A Song for the River

by Philip Connors

  Jean held onto the ashes, days turning into weeks while she avoided a moment she could not bring herself to confront. She had never spread anyone’s ashes. She wasn’t sure how to handle them. It was the sort of thing you pretty much had to get right on the first try. She needed to think it through. Bury some in the soil? Let them go with the wind? She couldn’t quite settle on a plan. She didn’t want to botch the most important ritual she had ever performed on her mountain.

  Remembering that John had already been divided and scattered here and there, with further scatterings still to come, she realized there could be no harm in doing both: bury a little, scatter a little. She bided her time, waiting for just the right day. It kept not coming. I’m really not one for ceremony, she later admitted. Too much Catholic for too long maybe. (Amen, sister.) But she knew this called for whatever impulse toward ceremony she could still muster. She needed a fully formulated plan, a meaningful gesture, one she could reenact each year henceforth. Something to give form to the feeling in her chest. Something to signify how much John had meant to her, while at the same time honoring his spirit of irreverence. She stowed the ashes in a safe place in her tower, hiked out for a few days off, and when she returned she brought a can of Miller Lite, although she had stopped drinking on the mountain years earlier. Miller Lite: John’s beer. She would share it with him. Some to the ground with his ashes, some for her so he wouldn’t drink alone.

  More than once she walked toward her favorite tree on the south side of the hill, looking out over the headwater forks of the river toward Signal Peak, a stretch of country Teresa liked to call “the navel of the world,” having absorbed its many moods and mysteries during her years watching over it. That characterization felt apt once you saw the view yourself, a view the majesty of which made you believe the story that Geronimo had been born there, down where the river’s forks came out of their separate canyons and merged—a place gnarly enough and beautiful enough to have delivered to the world a child who would become in time a legend.

  Still the moment kept not feeling right. She would walk to the tree and stand there awhile and walk away with the ashes still in her hand. Something was missing, I wasn’t sure what. Perhaps a certain mood, a certain congruence of weather and rite. So I thought some more on it and decided that I wanted to wait for one of those really foggy days, the days when my mountain sits in the clouds and for me things seem a little magical, though magic isn’t quite the right word.

  The day would come, she knew. Thirteen summers on high had taught her many things, that among them. A day would come, likely before the end of July, mid-August at the very latest, when she would lift her head from the pillow on her narrow single bed, next to the south-facing windows of her tower, and find herself swaddled in mist, having slept inside a cloud. The thrill of that never got old, no matter how many times it happened: waking on what felt like an island, the sky above blotted out by tufts of cotton candy and the land below drowned in seas of water vapor, the visible world—normally so vast, such a smorgasboard of delights for the landscape-enraptured—reduced to a handful of nearby trees and a hillock of earth caressed by tendrils of fog. Unable to see beyond a hundred yards in any direction. Unable to see Signal Peak except in her mind’s eye, the protuberant bump of it on her southern horizon, from which John, just a few weeks earlier, had given her a flash with his signal mirror so she could calibrate her Firefinder precisely with his tower.

  When that foggy day finally arrived, I took the Miller Lite and John’s ashes and headed for the tree. I dug a little hole in the ground and poured some of the ashes in. I said some words—a goodbye, an I’ll miss you, a promise to make it an annual ceremony. Some of the beer went with him into the ground, some of it went to me. Then I climbed the tower. The wind had picked up a bit, enough to carry some of the ashes away with it, and I let the remaining ashes fall from the window.

  It was an east wind, as it usually is when the monsoon plume flows northwest from the Gulf of Mexico and a back door cold front pushes across the low country of the Rio Grande rift. The ashes drifted westward from the tower, to a spot that marked the uppermost reach of the canyon running away below her. With the rainy season about to set in for real, perhaps a few molecules would hitch a ride on moving water, dribbling downhill, a few feet at a time, stranded for a day or three until what our lookout comrade Skip—aka Eagle Peak—would call “a real toad-strangler” of a storm moved over and swept them down a draw toward the canyon bottom. With a few more days of good precip, a stream would form in the arroyo, tumbling John’s remains through pools and carrying them through scalloped riffles as they made their way toward the canyon of the river’s Crazy Fork.

  There, on autumn nights after fire season had ended and the tourists had all gone home for the summer and the young hippies had packed up their things and returned to school, John liked to set up camp near the stream below a big warm spring. The weather was rarely better in the Gila than in mid-September—warm days, cool nights. In the daytime he would hike or ride Sundance or loaf about the river skipping stones. In the evening, after the sun dropped below the canyon wall, he would arrange tea candles all around the edge of the pool and set them alight so he could sit and soak for hours, miles from the nearest road, while the stars slid across the sky and the flames danced in the steaming surface of the water and the overhanging trees cast undulant shadows that moved like spirits of the ancients as he thought to himself how lucky he was to have found such a spot after a lifetime of footloose wandering. At long last, a proper home in the world. And in the epicenter of untamed fire, the original American Wilderness.

