Metamorphosis

by Sesh Heri

  Across the long hall I heard the door open. I turned, and through the door of the office above I saw Charmian and Bess coming out of a room, both of them attired in riding outfits and boots.

  “Wonderful!” Jack exclaimed, going up the steps.

  “I suppose I should put on my riding boots as well, but I won’t burn another instant of daylight. What do you say, Houdini, shall we mount up dressed in our city clothes?”

  “Sure,” I said, “why not.”

  “I’ve always wanted to ruin a good suit,” Jack said, “haven’t you?”

  “Oh, that’s nothing new for Harry,” Bess said. “He’s always ruining his suits.”

  “Then let’s go!” Jack said.

  I went up the steps and through the office and followed the others out through the front door and down the porch steps. Possum and Bobby came tearing around the corner of the house barking excitedly.

  “Come on, boys,” Jack said to the dogs, “we’re headed up to the mountain!”

  We all went through a gate at the right side of the house. The horses were lined up there on the other side of the fence. The giant oak stood beyond them. Jack noticed me noticing the tree.

  “Magnificent, isn’t it?” Jack asked.

  “Yes indeed,” I said.

  “See that limb there going over the roof?” Jack asked. “Couldn’t bear to cut it. That’s why my study is built down here on the ground, so that the limb wouldn’t have to be touched.”

  One of Jack’s ranch hands stood next to the horses, ready to help us mount, but Bess climbed up on her horse, and I pulled myself up on mine, and the hand stepped back.

  “Well,” Jack said, “you do know something about riding.”

  “I know which side to mount on,” I said. “That’s about it.”

  Jack held Charmian’s horse and she mounted it in one graceful motion. Then Jack got on his horse.

  “All right,” Jack said. “Is everybody ready?”

  “Ready!” Bess said.

  “We’re ready!” I said.

  “Then we’re off,” Jack said.

  Jack reined his horse around and led it off in a trot to the dirt road leading away from the house. I nudged my horse with my heel and tugged gently on the reins, and he responded, and followed after Jack. Bess rode behind me with Charmian at her side. Possum and Bobby came scampering along beside us, running ahead, and then stopping at places to explore and smell.

  The road took a curve downward behind the cottage past a stone wall to our right. A terraced garden rose up the hill on our left. The road then took a long curve to the west. Jack raised his hand to point up the hill on our right toward two slender silos rising above the trees.

  “My pigs are up there,” Jack said. “I’ll show them to you later.”

  Jack kept his horse on the dirt road, and we all followed after him, our horses trotting along, making soft, muffled sounds in the earth. The sky above was bright blue, but clouds had already begun forming over the top of Sonoma Mountain. Our trail, the dirt road, curved about the open pasture and its patch of trellised grapes to a thicket of woods up ahead. A squirrel ran across our path and shot half-way up the trunk of an oak where it stopped still. As I passed it by, I saw that it stared back at me, holding an acorn in its mouth.

  We entered an arcade of trees that created a canopy over our heads and cast a mottled shade upon the earth below. The chatter of crickets and birds filled the air. The hooves of our horses crunched the fallen leaves upon the ground. A strong aroma filled the air.

  “What’s that scent, Jack?” I asked.

  Jack turned his head up, catching the air, and said, “Laurel. It is the breath of the Valley of the Moon.”

  We rode on, deeper into the wood, the dogs running to and fro among our horses. The base of Sonoma Mountain rose up before us down at the end of the shadowed trail. A wall of dark forest stood there, as if waiting for us, as if watching us. We kept riding forward at an even pace, a leisurely pace, but around us and before us all was mystery and question and a kind of waiting. I had only begun to feel it. I had only begun to know it. I had not yet begun to understand it. I had arrived in the Valley of the Moon.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Chained to the Wheels of Moons Beyond Our Ken

  “In a minute and a half from the time I struck

  the water I had freed myself and was ready to

  rise to the surface. Small boats were cruising

  and looking about for me and, as luck would have

  it, I came rushing up at great speed just

  underneath one of these crafts. So rapid was

  my ascent that in rising I hit my head a fearful

  blow…and sank back into the water again stunned

  and bleeding. When I struck that boat I thought

  of the thirteens of the day and concluded that it

  was up to me to battle for my life.”

