by Nick Neely
From the Corral, I headed up-meadow until the grass tapered to a forested ridge choked with brush—manzanita, in particular, is unforgiving. Eventually I bushwhacked to a forgotten logging spur that connected with the jeep trail on Rattlesnake’s spine. I expected to see no snakes this time of year; they would be in their collective dens, their hibernacula, in torpor. But I was on guard anyway.
Where the road gave out, I remember sitting on a ledge beside a large, wind-bitten tree and peering straight down on the Bend, which, for the first time, was plainly a horseshoe. I wore it on my battered feet. Crows played below me, their shadows miming against the talus below the ridge, which in this spot was every bit the wall it looked from our porch. If I fell, my eyes would invite the hooked bill of the corvid.
I ate my peanut butter sandwich. The river was a shiver, a runnel that deflected off the canyon wall beyond our home creek and turned out of sight, disappearing but never gone toward Kelsey. This described the territory I’d come to know. I could see the Little Meadows, the Corral and ours, those handprints of fire. The A of the lower cabin and the mowed garden. The apple trees below the porch and Bill Graiff’s walnuts, now free of their fall saffron. I tried to memorize the view, which from this height seemed untouched by all the people that had flowed through.
Then I plunged down the Rattlesnake, glissading through scales of scree and fragile earth; catching trees with my hands and swinging myself around to temper my fall, my momentum, as if I were planting poles on a ski slope. Giving in to gravity, you’re less likely to turn an ankle. Lower, I wove though huckleberry taller than me, shouting, “You, bear!” though the fruit was gone, until I hit the bank of the Rogue River Trail. I remembered that Sarah and I had picked berries just here and boiled exactly two eight-ounce jars of purple jam to give to our families at Christmas.
For a moment, the soft, level ground of the trail was foreign and anticlimactic. Then it began to feel good. The whole month I saw no one along the river.
There was a cold spell, cold for southern Oregon. Two or three nights the temperatures fell to the low twenties or high teens. I hunkered down with the woodstove, digging out the coals in the ash as soon as I pulled off the bedcovers. “At Horseshoe Bend I had a cook stove,” Red Keller said. “You couldn’t keep that cabin warm, but I got used to it. Anybody come to see me called it the ‘deep freeze.’ I had it one time with the fire going all night and the next morning there was a lot of ice in the bucket of water.” With the sun of early afternoon, the temperature rose a fair ways above freezing, but it was expected to dive again.
I was reading, when suddenly there was a terrific hissing beneath me. I put on my shoes and ran outside. Under the cabin, water was jetting from a pipe that clearly had frozen, burst, and now thawed. Aside from a sporadic wrap of foam insulation, the plumbing was exposed below the floorboards. I had known that I needed to keep water moving in the severe cold, so I’d left the faucets dripping in the sinks. But the pitter hadn’t been enough.
This time, I thought, the bear’s jumped on my back: If I don’t fix the leak and get the system flowing in an hour, other sections of pipe will freeze and burst at sundown. I could drain the cabin, but then I wouldn’t be able to stoke the fire. The charcoal-encrusted pipes that coiled through the stove to produce hot water would melt if they were left empty. The stove would be ruined.
Briskly I walked to the upper cabin’s toolshed and rummaged for the blowtorch and solder wire. In June, Bradley had showed us how, but now it was December and I had no notes. My memory is often short; mostly I’m suited for meadow-watching. But with a handsaw, I cut out the split section, about four inches of pipe. Two fittings, copper bands, would join a new, shiny length of pipe to these sawed ends. With sandpaper, I wrung the cut edges to smooth them, inside and out, and to subtly score the metal, which would allow solder to flow down a thousand microscopic creeks and grip. Then I lit the blowtorch and held a blue pencil of flame.
It wasn’t working, and no wonder. Most days I can’t spell “solder.” Then I looked off into the meadow, dug deep, and channeled Bradley: You don’t heat the solder. You heat the joint alone, and then touch the tip of the unspooled solder wire to it. The silver wicked into the seam and circled the joint faster than I could see. Three more seals, and I restored water to the cabin. Putting my ear to the pipe, I heard movement inside, the tiniest of rivers; the eventual Rogue.
