the tyranny of stratigraphy

from the tyranny of stratigraphy

Too much light was, for him, breathing water. The sun was on his side of the car. He was cold. He had said he was cold over and over again. Sweat trickled down the side of his hollow, sallow, grizzled cheek and dripped into his open collar. The light was knocking at his temple too. Rap, Rap. Rap, Rap. Curved shapes of red and yellow moved on the surface of the windshield. Stars, tiny stars, shown brighter than the swell of light and pierced. He had to fight to close his eyes. They closed as he willed it.

Sometimes they did not. One eye could open if he did not hold his thought fully to it. The knocking grew and faded. Eighty raps per minute. He couldn’t count it. But he knew. He knew the patterns. Consoling patterns. Sometimes patterns that was breathing water.

He heard her voice.

“David.”

He tried to find the words. The cold was all he could say. He said,

“I’m too cold. It is very cold.”

The words ripped out from somewhere inside him. Uncontrolled. Very angry. Unintended.

Her voice again.

“Honey, it is eighty degrees out there.”

Her voice was gentle and calm. It was always gentle and calm now. Always Honey or Darling. This bothered his pride. He couldn’t let her see that he was breathing water. They all stole his pride when they saw his breathing water. They dismantled it and took it from him like boards and copper from a derelict building.

He felt the car slowing and a shadow sliding onto his chest and then his face. This cooled him and calmed him. His breathing slowed. He felt warmer. His eyes opened and he looked across at her. She stopped the car and removed the key. He wiped his face with a handkerchief. She patted his knee.

“Well Darling, we’re finally here. I’ll have a look. A small look and then we’ll get you situated.”

“Fine,” he said, turning away from her and then suddenly turning back and wanting to reach out to her as she left him. He watched her walk out across the little parking lot. She walked in a curious way that he didn’t notice any more because they’d been married for so long. Her steps were overly large for her size. Her whole body sunk into each step. When she was a little girl, her father said, “Vera, you’re a big strider, there being so much of Nebraska and so little of you.” She’d long ago forgotten her father saying this. Long ago, after her father had died, she’d let it go.

She continued across the black asphalt to a wide arbor that filled the bottom of the canyon; tall cottonwood curved up high above her; and she entered a large soft shadow beneath it. This shadow was green in places and light brown in others and fell like lace across the short grass and dry earth below her. This shadow drooped lazily, easy-going on the tops and down the sides of a half dozen red picnic tables scattered about. The air in this shadow was cool and moist and returned to her the easy breathing that had been made a little harder in the heat above the asphalt.

She and David had come to this campground for forty-odd years. The canyon was wide here, with high walls that rose perhaps seven-hundred feet in russet steps to large and slumberous, ocher, sandstone domes. The small creek came through the middle of the bottom of it with the campground built beneath the canopy of the grove on both sides of the creek. She turned about very slowly. A cluster of dried oak leaves swirled at the level of the ground around and between her legs and came to rest against the base of a large boulder and a tree just beyond it. They shuffled past in somersaults. At each gathering place, a few swirled up and spun, turned, held steady, suspended for only a little time, a fraction of a second, and then caught another thin gust and blew to mix with a thousand others, indistinguishable yet unique. She followed the migration of the leaves with her eyes, looking up here-and-there, stealing short moments from the past, at each of the little places, each a barren spot in the short grass, all where they’d spent one or two glittering weeks of so many of their past Aprils and Mays. Most were vacant now.

Each place held a vague date and a memory. She saw a dozen old tents of canvas: green and mainly brown – that had been discarded long ago. She saw her three children emerge from the flung-open canvas doorways and dissipate as they ran toward her: a myriad of ages, worries and contentments. Carol, Michael and Nancy with smiling, happy, tearful faces. She heard the childhood laughter and tears, still so familiar, so instantly recognizable. She wondered if it, the laughter and the tears, were here when she was not. She saw David sitting at all of the picnic tables, pondering maps.

He was smoking a pipe in the beginning years; and later he was not. Most often he wore a ridiculous hat. She saw his face in the evenings, large above a hundred campfires, long ago extinguished. He was lit yellow in the past firelight with the dark shadow of his nose roving over his face and changing in shape as he moved his head. Sleepy glimmers and shadows and dark branches loomed behind him.

It was a week in 1959 over there. 1962 behind the trunk of that tree. Had the tree been there then? Can’t remember. 1963, 64, 65. 1968, the argument with Carol. It was over there on the wide, yellow rise of sand. It was the green tent then. The large one. The one that always smelled a little musty. In 1971, the campground was larger and the bridge was new. Vera loved the suspension walking-bridge of wooden planks and thick, black steel cables. How it swayed so gently when she walked across it. How the air was so very soft and cool right up above the black, clear water and the great, round boulders. She had sat often with her legs dangling beneath it, with her toes just touching the chill of the creek.

