EXALTED BY THE WIND
The Slidre River, Ellesmere Island, Nortwest Territories, Canada (1988)
The Slidre River, Ellesmere Island, Nortwest Territories, Canada (1988)
The Slidre River, Ellesmere Island, Nortwest Territories, Canada (1988)
The Slidre River, Ellesmere Island, Nortwest Territories, Canada (1988)
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The Slidre River, Ellesmere Island,
Nortwest Territories, Canada (1988)
Up the snow-choked gorges went tracks of musk-oxen as of foot-dragging skiers. I felt trapped and gloomy. The wind had not come yet. At eleven in the morning the world was blue and white and perfect with hard-snowed clarity—the reification of some extreme ideal. The whole island, vast and by temperate standards almost lifeless, was in effect its own planet, low, blue, white, and brown, the horizon often no more than knee-high, so that heaven was all around. A realm of the Platonic Forms might be thus. I seemed to see nothing but solidified space without a predicate. It was a blank page of all possibilities, not excluding loveliness and terror. Absolute potentiality was a very wearisome thing to any imperfect being (such as myself) which crawled across the gravel flats. By now my companion and I had come a considerable distance from the coast. The Arctic Ocean having vanished from sight, we were left with only a cold and ugly river to follow. Muddy canyons grooved the land with dreariness. But a new force, no less inhuman, was entering the realm. I could feel it and did not know whether to fear it. My companion said nothing.
By eleven-thirty mist had covered the sky, except for a blue-gray line at the horizon. Lenticular clouds rushed at right angles to the ridges.
There was a white plateau (although it was not really a plateau; it was a river-edged valley, but because there was snow on it I could not see any difference between floor and wall anymore), and above the plateau was a thin blue smudge of sky, and above the sky was a white plateau of cloud with its own humps and mounds and appendages; there was nothing else.
A breeze began to deaden my fingers inside the mitts.
How are your gloves holding up? I asked my friend.
Not bad, really. — He was stretching out socks over the gas stove. — There's a couple of dry spots here, he said.
The wind increased.
My friend got into his sleeping bag, unzipped the vestibule door and lit a cigarette. — Kind of a much different day from when we got up, he said. Looks like it must be melting out there. Or it may just be the way the light changed.
An hour later, when the wind began in earnest, the shriekings of it precluded sleep. The tent-poles bent, quivered and lashed, and the tent bulged concave and convex, while snow blew up from the ground and worked itself into shifting patterns of continents between tent and fly, constantly changing and scattering like the harvest of a kaleidoscope. Ice from condensation rattled down on our sleeping bags. Somewhere in the storm could be heard the loud and regular cries of a seagull.
Suddenly I knew that there was something for me in the wind but I did not have the courage to take it. Thus the wind was but the increase of my despair. My heart stumbled into the deep wide ditches of tundra polygons treacherously covered by snow.
The Slidre River, Ellesmere Island,
Nortwest Territories, Canada (1988)
In the end I did sleep, and I dreamed. When I awoke, my companion was still sleeping uneasily. Everything was quiet. I unzipped the tent flap. Outside, the country was magically white and clean. The land had been scoured down to brownness in great long tracks across the valley; elsewhere the snow was neatly raked into drifts, mound after mound of them, and the river stones were black and white. A fierce white light hung above the ridges.
The Slidre River, Ellesmere Island,
Nortwest Territories, Canada (1988)
I'd dreamed that I walked up a round ridge-mound into a cloud, and the wind got stronger and stronger and threw sleet in my face so that I grinned and ducked my head and climbed so happily; then the wind threw sharp ice-crystals into my face and pushed me; and I staggered but outspread my arms like flapping wings, joking with the wind. Gaining the summit, a wide upturned bowl of snowdrifts and tan pebbles, I turned myself around so that I was looking back the way I had come, with the wind at my back; the wind became mine. I felt the steady eager thrumming of it between my shoulderblades, pressing at my back and legs with unerring force.
