The shore is an ancient world, for as long as there has been an earth and sea there has been this place of the meeting of land and water. Yet it is a world that keeps alive the sense of continuing creation and of the relentless drive of life.

Rachel Carson, The Edge of the Sea

i. Fog

4:30 on a cool afternoon, early September. In my second week of residency on the Schoodic Peninsula, the easternmost section of Acadia National Park, I’m paying more attention to the fog than I did last week. Schoodic Point, the tip of the peninsula, is a low, fractured, rocky slope, mostly pink granite interrupted by a few thick stripes of black diabase dike, jutting into the ocean. Most days the point appears like the clear, bright, colorful image I imagined as I flew here from the west: light stone blocks contrasting with vivid green firs on its inland edge, scruffy, light green grasses rising tenaciously from crevices, cobalt blue sea, cerulean blue sky. Down close to the shoreline the intertidal zone begins. Wet dark olive-green rockweed coats the lowest portions of the slope, the pinkish-gray rocks above the limits of high tide stay bare and dry. I stand in sun and sea breeze, studying the cracks and joints and fissures, the angles and shapes of slabs and blocks and shelf faces. I note changes in tide level, the shift from zone to zone—dense, dark green water-logged weeds, light green weeds draining sea water, damp off-white coatings of barnacles, the glistening, deceptively slick black zone. Sea and sky, those vast blue reaches immeasurable, draw my attention only to their immensity rather than to any fixed point. Each time I return to the Point in sunshine I become pleasantly detached. I’m content with the scale and scope of what I behold, and find it easy to simply engage in idle observation.

            But the fog—that’s something else. It alters my sense of the world, makes me feel both isolated and involved.

            Clouds that have hung above the peninsula since morning drift out to sea and the ground level fog thins in the afternoon sun. I wander out across the rocks, closer to the ocean, hoping for a better perspective on the shoreline, and stop at an abrupt drop-off, a broad break in the granite ledges. Rockweeds glisten in the refracted sunlight, thickly coating slabs and blocks ten feet below me; waves surge in from time to time to cover them, then ebb away. The fog merges with the ocean a little way out. The horizon is only a broad smear of bright blue-gray, except for a short stretch of gleaming silver just below the place where the sun, unseen, must hover. The thickness of the fog shrinks and swells like the surf, like the sea breathing in and breathing out. When it dissipates slightly, the distant silhouette of Mount Desert Island, across the broad reach of Frenchman Bay to the east, momentarily materializes out of the haze, then blurs and blends back into it again.

            On the other side of this little inlet where I stand, seven gulls stand placidly near the shoreline; it’s as if they’re marking time, waiting for the tide to turn and reveal the vulnerable lifeforms of the tide pool. Further inland, upslope toward the landward end of the inlet, a raised lip at the far edge of a granite slab forms a partial dam above an area of lower rocks. The tide must rise and surge across the slab before it can fill up that inner pool and drown those rockweed-coated blocks again. I hear a thump and splash as saltwater spills over the lip. The gulls are silent, immobile. The only sounds are lapping waves, the slap of water on stone, the gurgle of water sucking itself back away from land.

            The encircling fog, gradually increasing its distance from the shore, still closes in the horizon. I begin to comprehend the limits of my vision, strain to remember what is usually clear to me in sunlight. I suddenly realize that, if I wanted a place to lose myself, to momentarily step out of identity and obligation, it would be here and now. In this instant,—perhaps only for an instant,— I come wholly to my senses. Cognition ebbs away; feeling surges in. All at once my senses connect me to the most primal of elements—the soft enshrouding fog, the persistent rhythm of the waves, the implacable rock under my feet. In the distance a raft of eiders silently floats by, black shapes interrupting the gleam of sunlit waves, soundless, drifting, carried along by the tide and the waves. I feel myself drifting with them. I am no longer on the Schoodic Point I know, but some other where.

            I don’t know how long the moment lasts or why I feel I need to leave—to “get about my business,” whatever that might be—but the moment haunts me, draws me back a few hours later. The sun is descending, the fog thickening, that inner pool slowly filling, other sightseers mostly gone. I am, for the moment, alone on Schoodic Point. I shiver occasionally in a brisk cold breeze. Directly above me I discern blue sky but on the ground I find my horizon still tightly circumscribed. Ahead of me, sea soon dissolves into fog; behind me, inland beyond the point, trees are merely a frontline of shadows, growing dimmer, the forest beyond it vanished. Clouds high overhead only hint at the sun’s descent. No gleam shows through the fog.

            I concentrate on what encircles me; I close my eyes and listen to the surf, the slap and gurgle and s-s-s-s of waves against and across and retreating from the rocks. The air is palpable on my face, a chilly damp caress. I conjure up the image of Corregio’s painting of Io and Zeus, a naked nymph welcoming the embrace of the god in the guise of a cloud. I smile blindly into the fog, then banish the image to return to my senses. Minutes pass in the grasp of sensation, while cold seeps into me. It’s the pervading cold that makes me finally open my eyes. Blinking, I slowly take one last look around me, then I surrender the point to the fog, the surf, and the gathering dark.

ii. Crossing the Bar

The Boreal coast of the North Atlantic is known for the amplitude of its tides, the difference between high and low tide. The intertidal or littoral region is the area of shoreline between what the highest tides submerge and what the lowest tides expose; it can be divided into five distinct zones, each demarcated by degrees of submersion and exposure, each host to a variety of specially adapted organisms. Any casual idler along the coast of Acadia is likely to notice the changes that the levels of the tide make in the appearance of the shoreline.

            For example, on the Schoodic Peninsula, depending on the time of day, East Pond Cove seems to be different each time I pass it. At one time, it is a broad, serene pond, a beachless basin almost surrounded by higher ground. Its grassy shoreline is close to the road; only a narrow strip of gray rock shows between the water and the pavement. This is the cove at high tide. At another time, at low tide, it is startlingly transformed. Now is revealed a broad stretch of exposed shoreline, little pools of water in between cobblestones and small boulders. A burble of flowing water can be traced to a temporary tidal stream draining the higher sections of the pool. The water’s edge is now perhaps twenty yards distant from the shoulder of the road. On the open shoreline, among small exposed rocks all high and mostly dry, are strewn the blue shells of mussels, the empty shells of snails, and billions upon billions of barnacles, the seams of their intricate interlocking plates tightly sealed. Bladder wrack, a rockweed with heart-shaped brown bladders, lies flat everywhere, as if discarded. Abundant, opportunistic gulls peck among the wrack. Across what remains of the water, on the exposed shore of Little Moose Island, a clammer cruises the coastline, probing at the sand and occasionally plucking something out to deposit in the bucket carried on a strap over his shoulder. It seems a zone of debris and detritus, everything dead—certainly the litter of mussel shells, snail shells, and an occasional dismembered crab suggest abundant death—but most of this will revive with the turn of the tide. The rockweed will rise and stand waving in the water, the barnacles and mussels will open to feed, the periwinkles and whelks will set into predatory motion. At high tide the following day, the cove is a placid pool once more, reflecting the sky and suggesting nothing of the abundant life at its bottom. The passerby who observes these changes feels he shares a secret with the landscape, and remains conscious of the tides wherever he goes in Acadia.

            Bar Harbor is the name of both a harbor and a picturesque town on the eastern coast of Mt. Desert Island, where the main section of Acadia National Park is located. The harbor extends out into Frenchman Bay between two small islands and a somewhat larger island due north a quarter-mile offshore of the town. At high tide, Bar Island, the largest of the three, seems simply to be the nearest island, across a relatively calm and sheltered body of water. It’s only at low tide that it becomes apparent how harbor, town, and island all got their names.

            Twice a day at high tide, for several hours at a time, Bridge Street leads down the slope from the town directly into the water of the harbor. It seems to offer only water access. It’s low tide now. As I stroll down the street a pick-up truck passes me near the bottom of the slope and continues out into the harbor, onto a firm, flat tidal bar the width of a two-lane highway. When the ebbing tide drains away the water in that part of the harbor, the flats turn into a packed gravel strand solid enough to support a van or SUV, and tourists and townies alike set out to wander across the bar.

            I see ahead of me other people already walking idly on the bar. Two long vans park close to the water on the west side of the bar, one of them towing a partly empty trailer for kayaks. Off in the low pool beyond the vans floats a cluster of kayakers, facing each other and holding position with their paddles, apparently returning from an outing on the bay. Not far away a small sailboat heels over in the shallow water, more aground than afloat. Two small station wagons drive briskly across the bar; they pass an older couple ambling back toward town. Groups of people pick their way along the water’s edge, surveying the tide line. A little girl, walking several yards ahead of her mother, calls back to her that she sees a starfish; “It’s feeding,” she shouts. On either side of the bar, the tidal flats are cluttered with seaweed, blue mussels by the millions, barnacles in both their closed and their extended states, innumerable periwinkles, and various other tidal creatures.

            Midway across the bar I stop and slowly survey everything around me. To the south the flats slope off gradually, and some water-filled areas separate ridges of shells; in the distance, where the harbor is still deep enough, small boats float gently at anchor or move slowly between docks and open water. To the north, where Mt. Desert Island arches toward the mainland, the slope is less pronounced, and the waters have receded less. At either end of the bar, toward the town or toward the island, small figures amble unhurriedly and small vehicles either recede in the distance or grow larger with increasing nearness. The top of the bar is as flat and worn as an old dirt road, but beyond its edges vast fields of innumerable gray-brown mussel shells fall off to the limits where water still covers them. It looks as if the retreating tide has revealed an unimaginable accumulation of lifeless debris, the discarded residue of centuries, yet I’m aware that much of what I’m seeing—and what I can’t see beneath the surface in the shallows—is alive, tightly sealed against desiccation from heat and air and exposure, waiting for full submersion before opening up to life again. 

            Life in the littoral, literally unlimited. Here on the bar I glimpse something of the scale of life in the intertidal zone.

            I decide to step along briskly, to complete my tour of the island before the tide turns. The trail leads off the bar and winds through the woods of the island. It closes off the view of the harbor, but ends a quarter-mile later at a summit with an open view toward the south. Some prominent mountains of eastern Acadia National Park—Cadillac, Dorr, Champlain—fill the space between cloudy white sky and forested coast. Lower still I see Bar Harbor and its marina, with a couple dozen boats anchored off shore. The harbor looks calm and deep but when I lean out a little I can see off to my right the limits of exposed harbor floor and the places where people are walking and driving across the harbor.

            Returning to the sandbar, I realize the tide was still ebbing when I first crossed it. The sea is even lower now, revealing the tidal life to be even more endlessly abundant. As far as I can see from sea level, the surface of the harbor bottom is now exposed. Only occasional low pools are still partly water-filled, where blue mussels poke only their tips into the air. The van with the trailer, now loaded with kayaks, stands where it did, a few of the kayakers milling around it. The second van has already left with its passengers. The shoreline has retreated further; the place where the kayakers floated together is nearly completely land. The sailboat is utterly aground, canted to one side and resting on its keel on mud and mussels, no open water anywhere around it.

            The image of an exposed harbor floor dense with mussels and barnacles is a revelation to me. For the moment it looks drought-ravaged or like land drying out from a sudden torrential rain; it looks as if it has been devastated and will take years to recover. But I know the recovery begins within the hour, and within six hours it will all be submerged, the way I have most often seen it, as if it never could be drained—how do you drain the ocean? Here is life on a scale that staggers comprehension, here is resiliency of a resourcefulness that bewilders invention, here are life forms utterly unlike what we know on land, what we know of our own evolution, whose origins outdate ours by immeasurable millennia.

            “Time and tide wait for no man,” it is said, but I think that expression a rather benign and banal reading of what we behold here. Instead, time and tide give us some inkling of what eternity must be like, even as, twice a day, they display for us what, ultimately, existence is like. To understand life we need a more panoramic perspective, a slower shutter speed, a more encompassing comprehension. I recross the bar slowly, still looking all about me. I know that all this will soon disappear beneath high water, a fecund existence spending half its time submerged and invisible. To recapture this sight I will need to time my return with another turning of the tide.

iii. Cobblestones

It’s nearly noon. I’m hiking on Isle au Haut, the remotest section of Acadia National Park. I’ve rounded Western Head, one of the peninsulas on the southern tip of the island; I’ve dawdled awhile over an energy bar and bottled water on a rounded bulge of volcanic rock, where I appreciated the good sense of the gulls to have their picnic lunches of crab on top of it—whitening shells beyond counting suggest how often they use it; I’ve sat contentedly in sea breeze and warm sun, gazing out at the vast openness of the Atlantic. To complete my circuit of Western Head, I’ve followed the Cliff Trail high above the shoreline on the east side of the peninsula. Now I’m nearing the end of the trail, at its junction with the road that will take me back north to the ranger cabin where I’m staying.

            The trail descends to an open rocky beach. I try to distinguish among the stones the marker cairns that will keep me on the trail. Two prominent stone piles steer me away from the shore, back into the trees, but a glance toward the water makes me hesitate before starting inland. A dozen or more cairns have been carefully constructed upon the side of a knob of rock close to the shore. Some are stacked like a toddler’s stacking toy, decreasing in size from bottom to top; others are more haphazardly arranged and more precariously balanced. I see at once that they are not trail markers, since they would lead me back the way I came, along the bottom of the cliffs. I recall walking on Monhegan Island, further down the coast of Maine, along a trail through old growth pine forest, where hikers can discover a string of “fairy” dwellings, miniscule “houses” of twigs, bark, stones, and moss erected at the base of trees; I think that here Isle au Haut seems to counter that idle playfulness with a simpler and rather repetitious sea nymph or mermaid sculpture gallery. The cairns add only whimsical clutter to an already driftwood- and debris-strewn coast, but they prompt me to look back along the sheer cliffs toward the tip of Western Head. I realize more fully what I’ve been walking above.

            Cobblestones make up the walking surface from higher up on the beach, where the forest begins, down to the shoreline, and they fill in the spaces between the higher, raised knobs of the rocky headlands. They make for noisy, off-balance walking; finally on a beach for the first time since I arrived on Isle au Haut, I clatter and lurch across a long stretch of them to get closer to the water. I can tell that the tide is coming in. Once I stop moving and stand gazing at the cliffs, I hear other noises than the clacking of the stones under my feet. I stumble toward the shore, pause, and listen more intently. In a moment or two I realize that, after an incoming wave, when the waters recede, I’m hearing the clatter of cobblestones. I step even closer to the water and stare at the foamy waves covering the lowest stones. This time I see some of them move as the waters withdraw. I continue watching and soon notice that the chattering sound of stones knocking together is louder when the waves are stronger and heavier. Taking a few steps forward onto wet stones I squat down, getting nearer eye level with the stones and the waves. I concentrate on the cobblestones even when they’re invisible under the breaking waves, camouflaged by white foam. The water recedes off the glistening stones as a wave twenty yards off shore curls above a low barrier of rock. Then the space in between fills with white turbulence. One wave rushes up almost to my feet and reminds me that this is a rising tide. I wobble backwards across the cobblestones to a stretch of sloping solid rock and perch on the edge, still focusing my hearing on the clacking sound of the stones.

            The tide comes in farther onto the shore and, as it deepens, hits the stones more heavily. Now when it pulls back it draws more powerfully on the stones and the volume of the clatter increases. The racket the ebbing water and the rolling stones make together sounds like a heavy flow of rainwater gushing down a storm drain mixed with the rattle of thick chains striking against each other. The stronger waves pick up small stones and hurl them further back on the beach, and sometimes they toss up hollow stem kelp as well. The whomp and whoosh of the waves and the cracking and chittering of the cobbles grow more forceful. I’m alone on the beach, not a bird or other creature visible, and yet the rocks themselves are active.

            The moment reminds me of an essay by Barbara Hurd, “Fine Distinctions,” in which she walks a shingle beach in southwest Suffolk, on the Atlantic shore of England. She tells how, on that site, the U. S. military constructed a massive listening device, “the world’s largest, most sophisticated, most powerful radar of its kind,” at a cost of a hundred million dollars, but soon found it wouldn’t work. As she explains, “Its ability to receive signals was, from the start, hampered by the presence of a mysterious noise. ‘Clutter-related noise,’ they called it. ‘Severe background noise,’ ‘excessive noise of undetermined origin.’ Months of testing failed to find the source of the problem.” Apparently none of the project’s military and technical personnel had ever sat on a cobblestone beach during an incoming tide. It’s not surprising that all that sensitive equipment couldn’t overcome the interfering rumble and clatter of wave-tossed cobblestones; but it’s discouraging to know that no one involved predicted the result.

            “Shingle pebbles aren’t silent,” Barbara Hurd says; “they ping and clatter and clunk.” Just so. Days after I leave Isle au Haut, a woman will tell me that she can identify which beach she’s passing in the dark by the sounds the cobblestones make, differentiated in tone and pitch by the angle of the waves, the slope of the shore, the size of the stones. In At the Sea’s Edge William T. Fox has a handy chart distinguishing the rocks on the shore. Boulders are the largest rocks, cobbles are grapefruit sized, pebbles are the size of ping pong or golf balls, granules are pea sized. Smaller than that are the coarse, medium, and fine grains of sand, and below that silt and clay. These are handy distinctions.

            For the most part the waves have been juggling peas and ping pong balls, but just now higher waves are tossing lemon and peach sized cobblestones up onto the rocky ledge a few yards from where I sit. Only a few minutes ago, when it was my route to this location from the beach, that extension of this rock was dry. I move a little higher up and watch the lower portion of the rock receive the brunt of the next wave. I’m in no danger here—my reading alerted me to folks being swept off rocks by errant waves and I’m a cautious fellow—but I’ll have to choose a different route when I leave the rocks. I watch the tide advance for a few minutes more.

            When I feel spray reach this higher position where I’m sitting, I decide now might be a good time to go. I can’t go back the way I came—the waves are too vigorous across the cobblestones. Instead I scramble gingerly over the uneven surface atop the outcropping, then step carefully through that thicket of cairns—rather than topple any myself, I want to let storm tide decide their fate. Near the edge of the knob I pause to listen to the chatter of cobblestones a moment longer. I hope memory will record the sound, allow me to hear it again as I fall asleep tonight. Then I step onto the dry stones. The clatter of my crossing drowns out the sound of the cobblestones in the tide.

            The trail rises again from the beach, veers easterly, and leads me around to high ground further down the coast. When I reach an open bluff I pause to look back and locate the spot where I listened to the cobblestones. Through binoculars I spot the cairn-adorned knob. It is now an island of rock; the cobblestone beach around it is completely submerged, and foaming waves are breaking on the cliff face beyond it. The sound of the cobblestones must be muted now, beneath the surf, but I know they will clatter again with the changing tide. What was simply a moment of attention for me is the timeless nature of their existence. Though few creatures hear it, the cobblestones have been making the same sounds, wearing themselves away slowly—slowly—by infinitesimal degrees, chattering, pinging and clunking all the while, eons upon eons, open to change on every ebb and surge of the tide. My clattering across the cobblestones was only an instant of static in the ever-varying, timeless transmission of sound.

iv. Fog

An hour after sunrise, for which there is little evidence beyond the ability to see the fog better, I stand again on Schoodic Point. Last night, returning from a clear, sunny day on Mount Desert Island, I was surprised to find heavy fog cloaking the peninsula. The further I drove, the more it thickened, until I could barely locate the beaches a few yards beyond the shoulder of the road. Near the point, Arey Cove was invisible behind an impenetrable white wall. Certain that the fog would still be here in the morning, I rose early, eager to get out into it.

            I step slowly onto bare rock near the center of the point and at once detect motion down near the water’s edge. Dozens of eiders waddle off the weed-smothered shore and plop into the ocean. I’ve only ever seen them floating offshore, never spotted them out of the water before. I raise the field glasses hanging around my neck and discover an immense flotilla stretching around the point, hundreds of little dark shapes imperturbably rising and settling with the waves. The further out they bob, the more difficult they are to discern in the dense haze. From somewhere deep in the fog I hear a muted chugging, a lobster boat making its rounds; I shift my binoculars but only get a closer view of fog. On shore, in the rockweed just beyond the reach of the waves a herring gull picks at a crab he’s uncovered and dragged out of hiding. Early morning work for fishermen and gull.

            I make my way toward the shore over the pink ledges and across two black dikes, searching for a gull-guano-free-zone somewhere close to the water. I find a narrow spot still unspotted and sit down on a low, narrow, nearly level block of stone. My feet rest on the slick algae of the black zone between rock untouchable by high tides and the sloping edge where barnacles and green algae cling. The fog is thick and wet, the rock hard and cold; a familiar chill soon settles on me. The eiders, which were drifting east, begin drifting back west in a thin, widely spaced line; some them pop up out of the sea onto the tip of a nearby promontory and begin to probe the rockweed with their bills. The turning tide slams more vigorously against the shore. I sit with my pen poised above my daybook but the chill makes my hand shake. The rest of me quivers at times as well.

            Still, it’s hard to leave. Having become one accustomed to the fog, I try to settle in. I’ve come here to be in the fog. I breathe in wet air, inhale deeply, and as I slowly exhale, I feel my senses open up to my surroundings. I gaze, I listen, I feel, I taste the fog. The waves slapping the rocks and splashing, gushing, rushing on every side, the gurgle and glug of water drawing out of the crevices around me, the silent thickening parade of eiders floating past, the ghostly shapes of a thin line of spruces against the inland fog behind me, rockweed on a low, nearly submerged ledge before me bearing the force of breakers and filtering the white foam—this turbulence and serenity together are everchanging and yet timeless. For how many millennia has it been like this? How long has this been going on? Being here, shivering in this precise moment, is like having been here at any moment in all those millennia. It’s as if I could remember what the shore was like at the dawn of time because it’s like that every minute, is like that now.

            Only when I hear the occasional thrum of the lobster boat starting up again do I know for certain when the present moment is happening. Then it silences. Once more I become attuned to the rhythm of the waves, the white noise of the surf, the pulse of the tide. I can tell nothing about the world except for what I sense, what I see, hear, feel, breathe, exactly where I am, exactly now. I am simply alone—with the rocks, with the fog, with the tide—somewhere in time.

It is the morning of my forty-sixth birthday and the sun just rose over the hills, painting them a watercolor pink.  I am sitting in the dining room of my parents’ house, the renovated upstate New York farmhouse where I grew up.  If there is any place that feels like home to me, it is this house.  But as I watch the sun greet the Sunday morning that brings me one year closer to fifty, I realize I have never stayed anywhere long enough to really feel at home.

Just at the moment the sun cleared the hills, a wild rabbit appeared outside the dining room window. The rabbit stood still, its ears twitching, closer to the house than I have ever seen a wild rabbit.  I watched it for a while, contemplated the life of a rabbit, noticed that this one’s wiry haunches were ready to spring into action at the first sign of danger.  Sure enough, within minutes the rabbit disappeared into the bushes with a flick of its white tail.  The rabbit was here, and then it was gone.  I was just an observer witnessing one brief moment of its life.

I have been eating a small piece of apple pie; I baked it on Friday after my husband and I picked apples at a nearby orchard.  We wandered through the rows of carefully planted trees, picked a few hard, red apples, then some green ones, then some that were both red and green.  The orchard had provided us with a large, white paper bag with its logo printed on both sides, and we filled the bag with half a bushel, then sat contentedly for a while on a hillside in front of a big red barn near some other weekend harvesters, enjoying the warmth of an unexpectedly sunny day.

I really shouldn’t be eating pie, before seven in the morning no less.  Lately I have been trying to regain the slim young body I once had.  Frankly, I have been aching to reclaim a lot of things I once had or was or felt, but I doubt I’ll ever see – or be – most of them again.  No matter how much I fight the truth, the Faye of yesterday seems beyond me, out of reach.  I chastise myself often, telling myself that if I were more disciplined about my diet, worked harder and denied myself more, the body I once had and the person I once was would reappear.  So far none of it has worked, and lately I am noticing that I am tired of trying.  Today is my birthday.  I have watched the sun rise and have noticed a rabbit, and I am eating a slice of apple pie before seven in the morning.  So be it. 

I am not sure how I feel about turning forty-six, although entertaining the topic implies I have a choice.  For a number of years I have been increasingly uncomfortable on my birthday, because I am scared of getting old.  As soon as I feel the fear rising, or sense my depression about the passage of time, I think about a woman I met in Oregon when I had just turned thirty.  I was visiting the family of the man who would become my first husband.  We were gathered around the dinner table with Aaron’s parents and a group of their friends.  The occasion was the forty-first birthday of one of the guests, and Aaron’s mother dimmed the dining room lights and entered the room carrying a festive white cake.  A single candle stood in the middle, its flame reflected in large picture windows overlooking a stand of pine trees outlined by the moon.  We sang “Happy Birthday” as Aaron’s mother placed the cake in the center of the table.  The woman was tall and slim with a delicate face and short brown hair, and she placed her hands on her heart, smiling warmly as she looked around the table at her singing friends.  When the song ended she said, “Thank you so much.  For me, every birthday is a victory and a blessing.”  Aaron explained to me later that she had survived cancer. 

Every year I try to think about my birthday that way.  After all, sixteen years ago my own survival was in doubt; I was diagnosed with a potentially malignant tumor.  I endured months of tests and two surgeries.  What is generally said about life-threatening illness proved true for me; I stopped taking things for granted the way I did before my illness.  I began to notice and appreciate small things more acutely, didn’t grumble quite as much about chores or other things I preferred not to do.  I don’t enjoy running long distances, for example; I am short, my stride is slow and I do not have especially strong lungs.  In high school I was a sprinter on the track team, “built for speed, not endurance,” as I’ve often been told. 

Now when I don’t feel like running I remember a promise I made to God when I was sick, when the scars on my abdomen burned and I walked just five or ten minutes a day for exercise.  I promised that if I was ever able to exercise for real again, I would never complain about it.  I would appreciate the fact that I was alive and could move. 

Now when I get bored with the road and resent the heavy, gasping feeling in my lungs, I remember that promise.  I make an effort to feel my legs moving and my feet hitting the ground.  I try to taste the air.  If none of that makes me feel alive or grateful, I challenge myself to notice something small along the road, something I would never see if I didn’t look carefully – a caterpillar on the leaf of a roadside weed, or a tree that is growing in an odd way, split in the middle.  I remind myself that if I endure the run just to be done with it, if I rush through anything without experiencing it, I will miss something important. 

Why, then, do I feel sad today?  Shouldn’t I be filled with appreciation?  If I sense I am not grateful, I chastise myself and force the feeling, because it is a right feeling.  Still, there is no escaping the truth this birthday represents; I am a year older, a year further away from my youth, a year closer to whatever happens after youth disappears.  My sadness is mingled with fear, and I notice that the fear grows stronger every year.  When I was twenty-eight and living in Israel, I had dinner with a friend of my parents who lived in Jerusalem.  I told her that I was nervous about turning thirty.  She threw her head back and laughed and said, “If you think thirty is old, wait until you turn seventy.” 

When I was young I tricked myself.  I believed that what was true for the rest of humanity would not be true for me.  I thought I was ageless and invincible, that growing older was for people I could not relate to or understand.  When I was sixteen my mother was forty-four and my father was forty-eight; I thought of them as older than I would ever be, at a stage in life when everything was settled and decided.  Somehow I convinced myself that time would not touch me the way it touched everyone else.  The future was always in front of me.  Opportunities were abundant and I would be forever youthful, my face wrinkle-free, my body flexible and strong, no cellulite on my hips.  I remember wondering how my body could transform from the age I was at to the next.  If my body is what it is right now, I thought, and it will be the same tomorrow and the same the day after that, how will it ever become something different, alien, old?

Today I am forty-six and very little in my life is settled or decided.  I can’t say that this is a normal state for people my age; I seem to have gotten a bit more distracted along the way than most.  I lost my ability to have children when I was sick, and an early divorce led to a lonely decade in my thirties without a partner or the opportunity to adopt.  The years passed and I never had the responsibilities taken on by friends who started families and were transformed into adults simply because they had children.  I missed that phase of life and now, although I married Jean-Paul in my forties, I admit I feel a little lost.  My original roadmap did not cover the territory I found myself in for much of my adult life, single, unable to have children and moving often – from Boston to Israel to New York to Colorado, then back to New York and Boston.  I changed jobs often.  For a long time I found myself following one road then turning onto another, deciding randomly if the turn would be right or left, then unsure if the choice I made was the right one.  Really, I see nothing ahead of me clearly even now, no brightly lit, picturesque town at the end of this highway.

Some people say fairy tales are deceptive and question whether such stories should be told to little girls like I was, who are not likely to grow up and meet handsome princes.  I am divided on the issue.  I do think fairy tales are deceptive.  As far as I can tell after forty-six years, there are no bluebirds tying bows on ball gowns or chariots arriving to whisk me off into the magical night.  True, there are wicked witches, but no prince’s kiss has ever woken me from a bad sleep.  Usually the alarm clock does.  My sense is that there is happiness to be found, but it is not “ever after” – it comes in starts and stops or at unexpected moments that do not necessarily have anything to do with love.  Let me reverse that.  Happiness always has to do with love – but it is not always about romantic love.  Sometimes love is feeding a cat.  Sometimes it’s singing Abba songs with a friend in a car in Wyoming.  Sometimes love just happens, in an instant, when you see something beautiful.  Romantic love is more about willingness than wedding bells and destiny.  Or maybe it is willingness and destiny, or destiny is what we choose to believe it is because we’re afraid to believe that life is all about luck.

Still, I believe that fairy tales should be told to little girls.  When we are young we have a special capability that is difficult to maintain in later years.  We can imagine the fantastic and believe in endless possibilities.  That capacity should be fed, I think, with extraordinary things.  Magical things.  Why not?  If we are not allowed to believe life is beautiful when we are young, will we find anything beautiful later in life?  Perhaps beauty is self-evident, but maybe it is just another thing we are taught, or choose, to believe in.  Beauty, like ugliness, is a human interpretation of what exists.  If our ability to believe in beautiful things is squashed when we are little girls, what will be left for us to see or discover later in life?

A little while ago my husband wandered downstairs, wondering where I was so early in the morning, and found me typing on my laptop in the dining room.  My parents, who are in their seventies now but still live in this house, are away for the weekend.  Jean-Paul and I came here to briefly escape from our lives, which have been stressful because we are both working, I am in school and my mother-in-law is very ill.  Jean-Paul entered the kitchen wearing nothing but his running shorts.  I think it is fair to say that my husband is handsome; his blue eyes, dirty blond hair and expressive lips almost landed him the lead role in “The Blue Lagoon” opposite Brooke Shields in the ‘70s.  Now, however, there are deep lines around his eyes and outlining his lips.  This morning dark red impressions had formed around his mouth where a sleep apnea mask had been pressing against his skin all night.  His eyes looked bloodshot and tired, and were tinged with yellow because of a benign health condition that is common among people of French Canadian heritage.

Jean-Paul, my high-IQ husband, is a cum laude graduate of Brandeis University.  He studied guitar at the Berklee College of Music when he was in his twenties and now holds a master’s degree in social work.  He also worked for about ten years as a stripper, starting out in a show called “The Male Encounter” at the Palace nightclub on the outskirts of Boston.  Crowds of young women arrived in stretch limousines rented out for bachelorette parties to be entertained by sexy men with muscles.  The women drank, cheered and laughed, and stuffed $1 tips into the dancers’ thongs.  Jean-Paul grew his hair long, added blonde highlights and performed in numerous dance acts, including one titled “Hellvis.”  At the end of every show the young women lined up to pay $5 for an autographed picture.

I knew Jean-Paul from Brandeis, where I had also studied, but hadn’t seen him in seventeen years when I returned to Boston.  We met again at a party hosted by a mutual friend.  I had been divorced for eight years and on my own for most of that time.  I knew nothing about Jean-Paul’s unusual career.  I learned about the stripping from a hair stylist at a Boston salon Jean-Paul recommended to me.  I told the stylist who had referred me and he said, “Oh, you mean the Chippendales guy.” 

