I’m on the knob again. The sun is out, and the hole in the center of the lake has thawed, though I don’t know yet that this is the last time I’ll see open water. If only my bachelor duck could see the lake’s opening, would he return? At dusk the hole is a pot of gold-gilded ripples, a way of looking into the earth’s belly, but in the morning winter sets in.
It snows: six inches, then seven more, until the white is continuous, day and night, lifting the level of the ground twenty, thirty, forty inches. The wind howls, and during interstices coyotes howl back. The light is flat, and the landscape is ever-changing: drifts curve down from buildings and fence lines; sagebrush, fence lines, roadbeds, and five-strand barb-wire fences have all disappeared.
How far away autumn seems now, and its many days of burnished ruddiness. Like a house built into a hill, winter is cantilevered over all that. I can no longer see the lake, distinguish the knob from the flat, though the lake ice groans, shifting under the muffle of snow. An Alaskan biologist who lives on pack ice at Resolute Bay and in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas four months of the year says, “Reading the landscape up there means watching a whole topography come into existence. Ice collides and forms pressure ridges. I watch entire mountains come into existence. And just when I’m getting to know my way around in this newly formed landscape, the ice melts, the formations are gone, and my intimacy with that place is over.”
Matsuo Bashō writes, in the essay “Hut of the Phantom Dwelling”: “The grebe attaches its floating nest to a single strand of reed, counting on the reed to keep it from washing away in the current.” By what thin strands of luck we stay alive and know in which direction our feet are pointing! The snow continues. I keep thinking of the Crow word for loneliness, which translates literally as “I can’t see myself.” Perhaps the word was composed during a blizzard. Every morning my husband harnesses his team of black Percherons, and we make our way down what appears to have been a road—now mounded with drifts—to feed the cows. It’s a twelve-mile round trip. The dogs, running ahead, vanish under the snow, then leap straight up into the air as if to say, “I’m still here.”
Wind has carved the landscape into an impenetrable being, and worked snow down steep slopes into white whorls of brocade. When the storm ends, the sky clears fast, and at night it is thirty below zero. In the morning, sun hits the top of the mountain: light moving down the slope looks like cream being poured.
Winter solstice. How quickly the sun flies across the southern sky, ringed by a huge halo: a sun dog. At night constellations are blueprints, pointing the way between twists of cosmic strings. The winter night I flew out of Fairbanks, Alaska, a folding curtain of northern lights pulsed upward and pierced the Big Dipper, as if trying to follow an architect’s plan, trying to unfold itself into rooms.
THE FASTING HEART
February 28. Again and again winter’s brightness reveals possibilities, yet I drive its cold spine into my back and lose all feeling. In December I watched the sun lower itself to the horizon and saw how snowbanks rose up to it like a wave far out at sea, growing bigger as it pushed for shore. A shadow passes over the place where I know the lake to be; the lake is a white flat, featureless, with fenders of snow bending up into the night. Above me, mountains walk in clouds, are made of clouds. Beneath, hidden lake ice moans: Oh, darling, what are you saying to me?
The fasting heart knows hunger but is denied. It breaks and is set wrong: the leg that walks crooked must be broken again to go straight. Emptiness fills the heart until it bursts, and the salt water pouring out is a cord on which disparate elements are a ribbon of chaos.
Looking around, I see presages of spring. Willow branches are bumpy with tight buds, and melting flecks of frost in dirt are lights going out. Yet more snow comes, deep and soft. On the mountain there are tracks made by elk, narrow trails pounded deep into scree. I ski to the gate at the top of one mountain—a gate that leads nowhere—and remember how in spring wind swings it open and closed as if all snow came onto the earth this way and by the same route was fanned away.
