by Patrick Lane
I’ve been woken to the rain in the jungles of Ecuador by a woman who gave me thin soup made from gui. She nursed me in the rain after a centipede stung me in my sleep. In my delirium I thought her an angel come brown and singing through the rain.
And the mountains, the mountains of my West. Too many rains, too many lives. Part of me sits forever in a deserted cabin on the North Thompson and speaks to the ghosts of the men and women who homesteaded there a hundred years ago and more. I have watched a mouse peer from the drawer of an ancient sewing machine in that cabin. I have read the newspapered walls. The walls of rain on the great plains crossed the cordillera to reach me in my first great loneliness. I’ve stepped in and out of rain on the prairie, the sheer wall of falling water a demarcation only the clouds and sun understand. And I’ve made love in the rain. I’ve made love in the rain.
Who can put a name to the rain in a dying season? The psalms call the rain “angel’s food” and so it is the first manna of myth. “I am become a name,” said aging Ulysses at the end of his life. No wonder he set out for the far islands with an aging crew. In such ways are we lost. I cannot put a name to the rain though I sang it in the spring. Today I would like to sit with Dick beside an unnamed mountain creek west of Eagle Pass, just as we did forty years ago. We would watch a doe drink again among shattered quartz. I would call it “Lost Brother Rain.” I have drunk that rain in the far mountains. I have lain by the gravestone of my brother in the rain.
It is dark here now at six in the morning. The sun has retreated south and the winter solstice looms ahead, its arrival a signal for light to return. I am one of a northern people. If a place makes you who you are then the north has made me. This morning I rose and walked through the dark kitchen to let the cats out. I opened the door, the deck lights came on, and all three of us stopped and stared at a world changed utterly. Snow was falling, a grace come down from the sky to visit us. Basho hesitated a moment and then leapt from the doorsill and slid like a wild fur ball through the snow into the upside-down container in the corner of the deck. Roxy, careful female that she is, took a careful step forward, put down her head, smelled the snow, and backed into the warmth and comfort of the house. I called her to go out, but she ignored me. She stopped for a moment by the food bowl and took a few necessary bites, then walked through the kitchen to the living room. Why, she seemed to say, would a cat go out in that?
I watched the snow for a while then put on my boots, heavy sweater, and toque and went out into the garden. The bamboo lay prostrate, the rhododendrons’ branches were bent to the point of breaking, viburnum hung to the ground in huge curves, and the magnolia, that beautiful tree with branches brittle as glass, looked like it was going to lose its limbs altogether. The last bright red apples hung under caps of frothy white. I took the handle from a broken shovel and poked, prodded, lifted, shook, and otherwise knocked the snow off the plants. Their limbs lifted partway, as if dazed by this strange substance.
It was wonderful to walk through fresh snow in the dawn light. I knew the late morning or afternoon would bring rain and soon all the snow would be gone, but for a half hour I walked in the ancient world of the Interior and felt once again at home. Lorna came out at my calling and we walked and watched Basho run around the yard like a golden wind. Sir Francis Bacon said, “There ought to be gardens for all the months of the year, in which, severally, things of beauty may then be in season.” My garden is beautiful month by month. I can see its loveliness now the snow has reshaped it, bringing to my eye old forms transformed, new forms unnoticed before. Lorna and I stand under the apple trees and share a world made beautiful by this rare form of water.
The snow falls silently like a cat’s paw in the night. Basho runs beneath the ferns and the sky falls on him. He emerges patched in white. I take my woman’s hand. Winter is here and beyond the snow are the long rains and December.
