Taki the Beautiful

from trevor’s encyclopedia of beautiful things

Taki was beautiful.

She was beautiful on the outside, with dark hair, brown eyes, and brown skin against the white snow.

She was beautiful on the inside, with a warm heart beating against the Arctic cold.

She was kindly beautiful, beautifully kind.

When she was born, her aaka swaddled her in a blanket her aakaaluk sewed for her.

The blanket was red, the color of the sky over Point Hope at dusk, just before the night sky blanketed the people in frozen darkness.

Across the blanket, stitched with bright yellow thread, were the three Arctic whales - the beluga, the narwhal and the bowhead.

“With the beluga whale, I hope curiosity and music into the life of the baby,” aakaaluk whispered, “For the beluga look quizzically at you and sing songs that cause us to call them the canaries of the sea.”

“With the narwhal whale, I hope compassion and empathy into the life of the baby, for the narwhal will place the tip of its own hornlike tooth into the broken tooth of another narwhal to ease its suffering and pain.”

“And with the bowhead whale, I hope mystery and endurance into the life of the baby, for the bowhead’s scientific name is Balaena mysticetus and that best describes its wonderful, mysterious ways. It lives longer than any creature on Earth, for its heart beats slow and strong in the cold, cold waters.”

Taki's aakaaluk was an artist with needle and thread.

There were two narwhal whales.

The long tooth of one of the narwhals, the one that extended out from its upper lip, the one that makes all narwhals look like unicorns of the sea, was broken.

She sewed the hurt and despair of the wounded whale into its face so you could feel its pain just by looking at it.

In the face of the other whale she sewed compassion and hope that you could also feel as it placed its own tooth into the hole of the broken tooth to assuage the pain of her friend.

Taki’s aaka and aapa planned to name her after her aakaaluk, whose name was Asiavik.

Asiavik is the Iñupiat word for the Alpine blueberry.

It’s a berry that grows over the Arctic tundra.

It provides food for the smallest mouse to the largest person in the time of its harvest til the deep winter.

It can be frozen and preserved for good use.

Asiavik was beautiful, helpful and always there when you needed her, like the berry for which she was named.

The week before Taki was born, Asiavik died.

A strong, healthy heart has two billion heartbeats to give to the world.

Asiavik’s heartbeats made the world a more beautiful, ingenious, wonderful, courageous place.

In the Iñupiat way, when people die, their names are given to the next babies born into their families.

In this way, the loved ones can live again among the people.

Their beauty, ingenuity, wonder and courage can grow in the new person.

Yes, Taki was to be named Asiavik.

Her parents changed their minds, however, she was days old and whistled the song of the bowhead whale from her aapa's memory.

“Her name is Taklaingiq,” they announced as they introduced her to Point Hope.

“What!?” asked the people as they whispered among themselves.

“How could they not name her after her aakaaluk?”

“Why would they not welcome Asiavik back among the people?”

No one asked these questions out loud, though.

The Iñupiat people are polite and thoughtful and do not question the motives of others.

They wondered silently.

What might become of the baby?

Would she be broken because her parents broke the old ways of the Iñupiat?

Her parents never answered the unspoken questions or addressed the concerns of the people.

They simply let her name stand as it was.

Taklaingiq.

In the ancient, sacred language of the Iñupiat people, it meant “one who must not be mentioned.”

In the ancient, sacred language, it was the word for the bowhead whale.

That is what she would become.

Like the bowhead whale.

Life for the people.

Life for the world.

They would call her Taklaingiq.

Taklaingiq the courageous.

Taklaingiq the wonderful.

Taklaingiq the genius.

Taklaingiq the beautiful.

Taki.

Mattie

“Po lidda fella,” said the old, weathered woman with skin as dark and wrinkled as the bark and arms as thin and knobby as the farthest reaches of the branches of the island’s ancient oak trees. 

She spoke with the flavor of her Gullah ancestors, who had created a new language in the lowcountry of South Carolina by mixing the west African words they happily learned while sitting on their mothers knees with the English words they were forced to learn when they were stolen away from their own people and lands and brought here to America. 

She lived a holey floored, crack walled, Duck taped windowed shotgun style shack on John’s Island left over from the days of slavery and the Jim Crow laws. 

She fished along the inlet and the shoreline each morning trying to catch red fish, sea trout and flounder to go with the fruits and vegetables that grew out of her garden. 

She wove sweet grass into baskets from the late mornings to the early evenings. 