Lately I’ve had to redefine the word “knowledge” to a knowledge that cannot know anything. I’m dealing not in careless absurdities here but in the way material reality is unobservable and implicit order can be found in paradox. Perhaps despair is the only human sin. Who am I to feel disappointment? Is a bird disappointed in the sky? I read Lao Tzu: “Concentrate your will. Hear not with your ears but with your mind; not with your mind but with your spirit. Let your hearing stop with the ears, and let your mind stop with its images. Let your spirit, however, be like a blank, passively responsive to externals. In such open receptivity only can Tao abide. And that open receptivity is the fasting of the heart.”
To fast does not mean to go without but to become empty and in so doing open oneself. I am at the beginning of a new month, and spring is here. Snow comes when there is sun; sun shines, but I can see my breath. When the shadow finally slides from the hidden lake, I try not to long for open water but to see how light and darkness makes sense of these days, how it separates planes of thought and gives distinction to landscape.
I spend the night on my tiny island, Alcatraz, and watch the morning star and the dark side of the planet go bright. Then a light snow falls and steam from the earth rises into it, coming back down as a shroud. It was on an island in the North Sea that Werner Heisenberg, recovering from a bout of hay fever, formulated the first quantum theory. Strolling those desolate northern beaches, he recalled his conversations in student days with Niels Bohr and understood that the world, in all its diversity, is made of a single substance: quantum stuff, whose variety is manifested not as substance but as process, not in palpable form but in the way it moves.
It’s March. I don’t know the date. Tonight during a full moon, I watch a bank of clouds break off from a mountaintop and feel something break in me. Each thought brings forth a new world, and in this way, consciousness creates experience. Thoughts walk, new worlds are lost, and the losing brings forth another ephemeral continent, motion giving birth to motion.
In the morning I walk to the falls, taking notes on the erotic positions of winter-killed deer. “Even in death …,” my journal begins, though it is not about sex that I write but about how the body itself is a complete truth. Why, then, does life seem embellished with sadness? I fight against the optical illusion of separateness. Quantum physics tells me the experience of isolation is a fantasy, that I am part of a whole. Yet my heart literally hurts, saying these things.
Mid-March. From now on all my journal entries read: 2:00 A.M. It’s calving time, and I’m on the night shift, which means checking heifers and older cows every two hours from 11:00 P.M. until six in the morning. When the snow is deep, I ski between sleeping animals, who no longer pay attention to my strange gear. Tonight no calves come. Just before the sky lightens, a breeze picks up as if wind were clearing the palate of bad dreams, the difficulties of birth and living.
Days, I take wolf naps, lying on the ground with pregnant cows, the small bodies inside already unfolding, swimming in liquid, pawing with tiny hooves to get out. Their symphony of cud chewing, gurgling bellies, grunts and belches, teeth grinding, lulls me, and as I call to them by name, they respond, sweet-eyed, diffident, and calm.
Down the line of hay I notice a cow beginning to give birth. Two front feet appear through the drapery of a broken water bag. Unbothered, the cow keeps eating. As labor increases, she finally lies down and pushes hard. Within minutes, the head emerges, floppy-eared and wet, then the hips and back legs. The cow gets up, and I watch her look of irritation and bewilderment change to a wild, giddy sweetness as she licks and nudges, making gentle lowing sounds, welcoming her new calf into the world.
Morning. A waterspout of mist blows straight up from behind a ridge and wafts against eight thousand vertical feet of granite. Spring fountains life onto the earth this way, pumping warm air into Arctic nights and new calves onto the ground. Usually it’s snow and deep cold we have to contend
with, but this week it’s a sudden thaw, which brought disaster when the temperature rose from twenty below zero to sixty above in twelve hours, melting the three feet of snow that had lain on the ground all winter. At dawn there is water running everywhere. Rivers flood pastures. I find calves with only their heads above water and do my best to get them to high ground. It takes one teaspoon of bacteria to infect a thousand cows; we have many less than that, and by midday bacterial and viral scours, plus quick pneumonia, are rampant. Some calves become so sick they lie flat on the ground, their mouths cold, tongues hanging out, dying from dehydration. A friend, Erv, comes to help. Together we take temperatures, give shots and boluses, tube and bottle-feed calves with our vet’s recommended home remedy: warmed-up beef consommé. Erv holds the calf upright between his knees, and I give the bottle, working the jaw to stimulate a sucking motion.
