Islands, the Universe, Home

by Ehrlich, Gretel;

  Birds are glorified flying lizards. Positioned together, feathers are like hundreds of smaller wings, evolved from reptilian scales. Ancestral birds had thirteen pairs of cone-shaped teeth that grew in separate sockets like a snake’s, rounded ribs, and bony tails. Archaeopteryx was half bird, half dinosaur, and glided instead of flying; ichthyornis was a fish-bird, a relative of the pelican; diatryma was a seven-foot-tall giant with a huge beak and with wings so absurdly small they must have been useless, though later the wing bone sprouted from them. Aquila chrysaëtos, the modern golden eagle, has seven thousand contour feathers, no teeth, and weighs about one pound. I think about the eagle on the hill. How big she was, how each time she spread her wings it was like a thought stretching between two seasons.

  Back at the house, I relax with a beer. At 5:03 the vernal equinox occurs. I go outside and stand in the middle of a hayfield with my eyes closed. The universe is restless, but I want to feel celestial equipoise: twelve hours of daylight, twelve of dark, and the earth ramrod straight on its axis. Straightening my posture to resist the magnetic tilt back into dormancy, spiritual and emotional reticence, I imagine the equatorial sash, now nose-to-nose with the sun, sizzling like a piece of bacon, and the earth slowly tilting.

  In the morning I walk to the valley. The eagle isn’t there. The hindquarters of the road-killed deer have been eaten. Coyote tracks circle the carcass. Did they have eagle for dinner too?

  Afternoon. I return. Far up on the opposite hill I see her, flapping and hopping to the top. When I stop, she stops and turns her head. Even at two hundred yards, I can feel the heat of her stare.

  Later, looking through my binoculars, I try to see the world with eagle eyes. After glassing the crescent moon, I dream it has grown full and doubled. One moon is pink and spins fast; the other is an eagle’s head, turning slowly in the opposite direction. Then both moons descend, and it is day.

  At first light I clamber up the hill. Now the dead deer my husband brought is only a hoop of ribs, two forelegs, and hair. The eagle is not here or along the creek or on either hill. I climb the slope and sit. After a long wait she careens out from the narrow slit of the red-walled canyon whose creek drains into this valley. Surely it’s the same bird. Flying by, she cocks her head and looks at me. I smile. What is a smile to her? Now she is not flying but lifting above the planet, far from me.

  Late March. The emerald of the hayfields brightens. A flock of gray-capped rosy finches who overwintered here swarms a leafless apple tree, then falls from the smooth boughs like cut grass. The tree was planted by the Texan who home-steaded this ranch. As I walk past, one of the boughs, shaped like an undulating dragon, splits off from the trunk and drops.

  Space is an arena where the rowdy particles that are the building blocks of life perform their antics. All spring, things fall; the general law of increasing disorder is on the rise. What is it to be a cause without an effect, an effect without a cause, to abandon time-bound thinking, the use of tenses, the temporally related emotions of impatience, expectation, hope, and fear? But I can’t. At the edge of the lake I watch ducks. Like them, my thinking rises and falls on the same water.

  Another day. Feeling small-minded, I take a plane ride over Wyoming. As we take off, the plane resists accepting air under its wings. Is this how an eagle feels? Ernst Mach’s principle tells me that an object’s resistance against being accelerated is not the intrinsic property of matter but a measure of its interaction with the universe; that matter has inertia only because it exists in relation to other matter.

  Airborne, we fly southeast from Heart Mountain across the Big Horn River, over the long red wall where Butch Cassidy trailed stolen horses, across the high plains to Laramie. Coming home, we hit clouds. Turbulence, like many forms of trouble, cannot always be seen. We bounce so hard my arms sail helplessly above my head. In evolution, wing bones became arms and hands; perhaps I’m de-evolving.

  From ten thousand feet I can see that spring is only half here: the southern part of the state, being higher in altitude, is white; the northern half is green. Time is one of spring’s greening forms, a clock whose hands are blades of grass moving vertically, up through the fringe of numbers, spreading across the middle of the face, sinking again as the sun moves from one horizon to the other. Time doesn’t go anywhere; the shadow of the plane, my shadow, moves across it.

