Storytelling

I was on my way up to Gem Lake with a friend this past Sunday and it was snowing huge, crystalline flakes. We did not have snowshoes because there wasn’t enough of a base to really dig in. However, we could have used yaktrax or crampons of some sort as there was a thick layer of ice just below the surface of snow the entire way up. 

The clouds were low and obscured the view of the valley once we had made it to a certain point where we could look far down and trace our ascent. It was warm weaving through pine tress that haven’t yet been ravaged by the bark beetle. We walked through groves of aspen; the white and black markings on the trunk were sharp etchings against the silent achromatic snow. I told my girlfriend I never wanted winter to end on days like this: the quiet, the sparsity of people. It’s fine with me that I don’t have to share a trail with people who can’t see the beauty in such fierceness. I always think of Pound’s questions to his readers in Canto CX:

...can you see with the eyes of coral or turquoise or walk with the oak’s root?/....can’st’ ou see with the eyes of turquoise?/heaven/earth/in the center/is/juniper..

As we were going back down the trail, and my fingers were getting a little colder and I was starting to get hungry and tired, I thought about poet Robert Cooperman’s recently published, Dream of the Northwest Passage. The book, three-to-five stress lines of free verse, narrative poetry, imaginatively concludes the life of Henry Hudson. This was a relatively safe way to go in terms of writing historical verse. No one knows what became of Hudson, or his son and the several other men who were placed in a shallop and sent adrift after their mutinous crew grew tired of searching for the Spice Islands. Kudos to Cooperman for taking on this mystery in such a creative and interesting way. Reportedly, the crew could not conceive of the Northwest Passage that Hudson promised would lead them straight to Asia where they would be welcomed with warmth, food, and endless riches. Instead, they were caught in the frigid Canadian Arctic, now known as the Hudson Bay because supposedly Hudson “discovered” it. 

The journal that was kept most meticulously was written by one of the mutineers, Robert Juet, who was not happy with the frigidity of their environs, the lack of food and men all around him dying of “ague.”www.halfmoonreplica.org/Juets-journal.pdf  He writes that Hudson also had many encounters with Canadian Indians such as the Algonquins and Mahicans, but according to Juet’s journals, these encounters were never pleasant. Reading through the journals is painstakingly boring because he writes constantly about the weather: “This night we had some little myst and rayne.” But then there are sections that describe the encounters with the Native people. They are referred to as sauages or countrey people. Sauages translates roughly as “savages.” Juet writes how they traded with the sauages, but that they were not to be trusted. There is no explanation for this distrust, but the reader can discern fear as the driving force behind every emotion. And, of course, it didn’t take the crew long to accept this emotional distrust as a truth that allowed them to go ashore without any guilt whatsoever and “draue the sauages from their Houses, and took spoyle of them, as they would haue done of us.” Now there’s a big assumption. Although, perhaps the “countrey people” would have murdered them all in their sleep. The Europeans, after all, were an annoying bunch of buggers to the Indian people, I’m sure.

But all that aside, I’m impressed that Cooperman went so far as to imagine that Hudson’s shallop went drifting on until these banished men found themselves marooned on an island somewhere in the arctic regions. I don’t want to spoil the book for anyone, so I won’t reveal the ending. I will say that I think it is perhaps one of the most lovely, wishfully-drawn conclusions I’ve read in a long time. And poignant too. If only every mistake in history could have been reconciled in such a way.

I was also smitten by Cooperman’s Inuit character, Auliqoq, who meets up with the marooned men. Though he is supposed to be their “slave” since they “discovered” him alone and banished from his people, Auliqoq patiently watches as each man suffers from the elements and eventually dies. The men subsist on seal for awhile, but that resource soon becomes depleted. With macabre humor that some may miss, Cooperman slips in stanzas like, “So I [Auliqoq] have built an ice house/cutting the blocks with my knife,/using snow for caulking.” These are funny instances because not one of the Europeans bothers to ask Auliqoq how to build ice houses. Instead, they remain in their “hut” freezing and starving. At the same time these men are crawling around their hut, Auliqoq is going about his business living day by day. He’s healthy, he’s warm, he’s eating. Auliqoq does what they ask of him, but remains a detached observer of this European folly. 

So, in my usual roundabout way, I just delivered myself back to our chilly hike up to Gem Lake this past Sunday. The landscape we were in was so icy and wintery and my friend stopped at one point and said, “Can’t you just see us here, inside a tent with my little camp stove going? We’d be drinking tea, wrapped in down sleeping bags and coats, all bundled up just watching the snow fall and listening to the silence.” Would be nice. Especially nice knowing that we wouldn’t have to club seals over the head in order to survive. We’d pack plenty of peanut butter instead!