Woken Up by Silent Bonobos / Putting Horny Toads to Sleep

"What's so great about birds?" 

"They can fly." 

"They can fly. Sure. But they always have to land." 

I like it when memories lapse into a state where you're suddenly OK with exhuming them and giving them proper thought, honestly and impartially.

It's a sliding scale, that. Some memories, no matter how distant, remain too tender to touch. Other memories, recent by comparison, can be dragged out into the light almost immediately. 

But sometimes you realize, like lightning out of a clear sky, that some memories you thought you'd never really be able to face can suddenly come to mind with the realization that—at last—something has changed. Now you can revisit them with some clarity. Maybe you can finally pick something up about them that you were just incapable of even a day earlier.

I like it when that happens. Lately, I've wondered if memories are better than stories. Or maybe we go about it all wrong, writing stories in hopes they'll be remembered. Maybe, it's better to write memories in hopes that they may eventually become stories. 

I don't know. But, here are two memories, involving my father, that offered themselves to me recently for deeper reflection:

W O K E N    U P    B Y    S I L E N T    B O N O B O S

I went camping a lot with my Dad when I was a kid. I can't remember specifically what location he and I had just come back from on that occasion, but it was either Beaver Creek or Fossil Creek—two semi-frequent locations we'd visit for one- or two-day camping sojourns. Longer during the summer, which is likely when this memory occurred.

This was probably 1995. I may have been about 9 years old at that time.

There's a kind of exhaustion exclusive to kids—a body-tiredness you would feel sometimes that's a byproduct of not knowing how tired you are. An exhaustion you'd feel right at your peak, before a total burnout. 

On that day, the excitement of doing something fun—the adrenaline of adventure and the energy I got from being out in the hot sun, in nature, for an extended period—had combined with the limited sleep I had gotten during our trip. There's only so much sleep you can get in a hot tent, pitched on a bed of sand, inside a flimsy nylon sleeping bag. Add to that, spending the past couple of days going toe-to-toe with my old man, drinking a soda for every one of his beers, primed me for an unavoidable crash, which swarmed me not even an hour into the car ride home. Feeling the bounciness of our red Isuzu truck's tires on the rugged back roads along the Verde River basin, I fell into a weird, dreamless sleep.

Hours later I woke up at home. It was already dark outside, way past dinnertime. I had that disoriented feeling of having been inexplicably transported somewhere without my awareness.

The house I grew up in was the last house on an uphill dirt dead-end road in the thick of a pine forest in central AZ, about 20 miles from town. I've lived in small towns, big cities, and small towns again—but I've never been anywhere that had nights as quiet as the house I grew up in, our little wood cabin (built by my grandpa) surrounded by ponderosa. 

I had been laid to sleep on an old couch—it had a texture like burlap, very rough—with an orange and brown floral pattern. Waking up on that rough upholstery texture, shirtless, headachy, with my skin on fire from sunburn and possible heat exhaustion, I was overtired and overstimulated.

It was quiet, but there was also a nearly imperceptible and constant-droning sound that must've woken me up. So faint you probably wouldn't notice it, normally—but in the quiet of the night, in our cabin, there was a high-pitched, electronic tone emitting out of the box television set in our living room, adjacent to where I had been laid.

With those old TVs, that high-pitched frequency would shift—getting higher, or lower—depending on the brightness of the image displayed on the screen. If it was a very bright shot, the sound would be so high that you would strain to catch it. But at the next edit, if the following shot was much darker, the frequency would suddenly pitch down into a low electric hum. This variance was maddening—especially when combined with the ensuing brightness, and darkness, of the light emitting from the set, in our otherwise perfectly black nighttime home.

I stumbled into the living room in a daze. There, I found my Dad, asleep on the second couch we had, in front of the TV. How long had he been out? In the blinding glare of the television's light, everything not illuminated by its glow was pitch dark in contrast. 

He had fallen asleep with the volume completely off, watching a VHS cassette tape recording of a televised nature documentary program. 

I stood there, half-naked, in the dark, my eyes squinting against the brightness of the set, the electronic hiss of the television ringing in my ears, until I was slowly drawn into the nature show on the screen.

The scene that played before me involved a single bonobo sitting before a large dirt mound. He had brought with him a long narrow tree branch—straight as a rod—and was busily stripping it of its leaves. 

