Sun House, page 43
Totally focused on her downstream scrambling, Lorilee was surprised when the brush and boulders abruptly ended and the creek flowed almost silently out into the high meadow she’d remembered. Its wide expanse was nearly level, carpeted in cotton grass, sedge, paintbrush, wild aster, tundra moss. The creek meandered like a child’s scribbling, creating cutbanks and oxbows as if seeking a course that would allow it never to have to leave the meadow. The heat lost its intensity. The day’s harsh white sunlight softened to shades of citrus. Aiming for a stand of storm-gnarled aspens at the meadow’s downstream end, Lore was forced by the meanders to cross and recross. The fords proved a pleasure when raisin-sized frogs leapt from thigh-sized sandbars into sink-sized pools populated with equally tiny trout.
The shade of the aspen grove was instant soma. She dumped her pack, plunked down under the tree closest to the water, shucked her boots where the aspens’ roots twined down into the creek, and let her feet do the same. Lying back in dry grass and wildflowers, she stared at treetops and sky, pondering her next moves. While no other place on the mountain compared to this grove in beauty, scores of crushed beer cans, hundreds of empty bullet casings, and a fire ring kicked to pieces evidenced the fact that anybody with four-wheel drive would choose the same campsite.
Digging deep in her pack, Lorilee pulled out Elmerina Buddha, unwrapped her from the beach towel, found her unbroken, set her on the shelf of a boulder aimed at the downstream end of the meadow, and warned denizens of the lower world, “Enlightened sentry on duty!” She then wandered the grove on a housekeeping mission, collecting and burying the casings and cans, rebuilding the fire ring, setting up her one-woman tent, sleeping pad, bag. Her wet clothes she hung in an aspen but did not include underwear lest it excite possible male visitors. Her sopped boots she propped on Elmerina’s stone shelf, open to the sinking sun. She set her frying pan and saucepans on a rock slab she dubbed “the kitchen,” and used a cord to tree her bear-proof food bag. She gathered hundreds of limbs and branches for the next two nights’ fires, stomping them into usable lengths. With her camp night-ready, she gave her dulcimer case a glance. Not yet, it seemed to say. Lore decided on a stroll.
Pocket binoculars in one hand, water bottle in the other, she found the ground along the creek so soft she set out barefoot through the now-orange light. Strolling without boots or backpack created a floating sensation she found blissful until her memory of where she was headed bit into the bliss: at the meadow’s downstream edge the creek eased around a shoulder of Two Medicine and flowed out into what was once a second even larger meadow. Then the Bureau of Reclamation set out to improve it. The flowers, grasses, sedges, oxbows, were converted by bulldozers into a mile-wide alkali playa that resembled a postapocalyptic football stadium parking lot. In the center of the lot lay a tepid reservoir the Bureau had dared to name Crane Lake, though the reservoir had destroyed a sandhill crane nesting ground, warmed the creek’s water thirty degrees, turned it saline, killed off its endangered Colorado greenback cutthroat population, driven off the riparian birds, amphibians, and almost all other life-forms, but served America by sending Pipestone Creek down a ten-mile-long pipe terminating at a corporate high-fructose corn syrup farm.
In the August heat the reservoir had become a quarter-mile-wide, manure-colored puddle shimmering with mirages. But defiled water is still water. As Lorilee approached she sent coots, teals, and shorebirds flying across the puddle into a far shore mirage from which a plaintive cry now reached her. Two mystery birds rose by fractions out of the mirage, shone magnified for a few seconds, warped back down into the shimmer, rose and magnified again, and the blue legs, buckskin heads, and upturned bills gave them away:
American avocets. Lore’s favorite bird. She trained her binos on them. They were feeding with great energy despite the late hour. A vast expanse of exposed playa lay between them and the nearest scrub cover. They seemed terribly vulnerable. But avocets, Lore reminded herself, have uncanny survival tricks. Within a day of leaving the egg the chicks can run, swim, and dive. They also grow extremely fast, developing plumage identical to their parents’ within weeks, so that they don’t appear to predators to be the naive fledglings they are. A few years back Lore had been watching a three-chick avocet family in the shallows of Ben Travis Lake, above Gunnison, when a prairie falcon spotted them and went into a kill dive. Lorilee and the avocet mother both let out warning cries. Chicks and mother then vanished underwater, the falcon pulled out of its dive for lack of a target, and an instant later papa avocet struck the raptor, distracting it while mother and chicks vanished in tall shoreline reeds.
