Islands, the Universe, Home

by Ehrlich, Gretel;

  I’m looking for summer, but I can’t find how or where it begins. Is it a prick of light, the spark from a horseshoe striking rock as I ride into the mountains? Can it be found in the green eruption of a leaf? It’s my obsession, you see, to seek origins.

  It’s June twentieth, summer solstice, the longest day of the year and the hottest so far. Snow seems like something from another time, even though it snowed three feet in May. Now all that wavers in the mind is meltwater running fast, trying to get its rushing journey over with. At the moment the solstice occurs, my young saddle horse rolls in the dust, four legs in the air—motionless for a moment—and I run crouched like a thief out of the house through a hay meadow, over the tops of irrigation ditches, around the lake, through cattails, onto the thirty-foot-long island, all the time trying for a swift, gliding wolf gait in which the shoulders and head do not rise and fall but cut through air like a sword held out from the belly.

  When the solstice is past, the sun is a flickering light behind fast-moving high clouds. As I step from the island into shallow, colorless water, three water snakes wind away in unison. Following deer who came to the lake to drink and returned to a nearby slope to graze, I sprint a quarter mile to the top of Mahogany Hill and turn north, my downhill foot slipping, my heart pumping forward to the end of an endless day. The sun finally goes at 10:00 P.M., only to rise again at 4:00 A.M.; but even without the sun the sky seems bright. That’s how summer is: no past or future but all present tense, long twilights like vandals, breaking into new days.

  Yet it’s the briefest of seasons, and what time there is in summer is carried forward by wind, by Boreas, god of the north wind, who, it’s said, can blow out of two or more cheeks at once.

  June 23. A breeze stiffens. Gusts are clocked at forty-five, sixty, eighty-five miles per hour. Rainless thunderclouds crack above, shaking pine pollen down. La bufera infernale—that’s what Dante calls winds that lashed at sinners in hell. I decide to go out in the infernal storm. “This is hell,” a herder moving his sheep across the mountain says, grinning; then he clears his parched throat and rides away. Wind carries me back and forth, twisting, punching me down.

  I’m alone here for much of the summer, these hot winds my only dancing partner. The sheep and their herder vanish over a ridge. I close my eyes, and the planet is auditory only: tree branches twist into tubas and saxes, are caught by large hands that press down valves, and everywhere on this ranch I hear feral music—ghostly tunes made not by animals gone wild but by grasses, sagebrush, and fence wire singing.

  The next day, or the next. The wind stops and the temperature soars. I’ve given up my hunt for the origin of summer and instead take off my clothes and lie on the grass in front of the house, trying to find, in the noonday sun, heat’s grace. Sweat rolls from my face. Summer feels like a form of stasis: the oscillations of subatomic particles seem to rock less, vigilance is lost, and the axial wobbling of Earth steadies … or does it? In my journal no words, only a drawing of a stick figure (me) grasping a huge straw, ever uncertain, wondering how so many opposing thoughts can be contained in one head. A Sung dynasty poet writes: “The city is full of flying pear flowers.” I imagine a blizzard, the sky solid with blossoms, white noise, white heat.

  June 30. A heavy plane lumbers upward and circles near the mountains. It’s a World War II bomber carrying slurry, bound for distant fire. My own tiny twig fire is almost out. On it I’d cooked a dinner of elk steaks, half an onion, a green pepper. My bedroll laid out, I sleep on the ground until the wind wakes me. It’s 10:30 P.M. Night closes down over gasping trees; the clipped laughter and a cappella chants of coyotes by the house beat the dry dome of the ground. I lie on my back. This treasure hunt for summer has been a farce, especially now, since I know how the season arrived: wind served it up on a silver platter, but a platter hurled like an Olympian’s discus, metallic and hard—la bufera infernale. Then, at midnight, I see how wind is only an ocean held in by night’s black hood.

  A slurry bomber awakens me. It’s the middle of July, and the wave of heat that swelled in June now arches over my head. Summer’s heat is a koan, an answerless question. All I know is this: gravity rains bugs down from sources of light; botflies crawl out of dung; heat waves break over the roof of my mouth as if it were coral, its calcareous skeleton washed wet, then dry. Corals, being marine animals, shed eggs and sperm into the sea, and free-swimming larvae latch onto old colonies and secrete new skeletons; above the roof of my mouth I imagine brain coral. Ideas swim, fertilize, and reproduce. Skeletal forms called theca merge, and at the end of each deep channel of thought, the koan, the riddle, floats on its back heedlessly.