  To sit on a plane is to sit on the edge of sleep, where the mind’s forge brightens into incongruities. Down there I see disparate wholenesses strung together and the string dissolving. Mountains run like rivers; I fly through waves and waves of chiaroscuro light. The land looks bare but is articulate. The body of the plane is my body, pressing into spring, pressing matter into relation with matter. Is it even necessary to say the obvious? That spring brings on surges of desire? From this disinterested height I say out loud what Saint Augustine wrote: “My love is my weight. Because of it I move.”

  Directly below us now is the fine old Wyoming ranch where Joel, Mart, Dave, Hughy, and I have moved thousands of head of cattle. Joel’s father, Smokey, was one of two brothers who put the outfit together. They worked hard, lived frugally, and even after his brother died, Smokey did not marry until his late fifties. As testimony to a long bachelorhood, there is no kitchen in the main house. The cookhouse stands separate from all the other buildings. In back is a bedroom and bath, which has housed a list of itinerant cooks ten pages long.

  Over the years I’ve helped during roundup and branding. We’d rise at four. Smokey, then in his eighties, cooked flapjacks and boiled coffee on the wood cookstove. There was a long table. Joel and Smokey always sat at one end. They were look-alikes, both skin-and-bones tall, with tipped-up dark eyes set in narrow faces. Stern and vigilant, Smokey once threw a young hired hand out of the cookhouse because he hadn’t grained his saddle horse after a long day’s ride. “On this outfit we take care of our animals first,” he said. “Then, if there’s time, we eat.”

  Even in his early twenties, Joel had his father’s dignity and razor-sharp wit. They both wore white Stetsons, identically shaped. Only their hands were different: Joel had eight fingers and one thumb—the other he lost while roping.

  Ten summers ago my parents and I visited their ranch. We drank homemade whiskey left over from Prohibition days, ate steaks cut from an Angus bull, four kinds of vegetables, watermelon, ice cream and pie. Despite a thirteen-year difference in our ages, Smokey wanted Joel to marry me. As we rose from the meal, he shook my father’s hand. “I guess you’ll be my son’s father-in-law,” he said. That was news to all of us. Joel’s face turned crimson. My father threw me an astonished look, cleared his throat, and thanked his host for the fine meal.

  One night Joel did come to my house and asked if I would take him into my bed. It was a gentlemanly proposition—doffed hat, moist eyes, a smile grimacing with loneliness.

  “You’re an older woman. Think of all you could teach me,” he said jauntily but with a blush. He stood ramrod straight, waiting for an answer. My silence turned him away like a rolling wave, and he drove to the home ranch, spread out across the Emblem Bench, thirty-five miles away.

  The night Joel died, I was staying at a friend’s farm in Missouri. I had fallen asleep early, then awakened suddenly, feeling claustrophobic. I jumped out of bed and stood in the dark. I wanted to get out of there, drive home to Wyoming, and I didn’t know why. Finally, at seven in the morning, able to sleep, I dreamed about a bird landing on, then lifting out of a tree along a riverbank. That was the night Joel’s pickup rolled. He wasn’t found until daylight and died on the way to the hospital.

  Now I’m sitting on a fin of Gypsum Springs rock, looking west. The sun is setting. What I see are three gray cloud towers letting rain down at the horizon. The sky behind these massifs is gilded gold, and long fingers of land—benches where Charolais cattle graze—are pink. Somewhere over Joel’s grave, the sky is bright. The road where he died shines like a dash in a Paul Klee painting. But here it is still winter: snow, dry
as Styrofoam when squeezed together, tumbles into my lap. I think about flying and falling. The place in the sky where the eagle fell is dark. Why does a wounded eagle get well and fly away? Why do the head wounds of a young man cut him down? Useless questions.

  Sex and death are the riddles thrown into the hopper, thrown down on the planet like red and black hailstones. Where one hits the earth, makes a crater, and melts, perhaps a weed can germinate; perhaps not. If I dice life into atoms, the trajectories I find are so wild, so random, anything could happen: life or nonlife. But once we have a body, who can give it up easily? Our own or others’? We check our clocks and build our beautiful narratives, under which indeterminacy seethes.

