“The Human Road”

By Suzanne Paola

In the year 1991 it becomes possible to see the year 1992, and in 1992, 1993 looks probable, but the year 2000 implies 3000, 4000, 5000, a dizzying telescope of anticipation. It's A.D. 2000 and I can't lose the tic of seeing the human world around me already smothered, lost in a remote archeological past

It's not just me. My people -- meaning my human, American, now-people -- keep making futuristic movies where earth gets threatened by asteroids or warty alien ships. And we make movies about evil and apocalypse, turning the metaphysical prism around and around. The devil's been a handsome guy (End of Days), a bumpkin (Little Nicky), a beautiful sexual woman (Ninth Gate). He has been everything we are, in a dozen or so major films in a few years, many more in minor films and television. God puts in the occasional appearance, maybe as a female pop singer (Dogma) but mostly does not show up, leaving us to deal with her nemesis on our own.

I care about the appearance of the devil -- why I'm not sure -- and watch as many of these movies as I can.

I walk across the campus where I work one day, in the ten minutes I've squeezed out at noon to get some soup. A preacher, who visits our campus every year and calls himself Brother Tom, turns on me from his small group of listeners. The crowd of students looks mostly amused, using Tom to punctuate their swallows of Starbuck's. Tom is middle-aged, hardlooking, his face like a callous with features -- a callous on the open hand of a God about to smite.

"You might think you're a good person!" he yells at me. "Your friends and family might think you are a good person. To God you are not a good person. To God you are an evil rebellious wretch."

All around us -- me, Brother Tom, the few students milling around -- the spruce and hemlock and long-armed cedars wave their limbs like many-armed Hindu gods. Ours is a maritime climate; there's always a good wind here. It's spring, around Easter time, when Brother Tom comes back with the robins and the Canada geese.

This campus is red. Red brick buildings with tall windows rounded at the top, coaxed ivy: the self-conscious college. When I see the buildings they stand both as they are, in the blush of warm spring rain, and as they might be dug out in a few millenia, caked, crumbled, in a tilth of rubble, compacted volcanic ash. I don't want to see this way: it's like a sickness. The crumbling future slumps across my eyes. To Tom I walk across campus like an embodiment of humanity's fall. What am I wearing? I don't mark that in my notebook.

How do you know? I imagine myself saying to Brother Tom. How do you know I'm not saved?

Or maybe, How do you know so much about me? And meanwhile, at the omniplex, Arnold Schwarzenegger in End of Days fights the devil, handsome Gabriel Byrne, with the help of some really, really big guns. He doesn't bother calling on God at all, and though Byrne at one point manages to crucify him, Arnold escapes.

The spring of Easter and Lent's close. I don't give anything up; I haven't for years; does Brother Tom smell that about me? A pod of five gray whales swims into our harbor in Bellingham Bay, a detour in their annual Alaska migration. Our bay is polluted with mercury and chlorine from the Georgia-Pacific plant, which produces toilet paper, treating the paper with chlorine to make it whiter. The plant sends a nonstop cumulus of chemical-smelling steam into the air, like it's manufacturing another brand of sky. I accept the plant as part of the landscape, like the Northwest's chronic real clouds, and in my acceptance I find another kind of betrayal.

Like most polluted bays -- like Barnegat, the one I grew up along -- our Bellingham Bay makes rich and luxuriant flora, a soup of algae, drawing in the hungry whales.

I take my son Jin to a park that crescents along the water, to watch them. He's close to three and I keep thinking about his developing memory. My earliest memories are from his age. Only some twenty thousand gray whales remain on the earth, no longer a small enough number to be called endangered, but not too many more than my university has staff and students. Who knows what will become of the grays? They, and the orcas here, seem to be losing the ability to reproduce. They suffer from encroachment, from viability issues.

The whales are strips of black rubber separating the water now and then: moving spumes. When they surface and blow the crowd claps. A young girl in jeans has climbed onto a boulder and dances there, a slow undulating armwaving feet-on-the-ground dance, a Northwest expression of ecstasy. A businessman in a navy suit holds binoculars to his eyes and a cell phone to his ear. I see women in suits and heels, tie-dyed kids from local communes. Everybody's here.

"Watch this," I say to Jin, "remember this," over and over, because the whales are too theoretical for him, refusing to carry their bodies where we can see them clear; Jin chases the dirty-looking gray gulls that march full-on in front of us. I want him to record the whales for the future, like a human videotape.

