River, The Birds

River: The Birds

There are birds here.
I hold in my heart an absolute sorrow for birds, a sorrow so deep that at the first light of day when I shiver like reeds fluttering in a cold fall wind I do not know whether it is from the cold or from the sorrow. Whether I am even capable of feeling such kindness. Perhaps I am. The herons have taught me that.

One rainy winter dawn I stood beneath gray clouds with my arms up stretched, dripping in my cotton shirt (it was clear earlier, I did not heed the wind), staring at the sand at my feet, when I felt the birds alight. I first felt the flutter of golden plovers against my head, then black turnstones landing softly on my arms. The red phalarope with their wild artic visions, fighting the wind to land, prickling my shoulders with their needling grip. Their delicate bones denying the weight of anguish I felt from the journeys these birds had come.

Beneath the weight I recalled the birds of my childhood. I had killed a robin with a new BB gun. I thought the name of the kittiwake funny. Later, much later in life when my father died I wondered if the remaining uncles would want his fly rods. I coveted then in cold contradiction to my grief. Feeling watched I turned from his bed in the ICU and saw ravens watching me, perched on the bare branches of a cottonwood. They waited.

I became tired beyond the limits of what was capable, and lay on the sand, damp but warm.

When I awoke the sky had cleared. In the damp sea air I could smell cedar smoke, a cabin just up the mouth of the river. I felt from here I could see far, up to the headwaters. The plovers had told me what the herons do at night, what the tears they shed added to the mingled memories and guilt's of the people living along the river equaled.

The herons have tried to teach me, but I am still incapable of absorbing what they have to offer. I watch one across the river, just before the reeds on the other bank. Perhaps you know it is raining. The intensity of your stare is then not oblivion, only an effort to spot between the rain drops in the river, past your feet, the movement of small trout.

I know, your way is to be inscrutable. When pressed you leave, the dark grey of your wings fading into the mist. I wonder about the way you seem to brood about the water. Is it more than fish? Do you wonder what your tears have become, have transformed as they flowed downstream?

A dream, like all of my dreams, reveal something but not all. The dream told me that someday we will dance together. Before then I will have to become a trout, and bear scars from your stabbing, rare, misses.

The Falls

River, the last. The Falls

I did three other stories about the river; all somewhat connected, the same river on the Oregon Coast, the people, the occurrences. This, I think, is the last. 

Someone must see to it that this story is told: you shouldn't think that his man just threw his life away.

When he was a boy there was nothing about him to remember. He looked like anything else-like the trees, the other people, like his dog. Sometimes he would change places with the dog. For a week at a time he was the dog and the dog was himself, and it went unnoticed. It was harder on the dog, but the boy encouraged him and he did well at it.

This is what happened. The boy grew. Visions came to him. He began to see things. When he was eighteen he dreamed he should go up in the Crazy Mountains, near Bozeman, to dream. He went. He was careful hitchhiking, he took rides only from old men, old trucks. He was old enough to be careful, but not to know why.

He got a job down there around Beatty, in Oregon, and I didn't see him for two or three years.  The next time was in winter. It was the coldest one I had ever been in. Birds froze. The river froze solid, all the way across. I never saw that before. I picked him up hitchhiking north, he had on dark cotton pants and a light jacket. He had a brown canvas bag, and a hat pulled down over his ears. I pulled over right away, he looked sorry as hell.

I took him way up north, all the way to my place. He had some antelope meat with him and we ate good. We talked. He wanted to know what I was doing for work. I was cutting wood. He was going to go up to British Columbia, Nanaimo, somewhere in there.

I woke up the next morning when it was just getting light. I could not hear the sound of the river and the silence frightened me until I remembered. I heard chopping on the ice. I got dressed and went down, the earth was like rock that winter.

He had cut a hole a few feet across, black water boiling up, flowing out of the ice, freezing. He was standing in the hole naked with his head bowed and his arms straight up over his head with his hands open. He had cut his arms with a knife and red blood was running down them, down his ribs, slowing in the cold to the black water. He gave a cry, the cry was like a bear, not a man sound, something he was tearing away from inside himself. He climbed out and ran into the timber, long high steps.

He cut wood with me that winter. He worked hard. When the trillium bloomed and the birds came he went north.

I did not see him again for ten years. I was in Montana harvesting wheat, sleeping in the back of my truck (parked under cottonwoods for the cool air that ran down them at night). One night I heard my name. He was by the tailgate.
"You got a good spot." He said
"Yeah. That you?"
"Sure"
How you doing?"
'Good. Talk in the morning."
He sounded tired, like he'd been riding all day.

We worked three weeks together,the next morning someone lost their job, too much drinking.  We baled hay for days, the dust would gather in our clothes.

He came home with me, and he stayed that winter too. I was getting old then, and he was good to have around. In the spring he left. He told me a lot that winter, but I can't say these things. When he spoke it was like when you fall asleep in the woods, the breeze in the pines. You listen hard, but it's not easy.

A few summers later he was in Alaska, working at a farm in the Matanuska Valley. All that time he was alone. Once he came down to see me but I was gone. I knew it when I got home, I went down to the river and saw the place where he went into the water. The ground was soft around the rocks, I knew his feet.