Comparing this displaced pair, Lore found their plumage to be that of adult avocets, but noticed that one bird foraged ceaselessly, while the other broke off feeding to follow it around, crying in frustration. The complainer, she realized, was a fledgling just four or so months old despite looking like its parent—and Lore immediately pictured her own fledgling. Japhy sat zazen like an adult, had become a promising guitarist in record time, and for his seventh birthday was given a Swiss Army knife and a whittling lesson by Trey at least two years too soon, Lore felt. Watching the birds, she thought: Avocet tricks. Japh is still just a seven-year-old boy.
He’d shown it that morning. When she’d dropped him at Bess’s for a two-night sleepover, he was jacked: he’d taken swim classes that had won him permission to play by himself in the irrigation ditch behind Bess’s house. When Lore and Bess began chatting, Japh grinned and said, “Ditch?” She nodded, he shot back to the ditch, and when she went back to hug him goodbye he was seated in the shade of a salt cedar, whittling a six-inch-long canoe out of a branch. Spotting her, he pointed to a two-inch-tall rock with a flat bottom that allowed it to stand on end on a larger rock. “This is Search Man,” he said, then balanced the rock upright in the canoe. “If you’re not back when you said, I’ll send Search Man out to find you.”
With that, he launched his canoe on the gentle flow—and it capsized in two seconds, sending Search Man to the bottom. They laughed. But now, by a dying reservoir in dying light, watching an avocet child badger its single parent for food it was unable to find, desolation threatened to sweep down like a falcon.
Resisting the feeling, Lore realized the birds could be enacting a line of Dōgen’s: “Be disturbed by the truth.” And what’s true for them is true for Japh and me too, she thought. Sometimes migration is the only choice left.
Moved to be sharing a necessity with the avocets, she started back to camp.
FULL DARK AND a small fire had shrunk Lorilee’s world into a room with aspen trunk walls and a ceiling of interlaced branches, slow-quaking leaves and stars betwixt and between. Her roommates: a tin cup of red wine, her small musical instrument, her serene sentry, Elmerina.
Wanting the fire’s warmth, she tried sitting close and strumming the dulcimer as it lay in her lap, but the vast open air reduced its resonance to the dead sound of a plastic ukelele. She left the warmth, moved to the one good sitting log, and set the big wastebasket between her legs and the dulcimer on its rim. Leaning so low her nose nearly touched the heart-shaped sound holes, she sent her strumming and humming down into the echoing chamber. Resonations and oscillations now audible left her ready to whisper up a song. She kept strumming, let her mind drift to await a few good words—and with a speed that dismayed her was attacked by a scrap of sheer musical crap.
Like many things she wanted to forget, the scrap was compliments of Trey. One morning at breakfast, late in their marriage, Japhy had asked Lorilee about Appalachian hill music. He’d heard her talk about it but wasn’t sure what it sounded like. Charmed by his curiosity, Lore was seeking the best possible musical reply when Trey beat her to the punch. Making his voice satirically high, loud, and twangy, he sang out,
Way back in the holler
Where Pappy whupped us so hard
We had to eat possum
Once we run outta lard…
They’d all laughed. Lorilee too. But Japhy was five at the time. Way too young for satires of a tradition about which he knew nothing. Sure, Appalachian music tended toward the woeful. Mountain life was hard. But great hill singers had for centuries proven that plaintive responses to hard times can be beautiful; haunting; healing. Lore had been about to prove it when Trey’s lampoon shot that possibility dead for the night. She’d felt she owed Japhy and hill music an apology ever since.