His lens takes in other images: a small circle of women in Indian print dresses beat drums; a young man with blonde dreadlocks writhes in front of them, another dancer. They stare out at the whales, except for the dancer, who just circles regularly toward the mammals, flailing his arms in invitation. When people approach the women to ask what they're doing they say the whales are spirit guides, like angels, who come to humans to teach them to live at a higher level of spiritual evolution.

The human outlines on my Honda's dashboard -- reclining, with sketchy lines to show air blowing either to the head, the torso or the feet -- Jin has come to call angels. I don't have a clue where he learned the word. "Turn on angels," he says, when he wants to press the buttons.

Gray whales are a baleen whale, a primitive kind of whale, also called mysticetes. They feed through a baleen, a spongy scrim in the mouth that sucks in seawater and filters out the tiny organisms they eat -- porcelain crab larvae, ghost shrimp. Like all whales, grays are mammals and intelligent, large-brained, with a much larger brain than ours (a fact I suspect the whale drummers would tell me lots about if I asked them), but compared to other whales they're relatively slow in evolving, having lived in their present form for some twelve million years. Using baleen is a peaceful way to feed, compared with other members of the whale family, who might stun prey such as schools of mackerel with underwater sound waves, dive and feed ferociously.

When the whales surface you can see, with binoculars, the crust of thousands of barnacles on their backs, the quick dives of birds that live off the smaller lives whales carry, kelpweed and bladderwort tangles on their flukes. They're like islands, or planets, so whole and different they absorb our projections the way stars do: some people I know in Bellingham say whales are aliens from other worlds, come to teach us how to evolve so we can join with them. The spaceships they see hovering over us travel to contact the whales, besides doing other things, like abducting people. A hairdresser I know tells all her clients about her own abduction.

A grueling experience, she says. "But they won't come for you," she adds, parting hair, "unless you're spiritually ready."

Grays in the Pacific migrate 10,000 miles a year, from the Bering Sea down to Mexico, where they calve and hunger for the cold. The only other gray whale migration route is along the Korean peninsula; grays used to migrate the Atlantic but were hunted to extinction there. Only a few hundred still swim along Korea but I like thinking how my son, not yet three and born in Seoul, has lived along both their habitats. Ours is a gray corrugated water -- it wears the tint of its cold heart -- lined with the tall sparse cones of Sitka spruce. I can't guess at the look of the far-off waters of Korea.

"Say hello to the whales!" I say. "Some whales like this live in Korea, like you did." Jin looks at me with that incredulous look kids develop a few months out of babyhood, when they're already beyond a parent's bright, optimistic inanities.

When Jin was adopted and arrived here, five months old, he cried at night, for hours. Still thinking it was daytime and grieving Korea, other seas, other bodies moving through the darkness. It was November, the time of year when the wind rips off the bay, the house rocks and wisteria whips the windows -- when the wind lets us know it's been harboring all year a kind of killer rage. I walked and rocked Jin. I hummed melodies that went on and on and ended nowhere. I sang him, only because they were the songs I knew, old English folk tunes where lovers drowned or died by the sword, ships wrecked, Lord Franklin sought a passage around the Pole and never sailed back. It was throat-scraping work. Some nights it took twenty or thirty tragedies to calm him down.

It seemed like an awful thing to do to a baby, to uproot him, to frighten him with such a wind, to soothe him with tragedy. Jin had a mystical beauty, round pale cheeks, eyes so curious they drank the surfaces off things. Our couch-solid lives fell away into his face. I already loved him too much to want anyone to do to him what I had just done. How had Brother Tom known this, too?

Agency workers call it the transition time, the predictable grieving. Before Jin came, I willed myself not to think about this. Then it sounded in my ear, all night, as we walked: an outrage ripped from far off, like the wind's.

Now, at three, Jin loves me so much he calls me his, swats away my husband's hands and lips.

