Fraud (18 page)

I show my lizard to those working near me in the field. In turn, they show me what they have uncovered. I am kind and full of noblesse oblige as I feign interest in one woman’s small mound of unidentifiable animal scat. But we both know the truth: My reptile corpse makes her find look like, well, a pile of shit. For a brief moment I am big man in Vole City.

The instructor’s matter-of-fact treatment of the dead salamander, the complete lack of any “poor little guy” moral component to its demise, speaks to what makes the Tracker philosophy unique among so many naturalist communities. Unlike certain Steven Seagal—moderated Buddhist retreats and Icelandic piano-teaching, elf-spotting living rooms I could mention, there is none of that falsely benign conception of nature as friendly, inherently good, tame, and prettified. Aldous Huxley, in his essay “Wordsworth in the Tropics” assails what he calls this “Anglicanization” of nature, the cozy revisionism of a force that is intrinsically alien and inhospitable: “It is fear of the labyrinthine flux and complexity of phenomena . . . fear of the complex reality driving [us] to invent a simpler, more manageable, and, therefore, consoling fiction.” There is the clear-eyed acknowledgment here that things get eaten. Ruth Ann, in telling us the story of a year lived in the Pine Barrens in a house of her own construction, says, “Whatever came into my house, I ate. Mice? We just threw ’em in the fire, burned the hair off, and ate them whole. They just taste like meat, and there’s something to be said for that added crunch.”

She’s not being heartless; in fact, she’s the very opposite. For every skill we are taught, whether it’s harvesting plants, using our bow drills, skinning an animal, or gathering forest debris, the first step in our instruction is always a moment of thanksgiving for the trees, the spirit of fire, the groundhog, the water, and so on. It’s a strange adjustment to have to make at first (and I am not proud to admit that there is a moment at five-thirty
A
.
M
. when I serve on cook crew, as I stand bleary-eyed with exhaustion—having gotten to bed only some five hours earlier owing to a late night lecture on track identification—where I think I might kill the fellow who leads us in a fifteen-minute thanksgiving that includes complimenting the rising sun for being “just the perfect distance away from us,” which just seems fawning and, frankly, a little late in the game to me). But truthfully, there are worse things than acknowledging a continuum and connection among all things and staying mindful and grateful of our place therein, although it can be a hard concept to swallow before the coffee hits the system.

Even wide awake there are some moments of fuzzy logic in this theory of interconnectivity. Kevin, in explaining the Apache tradition of humbling oneself before taking another life, of being thankful to the prey, tells us this will also result in a willing acquiescence on the part of the hunted. “Something that gives its life for your benefit does so with gladness if you are humble.” Isn’t it pretty to think so, but ascribing complicit suicidal motives to the rabbit who licks the Cheez Whiz from a deadfall bait stick—no matter how self-effacingly daubed on—seems a tad Wordsworthian to me.

But such doubts become ever fewer as the week progresses. From about Thursday on, the home stretch of the course, spirits are high. Most of us have gotten fire, and in a brilliant bit of Pavlovian pedagogy, the food has improved markedly immediately following the outdoor cooking demonstration. Despite the staff’s urging us not to take what we are told at face value, to go home and prove them right or prove them wrong, we’re all pretty jazzed and itching to head out into nature. That said, among the people I talk to there is also a growing skepticism about Brown himself. It has nothing to do with his credibility, the veracity of his life story, or even the purity of purpose of the Tracker School. Unfortunately it’s personal: Brown’s drill sergeant persona so thoroughly kicks the shit out of his mother hen. As pleasant as he may be just after breakfast—and he frequently is: sunny, sprightly, and very funny—if he addresses us after sunset, there is a darkness in him with a potential for ire that is terrifying.

In one evening lecture Brown talks about the need for us to “take bigger pictures,” to see more of the world through our wide-angle vision, attuned to the periphery and a greater depth of field, to sense things before actually seeing them. “Instead of going
click, click, click,
” he minces, “go CLICK! CLICK! CLICK!” he roars at us. A few people actually flinch. Later on, in a moment meant to chide us for the persistence of our citified tunnel vision, he tells us that he has been observing us unseen from his perch on top of the toolshed. It’s a creepy and menacing moment. People seem visibly shaken as we make our way to bed. We watch our backs, scanning our surroundings for heretofore unnoticed surveillance. We cast furtive glances at one another, like children trying not to attract the hair-trigger attentions of an abusive parent. Out of earshot, one young man asks a group of us softly, “You guys ever see
Apocalypse Now
?”

