On Grief, Loss and Love

Say Hi to Eli aka Elias Robertson Tootalian aka Mile High Eli, Denver resident and first born son to my nephew Nicholas and his wife Emily, and first grandson of Nick’s dad, my brother Mark Steven Tootalian. Mark passed into the world of the Spirit in the early morning hours of May 2nd, bringing to a close his courageous, two-year, three month battle with Pancreatic Cancer. Eli, born January 1, 2019, crossed paths in the material world with his Grandfather for just over four months, becoming the apple of his Papa’s blue eyes. The picture above - sent in a text April 18th - was my final communique with my brother.

The photo was the last in a long line of beaming mug shots, the first arriving Tuesday afternoon January 1st, soon after Eli himself. “Meet Elias aka Eli Tootalian” wrote Mark. I responded with excited Grandpa congrats, a mash of emoticons, and the long-distance doting was On. “Gimme an E”/Gimme an L”/”Gimme an I” I’d text intermittently, followed by “What’s it spell?” And then “Where’s Big Eli?”, soon answered with the latest photo of Eli looking adorably angelic. “He reminds me of the infant Superman Kal-El on Krypton before Marlon Brando sent him to earth” I commented on a photo of a month-old Eli glowing otherworldly white. Back would come a GIF of a spinning Superman S, and then another of a soaring Super Boy, proclaiming, “I am here to save you.” Eli in the Bumbo Seat. Eli in his Magic Sleep Suit. Eli watching MSU in the Final Four, sporting green and white. Eli dancing, Eli sporting dinosaurs, Eli looking “Full and Alert. A Good boy” per his Papa’s comments. “Eli The Healer” Mark dubbed him a few months back. “On so many levels.”

I happily convey all this here because my brother and I had our differences in life, the distance between us only increasing at the onset of his illness — at least initially. Communication was strained, that is or was until all twenty-four inches of Eli The Healer closed the gap. Reading highlights off my phone to my sister Debbie, she responded, ”It sounds like you guys totally reconciled.” The latter half of April proved difficult for our entire family; with Mark’s health turning, we gathered at Easter, enjoying several rounds of Tootalian-style Jeopardy competition, the version where you out shout your relative as well as Alex Trebek, and then ask: “Wait, what was the answer?” Family activity being good for us all, the last few weeks were spent around Mark’s home in Orchard Lake, Eli going from wonder boy in short, texted videos to showing up in (perfectly pink) flesh and (Tootalian) blood, a blessing and reminder of life’s endless cycle.

Mark was honored in a Catholic Mass moved by The Holy Spirit at The Shrine Chapel at Orchard Lake Schools. His Bible was discussed, filled with hand-written notes and excerpts of passages from Thoreaus’s Walden, his favorite. “We must learn to reawaken,” read the cut and pasted pieces, “And keep ourselves awake.” Days later Team Tootalian took on our first Purple Stride in Detroit, the walk to end pancreatic cancer, with every member sporting #51 in honor of Mark’s standout high school football career and his well-known admiration for 1970’s Chicago Bear’s linebacker Dick Butkus. We raised over $32,000 in the mere days between my brother’s passing and the race, with our almost 90-year old Mom Louise rolling the 5K course. We’ll be there next year as well as in the years to come, punking it out proper with purple wigs and track suits, honoring our Husband Father Papa Son Brother Friend Mark T. Forever.

Shots and commentary on Eli’s beaming mug weren’t the only missives Mark and I exchanged. A video of the Crosby Stills and Nash concert he attended came through on March 21st. I’d forgotten I’d shared this old story with him, my favorite memory of Mark launching into Find The Cost of Freedom as he buried my pet parakeet. “Watch at 1:08”, he wrote, when they stopped harmonizing and ripped into Ohio. “That’s Amazing”! I responded. Did I share that story with you!?” So at the same time we hooked it up, therein also is my one regret regarding my brother - that I didn’t know they’d be passing a mic at the post-mass luncheon and didn’t get to tell that tale, of him and his chain-link wallet, back pocket bandana and denim, jean jacket tuxedo of a 70’s teen, singing the great memoriam of America’s Civil War fallen to my dead bird. But that’s alright, because we’ll be telling Mark stories for the rest of our lives. He will be dearly missed.

Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground
Mother earth will swallow you, lay your body down
Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground
Mother earth will swallow you, lay your body down

Chiricahua Apache Birthday Bash

Chiricahua’s Sculpted Solitude. Said an FB friend: ‘Looks like a group of Elders watching over you’. Good one.

