An anthropologist takes a swim
Missive 1
"Help me see the world through your eyes, so that we may speak a common language. Sometimes being teachable is all I truly have to give."
I’m a correspondent, reporting back from a faraway land, to a news station in your brain. Without you, I wouldn’t be.
And I’m an anthropologist, scratching field notes from longitudinal observations you haven’t the instrument to sense. Without you, I would have no point of reference, no control group.
Here, in a wilderness of backroads and blue water, I’m at once infiltrator and local, both undercover and preclusively converted to a culture that courses in my veins like a forgotten, under-city river. It’s in your veins too.
It’s not far. To get here from where you are, the most distance travelled is not through space but through changes in body states - more or less tonus, more or less wood hauling, more or less envelopment in furs. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, not while in my city clothes, but I’ve been there. I am still there. And by there, I mean here. I am writing to you from here.
If you’ve ever loosened your grasp on what you know to be true, long enough to have someone near to you die; If you’ve ever turned towards the giant, monstrous insect in your nightmare and watched your gaze transform it into a colourful sparkling jewel; If you’ve ever caught yourself doing the thing that years before you judged others for, well, you may already have a head start into understanding this place I’m in.
One time an anthropology grad student actually did come to study us in the wilderness of backroads and blue water. A real anthropologist, not like me pretending. His name was Tom. On his first night we gave him a bike and together we pedalled in the July heat and the low-hanging sun to the rocky shore. Tom looked on as we dropped the bikes then dropped our pants, hoots erupting, stretching out of our shirts and entering the cold waves of Huron like children. Golden light and splashes, with the old blue mountains holding silent vigil for us from across the water. Raucous bare bums and tits, immersion then emergence, dripping cool glints of light in our hair. Exuberance.
Tom stood naked in water to his calves, eyes splayed open in giddy astonishment, his excitement palpable in his 22-year-old muscles, under his sunsick skin. He grew up more in that moment than in all 4 years behind a university dorm-room desk.
I want you to know these things. I want to make you sunsick for them and then bring you along.