“Chippendales?”  I asked in surprise, and the stylist looked embarrassed, as if he had slipped up.  It turned out Jean-Paul, at forty, had transitioned from “The Male Encounter” into a job as emcee of the Chippendales show Friday nights at the Roxy.  He danced in the opening act and emceed the rest of the show, at one point pointing his microphone out toward the audience and asking seductively, “Is there a horny woman in the house?”  It was not quite the way Prince Charming had been described, but it was interesting.

Watching my husband shuffle around the kitchen and set up the coffee maker, it occurred to me that the women who once stood in line to meet him might be a little surprised to see him now, with his tired eyes and those other-worldly red impressions on his face.  But then I thought about what he’d said when he entered the room and found me typing.  He told me he was disappointed that I got up so early, because he had intended to bring me a cup of coffee in bed on my birthday. 

Jean-Paul and I took a long walk yesterday along the back roads that climb up and down the rural, hilly landscape of my hometown.  First we walked from my parents’ house along County Route 5, past old farming homesteads and Colonial houses and into the center of town, an intersection marked by a blinking traffic light.  We stopped for croissants at a coffee shop that now occupies the old post office, then continued walking past acre after acre of old farmland flanked by woods. 

Every now and then as we walked, I spied a caterpillar inching its way across the pavement from one side of the road to the other.  There is little traffic on the back roads but occasionally cars do pass, and I can never bear the thought of a caterpillar getting squashed beneath speeding tires.  So each time I saw one I found a stick at the side of the road or pulled up a weed and held it in front of the caterpillar until it climbed on. Then I moved the little creature to safety on the opposite side of the road.  This habit of mine makes for relatively slow progress on country walks. 

At one point a car raced up over a hill after I noticed one of the caterpillars.  I had no time to grab a stick, so I scooped the caterpillar into my hands and rushed it to the side of the road before the car zoomed past.  I don’t think I got to the next caterpillar in time, and it bothers me to think about that as I sit here and write.  I thought the caterpillar was far enough in the opposite lane to be missed by an oncoming car, but after the car passed and I picked it up and deposited it on the other side of the road I noticed that a spot of yellow goo remained on my palm.  Jean-Paul suggested the caterpillar might have voided as a defense mechanism, as some animals do when they are frightened.  But I suspect that it had been hit by the car, even though it curled into a ball the way caterpillars always do when I touch them.  This thought bothers me so much sitting here that I feel for a moment paralyzed by my sadness.

I know, logically, that there are caterpillars I can save, and caterpillars I can’t save, and that it is perhaps more than silly to attempt to save any caterpillars at all.  It’s not as if I control the fate of the world’s creatures, or as if saving one or two or three or four makes any difference in a world populated by millions of caterpillars.  But I can’t stop my impulse.  Saving caterpillars makes me feel a little better about something.  Perhaps I am just playing the leading role in my own fairy tale, the one in which the smallest, most insignificant beings are hugely important, and I am a hero who can rescue them all.

A few years ago I went on a whale watch off the coast of Portland, Maine.  Riding in boats always makes me seasick, so I took medication before the trip that day to stave off the sickness.  Unfortunately it was October, the end of the whale-watching season, and the boat wandered around the harbor and the waters further out for six hours before the captain spotted a whale for us to watch.  Most of the passengers were in a good mood, excited for the outing, and they passed the long hours sitting on the deck wrapped in warm, waterproof clothing, enjoying the cold, salty sea air.  Occasionally they ducked inside to buy food at a small concession stand or to sit at wooden booths indoors.  Finally a humpback whale was sighted in the distance, the captain made a gleeful announcement over the PA system, and everyone rushed to the appropriate side of the boat, grabbing for their cameras and binoculars.  My medication had long worn off, however.  The boat was listing from side to side, I was nauseous and my head was pounding.  We headed straight into twelve-foot swells that pushed the bow up and then brought it crashing down so that the frigid seawater sprayed over the passengers and onto the decks.  Still, I stood up on shaky legs, grasped the cold railing on the side of the boat with my hands, and stared eagerly across the water.  When I saw him, when I saw that whale, my head, my stomach, the cold salt spray on my face and the icy railing under my hands didn’t matter.  I couldn’t breathe for a moment; I felt an indescribable joy.  The whale breached once, then twice, and I wrapped my frozen fingers around the small camera hanging from a strap around my neck and held it as steadily as I could, hoping to snap some pictures.  The whale breached again and I caught it on film.  It breached five times, leaping from the sea and falling gracefully onto its side with a massive splash, finally disappearing for the last time beneath the surface.  Then the boat turned around and headed back to shore.

I see the whale and I love the whale.  I see the whale and I turn my pounding head off, I turn my thoughts off, I ignore the salty taste in my mouth and the rocking of the boat and the sound of the excited captain yelling into the microphone.  In that moment there is nothing, there is no past, no future, no birth, and no death. There is just the whale.  The whale is beautiful, and I believe.

Today is my birthday.  I am forty-six years old, but I don’t want to think about it anymore. The sun is up and I smell the coffee brewing and I have spent too much time wishing I was something I am not – wishing I was young.  The sun does not care that I am forty-six, and the hills do not care and the caterpillars do not care and the whale does not care and my husband does not care, and if I am not careful it will all vanish in an instant, like the rabbit, and I will miss the moment we share.

Somewhere deep in my memory of children’s books is an image of the shepherdess tending her flock by the light of the moon.  An old, romantic tradition of doves cooing on the cowshed roof, sheep scratching out a spot to bed down, and the shepherdess wandering among them, knowing the calls and murmurs of each animal, disturbing them little as possible as she looks for a water bladder to alert her to an imminent birth, or a little lamb off in a corner, just born.

I remember this as I find my way to the lambing shed.  The half-timbered house casts a thick shadow across the yard.  The cows in the field are talking in their sleep.  The legs of my waterproof trousers brush in a whispering rhythm, punctuated by the clomping of my wellies.  There’s just enough light to make out the crouched bulk of the meal house, silage pit, and milking shed in the distance.  It scares me a little bit, being out here at midnight, but I know that many lambing students before me have walked this very same path.  They had the advantage of actual courses in pulling lambs and dosing sick ewes, but I have the advantage of desperation.  I’m five thousand miles from home, and if I muck up here there’s nowhere else to go.

As I get closer to the shed, I can hear the sheep shifting in their sleep and faint squeaks.  When I open the door and flip on the lights, the rats scurry across the pens and make a tinny noise as they scramble under the barn wall to freedom.

It’s warm in here.  Most of the sheep are lying down in the straw, dreaming of grass and sunshine, but a few are wandering about.  Please, God, let them be restless rather than lambing.  I’m not entirely certain that I’ll know what to do if a sheep gets into trouble.  No one else is awake to help.  Richard said I could wake him up if I needed, but I’d be too embarrassed.  I’m shepherding by moonlight, doves cooing and all that jazz, and all I want to do is crawl back in the sheets.

Just a few minutes earlier, I was in bed, curled beneath the covers with a pillow clutched to my chest.  When the alarm went off, I groaned in disbelief.  I’d only gone to bed two hours ago.  I reached over to the nightstand for a bottle of beer and took a long gulp, hoping it would help me get into a mindset where getting up from the warmth of my bed in the middle of the night didn’t seem insane.

Sighing, I pulled on my dirty jeans and felt my way downstairs.  Richard’s wife Arwen had left the porch light on for me.  I grabbed my work coat from the peg on the porch, brushing off the bits of straw sticking to it, and shoved a wool cap over my head.  I get cold easily when I’m drowsy.

At least I am getting used to the feeling of not having any sleep, that tightness in the forehead that doesn’t go away, the dark ground that surges beneath my feet like an ocean wave.  Late nights are hell on the indigestion.  Between Arwen’s farm meals and the work itself, my gorge rises every time.  Images shove their way into my gut and stay there: the brown mush of a miscarried fetus, the ewe ambling about with her lamb hanging out halfway out her rear end, the hoof-shaped bruises on my shins.

Something’s happening to me.  I’m losing control over my most basic bodily functions.  Just a few days ago, I peed my pants just two feet from the farmhouse door.  I actually peed my pants.  I’ve never done that before.  I was on my way to use the bathroom; I only had to hold on for thirty seconds more.  I stood there disbelieving as warmth and dampness weighted down the denim.  What was happening to my control over my own body?

I didn’t tell anyone.  God, Richard would laugh if he knew.  I went inside, changed my jeans, and went back out again without a word.

Richard likes winding people up, especially his lambing students.  He particularly enjoys throwing darts at their pride.  Every day, he wanders in a slow circuit around the sheep shed just before we go in to eat.  He stands for long moment in front of each pen.  He’s got dark, busy eyebrows and sharp eyes that don’t miss a thing.  Sometimes he jumps in and walks among the milling ewes, craning his neck to catch a better glimpse.  Then he comes sauntering back up the aisle and asks me if any sheep are lambing.

I tell him, with a bit of trepidation, that I’d seen none as of fifteen minutes ago.  It’s just the bait he wants.

“Oh, you haven’t seen that one in the corner there?  I thought for sure you’d catch that one.  Where all the commotion is?”  He looks at me sidelong.  “Keep an eye on the ewe in the bottom pen.  She’s going to lamb.”

“Oh!”  I slap myself on the forehead.  “I did it again!”

The twinkle comes back into his eye.  “I’ve had vet students here who couldn’t see a blooming thing the first few days.  Walk right by a lamb.  But by the end of it they catch on.  If they don’t….”   He chuckles wryly.  “They get the piss taken out of them every time!”

So maybe I’m not a veterinary student or even an agricultural one, but I grew up around sheep.  I was a good little sheep tamer.  I spent hours sitting on the fence babbling away to the sheep until they were no longer scared me.  The orphaned lambs even came to the sound of my voice.  But all I could say about lamb-pulling was that I knew how to sit on a sheep while someone else did the dirty business.  At six years old, that’s all I was capable then.

I told Richard the truth from the get-go.  “I’ve never pulled a lamb before.”

He shrugged away my confession.  “That’s alright.  I can hire you, without much experience, and you can get on with it while I’m off doing what I want to do.  These ewes didn’t cost me much, so if I lose one – and I don’t want to lose one – but if I do I can live.”  He picked up his mug and took a thoughtful sip.  “If I get less lambs, well, there you go.  But you can bet I’m not up until three o’clock in the morning worrying about each little lamb that might be lost.”  He glanced back at me, and his mouth twitched.

Of course.  That’s why he hired me: to stay up until three o’clock every morning worrying about his lambs.

They were wild ewes, Richard’s, bought from the cheapest flocks at the livestock market.  Everyone knew that Richard would buy on price alone.  They laughed at him, but Richard figured that he got the last laugh.  “I just pump each ewe up with 10 ccs of penicillin,” he told me, “and turn them out to pasture.  I figure that gets rid of any abortion sickness or anything they might have had.  You’d be amazed at how sprightly those ewes turn out!  Fit as a whistle!”

Fit, maybe, but to my eyes they were scruffy and manure-sodden beasts with a wily look in their eyes.  He’d warned me about them, sneaky little bastards.  They’d hide the signs they were lambing by finding a corner where no one would see them.  They’d lie down and groan and push until the instant they saw a person.  Then they’d stop and lick their lips as if they were just chewing their cud.

Their looks deceived.

Before I came here, all I knew was the brand: Welsh lamb.  Welsh lamb has a reputation as the best in Europe, and it all starts here: in the wet fields sliced by hedgerows and supervised by a grim slate-gray sky.  But even at the best of times, no one could accuse Wales of a hospitable climate.  Bringing the pregnant ewes indoors is the quickest way to ensure that the lambs don’t die of exposure as soon as they’re born.

That’s what Richard does.  Richard is a lanky but spry dairy farmer from England with a nose for realpolitik in world affairs and business savvy at home.  He married a Welsh woman he’d met through Young Farmers and settled on a farm in mid-Wales without bothering to learn the language himself, and proceeded to raise a family alongside dairy cattle and sheep.

But to get through lambing season with twice-daily milkings and three children under the age of five, he needs help.  That’s where the lambing student comes in.  Veterinary or agricultural students use their school holidays to get in a little work experience, and Richard gets their labor in exchange for teaching them a wham, bam, thank you ma’am style of lambing that couldn’t be more different from what their professors taught them.

Being a sheep’s midwife isn’t glamorous, trust me.  Medical glory is only part of it; the rest is grunt work.  Feeding, watering, tagging, disinfecting, you name it, I did it.  I was good at being a grunt.  I wasn’t so good at being a savior.

I’ll never forget that first one.  I was watching Richard pull a lamb.  He shoved his hand in, fiddled, and next I knew the lamb slithered out in a steaming heap.  He made his way to his feet with a groan and wiped the blood and shit off his wrists on the ewe’s wool.  Then he pointed across the pen.  “You take a go on that one.”

God, it was frightening.  I squinted and stuck out my hands to grasp the two hooves peeping out of the ewe’s back end.  I pretended that I couldn’t feel the slime sliding up my arms and dripping onto the straw.  I could smell the shit lacquering the sheep’s back, rubbing into my jeans like furniture polish, and feel her heave her belly against my knee with each breath.  Then I tugged, both hands gripped tightly onto the lamb’s ankles, worried that if I let go the lamb would slide back in and disappear forever into a watery womb. 

It worked.  The lamb slid out with a ploop and a sound like wet leather slapping, in a cascade of dark blood and blue streamers of tissue.  Tiny black dots of feces and yellow puddles spread into the straw.  The lamb flopped a bit, choking.  It was sodden, each ridge of its coat soaked with a thick yellow fluid.  It didn’t open its eyes, as if to deny for as long as possible that it had left its mother’s body.  I understood how it felt.

“You want to know if she’s having another?  Here.  Feel this.”  Richard showed me where to place my hand on the underside of the udder.  “Tap it.  You should feel something hard.  It’ll slide back and forth if you push.  That’s a lamb.”

I put my hand on the ewe’s udder.  The skin was warm and textured and full as a human breast.  My touch faltered.  Was it right, groping a ewe’s privates for educational purposes?  But then I felt what Richard had described, something that wasn’t breast or udder but body.  A miracle right here, just under my hand, where the twin lamb sat curled in the womb, awaiting its call to ascend.

At twelve thirty Richard comes to the shed to get me for dinner.

“I was surprised you didn’t set up your radio out here,” he comments as we clomp to the house.

“What radio?”

“The one in your bedroom.”

I force a laugh, suspecting he’s trying to lead me into something.  “Nope, nope.  You can’t hear the sheep that way.  Why, have you had vet students do that?”

Richard just nods, chuckling to himself at the thought of his new lambing student boogieing among the pens.

We wash up before going in.  There’s only space for one person at the sink, so the boss goes first.  While Richard strips off his boiler suit and scrubs his hands, I shake off my wellies and wait.  He goes into the kitchen, and I take my place at the sink.  I soap up thoroughly, remembering Arwen’s admonition to use the nail brush.  I splash water around my mouth as well, worried that the sheep splatters on my face will make anything I eat taste of wool.

Dewi comes through the kitchen door and toddles down the stairs.  “What are you doing?” he calls, his voice high.  “What are you doing, Amy?”

“I’m washing my face,” I say.  “Washing up before lunch.  Er, dinner.”

His mouth opens wide.  He looks at me with round eyes.  “You said lunch!”

“Dinner, I mean.”  I grin.

I turn off the water faucet and dump the tub of lukewarm water down the sink.  I turn around to see Dewi standing in the door.

“You said lunch!” he exclaims with glee.  He runs back into the house to tell his mommy.  “She said lunch!”

I follow him into the kitchen.

It’s hell when kids make fun of me.  I don’t know why Richard seems to think I need to be taken down a peg when this language is doing it for me.  I don’t know what a spanner is, because I’m used to calling it a wrench, and my tongue keeps twisting to call the concrete area in front of the house a yard, the gravel roads tracks, and all old stone barns sheds.  Dewi even tried to teach me the numbers up to ten in Welsh and listened with wide-eyed delight as I repeated them back to him.  Of course I mangled them.  It’s Welsh, not Esperanto.

Richard takes his daughter on his lap.  Arwen is bringing jars from the refrigerator.  We’re having chips and mushy peas, but there are jars of pickled onions and Branston pickle as condiments.  I can’t bring myself to eat either; they’re just too foreign.

Richard picks up the newspaper and let his daughter play with it.  “She likes to eat it,” he tells me.

Dewi starts to cry.

“Stop moithering,” Richard commands, not looking up.

Dewi just cries harder, rubbing his eyes until they’re red.  “I want to sit by you,” he whimpers.  His mother has put him across the table to make room for their hired man Peter, who’s working late today to construct and hang the doors for the lambing pens.

Peter takes up with a hired man’s graciousness.  “Here, Dewi.  Don’t worry, lad.  I’ll take your seat.  See, watch this.”  Dewi watches with big eyes as Peter swoops him up and places him in Peter’s chair.  Peter slides himself into Dewi’s seat and sets his elbows down around the blue Thomas the Tank Engine plate.  “Is this mine, too?  Mmmm, I like this dinner.”

Stars begin to shine through Dewi’s tears as he watches Peter pretend to start in on the chips with a plastic knife and fork.  “Mine,” Dewi whispers with a smile.  He’ll snivel again a few minutes later for some unfathomable reason, but at least for now he is happy.

Arwen sets a pot of tea wrapped in a cozy and a jug of milk from the morning’s milking on the table, and settles herself in the remaining seat.  She has curly black hair and a curvy figure that couldn’t contrast more with her husband’s gaunt height.  She’s as pure Welsh as you can get.  I find it endlessly amusing that she speaks Welsh to the children and English to her husband.

The kids follow her lead.  They understand that they can’t speak Welsh to their dad.  Sometimes they’ll tease him, “There’s a pickle in your trwyn!”  They try to push their fingers up their dad’s nose, shrieking with laughter.  “Do you know what trwyn means?”  Richard just smiles and doesn’t say a word.  He brushes their hands away and lets them laugh.

“So….”

Richard’s voice breaks me out of my thoughts.  I brace myself for what he’s going to ask me next, like why I talk out loud to myself in the shed or what I’m scribbling down in that notepad of mine.

“What do you think of this war we’re having?”

I’m not sure if there could be a worse time for me to be traveling.  Kosovo is playing havoc on America’s relationship with the rest of the world, thanks to misguided NATO bombs.  Monica Lewinsky is still in the news.  When Richard learns that I’m from the “wild West,” he begins cracking jokes about John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Columbine.  I don’t understand how I can be blamed for my country’s embarrassments, but, then again, I’ve never worked outside the U.S. before.

I’ve got lots to learn.

I write down everything Richard tells me.  I can’t afford to forget and give him more ammunition.  I keep a notepad and pen in my pocket, along with a Swiss Army knife and toilet paper.

I don’t go anywhere without toilet paper now.  I can blow my nose on it, wipe blood flecks off my face with it, or run behind the lambing shed and pee any time.  There’s a bank of bushes perfect for hiding behind, and it’s certainly better than making the long trek back to the house.  Except, when I put my brilliant bathroom plan into action, I found it had a flaw.  I squatted down in the bushes and was just about to relieve myself when I felt a sharp sting.  I jumped up, but I couldn’t see the bee anywhere.  It was only later that I found out about stinging nettle.

I think I’m starting to develop an eagle eye to rival Richard’s.  I’ve got all the signs of a ewe about to lamb written down.  She’ll be off by herself in a corner, preoccupied, scratching at the straw with her hoof, grunting or baaing as if she wants something.  Then she’ll lie on her side with an oomph, stretch out her legs as far as she can, strain her neck upwards, and push mightily.  She might think she’s done it after a while.  She’ll get up and sniff all around for her lamb, but she won’t find anything.  That’s when I need to keep an eye on her, to make sure she gets there in the end.

You’d think that if any animal could spit out babies, it would be sheep.  But there are dangers in birth.  Sometimes there is skin, like a fine membrane, surrounding the lamb like a plastic sheet.  If the skin doesn’t rip open during birth, the lamb will suffocate.  Other times, the lamb will refuse to wake up and lie there like a dead thing until you dip its ear in cold water or stick a piece of straw up its nose.  It doesn’t like that, so it squirms and starts life with a sneeze and a kick.

So when a lamb is born, I have to be on it.  No excuses.  As the lamb coughs, lying stretched out, splayed-legged, sides shivering and shaking its floppy ears, I am there.  Sticking my finger in its mouth to clear out the mucus, turning the ewe around so she can start licking off the afterbirth, and glaring about for lamb-stealers, ewes whose maternal instinct has kicked in early and want a lamb, any lamb, even if it’s not their own.

If everything looks okay, I leave.  Give the ewe ten minutes with her lamb to clean it up and bond.  Then back to the pen.  Prop open the gate.  Grab the lamb by its two front hooves, squeezing out wetness as if I’m wringing a rag.  It’s time to get this pair into private accommodation.

I carry the lamb out through the gate, dragging its back legs gently on the ground.  To get the momma sheep to follow, I have to catch her attention by making lamb sounds.  “Maa, maa.”  The lamb’s head dangles to the side as it struggles uselessly.  “Maa, maa.”  With any luck, the ewe will think her lamb is being carried away by a predator, and she’ll follow me with fury.

The first time Richard demonstrated this, I laughed.  You don’t often get to see a grown man making baaing sounds.  I’d thought he was trying to mimic what the lamb would really sound like, that high-pitched bawling that sounds so terrified even when the whole turmoil is for its own good.  But I was wrong.  The only point of making sound is to get the ewe’s attention.

You see, a momma sheep can’t recognize the sound of her own lamb’s voice.  She only knows its smell.  A lamb, on the other hand, can hear a sheep call and know immediately whether she is its mother.  But, for the ewe, sniffing is the first and last answer.

So when the ewe hears a ruckus and sees her lamb being carried away from her, she’ll stagger to her feet and rush over and headbutt you from behind with all the force of maternal instinct.  That’s the sign of a good mother.

But there are always one or two stupid or shortsighted ones who don’t realize that it’s their baby being carried away.  They go back to where they gave birth, nickering anxiously and casting about for their newborn.  You have to set the lamb down and wait patiently until the sheep sees it and gets the point.  Once the lamb struggles or lets out a bleat or two, she notices, all right.

From there the ending is quick.  Set the lamb down in a private pen and close the gate after its huffy mother.  Spray the lamb’s navel with iodine.  Give her water.  She’ll want lots after her lamb is born, because she’s lost so much fluid.  Leave them.

Next case.

Dewi follows me around after school with a first-grader’s keenness for getting things right.  “You give them nuts at supper, and nuts for breakfast.  Do they get silage for dinner?  Or just breakfast?  And you give the lambs milk at breakfast, and milk at supper, and milk at tea.  And the sheep will have water for tea.  Will they have water again for supper?”

He reminds me of myself at that age.  I was only interested in either feeding sheep or playing with them.  I didn’t have to help with anything else.  My job was to talk to them, imagining replies in the stamp of a hoof or flick of an ear.  After all, in books sheep can talk.  Maybe you just have to make the first move and gain their trust before they start talking back.

But I am dealing with Welsh sheep now, and I don’t think my English words will do the trick.

I check with Dewi to see if I am pronouncing my new phrase right.

“Oen bach,” I say.  “Little lamb.  Is that right?  Oen bach?”

He is kicking his feet from his seat high up on the haystack.  He looks down at me.

“Is that right, Dewi?  How do you say, ‘little lamb’?”

He looks towards the lambs, then looks back at me.  “Say it again.”

I oblige.  “Oen bach.”  I swap the bucket of silage to my other hand and wait.

At first, there’s no reaction.  Then he sits upright and starts to giggle.  “Say it again.  Say it again, Amy.”

“Oooen baach.”  I draw out the syllables.

He just laughs.  He’s delighted by it.  What am I doing wrong?

Ah, it’s no use.  I dump a handful of silage in the next pen and move on.  The whole thing is ridiculous, anyway.  I’m just supposed to feed the dumb sheep, not call them by name.

Two weeks and counting.  I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and flinch.  It’s a lie that farmers are fit.  Farm work may be physical, but it doesn’t count as exercise, not when farm meals accompany it.  Arwen serves us chocolates and biscuits at every meal but breakfast.  For teatime there’s plenty of bread and butter and full-fat milk straight from the cow.  I am becoming a right Rubenesque shepherd girl. Luckily, I wear so many layers that the only time I notice is when I take a bath.

I have to take a bath each morning, as the centuries-old farmhouse doesn’t have a shower.  Easing myself into the steaming water is always a shock.  The tub screeches as my skin makes contact with the ceramic.  Water closes over my legs.  Ahh, this is what it feels like to be warm and safe.

I paddle in the water with my fingers.  My hands are unrecognizable, raw, knobby, and streaked with wounds gone sour.  Perhaps they’re pretty in an odd sort of way: rainbow-colored with blue marking paint and white lime and the dark creases of dirt that never come out, not even with scrubbing.  It’s my fingernails that bother me most, though.  I sniff them.  They smell like day-old menstrual blood, and the blood isn’t mine.

I miss feeling clean and pretty.  I really do.  I haven’t worn makeup in weeks.  I’ve still got a bottle of scented shampoo I brought over in my suitcase, so at least one part of me smells like roses.

I avert my eyes from the sight of my soft skin and splash water onto my face and neck to rinse off the previous day’s uncleanliness.  But, really, there is no need.  In a few minutes, I’ll put on my dirty clothes again, and all that clean skin will be covered up as if it never was.

Richard offered me a blue boiler suit for work, but there is no way I’m looking like a Smurf.  Instead I throw a flannel workshirt over my t-shirt and ignore the smears and stains.  I usually wear my t-shirt for several days in a row anyway.  When I put it on in the morning, it is as if I’ve never stopped work.  Waterproof trousers go over my jeans to keep them clean.  The trousers take the brunt of the mess, with layer upon layer of manure, iodine, blue spray paint, and blood.  Lastly, I put on two pairs of cotton socks.  I need them both to fill up my wellington boots.  The socks are a bit brown along the toes where the pitchfork put a hole in my boots one night.  There are some memories I’d rather forget.

“Do you know how to keep a sheep still?” Richard asks me.  We’re standing around a sheep in the center of the big pen.  In the strain of pushing, the ewe has expelled her insides in a big reddish lump, and we’re going to push the prolapse back in.

I hold a red piece of plastic, trailing bows of twine.  “Uh-huh.”  Of course I know.  I get ready to grasp the sheep as I’ve seen my father do it, pinning the head to the side so that the neck will curl round and the sheep will sink into the embrace of the person holding it.

Richard just stands there.  He has that dopey smile on his face, and his limbs are hanging abnormally loose.  He takes the ewe from me.  With barely any motion, he has his thumb in the ewe’s mouth like a bit, pressing back against the jaw and circling around to reach his forefinger.

He says nothing, just smiles at me with those hawk eyes.

The ewe struggles.  This is her first time having a lamb, and she doesn’t understand what’s happening to her body or why she’s in a shed with these strange humans who dispense feed and fear with the same visit.

And now she’s got two of those two-legged beasts against her.  She’s all on her own; her friends are crowded into the back corner of the pen as far away from us as possible.  Her eyes roll in her black face.  She jolts her head back and stamps, pushing herself backwards against Richard’s hold.

She’s a fierce fighter, with four square legs of power and a wooly back to match.  She twists her head, squints her eyes, and grinds her teeth.  But she can’t bite Richard.  He’s got her behind the row of teeth.  She can’t move backwards; she can’t move sideways.

The shed is silent except for the ewe’s struggle.

“It’s very painful,” Richard says, “because it presses against sensitive skin.  If they struggle, you just hold them tighter, and they’ll learn.”

I nod.

The ewe slows her squirming and stands there heavily, eyes wary, breathing noisily through her nose.

Richard has won.

I glance up at Richard, complicit in this as in all things.

“How did your dad teach you?”

“One sec.”  I want to get this over for her as fast as possible.

I bend down and collect the flesh poking out of the ewe’s rear end in my cupped hand.  I slowly push it back in and hold it with one hand while I ease the plastic spoon inside with the other.  I tie the spoon on, wrapping the twine around the ewe’s belly.

I let go.

“He taught me to hold the neck.”

“You’ll have to show him this one,” Richard says.  He has a bright gleam in his eye.  “It’s better.”

As the lambs grow stronger, it’s time to release them into the fields with their mothers.  I have to mark them with numbers matching their mothers’ eartag, in case they get mixed up on the journey.  I pull the spray paint out of my vest pocket in a shower of twine and straw and lean over the fence to scoop up a lamb with one hand.  I balance the lamb precariously on my knee as I brand it with a blue number, then shove the spray paint back in my pocket and pull the elastrator out.  As I slip a rubber band onto the lamb’s tail, I get soft little black poops under my fingernails.  I take no notice.

This isn’t working for me.  Four weeks with no days off, no time to be by myself, and no space to get away.  I’ve begun shaking the damn little lambs that won’t lie still.  No more caresses, just in and out.  I no longer think twice when I fling a lamb into a pen and knock out its breath with a wheeze.  The lamb will get up again, and I have another one to get.  Efficiency is everything.

My notepad stays in my pocket, pages stained and rumpled.  I can’t think of anything reasonable to write anymore.  I scrawled my last note days ago, just a line saying that I wished the sheep wouldn’t shit in their own water buckets, but then again, what could I do?

Perhaps, by not writing, I’ll forget things, like the memory of the water breaking on a ewe, gushing piss-dark over Richard’s wellies as he reaches inside to pull out three dead lambs, dried and deceased so long that their mother has lost the lubricant to push them out.  They’ve been holed up inside her for days, bloated with gases.  If they’d been left there long enough, Richard told me, if the shepherd was a poor shepherd and didn’t notice that the ewe had lost its water bladder, then only a Caesarean could get the lambs out, and the ewe still might die from the poison fermenting in her system.

I throw the dead lambs and the remains of afterbirth into plastic feed sacks.  Every day, there are more.  Today it’s one stillborn lamb, one suffocated lamb crushed by the weight of its mother, who sat on it as she slept, and five straw-specked placentas.

I’ve left one dead lamb left by the pens in case Richard wants to skin it.  I don’t know how to do it myself, and I’m not going to ask for a lesson.  You have to slice through the skin so the pelt peels off into a jacket that another lamb can wear.  You put the jacket on an orphan lamb, and the bereaved mother smells it and believes that this lamb is hers, that her lamb never died in the first place.  If all goes well, she fosters the orphan until its smell becomes familiar and displaces the smell of the dead.

The stink is getting to me.  The line of body bags is four long now.  The dogs like to get into the bags and pull out the bodies of baby lambs or bits of afterbirth.  They swallow the afterbirth whole or chew on the lambs’ faces and leave a pale red mess behind.  Then I have to pick up the carcasses and put them back in the bags, folding the tops over carefully and smashing them down with something heavy so that the dogs can’t get inside.

I’ve stopped petting them because of that.  Moss and Sam and Bob.  Now I wish I hadn’t learned their names, so that I could despise the dogs more easily.

You can’t get too attached.  That’s the first lesson of farming.  You can’t have a personal relationship with an animal.  I learned that the hard way as a kid.  Don’t love the little boy lambs too much, because by autumn they’ll be loaded into trucks and sent off to become lamb chops.  All the crying in the world won’t bring them back.  Trust me: I tried.

After dinner, Richard tells me to pull the watery-eyed lamb off his mother.  The lamb had been born that morning, and his twin brother must have taken all the milk, because that afternoon I found him hollow and huddled in the corner of the pen.  Richard figured that the ewe was bunting him away because she was too stupid to realize he was hers.

I take the lamb out of the pen and put him on his own under a heating lamp for the night.  When his temperature returns to normal, I figure I’ll take him back to his mother.

That’s not what happens.  By the next morning, the lamb still hasn’t moved.  He doesn’t even twitch when I touch him.  I feed him the only way I can, by crouching down and cradling his head in my hand, then slipping a rubber tube into the corner of his mouth and down through his throat into his stomach.  With a plastic syringe of milk, I pump him until his sides swell.

