Death in the Anthropocene
One of the unaccustomed rituals of time in the Anthropocene is suddenly realizing how much a natural landscape has decayed while you have, so to speak, been watching it. I call to mind the Olympics viewed from Seattle, now nearly bare in summer. What will they be like for my grandchildren? Thoughts that trouble me as I sit comfortably in a house situated precariously on regrade flotsam and jetsam from Seattle’s years of living colonially.
Unlike snow, the past doesn’t disappear. So another memory floats up from the deep wells of memory: the way the heat glimmered off the truck bed bouncing along the road up to the village of A-, a village in the impregnable vastness of Papuan mountain ranges, somewhere between myth and mist, and now reachable by potholed clay road (at least in the dry season). I mention heat because (tropics or no) it didn’t used to be that hot in the mountains when I was growing up there. Droughts have come with the heat, destroying the coffee trees. The rainforest looks thin in my memory, and the leaves seem more fragile. Thin in that indefinable way in which you know a man is beginning to lose his hair before the scalp can be seen. None of my companions on this truck seem to notice, either my Papuan friends or the white missionaries and their friends who have burned up avgas upon the altar of Bible tourism.
In my mind that most recent visit to my childhood home is inextricably linked with death anyhow, so it was fitting, I suppose, that the rainforest should also suffer. The pilot died, of course. The one flying us when the propellor quit on our way across the mighty Mamberamo toward the island where these memories, and my childhood, rooted in amongst the great dark undergrowth. But he died another day a few months later, flying straight into a great mountain in the mist on a standard morning flight he’d done so many times before.
The man I am thinking of was not our friendly missionary pilot, but a great ox of a man, a Javanese expatriate grown up in Papua, a man whose own father had been gone a long time. He was the some of a woman who had cared for me as a boy of two or so, welcoming my family when we (there were only my parents and I, then) arrived in S- in the early 80’s. S- was the principal town of the island, and this was a time when telegrams were still required for urgent communication with family back home. A telegram announced my birth to my grandparents in 1982, but decades later the death of this man, the death of the pilot, the death of the chief Bible translator’s youngest child from malaria just a few days before we arrived in A-, all these deaths in their separate death-ness were packaged and transmitted electronically, reduced down to bits and bites and Voice-Over-IP. And so we forgot them more easily, I think.
This man I’m talking about was a father, just like I am now (I wasn’t then). When he bought his ticket to what’s beyond courtesy of the new blacktop roads that had been slowly circling the island for decades, those road pythons squeezed away his chance to see his baby run, think, or talk back. He died non-conversant with his child, and left a widow fresh from Java in a foreign land. She took work with her mother-in-law, I think, grandma raising a young child again just as she had cared for her own son, for me, for both of us together.
His name was A-, and he loved his motorcycle like he loved his wife. He loved to hunt, too, and told stories of swimming the rivers with a massive king board strapped to his back, watching where the crocodiles fed, where they waited on the banks, swimming the estuaries out to sea. None of us knew if it was all quite true, but none of us really doubted his words either. He was that kind of man, and that kind of storyteller. I remember translating for my brother, who did not know the language.
A- viewed life as eternal, because he was young and we were young and of course it was at the time. I don’t recall him ever mentioning a sense that his world was changing, that his beloved boar were being forced inexorably to retreat. Slowly, yes. Road strangulation interrupted by the shakings of the earth so common along the so-called Ring of Fire. In the rainy season, by landslides. But always the road ate the land, so that I was put to mind in the hot afternoon of a certain Willy Kingfisher, and of his car humming and hunting along the shiny new kickback blacktop roads in Depression-era Louisiana, his chauffeur just twitching the wheel to catch some poor varmint dead to rights.
Thump. The whole island I grew up on is shaped like a road bump in the path of progress, if progress comes from the south (which it did, for the provincial capital in my young days was about 500 miles southeast). My father always called it a cigar-shaped island I remember. Which made sense since he never smoked and neither did any of the Baptist and Presbyterian men and their wives who gathered to watch his slide shows of primitive peoples. A road bump. Roadkill. A sacrifice, most likely.
So these were some of the thoughts I could not name, the thoughts that licked up from the hot metal of the Toyota (the same model favored by Sudanese warlords doing good service here in the rich red clayey soil). My hand burned and I grieved. Not for the first time. I felt a similar feeling, I remember, holding my daughter that first morning in Seattle and knowing she would always know my homeland as a stranger.
A decade later my daughter is five and has never known a climactically normal year. She never will. I realize in this moment I am afraid to go back home. Afraid to go back and see the Dorian Gray of the rainforest. While my career has grown, while my kids have been born, how has she aged? While my young ones run about on stolen land, where are hers?
We have lost most of our frogs since I have been alive. You might not know that, but it’s true. A naturalist on the island discovered new frogs there when I was a child. Whole new species. Known as friends to my dark-skinned friends who swam with me. Strange to white science. Discovered in the creeks and streams I through rocks in, sank toy boats in, soaped up in and floated to the sea in. Streams of clear water that ran in the dark for themselves after I ran home, afraid of witches in the dark, of boars, of bats, and mosquitos.
I’m not sure the frogs are still there, and every day it hurts me. Every day I ask to not live in a world where I don’t know if my grandchildren will be able to taste tuna. And every day I work in a world of silicon, where computers have made nearly everything 100-1000X easier in the last twenty years. Shopping, searching, sharing, watching, reading, even communicating news of death is easier than it’s ever been.
Yes, nearly everything.
