While traveling in Scandinavia to research The Palace of the Snow Queen: Winter Travels in Lapland, Seattle writer Barbara Sjoholm came across a little-known and long-forgotten book, With the Lapps in the High Mountains. This early text about the nomad reindeer herders tells of the year that Emilie Demant Hatt, a Danish painter, spent among the Sámi of northern Sweden in 1907-1908. Sjoholm, a translator as well as writer, fell in love with the book and knew that other English readers would as well. Sjoholm graciously offered Orion these excerpts from With the Lapps in the High Mountains, which hasn’t yet been published in book form. The introduction below is excerpted from a longer piece in the Spring 2008 issue of The Antioch Review and is used with the permission of the editors (http://www.review.antioch.edu). For more information, go to http://www.barbarasjoholm.com.

A Danish Lapp-Lady

Introduction by Barbara Sjoholm

In the summer of 1908, a small, easily-overlooked item appeared in a newspaper in Tromsø, Norway, under the title, “A Danish Lapp-Lady.” A Miss Demant was to be found not far from town in Tromsdalen, a valley that served as a summer home for the Sámi nomads who’d come with their reindeer from Sweden. “She has spent a whole year with a Lapp family, has dressed herself in Lappish costume, and lives in the family’s tent. Together with the Lapps she has wandered over the mountains from Torneträsk Lake in Sweden to Tromsdalen. She is doing well and has only praise for the Lapps.”

Emilie Demant (later Demant Hatt) had indeed been living the nomad life for about a year. The thirty-five-year-old artist from Copenhagen had originally visited Lapland in 1904, one of many tourists who’d taken advantage of the newly opened railway line that cut through the mountains of Sweden to deliver iron ore to the port of Narvik in Norway. On the train Demant Hatt happened to meet Johan Turi, a Sámi wolf-hunter who dreamed of writing a book someday about his people. Demant Hatt was so intrigued by Turi and the indigenous people she encountered that she resolved to return and live with them if she could, to speak their language and to learn their customs.

The Sámi, an indigenous people of Northern Scandinavia and the Kola Peninsula of Russia, number about 150,000, with the majority now living on the Finnmark Plateau in Norway. Many “sea” Sámi––that is, coastal Sámi who fished more than herded reindeer––were assimilated into the larger population along the coasts of Norway; and thousands emigrated to North America as well, often hiding their Sámi identity as they did so. Since the 1970s, the Sámi in the three Nordic countries have become an increasingly visible and organized minority, with parliaments in Norway, Sweden, and Finland, schools, cultural centers, and radio and TV news programs. Their name for themselves has been Sámi for at least six thousand years; they refer to their ancestral homeland as Sápmi. Until the last few decades, however, they were known as Lapps and also referred to themselves in that manner when writing and speaking to a larger public. Emilie Demant Hatt was consistent with her era in her use of “Lapp” and “Lappish,” and I have kept to that usage in my translations. Here, in the introduction, I use Sámi, which is both noun and adjective, and refers both to the people and their language.

Emilie Demant Hatt eventually made the Sámi a large part of her life’s work as a translator, editor, writer, and artist. Her first project was to study the Sámi language back in Denmark, at the University of Copenhagen, with the philologist Vilhelm Thomsen. She eventually was to work with Johan Turi on his narrative, as editor and translator. Muittalus Sámiid birra / A Book about the Lapps, was published in an innovative bilingual edition of Sámi/Danish in 1910 and was an immediate sensation in Denmark. It was also translated to Swedish, German, and eventually into English as Turi’s Book of Lapland (published by Jonathan Cape in 1931). It made Johan Turi famous for a while, and today it’s considered a core text in Sámi studies.

Demant Hatt then went on to write her own book about her nomad year, With the Lapps in the High Mountains, from which the excerpts below are taken. First published in 1913 and never before translated into English, With the Lapps is part travelogue, part ethnography; it is also a work of literary value, full of event, anecdote, and striking descriptions of a landscape that few in her native Denmark had ever experienced. With this book, Demant Hatt proved that she was far more than just a Danish Lapp-Lady, an eccentric woman traveler with a taste for roughing it.

Although Demant Hatt was, like most women of the time, not academically trained, she was a highly skilled observer of people and a writer and artist attuned to natural beauty in the landscape. There had been and were to be many other anthropologists visiting the Lapp camps, but Demant Hatt was the first and for a long time the only woman to have lived with the Sámi so closely. Almost twenty years before Margaret Mead visited Samoa to focus on the lives of girls and women, Demant Hatt wrote in depth about the Sámi children and women––in part because the men were away herding the reindeer and she stayed behind in the tent, sewing, cooking, and listening. Demant Hatt, a great animal lover, also recorded many observations and anecdotes about the dogs and reindeer around her. Contemporary Sámi scholars have relied on Demant Hatt’s books for fresh, lively, and accurate details about how life was lived in Lapland in the early part of the twentieth century, when the Sámi were still making annual migrations with their reindeer herds.

Reindeer
Emilie Demant Hatt
Excerpted from With the Lapps in the High Mountains (1913)
Translated from the Danish by Barbara Sjoholm

Up in an open space in the woods the ear-marking of the reindeer continued for another hour. Then both people and reindeer rested a good while, before the swimming across the river began. It was the first time that the small calves would test the cold water, which flowed down from snow and ice, and the current was strong. A boat rowed the whole time out by the mouth of the river, where it flowed into Lake Torneträsk, in order to be ready to save the calves taken by the current. Such a shouting, leaping, and racing—all to get all the animals across. The calves were afraid of the water and ran away, their mothers after them, and after them a Lapp or a dog, until they were captured and chased into the water. Reindeer cows and calves ran around looking for each other, but finally every one of them was out in the river. The river was white froth from the movement of thousands of animals swimming; like a living carpet the many gray-brown backs glided under a forest of antlers over to the other side. As quickly as the reindeer came up on land, they shook themselves and a halo of water droplets flew off the soaking wet fur.

Now, in great haste we got in the boats, with the dogs after us, the object being to cross quickly and to round up the herd before they took flight. The marking continued the rest of the day on a very large wet bog up under the mountains. The men and boys marked the calves; the girls and dogs kept the animals together. Each girl had her post at the edge of the herd.

