Margaret Panofsky’s Thoughts Take Off

Terrifying Roots

In Day of the Jumping Sun, a handful of humans survive 2050’s WWIII by living in a cavern way up north on Baffin Island. Their descendants remain underground for five hundred years until a religious rift splits the population into two factions. The polytheistic Shade People remain below. The monotheistic Sun People take their chances outside in the vast unknown, becoming hunter-gatherers in the lush pine forests that have sprung up in the mountainous areas of the warming post-apocalyptic isle.

As the Sun People adapt to a new way of life, their religion embraces the forest until it becomes a holy site, second only in importance to the sun and its god, Corlaz One. Everything about the forest fills them with ecstasy, and its daily and yearly cycles of day, night, and the changing seasons inspire a liturgy that binds the society together.

This quotation sums up the depth of the Sun People’s feelings. “We love the Forest. We worship the Forest. It is our holy temple where our graves have always been and will be, where our children speak their first words and learn to walk. It is mother and father; it feeds us and instructs us. Whenever Corlaz One blesses the Forest with the bounty of his sunlight, we fall to our knees in wonder to kiss the Forest floor.”

So how do I, mother of the Sun People, feel about forests? I will preface my answer by relating a childhood trauma. When I was about five years old, my family visited Yosemite where we stayed in a cabin at White Wolf Lodge half way between the Valley and Tuolumne Meadows. In the wee hours, I headed for the bathrooms and miscalculated the direction. For what seemed like forever, I crashed about in the dark among the forest trees and at one point squelched through a muddy creek bed. My parents managed to find me without raising an alarm because my mother had sewn jingle bells onto the toes of my slippers.

Don’t get me wrong. I love forests almost as much as the Sun People love theirs. I took daily hikes in Stanley Park’s forest here in Vancouver until the weather turned cold—and I will again in the spring. The forest is huge and hilly with a mountain in the middle, and it’s made up of mainly shaggy old-growth pines interwoven with meticulously manicured trails. I have never seen anyone walking off-trail in the forest. Nor would I walk in it. It is boggy in places and overgrown with giant ferns and weedy bladed grasses in others. Broken, decaying stumps and downed logs are everywhere. And oh, the tree roots! They’re disturbingly gnarled misshapen things as big as houses. Animals are not in evidence, but warning signs stand along the trails. Don’t disturb the this, the that, it’s nesting season, cub season, the birds and beasts are touchy as hell.

Yes, the forest creeps me out. But I am drawn to it nonetheless, and when I’m there and forget the busy roads that are close by and the mountain bikers who sneak up soundlessly from behind, I feel serene, as young as an unfurled fiddlehead. I float along the paths sniffing the piney breeze, my eyes drowning in fifty shades of green. My head is in a good place. But then comes that extra heart thump when I see those ferocious roots or think too hard about what goes on in the bogs.

To me, the forest represents the cycle of life even as it succumbs faster to death.

Day of the Jumping Sun: Three Circles in One

Svnoyi, one of the teenage time travelers, is a newcomer to the Sun People’s village. She’s thrown headlong into a society she knows nothing about. Soon she finds herself swept into a religious ceremony that includes everyone, young and old, waltzing to an exuberant rendition of “Amazing Grace” (now titled “In the Sun”) performed by a band of singers, reed flutes, and percussion. She’s so taken by the experience that she asks her partner, Corlion, “Does everyone here live a life of complete happiness?”

The answer is no; the Sun People’s seemingly idyllic hunter-gatherer life in the pine-forested mountains of Baffling Isle is beset with overwhelming anxiety and many physical woes. However, their sun-worshiping religion, which is bound to the forest they consider sacred, vigorously unites and nurtures the inhabitants of all seven villages. Everyone participates in dance ceremonies three times a day. These take place at the Jimjamoree, a cleared area at the center of each village, where fresh pine needles are carefully raked into many repetitions of large circles inscribed with three small circles. Why so many threes? Their religion sprang from the trinitarian roots of Christianity that met its end a million years earlier along with most of the world’s human population.

Corlion, the mayor and high priest of the Pippin village, interprets the meaning of the three circles within a circle for Svnoyi, who has now become his fiancée. He’s in an ecstatic mood, and his poetic delivery both beautifies and blurs the meaning. Yet all the facts are there. He asks as clearly as any preacher giving a sermon, “The Three Circles, what are they?” Each circle has a designation—"Awakening,” “Truth,” and “Exultation”—because, as Corlion explains, “Everyone who dwells in the forest relives the three circles each day.”

