Long Quiet Highway

by Natalie Goldberg

  Then I remembered an old Zen story: A roshi was dying. All the monks eagerly gathered around the deathbed, hoping to be chosen as the next teacher.

  The roshi said, “Where’s the gardener?”

  “The gardener?” everyone asked. He was just a simple man who tended the plants, not even ordained.

  “Yes, he is the only one awake. He will be the next teacher,” the roshi said.

  Who wakes up is not who we expect. I felt a great responsibility: We all carry Roshi within us.

  At the end of December, right before New Year’s, I went to say good-bye to Roshi. I had to return to Taos. I had a writing workshop to teach there in January. He was lying on his side in bed under a blue cover, his hands under his cheek on the pillow. He could hardly talk; he was exhausted. I tried to make light talk. Then I was afraid I’d never see him again: I tried to tell him everything. It was silly; he was tired and sick. I got up after frive minutes and said good-bye. He said, “I’ll see you again.” He had never said that to me before. I thought maybe he meant he was going to live. I hoped, maybe, but I knew he wasn’t, not in the old way, not in his body.

  The next day I got in my car and drove south through Iowa and into Kansas. I stayed overnight in Lawrence. Allen Ginsberg had written about that town in his poems. The next day Kansas spread itself in front of me. Brown hills and bare trees. In late afternoon, I blasted opera tapes that Joni had made me on my car stereo. I drove into Oklahoma and thought, how can a sky be bigger than this? I stayed overnight in a small town there and the next morning I entered New Mexico, its eastern border, and the sky was miraculously big, and, yes, there was a lot of space, but it was the quality of light that astounded me. It was golden, golden, golden, the way I’d seen it only in Jerusalem before. I knew I was home again and I was happy. On Thursday, March 1, 1990, two months after I arrived home, Joni called me early in the morning to tell me Roshi had died that night. I had known since the past Sunday that his death was near, and I had planned to fly out that Thursday, hoping I would get there before he was gone. I didn’t. I thanked Joni and got off the phone. I lay in bed for a long time thinking of nothing. Then I got dressed and packed. I drove the three hours to the Albuquerque airport, playing “Imagine” over and over on the car stereo, singing it aloud, very loud, with John Lennon.

  I arrived in Minneapolis at ten P.M. and Teah, a Zen student from Tassajara Mountain Center, a monastery, picked me up and drove me straight to the zendo.

  The night before, many of the Zen students had helped wash Roshi’s body. Tomoe had generously insisted that Roshi felt that his disciples were his important children and should be present with the family for everything. Yvonne prepared the body with herbs to preserve it. She was one of Roshi’s oldest students from the early days in San Francisco and had become a close friend of his family.

  They wanted a simple pine box to place him in. They got one with a Jewish star on it. They took off the star and someone said, “Save it for Natalie.” It was a star with a circle around it.

  For three days, Roshi’s body was in the zendo and we could sit with it at any time. By the time I arrived that night, it was the end of the first day. I bowed and walked into the zendo and went over to the open coffin. I was forty-two years old and somehow had managed never to see a corpse. This was the first. I stood and looked. The zendo was dark, except for lit candles at the altar. There were many flowers. Roshi’s skin looked dark and dry and he didn’t move. I just stood there. The windows near the body were opened and the cruel March air of Minneapolis filled the space around him. I didn’t believe he was dead. I wanted to reach out and touch him, then shake him. “Wake up, goddamn it!” I wanted to scream.

  I sat down on a black cushion. The doan, the bell ringer, was there for the evening, and Thomas, one of the Zen carpenters. The three of us sat. That’s all. It was late. Lots of people had gone home earlier. But I couldn’t sit still. I kept thinking I saw Roshi move. I adjusted my legs one way; then another way. I moved my hands, my neck. Finally, I got up and went into the kitchen. No one was there. I sat down at the kitchen table and burst out crying. “I’d follow you any place, even if I was a hundred miles behind, but now you’ve gone to a place I can’t find, a place I can’t go.” And I cried and cried until there was no more crying in me that evening. I fingered the wood table and then I stood up and went back into the zendo. I could sit still now, and I sat with his body.

