Spook, then on to Shamanka

Mary Roach, author of Stiff and Spook came to the Microsoft campus, saving me a trip to the University bookstore downtown - a great author, and so polite! She didn't come for just me, mind you, but as part of a visiting lecturer series put on by Microsoft Research.

Spook, like Stiff, is a great book. I read my (now signed) copy over the next couple of days, and it's really intriguing. It's all about Mary's research into what science has to say about the afterlife and the existence (or not) thereof. It's witty, engaging, and sounds like it was immensely entertaining to research and write. When she talks about her research into the mediums of the early 1900s and the kinds of things they were doing during seances, including the incredibly weak attempts to pass off cheese-cloth as ectoplasm, you can't help but wonder how people bought into that stuff. We live in a much more skeptical society today.

But let me add something more you won't find in her book: I was talking to my dad about the ectoplasm stuff in Spook and he surprised me by saying, “Oh, yeah I’ve seen that first-hand.” I told him how that stuff seemed to have ended in the early part of the last century, so having been born in 1940, he must be mistaken. His response, “Well, it didn’t end in Russia by 1995.” Dad was unexpectedly forcibly retired by the University of Alaska Fairbanks in his 50s, many years before he wanted to be. There was a bunch of trouble that caused, but the good part was that he was pretty well sick of working anyway, couldn’t stand the politics, and this gave him the opportunity to do some studying in some subjects that interested him with all that free time. That included technical writing, until the university dropped the post-graduate degree program in the subject, trombone, and Russian.

As part of learning Russian, he ended up taking a semester immersion class where the students go and live in Russia for several months. Off he went to Yakutsk. (My dad is pretty darn cool. A couple years ago when we went to a local theme park and me and my kids were going down the big water slides, my dad came along and went down them with us. I didn’t even think about the idea that he wouldn’t. Then I was waiting at the bottom of one of them for him to show up and I’m looking at some elderly couple standing there in polyester slacks and just watching, and I realize my dad’s pretty close in age to them. At 62 years old, he’s on the water slides and it doesn’t even seem weird except by comparison. So a trip to Yakutsk wasn’t all that surprising. But I digress.)

Among the many things that happened to him in Russia, my dad got rather sick. Sick enough that the locals were concerned and wanted him to be visited by the “shamanka.” Dad tells me that’s the female version of “shaman” to the Russians. I take his word for it, but it seems like a cool word and I believe that the people that originated Baba Yaga could still have a shamanka or two hanging around. Dad’s like me, and if I read your book correctly, like you – basically a skeptic that wants to believe, but can’t help but ask for just a bit more proof, proof either way just so long as it’s proof. Applying that kind of stuff to himself, though, didn’t sit so well, and as he put, “I managed to ‘miss’ my appointment with the shamanka three times before they cornered me.”

He said the shamanka laid her hands on him and made some weird noises and then spat up a bunch of stuff into a cup. She showed him (eww!) and said it was the sickness drawn out of his body. He said it sure looked like the soup she’d had for dinner – he’d seen her eating not all that long before. That would be it, except that after having a lingering malaise for some time, he found himself feeling significantly better the very next day. He tells me he can’t help but sorta, kinda believe that there was something to it. He found out more about the profession of shamanka, and apparently these people go through some years of training at the end of which they have to pass some kind of spiritual test. Failing the test means death, and some of them don’t make it. So they take this very, very seriously.

This wouldn't have fit in Spook, but if Mary were to do another one in the same genre on things like faith-healing, she'd have some new material. Personally, I wish I could be the one to write that book, as I'd love to take a year and do the research. In the meantime, I've passed on the idea to her although I think she already has her topic picked for the next one. I may not write that book and Mary may, but that's okay. I'll write something similarly cool someday.