When Dewi finds out about the orphan lamb, he follows me out.  “Are you going to feed the lamb, Amy?  I want to feed him.  Let me feed him.”

“You can come with me,” I say, “but I’m going to tube him.  He can’t drink properly yet.”

“Why?”

“Why?  Well…”  I look at the lamb.  It’s been two days, and he’s still huddled on his side, tongue hanging out.  He hasn’t lifted his head since I put him there.  Richard told me to flip him over every time I thought about it, so that circulation goes to both sides of the body.  He told me that he’s seen lambs that have lain in one position too long, and when they get well enough to walk they’re lopsided.

 “He’s a nice lamb, isn’t he, I?  Not naughty at all.”  Dewi holds the lamb’s head while I prepare the syringe.

“No, Dewi, not naughty.”  I moisten the tube with milk.

“Why does he not have a mother, then?”

I stare at Dewi, but he won’t look at me.

“Oh, Dewi, he wasn’t naughty.  It was just that his mommy didn’t have enough dinner for both him and his brother.  He still has a mommy.  It’s just that he can’t go back to her until he gets well.”

“Oh.”

Dewi plays with the lamb’s ears as I slide the tube down the lamb’s throat.  “We’ll have to name him then, won’t we, Amy?  We’ll name him.”

“All right.  What will you name him?”

“I’m going to call him….”  Dewi glances around for inspiration, mumbling under his breath.  Then he has it.  “Peter.  We’ll call him Peter, won’t we?”

“Peter.  Good.  Hi, Peter.”

I hold Peter in my arms and look at him.  His left eye is teary and milky, and I wonder if he can see out of it.  I stroke him gently, but he doesn’t bleat or move.  He’s far, far away from here.  I set him down, and the tube of milk splashes onto his forehead.  Peter sinks back into the straw, baptized in milk.  I’ll bet he dies in a few days.

The ewe with the dead triplets doesn’t seem to want to pull out of it.  She won’t lift her head, and she stinks.  She’s had that glazed, aimless look ever since she was pumped full of penicillin, after her lambs were pulled out of her.

But Richard has an idea.

She has milk, and Peter needs a mother.

Even Richard is surprised at Peter’s turn-around.  Maybe having a name helped him.  He can stand up on his own now, feet splayed for balance.  His weepy eye is half-shut, making him look a bit dozy.  I’ve moved him to a pen with a few other lambs, and he fits in perfectly, even though he’s been alive for a week and they just a day.

Richard tells me to take him over to nurse on the sick ewe twice a day.  He’ll need to be taught how to suck, but he should pick up it fast.  And who knows?  Maybe having a lamb will give the ewe a reason to live.

Peter takes to nursing with gusto, but the ewe still doesn’t respond.  I give her another intramuscular injection of penicillin in the leg: ten ccs, three times the normal dose.  I am to repeat the injections until the ewe gets better or dies.  Boss’ orders.

Richard reckons that it does no good to give them what it says on the bottle.  “Give her a good jolt,” he says.  “If that won’t cure her, nothing will.  No use fiddling about with a piddly three ccs.  You can bet that’s not what the vet uses.  It won’t kill her.”

It won’t kill her.  I repeat this to myself.  It’s only penicillin; it won’t kill her.

There’s another prolapse in the barn the next afternoon.  Nobody is around.  The lambing shed is quiet with stamping ewes and sunlight slanting into the dust.  In the second pen on the left, a ewe is lying on her side.  She grunts and strains, but no lamb comes.

When she rolls to her feet, I see why.  Her guts are hanging out.  At least, that’s what it looks like to me: a knotted up mess of organs spilling out of her rear end, flattened where she’d been sitting on them.

She’s a speckled-face with a green ear tag, which means that she must be an older ewe.  That’s good: she’ll be calmer than a first-timer.

There’s a clean spoon on the shelf.  I pick it up, tie strands of twine to it, then jump into the pen with one hand on the bars.  I land with a thud.  Sheep scatter.

Warily, I start moving towards where I’d last seen her.  The ewes closest to me jump to their feet with a bleat and dash away, the straw hissing with their steps.  I scan their black and pink behinds.  Ah, there she is.  The speckled face races by.  I leap to catch her.

Holding tightly to the fleece with both hands, I wheel in circles as the ewe continues to run.  At last she slows, tiring, and I find the breath to pull her over to the fence where I can pin her against the bars with my knees.

I lay the spoon on the ewe’s back.  She stands there, breathing heavily.  She can’t back up; my knee is there.  She can’t go forward; my other knee is in her shoulder.

With two gentle fingers, I push the prolapse in.  A few dry clods of manure that had been trapped inside fall from the folds of flesh.  As my fingers sink in further, the fleshy folds collapse in on each other, taking their right shape.

A fountain of warm water hisses out and splashes over my hands.  It smells like urine.  The ewe’s bladder has been blocked since she prolapsed.  This must be a relief to her.

I let the urine wash over my knuckles until it stops and I can work again, then gently push the prolapse in the rest of the way.  I insert the plastic spoon and tie it on with good strong knots.

I let the ewe go.  Without even a glance at me, she moves ahead and is back in the herd, surrounded by their comforting numbers.  I watch her as she walks to the water trough in short struts, hitching up her rear end to accommodate the new feeling.

It’s not that I’m disappointed.  I can’t expect the ewe to look up and bleat appreciatively.  That’s the balance of power between the human and the ewe: whatever I do, I am always the one to be run away from.

Still, if the ewe had just recognized me, looked me in the eye, known it was me saving her life, me who cared, not Richard….

But all human legs look the same from a ewe’s point of view.

I sigh.  I wipe my hands dry on my shirt and hop back over the fence to get some more marking spray.  I don’t know why I always seem to think everything’s about me.  It’s not.  None of this is personal.  The sheep seem to do a better job remembering that than me.

One week later, I move Peter and his new mother outdoors at last, to the observation field below the house.  They’re still alive.  They’ve taken to one another with the fierce attachment of survivors.

Peter’s wooly belly feels full in the crook of my elbow as I carry him outside.  The sun is a white halo in the overcast sky, and it smells like grass and dew.  I set him down inside the gate and step back as the ewe charges in, collects Peter, then flees down the hill to join the others.  The two merge into the flock and are gone.

No pause, no glance back.

But I’m okay with that.  Only children name lambs, after all.

I head back to the shed, towards the warmth and rich barnyard smell.  With only a handful of ewes left to lamb, I’ll be moving on soon.  Richard has promised to send me to a friend of his, an organic farmer.  Apparently the farmer uses homeopathic treatments on his sheep, making him the laughingstock of the county.

I can’t wait.

            This is an interesting trick, imagining connective lines traced with straight perfection, disregarding the rumpled surface of the actual earth.  It means calling on the familiar concepts of latitude and longitude, and, in my case, the decades of looking at maps that began early in grade school with roll-down charts of dusty-smelling paper bolted above the blackboard and metal globes with minuscule lettering across the slight texture of continents.  Greenland, I remember, was an oxymoronic white like a slightly-raised blob of Elmer’s glue.  One year, on a vacation camping trip with my father and brother, I was appointed the official navigator, while my father drove the car, and I felt the responsibility of choosing for us–yes, that is our exit.  Yes, I am sure; turn here.  I sat in the passenger seat, the atlas open on my knees, the landscape streaming past the windows.  In the long, boring stretches across Pennsylvania, I’d turn pages, skipping ahead until called back to task–there’s another exit coming up.  For today’s children, map literacy probably begins, if it does, with computer software and purely virtual models. The voice of the GPS unit, “turn right,” with the iconic car facing straight ahead. In any case, there is Abstraction, casting its net, or its hook-and-line of direction, into the invisible distance.  I once heard a former surveyor describing the summers in college when he worked for the US Geological Survey near Salt Lake.  “Running Line,” was what the crew called their work, and Line became a force independent of their command.  Line stuck tightly to the contours of topography; when Line pitched over a cliff edge, they had no choice but to follow any way they could, and catch up with its conceptual advent at the bottom where they would then pause, drive in a survey marker, and take a breather before moving on.

***

Pueblo Alto is one of the high points in the Ancestral Puebloan world, on the north rim of Chaco Canyon where for three hundred years culture bloomed and went to seed in the sandy dirt.  It’s not one of the earliest buildings constructed during what archaeologists call “the Chaco Phenomenon,” nor is it the last.  It’s not the most remote from the central cluster of ruins on the canyon floor.  But it is a spectacularly lofted place, 350 feet above the canyon floor, and it affords direct sight-connection with Huerfano Mesa, which in turn connects with Chimney Rock Mesa in Colorado, a far northern outlier of the Chacoan array of great houses.  Several years ago a young woman tested this in a project either for a science fair.  Together with some friends who helpfully climbed onto the mesas in question, she found that it worked: they could flash signals to each other through intervening miles of clear, western air. So we can infer that, centuries ago, the imaginary lines radiating from the canyon would have had visible points along their trajectories, line guides to straighten the conceptual filament’s release, and cast, and set.  The people who raised these now-ruined buildings from the stone and mud of the Colorado Plateau–call them Ancestral Puebloans, Anasazi, or, with the clannish specificity of location, Chacoans–established many of these sightline connections with which to signal other houses miles away. Fire, or mirrors of mica or obsidian; the lights they wielded could speed through the distance, like the nano-moments when intention flashes its neuronal pulse within the landscape of the brain.

            Then there are the ancient roadbeds, visible from the air, or, when I was here in a wet May a year ago, from the mesa itself, as a subtle indentation in the prevailing orange bloom of wildflowers.  These roads connect several sites within and outside the canyon.  Sometimes they scale the cliff walls with impressive, precarious staircases carved into the cap rock, easily visible–particularly so now, I think, since a recent snowfall has coated the horizontal lines with white while the vertical rises lift bare sandstone in a corrugated pattern that steps off into sudden air.  Once, there must have been ramps or wooden ladders to complete the descent, but in the austerity of ruin only carved stone is left in place. At Pueblo Alto a number of these stairways converged, connecting the high point with different locations on the canyon floor.  From the mesa top, a major roadway struck off to the north: first, it led northeasterly to cross Escavada Wash, a mile and a half away, but then it straightened out and for ten miles ran within ½ degree of true north.  Here it reached an archaeological site called Pierre’s Complex, a scattering of small structures built on the land’s highest places, rocky knobs and pinnacles.  From the complex, the road continued for nearly another twenty miles, always within 2% of north, arriving at a badlands punctuated by precipitous mounds and slopes that researchers have called “nearly impassibly steep.”

            This was the Great North Road, a massive structure that archaeologists have been puzzling over for a generation.  It is roughly thirty feet wide–broader, that is, than many modern two-lane roads–and it plunges determinedly over the topography, without the kindness of curves or switchbacks to soften the traveler’s journey.  The builders lived and worked without draft animals, without the wheel, so it’s difficult to imagine why they needed a straight, flat road in which two modern SUV’s might comfortably pass (or two pickups stop, windows down, for conversation).  “Overbuilt” is the term scholars repeatedly resort to, and many argue the system was nonutilitarian, with, most likely, only “ephemeral practical use.”

            “The road appears to be its own reason for development–an end in itself,” Anna Sofaer and her colleagues conclude.  They point to artifacts of language and tradition among the descendants of the Chacoans, the modern Pueblo people of Arizona and New Mexico.  Words aren’t immutable, of course, but language whispers history, tracing storied connections that ripple outward through both mind and world.  In Tewa, spoken in half a dozen historic Pueblos, the word for “road” connotes, etymologically, “channel for the life’s breath,” and the cycle of a human life, birth to death, is called “path.”  These are traces of metaphors so familiar in English they have nearly shaken the dust from their feet and stepped free from gravity, free from mud or dirt, to enter the realm of disembodied abstraction.

            All this archetypal emphasis on journeying seems to be stirring something in my inner web of neurons and hormones, calling me to attention.  Migration, journey, voyage–this has been one of the fundamental aspects of  human experience for hundreds of thousands of years, and even though it’s a far cry from modernity’s daily commute from suburb to work or the employee relocation determined by the corporate office, we’re still a species in motion and the voyage remains potent in our mythology and symbolism.  We love echoes of Homer and his tale of Odysseus, whether he’s transformed into George Clooney’s Everett and breaking into song, or Charles Frazier’s Inman, in love with a woman and a mountain, trying to get home.  (It’s a lot harder with Finnegan’s Wake, I think, but of course, it’s there, too.)  When, several years ago, I sat in a therapist’s office, studying the shards and chips of identity at my feet, trying to lift my imagination toward any metaphoric horizon, it was the motif of migration he turned to.  “You’re on a hell of a journey,” he told me, and I decided to believe it was true.  After all, I already owned three different pairs of boots.

            Here, in the warm-hued canyon, even in the single-digit grip of cold, consider the imagery of the journey presented through centuries of Southwestern art.  In legend, Puebloan people speak of “straight” roads that call to mind those “overbuilt” roads leading straight out of Chaco and into the surrounding world, the Great North Road being the iconic exemplar.  But I’ve also stumbled across suggestions that the spiral shape implies “journey,” as well, particularly in the many images carved in sandstone where the spiral seems to move out from its central point and terminate in something like a bubble, or the open eye of a needle, holding both potential and presence in that inscribed, enclosed space.

            The ranger, G.B., is a private man, his psyche curled around the emergent point where his life changed and he left his work in the city to move forever between sun and shadow, mesa and ruin.   He’s lived in the canyon for two decades now.  “I’ve had my best and worst experiences here,” he says.  He tells stories, but guardedly, leaving me guessing at some of the fractures he’s witnessed; fragments or shrapnel he’s caught with his heart.  In a cleft where a building-sized boulder was cleft by time into two toppled halves, I peeked where he pointed.  The sedimentary surface, darkened into rock rind, desert varnish, was pocked and scabbed; only a hip-wide passage opened in the stone, and I stepped inside, my shoulders nearly brushing each sandstone surface.  The sky–that desert sky, clear as flute- or wren-song–was just a narrow band of late-afternoon light directly overhead.  In the shadow of geologic time, petroglyphs hung like silence between one song and another.

            We guess at the images.  One figure, nearly centered in the corridor, could have been any number of things: two sandals, G.B. suggested, with their toes curving slightly towards each other.  Or a sunrise, cleaved by a conical landform or maybe a stylized tower.  He wondered: might moonlight, casting through the opening above, paint the rock art with its white-silver sheen for the brief slice of the night when the moon moved overhead?  It is, he said, a place that’s important for women, according to a Puebloan woman whom he accompanied here once, but if he knew anything more about the signifying nature of the artwork, he kept it to himself.  I followed a  deeply-pecked line that began at the eastern end of the miniature slot canyon with that same eye-of-the-needle, bubble-in-oil, loop-in-the-cordage shape, then traveled westward in a varying craze of meanders and back-loops, surely twelve or fifteen of it stretched across the desert varnish, maybe waist-high on the average. As I stood still, taking it all in, the line suggested wide-ranging, irregular motion.  It reminded me of a stream I looked down on from above, nearly twenty years ago, now, when I stood on a mountain in Maine and surveyed a cold, wet mountain meadow, the stream channel making slow, restrained switchbacks through the boggy grass while a red-eyed vireo sang an incessant accompaniment to the season. 

            It called to mind the drunk driver who careened off the snowy road at the campground one night and then wandered from the car as the temperature dropped toward single digits and the park police hunted for him in the dark.  Or the young woman checking into the cheap motel where I stayed on the long drive out, who objected when the desk clerk gave her room assignment. 

            “When I made the reservation, you told me room 105,” she said, setting a baby carrier on the floor at her feet.  “I have to report to Corrections, they want to know exactly where I am.  You can’t give me 106.”  Her voice crept upward, louder.  “I could get more prison time; I have to be where I said would be, in case they check.” An older women whom I took to be her mother came in carrying a plastic shopping bag of early Christmas presents and stood nearby, a listless pillar of resignation.  The desk clerk blinked and looked ineffectually at the paperwork he’d just printed out.  The baby began to cry, adding urgency to the little scene, and the manager arrived to sort things out, her eyes full of questions behind enormous glasses.  I wondered at the path those lives had taken, where each participant would place herself along its linear bend and curve, and did it feel, there in the cold night along Highway 160, that any of those turns was already carved in stone, no turning back.

***

But those were other days, other moments.  Today I’m in the middle of a ruined plaza atop West Mesa.  The great house, Peñasco Blanco, lies a couple of miles beyond trailhead near Casa Chiquita. It’s one of the three oldest buildings in the park, with some of its initial structure dating to the early 900s A.D.  On the hike here, I thrashed around in the brush along the canyon’s mostly-frozen wash, trying to scare up deer or elk or anything besides the juncos that have been my most numerous companions–their gray-and-white plumpness touched with rose in their breasts, marking them western birds, unlike their somber cousins I know must be pitting and trampling the snow back home.  But nothing much flushed from cover and mostly I just managed to get overheated and scratch my face a little, and I seem to have lost an earring as well, somewhere along the way.  Now, 150 feet up on the mesa, it’s much colder, exposed to the wind.  The sky is completely featureless and gray, and I’m getting chilly while I fiddle with my plastic compass.

            Any compass is a compelling little tool.  Three hundred and sixty degrees around, it invites the user to be mindful of the encircling horizon, the observable sense that always, anywhere, you are in the center of things, encircled by a perfect ring of possibility in the phenomenal world. Azimuth, we call the locations around that ring, a term borrowed from the Arabic-speaking astronomers who sought to systemize understanding of the night sky, both before and into the so-called “dark ages” of Europe.  As-sumūt, “the way,” linguistically pointing to each summit pass I’ve ever climbed, stopping at the top to drop the pack and turn in all directions, gasping at the surrounding, snow-capped view.  But with the needle’s thin shaft seeking magnetic north, and the need to correct for declination (the difference between geographic north and magnetic north), that self-centering moment is quickly complicated.  Here, in northwest New Mexico, declination is ten or eleven degrees east (there seems to be some uncertainty among the more knowledgeable folks in the canyon) which means that each horizon reading requires a quick arithmetical correction, adding the local declination figure.  Since my math skills are atrocious, I’m sticking with ten because the arithmetic is easier.

            Despite the fact that I’m mediating between myself and the horizon with a palm-sized tool that I don’t fully understand, I like the way concepts of location invoke the concrete world.  True north is geographic north, derived from the whole planet’s shape and spin upon that un-engineered and unseen axis, discernible once you have established east and west by observing the sun’s apparent motion through the year.  Even magnetic north, which isn’t “true,” is also Earth-based, generated by internal workings in the planet’s molten core. And although the magnetic poles aren’t fixed, moving several miles each year as the tectonic interior shifts and churns, magnetic north is neither purely arbitrary nor abstract.  The so-called “main field” wields an invisible shield in space, deflecting solar wind along the geomagnetic field lines toward the poles to ripple the skies with aurora light far into the northern night.

            According to a research team that investigated the alignment of the great houses in the canyon, Peñasco Blanco is one of two buildings I can hike to in the park whose architecture reproduces the angles between the cardinal directions east or west and the azimuths of the major lunar standstills.  They describe how the ruins on the mesa contain interior angles of 33 and 35.5 degrees, both correlating roughly with the 35.7 degree angle that separates the major standstill from due east.   To get these figures, they surveyed a straight line linking the outside corners of the ruin’s curved wall of room blocks, and then another, perpendicular to the first.  Where that perpendicular line intersected the curved back wall, they surveyed (in a less frozen season, I’m betting) two more straight lines connecting the intersection with the two outside corners. All this geometry is reproduced in neat, convincing diagrams and figures in a library book I’ve toted along in my backpack and I pull it out to help me situate myself in the schematic.  In a clumsy gait, I also pace the snow, trying to follow Line, stepping over dry shrubs and stiff, scrubby weeds: a little over 300 feet across the plaza. The midpoint must be roughly here. 

            I turn and look to the southeast, and find I’m facing one of the tallest remnants of the single-story arc that was added sometime late in the 12th century.  It blocks my view of the canyon, so I pace forward again and then detour out in front of the masonry.  All this is the crudest sort of orienteering but for the moment I am satisfied.  Out of the wind in the remaining shelter of a room’s side wall on the arc, I can prop open the book, eat a little peanut butter and banana sandwich to coax back some body heat, and imagine the line I just paced off extending over the lip of the mesa, into the wintry wind that fills the canyon. The temperature must be hovering somewhere near freezing but the wind makes my eyes water a little as I lift the compass and sight along its quivering needle, 54 degrees from north.

            That perpendicular line, cutting roughly through the center of the enclosed plaza (and which I hope I’m close to straddling now), should point directly to the spot on the horizon where the major standstill moon will rise. Not only that, the researchers argue, the same line projected down the canyon, past the trail I hiked to get here, past my muddy Chevy Tracker parked in the lot, old cassette tapes scattered on the back seat, past the other ancient buildings clustered visibly in the wash; past porcupines gnawing high in the cottonwoods to turn tree bark to mammal fat; on towards the southeastern end of the canyon–  That invisible, insistent line will hit another of the three oldest great houses, Una Vida.  And here’s the final detail I can draw from their analysis: Una Vida’s interior orientation, defined by a line perpendicular to the high back wall facing the cliff, also inscribes an angle of the standstill moon, 54.8 degrees. It is a house of the rising moon, preserving in its architecture the memory of the recurrent lunar maximum, that point of farthest cyclical travel south and north, beyond even the sun’s solstitial extremities.  Geo-metric, yes, but we’re measuring the heavens here, too–at least, I’m trying to.

            Since this cycle’s last full moonrise in the major standstill position is only days away, just after the solstice, I think it’s a good time to be here, pondering the bond of moon and self.  I like to think of myself as a woman in the very middle of my life, but that’s true only if I live to be ninety, a prospect likely given my father’s family longevity, but far less so if I take after my (late) mother’s people.  And we do tend to inherit the proclivities for aging from our mothers.  So the sense of time left actually matters for me, as it never did when I was younger; the sense of what I’ve accomplished–or not–; of chances taken–or not; these stand out like late-day shadows at the year’s end.  Here in the shadowless gray of overcast afternoon, I consider the pull of the moon on the body, and so as well the body’s emotional life. 

            I think of the body’s own emotional life as something separate from the mind’s emotions, though this can’t be strictly accurate.  The former include the reptilian brain’s responses, from some chamber curled near the brainstem, and above that, maybe, tail wrapped across its nose, a hibernating mammal waiting out bad times.  When he came to live in the desert Southwest, D.H. Lawrence had plenty to say about these aspects of humanity, but he could never stand free from the carved fruitwood chair of his British empire perspective when he watched Pueblo people, some most likely the distant descendants of Chacoan builders. For him, the otherness of Southwestern symbolism, the dark-faced dancers and their plumed serpents, conflated the exotic with the erotic, intoxicating (although, of course, when he arrived in Taos, hoping to breathe healing air into his tuberculosis-riddled lungs, he was the exotic one, the traveler-from-afar). Right now, I’m alone, my skin ripplingly awake in the desert air.  I know there’s another hiker somewhere behind me–I can even see him through binoculars, off near the trailhead–but for the time being there’s no need to be social or even audible in the pervasive quiet.  And that’s what I want: for a while, at least, here at mid-day, I want to train all levels of alertness inward.

            The emotional life of the mind is the delight in knowing and understanding.  Tyler, an astronomer taking a three-week sabbatical stay in the park, is an excellent conversational companion on the trail; he often seems nearly flushed with the pleasure of explaining, of offering knowledge to interested listeners.  I’m one of these, learning from his gestures to the sky.  We’ve chatted about the nature of scientific understanding, and his own frustration with imprecision in English concerning “knowledge” and “belief”–we agree, it would be helpful to have a greater variety of nouns delineating different kinds of belief, since it’s particularly unhelpful to use the same term for both tightly-held religious conviction and cautious, methodical reasoning.  “Consilience,” I think, is a helpful term here, though I learned it through biology and E.O. Wilson’s work.  A single explanation that follows induction from different sorts of data, was the best definition I could offer him on the spot.  And as I did, I called up the mental picture of those ancient roads converging on the central place.

            Later, though, poking through etymology listed in the dictionary, I found that the very precision I was hunting for disappears.  “Consilience” may sound in the voice as though it’s related to reconcile or conciliate, calling together like a deliberative council with hemming and hawing and debate–and, if applied to the workings of Washington–lots of pizza deliveries to fuel committee meetings late into the night.  But it’s not.  The Latin verb stem is my old friend salīre, to jump, and so the word suggests impulsive action rather than step-by-step reasoning.  The body’s emotional leap, both feet off the ground, to the immediate future.  For a brief time, just when I was turning forty, I couldn’t stop jumping.  Creosote bushes, fallen logs across the trail; bunch grasses lifting from the perennial prairie: they all presented themselves like second chances at becoming a hurdler, when, instead, I had always been a distance runner.  Short running start; then the leap–the suspension of self for seconds that stretched, uncounted, while endorphins celebrated all the doors that still seemed open.  Short-term delight, though: the knees won’t take this kind of fantasy forever, and then the long, horizontal view clicks into view, and you settle back in to the sustained walk.

            No more than half a mile away, over the precipitous lip of the mesa and sheltered in a protective sandstone overhang, the much-discussed pictograph that may record the Crab Nebula supernova faces east.  I remember first seeing it nearly two decades ago, after a hot, early-June hike through the canyon and a clumsy jump across the wash, which was running fast then from a recent rain.  I stood before the mesa’s flank, skin prickling with sweat, and looked up, thrilled by the red-paint composition, tucked beneath the protective overhang.  A crescent moon, a pointed star, a perfect human hand. 

            Two decades later, the pictograph has pulled me back–the me who both is, and is not, the woman I (then) was.  If the researchers are right, the artwork has been there, painted in confident, red pigment on the flattest, cleanest plane of rock, for nearly a thousand years.  Calculating backwards, astronomers have determined that the exploding star would have first been visible on July 5, 1054, in the pre-dawn skies with the crescent moon still rising. Anyone sitting outside, awaiting sunrise in mild, mid-summer weather, would have seen a sudden, brilliant addition to the familiar stars.  (Chinese astronomers did just that, and recorded the date precisely.)  Modern researchers figure that the apparent conjunction of star and moon was actually much closer here in the Colorado Plateau than it would have been in Asia; half a world away, the degree of separation between the two would have tripled by the time anyone saw their bright bodies near the horizon.  Here, recorded in paint, was an accurate cluster: the horns of the moon, the luminous star, the hand of the artist raised in witness and presence.

            I want to imagine the moment: the sudden flare of new light, the indrawn breath, the sensual rush of amazement and–perhaps–alarm.  Then surely a shout, rousing the sleepers nearby within the great house walls: Hey! Come see!  But this wasn’t a one-off apparition, leaving the sleepers grumpy and skeptical, and the viewer(s) noisily defensive.  For twenty-three days it was visible in daylight.  Expanding remnants still drape that part of space with the color and light of the Crab Nebula, where a pulsar spins its neutron heart, still flashing spectra into the cold, dark distance.  Another probable depiction of the exploding star has been found painted on a piece of Mimbres pottery, a plate carbon-dated to within fifteen years of the event: the star is carefully drawn with twenty-three rays, perhaps counting those impressive days before the light subsided. 

            The plate itself, though I’ve only seen it in a photograph, draws imagination into its shallow basin.  Nearly centered in the visual field, a stylized rabbit arches its black-on-white back, tall ears cocked forward and a bright eye of concentric circles wide above a furry-bristly mouth.  This is the personified “rabbit in the moon” that many indigenous peoples see in the full moon’s mottled texture. Here, however, the exaggerated arc of the back, the sharp points of its little rabbit-feet, suggest instead the crescent moon, those “horns” in close proximity to the probable star.  The plate, though broken, has been reassembled, glued back together with only two pieces missing so that just a tiny bit of the rabbit’s back is absent from the image, as well as a section of the plate’s undecorated rim.  In contrast to the circles that define the design, the dark rabbit is ornamented with an angular light line, running from breast to tail: a bold, acute angle across the region of the shoulders, followed by series of step-like jags (ten of them) and an obtuse angle across the animal’s hindquarters.  I love the image’s contrasts: angle and curve, circle and line, figure and ground.  In the plate’s apparent perfect circle, the mytho-historic symbols are stilled in time, preserved in an understatement of clay and paint.

            And here, near Peñasco Blanco, there’s another pictograph fading in partial sunlight beneath the star/moon/hand composition.  A series of concentric circles, in fairly broad rings of yellowish paint with a wide sweep of subtle red extending to the right.  In certain light, it’s nearly invisible but at other times of day the yellow stands out from the sandy substrate. When I look closely, I see three rings, or really two rings and a central dot, with faint traces of red between them.  I stand as close as I can, in the protected dust and litter beneath the cliff.  Then I move back along the eroding hillside, balancing among shin-high stalks of shrubs–rabbit brush, probably–and compare perspectives.  It’s a comet, some say–the reddish tail blown back by invisible solar wind centuries before anyone had named, or perhaps even imagined, such a celestial force.  In 1066, Halley’s Comet would also have been visible here, so together the panel may record the astronomical marvels of a generation.  Marvels for sure, because although Halley’s loops back regularly, its elliptical orbits swinging it into our view once (or maybe twice) in a modern human lifetime, the sky records few traces of exploding stars that could have been witnessed by human eyes, whatever the millennium.            

            Concentric circles are a common figure in rock art across the desert Southwest.  Some scholars take them to be deeply standardized, like hieroglyphs or potent runes.  According to contemporary Pueblo explanations for three concentric circles, the rings and dot represent the sun’s great aura, the fiery body of the sun itself, and the sun’s “umbilicus,” a portal that opens “to provide mankind with game and other food.”  Farther west, the Chumash peoples associated concentric circles with connective portals between worlds, passageways between mythic and profane realms.  Despite the cultural conservatism that must have held sway to keep Chacoan great houses under renovation and care for three hundred years, I like to think of the aesthetic play that happens in the hands of gifted artists.  We can imagine the hoopla at the installation site.

            First, there’s the choice of someone skilled enough to be trusted to paint the panel just below the brilliant red star and moon, no longer visible in the night sky but preserved in still-bright pigment high above the alcove floor.  Not just anybody can be charged with such an important addition to a public mural.  I wonder who made the actual selection?  The decision might have been politicized, with a snarl of hard feelings or suspect motives.  But whatever the process, the choice has been made and now the artist is balanced high on a ladder, an assistant standing just a rung or two beneath him holding pigment and tools.  (Is it a he? Or a she? I’m undecided.)  Off at the small crowd’s periphery, someone else is blustering, trying to convince the people in earshot that really, he would have been the better choice, this guy’s not nearly as good as people say, etc.  In the front row, someone has pushed forward to see.  Oh, look, she breathes to the person standing beside her, or to herself.  (This time there’s no question.  In my mind, it’s a she.)  I like the way he’s made the long-tailed star look like the sun.  And I like the perspective:  its face is looking at us, even though the tail’s spread out to the side. 

            But the guy in the back row’s still having none of it.  Look, he scoffs, what a loser.  He can’t even tell the difference between a star and the sun.

***     

Though I can’t see Una Vida from here, I’ve compass-puzzled enough to be pretty sure I have the angle right, and I stare at the smooth horizon’s flank at 54 degrees.  South Mesa presents a pale, barely-sloping saddle of grass, dotted with only a few widely-spaced juniper trees, none of them coinciding with “my” imaginary line.  If illuminated in sunlight, I think, the grasses would look like a tawny pelt, but now everything–vegetation, stone, sky–feels vaguely metallic and gray.

