“Look,” my friend says, “it’s an elephant.” I turn around. We’re walking along a path above the tide pools at Salt Creek, on the Straits of Juan de Fuca. It’s a cold, foggy morning, summer slipping into fall. She points to a western red cedar on a curve of the path. “I see an elephant,” she says.
She’s right. But where she sees a generic elephant I see a mammoth, a young Columbian mammoth, with a shaggy curl of moss on its domed forehead and layered fur all the way down its trunk. Its small ear flaps forward and a rounded burl eye stares sightlessly out over the straits. His trunk (by now I’ve already decided his gender) reaches down into salal and young firs, as if he is browsing while standing on the edge of a cliff where land meets sea.
I reach out and touch this frozen young giant – about seven feet tall to the top of his dome. He’ll be ten feet tall when fully grown. Of course he’s impassive, wooden to my touch, but the swirl of his bark/fur makes him seem as if he just stopped as we rounded his corner, hoping to blend in before deciding on our intent.
I retrace my steps to the other side of the tree and discover that my gender assignment is completely wrong. On the exact opposite side of the mammoth’s head is its unmistakably female rear end, two legs solidly planted on the ground, a hanging vulva in between them. Even though shaggy fur covers her rump, anus and legs, her triangular shaped vulva can clearly be seen. Male elephants have internal scrotum and their small hanging folds are tucked up and under. This mammoth is definitely female.
The western red cedar grows straight and tall from the middle of her back. I assume she grew around a nurse log, forming her shape during a hundred years or more. Cedars like this one will grow to 180 feet and live for a thousand years. Mammoths disappeared ten thousand years ago. But I wonder if giants remember giants and try to resurrect them however they can.
I’m nearly asleep, lying across several seats at Heathrow, dreaming of elephants, my body suspended at its origin eight time zones away. It’s neither night nor day in my dreams. I see fluorescent lights through the lids of my eyes, hear polite announcements for flights, smell the faint barnyard dust of Africa, sense a great presence looming towards me.
Step by step she comes closer. She is confident, unafraid. She looks me directly in the eye. Her eyelashes are long and straight, her deep brown eyes are dark, dark pools.
She stops less than five feet away, just beyond the reach of an outstretched arm, should I be foolish enough to do so. She is wild, in charge. I am on her terms and she knows it. She knows that people sit motionless on smelly, noisy, moveable rocks. She knows the small sneezing sounds of the devices they carry in their hands and point at her.
She stares into my eyes, then shakes her head sideways in a movement that would say “no” in my language. Her ears flap once, twice, and great clouds of dust rise from them. She raises her head, looks down the top of her long trunk. It’s an imperious, don’t-mess-with-me look, but that again is my language, not hers. A rumble like a promise for distant rain fills my ears. Then she sidesteps, turns and vanishes without another sound into a thicket of brush, her great presence subtracted, a void of air where she stood.
I am on a pilgrimage to that place. I am waiting for my flight, asleep at Heathrow. I am nearly, virtually there, in my dreams.
It’s a mucky, slimy, gloppy mud. A young elephant snorkels on his side, the tip of his trunk swiveling above the surface, as he slides towards the other elephant, a brother or cousin. His days are filled with heat and dust. It’s winter in Botswana, the sun is relentless, and mud will soothe his scorched skin. He lifts his head from the muck, curls his trunk and closes his eyes. This feels good, his body language says, this feels really good.
If we could imagine ourselves weighing four tons and think of gravity’s effect on those four tons, then maybe we could imagine wallowing in such mud, pushing and shoving like giant sumo wrestlers, reveling and rolling in the sheer pleasure of warm gunk. We would inhale a slimy trunk-full of ooze, squirt it like a water gun in any direction, even at each other. We would rub our eyes clear with a curled fist at the end of our trunks. We would arise glistening and bright as a metallic statue. We would be cooled, refreshed, gigantic, gentle beings. . . . if we could imagine such a thing.
