Islands, the Universe, Home

by Ehrlich, Gretel;

  Now Blue is dead, and I have the island to myself. Some days, Rusty, my thirteen-year-old working dog, accompanies me, sitting when I sit, taking in the view. But a view is something our minds make of a place, it is a physical frame around natural fact, a two-way transmission during which the land shapes our eyes and our eyes cut the land into “scapes.”

  I sit to sweep the mind. Leaves, which I think of as a tree’s discontinuous skin, keep falling as if mocking my attempts to see past my own skin, past the rueful, cantankerous, despairing, laughing racket in my head.

  At water’s edge the tiny leaves of wild rose are burned a rusty magenta, and their fruit, still unpicked by birds, hangs like drops of blood. Sun on water is bright: a blind that keeps my mind from wandering. The ripples are grooves the needle of memory makes, then they are the lines between which music is written—quintets of bird song and wind. The dam bank is a long thigh holding all restlessness in.

  To think of an island as a singular speck or a monument to human isolation is missing the point. Islands beget islands: a terrestrial island is surrounded by an island of water, which is surrounded by an island of air, all of which makes up our island universe. That’s how the mind works too: one idea unspools into a million concentric thoughts. To sit on an island, then, is not a way of disconnecting ourselves but, rather, a way we can understand relatedness.

  Today the island is covered with duck down. It is the time of year when mallards molt. The old, battered flight feathers from the previous spring are discarded, and during the two or three weeks it takes for the new ones to grow in, they can’t fly. The males, having lost their iridescent plumage, perform military maneuvers on the water, all dressed in the same drab uniform.

  Another definition of the word “island” is “the small isolated space between the lines in a fingerprint,” between the lines that mark each of us as being unique. An island, then, can stand for all that occurs between thoughts, feathers, fingerprints, and lives, although, like the space between tree branches and leaves, for example, it is part of how a thing is shaped. Without that space, trees, rooms, ducks, and imaginations would collapse.

  Now it’s January, and winter is a new moon that skates the sky, pushing mercury down into its tube. In the middle of the night the temperature drops to thirty-two below zero. Finally, the cold breaks, and soon the groundhog will cast a shadow, but not here. Solitude has become a reflex: when I look at the lake no reflection appears. Yet there are unseen presences. Looking up after drinking from a creek, I see who I’m not: far up on a rock ledge, a mountain lion, paws crossed, has been watching me.

  Later in the month, snow on the lake melts off, and the dendritic cracks in ice reappear. The lake is a gray brain I pose questions to. Somewhere in my reading I come on a reference to the island of Reil. It is the name given to the central lobe of the cerebral hemisphere deep in the lateral tissue, the place where the division between left and right brain occurs, between what the neurobiologist Francisco Varela calls “the net and the tree.”

  To separate out thoughts into islands is the peculiar way we humans have of knowing something, of locating ourselves on the planet and in society. We string events into temporal arrangements like pearls or archipelagos. While waiting out winter, I listen to my mind switch from logic to intuition, from tree to net, the one unbalancing the other so no dictatorships can stay.

  Now snow collapses into itself under bright sun with a sound like muffled laughter. My young friend Will, aged nineteen, who is suffering from brain cancer, believes in the laughing cure, the mango cure, the Molokai cure, the lobster cure—eating what pleases him when he can eat, traveling to island paradises when he can walk, astonished by the reversal of expectation that a life must last a certain number of years.

  In the evening I watch six ravens make a playground of the sky. They fly in pairs, the ones on the left, for no reason, doing rolls like stunt pilots. Under them, the self-regulating planet moves and the landscape changes—fall to winter, winter to spring, suffering its own terminal diseases in such a way that I know nothing is unseasonal, no death is unnatural, nothing escapes a raven’s acrobatic glee.

  THIS AUTUMN MORNING

  We are both in dreams, appearing in dream forms. I add words spoken in sleep: Turn this way; I’m lonely too this autumn evening.