  Sometimes, lying in bed, I feel like a flounder with its two eyes on one side pointing upward into nothingness. The casings of thought rattle. Then I realize there are no casings at all. Is it possible that the mind, like space, is finite but has no boundaries, no center or edge? I sit cross-legged on old blankets. My bare feet strain against the backs of my knees. Just as morning comes and the indigo lifts, the leaflessness of the old apple tree looks ornate. Nothing in this world is plain.

  “Every atom in your body was once inside a star,” another physicist says, trying to humor me. Not all atoms in all kinds of matter are shared. But who wouldn’t find that idea appealing? Outside, shadows trade places with a sliver of sun, which trades places with shadow. A Pacific storm blows in from the south like a jib sail reaching far out, backhanding me with a tropical gust. It snows into my mouth, between my breasts, against my shins. Spring teaches me what space and time teach me: that I am a random multiple; that the many fit together; that my swell is a collision of particles. Spring is music, a seething minor, a twelve-tone scale. Odd harmonies amass and lift up only to dissolve.

  Spring presses harder and harder and is feral. The first thunder cracks the sky into a larger domain. Sap rises in obdurateness. For the first time in seven months, rain slants down in a slow pavanne—sharp but soft, like desire. I drive the highway that crosses the wild-horse range. Near Emblem a lone black stud horse trots across the landscape. He travels north, then turns in my direction as if coming to me. Now, when I dream of Joel, he is riding that horse and he knows he is dead. One night he rides to my house, all smiles and shyness, and I let him in.

  THE SOURCE OF A RIVER

  It’s morning in the Absaroka Mountains. The word absaroka means “raven” in the Crow language, though I’ve seen no ravens in three days. Last night I slept with my head butted against an Engelmann’s spruce, and when I woke, it was a many-armed goddess swinging around and around. The trunk is bigger than an elephant’s leg. I stick my nose against it. Tiny opals of sap stick to my cheeks where the bark breaks up, textured: red and gray, coarse and smooth, wet and flaked.

  I’m looking for the source of the Yellowstone River, and as we make the day-long ascent from a valley, I think about walking and wilderness. We use the word “wilderness,” but perhaps we mean wildness. Isn’t that why I’ve come here, to seek the wildness in myself and, in so doing, come on the wildness everywhere, because after all, I’m part of nature too.

  Following the coastline of the lake, I watch how wind picks up water in dark blasts and drops it again. Ducks glide in V’s away from me, out onto the fractured, darkening mirror. I stop. A hatch of mayflies powders the air, and the archaic, straight-winged dragonflies hang blunt-nosed above me. A friend talks about aquatic bugs: water beetles, spinners, assassin bugs, and one that hatches, mates, and dies in a total life span of two hours. At the end of the meadow, the lake drains into a fast-moving creek. I quicken my pace and trudge upward. Walking is almost an ambulation of mind. The human armor of bones rattles, fat rolls, and inside this durable, fleshy prison of mine, I make a beeline toward otherness, lightness, or like a moth, toward flame.

  Somewhere along the trail I laugh out loud. How shell-like the body seems suddenly—not fleshy at all, but inhuman and hard. And farther up, I step out of my skin though I’m still held fast by something, but what? I don’t know.

  How foolish the preparations for wilderness trips seem now. We pore over maps, chart our expeditions. We “gear up” at trailheads with pitons and crampons, horsepacks and backpacks, fly rods and cameras, forgetting the meaning of simply going, the mechanics of disburdenment. I look up from these thoughts: a blue heron rises from a gravel bar and glides behind a gray screen of dead trees, appears in an opening where an avalanche downed pines, and lands again on water.

  I stop to eat lunch. Emerson wrote: “The Gautama said that the first men ate the earth and found it sweet.” I eat bologna and cheese and think about eating dirt. At this moment the mouth frames wonder, its width stands for the generous palate of consciousness. I cleanse my taste buds with miner’s lettuce and stream water and try to imagine what kinds of sweetness the earth provides: the taste of glacial flour or the mineral taste of basalt, the fresh and foul bouquets of rivers, the desiccated, stinging flavor of a snowflake.

