It's such a cold queer season, winter. Of dark dreams and hibernations. Of snow that floats gently from heaven-to-earth like white milky butterflies, deceivingly turning marrow to ice, painting summer as a vague and distant memory. Spellbinding. Let it once lull you to sleep, it'll take you to death. Touch its tapered icicles – hanging stalactite-like from tree and rock, sometimes dripping, sometimes not – and before you're aware, the pellucid ice turns red with your blood.
Mother Nature at her wickedest is winter.
Mother Nature at her wickedest.
When we first established camp at Eagle Peak, it was late in the summer of '80, a year that had no autumn. One September day was all blue skies and tee-shirts; the next was gray gloom and parkas. That same year, in fact only a few months before, Mount St. Helens had explosively erupted, sending a plume of ash as high as fifteen miles into the atmosphere. Meteorologists were already warning that the ash might have a significant influence on weather patterns. For some parts of the country, they were forecasting what they called a small Nuclear Winter.
But who listened to meteorologists?
Stairway To Heaven was what we called our little commune at Eagle Peak. Esoteric and self-important, perhaps, but that's the way of the artist. A government grant had brought us together, a small group of strangers, each an artist setting out to illuminate the four seasons through his or her own unique artistic medium. (And yes, it’s true. The National Endowment For The Arts does, in fact, fund projects that don’t have anything to do with bodily functions or sacrilegious interpretations.)
There were twelve of us, all previous strangers, all on separate paths of artistic endeavor – wood carving, leather craft, oils, sculpting, acting, photography, etc. I was the Hemingway of group. As much as possible, we were each supposed to integrate the resources of nature into our work. Paints were made from berries and saps and chalk-like rocks, leather from animal hides, wood carved fresh from fallen trees, etc.
Creativity ran rampant, you could say.
We established our little Stairway in a small valley – a cliff of rock to the north to protect us from the northerners that sometimes swept through the park, and an open lane to the south where we hoped the southern sun would keep us warm on those cold January days when the skies were cloudless.
As the lone writer, I suspect my presence at the Stairway was more for the purpose of recording the experience than anything else. The grant wasn't terribly explicit in this area, and the coordinator had emphasized that each of us were to interpret our experiences individually so that the canvas would be of the broadest, most varied nature. My own personal goal (which has long since been abandoned) was to compile a book of the folklore and mystique that I felt would inevitably grow out of our back-to-nature experience.
I gave up that goal when I was no longer able to comprehend exactly what was taking place at the Stairway.
There were two of us who matched up as outsiders right from day one. Margo McKennen was a photographer, full of f-stops and shutter-speeds, wide-angles and zooms. In a way, she and I were each observers more than creators. Sometimes I think that fine distinction was what kept us a cold breath apart from the others. On the artistic social ladder, Margo and I each had one foot on the bottom rung and one foot dangling free. I think there must have been an unwritten rule (naturally it would be unwritten) about the dirtier the hands in the creation of one's art, the higher up the ladder one stood. Margo and I, we were just doing our best to keep from falling off.
When I first met her, her camera was always busy whirr-clicking this and that with a nervous energy that never seemed satiated. In some ways, I imagined that camera as an extension of her. She saw the world – for all its ugliness, and all its splendor – through an open shutter, almost as if she were afraid to put the camera down for fear she might miss something that shouldn't be missed.
"Blink once, and a piece of the world goes scampering by unnoticed," she would say. "Blink twice ... and there's nothing left to see."
When she first used that line, I thought it had something to do with her own sense of being one of life's non-participants. But now, when I think back to the sadness that sometimes darkened her eyes at such times, I wonder if perhaps it was the blindness of death she was warning me about.
Blink twice ... and there's nothing left to see.
It was September 16th when the first snowflake came fluttering down from the heavens, melting against the ground of Eagle Peak. Then another flake came whispering out of the sky, and another, and it was only a short time before they quit melting as they kissed the earth.
