by Erik Storlie
I clamber down into the hole left by the roots and reach above my head to touch thin blocks of rock the size of flagstones. They’ve been yanked up and suspended by brown, gnarled roots the thickness of my thumb—roots that over decades penetrated cracks in the bedrock and spread out in horizontal umbrellas along the margins between each layer. I trace with my fingers these feathery root systems—delicate fans that crack rock, bringing life to hard places. “Ah, I’ll miss you, old man,” I murmur, and then lay my cheek on a hanging cluster of root and cool rock shards. At my touch, flakes of granite shower down, rattling against my boots.
I wander back up through timber and, after a time, find shade in a cluster of three Douglas firs, their huge trunks circled on a shoulder of the mountain. They enclose a small room carpeted in years of fallen rusty-red needles. The bolts show scars of lightning strikes from storms blown off the Flute Reeds, the largest trunk scarred clear to the ground. Tracing my fingers over the rent, I feel the two margins of smooth, mounded bark growing in from each side to a close. Dabbling my fingertips in sticky pitch oozing in the crack, I lean forward to press my nose and lips and tongue into the textured bark, inhaling the sharp smell of turpentine.
It’s a lovely, shady place, perfect for lunch. Dust blown up from the bare slope below carries smells of grass and the leathery blue-green sage baking in the sun.
I clear a small area, raking aside fallen twigs and branches and dried elk scat with my fingers. I pull off my boots and socks and take a seat on a heap of crackling red needles and tiny brittle twigs. I eat my peanut butter sandwich, linger over the chocolate bar, then finish with the apple, just as my mother taught me to do with brown bag school lunches, because the apple cleans your teeth.
After drinking the rest of my lukewarm water, I lie back, stretch out at full length, and relax.
An occasional cloud builds over the Flute Reeds, floats off and passes overhead, nearly scraping the tops of my trees, which whip occasionally in afternoon breezes.
After a time I think, “I’ll do zazen here. It’s shady, cool, protected from the wind.”
I stand up and stretch, then arrange my down vest and shirt to make a comfortable seat. I sit, again crossing my legs in half lotus and placing the left palm above the right, thumb tips lightly touching. My breath slows, drops into my belly, and smooths out. I drop my eyes down and my gaze rests softly on the reddish carpet of needles and tiny black twigs.
I sit in a fastness of rock and fir, belly full, heart filled with gratitude. For an hour my mind drifts peacefully on the flow of the breath—in and out, in and out. A few black ants, busy in the needles, climb over my hands or up my calves inside the loose cuffs of my jeans, probing, exploring with delicate feet. I ignore the tickling—it’s a test of one-pointedness.
Tides of mind stuff ebb and flow, ebb and flow with the breath, surging, pooling in every crevice of my body, flowing out, rolling down hillsides, filling the valley and then rising slowly, effortlessly, to touch the tops of the Flute Reeds.
7
The Flute Reed River Mountains
IT’S THE NEXT SUMMER, 1966. TERRIFIED OF LSD, I avoid Lon and Farmer and seek refuge. I plan to go alone into the mountains, to explore the Flute Reeds. Putting together food for seven days, I pack my backpack and go, fearful, excited. I’ve got two old Forest Service maps that Barney loaned me. They’re sketchy. I know only that these mountains are rugged and little frequented.
On the first day I’m clumsy. The soles of my feet recoil from the jolt of a rocky trail that winds up through dry sage foothills. My skin shrinks from brush that whips and stings my bare legs. Stumbling over a root snaking across the trail, I’m carried forward by the bulky backpack and go down sprawling. I get up panting, grabbing a huge granite boulder to steady myself. The palms of my hands are scraped raw, and I cringe at the rough, granular edges. I make camp early and try to relax.
Hunting for firewood the next morning, I do better. Each foot finds just the right fulcrum on rock and root. I build a fire and set a pot of water on to boil. I see that mice were here in the night. The corners of a chunk of cheese I overlooked in the dark are nibbled away through the tight plastic wrap by fine teeth, leaving many pairs of tiny parallel grooves. I cook oatmeal and raisins, then linger with coffee in the midmorning sun, reorganizing my pack.
