Or Not

by Brian Mandabach

  Dad is very proud of doing all the building himself—with light help from Mom, since she wasn’t too eager to smash her fingers with a hammer—and he likes to scoff at people who say they are “building” houses. He offers to put on the old tool belt and help them with the framing until they acknowledge that they’re actually having a house built.

  Back to our little home away, the cabin started out as one room with a loft. To make space for kids, they added an extra bedroom leaning against the west side, and eventually partitioned the loft, giving Sean and me some privacy.

  The only other improvements have been a solar-cell/battery system for electricity and a composting toilet in the old outhouse. I prefer my tipi, but on a rainy day or a snowy night, it can be cozy to get a fire going (more carbon—I know I’m a hypocrite) and curl up on the old couch. In addition to shelves and shelves of books at home, we have a well-stocked bookcase at the cabin: kids’ books, paperbacks, field guides, natural history—

  “Hallooooooooo!” calls Dad. Time to go.

  Ahhh! This makes all the difference. I’m up in the cabin loft in the quiet world of the mountains—not silence, exactly, but machine-free quiet where I can hear only the songs of insects and wind blowing in the window.

  The cabin sits on a gravelly slope above the creek where Sean and I learned to fish—pulling little brook trout out of the pools beneath splashing falls—and it faces south where the creek flows from spruce and fir woods in a narrowing valley that rises up to a shoulder of the Peak. The cabin is at ten thousand feet. A thousand feet higher, the trees grow sparse among huge, lichen-covered boulders and then give way to the alpine tundra. A western spur of the Peak dominates the valley with its rocky cone that we call the Goat-horn.

  Dad comes in from his bedtime trip to the outhouse. “I’m turning in,” he says, craning up so he can see me, lying on the bed, scribbling away. “Are you going to keep that up all night?”

  “No, I think I’ll actually sleep.”

  “You don’t need the white noise of machinery to lull you?”

  “Au contraire, mon père.”

  “What about your silly records?”

  “Good night, Dad.”

  For some reason, as he put out the light downstairs, sleepiness fled from me. After a few minutes, Dad was already snoring, so I decided to go for a walk.

  I pulled a sweater over my T-shirt, stepped down the ladder, and grabbed Dad’s blackthorn walking stick. On the doorstep under the stars, I laced up my boots, and then I set them to the East Meadow trail.

  I like this trail at night because it’s so open, and I am afraid of mountain lions. Under the trees, I can’t shake the feeling that a catamount is going to drop on me from above, and I get so freaked out that I see one crouched in the crotch of every shadowy limb.

  I also carry a stick, because I’ll fight like a wildcat myself, if I have to. And, because I’d rather warn them away with my boldness than startle them, I sing when I walk alone. Also because I like to sing.

  Railway line to the top of the world—

  Why you got to go so high?

  Might step out now, my sweet girl,

  Off’n the edge of the sky . . .

  At the top of the meadows, before the trail winds into the trees and rocks and disappears into threading deer trails, sits a wide, flat-topped slab of granite. It’s as liony a place as any in the meadows, and as I approached I sang louder.

  Freight train clattering through the night,

  Timbers on the bridges sway,

  Carry me right on through my fright

  And on in over the day . . .

  We call this place the Carrock—the rock in The Hobbit where the Eagles of the Misty Mountains deposited Bilbo, Gandalf, and the dwarves. The broad surface still held some warmth from today’s sun, and I stretched myself out, stunned by the masses of stars above.

  The first time I came up here alone at night was in the summer after fifth grade. I’d crept out of the cabin like I did tonight, enthralled by the brilliant stars—not washed out by the false twilight of the city—and at once thrilled and terrified by being out alone. When I got to the Carrock, my heart raced from the altitude and the hike, and my blood pounded at my throat.

  But as I lay on the bumpy rock under the stars, catching my breath, I relaxed and remembered sky-watching on my balcony with Jenny. It was so much better here where the stars were bright, and so much better alone. Alone, I didn’t have to feel separate. And in the mountains under the sky, being different felt good.

