by Pam Houston
Driving the other sled, the one where Rick and Madison are riding, is a crazy-handsome, soft-spoken, and kind man named Matt, who works for Becky, and who is taking a lot of care teaching Madison the names of the dogs, letting her stand in front of him on the runners, giving her the feel of what it’s like to drive the sled.
Madison has the best intuitive sense of how to be around animals of any child I have ever known. I bought her this trip for Christmas, to encourage her toward her interest in animals and away from both her parents’ dream of being a singing star, for which she also shows a lot of talent. It’s none of my business, as I am finding out daily. When you are a stepparent nothing that really matters is any of your business, but when I look down the road of her future to the fork I prefer Joy Adamson to Janis Joplin, Dian Fossey to Britney Spears.
Now Becky is talking about the Age of Aquarius and Mercury, dropping down into alignment at last, and I am watching the ice crystals fall from the trees, and shifting my weight from rudder to rudder to stay in the middle of the narrow trail, and smiling back at the dogs who turn now and then to smile at me (How we doin’? How we doin’? they seem to say), and hearing the whisper of the runners in the new snow, and easing my weight onto the drag break for the steep downhills, and jumping off and trotting beside the sled on the uphills, and thinking if the Age of Aquarius has made it all the way to Gunnison, that’s the best evidence I’ve heard that it’s really real.
98. Davis, California
For my birthday, Quinn makes me a playlist with one song from each year I have been alive, and it starts with “The Wanderer” and ends with a Bright Eyes pre-release download called “Heavy Love” which, she says, gives me a head start on living at least another few months. We are listening to it and playing our third game of Cranium in which Rick is the best at factoids and Quinn is the best at solving word puzzles and Pony is the best at drawing with her eyes closed. I think we’re on 1983 (“Radio Free Europe”) now but every time somebody has to hum or spell backwards we turn it down and sometimes we forget to turn it back up.
Quinn also got me a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cake made out of peanut butter cookie dough ice cream, the flavor I didn’t know I had been waiting my whole life for them to invent, and the frosting is a blue sky with white puffy clouds. Pony made her famous brussels sprouts, and it’s hard to believe that they are precisely as good as a cookie dough ice cream cake, only in a different way, but it’s true.
According to one of her ex-girlfriends who went on to study something called the Michael teachings, Quinn is a seventh-cycle sage, which at least is some explanation for how she knows so much at thirty. We don’t really know who Michael is or was, but we do know he said that before taking a body each lifetime, every essence determines for itself, perhaps carefully, perhaps not, the culture, sex, personality, and body type in which it will be housed. “Essences generally try to set themselves up in the vicinity of their entitymates,” Quinn reports, and then we have to take turns saying entitymate a whole lot of times out loud.
It doesn’t matter how many times I say Come up and see me sometime! Rick cannot get Mae West, but then I save the day with my charades rendition of “gravity,” where I hold an imaginary golf tee in my hand and collapse repeatedly to the floor.
At the queer-cluster symposium this afternoon, all of the snacks were vegan. If there is a God, why would he waste all his time making hell?
Later, the Dean’s Office called to see if I was willing to become the chairman of the committee on committees. For some of us, faith has to be a chaotic, ungovernable thing.
At the faculty meeting Sadie said, “Well, we certainly don’t want to send the dean the message that we are the kind of department who cares if one of their writers wins a National Book Award!”
It’s like the way the expression on the Pakistani owner of the Davis Dairy Queen’s face when he turns the Peppermint Patty Blizzard upside down to impress us with its thickness makes it indisputably clear that back in Islamabad he was a neurosurgeon or something even more important than that.
In her latest email Sofree said, “Lest Rick forget, I am the manager of Madison’s life-rhythms.”
To paraphrase Quinn, paraphrasing Michael Jackson, some people are always throwing stones to hide their hands.