Then he ties each word to the divisions of the day—to morning, noon, and night. And he explains how to realize the words. “Awakening” is the easiest. People get up. At the same time, they promise to make the most of the day. “Truth” is more complex; it happens at noon when the sun is high—that part of the day without shadows. It is a time for moral reflection since flaws in “the dark corners of our souls” are revealed by the sunlight. In short, it’s the hour to analyze one’s actions and try to become a better person. “Exultation” comes at night. It is hardly a time to tremble in the dark. It is rather a time for couples to be together, “exulting in each other’s arms.”

Just as a circle has no end, the religion always looks forward as well as backward when the Sun People give thanks for the day just passed and prepare for the next one. Corlion puts the year’s advance toward the arctic winter season into the mix. “We celebrate the day’s passing, remembering that each one brings us closer to the long nights of winter…. [We] will soon wake to the birds to bring us a new day or a new springtime.”

Even courtship follows the Sun People’s three-part ritual. Svnoyi and Corlion dutifully stick to the three steps, and the first, the sudden attraction or awakening, came naturally. If they get to the third, their love-making should be truly exultant because the middle circle's search for truth has become a stumbling block. After an emotionally charged confrontation, Svnoyi has second thoughts about a relationship that will end in marriage a year later. She reveals her alarm, “This is what I thought the circles were supposed to do for us, a new couple in love. The First Circle, Awakening, would be about mutual attraction. The Second Circle, Truth, would be about talking things over to see if we should be together at all….”

But what about the big outside circle that surrounds the small ones? The words that accompany “In the Sun," the "Amazing Grace” tune of the Jimjamoree dance ritual, give some hints. In fact, the lone verse is crying out for interpretation. (As you read the simple poem, try to imagine the “Amazing Grace” tune that fits the words perfectly.)

God Corlaz One, lives in the Sun,
And I, inside the Tree,
I circle once, I circle twice,
And thrice, I die with thee.

I like to explain it thus: The big circle symbolizes both the sun and its god, Corlaz One. Where he came from is a long story relating back to the actions of the original survivors of WWIII in 2050. Suffice it to say that Corlaz One has become the personification of the sun and dwells inside it. “I inside the Tree” refers to each Sun Person living in the forest. Then come the three circles, celebrated at Jimjamoree to represent the passing of a day, or a year, or a lifetime. The third circle, the circle of Exultation, brings a physical joining with a spouse, or with the sun at death—and not only a single person’s death, but if it were to happen, the death of all the Sun People. These are the final lines of Corlion’s explanation for Svnoyi. “If the forest dies, the Sun People will also die, each one of us becoming a mere pinprick of light that flares and fades on the vast bosom of Sun.” 

After I created a religion for the Sun People, I’d tell my friends that I liked it so well I could believe in it myself. Of course, I’d have to be a forest-dwelling hunter-gatherer in a distant place a million years from now—a fictional place called Baffling Isle.

Why Mythology?

When I was a child, I soaked up the ancient Greek myths and epic adventures that my mother read aloud as bedtime stories. Until a rotation system was established, the five of us kids would vie vociferously for the coveted spots on either side of her. Then we would enter a world of glorious and inglorious extremes—mayhem, murder, sexual exploits, and outrageous indignities—even though the tales within the beautifully illustrated books, Metamorphosis, the Iliad, and the Odyssey, had been cleaned up sufficiently for our young minds. I remember crying when the victorious and spoiled Achilles dragged Hector’s body behind his chariot around the walls of fallen Troy.

As in many myths and sagas, the backbone of The Last Shade Tree is the hero’s quest or journey—which moves externally within the world, and internally within the self. Sequoyah, who is my hero, resembles two mythological heroes, Moses and Ulysses. The first hero leads his people to a new place, and the second hero spends many years seeking a way home as he cares for his band of similarly stranded adventurers. 

Sequoyah’s story begins when he is four years old and an unwilling captive in a Cherokee boarding school. When he is eight, he composes a poem: “Old Man Moses ate the roses, /Meanie Matron broke his noses.” It seems like a nonsense rhyme, but it is not. The child Sequoyah is already a poet who tries to cope with his experiences and assimilate the beauty he sees around him. He is prevented from doing so by the Establishment that breaks him in every way possible. Did Sequoyah know what his poem meant? Probably not, but it is his first creation, and it mentions one of the heroes that he will emulate eventually when he and his small band of fellow travelers journey to the future.