Soon I head out on the rough, unmarked trail. All day I move deeper and deeper into remote forest never touched by ax or saw. Here is the original face of the land, the land as the glacier left it, the land absolute. Here are pine and fir and meadow grasses, the deer, antelope, and squirrel that followed the glacier’s retreat. All this wells up before my eyes as I slowly march toward the center of the range.
The next afternoon, after a morning hike that brings me up out of the dense timber, I feel I belong again. I leave the trail to follow a nameless creek that winds to the north, higher and higher, up into ghostly white peaks. Under brilliant skies and a blazing sun, I pass two large lower lakes fringed with pine and fir. They’re beautiful, but I don’t linger. I’m restless, eager to find the fourth lake, the very top of the chain, just a faint, small circle on the old map. Into this, ten thousand years ago, the remnant glacier collapsed—tons of rotten ice and snow.
At the inlet of the third lake, I push through tangles of willows. Then, the creek side steepening and my backpack flopping, I slide on rock faces peppered with loose gravel. Entering a deep declivity, smooth walls rising on either hand, I hop from one exposed boulder to another, sometimes wading, finally crawling on hands and knees up a gurgling watercourse of tiny pools and waterfalls threading down through turf and upended rocks.
Suddenly rock and water end in sky, and I’m standing on the lip of a small lake. It is encircled by peaks, the rugged scattered with low alpine fir that crouch behind rocks, sculpted by the relentness winter winds.
I drop my backpack and throw myself down at full length on the rich grasses. Now, at the end of this third day, my skin welcomes the harsh sun, dry air, and powdery windblown grit. My flesh and bones relax gladly into sharp-edged rocks. Sitting up, I wiggle my buttocks in the lumpy turf, placing the sharp exposed edge of a small rock comfortably between my hams. The creek brims out at my right hand. I pull off boots and wet wool socks and drop in my feet, then snatch them out, groaning with the deep cold ache.
Leaning back against the pack, stroking the cool, wiry green grasses, I look back down on the three lakes below me, each in its basin, the four beaded together by a twisting watercourse that wanders south, now through meadows strewn with giant blocks of stone, now disappearing over the edges of cliffs. The basin, cupping blue sky, was bitten from the circling peaks by glaciers, gnawing, moaning, grinding their icy teeth—century piled on century. In the ten thousand years since their retreat, in fields of rubble and blasted rock, it is these plants and trees before me, just these, that have come to take root.
I sit on thick, emerald turf. It teems with varieties of weeds and grasses, wildflowers and mosses. It creeps in pseudopods of earth, root, and stem as thick as my body, creeps in slow motion a few feet in a century, creeps in great fingers over rock after rock till stopped by snowfield and cliff—a green flesh softening every bitter, glacier-fractured boulder.
The sun lowers, a cool breeze drops off the peaks, and I’m chilled in my sweaty clothes. I rummage in my pack for an old sweater, wool pants, and some dry wool socks. I pull on my boots and pitch the tent, then slowly circle the lake, feeling airy and floating without the pack on my back.
Climbing another steep watercourse, I stand in an immense treeless field of boulders that ends against the great north wall of the cirque. Beneath my boots in the scattered rock and turf, seeps of snowmelt bubble up everywhere, fed by winter snowfields dying against the cliffs five hundred feet above me in the hot, angling afternoon sun. Each spring surrounds itself in grass and mosses, the turf honeycombed with tunnels of unseen small creatures that open out onto the water’s edge.
The sun falls toward
the peaks at my left hand. Time to make camp. I turn and begin to walk down, honoring the ancient sods and mosses, careful to place my boots only on the rocks, islands in the turf. As I go, the springs now gather into streams, descending toward shelter, the alpine fur reappearing, tangled, gnarled, hugging the ground, hiding behind rocks, resisting yet conforming to all the forces of rock and sun and wind, accepting a life on the edge of this or that house-size chunk of granite—accepting what is and thriving.
With each step down toward more water and warmth, my boots crush increasing, tenacious life, root tendrils following seams in the granite, until suddenly rocks split and meadow and forest are everywhere, home to trout and goat, elk and eagle.
