A Song for the River

by Philip Connors

  “Ella loved the school,” Patrice said. “She believed in its mission. It encouraged her passions. I know she would have demanded that people own up to the mistakes they made and try to do better in the future, for the sake of the kids. And not out of spite—out of love. That’s who she was.”

  She was also a writer with an uncanny gift of expression for someone her age. On a web site where Patrice posted some of Ella Jaz’s personal journals, I found this, under the title “Cord Fluidity”:

  Most often, I find truths about myself not with someone else, but in the moments alone; seeing a curve of water, knowing no one else will ever see that same drop of water in the same spot again.

  Truth is hard to capture, to hold; like a firefly buzzing around the dark chamber of my cupped hands.

  Sometimes I see it in a smile, a certain feeling of elation; the plunge of cord fluidity when I’m submerged.

  Sometimes as a memory, one I hold close or laugh about with someone else.

  A quick spark between the two of us, both remembering the same thing.

  At night in my room, my breath the only thing keeping me company, my thoughts go on and on with nothing to bounce off, nothing to curb them.

  In a way, that’s how I would like to live—free of things to stop my thoughts.

  But then I know my thoughts would soon lose their dimension with no interactions to shape them, no other voice to challenge them, or fortify them.

  I loved the doubleness of her line of thought, the proposition first stated, then complicated, then amended. You could see her mind at work, writing about the way her mind worked: her words had an unselfconscious beauty about them, like a musician glimpsed unawares, practicing alone, totally absorbed in the act of creation. And that lovely, mysterious phrase, cord fluidity: what did it mean? Its ambiguity, its strangeness, lit the imagination. I thought of a diver piercing the surface of a pool, her limbs relaxing afterward. I thought of seaweed undulating with the tide.

  I thought of ash carried in a current.

  The essence of Ella Jaz’s message for the world came down to the fundamental connectedness of every living thing on Earth. Perhaps all the evidence I needed of that truth was that her voice still lived inside of me like a tiny, unwavering flame—a flame I had seen reflected in a butterfly’s wing in Michoacán. So often my mind came back to the brutal injustice of all she had left unwritten, all we were denied when her life was cut short—not to mention all the songs Michael Mahl might have sung, all the novels Ella Myers might have written. But to think of them having been denied longer lives in terms of the rest us being denied the fruits of their artistry was to make the tragedy ours and not theirs. That may simply be a fundamental fact embedded in the experience of tragedy: that the living are left to feel the weight of what the dead have left undone.

  When we finished our ice cream, Patrice asked, “Do you still want to go visit Ella?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I was hoping to. I have some things I want to tell her.”

  She beckoned me to follow. We walked through the back gate of her property and into the late-day shadow cast by the ridge above us. For 200 yards we followed a trail that ran parallel to the ridge, with the river down the valley to our left, the ridge above us on the right. At a certain point we left the trail and began a scramble up the rocky slope, sometimes dropping to all fours to keep our footing. Loose stones skittered down the hill behind us.

  The top of the ridge was narrow but flat, its even contour occasionally interrupted by rock formations like terraced wedding cakes. Below us the green gallery forest along the river revealed its path through the valley. Scattered rooftops glinted in the little village along its banks. To the west the high ridges of the Diablos rose jagged and timbered at the head of Little Creek. To the north and east we could see the canyons of the river’s headwaters.

  We arrived at a small piñon pine. Patrice crouched and placed her hand on a flat, maroon-colored rock. I watched her fingers trace the words carved into it:

  Ella Jaz

  Fly Free

  After a moment she stood and looked at me. She shrugged her day pack from her shoulder. She unzipped it, reached inside, and withdrew a small wooden bowl with a lid held on by clear tape. She handed me the bowl and said, “I trust you’ll know what to do with this. I’ll leave you alone with Ella and hike back down the long way.”

  I watched her leave along the ridge trail headed north. When she disappeared from view, I sat down next to the piñon.

  I surveyed the offerings scattered about the base of the tree: a tiny stuffed koala, a carved wooden bear the size of my palm. Seashells and crystals and brilliantly colored stones. A mule deer’s antler point. A raven’s feather. A hummingbird made of beads.

  Like Patrice, I traced my fingers along the letters in the maroon rock. I removed the tape from the lid on the bowl and looked inside.

  Some ashes of Ella Jaz.