  Still, there had been something missing that night: a true friend to share the solitude. So I thought again of Jenny. I’d been angry when she asked her mom about infinity, but contemplating it under the stars, alone, my anger seemed silly, and I was glad she wasn’t there. She didn’t understand, I thought, and maybe she wasn’t as grown up as I was. Maybe she never would understand.

  Remembering all this tonight, I felt embarrassed by eleven-year-old Cassie, but I’d been right. Jenny will never grow up. She’ll always ask her mother, her father, the other kids, her pastor, her husband …

  And whom do I ask? On the Carrock, illuminated by the stars, whom do I ask?

  No one.

  I watch and I listen, but I don’t need to ask anyone how to be. Even when I’m feeling all wrong, the way I am is right.

  That night two years ago—just two years ago—I wondered why Jenny, if she was so religious, didn’t ask God, instead of her mother. That’s what she told me, that she had this personal relationship with Jesus. Why not ask Him about infinity?

  So I thought I’d ask. But not Him. I gave the question to the sky, the stars, the planets, and to the bowl of the valley, empty but full of plants, rocks, openness, distance, space. And the bowl of the land felt suddenly alive and pulsing—each rock, each insect, each bunch of grass perfectly placed, held taught in an invisible electric web. The rock below me vibrated without moving, and the stars went fuzzy, clear, fuzzy, clear—and I felt an answer.

  So I suppose I do ask someone, some thing: the land, or the presence I feel strongest in the land, always here, but hard to discover and harder to describe. I have tried to get it back—the awareness that I felt that night—and sometimes it comes, usually by surprise, and never so strong as that first time.

  I tried to call it up tonight. I let my eyes go fuzzy on the stars, and I knew it was there, but it didn’t come to me. At least the memory was strong tonight and real. Sometimes it seems faded by time, lost in empty words I have attached to help me remember it. But tonight it was beyond the words, and yet the words were a counterpart to the experience, like a slight breeze turning aspen leaves on their supple stems.

  31 August

  When I got back last night, Dad was no longer snoring.

  “Go to sleep,” he said.

  “Sorry to wake you.”

  “Go to sleep.”

  But I had to write for a while, of course, before sleep could take me away. And I slept good and late.

  I was breakfasting on a bowl of cereal and soymilk when Dad came in from fishing.

  “‘She goes out walking, after midnight,’” he sang, pumping some water in the sink.

  “What?”

  “What?”

  “Stop it.”

  “Stop it.”

  “Stop mocking me, please.”

  He scrubbed his hands. “Fish slime,” he said. Then, “I have a sixth sense about my shillelagh.”

  “Oh.”

  “How was the Carrock?”

  “You followed me?”

  “Well, when you didn’t come back I got worried.”

  “I thought the sunset provision didn’t apply up here.”

  He sat down at the table, across from me. It isn’t so cool having a lawyer for a father sometimes. E
ven though he plays defense professionally, when his kid is involved, he works for the prosecution.

  “There is no provision of the sunset law,” he declared, “that nullifies it in this environment.”

  “Why didn’t you make me come in?”

  “I didn’t want to interrupt your reverie.” He smiled. “But … I don’t like you sneaking out.”

  “Oh, Cassie’s a sneak. Yess, preciousss. Cassie’s a ssneak, Gollum.”

  “Why did you go out without telling me?”

  “Gollum doesn’t know, Sméagol doesn’t know. She’s a ssneak.”

  “All right, that’s enough, Sméagol.”

  Now he was on the bench in his judge’s robe. “I know you need time alone, so you can go out as long as you walk loudly and carry a big stick. I don’t want you entering the food chain just yet. And don’t climb any rocks bigger than, or go any farther than, the Carrock.”

