Animal Planet

I’d been writing hard, and I was tired. I flopped down on the couch and clicked on the TV, set for some serious vacant staring. I’d make a sandwich in a minute. What came on was a documentary on the Animal Planet, On Thin Ice: Into the Arctic Circle*. Soon I was totally absorbed in just watching. Maybe I didn’t need a sandwich after all.

The filmmaker, David Parry, was sharing six months he’d spent living in different communities around the Arctic Circle, exploring the effects of global warming. No words, no letters, which was good for my tired brain, no diagrams or numbers.

For a time he lived with reindeer herders in Siberia, whose whole existence was anchored to the herd. You could see it in the way they moved amongst the reindeer, so different from the modern filmmaker who worked so earnestly with them, as if reconnecting with each step to roots extending deep into the earth to bring up sap. You could see it in the way they fit into the landscape, the backdrop of mountains far bigger than any of their activities. You could see it in their enduring patience when the mosquitoes brought by global warming forced them to keep their herds on the move for hours after they would in the past have turned in for the night.

Time smoothed out, my shoulders eased.

He took us to a tiny village in Alaska where Native Americans hunted from small boats the two whales still allowed each year from their ancient practices; where, it is said, the whale agrees to be caught to help the people through the winter; where a successful hunt is announced to the waiting townspeople by a prayer; where the whole village turns out to carve up the whale that would keep them in meat for the rest of the year; where the ice cellar beneath each house is carefully cleaned before the meat from this year is stored there, because “the whale does not like to come into a dirty cellar.”

I know this place, I realized, sandwich long forgotten, I’ve been in this place before. Not in this place exactly, not in Alaska, but in this rhythm. A rhythm I remembered shaping myself to years ago when I lived in a village in Africa, when I walked on foot by dirt tracks at dusk to join the people taking baths or drawing water at the river, when the sky at night was big enough to fall into and lose your separate self. Times when I had endless patience to be, just to be, to feel time flowing like the river, the tributary of the Blue Nile, sliding past full of crocodiles and of ages past and to come. When I was living in something far bigger than myself, something whose purposes were far beyond the grasp of my judging brain, something I could only breathe in, breathe out, accept.

Something that can’t be put into words. But words are my tools for grasping the wonder, and for sharing it, so here I am, trying. Because I feel somehow that in this way I may in part understand, and may, in part, be understood—and that understanding that the wonder is there makes me, makes us, makes all of us, humbler, more tolerant, better citizens of the planet and the world.