I am not a man of power, but I waded into the river and shouted. "Keep going, you keep going!" My heart was pounding like the falls.

The last time I saw him he came to my house in the fall. He came in quiet as air sitting in a canyon. We made dinner early and at dusk he went out and I followed. He cut twigs from the ash, cottonwood and alder. He brushed me with the branches, telling me I had always been a good friend. He said this was his last time. We went swimming a little, there is a strong current there, I had to be careful.

I woke in the morning, just as light was seeping into the sky. I went to look at his bed, he was gone. I got dressed and walked the path to the falls. I see him all at once standing at the lip of the falls. I heard that bear-like cry, and his hands went out. He was in the air, turning over and over, the last moonlight finding the silver-white of his sides and dark green water before he cut into the river, the sound lost in the roar.

I went back up the path, to a clear-cut area where alders have started to grow. The sun was up, warm to me as I sat down, my back against the remaining fir. Good day to go look for morels, but I fell asleep.

When I awoke it was late. I went back to my truck and drove home, wondering if I felt strong enough to eat venison.

Downstream

Downstream

1952

Rebecca Beeson drove 18 miles each morning to work in a men's clothing store in town and came back each evening in time to fix her husband's dinner. It was a job that had paid for a second automobile, a funeral for an aunt and a new stove, but it left her depressed and stranded now, at fifty-six, as if it were a clear defeat, invisible but keenly known to her.

Her husband operated a gas station and logging supply shop in Beaver Creek, a small town on the river where they lived. They had no children, the only time she'd been pregnant the baby was stillborn, which had caused Cawley Beeson a kind of dismay from which he'd never recovered. Maybe this wasn't a place to raise children, he'd thought. He lived as though he were waiting for wounds to heal before moving on.

He hardly noticed, when she helped him in the shop on Saturday's, that someone often came by with wildflowers her, or to tell a story, to ask if she'd seen the skunk cabbage in Watson's field or the pussy willows blooming, sure signs of spring. Cawley appreciated these acts of kindness, while he finished a job for whoever it was, as a duty done that he had no way with.

Men were attracted to Rebecca in an innocent but almost hungry way, as though needing the pleasure she took in them. Because there was never a hint of anything but friendship, their attentions both pleased her and left her with a deep longing, out of which, unashamed, she lay awake at night in a self-embrace of fantasy.

Late at night, when he couldn't sleep, Cawley would roll over to her and try to speak. Sometimes he would begin to cry and sob in anger at a loss he couldn't find the words for. He cried against her nightgown and drove his fist weakly into his pillow. On these nights she held him until the pain ran it's course, and said nothing about her own yearning.

She had hoped that at some point they could go away for a while, in a deeply private place she wished to go to Europe, alone; but she could not bear the thought of his loneliness, and did not believe that in a journey together there could be any joy.

One summer evening while Cawley was in the living room reading, she sat on their bed with her face lowered to a glass bowl of dried blossoms in her lap. Twenty years of anniversary roses, flowers from her first garden, wildflowers from men who were charmed by her. She felt the tears run the length of her nose. She wished to be rid of it, and rose with the bowl and left.

In the dark yard by the side of the house she walked down to the river and stepped in, wetting her dress to the waist. She scattered the first handful on the water, the pieces landed soundlessly and tettered away. She flung the dry petals until the bowl was empty, then dipped its lip to the current to swirl it clean.

Of the flowers she threw on the water, some floated down to the log jam, and washed up on a stump that had been cut with a saw, and had a fading dark stain on it's surface. They stayed there until the first fall rain washed them away.

The Stump

The Stump

1954
A storm came this year, against which all other storms were to be measured, on a Saturday in October, a balmy afternoon. Men in the woods cutting wood, children outside with thoughts lodged somewhere in the memory of summer. It came up the river valley, as did every storm in the fall, but the grey-black thunderheads were piled up high, much too high. In the stillness before it hit, men looked at each other as though a fast and wiry man had pulled a knife in a bar. They felt the trees falling before they heard the wind, and they dropped chainsaws and choker cables, scrambled to get out. 

Olin  Sanders tried to free his saw from the big fir, but it caught him barberchairing, as he tried to run it hopped after him like it was trying to find it's stump. When the wind died the men found him. They laid him across the laps of two men in the back of the truck and sent word ahead. When they got down to the road his wife was there crying, with pink curlers  in her hair. Two county sheriffs were there, drawn by the word of death. When she looked through the window of the truck and saw him broken in half, like a buckled tin can she raised her fists and began beating on the truck. When the sheriff held her back and said in a polite voice "Now, control yourself." she began beating her thighs. One of the men stepped up and punched the sheriff.

All this time the son, in whose lap the father's broken head was cradled, sat silent. He was aware of the beginning of something else, more than his father's end. His pants were wet with his father's blood.