  Persistent heat pushes the thermometer to 102 degrees, then 105 degrees, and the sky balloons, featureless. Behind smoke from forest fires the sun rises bloodied and sets bloodied, and the moon is a half-eaten peach midsky. The long summer twilights I’d longed for all winter are obscured. I turn on house lights at 5:00 P.M. and, scanning the sky, wonder if the moon is reflecting not sunlight but the light from fires.

  Midsummer means cattle are on the range. Ducks on the lake are half grown but still can’t fly, and the birds that pass through in their dash from South America to the north—terns, godwits, sora rails, phalaropes—are long gone. Smoke blues the sidehills of this valley. I think of my dead grandmother’s hair tinted pink, turning blue at death. “Turn on the lights, turn on the lights,” she kept saying when she was dying, and that’s what I say to the sky now.

  Fires in the Bighorn, Beartooth, and Absaroka mountains flare like sunspots, making hellish day out of night. “Gloom of hell, gloom of night uncomforted,” Dante writes. Night consists of smoke. No human presence here. Then visitors come through: a retired rancher, a photographer, a child, a woman who danced in the New. York City Ballet. I tell them there are ten-thousand-foot peaks directly behind the house, but they are skeptical. Rolling smoke has bulldozed all that. We work in the garden harvesting beans, then eat, drink, and dance, pirouetting on dead grass under a lidded sky, with no constellations to tell us in which direction to turn our lives.

  After they leave, alone again, I sometimes sleep through the afternoon, stupefied by heat, and between wolf naps read more Dante. By chance I turn to the second circle of the Inferno, the realm of lust. One is warned to go warily because of fires burning on either side of the path where spirits are passing; voices extol the virtues of chastity. Chastity … lust … what are they, and why has the waxing and waning of passion been bent into strict measures by rules?

  July 17. Summer’s rapid heartbeat competes with that of the hummingbird who just mistook my red shirt for a flower and bombarded my chest. Reds dominate. At noon even the water holes where deer, elk, and cattle drink have a ruby tint. In Japan I read about the volcanic crater in northern Honshu where a shallow pond—the Pond of Blood—is likened to the pool of dirty blood from which a sinner must drink. Summer is not about fruition but about conflagration—the pear flowers streaming through are really white ash. All day I lean toward what shimmers and dazzles: the hard, obsequious diamonds of light on our half-dry lake, begging for rain and, like me, begging to be put out.

  A friend from my home state, California, calls to tell me his child has just been christened in a seventeenth-century mission. “He laughed,” my friend says. “And just as the holy water was being wiped from his forehead, a dog came to the entrance of the church and barked.”

  I think about how water crosses the land in a blind-man’s buff through thatches of grass; how its percolation into the ground is the kind of blessing that cannot be wiped away except by wind. I think of how a child’s head is wetted by sanctified water and how the sign of the cross is made just above the natural cross of bones in the body—sternum, spine, and pelvis—and wonder why blessings, in Christian churches, are applied to foreheads and not hearts, why part of the human skull has a religious name: temple, as if the cranial cavity were some kind of shrine.

  In an irrigation ditch I set a tarp da
m and turn water down the field from four notches. The human body is like so much plant life—green in its wanderings, the way the penis has a mind of its own, and the nipple; the way ideas are pressed upward to the tip of the brain stalk, pushing out of the skull like an inflorescence; the way these things are cut down.

  Summer’s natural fecundity both generates and is at odds with my emotional state: there is no moment without longing. And if longing implies an absence or the riddle of emptiness, then what fills me and why? On these solitary summer nights. I long for company, yet by day, hearing a truck heave up our steep dirt road—perhaps a Sunday driver—I hide. Will the heat waves blur me sufficiently? That’s what I wonder as I run to the top of the hay meadow where two fence lines meet in a creek. I crouch in the shade of a willow until the truck leaves. Locusts line the branches, making sounds like rattlesnakes. In the dust bowl days, a rancher told me, locusts ate all the bark off fence posts and trees. I dangle my feet, shoes and all, in the creek. Tiny islands split water as if showing how separate truths—like separate, simultaneous loves—can be found in the same story.

