The Grand Canyon

Orangutans are not really hairy little old men with long arms. They just look like hairy little old men with long arms. I know because my father told me.

Maybe Cleveland doesn't sound like a good place to start from to study orangutans. We live in a neighborhood on the south side of Cleveland. There is a little park at the end of our block, in a corner where this old house used to be that got demolished because the old man who lived there died and gave his house to the city for a park. His name was Oscar Wells and the park was named after him, Oscar Wells Park. We just call it Wells Park, or just the park if you are from the neighborhood. In the evenings during the summer we would go to this park.

My father would say: "Ok everybody, lets go down to Oscar Wells Park and watch the sunset."

And then we would all get our coats on and my mother would put my littlest sister Jeanine into the stroller, all bundled up with a little quilt. "Louis, don't forget your muffler." my mother would say.

"Jeanie, it's perfectly warm out, I won't need a muffler." my father would say.
"Louis, you remember that time we went to the Grand Canyon?" My mother always used the Grand Canyon on him when she wanted him to do something.
"That was winter dear."
"It was september, you remember very well. And you remember what I told you too."
"Andy," that's me, "go look after your sisters." My father always tried to get rid of me when he and my mother had this argument. But I know how it goes.

He would say: "Yes, I remember, you told me to bring my galoshes."
"And your muffler."
"And my muffler. And my macintosh. And you told me I was being foolish."
"I did not say you were being foolish. I said it would be foolish to leave them behind, seeing as the weather was so iffy."
"You might just as well have said I was being foolish."
"It is not the same, Louis, and you know it."

It goes along like this, more or less, for longer or shorter, depending. Eventually my father admits he was being foolish. He didn't take his galoshes or muffler or macintosh, only a sweater. They parked out near the canyon and then hiked three miles to a good spot to watch the sunset. My father always gets a faraway look in his eye when he describes that sunset, how the clouds were dashing across the sky like a flock of wild egrets fleeing a forest fire, flying toward them, croaking like mad dinosaurs. Which turned out to be a problem because they were rain clouds and my father got soaked and caught mild pnumonia and had to stay at home for two weeks. That was before I was born. So now, my father always takes his muffler and macintosh even when we're only going down to Oscar Wells Park. And his galoshes too, if it is September and my mother is concerned.

My father was an associate professor at Indiana State College at Cleveland, in the Anthropology department. Indiana State College is not a very important place for Anthropology. Anthropology takes a lot of money, and Indiana, being only a state college, did not have any money for expeditions or commissioning studies or attracting the kind of funding you need even to send graduate students out into the field. But one year my father got this idea how he could give his students a feel for real field work.

For years his students had been making casts and molds and reconstructions of artifacts; pottery, tools, those little goddess figurines that have really fat middles and no heads. My father decided he would bury some artifacts in our back yard and have his students dig them up. He brought home a box full of junk one friday, he called it a suite; a bunch of vases and bowls and a few little statues. On saturday he went to the garden supply store and bought a pick and shovel and a huge hunk of flint rock which he spent all afternoon breaking up with a Sears Craftsman hammer.

For the next two months my father spent every weekend digging up the backyard. We have a large backyard because a creek cuts across it, at the back, and nobody wanted to build houses too near the creek. My father said this was perfect because it is usually creeks, eroded by spring floods, that reveal the presence of unsuspected occupations by indiginous peoples.

At first it was pretty interesting. My sister Marilyn and I spent saturday afternoons sitting on the back porch, drinking milk, eating the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches my mother prepared for us, watching my father whack away at the hard packed clay soil of the creek bank. Near the house my mother had buried the clay beneath mounds of potting soil from the nursery so she could grow the daffodils and tulips she loves so much. In spring there are always flowers on the table, and that spring there was also dirt, because my father would come in for dinner in his digging clothes, scattering clods and bits of gravel from his rolled up shirt cuffs.

When he finally was done with the digging there was a trench wide enough that I couldn't touch both sides with my arms stretched out, and two piles of dirt on either side so high that Marilyn and I used them as forts. My father walked around the house flexing his muscles and saying that he would dig to China and become the next Arnold Schwartzenegger. All this time my mother said nothing except to warn him when he started getting too close to her flower beds.

By the time my father got done burying all the pots and figurines and flint shards in exactly the places he wanted them it was already summer and there wasn't any time to organize the expedition to our back yard. He said that was ok because the backyard was all dug-up looking and that the rains that winter would help pack the dirt down.

