A long, long time ago the old man in the sky, name of Sun, fell in love with the woman named Ocean, and straightaway made love to her, and, for a time, that was fine. But in his gung-ho solar affection Sun kept staring, staring, staring at her lovely blue-green body before and after and during their lovemaking till she began to feel transparent, sunburnt, overexposed—and this was not so fine: Ocean, like a human, was made almost entirely of water, and so like a human she shied from such bald, brilliant adoration. But there wasn’t much she could do, so she tolerated his hot gaze. Then she bore him children—
and he beamed so brightly that they were blinded at birth! After the fifth child—all daughters, all blind—Ocean had had enough. She gathered her daughters around her. She changed them into clouds. She said to them, “Help me. Hide me from your father!”
The five daughters did their best. It even worked for a time—Ocean looking very like the planet Venus, swathed in a thick layer of cloud. Sun tried to brazen his way past the daughters, but all that heat and light only fattened them up. So he called on his brother, Wind, and Wind got mixed up in the affair by blowing the cloud-daughters inland. Ocean saw what Wind was doing and kept changing more daughters into cloud, but she couldn’t keep herself covered.
That’s when it became plain that she had made a big mistake. If she had been lovely naked, she was ravishing now, for now she was garbed in billowing cotton robes and thin veils of swirling mist, and at her dawn and sundown borders these garments flamed scarlet, auburn, pink; and all day long the robes and veils fluttered and slipped away from different parts of her body so that poor Sun would see a bare shoulder here, a naked breast there, a pale throat up here, a smooth thigh down there, so that now he was constantly aroused. And constantly gratified—for now he made love to her without ceasing, moving gently across her undulating body as the planet spun.…
Ocean got used to it. She realized in time that her daughters were no less beautiful for their blindness, and she came to see that Sun was a skillful and prolific, if tediously brilliant, lover. And she gratified her dark, restless side by keeping a little flirtation going with Moon on the sly. (Sun got wind of this, but didn’t mind, figuring what good looks old Moon had were borrowed from him.)
As for the five blind daughters (their names were Ice, Snow, Fog, Rain, and Dew), Wind did his job well: he blew Snow to the distant mountains, Ice to the highest, coldest places, Fog to the headlands, swamps, and river valleys, Rain to the ends of the earth, and little Dew right down into the dust itself. But the five daughters were simple-hearted, and they loved Ocean very much: their only desire was to do her bidding, and her bidding, as far as they knew, was to shield her from Sun. So as soon as they touched the earth they began trying to return to her. Being blind, they couldn’t tell north from south or east from west, but they could feel the difference between up and down. Knowing only that Ocean lay somewhere below them, they turned into water and began to grope their way downward.
Since they couldn’t see where they were going, they brushed against or crashed into just about every plant and creature on the face of the planet. The plants and creatures grew accustomed to them, and learned to stay away from the places where the daughters ran fast and strong; they became fond of their soft, yielding, almost apologetic touch—so fond that in time no plant or creature could live without that touch. But this meant nothing to the daughters: seeing nothing, they were distracted by nothing. They moved on downward with the relentlessness of their father, merging in the valleys and canyons, gaining power, speed, and surety, unwittingly benefiting every least plant and creature as they won their way back to the sea.…
I dipped a last cup from the spring, toasted the daughters, drained it dry, pocketed the cup for a keepsake, and started down the trail toward my cabin. Miles later, stopping to pee, I was still so taken with the Ocean tale that I peed directly into the Tamanawis, believing I was helping a little blind girl home.… It’s a good thing it started raining: I might have sat down and smoked up some mythologically auspicious ecologically atrocious deposit for my next attack of the runs.
It was a soft rain, descending in the same windless way a spirit-helper might descend. But it was a wet rain and a cold fall rain and I was hungry and tired and on foot fifty miles from home. Walking fast, I made it to the end of the deer and elk trail by dusk. The rain never increased, but never stopped; it was only a drizzle, but it clung to the brush till the brush soaked me through. I decided to try for the logging road before making camp, in hopes that some late-returning hunter or fisherman would offer me a lift.