  MATSUO BASHŌ

  When did all this happen, this rain and snow bending green branches, this turning of light to shadow in my throat, these bird notes going flat, and how did these sawtooth willow leaves unscrew themselves from the twig, and the hard, bright paths trampled into the hills loosen themselves to mud? When did the wind begin churning inside trees, and why did the sixty-million-year-old mountains start looking like two uplifted hands holding and releasing the gargled, whistling, echoing grunts of bull elk, and when did the loose fires inside me begin not to burn?

  Wasn’t it only last week, in August, that I saw the stained glass of a monarch butterfly clasping a purple thistle flower, then rising as if a whole cathedral had taken flight? And didn’t Dante and Beatrice, whose journey I have been tracing, finally rise from fire to Paradise?

  Now what looks like smoke is only mare’s tails—clouds streaming—and as the season changes, my young dog and I wonder if raindrops might not be shattered lightning.

  It’s September. Light is on the wane. There is no fresh green breast of earth to embrace. None of that. Just to breathe is a kind of violence against death. To long for love, to have experienced passion’s deep pleasure, even once, is to understand the mercilessness of having a human body whose memory rides desire’s back unanchored from season to season.

  Last night while driving to town I hit a deer. She jumped into my path from behind bushes so close I could not stop. A piece of red flesh flew up and hit the windshield. I watched as she ran off limping. There was nothing I could do. Much later, on the way home, I looked for her again. I could see where a deer had bedded down beside a tree, but there was no sign of a wounded animal, so I continued on.

  Halfway up our mountain road a falling star burned a red line across the sky—a meteorite, a pristine piece of galactic debris that came into existence billions of years before our solar system was made. The tail stretched out gold and slid. I stopped the truck. I was at the exact place where, years ago, I declared love to a friend, who grabbed his heart as if in pain, then said laconically, “What do you mean?”

  Tonight on the same road in a different year I see only the zigzagging of foxes, whose red tails are long floats that give their small bodies buoyancy. No friends meet me to view the stars. The nights have turned cold. The crickets’ summer mating songs have hardened into drumbeats, and dark rays of light pole out from under clouds as if steadying the flapping tent of the sky.

  Even when the air is still I keep hearing a breeze, the way it shinnies up the bones of things, up the bark of trees. A hard frost pales the hayfields. Tucked into the flickering universe of a cottonwood tree, yellow leaves shaped like gloved hands reach across the green umbrella for autumn.

  It’s said that after fruition nothing will suffice, there is no more, but who can know the answer? I’ve decided to begin at the end when the earth is black and barren. I want to see how death is mixed in, how the final plurals are taken back to single things—if they are; how and where life stirs out of ash.

  On May 5, the first day the roads opened, my husband and I drove to Yellowstone Park. Twenty miles before the east entrance, we were greeted by buffalo: four mother cows, one yearling, and a newly born calf. At Sylvan Pass a young couple were skiing down a precipitous snow-covered landslide, then trudging up the nearly vertical slope carrying their skis. Just before we reached Yellowstone Lake, a pair of blue grouse, in the midst of a courting display, could not be moved from the center of the road. Neck and tail feathers plumed and fanned out; we waited. The lake was all ice. Far out, a logjam—upended, splintered, frozen in place—was the eye’s only resting place in all that white.

  At the next bend we
came on a primordial scene: north of Mary’s Bay, wide, ice-covered meadows were full of dead buffalo, and searching for grass in among the carcasses were the barely live bison who had survived a rigorous winter, so thin they looked like cardboard cutouts, a deep hollow between their withers and ribs.

  We drove on. More dead bison, and dead elk. The Park biologists were saying that roughly twenty-eight percent of both herds had been winter-killed this year, not only because the fires diminished their forage but also because the drought had brought us five years of mild winters, thus allowing old and sick animals to survive.

  Between Madison Junction and the Firehole River we stood in the charred ruins of a lodgepole pine forest. The hollow trunks of burned-out trees looked as if they had been picked up and dropped, coming to rest at every possible angle. The ground was black. Where the fire had burned underground, smoldering root systems upended trees; ponds and bogs that had supported waterfowl were now waterless depressions. Way back in the trees, a geyser hissed, its plume of white steam a ghost of the great fire’s hundred-mile-long streamer of smoke.