That winter in Cleveland was the wettest winter in fifty years. It rained for weeks, off and on, a day, two days at a time. The dug up place in the back yard turned into mud. On the cool sunny days in between rains Marilyn and I, and sometimes Jeanine, would scoop up the doughy damp clay and make bowls and pots and figurines, pretending we were primitive peoples. Sometimes my mother would let us dry them in the oven. Then we would take them outside and lose them in the muddy heap. Since they were never fired they were never there when we went back to look for them; they had melted back into the red-brown soggy dirt.

One week in October it rained continuously for seven days. I used sticks to mark high water in the creek every day after school, and every day I had to move the stick back or find another. On saturday morning the water was rushing by at the end of my father's project site. As the rain continued, getting heavier, the softer mud of the dig began to wash away. The hard clay around the dig site created an eddy that made the soft mud wash away even faster.

In the afternoon my father came home from a conference, looked out our living room window and swore: "Damn. Jeanie, have you heard the news?"
"What news?" my mother said from the kitchen.
"The news. The weather report."
"Oh. Did I hear the news."
"What did they say. More rain?"
"I heard it this morning. Maybe it changed."
"What?"
"More rain."
"Damn." my father swore.
"Louis, come help me with the table," my mother said. She tries to keep us from hearing swear words.

I watched out the window while they clattered dishes in the kitchen and the stream rose up to the middle of my last stick and then washed it away.

"Mom, I gotta put another stick out."
"Andy, you're not going out in this rain. Dinner will be on the table in a few minutes. Go wash your hands."

As I passed by the kitchen door on my way to the bathroom I heard my mother say "Louis, you remember that time we went to the Grand Canyon?"

When I got back from the bathroom Marilyn was in her chair, and Jeanine was in her high-chair, and my mother was serving tuna casserole to everyone and my father was gone.

"Where's dad?" I said.
"He had to run an errand."
"Daddy went to the store 'cuz the hardware is closed." Marilyn said.
"Eat your supper," my mother said, sitting down next to Jeanine and starting to spoon stuff from Gerber jars onto her face.

When I was working on dessert I heard the Plymouth pull into the driveway. The door didn't slam right away.

"What's dad doing?" I said.
"Don't talk with your mouth full."

I finished my cake and asked to be excused. From the living room, in the dusk light out the living room window, I could see my father in his jacket and oxfords digging at the crumbling slope of soft clay, filling plastic grocery bags from the supermarket.

"Mom, what's dad doing?"

My mother came in from the kitchen with Jeanine on her shoulder, patting and bouncing to make her burp. She came to stand beside me by the window. Jeanine burped. My mother said "Your father is saving civilization."

"Huh?"

Dad was digging and piling bags and digging. The bags kept slipping off each other.

"Mom, dad needs help."
"Have you finished your homework?" she said.

My father stayed in our back yard for hours, shoveling and piling and re-piling plastic bags of dirt while the water came up and up. Even after it got dark. In the morning it was still raining, but not very hard. In our backyard there was a big empty trench where my father's archeology dig was supposed to be. It looked like the Grand Canyon. Later, when the rain stopped we all went out to look at the hole.

My mother said, "At least my flower beds didn't wash away."

My father said he felt sick and went back to bed. He got pnumonia pretty bad. I must have taken him enough chicken soup to fill up the hole in our backyard. When he got better he still stayed in bed. They had a substitute professor to do his classes and it was so late in the school year that they decided he should just be on sabbatical for a while. He started reading about Louis Leaky and Jane Goodall and Diane Fossey, and Birute' Galdikas.

When he finally got out of bed we all went down to Oscar Wells Park to look for artifacts. That was where all the dirt from our back yard washed down to. The Cleveland Parks Department said he should have had a permit to do excavations in our backyard. All we found were plastic bags from the supermarked buried in the mud from our backyard. No pot pieces, no statues, no pieces of rock.

My father said; "It rains a lot in Borneo too."

In the summer my father packed a suitcase and went away.

As he was walking out the front door my mother said "Did you pack your galoshes?"

My father nodded and got into the car. About two months later we got a post card from Sumatra with a picture of a baby orangutan on the front. On the back my father had written: "Orangutans are not really hairy little old men with long arms. They just look like hairy little old men with long arms. I love you all. Your father."