While rain now poured from the sky, we ran, soaked through, between unstable tussocks, between knee-high willows, over rocks and holes, often in water up to our knees. It’s no easy thing to keep several thousand semi-wild animals together in a relatively small area. The girls directed the dogs with the musical command words that the Lapps use in reindeer herding. The dogs streaked out in every direction, but if one did something wrong or sowed confusion in the herd, it was called back with a yell that could wake the dead. When you’ve heard the Lapps work with the herd, you can well understand why they often have such weak hoarse voices in ordinary speech. It’s because they use them to their full capacity in reindeer herding, when the dogs are commanded and called back. The voice has to cut through a long distance and an unbelievable roaring. (Perhaps they also save their voices half unconsciously for the times when they truly need them). In addition, those who work with reindeer must be lightning quick in thought and action. Even if the herd is in flight, they must seize the moment and let the lasso fly if they’ve glimpsed an animal to be captured. The rope is cast and then coiled up, ready for the next throw. They also need to keep a sharp eye on the dogs, and scout out particular reindeer in the swarming confusion. A bad or untrained dog can cause a great disturbance in his mistaken zeal, charging into the middle of the herd, which then spreads out like chaff in the wind. Angry words rain down upon the dog; he slinks off in shame, followed by the fiercest curses and furious looks. When there’s time, he also gets a beating if he’s done something truly wrong. However the Lapps have a rule that you shouldn’t strike and scold at the same time, only one thing at a time. That’s because you need to be careful not to insult the dog. If an otherwise competent dog feels affronted by someone who, in his opinion, has treated him too roughly, it can happen that the dog suddenly sits down and looks at things without budging, however much his owner commands. Only kind words and friendliness can soften him up then, so he’ll take up his work again, though a sit-down strike can last as long as a whole day. Some dogs are lazy and can only be bothered to jump in a pinch; others are all excitement, with shining eyes, and each muscle tensely following the movements of the reindeer. Sometimes one animal breaks away from the herd. That reindeer has a panting dog at its heels, a dog that keeps up until he sees his chance, and cuts in front of the reindeer and forces it back. Often the reindeer itself abandons its flight and returns to the herd. More or less serious quarrels occur between the reindeer and the dogs.

I saw such a small clash between Benno and a large male reindeer. Benno belonged to our neighbor’s tent; he was blind in one eye, deaf as a post, stump-tailed, toothless and very old, but was he a dog! And although he had only one eye, he had that one; he didn’t need to hear. Benno knew his work and needed no commands. He was on the go from morning until night, even though it was hard on the old legs. He chose his post at a spot high enough that he could oversee the section of the herd that lay within his ability to reach. He worked on his own without a master, and the reindeer had respect for him (reindeer recognize the dogs and have varying degrees of respect for them depending on how skillful they are). But, once, things went awry for Benno. A large bull reindeer had broken out of the circle and Benno had brought it back, but in his zeal to serve he kept barking and nipping at it until they returned to the herd. At that the reindeer grew insulted and whipped around, got the dog under him, and thrashed his old body, so you could hear the blows. Proudly the bull returned to the herd. Benno didn’t make a sound, but limped quietly over to his place. A little while later he was at work again and probably had forgotten the ignominious scene. In his younger days Benno wasn’t for sale for love or money; such a dog outweighs the work of several people.

When the marking was finished, the herd rested and grazed; afterwards they migrated toward the Norwegian border, followed by the herders and dogs, who would guard the herd this summer over in Norway.

ONE DAY NILSA CAME RUNNING, flung the door opened and cried, Ællo boatta, čana bœdnagid gidda! “The herd is coming, tie up the dogs!”

The whole camp sprang to life. You heard the tent doors continuously flapping open, falling back against the tent as the children and adults hurried off. In the neighbor tent they were sitting and eating, but when they heard the call, everyone ran out and away. The oldest of the children, a seven-year-old boy, snatched up his lasso and said, “Food is good, but the herd is better,” after which he shot like an arrow through the forest.

It was only a lesser separation of the herd, which was being gathered in an open field in the forest for a couple of hours; still, the usual tasks would be carried out: milking, castrating, and butchering.

The corral itself lay almost a mile away. For several days the women went up in vain with their milk buckets. The herders hadn’t succeeded in getting the reindeer to come down to it, but finally, for some days in a row, the herd came into the corral.

We started off from the tents at seven in the morning, but when we got up there, we couldn’t hear either people or reindeer. A camp fire was started in the thin edge of the forest where the leaves were already gold with frost, even though we were in the middle of August. We passed the time in coffee drinking and merriment. Then we heard from afar dogs baying loudly and the hollow thunder that always heralds the coming of the large herd.

Everyone jumped up and began to scan the mountains in the direction of the sound. Up there the herd looked like turbulent gray dots. It came nearer quickly and at furious speed the living mass rushed down over the mountain side like a hailstorm. The women practically sparkled with delight and excitement. Everyone hurried to take up a guard position, so the reindeer had to go through a funnel of people and were chased into the corral through a relatively narrow opening. It was closed off quickly with chopped-down birch trees, which lay ready. Everyone slipped in; only the dogs were kept out. They stood for a while with tongues hanging out, trembling with eagerness and strain after their hasty downward rush.

The reindeer inside the corral galloped at full speed with their little white tails in the air and their heads thrown back. They ran round and round like horses in a circus—counterclockwise, as is their habit. Gradually, they grew much quieter.

Now the lassoes whistled; an alddo (reindeer cow) was caught, the noose was loosened and placed like a halter around her head. If the alddo is particularly wild and unruly, she’s tied to a tree or tree stump. If she’s tamer and used to being milked, the husband stands holding her with his lasso while the wife milks. Men and boys creep around to sneak up on the animals, and the women are ready with the nappe (milking cup).

The sun shone, the high snowfield glittered, and the golden leaves made a splendid background for the colorful lives in the corral, where everything was in movement. The Lapps were in their true element here. This was pure entertainment for them and working hard the happiest kind of play. There was milking and ear-marking; calves were slaughtered and bulls castrated. But in spite of all the grappling with the half-wild animals, not a single coarse or hard word could be heard, and there was no sign of violence. These were tasks they’d mastered and they were carried out deftly and powerfully, without unnecessary flailing about.

