Mornings, Evenings, Coincidences

[Books discussed: THE BIG WAVE (1947), by Pearl Buck; THE LITTLE ARK (1953), by Jan de Hartog; THE BLUE BEAR (2002), by Lynn Schooler; THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES (2002), by Sue Monk Kidd]

Coyotes were kicking up a yipping, howling fuss out behind the house shortly after 3 a.m. Already wide awake, I made a couple pieces of toast and settled into a comfortable reading chair with THE LITTLE ARK, so close to the end of the book and so early in the morning that I also had time to finish THE BLUE BEAR, OR, THE SHORT HISTORY OF A PHOTOGRAPH, by Lynn Schooler. It’s Sarah’s birthday today (not that it means anything to her), and she was up early, too, so I stuffed peanut butter into a bone (replacing marrow) to give her something to do. Going out to play with coyotes was not an option, and she didn’t even argue with me on that one.

Recently, at last, I finally got around to Sue Monk Kidd’s THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES (2002), long after the rest of the country had read and discussed. The funny thing was that when I was halfway through, a local man gave me the gift of a jar of fresh honey from his hives, and that very day someone walked into the bookstore looking for another book having to do with bees. Another set of coincidences has to do with several books I’ve picked up to read lately that echo in some way the Katrina September that everyone has been remembering around this three-year anniversary.

First came THE BIG WAVE (1947), by Pearl S. Buck. Illustrated with prints by Hiroshige and Kokusai, this simple children’s book tells the story of two boys, Kino, a peasant’s son, and Jiya, the son of a fisherman. Kino lives high on the side of a mountain, his father’s farm a series of terraces on the mountainside, but Jiya lives in the village on the narrow strip of beach between the mountain and the sea. “’The sea is our enemy,’” Jiya tells his friend. When the ocean god is angry, the earth shakes, and the waves roll. Kino learns to fear the sea and is thankful that his father is a farmer, though he recognizes that both farmers and fishermen are necessary to Japanese life.

Then one day came “a strange fiery dawn. The sky was red and gray, and even here upon the farms cinders and ash fell from the volcano.” At last, after hours of anxious waiting, “the earth … yielded at last to the fire. It groaned and split open and the cold water fell into the middle of the boiling rocks. Steam burst out and lifted the ocean high into the sky in a big wave. It rushed toward the shore, green and solid, frothing into white at its edges. It rose, higher and higher, lifting hands and claws….

“In a few seconds, before their eyes the wave had grown and come nearer and nearer, higher and higher. The air was filled with its roar and shout. It rushed over the flat still waters of the ocean and before Jiya could scream again it reached the village and covered it fathoms deep in swirling wild water, green laced with fierce white foam. The wave ran up the mountainside….”

Jiya was safe with Kino’s family, but as the two boys watched, the wave took the entire village, sweeping back once before subsiding into stillness, leaving only an empty beach. No bodies, no wreckage, nothing. Kino’s parents tell Jiya he is their son now, understanding that it will take time for him to get over the shock of his loss and go on with life. He does, of course. In the end, he marries Kino’s sister, Setsu, and moves back down to the beach to build his own house and follow his father’s way of life. “’If ever the big wave comes back,’” he says, “’I shall be ready. I face it. I am not afraid.’”

Another thread of this narrative of life on the edge centers around the Old Gentleman, a rich noble who lives in the castle high on the mountain. He wanted to adopt Jiya after the boy’s family was lost, but Jiya chose to remain with Kino’s family, even though they were only poor peasants. The Old Gentleman was angry that Jiya would be so foolish. He was angry again when surviving fishing families came back to begin to rebuild the seaside village. You will never be safe here, he tells them, but Jiya tells him that he is not safe on his mountain, either, for an earthquake could destroy even the castle. “’There is no refuge for us who live on these islands. We are brave because we must be.’” This tale of home and loss and rebuilding on dangerous ground, though different from New Orleans and Katrina in many details, had many elements that Louisianans would find familiar.

