Peripheral Visions by Bateson Mary C

Author:Bateson, Mary C. [Bateson, Mary C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

Turning into a Toad

I GREW UP LEARNING NATURAL HISTORY from my father, paddling in summer through the swamp in New Hampshire or wandering the California woods, absorbing his steady attention to plants and animals. In the city, I kept an aquarium and went with him to the zoo. But when we moved to Iran, doing natural history with Vanni came less easily. The mountainous desert around Tehran has, of course, its own flora and fauna, but it was hard to get to with a small child and unfamiliar to me, dry and thorny. The zoo was a scandal: tatty, miserable animals, mocked by visitors offering lighted cigarettes to the chimps and reinforcing in their children the sense that wild animals and even most pets are vicious and dirty. Persian culture values cultivated places, walled and irrigated gardens, so when Iranian families picnic farther afield they bring their rugs, the images of enclosed and hospitable spaces, along with pots of food and samovars.

Vanni and I found our wildlife where we could: tadpoles in garden pools, beetles, a hawk with a broken wing that lived in our greenhouse but was never able to fly again. Vanni was out shopping with the housekeeper one day when they saw a large tortoise, its shell cracked in some highway encounter, and Vanni picked it up and put it in the shopping basket. The housekeeper was half hysterical when they got home, afraid to remove her passenger or to abandon the groceries. Vanni and I set the tortoise loose in our little garden, where its shell healed in the course of a year and it grazed peacefully on pansies and the excess kitchen greens the housekeeper began to enjoy hoarding for it.

Some months later, I traveled to Europe for a conference, my first absence since the family had come to Iran. I got up to wait for a cab to the airport while the rest of the household was still asleep. The early morning is a gentle time, before the dew is dried and the sun blazing, so I stepped out in the garden to greet the tortoise (whose name was Mud) and the day, and there I saw a magnificent toad, a toad that I very much wanted Vanni to see. I put it in a large empty storage jar and set it by her bed, rushed to scribble a note to my husband to make sure it was released later in the day, and ran out to meet my taxi.

And I began to worry. What would a two-year-old, waking up to find her mother gone and a toad sitting beside her bed, surely conclude? What price Piaget? What price Kafka.

A phone call from the airport woke Barkev up to move the toad away from the bedside so it could be produced later in the day, and confusion was averted. But I have wondered since whether I should have left well enough alone. Perhaps the transmutation of mother into toad might have conveyed a significant truth, a lesson rather than a trauma.

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