Below me, corkscrew trails of snow whirled across the plain and fogged the ridges. They blew across the land like parallel wave-crests. The fjord also flowed in that direction; the wind was pushing it, wind-ripples greenish-grayish-gold.
I raised my arms to my shoulders, and opened them wide. I laughed as the wind lifted me under the armpits and bore me up into the blue sky, where the clouds floated like drifts of ice. I flew far.
I came to a place where the ice was gray but gold-bordered. It seemed to glow from beneath. On the white snow-beach I saw the black silhouette of a woman, with white fur-ruff around her face.
The Slidre River, Ellesmere Island,
Nortwest Territories, Canada (1988)
The snow was raked into parallel ridges half a foot high. Ridges ran also between the black rocks that protruded from the snow-covered river, so that they seemed to be lined up in rows. The scene expressed above all an unearthly precision. Once again golden plant-stalks rose above the snow; the faraway ridges were blue, and all was calm.
The wind began to keen, and I closed my eyes again. In my sleep the wind caught me and carried me to the woman with the fur-bordered face. She kissed me. Then I heard my friend unzip his sleeping bag and open the outer door; I heard the match strike and smelled the sulphur of it; I smelled the cigarette smoke. Opening his eyes, I saw the smoke mingling with the steam of my own breath. It was another cold and dreary day. Yet somehow it did not seem dreary anymore.
In the afternoon the sun came out, but the snow and wind kept on for a long time. Finally the snow stopped and I lay in the tent watching the fly flap away from the tentwall in the gusts so that the wall became sublimely white and perfect for a moment before the fly's writhing shadow lashed it; all day I watched the sun-play and felt that I needed no more.
Later my companion and I came to a mound of frozen sand and stones like the one in my dream, and as we started to climb it the wind swooped to chill our faces numb and white. And yet we both were laughing, too. By the time we reached the summit of that upturned bowl the wind was almost strong enough to carry us away. I wanted to be carried away. I said to the wind: Please carry me away. — Then my companion rushed past me. Before he disappeared in a lenticular cloud, I saw that his eyes were closed and he was smiling tenderly and his arms were outstretched as if he were about to embrace someone.
THAT'S NICE
Split, Dalmatia, Republika Hrvatska [Croatia] (1994)
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Split, Dalmatia, Republika Hrvatska
[Croatia] (1994)
Now I want to know who will pay for the car, said the rental agency man. I have been to the bridge to get the car and it was very dangerous with all those bombs.
That's nice, I said.
In America you could not leave the country before you paid for this type of damage, he said.
I don't like to be threatened, I said. If you threaten me I won't help.
He sat there in my hotel room and stared at me while I sat on my bed looking back at him on that Sunday morning.
Why did you go there? he said. You must tell me why you drove that dangerous bridge.
Why don't you ask Mr. A., I said politely. He was driving.
He's dead, the man said. (I could see that he had no sense of humor.)
Well, then, why don't you ask Mr. B.
But he is also dead.
I guess you're out of luck then, I said.
We stared at each other some more, hating each other more every minute, and the church bells tolled outside, and then he got out an album of color photographs which portrayed the car from every angle.
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As you see, it is completely damaged, he said. Destroyed.
Which photo is your favorite? I said. Why don't you give me your favorite one and I'll take it to my agency.
At first he wouldn't do it. He hated to part with any of the glossies in that collection so pure and complete, but at last he selected a good one that showed how the driver's side had been smashed and twisted and riddled.
That's nice, I said. That's very artistic. Here. I'll show you a couple of nice pictures, too.
I got up and went to the other bed and took the envelope of contact prints.
This is Mr. B. after I pulled him out of the car, I said. Isn't that nice? He was my friend for nineteen years. And this one here is Mr. A. Here they both are in the front just before I pulled them out.
Mr. A. was driving? the rental man asked.
That's right. See how the first burst got him right in the head? I'll be happy to make a copy for your collection.
