A Most Valuable Utensil

Wherever I happen to go, I always take a pencil with me. Write down that damn story immediately, the pencil I have in my hand will declare, and I feel obliged to obey its request. Sometimes I’ll scribble the story in question while standing up, sometimes while seated on an alien doorstep, and sometimes while chatting with another person. For pencils are my lords and masters.

Often I’m sitting in a coffee shop, writing down a story. When this is the case, I tend to be the only person in that coffee house who’s not tapping on a laptop. Such tappers will often gaze oddly at me, as if they’re wondering what sort of early primate I might be. They might also be asking themselves what sort of peculiar object I’m holding in my hand.

Such has been my devotion to pencils that while traveling in Greenland, I acquired the name Allaut, which means pencil in Greenlandic. “Greetings, Mr. Allaut,” locals would say to me. I once offered a pencil to an elder, suggesting that he write down why he was constantly beating a drum. “I beat a drum so I won’t grow old,” he wrote on the note paper I gave him. Such wise words!

Let’s remain in Greenland. So there I was, wandering along a street in the small East Greenlandic village of Ittoqqortoormiit and taking notes on the vociferous nature of the sled dogs, the artifact-selling locals (“You can get rid of evil spirits with this carving.” they would say to me), and the not necessarily pristine weather.

All at once I found myself standing next to a rather gruff-looking local guy who was flensing a seal skin with a sharp knife. “Stupid takornaniaq [tourist}!” the man shouted, then pointed his knife at me in a manner that suggested I might be the next creature he would flense.

I had to think fast. Telling the Greenlander that I wasn’t a stupid tourist, but a stupid ethnographer probably wouldn’t work. Nor would running away from him, for — given the icy ground — I might slip and fall, then receive a different sort of wound than a stabbing might give me. Confronting the Greenlander seemed out of the question.

What to do? I noticed a crucifix dangling from the fellow’s neck — a not uncommon ornament in those parts. So I took a pair of my #2 pencils and pressed them together vertically and horizontally in front of my chest, thus creating a simulacrum of a crucifix. Then I bowed slightly. So, in fact, did the Greenlander. Indeed, there seemed to be a somewhat reverential look on his face.

A few minutes later I sat down among some yowling sled dogs and documented my use of pencils as religious objects. I also documented my use of them as a way of warding off a potential injury. And not surprisingly, I used one of those pencils in the crucifix to write down the very words in this story.