  Late that night, I walked to Cary and Joni’s along Lake Calhoun. The ice was just breaking up in the lake and the snow that wasn’t melted was hard and dirty. Cigarette butts that had lived under ice all winter were gathered in cement cracks. A hard wind blew through my clothes and the sky was thick with night clouds.

  I dreamed that night that there was a closed mahogany coffin with brass knobs standing all by itself out on a very green lawn. There were no people, not even me. It was night and it was pouring hard. The earth was very wet, rich and fertile. Then the dream switched: My father picked me up in his white Buick out in front of the airport. He was going to drive me to the funeral. He said, “There’s a big rain, but most of all up on the mesa. It’s wiping everything out up there.” When he said that, I saw a picture of my adobe house dissolving into mud, except the center had a glowing light. I turned to look at my father. I saw his big hands on the steering wheel. I turned my head again. My mother was in the back seat. I saw her black hair and dark eyes. She looked beautiful.

  I woke from that dream at four A.M. In the dream, my parents were carrying me to the funeral. My life had taken me to this point, because of them. They had given me life. I carried a lineage of strength. I had two fathers: One was standing in the Buddha dharma and the other was the owner of the Aero Tavern. My father and Roshi were two rivers converging inside me. My father had said once when I told him about Zen, “I fought the Japanese in World War II and now you’re studying religion with them.” I turned over and fell asleep again.

  The next morning I woke up with my heart aching; I remembered why I was in Minnesota; I did not want to face the day. I pulled on sweat pants and sneakers, left the house, and ran hard down the cement sidewalk to Lake Harriet and around the lake. I thought I could outrun pain. At the time, I was in a track club in Santa Fe, training with a coach. I wanted running to cure everything. It didn’t, and though my heart was pumping and I was breathing hard when I stopped, someone a mile away wasn’t breathing and his heart wasn’t pumping, and my heart ached because of that.

  I went back to the house, showered, changed, went to the zendo, and saw Roshi’s body in daylight. His skin looked yellower, tighter, his features were sharper—he was still dead. I grimaced.

  There were a lot of people sitting now, and some were in the kitchen, preparing food. I stayed for two hours that morning and then couldn’t take it. I walked down to Calhoun Square and wandered blindly in the shopping mall there. I couldn’t believe it, but I found myself purchasing a black leather book bag that was on sale. I took it and almost dropped it in a garbage can as I walked down the alleys back to Zen Center. I was in a complete daze. Luckily, after lunch Kate joined me. There was nothing to say. We just sat in front of the body.

  The next day I brought a big tin of chocolates from Amsterdam and plunked them down on the kitchen counter. Bob, the man I had been dating, had arrived the night before from Europe and given them to me. Zen students, some who had been devoted to macrobiotics, all hovered around the tin and popped chocolates into their mouths. All of us felt a tension no words could express: Roshi was in the next room in a coffin.

  On that third day, Roshi’s skin began to shrink; his upper lip lifted from his bottom lip and I could see part of his teeth.

  On Sunday morning there was a short ceremony at the zendo and then the coffin was closed and ceremoniously carried out by the monks to the hearse. Yvonne sat next to Tomoe in the black limousine. Tomoe looked out the window at the dismal gray landscape of broken ice, mud, and bare branches, and nodded at it. “That is how I felt when
Roshi left for America.”

  I remember almost nothing at the cremation ceremony—who I drove with, what I wore—except that the service was in a room with a pink carpet, and that a Zen student who sat next to me was delighted her husband, not a Zen student, had surprised her and come. I remember only one of the several speeches that were given: It was by Erik Olson, a friend of Roshi’s younger son, Ejyo. He told us what Roshi was like as his best friend’s father: warm, playful, encouraging, a lot of fun. It was a beautiful speech; but I knew soon the body in that box would be burning.

