Islands, the Universe, Home

by Ehrlich, Gretel;

  Wind slices pondswells, laying them sharp and flat. I paddle and paddle. Rain fires into the water all around me, denting the mirror. The pond goes colorless. Where the warm spring feeds in, a narrow lane has been cut through aquatic flowers to the deep end. I slide my canoe into the channel. Tendrils of duckweed wave green arms. Are they saying hello or good-bye?

  Willows, clouds, and mountains lie in the lake’s mirror, although they look as if they’re standing. I dip my paddle and slide over great folds of time, through lapping depositions of memory, over Precambrian rock, then move inward, up a narrow gorge where a hidden waterfall gleams. After fruition, after death, water mirrors water.

  The canoe slides to shore, and I get out. A cloud tears, letting sun through, then closes again. I get down on my hands and knees and touch my tongue to water: the lake divides. Its body is chasm after chasm. Like water, I have no skin, only surface tension. How exposed I feel. Where a duck tips down to feed, one small ripple causes random turbidity, ceaseless chaos, and the lake won’t stop breaking. I can punch my finger through anything.…

  Much later, in the night, in the dark, I shine a flashlight down: my single wound is a bright scar that gives off hooked light like a new moon.

  I try to cut things out of my heart, but the pack rat who has invaded my study won’t let me. He has made himself the curator of my effects, my despair, my questioning, my memory. Every day a new show is installed. As if courting, he brings me bouquets of purple aster and sage gone to seed, cottonwood twigs whose leaves are the color of pumpkins. His scat is scattered like black rain: books, photographs, manuscripts are covered. The small offerings I set out years ago when I began using this room—a fistful of magpie feathers and the orange husks of two tangerines—have been gnawed into. Only the carved stone figure of a monk my mother gave me during tumultuous teenage years stands solid. The top of the narrow French desk where I write is strewn with cactus paddles—all lined up end to end—as if to remind me of how prickly the practice of vandalizing one’s consciousness can be, how what seems inexpressible is like a thorn torn off under the skin.

  The pack rat keeps me honest, and this is how: He reminds me that I’ve left something out. The summer after the fire, I returned to Yellowstone Park. I wanted to begin again in barrenness, I wanted to understand ash. This time the carcasses were gone—some eaten by bears, coyotes, eagles, and ravens; others taken away by the Park. Those charnel grounds where only a green haze of vegetation showed had become tall stands of grass. And the bison—those who survived—were fat.

  In a grassland at the northern end of the Park I stood in fairy rings of ash where sagebrush had burned hot, and saw how mauve-colored lupine seeds had been thrown by twisted pods into those bare spots. At the edges were thumbnail-sized sage seedlings. Under a stand of charred Douglas firs was a carpet of purple asters and knee-high pine grass, in bloom for the first time in two hundred years—its inflorescence stimulated by fire. I saw a low-lying wild geranium that appears only after a fire, then goes into dormancy again, exhibiting a kind of patience I know nothing of. In another blackened stand of trees it was possible to follow the exact course of the burn by stepping only where pine grass was in flower: ground fire had moved like rivulets of water. In places where the fire burned hottest there was no grass, because the organic matter in the soil had burned away, but there were hundreds of lodgepole pine seedlings; the black hills were covered with pink fireweed.

  Just when all is black ash, something new happens. Ash, of course, is a natural fertilizer, and now it’s thought to have a water-holding capacity: black ground is self-irrigating in a self-regulating universe. How quickly “barrenness becomes a thousand things and so exists no more.”

  Now it’s October. On the pond again, I hear water clank against the patched hull. It is my favorite music, like that made by halyards against aluminum masts. It is the music emptiness would compose if emptiness could change into something. The seat of my pants is wet because the broken seat in the canoe is a sponge holding last week’s rainwater. All around me sun-parched meadows are green again.

  In the evening the face of the mountain looks like a ruined city. Branches stripped bare of leaves are skeletons hung from a gray sky, and next to them are tall buildings of trees still on fire. Bands and bars of color are like layers of thought, moving the way stream water does, bending at point bars, eroding cutbanks. I lay my paddle down, letting the canoe drift. I can’t help wondering how many ways water shapes the body, how the body shapes desire, how desire moves water, how water stirs color, how thought rises from land, how wind polishes thought, how spirit shapes matter, how a stream that carves through rock is shaped by rock.