Just at the edge of darkness, where the light of our fire does not penetrate, an elephant thunders by, trumpeting the whole way, like a locomotive off track in a dry forest, a classic illustration of the Doppler Effect, sound that condenses, rises in pitch, crescendos, blows by, drops pitch, recedes.
We lift our heads in surprise. Waves of sound undulate away from us, kin to ripples on a pond. We use pulsed sound waves, Doppler Radar, to see rain, to know when we should run for cover. There is no such radar for an incoming elephant.
Eventually his outrage is extinguished in our ears, but elephants a mile away are just beginning to hear it. Resonance fills the night airaround us, yet we are deaf to it, to the sounds just below our range of hearing.
How much of the world are we missing, circle upon circle? Perhaps instead of placing ourselves at the center we should move to the edges where our skills are low and our learning curve high. We should extinguish our fire and sit in the darkness listening, really listening.
We tell old stories in order to see anew. Each and every one of us takes the same journey from life to death, though our paths are never the same.
We begin as an explosion of infinite possibilities and then fall back upon ourselves, grabbing at some of those possibilities during our fall.
Our trajectory, which touched the very rim of life, descends toward the center, ending at zero, at what some see as a portal and others see as finality.
Falling, always falling towards the center of ourselves, the huge unknown universe within, our journeys are all the same.
Sunset at Doug & Sandi’s camp, Okavango Delta, Botswana
The tip of Jabu’s trunk hovers in front of my eyes, wet with mucous, dotted with sand, nostril hairs visible.
He blows into my face, gently. I blow back, gently. We exchange breath, distillations of our own personal atmospheres, particle-swarms of changed, exchanged air, brewed though all the cells of our bodies.
My lungs fill with the fragrance of crushed leaves, with saproots and spearmint-scented bark, all lightly fermented. I think of the stagnant air that surrounds my daily life, air that is conditioned, filtered, deodorized, air that is bland. Elephant’s breath is said to cure headaches. And it just might, if I had one.
Jabu’s trunk tip investigates my right boot tip. The scents I’ve picked up while walking tumble up two seven-foot-long nostrils – nostrils surrounded by nerves, arteries, veins and a staggering array of longitudinal and transverse muscles, the world’s biggest, longest and certainly most flexible schnozz.
A trunk is the most useful appendage that ever evolved. Imagine having an arm in place of your nose, an arm long enough to reach to the top of a tree, and pluck a single leaf from its crown. Imagine having a nose with which you could rip, tear, excavate, whack, and blow bubbles. You could steal with your nose, suck on it, squeal, swat, poke and siphon with it. You could take a shower, or reach over your shoulder and scratch your back with it. You could even arm wrestle with your nose.
He chuffs, a hot gust of air directed at my feet. Wet mist covers one boot top momentarily, then evaporates.
An excerpt from my book, Larger than Life: Living in the Shadows of Elephants:
As Doug and Sandi prepare for our morning walk, a nearby Cape mourning dove begins its chanting call: hoo-HOO-hoo, hoo-HOO-hoo. The dove is the same shape and color of the pigeons strutting the streets of my hometown, and belongs to the same family as pigeons, Columbidae. Doves are generally smaller birds and pigeons are larger.
One member of Columbidae, the American Passenger Pigeon, was once the most abundant land bird in the world. It’s been estimated that nine billion passenger pigeons were in the United States before colonization – more than twice the number of all birds alive in the U.S. today. Up to a foot-and-a-half in length, the passenger pigeon had distinctive, even iridescent, coloration.
In the early 1800s a flock of passenger pigeons that numbered 2.2 billion birds flew between Kentucky and Indiana – a flock one mile wide extending 240 miles. So many Passenger Pigeons were in that flock that if they were placed beak-to-tail they would have wound around the circumference of the earth nearly 23 times. Audubon recorded an over-flight of Passenger Pigeons that took three days to pass, even though the birds averaged sixty miles an hour. He likened their passage to an eclipse of the sun.
