Baku's Theory

BAKU'S THEORY /Janet Kauffman OUT THE DOOR of the Palace Cafe, it is ten below. Baku Pledhla wears his long wool coat. He wraps his neck in scarves. Tanya Johnson zips up her green jacket and hands me two wool caps, wrap-around sunglasses, ski gloves. Nadeen MuIfana, the tall one, wears her cousin's black snowmobUe suit. "There are three reasons to be out here," Nadeen says, "and one of them is not fish." She shouts, her mouth behind a coarse wool wrap, the fabric probably wet against her Ups, and frozen just past that. Nadeen eats no meat, no flesh. She stops at the edge of the lake, sets her boot on a ridge of clear ice, and leans on an orange-handled ice auger. She breathes out and blows upward. I see a puff in front of her eyes. "Reason one," she shouts, "is the cold! It is good to witness extremes. Reason two, the sky!" "Le ciel," Tanya Johnson says. She pushes a pink life-preserver cushion under chin and tips her head up, to look. "It is blue sky with clouds," Baku says, scanning. "White clouds. WeU, gray-white. Gray-green, blue-gray." Nadeen stands up very straight. "Reason number three, of course—the ice!" She hits the ice with the heel of her boot. Baku shuts his eyes. An oceanic, voice-like whonk of ice sounds along a new fault line—I watch it crack—across the three hundred yards to Goose Beach. It takes fifteen years to know where you are, and to know if it makes sense to be there. You understand, this is Baku Pledhla's theory. He refers to it whenever necessary. And it is often necessary. I don't know if it makes sense to be here. This is a concern I have had, wherever I've been. No matter how long. It is hard for a human being to feel at home, although Baku works at it. He knows at least where you have to start. You have to get used to the bottomland drainage, which creates environments for tree toads and pondweed, oddities of waterfowl like the moorhen, the grebe—whose call at least is famiUar, a low, repeated bark like the bark of the short-haired dog you had in 128 ' The Missouri Review the apartment in Vienna, say, or the other one in Nadjula, where the water flowed and flowed, feU easUy two hundred feet and the water fowl there were plain and simple ducks. Baku was prepared, stepping off the plane at JFK, to found an immigrant support group wherever it was he ended up—Reno, CharlottesvUle. Salunga, Osseo. Battle Creek, as it turned out. Baku's group includes immigrants from the whole range of foreign geographies, but also life-long American citizens, and I'm one of those, transferred from other states. There's no format—we do what we can, with our longings for plantain, or the smell of diesel, with the recurring dreams of Moroccan air. With the nightmares of burning straw roofs. With the desire to hear our names in our own languages, unaccountably tender. During the summer, we bought the ten doUar State Park admission tags. We bought binoculars. And we moved out into the landscape and walked, in our boots of various origins, over the boardwalks across bogs. Baku, Tanya Johnson, Nadeen MuIfana, always. Sometimes myself. Or the Escalap twins and George Deam. Sometimes Laura Herit and her mother. In town, we walked where there were sidewalks, and on through the subdivisions, where there were no sidewalks. Baku asked me to bring my camera. The Polaroid photos of these occasions have filled Baku's corkboard by the phone. In December, for the hell of it, Baku took the meeting outside the community center onto the parking lot, and using the buUdozed snow, constructed oversize Michigan creatures—muskrat, heron, wild turkey. Then they broke everything down into snowbaUs and battled it out. Baku made a caU from the pay-phone to get me there, and I took pictures before and after. For January, Baku selects Green Lake, and ice-fishing over DevU's Hole. It's a weU...