Many of the small dark three- or four-month-old calves had to lose their lives. August and September is the right time to take the skin for fine furs. The Lapps, like other people, show their prosperity by wearing beautiful clothes; such a single-colored dark fur garment of borgge-nakke (freshly killed skin) is quite elegant. The poor don’t have enough calves to be able to pick and choose between colors; they must take light and dark together, whatever they have, and that naturally makes the fur less attractive.

At the end of the afternoon the reindeer were released from the corral. They took immediately to the mountains, except for the alddos who had lost their calves; they ran looking and calling inside and outside the corral. Sometimes they stopped, listened intently and looked to every side; then they began running again grunting and searching. In that manner they grieve for three days, the Lapps say, and they stay at the site where they last saw their calves. After that they seek out the rest of the herd.

The slaughtered calves are flayed and their guts removed, both of which take place outside the corral. All the meat and other parts of the reindeer are wrapped in fresh birch twigs and loaded on draft reindeer that had just been rounded up. The women wrapped the dried jerky in scarves and, for the same purpose, brought out the čalmas holding fresh reindeer milk and carried it on their backs. The pack train set off homewards. A Lapp had taken a young bull on a lead to slaughter him at home by the tent. The bull was untamed and in a complete rage; it took both skill and strength to tow the wild animal forward between the trees and rocky outcroppings for a whole mile. The path of the Lapp and the bull was very irregular; ultimately they disappeared far ahead of us. The reindeer pack train stepped sedately behind, with people and dogs. Now came the reaction to an exhausting day; everyone was rather silent and tired. Little by little it grew dark and the stars came out. It was late when we finally glimpsed the glowing tents far below. Inside sat those who’d stayed home, longing for news of the herd and for fresh reindeer meat.

Christmas in Lapland, 1907
Emilie Demant Hatt
Translated from the Danish by Barbara Sjoholm

Christmas Eve dawned with a temperature of minus forty (Celsius). Inside the tent we couldn’t see each other for a fog of frost and the tent was white with frost on the inner walls, in spite of the huge fire. When the thermometer sinks to such a low temperature this fog appears—hot steam from the fire mixes with the ice-cold air coming down from the smoke hole above and pouring under the bottom edge of the tent.

Outside the sky was completely clear, quite unearthly clear in the half-light of the middle of the day. I went out into all that silent white and followed a single ski track that turned north, away from the tents. After an hour’s time, the tents, the forest, and all sound from there was gone. Everything was white, white––not cold chalk white, but glittering, like pale hyacinths. The colors of the air sank over the earth. In the west, Tavanjünje Mountain climbed sheer and solitary; the steep slope in the north lay in lilac and shadow, while the south side sparkled faintly like mother-of-pearl.

The ski track ended in a little scrub-covered rise in the terrain; ah yes, it was here that the children had their grouse snares. Fortunately no grouse were trapped. If a white bird had been flapping in the snow I would have let it go with a clear conscience.

I went farther through the stillness. It seemed almost uncomfortable, hearing the skis gliding over the snow, and I stopped. All sound ended immediately. Only in my head did the blood whistle with a faint crackle. Then from far off came the sound of a reindeer bell. The herd was going up around Tavanjünje. Immediately I believed, in my Christmas mood, that it was the sound of a church bell, which wouldn’t have been a good thing. The Lapps say that he who hears a church bell in the wilderness will die the same year.

No, the sound of holiness doesn’t reach into the wilderness, where the underground beings live. The church and its believers leave us alone here. And just as I stood there, I heard a weak but clear half-humming song deep under the snow. I listened for a long time and the silence made it possible for me to make out plainly where the sound came from. There must have been a reasonable explanation—probably a spring hadn’t frozen far below. I stuck my ski pole to the bottom; it was completely dry when it came up, but the sound stilled at the same moment and I continued on after having waited a little.

When I returned to the spot, I heard the faint singing again. Afterwards I told Sara about it and she said, “You’ve heard the underground beings, the Uldas. That’s unusual during the winter.”

Now the forest with the tents became visible again. The smoke lay in long curves throughout the trees like the finest elven web. The sound of axes rang out everywhere; all were busy chopping wood, which needed to last over both holidays in great cold. Soon the stack would be high enough and everything ready. The twilight had already set in, even though it was only a little past one.

However, the abundant wood cutting was the only thing that indicated a major holiday approaching. The children were given repeated admonitions not to make noise or run around the tent: no loud voices or wild play. You need to be very careful and quiet when “the evil one” is out and is looking for sinners, as a big holiday approaches, particularly ruotta œked, Christmas Eve.

Turi and Inga chopped wood and I joined in to keep warm. It was so cold that every little downy hair on your face stood up like a quill and if you blinked, your lashes froze together in a split second. The evening by the fire could feel long; you had to sit there idle for many hours. The holiday and cold brought all activity to a halt.

Where there was enough wood, the white pieces of birch were arranged in a nice-looking pile. The twigs were placed in the same way so that no branch stuck out, and the camp cleared of tree litter. It was Turi who gave orders and himself helped out. Before he went inside, he set up a very long birch branch next to the trees where wood was chopped. Later I realized the branch was for Stallo, who could tie up his caravan here, when he went inside on Christmas Eve, after his custom, to see whether all was in order in the manner it should be. He’s thirsty after his travels and drinks water; that’s why the kettle needs to be full the night before Christmas. If it’s not, he sucks out the brains of the youngest child in the tent with an iron pipe (it’s usually the task of the children to fetch water).

As the day darkened the camp fell into deep silence, as if all sound had frozen away. The chopping of the ax had ceased. No human voices, no dogs barking. The only living thing was a thick, spark-filled smoke that billowed out the smoke holes from the large fires in the tents.

When Nikki came home in the afternoon from the herd, he brought with him a dead reindeer that he’d found just after a wolf had killed it.

“The navdde (the wolf) wanted to have himself a ruotta-males (Christmas dinner),” said Inga, but she was shushed by Sara. It was better not to speak of dangerous things at the most dangerous time of the year. Old gray-legs had been particularly evil that day; many in the community had to provide reindeer for his Christmas meal. Little Oula, a nine-year-old neighbor boy with overflowing spirits had been especially loud during the day’s play, hooting and shouting, so that Sara had often scolded him. Now he was the subject of her harsh reproaches. The dead reindeer proved how dangerous it was to make noise so close to the holiday. The boy took on a skeptical attitude and accepted his talking-to with equanimity. But Sara was in a bad mood; one of her best reindeer cows now lay bloody and torn apart.