Ulysses, on his way home from Troy, had to choose between the wrath of one or the other of two sea monsters, Charybdis or Scylla. In fact, one of my novel’s final chapters bears their names. Sequoyah’s “Charybdis and Scylla moment” happens in the previous chapter, “Babloons,” when he faces two options: to either accept or reject help from the future world’s dominant species, creatures highly evolved from their original kind. The choice is rigged, of course: each option is equally awful. He decides to accept their help, and this decision protects the clan members from the coming winter. But it comes at the expense of their freedom. For better and worse, it is the logical choice for a person with his caring nature.

The heroine’s name, Aleta, means “traveler” in Greek, and she, too, participates in multiple journeys, both real and symbolic. Aleta and Sequoyah, husband and wife, must mimic Ulysses’ journey home, but not to a real place. Their journey is internal—to the symbolic centers of their joined hearts.

Real myths that are interwoven throughout the book include two Cherokee stories: “The Haunted Whirlpool” and “Cherokee Rose.” Both occur at significant turning points. In “The Haunted Whirlpool” Sequoyah sees his future in a vision, and in ”Cherokee Rose” his teenage daughter, Svnoyi, who is both as fragile and as tough as the flower in the myth, understands how her future will tie to his. Many myths appear as passing references, some serious, others, cynical jests: The myth of Sisyphus, Hercules and the Augean Stables, Leda and the Swan, Niobe and the death of her children, and many, many others. 

I came to realize as I worked that perhaps the strangest achievement in my novel is the evolution of new myths. Many of these spring from the horrors of true historical events: the magic wolf pack during the WW II persecution of the Roma or the tale of the golden eagle pair on the Cherokee Trail of Tears. A most powerful mythological figure is Aleta’s almost animate Italian violin, made in 1838, the year that coincides with the Trail of Tears. It often screams when the people in its life are suffering. There on the Trail, Sequoyah’s great-great-great grandmother had tied a rope around the neck of the violin case, and she “drug it, that thing howlin’ up a storm inside, all the way to Oklahoma like a pup on a leash.”

What? Never Heard of It

Looking back, I now see my high school history classes as one big maneuver to avoid the ugly facts from our nation’s past. Was my generation shielded from harsh realities that later generations of students would hear about with the misguided but honest motive of protecting the young? I suspect that it was due to something worse and intentionally dishonest; suppressing uncomfortable facts was simply the policy of the time. Education for the young put forward nice-sounding myths about our country’s virtues and achievements over its blind spots, failures, and atrocities. Here’s a glaring example. George Washington, who has been elevated to American sainthood as the nation’s first president, was a slave owner.

When my heroine Aleta is forced to time-travel back to the week before Pearl Harbor, she learns first-hand of the compulsory internment of Japanese American citizens: “Aleta frantically scoured her memory for what she’d learned in her high school history class [in about 1960], but she could not recall a word in her textbook about this human catastrophe.”

When I started writing The Last Shade Tree, I had no idea that I’d be tackling the horrors of recent history. But as the books began to stack up on my desk and my research intensified, I grew more and more aware that too many dreadful episodes had been swept under the rug. So I came up with the time-travel concept so that my heroine and hero would experience personally some of the atrocities that had been kept from us or glossed over.

I believe facing this history is especially urgent today as our world lurches again toward exclusiveness, racial hatred, totalitarianism, and, worst of all, nuclear war. Some of the book’s episodes are better known than others, such as the Japanese internment after Pearl Harbor and the Cherokee Trail of Tears. But are they known well enough? And what about Drancy, the Indian boarding schools discontinued only late in the last century, or the Roma in Nazi camps? Add in the right-wing historical revisionists, and I just can’t shake feeling that we as a nation are in big trouble.

From Bad to Worse

How did I dream up The Last Shade Tree, a strange book by any definition? When I was fifteen, a frightening polar-route flight home from Europe to San Francisco forced an emergency landing at the US air force base in Frobisher Bay, Canada (now Iqaluit), near the Arctic Circle. It was mid-winter. Shivering in the sub-zero air, I was amazed by the intensity of the Northern Lights. I decided to write about it one day. Many years later, pieces of that experience have inspired several chapters.

But as I’ve grown older and more aware, what has surely shaped my book’s unusual story are my fears for our future. I have watched the world lurch from bad to worse to bad and back again—more times than I can count. And so I decided my characters would convey a message: that humans don’t seem to learn from the past horrors they’ve either created or lived through—except briefly at best. Soon the well-intentioned agreements and treaties begin to unravel until the world finds itself in worse shape than before, whether through hubris, greed, or the mind-boggling limitations of our world’s leaders.