  The ceremony was over. The box was carried away by the disciples. We all moved to a brown-carpeted waiting room, stood around, had tea, and visited with people we hadn’t seen in a long time. After a while, Tomoe appeared. She was quiet, and there was a vulnerability about her. Yasuhiko, Roshi’s older son, held his newborn son and sat next to his wife. As I brought the tea cup to my mouth, I felt as though my face had been ripped off.

  Yvonne told me later that the crematorium allowed the monks to put the coffin in the oven, and she, Yvonne, in the presence of the disciples and Roshi’s family, turned on the gas so the body would begin to burn. I walked down the street to Curran’s with several of the Zen students. The restaurant was full of the Sunday church crowd. While we waited for a table, I watched cream pies move round and round on a rotating display case. When we finally were seated, I looked at the menu and there was nothing I wanted to eat. I ordered a plate of french fries. French fries! My teacher was burning and I was eating french fries. I remember they were the frozen kind. They were terrible and I ate them all with ketchup.

  After we paid the bill, I walked back down Nicollet to the funeral home and went down to where the oven was. I walked down a long cement basement hall into a small cement room. The door was heavy and hard to open. It was hot in that room and there was a ferocious constant noise: It was the oven. Yvonne and two other people were there sitting zazen. I joined them as the body continued to burn. Fifty minutes before the cremation was finished—it takes five hours to burn the body completely—I opened the door of the oven and looked in. Through the heat and intense flames I saw two small ribs—that was all. They were the last of my great teacher.

  Four days after the funeral, the day before I was to leave, I called Tomoe and told her I’d like to come by and say goodbye. We made an appointment for two in the afternoon. On my way there I stopped at Gelpe’s, a special bakery on Hennepin Avenue, and picked up a beautiful raspberry cake. They put it in a white box for me, bound with string. I carried it up the stairs to Roshi’s apartment and presented it to Tomoe.

  She said, “Come, let’s see if Roshi wants a piece,” and she brought me into his study and placed it on his altar. There was a photo of him, leaning against a flower vase. “Go ahead, speak to him.”

  I knelt in front of the altar. “Roshi, I brought you a delicious cake. Raspberry. From Gelpe’s. I hope you will enjoy it.”

  Then Tomoe and I went across the hall to the room where I last saw him alive. We knelt down at a low table and chatted.

  “If he doesn’t want the cake, later I will have a piece.” She paused and then said, “Roshi once asked me, ‘When you die, what do you want to come back as?’ and I said, ‘As a small white flower, like you see in a field.’ He shook his head. ‘That’s so romantic. I will come back lifetime after lifetime as a monk.”

  I smiled at that, at his commitment beyond this lifetime.

  The next morning I left Minnesota and flew to California to teach a writing and meditation workshop with Yvonne at Green Gulch Zen Center, a Zen retreat in Marin County. Roshi had taught there many times. I’d never been there before.

  The first night I was there I had a dream: Roshi came to me and we walked along the gulch to the ocean. As we walked, we discussed different people I might marry; it was clear I needed to be married within six months. About one woman I brought up, he said, “Naa, she’s too hysterical”; another man, he said, was too conservative. We stopped by some burned grass and just looked at it. Then he said, “But you know, that woman is also pretty wonderful.” When we got to the beach, there was a snowstorm. Roshi stepped into the storm, turned around, waved good-bye to me, and then dissolved.

  He said once in a lecture, “When I die, I die completely. There will be nothing left of me. It won’t matter what you call me.” And he said another time, “Don’t cry when I die, go on.”

  Marriage was another commitment. Roshi was telling me in the dream to go on, to make another commitment, not to linger. I knew it was the only time he would visit my dreams. He had given me my instructions. I had to move on.

  Part Five

  I am here/now with your heart;

  I hold your hands in here/now.