Lore had become a musician for nearly opposite reasons. One: at age twelve, her voice began to rivet people, herself included. If the venue was good and she gave herself to one of the old storytelling songs she loved, the effect was startling: kids stopped playing and listened open-mouthed; old men reached for old women’s hands; smiles grew far away; eyes shone. But the other reason she’d turned to music was that once she heard a new melody, it snapped shut on her like a leghold trap. Any melodies. Puerile pop hits, fatuous ad jingles, self-righteous old hymns—and now, Trey’s wretched scrap.
She had long since learned that one way to purge herself of an unwanted melody was to transpose it into something more than it was. She hated to waste precious Peak time on a purging because of Trey. But when out of curiosity she dropped Trey’s derisive twang, slowed the scrap’s tempo, and hummed it down into the hollow of the wastebasket, the beauty of the little melody surprised her. Trey may even have stolen it from a genuine old Appalachian song.
Picking the tune out on the fretboard and finding the best chords to match, she wed her hum to her strum. To a degree that startled her, the dulcimer and voice rising in a woven strand were wildly more alluring than the ingredients that had gone in. Raising her gaze to Two Medicine, she asked, “Are you up to something?”
Don’t sing to me, the peak seemed to convey. Sing out of me.
Gazing out over the meadow the way the Peak itself was doing, she gave herself to the strand. She didn’t try for lyrics. (Do not try to be masters of yourselves in any kind of hasty manner.) She just used a hum to wed strings to voice till they entranced her. A high shoulder of Two Medicine was aglow. A half-moon nosed into sight. A notion rose with it. Lore placed a capo on the dulcimer’s fourth fret, raising the dulcimer into the range of a mandolin, and lifting Lore’s voice into its richest range. The capo also let her shift from major to minor and back. A two-mood rhythm entered her strumming hand, inviting desolation and consolation to take turns while her voice created bittersweet tension between the two.
Four lines of a forgotten hill song rose like the half-moon inside her, carrying the same tension, trumping Trey’s parodic intent. Chills slid up her spine. Adding lines of her own to the recollected four, she sang them down into the śūnyatā of the amp:
Gonna build me a campfire
On the mountain so high
That the blackbirds can’t find me
Nor hear my sad cry
And when the moon lights the valley
And the deer start to roam
I’m gonna sing out my sorrows
Till they leave me alone
Because, lit by this same moon
We two became one
And three seasons later
I bore us a son
Who for five fleeting birthdays
The first verse of a life
Loved a mother and father
Who were husband and wife
And who now, in a ditch
At the foot of this hill
Is launching boats to find Mommy
That sink in the rill
The half-moon broke free of the horizon. She used its light to fetch her notebook and scribbled out the lyrics that had come. Rereading them, her first impulse was to burn them. She was done with Trey. She hadn’t climbed and crossed over Two Medicine to relive all that.
But what about the apology I owe to hill music and Japhy? she remembered.
Focusing on the failed love that wounded their avocet boy, words began to pour.
I’m not pointing fingers
I’m not placing blame
We set out for sunlight
But arrived at cold rain
And now a half-moon is rising
In a wide eastern sky
And something inside me
Knows it’s come here to die
Like spring flowers in summer
And wild salmon in fall
But I also feel something
That’s not dying at all
Something calm as this Peak
That neither sorrows nor longs
But just looms like a guardian
Above the love we have wronged
So I’ve built me a campfire
On the high slopes alone
Red flames are now flickering
In a circle of stones
And in a circle of sorrow
I feel my heart holding true
To the heart of this high place
I once shared with you
She set down her instrument and stepped out into the meadow to look closer at what she was trying to hold and sing to. The moon’s light had turned the looming north face of Two Medicine more sentient than ever. Nine deer out of nowhere now browsed the marshy grasses. The yip of a coyote made them all look up, but went unanswered. They bent as one back to browsing. Lore returned to her log, amp, and intertwined desolation and consolation modes. More verses came to her:
I don’t know where love comes from
But I can tell you this
It was we who pulled back
From the flame of its kiss
And having failed love together
We can’t rebuild it alone
Though we beg the forgiveness
Of every tree, cloud, and stone
We beheld in our oneness
Because that one is now two
So I’ve built us a pyre
In the night mountain blue
I have built us a pyre
At the foot of the sky
In these flames let us burn
In these flames let us die
O pretty flames, let us die,
let us die, let us die…
Silence. The way the heavy night air stirred the silence. Way starlight pierced it. Out in the meadow somewhere, creek water fell a hand’s span, creating a sound like a distant child’s laughter. Two slow crickets kept time.