            The moon will rise in mid-afternoon today and I had considered hanging around the ruins to watch it lift. Other researchers tell me they’ve watched this standstill moonrise, and it isn’t precisely over Una Vida (though the great house itself is occluded from sight by the intervening South Mesa).  G.B. and his colleague Ron watched from Peñasco’s height; they report that instead the moon rose over Pueblo Bonito, the oldest and largest great house in the canyon, clearly visible from where I stand.  But the cloud cover remains heavy and dull, and the chances of my seeing the moon in that sky seem pretty sparse. Besides, if I’m reading the research correctly, Peñasco Blanco isn’t aligned with the northern standstill.  Instead, that line I’ve abstracted outwards from the low point in the ruin’s bowl should point towards the moon’s southern standstill.  I’d have had to be here more than a week ago to see that–each month, the moon swings its arced trajectory from both extremes, north to south, cycled through in such short time compared to the sun’s annual pacing.  So even if the clouds were to lift, the moon to take the sky, I’d still be stuck with the compass, trying to measure the angle of the difference, plus or minus ten, and probably missing something else in the process. Suddenly, I feel very far from home.  Any way you look at it, I’m poorly placed for direct observation.  It’s probably time to think about heading back.

            But first I look around again, counting the side canyons.  There, second from Escavada Wash, should be Atlatl Cave, the earliest site of known habitation in the canyon. I’ve seen reproductions of pictographs from inside that remote rock shelter, stylized human figures with broad triangular shoulders and narrow waists; near them is a four-legged creature, a dog, maybe, or a coyote.  Impossible to see the cave opening from here, but I imagine it, too, under the striped awning of the sandstone above.  Researchers have sorted through packrat middens stashed away there–deposits dating back more than 10,000 years, filled with pollen and seeds and other hints at the vegetal life of the canyon. For all that time, this part of the world has been a desert shrub grassland, with variations of drought and cold and heat, of course, and greater or lesser numbers of trees–even, in those oldest deposits, Ponderosa pines and Douglas firs, now long since gone from the canyon.  Before corn and squash tethered their farmers into settlement, wide-ranging Archaic people visited the rock shelter, leaving behind bits and traces of gathered foods (pinyon nuts, hackberry seeds), rabbit fur “fabric,” and even a single yucca fiber sandal as well as the eponymous spear thrower, an ancient atlatl.  They came and they went, governing their movement by whatever season and surplus they saw in the landscape.

            Okay, okay.  I’m packing up, now, fingers back in my gloves, the sandwich bag stashed in a pocket.  But there on the ground where my stuff’s been sprawled throughout this little spate of amateur field work, I find a slip of bone and lift it up to see.  Off come the gloves again, and I cup the specimen in my bare palm.  It’s the upper mandible of some small rodent, a few exquisite molars the size of small beads, and one incisor poking forward, tool-like and yellowed.  Pocket gopher, maybe, I think.  Or a pack rat?  It looks too small for that, but bird and rodent bones always seem surprisingly small to me, such diminutions of the living animal.  I put it on a flat edge of stone that just barely protrudes from the masonry wall, a perfect shelf for my little installation–Rodentia: Memento Mori–and head back eastward.

***

One of my favorite petroglyphs from this trip is in the far eastern end of the canyon.  Beyond the cleft boulder G.B. showed me, there is a broad panel of images carved on spectacularly red sandstone.  Facing south and catching bright mid-day light, the carvings stand out imposingly against the patina of the rock face, without any sign of graffiti or vandalism.  A pecked rendition of a hand–except it’s a misshapen hand, only three fingers and the opposable thumb.  A few three-toed shapes, looking for all the world like the dinosaur tracks I’ve seen fossilized elsewhere in the West.  An animal, four-legged and with the perky antlers of a pronghorn standing in profile.  Some other designs, unidentifiable to my eye and a three-lobed shape–vaguely, I think, like a poorly-made backwards E (oh, it’s all about me).

            But commanding the middle of this intriguing panel is a spiral, so regular in proportion and execution it looks too perfect to be hand-pecked into friable sandstone.  The lines are thin and even, impeccably circular.  In fact, at first I thought it was a series of concentric circles, one trim form inside the other like a bull’s eye on the flat stone boulder. They’re so tightly packed they resemble the growth rings from Pueblo Bonito’s original pine beams, cut in the Chuska Mountains in the 11th century, and datable now through the painstaking yardstick of dendrochronology.  Each ring’s record of sap and girth, the sequence of dry years with wet, make a calendar of that particular tree-time, in that particular location.  But when I tried to count the rings in the petroglyph, I discovered it is a spiral, after all: fifteen grooves from one side to the other.  It’s a trick to the eye in bright desert light: the illusion of concentric completion, combined with the journey’s outward turn from the central point.

            There are other spirals on Fajada, a great free-standing butte in the eastern part of the canyon, which I will never see.  Beneath three slabs of sandstone leaning against the butte’s upper cliff are two pecked spirals.  The larger is slightly elliptical, over a foot in width, consisting of nineteen coiled grooves.  They seem designed to catch the light that crosses overhead, obscured by stone and then entering the gap between each slab in patterns that seem so richly symbolic I expect they’d make me weep to see them play across the rock.  On mid-summer’s day, in the flood of sun, a vertical blade of light would pierce the center of the largest spiral.  In mid-winter, the spiral remained in shadow but two vertical shafts of light would move into positions just touching the outer grooves on either side so as to frame the darkened spiral.

            The research team who recorded these seasonal patterns of light and shade hypothesized that the moon would cast timely shadows as well: at major standstill moonrise, the large spiral would lie bathed in light, the shadow just touching the left edge.  At minor standstill, the shadow would bisect the spiral through its center.  The site seems to be an ingeniously calibrated cluster: the slow-weathered butte; the sloughed-off slabs; the cyclic patterns of daylight and season, moonlight and menology.

            But all this is, now, academic.  The researchers simulated standstill moonlight and found the results they expected, but they never recorded the events themselves (unlike the solstices, remember, these cycles fall far apart (18.6 years), so at the time of their simulations, the team couldn’t make the direct observations to catch the moonlight’s actual patterns on the ontologic stone.  And now the slabs have shifted.  It’s theorized that, after the petroglyph’s discovery and fame, too many observers flocked there.  With the trampling weight of their own enthusiasm, they must have compacted the soil, shoved the boulders slightly out of line.  Predictable, ephemeral light on the stone is a thing of the past.  And anyway, Fajada Butte is strictly off-limits now.  The time of clambering up to catch the sunlight on Dagger Spiral belongs to the last millennium and to memory.                           

***

Some researchers argue that the canyon was never primarily a population center, a bustling pueblopolis with each great house filled, like desirable urban apartment buildings, with families–children playing in the dirt, annoying the dogs or turkeys, and their mothers chatting with a wrinkled grandmother about the latest raid some vermin has made on the remaining clay jars of corn.  Instead, they offer a story in which the great houses were mostly ceremonial, many of the rooms empty day after day until a time of festival when the surrounding roads would quicken with travelers, and then the canyon would fill with unaccustomed voices, perhaps in several languages, a cacophony of song and talk–a flash flood, maybe, of ritual, rising along the wash only to disperse again, days later.

Some of the evidence for this interpretation is that the buildings, for all their engineering expertise and aesthetic beauty, wouldn’t have been very comfortable or practical for daily family life.  Original excavation records indicate that Pueblo Bonito, with nearly seven hundred rooms, didn’t have enough kitchen space to support more than one hundred people.  (Kitchen space would translate, in archaeologese, to interior hearths, readily identifiable through burned dirt and oxidized stones.)  The rooms were laid out inconveniently for daily work rhythms like simply fetching fuel or water or letting the toddler hurry out to pee.  Another of my favorite ruins, Pueblo Alto, held 133 rooms but likely never housed more than 25-50 people.  However, its trash heap reveals something like binge-cooking, busted pottery and food scraps that are, as a researcher concludes, “strongly suggestive of periodic dumping events.”   I’m reminded of a group of foreign students who lived across the alley when I was in graduate school.  Following a noisy party, the dumpster we shared was filled not only with leftovers, but the pots in which the meal—unfamiliar food, which I looked at with interest when I went to dump my own trash—was cooked, along with the dirty plates.  No doubt heading back home by jet plane at the semester’s end, the young men had decided to pitch everything.

            But that’s my personal aside. “Ritual destruction of pottery,” is what the scholars hypothesize for these feasts, and the number of potsherds scattered around the earthen ring of just one un-excavated kiva suggests even to my casual glance that either the “ritual destruction” model is accurate or else the people were astoundingly clumsy in their most public places.  (The latter explanation is pretty far-fetched, since some scholars conclude that by the heyday of the canyon, most pottery was made elsewhere and imported, not the sort of thing you’d smash unthinkingly.)  Most likely, the breaking of vessels was something deliberate, maybe performative. 

            In this interpretation, the canyon’s primary residents were a priestly elite dedicated to astronomical study, art, ritual, ceremony.  Engineering and drafting too, I think, if the actual residents of Chaco had a leading role in planning the architecture and the roads that headed out, north and south, to additional great house communities.  One couldn’t spend most of the day grinding corn or hunting deer or otherwise bustling to secure one’s material needs for this mortal coil, and still have time left for the observation implicit in the canyon’s complex astronomical orientations, let alone for the expert level of artistry and craftsmanship left in stone.  And I wonder what else has vanished in the intervening centuries–paint on the inner plastered walls, or on the rock faces, exposed to sun and wind and everyone’s view. 

So perhaps the priests and scholars–one and the same–lived here year round, and shook out ornamental blankets and swept the kivas clean when, as modern scholars suggest, “pilgrims” would arrive for “episodic ceremonial events.”  Then, perhaps, the great round kiva of Casa Rinconada would be filled, the travelers descending into the sunken room through either of the opposing doors, one facing north and the other south. Some might duck through the antechamber on the north side, whose doors open east and west.  From the canyon floor, they might glimpse back up the way they’d come, through Pueblo Alto and then off on one of its converging roads. There’s a marvelous cardinal alignment among four of the central buildings grouped near Rinconda.  On the canyon floor, Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl line up neatly on an east-west axis, while Pueblo Alto and the great house on the south mesa, Tsin Kletzin, define another one reaching north-south.  No matter how you came to the festival houses in the sandstone canyon, there’s a building associated with your cardinal direction. Line, staking out the proper relations among clans or seasons; Line, insisting on its power far beyond your sight.

            While the Great North Road leading to Aztec is perhaps the best defined, leaping off the mesa top at Pueblo Alto towards the San Juan River, the orientation to the south also casts its warp- line across the distances.  Archaeologist Stephen Lekson describes a “Chaco Meridian,” a north-south alignment running four hundred miles, from the ruins at Aztec, just south of the Colorado border, through Chaco Canyon’s careful alignments, south to the ruins along the Rio Casas Grandes in northern Mexico.  These three capitals, as he imagines them, lay out a time sequence, the architectural footprints for the migration of the culture’s elite.  Moving from Chaco, these founders established Aztec in the early 1100s; a century later they moved on to establish the “big houses” named in Nahuatl “Paquimé.” 

From the mesas above Chaco Wash, the way south dominates attention: South Gap stands invitingly, the wide, U-shaped grassland resting between West and South Mesas  gesturing with nonhuman elegance: this way.  One afternoon I descended into South Gap from Tsin Kletsin, as a rising wind finally shook snow from the low clouds that, for hours, had obscured the far horizons.  As I moved along the trail, a group of coyotes crossed in front of me.  Muscular and dark, their coats patchy with shades of brown and a little white mottling the tawny look familiar from tall-grass dwellers back home, they leaped and bounded through the scrub along the valley’s intermittent stream.  Suddenly startled, they noticed me and took turns staring at the red-jacketed human standing stationary in the snow while they moved onward, west and south.  The deer I scared up later, as the snowfall increased and I headed back, made no such effort to monitor my movement.  All five of them lifted from their daybed in wind’s lea and, heads high, trotted up South Mesa’s slope and out of sight.

            The southern influence on Chaco Canyon is strong in the archaeological record.  There are the trade goods from the south: exotic feathers, even macaws themselves, kept in dark, adobe cages more like caves that distorted their bone growth.  And agriculture came from deep in Mexico: maize, first coaxed into the hand-turned earth, out of the undisturbed grasslands of its undomesticated great-aunt, teosinte.  Mid-twentieth century archaeology may have over-corrected the earlier assumptions that cliff dwellings were the work of the great civilizations to the south–outliers from the Aztecs, as implied by the name given to the ruins by Anglo-American settlers in the 19th century.  It’s an “inappropriate name,” according to the Park Service, reflecting early Anglo ignorance of the Puebloan people’s connection to their ancestor-architects.  But recent genetic research complicates the matter, suggesting quietly that not just corn and the concept of its cultivation passed along through trade, but the planters and grinders themselves made the trip north as migrants from the metate-crucible of indigenous American agriculture. 

            Recently, researchers tested artifacts from what’s called the Basketmaker II archaeological period–in this case, items ranging from 500 BC-AD 500, before the rise of Chacoan architecture.  Throughout that thousand years, the people of that pre-ceramic culture in the Southwest left intimate hints of themselves in the dry caves and shelters of the Colorado Plateau.  “Quids”–plugs of what might be called “chaw”–have been dug up from the dust and sand of intervening centuries, with ancient DNA still caught in the masticated tangles of fiber–yucca, usually.  From the mitochondrial DNA sloughed off somebody’s cheek tissue, or left behind by the saliva, long since dessicated, geneticists can identify certain population subsets, or haplogroups.  Recognizable by certain shared mutations, these haplogroups indicate shared ancestry, and allow researchers to make improved interpretations about ancient migrations and the peopling of new territories. 

            The spat-out wads of chewed-up plant matter favor a particular theory of migration from Central Mexico; the presence of haploid A mitochondrial DNA seems to be correlated, the researchers believe, with farmers speaking Uto-Aztecan languages who walked northward, bringing their seed-corn and farming secrets with them, to become the Western population of Basketmaker people.  The Eastern Basketmakers, they conclude, however, were different people–an indigenous group who adopted the new agricultural arts introduced by their new neighbors.

            But the results are tenuous.  The sample number was small–the scientists seem to have seen this as a pilot project, to identify a methodology that others could repeat, developing a larger base of information.  But even more than the dried-up spitballs, I’m intrigued by the other type of object they tested: women’s clothes.  Called “aprons” (an “inappropriate name,” I think–they look more like a breechclout or a wide, fringed thong), these are known to have been worn by women because they’re depicted that way in decorated pottery.  Many are stained with menstrual blood. 

            The researchers sampled that blood, taking tiny snippets of the fabric, grinding them up with mortar and pestle while adding purified sand and liquid nitrogen, spinning them in a centrifuge and finally, after other, chemically-abbreviated steps, removing the ancient DNA for analysis.  Only two samples gave results, and neither of these seems linked to the out-of-Mexico theory: neither belongs to haploid A.  These women left behind blood-shadows, hints of who they were or weren’t, but only hints. I imagine them in profile, bent over the stone basins in which, day after day, year after year, they pulverized dried kernels into flour.  Then I picture them standing, stretching skyward, trying to lift themselves out of the kinks that settled into their muscles–there, ooooooh–before they have to bend again to start the fire and hustle up some supper.

***

            This month the park can be seen to re-enact the theory about Chaco’s ceremonial importance in its cultural apex, the 11th century. Throughout December, the few resident staff in the park are hosting guests, travelers from elsewhere who have come for the solstice season. We’re all on a first-name basis though some of us exchange formal business cards, as if we’re at a special seminar or institute workshop.  In an empty duplex in the residential area, a series of archaeoastronomers come and go over several days.  Alonso, from Chiapas, comes to see the sunrise at Bonito.  Anna, from Santa Fe, photographs the sunrise at Wijiji with John, from Durango.  A dark-sky preservationist from Albuquerque, Peter, drives up for an afternoon of meetings and stays the night. Cherilynn, with her belongings already en route from Colorado to Georgia for her new job there, arrives for the solstice and the lunar standstill afterwards at Chimney Rock.  Tyler, here for three weeks from Los Angeles, takes time-lapse pictures each clear night, showing us his finished pictures when they turn out well.  From Kansas, I’m the relative easterner and I’ve brought prairie-fed bison meat from back home to use in evangelical outreach: Reducing the Hegemony of the Cow in the American West. 

            It turns out I’ve been assigned quarters in a duplex called “The Cantina,” and my week-long host, Kelley, believes deeply in the ameliorative power of dessert, especially chocolate.  So most nights the travelers gather at the Cantina for dinner, following whatever we’ve been up to in the day.  Several members of the permanent staff drop in, one night or another, and people bring dishes to share–roasted vegetables, a giant Tupperware wheel of salad, a pot of soup nearly the size of a small generator, six-packs of beer to sit outside on the porch, keeping cold. After dinner one evening, we move furniture and take down one of Kelley’s hanging quilts so Alonso can show slides on the clean white duplex wall, and he describes astronomical alignments in Mayan ruins at Palenque while fudge brownies bake in the Cantina’s oven.

            It’s nothing like the swell of folks who’ll be here in the summer, everyone says so.  In fact, the campground’s almost empty, with only the hardiest enthusiasts (and, one night, that errant drunk guy) sleeping in their vans or a few tarp-topped tents on single-digit nights.  And despite the continued importance of the winter solstice in the local traditions, I think it must have been a hard thing a thousand years ago to journey to the canyon for the standstill of the sun.  Even if, for people living anywhere in the Colorado Plateau drawn to Chaco for festivities or ritual, their travel converged on the wide, prepared roads that approach the cliffs from dozens of miles, their trek would likely start in more remote topography, perhaps in snow.  Assuming you could cover twenty miles in a day, all but the closest travelers in the Chacoan world could have expected to spend more than one night abroad before they reached the great houses and the waiting guest rooms.  And weather, of course, can always slow one down.

            I was planning to brave the campground to be here, if I had to.  Until I learned that by joining the volunteer community I earned a heated place beneath a roof, I’d imagined pitching my tiny backpacking tent inside a larger, heavy one for a wimpy kind of double-walled construction.  A friend was set to lend me her expedition sleeping bag, rated for temperatures of forty below zero.  But it would have been a grim experience after an hour or so at the campfire, burrowing under down and rip-stop nylon, feeling the cold cast its tactile shadow along my spine, disk by disk.  Enough, perhaps, to make a person change her mind, pack up, head homeward early.  Certainly without the social pleasure–and distraction–of evenings in the Cantina. 

            Two hours before sunrise, when I slip out the door to the front porch to check the sky around Fajada Butte for clouds or stars, the single-digit cold is a shock in the lungs. It’s clear and I bet the temperature’s right above zero, just like the night before.  Exhaling, I’m exuberant, but if for hours my breath had frosted every nearby surface–pillow, bag, the inner tent walls inches from my face…  That would have made worlds of difference.

            It would have been hard, I think, to set out from somewhere two days or more away, and crunch over the frozen sagebrush in rabbit fur socks, perhaps, and ankle-laced yucca sandals.  It would have been hard to watch the sun go down knowing the next settlement–an outpost, maybe, on the Great North Road–was still hours away, and who knew how full the rooms would be when you arrived?  And harder still when the feasting was over, the great fires burned out, maybe, and your pack and pockets far lighter than when you came, to direct yourself back over the snow, back through the days that, though marked by the promise of returning spring, were still so much shorter than the long, cold nights, and your home-bound shadow lengthened by the low sun’s low angle, from morning to dusk, until icy moonlight overtook the sun’s last hint of twilight, and you kept walking homeward, the canyon falling back beyond the visible horizon.

           I hadn’t wanted to ride him; he was too small. But the hectoring Thai guys hawking pony rides convinced me to take him out for an hour for 500 bhat, more than the cost of a good meal. I couldn’t resist the idea of galloping through the surf in the Gulf of Thailand. Seymour had short legs and an eggbeater gait, and while it was kind of fun to gallop through the surf in front of scads of belly-heavy sunburned northern Europeans, I probably could have run faster and with less discomfort on my own. Plus Seymour—I knew that wasn’t his real name, but I liked that whatever it really was, the way the Thai guys pronounced it made it sound like my great-uncle’s name—was kind of a jerk, pinning his ears and throwing his head when he didn’t want to accede to my requests.

           So when, after spending too much time at the bridge on the river Kwai—because the train that was to be the continuation of our tour was delayed for more than an hour—and then boarding and traveling for another hour of noisy rumbling, past fields of sugar cane and what our guide called “sweet potato”; after a buffet lunch of pad Thai, Indian sweet curry with don’t-ask-don’t-tell meat, and fried chicken and bananas; after getting back in our air-conditioned mini-van (now more appreciated in the afternoon sun); after getting to the elephant park and climbing the stairs to mount, I was disappointed to see that my elephant was not the biggest.

           She was not, to be sure, small. I jittered like a kid at the state fair preparing for her first time astride a pony. With awkward steps—like boarding a small boat from a dock—I managed to climb onto her back. I settled onto the bench and was seat-buckled in for the event.  A long line of elephants with tourists on their saddle-benches and young Thai boys on their necks followed each other on a short path through the jungle.

           I have sat bucking horses more easily than I remained seated on the elephant’s back. I held onto the sides of the seat, my arms aching as I felt each of my vertebrae smash against the padded back of the seat; each step lurched me to one side, and then the other. It made the beach pony ride feel like gliding.

           I asked the guide how old the elephant was.

           He said sixteen.

           I asked how old he was.

           It was a question he seemed unaccustomed to answering in English and it appeared to take some calculation.

           Sixteen he said, finally.

           Yes, he was a sixteen year old boy, and an asshole in the way that sixteen year old boys often are. He called out “I love you!” to young Asian tourists as they passed us in the other direction  He whooped Yeehaw when we went downhill, and cut the line in front of other elephants, urging his—our—steed to go faster by kicking her hard behind the ears. He and his fellow guides carried on long and loud conversations that cut into the heavy jungle air.  

           Then, toward the end of the ride, he stopped, climbed back from the elephant’s neck, and sat on the bench beside me. When we arrived at the park I’d seen a sign listing the rules. The second one, after the customary caution about keeping an eye and a hand on your valuables, was “Not allow to sit on the neck of elephant or other parts except specific place only.” I said to him, “I get to ride on her neck?”

           He said “Yes, you want.”

           So I slid down, reaching my legs behind her ears. I asked her name, and what I heard was “Chopin” like the composer and the writer.  I urged Chopin forward, but she didn’t move. Instead she drew her trunk to the top of her head and searched for my hands.

           “She hungry” said the guide, her conspirator, and then mentioned something about 500 or 1000 bhat, as I wished. I’ve been swindled in Thailand before so I said, “Sorry, no money.” Chopin lowered her trunk and ambled off.

           Sitting on the neck was far easier than on the bench. It was, in fact, thrilling. My riding muscles are well developed and my body responds instinctively, able to balance without thought. I no longer feared falling off. I started to understand her rhythms, began talking to her with pressure from my legs. I didn’t want to stop.

           But eventually, of course, I had to stop. After the elephant ride, we tourists dismounted and, in the middle of a jungle in Thailand, we were funneled into a line to see photos of ourselves displayed on a computer screen. I hadn’t understood why, shortly after boarding, we rode the elephants into the muddy river. I thought that perhaps it was for them to have a chance to cool down and get a drink before we ventured on a long jungle trek. I was wrong. Now I saw that it was just for a photo op before we set out on the short well-trampled loop around the camp.

           I have never bought souvenir photos of myself—I am either unphotogenic or simply less attractive than I would like to believe—and wasn’t even going to look at this one, but I was standing there in line for I didn’t know what and it popped up on the screen. I have few documentary impulses, but I felt compelled to purchase it.

           I look happy in the photo, though you can see the tendons in my arms straining as I clutch the sides of the bench. My light orange shirt—I’d bought a button-down Thai schoolgirl shirt because it seemed more modest than the beach wear I’d brought for my two-week stay at a friend’s borrowed luxury condo in Hua Hin—picks up the yellows in the leafy background, compliments the red in the blankets piled underneath the seat.

           But the focal point of the photo is not me, and it’s not the elephant. The eye is drawn to the tee-shirt on the guide. This 16-year-old Thai boy setting astride the neck of an elephant is wearing a black tee-shirt. In the middle is a swastika, black in a white circle, framed on a red square.

           Because I was so excited, looking only at the elephant, I hadn’t noticed the boy’s tee-shirt, not until I saw the photograph. I showed it to the Thai guide who had taken us on the trip, who had booked the tickets to this elephant park. He looked embarrassed, laughed a little. I waited for more of a response.  He said it was a symbol in eastern religions.

           Yes, I said, I know that symbol. This is not that. Look at the colors. Look at the design. This is a swastika.

           There were five of us on the tour, the others were German women, likely two lesbian couples, who talked mostly to each other in a language I’d been taught as a child to hear as ugly. One of the couples came over having just bought a print of their elephant-riding photo. They showed it to me; it was a romantic setting, indeed, a good photo opportunity.

           Then I showed them mine. At first they cooed, commenting on how happy I looked. Then one of them gasped.

           “Not gut,” she said. “This is not gut.”

           We all turned to the Thai guide, who tried again to make his argument about it being a religious symbol.

           The quietest of the German women delivered a lecture. Yes, she said, in the cadence of an academic, there is a symbol like this that you often see in India. It signifies new beginnings. But that is not what this is. She shook her head. She kept shaking her head.

           Two nights before I had watched, with Thai subtitles, the bad American movie Valkyrie, about a plot to murder Hitler. Seeing Tom Cruise in a Nazi uniform—even as a member of the resistence—was unsettling. The imagery of the Third Reich can’t not rattle you.

           I had booked this tour, to go to the bridge on the river Kwai, because after two solitary weeks at the beach reading and writing, I needed more than sun and surf, excellent cheap food and daily massages that cost seven dollars an hour. I needed a little history, a little culture, a chance to get out of my own head.

           We’d spent the morning immersed in World World II. Everything we had done and seen that day was tied to the years between 1939 and 1945. Our first stop, after a two-and-a-half hour mini-van ride north, was a cemetery built by the Thais for the British and Dutch dead. Our second stop the JEATH War Museum in Kanchanaburi.

           It was, we learned, established in 1977 to commemorate the horrors of the construction of the “Death Railway,” an appropriate nickname for the strategic train line the Japanese built connecting (what was then) Siam to (what was then) Burma. Most of us know one small segment of this history from the movie, The Bridge on the River Kwai. As it turns out, JEATH is a curious acronym of the names of the countries involved: Japan, England, America (and Australia), Thailand, and Holland. The poorly-copied museum brochure explained that “The Japanese were the controllers of the railway project, Thailand was involved as the conquered country and the other four countries were involved as PoW’s on the actual construction of the 415 kilometre long Death Railway and the bridge over the River Kwae.” It continued on the next page, “The word JEATH also replaces the word Death because it sounds too horrific.”

           The museum consists mainly of a replica bamboo hut with a display of photographs of the POWs, more than 16,000 of whom—plus 100,000 impressed laborers—died during the construction process which Japanese engineers first reckoned would take at least five years. The railway was completed in sixteen months.

           The last paragraph of the brochure read as follows: “Dear visitors, JEATH museum has been constructed not for the maintenance of the hatred among human beings, especially among the Japanese and allied countries, but to warn and teach us the lesson of HOW TERRIBLE WAR IS.”

           After leaving the museum, riding on a railway that had been hacked into the jungle by men fighting off disease and starvation, I thought about what I thought about World War II. Growing up Jewish in a rural, agricultural community, my father taught me that the most important thing about my ethnicity was that there was always somebody who wanted to kill me. My great-grandpa Max, a giddy and sweet man, had numbers tattooed on his arm. He didn’t talk about them. Once, during my childhood, someone painted a swastika on the sidewalk in front of our house. At Yale, because of my blonde hair and pale eyes, my “Ellis Island Special” last name, I got to overhear the scions of Robber Barons make anti-Semitic comments. When I thought about World War II, to be honest, I thought about the Jews.

           In my twenties, as an editorial assistant at Oxford University Press, I worked on a joint US-Russian authored book about the collaboration between US and Russians forces during the war. (In a small world moment, I later dated the US author’s brother. He turned out to be a toad.) I’d thought about the dropping of the bomb, about Rosie the Riveters, about the internment of Japanese Americans, but I confess to not knowing much about what was happening in Southeast Asia during that time.

           So this winter I spent a sunny morning in Thailand feeling abashed by my ignorance, learning in visceral ways about what had happened here during WWII, and hopped off my elephant and looked smack into a photo of a happy me with a swastika-wearing Thai boy.

           The German woman urged me to take the photo back.

           No, I said, I’m keeping it.

           I’m Jewish, I added. Somehow, this was something I needed to say.

           The Thai tour guide said, “He doesn’t know.”

           I don’t know what he knew, that teenager, that elephant-riding, trash-talking, rambunctious boy. I wanted to ask him, to talk to him, but he had already loaded another tourist onto Chopin’s bench and taken off on the loop, whooping and hollering. His English was limited. How much, really, could I have learned from talking to him? Was that swastika just another incomprehensible symbol of the far-off West, like the ubiquitous tee-shirts from American universities that didn’t exist? In Thai tourist markets there are often vendors selling tee-shirts with unutterably nasty English messages. Was this just another example of rampant commercialism with no content?

           Thailand, so long a country known for its tolerant and accommodating people, is undergoing change. The beloved king is ailing; there is now gang violence.  Did I want to know what, specifically, this young boy knew? Was it meaningful? Did it matter? There is no such thing as global political correctness. I have no more right to question his appropriation of cultural and political symbols than he does to accost Americans who adapt Buddhism to suit their needs.

           For years I have been thinking about the commemoration of atrocity. A decade before this trip I’d gone to Asia with a college friend, and we had dinner with friends of hers, expat Americans living in Hong Kong. They were giving us advice on our itinerary. The guy, well-educated and well-spoken said, “I’ve been to Auschwitz, I’ve been to Dachau, you gotta go to Tuol Sleng. No one does concentration camps like the Cambodians.”

           I never saw him again but have always hated him for that remark, though I understood, when we went to Tuol Sleng a few days later, what he meant. It was an awful experience, moving and unsettling and tear-filled. We had gotten lost on the way, consulting our guide book but unable to negotiate the streets of Phnom Pehn. My friend wanted to stop people on the street and ask them for directions. I blocked her. I couldn’t imagine asking locals to think of a place like that—a former school where just 25 years before their families, their friends, their teachers, had been imprisoned and tortured—as a tourist site. How do you commemorate atrocity? How do you keep people informed and aware of the vicious vicissitudes of the past, how to educate young people in ways to foster tolerance? My intolerant father often quoted, without attribution, Santayana’s remark about the condemnation of repeating the past. How do you do this in a way that is not ham-handed?

           I look at that cheerfully-framed picture of myself on the elephant, smiling and unaware, seated behind a Swastika-branded teenager. I think about the contemporary genocides, and how so many of my college students have no idea about things that have happened in their lifetime, that, as those of us who are steeped in history know, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” It makes me wonder what the best way to engage and instruct people about “HOW TERRIBLE WAR IS.”

Standing on the stone ledge of Blood Mountain, I have to check a foolish impulse to fly.   I put my hand to my eyes, surveying a blue that looks pristine simply because it hangs above a horizon line that is so far away, and see a soft blanket of treetops a half mile below spread in lumpy folds to a misty horizon, promising me a safe landing somewhere in Tennessee.  I inch closer to the edge and plant my feet, drawn by the power of the panorama and buoyed by an unearthly feeling of calm.  The urge to spread my arms, lean into that emptiness, and yield to infinity is hard to resist.

Just a step, I think.  It would be easy.

 “Go to the mountain top & cry for a vision,” an ancient Sioux poem says.  Blood Mountain is a place where that can happen.  It looms above the Dahlonega Plateau, forming one of the last great peaks at the southern tip of the Appalachian chain where mountains give way to the wide, flat expanse of coastal plains.  The poet Byron Reece, who grew up near here, liked to lean his “elbows on the sky” that the mountain delivered to him daily and contemplate life.  A convenient guardian spirit of the place, Reece farmed a field in the mountain’s shadow, the surrounding peaks marking off what he knew of the holy.   “My heart is native to the sky,” he wrote in one poem, thinking about the hilltops of his home.  “I feel,” he added, the “wide sky entering my heart.”