Suddenly I know. I’ve caught the goddess in the very act of creating the garden! She gathers her strength here, alone, growing more beautiful since the glacier melted ten thousand years ago. She waits. With wonder and a catch in my throat, I fall down on my knees and worship her in the thick emerald turf. Icy water sponges up into the knees of my wool pants as I lean forward and spread my arms wide to gather in the earth, kneading my fingers into the sod. I bury my face in sun-warmed grasses, inhale moist, fecund, mushroom smells, and open my lips, licking my tongue deep into the hairy fiber and grit of the sod.
Tears well up and I’m shaking, sobbing with loss and grief and gratitude. “Oh, I love you, I love you,” I murmur into the grass that tickles my lips and tongue, and I hug her close, crushing my face into her belly, crying a small boy’s tears.
I can’t live without her! I must touch her, stroke her, adore her body, find there the outside of that mind that lies secret, deep. A mind prior to thought—patient, sacred, an ocean of consciousness, its shimmering surface buoying this earth, the plants and animals, the women, the children, the men.
The sun has just swung behind a peak on my right. It’s suddenly cold. I move down off the meadow, stepping from boulder to boulder down another steep slope. Above me, angling afternoon sunshine rakes the shattered rock of the mountains into deeply contrasting light and shadow. The bowl of sky inverted over the cirque is a deep brilliant blue. Occasional puffy clouds cap the peaks. Then I’m on rimrock above the lake. I stand for a minute, shivering as cool evening air begins to roll down off the slopes and cliffs above. I see my little blue tent. Good. I’m ready for the sack. I’ll eat more cheese and bread and forget about cooking.
Plunging chilled hands in my pockets, I slowly descend the last few hundred yards, following the creek as it widens out and runs, only a few inches deep, over broad bands of glazed, glacier-polished bedrock. At last it drops in a little falls into the lake, glassy now as the wind dies down with evening, gently pulsing, mirroring its cup of rimrock. Standing at the brink of the falls, the cirque darkening, I see a few circles dimpling the surface where rushing white water grows calm as it enters the depths. Trout rising! They’re watching for bugs carried down by the stream. Fish for dinner? I’m vegetarian now, mostly, but brought fishing gear as emergency backup. I could cook after all.
At camp, a knot of anticipation in my stomach, I kneel by my pack and assemble a light spinning rod. My fingers, clumsy with cold and trembling with excitement, tie the fine spin-casting line onto a small lure. Several thick-bodied trout lazily cruise a few feet off the rocky shore, making the evening circuit. Beneath the water their bodies are green-yellow. They have flaming red spots at the gills. Goldens.
I stand too abruptly, and seeing me, they spook and dart into deeper waters. I slow down and stalk, heart pumping, moving along the water’s edge, waiting for the evening hunger that I know will drive them past wariness. Still they don’t return.
I sink down behind a rock and poke up only my head, scanning the water. Now three big ones drift by, cruising just beneath the surface, dabbling the water with their noses. Without standing, moving cautiously, I cast awkwardly from behind the rock.
The lure hits the surface and the biggest goes for it, fiercely outrunning the others. With a jerk I set the hook, then give him line as he rushes out of sight into deep water. I raise the pole, slowly reeling him back, but he runs again. The rod bends double, he breaks water in his fear and rage, and I give back more line, afraid he’ll break free.
After a half dozen runs, he tires. Gently, I bring him in close to the shore. At last he rests at my feet in a foot of water, his tail waving, fins pulsing. He jerks his head stubbornly from side to side, struggling against the gnawing hook. He’s too tired to run again.
I reach out my hand very slowly from behind, then suddenly get my fingers under a gill and flip him up onto the turf. He’s a good fifteen inches, and fat.
I kneel down and admire him, entranced with the golds and reds burning in the fading light. With a pang, an ache deep in my own flesh, I reach with two hands, grip his firm, slippery body belly up, and swing him high over my head, then down sharply to crack the back of his skull on the edge of a fractured boulder lying next to the shore. There’s a snapping sound and instantaneously, like a lightning bolt, I feel rows of fibrous muscles up and down his spine ripple under my fingers, a quivering shudder of death. Pulled fresh, living, from the waters, he’s a jewel—golden treasure. Now, even as I pull up grasses to cushion his body in my canvas side bag, his vibrant reds, greens, and golds begin fading to a dull silver.
