Anu was telling the two foreigners the tale of the Vavakalun. Over the past two decades he had told this story a thousand times at least. But every time Anu tried to tell it for the first time.
“In the old times, the Bunun people used to choose big rocks and trees as landmarks. One time the ancestors chose a big tree as a boundary marker. A while later they looked and thought, Hey, that’s strange, that marker appears to have moved. And it doesn’t look quite the same as it did before. Well, as soon as they paid attention they discovered that when this kind of fig tree is mature it dangles its aerial roots all the way down to the ground. Sometimes the parent tree dies but the aerial root survives and becomes a new tree. When it’s been too long since the previous visit, the tribespeople might mistake the new tree for the old one. That’s why we call it Vavakalun, meaning a walking tree.”
Anu asked Detlef and Sara to touch the roots to see if they could “hear the tree sucking water out of the ground or dividing into two.” They caressed the roots very obligingly. This kind of tree, with its twisting, branching roots, was totally new to them, because it was a species seldom seen in northern countries.
There in the darkness, feeling the root system of the tree on the boulder, Detlef had realized that one day the roots would crack the rock. There should be some kind of noise when the roots got inside the rock, and when it was finally split asunder there might be an earsplitting sound. Of course, as an engineer, Detlef had confidence in his own expertise, but he had never been so impressed as he was now by what the power of nature, so much greater than his own, was capable of. In this case, the forces involved were beyond calculation. Including the force exerted by the leaf-cutter ant that had just crawled onto the back of his hand.
Detlef searched in the darkness, and at some moment his eyes found hers and they gazed at one another a brief while.
The hike had not been that strenuous, but actually they’d been walking down a shadowy hunting path through a miniature tropical wilderness. Detlef had been noticing myriad tiny sounds along the way. He often said that he wasn’t really good at anything, except that he had really good hearing. In this respect he had a gift. He had grown up in a cultivated family. His father was a business manager, his mother a middle-school teacher, and he, an only child, had always been academically inclined. With his exceptionally keen hearing, his favorite activity as a boy was to find something apparently silent and try to “dig” by pressing his ear close to it, trying to hear the subtle sound it was actually making. One time, late at night, he stole out into the garden and dug up an anthill in the flower patch until he was standing in a pit two meters deep. His parents were astonished when they got up the next morning and found a big hole in the garden and Detlef covered in dirt. But they did not scold him, they even let him keep digging wherever he wanted. He got in the habit of testing the terrain wherever he went, crouching down and touching the ground, or propping himself against a rocky outcrop.
Detlef remembered at nineteen years of age visiting a technical academy where he’d seen a model of Charles Wilson’s Patented Stone-Cutting Machine. He was enthralled. Intimating power, it was a kind of metaphor for getting to the hearts of various things. To him, it was the ideal machine. Henceforth he took every course he could in geology and mechanics. For him, these two fields of knowledge had a single method and the same aim: “comprehend principles, overcome obstacles, bore to the core.”
Detlef made a name for himself by making improvements to the TBM design. He had achieved some stature in the industry. But nothing in his entire career had made a deeper impression on him than the experience he’d had here on this island over twenty years before.
Everyone in that cave of a tunnel heard it. But what was that sound? He had been grasping at an answer all this time, but it eluded him still. Only after meeting Sara did he begin to think that maybe, just maybe he did not have to drill all the way through when there was a sound he did not understand, that some sounds could only exist if they were left alone, undrilled, intact.
And just now when he and Sara had squeezed into that small rock cave, his shoulder touching hers, it was like being in a dream. He felt he could hear, through the wall at the end of this little cave, the sound of the whole mountain.
Not surprisingly, the sound that a living forest or mountain makes is different from the sound of an eviscerated mountain. Detlef reached out and held Sara’s hand, wanting to convey this thought to her.
Sara was now feeling the roots of the tree with her other hand, wondering whether her widely traveled father had ever seen a tropical forest like this. On that trip he’d taken to the Mississippi, had he gone downstream into the warm South and encountered trees there like the one she was now seeing?
Actually, Sara never even got the chance to see her father’s body. His friends had already cremated “their Amundsen” by the time she was informed of his death. He had died in his favorite place — on the ice — but in Canada not in Norway.
Sara could not say she had not begrudged Amundsen his absences. At least when she was an adolescent, she thought for the longest time that he loved the sea, the fish, the whales and, later on, even the seals more than he loved her. Her mother’s departure had thrown Sara into a man’s world, a world of gory slaughter and relentless pursuit that she always regarded with disgust. And when she found it hard getting accustomed to life at sea he never gave her a word of comfort, just let the sea torment her. The sea had separated her from her mother, and even if Sara had wanted to go looking for her, there was no easy way for her to get back to land. The only way she could punish her father was by looking away whenever he spoke to her, looking toward the sea instead.
Her father finally permitted her to start a life on land when she was fifteen, and from then on they lived separate lives, one at sea and the other on shore. He was always away, while she worked nonstop in her seaside lab learning science and getting to know a freedom she’d never enjoyed out on the open ocean. When she went into oceanography, she realized she understood the sea way better than her classmates. What the professors taught in class was just a way of talking about what she had lived through, and a way for her to revisit a girlhood spent at sea. Sometimes, pondering some issue in marine ecology, Sara could almost hear her father haranguing her from the ship’s railing.
He would wire money into her account regularly, but hardly ever sent even a simple postcard. Soon after Sara obtained her Ph.D. she got a reputation for being fierce. When most professors were cozying up to the government, she was the “spear of knowledge” for protest organizations. She was always able to pierce the criminal subterfuges of state agencies or capitalists hiding behind the letter of environmental protection regulations or pseudoknowledge, no matter what the issue: the exploitation of polar oil or methane ice or excessive whaling in the name of research. The literature reviews she did were so thorough that the scientists defending the capitalists always got beaten back, unable to hold their own against her. While most people described Sara as “fierce,” only she knew about the emotional knots a traumatic childhood had tied in her soul.
When Sara’s father was found, the hunters initially mistook him for a flayed beater. Obviously, he had been battered to death with a hakapik. His head had sustained multiple blows, leaving his face almost unrecognizable. All his teeth had been knocked out. As he was not found until several days after the fact, his arms and abdomen had been eaten away. Maybe the seals had come on shore and divvied him up. They didn’t even leave his reproductive organs.