Lapps of Consciousness

My husband and I have been following a South African musician lately. Goes by the name of The Kiffness. Our fascination started with a clever mix of cat vocalizations with strings, horns, keyboards, and percussion called Lonely Cat. 

We scrolled through his YouTube catalog. In addition to cats, dogs, and even a cockatoo (all hilarious), we found a remix with Batzorig Vaanchig, a Mongolian throat singer, who performs “In Praise of Genghis Khan.”

“He’s yoiking!” I exclaimed. The blank look on Bob’s face told me he had no idea what I was talking about. Yoiking, I explained, is the term for throat singing used by the Laplander Samis who dwell in northern Scandinavia. He still had no idea what I was saying. “He reminds me of Wimme.”

He stared and continued to scroll, looking for more cats. But he found instead a remix with Bilal Göregen doing the Ievan Polkka.

“I know this song!”

As Bob rolled his eyes, shook his head, and continued to scroll through The Kiffness offerings, my consciousness lapsed. I drifted elsewhere, where Wimme Saari, a Finnish Sami yoiker, performed “The Reindeer” and Loituma sang the Ievan Polkka.

My time travel landed me at a camp on the Tangipahoa River in Southeastern Louisiana, some 20 years ago. A few years before storms named Katrina and Ida destroyed an idyllic life defined by rustic camps that were accessible only by a 45-minute boat ride.

I had friends there. They lived on the river, running trot lines for fish and skinning nutria for gumbo. Zelda hunted alligators. She gave me a tooth that I wear with consciousness. Duke traded smoked meat for legal work in town. Kelly claimed Choctaw as his lineage. Shelby had a metal plate in his head and mined sinker cypress. He was featured in a few seasons of the History Channel series Ax Men. George didn’t live there, but he had a camp. He was an English professor at the nearby university.

“Camp” is a relative term. His had air conditioning, running water, and a great stereo system. Somehow, he had happened upon eccentric Nordic music distributed by Northside, a record label in Minneapolis that specialized in yoikers, hurdy-gurdies, and a cappella polkska. The musicians had names like Loituma, Väsen, and Wimme. I once trekked to Lafayette to see Väsen in concert.

Once we unpacked at the camp, we would change into bathing suits and swing from a rope into the cool Tangipahoa (after checking for gators, of course) and swim to an anthology of music that we called “Lapps of Consciousness,” in honor of the musicians from Lapland.

Then we would feast on local trout, blue crabs, and smoked turkey before settling around a fire in the lap of the impenetrable swamp, with its screeching owls and unidentifiable grunts and hoots.

Oh, how I long for such a lapse of consciousness.