Tracing the Image of Eve
by Allison Palmer
Once, at the height of a strange morning, her scream tore open the air around me. It was something like the unfolding of a narrative; there she was, the image of primordial Eve in agonized splendor, a Native American woman of lithe stature, perhaps in her twenties, screaming at (and into) all four of us, as we leaned into the slope of a hillside strewn with leaves.
As officers of the park, we were obliged to investigate the scene of her unauthorized camp, a tent and some scattered belongings strewn at the bottom of an embankment, each item lodged unobtrusively under a tree. Interestingly, the blighted eucalyptus at the center of things was also an enigma, a being just as vulnerable and oddly situated as its tenant, the woman who identified herself as Eve. And with a surname not listed in any official database, she, and the site of her habitation, quickly became the subject of a mystery.
With the woman’s invented persona in hand, we began the task of discovering her true identity (a feat we never managed to accomplish) and returning her to a lawful involvement with the land. As romantic as it seems to live outdoors, in a state of natural bliss, reality for city dwellers is a far different matter, urban land being quite dangerous in the hours of darkness. For this reason, we executed our duty with great care, knowing that our subject needed to be in a homeless shelter. But what was her opinion on the matter? This aspect of the story was more straightforward; after a bit of conversation, it became obvious that Eve was not entirely fit to determine her own best interests. But in the course of our encounter, something else emerged: another life, that of her child.
Again, it was something like a narrative unfolding before our eyes, each subsequent moment yielding more distressing details with deeper mysteries to explore. After giving birth, Eve had elected to forage on public land and seek shelter under trees, thus confronting us with a daunting social service issue, a complex set of questions relevant to individual rights, the stewardship of urban parks, and child safety. It was quite a strange puzzle. A two-month-old, alive and well in the care of her mother—at odds in a dangerous setting, a place filled with transient uncertainty, suffering and secret instances of violence—was not what we had expected to discover on an ordinary day.
Of course, aside from our surroundings, the midmorning crowds and tour buses, the trees and museum facades, nothing about the day was ordinary. With each passing moment, the situation managed to grow more complex, as we attempted to help two extremely vulnerable people survive unfavorable odds, a task the woman had accomplished quite well on her own, prior to our arrival. Even now, as I look back, Eve’s strange survival talents astound me, a mystery somehow related to her ability to retain secrets. In the hours that followed, amid questions of how to care for mother and daughter, the difficult problem of names and legality resurfaced, and still refused to be resolved. With uncanny resilience, her secrets endured despite our best attempts to reveal them.
Much to our frustration, Eve’s stated surname was unknown to official records. It had become an obstacle that countered all attempts to discover her true identity and status. Was she wanted for any crimes? Did she have a history of mental health challenges? Were there any hospital records pertaining to her daughter? We simply had no answers. It seemed as though she had been self-christened and declared the citizen of some principality beyond our influence. In point of fact, she had proudly declared herself to be a sovereign citizen, immune to the ways and means of government agents, free to roam the land as she pleased—and so she was. There, on a hillside, believing that we had come to take her daughter, she screamed her indignation into the very fabric of the morning, and resisted every method we undertook to save her from herself. So powerful was her resistance, that it made me think back upon the image of primordial Eve, mother of the ages, a woman at liberty to roam creation and determine the fate of her children, rebellious to the male authority that ultimately falters and gives way in her presence. But what about the image of the woman we discovered, the soft contours of her form traced across shadows of the morning? Here, The Unknown Masterpiece by Honoré de Balzac comes to mind. As a piece often associated with the Book of Genesis, it fits well with our own story of Eve.
We move, now, from the idea of a written narrative, to the surface of a painting, the visual expression of Eve and her world. In Balzac’s tale, Frenhofer, the old master, has produced his final work after ten years of labor, the delicate lines of a woman’s foot, emerging from an eruption of color. In conflict with the perils and beauty of her environment, the woman is, nonetheless, moving forward into her own means of expression, slowly advancing upon the gaze of viewers, a creature held captive but captivating, as well, much as I imagine this Eve to be. And like the painted image, this Eve—our lady of the urban park—hovers somewhere in the midst of things, powerful in her powerless situation, the subject of endless questions, the one who holds and releases answers at her own discretion. Remarkably, although she must face the dangers of the urban night alone, and provide for her child by her wits, she always seems to evade the grasp of predator and authority figure alike. In her captivity, this Eve has found an undeniable form of freedom. And with this in mind, all that remains is for us to arrive at our depiction of this woman, perhaps taking Balzac’s story as a point of departure. What might our own creation resemble, taking all the complexities of Eve into consideration?
To trace her image, with accuracy and fairness, is to think back upon the fragrance and sunlight of the morning in question, to recall the sound of Eve’s bare feet gliding over fallen leaves, to see the face of her baby, and to feel the power of her scream tearing through me on that hillside.
Allison Palmer is an urban park ranger, writer, and artist living in Southern California, with work appearing in Nonconformist Magazine, The Templeman Review, Belle Ombre and other publications. Inroads: An Urban Park Anthology, released in 2020, is the author’s first book.
About this essay, she writes, “I found it poignant that a woman, who had chosen to live on the margins of our city—along with her baby—had the name of our primordial mother. Her complexities and resolve deeply reflect the nature of urban park life in San Diego.”