He looked away. — So you will stay here in Split?
No, tomorrow I'll go back to Mostar, I said. It's so nice there.
Why? Why do you go back to that dangerous place? — That was what I expected him to say because that was what everybody else said, but he did not say it. He was not so interested in future whys because he was first and foremost a rental man.
When do you come back? he said. I'll be waiting for you.
Tuesday night. That's when Mr. B.'s family is arriving for the funeral—
So they will be in this hotel? he said, eyes lighting up for the first time. What room number?
I want you to understand something, I began.
I already understand everything, he said. But who will pay for the car? Ten thousand six seven hundred dollars! Who will pay for that? I ask you, who will pay?
No, you don't understand everything, I told him. What you don't understand is that if you bother Mr. B.'s family with this matter in any way I will not help you anymore. His mother is old and has a bad heart.
Then who will pay?
I did not sign the rental agreement, I said. Legally I have no responsibility. Morally I do, so I will try to—
You are also responsible, he interrupted. You also chose to go there. I have rented to journalists before. I know how you are (this last he said with stunning contempt).
I promise you, if you disturb Mr. B.'s family in any way you will receive no help from me, I said. I will not be happy. Right now I am very happy because I enjoy talking to you so much. If you bother anyone but me I will be quite unhappy. Then maybe I will not be very nice.
You were very lucky, he said. So you must pay.
We understand each other there, I said. What you say is very true and relevant to all walks of life. Thank you for imparting your philosophy to me.
His cellular phone rang just then, so he had to go off to Sunday dinner with his family. He was eager to go now because the food would soon be getting cold. Before, his business with me had been quite urgent. I offered to buy him a drink and show him still more photographs of my friends' mutilated bodies, but he would not stay. So I sat alone on the bed, looking at the damage estimate, which was typed in a language I could not read, and I was unable either to laugh or to cry.
FATHERS AND CROWS
Joshua Tree National Monument, California, U.S.A. (1988)
Charlevoix, Québec, Canada (1990)
Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario, Canada (1990)
Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario, Canada (1990)
Mission-Sainte-Marie, Midland, Ontario, Canada (1648)
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Joshua Tree National Monument,
California, U.S.A. (1988)
Peter returned to the mount called Olivet whenever he could, at first because he sought yet for signs of Him Whom he worshipped, but once he'd taken upon himself the first black mantle of priesthood, once he had founded his church, his craving for JESUS lost its ache and became instead a wholesome nostalgia: — This place, he said to himself, is where I became what I am. — And he meant this not out of any sinful pride, for he fully expected to die for the LORD as JESUS had done (and we know that in this he was to be gratified). So Peter walked the path of hardpacked quartz pebbles; his robe caught and tore on the gray bushes; he ascended the way his FRIEND had gone and looked up at Heaven until his face was sunburned; he sat on the spot where the two Angels had appeared, and there he rested all day, smiling with his head in his hands. In the evenings that cut like blue and ancient knives, birds pelted the sky in droves, sounding their different notes, and the Joshua trees seemed to stretch upward as their shadows lengthened; His shadow must have become impossibly, mournfully elongated as He had risen (but the silhouette of His face would have remained as it was, a face of ordinary proportions, bowed upon a great pillar of cooling shadow)—and the Joshua trees whose arms invoked all directions like the crooked legs of spiders began to tremble in the wind, and the ridges to the west turned purple with black tree-dots, while the ridges to the east, receiving the last of the sun's low-slanting rays, glowed hot and pink above the darkness.
