Storm (31 page)

And the Mighty Creator can’t find fault. After all, his chosen pair of bonobos survived the flood.

We walk all day, stopping only to fish and eat. We pass piles of debris. Twisted trees, bones. We can’t find a cave for the night, so we make a nest of dried, stranded seaweed for tinder and spin a stick of driftwood against a larger block of driftwood till sparks fly. We have a fire! Smoky, but hot. And, oh, for the first time in over a year, we eat food that is cooked. I had forgotten the taste of cooked food, the marvel of it. We sleep in a heap, all six of us.

This becomes our pattern. By the third day we make it all the way down the mountain. Swampland extends to the foot of the next one, and on both sides of the swamp is the sea. The land has to dry out more before we can continue south, around
the base of that next mountain and onward. We set up camp.

All at once Queen and The Male go wild with hoots. They race away from us, moving so fast across the swamp, it’s dizzying. Now they’re climbing that next mountain. Scampering up it faster than goats. And then I see it: a lone olive tree high on the mountain. Incredibly, it is covered with leaves! The dove’s tree. Queen and The Male reach it and climb and swing in its branches. They settle there. My heart is suspended. I realize they belong in trees; this would be a good home for them.

We eat in silence.

But when we curl up to sleep, Queen and The Male are back with us.

Thank you.
There have to be more trees ahead. We’ll find a land with lots of trees. Or we’ll make one.

By the end of the fourth day, the swamp has been reduced to mud. We slog through it and walk around that mountain, which we think of now as Olive Mountain, and continue south, moving more and more west, as the water recedes. A third mountain looms to the southwest. Its base is a good next goal. Everything is changing fast. We camp each night on beach, only to wake with the water far off.

By the end of the seventh day, we have passed the entire mountain range. We look back and it’s green. Grasses and weeds have popped out already—just days after being free of the water. The mountains are regenerating. Life is coming back in all its glory!

Well, I can add to it. I made up my mind the night Queen and The Male romped in the olive tree. Each plant of my garden is packed in dung—and that dung has seeds in it. From here on I will plant seeds as we go. Who knows what will spring up from them? The terrain here is rolling hills. Before the flood, it must have been covered with forests interrupted by meadows. It will bloom again—with my seeds lending surprises.

The air is beautifully clear, and sometimes we can see so far that we know the shore is curving. We go with it, as much west as south now. We come across a giant pile of debris, bigger than anything we’ve passed so far. The remnants of human life—broken benches and tables.

We could build a home here. But we’ll find this sort of thing over and over—and it’s better to keep going. So we search through the mess and gather what’s useful and easy to bring along. We make a second sled from a door, and I pull the whale-rib sled, while Bash pulls the heavier one. We have a fishing net now. And ropes. And more buckets and a wooden spoon and bowl.

We come across a small boat. It would be faster traveling. But I won’t climb into it. The ark was too recent. Besides, we’d have to leave behind some of the paraphernalia we’ve gathered to fit in it. And I don’t want to give up anything. The ordinary objects of a household feel precious to me now. They are so very hard to make. We leave the boat be.

The next night scraping sounds wake me. I sit up in
surprise. And we are surrounded by them: sea turtles! So many sea turtles crawl along the beach. Well, of course; they nest on land. They’ve been waiting for land as much as any of us. There must be hundreds of them. They crawl, each to her own spot, and fling pebbles this way and that with their flippers. Then they rotate their bodies in place till they’ve formed a pit. They dig with their back flippers now. I wish I could see them more clearly. But I don’t dare go near; I don’t dare take the chance of disturbing them after they’ve waited so very long for this. I fall back asleep.

In the morning, the turtles are gone, and their pits are covered over with pebbles. Bash and I dig carefully, and we collect a few dozen eggs. There are many in each nest; still, we don’t take more than a couple from a single nest. It is a splendid breakfast. And a splendid evening meal too.

On the thirteenth morning we find another boat. Far larger. And it somehow still has its cloth sail. Bash asks me with his eyes. I smile.