Evergreens hunched low against the wind. The haunting laugh of a canyon wren. A canopy of bright blue sky arched over a burning red desert. This is Chiricahua National Monument, a unit of the National Park System located in the Chiricahua Mountains east of Tucson in southeastern Arizona, USA. In 1976, the United States Congress designated the 9,440 acres as “Class I Pristine Wilderness”. The Wilderness Act of 1964 defined the wilds as “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, and where man himself is only a visitor who does not remain.”  According to the law, “Designated Wilderness” is protected from human developments which alter the land, such as roads, buildings, utility lines and mines. Here, a place a previous AZ article declared is the state’s most energized, engaging landscape, thousands of naturally sculpted rocks line canyon walls, as expansion and contraction due to temperature changes, the wedging of ice and plant root growth contribute to this break out of the earth’s complexion. The weathering of softer layers have left harder layers to stand out in relief, often taking dramatic, unusual forms. Erosion will continue as long as there are rains, ice, wind, and temperature fluctuations. Today’s rock faces are exposed and weathered away, others will be exposed to take their place, and on and on.

In the 17th century, as the Spanish frontier expanded northward, missionaries along the San Pedro River heard of the fierce enemy peoples living in these mountains to the East, moving into the homeland of the Chiricahua Apaches. The priests made no attempt to extend their missions in this direction, and by mid-century, the Spanish abandoned missions bordering the river. Good thing, for at the same time the Gasden purchase of 1853 settled our international border with Mexico and opened up a new frontier, the people were exposed to this fierce new band of semi-nomadic hunters. Separated from other Apache bands around 1690 and ruling the wilds of Southeast Arizona, the Chiricahua Apache were in constant movement, subsisting chiefly on the products of the chase and roots and berries. The ability of the Apache as foot warriors was exceeded by few native peoples. Masters of the art of concealment, they could appear unexpected at any time. So when my friend Chris Ferris and I celebrated our shared birthdays of April 8th stomping around the Sonoran Desert, checking out Arizona’s unique history and terrain, I had the thought that It’s always good to run with - rather than away from - the Apaches for a bit.

Going from the Phoenix area up to Sedona and Flagstaff, back down to Jerome and ‘Preskitt’, then down to the Southeast area of Bisbee and Douglas, there were those many moments of muted desert grace. Just after the sun disappears over the horizon, Saguaro cacti shadows stretch long and thin over apricot colored sands, during the fleeting interregnum between the blast-furnace heat of the day - still ramping up in April - and the cool, star-draped immensity of the nights. Silent stillness descends over the land of the lesser-known but equally grand canyons and into oneself, the bedrock bathed in a special kind of light, the uplifting winds sounding like blown notes on a native flute. It was good to celebrate growing a little older amongst the hoodoos and balancing rocks in a wilderness place that, in the Monuments words, “offers a superior kind of pleasure, where nature remains untarnished and undepleted.” People, too.

How To Catch A Cobra - Part 2 (The Tale) - कोबरा कैसे पकड़ें - भाग 2

That’s our snake catching crew, in the southern India countryside outside the town of Chennai, after having successfully bagged our first wild Cobra. Or at least my first wild cobra. J. Raja, his sidekick as well as the rest of the Irulas Tribe of Tamil Nadu have long been hunter-gatherers on the hot, dry plain-forests, practicing the art of snake catching for generations. Highly venomous snakes are caught with the help of a simple stick, and managed as I witnessed with bare hands and a rough metal scythe. Catching thousands of snakes for the former snake-skin industry, India’s Wildlife (Protection) Act of 1972 protected snakes and banned the former practice country-wide, inspiring the formation of groups like the Irula Snake Catcher’s Cooperative. Card carrying members like J. Raja switched to snake catching for biomedical research and producing medicinal products, the removal of venom producing life-saving anti-venom, with captured snakes released back into the wild after four extractions. The Irulas are also known to eat snakes and are very useful in village rat extermination.  

More on the contribution of snake men to the greater good when we get back to the snake farm, Herpetology Headquarters, officially known as the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust Centre for Herpetology. But how we side-wound our way there and even found these guys in the first place is a whole other story. As Sarjan, my trusted guide on the Cobra quest well informed me: “In India and in our Hindu mythologies you’ll find there is always the story behind the story.” And there was, a winding tale to that ecstatic, exotic morning we literally bagged with a pillow case a wild Spectacled Cobra, or Indian Cobra (Raja Raja), our “lucky” find coming only after my second eight-thousand-five-hundred-four-mile jaunt to the Indian sub- continent. Per the previous post, I kidded my friend Rajiv of Mystical Journeys that I couldn’t in good conscious return to India for a second time and fail to cross paths with the cobra, given my love for snakes coupled with the animal’s role in human history and ritual, its impressive, threatening, hooded stance and renowned ability to kill a human with a single bite. In India, 250,000 snake bites are recorded annually, on the order of 100,000 people dying each year.