And that is how I feel as I hover at the tip of all I know about the here and now, perched on the rocky outcropping at the edge of forever, the wide sky entering my heart.

I hold my breath and close my eyes.  Oh, yes.  I want this.

The long path to this mountain precipice began at Walasi-Yi, one of the last outposts on the Appalachian trail, the path winding uphill through hardwoods.  My older boy, Matt, and I have hiked it several times, and once, when he was seventeen and his brother, Sam, about ten, the three of us walked it together, one of those events that sinks a spike deep in the shifting sands between fathers and sons.  When we drove from our house to the trail head that day we rarely saw Blood Mountain itself, even when we were right up on it.  Unlike Brasstown Bald, the tallest peak in Georgia which stays in view along much of the highway, Blood Mountain remains hidden shyly behind a ridgeline of smaller hills that hug up to it. The tallest peak on the Georgia portion of the Appalachian trail, it is formidable, if for nothing else than its history.  According to legend, Creek and the Cherokee battled here, the blood of the dead making the streams run red, consecrating the place and giving the mountain its name.

Starting at the marker dedicated to Reece, my boys and I headed deep into the woods, the path winding wide and flat through thickets of laurel and rhododendron.  When we crossed a steam and began our ascent, the path narrowed into a sequence of switchback trails that, clearly visible in winter, stitched their way up the mountainside.  At no point could we see the mountain top, our vision obscured by the canopy of tree limbs, but I could feel our upward movement in the tug of gravity on my legs and back.  The universe was calling.

I answered with heavy breathing.

My sons didn’t seem tired at all.  They hopped from rock to rock, leapt small streams, dashed ahead and waited, laughing and talking.  I paced myself.  My eye wearied  of verticals.  Once old growth poplars and towering chestnuts shaded this landscape, and several times the boys stopped on the path ahead and gazed into the rotted circle of an enormous stump.  Blight and lumbering had killed the old trees, so we trudged an uphill trail surrounded by a young hardwood forest, oak mainly, stretching ahead like an endless series of mirrored images, vertical lines as far as I could see.  A disorienting monotony sunk in and my universe shrunk to the narrow path, the rhythm of my footsteps, and the rasp of my breath.  By the time we crested the foothill, our walk along the ridgeline relaxed into a saunter, my legs happy for the flat path, and  I longed for an overlook so that we could see what we had left behind.

Eventually we found one.  My boys and I stepped onto the enormous rock slabs near the summit of Blood Mountain, and I walked to the ledge where I had my insane vision.   Crows flew below me, and a small Cessna buzzed into the distance at eye level.  A hawk cut a lazy circle overhead, dragging a flittering shadow across the treetops.  Fly—yes, it looked so easy.  I saw the universe spread before me, not just mountains and streams and a blanket of trees, but the whole mighty thing, and even when I reached my hand out tentatively to break the plane of this apparition of infinite depth, I could not put the vision in perspective. The lesser hills seemed to emanate from me, the topography of the land wrenched into submission like a supplicant at my feet by a grand trompe l’oiel, even though I knew that the view was not created for my eye.  I was created for it.  I stood on the porch of the earth, and holiness held me.  The sun and moon paused high above a world lit as far as I could see.

Only when Matt shouted “hey Dad, it’s over here,” his voice the call of the familiar, did I step back and, reluctantly, turn away.

Matt had found the trail and was waving us on, but as we picked our way through boulders and gnarled, wind-stunted pines along the last stretch of path, my mind still clung to the ledge.  What is the pull of holiness?   No God had spoken to me—of that I’m sure.  When I stood at the brink of a hundred-mile view, tracing the light blue humps of hills in the distance, I did not see the hem of God’s sleeve in the ridgeline and imagine, in the spume of clouds gathered in the sky, his face leaning benevolently my way, and if I had I would have dismissed it as an illusion of my own making.  Okay, no God spoke to me, but clearly I felt something.  What exactly?

The word ‘holy’ offers a clue.  It shares the ancient root word kailo with the word “health” as well as a host of words we associate with well-being:  “wholesome,” “heal,” “hallow” (as in bless) and “wassail” (as in cheers!).  In its most ancient form ‘holy’ meant uninjured in the sense of complete.  Built into its earliest meaning was the idea of wholeness, the word ‘whole’ being yet another word that shares a root with the word ‘holy’.  Until we are in a holy state our lives feel fractured and undone, but in holiness we are made whole and no longer yearn for completion. 

I envy those who can feel a deity’s love in such holy moments. St. John of the Cross wrote that on “one dark night” when “fired by love’s urgent longing” he left his quiet house, his only light being “the one that burned” in his heart.  With the sky moonless and the path dark, the glow within lit the way, a guiding light, he called it, more lovely than the dawn.  Eventually the radiance led to God—“Him I knew so well”—who appeared as a lover waiting at the end of the path.  “I abandoned and forgot myself,” he wrote, as he kissed his “Beloved” and lay his head on God’s breast.   Gender no longer mattered—the pronouns become confusing here—and his old sense of himself was suddenly shattered.  At that moment, “all things ceased,” he wrote, and “I went out from myself.”

All things ceased, yes, but who would not trade all he had to brush up against the lips of God?

St. Teresa, a friend of John of the Cross, suffered the stabbing pains of Christ’s lance at her breast. Sometimes in her visions Jesus wore a crown of thorns and showed her his wounds, and once he took her rosary into his hands and recast the stones into diamonds that no one else could see.  Her visions of Christ flashed so vividly before her eyes that she feared they might be from the devil, and when she explained what she saw to her superiors they agreed—and chastised her.  At their request, she snapped her fingers in the face of the next apparition of Christ, trying to make the sight go away.  It did not work.  Jesus spoke to her and gazed at her with sublime sympathy.  Afterward she could not put what she saw into words—she could not tell the color of those eyes—but she knew they watched her lovingly.  The look, the divine gaze, was real and, eventually, she came to the conclusion that these visions could not be illusions.

Who, I wonder, would not gladly suffer steel under the flesh to see the colorless all color of the eyes of God?

There was a time in human history when God spoke to everyone.  The primitive mind made little separation between itself and the rest of the universe.  Much of the lives of the ancients was spent, as the aborigines put it, in “The Dreaming.”   Able to set aside consciousness, they passed through the world the way we do through dreams, each object animated in a way that we, who understand history and are adept with language and science, cannot imagine.  In this state their lives unfolded, much as the lives of animals do I suppose, with little intention. It is not that trees spoke to them or the wind whispered any more than trees speak to us in our dreams.  Rather, they were the trees and the wind, in much the same way that all the characters in our dreams are actually us in disguise.

A vestige of this dream state clings like trailing clouds of glory to our purest religious mystics.  Jesus learned God’s will at Gethsemane.  Sioux cries for divine visions were answered.  Allah delivered the Koran to Muhammad.   Moses did hear the voice of God in the burning bush—of that I am convinced.   I believe these holy scriptures.   Modern minds, by trance or intoxicants or flagellation or fasting—by myriad devices to transform consciousness—can hear God as well.  The exhausted can hear God.  The desperate and zealous can hear God.  Even the insane can hear God.

But I can’t.

At the top of Blood Mountain, a stone sanctuary lies nestled among enormous slabs of rock that rise, cantilevered, out of the mountain’s summit.   Built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930’s, it shelters hikers who need a resting place along the trail.  Ever since my first trip up the mountain, the stone cabin has held some inexplicable allure for me.  Now that I was past the precipice, it stood squat before me like the answer to some question I had been trying to formulate all of my life.  My boys and I looked through the rough window openings and saw a fireplace against the wall, a small broom, some firewood off to the side, and a doorway to a back room.  During a sudden blizzard here in the eighties, we heard stories about hikers who weathered the storm in the cabin until a helicopter crew could rescue them, and, I realized, looking inside, what a blessed haven this must have been for someone buried deep in snow.

The boys lost interest in the drab stone interior and ran off to leap the high rocks, but long after they went their way I kept looking.  Shafts of light, sprinkled with dust, cut heavy triangles into the stony space, carving out several shades of ochre in the darkness.  Light puddled on the middle of  the floor revealing ridges and textures in the stone, but the corners remained hidden in shadows.  Yes, if God could visit me, this stone cabin would be the place.

What if I told the boys to go back without me, and I spent the night here alone?  Would God visit me in this chamber?  What would he look like?  The gash of a sunbeam would cross the floor, I suppose, and glow briefly on the far wall while the shadows of broom handle and firewood grew long in the soft light.  Later, as I huddled in a corner, awaiting the divine presence, the light would dissipate and the darkness in the room would spread like an oily puddle, filling the cabin. Wind would whip through the rocks offering a sad, inhuman moan.  A rat might scuttle along the far wall and squeal.  Would God call my name?  Would the Beloved appear in the cold to warm me?  Would the eyes of God look down on me with loving sympathy?  When God visited the cabin, would he stand regally before me, his countenance shining, or would he come dressed in nighttime and cover his eyes behind a cloak of spectral moonlight?

Turning away from the cabin, I felt incomplete and yearned for that kiss against my cheek.  I saw bright blue above the thrusted rocks and wanted to gorge myself on the sky.

When Reece claimed that his heart was native to the sky, I think he was admitting to himself that he wanted to go home.  I don’t mean his home in the valley.  He was, by all accounts devoted to his family, taking care of both his mother and his father who contracted tuberculosis, the disease that plagued Reece and contributed to his death by suicide.  He always called himself a mountain farmer, firmly rooted in the earth.  “These hills contain me as a field, a stone,” he wrote in one poem.  When asked by a correspondent why a poet struggled to farm when “anybody could plant potatoes,” he replied that “nobody is willing to plow mine but me.”  Much of the way he saw and dealt with the world was bound up in his strong sense of place.  So, when he searched for a metaphor for the title of his poem, “Elbows on the Sky,” he found the familiar posture of philosophical farmers who “lean their weight upon a wall” while looking over their fields ripe for harvest, as they attempted to “dicker with close-fisted fate.”  No doubt Reece himself spent a good deal of his time leaning against stone walls, too, grumbling at the sky, a man driven to farm and write poetry who could support himself with neither.

But, being married to poetry as well as farming, he knew that his earthbound view was not enough.  To complete himself he had to lay claim to his birthright in the heavens, relinquishing other claims on his heart and following the lonely path of the poetic line away from the familiar.  Reece’s poetry asks for a wrenching change in perspective, a celestial vision that draws on the imagery of the land but sees our accomplishments on earth as ultimately insignificant and fleeting.  Like the crops he planted, it grows out of the soil but stretches toward the sky.  So, after the break in his sonnet, Reece asked his farmer to turn the telescope back on earth and, taking a God’s eye view of himself and his world, find relief from earthbound suffering:

Yet if he leaned but once upon a star

And saw his earth, and himself fugitive,

As long as breath could keep life’s door ajar

He would be happy but to breathe and live,

With little care for what he shall be when

Of death’s gray waste he is a citizen.

Notice the phrase “but once” hammered into these sturdily crafted lines.  “Yet if he leaned but once.”  It doesn’t take much.  A door left ajar is enough.  When Reece surveyed the world from this lonely celestial perch, the wide sky entered his heart through the opening door of his true home where he could be “happy but to breathe and live,” and death itself was irrelevant.  A glimpse was all it took. 

Reece toed the poetic line on the ledge of the world that “contained him,” looking longingly at the crack of light before him, and then, when he couldn’t stand it any more, he took a step.  He was teaching at Young Harris College when he died, the same college where I teach, living in the dorm.  After he shot himself,  anxious students ran to his rooms.  Mozart was spinning on the turntable and graded exams were stacked neatly on his desk.

The boys and I looked around a bit, tossed a few stones into the vast open scenery about us, and decided to head back down the mountain before darkness fell.  Along the way we came across the stone ledge again, my launching pad into holiness, the rock slab facing now on a dusky sky. The sun hung low, and I knew that we had to get down the hill in a hurry, but I paused anyway.  No longer tempted to fly, I felt instead the planet’s slow turn, as its enormous penumbral shadows spread over the land, and I imagined what this scene must look like at night when the darkness above filled with a spray of stars.

It was time to go home.

That night long after the family had gone to sleep, I walked out on the porch of my house and thought about my moment at the precipice.  Stepping up to that stony edge, I had felt an impulse urging me out of my familiar—my familial—world.  I am not suicidal or depressed or heaven-haunted.  But something happened up there.  Trying to shake the thought, I stepped out from under the porch to look at the stars, but a mist had fallen over the valley obscuring the sky.  So I closed my eyes, imagining myself again on the precipice but at night this time, a map of the night sky forming above me, marked off with those familiar dotted line-drawings of godlike heroes including Orion, Cassiopeia, and the Twins enshrined in the zodiac and gliding eternally through the milky way.  Why do we fill the empty spaces with pictures of ourselves?   Why do we hunt for a familiar face in the stars?  What would happen if I erased the lines?   

In the end, I did not spend the night in a mountain sanctuary isolated from those I love.  My wife slept beside me as usual in our warm and comfortable bed.  For now, at least, I live my life in the valley enveloped in work and job and family.  I harvest my own tomatoes and grade my exams.  When my son calls my name, I turn to him and cannot imagine a day that I wouldn’t.  I am no saint, to be sure.  I keep my elbows planted firmly on the porch rail and leave heaven to others.  It is the universe I feel on my cheek—not a kiss.  “Yet,” as Reece liked to say in the double vision of his poems, the hike offered a moment of aboriginal dreaminess, a glimpse of a reality on the mountain top that cannot be dismissed with the snap of the fingers.  It was a crazy impulse to fly, but I can return to it any time that I close my eyes, look hard at god walking toward me dressed as the night sky, and, yielding to infinity at last, disconnect the dots.

            I went shopping for a mailbox today.  Before I left, my husband, Mark, put in a special request.  “Can you get one big enough so that my whole hand can fit in it?” he asked.  “I’ve been using these two fingers for years.”

            He made a V-shape with his index and middle fingers, then awkwardly mimed how he had to use them as pincers to retrieve the mail.  He wore Large Tall in clothes.  He was 6’4”.  His toes hung over the end of our bed.

            I said I would do my best.

            I went to Lowe’s. I always felt like I should be excited when I entered Lowe’s, but I wasn’t.  It was just tools and flats of withery petunias and grim sacks of cement and miles of doorknobs and men in blue vests driving forklifts around.

            I stood in the center of the gigantic store and looked up.  Suddenly, a blue-vested man asked if I needed help. 

            “Mailboxes?” I asked.

            “Aisle 15!” he shouted, and sped away. 

            It was a bit of a walk over there.  I decided to walk down the ceiling fan aisle, make a right by the custom order blinds, then cut through the model kitchens. 

            There were 8 wall-mount mailboxes to choose from, and I was disappointed with all of them.  Plus, the sample mailboxes were mounted so high up on a wall there was no way to really study them up close or touch them or open their lids.  In fact, I had to keep jumping up in the air to get a better glimpse.

            “Can I help you?” another blue-vested man asked.  It was funny how all the young females worked at the checkout and all the older men wandered around the store trying to be helpful. 

            “No, thanks,” I said.  I didn’t like help.

            “Well, have a great day!” he shouted.

            “All right.”

            The cheapest model was the Postmaster Townhouse for $13.99.When I picked up the sealed box, thin aluminum and loose screws rattled against each other.  Judging by its width, there was no way Mark would be able to reach his whole hand into it.

            The only mailbox even close to being a contender was the First Class Park Avenue for $31.94.  According to the box, it came with three color inserts (black, brick red, silver) as well as Full Alphabet monograms, which were basically cheap glittery stickers.

            “Can I help you with something?” another worker asked.  They seemed uncomfortable with my lingering in Aisle 15 so long.

            “No,” I said.  And because they were all so cheap and ugly, I left.

*   *    *   *   *

            Back home, the daily mail had arrived.  I dug my hand into the rusted black mailbox which had lost its decorative trim and was sun faded.  Here was the day’s mail:

 1.  Prevention magazine under Mark’s name.  Why were they sending him this old person’s magazine? He was 43 and had mysteriously started receiving it.

2.  Two offers from Delta Airlines, for our children Hudson and Lily, for free round-trip tickets if they opened up a Delta Airlines Visa (Hudson was 8, Lily 5).

3.  Capitol One Visa bill (I left it unopened).

4.  A yellow postcard from Bittersweet Gift Shop announcing their July sidewalk sale.

5.  A Netflix movie, Waltz with Bashir.

6. A bill for Weight Watchers magazine, $12.95.

7.  A postcard from Most Dependable Fountains, Inc. (I’d at one point toyed with installing a drinking fountain in my study and they’d continued to hound me).

8.  Chase bank statement (also left unopened).

9.  Urgent “Immediate Response Required” from TIAA/CREF (I was in the middle of an insurance upgrade).

Not a single piece of personal correspondence on July 2, 2009.

*    *    *    *    *

I logged onto Facebook the next day.

FACEBOOK. July 3, 2009.  8:30 a.m. Saturday

Anne Panning “has been searching for the perfect mailbox.”

Lindsay Hansen

Describe the perfect mailbox. Maybe someone can help you.

Anne Panning

1.  Mark’s hand has to fit all the way into it.             

2.  Not flimsy cheap tinny

3.  Detailed but not in that mass-produced way

4.  Suitable to the aesthetic of our 1880 Victorian

5.  Not super-expensive

6.  No hand-painted farm scenes or kitties!

Sarah Hart

This is so funny! I have been plotting about dream Victorian mailboxes and frowning about annoying subdivision ones. For around the corner where our old picket fence is I would like to sink a skinny Victorian porch column in cement and put a deep, black open-from-the-front mailbox on top of it. Then grow climbing/old fashioned flowers around it. Can you picture the scene?

Lynn Wehnert

Get a cow mailbox. JK. Reminds me of a thing that happened to Randy and me many years ago. I rented a motel room in a country theme thinking it would be cozy. When we got there the entire room was cows, cows and more cows. Even the bedposts had hoofs on them. The entire wall facing us was one huge painting of a cow. When we went to bed this … Read More Holstein was staring right at us and finally Randy said “enough of this”. He went to the desk and asked for a different room which we got. We still laugh about that.

Steve Brauer

The perfect mailbox for us has been cutting a slot into the front door so that our carrier leaves our mail inside our house. This certainly makes it easier to travel – we don’t have to put a hold on our mail nor ask someone to pick it up every few days.

David DeBlieck

Wow! I am amazed at all the mailbox advice you’ve received in such a short span. We had a devil of a time finding one for Jeffrey’s parents at Christmastime. Are there any pig mailboxes out there? I know how much you love your pigs . . . )

            By the end of the day, I had received 14 responses.

*    *    *    *    *

I went to Ollie’s Outlet the next week and looked for a mailbox.  Instead, I ended up buying a Country Cottage cookie jar, some cotton floral sheets for Lily and some Wolfgang Puck cream of crab soups, dented. 

*    *    *   *   *

            In my hometown of Arlington, Minnesota, there is, for some unknown reason, no mail delivery service.  You have to drive downtown, park in one of the diagonal slots on Main Street, walk in, twirl in your combination, and get your mail. It’s the social hub of the entire town; there’s often frantic little traffic jams on the corner of Second and Main; you have to circle the block several times or else end up parking in front of Dueber’s Dry Goods across the street; in winter, everyone leaves their big diesel pickups running: gray clouds of exhaust freeze, suspended, in the arctic air.  My Grandpa Griep, when he was still alive, used to schedule his entire day around the 10:00 a.m. mail pick-up.  He used to keep their outgoing mail clothes-pinned together on the kitchen windowsill.  My father, ever since my mom died, has to get the mail now.   I realize how nice it would be if I wrote him a letter someday and he’d find it there in his little metal mailbox.  He has never written me a letter in my entire life.  I realize I haven’t written my father a letter, exclusively just my father, ever. What would I write?

             Dear Dad,

            How are you?  I hope you’re managing to eat better lately. Remember that you can’t just drink pot after pot of coffee and then chew Copenhagen on an empty stomach without feeling like crap.  How did your visit with the new psychiatrist go?  Remember that you have to take the Zoloft only once in the morning and then try not to take so many Ativan or you’re gonna end up in the psych ward again.  Really.  You have to try and take better care of yourself. I called the butcher shop and so now you have a $50 credit up there so make sure you go and get yourself something good—not just hot dogs.

           Okay?  You have to try and leave the house more than you do.  It’s not good for you to be so alone.

           So, did I tell you I won The Professor of the Year award? I was totally shocked and so Mark and I will be flying to Washington, D.C. for the awards ceremony.  Who knows what we’ll do with the kids, but we’ll figure something out.

           I finished the Vietnam book and sent it off to my agent so now I’m just waiting for her response.  The kids are good.  Lily was home sick yesterday only she wasn’t really sick and kept trailing after me all day wanting to play Zingo.  Hudson joined Brockport Kids Rock, which is like this chorus group and SO unlike him but we’re excited that he’s branching out. 

          Not much else new around here.  Remember about the meds. Only one Zoloft and really, actually, I’d like to see you get completely off the Ativan because they really make you into such a zombie. Don’t you think? I mean, I know you say you get so anxious but there’s got to be a better way of dealing with things. 

         Anyway, I love you.  Hang in there.

         xo,  Annie

         I can imagine him getting the letter in his mailbox.  Maybe he’d tuck it carefully into his coat pocket.  Or maybe he’d let it ride next to him in the Buick’s passenger seat (where my mom should be sitting) on the short four-block ride home.  Maybe he’d wait all day to open it, savoring every word over a steak he’d cook for himself in a frying pan. Or, more likely, it would get shoved inside his stack of overdue electricty bills and The Glencoe Shopper and the Quilts & More magazines that continue to arrive for my mother and accumulate in sad, colorful piles.

         I still remember our mailbox number: 773.   I still remember spinning that little brass dial: 14-31-27.

*   *   *   *   *

            I decide ebay is the best route to an eclectic mailbox. I type in “Vintage mailbox” and up pops an old mint green mailbox.  It says, in creamy white letters:

                                                            Wirtz’s Store

                                                Groceries  ~  Fruits  ~ Vegetables

                                                            Dry Goods

                                                          Cologne, MN

            Cologne, Minnesota?  This is just minutes from where I grew up.  This is where my Aunt Lynnette and Uncle Randy live.  This is where my Uncle Bert and Aunt Harriet live.  The seller lives in Betholl, Washington. How did he come across this odd Minnesota relic? It’s an antique—funky, vintage—with a little bit of paint chipping at the edges.  Its cozy charm appeals deeply to me.  But, no.  I live in New York state now.  I have traded in my old Midwestern self for an East Coast one.  The quaintness of the Minnesota connection would be lost here. It simply wouldn’t translate.   

*   *   *   *   *

            I don’t want to, but I sneak out to Wal-Mart.  Actually, it’s a Super Wal-Mart that they built after abandoning an already hugeass Wal-Mart, which is now vacant with a weed-filled parking lot.  I bring my son along, who loves running errands and is unusually detail-oriented for an eight year old.  I want to teach him that Wal-Marts are awful but here we are. 

            The mailboxes are back by the paint; it actually smells like someone is spray painting all over the store so I breathe with my mouth open.  It’s hard to find the mailboxes, and unlike at Lowe’s, there are no employees anywhere to help you.  We walk through aisles of plastic storage tubs, through aisles of garbage cans, through aisles of tarps, and finally, at the very end of the tarp aisle, are the mailboxes.  There are two: the very same ones I rejected at Lowe’s. 

            “Let’s go,” I say to Hudson.  “These are crap.”

            “But Mommy?” he says. I can sense he’s angling for something. “Can I look at the toys?”

            “For two minutes.”  The toxic scent is giving me a headache, but I follow him back to the Legos aisle.  There is so much he wants! One Treasure Island Legos set is $79.99. 

            We settle on a can of black Play-Doh.  Utilitarian but unusual. 

*   *   *   *   *

            My Grandma Griep was my last faithful correspondent until her death in 2000.  Her feathery Bic fine point cursive and classic Mead lined letter paper remained a constant in my ever-changing life.  When I moved from Hawaii to New York to begin my career as a college professor, she was the only person who continued to write me letters (my mother refused, convinced that her grammar and spelling would now be deemed “incorrect” by her professor daughter).  But Grandma Griep stayed loyal with the small white envelopes, the Libertry bell stamps. 

                Dear Annie,                                                                                                            Nov. 18, 1999

                Thanks so much for your telephone call.  What a nice visit we had!  Thanks, too, for the letters.  Most of my mail is either junk mail or bills, so when I get a personal letter it makes my day.  People just don’t write as often as they used to. Guess everybody is just too busy.  I do hear from old friends once in a while. Our nurse’s class celebrated their 60^th anniversary in May.  Of course, I couldn’t be there, but I got pictures & the program from my classmates.  I think there were 7 left that could attend and we had a big class.  Lots of sick & ailing ones.  And dead ones.

 I’m listening to my new Guy Lombardo cassette.  Don’t laugh.  They are oldies but goodies.  Brings back many good memories for me.  Grandpa and I used to dance to those old waltzes.  They are great!  Guy used to be on TV every New Year’s Eve.  Annie, I’ll never get over missing Grandpa.  I miss him so much.  He was such a sweetie.  How lucky I was to have him.  But life goes on.

 Happy Thanksgiving.  I know you will spend it with Mark’s family.

                                                                                 Love,

                                                                                 Grandma

                  Holding the letter, I am catapulted to her tiny kitchen with the white metal cabinets and dark paneled walls. Snow falls feathery outside the tiny window and the radio plays polka with a peppy 4/4 beat. A dishtowel wrapped around me tight, I’m standing on a kitchen chair, rolling out pie crust with floury hands.  My grandma scooches around me, squeezing my little shoulders every time she comes near.  In the living room, my grandpa reads National Geographic with a magnifying glass.  All about the house there is peace and solidity and warmth.  My parents work long hours at shitty jobs; my father pisses away all our money at the bar.  They can’t afford babysitters so I am practically raised by my grandparents.  This is probably the reason, I think now, that I have come to appreciate homegrown tomatoes and roses, that I have developed a fascination with maps, that my heart did not grow bitter but stayed soft and open to love.

                 Dear Grandma Griep,

                Thank you.  Every day I rub Oil of Olay onto my face and think of you.

                The roses are still blooming.

                 love,

                Annie

*   *   *   *   *

            Mark thinks I’m going off the deep end, but I spend hours hunched over the computer.  I switch my ebay search from “vintage” mailbox to “retro” mailbox and hit the jackpot.  Finally, after scrolling madly, there’s an old cast iron mailbox from England, a “vintage Griswold 105/106” that looks sturdy and full of charm, but the shipping alone is $55.00 and the bidding is already up to $45.00.  I will not, on principle, spend $90 on a mailbox.

            It’s Friday afternoon. I go stand on our front stoop and study where the new mailbox would fit.  I run in for a tape measure and begin measuring height, width, depth.  Our neighbor, Leon, is drinking a beer on his front porch and calls over to me.  I explain what I’m doing and he invites me to see their new mailbox.  His wife, Stacy, he tells me, was similarly obsessed.  “She bought this one here,” he says, pointing to their faux antique bronzed mailbox, “and then handpainted these vines and flowers on it to match the house.” 

            I nod.  Stacy has big wavy Crystal Gale hair all the way down past her butt.  They have a Jack Daniels-themed bathroom with black hand towels and Confederate flag curtains. 

            “Maybe you could do something like that,” Leon says. 

            “Yeah,” I say.  “I don’t know.  I just want something…”

            “…that doesn’t exist!” Leon says, and laughs.

            When we had our house painted last year, I grew so invested in paint colors I ended up mixing two different greens for the window trim because I couldn’t find the right one.  Our house is Plum Raisin with Celery Salt trim with a mixture of Weekend Getaway and Baby Turtle for fine details.  We have a white picket fence surrounding the front yard, and a small needlepoint WELCOME sampler hanging on the front door.  47 Park Avenue. How perfect I want everything to look, how wholesome and welcoming and solid.

            But of course.  I grew up in a trailer court down at the edge of town.  Our front stairs were portable, unattached to the “house.” No mailbox, no sidewalk, not even a front door. 

*   *   *   *   *

            One dark and dreary Sunday, missing my mother, I start digging through my file cabinet.  I need some physical evidence of her. I need a way out of this lonely day.  I find a little bundle labeled “Mom” and grab it.  The few remaining letters I have from her are crinkly and without envelopes since they were always tucked hastily inside packages full of handmade treasures.

            Dear Anne and Mark,                                                                         Dec. 3, 1999

                Here are your Christmas stockings, as requested.  I hope you like them.  If they are creased from packing, just hold them over a steaming pot of water, don’t press with an iron.  Also, enclosed are some old linens.  I’m sure you can find a use for most of them.

                 The snowman ball is one I painted from a class at the high school – the Angel I just thought was pretty.  The cluster of snowmen & women is something I made last year. If it’s too “cutesy” for you, send it back and I’ll give it to Amy.  I really did put a lot of time into it.

               The silver cup and silverware was given to you, Annie, from Grandma & Grandpa Griep for your baptism (dated your baptism day). I thought you might like to have them.

                I’m  home today, and want to get some sewing done -  After I run this up to the post office, do bills, set Grandma’s hair, etc. etc. etc. etc.

               Hope you enjoy digging through the box. Will send biscuit quilt next.

                                                                                 Love to you both,

                                                                                                 Mom

             Some of the letters, written on cheap spiral notebook paper, actually have swatches of fabric safety-pinned to them.  Next to a red and blue calico strip, her handwriting:  “this is only enough for 2 valances.  You two will talk this over well I’m sure.” This was always her tease: that Mark and I overanalyzed everything. 

                She was always making something for us:  kitchen curtains, flannel pajamas for the kids, a table runner for the dining room table (“thought it would like nice for your holiday party”), hand-knit slippers for the four of us.  Her letters are like artifacts with bright fabrics, wool yarn and pencil sketches dangling off the page.   

            Then, in a stack of crumpled papers, I find a small cream-colored envelope.  Inside, a yellowed card with an Indian teepee on the cover. 

CIKSUYA CANNA SNA,

CANTEMAWASTE YELO

 “whenever I remember you my heart is happy”    love,  Mom

          Then, in her classic Palmer cursive, inside:

Dear Anne,

                I am writing to “thank you” for sharing your trip to Kansas City with me. You have a way that makes me feel special about myself, a trait that doesn’t emerge very often.  I’m a real person, my thoughts and wishes are as important as anyone else’s.  It feels good to feel good! 

You are a truly, wonderful daughter and friend, and I love you so very much.

                                                                                Much love,

                                                                                       Mom

            I remember I’d had to convince her for months to fly from Minneapolis, by herself, and meet me in Kansas City where I’d be attending a conference. I told her if she could just get there, I’d take care of everything else, including a nice room for us at the Hilton.  But it wasn’t always easy with her.  My pace was about twenty times hers; I was a jaded traveler and didn’t have patience for the boring guided trolley tours she loved.  In stores or museum, she’d want to look at every single little item.  No matter where we went, she made sure to let the clerk/waitress/bus driver know that she wasn’t from there.  “Well, now, what is the tax here anyway?  We don’t even have sales tax on clothing where I’m from,” she’d say, then wait with a little smile on her face for someone to ask where she was from.  And to my surprise, people often did.  Even the hipster Buddy Holly clerk in the vintage shop seemed to enjoy chatting with her.  “You’re from Minnesota?  Cool!”  Still, it made me groan a little inside every time she did it. 

            At the Toy & Miniature Museum, however, we both hit our stride.  We stood for hours in front of perfect little rooms with tiny china plates the size of nickels.  “Don’t you just love mini?” she said.  “I could live in there. I really could.”   I did not argue; this time, I was in no rush to leave.  I, too, wanted to shrink myself and hide inside the carefully appointed tiny luxurious rooms.

            Hours passed.