I take two more smaller ones and, hungry, I can’t wait. No need to cook anything but fish. I head back to camp and lay them side by side on a flat rock that juts out into the water.
Kneeling, taking up the big one, I sever cartilage under the jaw with a razor-sharp knife, then with a slight sawing motion slit him from anus to gill case, releasing traces of blood and a curve of intestine. With the finger and thumb of my left hand, I grab the loop of his jaw. His sharp teeth drag over my finger, then lightly lacerate the skin as, with my right thumb and fingers, I firmly pull the throat cartilage down and out, shucking gill case and guts. In the fading light the entrails seem to glow, an iridescence peculiar to goldens.
I slit the gut to see what he’s eating and find a tangle of insects and stone caddises. I set it aside, and as my left hand returns, about to reach for the next fish, I’m shocked.
The gray-pink heart, just the size of the tip of my forefinger, sticks to the middle of my palm. It’s contracting, pulsing—still beating out the rhythm of this life I’ve just ended. I stare for a long moment, my own heart in my throat, then slowly throw this slight piece of flesh as far out into the lake as I can.
My hands are painfully numb with the icy water. I put them, fishy and slippery, into my pockets for several minutes till they begin to warm up. I kneel down again and with my thumbnail strip out the membrane that holds a line of blood just below the spinal column. I clean the other two, then take up each one for a final, careful rinse.
Back at my pack, I pull leather work gloves on my icy fingers, quickly gather wood, and start a fire in a heap of dry branches in a ring of stones I place by the edge of the lake. Since I packed in only a single aluminum pot, while the fire burns down to coals, I hunt around the camp for green willow sticks.
On a lattice of these laid across the stones, I roast the three goldens. In the heat their eyes turn from clear balls into small, opaque white marbles.
Halfway through cooking, the green sticks burn through and the fish fall into the fire. I jump up to rescue them, scrambling to cut more green sticks and rebuild the lattice.
It’s almost dark when the fish are done. I check them with a flashlight. The flesh is salmon pink and running with juices. I brought neither plate nor fork, so I lay them out on a flat rock by the fire, shake out salt and pepper, and eat with my knife and fingers, first popping out their delicate cheek muscles, then eating chunks of flesh off the ribs, finally holding the skeletons like corn on the cob, tail in one hand, head in the other, nibbling off tiny luscious morsels where the ribs meet the spinal column.
Gorging on their fat diamond bodies, chewing grit, ash, and blackened skin flakes, I don’t stop till I’ve eaten every
one—then lean back on the rocks with a sigh, hands and face smeared with their grease.
I sit zazen, cross-legged, for an hour as the fire burns down. The pure, smokeless embers glow in the ashes and, one by one, wink out. It’s moonless again tonight. The Milky Way gently pulses over my head. A chill penetrates me—up through my legs and spine from the earth, down into my ears, face, and skull from clear sky.
A thought slowly courses through my mind. “Oh, you beautiful creatures, we all suffer and die. Now your bodies are inside my body. You nourish me, not just with flesh, but with beauty. I rob you. Someday, in turn, my own flesh will be scattered. To whom will I give nourishment? Whose hunt will thieve from me?”
Now the fire is out and I’m shivering. I keep sitting. It’s this moment I hunt for. All five senses taste the cirque that surrounds me—deep, still, transparent. Behind me I hear the bubbling rush of the inlet creek, threading down rock and melting into deep waters.
The next morning is clear and cold. Frost whitens my green down bag and lingers on the turf in the shadows behind rocks. I spread the bag out in the sun to dry. After a breakfast of oatmeal, raisins, cocoa, and coffee, I survey the wall of the cirque and decide to head for a cleft between two peaks that might lead down the other side to another chain of lakes. Looking from here, I can’t tell whether I can make it. I see several hundred feet of steep slide rock. That I can climb. But it’s broken in several places by tongues of snow and dark rock faces. And it winds just out of sight before reaching the saddle. The other side, of course, could be a sheer wall. I’ll have to be careful. I’m alone. No mistakes are permitted.
I put together a lunch of cheese, hard unyeasted bread, and chocolate, and pack that, along with water, rain gear, and a jacket, into my day bag.