One nesting colony in Wisconsin measured 850 square miles. The rumble of wings erupting from that roost made the ground tremble. Tune your stereo receiver to a place between stations, then turn up the volume until your walls shake. That was the sound of huge flocks of passenger pigeons, a Niagara of birds.
Audubon’s Passenger Pigeons
Audubon painted the passenger pigeon in 1824. Printed plates of his painting show a female on the frosted upper branch of a tree feeding a male perched on a lower branch of the same tree – which is a bit of artistic license, since the pairs always stood next to each other on a branch.
The sexes of the passenger pigeon differed in coloration. The female, with her drab, brownish-orange back and gray plumage on her belly, contrasted with the male’s brilliant blue back and deep pink breast. In Audubon’s painting the male has a duller neck than was often reported – a neck that glittered purple, gold, yellow and green iridescence. Both sexes are depicted with their trademark pink feet and red eyes.
Now the passenger pigeon is gone. Snuffed out. Not a single bird left. Flocks in the millions whose wing beats sounded like thunder, whose descent to the ground in funnels looked like tornados, whose excrement rained to the ground like sleet, gone. Flocks that blocked sunlight from the sky and moved in squalls, in weather fronts, gone. Flocks that would have turned entire radar screens green, gone.
Their extinction was not a natural one, caused by a meteor or ice age or disease. No, we did it. We destroyed their habitat, hunted them, killed them, ate them, fed them to livestock, stuck their feathers in our hats, and shipped them by the ton in railroad cars, five billion birds by the late 1890s.
No one ever thought that five billion birds could disappear. An Ohio legislator wrote in 1857 that the pigeons were “Wonderfully prolific. No ordinary destruction can lessen them or be missed from the myriads that are yearly produced.” But nets, guns and the railroads did their job. Speedy travel meant that pigeon feathers and meat reached their markets in forty-eight hours. Live pigeons were shipped for sport. An estimated half-million pigeons were netted annuallyfor use in shooting matches. One trap shooter claimed he had personally shot 30,000 pigeons in his lifetime. In 1875 three nesting areas in Michigan yielded 1,000 tons of squabs and 2.4 million live birds for consumption.
Martha, stuffed and mounted at the Smithsonian
And yet, scarcely 25 years later, a young boy in Ohio named Press Clay Southworth shot the last wild passenger pigeon on March 12, 1900.
On Sept 1, 1914, Martha, the only passenger pigeon left in the world, died at the Cincinnati Zoo.
I wonder what our skies would look like if the passenger pigeon (instead of the turkey) had been designated our national bird.
The probability of any human being alive is one in billions of trillions. That’s
1,000,000,000,000
multiplied several billion times.
Life. It’s not easy to come by. And lessened by all that has been subtracted from it.
In Greek mythology, the Charites were goddesses of charm, beauty, nature and creativity. Aglaea, “Splendor” was the youngest, Euphrosyne, “Mirth,” was the middle sister and Thalia, “Good Cheer,” the eldest. To the Romans they were known as the Gratiae, the “Graces.” Homer wrote that they were in the retinue of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, pleasure and procreation. Although early depictions of the Graces occurred in marble sculptures dating from the 6th century BC and a first century fresco at Pompeii, they are more likely known by the Renaissance paintings of Botticelli, Raphael and Rubens.
The Three Graces – Rafael
In Africa, grace – the pleasure of beauty in nature – is a constant state of existence. Splendor, the youngest of the Gratiae, can be found in moments both large and small – in the turn of a head or in a long, glorious sunset.
These three impala in identical coats pause before us in a moment of easy grace. The youngest, coltish, knock-kneed, takes our breath away when she throws us a glance over her shoulder. The charm, the Charities, of fleeting beauty.
ABOUT ELEPHANTS 