“Ooo,” she said. “Let’s buy postcards!”  She purchased several and sat that night on the bed in our hotel room, her bare feet wiggling in contentment.  She wrote out cards to my father, my sister Amy, my Grandma Griep, her sister Beth.  A couple times she’d look up, thinking what to write, and catch me watching her.  “Oh you,” she’d say, and pretend to toss her pen at me. 

*   *   *   *   *  

            Finally, I find it.  It’s Swedish.  It’s dark green enamel with white letters that say: POST.  It is cheerful and functional and minimalist in a classic Scandinavian way.  It is deep and roomy, and Mark confirms that yes, he can scoop his whole hand inside freely to retrieve the mail.  What’s odd is how once the search is over, the mailbox installed, I feel sad.

            Every time I pull up to our house, I think: that mailbox looks really great, especially with that antique little bench I found and that cute little yellow boot planter and the red welcome sign I swiped from my dad’s kitchen door.  But so often our big deep mailbox is nearly empty.  After I fish out the white wisps of bills, the lid closes loudly on all the darkness inside.  

            What kind of man wants to be alone on his birthday? Wants to be lonely on that day. Wants to be homesick. Wants to go without wishes for a good one, jokes about getting up there, cracks about being over the hill. Wants to avoid presents, cards, cakes, candles. Wants to go someplace where no one knows him or cares about him or even notices him, hopes to find in this solitude a blinding flash of insight into his existential condition, a serenity that will see him safely through the coming years, a solace he can draw upon like an unlimited savings account, a wisdom that will make him the envy of all his friends. Wants, at the very minimum, to catch a trophy brown trout of such size, strength and vibrancy it temporarily reconciles him to life, the late middle part of it anyway, the upcoming installment in a trial by existence that certainly wasn’t getting any easier in this his fifty-sixth…would you believe it?…year.

            There are plenty who have to be alone on their birthday, choice doesn’t enter into it. In making my resolution, I thought a lot about those poor souls who would give anything to have the family I have, and it made me hesitate. You often get what you wish for, especially on birthdays, and asking for solitude tempts a mordant power that is ever ready to oblige. I had been alone on my thirtieth birthday, and not because I was indulging a whim. Alone as in depressed, suicidal, bewildered, suffering the illusion that in a world of the interconnected I was the only one who had failed to catch on. I can remember that feeling all too clearly–what real solitude is like, how easily it can ensnare a man or woman, how difficult it can be to break free.

            So I wasn’t going to brag about my intention, far better just to slink away before anyone noticed I was even gone. To my family, I tried explaining as best I could my more  comprehensible motives. I’d had a difficult career year in which luck seemed to have turned against me, and I needed to do something dramatic to change the run of play. I wanted (reason number two) to commemorate a birthday I saw as a landmark, the real  Big 55, not the phony Big 50 I had passed in a breeze. I wanted to get out from under things for a few weeks–out from under the weight of routine, the burden of responsibilities, the settled groove a life sinks into. I needed to see things from the side, edge-on, in an entirely new perspective I couldn’t manage at home. I wanted to test my eye on a different landscape, sharpen my vision by having to rely on my seeing alone.

            I wanted to accomplish all those things, take three weeks like Thoreau had taken his twelve months (and in the inflated press of life, three weeks alone in 2003 is roughly commensurate with one year alone in 1845), but since these motives are difficult to explain, I usually ended up with another of my motives, one that was easiest for people to understand.

            “The fishing is supposed to be great in Yellowstone in the fall. Spawning browns. I’ve always wanted to give it a try.”

            Which is the nice thing about having an avocation you pursue passionately–it becomes your alibi for everything. For most people, trout fishing is a much handier motive than philosophy. “You’re going fishing? I envy you.” That’s the kind of response I was looking for, and for the most part that’s what I got.

            My daughter Erin, age seventeen, was much shrewder; her comment cut right to the heart of the matter, and I didn’t have a snappy comeback.

            “Alone? On your birthday? You’ll be homesick, you’ll be home in two days.”

            She was probably right–but what I couldn’t explain to her was that I needed to remind myself how good my life was, how far I had come since that thirtieth birthday alone. And even this was minor compared to my prime motive. My prime motive to be alone in Yellowstone National Park on my fifty-fifth birthday was because I wanted to discover why I needed so badly to be alone in Yellowstone National Park on my fifty-fifth birthday.

            Yellowstone, after all, was not the obvious choice. Anyone wanting to commemorate a big birthday in a big way might prefer going to someplace truly exotic, backpacking on Baffin Island, say, or fly-fishing for those monster sea run browns in Tierra del Fuego. I thought about this, but decided in the end that this kind of place would be too exotic–that there would be no frame of reference within which I could begin to puzzle things out. This was going to be my year of paying attention, my year of slowing time down, and tundra, exotica, weirdness, seemed the wrong way to start.

            Yellowstone can be a weird place, too, with its signature blend of the beautiful and the bizarre. I’d been there several times before this. My first visit was in l988–timed so that I arrived at the peak of the great fires, when two-thirds of the park was aflame. I’ve wondered over the years if this isn’t one of the reasons I fell in love with it so fast–that when I first saw the park, it was very close to disappearing. The great clouds of smoke; the sweet, inescapable smell of burning pine; the long line of firefighters waiting at pay phones to call home to say they were okay ; the black, steaming embers I had to tiptoe around in order to fish. I sensed an awesome-ness inside an awesome-ness I couldn’t penetrate–and when I left, defeated in my efforts to see more than a fraction, I couldn’t wait to come back.

            Yellowstone is purest America, Wonderland, the country’s least-known best-known place. Millions go there, but very few see it; the normal park stay is less than 24 hours, and only two percent of visitors ever leave the roads. People know about the geysers, have heard horror stories about the crowds, and most seem content to leave it at that; in the contemporary American imagination it’s become a place that was long since tamed, Jellystone National Park, with photogenic bears and adorable rangers and Old Faithful.

            The Yellowstone I’d come to know is entirely different–a place where with only the slightest amount of effort, you can be alone in one of the most magnificent and unspoiled landscapes in the world. (That old poet James Russell Lowell had a wonderful phrase for such sanctuaries: “unmanstifled places.”) For Yellowstone, even now, is the classic American place–and a shot of pure, classic America is something I badly needed, after the year we lovers of America had been through. With all that happened, ever since…and you can insert your own favorite atrocity here…I’d still managed to cling to an unreasoned, instinctive, gut-level patriotism that makes the manufactured, flag-waving version seem puny. In my genes, in all our genes, is a chemical signal that is not quite extinct–a pulse that awakens in us, give it half a chance, the original awe and wonder our ancestors first felt when they came face to face with the continent’s splendors. Each new outrage, each new shabbiness, each new instance of aggression, and the gene grows fainter–and yet in Yellowstone, the wonder comes alive again, the love for the land that, at least in this one middle-aged American, can still be so overpowering it makes me want to sob.

            And Yellowstone has always been one of those spots that writers go to for meaning, as in “What is the meaning of Yellowstone?” Yes, I told myself, in planning all the details. I’ll take a crack at that–and maybe there will be enough meaning left over that I can apply some to myself.

            For reading material, I brought alone some accounts by early travelers to Yellowstone–the ones who were afraid of being called outrageous liars if they wrote sober, matter-of-fact accounts of what they had seen. These narratives all begin with the long, hard slog to reach the park. Reading these, I couldn’t bring myself to complain about the plane ride out to Bozeman. Yes, it was a good flight; there were no major foul-ups, I was frisked going through security by an unusually polite and apologetic guard, flew right over a brilliantly shiny Toronto, then, later, with the pilot obligingly lowering the wing so we could see, the furrowed hillside of Custer’s Last Stand.

            There was some down time in Minneapolis between flights. I noticed something as I waited; I noticed that when you reach my age, no one notices you. Seniors, yes, they’re quick to be scooped up by those golf carts and whisked to their proper gate; kids, too–there are always people on the lookout for lost kids. The teenagers and the twentysomethings check each other out and casually preen…which leaves middle-aged people to cope on their own, no one expects a fuss out of us, no one ogles us or pities us, we’re pretty much part of the plastic.

            But I’m noticing the late middle-agers even if no one else is. What I’m noticing are men who are a little older than I am, men in their late fifties or early sixties. I can’t remember doing this since I was twelve–looking at older males to find a role model I can emulate. There are a surprisingly large number of men to choose from, a good many traveling alone. The businessmen I quickly skip, finding them too haggard looking, too predictable; the paunchy men a little ahead of their wives on the moving sidewalks I skip over as well. But there are others, comfortable, fit-looking men who sometimes carry briefcases, but are more apt to be carrying fly rods or tennis rackets or even fairly thick books. They’re a damn fine looking bunch; they tend to be tanned, tend to wear chinos, tend to look like football refs.

The ones I stare at longest seem marked by a generous kind of sophistication (they can talk to anybody), and a relaxed sort of acceptance; they’re comfortable with themselves, but far from smug. Role models? The kind of man I’d like to be in ten years time? Well, maybe, maybe not, but it’s interesting to catch myself looking.

            The only other part of the trip worth mentioning is the unbelievable miracle of it, something the unsophisticated, nineteenth-century hick in me can never get over. I wake up just before dawn in rural New England, walk to our window that faces east, see in the moonlight the lenticular cloud that drapes itself over the wooded slope of our local mountain, then go to bed that same night in a cabin facing Mount Evarts, the castle-like rampart that seals off Yellowstone’s northwest corner, watching the same moon apply the same milky whitewash against an entirely different texture. The same day! It’s a hard concept to get your mind around–so hard it made me restless, and about midnight, to convince myself I was really there, I threw on my jacket and went outside.

            I was there all right. Yellowstone by god! The Mammoth terraces, the reek of sulfur, elk droppings squishing underfoot! I walked gingerly over to the old parade ground, crossed to the middle, stood there looking up at the bright red eye of Mars (at its closest approach to earth in centuries), then at the ghostly steam wafting off the bone-colored terraces behind me.

            Wrapped around me with the moonlight was a silence that at first seemed total (and why, I wondered then and later, is silence in Yellowstone more silent than silence in New Hampshire?). But I was wrong on this; my ears simply hadn’t acclimated themselves yet to this new, richer, more pregnant kind of ether, and after a few minutes my hearing, like my vision, started to catch up.

            Faint at first, like a distant radio station that isn’t quite tuned in, then much sharper, came the sound of wolves, frantically howling, yipping and barking. Closer, but just as wild, was the sound of elk bugling, showing off for their harems, warning off rivals, enjoying–it was easy to imagine–their liberation from muteness that only comes once a year. Earlier, I’d seen bulls grazing on the lawn outside the old officers’ quarters; there’s a ventriloquist quality to the sound they make, and when you look at the animal that’s emitting the sound, it looks like it must be coming from somewhere else.

            Now, in the darkness, listening intently, I tried coming up with a better description. There is definitely a bugle note in an elk’s bugle–a bugle as played by a kid in summer camp who’s got lots of wind, but not much lip. There’s also something bird-like about it, a lonesome bird, someone of the order of a loon. Add a horse whinny–a kind of pathetic and wistful clumsiness of expression, as if the elk, though trying its best, regrets not making the sound sweeter. If you had to guess, not knowing what the sound came from, you might think it was a squeaky pipe organ played at its highest pitch. Pipe organ, horse whinny, bugle, loon. Blend all these and you can start to imagine the kind of primal thrill it must create in a female elk.

            But say one thing for it–it’s one of the few sounds in nature worth traveling 2,000 miles to hear. When the chill finally got to me and I went back to my cabin the sound was even louder, the air absolutely lousy with elk lust. But that’s not a bad thing for a man my age to fall asleep to after crossing the continent in a single bound, not a bad thing at all.

            Up early in the a.m., a quick bite to eat in the cafeteria, a bag lunch taken for the road, then out I drive on the Mammoth-Tower road, exhilarated from being in the exact place on the planet I want to be at absolutely the perfect moment.

            Yellowstone labors under a burden that would sink a lesser place–everyone who visits here expects to be enchanted immediately. The good news is that, yes, you come upon enchantment very quickly, especially in the morning when you’re apt to have the road to yourself and the landscape comes dramatically alive under the sunrise. Take my drive from Mammoth out to the Lamar valley. You follow the golden ramparts of Mount Evarts, crane your head down to see the Gardener River racing through its canyon far below the first high bridge, have the shadows come back again as the road pinches against the cliffs of Lava Canyon, emerge into the rolling, sage-covered meadows of the Blacktail Deer Plateau, pass several lakes, see to your left the tight, hidden folds of the Black Canyon of the Yellowstone, the wooded left-to-right slant of Hellroaring Creek, cross the surging Yellowstone on the Cooke City bridge, then follow Specimen Ridge with its wildlife and its petrified trees before coming out–as the sun pours down full-strength–into the overwhelming beauty of the Lamar valley, America’s Serengetti, with wolves and buffalo and antelope and the whole Yellowstone nine yards, a basin of magnificence backed up by the Beartooth and the Absarokas.

            Not bad for a 45-minute drive–and I didn’t see another car until I came to Tower Junction. The sun was in my face most of the way, so I stopped frequently to get out and soak in the views. I’d heard stories about snowstorms in autumn shutting the park down, had come equipped with layer upon layer of Gore-tex and fleece, but I was never to need them. The weather that first day was the same weather I had for my entire three weeks, with no variation whatsoever. Temperatures in the high 70’s, a good twenty degrees above normal; zero humidity; a perfectly cloudless sky ; hardly any wind to speak of; a sun that, in the high altitude, burned through all the sunscreen I splashed on. It was exhilarating weather, desert-like in its clarity, the famous Rocky Mountain high–lousy for the fishing, but stimulating all to hell.

            The only definite sign of fall were the golden aspen trees, which, with the sun pouring through their branches, were absolutely at their peak. They grow in well-spaced groves that stand out even more noticeably than maples do in New England; what’s more, they have no foliage competition, except for the willows along the creek. Aspens tend to be flame-shaped in silhouette; their leaves give the impression of wanting to go up, to sail skyward, rather than maple leaves which ponderously want to go down. They’re one of the stars in the park in autumn, and if passed a grove near the road it was sure to be surrounded by photographers trying to come up with those classic, cliché shots you see when September rolls around on Western calendars.

            I did my share of aspen watching during my visit, but on that first morning I was on the lookout for one tree in particular, of another species, a lodgepole pine. And yes, there is was high on the burned-over ridge north of Tower Junction, just where it had been the last time and the time before that. The scars from the ‘88 fires  have healed remarkably in the years since, with the green fuzz that took hold almost immediately afterwards now grown into teenaged trees taller than I am. The ridge I was looking at had been burned over entirely, and was dotted with black limbless trees that made it look like Verdun in l916, a spiky forest of ugly charcoal. But there on the very crest of the ridge…and I had spotted this first on a visit in l990…was a single mature and flourishing pine, one that had survived when every tree on either side of it in a radius of three miles had caught fire and burned.

            It was still there, I was glad to see, though it wasn’t easy to pick out now, with the new green slowly reclaiming the ridge. A younger man (I told myself) wouldn’t have seen my pine, it’s just not the kind of exception his eye would be sensitive to; an older man probably would have seen only dead trees and turned away a little sad. And how old was my tree anyway? Fifty-four? Fifty-five? Old enough to teach some lessons at any rate. Life amid the ruins. Survival when all around you goes down in flames. The random play of chance, and how it can exalt as well as crush. I spent a long time sitting on the warm hood of my car staring up at it, thinking long, deep, Yellowstone thoughts. It’s a remarkable tree. A survivor tree. My favorite tree in the entire park.

            The nice thing about driving early is that you  miss most of the elk jams, where RV drivers suddenly slam on the brakes in the middle of the road and disgorge the camera-toting occupants who immediately surround the embarrassed squirrel (quite often it’s squirrels) while behind them other RVs screech to a stop and disgorge similar, backing things up.

            This time of morning, this time of year, you’re more apt to come across the serious wildlife spotters, the ones who are careful to use the pullouts and sit there behind spotting scopes keeping one particular animal in view for hours at a time. They’re a sociable bunch; quite often you see them sharing coffee with fellow spotters, and they’re quick to share information with any newcomer. Seeing a pod of them is usually a good sign that a wolf is in sight, or a moose, or sometimes even a grizz.

            The Lamar Ranger Station is a popular spot for them, with its expansive views of the valley leading up to the Mirror Plateau. They had a herd of antelope spotted, which I could see when I parked one pullout down–gentle whitish things clustered within a bend of the river, keyed up like debutantes at a ball, watching us with as much interest as we observed them.

            I’d like to think I could someday be content with just watching nature from a distance making no disturbance at all, but I’m not there yet–I still need a more involved kind of engagement. In pursuit of such, I opened the trunk, strung together my fly rod, donned my new Patagonia waders, pulled on my fishing vest, stuffed snacks in my pockets, applied sunscreen–busied myself with the fly fisher’s equivalent of primping.

            For my first morning’s fishing I chose the spot where the Lamar is furthest from the road; a sign of continued youth, I told myself–that distance from the road is still a plus in my eye, not a minus. It was an easy enough walk through the usual mix of sage, buffalo pies and willow. The Lamar is a spate river, which means it has a broad, scoured flood plain that becomes rocker the closer to its banks you come. It means, more to the point, that the trout roam t he river without rhyme or reason, so you have to do a lot of hard walking and careful squinting to locate where they are.

            The minutia of an angling day is a fascinating subject, but–to paraphrase Mark Twain–it’s only fascinating to those who find it fascinating. Suffice it to say, I had a hard time conjuring trout from the trout-shaped rocks, an even harder time getting those I located to rise to my fly. A good cutthroat lazily swirled toward my rubber-legged Kaufmann stimulator, but I was too tender with him and he broke free. The sun rose to full strength pretty fast, and its brightness didn’t help; I was soon in that familiar self-defeating mode whereby, not getting much action, you stop paying attention and miss random strikes.

            I fished hard most of the morning, then suddenly bagged it; there’s not much shade along the Lamar, and I have a redhead’s sensitivity to the sun. I walked back to the car, drove east past the run where the Lamar is joined by the smaller Soda Butte. The trout proved even scarcer here than on the Lamar, but it was more my kind of water, and after a half mile of careful wading I took what would turn out to be the best trout of my entire trip: a twenty-one inch cutthroat, with that beautiful butter/copper color along the flanks, and the telltale flash of orange/pink below the gills. It was an extraordinarily large fish in water so thin. I played him slowly and carefully, then, once he was in  my net, flailed about like a madman to pull my camera out, lay him beside my rod on the bank, snap a picture, and return him back into the water unharmed.

            What was a fish that size doing so high up the river? I didn’t find any more like him, though I caught some decent fish in the pockets and pools of Ice Box Canyon. After that, I tried the Lamar lower down, in its own dark canyon, then, needing fish which were easier to catch, switched to my lightest fly rod, stuffed my pockets with grasshopper imitations, hiked for a mile down Blacktail Deer Creek, and fished my way back to the road, catching two or three brook trout–yes, New England brook trout–in every pool.

            I enjoyed this immensely; enjoyed the miniaturization of the whole Yellowstone experience, the sneaking around the willows from pool to pool, the generous willingness of the trout to play along, the connection that came between us via the supple intermediary of my fly rod. After the classically Western expanse of the morning’s fishing, this was a more intimate experience, and reminded me what the Green Mountains were like once upon a fast disappearing time. If anything, these trout in their spawning colors seemed brighter and richer than any I had caught at home–their copper so intense, the coral decorations so blinding, I couldn’t hold one in my hand without blinking.

            After a while, I didn’t bother trying to hook them, just enjoyed the way they appeared out of nowhere to attack the grasshopper, these little bubbling upsurges that always startled me, no matter how many I saw.

            It was late by the time I quit; I drove back to my cabin at Mammoth worn out from a long day. With the weather being so perfect, there were more visitors around than I expected; seeing the families having fun, eating dinner together, pointing at the elk, made me homesick–but maybe that wasn’t bad, to still feel anything at my age that was identical to what I felt when I was twelve.

            I went into the Mammoth store, found a pint bottle of bourbon called “Old Faithful.” It was cheap stuff, raw–had they included geyser water in the blend?–but it eased away the homesickness. I shared some with my neighbors as we sat on our joint porch watching Mars rise over Mount Evarts. They were my age, they loved the park as I did, and we clicked immediately. They were curious–about my fishing, about, most of all, why I wanted to be alone on my birthday. I decided, as we drank, that in discriminating out who I would bother with and who I wouldn’t bother with during the rest of my life, my attention and interest would go strictly to those people my age who were still, whatever else they were, curious–that the only fiftysomethings worth bothering with were those who had survived their half century with their curiosity intact.

            I wished them goodnight, went back to my cabin, but not yet to sleep. I wanted to try and fulfill another park of my resolution, which was to spend the evenings trying to put my mind around some of the big things I had come here to tackle.

            But it’s hard to be profound on cue. I thought deep thoughts all right, lying on my bed in the soft yellow of the porch light, sipping my Old Faithful bourbon, listening to the giggles of children being tucked into bed and the love calls of elk. I thought  how deep the pain was in my knees, my back, my shoulders. Before the trip, I had resolved not to fish myself into my usual stupor, and here I had done exactly that on my very first day. “Fishing hard’ is the term the macho boys use to denote such a day; not sitting on a bank dangling a worm into a stream, but actively hunting, searching, wading, for twelve hours at a stretch.

            Okay, so thanks to aspirin I could still fish hard–but what of it? I had noticed this in myself for a few years now, a tendency to swing between moods wherein I tell myself I’m getting too soft, and moods where I decide the opposite, that I’m too hard on myself, need to ease up. I had talked to enough friends to know this kind of back and forth was one of the real identifying traits of late middle age. Some people, the self-damning kind, swing too far toward the first, and others, the slackers, may give in too soon to the second, which leaves a few of us trying to keep a sensible equilibrium.

            Living in my town are a group of men my age who commemorate the summer solstice by hiking the entire Presidential range in the White Mountains in one long day–twenty-two miles of the most rugged terrain in the Northeast. They invite me to come–but what’s the point of such a test? To prove you can still do everything you could do when you were twenty-five? Yes, there is a certain splendid defiance in attempting such marathons (which have their sexual and gustatory equivalents), but they can also hide changes that are real, imminent, not to be denied. All these tests are ones you’re eventually going to fail, and the real tests you probably should be getting ready for are the moral tests of late middle age, which are an entirely different proposition.

            Men my age run marathons, women my age run marathons; both sexes kick against time by surgery or makeup. I don’t mean to sneer at them–a little defiance it fine–but I sense that clinging to youth so desperately is not quite the right direction for me, not quite my style. If I needed to test anything during my stay in the park, it wasn’t my hardness, but my softness–my ability to open myself up to beauty and splendor and all those things hard fishing, hard drinking, hard screwing can rush you past. And so for the short term…as I lay there writing in my  notebook…I resolved to slack off more during the rest of the trip, to be easier on myself, to sit on the bank and smell the flowers (well, the aspen), not deny certain important lessons my joints were trying to teach me. Easy does it fella.  Not a bad motto, and I wrote it down in big letters in my notebook.

            When you enter the park, in the packet of information the ranger hands you, is a yellow paper with a cartoon of a charging buffalo butting a man hard enough to knock him over. The park service, having experimented over the years, has found that the cartoon is a much more effective warning than the unillustrated caution they used to give out. (But not totally effective; during my time in Yellowsonte, two middle-aged man, approaching bulls for close-up photos, were uncerimoniously gored.)

            Bison, grizzlies, horny elk or moose, the earth giving way beneath your feet as you approach a thermal feature–or, a real concern now among geologists, the risk the entire Yellowstone caldera will undergo an enormous volcanic eruption in the very near future. These are all dangers to be respected, but in my visits I’ve found that by far the greatest danger here is letting all the irony get to you. Ironic National Park–that’s what you’ll see of it, if you don’t keep a lid on your cynicism. All those monstrous RVs big enough to transport a regiment, or the SUVs which out West apparently pass for sub-compacts. The highway cloverleaf  near Old Faithful, the noisy and rowdy campgrounds, the tacky souvenir shops, the runaway development in the gateway towns (my favorite, cynically speaking, being Grizzly Village, the theme park in West Yellowstone that advertises the complete “Yellowstone Experience” a hundred yards from the west entrance).

            These can all be ignored if you make some effort, but it’s easy to let them overwhelm you, too. One of the few convincing lessons life has taught me is that cynicism, while bracingly astringent in small doses, doesn’t lead very far, not in literature, not in philosophy, not on vacation. It’s a sterile attitude–and yet I’m a contemporary American novelist, which means I’m pretty good at it if I want to be, which means, driving through the park, keeping my eyes open, there are lots of mordant zingers that have to be choked back, especially with no one else in the car to share them.

            (My kids, in a teenage kind of way, can be pretty cynical; my response to this is to always out-cynical them. Hey, you want to be cynical? Try this on for size… and I always leave them appalled.)

            So, on my explorations of those first few days, I tried not letting the RVs towing SUVs towing boat trailers get to me, just like I tried not letting the bison, so placid looking in repose, get a window of opportunity on my rear end. The problem with irony/cynicism is that I’ve never indulged myself in it deeply enough to find positive delight in the experience, a la H. L. Mencken–and now, I suspect, it’s too late in life for that, and, starting here in Yellowstone on my birthday, I’d better learn to temper the irony with some bemusement rather than letting it fester.

            One of my finest days that first week began with a hike up Cascade Creek, just west of Canyon. There were no cars parked at the trailhead; I brought my bear spray along and fastened bear bells to my rucksack where they would jingle, hopefully in a key the bears found repellant. Don’t hike alone, the rangers advise, and if you do, make noise. The bells, to my ear, were a bit too mellow, so I attempted to make myself more obnoxious by banging my rod case on the rocks and singing the first thing that popped into my throat, which happened to be Manchester United soccer fight songs, as in–sung to the tune of The Battle Hymn of the Republic–”Glory glory Man Uniiii…ted!”

            It worked–I saw no grizzlies during this or any of my other hikes. A mile into the woods, I detoured over to the stream, Cascade Creek, which was set in a beautiful meadow with a view toward Mount Washburn. These Yellowstone meadows are as sweet and secret a place as you can imagine, especially in autumn, when the willows and alders turn golden and you’re guaranteed to have them to yourself. They resemble alpine meadows in their openness, in the way the grass waves in the wind, but they also tend to be surprisingly boggy, so there’s the kind of mystery that comes with being in a swamp. Cascade Creek cuts through the center of this in serpentine meanderings which allow you to take shortcuts over the sandy isthmuses and sneak up on the trout from different angles.

            Under drought conditions, the little cutthroats were very wary–much harder to catch than the brookies back in Blacktail Deer Creek. I went down to 7X on my leader, which is to say, I was fishing for them on sheerest gossamer, but anything heavier on the water would send them fleeing upstream in panic.

            But that was all right–this was my day of not fishing seriously, and what I did most of the morning was lay against a log in the center of the meadow enjoying the scenery, not thinking about anything profound, just mostly staring. Or at least I tried doing this. Various concerns intruded before I could relax completely. One concern was the possible proximity of grizzlies; traveling alone in the backcountry, you can’t shake this feeling entirely (and it’s not necessarily a bad feeling either). Concern number two was that maybe the trout were bigger and dumber a half mile upstream and I should be up there fishing for them. Concern number three was the ordinary background worry that, when you’re my age, with a family, never goes completely away, even in Yellowstone.

            After a while the tug-of-war grew fierce–the brilliant immediacy of my surroundings versus all this worrisome, hateful buzz. I felt mad that I couldn’t relax completely–and when you get mad at not relaxing, the game is up. I went back to fishing, since its concentration is all about immediacy, living in the moment, sharing the same spontaneous time line as the trout. But shouldn’t I be able to achieve that just by sitting on my butt?

            I had a companion, I realized now. There under the pine that grew furthest out in the meadow–a buffalo bull, all by his lonesome, brown and stocky and perfectly content, gravely munching on something he found in the little slough where the swampy part began, aware of me, but totally indifferent.

            I read later than an older male can eventually become a nuisance to the herd, attacking young ones with no provocation, to the point where the stronger, younger males drive him out, banish him to exile. I was to see a good many lone buffalo during my three weeks; they always seemed waiting at the furthest point of my fishing/hiking expeditions, so I began to believe it was the same buffalo who was following me around the park. This made for a strong fellow feeling, though I had actively sought my exile, not been banished. (Well, not exactly; I’d been grumpy all year, and I don’t think anyone at home was sorry to see me temporarily go.)

            My intention was to stay on the creek all afternoon, but my restlessness made this difficult. I got to thinking about the grizzlies again, remembered my promise to call home before the kids went to bed, worried over the construction delays I could expect heading down to Lake where I was to spend the night…well, the list hardly matters. I put it down to illustrate the wretched background worry that makes it hard for a middle-aged man to sit in an unspoiled meadow letting the beauty of it soak in.

            Vexing–but I decided to give myself another chance. My drive from the trailhead to the lake took me past the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, and I detoured over to take a look. APPROACHING  INSPIRATION  POINT read the sign, and that was good for a smile–at last, a road sign meant just for me! There were only a handful of cars in the parking lot. Inspiration Point is out on a little boardwalk, and older couples were taking photos of each other with the falls as background.

            I’d seen the Lower Falls before, but never in autumn, and the shadows gave a steely texture to the dropping water, made the huge upsurge of spray seem molten. The sun was high enough that it turned the canyon canary yellow; as usual, it was a long way down.

            Waterfalls, of course, are meant to induce solemn thoughts. Here is Nathaniel Pitt Langford’s description of his own reaction as he viewed the scene in l870; Langford was one of the first 100 white men to ever see the falls, and probably the first whose education gave him a Romantic frame of reference.

“The rapids were so terrible to behold that none of our company could venture the experiment in any other manner than by laying prone upon the rock, to gaze into its awful depths; depths so amazing that the sound of the rapids could not be heard. The stillness is horrible, the solitary grandeur of the scene surpassed conception. You feel the absence of sound–the oppression of absolute silence. Down, down, down, you see the river attenuated to a thread. If you could only hear that gurgling river, lashing with puny strength the massive walls that imprison it and hold it in their dismal shadow, if you could but see a living thing in the depths beneath you, it would relieve the tension of the nerves which the scene has excited, and with a grateful heart you would thank God that he had permitted you to gaze unharmed upon the majestic depths of his handiwork. But as it is, the spirit of man sympathsizes with the deep gloom of the scene, and the brain reels as you gaze into the profound and solemn solitude.”

            A strange, overpowering, existential kind of reaction (and I don’t just mean Langford’s fondness for the verb “gaze). Joseph Conrad could have written this in The Heart of Darkness–but not Langford, who had the soul of a Kiwanian, not unless he was vouchsafed a moment of intense insight that few of those who have seen the falls since could ever recapture, not with the click-click-click of cameras going off on every inspiration point around.

            Langford and the other early visitors saw the falls free of the ironic add-ons of the years; to them, “grandeur” and “sublimity” were not just platitudes, but qualities they could grasp between their hands. That’s what I found myself wanting to do–to see the park as clearly as those first visitors had, get past the tourists, past the post card familiarity, take the grandeur and sublimity, even if they shook me, into my soul…and not apologize for using the word either.

            It’s hard to see a celebrity place without the cliché halos. When it came to Yellowstone’s marvels, had I already reached the saturation point, one week in? Rudyard Kipling asked himself the same question on his visit to the park in l889. “Miracles pall when they arrive at twenty a day,” he wrote. “The power of the mind for wonder is limited.”

            This is exactly what I worried about on Cascade Creek, then again driving down through Hayden Valley toward the hotel. “Wonder”–theme for the day, theme for my trip, theme for the next stage of life. When I was young, I could stare at “wonders” for long minutes at a time, seeing them, focusing on them, realizing them, in a way I’ve seldom been able to do since. These weren’t wonders in the world-class Yellowstone sense, but more near-at-hand kinds of marvels. Views from the top of New England hills; the stars in a dark country sky ; almost any trick of moving water; the leaves on a maple tree in October, under which I would lay with my hands behind my head to stare my fill.