PLANTS
Boletus – Boletus luteus and Boletus granulatus
Evening primrose – Oenothera speciosa “Siskiyou”
Fatsia japonica – Fatsia japonica “Variegata”
Giant agaric mushroom (the Prince) – Agaricus augustus (synonym – Psalliota augusta)
King Bolete mushroom – Boletus edulis
Kocho Nishiki (Butterfly) maple – Acer palmatum
Ligularia – Ligularia dentata “Desdemona”
Mahonia – Mahonia x media “Charity”
Oak-leaf hydrangea – Hydrangea quercifolia
Seiryu Japanese maple – Acer palmatum
Simons’ cotoneaster – Cotoneaster simonsii
White pearl bugbane – Cimicifuga simplex
ANIMALS, BIRDS, AND INSECTS
California quail – Lophortyx Californica
Camas western pocket gopher – Thomomys bulbivorus
Canada goose – Branta canadensis
Mule deer – Odocoileus hemionus
Spruce grouse – Canachites canadensis
Gray wolf – Canis lupus
12.
You learned them and where they stood in relation to each other, and then you filled in the details working from these known marks. General to particular. Everything had a name. To live fully in a place all your life, you kept aiming smaller and smaller in attention to detail.
—CHARLES FRAZIER, Cold Mountain
THERE ARE TIMES I want to be in the second or third person. Like any writer, I’d rather be a he than an I. It’s simpler to be a fiction. In a novel I can imagine things that aren’t real, that don’t exist, and I can make out of them a story and a place where I might exist free from my life. Like a fiction writer, I want to create sentences of deception, paragraphs whose history can’t be verified. It’s far easier to be a figment. Yet even when I try to create the past using a point of view not my own, it is still and always mine.
Four years after my father’s death I took my mother back to Sheep Creek. I wanted to go to the place where my brothers and I first lived. I thought if I could find the beginning, the place, I might understand what had happened there and so, somehow, understand what has happened since.
It was strange to take my mother back there, the more so because she didn’t want to go. It was so close upon her husband’s death. I think, in this life, I have asked too much. I look back now at that man I was and I wonder at him. His desire for a return to first things was a kind of madness.
I want now to sit under the huge leaves of a thimbleberry and watch my younger self search in the detritus of the years for the clues to a mystery there is no solution to. He has climbed down the bank above Sheep Creek and he is searching through the dump where half a century ago people threw their garbage. Empty bottles, tin cans, bits of broken machinery, everything glass and metal that the long winters and the dry summers could not reduce to dust, lie there under the forest floor. The tired dresses and shirts, worn socks and work pants mended over and over again that were finally thrown out with the potato peelings and carrot scrapings.
This young man can barely be seen through the leaves and splayed stalks of the thimbleberry and Oregon grape. His hand moves among the spare berries and he picks up a piece of dried fir bark and throws it behind him. Beetles scuttle for cover and red ants scatter, the sterile workers carrying the unborn larvae and eggs in their jaws. The soldier ants raise their heads and clatter their mandibles as they search for the enemy who has destroyed their nest.
The man ignores their bravado and panic. He is tearing away the mass of twigs and needles, branches, and desiccated leaves. Under the dust that chokes his throat he sees a glint of glass and he reaches deeper and pulls out a small blue bottle. A label hangs from its round sides, the words on it rotted into an indecipherable text, an unreadable code that once declared what was inside, nectar, liquor, or perfume, some substance that was prized until it was gone.
The man in the dump doesn’t know why it was discarded. He holds it up like an archeologist might who has just uncovered an artifact in an ancient ruin. He feels he has found th
e single object that defines a time so far in his past it has been forgotten. He rubs the bottle on his shirt to clean off the crust of dirt and bends the torn label back carefully, but it begins to crack. He stops and holds the paper still. The words are there and not there.
This young man is a writer who is coming into his maturity. In a few years he will begin to write his finest poems. At this moment he thinks words are his life. He has searched among them for meanings so elusive that sometimes he doesn’t know what he has found and has had to lie down and wander among the instincts he has built the edifice of his trust upon. To him his poems are simulacra, shadowed images that betray what he feels. He thinks the bit of dry paper he touches is a found poem. The script is indecipherable, the directions and descriptions printed in a type too small to survive. He places the bottle carefully on a flat stone above his shoulder on the slope and starts again to dig.
