Islands, the Universe, Home

by Ehrlich, Gretel;

  A front comes in. I ride to the mountaintop gate—the gate that leads nowhere—and watch shifting mists hide running herds of elk. Truncated rainbows stab the green slope; rain comes as an act of generosity, as if the sky’s big body had pulled itself apart for me to see.

  I go back to the grotto on Cedar Creek. Moss climbs the walls, and little ferns poised on rock ledges receive spray: Way back in the crypt, a pool has formed, and water dripping out of a seam in the rocks feeds it continuously. I walk through the waterfall—hair and clothes drenched—and, on the other side, crouch down under sloping walls. Shoes off, I put my toe into the pool: silt rises in plumes, hiding me.

  “Passion too deep seems like none,” a Chinese Tang poet wrote. Walking down the mountain from Cedar Creek, I think of Raku-san, the fifteenth-generation potter I visited whose family’s hot firing technique has made their ware famous around the world. Steeped in a thousand years of pottery-making tradition, he lives by breaking with that tradition. At his house in Kyoto we were led into a cold, empty reception room and sat “women’s style”—on our knees. After a long wait, Raku-san’s wife appeared dressed in a black leather miniskirt, and served us sweets and tea ceremony tea. Then Raku-san burst in. Tall, graceful, handsome, he had an easy laugh he claimed to have acquired while living in Rome during the sixties. He was dressed in formal priest’s attire, since he was only taking a break from performing the tea ceremony at a nearby temple as part of the New Year’s celebration. “The formal duties of the eldest son of such a family of National Living Treasures are worse than those of royalty,” my friend and interpreter Leila said, “because royalty aren’t expected to make art too.”

  After we talked, he asked us if we would like to see some of his new work. No one else in Japan had had this privilege, we found out later. He set four tea bowls in front of us on the tatami. They were unlike any others I have seen: oversized, oddly shaped, marked boldly with grays, greens, oozing red glaze. “Each tea bowl is a canvas,” Leila said, holding one. I tried to register the feel of another bowl in my hand: smooth and bumpy, delicate and heavy. Sitting cross-legged, leaning one elbow on a knee, then the other, Raku-san watched us, smiling. His hands and arms were muscular and heavily veined, and all the beauty of his bowls shone in his face—the one lighting up the other.

  “My bowls have caused some controversy,” he said. “They aren’t appropriate for traditional tearooms now. So I’ve decided to design a new kind of tearoom to match my bowls. They’ll be bigger and a little wilder.…” He talked about the house he is building in the mountains outside Kyoto and the place where he digs clay—the same place his grandfather dug his and where Raku-san’s grandchildren will dig theirs. “Sometimes I feel something over my shoulder like a ghost,” he said. “It scares me a little bit, but it’s just my grandfather telling me what to do.”

  “Does your grandfather tell you to make your tea bowls like these—wild and passionate and free?” I asked him. A faint smile came over his face: “Yes.”

  Later in the day I decided to make my own ink. I boiled bones, twigs, bark, and added powders bought in Kyoto: vermilion, cerulean, purple, green mixed with dried deer-hooves. The colored liquid resulting from my brew was brackish and faded when I wrote. John Muir more successfully made ink from his beloved sequoia trees, and Ikkyū, the Japanese poet-monk, abbot of Daitoko-ji, favored the charcoal of orchid trees for his. Another monk made white ink from cuttlefish bones and called it “the ten-thousand-times-pounded frost flower,” commenting also that “as ink is made through many poundings, so too the spirit suffers ordeals.”

  June. Flowers from the apple tree fall, and I feel the bulbs at the end of branches swelling into fruit. Clouds of yellow pine pollen billow past. Now the gate on the mountaintop is sun-whitened against a black sky, and the island in the lake is a brain studying itself, not only remembering remembering but knowing how the remembering takes place. Receptors exposed, everything ordinary turns into an exotic aperçu.

  I saddle my young horse, ride out into a field, and ask him to stand quietly. This he will not do. Instead we take the pilgrim’s loop: from lake to grotto, grotto to tablets, tablets to lake. Now the gate that leads nowhere is black, and the mountains behind it are white with unseasonal snow. When we trot home, a cloud throws huge hailstones like miniature comets to the ground, as if my uncertainty had become a form of gravitational pull.

  The fasting heart slides from extreme to extreme, looking for quiescence, longing for longing to be assuaged. To fast means to put nothing in the body. It also means leaving nothing out. Is that why I keep breaking into myself like a thief, not stealing but filling up on hope and fear? Borrowing a stethoscope from the vet’s kit, I listen to my own heart. Its beats are slow and fast, sure and unsure, arrhythmical and steady-state. Again and again, during the long summer, it is knocked open by a flicker’s drumming love tap, and the skin that covers tissue is pecked away.

  Sometimes I wonder if the fasting heart is not another term for gluttony. At dawn in a friend’s hillside house, I hear a grove of bamboo rustle, and from it the world’s smallest bird, the hummingbird, flies into the room, spinning around and around as if trying to show me how to draw the outlines of self bigger. What I’m talking about is not illusions of grandeur but how, in emptiness, I could become more inclusive, evolving in the direction of generosity, a world in which one thing never precludes another.