  Dainin Katagiri Roshi

  IN JUNE, THREE MONTHS after Roshi died, I went to Plum Village, near Bordeaux, France, where Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, lived and taught. I had seen a flyer hanging up at Zen Center that fall for this retreat, and several Zen students in Minnesota planned to go. I was the only one who finally ended up going. I’d read Thay’s books (Thay means “teacher” in Vietnamese), but what really impressed me was a tape of him discussing the Heart Sutra. I listened to it one afternoon as I drove along the Rio Grande from Taos to Santa Fe. The Heart Sutra was that chant we did every day at Zen Center: “No eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body...” The chant that had stumped me, engaged me, entangled me, made me curious, full of wonder and laughter since my first days at Zen Center. Thich Nhat Hanh talked about it so simply, so beautifully. I wanted to meet him.

  Plum Village was in the vineyard country. The zendo was a reconstructed three-hundred-year-old stone farmhouse. We slept on the floor on foam mats, three or four to a room. Meals were cooked on two burners in an open kitchen and we ate our meals silently, beneath a linden tree. There were only two daily sitting meditation sessions: one session early in the morning; and one in the evening before we went to sleep. That’s all. It was very different from my Zen life in Minnesota.

  Thay lectured every morning after breakfast and then we took a long meditation walk with him through the woods and fields. I liked being there. I was learning a whole new angle to Buddhism, less strict, less sitting, more walking, but in lectures I had trouble paying attention, so I looked around me. People were busily taking notes. They obviously adored Thay. I liked him a lot, but I had just lost my teacher. I envied them for having one. Though I had “moved on” as Roshi had asked in the dream, it was only physically. My heart still ached for him, and with the kindness and slowed-down life of Plum Village, a question began to burn in me: Where can I find him now? I was sure the body we burned wasn’t him. I was willing to climb down to Hades, if need be, to get him. Here—and then not here? It was impossible. Where did he go? I grew painfully determined to find him again.

  I took long walks alone along the country roads, up and down steep hills, flanked by green grass and old, old vineyards, the crooked grape vines held up by long wires, the land here cultured and cared for, all of it. I sat in fields in the afternoon sun, writing in my notebook:

  A hundred thousand years will run through me before I can clearly say, Katagiri Roshi, black eye on a clear tin roof, I accept your death. I can say I will never forget you. I can say the vows I took I will carry into small towns in Kansas and Iowa, the yellow clover growing near the side of the road.

  Roshi, you know, there are a thousand things I never told you: My father owned a bar. I had skinny legs as a kid. My grandmother owned a poultry market and twisted the necks off chickens. They came from Russia. They spoke no English. Roshi, my father flew over Japan in World War II and dropped bombs over your small island country. I liked coffee ice cream as a kid and roast beef. My mother wore red lipstick and ate oreo cookies.

  What was it like for you when you took your young wife to bed after green tea in the slow evening of Japan? Tell me now, what color were your school shoes and who did you love the best when you were
eight?

  A thousand things I will never know, but we walked that line, that dark deep one together and now I walk the roads of southern France, but you are not here. I’m going to find you again. I promise. I won’t be left behind as you walked over to the other side, someplace I can’t see, a place so thick with gray I thought the air turned into an army of planes. My great teacher, sometimes now I want to relive your death, grab your body from the flames and run off with you. I’m afraid you’re gone for a long time, longer than I expected, and I won’t find your face again in this lifetime.

  (notebook entry, June 1990)

  I walked in the heat of one afternoon to a thousand-year-old stone church and sat in the cool of it and heard even my breath echo in its stillness. It was lined outside by cypress trees and there was one white pigeon by the well.

  Sometimes I’d skip evening meditation and sit in a vineyard and watch the sun set over a hill. It seemed to set differently there. The sun would flame orange and round in a pale white sky and then descend over the horizon. No color after or around it, unlike New Mexico. And then a while later darkness would come, and stars. It felt complete and I watched the whole thing.

  Then sometimes in the evening after everyone else left the zendo, I’d go in there and sit a while, knowing there was yellow clover out the window, and in the morning, bees. When, Roshi, when? I’d think to myself. When will I see you again? Death seemed an impossibility. I couldn’t comprehend it. He said he’d see me again the last time I spoke to him. “When”—I wanted to scream at the trees through the zendo window—“when will I see you again?” And then I’d take my legs out of their crossed position, bend my head on my knees and sob. Hard, quickly, direct. No holding back.