“Jus sits dere,” she continued, “Eva monin’ as de sun rises ova de ocean an sits on de wada like a ripe tomata. Neva says one word. Jus sits dere a’watchin de wada and a’list’nin to de waves.”

One day she walked over to him and stood beside him. 

The sun cast her shadow over him.

She protected him from the brightness of the new day. 

“Wha’s yo name?” she asked kindly. “My name’s Mattie. Could you tell me yo name?”

He turned his earthy brown eyes to her. 

He didn’t say one thing. 

She figured he didn’t understand her. 

His mami and abuelo were migrant workers picking peaches and tomatoes in the lowcountry summer until they were ready to move down the coasts of Georgia and Florida with the fall and winter. 

She thought maybe he only spoke Spanish, since his family had made it to the United States from the farms and fields of El Salvador in Central America.

Suddenly, he whistled. 

It astonished her, and she almost fell over into the sand. 

The sound was unlike any whistle she had ever heard before. 

A usual whistle has two notes and a high pitch, but this was an unusual whistle. 

Its sound had all kinds of notes in it, and the pitch went high and low, low and high and all kinds of places in between. 

It was as if the great composers had written his whistle at the height of their compositional powers.

“Ya know, it was like he was a’tryin to say somepin to me in a be-yoo-tee-ful way,” she explained, “But I din’ hab no idée whad id was.”

He looked back over the water and at the sky again, and was very still and quiet. 

She felt a wide compassion for him in the deepest part of her heart. 

Taki and Hilcias in Brownsville

from trevor’s encyclopedia of beautiful things

They looked out the window of the Greyhound bus, side by side, cheek to cheek.

The heat and humidity of the Brownsville morning and the air conditioning on the bus caused the windows to fog.

Hilcias pulled his sleeve over his hand and used it as a kind of windshield wiper, moving it back and forth until he and Taki could see clearly the Gulf of Mexico along the coastal road.

“Wow,” clicked Hilcias softly, “Maybe 52 Blue is there.”

“Maybe,” whispered Taki. “I sure hope so.”

People began to stir and stretch and reach for their bags above and around them, but Hilcias and Taki stayed as still and quiet as the leaves on the trees that lined the street beside the bus station.

There are five foundational forces in the universe.

They hold everything together.

They bring order if all is well.

They cause chaos if all is not.

Four of them can be explained by physics.

They are the gravitational force, the electromagnetic force, the weak force and the strong force.

The gravitational force keeps planets in orbit around their suns and our feet firmly planted on the earth.

The electromagnetic force brings us electricity, information, and connection. It underlies the mighty power of lightning and the gentle touch of the human hand.

The weak force brings us nuclear power and makes stars shine.

The strong force holds protons and neutrons inside of atoms.

The fifth foundational force can’t be explained by physics, though.

It can only be explained by being human.

It is love.

Taki and Hilcias stepped off of the bus into the early morning sunlight.

“We should go to the water,” said Taki.

She looked at the horizon between the Gulf of Mexico and the Brownsville sky.

Hilcias looked at the horizon, too.

He whistled an okay.

They reached out for each other’s hands.

They walked together down the road toward the gulf.

This created that fifth foundational force, which is the strongest force of all, for it keeps hearts in orbit around each other and gives the possibility of finding a lost and lonely whale in the vast, vast reaches of the deep, blue sea.

Taki

from trevor’s encyclopedia of beautiful things

Taki lived beneath the whale bone arch in Point Hope, Alaska at the edge of the Chukchi Sea.

The arch was made of two bowhead whale jaw bones planted vertically in the ground, forming a gateway from the land to the Arctic waters and from the Arctic waters back to the land.

It says quietly, humbly to the world, "The Balaenidae mysticetus gives it's whole life to the people, and you have entered a place where the people give their whole lives to the world."  

Her house was made of yellow wooden slats and a red tin roof.

It had four windows, one for each side of the house, so she could see all four cardinal directions of the Arctic land and sea.

A little chimney rose slightly above the roof's ridge.

Smoke from the evening fire swirled ever so gently into the night sky and thinned itself up and out into the star filled sky.

She sat by the fire in the front room, warming herself against the 24 hour night of the deep Arctic winter.

She looked out over the Chukchi Sea.

The water was calm, and the stars reflected off it like little lights.

Ice floes crept slowly with the tide.

Whales sang to each other.

Her heart sang for the beauty of it all.