  It is the third week of July. I notice now my days are cut in half: mornings I contemplate repletion, afternoons I consider thirst. Today I go for a walk but turn back. No cobalt skies lure me on. During a drought, space shrinks, and only time, like a tongue swelling, grows between me and those I love. I’m unable to give words to flashing and darkening thoughts, or to swim the alternating current of revulsion and desire. There is no stir in the air. My legs are tiny straws trying to move the wide drink of air but failing. Yet even in this claustral, motionless heat there is an inward billowing. Heat waves carry me upward on their snake charmer backs, and for a moment I catch a wild scrawl of fragrance—not smoke but wild rose.

  At dusk smoke looks like coastal fog, and the mountains are California’s Channel Islands, which I could see from my childhood bed. Fog brings with it the smell of life—of the sea, of celery, flowers, garlic, and oranges growing. It stands for its opposite: possibility, not occlusion. Elk, shouldering mist, drift through pine forests; now bombers carrying fire retardant boom in the half-dark, and, sleepily, I mistake them for the sound of tectonic plates stirring.

  July 30. Tonight it’s too hot to sleep in the house. Even the horse I saddle to ride into the mountains, where it will be cooler, is anxious to escape. He runs to me when I appear in the pasture with a bridle looped over my arm. There is no moonlight, but we know the way. Quickly the rasp of sagebrush gives way to the whir of pine, and the smoke smell mixes with wild geranium. Aspens tick in the breeze as if counting off the elevation: seven thousand eight hundred and one; eight thousand and eight … In the dark I enter a high, wide bowl and ride through the castanets of wild irises gone to seed: clickety-clack go the dry seed-heads as my horse’s front legs hit them, but no fandangos are danced tonight.

  July 31. At the end of the day, I come to this: there’s a sameness to the extravagances of every season, to the promiscuousness of pollinators, the abundance of seed produced, to the way we press ourselves on a hot night to what Robinson Jeffers calls “the careless white bone of things,” to the way the ruthless second hand cuts down months like hay.

  A middle-of-the-night thunderstorm awakens me. It brings no rain, but lightning’s light pierces my eyelids, and for a moment the elusive shapes of summer—the hipbones and elbows of a mountain’s body, or a lover’s—jut up above the general haze, breaking welds that have bound desire to despair.

  Igor Stravinsky said at the end of his life that he thought his blood had thickened into rubies. That’s how August looks: a ruby sun descends through leaves and layers of smoke like an elevator falling through an abandoned building. What kind of edifice is this season of summer, that it looks empty when it is ripe, that crystallized blood is flushed like musical notes from the head?

  On August fifth, it rained for three minutes, but it was like water dropping on a hot griddle. New fires have erupted and are given names: the Clover, Mist, Mink. Now a cool mistral fingers my horse’s mane, and the shade a departing rain cloud makes grazes the green grass in front of me as I ride to find stray cattle.

  Dante thought that shades were souls who had been freed from their bodies but still retained intelligence. I see shades and shadows everywhere. But what to make of them? When the sky clears, even the lake takes on the gray, as if inhaling smoke; cattails brandish brown torches that have burned; and in the west, cinnamon-colored smoke mushrooms upward like the spew of a dropped bomb. Tomorrow: Hiroshima Day.

  August 6. The evening news brings it all back: from the hijacking of superior minds to work on the Manhattan Project, the first detonation at the Trinity site, viewed from bunkers ten and twenty miles away; to the loading of the bomb on the Enola Gay, a plane named for the pilot’s mother; and on a quiet morning the dropping of the bomb on a sizable Japanese city through which the Ota River runs; then the permanent shadows cast on stone by heat, and the skin and hair that would not stay attached, and the dead horses floating in the river, and the black rain.…

  Walking from the house, I remember the day Chernobyl blew, the two clouds of radiation that met over Wyoming and the rain that came as I was irrigating the fields; how sudden, darkening skies tarnished what is hopeful about vivid green.