Nikki pulled it behind the boaššo, where all the butchering took place; a little later he came in with the steaming entrails in a large bowl. Afterwards, against all usual custom, he dragged the dead reindeer inside the tent to skin it and cut it into pieces. Outdoors everything would have frozen between his fingers.

The Christmas tent wasn’t cozy. First: there was the dense, clammy fog of frost and frost fog, which almost prevented any feeling of being indoors; Nikki, with his bloody work; the dead reindeer, whose large, dulled eyes created such a dismal mood; and Sara, silent and cross, she who was always good-humored. The children weren’t to be seen; they were probably in another tent, where the mood was livelier. They only returned home in the evening.

The food kettle was hung over the fire, but it didn’t lift our spirits to see that Nikki had filled it with meat from the reindeer killed by the wolf. This sort of meat is quite bad, in part because the actual bite of the wolf has a sharp taste, the Lapps maintain. Additionally, this reindeer was skinny, and lean reindeer meat is never a delicacy.

I asked Sara’s permission to bring inside a small spruce tree and to set it on the hearth and light it with the Christmas candles I’d gotten in one of my packages. The children were quite excited about the idea but Sara sternly rebuffed our pleas: “People shouldn’t have those sorts of amusements on Christmas Eve.”

We had to be satisfied with the Christmas lights provided by the fire, the moon, and the stars. It was so cold that many particles of ice in the air were visible, as a rainbow-colored ring around everything that shone. Such a large, colored ring was around the moon, the large stars, and around some of the flames in the fire. I planted a candle in the snow on a little spruce outside the tent. It stood there with its halo, burning fine and quiet in the large forest, but it was so cold I couldn’t hold out long enough to see it melt down.

In this paralyzing cold and the endless dark, it was like standing apart from earth, exposed to the icy rays of the universe, surrounded by a dead nothingness that spread its horror over a poor night-black globe, where here and there a small clump of skin-clad people gathered around a fire in the deep snow.

But even though it was Christmas Eve and far below freezing, the herders had to go out to the herd if they didn’t want to risk being without reindeer the next day, the way the wolves were hunting. Nikki had been out during the day. Now it was Inga’s turn to take the night watch. She got up, snatching her fur-lined leather gloves, called to the dog and as she went out she tied her cap under the chin. All of these things were preparations for the long night.

It was cold for the two who left, but it was no warmer or more comfortable for those who sat at home.

Shortly before the meal was served, Turi disappeared to his sister’s tent, where they probably weren’t having “wolf meat,” for supper on Christmas Eve. We gathered, meanwhile, around the food and served ourselves from the dishes there, but the meal was passed in deep silence and when we were finished, everyone took off their gloves and began to straighten the bedding.

Sara, who was occupied with something at the hearth, suddenly exclaimed, “No, I’ve never seen anything like it before—long icicles hanging down off the wood burning on the fireplace!” It was a hot steam pouring out of the new wood that had momentarily frozen.

Christmas night was a cold one to get through; in spite of the fur-lined boots and dry hay, your feet felt like blocks of ice. The water kettle was solidly frozen and made creaking noises; the trees outside groaned with the cold. Little Nilsa walked in his sleep and sat down by the door, but Sara woke and got the boy tucked under the covers again.

“I thought it was the Christmas-Stallo who’d come into the tent, when I saw you sitting over there by the door,” said Sara in the morning, when she told us about it.

I couldn’t sleep well with my face under the covers, and so I used to wrap my head in a woolen shawl. It was quite uncomfortable to wake in the morning with this garment covered in ice over my face; the shawl always froze stiff from my breath, so it had to be pried apart. If you pulled the mosquito netting around you, for warmth’s sake, you lay there in a small snow-house in the morning. Inside everything was white with thick frost crystals. The dogs too were white with frost; their breath frozen. Our little puppy had now grown up to such an extent that he decided on his own where he wanted to sleep, and he’d chosen a spot under my chin. There he lay with his head near my face so that my breath could keep him warm. Often when the temperature dropped, I was awakened by the puppy sticking his ice-cold little snout completely against my nose under the shawl. Even after the puppy grew up to be large and strong, he kept his spot.

It was eight in the morning when Inga and her dog Rill came home, chalk white with frost and snow and with long icicles in their hair. No one wished her “Merry Christmas.” No one said anything at all. The mountain folk aren’t troubled by sentimentality; no one uttered a word about it having been a difficult Christmas night for the young girl. She knocked the snow and frost off her clothes at the door, hung up her gloves, and sat down silently to wait for morning coffee, while Rill lay down in front of the fire, zealously picking the lumps of ice from his coat and licking his exhausted legs.

The elegant sinewiness of a sprinter, the coiled power of a diver, has little to do with the abstraction called nationhood, except that the sprinter or diver is being put forward as the public face of his or her nation—or the mask. There are other faces to nationhood. We live in an era where truth is most often found by looking away from the spectacle presented to us. Corporations consciously choose their masks: BP claims to care about climate change; Chevron had its “People Do” advertisements of the 1990s, in which the oil giant advertised its noble deeds (often obligatory environmental mitigations that cost a tiny fraction of the company’s earnings). Chevron doesn’t want you to see that the toxic emissions of its Richmond, California, refineries make the mostly poor, nonwhite people living nearby seriously ill. Or its complicity in human rights violations in Africa, Asia, and South America. Then there’s Nike, one of many apparel manufacturers that would rather you think about the celebrity spokesperson or anonymous Adonis than the sweatshop workers who, in all their bodily misery and deprivation, have infinitely more to do with the product. In the same way, nations have infinitely more to do with prisons, laws, and foreign and domestic policies than athletes.