Of course, there are the credulous few among us who find every word from Brown’s mouth a pearl, like the art teacher who indiscriminately records every moment of the week or the woman who gives me a look of such utter disdain one day as I eat a Snickers bar, one would think I was sitting there insouciantly enjoying a human turd. As far as they are concerned, everything Brown tells them is true, but they are, kindly stated, not the tannest hides in the barnyard. They wipe away a tear when Brown tells of going back to his sacred spot in the woods years later with his son, Tom Jr., and his own father:

“Passing the old spot on the river where my dad and I used to swim, little Tommy pointed out the dead plants on the bank. ‘The water’s sick. We can’t swim here, because up the stream they put in the municipal dump.’ And my dad burst into tears because it was his fucking vote that put it in.
The last vote on the town council.
” Any teacher of freshman composition would advise toning down the Susan Hayward and cutting that last detail about the deadlocked vote, with its contrived eleventh-hour coincidence and shameless play for the reader’s sympathies. There is a fair amount of jaundiced eye rolling after this particular lecture.

It’s too bad that Brown the Personage has this effect on people. I think it would come as something of a surprise to him, because Brown the Person, when I interview him one-on-one, is really a very nice, intelligent guy, with an undeniably noble and admirable mission in life. I do not meet with him until the Friday afternoon before the course’s conclusion the next morning. By this time, while I am ready to renounce my toxic city ways for Ruth Ann and think the rest of the instructors are marvelous, my disenchantment with Brown himself is fairly entrenched.

My trepidation is only increased when I am escorted into the kitchen of Brown’s home by Kevin, who does not leave. Tom McElroy, as well, sits in a chair nearby, weaving a jute bag on a small circular loom. I turn on my tape recorder, wondering if this will be an interview with the Party official surrounded by his apparatchiks. But the gestalt of the room is actually one of hanging out, not gatekeepers monitoring my questions. They crack jokes, weigh in with opinions, engage in quiet, unrelated conversations with one another. I’ve essentially come to the teachers lounge.

Or is it a convocation of disciples? I ask him about the cult of personality that seems to be a definite part of the Standard class.

“Oh, I try to get rid of that real quick. I tell people right off, ‘Don’t thank me, thank Grandfather. I’m a poor example.’ I am nobody’s guru.” He talks about how they have to make sure to keep “Tracker groupies”—those overenthusiastic few who try to volunteer too often—at a healthy distance. “Boy, this would be very easy to turn into a cult, big time, and I just will not allow it to happen. That’s the last thing I want to happen.”

Noted. Yet in almost every lecture there is the requisite prefatory story from Brown’s life (“When Tom was twelve years old, Grandfather told him, ‘This is the year you will provide me with meat . . .’ ”). The accrual of personal detail forms a gospel of sorts; anecdotes are delivered in a prescribed, hortatory, liturgical style. (“He raised his hand before Tom could speak and said, ‘Silence!’ And he pointed a bony finger and said, ‘Grandson, when you feel the same way about a stalk of grass as you feel about the deer, then you will be truly one with nature.’ Tom realized at that moment that he had been ascribing a hierarchy to nature.”) Granted, the stories are told to show the wisdom of Stalking Wolf, not Tom Brown, but the reflected glory of playing Boswell to Grandfather’s Johnson—a term straight out of a traveling salesman joke—is a position that clearly must have its attractions.

Attractions not callously exploited, it seems. There is no line of Tom Brown sportswear, no exhortation from Brown that I buy anything while I am there, that I Think Different. The Tracker School is not the enterprise of the career opportunist. In person, Brown is not only not power-mad—having willfully kept himself out of environmental politics, not even offering recommendations of organizations people should get involved in—he’s not remotely anything resembling an asshole. He has so much less of the brusque machismo of his stage persona that he seems almost as nice as one of his instructors.

