Great hatred, little room
maimed us at the start.
I carry from my father’s tomb
a fanatic heart.
Ah, the easy judgments of
an American Westerner, much of whose life has been passed in a land so
vast that a village fifty miles away feels next door; where you
snowmachine two hundred miles to shoot a caribou; where, before ELTs,
small planes regularly disappeared without a trace. (A friend of mine
has been lying somewhere in the Alaska Range since 1988.)
To
me, the world is a giant place with room for all. Fresh water for all.
Salmon for all. Birch and spruce for all. Moose, and caribou, and
bears, for all. Even gold, if you want to freeze your hands off
dredging and panning for it. There are a few limitations, to be sure.
Traffic is a big headache in Anchorage. The state now requires drawing
permits on the Koyukuk, which they didn't when I first hunted there.
I'll probably never get to shoot a musk ox.
Israel has
(not counting the Occupied Territories) ten times the population of
Alaska. Its area is somewhat less than that of Denali National Park. It
drains the Jordan River dry, and is working on draining the mountain
aquifers under the West Bank. I have never visited the country, but my
daughter knows it fairly well and has told me about it. Sounds roughly
like, say, eastern Washington State, except for having nowhere near as
much water. I grew up there, partly. The idea of fighting over apple
orchards strikes me as funny. They're almost trying to give them away
now. No money in it.
But, of course, Israel/Palestine
isn't about money. It's about History. Despite having several of the
oldest verified human habitation sites in North America, Alaska has no
history. (Pace, Stephen. This is only the Fray. I can utter any
blasphemy I want.) That's one reason I live here. I have stood at one
of those sites, a low mound in the middle of a broad valley, and seen
it through the eyes of the prehistoric hunters whose seasonal camp it
was, probably for thousands of years. (Reindeer? Steppe bison?) Not
even the Natives can really claim these people as ancestors. (Yes,
another blasphemy). They are everybody's ancestors. Everyfather, so to
speak. We don't know what they looked like, or what languages they
spoke, or what stories they told. And we never will know. We can't do
anything in their names, because they are so blessedly nameless. The
past is not dead. It isn't history, either. It is here, now,
but you have to know how to feel it, how to touch it.
History is
something else. It is the nightmare from which another Stephen was trying to
awaken. But those who cut one another's throats over a meter of land or
a liter of water have no desire to awaken. On the contrary, they
embrace the nightmare. They create it. They teach it to their children.
It is the meaning of their lives. I do not say that in condemnation or
superiority. I say it in genuine incomprehension. I never suffered from
that nightmare. My life has gone differently. I live in the land
history forgot. I suppose that, ironically, I have Vietnam to thank for
that. The price was high, but I wasn't the one who paid it.
Jerusalem,
Jerusalem. You whore among nations. How many millions have you seduced
into your beautiful, diseased arms? No place is as foul with human blood, human
guilt, as you are. And still they kill one another over you. You should
be razed from the earth and a curse put upon your ground so that men
would be afraid to set foot there for ten thousand years. Perhaps, by
then, they would have forgotten History. And discovered the past.