Another story of disaster, from a very different part of the world, THE LITTLE ARK (1953), by Jan de Hartog, tells of two children, Jan and Adinda, aged ten and eleven, orphaned during World War II. The children come to live in the Dutch village of Niewerland as the wards of old Parson Grijpma and his wife and are given the job of ringing the church bells for the parson, who is too old to climb the belfry steps any more. Thanks to this chore, Jan and Adinda gradually make a whole world for themselves up in the belfry. A puppy, a kitten and a rabbit, unwelcome in the parsonage below, become their treasured menagerie high above the village, and there is no one to take these pets away from them.

“Another reason why the belfry was a world all of its own was that, seen from up there, the village with its little red roofs, small trees and tiny windows looked like a toy village, peopled with little animals. The harbor, in daily life a noisy basin, full of big ships manned with giants who spat black juice, looked from the belfry like a rectangular puddle in the distance, silver in the sunlight, with small gray and black ships; and the giants looked like ants, crawling to and fro.”

But just as the warning bell in THE BIG WAVE tolled over the hills of the Japanese island, warning of danger from the sea, one evening the harbor master in Niewerland reports that the sea has reached its highest-ever level and is still rising, and the bells in the belfry must be sounded to warn everyone. Jan and Adinda have never been in the tower before after dark. “When they finally arrived in the belfry, they had to crawl on all fours. The wind screeched through the arches, and the bells that had hung motionless for as long as they had known them [the children hit the bells with hammers to toll them, rather than pulling on ropes] now swung and groaned in their yokes.” When the cold, exhausted children wake the next morning, the dike has vanished, along with the harbor and all the ships, and only a couple of rooftops remain, people huddled on top with their bundles.

This is not a children’s story but an imaginative fictional account of a very real flood in the history of the Netherlands, that of 1953, and its horrors only begin when the children discover their stepmother dead at the bottom of the belfry tower staircase. The girl, Adinda (repeatedly referred to as a “half-caste” throughout the story), manages to get the boy and all the animals down from the belfry and into a houseboat they have always admired from shore. In their little ark, they drift helplessly over submerged villages and farms through water afloat with human bodies and the bodies of farm animals, some living but most dead. “After the horse, other small objects slowly drew nearer from the sea, as they bobbed inland sideways, rocking. A telegraph pole, heeling over, its wires trailing like hanging hair, moving with the current; a swaying tree, looking as if it were sailing; then a small orchard with, suspended in the branches, a big black rubber dinghy. At a hundred yards’ distance was a corner of a ruin that had been a home, a right angle of jagged walls, and over it peered the mad motionless face of a man.” The man, we feel certain, would have stolen their boat and cast them into the water, but he sinks before he can reach them.

Adinda is given to fits of gloom and pessimism. She expects the worst, expects every joy that comes to be snatched away. Her refusal to be play happily with the treasures on the houseboat goads Jan to anger. “Had he been older, he would have hit her; he kicked the desk, hammered brutally on the piano, slammed the lid shut with such violence that the wires hummed and ended up on his back in front of the fireplace….” He tortures the cat and flings it into a corner. The girl watches expressionlessly, then withdraws even further into herself. She “shut her eyes and listened to the wind rising, and the toneless lapping of the waves, feeling like crying but incapable of tears, accepting as inevitable the misery she had brought about herself by imposing on her world the gloom life had taught her to expect.” She withdraws, he rages. This is no fairytale idyll on the little houseboat.

Adinda and Jan are rescued for a while by a crew of friendly pirates. The boy loves their “manly” talk and never wants to leave, but instead they are removed to a hospital ship. It is there than Jan overhears adults forming a plan to put the children off again rather than return them to the village to which their adoptive father has been evacuate. Parson Grijpma has been searching for his adopted children, but the director of the hospital ship says he would rather take the children to Devil’s Island. Onderkerk is a collection of morgues for men, women, and children, bonfires for dead animals, and all who remain alive, a witness reports, are “raving mad.”