  Now the lake is flat, but the boat’s wake—such as it is—pushes water into a confusion of changing patterns, new creations: black ink shifting to silver, and tiny riptides breaking forward-moving swells.

  I glide across rolling clouds and ponder what my astronomer friend told me: that in those mysterious moments before the Big Bang there was no beginning, no tuning up of the orchestra, only a featureless simplicity, a stretch of emptiness more vast than a hundred billion Wyoming skies. By chance this quantum vacuum blipped as if a bar towel had been snapped, and resulted in a cosmic plasma that fluctuated into and out of existence, finally moving in the direction of life.

  “But where did the bar towel come from?” I asked my friend. He laughed. No answer. Somehow life proceeded from artlessness and instability, burping into a wild diversity that follows no linear rules. Yet in all this indeterminacy, life keeps opting for life. Galactic clouds show a propensity to become organic, not inorganic, matter; carbon-rich meteorites have seeded our earthly oasis with rich carbon-based compounds; sea vents let out juvenile water warm enough to generate growth, and sea meadows brew up a marine plasma—matter that is a thousandth of a millimeter wide—and thus give rise to all plant life and the fish, insects, and animals with which it coevolved.

  I dip my paddle. The canoe pivots around. Somewhere out there in the cosmos, shock waves collapsed gas and dust into a swirl of matter made of star grains so delicate as to resemble smoke, slowly aggregating, gradually sweeping up and colliding with enough material to become a planet like ours.

  Dusk. A bubble of cloud rises over the mountain. It looks like the moon, then a rock tooth pierces it, and wind burnishes the pieces into soft puffs of mist. Forms dissolve into other forms: a horsehead becomes a frog; the frog becomes three stick figures scrawled across the sky. I watch our single sun drop. Beyond the water, a tree’s yellow leaves are hung like butter lamps high up near the trunk. As the sun sinks, the tree appears to be lit from the inside.

  Another day. Listen, it’s nothing fancy. Just a man-made pond in the center of the ranch, which is at the northern, mountainous edge of a desolate state. And it’s fall, not too much different from the last fourteen autumns I’ve lived through here, maybe warmer at times, maybe windier, maybe rainier. I’ve always wondered why people sit at the edge of water and throw rocks. Better to toss stones at the car that brought you, then sit quietly.

  This lake is a knowing eye that keeps tabs on me. I try to behave. Last summer I swam in its stream of white blossoms, contemplating “the floating life.” Now I lie on its undulant surface. For a moment the lake is a boat sliding hard to the bottom of a deep trough, then it is a lover’s body reshaping me. Whenever I try to splice discipline into my heart, the lake throws diamonds at me, but I persist, staring into its dangerous light as if into the sun. On its silvered surface I finally locate desire deep in the eye, to use Wallace Stevens’s words, “behind all actual seeing.”

  Now wind pinches water into peaked roofs as if this were a distant city at my feet. I slide my canoe onto one of the tiny, humpbacked islands. The rind of earth at water’s edge shows me where deer have come to drink and ducks have found shelter. It’s not shelter I seek, but a way of going to the end of thought.

  I sit the way a monk taught me: legs crossed, hands cupped, thumbs touching,
palms upward. The posture has a purpose, but the pose, as it must appear to the onlooker, is a ruse, because there is no such thing as stillness, since life progresses by vibration—the constant flexing and releasing of muscles, the liquid pulse, the chemical storms in the brain. I use this island only to make my body stop, this posture to lower the mind’s high-decibel racket.

  The ground is cold. All week blasts of Arctic air have braided into lingering warmth. Sometimes a lip of ice grows outward from shore, but afternoon sun burns it back. Water rubs against earth as if trying to make a spark. Nothing. The fountain of leaves in trees has stopped. But how weightless everything appears without the burden of foliage.

  At last light, my friend the bachelor duck makes a spin around the lake’s perimeter. When the breeze that sweeps up from the south turns on itself, he swims against the current, dipping out of sight behind a gold-tinged swell. Fruition comes to this, then: not barrenness but lambency.