 These were some of the facts learned at the very start of the snake tour, beginning at the Chennai Snake Park — officially the Chennai Snake Park Trust. Along with other indigenous reptiles, the park displays a collection of captive snakes with an unblinking eye toward fostering interest, education and empathy toward the singular species. Awareness is spread among the public on India’s snake conservation and anti-snake bite efforts, as well as the history of real Snake Catcher cooperatives. I enjoyed learning of facts like the establishment of the Big Four —  the four venomous snakes responsible for causing the greatest number of medically significant human snake bite cases in India — our later catch of the Spectacled Cobra being one, along with the Common Krait, Saw-scaled and Russell’s Viper. As an interesting aside, that species was named for Patrick Russell, an 18th century Scottish herpetologist who first described many of India’s snakes, the name of the genus (Daboia Russelii) from the Urdu word meaning “that lies hid” or “the lurker” a spooky but apt title. I even had my first brush with a real cobra at the park as well as a genuine Tamal snake man, who lead a show for visiting Indian school children, displaying harmless as well as poisonous specimens and canvasing public support for snake protection amongst the young.

Still the nagging thought persisted that I didn’t travel all the way back to India a second time to see a Cobra at a zoo. Doubts raised their hooded heads, as Sarjan fielded several calls from different potential snake hunters, revealing our plans to be… murky at best.  One was away, one snake catcher was feuding with another (funny), everyone making it very clear that January was not high Cobra season. Its understandably hard to pin both snake and snake catcher down this time of year, as you’d be hard-pressed to find a Diamondback Rattler in Arizona during the chilly winter months, with the same natural law here. Sarjan shared his semi-reliable back-up plan, that of a contact in Varanasi who owned a “Big cobra man”. But, learning as I went along, my original hope to see and hold a basket cobra — half the infamous roadside show, performed also by a flute-like musical instrument player who seemingly charms the snake to music – had significantly shifted. Snakes actually lack external ears, though they do have internal ears, the response being to movement and not noise. But those city snakes are defanged and turned out to be a bit depressingly domesticated. Sure, they were cool to touch and emulating Shiva with one round the neck and over a shoulder was fun, but catching the wild cobra became The Mission. And if anyone was going to prove a reliable guide it was mystical journey man Mr. Kumar (Rajiv Rajiv). Maybe a semi-dark, somewhat obscure plan was best when hunting the notoriously clandestine shape.

With that in mind, we set out in the pre-dawn hours to meet the snake catchers, embarking together from the quiet, gated Herpetology Centre into the countryside. Our crew sauntered along what looked like rows of Eucalyptus trees, the hunters poking at the brush underneath. We traversed farmland and rice fields, crossed waterways, dug into huge, hip-high dirt termite mounds, overturned downed trees and kicked at piles of cut, dying shrubbery. The walk was pleasant as the sky brightened, hopes kept in check, knowing well how some big expectation would kill the experience.  We tried some conversation, J. Raja as a non-Hindi speaker billing himself as semi-fluent in English, which wasn’t exactly the case. Inquiring of his history — how long had he been snake wrangling, was he ever bit, what then? — were all answered in his native tongue interspersed with bits of English. “Yada yada yada four hours, four hours yada yada” he would say emphatically, pointing to a bite scar on his hand, with me basically deducing (with some help from Sarjan) that one had four hours to live if bit. Questions like “Did you take anti-venom? Were you hospitalized?” were met with “Yada yada yada one month’s rest yada yada.” Despite the language barriers and off-season logistics, the search was ON, the snake-catchers being dogged in their pursuit of digging, scratching at and overturning the landscape. While enjoying the hunt, after miles walking and several hours, it appeared we were coming up empty-handed, and so the convoy turned and began making its way back to the home Centre. 

I was off on my own when it occurred. The lead snake man had been poking at a bush and excitedly called to his buddy. “Paul, Paul, Paul,” shouted Sargen, “come come!” And then there it was, the three-foot beast I’d traveled half-way around the world to behold: a yellow-tan female Spectacled Cobra, the Spectacled name derived from exhibiting a rear hood mark with two circular patterns connected by a curved line, evoking the image of spectacles. The impressive hood expanded and it hissed and struck aggressively. Beautiful. There’s a video that goes with the catch, my favorite segment being about :23 seconds in when Sargan, in a mellifluous Indian accent, shouts, “We finally find the big cobra man!” 

Thinking back on it all now, it was one incredible moment of ecstasy. Afterwards I felt wiped out, like I’d just made love - content, calm and basking in the afterglow of an farfetched sensorial experience. We pillow-cased the catch, took some trophy pics and made a triumphant return to the snake farm. At least triumphant for me, perhaps all in a day’s work for my comrades. There the snake would be turned over to Morrey along with a half-dozen another real, hard-core snake men, all who wielded the big Four around with such ease, they had me voluntarily abdicated my former status. Over breakfast, I considered the bad rap snakes have had through the ages, and the connection to and reverence for the natural world that we’ve somehow lost. But we can regain that sense of awe. And in that way, maybe snakes are a good place to start over, resetting our fears and misperceptions and in a way rediscovering Eden. With that, we’re back, on the lookout for Michigan’s only poisonous snake the Massasauga our own local “lurker” with some final notes from the road along with specifics on our upcoming Spring and Summer schedule at the start of April.