  A SONG FOR THE RIVER

  SUMMER 2017

  MÓNICA AND I WENT to the mountain that summer, a homecoming and a honeymoon. I had been away for nearly two years and prevented from having a full season there for four, what with interventions from the Silver Fire, John’s death, and my own corporeal frailty. An absence of 700 days gave my return the feeling of a minor triumph, another small miracle.

  It was a quiet fire season, made mellow by unusually heavy rains in early June, when normally the forest was at its driest. On June 7—the four-year anniversary of the Silver Fire and the three-year anniversary of John’s death—I looked in on the hueco where I had once spread his ashes and found it full of standing water, inhabited by salamanders. No such thing had ever happened that early in the season, not in my years there. The next day the hueco was dry again, and the salamanders had returned to their burrows. Their brief appearance reminded me that in our restless human quest to make meaning, sometimes all we have to do is pay attention. Meaning will be made for us.

  Mónica wished to know the rhythms of the place for herself, to sit at night by an outdoor fire under a sky silly with stars and feel the magisterial hush of dwelling amid the fog in the rainy season. She quit her job and arrived in mid-June, spent whole afternoons on her belly in the meadow, watching short-horned lizards dine on passing ants and ladybugs converge on sapling pines. We made hot dogs and s’mores to celebrate the solstice American-style. Sticky-fingered and delirious from sugar, we moved off into the dark to watch shooting stars trace their evanescent paths across the long arc of the Milky Way. Alone there on the rim of the range, joined in an odyssey through sky and light, waking to the first bird calls of morning, spooning against the chill of night, we grew closer with every passing day.

  Any couple who survives three or four months with no human company but each other is destined for a long permanent relationship. They deserve each other. So wrote the author and fire lookout Edward Abbey, with the caustic irony of a man five times married. I felt quite the opposite. I had done nothing to deserve Mónica, but we had already tested the edges of the phrases for better or for worse, in sickness and in health. During my recovery from the hip surgeon’s handiwork, I had dabbled with the Percocet he prescribed and sensed almost instantly that down that path lay ruin. Instead, flat on my back in El Paso, I dreamt my way to the mountain: the spooky moonrises over
the desert in the east, the bounding deer and blooming irises, the hills flowing through hues of green and blue, gray and black with the circuit of the sun. And when my imagination faltered, Mónica joined me in bed and rubbed my feet, massaged my legs, scratched my head, anything to distract me from my rather pathetic condition.

  In a sign of the squalid times, my health insurance plan was discontinued on the day after my second surgery, and the one I bought to replace it denied me coverage for any post-op physical therapy. Mónica proposed marriage in order to bring me under her plan. It made sense. It felt right. We were all in by then anyway, so for the sake of love and my full recovery we held a small ceremony in the backyard, just a few family and friends in attendance, flowers in her hair, pearls at her neck. I could barely stand to utter my vows, but her love was the major reason I came out the other side, and I hoped in time to prove worthy of it.

  It would be the work of a lifetime if I could pull it off.

  Often in the evenings that summer, we took a long walk off the mountain, alternating between meditation and observation, talking and thinking. Our meanders reminded me that in the forests of the Southwest, no place is more lushly green than a burn scar in recovery: aspen now eight feet tall, riotous tangles of locust with thorns like fish hooks, grama grass and raspberry sprouts and fire-following mosses that sparkled like crushed velvet. Everywhere the country was alive with new growth.

  Toward the end of one of our twilight walks, Mónica turned to me and put her finger to her lips. Ahead of us, just off the trail, stood a saffron-colored bear, a male yearling, tipping over rocks in search of worms and grubs. It was Mónica’s first such encounter, a moment she had both anticipated and feared. We moved with care, creeping in silence through the grass, keeping a safe distance as we watched him snuffling for food. We admired his beauty and honored his power by letting him drift away down the side of the mountain, unaware of our presence.

  A moment together in the presence of a bear: it was a start at balancing the scales. And not the last such encounter of our summer, not the only jolt of joy. There would be other bear sightings, and afternoons of downy fog, and double rainbows over the desert, and surprise visits from friends emerging cold and shivering through the mist—venerable poets grooving on the pain and pleasure of the climb. There were days when four different varieties of hummingbird visited the feeder: rufous, blue-throated, broadtail, calliope. There were opulent hours of reading in the hammock and nights when the tree frogs croaked their mating call, a chorus that seemed to applaud our own amorous instincts.

  There were moments when it felt as if we might spontaneously combust from an excess of ecstasy.

  I OFTEN HAD OCCASION to wonder that summer how my fellow humans endure the seemingly unendurable. If our culture offers one overriding message, it’s that the trick is to avoid looking too hard at anything. Never have a people been so commanded to distraction. Terrorists destroy our gleaming temples of finance and commerce, and our leaders instruct us to go shopping. Our pursuit of new forms of intelligence privileges the artificial. Two billion of us seek validation and connection through a tool that began as a crummy, misogynistic web site called FaceMash whose sole purpose was to rank the hotness of women at Harvard. A visiting sociologist from another planet could easily conclude that the pinnacle of human purpose in our time is expressed in the act of art-directing quirky photo shoots of what we eat for lunch. We exalt “disruption,” lionize men who live by the credo “break things.” We treat our pain with pills whose end game is to extinguish pain by extinguishing our selves.