Two days before my own twenty-fifth birthday, I left the Rogue. It was an overcast morning in December, a fundamental Oregon day. I was to hike out, without a mule, to meet my father at the Grave Creek trailhead. It had been a mild winter to that point, precipitation-wise, and likely he could have driven the dirt roads over the pass. But that was the arrangement.
In September, Sarah had hung her paintings in the love grove, but what did I have to show for myself? Nothing so visible. I had scattered my time like madrone leaves, which flash an indecisive pale and dark as they twirl and fall: a month writing novice poetry, a month on a few mediocre stories, another editing a literary journal I would soon let unravel, and one more tweaking those Rhode Island essays that really needed wholesale reinvention. It all amounted to splitting rounds for the firewood I would have to later burn for heat. Which I hope means those words were not wasted. You have to spend energy to gather it. You have to homestead, dig in today for future seasons.
All morning, I battened down the property. The garden beds were tilled by hand and again under tarp. The water system was drained, those pipes below the cabin now roaring through open valves to the bare red earth, as they were supposed to. I diced my few remaining vegetables, cucumbers and onions and a pepper, and gave them a turn in the waterlogged compost barrel for the next summer’s resident to spread if the bears didn’t enjoy the slurry first.
To my dismay and mild panic, however, I ran behind schedule on these final chores and locked the cabin door an hour later than necessary to meet my father so we could make our Medford flight and join my family for the holidays. My pack was forty or fifty pounds. It was fifteen rolling miles upstream to Grave Creek, five hours of walking. I had four. So for a few hours, I jogged the flats and downhills, cinched tight and feeling the Rogue hard in my knees.
The river was alone, full and resonant. My body would be sore for days. I was the only person in the blessed, evergreen canyon. What I remember most was pausing at the top of a rise and unzipping my pack to dump weight. I had a few pounds of chocolate truffles, still in their open package of golden foil, that a friend had kindly sent to our P.O. box in Grants Pass. I ate one more and, with a heave, scattered the rest toward the river, several handfuls down the hillside into the trees. I wondered how many the animals would find.
The poets left their work on the walls: one poem each. They would hold as long as the staples. Sarah hung a painting of a walnut tree and empty bathtub above the radiophone, and though I wasn’t at the homestead as a poet, beside the woodstove I tacked up something basic, “September.” It was a poem about bushtits, small gray songbirds I grew up with in the oak and chaparral of California. Gregarious, and always in tight flocks of fifteen or twenty. The males with bright gold irises.
I ran into them just once at the homestead as they trailed from the apple trees. They fly haltingly. They have short wings: “One moves,” I wrote, “a brief, impromptu space, / moth-like, a mote of dust to a pine bough. / They all follow, as if tied, / save those with the long / lengths, endlessly left behind / and latching on again, as days.” To become at home in a place, I think, is mainly to try to discover the words for things. The names. Bushtit.
In the meadow, we found potholes where bears had dug yellow jacket nests, perhaps years ago, and sucked the larvae from their nurseries. Apparently a wasp sting is nothing to a bear, which makes me wonder about the effectiveness of our electricity. The shreds of the jacket’s wallpaper, gray as newsprint, lay scattered about these excavations, and I would think of those wasps masticating pulp and depositing it underground. I’d imagine that they
had, or soon would, steal bits of the dictionary that was disintegrating on the porch aside the beaver skull and paste stray words inside the meadow: crepuscular, apricity, rogue.
This whole meadow, I realized, was papered with words, with stories and sketches and histories, and I would add a few. You can build a shelter from words. The poems stapled in the cabin would eventually cover the walls, like the thinnest of cedar shakes, and become a cabin themselves. And when the bear clawed or nuzzled into that house, it would return to the clay of vocabulary, become a madrone, drift again.