            Somewhere along the way, somewhere in the course of daily living, the steady encrustation of responsibility, this ability to just sit and watch and wonder had become atrophied, even in me, a writer, someone who is paid to keep his eye fixed on marvels of every kind. Another visitor to the park, John Muir, took a bittersweet view of the problem. “As age comes on, one source of enjoyment after another is closed, but nature’s sources never fail.”

            Okay John Muir, I hear you on this–but the truth is nature’s sources were failing me, or beginning to. I could sense this happening; I told myself, well I can always go back to it, that kind of pure absorption in the moment. One day I’ll retire to it the way other people retire to Florida. But here I was three days from turning 55, and between this and that I hadn’t gone back to it; my trips outside at night to stare up at the stars were becoming less frequent, the time I could happily sit staring into the middle distance was becoming shorter; even my love of music, my ability to concentrate on it, was much choppier than it had been when I was twenty, when you think the added years would result in just the opposite. Middle age people complain about “losing it,” referring to strength, speed or endurance; this to me was minor when compared to letting the qualities and sights that make life more than endurable go flying on past without my appreciating them.

            Could it be pulled back again, a young person’s sense of wonder, and, more to the point, could it be recaptured in a place that more than any other in the world justified its nickname–Wonderland? F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed America was the last place on earth where man came upon something commensurate with his capacity for wonder, and Yellowstone was one of the last places left in America where you could still test this capacity–and, for that matter, miserably fail.

            A flagman stopped me along the Yellowstone, and I waited a half hour for construction trucks to pass. Beside me, the river looked cold and lonely, and I spent most of the time in the fly-fisher’s state of mild hallucination, seeing the rise rings of trout in what were probably only the surges and swirls tossed up by the current.

            But then–eureka. Maybe it was the sheer noise and ugliness of the trucks passing between me and the river (they were widening the road for the comfort of ever larger RVs) that crystallized my thinking. Between one moment and the next, brooding about these things, I realized I had stumbled upon one of the answers I had been on the lookout for ever since entering the park. The primary reason I wanted to be alone in Yellowstone on my birthday was that I needed to be somewhere that would shake up my senses, jolt me back to that sense of wonder I wanted very badly to recapture; I wanted to recapture this now, so I could enter the crunch years of late middle age armored with, enhanced by, a talent that required neither money, equipment, nor elevated levels of fitness to achieve: the ability to focus on the grandeur and sublimity that comes…and this is the secret of youth that can be our secret, too…even in moments that are camouflaged and hidden by the weight of the commonplace. Been there, done that, seen those. Yes, these are our excuses for our jaded weariness, the three clauses that sink us, but maybe late middle age is the time to go back and see everything again, and really see this time, these Yellowstones andYosemites of the near at hand.

            Deep stuff–but that’s why you go to Yellowstone in the first place, and who was I to break the tradition of two centuries? I was approaching the midpoint of my trip, and had done okay, caught some trout, caught some sublimity, and now here was a resolution worth all the time and trouble I had taken to find one. I got to apply it that very night. The Lake area was much quieter and more deserted than the other parts of the park; it had exactly the lonely, autumnal feel I had been looking for. The old Victorian hotel built on the lakefront wore its venerability well under the light clouds of evening, and there was my friend the lone buffalo, grazing under the pines by the fire escape, totally ignored.

            As usual, I hardly bothered with dinner, just grabbed a sandwich and brought it out to a bench on the low cliff that fronts the lake. There can’t be many moments during the season when you can have this view to yourself. Some trick of twilight made it seem the sun was going down in the east over the Absarokas, and then I realized what I was looking at was alpenglow, or something similar, and it colored the ragged ridgeline into a soft gray-lemon that, as the light faded, came down and touched the lake. Nothing stirred on the water, nothing beside the ripples and folds that moved slowly and stately across the surface, slanting ashore on the black gravel shingle below me with the softest, gentlest sound water is capable of making. Inside that softness was the secret of autumn–that’s the effect it gave—and if I listened carefully I would have that secret.

            The silence, the light, the way those velvety folds seemed to flow from the mountains to take up residence in the lake. All these things, and then–the true surprise–my own giving way to it, so for those few minutes I had what I was looking for: forgetfulness, immersion, solace, oneness, not me looking down at the lake, but me and the lake together, unbothered, unvexed, unbewildered.

            When I could no longer see the ripples, I went back to the hotel, shivering–and not just with cold. My room was the last one on the endless corridor of the third floor, and it was apparent I was the only guest up there. I spent the night waiting for ghosts to appear–not a bad feeling, sort of like waiting for the grizzlies, and it added a pleasant frisson that made me pull the blankets up higher around my chin. Around midnight I heard some bumps and knocks, got up to investigate–and yes, there he was right below my room , the lone buffalo, red in the glow of the exit light, rubbing up against the siding for whatever companionship the hotel could provide.

            “You sound like you’re a million miles away. Matt?”

            “Hi, Dad!”

            “How are you?”

            “We have a tournament, can you come?”

            “First, ask me if I’m having a good time.”

            “Sorry.”

            “I’m having a great time. Just a little while ago I was fishing this stream called Aster Creek, and three otter came swimming past, plunging up and down just like porpoises.”

            “Neat.”

            “Okay, your turn.”

            “We got stuck in the toughest division. There’s a team that’s ranked number three in Connecticut and another team that’s ranked number two in Rhode Island.”

            “Well, you’re the hicks from the sticks. You can beat them in an upset, soccer can be a funny game that way. How’s school going?”

            “Fine. Dad?”

            “Can you speak up a little louder? Hear that elk? He’s right behind me.”

            “Cool. The first game is at eight, which means I have to be there at seven.”

            “In Nashua? Which means we’d have to leave home at five a.m., get up at four. I get home at midnight. That’s going to be tough…Well, okay. Maybe. Is Erin around? Mom?”

            “Here’s Erin.”

            “Hi Dad, what’s the sound?”

            “Elk. Here, listen, I’ll stick the phone out the booth.”

            “Neat. Are you homesick yet?”

            “It gets bad at dusk.”

            “Told you.”

            “How’s school going? How’s the college applications going?”

            “Terrible.”

            “Terrible? Why terrible?”

            “I’ve got babysitting. Here’s Mom.”

            “Love you.”

            “Love you.”

            “Hi, honey!”

            “Why did she say terrible?”

            “Long story. How are you?”

            “I miss you.”

            “Liar. But I miss you.”

            “A change is good for all of us. The kids anyway. Makes them appreciate me. Actually, I’m doing better alone than I thought I would. It’s true, you do see more when you’re by yourself. You take everything in, you don’t waste energy on chitchat.”

            “You being careful? Seen any bears? Your dad called. His anemia is worse, and now they’re talking about giving him platelets.”

            “That doesn’t sound good. Platelets?”

            “It isn’t, not for someone his age. He didn’t want me to tell you.”

            “Is he getting ready to move out to that assisted living place?”

            “He keeps saying it’s for old people.”

            “Hear that elk?”

            “Oh my god. It must be really attracted to you.”

            “Hardy har-har. I’ll call on my birthday, okay?”

            “That’s three days. Call before, too. I’m driving Matt to soccer practice. Love you.”

            “I had a pretty special moment last night. I was–”

            Click.

            Three weeks is a long time to spend in the park, compared to most people’s twenty-four hours. But I was determined not to be rushed–to pick up one of the many glorious threads that compose the park and follow it all day, knowing I had plenty of time to follow another thread tomorrow.

            I fished seventeen rivers during my stay, plus three lakes, and I’m going to list their names here, for the sheer, evocative pleasure of saying them out loud. Yellowstone River. Gardner River. Lava Creek. Blacktail Deer Creek. The Lamar. The Firehole (Biscuit Basin and Muleshoe Bend). The Gibbon River. Hellroaring Creek. Soda Butte Creek. The Madison (Nine Mile Hole and the Barns pools). Cascade Creek. Aster Creek. Solfatara Creek. Trout Lake. Fan Creek. The Lewis River outlet. Joffe Lake. Nez Perce Creek. The Gallatin. Ribbon Lake. Grayling Creek.

            I worked out a good routine most days, up in darkness to make myself a cup of tea, off to the nearest lodge to grab breakfast and the makings of a lunch, a short drive to whichever river I was concentrating on, carefully gearing up, the hike in to the river, a hard morning’s fishing, a long break for lunch, often in the shade of the nearest aspen grove, then another river in the afternoon, not fishing quite so hard now, doing more in the way of sitting and watching, quitting around seven, then coming back to my room to write in my journal.

            The leisurely pace gave me a chance to do something that had been on my wish list for a long time, which was to take a closer look at Yellowstone’s geysers. I’m probably the negative world-record holder in this regard; this was my fifth trip to Yellowstone and not once had I seen Old Faithful. I took a snobby, reverse kind of pride in this. Old Faithful was the icon of that other Yellowstone, the RV people’s Yellowstone, the bus tour Yellowstone, the prepackaged side of the park I was determined to avoid. I was going to prove, by ignoring its most famous feature, that there was a hell of a lot more to the park than just some tacky, over-praised bubbles.

            This was foolish of me, short-sighted, but it set me up for the best moments of the last third of my trip. As well as splendidly beautiful, Yellowstone is splendid  in a loopy, weird, otherworldly kind of way–a performance artist in the theater of nature’s absurd. Early visitors, almost without exception, looked at the hot springs, geysers, mud volcanoes and paint pots, and thought automatically of hell. (Cartographers in the l890’s had to go back and change many of the park’s original names, since too many contained the world “hell” or “devil.”) Modern visitors, conditioned in less Calvanistic ways, tend to be immediately curious about the science that causes these weirdly melodramatic effects, never  mind the portals-of-hell metaphors that scared our ancestors.

            Old Faithful, I discovered, is still great theater after all these years. The enormous parking lot only had a few cars this late in autumn (things were so quiet that trotting along the middle of the pavement, wearing a look of requited curiosity, was the only wolf I saw on my trip), and if not for three yellow busloads of Idaho Falls school children, I would have had the geyser largely to myself. According to the clock in the visitor center it was thirty minutes before the next eruption. I stretched out in the shade of some lodgepole  pine where not only could I get a good view of the geyser cone, but I could watch the people sitting there on the horseshoe of benches waiting patiently to be amazed.

            A small enough group–91 I counted, mostly the kids, but with a good sprinkling of seniors, many of who, I noticed, held hands. About fifteen minutes before the eruption, dogs began getting restless–they looked up at their masters and made urgent little tugs on their leashes back toward the parking lot. At the same time, steam began gurgling up from the bone-white cone, surges that slightly exceeded each other in what the rangers coyly call the “pre-play” period. The actual eruption, when it came, was both beautiful and anticlimactic; beautiful in that the strong northwest wind flattened out the spray into rippling sheets of sideways moving rainbows; disappointing in that, because of the wind, the water didn’t form that familiar, classic column seen in so many photographs, calendars and posters.

            And, of course, it seemed smaller than I pictured it being–smaller in the way Stonehenge seem smaller, because you’re looking at it not just with your eyes but through exaggerated layers of legend and hype.

            It did better the next morning; again, as with so many Yellowstone wonders, the trick is waking up early so you can get them to yourself. I hadn’t bothered looking at the visitor center clock this time, so the eruption took my by surprise. I had crossed the little bridge over the Firehole, and was climbing up along the boardwalk toward the Beehive and the other famous geysers, when I heard a whoosh and looked around–and yes, there it was, Old Faithful blossoming into Old Faithful, high and fresh and sparkling, and no one there to see it but me.

            I had big fishing plans for the day, I was going to concentrate on the Firehold, that strangest of all the worlds’ trout streams, with active geysers on one side of you, boiling hot springs on the other–big plans, but I stayed around for three more eruptions, mesmerized, enthralled, converted. Why had I waited so long to become a geyser freak? All around me, as far as I could see stretching across the valley toward the escarpment to the west with its fire-blackened trees, jets of steam shot skyward in the chill morning air. I wanted to laugh, to shout, to point–at no other time in my trip did I feel so strongly the need to have someone to share all this with. I realized, in that instant, how the most overwhelming imperative those first explorers had experienced must have been to immediately race back to civilization to tell people about the wonders they had seen, even if they risked being called liars.

            In the most inspired moment of place naming in U.S. history, General Henry Washburn and his exploring party of l870 named this great geyser almost immediately upon seeing it. The words “old” and “faithful” had spontaneously come to their minds, when almost everything else they named in the park tended to be “hell’s this” or “devil’s that.” To these frontiersmen, it must have seemed the highest virtue–fidelity, steadfastness, dependability–and I thought how far we had gone in the opposite direction in the century and a half since, to the point where almost the only time you heard the word “faithful” now was in its sexual and entirely negative sense, “unfaithful.”

            But maybe, I thought, as I watched each new eruption with its subtly different variation, it’s time to get back to restoring “faithful” to its place on our short list of virtues, not just faithful as in marriage (though, quaint as it sounds, I see no harm in honoring it there), or faithful in a religious sense, but in the meaning I was watching here–of something that  not only manages to be young and fresh and inspiring, but manages to be that right on cue. Stars are faithful in that sense, sunsets, even some heroic and inspiring people who seem to draw upon a never-failing inspiration in a way that manages to be young and old at the same time. Fountain of youth, fountain of experience, drinking from both simultaneously? Yes, I was staring at the proof–young and old weren’t necessarily opposites after all. It’s an absurd thing for superheated water to suddenly pop its cork, but if it does this faithfully…every 65 minutes if its last eruption lasted less than 2.5 seconds; every 92 minutes if the last eruption lasted longer than 2.5 seconds….then you have something that serves, even in our sardonic age, as a tonic to our souls.

            The next three days I was locked inside a smaller enchantment set within a larger one. The Upper Geyser Basin, Midway, the Lower Geyser Basin, the huge Excelsior Pool, the Grand Prismatic Spring. I shuttled between all these, found it all but impossible to leave their radius. Even later when I arrived home, that’s what I ended up talking about the most. “Dad,” Matthew said, with the expression thirteen-year olds get when they’re leveling with you. “You’ve got geysers on the brain.”–and he wasn’t far wrong.

            My actual birthday, the Big 55, I spent hiking up Fan Creek, a beautiful tributary of the Gallatin running into the western side of the park. The river (going upstream) starts in one of those expansive Yellowstone meadows, rises through a steep forested canyon, then opens into a second, higher meadow surrounded by low ridges and the foothills of the Gallatin Range. As on all the streams I fished, the water was low and the fish spooked by the sunlight, so it took some careful stalking to find them. The corner pools where the creek twisted, had all the fish–good rainbows, and now and then a decent cutthroat. As usual, I wanted to shout out loud from the splashy surprise of their rises, then, as I knelt to release them, from their classic beauty in my hands.

            Later in the afternoon I retraced my way to Mammoth where I was going to spend my last night. I stopped at Norris to see the havoc some brand-new thermal activity had wrecked in the parking lot, stopped and listened to Thunder Mountain (which in a park of oddities ranks way up there), and then–and this was all new to me–drove along the beautiful Swan Lake Flats, the cliffs of Obsidian Mountain, the spectacular Golden Gate Canyon…or, in other words, enjoyed the usual miracle-a-mile kind of Yellowstone drive.

            A quietly satisfying day, and I followed it up with a quietly satisfying evening, beginning with what was virtually a first on my trip: a genuine bona-fide full course dinner in Mammoths beautiful art-deco restaurant. My notebook had dinner with me, not only to provide some company, but because I wanted to jot down some resolutions in keeping with the occasion. Profound resolutions would have been nice; there was something about the almost empty dining room, the candlelight, the lonely looking waiters, that made profound seem like a real possibility. But the most I could come up with were garden variety resolutions, the kind anyone might make. Pay more attention to friends in the coming year, don’t neglect them like I’d been doing. Don’t micro manage the kids’ lives, draw back a little on the details. Try to avoid turning family life entirely into a matter of small business management. Encourage my wife to indulge her love for hiking the way she indulged my love of fishing. Be there for my father in the trials that would soon be upon him.

            Later, alone in my cabin, I went at it again. Mammoth was in the process of closing down for the year, at least the cabins, and only four were occupied beside mine; our lights in a little semi-circle made me realize how it must have been for the soldiers stationed here in Fort Yellowstone back in the early 1900’s when the army patrolled the park. The lonely, autumnal mood made it easier to feel 55. “I don’t feel any older,” is what people say on their birthdays, starting with their fourth or fifth, but if I really examined the issue it was clear I did feel older, and this was coming not so much from any physical changes (though they were there), or any lessening in my imagination (that, at any rate, was as strong as ever), but in my entire relationship to time.

            That was the big one, far past the mere resolution stage of a typical birthday. At 55, our rules of engagement with time are rapidly changing, already differ significantly than what they were ten years before. No longer does the future spread before you like a blank and wonderful map, yours for the coloring. This is the future my son faces, my daughter. Nor was it critical in the other direction–time wasn’t ticking so fast it scared me into immobility, as if now frightened my father, age 86. It was somewhere in between, but, if I was honest, moving closer and closer to that better-do-it-while-you-can third of the dial, adding an urgency I hadn’t felt when I was in my forties.

            Take a simple thing like that lavish restaurant dinner I had treated myself to earlier than night. AT 45, at even 50, I may have decided it’s a luxury I could do without. But now? Well, what was I waiting for? Why not be nice to myself, I argued, I’ve earned it, haven’t I? This is one of the turning points that makes late middle age it’s own unique stage of life; advertisers know this, which is why you see so many men my age driving brand-new Corvettes. But the same kind of resolution has a spiritual side. Serenity? Calmness? Acceptance? All those virtues and strengths you told yourself you’d grown into someday. If not now, when?

            A life is protected by so many milestones and landmarks it can seem a fortress time can’t storm. School age looms before you, first communion or bar mitzvah, voting age, drinking age, the Big 30, the Big 40, social security eligibility, retirement age…and every landmark and each birthday forms another barricade protecting us from old age. And yet the barricades are falling, and when 54, like all the others, crumbles into dust, the 55 that replaces it seems to offer very little in the way of shelter, at least when compared to those solid 25’s you sigh for, or even those rock-hard 44’s. Every new birthday adds substance to a person, at least when you’re young, but when, I wondered, does every birthday begin to subtract?

            At 55 you begin to play around with the notion of how much time you actually have left,  not just to be morbid, but as a real calculation that influences many different kinds of decisions. Take my decision to visit Yellowstone in the autumn, something I had long wanted to do. What am I waiting for? I told myself that summer. I’d better do this before it’s too late. The flip side of this, when I actually went and did it, is wondering whether I’d ever have the chance to visit again, or whether this was a farewell tour.

            Time would require some thinking about as the year went on, but I could already see other implications in this new relationship. For more years than I could remember, I’d been spurred on by the dream of future achievement, not in the go-go American “success” mode, that old bitch goddess to which many sacrifice their lives, but as an artist who longed for aesthetic success, that rarest of all rare ambitions. Now, though this still drove me, more and more I was turning from the glittering allure of future achievement to looking back at the achievements I had managed, god knows how, to pull off. This was potentially a major switcheroo, and while it wasn’t complete yet, I could see a  more than subtle part of me preparing for the moment when looking back at the past would seem a more fruitful occupation than dreaming about the future.

            A man’s work, a man’s victories, are largely behind him at 55–or is this a self-defeating cliché, one of time’s dirtiest tricks? Maybe that’s why most Presidential contenders tend to be about my age–that these are men and women who detest the fact that possibilities in their life no longer seem unlimited, and so they lust for one of the few entirely new achievements left for a late middle aged person to pull off.

            And as for the increased pace of time, how years go by in a bewildering second, this was and remained the most surprising fact of adulthood, something that nothing in youth prepares you for. Would it ever level off, or would the speed only increase as I got older?

            I wrote down a few thoughts on the subject, knowing even as I did so that they were the kind I’d probably angrily scratch out first thing the next morning. When I left on my trip everyone in the family had written cards for me, not to be opened until my actual birthday. I remembered they were there now, in the bottom of my duffel bag with my extra fly reels. Celeste’s note was short and sweet, and contained one line that got me smiling. “Remember, the fish like you!”–and yes, this was true, any time I felt down or homesick the trout had all but sprung from the water to pat me fraternally on the back. Matthew’s was a soccer anagram; by filling in the blank letters in various soccer stars’ names I ended up with the words “I love you.”

            The longest letter was Erin’s, and this is the one that shook me deep and hard, so as I finished it, laying there on the bed in the soft light of my table lamp, I began unashamedly to cry.

            “Hi Dad! I hope you’re having a good time, and that you’re not getting too  comfortable without us! It must be nice just to get away some times from all the arguing and complaining and stress. Do you ever learn things you didn’t know about yourself on solo trips, or when you’re by yourself? You seem to want to be alone a lot, but maybe that’s the writer in you. I’m still learning stuff about myself, but that’s to be expected. Umm…Please remember that I am as scared/excited about going to college as you are about me going. It will be easier if we both know that. I hope you have a good 55th birthday and make sure to eat a bison burger and a Montana Monster cookie for me! Happy birthday, love Erin!”

            Throughout my stay in the park I carried around in my head, the way you do a catchy jingle an idea for a novel. Writers are always doing this, of course; this particular idea was the harmless, non-tormenting kind that probably wouldn’t ever lead to much, but was fun to roll around in my imagination. (There’s an opening here; Yellowstone has never been the subject of a great book.) The hero would be a man my age who, acting on a whim, never having been there, decides to visit the park just before some calamitous something shakes the world–9/11 say, or the start of the Iraq war. He immediately becomes fascinated, falls in love as he’s never fallen in love with a place before, its beauty, its peacefulness, even its primness (and yes, Yellowstone, wild as it is, also has its prim side). So deep is this enchantment, so bad is the news in the outer world, he can’t bring himself to leave when his allotted time is up; he extends his reservation, e-mails some excuse to his wife, keeps staying on and on right through the summer and then the fall.

            He’d have an affair, of course…maybe with one of those woman rangers who now seem to outnumber the men…and between this and his adventures in the backcountry, comes face to face with what the reviewers (unanimous in their praise) call his “essential core values.” As winter comes, he’s taking a job as a dishwasher in one of the park lodges just to keep the connection going…or should I give him a fatal disease, have him crawl off to die in an empty beaver lodge as the snow falls down?

            An autobiographical novel? Well, partly. I had become just as enchanted by Yellowstone as my hero; yes, I hated ferociously to leave. (The shortest sentence in John Muir’s rapturously lyrical essay on Yellowstone is the following: “It is a hard place to leave.”)

But unlike my hero, I had strong ties puling me out from the enchanted zone, bonds that, if you looked at them correctly, were just as wondrous themselves.

            I had done okay during my three weeks–I had done okay. I learned that I still have the stamina to fish hard, learned that my eyes were still quick to respond to a trout’s subtle rise, that my reflexes were still fast enough to enjoy this kind of big-league fly-fishing. I remembered enough about tenderness that releasing trout carefully was still a big priority; only my children when they were babies ever got the TLC I lavished on that big Soda Butte cutthroat. I discovered that I could still take care of myself alone, not only in the backcountry, but in that wilder jungle of airports, highways and motels–learned that traveling alone makes you filter everything through the screen of your own seeing, with no compromises blurring things up. I had reconnected with the boy in me–not just through fishing, but through my renewed willingness to sit and watch and wonder. Yellowstone had once again given me an unsurpassable standard by which to measure beauty, wildness and perfection. It had supplied me with a deep reservoir of solace to help me through the coming year.

            A good trip. A good life to match? Well, I could total that up, too, while I was at it. At 55, I still had my health and 7/8 of my energy. I still had my curiosity left. I was still trying to puzzle things out. I still had a surprisingly high number of traits left from youth, the bedrock fears, inclinations, attitudes you apparently never totally leave behind; even a good deal of innocence remains, which you would think would be the first quality to go. I was still asking a lot of myself, asking a lot from life in general. As for the demerits, the down side, virtues I had lost, places where I’d better improve quick…

            They could wait. It was my birthday plus one, I was entering this 55 business slowly, and one of my resolutions, jotted down as a final entry in my notebook, was to give that oh-so-serious side of me a little more vacation.

            I say it for a second time. Alone, I’d done okay. But the biggest lesson to take home, along with the souvenir visors, t-shirts and mugs, was the fact that I wasn’t alone, not in any sense short of the ultimate metaphysical one. Any definition I could come up with about who I was on this landmark birthday involved my being a husband, a father, a son–that these connections were real and vital, and (coming late in life, the first two) all but miraculous.

            And demanding. I can’t pretend it wasn’t welcome, a vacation from being chauffeur, teacher, dishwasher, cook, but if I had any illusions that the true me was a solo me, the painful wave of homesickness that washed over me on my last night proved otherwise.

            On that first trip to Yellowstone in l988, the plane ride out had taken me right over the park, which was invisible except for one monstrously large boiling cloud of red-veined blackness, a cloud that, for all anyone knew at the time, was erasing the beauty of Yellowstone for an entire generation. It hadn’t managed to do this, of course. Fire had renewed its beauty–and there, I saw it now, as our flight took the same shortcut it had fifteen years before, slanting high across Yellowstone Lake. That early in the morning the cold tightened and showcased all the hot springs and geysers within the enormous caldera, so the park seemed the base for a thousand columns of the lightest most ethereal gray imaginable, holding up the sky.

            I watched these as long as I could, twisting around in my seat to look out the window behind me, then turned with the greatest reluctance away. People were donning headphones now, taking out laptops, unwrapping their breakfast bars and peanuts. My thoughts turned eastward as the plane turned eastward. The birthday boy had done okay in Wonderland–but how would he do at home?

 (first published in the Fall 2005 issue)

          The first time it happened was in October. And then again—twice—in November. What better season for falling? The leaves lose their grasp and come floating down, brittle as an old woman’s hipbone.

*

          After she fell for the second time I bought her a cobalt blue walker with hand brakes, shiny as a new bicycle, but two days later when we left for a doctor’s appointment, she abandoned the walker inside the front door and reached for me. I took her hand as she lurched down the porch step, lost her balance, then steadied herself against me. My thoughts immediately raced to Don’t fall, please don’t fall. At the doctor’s office I took her hand as we walked into the waiting room and then down the hall to an exam room. I understood, without asking her, why the walker had to remain at home. She was not yet ready to admit she needed an old-lady contraption, shiny blue or not.

          “One of my medications must be off,” Jeanne told her doctor. “I just can’t figure out why I keep falling.”

            “We’re all getting older,” he said. “Do you think you blacked out? Did you feel dizzy before you fell?”

            “Oh, no. Nothing like that. My feet just got tangled up.”

            “Well, let’s draw some blood for labs and see if there’s anything. Definitely use a walker. Silver sulfonamide on the leg wounds and moist-heat soaks three times a day to increase blood flow and promote healing.” We filled the prescription for the special ointment on the way home.

           I picked up her lab results the following day, and the nurse sat with me in the waiting room for a few minutes, chatting. The report showed Jeanne’s complete blood count and her thyroid hormone levels as normal.

           “It’s the steroids,” the nurse said. “They destroy the protective fatty layer under the skin and make it fragile. That’s why it tears so easily and takes forever to heal.”

          “But that doesn’t explain the falling, does it?” I asked.

          “Oh, it’s just so hard to get old,” she said.

*

          My mother-in-law is seventy-four and has severe emphysema. Every morning, while I’m pouring milk on cereal and packing lunches and brushing hair to get four kids out the door by 7:15, Jeanne pushes her walker down the hall from her bedroom to the TV room, where she sits in her favorite wingback chair and twists open two tubes of liquid steroids. She squeezes the medications into the bowl of her nebulizer and turns up the volume on the TV so she can hear it over the machine’s hum.

          Once the kids are off to school, I pour myself a cup of coffee and join her. Jeanne smiles at me through the fog of vaporized medication. As long as the nebulizer is running, we do not talk. She needs to breathe every bit of the medicine deep into her lungs.

           When the nebulizer’s reservoir is empty, Jeanne turns the machine off. I set my coffee aside and kneel down next to her footstool to peel back the bandage on her leg. She winces as I pull up the gauze pad.

            The open wound looks mushy, with a layer of yellowy white over the exposed flesh. It reminds me of chicken fat. The nurses use terms like exudate, metabolic waste, slough. Every time I remove the bandage I cringe and taste bile. At the kitchen sink I drag a towel through steaming water and wring it out like a washermaid.

          “Oh, that feels good,” Jeanne says as I place the soaking towel directly on the wound. I cover it with a layer of plastic sheeting and lay the heating pad on top. I set the timer for twenty minutes and leave her to the rest of the morning news. Cloud cover today, the weatherman says. Calm early this morning then breezy and cool, with highs in the mid-fifties.

*

          After talking to the nurse the other day, I came home and looked up prednisone, side effects on the Internet. This drug, among the many Jeanne takes, creates a host of problems: cataracts, osteoporosis, thin skin. Prednisone also causes muscle weakness that in turn may lead to falling. The steroid decreases bone density, making the tendency to fall even more alarming. Daily doses puff up her feet and legs with fluid that also pools around her heart and lungs, resulting in even more difficulty breathing. So the doctor prescribes a diuretic, which makes Jeanne lightheaded and likely to fall again. Along with the diuretic he tells her to take potassium, since frequent urination leaches important minerals and may throw her electrolytes out of balance.

          There is no way to reverse the prednisone’s damage. We keep adding more treatments and more medications for each side effect, as if it’s an independent ailment. I guess we should have read the tissue-thin scroll of fine print that came with the pills that very first time. But what would we have done, even if we’d read the list? She was so short of breath. Prednisone helped.

          Each time we come home from the doctor’s office with a new prescription in hand, Jeanne is hopeful. She feels as though something’s getting fixed, as though a problem has been solved. In a month or two, the new medication will need its own companion med to treat some new symptom. Still, there is no question that these medications have extended her life. Despite signing an advance directive years ago, she has gradually been put on various forms of life support—oxygen, heart medications, plus steroids in powder, liquid, tablet, and aerosol form. Prednisone has made her veins so fine and delicate that nurses can’t draw blood without collapsing a vein. Each failed probe of the needle leaves a dark bruise on her arm.

          Time to talk to the doctor about a portable catheter, the nurses say. I want to shake them for giving her one more magic procedure, one more hope. But it’s not my body and these are not my decisions. I keep my mouth shut, make more appointments, do more tests, give more medications. She does whatever the doctors say.

*

          The timer goes off and I return to the TV room to lift the wet towel from her leg and apply a fresh dressing. She asks for an English muffin with cream cheese. I bring it to her along with a glass of orange juice.

          “I need to eat something before I take my pills,” she says. “You do so much for me, dear. Thank you.”

           On a morning show, one of the hosts has traveled someplace warm and wide, with white beaches slipping out to great swaths of blue.

          “Guess I’ll go back in my bed,” Jeanne says, handing me her half-finished plate. “Don’t know why I’m so worn out today.”

          Just before she clicks off the TV, the programming cuts to the local weather report. Storms possible tomorrow—

          Jeanne pushes her walker down the hall toward her bedroom, and the clear tubing trails and tangles behind her. Her oxygen concentrator hums and gasps.

*

          Jeanne gets a mammogram every October. This year when the postcard came in the mail, I encouraged her to let it slide.

          “Mom, before we call and schedule the appointment, think about it. You always say how painful it is, how you dread it.”

          “But if I have breast cancer—“

          “If there’s a spot, you’ll return for more tests. A biopsy would create another wound that won’t heal. And if you do have breast cancer, what are you going to do—surgery? Radiation and chemo?” This is a woman who scratches an itch on her arm and ends up with a wound that doesn’t heal for weeks.

          “You’re right, Lisa. Even if I had cancer I wouldn’t want treatment. But at least I’d know.”

          “That’s fair, Mom. But think about it, will you?”

          Protocol: mammogram every year after forty. That’s what the brochures say. How likely is it that Jeanne would live long enough to die of breast cancer?