When I reached the logging road I was stumbling, sopped, all played out. The night was black and the sky still leaking—in revenge, I figured now, against my pissing in the river. I gathered wood, thinking to build my fire right on the shoulder of the road so that any passing vehicle would be sure to stop. I pulled out the book of Diamond matches: the cardboard fell to pieces; the match-heads were mushed together, useless. Like many a sorry camper before me, I summed up the situation with a single shouted word: “Shit!”
I was shaking with cold and hunger; I couldn’t stick it out in the woods; I started walking to get warm and I realized before long that I would have to keep walking until a car came.…
No car came.
I made some discoveries that night. I discovered that in addition to the well-known “second wind,” there are third, fourth, and fifth winds—each a little punier and shorter-lived than the one preceding. Then—still hours before dawn—I discovered that last of all comes a windless wind that lasts till you drop. You experience this last wind more in your gut than in your body, heart, or lungs. You know it has arrived when you feel certain essential parts of your anatomy start to chew and ingest the less essential parts. You walk along, digesting yourself, no longer able even to pretend to understand or to enjoy or to desire or to seek anything whatsoever. You forget everything that ever happened to you. You come to believe that nothing but this interminable dark wet walking ever will happen to you. You cease to think, cease to feel, cease to exert, cease to do anything conscious at all. You just wash down the road on your two dumb feet like a dead leaf washing down a river.
You do this all night long. The darkness makes you stumble, and the night lasts far longer than any three nights you’ve known combined. You don’t care. You just keep doing it. You keep doing it as at last the sky turns a dull dead gray and no warmth comes with the day and the drizzle never stops and your boots weigh twenty pounds apiece and incomprehensible trees close dripping over the road and there isn’t an unaching unwet bone in your body and you feel the little campfire inside you that is your life start to sputter in the damp so that you have to walk with head and body bent to shield it from wind and rain. But you don’t care. You just wash down the road like a dead leaf washing down a river.
From somewhere along the road ahead you hear the morning cry of a lone wet raven. You think, “Raven is an Indian god.” But you don’t care. You spot the raven, perched high in a snag overhanging the road. You look at the raven. The raven looks at you. The rain falls on you. The rain falls on the raven. Then suddenly you are the raven, perched high on the snag, watching yourself trudge past below. You don’t care. You just keep going. One you watches the other you down there, forlorn, sopped, and laborious, slogging along a rutted mud strand, too stupid to grow wings and fly. You wait till the other you passes beneath, then you pluck a twig from your snag, hop into the air, flap over his head. You drop the twig, sing out “Cro-awk!,” and fly on. You look back over your shining black shoulder and see the twig just miss the other you’s ear. When he picks it out of the mud and puts it in his pocket you sing “Cro-awk!” again. This is your laugh. It is also your cry. If there is a difference, you don’t care.
You fly down the corridor the man-road makes through the trees as the other you grows small and gray in the drizzle behind. You fly swiftly, effortlessly on your untiring wings. In all directions you see an unending sea of gray-green hills, rag
s of mist twisting along their sides. The man-road and the river cut two pathways through the trees. You fly low down these pathways, weaving from one to the other, watching for food. Higher hills stand behind you. The ocean lies far ahead. It is raining.…
But just before you pass beyond the other you’s range of vision something in him wakes and panics, fearing that if you pass beyond his sight you will be separated and he will lose you. You are never lost, but he forgets this and feels afraid. And so he calls you back into himself. The raven flies on without you.