99. Waitomo, New Zealand
In the language of the Maori, Waitomo means water hole. In this North Island region the rivers flow underground in deep limestone caves, and I have come here to go blackwater rafting. The fog is thick and the air is chilly as we struggle into our wet suits, which, because at 9:30 a.m. this is already the third trip of the day, are as their name implies. There are twelve of us from seven countries and four continents, though we look almost identical in our black outfits and metal miner’s helmets, crammed in the minibus as it rattles toward the cave.
So far the guides haven’t told us much of anything and the guy next to me, Bryan, from Tasmania, who likes boats but can’t swim a stroke, is getting a little nervous. I hear him quietly tell the guide that he can’t swim and she says, too loudly, “That’s great, neither can I. We’ll stick together,” and I can’t tell if it’s true or if she’s kidding or if she thinks he’s kidding too.
We pile out of the van next to the river which is, at this moment, aboveground, and they tell us to choose an inner tube that fits us and then they teach us how to eel up. To eel up is to form a twelve-man chain, and we do it this first time sitting in the dirt parking lot, our inner tubes around our middles, our feet up under the next guy’s armpits, someone else’s feet under our own.
“You’ll have to eel up right after we jump off the waterfall,” the guide says, and Bryan shoots me a look and I shrug. Then they make us jump off a ten-foot platform into the deepest part of the river, to build our confidence, and Bryan has to take three runs at it, but when he bursts back up through the silvery surface, his grin stretches ear to ear.
We turn our helmet lights on and wade down to the place where one river channel enters Ruakuri Cave. At first the water is shallow, ankle, then knee deep, but as we get farther into the cave one stream joins another and we are forced to float through the passages, the cave floor rising up to touch our feet momentarily, and then disappearing under the black water again.
There are drops, slides, and whirlpools to negotiate, and in some places the ceiling comes right to the top of the water and we have to put our heads under and yank down on our tubes to make it through, trusting that the ceiling will rise again a few seconds later when we get to the other side.
In the echo of the cave the waterfall sounds gigantic—even from a long way off—and when we get there, our headlamps aren’t strong enough for us to see beyond it to the bottom.
“Jump way out,” the guide says, “there are big rocks below you,” and so we do, one at a time, far out into blackness, not knowing if we’ll hit the water after fifteen feet or fifty, the force of the jump plunging us through our inner tubes and underwater, almost impossible, in all that darkness, to tell whether we’ve come back to the surface or not.
“Okay, eel up, eel up!” the guide yells, and we do, just in time, before we reach the end of the plunge pool and the current, which is fast and strong now, sweeps us away. Under my armpits are the feet of Albi, a windsurfing instructor from Berlin; my feet are in the armpits of Haruki, on his honeymoon from Osaka. The walls of the cave move past in the glow of our headlamps and we bump along the sides like a giant caterpillar gone blind.
“Turn off your headlamps,” the guide shouts, and though this seems illogical no one hesitates because she hasn’t steered us wrong so far.
The cave goes dark and above our heads thousands of glowworms hang like constellations, tiny globes of light dangling on invisible strings of their own making. We are struck dumb by the sight; the only sound for many minutes is the water sloshing against the sides of the cave. The depth of the cave ceiling changes, from as little as six feet to as much as sixty, and when we pass under one of those tall ch
ambers it’s like we have turned in to face the center of the galaxy, the lights are so dense, so thick and deep.
100. Tabernash, Colorado
Through the snowflakes, the shape of a giant white pelican becomes apparent. We are at 10,000 feet, it is 21 degrees, and though we try to call it a snow goose, try to call it a trumpeter swan, even try, in the mind’s tireless attempt to make sense of non sequitur, to call it an albatross, nothing has a beak like a pelican, and when it lands on the little pond behind the Tabernash post office, dunks its head under the icy water and pulls up a fish, there is no more denying what it is.
