was once again sidling indecently close to the tops of the trees. "Maybe we should get going", I said, turning my air mattress towards the island. It was no longer quite so hot and the caimans were probably not quite so sluggish.

"Good idea" said Michael. "But the house is down that way. If we paddle around the tip of the island we'll be right across from it."

This was, of course, very wrong. "You're full of horse poo" I said, in the strongest missionary-kid language I could muster. "We came straight across from the house and sort of zig-zagged through the trees. This is a really long island and there's no way we went that far sideways."

"Nah ah" Michael replied.

"Look, man. The sun's about to go down. The caimans will be coming out and I want to go home. Lets just paddle straight through the island and then if it's the other way we can just angle across the lake. Besides, I don't want to die." Sounds like a good argument, right?

"No." Michael replied.

Michael had an infuriating way with words, but if you wanted to be in on the insanity you had to go along with it. So we paddled and stroked and paddled some more, pulling those air mattresses across the water until every single fibre of every single muscle in every single one of my arms burned like it had been bitten by fire ants. An air mattress is very, very flimsy protection against a ravenous, vengeful caiman. We were almost to the corner of the island when the sun fell into the arms of the far trees and snuffed itself out for the night. We rounded the tip and there, waaaaaaaaaaaay back in the direction we'd just come from, glowed the comforting lamps of home. I wasn't comforted. I was going to die. Painfully.

----

You know what? You're sick. That is just a sick thought. I left out the killing stuff out of consideration for your finer sensibilities, and here you are going on about "literary irony" and "the hunter becoming prey" and "just desserts" and all that. Fine then. Forget you and the horse you rode in on. I'm not even going to tell you how it ends. You'll never hear about how we were dramatically saved at the last moment by a fortuitous glance from a fortuitous spotlight and literally plucked from the jaws of death. You'll just have to go through the rest of your life wondering if Michael and I got eaten by caimans. Hah! Eat that!

fish eyes

Yesterday I caught myself wondering how the fish felt when they first breathed the poison. I know how they acted - swimming in haphazard, frantic zig-zags just below the surface of the milky water, bug-eyed and frantic - but how fully did they know they were going to die?

Barbasco root is an excellent tool for catching fish, and back in nineteen-dickety-ninety-two I helped members of the Machiguenga tribal group of Peru, South America pound it with rocks on other rocks, creating a sticky mash that was then placed in wicker baskets and dragged through the shoals of a section of the river that had been painstakingly dammed off with even more rocks (and some banana leaves) in the wee hours of the morning.

After that it was a free-for-all as the poison seeped into the water, whiting it and addling fish brains to the point where they could be easily dispatched with a sharp blow to the back of the head from a machete - a pastime in which men, women and children partook with glee because that, my friends, is how the happy little eco-friendly natives do it.

Worrying about the environment, you see, is for comfortable fat people, like us. My German/American buddy Dan Fast, who grew up in the deep jungle living "native" and decided to stay on into his forties often said that the natives are less eco-freindly than the rest of us - there just aren't enough of them to do a whole lot of damage. But that's the short story. The long story is told slowly over smoky campfires and speaks of thousands of years of dark hot jungle living and dying, of a savage existence eked out on the brink of extinction at the hands of exploitive outsiders and vicious Mother Nature, red in tooth and claw.

What brings the Machis to mind is a book I bought in the Whitcourt Library called “the Storyteller”, by Mario Vargas Llosa, who is to my knowledge the only world-famous novelist Peru has ever produced. I thumbed the spine of the book on the “for sale” rack and recognized the name, since Vargas Llosa had run for the Presidency when I was eight. I remembered that as schoolchildren we used to laugh at “Mario Vargaseosa”. “Gaseosa” is Spanish for soda pop.

Since then I had heard reference to his name a few times as a writer of note and from time to time thought of looking up his work. There it was, in my hand. I bought it, walked out to my truck, and started to read. Page by page it sucked me in and took me back. Or aback. Here a man writes in florid, brilliant literary style of my own home. He describes his experiences with the Machiguengas (with whom I had lived for a couple of weeks) and even paints a picture of the lake by which I was raised. Hear his words:

“Yarinacocha at dusk, when the red sun begins to sink behind the treetops and the greenish lake glows beneath the indigo sky where the first stars are beginning to twinkle, is one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen.”