Slow Flame
Once, in Northern California, she and I were walking through a redwood park with old-growth trees, when we heard something up a side canyon, a kind of whispering. Curious, we walked up the draw along a deer trail and discovered a wildfire burning unannounced in the forest, a line of flame hardly wider than my hand. It was windless and quiet—not even the sound of wrens—and the fire was moving a few inches at a time. You could stand there and watch it come forward as if it were creeping on its belly, and I remember thinking: Even a newt could outrun this.
There is a canyon next to my old home south of San Francisco, one among many, and as in most canyons, the legacy redwoods were cut a century ago. The enormous stumps remind of wrecked ships. But a few great trees remain higher up, still clinging to the steepest ground, the most difficult to cut. Almost all of them are fire-scarred: their fibrous bark singed, or their hearts fully hollowed and charred. Redwoods survive fires because their wood is saturated with tannins, a fire retardant and also a mild poison, which gives them their sunset interior.
In this forest and the surrounding oak woodlands, during certain times of the year, one can find California newts, Taricha torosa, ambling carelessly, it seems, in all directions. They are the color of decaying needle: deep brown on top, their underbellies a brilliant orange. They hatch in cold creeks and ponds, where for a time they have feathery external gills, but they become terrestrial during the late summer, walking off into the duff in search of bloodworms and sow bugs. At the first hard rain, they return to their waters of origin to spawn and, each winter, a few adults returned to our concrete basement, to the flooded drain where they were born.
When threatened by a prodding finger, Taricha newts curl their tails over their granular backs in an arch, an act as sensual as it is intimidating. When I was young, I wondered why I never found their bones in the pellets of the great horned owls roosting in the shadows of certain trees, but it’s not because they seem to have none: Their skin carries a poison, tetrodotoxin, hundreds of times more potent than cyanide—easily enough to kill a grown human, if you were to swallow one and keep it from wriggling back up into the light. So they flash their golden undersides as if to say, Wash your hands, wash your hands. Only garter snakes, with a red stripe down their backs, have evolved immunity. They strangle and gulp newts whole.
Newts belong to the family Salamandridae, and in the occult, the salamander is believed to have a unique connection to fire and, thus, medicinal properties. Aristotle wrote, “And the Salamander shows that it is possible for some animal substances to exist in the fire, for they say fire is extinguished when this animal walks over it.” Pliny the Elder concurred: “This animal is so intensely cold as to extinguish fire by its contact, in the same way that ice does.” Their glistening skin does suggest an immense wetness. And as newts and salamanders often hide or hibernate in logs, probably they are sometimes found near or among the ashes of a hearth. I have never seen such a thing, but I have found snakeskin in a woodstove, its broad belly scales glowing like windows.
One year our basement flooded during a heavy December storm. My mother enlisted us to help mop up the rain that was seeping in, somehow, through the walls; the same rain that was also feeding a hidden pool, the perennial source of young newts that would stumble inside and wander the concrete. A thick blue carpet was sopping, as heavy as stone and destined for the dumpster, while the skirt of an old couch wicked water toward its cushions. A mop already leaned against one wall, and when I lifted it, newts came tumbling out of the woolly dreadlocks, plopping quietly. But not all of them: We had to shake out others that clung to these coils of moisture like children to a mother’s hair.
When they landed squirming on the concrete, they turned over so lazily, almost reluctantly, and returned to their feet. Began to pace. Over the years, I would carry them outside by the handful, most of them first-year newts, about two inches long. As a child, to hold one in your hand is to imagine holding a newborn. Even as an adult. The peculiar softness of it, the pinky quality, their slow motions. Momentarily your hand becomes a womb in which you hold a memory or premonition of your own evolution.
Inevitably I would forget to check the basement and some would desiccate, the moisture run out. In a desk drawer in my former room there is a tiny white jewelry gift box, made of cardboard, that perhaps once belonged to my mother. Inside I gathered the dead like potpourri, this beautiful “rotten” flesh. Through parchment skin, you can see the bracelet of their spines. Only the faintest of smells, something like the apricot scent of the chanterelle slices we dried each winter. I stole them from the basement and shut them up in my cardboard sarcophagus, occasionally lifting the lid to look in. As if to see if they were ready to rise and go, back to the redwoods. Taricha in fact means “mummy,” their name likely inspired by their warty appearance in life.