         We think one step at a time. Ease the breathing. Take the prednisone. When her skin starts breaking down because of poor circulation, we apply ointment and bandages. Blood samples are taken and corpuscles counted. Radiologists interpret x-rays and ct scans. Jeanne spends more and more time in doctor’s offices, in labs, in the hospital, when she could be watching the hibiscus grow and blossom red in the backyard; she could be reading books to her grandchildren.

          After two days she threw the postcard away. I wasn’t the one making the decision, but my influence was clear. Jeanne doesn’t question medical advice enough—I question it too much. I hope I’m not wrong to dissuade her from treatment. I’m relieved to let the yearly mammogram go. If nothing else, there is one less possibility of her falling while getting from wheelchair to car and back again.

          When the doctor asked if she’d scheduled her mammogram, I felt a rush of shame. Maybe I was wrong. She explained to him why she decided to forgo it. He nodded, wrote in her chart, said nothing at all.

*

          I dump the uneaten bit of English muffin into the disposal, load the dishwasher, and dry my hands. Now that she’s back in bed I can get things done without feeling like I’m neglecting her. I’ve been meaning to prune the backyard flower garden, where the deep pink blossoms on the low-growing autumn sage have become spindly from lack of care. No reason to put off the task any longer.

          The pruning shears I left on the porch last summer have become rusty, but when I open-close them, I find they will still cut. I recently learned that I should have been clipping back the hibiscus all season to maximize blossoms. Now the worn-out stalks stretch in all directions, reaching and bending low, unable to support their own weight.

          I cut back a big stem nearly my height. The in-law suite’s bay window looks out to this part of the yard. In the drought of summer, while the rest of the yard went to hay, I hand-watered this section so she could enjoy it. I put up a leaky hummingbird feeder and refilled it with sugar water every few days for the one green-throated fellow who hovered and delighted Jeanne—but I didn’t prune anything. I didn’t know that I should. After Jeanne’s cataract surgery in September, she said the colors of the overgrown hibiscus and autumn sage were brilliant.

          A light breeze lifts my hair from my shoulders as I cut every hibiscus plant back to the ground. I’ve read that they’ll rise again in spring, but that’s really hard to believe. What if I’ve misunderstood? But it’s too late now to change my mind. I rake all the clippings and toss them into the fenced side yard where we compost.

          The autumn sage bushes look scrappy now that their hibiscus backdrop is gone. The sage, too, should have been trimmed through the growing season—should have been kept close to the ground so the internal growth didn’t become woody. I prune one-third—maybe more—from each bush. What’s left is blossomless and lonely against the bare garden that was moments ago a tangle.

I glance toward the bay window. The shades are up, so I can see Jeanne’s sleeping shape in bed. My scalp prickles and my neck feels suddenly cold. It’s not yet winter, but here I am rushing autumn to an end.

*

          For lunch I make sandwiches—grilled cheese with applesauce on the side, her favorite—and we sit together to eat.

        “I see you’ve pruned back for winter,” Jeanne says.

        “Oh, Mom, it’s so sad to lose the blossoms and say goodbye to the growth.”

         My mother-in-law takes a bite of her sandwich while looking out the window, appraising my work.

        “Well,” she says. “It is getting toward winter.”

        Outside our kitchen window, clouds cushion the sky in variegated grays.

I grew up flying, shuttling back and forth between Mom in the Midwest, Dad in New Jersey. Once a month, I left Champaign-Urbana–that classically low-lying university town–to fly to LaGuardia, its runways surrounded by Eastern Seaboard swamp–fields of Long Island reeds and cattails. Right before it lands, the plane seems to be about to skim the surface of the water, and just in time a strip of concrete appears. Next, my father picked me up in the gold Toyota, and we’d make our way onto the Long Island Expressway traffic, and small talk.

            At eight, I decided to like my divided life.  There was always someplace else to go. A pioneer in the world of the unaccompanied minors, I flew once a month during the 1960’s and 70’s, moving back and forth between parental worlds.  Audrey and Dick’s homes, politics, eating habits, sense of their daughter, were pretty different, so I was a pretty different kid with each of them. O’Hare was the midpoint; there I changed planes, sometimes lost my ticket, once had one hundred dollars sucked out of my wallet by a minor tornado swirling outside the sliding glass doors. I sometimes imagined walking away from the airport, catching a cab and living a daring, independent life.

            That is still a fantasy, especially when walking through O’Hare, as I do a couple times every year.  Decades later, it’s hardly the same place—so many makeovers under its belt, but I see through the Starbuck’s, Godiva, and ambient lighting to the sterile terminals of my youth. O’Hare was where I was really alone. Adults didn’t notice me, and I walked aimlessly, daydreaming for an hour or two, watching the Hare Krishnas proselytize.  Even they ignored me. It was a kind of invisibility, a trick of the eye, my not being seen.  No one knew exactly where I was.  And so vague was I even to myself that I a ticket was lost, or a flight missed.  As an adult, something still takes hold of me in airports, a dreamy feeling of detachment. Because it is so easy to lose track of time, I try to watch the clock carefully, and force myself to sit in the departure lounge at least twenty minutes before boarding, but it’s not easy.

            Walking through the airport while waiting for a flight, one cannot resist the allure of brazenly staring at people. Men watch women far more pointedly than they would on a street. Standing  in line or sitting in the departure lounge for hours, passengers survey one another and their baggage without normal visual boundaries. Watch, and conjecture.  What kind of life are they leading? Maybe the life I wish I were leading. Who are you, would I know you in real life? 

            On the plane, there’s an almost community. If I’m late entering the cabin, scanning passengers already seated—invariably scraping someone’s head with my carry-on bag’s hardware—I note that they’ve formed a seminar without me.  Their expressions ask what it is that she brings to the group.  All those collective heads stiffly cocked, thinking she’d be the first we’d give up. In a few hours I will be somewhere else; perhaps be someone else in one way or another. In the meantime, if we crash, would that carnival-esque raft inflate, and would I be alive enough to slide down it?  Occasionally there are wild bumps in the air, and the non-praying passengers like myself pray and hold hands with the person in the next chair. An ephemeral togetherness.

            Thirty thousand feet above the planet, suspended between goodbye and hello is a fine place to wait for the next thing.   Sitting in a speeding bullet full of strangers, I wait and consider. Then a door opens, I step onto new ground, and feel the tenor of the arrival.   There’s the mall familiarity of Pittsburgh, the kitschy Southern welcome in Louisville, and last summer, at the Munich airport–the sex toys on display in a store window. Once, in my hometown airport, the door opened, and the next thing that happened changed so many other things, it seemed to confirm for me that flying holds a central curvature in my life—its surface riddled with places visited and left behind, a constant navigation of coming and going. I got the idea that I’m not meant to land in one life for very long.

                                                                   *

            When I left her once a month, my mother observed my departures as if they were signs of seasonal change.  From the parking lot, she would point out the fields surrounding the airport:  corn knee-high, or head-high and de-tasseled, or the harvest over—the earth brown and barren—and then finally snow with hawks circling overhead. Seedlings forcing green from black. Our goodbyes unchanged. 

            “Well. Have fun, honey.”

            “I will Mom.  I’ll see you soon.”

            “You’re a trooper, kiddo.”

            “I’m a trooper, kiddo.”

Sometimes I would have a window seat and, on the right side of the plane, I could make out my mother’s brown bouffant.  The first couple of years she would stay to watch; by the time I was ten, she’d head back to our red Gremlin.  Sometimes she had a date.  Perhaps she’d catch a glimpse of my plane’s departure as she drove back Highway 57 to a weekend without me.

            My mother was beautiful and independent.  That she was the only divorced woman my friends and I knew made her seem a little invincible, as if the rules for mom-ness weren’t meant for her; she could be wear very short skirts, and swear, and ask my friends too direct questions. 

            “Do you think that boy is worth your sleeping with him? ” she’d say to a high school friend talking about a new love interest. 

            It was my mom who took my friends and me camping in the Indiana Dunes, or to visit Chicago’s Art Institute, who blasted the Rolling Stones on the radio, embarrassingly belting out the lyrics. She was the one who, after a night of crying over a man who broke her heart, announced that she and I were going to Mexico. 

            “This has got to stop. Enough of this Weeping-At-Midnight Angst. Let’s go to Mexico.”

            My first time out of the country I saw strange beauty and poverty and got sick and got better and learned a bit of Spanish, and realized my mother had no fear.  A year later we flew to Europe because I was turning thirteen, and “you should see Paris sooner than later.”  There were many firsts: eating Mussels in Bruge, raw fish in Amsterdam, visiting the Reichsmuseum, watching the Bastille Day parade from our flea bag hotel window. Everywhere, I watched my long-legged mother move through streets with elegance and curiosity. These were vacations on a shoestring; we couldn’t afford them, I knew. 

            “This is what credit cards are for, “ she explained. When we started off on trips, she used to hum “Do you know the way to San Jose?” I don’t think she ever went to San Jose; it was an anthem to places in need of visiting. Traveling, being alone, these were second nature to her.

            Once upon a time, my mother, Audrey, and my father, Richard, found in each other an appetite for art, ideas, and travel that bordered on religious fervency.  They came together in the 1950’s, handsome and rebellious in their black turtlenecks, talk of Norman O. Brown, Northrup Frye, Lenny Bruce, and defiance of their working class parents.  They visited Europe and Mexico, lived on the West Coast, embracing the ethos of the sixties together—for a while. 

            When I was seven, they divorced, my father moved to New Jersey, and then they hardly spoke to one another.  Sometimes it seemed that I was the hyphen between them. Was I a message? If so, I didn’t know the words.  All those hellos and, goodbyes were my only way of connecting them. I was the trooper.

            My trooping was not without its tripping. I lost my ticket in O’Hare at least five times over the years. I would stand very still, as if this would conjure in my mind the ticket’s position in the airport, as if, inside my invisibility, I had special vision. Then I would re-visit each bathroom, chair, and newspaper shop of my vague trajectory. Fifteen minutes before boarding, I made the phone calls:  Dad first– shocked and annoyed, then Mom, from whom I would receive some boozy empathy. Then to the ticket counter, where a frazzled airline person provided a replacement ticket. 

            “You what?”  Stiff-haired and pretty, the counter lady was not happy with me.

            “I lost my ticket. The plane leaves in fifteen minutes.”

            “Oh, God. Are you sure?  It’s not in your purse, or your bag?”

            “No, I lost it.  This has happened before. . . I hope you have time to give me a new one.  I think you can do that?”

            Counter Lady would issue me a new ticket. Was her irritation at me about my traveling alone? Maybe she thought I felt myself to be too good to travel, like regular children, with parents? It was the early seventies; divorce rates have quadrupled since then, and children flying back and forth between parents is a commonality now. In clogs and a floor-length cape, I blazed the way for today’s generation of “un-accompanieds”. 

            “So. . .your first flight alone?” On the plane, men were chattier than women.  They were businessmen, mostly.  They wore suits and cologne and thick gold rings, and seemed to assume I could use their supervision, so they asked a lot of questions.

            “Going to see Grandma?”

            “No.”

            “What’s your favorite subject in school?”

            I honed skills of detachment.  That didn’t always work. One man under whose wing I found myself spent an hour and a half writing numbers on the airsick bag.  He had soft, manicured fingers and he deftly covered the bag with figures and signs in neat columns.  I had made the mistake of saying that math was not my favorite subject, so he passed our time together by demonstrating The Joy of Fractions.  “Grown ups love figures,” it says in The Little Prince.  

            I listened to the man, hoping the stewardess would rattle by with cans of Fresca and Coke.  Was this guy someone’s dad?  I thought of the businessman the little prince meets who thinks that because he counts the stars, he owns them.  “‘I administer them,’ he says. . .’I count them and recount them.  It is difficult.  But I am a man who is naturally interested in matters of consequences.’”  Finally my seatmate folded the sick bag neatly and handed it to me.

            On one childhood commute, I stayed overnight in a hotel by myself.  There were thunderstorms in New York and flights headed there were cancelled. The airline paid for a hotel, and after calls to Mom and Dad, I arrived at the O’Hare Hilton in a shuttle around eleven p. m., scheduled to fly out again early in the morning. Entering the lobby, I felt like a teenager; I was ten: this was something happening; this was adventure.

            The disgruntled but amused grown-ups headed to the bar.  I went to my room, opened my suitcase, turned on the T.V, looked through the peephole, checked out the bathroom:  the miniature body lotion and shampoo were worth taking. I heard voices rising and falling in the next room. I lay down in my clothes and fell asleep with the air-conditioner blasting.  The adventure seemed to pass me by.

            At seven the next morning, I waited for a cab, exhausted; I had slept straight through but felt as though I’d been up all night. The driver was irritated. He shouted questions as I began to nod off. My leave-me-alone persona was useless. He refused to let me sleep, and I arrived at O’Hare forty-five minutes later, red-eyed and sick to my stomach. What a relief, then, to be in the air.   The view from above the clouds brings to mind what the fox in The Little Prince tells the prince at goodbye:  “What is most important is invisible.” The solid world disappears. Anything can happen.

            Goodbye is easy.  I was always a little relieved to say it to my parents who were people with big personalities and demands. Hello was harder; I entered the world of the other parent not yet sure of my script.  This was certainly more the case with my father than mother, with whom I lived most of the time. I saw my father for a month or two in summers and one weekend every month. His world was harder to know; he could be oblivious to the people around him, living in ideas—about politics, art, the irony of history’s repetitions, things I didn’t understand.  He talked to me about them anyway, gesticulating with long thin fingers, a cigarette between his lips, his blue eyes wide and intense.  He took me everywhere with him when I was there—to the classrooms at Rutgers where he taught Modernism, to late night parties where I was the only kid, once to a peace march where he almost got arrested for raising his fist at a cop.

            With his fits of anger– tirades against University administration, the U.S. government, sometimes the door in front of him, my father may not have been the most stable person; he was, however, predictable, mostly reliable. Only once in all those years was he late to pick me up from the airport.  I was twelve, and knew the descent into LaGuardia like an amusement ride I insisted on riding again and again. Just barely in time, the runway appears as passengers look out at the dark water, so close–a flourish that pilots must enjoy, knowing some of us are holding our breath, heads pressed to the window.

            It is dusk, and the air around the airport has settled into a grayish pink. People are striding into the gate, opening arms for loved ones in the space ahead. My dad isn’t there.           

There are five minutes of walking around, thinking I’d never been there alone before. A few airline employees vacantly glance my way, opening and closing drawers, moving unseen objects beneath the counter surface, as if practicing that trick with plastic cups and the one bead under one cup that never turns up where you think, or, exactly where you think–I can’t remember which. Outside, it is officially dark. 

            I pick up a magazine with Evil Knievel on the cover.  Fearless, that guy, and I guess he liked flying—over things. I spent the next ten minutes wondering what I’d do if Dad didn’t show up.   Was this the time to run away?  Live in the Metropolitan Museum like the kids in The Mixed up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frakenthaler? Dad walks toward me, long-legged and forceful.  Furious.

            “Jesus, Kir, it’s been bumper to bumper for an hour.” He tosses his arms around me. I hug his chest and smell his masculine smell through a orange and green striped shirt with big cuffs.

            “Sorry, Hon.” He lights a cigarette, inhales.  After we collect my suitcase, he walks outside into the heat and glow of coming and going.

            “Jesus. Jesus Christ that go–ed traffic.”

            I wonder if it felt like a long or short time since he’d seen me last, six weeks ago. He’d just driven for two hours, and without the traffic it would still be well over an hour to get back to his house.

            I am hungry. “How is work, Dad?”

            “Good.  Endless.  Good.  Writing a new article.” He puts a hand through his

ruffled blond hair.

            “How’s school?  What are you reading?” Once on the road, we were something like Dad and daughter again, driving toward home in his smoky with the windows rolled down and Derek and The Dominoes on the radio. In New Jersey, where the oil refineries surround the turnpike, cranes for unloading drums of oil look like extra-angular giraffes.  I try to decide if theirs is a friendly giraffe-ness. They were gleaming with sparkling white lights—pretty, but I could picture them as the aliens of the War of The Worlds.     

            “White Castle?” Dad asks. 

He means the burger place in Edison, near his house.  We often stopped there as a reward—for our managing the un-comfortableness of knowing each other this way, perhaps?

            “I’ve got a guy coming over tomorrow to look at my motorcycle. . .I need to sell that thing.” He was letting me know that he had things he needed to get done this weekend.  

            “And I have some work up at my office.  This summer school crap is never over.”

            “O.K.”

            Ahead stretches the Verazzono Bridge.  The visit was taking shape like a sheet of paper folding into origami.  A few kids at the pool would remember me, I hoped.  We’d go to my dad’s office at Rutgers, and I’d maybe finish A Wrinkle in Time in the chair meant for students.  Sometimes there would be a walk with a woman who could be his girlfriend; sometimes we’d bowl. 

            On my last visit, we’d picketed a grocery store selling non-union grapes with Dad’s Teamster friends.  We walked back and forth in the rain with handmade signs chanting “No Grapes From Scabs!  Buy Union, Buy Union!” I felt mildly exhilarated, mildly embarrassed. Some of my dad’s friends paid attention to me, commenting on my growth since the last time they’d seen me, acting as if I were interesting, or cute.  My dad rarely seemed to think I was either, so I ate it up.  If the protest had been in Urbana, I’d have been worried about someone’s mom walking past our line.   

            In three days, we would drive past the giraffe cranes again. Arching over us, arms of the Verazonno bridge swooped down and up and down. Stars marked the sky, constellations of there and back.  Fender to fender, cars, trucks, and taxis braked in unison, as if there could be only one destination.          

            Saying Hello to my mother came easily; I was, after all, coming home. I had my room, my cat, my life.   Still, it took a bit of readjusting.  Flying over the repeating fields of farmland reminded me that I was returning home.  I’d been away; I had another home, another almost life.  And not much was ever said about it.  My friends didn’t ask.  My mom did, but in a distracted way, and I left some things out—new friends and parties, my dad’s anxiety and fury.  I wasn’t sure if she wanted a report on Dad or if she wanted to know if I’d had a good time. I shouldn’t have too good a time, I figured.  They both wanted to be the better parent. My mom and I were closer and I lived with her, but going to the Jersey shore, ballet, and museums in New York City was a lot of fun, so I did some filtering. No one would ever know.

            They didn’t see each other for years. Visiting me in college once, my mother pointed to a photo my father and me standing by his house.

            “Who’s that guy?”

            “That guy is dad.  Remember him?”

            “Jesus,” she said with the same intonation as his (I wondered who started it),        

“he’s aged.”

            I found myself unaccountably upset.   I realized she almost never thought about him, at least not in the present.

            “He’d recognize you, Mom.”

            “You think?  Who knows—I’ve aged too.  Shit.” She laughed, and patted her hair.  Her cavalier amusement had me in a state.  Their marriage, the union of my making was, it seemed, something sort of funny—a little sad, but funny. 

                                                                        *

            Once I became an adult, I flew a lot, and I flew happily, taking back suspended time from a confused childhood, lost time perhaps.  I was a woman restless to see the world. I scoffed at people who are afraid of flying—a sign, surely, of someone afraid of losing control.  Not me. Certainly Since 9/11 it is hard to fly without one or two thoughts of disaster and mortality; airport security makes sure of that.  But my relationship to flying changed before that. At thirty seven, I flew to visit my mother because she’d not been feeling well.  I waited in the Urbana airport, the one where I’d landed month after month, year after year. 

            Though she was rarely late, I wasn’t surprised. She was moving slowly these days. I was grateful she hadn’t rushed, hadn’t felt it necessary to be early. At the half hour mark, in a secluded corner under the elevator, I dialed her number. No answer. I called back; it rang and rang. I returned to the front of the airport, then in five minutes called again. Again in another five.  It had been almost an hour since I’d stepped off the plane.  Could she have gotten the time wrong?  Was she out running an errand? How unlike my mother–always on time. I returned to the row of orange chairs by the window.  A family of grandparents, an adult daughter, and several little kids fussed and fidgeted near me.  Who are they waiting for, I wondered. I’d been there about forty minutes when I heard my name on the intercom.

            A thin man, about sixty years old appeared from nowhere, handed me a phone at the information desk.

            “Kirsten, I have bad news.”  It was the voice of mother’s close friend Sherry.  “I think your mother is dead.” My knees buckled—an expression I’d never been able to visualize—and then I was on the floor, breathing too fast.  The man’s face above me looked midwesternly embarrassed.  Sherry told me that my mother had had a heart attack, that medics had been trying to resuscitate her. . .for over an hour, and that I should just wait to be picked up.

            I stumbled to my feet and asked if there was someplace to use a private phone.  I felt that I was underwater, that my scuba equipment had malfunctioned if not just disappeared.  The “I think” of Sherry’s sentence circled around in my head.  I was sobbing loudly and everyone around me stared.  A woman with an expression on her face like that of a steady nurse for the criminally insane led me to a back office with desks and telephones. I called a friend who sounded shocked and tried to say kind things,  but I took more consolation from her shock than any reassurance.  

            At that moment I believed in my mother’s death more than I would in the coming days, perhaps years.  Mom was never late before, but she also never died before. So   this made sense. She’d be telling me that.  “You think I’d show up late?  It didn’t occur to you that I died?”  My imagination had clearly failed. I had to think of something sensible for this occasion, when I was completely beside myself, my smarts.  Was my mother waiting for the right answer?  Without her I couldn’t say or think a single thing.

            “A branch is a branch,” says a childhood book of Noah’s, “until it breaks.  And then it is a stick.”  Where was the stick? Nothing so simple as the image in the storybook, a boy marching happily across his lawn, waving a stick like an army general. There is, in fact, a branch: I hear my mother’s voice every day. Nevertheless, there is also the failure. I will never answer the question: why did my mom die without Goodbye. Why did she disappear while I was close but not close enough, her heart failing while I was not even on the earth, but  far above, trying to get there.

            Sherry and I did not speak on the way home except for her to fill in slightly the story she’d told me on the phone.  She and her friend had stopped by to say Hello. No one answered. They found her in the kitchen and called an ambulance.   Sherry wasn’t looking at me.  She’d been my English teacher when I was a senior.  She looked grim, pale, and—I suddenly noted–quite stylish.  Her car was new and impeccably clean. At home, there was an ambulance parked by the side door.  Sherry told me to wait outside.  I opened the door of my mother’s car and a fresh wave of nausea washed over me.   A few balled up Kleenexes on the floor.  Her perpetually allergic nose.  A Marrimekko designed bag on the backseat.  The details suggested that my mother was alive, just inside the house, chatting with Sherry.

            The coroner came soon after that.  He was inside the house ten minutes, then he was sorry to have to tell me but my mother had passed away. What happened next is blurry.  I remember that Sherry recommended that I not go inside the house.  To this day, I wonder what I would have seen, what my mother’s body could have told me. I remember hugging the trunk of her Honda, then climbing in to hold the steering wheel, at which point someone leaned in gingerly to ask about funeral home to  which the body should be taken. Neighbors came home, took me into their kitchen right about the time that the hearse pulled up the infamously narrow driveway.  I couldn’t stay in their house long because they had two cats that made me sneeze—an allergy my mother and I shared.

            My mother’s friends appeared in the next few hours, bearing arms and shoulders

on which to cry.  I was offered a gin and tonic. And then another one.  Everyone looked at me with misery. I don’t know if they were reflecting my pain and shock or if it were all theirs, but those faces gave solace. I needed the world to reflect the terribleness of this.  Nicolle, a friend from high school, turned up. I cycled through crying, moaning, drinking, blubbering.  I moved through the house touching my mother’s things: a grocery list, an earring, her toothbrush, a present that was suddenly the past. Her laundry—underwear and a towel–was still slightly warm in the dryer.

            My father arrived the day of the funeral. I didn’t know if he would come.  He looked confused, grief hovering around his heavy face and body.   It must have been strange for him to return to Urbana after two decades, to see old friends and colleagues gathered together on the occasion of his ex-wife’s death.   At the house, he tiptoed in and out of rooms, as if fearful of waking a sleeping baby. He looked with surprise at the bookcases and the study that had, thirty years earlier belonged to him: furniture and books that belonged to my mother and my dead stepfather.

            My dad asked me to use the study phone, and later I found on the desk a ten-dollar bill with a note: For Dick’s phone call. “Dick” rather than “Dad”. . . as if he were writing the note to her, not me. He was tender with me, cocking his head, wrinkling his brow, and trying to pat me. He needed some attention I couldn’t provide.  When he offered to take me out to breakfast, I declined.

            After the funeral he asked, “How are you?” I replied, “Sick. ” And when my father inquired if I had a cold, I answered, “You must be kidding.”  I didn’t let him touch me or sit with me, and I can’t remember saying a proper goodbye. I had no energy for manners, but more significantly I was angry with him. I made an ugly equation:  he was the one with the poor health, the one who neglected his Type 2 diabetes, who still snuck cigarettes after bypass surgery; shouldn’t he have been the one to die?

            Shortly after he returned to New Jersey, I felt guilty and sad about him.  We talked on the phone, and I tried to repair my ugliness in his direction.  But, as it says in The Little Prince, “On our earth we are obviously much too small to clean out our volcanoes.  That is why they bring no end of trouble to us.”  I needed time to clean, to sweep up extensive emotional fall-out, and time to think of my dad as my only living parent.  As it turned out, I had no time for that.

            I left Urbana five days after I had arrived. I observed, as I had on recent trips home, the remodeling of the Urbana airport.  A Mediterranean blue carpet, abstract etchings on white walls. An obligatory gift shop of  “Fighting Illini” trinkets. Not the barracks-style cinder block building of my youth.  One might think that one had arrived at a place of some significance.    

            As the plane rose into the sky, the view of the landscape was as familiar as the walk from my bedroom to the bathroom where every bump on the wall, every curve in the floorboards was understood.   Corn and soybean fields, endless strips of road pointed exactly to more and more of the same.  I remembered flying to Urbana in June with Noah and something he’d said then.  Before landing, Noah pressed his head into the window’s oval of Midwest sky, and asked:  “Gramma, are you down there?” When he told her about what he’d said, my mother promised that when we flew away she would be saying, “Noah, I’m right here! See me?”  Now, Noah’s question came into my head. If she were down there or out there, she wasn’t letting on. In fact, her ashes were in a small heavy box in a shopping bag by my feet. Needless to say, that wasn’t exactly how I wanted to picture her.  She was—for now—in perpetual en route, traveling with no end in sight.

            My relationship to arrivals and departures has been marked forever by that unspoken goodbye.  I flew home—if I can still call it that—twice afterward.  Once I went to empty my mother’s house of its belongings, and once to visit friends.  I got inside 208 West Pennsylvania, now inhabited by an architect and his wife, who showed me around. Noah was with there, and his memories were vivid: breakfasts of bacon and eggs before I was awake, painting at an easel my mother had bought him, my mother showing him her herb garden and insisting he taste everything. He recalled her being a constant reader,  lying in the window seat of the kitchen with a book until he demanded a walk down the driveway and around the block.

            A decade after her death, my mother appears in my dreams regularly. Unaware that she is dead, she is angry that I’ve put her things in storage, her house inhabited by strangers.  She admires their architect-y taste—clean lines, black and white furniture.  In some dreams I don’t tell her she’s dead, just humor her, biding my time by taking her shopping, then out to lunch.  In others, I am about to tell her when the dream ends. And then there are the ones where I realize that she is right; the coroner, all of us, In fact, made a terrible mistake.  She is ill, but she has several years to live.  And now we must figure out how to get her back into her house, her rightful place.

            Six weeks after my mother died, my father did as well, as if there were a rhythm to the deaths in my life, perhaps connected to the schedule that controlled my childhood visits between mother and father.  Sometimes I think the timing implies that my father couldn’t live without my mother, though he had for over thirty years.  As in the case of my mom’s death, there was no time to say goodbye; he just dropped dead, alone, in his kitchen. His body was found several days after a fatal heart attack. In retrospect, it seems there is an internal landscape of shock and things unsaid built into my life’s geography—for which, needless to say, I have no map.

            Traveling, I imagine, is a way to discover the future as well as to recall my past.  I fly alone a lot, and sometimes with Noah, who finds it uncomplicated. Last year I visited a friend in California for a weekend of hiking, sun, and the Pacific; returning home, I was late for a connecting flight in San Francisco.  The plane was right outside the window, a stone’s throw away, stark still, and the anonymous, moveable hallway leading to my way home beckoned, but the attendants would not let me on.  Departure time had passed, they said.  

            I did what I never did when I was younger, losing my ticket, or missing a flight. I threw myself on the floor wailed in fury and fear. People watched not unkindly, and the US AIR employees looked alarmed. My catharsis eventually quelled itself, and after I spit, “Thank you for your big fucking hearts,” I found myself in a souvenir store, spending a hundred dollars on items I could barely identify.   Of course I had to return to the scene of my break down for help in getting another flight.  As embarrassing as that should have been, I hardly blinked.  All those times I did not cry in the airport.

            Noah likes going places, but dislikes the inconvenience of flying, changing planes, and being forced to sit still for hours. I consider him a charm of sorts. We’ve never missed a flight or had to stay overnight in a hotel, or even had unreasonable waits in airports. If only I’d had him around when I was a kid.  Our last trip together was to visit the same California friend I’d gone to see the year before. We were flying into San Jose, a destination that, because of my mom’s fondness for the song, amused and touched me.  Do you know the way to San Jose?/I’ve been away so long I may go wrong and lose my way/I’ve got lots of friends in San Jose./Can’t wait to get back to San Jose.

            We had to leave at 6 am, and had two layovers, Detroit and Salt Lake City. The Detroit airport shone with sun and blue sky. Noah got a kick out of the airport’s surreal tunnel from one arm of the airport to another, with lights and low humming music.  I remembered that this is where I spoke to my mother the last time.  I had called her to tell her that I was coming; it wasn’t anything for which she’d asked.  Although I was already en route, she briefly put in some effort to protest the trip.

            “It’s your weekend with Noah.  Shouldn’t you stay in Ithaca?”

            “I can make it up; it’s fine with Jerry. I want to see you.”

            “Well.  I may not be much fun. I think I’m kind of sick.”

            “Mom.  I’ll see you in a few hours.”  We agreed on the time she’d pick me up.  And then we did, in fact, say goodbye. 

            In Salt Lake City, snow came down in huge wet discs.  It was as if Noah and I were passing through not only time zones but foreign countries, each airport speaking a different language.  Salt Lake’s was one in which I’d never been. The souvenir shops boasted trinkets of  “The Old West”.  Noah likes window-shopping; we wandered from spot to spot, and I watched as my tall sixteen-year old was admired by young women.  He’s six foot two, and has a pile of springy brown hair that gets a fair bit of attention.

            “WHAT.” Without expression, Noah directed his accusation at me.  He does not think it’s cute when I think he’s cute. We got sandwiches and headed to our gate.

San Jose was a smaller place than I’d imagined, but clean and bright as California always seems to be.  Not a place that would interest my mother very much. Mary picked us up, and as we drove out of the airport I leaned out the window and sucking in air, mouthed the first lines of Bacharach’s lyrics: Do you know the way. . .this had been one of my mother’s mythical places. Gramma wasn’t here, but she could be; this was someone’s idea of paradise.

            A month later I am again flying West: The Sierra Nevadas are below, and we are dropping in the air, getting ready for a landing. A tiny shadow of the plane rides over rippled earth. Is it possible to read the earth’s texture? For decades I’ve observed intently the land from above. Mountains, lakes, farmscape, cities’ sprawling highway arms are topography that remind us that we are off the planet, we are not living our lives as we know them, comfortably situated on solid ground. When we come back, we might be a little altered, some shift having taken place during flight.  I’ve never before seen this range of rumpled brown and green, and watch it unfold like yards of velvety cloth.  The plane’s shadow disappears, and I wait for it to reappear, the magic of biding my time.