  Houdini

  By the time we had finally reached the first upward slanting stretch of the trail and climbed up along a few dozen yards of forested mountainside, the sense of being in a rugged, wooded valley was gone. We were now in a dense forest, thick with ferns and berry bushes and tangled vines twisting their way through the lush growth. The broad-armed trees of the valley were gone and in their place majestic redwoods stood sentinel over the slope. Shafts of sunlight lanced downward from far over our heads and lit the ferns and the bushes with intense greens. Further up the mountainside, the slant of growth deepened to a green-blue, and, far in the underbrush, a black-blue. Farther yet up the mountain the chatter of crickets and the songs of birds filled the distant air, but near at hand everything was still, and quiet, and full of that waiting I had already noticed.

  The trail steepened, and I leaned toward the pommel of my saddle. I did not know this trail, but my horse did, and he kept to a steady pace, following Jack’s horse up ahead. Jack’s horse kept mounting the trail up ever higher, winding up among ever taller redwoods, following the winding path up into ever deepening shadows. The dogs would stop at intervals and dive deeply into the ferns, and then, just as suddenly, explode upward out of the leaves with a yelp, and scamper back on to the trail, and run ahead of us several yards before plunging into the green again and tearing through the vines.

  I looked behind and saw Bess leaning forward in her saddle, just as I was doing, a look of amazement on her face. I had not seen that look in a very long time. Her horse also knew the way, also climbed the trail at a steady pace, its hooves planting down upon the soft earth with assurance. Behind Bess, Charmian came along on her horse, smiling; she had the same assurance as the horses; like them, she also knew this trail.

  I looked ahead up the mountain. I could only see Jack from behind, his hat, his back, and his legs down alongside his horse. He seemed completely relaxed. I wondered what his face looked like. Then he disappeared from my view behind a thick stand of redwoods. In a moment I caught sight of him and his horse again. He was still moving along at a steady pace. He turned another bend in the trail, and then, again, he was lost to my view.

  Ever further upward our horses climbed, and, with each step, the trail narrowed, steepened, and the woods thickened. Behind us, all view of the valley was obscured by the forest of redwoods. The trees had their roots in the slopes far below us, but their crowning branches still towered far above us into the glints of blue sky. I turned about and reined my horse into a very steep turn, gave him a gentle nudge with my heel, and he resumed his measured climb. Somewhere, not far away, I heard the rush of a mountain stream. The sound continued to grow louder amid the call of birds. The air was filled with that deep-forest smell of redwood and earth and dew-drenched ferns.

  Bobby stopped on the trail in front of me and let out a bark. Possum ran back to him, and they stood nose to nose as if in conversation. Then both dogs suddenly took off running up the trail toward Jack and his horse.

  “I’m taking you the long way up to the lake,” Jack called back down the trail to me.
“Wanted you to see this stand of trees.”

  “They’re— they’re magnificent,” I said.

  “Magnificent will do,” Jack said. “Words fail before such as this.”

  We continued up the trail, turning right and now passing up along the almost vertical wall of the mountainside on our left, all of this covered in large ferns. Another hundred feet, and the trail turned to the right again, and we entered a low point, something like a little pass, and entered another thick wood. We emerged from the wood into a clearing, a little valley hidden in secrecy from the larger valley below by its stand of woods and forest on all its sides, a little valley hidden on the shoulder of the mountainside. We rode out along a narrow trail that cut through the dry grass that grew all across this long clearing. The trail disappeared into a deep forest of redwoods again at the clearing’s far end. Soon we were among those redwoods, and then, in a few more moments, we emerged into a second clearing, and before us lay a little mountain lake surrounded on all sides by dense forest.

