The writing below was in response to a prompt for a writer’s group in 2018. The events described took place in Victoria BC in October 2016.
“You can just let me out here,” I said to my carpool. We were one-and-a-half-weeks into a two-week intensive training, and my healing brain was cooked. (Of the 14 people in the program, two of us were in long-term recovery from traumatic brain injuries, and one was in recovery post cancer treatments.) Our bodies were beginning to break down, and our abilities to learn and function were waning.
For me, I was not only losing my focus
and my temper, but I was also beginning to lose my immune system. My eyes were
red and puffy every day, watering throughout class for no clear reason. My
roommate, the cancer survivor, spent most of her class time on the floor,
coaxing her body to relax throughout the lessons. Although the intensive was
focused on our collective passion – music – and set in a beautiful church on
the heavenly water’s edge of Victoria, BC, we were all beginning to reach our
breaking point. I could feel it.
“Just let me out here,” I said again,
although we were nowhere near our homestay. “I’ll meet up with you later.”
“You sure?” my host and driver said.
“Yeah, this is good.”
Cathy pulled over and let me out on a
street corner at the edge of town. I was past the main drag with all the shops
and restaurants, but the closest thing to me was the Royal BC Museum, which
boasted a mammoth exhibit inside. “Perfect,” I thought to myself.
I loved museums, and I loved visiting
museums in foreign cities. But even more, I loved mammoths.
I looked at my watch. It was almost
4:30 – the closest thing we’d had to a day off during the whole intensive so
far. The museum closed at 5pm, and tickets were $15BCD. I decided to go for it.
Ticket in hand, I dashed up the
escalator toward the art exhibits. My aim was to see as much art and local
history as possible in the time allotted, then take a spin by my beloved
mammoths on the way out. I grew up in LA and frequented the La Brea Tar Pits,
where mammoths were a feature. They felt familiar, like home. I wanted to at
least pay them a visit.
But as my body reached the top of the
escalator, I felt it pull left instead of right. There was the sign, clearly
pointing to the right for art and history. But my body went left, and I found
myself in the ice age, face to face with a hologram projection of a mammoth.
A smile broke out across my face
immediately, and the child I keep not-so-deeply-tucked inside my heart came
instantly to the surface of my personality. I began playing with a trunk
simulator, trying to pick up objects with a mechanical protrusion, driven by a
joystick. A security guard walked by and chided me for beaming at my own
success. “It’s hard, eh?”
“Yeah, not for a pro like me tho.” I
smirked at him.
Aware of my time and feeling the
minutes tick away, I blasted through more of the exhibit, trying to see it all
and get to the art galleries before the museum closed. I discovered pygmy
mammoths – little ones that lived on Catalina Island where I spent my childhood
summers, and delighted in this discovery. I said hello to the saber tooth cats
and bears that were mounted alongside the full-grown mammoths for scale and
scenery. I took selfies, trying to soak it all in, determined to have something
for my healing brain to look at besides sheets of music that night.
I had dashed through a small room on my
way to the end of the exhibit, and was about to shift gears and head into the
rooms of arts and history, when something stopped me.
What had been in that small room? It was darkly lit and crowded when I had gone
through. I took a step further toward the exhibit exit, but was pulled back
again.
Art would have to wait. Before I left
Victoria BC, I needed to see what was in that room.
When I returned to the darkened
chamber, my breath caught in my chest. It was quiet now – all the museum
patrons having left at this point, except me. One security guard remained, at
the edge of the room. It was silent in there, and dim, except for a lit
Plexiglas display case mounted in the center of the room, inside which stood a
real mammoth.
A real one.
A baby one, surely, for she was only
about 2 ½ feet tall. Her wrinkled skin mostly covered her eyes, still in their
sockets, and eyelashes and ear hair brushed outward from her lovely creases.
Even on the back of her knees, I noticed, there was hair there – bristle-like
and course, a tan color. Lighter than I expected. She looked familiar.
“Isn’t she beautiful?” the security
guard asked from the doorway.
“She’s stunning,” I answered, breathless.
I put my hand to the class, mere inches from this 4,000 year old creature. A
real mammoth.
“Her name’s Lyuba,” the security guard
continued. “It’s Russian for ‘Love.’ A farmer found her in his field, out in
Russia. They were going to tour her around North America, but I guess they
don’t trust the United States right now. That’s how we got her.”
I had to come to Canada to meet a
mammoth, I thought. Of course. It all made sense. I had grown up around mammoth
bones in LA, seen whole adult and juvenile skeletons unearthed from under
Wilshire Boulevard. I had loved them as long as I could remember. But here was
Lyuba, the littlest, and the most perfect, most in tact, most innocent, most
ancient being I had ever been face to face with, and all I had to do was cross
the border to meet her.
There was 10 minutes left until closing
time. More than once, I tried to leave, but Lyuba called me back. I gave in to
her Siren song, and stayed. The security guard politely let me have my moments
with her. I put my hand on the glass and closed my eyes, trying to remember
every crease, every wrinkle, every curve and detail of her perfectly preserved
little body. Lyuba means Love. Of course it does. She is Love.
Lyuba’s eyes contained messages. I
asked her what she had come through time and space to say. The answer came
immediately.
“Time is long,” she said. “Slow down.”
When the museum closed, I floated down
the escalators on a cloud. I had met Love, and been granted 10 minutes alone
with her. She had died young – only 33 days or so in the body – before going on
to be preserved immortally for another 41,800 years until an unsuspecting human
found her. Until she traveled to Canada, and I traveled to Canada, and we
shared 10 minutes together on the planet. That’s impossible. But it happened.
She was young, and old. She was ugly,
and gorgeous. She was dead, and very much alive. The youngest infant; the most
ancient elder. Lyuba was everything.
