I am confounded by the world. Yesterday while driving home from the local wilderness I heard two very odd news tales. Stories such as these two, which I will explain shortly, may be a regular occurrence on the radio news, but I don't know. I do my best at the beginning of each day to take a vow of secession regarding worldly events, local events, and generally staying in touch with the man-made world.. This annoys my dad who is a shameless news junkie, but it is the only way I can function. If I actually allow myself to acknowledge many aspects of modern life (the number of semi trucks on the roads delivering all manner of stuff to stores, the countless number of people at the grocery store on a Saturday, the number and frequency of land parcels being vivisectioned for no greater good) I would be unable to take another step. An overly dramatic response, I admit, but done in the name of self-preservation.
Anyway, the stories were these, and in this order:
1. Canadian researchers have successfully wiped "fear memories" from the brains of mice. There is hope, the story reported, that at some future time it will be possible to remove "bad" memories in humans-- as some traumatic memories are so strong that they disable people from living "normal" lives.
2. German authorities have identified a skeleton found hanging in a tree (by a hiker) as that of a man who disappeared 29 years ago. The man, who supposedly shot himself after tying himself to the tree, was once a soldier.
This is some serious mental fodder. I mulled the implications of these news bits for the rest of the afternoon and I still can't seem to shake them. The question my brain continues to ask me is this: If the skeleton in the tree had been given the option, 30 years ago, to have his brain cleaned of all bad or fear -inducing memories, would he have done it? And further, would doing so have changed his outcome?
___________________
When I was a kid we lived across the street from a lake. It was probably a pond, but to us it was a lake. It was nearly shoreless in its vastness and offered the kind of treasures, both real and perceived, only imagined by two kids recently moved from the edge of Chicago. Lake Dartmoor was our personal, just-across-the-street, heaven. We swam in it, fished in it, swung on willow branches over its depths, slung its mucky, silty bedding at each other, and hunted for frogs and crayfish in it. It was part of our home and roaming grounds, but we shared it with whatever wildlife was there long before us.
Waterfowl of all kind made the lake their foraging ground three seasons of the year. It was a particular thrill to see a Mallard on eggs in the spring and even more exciting when the eggs were spared by the local raccoons and actually hatched. We nervously scanned the shore of the lake each morning for a sign of the hen and her ducklings...had they been discovered by the local 'coons and eaten up in the night? More years than not they were there, waiting for the day they would be big enough to float the lake with their mother. Once they were ready to be on the water we thought we would be able to watch them morph from fuzzy beige balls into replicas of their parents--for once they were able to get out of harm's way and into the water, what could happen? As soon as they were swimming, we felt they were safe for the season--no need to fuss any more over the fate of the Mallard ducklings.
But soon-- within days-- the ducklings disappeared. One by one, sometimes two or three in rapid succession. A brood of thirteen was neatly whittled to seven, then three, and eventually the hen swam alone with no trailing, jabbering young behind. Where had they gone? In the morning we saw everyone together but by afternoon there seemed to be one or two missing. We took to counting every morning and again each time we saw them throughout the day. No raccoons to be seen in the light of day, no marauding cats.
My dad, ever and still the storyteller, provided the answer. Deep at the bottom of the lake, coddled by the same sludge and muck we used as ammunition, lived a snapping turtle. He prowled the cloudy waters by evening, hunting frogs and small fish, but by day....he yanked our Mallard ducklings under the surface and snapped them up. He could take off one of our fingers or toes, we were told, in one clean bite. He was the carnivorous thief, dad said, responsible for carving up the population of new ducks every spring. And you could never know when he would pop up; he could be on the shoreline at one moment and at the middle of the lake the next, drawn by the promise of child-toes or tasty ducklings.
Immediately the safety of the swimming across the street was greatly diminished. I don't know about my brother, but I did not ever treat the waters there the same way. Swimming the 50 feet from the beach to the first raft was an exercise in terror and going beyond the first raft, all the way out to the center of the lake was gut wrenching. I no longer swam, but thrashed my way to wherever I was headed in the water. Noise, commotion, and churning limbs were all that stood between me and instantaneous digit amputation. Fear of the roving, submerged, carnivorous monster changed the way I behaved.
At a month shy of forty, the memory of swimming at Dartmoor is still wrought with apprehension, to say the least. Any lake I now swim is tainted by those thirty-year old memories--irrational, unwarranted, but now hard-wired and not going anywhere. Snappers still strike fear into my heart, even though I understand their natural history and more importantly, the fact that the old man was telling us one of his yarns. No matter. Snapping turtles are fascinating creatures, genetically designed and thus theoretically capable of living hundreds of years. They possess lightning speed when needed, attempt a return to their nesting grounds every spring no matter the obstacle, and are a vital spoke of any watershed--essentially, they are creatures to marvel at, not fear. Yet when it comes to snappers, I am always eight years old, my entire being is nothing but fingers and toes.
This memory, though a great deal of it is the child of legend, myth, and a healthy dose of parental exaggeration, is close to me. Even if it now, 30 years later, prevented me from swimming I don't think I would relinquish it. Fear and memory, primeval companions which I am reluctant to put asunder, can be dangerous indeed. Fear leads to memory, and memory back to fear--the duality of the two is where legend and myth were born, long before language ruled us. Without them, the memories we carry and the fears we harbor, how would we conceive the stories we tell each other?
.
Now, far too many words later, having finally having finished the explanation of how the news puzzled me, something else occurs to me.....up until now I thought the connections between the two news bits and the memory I unraveled here were so obvious. Those connecting points seem less clear now, and I question the purity of my motives. Maybe
they were just an excuse I made to tell a story of my own.
No comments:
Post a Comment