Sports bring us the human body as a manifestation of nature—not just the elegant forms of athletes, but their animal ability to move through air and water. At the Olympics, these bodies are co-opted by a political culture that wants to be seen as natural, legitimate, stirring, beautiful. Beautiful bodies are just one kind of nature that nations like to claim. After all, this country invented the idea of “national” parks and claims the sublimity of the Grand Canyon (which preceded it by hundreds of millions of years) and all those purple mountains’ majesty as part of its identity. Corporations too like pristine landscapes, particularly for advertisements in which an SUV perches on some remote ledge, or a high-performance car zips along a winding road through landscape splendor. Few car commercials portray gridlock or even traffic—that your car is just a car among cars—let alone the vehicle’s impact on those pristine environments. Of course most of us have become pretty well versed in critiquing advertisements as such—we assume they are coverups if not outright lies. But the Olympics have not been subjected to the same level of critique.

On August 8, the Beijing Olympic Games will begin, and television will bring us weeks of the human body at the height of health, beauty, discipline, power, and grace. It will be a thousand-hour advertisement, in some sense, for the participating nations as represented by athletes with amazing abilities. In reality, the athletes will be something of a mask for what each nation really stands for, and this year the Olympics as a whole will be as much a coverup as, say, the Mexico City Olympics of 1968, which came hot on the heels of the Tlaltelolco Plaza massacre of students, or the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which gave the Nazis legitimacy as they turned Germany into an efficient totalitarian death factory. Ironically, the 2008 summer Olympics begin on the twentieth anniversary of the 8888 (for 8/8/1988) Burma uprising against the brutal military dictatorship that has controlled that country, with crucial backing from China, for more than four decades now. The Chinese government is also busy terrorizing Tibetans protesting for religious freedom and liberation of their colonized country; it is also the main protector of the Sudanese government carrying out a holocaust in Darfur.

It serves the nations of the world to support the exquisitely trained Olympian bodies, and it often serves their more urgent political and economic agendas to subject other bodies to torture, mutilation, and violent death, as well as to look away from quieter deaths from deprivation and pollution. In the struggles for land and resources—for Chinese control of Tibet, and for the petroleum fields of Sudan and the timber and mineral wealth of Burma—bodies are mowed down like weeds. The celebrated athletic bodies exist in some sort of tension with the bodies that are being treated as worthless and disposable.

At the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, two young African Americans from San Jose State University won first and third place in the two-hundred-meter dash, gold medalist Tommie Smith setting a world record in the process. On the podium, receiving their medals alongside Australian silver medalist Peter Norman, they gave the Black Power salute. Bronze medalist John Carlos wore beads that signified the lynchings of his fellow African Americans. They were shoeless to represent black poverty. Norman joined them in wearing Olympic Project for Human Rights badges. Their actions suggested that great bodily gifts could not be separated from bodily suffering, or conscience. It was a beautiful moment, one of the iconic moments of the 1960s. As athletes, they had represented their country magnificently; as human beings they had testified to the complexity of that nation and their place in it.

In response, International Olympics Committee President Avery Brundage banished the two men from the rest of the games and a spokesperson called their act “a deliberate and violent breach of the Olympic spirit.” The Olympic spirit by this measure insists that athletes be bodies without minds and hearts. But the insistence that athletes not “politicize” the Olympics is really an assertion that the politics of the Olympics be determined by governments, not movements and individuals, most particularly not participating athletes. When authorities say we should not politicize something, they mean that the politics of the status quo should not be questioned. Fortunately, people nowadays have become more skeptical of masks and more sophisticated at connecting the dots.

The global route of the Olympic torch this spring was interrupted again and again by human rights protests, so that rather than a triumphal tour, the relays seemed to be a flight from principle and responsibility with activists in hot pursuit. The athletes, too, have refused to be silent. Some joined Team Darfur, “an inter-national coalition of athletes committed to raising awareness about and bringing an end to the crisis in Darfur” cofounded in 2006 by speed skater Joey Cheek and water poloist Brad Greiner. This will be the invisible competition at the games: between the official desire to strip athletes of any meaning their country does not superimpose on them and the desire of some athletes to give true meaning to their acts.

Bodies in peak condition performing with everything they’ve got are an image of freedom, as are pristine landscapes like Yosemite and the Tetons. But the reality of freedom only exists when these phenomena aren’t deployed to cover up other bodies that are cringing, starving, bleeding, or dying, other places that are clearcut, strip-mined, and contaminated. Television coverage of the summer Olympics probably won’t cut away from those sleek athletes to the charred bodies of massacred villagers and the anguished faces of young gang-rape victims in Darfur, or the bloodied heads of young monks and uncounted corpses and prisoners in Burma and Tibet. But the associations between the two are crucial to our sense of compassion, and of what it means to be a part of a global community. 

Ulrich went beyond theory and tested these ideas. In a landmark study published in the journal Science, he investigated the recovery rates of a group of patients with contrasting views from their windows in a Texas hospital, all of whom had had gall bladder surgery. Some patients had rooms that overlooked a patch of trees in the hospital courtyard; others had windows that faced a concrete wall. Patients in rooms with views of trees spent fewer days in the hospital, used fewer narcotic drugs, had fewer complications, and registered fewer complaints with the nurses. Other studies showed that environments with nature-related imagery, such as photographs and paintings on the wall, reduce anxiety, lower blood pressure, and reduce pain. Not only did Ulrich demonstrate a direct correlation between having a view of trees and better health, but research has since shown the obverse to be true as well, linking unsupportive surroundings such as blank walls and harsh lighting to elevated depression, greater need for pain drugs, and longer hospital stays. Even the most mainstream administrators, hospital architects, and interior designers now acknowledge that environments with nature imagery—from reception to radiology to restrooms—empower patients in their healing, provide relief for worried families, and fortify care providers.

Of course, not every hospital or clinic is fortunate enough to have views of a forest. Over the past decade, a number of private companies have been marketing artificial “treeviews” to health-care facilities. One such company, The Sky Factory, offers two product lines. The SkyCeiling, which creates a photographic illusion of a real tree canopy against a cloud-dotted blue sky, is installed in ceiling grids where fluorescent lights and acoustic panels usually reside, while the Luminous Virtual Window features landscape images for vertical walls. Though relatively expensive—panels cost between eighty-five and one hundred dollars per square foot—they are easily installed and radiate light at a color temperature of 6,500 degrees Kelvin (equivalent to natural sunlight) into the room. These companies post enthusiastic testimonials from patients about how views of blossoming and leafy trees had a soothing and balancing effect on them. Although little quantitative information exists to attest to these products’ direct health benefits, the fact that the artificial treeview business has grown exponentially in the past five years suggests their effectiveness—enough so, anyway, that hospital administrators are willing to pay handsomely for a room with a view, albeit a manufactured one, of trees. 