We clean it up and Bash tests it. It doesn’t take in water. I wonder if the fishermen were out at sea when the rains started. Like Aban. I wonder if the boat filled to the brim and they held on, fiercely hoping. Maybe holding hands. Like my brothers. When did they finally realize? What were their last words? I feel heavy as we climb on board. Especially since Screamer refuses to come with us. It drives me half-wild to leave him.

But as we sail along the shore, Screamer runs there. Every
now and then we lose sight of him, but by the time we stop at night, he’s with us again. He follows me around as I scatter seed-laden dung in our new campsite. We build a great fire and look at the sky, all of us together. The ark is so far behind us now we could never see it, even if we stood on the tallest mountain in the world. But in my head I can see everyone inside it—everyone except the helmsman. I know they are counting the days, just as I am. Mother Emzara gave me the count. I know that on the fifteenth day Noah will open the great door in the side of the ark and a new phase of the world will begin. I know every husband and wife on that ark can’t wait.

I fall asleep on Bash’s chest.

In the morning the sky is cloudy. Not fluffy white clouds—but gray ones. We eat breakfast, then sail until evening. We scatter seeds and build a fire and eat again. But there are no stars to watch tonight. No moon. Only clouds.

“It will rain again,” says Bash. “Soon. Rivers will form. We can follow the first river we find. And go up it until we know we’re in the right place. We can make a home.”

“Surrounded by pistachio trees.”

“Yes,” says Bash. “And I’ll call our home Sheba. It will grow. It will become a town someday. It will be so big, it will have a king and a queen. We could be king and queen.”

“Those roles are already taken,” I say, and I point with my chin at Queen and The Male.

That night I fall asleep petting Screamer with one hand and Pishon with the other.

Before dawn it rains, just as Bash said, just as I knew. I could laugh. Rain brought the animals into the ark. Rain will bring them out. It’s fitting.

But by the time dawn comes, the rain has dribbled off. And oh! I shake Bash awake. “Look!” I shake Pishon awake. “Sweet baby, look, look.”

Huge streaks of colors curve across the sky in a bow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. The sun glitters through the mist.

I am dazzled.

The mist stays and the colors stay and I think about the animals. All this time they have known nothing. They have long since given up hope. The swinging doors of their cages are opening, even now, and they are hesitating. They walk outside unsteadily, blinking against the sun, disoriented. But then a vague and distant memory stirs—it must stir. Something deep inside them recognizes wind and ground and space. They will leave and multiply and replenish the earth.

And Noah’s sons are young; their wives are young. So many of their problems are gone with their first step from the ark. Their liberation. After all this time of caring for the animals, they can care for one another again. They will cleave together, and build a new civilization for their children. Maybe many new civilizations.

It will all happen as Noah said. As the Mighty Creator wants.

We are all learning how to be free again. We are all learning to know joy again.

I have a habit of reading classic stories repeatedly, whether they are folktales, fairy tales, myths, or religious stories. I find that if I read them open to the conjecture of what would happen to me if I lived in this time and place and through this event, on each reading I will see things in the stories that I hadn’t noticed before. The stories will seep inside me and I’ll feel them as I walk along, going about the ordinary tasks of my life. They will press on me.

Soon enough I’ll ask what would happen not to me, but to someone who had characteristics that gave them a particular slant on the event. Maybe someone who would be most affected by it. Or someone who would have an unusual response to it. Basically, someone who could shake things up, so that when they settled, we’d have a new understanding of the event.

Why write about a flood? As a small child, I had a tremendous fear of drowning, though I never had a bad experience in water. I think most of us go through this fear—and with reason. When my husband was six, his twelve-year-old cousin saved him
from drowning in a gravel-pit pool. When my own children were small, I watched them grit their teeth as they faced the task of learning to swim. Waters can be fatal—and floods are fatal to many, all at once.

This fear seems to haunt humans in general. Many cultures have a story of a great flood in ancient times, even Australia, which is known for arid conditions. In fact, in the Aboriginal tale, the animals got together to try to find a way to end a long drought. If they could make the frog laugh, the drought would end. So they did, and from the frog’s laughing mouth came a flood in which many humans and animals died. The cause of the Aboriginal flood is as arbitrary as can be. In other cultures, however, the flood is the result of natural causes, as in the floods of the oral traditions of China, which go back to 3000 BC.