In the 70 ‘s and 80 ‘s they had stayed across the bridge. The children were older. David sat there, and over there, and behind that stand of pinyon pine. He was tying flies and reading books. He was always smiling here. His face came back to her and faded away, clear and bright and confident, and then only a face that faded away even as she held to it, tried to hold on to it. In the 90’s, David and Vera had come only three times. They had slept in the parking lot, in a camp-trailer that Carol rented and brought from Salt Lake City.

Vera came here at first at the urging of David. Then she came for the solace and sunshine of the mornings; April mornings were her favorite, with the bloom of the cactus in bright red, magenta and yellow. It was a good place for the children. In the last ten or fifteen years she came for the memories. So much in her life had changed, so drastically, so quickly. She now had trouble recognizing the California towns where they had lived over those forty years. Whole blocks of houses were gone. Factories and apartment buildings rose up unexpectedly and were suddenly leveled and replaced. All of the fruit orchards that filled the valleys and the small shops that made the little town centers were gone. Even the highways, which had been so fresh, were now old and being redrawn and built anew. She could not drive far, in a place where she had lived for forty-odd years, without becoming lost.

Here she could touch the dry edge of a twig, extending out from a live oak branch, and think that she might have broken it perhaps five or twenty years before. Some memories remained for her, some solace, in the lines of David’s face and the patterns in his eyes. This was and would always be some solace of consequence, that a younger woman couldn’t understand. But with this last year, to look in David’s eyes was to look in a mirror rubbed almost clean of its black backing.

David watched Vera. He was turned on his side, seated and leaning back and peering over the seat of the car and out the back window. He decided that he could try to do this for her. He didn’t understand why this was important to her. It was only one mile in each direction and he’d walked that distance at home. At first, learning to walk again was horrible with the nurses-aid right up next to him with a leash around his waist. She smelled of medicine and faintly of urine. She didn’t speak when he spoke to her. He was better now and he could walk with Vera as long as the location was familiar and he didn’t become afraid. Once he’d walked three miles alone. He’d gotten to a park and sat on a small bench. The sun came out and he became cold and began to panic. It was always there. That thing waiting for him. He thought that when it rapped at him, it was waiting and would get him again.

Then he’d realized he couldn’t remember how to get home. That made him cry. He sat there on the little bench and roared with the tears pouring out him. It was in the middle of the day and no one was there to see him until a little boy came and stood in front of him and looked at him. The little boy began to cry and ran away. Then a cloud covered the sun and David had felt warm again and remembered where he was and the fear left him.

This light at this place. He didn’t know if he could take the light. As Vera approached the old car, she saw David sitting sideways and leaning out the door and over his feet. He had removed his slippers and was struggling with the laces of hiking boots of worn leather.

“It is good to be here,” she said.

“Fine,” he said and he stared at his feet.

His speech was not greatly changed. It was less precise in both content and form, and the right side of his mouth moved slightly but significantly more slowly than the left.

“Oh honey. You haven’t had laces for some time. Let me help you.”

“I’m fine. Damn it. I’m fine.”

He pushed her away; softly, abruptly pressing across her shin with his right forearm. His right side was his good side. He continued to look at his boots.

“As you wish, Darling.”

She stepped back from him.

“You take your time,” she said. She remembered to pause and breath deeply.

“I intend to.”

She caught herself beginning to say something that might offend him and paused.

“It is wonderful to have such a place,” she said.

She opened a back door of the car and removed a black metal cane, a little pack with food and water, a thin coat for David, and her yellow-straw walking hat. This was a new hat in an old style, popular again after thirty years.

She looked at David with concern and said, “Thank you for not mentioning this little trip to Carol. Can you imagine what she would say if she knew we were stopping here.”

“She could mind her business.”

“She cares for us. She is a lovely child. We should appreciate that.”

“She could not bother so much about me.”

“Someone has to Darling.”

“Well, thank you for that.”

“I’m terribly sorry. I wasn’t thinking. Have you gotten anywhere with those laces?”

“Nowhere.”

He sat up stiffly.

“You can’t expect to do it all.”

She knelt, quickly tied his laces, then stood and stepped delicately backwards.

He did not speak or look at her.

“There you have it. They are tied and ready. Should we begin?”

“I would expect to do something,” he said as he held the frame of the door with his right hand and swung out from the car and stood very tall and straight. She handed him the cane and he tossed it into the car.