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FREEPORT MARINA, the edge of the world. The ancient live oaks are blanketed with Spanish moss, a tattered and ghostly legion along riverbank and marsh, giants among the pickets of yellow pine, tupelo, and lesser trees. The tide floods the spartina flats as the sun slips off toward Savannah, where the spew from that glorious and tragic city shatters the slanting light and turns the world to bronze and gold, so beautiful you wish you could forget it’s just smoke and dust and fumes.

And it’s easy to forget here at Freeport Marina. The beer is cold, the corn and sausage and shrimp are hot, all boiled up together and served on newspaper platters. The tide is humming around the dock pilings, the floats rocking and creaking in the wakes of passing boats, the river wind whistling through screen wire. The moon is still two hours below the horizon, but it’s already making music in our heads.

It’s the full moon of June, a turtle moon, and the loggerheads are crawling ashore to nest. Loggerhead sea turtles, Caretta caretta, losing beaches, struck by boats, tangled in nets, awash in oil and garbage. They are a species just like us—eyeball to eyeball with the Death Angel.

Susan and I are fresh off the beach, windblown, gnat-gnawed, sunburnt, and thirsty. A ship got in trouble off Cape Hatteras, lost cargo over the side. Forty thousand Chinese coffee makers went to the bottom, but the packing did not. For the past week we’ve been picking up Styrofoam the size of Frisbees, five hundred gallons now and counting. Besides this recent plague, there are always balloons from cruise-ship weddings, offshore fishermen’s ice bags, water bottles, and enough mismatched flip-flops to start a half-price one-legged shoe store. They are all bad news. Loggerheads can mistake them for jellyfish, a favorite prey.

We duck into the cool shade of the Freeport bar and meet Crazy Jack and Naked Bill. Crazy Jack is hooked over the end of the counter, looking like he’s been waiting for somebody to talk to. He’s got eyes like a neon beer sign, a voice like he’d just gargled with turpentine—you know, drawed up and squeaky, like he was fixing to sing with Bill Monroe.

“Mr. Squirrel and Mr. Lizard was up a gum tree smoking a joint when Mr. Lizard says, ‘Man, this stuff is just tearin’ up my throat.’”

It’s an African animal tale with a New World twist. We’re not in Africa, we’re on Daufuskie, a barrier island on the tip end of South Carolina. But Africa is never far away, nearer than Los Angeles, with only the bump of the Cape Verdes in between.

And Africa is even closer than that. Daufuskie was home to the Gullah, brought here in chains. A diverse people from diverse tribes—artisans, tradesmen, warriors, and witch doctors—they labored here one hundred and fifty years. Eventually, all along this coast, the Gullah got land with freedom, but not forty acres and a mule, the lie they told you back in high school. Mules were expensive, and amid the ruin of war, land was cheap. Expropriated from slave masters, sometimes even gifted by former masters, it was doled out, three, five, seven acres at a time. Tasks, they called them, the acres it took to feed a family, ground a good man could plow in a day—if he had a mule.

No polyester in those days, no Dacron either. The country needed cotton, the world needed cotton, slave labor or free. If the Gullah had land, maybe they would stay. The Gullah stayed and they bought their own mules whenever they could afford them. They farmed, fished, built cabins, stores, and churches, elected constables, school boards, and bishops, and even sent one of their peers to Congress. But the Gullah would not chop cotton any more. They grew African crops instead, like rice and melons, yams and peas and peanuts; Indian crops like corn, squash, and beans.

There were a hundred years between freedom and dispersal, magic years. But then the great-grandchildren of Yankee soldiers came back for the golf and tennis and waterfront lots, tens upon tens of thousands from Ohio and New York and Pennsyl-tucky. The Gullah call them come-heyahs. This county’s population doubled in ten years, taxes increased sevenfold while the slop from the paper mill and the sugar mill slowly crept up the waterways from Savannah, poisoning the oysters and thinning the great schools of fish.

The Gullah could stand any tide but this. They abandoned their land, moved off to find work in Charleston, Jacksonville, and Savannah, sometimes New York, Philadelphia, and Detroit. Their sagging cabins are all awash in jungles of kudzu and wisteria, their tasks gone back to honeysuckle and briar, and now both deacons at the First Union African Baptist hail from somewhere up in Yankee land.

Crazy Jack is not Gullah, he’s white like me, like Susan and Naked Bill, like most of us on this island these days. But we are more African than we might think. Things we eat, the way we speak, the stories we tell, and sometimes, how long they take.

“So the squirrel says, ‘Man, just go on down to the creek and get you a drink.’ So the lizard crawls on down and is lapping up some water when Mr. Gator comes sliding along. ‘Hey, Mr. Lizard, what you up to?’”

Crazy Jack ran a record shop over in Savannah, and I can see the domed and spired skyline shimmering just over his shoulder, across the great flats of spartina, gold as grain for the harvest. Crazy Jack sold LPs, 78s and 45s, tickets to Little Richard, Ernie K-Doe, Pigmeat Markham, rolling papers, and so forth.

“Lizard says, ‘Man, I was smoking a joint with the squirrel and it just tore up my throat.’ Gator says, ‘Well, lemme have some!’ Lizard says, ‘Squirrel’s got it. Better crawl on up there and axe him.’ So the gator clumb up the tree and the squirrel looks at him and says, ‘Great God, man! How much water did you drink?’”

Maybe you should have been there to hear him tell it. And indeed, you should be a come-heyah, if only for a day. You should see this island before more Yankees gobble the last of it up. It’s an hour by boat from the nearest highway, five thousand acres, four miles of beach, three hundred souls, if all of us have souls. The beginning of the end is already here, a resort, a beachfront inn, three dozen rental cottages, a scattering of homes, “starter castles,” we call them. Development fizzled in the 1990s, after a bubble on Wall Street busted. Fine with us. But the market is seesawing its way back up again and the developers are in a high sweat. They want to tame this last bit of wild country, civilize this last tribe of wild men. Wild women, too.