Still, I wanted to write a novel, not a piece of forbidding non-fiction. So I came up with a story that would be thought-provoking and a great adventure at the same time. I hope I’ve succeeded, and that The Last Shade Tree will sweep you off your feet as you share my characters’ extraordinary journey across the world and through time.

How I Fell in Love with Prairie Dogs

I met live prairie dogs for the first time in New Mexico in 2015 in an unnatural setting. About twenty of them had been transported to the middle of a shopping mall where they puttered about in an artificial enclosure of concrete walls and tunnels painted brick-red. The little creatures were fat and cuddly, sitting tall on their hind legs and kissing each other beguilingly. My second, more unhappy encounter was a few weeks later on the highway to Angel Fire, NM, where I saw dozens of the poor beasts flattened along the road. In that mountain resort town, grassy acre fields sandwiched between housing developments contained prairie dogs who would briefly pop frightened faces above the dirt mouths of their burrows.

I read up on the Prairie Dog, genus, cynomys; order, rodentia, and instantly made up my mind to feature these amazing animals in an apocalyptic science fiction novel. If they happened to get big, say, reaching five feet and becoming ultra-smart, their natural characteristics would make them formidable equals to any humans lucky enough to survive Armageddon. To list a few of these traits, the little creatures of today have a sophisticated language of yips and barks that a few scientists claim to have deciphered. Their family structure is complex and hierarchic. Their communal society—with duties strictly assigned—rivals the organization of the Roman Empire. And they have a penchant for cruelty, too, at least in human terms. They practice infanticide, which somewhat dilutes their cuteness.

And so I set the four-way stage. Start with the oversized and brilliant Prairie Dogs. Then add the human survivors, rivalrous Shade People and Sun People. To complete the mix, bring in confused time travelers. Come join the romp in Day of the Jumping Sun.

Romeo and Juliet: Disordered by a Play

I was a normal child until age eleven when I got severely bitten by Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. To be fair, I was no child prodigy: I saw the movie first. The very next day I read the play and in my high school years, I wept over pages 1007 to 1044 so many times that they nearly fell out of the family’s Complete Works of Shakespeare. At some point I realized that I’d memorized the entire play. In addition to leaving me with a serious case of Hopeless Romanticism that would distort many a youthful love relationship, the play also determined my life’s work. Although early music extends well beyond the Age of Shakespeare, my love of the period must have influenced my choice to play the viola da gamba professionally. But eventually Shakespeare’s lines invaded my everyday thinking: the magical lilt of iambic pentameter and the extraordinary lure of gorgeous phrases cried out, Write! My first novel The Last Shade Tree has quotes and misquotes from Romeo and Juliet subtly hidden throughout. In the disordered world of today, I feel blessed to have found a lifetime of solace in an equally disordered piece of literature.

Story of a Sailboat

A wintry sun is setting over Vancouver’s English Bay, and the tableau of a sailboat stuck on the shore beyond the seawall is sad to see. Sad certainly, but my fellow gawkers are also shaking their heads, embarrassed for the sailboat’s owners. How careless of them, what a big oopsie. Clearly the sailboat hadn’t been secured properly and had broken free. She’d scudded across the bay the night before, unmanned and with the sails down, propelled by higher-than normal winds. She had run aground. And now that the water is at its lowest, she perches precariously among the rocks and tide pools for all to scrutinize. She’s a twenty-foot maiden with her bottom exposed, her dignity lost.

 A few days later, the sailboat is still there. But ominously for her, she’s flipped over to her other side. Her mast that used to point toward the shore now signals the water. Perhaps she’s asking to go home in the mute voice of an inanimate object.

Days pass. The sailboat is unstable, rapidly turning into a shipwreck. The maiden’s mast has been sheared off. The rest of her is lodged against the seawall, her journey at an end because she can travel no further. Even the fierce winds and waves of recent days couldn’t push her through stone. But the waves can still crush her. Then she’ll be so much fiberglass, resin, wood, foam, and metal—no longer a “she,” but a big industrial mess.

I spoke too soon. This morning the sailboat is gone. She’s either at the bottom of English Bay or at the junkyard. But just maybe—ah, wishful thinking—she’s at the boat repair shop. Her mast is being replaced, her hull mended, she’s being cleaned and refurbished inside and out. If there’s a second chance for the maiden, please, owners, take the time to dock her properly. Because now lots of people have indulged her with their concern, affection, and tender sympathy—as if she were alive.