  I knew too well what to do. I dipped my fingers in the bowl. I sprinkled a pinch of ash on the rock. I licked my fingertip and savored the bitter taste. I began to weep at the enormity of the honor Patrice had done me, the almost unbearable intimacy of holding her daughter’s remnants in my hands. I sobbed until my vision clouded over with tears that fell on the rock and dimpled the dusting of ash, the first tiny movement of their journey joined with rain toward the river.

  The Puebloan peoples of northern New Mexico, with a nearly 2,000-year history rooted in the land, view a watershed as a cycle of life—one that encompasses the sky where the water originates, the shape of the Earth where the water percolates and flows, the rocks that erode to create soil, the plants that grow from that soil, and the creatures who subsist on the seeds and fruits of those plants. Eventually the water evaporates into sky, and the cycle begins again.

  The ebb and flow of drought and flood are like the pulse in a human body, water moving like blood, carrying nutrients through the veins and arteries of creeks and rivers. We are mostly water too, which explains why not much remains when we burn: a few handfuls of ash. Perhaps that’s why it feels natural for ash to join with water. It is a form of reconstitution.

  I remembered Patrice questioning me when I used the word remnants about the portion of Ella Jaz’s ashes that had joined with the river three years earlier. “Are they remnants or are they seeds?” she wondered.

  Maybe both, I came to think: a vestige of a life transfigured by heat into sustenance for some other. A fish. A tree.

  Once more I spoke aloud across the divide:

  We miss you, Ella Jaz, but we are still here speaking up for the river. We remember your words in defense of it. I hope you won’t mind if I borrow some for a story I’m trying to tell. They can’t be repeated enough. They teach us still. I even have a few of them down by heart. We can never separate ourselves from the fate of any other creature or the fate of our planet. We are all in this together for better or worse. Your exuberant creed stays with me too. So many people live with their minds closed off to the world. Sealed and safe and complacent. You know what? I want to live a kick-ass life!… I want to scream and cry and laugh and run and dance and eat ice cream and climb mountains and I want to love.

  The world is catching up with you, Ella Jaz. We are learning more all the time about how to love. Would you believe we’ve begun granting rights to rivers as the equal of humans? Just this year the Māori in New Zealand won legal recognition of the Whanganui River as an ancestor of their people, and the Ganges has been granted personhood under the laws of India. We’re starting to see our fates as intertwined with the lives of rivers. Our laws are playing catch-up with our spirits and our hearts.

  One day, hopefully soon, we’ll all gather and celebrate one more memorial for one more death. This time it will be a wished-for death, a welcome death, one that’s really a reprieve into life: the death of the dream of a dam on the Gila. I can see us already. We’ll meet on the banks of the river with all our friends and join hands and sing a song you sang yourself and record
ed for posterity. I turn to it when my spirits are low, cuing you up on my CD player, that old gospel standard that invites sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers and sinners too—heaven knows we need it—down to the river:

  I went down to the river to pray,

  Studying about that good old way,

  And who shall wear the starry crown,

  Good Lord, show us the way.

  Oh sisters, let’s go down,

  Let’s go down, come on down.

  Oh sisters, let’s go down,

  Down to the river to pray…

  All of us will be there in the water, joined once more in tears and laughter, gathered in memory of you and your friends, in celebration of all you loved and others we’ve loved and lost. We’ll scream and cry and laugh and swim and dance and eat ice cream and together we’ll sing us a song—a song of triumph, a song of love.

  A song for the river.

  CATECHISM FOR A FIRE LOOKOUT

  We will be nearly finished, I think, when we stop understanding the old pull toward green things and living things, toward dirt and rain and heat and what they spawn.

  —John Graves

  It doesn’t take much in the way of body and mind to be a lookout. It’s mostly soul.

  —Norman Maclean

  I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?

  —Aldo Leopold

  I talk to myself and look at the dark trees, blessedly neutral. So much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever.

  —Sylvia Plath

  As for lightning and fires, who, what American individual loses, when a forest burns, and what did Nature do about it for a million years up to now?

  —Jack Kerouac

  If you live, live free / or die like the trees, standing up.

  —Mahmoud Darwish

  Often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend.

  —Nan Shepherd

  A life confined to what is personal is likely, sooner or later, to become unbearably painful; it is only by windows into a larger and less fretful cosmos that the more tragic parts of life become endurable.

  —Bertrand Russell

  For thousands of years after our race opted for a civilized existence, we dreamed of and labored toward an escape from the anxieties of a wilderness condition only to find, when we reached the promised land of supermarkets and air conditioners, that we had forfeited something of great value.