  Later we returned to the lake and sat on the end of a long spit of land that angles out into water. From there it’s difficult to tell there was a fire. Lodgepole pines fringe the shore. A cloud that had moved off Mount Sheridan rolled toward us, its front edge buffeted by wind. In ancient Greece it was said that Boreas, god of the north wind, became jealous of his lover, Pitys, who had been flirting with Pan, and threw her against a rocky ledge. At that moment she turned into a pine tree. The amber drops of sap at the breaks of limbs are her tears.

  Pines are ancient trees, having appeared 170 million years ago. The Buriat people in eastern Siberia consider groves of trees sacred and always ride through them in silence, while in Japan, pines stand for loyalty and longevity. As I sat, the cloud took me midthought, slamming into the fringe of pines, shattering, becoming white needles.

  That was May, and now it’s September, and already frost is breaking down the green in leaves, then clotting like blood as tannin, anthocyanin, carotene, and xanthophyll. If pines represent continuance, then cottonwood leaves show me how the illusion of time punctuates space, how we fill those dusty, gaseous voids with escapades of life and death, dropping the tiny spans of human days into them.

  This morning I found a yearling heifer, bred by a fence-jumping bull out of season, trying to calve. I saw her high up on a sage-covered slope, lying down, flicking her tail, and thought she must have colic. But I was wrong. The calf’s front feet and head had already pushed out, who knows how many hours before, and it was dead.

  I walked her down the mountain to the calving shed, where a friend, Ben, and I winched the dead calf out. We doctored the heifer for uterine infection, and I made a bed of straw, brought fresh creekwater and hay. The heifer ate and rested. By evening she had revived, but by the next morning she seemed to have pneumonia. Twenty cc’s of penicillin later, she worsened. The antibiotics didn’t kick in.

  That night she lay down, emitting grunts and high-pitched squeals. The vet came at midnight. We considered every possibility—infection, pneumonia, poisoning—what else could it be? Another day, and her condition worsened. Not any one symptom but a steady decline. I emptied more medicine into her, knowing it was doing no good, but my conscience forbade me to do less. The vet came again and left. He suggested it might be “hardware disease”—a euphemism for an ingested piece of metal, a nail or barbed wire, cutting into her throat or stomach or heart. I put a magnet down her throat. Strange as it seems, it sometimes picks up the metal, taking it all the way through the digestive tract. No response. I sat with her. I played music—Merle Haggard and Mozart—wondering if my presence consoled or irritated her. This was not a cow we had raised, and she seemed unsure of me. Could a calf-puller, a shot-giver, not mean harm?

  That afternoon a phone call came telling me my dear friend and mentor in all cowboying skills—“Mike”—had suffered a heart attack. I drove hellbent to the hospital—something told me there wasn’t much time, but when I entered the room, she sat up, elegant as ever, and we embarked on our usual conversation about horses, dogs, cattle, and men. Despite a night of ferocious pain she looked beautiful. After an hour I reluctantly left to let her rest and went home.

  There I found the cow had not eaten or taken any water. Her breathing was worse. I lay on the straw beside her and slept. Before coming to the barn I had smelled something acrid—the old, familiar smell of death, although she was still alive. Yet the sounds she made now had changed from grunting to a low moan, the kind of sound one makes when giving in to something. She was dead by nightfall. In the morning a second phone call came. My friend “Mike” had “gone over the ridge.”

  Today yellow is combed all through the trees, and the heart-shaped cottonwood leaves spin downward to nothingness. I know how death is made—not why, but where in the body it begins, its lurking presence before the fact, its strangled music as if the neck of a violin were being choked; I know how breathing begins to catch on each rib, how the look of the eye flattens, gives up its depth, no longer sees past itself; I know how easily existence is squandered, how noiselessly love is dropped to the ground.

  “You have to mix death into everything,” a painter once told me. “Then you have to mix life into that,” he said as his cigarette ashes dropped onto the palette. “If they are not there, I try to mix them in. Otherwise the painting won’t be human.” I was a child, and his words made me wince because it was my portrait he was painting. I wanted to be a painter at the time—I was twelve, and as far as I knew, death was something in a paint tube, to be squeezed out at will when you wanted to put in meaning.