“I’ll find something of a staff along the way.”

“As you wish,” she said. “This place brings back so very much.”

He closed the door and began to walk. His walk was greatly affected. He walked very slowly, rotating his left leg out to the front.

“I remember nothing of it,” he said and she knew that this was true and withheld her talk of the memories in fear of hurting him. She sometimes touched his hand as they walked. His pride shifted his hand away each time. He could remember certain things in great detail that had only taken place once and were of no significance. Other things that had happened again and again to make up most of his life had completely left him. There were also coy memories that would come and then go away. He would forget that he had remembered. The worst were the ones that were not true. These seemed as real as any of the others. But when he mentioned them to Vera, she would smile politely and say something like, “That, I don’t recall. Perhaps it was a dream.” So he tried not to mention the memories unless they were certain.

The trail followed the creek along the bottom of the canyon. The trail was very straight and broad and quite level at the beginning. He soon found an old, dark snag of cottonwood and, for longer than Vera would have liked, rummaged stiffly through a pile of dry wood beneath it. He emerged with a long and clean, straight branch and he used this to sustain his balance as he walked. The path rose above the stream and dropped back down in a few places. Broad, flat stones were arranged to make fine stairs at each of these, which he climbed and descended easily and without complaint. The sun was full upon them, but was not hot. He fought the emotion. It built up, hesitated, built up again and collapsed. He wanted to cry. With his good arm he slapped occasionally, nervously in front of his eyes. Then he wanted to smile. Swatting the sunlight as if it were a fly.

He watched with diligence each step she took, the placement of her feet. They stopped and sat at quarter mile intervals. Benches of flat stones had been built in the cold shadows of clusters of oak or pinyon pine. David drank the water that Vera carried. He did not speak. He knew that if he spoke, the emotion would take him. Her mind wandered into the past to fill the silence between them. She couldn’t help it. It was, after all, the reason she’d come. She saw Carol running into the stream just above the campground. The girl was ten, perhaps. It had been the spring following the winter when Vera’s mother died. Vera was forty that year. She could see Carol clearly in cutoff bluejeans and a red and yellow halter top. The child ran at a group of ducks and yelled at them, and splashed the shallow water with both hands. The coloration of the twenty ducks still seemed marvelous. All with green heads, white necks and dark brown bodies. The green-blue of their heads and necks shimmered like gas flames. Water rose up with their frightened, hurried wings and hung suspended in long strands and fat drops. The ducks assembled into a tight aerial wedge only a persons height above the stream. They flew three hundred yards past her and dropped again to the water.

The image came back to her in every detail. The girl was standing wet to her waist. Behind the girl, beyond the opposite bank of the creek, Vera had then seen only the movement and, in memory, she could see it again. It was amazing. The grass was tall and light amber and brown. The grass simply shuddered at the top in a long moving line that curved twice leading to the canyon wall. And a coyote emerged from the connected arcs onto the small ledges of the wall. The animal was a patchwork of color indistinguishable from the grass. It was only visible against the russet rock and as she watched it, it disappeared. Her eyes were dead on it and, before her eyes, it dissolved into nothing. It occurred to her then, how things could just disappear, could vanish cleanly off the face of the world.

“Only spooking the birds away from the coyote, ” David had said.

Then they came to a place where the stream turned and curved to run alongside the trail. A deep pool was there beneath a small beaver dam. She looked carefully and saw that fish were still there. She pointed and told David about the fish and he looked down and nodded. They were brown and grey brook trout with a touch of blue. They were only the length of her hand at most. She had been hiding behind the low, brown bank. She had held Michael back from the bank when he was seven. David made the fishing pole that Michael used from the branch of a willow tree. He simply tied the short length of line from the end of it. She remembered the look in David’s eyes at the campground when he built the pole, the way he smiled and patted the boy on the head when he gave it to him, the way he winked at her when the boy collected her hand and began to pull her along to the trail.

The boy had whisked the pole gently from side to side. The line held the sunlight and looked like a strand of golden hair with drops of water set like tarnished pearls with an even spacing along the length of it. She had peered meekly over the bank and saw the worm move up and down and side to side as Michael moved the branch. It sank within and beneath a cluster of five of the tiny fish and further to the cluster of five tiny fish shadows on the white sand at the base of the pool. Then it rose back through the cluster of fish and to the surface. One fish took it and she helped Michael remove the hook; and he put the fish back without much harm to it.

She saw the joy in Michael’s eyes. Remembered joy in the eyes of a small boy holding a little fish on a wondrous day, she thought, is a tangible thing.