  Jack brought his horse down to the edge of the lake, reined him to a halt, and dismounted. His horse lowered his neck and drank at the lake’s edge. The rest of us came down and dismounted our horses and let them take a drink too. Bobby and Possum ran to the lake’s edge, stuck their noses in it, and then began slapping about in the water with their paws, and then running back and forth in the shallows, splashing at each other and barking excitedly.

  “We created this lake a few years ago to irrigate the crops down below,” Jack said, “but it has afforded us some great fun. Come on.”

  I followed Jack around the edge of the lake and over to the dam at its far end. The dam was built in a great curve, blocking off the lower end of a stream; it was about ten or a dozen feet high on its dry side and constructed of rock masonry and cement. Jack stepped up on to the cement top of the dam and walked out along its length. I followed him out on to the dam and we stopped at its center point.

  “Look down there,” Jack said. “Thick with catfish.”

  “Catfish are found in these waters?” I asked.

  Jack laughed. “Oh no,” he said, “not found. I stocked the lake with these fish. We come up here in the summer and have a time swimming, fishing, frying fish, eating fish, and just loafing about doing absolutely nothing…water fights…oh, we have had some grand water fights up here! Oh, how I wish you and Bess could come up here for the summer!”

  I looked across the lake. Up from the shore, from where Possum and Bobby frolicked, beneath a stand of trees, Charmian and Bess were looking into some little wooden buildings.

  “That’s the boathouse and the dressing rooms for the swimmers,” Jack said. “Eliza had those built for me. I only mentioned to her that I’d like to have a bathhouse up here, and, the next thing I knew, there stood those little buildings! She had workman do it all without telling me a thing.”

  “You have quite a stepsister,” I said.

  “I have quite a lot of many things,” Jack said. “Perhaps more than I deserve.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “You’ve worked hard for everything you’ve got.”

  “I have worked hard,” Jack said, “but I know many others who have worked just as hard and just as well and have much less. Some have nothing at all. Do I have so much because I worked so hard or do I have so much simply because I have so much? You see? It’s not a simple matter.”

  “You have so much because you worked so hard,” I said.

  Jack turned and looked at me, looked me up and down.

  “Life for you is a simple matter,” Jack said, “isn’t it?”

  “No,” I said. “I know life is not a simple matter. But I choose to treat it as a simple matter.”

  Jack nodded slowly, and then said, “Ah! You are a genius.”

  I stood looking at Jack. He suddenly walked away from me and back along the length of the dam. I watched him walk away, at first feeling foolish, for I believed he was joking in calling me a genius. But then, something in his stride, something I could not pin point in the way he moved, told me that he had made his statement as a simple observation of fact, a sincere observation of fact. I suddenly realized that Jack London had really said that I was a genius, and my feeling of foolishness gave way to an embarrassment and a flush of pride and an old, familiar sensation of vanity— a vanity that now, as I write this, I begin to realize was really only a kind of empty childishness. Jack, himself, if he had known what I was feeling, I now know would have said, “So what if I said you’re a genius? What does that mean? What does that amount to?”

  I followed behind Jack along the top of the dam, and we went back to the horses, and all of us mounted up again. Once more Jack led the way, this time around the outside base of the dam, over a little wooden bridge built above the dam’s outlet which became a creek in the ravine below, and then we climbed on up along another trail that led even higher along the slope of Sonoma Mountain.