I watch him clear away the cloak of dirt that covers the rubbish below. He finds another bottle and a tin pie pan with a crumpled edge. He places them with the first bottle and then widens his search. He heaves the dirt aside. Each thing he unearths is a clue to the word was. He is thinking that if he can only dig deep enough and far enough he will find something that will explain his life to him.
He has forgotten his mother. He left her on the flat above him where she once lived back in the thirties. The cabin her husband built for her is nothing now, just a few rotted boards and logs, and the base of a stone chimney. The old mortar has washed away long ago and the stones that her husband had built it with are now a tumble of rocks. Only the well remains. Her husband had blown it with dynamite stolen from the mine. He was a hard-rock miner and a powder monkey. He secreted sticks of dynamite, blasting caps, and fuse in his lunch bucket, and when he had enough he blew a shaft in the mountain behind their cabin deep enough for water to gather. He had promised her that she would not have to walk the trail down to the creek for water. He had promised her anything and everything in the hope she would be happy in the canyon where the mine was. She wasn’t used to cabins and wells and hard-rock miners. She wasn’t used to their wives, their children, their kind of life.
She looked down into the well after her son had walked away from her and then turned away. She did not drop a pebble into it like her son had done when she showed him where it was. The tiny plash of a pebble hitting the water was not something she wanted to hear. She remembers lowering a bucket on a rope and lifting water out of the earth. How many thousands of times had she had done that? How many times had she walked the trail to the cabin and poured the water into the washtub on the stove that burned winter and summer? No, she does not want to drop a pebble in the well. She does not want to remember water.
Her third son has brought her here to this place, to Sheep Creek, where she had birthed him and his older brothers. Three sons in four years and a husband who left her each day in the darkness of morning for his shift at the mine. Winter and summer, spring and fall. She had watched his back walk away from her up the trail that threaded through the other shacks and bunkhouses as he climbed up to the mine shaft and the men who were waiting to descend into the pit. Each day she had touched the palm of her hand to the great stone outside the cabin door as if with her touch she could feel him in the tunnels under the earth. Clouds and rain, sun and snow, she had touched that stone in all weathers, and each day she had felt him there and imagined the lamp on his forehead glowing in the shafts. She imagined his hands and his laughter.
The stone is still there and she stares at it, but she doesn’t touch it. Whatever is under the earth now can’t be touched. He is no longer in this place, and the deep shafts and tunnels are empty. Only water is down there. It trickles and splashes among stones but there is no one to hear it. There is no one to hear the sound a falling rock makes, no eyes to watch the water’s silver threads drip in the huge darkness where stalagmites and stalactites have begun to form. They are infinitesimal nipples of new stone growing from stone.
She passes by the rock at the door that no longer exists. Her son has climbed down over the edge where the land falls away to the creek. She is alone. The creek roars as it has always roared and the mist from its crashing among boulders and mine slag lifts through the trees. There were fewer trees back then. The forest had been cut down for mine timbers. These trees have grown since the year her husband came back from Nelson to tell her he had joined the army.
She had turned her back on Sheep Creek then and had never returned, not until now, not until this son of hers had made her come back. She hadn’t wanted to, but he had begged and pleaded and when his entreaties fell upon her deaf ears he had demanded she go with him. He had said that only she could tell him where it began, only she could show him the way to this place, this spot in the mountains, this small piece of ground where a cabin once stood and where she had nursed him. And so she had finally agreed. She looks down at the worn flowers of a purple aster growing in a bit of sunlight. She remembers that it is named an aster because the flower looks like a star. She remembers many things she doesn’t want to remember.
