Mike Davis makes a mammoth shift

Imagine for a moment that by a sheer act of will the flimsy line between fact and story, life and literature could be cut and sent floating in a gossamer cloud through the dimensions. Now imagine a 7-year-old boy under the covers in Fontana in 1953, reading “My Eskimo Year” by Paul Victor (the first explorer to winter over with the Greenlanders and become part of an Inuit family).

Mike Davis has sort of grown up now and teaches urban theory at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles. He’s spent his entire life strung out on that line between the fiction and adventure of his youth and the facts that form the basis of his work. In the last 15 years, he has written such books as “City of Quartz,” “The Ecology of Fear,” “Magical Urbanism” and, most recently, “Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See” -- books that are taught, cataloged and generally relied upon for any critical understanding of life in Southern California.

These days, there’s another side to Davis emerging in print: the little boy reading about explorers in the far north. His new book, “Land of the Lost Mammoths,” is a science-adventure tale for children. It seems somewhere between “The Ecology of Fear” and “Under the Perfect Sun,” Davis began writing under the covers.

Actually, the book is not that big a stretch. While critics have focused on Davis’ noir approach to urban theory and history -- his tendency to look at disaster as the formative force of change -- there’s long been a hint of that adventurous twinkle of his childhood. Consider the chapter in “The Ecology of Fear” titled “Maneaters of the Sierra Madre,” an essay on the wild animals Angelenos fear most, from mountain lions to goat-sucking vampires.

There’s a bit of the iconoclast, a dangerous spark that Davis, whose life has included meat cutting, truck driving and serious political activism, seems to ignite in his readers. He wants adventure, in life and in literature and in urban theory. He likes his readers on the brink.

“Land of the Lost Mammoths” (Perceval Press), which published this winter, has that familiar, delicious childhood feel to it: Think Jules Verne; think “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” think Georges Melies’ 1902 film “Le Voyage Dans La Lune.”

“The North has been in my mind since I was a child,” says Davis on a balmy winter evening before a reading in Santa Monica, accompanied by his adult daughter. It is the hour when the black palm trees are their most dramatic against the Southern California sunset. “While other kids were thinking about fights and stewardesses, I became obsessed with Greenland.”

Also gnawing at him was a terrible longing for his children Jack, 11, and Conor, 6, who have spent much of their childhoods in Ireland with his ex-wife. It was a yearning so strong that Davis, in casual conversation, mentions it about four times in as many minutes. “I missed my son so much,” he says, as his daughter, Roisin, 22, who works as a model in Los Angeles, reaches a hand across the table toward him.

Using the $315,000 proceeds from a 1998 MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant (with no strings attached), Davis decided to hunt down his dreams. He traveled to Newfoundland, New Zealand, Italy, the Arab island of Socotra, Iceland, Thailand and many other places (“especially places with volcanoes,” he grins). “The grant allowed me to see the places that have been in my mind for so long.”

And in August 2000, it allowed him to scoop up Jack, who was then 7, and visit Greenland. There are 800 people in the town of Tasiilaq, where they stayed. Their hotel looked down on the school soccer field where Inuit kids play under the midnight sun. Three thousand sled dogs rattled the northern night with their incessant howling.

The experience left its mark on the pair. Davis carries with him pictures of Greenland and remembers his travels in vivid detail: the expressions on his son’s face, the light under a plane’s wing, an island in the center of a lake. Jack discovered a spirit bolder than either of them knew he possessed.

Once home, they knew they had to share their tale of Greenland, about how they “climbed mountains, chased icebergs along the shore, and met polar bear hunters returning from places still marked ‘unexplored’ on official maps,” Davis writes in the opening chapter of the book. His young heroes -- Jack, Conor and Julia, a girl modeled on a close family friend of the same name -- “came across a man singing to a dead whale. Several times they discovered stone circles that were the ancient footprints of houses from an Arctic dreamtime before Europeans, when Greenlanders thought that they lived alone on an ice planet.”

Davis consulted all three youngsters in writing the book: Conor, obsessed with the proboscidean order, added his knowledge of mammoths to the mix; Julia, who had spent a year in Israel, demanded the female heroine speak Hebrew. Roisin had a friend in Belfast who drew the eerie, fantastic line drawings of icy landscapes, Vikings and strange birds, all surrounded by runes and Celtic designs.

In the story, Jack wins a science competition that takes him and Conor from Ireland to East Greenland to work with the mysterious Professor Dansgaard. Julia, a winner from the United States, will go along as well. When the kids stumble across mammoth bones in Dansgaard’s lab they are drawn into his secret quest, not just for the mammals but for a lost tribe of Vikings living near the Puisortoq glacier who have remained unexposed to modern civilization (based on the true-life discovery by Danish explorers in 1884 of an isolated Inuit culture in Ammassalik Fjord).

For Davis, one of the most gratifying things about working on the story with the kids was watching Julia, in real life a painfully shy young girl, create a heroic figure of herself. Jack, who also has a timid streak, “was incredibly brave outdoors. He smiled the whole time.” Davis was repeatedly impressed by the moral character of the children as well as by their rational minds.

Looking these days like an Icelandic elder statesman, a father-king, with his white shock and round little white beard, Davis found that once he started, he couldn’t stop writing. In fact, he has already finished the sequel, “Pirates, Bats and Dragons,” which again stars the children but is set on Socotra, often called “the Galapagos of the Indian Ocean” or, by Marco Polo, “the most enchanted land on Earth.”

“I was supposed to be writing a book about California. But writing these two adventure stories was like automatic writing. I would stop only to do research and talk to the children about the story.

“I wanted to do two things,” he says: “Make a fantastic plot that did justice to the detail and spirit of the epistemology of science and create adventure situations like in traditional novels but in which mysteries and issues were resolved by kindness not violence. The Icelandic sagas, for example, are full of bloodthirsty stories.”

“Land of the Lost Mammoths” has several scenes in which dreams are sent across continents like e-mails. “I wish we could share dreams,” Davis says. “These young characters have mature scientific ethics, they are kids who take a moral stand in science.”