In a few minutes I’ve got the whole story in my mind. Some developer in West Vail or Breckenridge, a big guy with a perpetually unlit cigar in his mouth building a condo-slash-single-family ski home extravaganza with a moat and a name like Xanadu, on the phone, saying, “Get me some of those giant white pelicans from Sumbawa . . . We’ll install little heaters for the winter months, bring in minnows by the truckload” . . . but this pelican, my pelican, during the requisite wing clipping, tucked his feathers tight tight to his body and retained just enough wing length to fly. Now he is bound for a happy reunion with his pelican brothers and sisters in the bright Indonesian sunshine, and would get there, too, if he hadn’t been foiled, as we all have been, by the can’t-make-its-mind-up weather, and now he will starve, shiver, his little webbed feet freezing to the surface of the Tabernash pond most likely that very night.
“Do you think I should call Fish and Game?” I ask Rick, and he says that kind of decision is usually my department.
The postmistress of Tabernash assures me that of course she knows there is a pelican out her window, that there are only 153 residents of Tabernash, who pick up their mail on average twice a week, and she has very little to do all day but stare out at the pelicans who come through with some regularity at this time of year up the flyway from some lake or another down south.
“But we’re so far from the ocean,” I say, and she looks me up and down and says, “I guess the pelican’s got that figured out.”
“See?” Rick says, when I get back in the car, by which I know he means, Things are often not as dire as you think they are, and Maybe there is more to our life together than baseball after all, and The story you tell yourself about how you are just a witness to my war with Sofree might have been true at the beginning but it is not true anymore because look, here we are in Tabernash, for instance, not to mention Scotland and Tunisia, and While it used to be you all the time talking me into this relationship, now it is the other way around, and I don’t mind, because it is probably my turn, but it would be really nice if you could at least try to hear me.
“You make some really good points,” I say into the silence, and he smiles at me like a man who has never had a bad day in his life.
101. Woody Creek, Colorado
Steak Fajitas Special Night with Art, Allison, and the kids. It’s been twelve years since the boulder fell from the wall of Glenwood Canyon, crushing the car Art was driving, killing his wife and two little boys, Tanner and Shea, and leaving him entirely untouched. Now his new boys, Rider and Burke, play their Game Boys at the table while Allison, their mother, asks Johnny how far along he is in his grief.
I have brought Johnny to meet Art and Allison shortly after the three-year anniversary of his wife Sue’s death. They were diving on the Ningaloo Reef north of Perth, a trip to celebrate ten years of marriage, when Sue reached for a shell and was bitten by a blue-ringed octopus which, though tiny, carries enough venom to kill twenty-six adult humans in minutes and there is no antivenom, even if you know right away.
Johnny looks better than he did this time last year, his eyes less shocky, his spine held slightly less erect. It took ten minutes of pleasantries for both men to start weeping, and now they are deep into all of it: Ram Dass and Joseph Campbell, Eckhart Tolle and the Dalai Lama, temenos and vision quests, sacred datura and peyote back in the seventies and the one question that won’t ever go away: Was this all part of some indecipherable plan?
Art and Allison got together after Art’s dead son Tanner came to Allison in a vision as she was backpacking in the Grand Canyon—on the Tanner Trail. He told her where the turns in the trail would be, what the approaching campsites would look like, and eventually, where she’d accidentally dropped her car keys at the trailhead several days before. Then he asked her to go back to Aspen and tell his dad that he and his brother and mother were doing all right. He told Allison his favorite toys, the number of his hockey jersey, the color of his favorite fleece—yellow—so that when she told Art he had come to her in a vision, Art would not doubt it was true.
Now, Allison turns to Rider, her soul child, a kid who is surrounded by ghosts every evening and can talk to them, not only the ones that belong to his family, but countless others, who, according to Allison, recognize him as a portal, a chance to get through.
“Rider, honey,” she says, “put the Game Boy down for a minute,” and he does.
“Johnny’s wife died in the ocean, honey,” she says. “Can you take a moment and see if she’s got anything to say to him; can you maybe tell him if she’s okay?” Rider sighs a little sigh and closes his eyes to try to see Sue. He is ten years old, a left winger on the Aspen Leaf’s hockey team and he is a bit tired of this gift the Universe has bestowed upon him.