  November 1. The ducks are gone. A lip of ice grew grotesquely fast during the night and now stretches across the water. I can’t sit. Even the desire to be still, to take refuge from despair in the extremes of diversity, to bow down to light, is a mockery. Nothing moves. Looking out across the lake is like viewing a corpse: no resemblance to the living body. I go to the house despondent. When news of the California earthquake comes I think about stillness and movement, how their constant rubbing sparks life and imposes death. Now I don’t know. Now the island is like a wobbly tooth, hung by a fine thread to the earth’s mantle, and the lake is a solid thing, a pane of glass that falls vertically, cutting autumn off like fingers.

  A week later. It has snowed, and I’m sitting on the white hump of the island. My thrift-store canoe is hopelessly locked in ice. The frozen lake is the color of my mother’s eyes—slate blue—but without the sparkle. Snow under me, ice at my feet, no mesmerizing continuum of ripples forwarding memory, no moving lines in which to write music. And yet …

  I put my nose to the white surface of the lake. It’s the only way I’ll know what I’m facing. At first it looks flat and featureless but closer, I see the ice is dented and pocked, and across the middle, where the water is deepest, there are white splotches radiating arms like starfish.

  At midday the barometer drops and the radio carries stockmen’s warnings: high winds and snow, blowing snow in the northern mountains. That’s us. Sure enough the wind comes, but it’s a warm chinook. Rain undulates across the face of the mountains, then turns to snow.

  In the morning I go back. Drifts dapple the lake’s surface like sand dunes, and between, dead leaves fly across the ones trapped under ice. But at the north end, where the warm spring feeds in, there is open water—a tiny oval cut like a gem. Something catches my eye: a duck swims out from the reeds, all alone. Is it my bachelor duck? Around and around he goes, climbing onto the lip of ice to face the warm sun.

  How fragile death is, how easily it opens back into life. Inside the oval, water ripples, then lies flat. The mirror it creates is so small I can see only a strip of mountains and the duck’s fat chest bulging. I want to call out to him: “Look this way, I’m here too this autumn morning,” but I’m afraid I’ll scare him.

  He goes anyway, first sliding into the water, then swimming anxious laps. When he takes off, his head is a green flame. He circles so close I can hear the wing-creak and the rasp of feathers. Over the lake he flies, crossing the spillway and dam bank, then up through a snowy saddle, not south as I would have expected, but northwest, in the direction of oncoming storms.

  THE BRIDGE TO HEAVEN

  This morning I woke to the sound of crows cawing and watched light fill the room. No city noise, no sirens, no horns honking, only the distinct smell of a country not my own, the smell of straw, urine, and something sweet. From the downstairs kitchen came the sound of someone pounding mochi—a sticky ball made of rice, flour, and water. I am in Tokyo, and it is the day before New Year’s Eve.

  My friend and fellow writer Leila Philip had agreed to come along as an interpreter. All night we flew in a convex arc south of the Arctic Circle. Northern lights seemed to push out of the frozen Beaufort and Chukchi seas, whose islands of ice are crushed upward into temporary mountains, then melt down into a flat plain of ocean. Ahead was the “Country of Eight Islands,” as Japan is known, whose islands were thrust up out of water in great volcanic bursts, the result of one tectonic plate sliding under the other, breaking earth’s crust, allowing molten material to flow through.

  Earthquakes and eruptions, seas on all sides that seem to eat the jigsaw puzzle pieces of land, islands shaped like dragons with long, twisting mountain spines, tumbling rivers, fertile plains—this is the landscape out of which the Japanese people have fashioned themselves.

  I have come here to sniff out shizen—the Japanese word for a spontaneous, self-renewing, inherently sacred natural world of which humans are an inextricable part. I wanted to see how and where holiness revealed itself, to search for those “thin spots” on the ground where divinity rises as if religion were a function of geology itself: the molten mantle of sacredness cutting through earth like an acetylene torch, erupting as temple sites, sacred mountains, plains, and seas, places where inward power is spawned.