I remember the feeling of going to bed as a child and feeling emerge around me in the dark the hushed, occult world of Adult Things. Often, since he went to night school, after I went to bed the door of our apartment opened and my father came home. I don't have specific memories of that bedroom I shared with my brother in Elizabeth, but the sense of a curtain of dark, softened by the weak bulb of a nightlight, that fell like a theater curtain, to close on my daytime act of Barbies and Velveeta and Bullwinkle and open on my parents' nighttime -- an adult act full of drama and nuance I wasn't allowed to watch. I heard whispers and the whisk of curbed careful movements. Voices fell from their normal low level -- we lived in close quarters -- when my parents hit on something they really didn't want us to hear. Or that's what I guessed when the conversation dipped out mid-sentence and then came back up in volume. This shift in my apartment to adultness obsessed me as a child and I lay in bed imagining what I was missing, the brilliant and disturbing secrets of those whispers, the movements -- furniture and dishes, scrape and clink -- my parents waited all day to spring into, like this was their time to be themselves, not just the automatons who wiped noses and warmed bowls of Campbell's soup. And there I was, in bed and forced to stay there.

I thought about this childhood feeling one day after Jin had finally fallen asleep. I was mashing cooked peas through the medium-fine blade of my food mill over a bowl -- which never seemed to be wide enough to keep butchered peas from flying around the table -- and talking to Bruce in a low voice, about what Jin had eaten that day and what we thought he might eat or should eat the next. I am one of those fanatical parents -- only home cooked food, organic, full of touches like fresh tarragon in the fish I stewed for his toothless mouth. Most nights after Jin fell asleep I found myself cooking baby food in the kitchen, after picking up toys and throwing on a load of wash.

Oh, I thought over the Jackson Pollock spatter of peas. So this is what it was, all along.

I am writing. Jin shoves a feather under the door: a gull feather, huge, its pins tipping from white to gray. Then his two-inch, dirtmooned fingers. He doesn't want me in here, in our tiny study with the door shut, but he's learned not to open the door. "Show you something!" he croons. So clear, my weaknesses, like the blemishes on the moon: curiosity and curiosity.

The whales we greet with writhing and ecstatic drums are starving. Under protection the grays have repopulated but something, possibly global warming, has killed off a lot of the small life they feed on in the Bering Sea, where they build up their fat reserves for the long migration. These whales turn off here because they can't make the final leg of their trip to Alaska. Some of them will replenish and make the last run and others will die here, in audience to the dancers. For those, we clap and cheer their final breaths and look for them to guide us as they exhaust our small bay's food supply.

One gray, a male, dies during Holy Week. His body fascinates me and it becomes a ritual, my daily viewing of the dead whale: Mass on Ash Wednesday, smudge, dead whale. First the whale corpse is a still lump in the water, an island, with none of the arching muscularity of a living gray. As it gets closer to land and more exposed, the island produces a toneless fluke.

The corpse beaches gently, right at the edge of the Georgia-Pacific plant. Before the whale lands someone sneaks onto G-P and erects a wooden cross. When the corpse has drifted within a few feet of shore the city of Bellingham wraps off the stretch of shore in clime scene tape and adds a full-time security guard, to prevent I-don't-know-what whale violations.

I have been reading about metabolism lately, the timing of our bodies -- heart rate, blood flow -- by which we learn to time the earth around us. Our body's speed is the clock that invents us. What's faster than our body rhythms, like a shooting star, is fast; what's slower is slow. I learn that to the whales, with their slow metabolisms, humans appear speeded-up, so the dancers greeting the whales with their swaying scooped-arm movements would have looked to the whales at sea jerky, spastic, desperately flapping.

By Holy Thursday the dead whale's reached the shore. A dog of ours has just died, a Brittany spaniel. He died, old and cancerous, at the foot of my bed, after I held him, fed him canned cat food from a spoon. In the morning Jin leaves a stuffed dog that looks just like the spaniel on the floor carelessly, in a skewed posture that mimics the dog's sprawl in death. Front legs stretched wide in a way no living animals' could, in the jelly before rigor mortis. I pick the stuffed dog up, toss it in a toy chest. Then drive to the whale, now right under the low bluff of sand and pebbles and the yellow tape. It's thirty-five feet of dark skin that looks strangely artificial, like car leather, mouth lolling to show the pleated paper of baleen. Flukes, the gross pores of barnacles. And the eye! Brainy, open, huge, a cerebral dinner plate.

As always a few dozen people have parked here and gawk along the coast. The balding, paunched security guard is, as always, gleeful. "In a day it will stink all over Bellingham," he says cheerfully, gesturing at the whale.