  We made another long, winding climb among the redwoods. At intervals through a break in the trees I could glimpse grassy clearings down below, little meadows formed upon the shoulders of the mountain and all of them surrounded by dense forest. Jack urged his horse on up the mountain and I tried to keep up with him. In a while, I glanced behind me and saw that Jack and I had left Bess and Charmian somewhere below on the steeply winding trail. I looked forward again and saw Jack framed as a silhouette against the sky. I followed him up, and a grassy slope shifted into the position where the sky had just been. Jack and I came to an open space of grass, and the rugged crest of Sonoma Mountain loomed before us. On we rode, leaving the redwoods behind to ascend a knoll, and then—

  The Valley of the Moon spread before us unreal, like a giant relief map, a painted sculpture of gold and purple, gray and brown. The Valley curved away to the south, and at its far end I could see the blue expanse of the northernmost tip of San Pablo Bay. Over the valley, in a long train coming up from the south, white clouds hung against the blue sky. To our right, the Coast Ranges stood as purple crags, and along their peaks, a white froth of clouds suffused with sun-glow hung down over their slopes, a pouring torrent frozen in time above the valley mottled with sunlight and shadow. A strong breeze was passing by us from over the mountain to our right, to the west. I could see that this same bank of clouds that hung far away extended all the way to the top of the mountain before us, and here I saw that the clouds were moving very fast; they were coming at us, pouring down into the valley.

  “Sonoma Valley extends across the landscape in a great curve,” Jack said, “see there? Like the blade of a giant scimitar.”

  “I’m…I’m speechless,” I said.

  “This is what I live for,” Jack said. “This is living. This is life.”

  “It is beautiful,” I said.

  “You couldn’t live here long,” Jack said. “You need an audience. I know. I think maybe I once needed an audience myself.”

  “You don’t anymore?” I asked.

  “Oh,” Jack said, “I like a small audience. The people I really care about— Charmian, Eliza, a few old friends, like George Sterling and Jim Whitaker— a few new friends, like you and your wife, Bess. A small audience, yes. A large audience? No. I am quit with the large audience, ‘the people’— that amorphous, floating abstraction. I once felt that ‘the people’ was something worthwhile, something to fight for, something, perhaps, to live for, to live for the sake of. ‘The people.’ I’d write their name in capital letters— ‘THE PEOPLE.’ I believed they had saved me from myself. That was just one more delusion. ‘THE PEOPLE’ didn’t save me. Charmian saved me. Eliza saved me. And maybe I saved me a little, too. ‘THE PEOPLE.’ Ha! What an empty dream! ‘THE PEOPLE’ can buy my books; that’s fine and necessary, but I don’t care for their company. I’ve turned down the page on them. Turned down the page. Frankly, and confidentially, as far as I’m concerned, ‘THE PEOPLE’ can all go to bloody hell.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “I found,
” Jack said, “that most people almost always end up a disappointment. The more you give to them, the more they despise you. Haven’t you found that to be the case in your own life?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “If I really think about it, I suppose I’d have to agree with you. That does seem to be the case of it. If I really think about it. Thing is, I don’t really think about it much. I don’t really think about people all that much.”

  “You don’t really like people all that much,” Jack said, “that is, for someone like you who receives so much acclaim from the public, the great mass.”

  “It’s important that the public knows me,” I said, “that they come to my shows. It’s not important for me to know them. That’s not to say that I haven’t helped people. I’ve helped a lot of people. But my father taught me to do my giving on the quiet. And I do it on the quiet, and I don’t think a lot about it afterwards.”

  “My, my,” Jack said, “You and I are not so different after all.”

  “We’re not ones to gather moss,” I said.

  “Ha!” Jack exclaimed. “I’d rather be ashes than dust, I’ll tell you! I’d rather be a superb meteor— every atom of me burning up— flashing instantly out of existence in a magnificent blaze— than a permanent planet on an eternal, dust-scattered orbit around a dead sun! The proper function of man is to live, not just to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”

  I heard the muffled sound of horse hoofs coming from behind us, and turned around and saw Bess and Charmian emerging from the thick forest below. They rode on forward, climbed up the grassy slope, and stopped next to where Jack and I sat astride our horses.

  “Oh, Harry!” Bess exclaimed, “What a view!”

  “You like that, young lady?” I asked.