I leave the house fairly won over, wishing that I had been fitted with these rose-colored spectacles somewhat earlier in the course. I return to Tent City and walk out to the field beyond it to gaze upon the sun, now lowering in the late afternoon sky. I find one of my classmates standing in the grass in the honeyed light, enjoying a water bottle full of herbal tea. We stand there amiably and peacefully, mutually imbued with the soy milk of human kindness. He holds out the amber liquid, offering it to me, and asks, “Rum?”

Our last supper is one of our own harvesting. I am on burdock detail with another fellow. The rough brown roots are over a foot long and hold fast in the red clay of the field where we dig. All ninety of us spend an hour or so cleaning, scraping, and slicing the meal. But I have never had food so Edenic in its profusion and beauty: a salad of chickweed, violet flowers, pennycress, and wild onions; a stir fry of burdock, dandelion, nettles, and wintercress buds; dandelion flower fritters; garlic mustard pesto over whole-wheat pasta (store-bought—cut us some slack); nettle soup; and spice bush tea. We are each given a trout to gut, wrap in burdock leaves, and place in the fire. After six days here, I approach this task with a strange relish. It is quite the best fish I have ever eaten.

The meal’s preparation is communal and great fun, although while chopping garlic, Indigo berates four or five of us for having let one another down. Apparently our tardiness in getting inside the barn for the lectures (tardiness not really apparent to me, frankly) has made the instructors have to cut out vital things they were planning on teaching us. Things, it is presumed, they managed to impart to other, more studious Standard classes. “You’re a family, a Tracker family, and you let your brothers and sisters down.” If I cared more, I might mention that my family is actually up in Canada, using flush toilets at that very moment. Why Indigo felt the need to bum our stone when we were at our most cohesive and communal will have to remain a mystery only Grandfather could have explained.

The grand finale of the Standard is a sweat lodge. I generally try to avoid pitch-dark, infernally hot enclosures unless they’re same-sex and I’m a little drunk, but now that Brown is my new best friend, I find his preamble so avuncular and sweet that I almost consider it. He tells us we are to enter the three-foot-high, round, straw-covered structure in a clockwise direction, leaving the area behind him free for those among us who suffer claustrophobia. “The minute you want to get out, just say so and we’ll open the doors. I won’t love you any less.” I resolve to do it until he cedes the floor to Joe, who reads us the guidelines. When I hear “crawl in on your hands and knees,” I realize that there is not Xanax enough in the world to make me enter the sweat lodge. The other rules include taking off all metal jewelry that doesn’t sit directly against one’s skin, as it can heat up and swing back and burn one rather dangerously, and the final admonition: “You are absolutely forbidden to pass wind in the sweat lodge,” says Joe. “We wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t important.”

In the evening darkness the students assemble in their bathing suits (the Italians, of course, in virtual thong bikini briefs). There is something strange and primal about this disrobed crowd in the moonlight. Their progress into the lodge is slow, taking some time before they are all in. I can hear Brown beginning his incantatory singing, and almost immediately I see some people having to get out. From those who stayed throughout the ceremony, I am told of moments of difficulty, when sudden walls of heat made even getting one’s next breath difficult. Apparently this situation was not helped by the fact that, despite Joe’s proscription against flatulence, the sweat lodge clearly brings it out in people. One man was seated behind such a pair who just couldn’t help themselves. “It got kind of bad there. I mean, they didn’t let out any crackers or anything, but one of them was a pretty significant one,” he says.

I rise early on the last morning. I’m almost the only student awake. I ask if there’s anything I can do, and one of the volunteers asks me to build up the fire. Well, how the fuck am I supposed to do that? I think to myself. Almost as quickly, I realize I know precisely how to do that, and much more. I have never taken in more information in one week of my life. Can I track a mouse across a gravel driveway? I couldn’t even track a mouse across a cookie sheet spread with peanut butter, but that’s no matter. Despite Kevin’s recantation in his final wrap-up, when he begs us, “
Don’t
quit your jobs. Don’t make any radical decisions for the next three months, don’t trash your relationships.” (“How many of us did
that?”
Ruth Ann stage-whispers.) I can’t help feeling that I
could
if I needed to, and survive. Lavishly.