  I couldn’t believe my luck. Maybe it was the Gollum routine, but then again, I didn’t want to push it, so I stifled the impulse to grovel and cringe and say, “Yes, preciouss, we’ll be good! Nice Sméagol never sneaks up nassty, cruel rockses.”

  “Also,” he went on, “I want you to tell me where you’re going and when you’ll be back.”

  “If you’re in the snore-zone, can I leave a note?”

  He gave me a look with his light eyes, blue with tiny pupils contracted from the sunny windows. “Yes,” he said. “But bring your watch and don’t get so lost in reverie that I have to come out looking for you.”

  “It’s a contract.” I reached over, and we shook on it.

  After that, Dad worked, and I went out to my tipi. I tied the sides up a little bit, so the breeze could come through, and set up my cot with my thick foam pad and blanket—just try putting a pea in there, just try it.

  The tipi became more objet d’art than tent when Ally and I painted it last June. I’d had illusions of painting a mural over the whole thing when I first got it, but I became disillusioned about halfway through when I realized how awful it looked. So I covered it with white and tried to forget about it.

  In the beginning of the summer, when Sean brought Ally back from college, she loved the tipi. She helped me set it up and then surveyed the damage I had done. I explained.

  “It was not a perfect creation,” Ally said, “so you obliterated it?”

  “I didn’t want it to be perfect, just good.”

  “If you don’t care about creating a masterpiece, then why don’t you cover it with patterns and symbols. Peace signs, yin-yang, hearts, smiley faces, flowers.”

  At this point my jury was still out on the girl. I watched her gazing at the tipi, her long brown hair in braids, wearing an Indian print skirt and one of Sean’s white V-necks, no bra. Serious church of latter day hippie.

  “Trouble is,” I said, trying to be clever and biting, “smiley faces might nauseate me more than what I did before. I’m not trying to create a set for ‘That ’70s Show’—”

  “You’re right,” she laughed. “What about Indian stuff, Native American, very flat shapes—you can’t mess them up. I see thunderbirds, lightning bolts, brother salmon—”

  “Cliché.”

  She laughed again, sort of a, “You’re right, I’m silly,” but not in a fake, annoying way. She really thought it was funny. And maybe she was impressed that I wasn’t.

  “I was thinking of easy stuff you could do yourself, but if you’d let me help you—I mean, I’ve got nothing better to do for the coming week except tag along with the fisher of fish here—”

  “Ally is an artist, Cass,” Sean said. “You should take advantage of her talents.”

  A very accomplished lady, I thought. A master of all the hippie arts: rolling of the marijuana cigarette, painting of the smiley face, Phish music on the pianoforte . . .

  “Okay, well here’s my concept,” she said, “take it or leave it: no symbols, just an abstract of land and sky. Colors and shapes—some in contrast, some blending into one another, beginning with earth browns at the bottom, changing to red to green to blue, with a sudden sun at the top of the cone, possibly rays shooting down into the rest.”

  I had to admit, to myself, that it sounded kind of cool.

  “It wouldn’t stand out too much?” I worried. “All that red and orange?”

  “Just a little of those—and we’ll mix the colors of the landscape.”

  She struck a professorial pose. “The piece will enhance the environment, reflect its beauty without attempting to upstage it.” She broke her pose and pointed to the Goat-horn, still wearing its snowy cap, shining against the blue. “How can you compete with that, anyway?”

  And right about then I started to like her a little, though I didn’t let on.

  “Won’t this masterpiece take some time?”

  “It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece, it just has to look good, right? And we can do it in under a week. Come on,” she said. “Let’s see if those paints you started with are still any good. What did you use?”

  “Liquitex?”

  “Perfect.”

  So while Sean went out on his first few guiding jobs of the season or fished by himself, we painted. We had to start early in the morning because it rained most afternoons. We got some giant sheets of plastic and wrapped the whole thing when the clouds came. Then I slept in my plastic-wrapped art object while they stayed in the cabin.