  Days later I walked to the graveyard. On a ranch, death is as much a constant as birth. The heifer was there with her calf, legs stretched out straight, belly bloated … but the white droppings of ravens—who were making a meal of her—cascaded down her rib cage like a waterfall.

  I wandered through the scattered bones of other animals who have died. Two carcasses were still intact: Blue’s and Lawyer’s, saddle horses who put in many good years. Manes, tails, hair gone, their skin has hardened to rawhide, dried to a tautness, peeling back just slightly from ribs, noses, and hooves, revealing a hollow interior as if letting me see that the souls are really gone.

  After fruition, after death, after black ash, perhaps there is something more, even if it is only the droppings of a scavenger, or bones pointing every which way as if to say, “Touch here, touch here,” and the velocity of the abyss when a loved one goes his way, and the way wind stirs hard over fresh graves, and the emptying out of souls into rooms and the mischief they get into, flipping switches, opening windows, knocking candles out of silver holders, and, after, shimmering on water like leaked gas ready to explode.

  Mid-September. Afternoons I paddle my blue canoe across our nine-acre lake, letting water take me where it will. The canoe was a gift: eight dollars at the local thrift store.

  As I drift aimlessly, ducks move out from the reeds, all mallards. Adaptable, omnivorous, and hardy, they nest here every year on the two tiny islands in the lake. After communal courtship and mating, the extra male ducks are chased away, but this year one stayed behind. Perhaps he fathered a clutch on the sly or was too young to know where else to go. When the ducklings hatched and began swimming, he often tagged along, keeping them loosely together until the official father sent him away. Then he’d swim the whole circumference of the lake alone, too bewildered and dignified to show defeat.

  A green net of aquatic weeds knots the water, holding and releasing me as if I were weightless, as if I were loose change. Raised on the Pacific, I can row a boat, but I hardly know how to paddle. The water is either ink or a clear, bloodless liquid, and the black water snakes that writhe as I guide the canoe are trying to write words.

  Evening. In Kyoto I was once taken to a moon-viewing room atop an ancient house on temple grounds. The room was square, and the windows on four sides were rice-paper cutouts fram
ed by bamboo, rounds split down the center, allowing the viewer to re-create the moon’s phase. To view the moon, one had to look through the moon of the window.

  Tonight the lake is a mirror. The moon swims across. Every now and then I slide my paddle into its face. Last week I saw the moon rise twice in one night: once, heavy and orange—a harvest moon—heaving over the valley, and later, in the mountains, it was rising small, tight, and bright. Back in August the moon went blind. One night I sat outside with a bottle of wine and watched a shade pull across its difficult, cratered solitude.

  Now with September almost gone, a half-moon slants down light and shadows move desolation all over the place. At dawn a flicker knocks. The hollow sound of his labor makes leaves drop in yellow skirts around the trunks of trees. Water bends daylight. Thoughts shift like whitecaps, wild and bitter. My gut is a harp. Its strings get plucked in advance of any two-way communication by people I love, so that I know when attentions wane or bloom, when someone dear goes from me.

  Tonight thin spines of boreal light pin down thoughts as if skewered on the ends of thrown quills. I’m trying to understand how an empty tube behind a flower swells to fruit, how leaves twisting from trees are pieces of last year’s fire spoiling to humus. Now trees are orange globes, their brightness billowing into cumulus clouds. As the sun rises, the barometer drops. Wind swings around, blasting me from the east, and every tin roof on the ranch shudders to a new tune.

  Stripped of leaves, stripped of love, I run my hands over my single wound and remember how one man was like a light going up inside me, not flesh. Wind comes like horn blasts: the whole mountain range is gathered in one breath. Leaves keep coming off trees as if circulating through a fountain; steep groves of aspens glow.

  I search for the possible in the impossible. Nothing. Then I try for the opposite, but the yellow leaves in trees—shaped like mouths—just laugh. Tell me, how can I shut out the longing to comprehend?