Two days later, a park ranger – all yellow-jacketed and puffing out great breaths of hot air – came snow-mobiling up the trail. They were closing the park (something usually reserved for shortly after the Thanksgiving weekend), and he wanted to know if there were any ... "last requests" is how he put it. I remember how he was trying his best to keep warm, clapping his hands together and scratching at the snow like a great elk trying to uncover the skeleton of a buried shrub. Beneath his words, there was a poorly-disguised contempt. Goddam fools! he was thinking. This ain't no place to be. Not this winter. Not here.
They officially closed the park on September 20th, 1980.
And that began the longest winter I've ever experienced.
During those first winter days, Margo and I were detached observers, more or less keeping a wide eye on our fellow artists, and a curious eye on the strange weather. She was fascinated with the bitter cold of the early snow storm. And I guess that's what I found so attractive about her, that wonderful child-like curiosity, always wanting to watch, to be patient, to wait to see what would happen.
Together – for we became almost inseparable after awhile – we watched as our artistic cohorts slowly lost their facelessness and became real people, whole and eccentric and Jekyll-and-Hyde-ish each in some personal way. It was during those early winter days, when Margo and I were standing just at the fringe of the Stairway experience, left alone to take our little notes – both visual and written – that I enjoyed the most.
Of the lot, Billy Dayton, our resident sculptor, was the oddest. He was a man out of his time, a lost child of the Sixties. He wore his hair long, tied in a ponytail with a strap of fur taken from a rabbit. His face was hidden behind a full beard with touches of gray that made him look older than his years. His eyes were as dark as a moonless night, always seeming to hide something uneasy going on inside him.
I ran into him one late-summer day about a mile from camp. He was kneeling at the base of a monolithic slab of volcanic rock, chipping at it with a chisel made of granite.
"What is it?" I asked, in all innocence of the answer.
"The revolution of nature," he answered with a voice soft and fragile, the kind of voice that makes you believe every muttered syllable even though you knew it was nonsense. That was Billy Dayton, always talking nonsense and making it sound right. At least that's the way I saw it at the time. Now ... well, now I'm not so sure. Perhaps it wasn't nonsense at all.
"Catchy title," I said.
Then Margo came along, whirr-clicking away at everything that found its way into her camera frame. When she saw Billy's monolith, she snapped off four or five shots, then paused with her camera clutched in her hands. "What is it?" she asked.
"The revolution of nature," I answered.
She didn't giggle, at least not out loud.
But something hit Dayton wrong, because he turned on his knees and caught eyes with her, as if he were reading her mind. I remember, for just a moment, thinking his eyes were afire with liquid mercury. Then Margo shivered, and I could see the joy shriveling up inside of her, the way a child's joy sometimes shrivels when an adult walks into the room. "Let's go," she said, giving my arm a tug. Her hand was ice-cold, as if the blood had drained out of her body.
I followed along, while Billy turned back to his revolution. When we were out of ear shot, I asked Margo why the sudden escape.
"Just a
feeling," she said. Then her camera came up and she was whirr-clicking first this tree, then that one. And that was the first time I realized Margo's camera wasn't just a window to the world, but was also her way of closing off the things she didn't want to see.
Out of frame, out of mind.
As winter nights grew colder, the Stairway slowly divided into smaller and smaller groups, each with its own self-interest. Inside this tent, a great debate on craft versus art, and which is the soul of creativity. Inside that tent, a sharing of berry-paint recipes and ten great uses for volcanic rock. Inside our tent, Margo and I – once strangers, now friends – safely sharing tiny, protected pieces of ourselves.
"Perspective is the greatest gift we can give the world," she said on one of those cold nights. She was bundled warmly in a mummy bag, the flickering light of the fire reflecting brightly in her eyes. "Outside, you see the bleakness of a harsh winter; I see ice castles and snow fairies. We look at the same thing, yet see it differently. That perspective – yours unique to you, mine unique to me – is our greatest gift to the world."