  As a corrective I sometimes thought of John and Jenny Mahl. When I paid them a visit on my days off the tower that summer, they showed me what remained of Michael’s sunglasses collection, most of which they had given away to his friends, little tokens of remembrance. They allowed me to hold his hand-carved didgeridoo, a gorgeous marriage of the creative and the native—his own artistry brought to bear on a sturdy yucca stalk.

  Their family once played songs together every evening before dinner, but with Michael gone a silence moved in—a silence, by the time of our meeting, more than three years long. “You know what kind of plane it was that Ritchie Valens, Buddy Holly, and the Big Bopper died in?” John Mahl asked me. “A Beechcraft Bonanza. The day the music died—it felt that way for us too.”

  Jenny still remembered their last breakfast together, when Michael gave her a hug and said, “Mom, I’m so glad we skipped all that silly teenage stuff.” John still remembered how, five days before the crash, Michael had sat with a glass of bourbon and a cigar at his older brother’s high-school graduation party, “owning it like a boss. We didn’t have to worry about him abusing it. He was already so mature.” Immediately after the crash, business dropped off at the family’s sign-making shop. It took them a little while to realize that people were afraid of them and their grief. By way of invitation John felt a need to tell a local newspaper reporter, “The Mahls are not toxic.” He urged people to come by and see them, give them a hug.

  Michael had cultivated a fascination with insects from the time he was a small child. As young as age two, he would sit in the family garden and watch ladybugs for hours on end with a patience that astonished his parents. When his mother first visited the crash site a few months after her son’s death, a resident of the nearby trailer park guided her to the place where Michael’s body was found. Jenny Mahl found the experience of standing there overwhelming—the thought of her son dying in fear as the plane stalled and went out of control, the son she had spent nearly half of her life protecting from harm. Through the smear of her tears and her shuddering sobs she happened to notice, on the bark of an old juniper tree blackened by the fire started by the crash, a solitary ladybug bigger than any she had ever seen. It was one of many such moments she came to think of as “little Michael winks”—mysterious telegrams of comfort and hope sent from the other side—and it was part of what inspired the Mahl family to gather at his gravesite every year on his birthday, to release a small swarm of mail-order ladybugs in his memory.

  Amid the stillness of their home and the fierceness of their grief arrived an invitation to re-examine what they cherished. How to survive inside the silence became the work of their lives. The church to which they belonged, the faith they had inherited, no longer felt adequate to their spiritual needs. Its answers did not jibe with the urgency or complexity of their questions. John’s father led that church, so drifting away involved a painful break with family tradition, but such were the demands of an honest reckoning with tragedy. They could not lie to themselves. They could not go through the motions and pretend.

  They discovered that their true church, the place where they made contact with the holy, was in the wild Gila. Their son had loved the great fecund pageant of the out of doors, and to be in the presence of insects and wildlife was to feel close to him in a way unattainable inside a box with four walls and a roof. They now made a habit of camping in the woods whenever the demands of their business allowed them the time. Intimacy with the nonhuman not only helped them preserve intimacy with Michael, it helped them cultivate connection with their two living sons, Alex and Danny, who enjoyed camping too.

  Contrary to the dictates of the culture, they had come to understand that the trick was to look harder at everything.

  WHEN I LOCKED UP THE CABIN and came down the mountain for the last time that season, I went to the river, where I had people to see and work to witness.

  I began on the river’s main stem, thirty-five miles northwest of Silver City. I timed my arrival just after six buses of kids unloaded and organized themselves in groups at the Gila River Farm, in the valley below the proposed dam, on a piece of land owned by the Nature Conservancy—eighty acres of river and floodplain. With donations given by friends and admirers of Ella Jaz in the aftermath of the crash, Patrice Mutchnick had set up a watershed conservation fund in her daughter’s name. It brought more than 200 Silver City fifth-graders to the river for an afternoon fie
ld trip each fall, where they learned about stream ecology. This year, for the first time, the fund provided seed money for matching grants to expand the festival from one day to three, which allowed the organizers to include fifth-graders from other towns near Silver City.

  At different stations across the property, instructors taught the kids how to measure turbidity and dissolved oxygen, how to make adobe bricks from river mud, how to weave a duck shape from a cattail reed. Jenny Mahl guided one of the groups of children, and Patrice led the instruction station on pollinators. In an open field the kids played a game that mimicked bird migration. Some imitated cooper’s hawks and peregrine falcons. One kid played a hurricane. The rest tried to run the gauntlet as neotropical migrants, eluding predators and harsh weather.

  Next to a pond and irrigation canal, Patrice showed the kids how to catch a butterfly in a net for a closeup look at its intricate color pattern. She told the children how she and some other adults had created this place called Butterfly Way, seeded with native flowering plants to attract pollinators vital for our food supply; avocados and apples and other yummy things could not grow without them. Then she sent the kids off with nets and instructions to bring back what they caught to share with the group. They shrieked and laughed as they ran through the field, nets swinging wildly.