Doctoring sick calves becomes my sole work. I don’t even notice when or where the new ones were born. My days and nights are lived in the herd, and an intimacy blossoms as it does when one attends any gravely ill being, after talk becomes impossible or unnecessary to exchange.
One night the temperature drops to twenty below, and just at dark I notice a yearling steer has broken through lake ice and is half submerged. We drive the pickup to the edge, rope his horns, dally to the trailer hitch, and pull him slowly out. In the squeeze chute, I dry him with a tiny hair dryer, then put him to bed in a shed piled with fresh straw. By morning he is healthy, but more calves are dead.
Every few days a blizzard whips up fast—from clear sky to whiteout in fifteen minutes—and we try to move the newborn calves and their mothers to sunsheds so they won’t freeze to the ground or suffocate in drifting snow. After one such move, a calf is missing. I hike back up to the pasture above the house. Up there the wind is blowing so hard I am bent double. On hands and knees, I search under giant sagebrush for the animal. Nothing. Then out across the flat I see something moving: the calf is being blown across the ground. Running, I tackle him, and for a while we lie huddled together.
It’s said that enlightenment is trackless, that the path of knowledge and the path of ignorance are the same. Snow covers us. There is no telling how we got there, where we could go. All I know is this: I am the calf’s anchor in a storm, and he, mine. Unseeing, unmoving, which path am I on?
The end of March. Where is spring? Rain is followed by snow which is followed by rain. Snow on shed roofs loosens and slides, lying broken and glistening on the ground in huge crystals. A flock of finches descends from a passing cloud, bringing song to the earth for the first time since fall. Snow on the lake curdles, and underneath, the ice cover has grayed like bruised skin. Sun shifts its long-legged rays through clouds walking across seasons. Mist dissolves in juniper fronds. Wind deepens: winter is so difficult to dislodge. I hear it groan as it leaves: Oh, darling, why are you doing this to me?
I think of the night when I stayed at the house of the novelist Osamu Dazai in northern Japan, now an inn. I couldn’t sleep. It had been raining on and off, but there was a full moon. I slipped out of my Meiji-era, second-story, foreign-style room, with its high ceilings and French doors, and walked the narrow hallways of the otherwise traditional Japanese house. Under my feet floorboards chirped—what Japanese call “nightingale floors”—and wind rattled long horizontal windows. I looked down at the heaving shoulders of a tree in the courtyard and thought of the Japanese pivot word nagame, used in poems to mean, simultaneously: “long rains,” “reverie,” “thinking of love.”
At dinner I had met a young Japanese man. With his angular nose and sensuous lips, he looked princely, but his hands shook as he brought the sake cup to his mouth, and his face reddened after it was suggested by the proprietress that he and I should become friends. It’s stylish now in Japan to drink coffee instead of tea, so following custom, I sat in the tiny lobby sipping espresso and thumbing through one of Dazai’s novels, The Setting Sun. Glancing around once, I found the young man sitting opposite, staring at me.
Late that night, sleepless and walking the halls, I came on his room. The sliding door was partway open. The storm had broken, and moonlight shone in on his perfect face. I could see his hands clasped together and the sleeves of his indigo yukata folded in triangles across his chest. Was he asleep or awake? Why was his door open?
Wind battered the house. In Dazai’s novel he wrote: “Last night we drank together and I put her to bed in the foreign-style room on the second floor. I laid out bedding for myself in the room downstairs where Mama died. Then I began to write this wretched memoir. Kazuko, I have no room for hope. Good-bye.” After which, in real life, he and his lover gave their lives in a double suicide.
Book in hand, I stood in this stranger’s doorway watching moonlight shake across his face. I listened. Would he call out for me? His breathing was deep and slow. Whispering, I said good-night.