By three o’clock, Vera and David came to another place where the trail dropped to the level of the stream. The floor of the canyon was moist and the trail passed through a stand of reed and cattail that were brown and taller than David. Then the path wound into and through a dense thicket of the oak which closed above them and David stooped in passing beneath it. The light was filtered by the yellow-orange of the wall of leaves; and a coppery glow was everywhere. A garter snake slipped casually to the side of the trail. A wake of rising and falling leaves and a sliding, scratching sound, a fading murmur, were all that became of it.

As the path emerged and crossed a small stretch of open ground, Vera noticed a place on the far canyon wall where petroglyphs were etched in the color of rust on the pale sandstone. There were three figures. She thought that these were one thousand years old but never understood how that could have been determined. They depicted tall and strange men with box-like shoulders. At other places, in the canyons of Utah, she saw these figures with horns or hairpieces of snakes, or carrying severed heads by the hair. At one place well to the north of here, the body of the figure was stained somehow with dyes in vertical stripes of red, white and blue. David called it the All American Man.

Vera had been seated beside the fire. They were across from her. David was waving his pipe and telling Michael and Nancy about it. The children had wanted to see it, so he drove through most of the night and they had all seen it, after a long hike, the next morning. The children couldn’t understand why David thought it so important, so impressive.

“Defeating the statistical tyranny of stratigraphy, ” he said. And then the children looked at each other as if to say “so what”.

And then he said, “It is someone somehow reaching out through that amount of time against all of probability and the nature of things. ” It was clear the children still did not understand.

He continued, “Time is a little like a river. Not a fast river but a deep sluggish river where things can fall into it and get lost. Things fall into the river and slowly sink and fade away. The deeper the things get, the harder they are to see. Whenever something disturbs the bank above the thing that’s sinking, or whenever there is an unusual current that comes up after a rain, the water muddies and the thing is even harder to see. Eventually the thing reaches the bottom and is covered with silt, and then there may be a big storm that can scour the bottom and move the thing but it gets buried again under more and more layers of silt and sand; and then, unless it is a most unusual circumstance, it won’t ever been seen again. But things like the All American Man, but things like this, are like gems that can capture the light and reflect it back even for a thousand years, maybe another thousand or ten thousand.”

In the next section of the canyon, the trail rose to about fifty feet above the floor and followed a broad curve of the wall. It was more narrow here and dropped sharply on one side. Vera was nervous and attempted to take David’s hand but he refused hers. He stumbled once. The foot of his bad leg hung on a small stone. He began to say that it was ridiculous for him to be there. That he couldn’t go any further. He felt the emotion building. He stopped and took in slow deep breaths. He began walking again. He maintained his balance with the wooden staff. She put her arm around his waist.

“Vera, really,” he said as he again pushed her away.

“This is a bit treacherous, Darling.”

“Thank you for the consideration, but if you haven’t observed, I do remain capable of walking.” He wanted to cry. He faintly smiled at her.

“It is a difficult passage. My concern is for the difficulty of the passage and not in a general sense. It simply isn’t a matter of your capability. It is a matter of the terrain.”

“The terrain,” he said. “I assure you that I will be fine regardless.”

“It is getting a little hot, Darling. Should we rest?”

He yelled at her, “Must I always be your Damn Darling. I’m perfectly fine.”

He took the water bottle from her and drank and returned it to her. They continued, walking even more slowly. She became uncomfortable with the heat and noticed that he began to slightly stagger, hooking his bad foot here and there and righting himself with the staff. They crossed the mouth of a large side-canyon; and just beyond it, they entered a cool and sheltered section. Beaver had built several dams that stretched very nearly all of the way across the canyon; and the stream became a string of shallow ponds. Along the sides of the ponds were very large cottonwood and thickly-matted, dark-green horse-tail. The horse-tail rose so that at its middle it was at the height of Vera’s waist and the weight of the top of each of the thin stalks bent it down again to the ground. The water in the ponds was very black beneath the shadows. Clusters of grass and the pointed stumps of trees which had been fallen by beaver extended up through it. The opposite wall of the canyon was brightly lit. The surface of one of the ponds precisely mirrored the glow of the wall and the fine black lines of the long fractures in the rock.

Superimposed on the reflection of the wall were the black-silhouette reflections of the enormous cottonwood that stood above the pond and in shadow. On the mirror surface of the pond floated a dazzling polka-dot array of the small, yellow leaves of cottonwood.

She could not resist the impulse.

“Do you remember this?”

“Nothing of it, But I do enjoy the coolness. I’ll try to keep this with me.”