I remember one particular year finding newts squashed by the dozen on the road leading to our house. It was just as I became aware of their existence, and mainly I recall feeling helpless to save them, to stand guard long enough. Pressed to the pavement like giant worms, their pygmy limbs and jaws were identifiable among the otherwise freeform S of their bodies. There are particular roads in Northern California that, thankfully, close each year to cars during the newt migration, including one famous stretch in Tilden Park of Berkeley from November through April. Yellow Newt Crossing signs—a black, curled silhouette floating at center—also go up to caution mountain bikers to slow. But newts know no boundaries, and if the rains come in October, they begin to plod before the cars are outlawed. I’ve read of one man who, at six each morning, would ride his bike, like a boy on an early paper route, to see if the newts were shining on the road. To carry them across, in their direction.
Shortly after we met, she and I visited my hometown together. It was early January, and we decided to take a walk one night in the rain. Above the redwoods, we came to a small, lush meadow where the jeep tracks ran with rivulets and newts. Extrapolating from our flashlight beams, thousands lay in the dark wetness. Trying to find each other. Pacing with cinnamon eyes. My approach was to examine the patch where my foot would fall and then move forward confidently. But further up the hill, when I looked back, there she was, frozen, scanning the ground around her as if a newt might dash under her boot and she could never forgive herself. I had to go back and retrieve her, take her hand, convince her that the newts would survive.
More recently, but years ago now, we lived off the grid in the woods of Oregon for several seasons. We were still young in our relationship then, younger. She painted each day and I made attempts at writing, often staying up late into the night by the thrumming woodstove. Not far up the hill from our meadow was an artificial pond where Taricha newts swam lazily along the weedy edge. These were the California newt’s closest cousin, the rough-skinned newt, granulosa. When both species enter their breeding waters, their skin becomes smooth, losing its warty texture. Their tails grow long and thin to serve as a propeller and rudder. They glide in casual circles and dive into the muck ahead of their corkscrewing tails. Looking down from the bank into the pond, we thought them like bathers in a park.
We swam in the pond on the hottest days and, as caretakers, once we waded in and tore out the sharp aquatic grass around its edge. Occasionally we would see a couple in the shallows in “amplexus,” a word that means “an embrace.” He grasping her from behind, rubbing her snout with a gland below his chin.
They drift together untethered. The male develops “nuptial pads,” which look like black thimbles on his sixteen fingers, to improve his chances of holding on to her. For she might squirm away, never to be seen again. We had missed the season, but, earlier in the spring, wild clusters of newts can be found, a mass of males all competing for a single female somewhere in the slimy fray.
The pond was decades old and originally subsidized by the Forest Service so that, in case of wildfire, one of their helicopters could dip a massive bucket on a chain and swing up with water. All those years, the water had only ever fed the homestead’s garden; our tomatoes were nurtured by the newts’ algal pool. But last summer, the steep drainages finally burned, over a hundred thousand acres across the river. The river canyon, as we knew and came to admire it, was revised in a week’s time. The cabin hillside was spared, but I am left imagining newts by the hundreds raining into the fir below the whirring blades, beside each other: their bellies the color of the conflagration, their movement in free fall a kind of slow flame.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the publications in which some of these essays previously appeared:
The Threepenny Review: “Chiton” (2015)
Ninth Letter: “The Book of Agate” (2014)
Kenyon Review: “The Afterlife” (2016)
The Southern Review: “Discovering Anna” (2015)
Fourth Genre: “Gone Rogue, or Suck It Up” (2016)
River Teeth: “A Guide to Coyote Management” (2010)
Orion: “The Garden of Earthly Delights” (2016)
Passages North: “Chanty” (2016)