  Now summer’s supine sky appears to be sealed when it is not. The myth of inviolability, the idea that no force could shred skin from our faces, implies a refusal to believe we can cause harm. At the end of this evening’s news we were given updates on the holes in the ozone, as if now we were tossing bombs or bayonets upward, tearing the skin of the sky. I try to unwind one thread from these enormous catastrophes all the way back to my heart, to any human heart, to see if anywhere along the way an instinct for care exists. What shocks me so is the detachment with which we dispense destruction—not just bombs, but blows to the head of the earth, to populations of insects, plants, and animals, and to one another with senseless betrayal—and how the proposed solutions are always mechanistic, as if we could fabricate the health of the planet the way we make a new car.

  August 7. I walk to the lake in the morning. My blue canoe is loose. Blue, the color of ozone, that poisonous, explosive gas made from one too many oxygen atoms. I watch the boat glide, smoothing out hard angles of light on water, recutting them, as if to say possibility still exists, if only we could direct our lives so that peace, which can be achieved only by peaceful means, could be embedded like garden seeds in our actions, ideas, and goals.

  Days later I bumped my head on the top of the pump house door and surprised myself by sobbing. It wasn’t the pain but the memory of having hit my head hard two summers ago, when the colt I was riding bucked so unexpectedly. I landed headfirst and came up in a daze. There were cuts on my mouth and neck; slivers of rock slid under my skin like shrapnel, and are with me still. The next day I had trouble seeing. Clots of blood, bunched like grapes, appeared behind my eyes, and when I was taken to the hospital, the doctor gleefully announced that I’d have to have holes drilled in my skull to relieve the pressure on my brain. To my look of horror he said only, “I really do hate horses.”

  Inside the CAT scan I experienced unearthly peace: the capsule white, the noise white, the body held motionless by straps. It was comforting. I fell asleep and dreamed I was blind but could see hills washed by lightning. The people in the dream were opalescent; only the animals had ruby red blood.

  Dante writes in the Inferno that the damned were unable to see the present but could foretell the future. In Japan, among other places, physical blindness is thought to bring on a kind of inward vision. In the Ōu Mountains of northern Honshu, mediums called itako—blind women—are hired to perform divinations and to communicate with the dead.

  At home, I lay on the couch. The brain in the process of mending feels like Jell-O being pressed through dry hands. Aside from the roaring in my ears, all senses and desires were deadened, and even with regained sight, my inward life was a blank, my outward one had no m
eaning. Friends came by. I looked normal enough, but how could I explain the bruised heat or the coolness of no desire? Now the blindness and deadness is not mine but the sky’s.

  August 12. Determined to transpierce this wall of smoke, I scan the sky with new resolve. Why has this smoke-flattened landscape become an inward torment? All I see is gray and cinnamon rolling into gray. Hope comes from a friend—a geophysicist—who calls on the phone. He has news: using seismological equipment, he has begun mapping out a topography of the earth’s molten core by measuring the velocity of pressure waves. Below the earth’s crust, down through the two-thousand-mile-thick mantle, the core has its own unique landscape, complete with mountains and hot oceans and a geological weather in which turbulent eddies of iron splinters rain down. “It’s like seeing form come into being,” he says. I try to do the same with smoke, to sense the ghosts and the landscapes it hides, the shape and weight of desire.

  August 16. More fires erupt. A big hand is dropping matches all over the West. Like winged seeds, sparks are propelled into the sky, scratching and scarring its skin. Then the smoke goes and the sky bulges in Gothic arches of blue. To hell with rubies, I say. The sky is sapphire, hyacinth, robin’s egg blue. My head feels light: smoke’s vise has been removed.

  Tonight, for the first time in thirty-nine nights, I can see stars. I lay my bedroll on the ground in front of the house and gather my dogs around. “There’s Sirius,” I say, pointing to the Dog Star, but quickly they fall asleep. The Milky Way rolls over me; it has turned the scroll of the sky from gray to blue to black and filled it with clouds of stars whose luminous galactic centers are fueled by streams of dust and gas fifteen light-years long.… My God, how I’ve missed this: the contrast of light and dark, time gone wild, star deaths, pulsars spinning out a whole day in one two-thousandth of a second as if spinning time into matter and matter into radio noises, into what one astronomer I know calls “crackling, night-chanting songs.”