  As I begin to walk again, it occurs to me that this notion of eating the earth is not about gluttony but about unconditional love, an acceptance of whatever taste comes across my tongue: flesh, wine, the unremarkable flavor of dirt. To find wildness, I must first offer myself up, accept all that comes before me: a bullfrog breathing hard on a rock; moose tracks under elk scats; a cloud that looks like a clothespin; a seep of water from a high cirque, black on brown rock, draining down from the brain of the world.

  At treeline, bird song stops. I’m lifted into a movement of music with no particular notes, only windsounds becoming watersounds, becoming windsounds. Above, a cornice crowns a ridge and melts into a teal and turquoise lake, which, like a bladder, leaks its alchemical potions.

  On top of Marston Pass I’m in a ruck of steep valleys and gray, treeless peaks. The alpine carpet, studded with red paintbrush and alpine buttercups, gives way to rock. Now, all the way across a valley, I see where water oozes from moss and mud, how, at its source, it quickly becomes a river.

  Emerson also said: “Every natural fact is an emanation, and that from which it emanates is an emanation also, and from every emanation is a new emanation.” The ooze, the source of a great river, is now a white chute tumbling over brown bellies of conglomerate rock. Wind throws sheets of water to another part of the mountainside; soft earth gives way under my feet, clouds spill upward and spit rain. Isn’t everything redolent with loss, with momentary radiance, a coming to different ground? Stone basins catch the waterfall, spill it again; thoughts and desires strung together are laddered down.

  I see where meltwater is split by rock—half going west to the Pacific, the other going east to the Atlantic—for this is the Continental Divide. Down the other side, the air I gulp feels softer. Ice bridges the creek, then, when night comes but before the full moon, falling stars have the same look as water falling against the rock of night.

  To rise above treeline is to go above thought, and after, the descent back into bird song, bog orchids, willows, and firs is to sink into the preliterate parts of ourselves. It is to forget discontent, undisciplined needs. Here, the world is only space, raw loneliness, green valleys hung vertically. Losing myself to it—if I can—I do not fall … or if I do, I’m only another cataract of water.

  Wildness has no conditions, no sure routes, no peaks or goals, no source that is not instantly becoming something more than itself, then letting go of that, always becoming. It cannot be stripped to its complexity by CAT scan or telescope. Rather, it is a many-pointed truth, almost a bluntness, a sudden essence like the wild strawberries strung on scarlet runners under my feet. For half a mile, on hands and knees, I eat and eat. Wildness is source and fruition at once, as if this river circled round, mouth eating tail and tail eating source.

  Now I am camped among trees again. Four yearling moose, their chestnut coats shiny from a summer’s diet of willow shoots, tramp past my bedroll and drink from a spring that issues sulfurous water. The ooze, the white chute, the narrow stream
—now almost a river—joins this small spring and slows into skinny oxbows and deep pools before breaking again on rock, down a stepladder of sequined riffles.

  To trace the history of a river or a raindrop, as John Muir would have done, is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body. In both, we constantly seek and stumble on divinity, which, like the cornice feeding the lake, and the spring becoming a waterfall, feeds, spills, falls, and feeds itself over and over again.

  SUMMER

  This June morning I walk north of our ranch, crossing two forks of the same creek split by three miles of mountain. At dawn there is no dew on the grass, and the wildflowers come and go in three weeks—an instant. Already this summer has been declared the driest since the dust bowl days of the 1930s. Scorching weather rarely felt here until mid-July has brought down what melt-water we have too soon and too fast for the earth to absorb. Hot, Mojave-like winds fill what are usually rainy days, and the native grasses are prematurely going to seed. Is someone holding a magnifying glass against the sun? Has the prediction that global warming was to have taken place in small increments been naive?

  The sun inhales and exhales; its storms of heat reach down and strip the ground of memory, and the creek’s split halves run meagerly, spending their drought songs in my ears, the one stream trying to hush the other. Above, two rock tablets, each the size of a five-story building, rise from the center of the steep mountain slope. Together they form an M, and a stain from an intermittent waterfall drives down through the center. As the sun rises, the rock catches light like a burnt shoulder.

  I’ve come here looking for summer, as if the season were not a temporal occurrence but a geological one, a nugget of gold for which I could pan. I dive in and out of thick riparian vegetation, and only sudden openings, like green curtains drawn, allow me glimpses of water.