“Mom,” he says, “I think you are going to have to ask God those questions.” He pauses for a minute like there might be more. “But she did come to my room last night. She has a thin face and glasses, right? And brown hair that she keeps in a ponytail most of the time. She seemed okay to me.”
Rider shrugs, picks up his Game Boy, and turns back to his brother. The look on Johnny’s face confirms that his description is right on and I can’t tell which I love more, Rider’s gift or his boundaries. Around us the Woody Creek Tavern sighs contentedly, like an old dog returned to the porch after a long day hunting, and the ghost of Hunter Thompson, who is surely somewhere here among us, orders one more drink at the bar.
102. Freestone, California
Cinder and I go to a Zen spa in west Sonoma County to get what is called a Cedar Enzyme bath. We change into our robes and sit on meditation pillows and look out the floor-to-ceiling windows at a man-made waterfall tumbling down rounded rocks beside a little slate pathway, the whole scene looking suspiciously like a life-size version of one of those Rolling Rock beer signs in bars where the water pretends to move.
After a while a young woman with badly shaking hands pours us some enzyme tea, and then we are shown to the baths themselves, which are really more like horse stalls, if you cut the walls off a horse stall about three feet up. Picture side-by-side cut-off horse stalls, piled high with steaming cedar shavings. The shavings, the woman tells us, have not been heated using any outside source. They were mixed with the enzymes twenty-four hours ago, and have generated this heat entirely on their own, like compost.
She takes our robes and we climb naked, awkwardly, over the walls and into our individual horse stalls. The heat is overwhelming. She buries us, one at a time, in the steaming shavings, leaving our heads exposed. It is impossible not to think of childhood, all the years I spent cleaning stalls in exchange for getting to take a three-year-old thoroughbred fast over a set of jump standards, or slowly along an oak-lined path.
After about three minutes of sweating, I say to Cinder, “This is like being buried in horseshit.” After twenty minutes, after I’ve pulled first one arm, then the other, then both legs out of the shavings to get some relief from the heat, and I look like a stinkbug rolled up onto its back, I say, “No, no, that’s not right. We are the horseshit.”
“Anything is possible,” Cinder says, “and I mean that in the very best way.”
103. Saguache, Colorado
Slept very well pulled over in a pig farmer’s field. The heater kept the car toasty all night even though now, an hour after sunrise, on the far side of Saguache, it is still 19 below.
&n
bsp; The darkest hour may be just before the dawn, but the coldest one is right after it, at least up here. It’s like the night holds on to every scrap of heat it can until sunrise and only then lets go, the thermometer dropping a handful of degrees before it starts to rise again—a kindness the night pays all the cold and hungry cows and horses, elk and coyote who are probably starting to wonder if this winter is ever going to end.
I slept in the back of the 4Runner, no wolfhound to cuddle up with but plenty of other stuff including two cardboard boxes of books, a 64-quart stainless steel Coleman cooler, the largest rolling suitcase that can fit in the overhead bin, and two weeks’ worth of groceries.
The pig farmer woke me at dawn, checking to see if I was dead in there. The sky was all pink over Great Sand Dunes National Park and the Sangre de Cristo. I heard the farmer’s tires on the snow and popped up among the boxes and clothes I had pulled over me for warmth. He jumped out of his truck in his insulated coveralls just as I lowered my window.
I was immeasurably cheered up by the conversation under our conversation, that he wasn’t there to rape me, that I wasn’t there to rob him. I said I’d be heading down the road now that it was daylight and he said, No, you go on and rest as long as you want.
The main reason I slept in the pig farmer’s field is that I was really tired. Also, I didn’t want to have to carry the heavy cooler in by myself when it was 25 below, which it would have been had I arrived home at 2 a.m., and I didn’t want to have to empty it, one bag at a time while my earlobes froze. Not to mention everything else in my car—toiletries, laptop, camera—that would have been frozen solid by morning. There would have been no thought of Rick getting up to help me unload the car, because he is still trying to make up for all the sleep he lost those years when his soul was shattered.