Printed across the worn cover in gilded type was the author’s name: Charles Darwin. Here was a book to shelter me. A story I could hide within for months.
My Nana Minnie’s voice, hollering from the recesses of the farmhouse kitchen, called, “Time’s up, Pumpkinseed. Them peas ain’t going to shell themselves….”
I called back, “But I found one!”
“One what?” she called.
Putting a child’s happy smile into my voice, I called, “A book, Nana!”
A silent pause elapsed, broken only by the mating cries of icky out-of-doors birds trying to entice one another to engage in avian sexual hijinks. Indoors, the air smelled of cigarette smoke and the steam from my nana’s tireless torture cooker.
“What book?” my nana asked warily. “How’s it called?”
I turned the book sideways, searching its spine for the title. “It’s about a dog,” I said. “It’s about a cute little dog that travels on a maritime adventure.”
In response my nana’s voice sounded jolly, her tones rounded almost to laughter, the voice of a younger woman. In almost a girl’s voice she shouted, “Let me guess. It’s The Call of the Wild!” She shouted, “When I was your age I loved Jack London!”
My hands cracked open the book, and the pages smelled like a room where no one had walked for a long time. This paper room smelled enormous, with varnished wooden floors, and stony fireplaces filled with cold ashes, and dust motes swimming in the sunlight that fell through the room’s tall windows. Mine were the first eyes to peer inside this paper castle for generations.
No, the book’s title wasn’t The Call of the Wild, but—Gentle Tweeter—my Nana Minnie was happy. I was excused from shelling peas. That’s what mattered most.
The author was not Jack London, but who really cared? If I were to read slowly enough, this book would fill my entire desolate summer holiday. To tedious, odious upstate it would deliver all the joy and excitement of a bygone canine universe. Already, my head was nodding over the open volume, engrossed in the words and perceptions of some long-deceased narrator. I was seeing a vanished past through the alien eyes of that dead man.
Flipping to the title page, I read, printed there: The Voyage of the Beagle.
DECEMBER 21, 9:00 A.M. EST
Papadaddy Three
Gentle Tweeter,
To help alleviate my tedium, Papadaddy Ben suggested we construct a housing unit for the indigenous birdlife. A sort of avian Habitat for Humanity, minus Jimmy Carter and his ilk. Actual architectural planning played a very small part in the project. We sawed boards to fashion rudimentary walls, floor, and roof, cobbling these together with nails. A not-unsatisfying process. Last, we applied a coat of sunny yellow paint.
Brush in hand, my papadaddy asked, “You remember me telling you about Leonard? Your ma’s guardian angel.”
I feigned deafness and concentrated on my painting technique, avoiding leaving brush marks and drips. I worried about the paint smell, concerned that I might be contributing to the birdhouse equivalent of sick building syndrome.
Oblivious, my papadaddy forged on. “What if I was to tell you the angels call your nana as well?”
I dipped my brush and dabbed yellow around the invitingly round door of the house. I wondered whether the birds who’d set up housekeeping would migrate, as did my parents, between similar dwellings in Nassau and Newport and New Bedford. Likewise, would their migratory patterns be determined by the income tax rates of each location?
Papadaddy took my silence as encouragement. “I don’t want to scare you none, but do you remember how I mentioned your big showdown? From what Leonard tells your nana, the forces of good and evil will be testing you.”
My Chanel playsuit felt snug in the hips.
“On some island,” he added. “Your big test will come on an island.”
Despite Ctrl+Alt+Hurtling my nana’s cuisine out the kitchen window, I was gaining weight as if by osmosis. Genetics or environment, I worried that my body-fat percentage was nearing double digits.
“According to your nana, somebody’s going to die pretty soon.” Papadaddy dipped his brush and resumed his work. “Just so you know to be careful, the one who dies might be you.”
DECEMBER 21, 9:02 A.M. EST
Charting a Course for Glory
Gentle Tweeter,
Contrary to its merry title, The Voyage of the Beagle is not a picaresque yarn about a small, plucky dog who embarks upon a madcap over-the-waves maritime adventure. If I were compelled to write the CliffsNotes summarizing the book, that distillation would go as follows: Stupid wild fish… dumb wild bird… big rock… Snake! Snake! Snake!… slaughtered animal… another rock… turtle. Imagine such a series made long enough to fill almost five hundred pages and you’ve more or less written the Beagle book for yourself. In half a thousand pages hardly a dog is mentioned, and nothing exists in the spotlight for longer than the duration of Mr. Darwin’s ten-second attention span. Instead of evolution, Charles Darwin seems to have invented attention deficit disorder, and his focus is constantly distracted by a different fungus… a novel, new arthropod… a brightly colored pebble. Reading along, one hopes to see a pretty señorita catch the narrator’s eye. The reader expects a romance to blossom among the pampas followed by a lover’s quarrel and the introduction of a romantic rival, kissing, fistfights, drawn swords—but it’s just not that kind of book. No, The Voyage of the Beagle seems more akin to watching five years’ worth of vacation snaps, shown by an Asperger’s sufferer compelled to narrate incessantly.
The title of the tome is a blatant misdirection. The Beagle cited is actually the ship upon which Mr. Darwin and Co. are sailing, apparently christened by some long-ago dog fancier. Nonetheless, it’s within these brittle old pages that I found my destiny.
It takes but a single remarkable victory to cement the reputation of a budding scribe. For my nana’s favorite, Jack London, it required only six months of mucking about in the gold-rush towns of the Klondike. For Mr. Darwin the transformative episode in the Galápagos Islands lasted at most four weeks. Both men had begun their adventure in resignation: London had been unable to secure gainful employment in San Francisco; Darwin had dropped out of college, failing to earn his degree in theology. Both men returned to their ordinary lives while still young, but milked inspiration from their short-lived adventures until they died.
There was no reason why the summer of my eleventh year need be wasted. I had only to find some as-yet-undocumented species of disgusting creature—fly, beetle, spider—and I could write my own ticket back to civilization. Scientific acclaim would be mine. I’d reinvent myself as a world-renowned naturalist who need never kiss and hug her evil, heartless parents ever again.
The morning I’d resolved to begin my fieldwork, I sat at the table in my nana’s kitchen. The dawn light shimmered, brown-orange, through the jar of stagnant water and sodden tea bags that she kept on the windowsill above her sink. I feigned spooning some vile porridge to my mouth, tasting nothing except the bovine growth hormone in the milk. Still, I smiled winningly, my Beagle book open beside my breakfast, and asked, “Nana, dearest?”