Lingering on her song’s claim to be willing to let failed love die, Lore set her instrument aside, stepped over to the meadow-facing boulder, removed Elmerina from sentry duty, took her over by the campfire, and set her on the ground six feet from the flames. She went to her firewood supply and delved until she found a little pine stick that forked in two. She said, “I hereby christen you the Broken Love Stick.”
Returning to the fire, she dropped to her knees before it; nodded across the flames to Elmerina; closed her eyes; held the stick to her heart; began conjuring the love that had infused her and Trey the first time they climbed this peak not so many years ago. It was a love, they’d agreed, that rose out of the earth and burst into them the instant Lore spoke the words “The mountains are your mind.” On their anniversary four years later, finding the same words inscribed in Axe Handles, the same love seemed to fly up out of the bedrock beneath the garage apartment to flood their legs, loins, lungs, bones, blood, till nothing remained of them but the eruption itself. Japhy, she felt more and more since the marriage ended, was not so much her and Trey’s child as the son of that bliss-shot mountain-rooted upsurge.
As she knelt before her fire, holding the Broken Love Stick, she felt Two Medicine claiming their boy as what Dōgen calls “a mountain’s child.” To seal the claim she began to conjure the moment she’d felt the Peak rising up into her and Trey’s bodies. For the first time since their son’s conception night, she allowed the uncontainable surges to course through her again, but stayed focused, in their throes, on the way the Broken Love Stick forked in two. Raising the fork to her forehead, she held it there for long, intense seconds—then tossed it in the fire. When it burst into flame, the degree to which a severed love did the same left her gasping. She’d believed herself clear of Trey, but as the pronged stick began to vanish, feelings of regret, self-betrayal, heartbreak arose. Fighting the urge to cry, opening her hands repeatedly to fire and icon, releasing each surge of feeling as fast as it came, she let everything she and Trey had ever been to each other turn to vanishing heat, fading flame, glowing coals, cooling ash. She then bowed, touching her forehead to the ground.
To her surprise, at the moment she bowed, a last couplet arose. She whisper-sang it down into the earth:
Trust a seashell discovered
In Two Medicine scree
That awaited your touch
Since this mountain was sea
And it felt like a directive. Reaching in her pocket, she took out Bivalve, circled the fire, placed the fossil in Elmerina’s upturned palm. The fit was so perfect it somehow caused a great calm to come rolling down out of everywhere. Figuring she was done for the night, Lore decided to settle toward sleep by circling the meadow one time.
Slipping on her sandals, she forded the little stream and wandered out. No trace of the deer now. No coyote cries. Only the tiny fall in the creek making its laughing-child sound. Then, somewhere behind her: shrill human cries? An actual child, lost in the night?
No. The sound was airborne, coming fast out of the west, till it passed directly overhead: the avocets’ flight calls! The fledgling trailing its parent, crying, Where are we going? What are we doing? It’s dark. I’m afraid. The parent, refusing to slow, tossing back an occasional, Come! No choice! We go! We go!
“Good mama,” Lore whispered. “‘Be disturbed by the truth.’”
Gazing right at the cries, seeing only stars, she tracked the voices as they circled the meadow once, twice, then divided, the fledgling’s cries panicky as it flew back toward the desiccated reservoir, the only habitable place it knew. Lore heard the mother chase it down, take the lead again, turn it northward. Again fledgling and mother passed invisibly overhead, side by side, the young bird now making the same call as its mother’s: We go! We’re going! We go!