The raven is out of sight now. Your body feels heavy as stone. Your wings are hands now, stuck in your pockets. One wing holds an old tin cup, the other the twig the raven gave you. There is a water in your eyes that is not sweat or rain; you feel you must laugh, or else cry: if there’s a difference, you don’t care. An unending ocean of gray-green hills surrounds you, rags of mist twisting along their sides. The road cuts a path through trees. You wash down this path on your two faithful feet like water winding down a river. The sea lies far ahead. It is raining.…
If the raven keeps flying seaward it will soon be over the . It will look down and see the same curves you saw from Tamanawis Mountain—but now you know that the raven will see no word, no question, no order—because there is no need for word or question, because there is no disorder. The raven will see the as the river wrote it—as a simple, bending statement: the rivery intricacy from source to sea, the life and lives the water supports and contains, the infinity of facets it welds into one, all of this is not asked, but stated. Stated, as it is created, in a language so simple, so pure, so primordial, that it is not accessible to our inspection or understanding; not at the mind’s disposal, nor at the tongue’s. All that can be said of it in English is that it is… yet thanks to the raven you have glimpsed it. You have seen that the answer to the was the word itself: the Tamanawis was not questioning. It was sculpting and painting and humming seaward with all it touched and fed and carried and concealed, singing, “This—all of this—is .”
6
Googler and Mangler
But I will lay aside my Discourse of Rivers, and tell you some things of the Monsters, or Fish, call them what you will, that they breed and feed in them.…
—Izaak Walton
For three days it rained, almost without sound, almost without ceasing. It was the first good rain since the August showers, and the first rain I had ever watched and listened to without fishing: it was a rain that soothed and softened everything it touched as the river rose, taking back into its glassy Indian-summer eye the cat-eye greens it had lent to the leaves for a summer; it was a rain that hummed on the river pools and pattered on new puddles, washing the songbirds south, but bringing newcomers from the north—rain birds, water lovers—eared, horned, and western grebes with wild, scarlet eyes; varied thrushes, ruddy ducks, hooded and red-breasted mergansers; birds bearing the rufous sides or iron-red markings the autumn demanded of survivors. It was a rain that plucked the last leaves from the trees, turned stone gullies into streams, set the water ouzels singing; it brought long, undulating V’s of geese to the smoky sky, brought whistling swans to the dune ponds, brought juncos and chickadees to the tiny cones clustered high in the naked alders. It brought the last bluebacks, summer steelhead, and the first fall chinooks to the Tamanawis, yet while the rain fell I didn’t fish—only watched and rested, and I was lulled and cradled, caressed, and enveloped in a cool, mothering touch that washed away the wounds of the summer; and my old, unmitigated longings—even the longings for fish, for Eddy, for the Friend—were changed from gnawing, aching dissatisfactions into a kind of sad, silent music, and the hollow place those longings had carved in me became a kind of sanctuary, an emptiness I grew used to, grew satisfied to leave unfilled. Reckoning up these transformations, watching the rain that began the day I sat at the source, I realized I had been given a spirit-helper: I had been given this rain.
The sky cleared—perhaps in answer to the prayers of trick-or-treaters—on Halloween day. Hoping for visitors, I made a dozen caramel-coated apples and carved six jack-o-lanterns to brighten the black and crooked walk down the driveway to my cabin.
All evening I listened for footfalls, figuring at least Bernie and Kernie would come soap my windows or t.p. the trees. I waited and waited, but no one came. I tried to write a letter to Bill Bob but couldn’t make it go; tried to read, made me sleepy; tried to sleep, made me jumpy; tried to eat, wasn’t hungry. When I finally slumped on the couch I found myself staring up into the rafters at the poles and belly reel I’d made for Eddy, and the peace of the last few days spilled like milk and threatened to turn rancid. I had one unexplored alternative: the Halloween Party at Coke and Doughnut Dairy. I knew damned well that that was where the trick-or-treaters were: houses in Tamanawis County are too scattered for efficient trick-or-treating, and the older kids too randy to be trusted among the abandoned fodder-sheds and thickets, so parents let kids throw parties. When I’d gotten my invitation to this one I’d convinced myself I was too old for a kid party—but after several hours of fidgeting and fretting I realized that what was keeping me cabin-bound was a libidinous fantasy that Eddy would come trick-or-treating in her cut-off jeans and sky-blue t-shirt. I quit kidding myself, threw together a costume, and stormed out the door, kicking in the faces of the jack-o-lanterns as I tromped up the driveway.