  —Roderick Nash

  Isn’t it curious that science never invents antidotes? There is no means of spreading silence, or of spreading darkness.

  —Sylvia Townsend Warner

  Thank God, they cannot cut down the clouds!

  —Henry David Thoreau

  It’s okay to love something bigger than yourself without fearing it. Anything worth loving is bigger than we are anyway.

  —Percival Everett

  After so much constraint and clever politics, alone, removed from men’s eyes and instinctively having no fear… he gave himself up to the pleasure of living, so intense at his age, and in the midst of the most beautiful mountains in the world.

  —Stendhal

  In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.

  —Albert Camus

  I try to respect the difficult job of agencies… who think they have to manage every inch of wild country in order to protect it. Maybe they do. I try to keep a balanced view, valuing freedom most. Not freedom to molest and trample but freedom to take total control for your own ass. Even if a bear chews it off: no lawsuits, please.

  —Doug Peacock

  I wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one is alone.

  —Daphne du Maurier

  It is perhaps impossible for a person living unhappily with a flush toilet to imagine a person living happily without one.

  —Wendell Berry

  The idea of wilderness… is the most radical in human thought—more radical than Paine, than Marx, than Mao. Wilderness says: Human beings are not paramount, Earth is not for Homo sapiens alone, human life is but one life form on the planet and has no right to take exclusive possession.

  —Dave Foreman

  In small doses melancholy, alienation, and introspection are among life’s most refined pleasures.

  —Rebecca Solnit

  Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home of insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?

  —Rachel Carson

  Natural objects—living things in particular—are like a language we only faintly remember. It is as if creation had been dismembered sometime in the past and all things are limbs we have lost that will make us whole only if we can recall them.

  —Lewis Hyde

  If we are here for any good purpose at all (other than collating texts, running rivers, and learning the stars), I suspect it is to entertain the rest of nature. A gang of sexy primate clowns. All the little critters creep in close to listen when human beings are in a good mood and willing to play some tunes.

  —Gary Snyder

  I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my “real” life again at last. That is what is strange—that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened.

  —May Sarton

  By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us.

  —Robert MacFarlane

  To have passed through life and never experienced solitude is to have never known oneself. To have never known oneself is to have never known anyone.

  —Joseph Wood Krutch

  We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.

  —Edward Abbey

  Adieu to disappointment and spleen. What are men to rocks and mountains?

  —Jane Austen

  To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.

  —Anthony Burgess

  The mountains were his masters. They rimmed in life. They were the cup of reality, beyond growth, beyond struggle and death. They were his absolute unity in the midst of eternal change.

  —Thomas Wolfe

  The idea of the contented hermit who lives close to nature, cultivates his garden and his bees, is trusted by animals and loves all of creation, is some kind of archetype. We think we could be like that ourselves if somehow things were different.

  —Isabel Colgate

  Crane your neck. Worm your way. Wolf it down. Monkey with things. Outfox your foe. Quit badgering your tax attorney. Take notes on the deafness of coral, the pea-size heart of a bat. Be meticulous. We will need these things so that we may speak.

  —Ellen Meloy

  Solitude… is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or penance, but hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to ordinary life, and from this want of recognition come half our domestic troubles.

  —Freya Stark

  We are no longer frightened of nature; what frightens us is the idea that we have triumphed over nature, and what that triumph will mean in the long run, when we understand, too late, that we were nature, that our triumph has been a suicide.

  —John Jeremiah Sullivan

  Ther
e is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question.

  —Thomas Merton

  Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!

  —Willa Cather

  It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.

  —Gertrude Stein

  I grow into these mountains like a moss. I am bewitched.

  —Peter Matthiessen

  You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.

  —E.M. Cioran

  Some people see scars, and it is wounding they remember. To me they are proof of the fact that there is healing.

  —Linda Hogan

  Before there was any water there were tides of fire.

  —Robinson Jeffers

  If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.

  —Jean-Paul Sartre

  Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures that are there and all the faintest motions in the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of dawn and dusk.

  —N. Scott Momaday

  Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still

  —T.S. Eliot

  The body is not important. It is made of dust; it is made of ashes. It is food for the worms. The winds and the waters dissolve it and scatter it to the four corners of the earth. In the end, what we care most for lasts only a brief lifetime, and then there is eternity. Time forever… The body becomes dust and trees and exploding fire, it becomes gaseous and disappears, and still there is eternity. Silent, unopposed, brooding, forever.