  I’ll tell more about Ally later—writing about her gets me alternately energized and depressed. Though I resented her at first, we ended up very close. Just in time for her to go back to college with Sean, a thousand miles away. So I’m alone again, substituting a diary for a friend. I think it helps me feel that she isn’t so far away after all, as if this book is a long letter to her.

  When the shadows were long, I went down to the beaver ponds with Dad. I sat under the fir trees above the pond, tired after eating, and watched him sneak up under the dam. He waded in the creek below, played out some line as he waved his rod back and forth, and laid it out flat on the surface.

  Splash! A fish hit his fly, and he raised his rod, which bent under the strain and zigzagged back and forth as the frenzied trout fought its unseen enemy. Dad brought it to the top of the dam where it splashed as he reached in, freed it from the barb-less hook, and released it without pulling it from the water.

  His next fish took the fly and ran for the far side, then straight back at him as he furiously stripped the line in by hand. He netted this trout, and had some trouble removing the hook, holding the fish out of the water and talking to it as he worked the hook free. Then it flipped out of his hand, and he continued talking to the surface of the water where the trout held still below the surface before flashing away into the unseen world.

  Watching Dad talk to the trout, I remembered the huge drought we had when I was six. Big fires burned all over the West, and a massive one started about twenty miles northwest of the cabin. From the city, it looked like rain clouds were building up in the northwest. The whole sky turned yellow with smoke and stayed that way for almost two weeks. We couldn’t have windows open for the filthy air and had to stay inside in the heat. It only rained once during that time—a brief but intense storm from clouds seeded by ash and smoke. There was a thrashing wind and rain, then hail stripped the garden, piled up on the ground, and lay melting amid a scent like water poured on a campfire. That was the worst of it, I think, the one thing that made it seem like doomsday: rain that smelled like fire.

  Just after the fire started, Dad took Sean and me to the cabin to clear a firebreak, and before we went home he insisted on fishing. We followed our little stream—running at less than half its normal flow, down to where Two Mile Creek added its pathetic trickle, summing to a stream that would support fish—barely. The peaks that watered our valley with snowmelt had long g
one dry, and all along the bank, usually lush and boggy, only a few blades of green grass poked through last year’s dry growth.

  Sean went off downstream, while I sat watching my dad, smelling smoke on the air and feeling that everything was dry and dying. When he got a fish on the line, he called me over. I waded in next to him, cool water on my feet and ankles, as he pulled out a brook trout as long as his hand.

  “Hey, little trout, you go talk to the rain clouds, will you?” He lowered the fish into the stream and it darted to the shadows under the bank. “We need rain, little brother—you need it, we need it—the land is thirsty. So go swim upstream and bring us some rain.”

  He did this with every catch, not many with how low the water was. And before we left, he poured out the rest of our water bottle, wetting the lichen on the rocks and splashing some into the creek.

  I’d seen him do these things before, talking to fish and sharing water with lichen and pouring off the top of his beer in an offering. It’s strange because he’s not religious, and doesn’t—except for these rituals—seem interested in the mystical side of nature. Geology is his science, along with ecology, so when he claims that the rock is alive, he means that it changes and rearranges itself in its own cycle. He doesn’t mean that the rock has soul.

  Or does he? And do I? I don’t know, Di, I don’t know. And what is spirit or soul, and who cares? I don’t know, Di, I don’t know. Sylvia Plath talks about the incandescence of things, “sudden tricks of radiance” and sometimes they do shine. But sometimes they are dull and dead. And if it’s just me that makes them dull and dead because I can’t see their light, is it also me that makes them shine?

  Oh, yeah. Asking those tough questions.

  1 September

  We took the car down to the big river today, and Dad’s wading down the canyon to the deep holes where the wise, old trout live. I’m perched on a rock jutting into the stream. Though I was going to, I don’t feel much like hiking. I can’t put it out of my mind that we’re going home tomorrow. There will be Mom’s concert in the afternoon and then, on Tuesday, back to school.