My home, my geographical first love, immortalized in fine literature by a sophisticated world traveler - a distinguished writer, lecturer and politician. Vargas Llosa went further, though, for apparently his study of the Machis had brought him into contact with the Snells (whom he re-named the Schneils) and his description of the conversations they shared was just so “them”. There I was, reading a well-written hardcover novel about personal friends and intimate places, sitting in a nasty big Ford F450 diesel truck in central Alberta. Everything about it was drawing me back home.

This utterly disconcerting experience hits me with two basic responses. First, I am surprised to feel homesickness thudding down into the pit of my stomach. Vargas Llosa writes of fishing for Sungaro and I am transported back, envisioning cleaning and frying the tender flesh of one of those spotted, flatnosed catfish after I’ve pulled it, glistening, from the river. He describes my beautiful Yarinacocha like it's an immortal romantic landscape and I can practically smell the water. Why have I never heard of this book?

Yet here it is and my second reaction is just as strong. I am confronted by an entirely new species of human being – the thinking, educated Peruvian – and I am unsure of how to make their acquaintence. I lived in Peru with a rough, extremely limited understanding of the situation and of my latin hosts and here I am nearly a decade later reading a book tossed to me from the other side of the wall. This man is looking at the organization for which my parents have worked for over thirty years – the Summer Institute of Linguistics – and critically evaluating what he sees.

I am not jolted by the idea that he doesn’t like what we were doing there (It seems, rather, that he views the Snells with a lot of respect). It is more that he (that is, the literary Peruvian) exists and that after living in Peru for seventeen years I am faced by him, for the first time, on the pages of a book in Canada. It is as though we have met at a poetry reading and I'm awkward and I don't know how to hold my drink and I keep stumbling over words and eventually, I know, I'm going to accidently gesticulate wildly and douse the man with wine. I respect him a lot but I am unsure what to make of him, because for so long I’ve thought basically nothing at all about his “type”.

I wonder at the many ways in which I am unaware of how I have put him, the Machiguengas and all other Peruvians into boxes, just to make them less intimidating and easier to stack, so to speak. There is endless complexity to people and it seems that in order to live a person has to draw lines and set up boundaries for the mind, resorting to simplistic explanations to avoid mentally imploding.

Take, for instance, a chair. Any old chair. That chair is a miracle of human ingenuity and a marvel of physics. From an artistic standpoint it is a fantastic subject for study, a cacophony of subtle gradations of hue, value and intensity. It occupies a unique space in the universe and is therefore important in its own individual way. Enter a roomful of chairs, however, and the only way you’re going to ever find a seat before the lecture starts is if you can ignore the miracle of a single chair and say, “Aw, frick. A roomful of chairs. Now, where should I sit?”

So it is with people, I suppose. In order to live and get things done, you’ve got to do some generalizationing, boxing nouns (people, places, things and sometimes ideas) into controllable ideological chunks. The problem is that this attitude, corrupted and magnified by corrupt human nature, tends to go hay-wire-bonkers and leaving no room to pause, reflect, and love. The attitudes engendered when pride mates with naming lead towards the sort of mindless destruction manifested in the cut-blocks where I currently earn money off the people who wastefully land-rape the world for trees in a "chicken-with-head-cut-off" obsession with bottom lines and “getting things done”.

On the other hand, I don't think I really want to advocate a Buddhist nothingness, attempting to empty yourself completely in order to experience the “other” which is you. While those orange-robed chanters might be attempting a good thing, I think it’s an exercise in futility. You can’t do it. To live is to name and while this tends inevitably to degenerate into a desire to control and overwhelm the named, it need not be so. Naming is not a bad thing in and of itself. It need not necessarily destroy – for to name something can also be to give it life and to make it real, to create form out of nothing and to shape order out of chaos.

Probably I should just try to name as the Machiguengas traditionally do – temporarily and contingently and relationally. A man is not “Bill” to them as much as he is “Billmybrothergettingoutofthecanoe”. Then, perhaps, I can step away from boxing and begin to learn how to empathize – to feel what the Other is feeling so that I can begin to truly love. This could go anywhere – even (horrors!) the mind of a barbasco-warped fish.