In fact, the city's reeling with the problem of whale disposal. The creature weighs probably twenty tons and is largely blubber -- fat's an unpretty thing when it decays -- and no one here can remember dealing with this problem before. In a newspaper story a councilwoman complains that she doesn't want a "smelly whale" ruining her city. A friend named Mary Janell tells me a town in Oregon faced the same problem and finally dynamited the creature.

"But there was a huge rain of blubber all over town for a while," she comments matter-of-factly, like people just went inside and got out their blubber-proof coats. I try to imagine that: a self-made Biblical plague.

Besides me, the most common guests to the whale are parents and children, mostly toddlers. The little ones cry to poke it, touch its glossy eye or rough fins. The mothers and fathers drag them out of the car to see, then drag them back in. A mother says one day, "Come on, honey, there's live ones this way."

In a letter to a local paper a father carries on (I wonder if I have ever seen him!) about the whale's penis. "The damn thing," he writes, should be cut off, instead of "bobbing there" where his two daughters can see it.

Another whale washes up, on the Whidbey Island yard of a bed-and-breakfast run by our conservative congressman Jack Metcalf, who has voted to roll back the Clean Air Act, get rid of the Clean Water Act, exempt refineries from rules governing toxic emissions, hamstring the EPA. His environmental voting record rates a 15 out of a possible 100 by the Conservation League. I wonder what he thinks, with the whale and its eye washed up into his own, private existence.

The gray has an arched rostrum or upper head, a long snout with a long, slightly upturned, ironic mouth. Its eyes stand above the end of the mouth, as if ours blinked out from the lower part of the cheek. There's a calm mossy brainpower in whales' eyes and this gives grays a rueful look, like they know they deserve better than just staring face forward at their food all day. Our whale's body beaches on its side, so it stares quietly and patiently at the rain that fills its eye and runs out the comers. The eye has the quality of eyes in those trick paintings that are so well centered they follow you everywhere in the room you go, left, right or middle. I feel it on me, everywhere in Bellingham.

Whales vocalize about many things -- food, danger, mating -- through a system of sounds with names like hauntings and trumpets. And they click and whistle and sing, in two-tone themes that build toward nothing and sound both complex and primeval, yanked from the ocean floor. The orca pods housed in our Northwest waters have individual dialects, and one pod member takes on the job of teaching the young of the group how to vocalize. Whale species that like to sing have whales in each group that sing more than others, more accomplished singers; the rest listen more, falling out into performer and audience. Humpback whales have a common breeding song made up of four to ten musical themes -- sequences of notes -- that each singer changes so that each year the song evolves, as the males follow each other's improvisations and add their own. Speeded up a lot, the humpbacks sound like birds. Speeded up somewhat, they sound just like human music.

Scientists like Donald Griffin at Harvard, an animal mind theorist, call this musical intelligence. It's not just a sense of language as survival but as an aesthetic tool, a source of pleasure, a reason to listen to a pod member who might otherwise be poaching on your turf of ghost shrimp, a reason to swim up, as they do, to human researchers blasting symphonies on underwater speakers, though they must know by now we're their only real predator.

I've been thinking lately about Devil's Advocate, one of the movies I've watched in my own private Hell's Film Festival. This devil's a lawyer. He lives in a palace of dark stone and is named John Milton, after the poet. Why, I'm wondering? Is this supposed to be demonic humor, summoning up the author of Paradise Lost? Or a frank acknowledgement of the pious poet's own fallenness, when, caught between the demands of faith -- the devil as nothing -- and the demands of literature -- great characters -- he chose the latter. It's a critical chestnut that we love Milton's devil. He has all the best language.

I ask people what they think of evil, to see how it's appeared to them: the answer always holds the idea of narrative. The Father of Lies is the father of story. Rosanne says, "People build layers and layers of deception." Lillian says we talk away our dark side, forget about it, and give in to it. Language gives us so many ways to say something else entirely, things like "habitat encroachment" and "viability" and "transition" and "grieving." Our speech is riddled with markers of its own inconsistency: Let's say, we say, or Let's put it this way, as if in speech we choose how to place the truth of an event, like a piece on a chessboard.