I thought I could understand that. "Take the same idea for a story," I said. "Give it to fifty different writers and you'll get fifty different stories. Each with its own personality. Each as individual as its writer."
"Yes!" she shouted excitedly, teacher to student. "And from where do we draw our unique perspectives, you yours, me mine?"
"From yesterdays and todays! From childhood delights and adolescent nightmares! From staring monkey-like at the mirror! From growing up so fast we never quit feeling like we're still children!"
"And from the smells we smell!" she said, raising up on one elbow and spitting out the words as fast as they'd come. "And the sounds we hear, the roughs and smooths and squares and rounds we touch! From what makes us sad, and what makes us happy! From our beliefs about the world and the universe, about birth and death, about promises and lies! From all of it!"
She took up a great breath, held it, smiled through it, and let it all out in a white cloud that filled up the tent. She had said so much more than she realized at that moment. Because I think that's what happened to Dayton. He had a perspective all his own, and somehow it got loose.
"I want you to see this," she told me one late January day. The sun was shining freely over Eagle Peak, and the white snow on the ground was nearly blinding as she tugged at me. "It's beauty at its ugliest."
"That's a contradiction in terms. It must have something to do with Dayton," I said.
"Who else?"
"Another revolution?"
"Of sorts, I suppose." She stopped to snap off a few quick shots of some deer tracks in the snow. "Take a guess at what the man has done this time. Make it the wildest, most bizarre guess you can come up with."
"He's built his own stairway to heaven," I said.
Margo lowered her camera, then shared the oddest smile with me, as if she were giving actual thought to the possibility. "I wonder," she said softly. Then the camera went up again, and she said, "Guess again."
"I give up. The man's too unpredictable for a writer's imagination."
"He's sculpting in ice."
"Sculpting what?"
"A self-portrait."
There were three sculptures cut in the ice, each slightly different in a not-so-subtle way I still find difficult to describe. A progression of some sort – young, old, older, first came to mind. The first, a marvelous likeness of Dayton himself. The second, a little less recognizable. The third, Picasso-like, only softer, less sharp in line and cut. Perhaps digression might better describe the three since each appeared less distinct, more oblique than the one to its left.
"That's a self-portrait?" I asked. There was an odd sense of imbalance about the work, something that seemed to say: the wiser the man, the more self-destructive. And that was Dayton himself, wise and self-destructive.
"What else can it be?" Margo answered.
Dayton damned all twelve of us that winter. Each of us became one of his ice-cut similitudes done in three distinct digressions – born, living, dead – as if the breath of death had slowly shriveled the ice. All twelve of us, he cut and shaped and sculpted. Sally at 7,000 feet, near Eagle Lake. Hampton at 7,500 feet near Goat Head Pass. The others hidden in places we were never able to locate.
At the completion of the last sculptured likeness, sometime in mid-April when the snow at the lower elevations was already beginning to turn to water, Dayton disappeared inside his tent and never came out again.
We didn't know it at the time, but the revolution was on its way.
It arrived near the end of April. The sun was shining almost summer-like in the southern skies. And the spring thaw was slowly lending life to an endless number of trickles and runnels and fountains, sculpting deeper into mountainsides, and here and there rearranging the topographical anatomy.
Eagle's Peak was finally coming back to life after its long winter hibernation. And I for one could hardly wait for the day when I could let out a warm sigh and not see it mushrooming before me in the cold air.
As much as I thought of myself as nature's victim, I suspect Dayton thought of himself as nature's messiah. Perhaps that was truly what he was – Mother Nature's messenger. It had been two weeks since anyone had seen him poke his nose outside his tent flaps, so Margo – her insatiable curiosity piqued – convinced me we should try poking our noses inside for a glimpse.
"This isn't the time to be taking photographs," I whispered to her. We stood outside Dayton's tent, Margo with both hands on her camera, me with both hands on the canvas flaps.
"Just one," she said with a sparkle in her eye. "Go on."
I pulled back the flaps.
Margo snapped off two or three quick shots.