“I love the abstractions. I think the most beautiful things of the desert are the abstractions in the shadows.”

“That may well be. I regret I can’t remember this. I am glad to see it though.”

He walked further, away from the black water as if repulsed by it. She stayed and looked across the ponds. Then a small dark bird flew rapidly past her, at just inches above the water. She followed it along the line of ponds and then along the creek. At last she saw it enter the dull and overpowering white of the unshaded canyon.

She walked quickly to reach David. He sat on a boulder beneath the lean, bent, red trunk and branches of a dogwood, and was wiping his brow with a handkerchief. He was calm. He knew that they were near the end of the trail because he could hear the beginnings of the roar of a waterfall and could feel a very cool mist that floated past them at the base of the canyon. The canyon was quite narrow where he sat and was sunless. It seemed to Vera to have become very cold. Vera removed the jacket from her pack and gave it to David. He put it on using the curious one-handed technique that he had developed to dress himself. She walked behind him as they passed the last turn and the walls opened to a large and deep stone amphitheater. A broad and shallow, green pool lay at the base of this. The slender white veil of a waterfall, two hundred feet in height, hung from a deep notch, cut into the far wall. The wall behind the falls did not drop straight down but curved down in a gentle, sensuous, sleepy way. It was black and dark green with algae; and the waterfall was not straight but rested, spread out in places and came back together again, and turned slightly on the surface of this stone curve.

They did not speak; and they could not have heard one another if they had spoken because of the sound of the water. Vera stepped to the side and in front of David. Children were playing in the water of the falls and the pool. There were six in all. A boy with closely-cropped blonde hair climbed along a ledge to a place beside the falls about thirty feet above the pool. A younger girl and others, younger still, stood in the water at the margin and watched him. He leapt from the ledge and pulled in his knees tight against his chest and landed with a splash that couldn’t be heard.

A second boy was chasing a pair of garter snakes in a flat jumble of cobbles where the creek drained the periphery of the pool. As he caught each of the snakes, he held it up high to show anyone who might be looking and carefully placed each snake back.

Three sets of young parents rested beside a gathering of picnic baskets, a sleeping beagle and an empty bottle of wine. By some quirk of the way light moves about in the canyons of the desert, one side of the amphitheater suddenly became softly illuminated. This light made strange and subtle, yellow shadows of the leaves and branches of dogwood and oak on the curving surface of the hat that Vera wore. A mild wind came from behind them and this made for wild convulsions in the patterns of these shadows.

Six acorns fell in quick succession from a length of a branch of oak that angled above Vera and David and these landed noiselessly in the yellow sand. The events conspired in the making of another recognition. It was 1953 or 1954 he thought. We did not come here then, he realized. It was early though. Very early. Before the children. This memory was different. It was so abstract but somehow firmer than all of the others had been. It had been a year now, almost a year. He was getting to know himself again. He did not mention it to Vera. He could not trust it. It was so abstract.

He stepped back from her and sat on a boulder in the soft breeze. With the one hand he removed his boots and socks and rolled up his pant legs. Then he clasped his staff and walked past her and to the edge of the pond. One of his pant legs fell as he walked. She was looking at the waterfall when he passed her and then at his shoulders and then the back of his head. She startled as he began to walk into the pond. As she approached him, he sensed her movement without looking and raised his walking stick and held it above his head. He turned his head back to face her and made a little bubbling sort of vocalization, then a small laugh. With this slight rotation, he fell to his right knee and then very slowly and gently over onto his back into the shallow water. He lay for only a moment with his back flat on the sand beneath the water and he struggling with his one good elbow and his neck to keep his head up above the surface of the water. He rolled then to his good side and pushed himself onto his knees. She wanted to scream but she didn’t. She wanted to run to him but she didn’t. He knelt forward and caught his reflection. He usually hid from his reflection. Though now he looked hard at himself. He cupped his hands and brought water up to his face and let it fall through his fingers.

First one and then another boy came to him and pulled him up from the water. He fell again and they fell with him. Vera watched the three sitting in a little row, all of them smiling; and she began to smile too. She looked at his face very carefully. His smile was sincere but awkward. Half of his face shown the smile of the David that she had known so well. His mouth hung limp on the other side. Somehow in the form of his half smiling face, from the patchwork of her own fear, guilt, anger and pity, from her mask of cheerful caring and the reality of her underlying loss, a crystalline image, a new and truer image of him emerged. She saw him clearly now through her own vague tears. She had, just then, seen in his eyes a true and lingering desperation, as he had struggled to rise up and out of the water, that she had seen often enough before, but had mistaken for only fear.