For the sake of this same sentimental archeology, Peter occasionally returned to Golgotha, ignoring the cries of the more lately crucified because they were not the ONE; so paying them witness could only erode his recollections of that Crucifixion which he was bound to consider final. — Water, water! moaned a man on a cross. — Oh, what a cursed place this was! — But Peter's occupation must now be to overcome such impressions. Kneeling with clasped hands, he lowered his head and began to search for beauty in the ridges below him, whose tan boulders were ridden with cracks so that they seemed to be stacks of half-melted bricks from some old time, and channels and canyons of the same rough rock ran between them, all edges sandblasted smooth, but their stone-flesh was grainy with sharp quartz crystals that could scrape hands to bleeding. Yucca plants grew in fractures or little beds of sand; their shadows were very sharp. Sometimes a sandbed led between two slanting boulders that gave like a gateway onto some plain or plateau bounded by ridges of again the same rock; those places were gray with brush. Immense squawbushes shone iron-gray like tumbleweeds forged in some smithy; they bore no red berries to refresh the Savages; they bore nothing but grayness; the only green things were piñon pines or the straight shaggy trunk-posts of Joshua trees, in whose green brushes crows sat. In sunny places the heat was burning; in the shade it was cold. — Peter could see nothing beautiful there. — Sighing, he proceeded up the Road of Tears, which wound monotonously upward, not steeply but steadily, and the wind gusted colder and the shrubs grew grayer and the Joshua trees smaller, while the way went from bowl to bowl in the rocks. In each bowl the horizon was very close, being bordered on every side by a ridge of the same tan stone, and in each bowl a cross was erected, on which a man hung dying while his guards played dice; and Peter averted his eyes and strode on to the summit, from which he could see many dead black hills below, fretted with shrubs and the silvery trails of flood-washes, and then the far flat plain of bluish enigma, stained by cloud-shadows, upon which the great whore Jerusalem walled herself in to her pleasures, and the plain stretched past Emmaus all the way to the Dead Sea, which was then the color of the sky; and a great dark range of dark blue mountains made the final horizon. But where Peter sat was only reddish dirt with the ant-hollowed flute of a man's thigh-bone sticking out, and flakes of quartz or feldspar, and feeble patches of grass huddled in shrub-shadows; — so all he saw was a great anthill of decay swelling above a world of iniquity, but I am sure it was only because he was not quite high enough; had the guards considerately raised him up to the fork of a Joshua tree and nailed him thereon, he might have seen what CHRIST saw: the lovely cacti, over which the delirious CHRIST murmured and waved His hand as He blessed them (but of course His hand was nailed fast to that cross of gray splintered ironwood, so that to those watching below it seemed only that He struggled feebly for a moment, tearing His wounds a little more so that another trickle of weary black blood ran down between
the hard-baked clots already on him), and He smiled at the gardens of cholla cactus which only He saw, loving them for their spines, which were as intricately whorled as rose coral; he smiled upon their greenish-orange fruits, which were like hard raspberries; He sent His affection to them on account of the beautiful green they glowed beneath the gray bushes where woodrats lived; in His greater self, which was never maimed or fettered, He kissed the hale gray buckhorn chollas; He embraced the strawberry stems of calico cacti; He smiled in such delight to the rustling leaf-music of the creosote bushes, whose waxy leaves, though olive-green and soothing like stream-plants, were nonetheless almost as sharp-edged as those cholla spines which shimmered silvery and lavender like delicate down upon their lobes and joints, which twined caressingly about each other in that dry sand and they seemed softer than hare-fur until you got closer to them and saw that each joint was like a sea-urchin and their shimmering was a shimmering of barbed spines (but cactus wrens could nest in the chollas, and the Cahuilla Indians could gather and eat the cholla-fruit); so CHRIST married the fuzzy-soft chollas, and he took to himself the detached chollas lying in the sand like fallen gray stars; and He married the pencil-chollas, whose pale green cylindrical leaves were rolled tight like promises; they too were spine-studded, but every spine was precious, and so emerged from a diamond on the leaf; He resurrected the dead gray-white cholla skeletons that decay had reduced to hollow wind-tubes; nor did He neglect the others, the jojoba and the desert senna, the ocotillo, which rose, woody, split, and spined like fish backbones, to a height of fifteen feet or more, like the upright of His cross, and its gray wood was cracked and helically green-veined; but it glowed with orange cactus-flowers . . .
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