  As we were the only guests at our Tokyo ryokan (inn), we breakfasted with the family. Our coffee was heated in a microwave whose trademark name was Genji—the Prince’s great passion having been reduced, in this modern world, to stirring a few molecules. While we ate, the owner’s father, an old farmer from Narita, with a farmer’s meaty hands, fussed over the New Year’s decorations, tying and retying two fern leaves around the “waist” of the mochi stacked one on top of the other. Looking irritated, the young owner pushed his plate away, took the dog tied to the table leg for a walk, and came back, only to find his father had made no progress. Impatient, he ducked into the office, switched on the TV, and watched giant sumo wrestlers sweat, teeter, and fall.

  The old farmer smiled at me. When I asked about the traditional hanging at the front door, he happily explained: “The seaweed hanging down is a warrior’s long hair, the folded white paper his skirt, and the red plastic shrimp is the samurai’s armor for long life and luck.” Then he added, “But really, it is like me, only a shell, a withered old man soon to die.”

  Pine for luck, straw for peace … the streets of Tokyo were almost empty of cars. Little stands were going up everywhere to sell New Year’s charms: knotted ropes made of rice straw to be hung from automobile grilles, bouquets of white chrysanthemum mixed with fragrant pine boughs for tokonomas and household shrines.

  The grounds of the Asakusa Kannon Temple were carnival-like. Throngs of people—some kimono-clad and geta-shod—pushed down the long walkway to the entrance of the temple, where stately pine trees, plucked whole from the forest, were lashed to bamboo poles and tied across the top with rice-straw ropes whose blowing tassels looked like waves rolling in across an ocean.

  Kannon is the Shinto deity of mercy and compassion. This temple was founded when three fishermen hooked onto a carving of the goddess in the nearby Sumida River. In the days when Tokyo was called Edo, the temple grounds were made popular with sake stands, restaurants, archery ranges, and stalls where prostitutes plied their trade.

  Now the side alleys offered nothing more titillating than red-lit stands selling steamed octopus buns and a fortune-teller who prayed over New Year’s charms sold by birth date. For mine, January 21, I was given a tiny plastic gourd, a red bell, and a pink plastic horse on a key ring; 1990 will be the Year of the Horse.

  There are eighty thousand Shinto shrines in Japan, yet no one quite knows where Shinto comes from, since the origin of the Japanese people—thought to have migrated from two separate areas of Asia, from Malaysia and from Mongolia and China in the north—is still a matter of debate. Does Shinto derive from the Ainu of the north or from the Okinawans in the south or is it an amalgam of both?

  Before the arrival of “the foreign deity,” the Buddha, in 538
A.D., Shinto had no name, so integrated were the animistic beliefs within village life. And even now it is free of doctrine and dogma, since Shinto predated writing in Japan. Shinto is not a moral code or an ideology. It is, instead, a guide to natural expressions of gratitude and wonder at the substance, variety, and abundance in nature. Pines and people, thunder and monkeys, bugs and rain clouds, birds, rice, rocks, fish, foxes, and waterfalls are all kami; they are the gods, and the gods are manifested in them. The words shin and to mean “the way of the gods,” and the dances, songs, and ritual offerings form a bridge over which the kamisama travel from their world to ours.

  In the morning we took the Shinkansen south to Shin Kurashiki. The train’s sudden speed made me feel sick. We were on our way to spend New Year’s Eve watching kagura—sacred Shinto dances—in a small mountain shrine where a friend is the priest.

  We sped through the knotty, populated heart of Honshu, past cities and factories, village houses clustered like islands within the islands of rice fields between cities, following a continuous chain of habitation. Fujiyama poked its white head up through silvery pollution, and the rivers, all diked and cement-walled, flowed, well-behaved, into the Inland Sea. Up on the banks, at golfers’ driving ranges, balls slammed into huge three-sided nets under which old men fished for the New Year’s special meal with ten-foot-long bamboo poles. Farmers on bicycles hooked shopping bags to handlebars and forded the shallow parts of riverbeds, then rode the grid of paths through flooded rice fields. Mountains rose to the west as hills of bamboo bowed down to the bullet train’s slipstream, and small cities with their Las Vegas-style facades—bright, glittering, impermanent—were backed by villagelike residential streets, welcoming because of their human scale.