The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness Read Online Free PDF Page A

realm of polar bears’ naps and shocking to see the creature so vulnerable and so confident in its own habitat. If it was in that habitat—sofar from the sea ice where I think it is supposed to be hunting—maybe it was in crisis. It was hard to tell, but a white bear on green tufts is not exactly camouflaged.
    Me: Being here was restful. It seemed both odd to be so comfortable in such a remote place and perfectly sensible to have come to the end of the world for the peace and quiet in which to nap. Which I did deeply and often, and at night I dreamed—of a forest that doesn’t actually exist at the end of my childhood street, a house on the corner of a street near Baker Beach in my city that also doesn’t exist, and then the childhood swimming pool piled higher than its deep end in wishing coins and debris thrown by neighbor children, and a visit with the infant son of an acquaintance in a house I have not actually been in for twenty or thirty years. It was so peaceful in this quiet place at the end of the world where I could only be reached by the radiotelephone that only my brothers had the number for.
    Swedish Baking. Sometimes what looked like rye bread was cake, sometimes what looked like fruit bread was rye with nuts, sometimes a great brown sourdough loaf was baked, sometimes the coffee cake that was put out on the round table in the saloon was extraordinarily moist and delicate, particularly considering that it was made by thin tattooed young women named Hannah and Erica, sometimes one wished that there was not quite so abundant a choice of sweets and starches. Spiral cinnamon rolls, cookies of various kinds with nuts, another moist coffee cake topped with toasted almond slivers and cardamom, chocolate cake, raspberry pie with whipped cream, and more. See Sleep (Me)
    Underwater Forests with Pink Lanterns . Sometimes when the Zodiac came into the shallows for a landing, you could look down and see whole forests of ruffled seaweed, long pale sheets of it in rows, and branching seaweeds, a kind of lushness that did not exist on shore, though great slimy mounds of kelp did. I said to Lisa, the guide, the forests here are all underwater, right? She beamed in approval that I had recognized this obvious fact. And there were also various kinds of jellyfish, notably, small ones like pink lanterns, like the ghosts of small cucumbers and sea urchins, like tiny zeppelins,floating by in the dark clear water, festively, so delicate, so enchanting, so unlike the massive warm-blooded animals you hear about here. There were urchin shells, tall spiraling seashells, occasional mussel shells on shore where the seabirds flew. These when alive were also wildlife.
    Walrus. The first walrus more wrinkled and pink and comic than I had imagined with its eyes invisible and its whiskery lip rising and falling like a gigantic cyclopian eyelid. A fanged eye. Its vast chest wrinkled and creased into chasms or crevasses of dry hide. Its tusks looking mildly dignified when its head is upright but also pointing sideways, and sometimes it scratched itself with its flipper and looked more agile and more like a cat or a dog. More walruses turning their heads in various directions so that their tusks looked like semaphore torches or runes, as though they were sending us messages we were inadequate to receive.
    Their Latin name is Odobenus rosmarus: Odobenus means “one that walks on teeth,” and rosmarus comes from Old Norse, meaning “horse of the sea.” So the walrus is a sea horse that walks with its teeth. “For me the walrus is a prehistoric animal. I feel like I am traveling back in time when I see them—or even smell them,” says Lisa Ström, and she tells us they can use the tusks to get up on the ice and the front flippers to walk on. They have lice, walrus lice, so they are always scratching themselves. The male averages 1,200 kilos; females, 800. Pink wart-like growths stud the male neck and breast. (“Maybe it’s attractive!”