That night the boy left the house, walked past his father's shirts hanging to dry on the line, and drove up Jumpoff Joe Road to where they had been cutting. He sidestepped downslope with the chainsaw in his hands to reach the stump of the tree (the blood congealed like dark sap on the wood) and cut off the top of the stump with the stain of his father's death on it, the saw screaming in the dim night.

No one had ever done anything like this before. The lack of any tradition in it bothered the boy. As he walked past the trees near the house he was suddenly afraid. His mother was awake, sitting in the darkened living room when he walked in, wearing the tattered quilt robe that embarrassed him when his friends were around. Behind the glow of her cigarette she asked where he had been.

The butt of the tree eventually rolled downhill after the logging was done. A family of Marten's took up residence beneath it, living as well as was possible in that country.

Olin was the only person killed, among the other dead were Cawley Beeson's dog, and two deer, quietly butchered and passed among neighbors.

Upstream

Upstream

The river above here is largely unknown, the climb is difficult and the road passes near enough to provide a view, satisfying most. The river has been explored by government mappers up to the headwaters, looking for mineral deposits and to complete maps, but it remains unknown nevertheless. The illusion has been sustained, if one asks around or consults a topographical map, that it is well-known, but I know this to be false. For example, at the headwaters itself, further up than is shown, there are herons. At night they weep, a inconsolable grief, and it is from these tears the river is formed.

Further downstream from here, the murmurs of fish enter, and the water feels like cold steel, impenetrable like certain shades of deep blue, the sound of a crack working it's way through a china plate. It is from this, the imagined but uncared for, that the river takes form, visible water, of measurable dimension.

In recent years I have spent considerable time upstream, along what I believe to be an unknown section of the river. I have meant to examine things closely there, and sometimes I think I have the answer and gone gleefully ahead, only to haul myself back to an ordered course. In this way I saw a house one day, perched at the start of the forested hill above the river.

It was painted gray, with blue cape cod style shutters. A broad porch, shadowed by the limbs of a cottonwood. A white porcelain doorknob opened the French door. The floors were oak parquet, the rooms spacious with hemp rugs. The walls were papered with Cockerell marbled paper, from England, the colors somewhere between primary and pastel, like the taste of a peach bursting on your tongue.

One fall I entered a room for the first time, and saw a book sitting on a windowsill, open and face down. A single chair was next to the window, as though the occupant had just left to brew tea. I sat down and read the book, a language I didn't know, in hopes of understanding.

There was a woman's bed, with a brass bedstead and a chenille spread, somehow light was always falling on it. We would lay there, trusting, and fall asleep in the afternoon.

We would dance, the only sound of our bare feet on the wood floor. An imagined music filling the room without echoes, strands of her hair stuck to my cheek, the sound of our breathing.

In that time I do not remember ever being away from the river, though I know I was. Even now in the memory of it I do not know where I am. I know I still spend time in the upper part of the river and that relationship I know to be true.

Still further up the river are the unfolding of other relationships, together with the loss of the promise of anything to be found. I have been told that this is the reason no one goes up that far, though the promise, in it's way, is kept.

It is the walk home that is terrifying.

The Beginning

River, the beginning

This was intended to be the first installment, but it got sidetracked. Think of it as an introduction, not a guide, but perhaps it will explain some. The story, which had kept popping up in my mind for some time, was prompted by stories....my older relatives, dad, the uncles and aunts. Life on the Oregon coast in the 30's, 40's and 50's, and my knowledge of the coast since then. In these stories, my wife appears in the upriver section, and like the upriver, she's never vanished. My friend Quinn, died in a boating accident on the Rogue in '63, chatted with me in a dream once and approved of a description of the river.  You may have to go back to the stories to understand. Anyway, here 'tis:

River, the beginning

I began each day like this, as though it were the last. I know the last days will be here, where the sun runs into the ocean, that I will see in a movement of sea birds and hear in the sound of water beating against the earth what I now only imagine, that the ocean has a sadness beyond even the sadness of herons, that in the running into it of rivers is the weeping of the earth for what is lost.

By evening, when confirmation of those thoughts seems again withheld, I think of going back upriver, up to the log jam, past where the stump is jammed, or even beyond, to the headwaters, to begin again.

I will tell you something. It is to the thought of the river's banks that I most frequently return, their wordless emergence at a headwaters, the control they urge on the direction of the river, mile after mile, and their disappearance here on the beach as the river enters the ocean. It occurs to me that at the very end the river is suddenly abandoned, that just before it's finished the edges disappear completely, that in this moment a whole life is revealed.

It is possible I am wrong. It is impossible to speak with certainty about very much.

It will not rain for the rest of the day. Lie down here beside me and sleep. When you awake you will feel the pull of warm winds and wish to be gone. I will stand somewhere on the beach staring at the breakers, the scampering of sanderlings, thinking I can hear the distant murmuring of whales. But I can as easily turn inland, and go upriver.

When you awake, if you follow the river into the trees up the valley I will be somewhere ahead or beyond, like the herons.

When you are overwhelmed with feeling,  when your fingers brush the soft skin of a deer-head orchid , or you see a house ahead, near the river bank beyond the falls, you will know a loss of guile, and the beginning of the journey.

Come find me. We have much to see.