When Kernie, Bernie, Charlene, Marlene, and Darlene join forces, they do it up big. (Ernie II won’t help: he hates parties.) For the Halloween fiasco they had scoured and decorated the haylofts in both their barns, called for a potluck/potlatch, invited a hundred and fifty souls, and postscripted each invitation with the warning that anyone lacking a contribution or costume would be “wrassled” by Kernie and Bernie. I brought the caramel apples, dressed as a wino, and refrained from explaining to the chaperones present that my clever slur was the result of the fifth of Cabernet I guzzled on the way over.
The dairy was a madhouse by the time I arrived. The distribution of people was approximately thus: Emma and a cluster of responsible moms and dads hung out on the front veranda, dispatching occasional deputations to maintain a PG rating in the barns, or to take flashlight-lit strolls past certain R-rated stalls and parked cars wherein furtive postpubescent ghouls and witches might be tempted to gather and breed; Ernie Senior and a couple of veiny-nosed pals stayed in by the Z-rated TV with a cribbage board and three cases of Burgie; almost everyone else crammed into the G-rated haylofts, which sported the apple dunks, spook houses, peanut races, arm wrestlings, costume contests, flirtations, spoonings, dirty jokes, guffawing, overeating, belching, and farting we associate with such gatherings. I paid my respects at the veranda, then annihilated Ernie in a quick game of cribbage—but I paid for my victory by contracting a sudden fit of Scrabble’s Disease, thanks to the Cabernet and to listening to Ernie contagiously counting out his “flifteen tool, firfteen flour, sixteen sick” hands; I then strolled through the seething barns, trying to shout Hi to kids I knew without spitting the pumpkin pie I was scarfing as a Scrabble’s Disease antidote into their faces. Unfortunately the pie sobered me up a bit and I was able to see that I was either ten years older or twenty years younger than most of the people present: in the barns I felt like a crow in a flock of starlings, on the veranda like a crow in a flock of domestic geese. I wandered into the stump-filled yard, feeling depressed and lonely and having a hell of a time staving off visions of the Broken-topped Alder… then I spotted Arjuna and Hemingway:
Midway between the two barns one of the biggest yard-stumps had been drenched with diesel and ignited for the occasion; Arjuna and Hemingway (without costumes, but armed with knives in case Bernie and Kernie tried to wrassle them) had dragged hay bales up by the flames, hunkered down with bags of popcorn and a jug of cider, and proceeded to exhibit—via a variety of leers, sneers, snorts, and gestures directed at passing guests—the most flagrant antisocietal sentiments. There, by the fiery stump, with the hard-bitten, world-weary five-year
-olds, I found my niche in the natural disorder.
I pulled up a bale, flopped down, glowered at the barns, the house, the sky, spat in the fire, and grumbled, “Evenin’.”
They grunted in unison and, with barely a glance at me, passed along the popcorn and cider. “Dumb party,” observed Hemingway.
“Stupid pigs,” added Arjuna, nodding toward a covey of acneed girls feeding by the barns.
Never having seen these two together, I’d wondered how they hit it off. Arjuna had spent his first four years on the streets of L.A., whereas Hemingway had been a farmin’ fumin’ fishin’ an’ huntin’ North Coast mossback from the day he could toddle and tote a BB gun. When I’d had my fill of popcorn I asked them how they met.…
They said it happened at lunchtime, on the first day of kindergarten, just over a month ago. Hemingway was a rookie in the school-going field, but Arjuna had been the terror of the Wilshire Boulevard Montessori School and had brought to Tamanawis County some very undairylike ways of looking at things. It seems he and Hemingway sat side by side at the lunch table, nodded wordlessly, and proceeded to ignore each other—till Hemingway reached in his brown bag and pulled out a greasy steak sandwich. Arjuna ogled it, then glowered, then gritted, “Meat-eater!”
Hemingway was taken aback: as far as he could see there had been no insult in the stranger’s words, yet the challenge in the voice was unmistakable. He frowned; he checked out the newcomer’s baggy white India-cotton clothes and long blond braid; then he sneered and growled, “Girl!” Here was a proper insult: nothing ambivalent about it.
The River Why Page 32