No doubt, if I were to turn up the volume, I would have heard the voice of a British narrator, expertly describing the behavior like something out of a novel about bonobos. But all I heard was the discordant piercing note of electronic components blasting signals of information upon the screen.

The bonobo then took his stripped twig and inserted it straight down the hole in the center of the mound. 

The camera cut in close—focusing on the bonobo's eyes. Cut again: to the bonobo's fingers, cleverly manipulating the stick this way and that. Ants, in a frenzy and furor, erupting out of the hole in the hill, scattering in all directions and ascending the length of the stick.

The bonobo then withdrew his stick from the hill. It was now nearly entirely black with ants. I watched as he brought the stick to his parted lips, exposing his long, flat yellow teeth. The bonobo passed the smooth stick between its lips, capturing dozens of ants at a time in its mouth, and began to chew them before replacing the rod back down into the hole of the anthill. 

My memory of the program ended there. Something about that scene, at that time, shown to me in this exact way, just fucked with me in a way that's always beguiled me. 

Like a frightening dream—you can articulate the components of the nightmare you had to someone else, but something is always missing. Something integral about the dream that made it frightening, specifically for you, lies beyond the total of its individual events. What doesn't translate when retelling a nightmare is the swell of malaise you feel inside you. The halting, petrifying terror you feel. The feeling of impending fate as the dream proceeds inevitably toward something that symbolizes some inner fear you cannot face. So, too, this memory of me seeing the nature documentary showing how bonobos use tools falls so short of the horror I felt in that moment. 

The sunburn. The exhaustion. The hunger. The deliriousness of waking up in the darkness. Alone and witnessing the scene as my father, my caregiver, lay sleeping on the couch to my right. The bonobos. So skillfully preparing their stick—so practiced. Eating mouthfuls of ants.

I think the reason why I've had so much trouble reconciling the memory is because it was, perhaps, the beginning of the death of my childhood.

I was ignorant, then, of the larger predicament my father and I were in at that time. I perceived that there was something unsustainable about our lives. But as a kid, I was limited in my capacity to mount a defense against obstacles beyond my comprehension. That's not a problem for children, though. Even now, I remain powerless against challenges that I cannot completely grasp or comprehend.

But I think now, the bonobos made me aware that trouble was coming. That the things I had known all my life would begin to disappear after that. The house we had lived in my entire life was unsustainable for us, and in only a few years we would abandon it. How could I have known that watching the bonobos feasting on ants revealed my father's loneliness to me in startling clarity? Before then, he had been my father——towering, in my eyes. 

Until I saw him, in the dark, lit by the glow of a television screen, asleep—and unaware of me. That was when I started to see that my father was a man, vulnerable and alone.

And that, just as much as the silent bonobos, woke me up.

P U T T I N G   H O R N Y   T O A D S   T O   S L E E P

It's worth mentioning how grateful I am for my father. If this memory comes across at all as a criticism of his parenting, it should be set in the context that he was without a doubt the best option I had, and I consider myself lucky that we had each other for those years. Things changed, as they do, as years passed by, and a part of me will always feel robbed of him near the end of his life—but for every one memory I have, like this, where his vulnerabilities were laid bare for me to see, I have five more that demonstrate his heart, his wit and his character. 

There's a Nietzsche quote:

"Modern man can't see God because he doesn't look low enough," 

For years I had no idea of what my father believed in terms of religion or deity. That was an answer I only got when he had reached his deathbed, and maybe there's a correctness to that. But Nietzsche's quote here always reminded me of my father. He seemed to me a man who had no pretensions about himself, or others, that would limit him from looking low enough to find God, if that's indeed where God was.

My Dad once taught me how to put a horny toad to sleep. We caught one, in our yard in that same house I described, this time in the daylight. He held it in his hand—turned the frightened lizard, very delicately, upside down so it was lying on its back on his palm, his other hand on top of it like a big blanket—and blew, gently, a soft little breath on its face. Like magic before my 4- or 5-year-old eyes, years before the bonobos, I watched as the lizard fell asleep at once in his hands. He set it down, and we both stood back and watched over it while it slept, until after a few moments—not even a minute—it came to, and scurried away, confused (but inexplicably well rested).

One needs to look low indeed to find horny toads amid fallen brown oak leaves. From what I gather, anytime Dad looked that low, he always found something interesting to point out to me.