April 1. Open water. Hot days, seventy degrees, and the hard, monastic rules of dormancy are finally broken. The world repopulates itself with ducks. Pairs of mallards crowd in at the warm end of the lake, feeding on watercress, bugs, and aquatic weeds. Then goldeneyes, terns, avocets, coots, godwits, wigeons, and phalaropes fly in from points south, guided by moonlight and stars and magnetic fields. A secret organ inside their chests helps them detect compass points, and as they glide in for landings on the water, I wonder if we too have a place in our bodies that guides us.
I sleep on the island in the pond. During the night more birds arrive. Humpbacked, the island bends me, thrusting my pelvis. “These yearnings, what are they?” the poet Walt Whitman asked. Mallards fly at night, navigating by their internal compass as well as by the position of moon and stars. What is it that magnetizes me to one person, one landscape, then another? Seemingly stationary, I attempt to locate myself, knowing that when I look at the Milky Way, I am looking laterally through the galactic equator; that this is just one galaxy—gala, from the Greek for “milk”—around which there is a celestial landscape wilder and more turbulent than anything I can imagine or see.
In the dark I look between stars at luminous debris—the building blocks of our solar system—and strain to see where the Oort cloud might be, the birthplace of comets captured by gravitational perturbations and spewed into our local sky like seed.
In 1986 I flew to the big island of Hawaii to observe Comet Halley from NASA’s infrared telescope on Mauna Kea. For five hours, the choppy sea below had looked like a field of stars. Ahead, Mauna Kea loomed, snow-covered, nearly 14,000 feet straight out of the sea. A dormant shield volcano, it has long slopes covered with reddish-black lava, which has pooled and hardened on the outskirts of Hilo. The mountain is the sacred home to Pali, whom legend describes as having a mane of black hair, a back straight as a cliff, and breasts rounded like moons.
At the airport I’m met by Roger Kanacke, an astronomer, and his assistant, Tim, and together we drive up through lava fields to Hale Pohaku, or “midlevel,” as they call it, a place built for observing astronomers to stay and get acclimatized at 10,000 feet before going up to 13,500 feet, where the observatories are.
Roger is the son of an engineer who designed the parachute for the Apollo mission. When he was ten, his mother gave him a young astronomer’s kit—a starfinder and telescope—and after, he knew what he wanted to do with his life. “Astronomers get just as excited about seeing the stars in the night sky as anyone,” Roger says, “but now we spend most of our time in windowless rooms with computers. I’m beginning to forget where the stars are.”
In the late afternoon we drive to the top of Mauna Kea. At dusk the shadow of the earth rests against a bank of clouds, then a full moon rises, erasing us. Later the moon goes into eclipse, and as the sky darkens, the gauzy tail of Comet Halley appears.
“We are trying to understand the universe from the inside out—it’s not even clear if this is possible, because we’re part of what we’re studying. But we keep pushing what we know back to the tiniest fraction of time, to the mom
ent of the creation of the universe. We are asking the fundamental questions, but I do not know if the answers are forthcoming.”
Inside the observatory the infrared telescope seems huge, and at an altitude of almost 14,000 feet, I grow dizzy as I tip my head back to take in the whole machine. There are oxygen tanks on wheels nearby for fainting astronomers. Through a heavy door, we enter the computer room.
At 6:00 P.M. Roger calls the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, to get the coordinates for Comet Halley—where, exactly, in the sky the comet will be—then the telescope operator, a loose-jointed, laid-back young guy from Kona, punches the numbers into the computer. “Gone are the bone-chilling nights standing on a ladder with your eyebrows frozen to the telescope’s eyepiece,” Roger says, adjusting dials and refiguring equations on a calculator with symbols I’ve never seen before. Using the intercom, Roger logs in with the telescope operator: Adjust focus. Adjust chopper. Set crosshairs. Focus at 1.5, aperture at 5 mm. “We’re going to set up on a bright star,” he explains. Then a voice comes over the intercom: “Wind’s coming up. It’s twenty-five mph now.” Roger groans. At forty or fifty miles per hour, the observatories have to shut down.
Islands, the Universe, Home Page 12