Naked Bill is hunkered by the jukebox, nursing a whiskey and water. Whiskey ain’t African but juke is, an impolite verb whose English equivalent would not likely be printed here. But you’ll see how the jukebox got its name when you punch up some raucous old blues and get to bump dancing on a turtle moon.

“Just leave the damn turtles alone,” Naked Bill says. “If the Mexicans can’t find ‘em, they’ll be fine.”

Leave them alone. Nesting loggerheads, bigger than washtubs, three hundred, three hundred and fifty pounds. Yes, tides will run, winds will blow, and sand will shift, and after a couple of days, you won’t see the herringbone tracks upon the strand marking the midnight comings and goings of a creature three hundred million years old. You can read those tracks like you would read a book, the way the sand lies behind the thrust of each flipper, the wiggle-wobble of their tails between. You can see where they came up, where they went down. The way they wallowed, dug, and covered. Or if you’re lucky enough to find one laying, you can watch eggs like ping-pong balls ploop into the cavity she digs with her flippers. You can walk with her as she struggles back to the surf, swim with her, lay your hand upon her shell in a parting blessing, watch the sea phosphorus explode at your fingertips like a thousand tiny lightning bugs.

This annual miracle gives us faith. Show folks the nests, and tourists will leash the dogs and kids, the gals from the resort stable won’t ride their horses over them. The old Gullah women used to raid the nests for eggs for baking, because the whites never set and the shortbreads and cakes kept soft and moist and fine. Now there’s only Miss Janie, Miss Flossie, and Miss Ethel Mae left, and their children and grandchildren are grown and scattered. But the Latinos working the golf course think turtle eggs are some sort of organic Viagra. Se hacen muy fuerte!

Susan and I are registered under the Endangered Species Act, as part of a network of beach keepers working from here to the North Carolina line. We’ve been off to school and they have been here to teach us. We find nests and stake them each low tide, June through August. Then we look for hatchlings till October. We look for dead or injured turtles all year long. We post “gubmint” signs: SEA TURTLES, THEIR CARCASSES, EGGS, and HATCHLINGS ARE PROTECTED BY STATE AND FEDERAL LAW.

We have a hot-rod cart that never saw a golf course. Knobby tires, jacked up and geared down, it will take you about anywhere you need to go. Rack on the front for hammer and signs, rack on the back for a bundle of stakes. Thermos of coffee for morning low tides, cocktails for the evening ones—we have our sweet rituals. The surf whispering its sad low-tide secrets, the ospreys wheeling and screeching, the pelicans diving, the terns turning, the black skimmers skimming, the porpoises lolling in the shallows, grinning and rolling their eyes like they just heard Crazy Jack tell a joke.

“You go out every morning?” Crazy Jack asks. “And you drive on the beach?”

We do. At first when the tourists saw us coming, there would be a great collective grabbing of cell phones, every God’s one of them calling the sheriff to complain. So we figured to look a bit more official: khaki shorts, khaki shirts, and a big Turtle Rescue sticker on the cart. Now the tourists know who we are, but the golf-course workers think we are from the INS and hide in the bushes whenever they see us coming.

“If the Mohican hadn’t got tore-down drunk and cut wheelies in front of the inn,” Naked Bill says, “we’d all still be driving.”

The resort called 9-1-1 and the cops shut the beach down—a secret law they dredged up from somewhere. Our friend Maria was out on the beach the day they lowered the boom, sunning herself alongside her ATV, maybe naked, maybe not. “You got any papers to prove it?” she asked when they told her she had to move. “You want paper, lady, you got it!” they said and laid a $187 ticket in her hand.

Then they put up the sign. It was better than over on Hilton Head, where they post a big red no followed by three or four hundred words of fine print. But it was bad enough: no vehicles of any type or nature, no horses for about half the year, no fires, no fireworks, no nudity. They knew about Naked Bill.

So no more loading up surf rods, tackle, and folding chairs, no coolering up beer and bait. No more easing down till you find a spot that looks fishy, even though the fish don’t bite the way they used to. No more shortcut to the store, driving down to see the neighbors, or farther where you could juke without interruption.

Blame it on the Mohican. He’s not here to defend his good name. He’s a direct descendant of the convicts the English turned loose in Savannah in the 1740s, Georgia to the bone, but he looks like some wild warrior chief, swarthy from pulling crab pots in the sun, rope of black hair, his nose hooked and busted from barroom brawls, a scar the size of a half dollar in the middle of his forehead from when his last girlfriend got after him with a claw hammer.

“How about you?” Crazy Jack asks Naked Bill, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a pump handle trying to draw prime. “They mad at you too, bare-ass in that old fire truck, all them girls bare-ass, too, down on the beach shootin’ at them damn Yankee tourists with a damn potato cannon.”

“Random acts of naked terrorism,” Naked Bill says. His sentiments are left over from when General Sherman got too handy with his matches, when he burnt every home, school, courthouse, outhouse, and church in a swath a hundred miles wide and four hundred miles long. Sherman went on to command the army during the extermination of the Plains Indians, and a hundred and forty-odd years later, he made liars out of the talking heads after 9/11, when they said such a conflagration had never happened in America before. It’s a long time to hold a grudge, but we got burnt out, so we still hold it.

Naked Bill pulled the water cannon off the back of the fire truck, replaced it with a long stick of two-inch plastic pipe. A whiff of starting fluid and the flick of a Bic, and it would rocket a russet two hundred yards. Wouldn’t kill nobody, but it sure made ’em scatter.

Naked Bill got his name when he was fishing off Tybee and wouldn’t put on his britches for the Coast Guard. That was the year of the Atlanta Olympics, when they ran the sailing events down here and the coasties, game wardens, and deputies were boarding boats looking for Osama. There was a good-looking young boatswain’s mate in command, Naked Bill says, and this is how it went:

“Sir, can I see some identification?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Sir, can I see your fishing license?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Sir, will you please put on your pants?”

“No ma’am.”

And then she sped away before he had a chance to get her phone number.

“It’s the lights, not the driving,” Susan says. “Last year they fished forty hatchlings out of the condo pool. They thought it was moonlight on the ocean.”

Hatchlings the size of poker chips. Susan calls them her babies, the sum of all our hopes. A bedraggled island coalition had fought the condos in the press, in committees, in state and federal court. They cost us time but we had time. We cost them money but they had plenty. Yeah, we knocked off a floor, but they built the damn things anyway, five-story nightmares on an eroding beach, turtles nesting in front of it, bald eagles behind. But it wasn’t just hatchlings that wound up in that swimming pool.