And we both stood silent for the longest breath, Margo's camera dropping numbly back to her side (a sight I'll never forget, because it was the first time I had ever seen her come face-to-face with something horrible and not try to hide behind the lens of a camera).
What was left of Dayton was on the floor, partially hidden beneath some clothing and that strap of rabbit fur he always used to tie back his hair. I nudged the pile with a foot, heard the eerie clicking of bone-against-bone, saw a jelly-like substance ooze outward in a growing puddle, and tried to keep my stomach from heaving.
Dayton-the-messiah had delivered his message.
Something in Mother Nature was out of balance.
Stairway To Heaven disbanded the next day, partially because of what had happened to Dayton, partially because the long winter months had finally taken their toll on our collective state of mind. Even in the face of spring, it had become too easy to see things as forever cold and frozen and hopeless.
Sally and Hampton left early the next morning for Mount St. Helens. Some of the others went home, some went south where the weather was warmer, some drifted out of camp without saying a word. Margo and I stayed on.
We were curious, I guess. And maybe that's what had set us apart from the others right from the beginning. I think Margo felt somehow responsible for what had happened to Dayton, though we both tried to label it as a fluke of nature, something like spontaneous combustion, something better left unquestioned. Still, she wanted to keep taking photographs until (through the eyes of her camera) it somehow made sense. And for myself, well, I wanted to write more about Dayton and how he seemed so different from the rest of us, and maybe how things at the Stairway might have been different if we'd tried to understand him a little better.
We both felt compelled to remain at Eagle Peak a while longer.
The twenty-first day of May was my last day there.
I was sitting on the ground, leaning back against a rock, soaking up some sunshine, and scribbling stray ideas into my notebook. I couldn't escape the thought that somehow Dayton and Mount St. Helens and the ice sculptures were all intertwined in some strange malevolent way that had brought about Dayton's death. Then Margo quietly appeared from the mouth of a small valley that fe
d into a single-file trail leading upward toward Eagle Peak's 12,000 foot summit. Her camera was resting at her side. Her steps were nearly staggering, and I remember my first thought being that she must have tried to hike to the top of the mountain. She was glistening in the mid-day sun, her hair was damp against her forehead, her face and arms and legs were alive with reflected sunlight. And her eyes were glassy and ice-like, as pure as the crystal-like agates I used to play marbles with as a child.
"Margo?" She leaned against the rock wall. I knelt next to her, and noticed for the first time, the blood coming from her head. "My God, what happened?"
She handed me a roll of film – the touch of her hand was cold, like a mountain stream in early May – then another, and another. And when she tried to smile it was a sad smile she couldn't hold. "You're still up there," she whispered. "I couldn't reach you, but you're there."
I brushed the hair away from where she was bleeding. There was a dark, red hole where her left ear should have been. "Oh, Margo ..."
"I found my sculpture," she said, between small, fought-for breaths. "Thought maybe if I shattered it ..."
"Dayton's likeness of you?"
She nodded. "Yours, too. Another thousand feet up. Near the summit."
There was a long, breath-held silence. I sat next to her. She curled herself into my arms. "I'm dying," she said, and it was as innocent and honest a statement as one of her photographs. "And there's nothing I can do."
She leaned into me. I whispered, "I love you," and pulled her closer. She felt soft, too soft, like a worn pillow or a balloon losing its air. Her skin was moist and cold and slick to the touch, wax-like in some ways, ice-like in others. I knew I was going to lose her.
I held her till the sun went down, till I couldn't see in the darkness any longer, because I wanted to remember what she looked like before the flesh began sliding off her arms and legs and face, before the tissue and muscle and cartilage turned jelly-like and puddled beneath her. When there was only a distant, hazy moonlight overhead, I listened to the final clattering of her bones, and felt the last of her form melt beneath our embrace the way the last of her ice sculpture was melting beneath the May sky two thousand feet higher up the mountain ..
Through Shattered Glass Page 4