THE LITTLE ARK faces head-on the nightmares of sea invading land. Jan and Adinda are determined to find their way back to their adoptive father without leaving their menagerie behind, but an adult helping them with their escape scheme warns them to “attach those animals to a string or something,” or they’ll be shot by the military police. “’All stray animals in the flooded area are shot at night. They say it’s against contamination from the corpses.’” There were people in New Orleans who refused to leave their dogs behind. Others, picked up by rescue boats, are still sometimes said (by those with short memories, little imagination and faulty information) to have “abandoned” the pets they were not allowed to bring with them.

Back to the book: Arriving at Onderkerk, Jan and Adinda find coffins being buried in the dike, thin processions stumbling along the narrow clay ridge to say last farewells. They are reunited with the parson, but problems do not end. There is the problem of water and the problems of waste. At one point the girl, Adinda, infuriates her affectionate, pious father by observing, of their cabin aboard the hospital ship, “About everybody has pee’d in this room by now, except me and Jesus.” The puppy squats, the rabbit drops, and the boy begs to be allowed to urinate in the washbowl.

For those not fortunate enough to be onboard, life is worse. One farmer’s disaster-induced madness pushes him to murder. Looting is not widespread but does occur, and there is one particularly ghoulish incident.

Before the book closes, Parson Grijpma, Jan, Adinda and their animals return, in the little houseboat, to what is left of Niewerland. It isn’t much. The church is the only old building left, “buttressed up with poles and planking to prevent its bulging walls sagging out still more.” Prefabricated wooden shacks stand on the rubble, and a dredge works out in the harbor. The puppy has become a dog, the kitten a cat with kittens of its own, the rabbit has somehow multiplied, and even the parson’s wife’s rooster has survived. This village, too, will be rebuilt.

Neither of these two stories end “happily ever after.” In one sense, neither ends at all. The story of Jan and Adinda, like that of Kino and Jiya, centers on one historic incident that marked a generation, but each generation is only a chapter in the ongoing larger story.

Wilderness guide Lynn Schooler’s first-person account of his friendship with Japanese photographer Michio Hoshino and their many adventures together searching Arctic islands and glaciers forms the main narrative in THE BLUE BEAR. Again, however, there is a larger story. In the Arctic, danger does not come as a disaster that tears ordinary life apart but is itself part of everyday life. It can and does come without warning, out of the most beautiful day, in the most pristine scenery. “Every fourth or fifth wave was a monster, a slick gray animal that rose so high it seemed to block the wind. I was sure it was only a matter of time until one fell on top of us and drove us under.” How long is the story of Alaska itself? Schooler recounts findings in paleobotany of plant fossils 50 million years old, but those palm fossils had to have formed near the equator, before Alaska as we know it today had taken shape. As for the giant glaciers, as landforms they change within a human lifetime.

Schooler and Hoshino are both bachelors for most of this story, neither exactly by choice. Schooler yearns for a partnership, and Hoshino is very clear in his mind about wanting a family. Everywhere in nature he sees families, projecting his own desires onto all of life. When the two men visit the remains of a rotting cabin, the images Hoshino finds there focus on the brevity of life and the sadness of leaving no one behind.

Adult nonfiction adventure memoir, THE BLUE BEAR nevertheless somehow completed for me a coincidental trilogy of books picked up at random, all having to do with human beings living intimately with the sea, facing danger, suffering loss, and somehow going on. I am no saltwater adventure-seeker but only a freshwater bookseller, content to live within walking distance of one of the world’s Great Lakes. Once in the last century, however, the waters of our little creek came as high as this old farmhouse, we have been told. Complacency is always asking for trouble, but meanwhile, for now, I’m counting my blessings.


We got some of the rain we needed. The mornings and evenings have been beautiful, the hours between bright and clear.