“Take me to the condos,” Susan said.

Susan is the kind of gal who will dog a bone right down to nothing. You might tell her no a dozen times, but it just won’t stick. And she was about to get shut of all this civilizing. By that time I had had my quota of condos, but I humored her. 

“Okay, baby, we’ll do it tomorrow.”

Tomorrow came and tomorrow went. “You said you were gonna take me to the condos!”
I slid off the hook again, but a couple more days and she cornered me one final time. “Okay, dammit,” I said, “I will stop everything else and get in the cart and I’ll take you there right now!”

She eyed me like an osprey eyes a mullet. “Naked,” she said.

By that time there were thugs on the island—caretakers, they called them—who’d sunk one of our boats, gloomed and threatened. “I can’t go down there naked!” I howled.

“Why not?”

“Where in the hell will I put my pistol?”

Naked Bill never saw us, four o’clock one Sunday afternoon, but he was mighty proud when he heard about me and Susan naked down a mile of beach in the jacked-up cart. There was a hundred feet of loose sand I thought we’d never get through, but we did. We drove as close as we could, hopped the fence, and had the pool all to ourselves for about three minutes. Then somebody came a-running and flapping, and when we got out of the water, he beat feet just like that boatswain’s mate when Naked Bill wouldn’t put on his britches. Nothing much came of it, but it was a good story for a while.

That was all a couple of years back, before we got registered and respectable, before I cold-cocked one of the thugs with a magnum of Chablis and went to jail for it. But that’s a whole ‘nuther story.

“Don’t reckon chlorine does a turtle much good,” Naked Bill says.

Susan breaks down and cries whenever the tide gets a nest, when the ghost crabs and coons get them, too. God help anybody she finds digging. “And then they had to swim clean to the Gulf Stream,” she says.

“Reckon they made it?” Crazy Jack asks.

Ninety miles on the energy of a yoke, a thimble of faith. Susan does not answer. I want to say, Them poor little skutters was dead before they hit the sea, but I know a thimble of faith can tilt the Earth.

Crazy Jack is ten years older than the rest of us, old enough to remember German subs prowling offshore and the great litter of war that washed up on our beaches, the splintered lifeboats, oil slicks, and bodies. “You know how we enforced the blackout during the war?” He asks it like a question, but we know he already has the answer by the flash in his eyes. “We shot at every light we saw.”

“Well,” says Susan, with that osprey look in her eyes, “maybe we could talk Naked Bill into breaking out that potato cannon.”

Naked Bill grunts and motions for another whiskey. A thimble of faith can tilt the Earth. I want the come-heyahs to all go home, back to the concrete and crime and smog they have created, not stay and make more of it down here. But I know they won’t. I want the air to clear up and the water too. I want the Gullah and the fish to come back, but they won’t likely either.

But the turtles will come, back to the beaches where they hatched, fifty, sixty years before. From Africa and the Azores they will come. From the Tortugas and Antigua and from Labrador. On the full moon they will crawl up into the dunes. And there among the rattling sea oats and the jackstraw of last year’s spartina, they will weep great salty tears as they lay their eggs. Biologists will tell you it’s just a way to regulate salinity, but we know better. They weep for the babies that may never find their way back to these beaches, for beaches that may not even be here at all. They weep for all that has been and all that is to come, here on this barrier island on borrowed time.

I weep too. And I will help them as best I can. One miracle at a time will suffice.

The barkeep brings another round as the sun slides down the west and the shadows grow long upon this land I love.

I turn to Crazy Jack. “You got anything to smoke?”

He giggles. “Climb on up that gum tree yonder and axe the squirrel.”

The high-tide breeze comes ghosting up the river, sets the palmetto fronds rattling. Moonrise in another hour. 

Three years ago my colleagues and I proposed restoring megafauna to North America using ecological history as a guide. Our idea: re-create the missing ecological functions and evolutionary potential of lost megafauna by using closely related species as analogues. It turns out the horses, camels, and cheetahs in Africa and Asia today are closely related to vanished North American counterparts. In fact, today’s “African lion” is the same species that once roamed North America. The social and ecological challenges of bringing megafauna back to North America are monumental, but so are the potential benefits.

Large animals maintain biodiversity through their interactions with other species. Elephants knock down trees and create new habitat. Lions regulate prey populations by eating them and affect their behavior by creating landscapes of fear. Similarly, wolves alter the vegetation by changing where elk go to forage, and these changes in vegetation patterns influence migratory birds. Wolves may even dictate the ability of other animals to survive by providing carcasses to scavenge when times are tough. Such pervasive influences appear to be the norm for megafauna, which means that bygone big animals were critical cogs in the wheels of North American ecosystems.

Those critical cogs are also missing from North Americans’ psyches. While we often fear them, we love megafauna. Anthropologist Paul Shepard wrote at length about our deep relationship with large animals, and how that relationship extends back tens of thousands of years. He believed there are important reasons why children’s books are filled with large animals. Given that children in the U.S. now spend 80 percent of their free time in front of television and computer screens, what are the psychological consequences to North Americans of losing touch with flesh-and-blood versions of the continent’s bygone megafauna?

The consequences to North Americans of losing such a colossal component of our natural heritage are rarely considered. Restoring megafauna to this continent will mean risking unexpected consequences. Some of those risks can be mitigated with sound science; others will be surprises revealed only by trial and error. Yet in the coming century, by default or design, our society will decide what and how much biodiversity we will coexist with. We now live in a world of decaying ecosystems, where humans increasingly lack any relationship with nature. Meanwhile, biodiversity conservation is focused on managing extinction instead of actively restoring natural processes. Maybe bringing megafauna back to North America could jumpstart a more proactive vision of biodiversity conservation, while also helping to reconnect people with nature.

My grandchildren likely will grow up in a world where videophilia trumps biophilia, and will almost surely know polar bears solely from DVDs. Perhaps we can do better, and our ecological history could help. Perhaps we can accept the risks and take the bold actions needed to bring back the megafauna. As biologist Geerat Vermeij stated, “A risk-free world is a very dull world, one from which we are apt to learn little of consequence.”