Still, very often in these stories the ancient flood was sent by a god or gods to wipe out the evil that had developed among human civilizations. Several flood stories of this ilk are found in Mesopotamia. The oldest one comes from the ancient Sumer civilization (which was located in what is now Iraq). This flood tale was written as an epic poem in the seventeenth century BC. In that story, the gods decided to destroy humans, so they told King Ziusudra to build a large boat to weather it. The storm lasted seven days. Interestingly, this story mentions a river flood, and there is radiocarbon-dating evidence of river floods in this area of the world around 2900 BC. Still, around twelve hundred
years elapse between those actual floods and the story of the flood—so was the tale really based on a historical event?

In the Indian peninsula there are also tales of floods in ancient times. The
Shatapatha Brahmana
, for example, is a Hindu text written between the eighth and sixth centuries BC. In it the god Vishnu tells the first human to build a giant boat, because a flood is coming to purify the earth.

In Greek mythology the god Zeus let loose a flood out of fury at humans’ savage behavior. He washed everything clean. But the human Deucalion, with his wife Pyrrha, survived the deluge by floating it out in a box. Deucalion first appears in Greek literature in the third century BC.

Central and South American cultures also have flood myths. The
Popol Vuh
was written around the 1550s, and it tells many myths and historical stories of the Mayan people known as the K’iche’—one of which is a flood story. The gods caused flooding because people had failed to worship them. Then the animals that had been abused by the people—that had been made to work for them and that had been hunted by them—rose up against the people as they ran from the floods. All humans were annihilated, but somehow they did have descendants—and that is the source of the monkeys in the trees. The Muisca, a tribe of the Andes, told oral tales about a man named Bochica, who taught the people agriculture and crafts and how to live a moral life, and then went off to live as an ascetic. The people later stopped following the ways Bochica had taught them, and two
of those people caused floods to come. Bochica returned and saved everyone by making stupendous waterfalls to drain away the floodwaters.

And, of course, in the Book of Genesis of the Bible, we find Noah’s flood, which was the basis for this story.

So the draw of a flood story is huge—and it overwhelmed me. I am a gardener—not by profession, but by metabolism perhaps. I love nothing more than to spend hours working in the dirt. I still marvel at the first tomato of the season, at the last onion. The replenishing nature of the earth calms me. So a flood is a threat not just to my physical life, but to my spiritual life. That drew me too.

Sebah was a natural character for me to come up with. She was a Canaanite farmer, tied to nature by both her daily chores and her religion. She is not particularly devout—and I made that decision on purpose. I didn’t want her religion to give her all the answers; I wanted her to look around and figure things out in a unique way—her own personal way. She is hardworking and resourceful—qualities that serve her well on the ark. She can empathize with the animals around her because of her own experiences and inclinations. And the animals respond to her, because many animals will respond to the behaviors of those around them, and bonobos, in particular, are our closest cousins and are known for taking care of others.

In writing this book, I relied first on the Bible, which actually tells little about the flood and Noah’s family—thus allowing
me latitude in developing some aspects of their characters. We also know little about the historical timing of the biblical flood (biblical scholars argue over this). Time in the Bible is not calculated in an ordinary way; people were said to have lived for hundreds of years; it is difficult to pin down biblical events as tied to historical events we know the dates of. So I decided not to worry about setting the story in an exact time or place. Instead I chose the general time of the third millennium BC and the general starting place for Sebah as a field outside an unnamed city in Canaan. Everything I wrote is consistent with the Book of Genesis as far as I know. (Following this note are the Bible verses I relied on in framing the timeline for the events in the story with a note in italics that gives the conclusions I reached based on those verses.) Where I took a liberty was with Og, king of Bashan. He appears in a Jewish midrash as an interloper on the ark, but one that Noah allowed. I decided to make him a stowaway . . . and whether Noah knows he is there or not is never made clear. My reasons were purely narrative—I think it made for a better story.