The flowers stop her for a moment and she stares at the violet petals, then opens her purse and takes out the plastic box that holds her rolled cigarettes, puts one in her lips and lights it. She stands there smoking. Her son is somewhere over the edge of the bank, but she doesn’t go there to see what he is doing. She knows he’s down there somewhere rummaging around and she doesn’t care. She drags on her cigarette and pulls the last bit of smoke into her lungs, then drops the butt and stubs it out in the moss. She doesn’t want to be here. The day she left here she swore she’d never come back. Now she is here and it is as if she had never lived here. All the mine buildings are gone, hauled away by the company to another mine site above Kootenay Lake. The other buildings, the bunkhouses, shacks, and cabins collapsed under the heavy snows. The years have borne them away.
She looks at the forest. What light there is comes as glances, as fragments among the heavy boughs. As she looks through the mottled light she sees steps leading up the side of an old tree, one that was here even then. There are seven steps. She clutches her purse and pushes a wisp of gray hair away from her face. She remembers those steps. She remembers the day her husband built them into the tree. They led up to the clothesline stand. The seventh step was the platform she stood upon as she hung the shirts and pants, the dresses and underwear, the sheets and towels, and the countless thousands of diapers she washed by hand on the scrubbing board in the washtub. Summer and winter she stood on that seventh step and hauled the clothes out into the sun and the rain and the snow.
She walks slowly over to the old tree and tests the first step with her foot and finding it firm she slowly climbs one step at a time until she is on the platform. She plants herself there and stares out through the trees. By her shoulder hangs the iron wheel that once held the rope. She touches the rust. The wheel is frozen and no longer turns. She stands there on the gray boards and stares out at the washing line that isn’t there.
Her son hasn’t thought of her since he left her there by the well. He is frantic now. He is throwing chunks of bark and stones to his right and left as he burrows into the bank. He has found three more bottles and hundreds of rusted tin cans. He digs deeper in his excitement. He knows there is something down there, something that will tell him why he is here. Then he sees a dull glint of red and he clears away some cans and sticks and reaches into the till and picks up a toy car. The red paint has mostly moldered away, but there are still streaks in the crevices where the metal was bent and folded along the fenders and windows. There are two wooden wheels still attached to the rusting wire that is the back axle. He sits and cradles the toy in his hands. He remembers it. He holds it in one hand and with the other he turns the wheels. The creak of the axle is the faintest of whispers, a tiny scream in the forest.
He stands up. He must show his mother, he thinks. She will remember it too. She will tell him the story of the toy car. He looks up and he sees
his mother floating among the weave of branches, high above the ground. For a moment he thinks she has died and is now, at this moment, ascending toward some heaven only she knows. The toy is in his left hand and his right hand is shading his eyes. What he sees is his mother in the sky.
It was summer when I took her back. I remember how hard she argued against going. We sat up night after night drinking as I begged her to guide me back. Then she finally told me she would go. We bickered and argued all the way there, the truck climbing up the mountains to the high passes and then down again into the desolate, isolated valleys of southern British Columbia. She sat beside me and rolled her endless cigarettes, the tiny butts sticking from the corner of her mouth long after they had gone out. Whether she was cooking or ironing, sweeping floors or making beds, the corner of her mouth always held a dead butt gone brackish from her saliva and lipstick. All the years I had lived with her as a boy it had been like that. Nothing had changed.
She was very angry with me, but I didn’t care. I had wanted to make the journey for years, and for years she had refused. Now she was there in the truck and I wasn’t about to stop until we got to Sheep Creek. As we passed through Nelson and began the climb up to Salmo and the road that led even higher to Sheep Creek, she became quiet. Her hand gripped the door handle the whole way as she stared out through the side window. I thought at first she had turned away from me, but it was more than that. She didn’t want to see where she was going. The trees stuttering by her window must have seemed like an old film from the thirties. The only thing missing was the clatter of the projector and the white sheet stretched out against a wall where images bent and twisted around the folds of the cotton. Missing too were mothers shushing their children as Rhett turned to Scarlet and said his bitter words.