After dropping off the Endangered Species List, the grays became open to whaling again, under native American tribal treaties; a few have been killed this way. During the Makah Nation's whale hunt the mothers of the hunters remain in bed, immobilized. The Makah believe in a deep psychic connection between the whale and female relatives of the hunters, so the women become captive; any movement of the hand might trigger a desperate fluke that could kill their men. I want most days to do the same thing myself. A flick of the wrist: that's how easy it is, to screw up in this life.

To indicate a predator the head of an orca pod, the matriarch, will utter a high-pitched whistle. If she does not achieve these tones she says nothing at all.

During the Makah whale hunt a woman named Kathleen Lange wrote to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that she had been walking on the beach with a gray whale very close, close enough that she could hear its song, melodic but not tonic, without closure, unearthly.

"I have been blessed," she wrote. She just wanted people to know that.

I read an article, also in the Post-Intelligencer, about an underwater concert arranged by Jim Nollman, the founder of Interspecies Communications Inc., a group of people who play music for and with whales and study their systems of communication. The Seattle Cantabile Choir sang to a pod of orcas. The black-and-white mammals, their markings opposed as humans on the Day of Judgment, had begun to swim away when the choir began singing the hymn Amazing Grace. The orcas turned slowly and swam back, back, I wrote in my notebook, from the safety of their dark cold water to the human world. It strikes me profoundly: the species that may be dying, their poisoners, the promise of grace thrumming underneath it all. I call Jim Nollman and ask him how that moment felt to him.

"Never happened," he says. "Actually nothing happened in that concert. It was all wrong. There were boats all around, too much noise for the orcas to hear the singers. The reporter needed something so he made that up."

To the cetacean freaks, I imagine to those drumming women, maybe to me sometimes, whales are huge gentle gods, consciousness without fault, language without lies.

Hasn't it always seemed right that in the era of whaling, when our country knew whales, an ex-whaler would write Moby Dick? The prey of Ahab, a man named for a wicked king in the Old Testament, could not have been an elephant or a rhino or a squid, large and even desirable as these may be. It had to be a good opponent, sentient, and intimately wrapped up in questions of good and evil. It had to be something that had been here for millions of years and was perhaps about to be here no longer, slain by an evolutionary upstart.

I am shambling through what's left of my world -- well, not the real I who holds the now-quaint computer mouse in her hand but the general I of the species. I walks through the dental geometry of foundation -- tawny brick, rounded casement -- the same way Real I walked through ruins in Rome: curious, collecting the experience, amused at the earnestness with which these people took their lives -- like having special rooms just for books, when their defenses against the future were, after all, so poor. Real I would never concede to be so temporary, though she's not sure where this confidence arises -- it's bloodpressure confidence, oxygen confidence, the confidence of the living in lording it over the dead.

Maybe for this future I the overdeveloped Northwest has ceded back, and between the rubble old growth is here again -- Sitka spruces the size of low office towers, Douglas firs thick enough to live in, Western hemlocks with the lopsided sprigs at the top, pointing the way of the wind. Or maybe the anthropogenic world will have closed over -- just as if the Bay pursued by the Sound pursued by the Pacific had leaked forward -- ponds of concrete and structure everywhere, islands of rote grass. The crows, who thrive on humanity, will have the numbers and stimulation to diversify as a species: the new I picks her way through the preserved ruins inside their titanium alloy fence surrounded by white crows, or crows with hooked beaks for digging through pavement, or crows that sing with the voices of early robins before croaking with outrage.

Or it will be just thirty years from now, but still changed, and Jin and I, the I that is me, can stand on the shoreline again. I can show him where he once saw gray whales: where they spouted and rolled and heard the too-fast bird chirps of humans crying to them on shore. Anglo-Saxon poets once called their whale-filled Atlantic whale-road -- the mammals were that plentiful -- though the whales they saw, like the sperm, are now almost extinct, and the rolling backs of tankers have taken their place.

If we hum, we might speak with whales' voices, inventing the same pointless tunes. They are so much us they could write our symphonies; isn't it funny to know that now that they're almost gone? Of course, when we talk about the grays in that future, it will depend on how we talk: Let's put it this way, they weren't able to adapt; it's nature's way, we could say, which is to say: We are nature now, or We changed the atmosphere, we dumped so many PCBs in the water that once it got into their cells they couldn't give birth. Or maybe there'll still be this village-worth of them, clinging to their strip of coastline, their movement foreordained as my son's.

Human-road, we could say to all we see, where to?