  Later a fan spills cool air across my back, and because I’m feeling sad, my friend feeds me delicacies between gulps of wine. I think of a small culvert on the ranch that connects one irrigation ditch to another—how during high water it fills at one end and overflows at the other, so that filling and emptying become the same thing.

  “To yield is to be preserved whole. To be bent is to become straight. To be hollow is to be filled. To be tattered is to be renewed. To be in want is to possess. To have plenty is to be confused,” Lao Tzu wrote.

  Where did June go? Now it’s July. Helped friends move cattle from one mountain pasture to another. Rode Slim, my young cutting horse. Hours go by—these are always fourteen-hour days on horseback—and suddenly he and I are in harmony and I can steer him, not with reins but with the knotted wheel of my pelvis. As we race after a cow and calf, his legs thump up into my body like pistons: I know where each foot is all the time, and he feels me in the center of him. Together we float. The reins are made of helium, his head bending, bending the way water does, following the path of least resistance; our movement is a result not of control and force but of mutual release so that the life can come up through our bodies.

  None of this would be possible without a horse trainer named Ray Hunt. I go to him each summer, as much for what he teaches me about how to live as for what he can teach a horse. “You are stupid and the colt is smart,” he says at the beginning of each five-day clinic. And he means it. In his sixties now, Ray, big, powerful, and weathered, grew up cowboying on ranches in northern Nevada and Idaho, riding the rough string, putting in long days. One winter he came across a stud horse named Hondu, whom nobody could ride, much less get near. Hondu hated people: he struck, bit, kicked if approached. Ray recalls: “I lay awake plenty of nights trying to figure out how to get this horse to trust me, and I knew it wasn’t going to be by tying him up or hobbling him or by teaching him any lessons. Finally, I just stopped doing things to him. When I let Hondu be the teacher, we came, by trial and error, to mutual respect and trust. And when that happens, anything is possible.”

  The first day a young horse is brought to Ray, he is worked loose in a round corral. Standing in the middle, Ray watches the horse move and becomes a spokesman for the horse’s thoughts. “You see, he doesn’t know what’s going to happen to him in here; he’s afraid,” Ray says as the colt runs, stops, dodges his head, then runs again. “But when he sees nothing bad is going to happen if he comes toward me, then he’ll begin to find sanctuary in my presence.” In half an hour the colt has his head in Ray’s arms.

  “It’s
amazing what a horse goes through,” Ray says, rubbing the horse’s head gently. “The stress … a human couldn’t take it. You see, a horse is as pure and innocent and clean as anything you can imagine, and he wants to please.”

  Later he puts halters on, saddles them, and lets them run loose in an arena, and when they’re used to the saddle, the riders get on, with nothing on the horse’s head for control. As they step on, the horse sometimes runs off or bucks, and the riders are prohibited from doing anything that might restrain the horse. “Pretty soon he finds out that having you on his back is no different than having a mane and tail.” The riders, feeling a bit helpless, get the message: that resistance and punishment communicate only a lack of trust. “Humans always want direct answers and right now. But when working with a young horse, it should be not what you want him to do but what his capabilities are. You help bring those out, that’s all.”

  The next day, when the riders are allowed to use a snaffle bit or a hackamore, Ray admonishes us: “I try to do less and less with a horse. To give the least resistance to the life in the body and to let him stay united within himself. A horse will feel that and respond accordingly.”

  By the end of the five days the young horse stops, turns, backs, has the beginnings of a sliding stop and spinning turn, and is moving in the direction of his own energy, not away from tension. “When you’re riding, it should look like a bird flying,” Ray says, smiling. “Not a gut-shot bird … it should be smooth as silk. And I’ll tell you what it takes to accomplish this: self-discipline. We humans only know how to put pressure on. We’re good at making war, but it’s a hell of a trial for us to make peace. Peace means respond and respect, not fear and escape. I try to operate, not through pressure, but a feel. When I’m not giving, only taking, the horse starts acting out of self-preservation, and then watch out. He’ll survive, but you may not.”

  At the end of the day he gathers his students around. The horses stand quietly. “A horse is a mirror. I know everything about you by looking at your horse,” he says. Then he thumps his heart: “Dig in here. You’ll be surprised at what you find. My goodness, it’s amazing, when you really dig deep, what you see inside. And once you start giving, there’s no end to what you get back.”

  August. I am camped with friends in Yellowstone Meadows, a ten-hour ride horseback through timbered mountains where, two years ago at this time, fires burned hot. This year the meadows are a wild garden thick with flowers, walled by the volcanic arms of the Yellowstone caldera. Clouds of mosquitoes rise with clouds of pollen. Early every morning I go for a walk, bear bell banging against my thigh. A stand of trees to my left is all black trunks crowned with the gray hair of charred needles and branches. On the ground, where willows burned hot, circles of tall grass have appeared, their inflorescence like lace between my legs as I walk.… Who is embracing me?

  Not far from its source below Younts Peak, the Yellowstone River is still narrow. It moves like glass, bends at oxbows, melts into one transparency laminated onto another as if to show me how true wealth should look.

  The meadow is bombastic, a thick, bright mass of grasses, forbs, shrubs—fescue, blue bunch, timothy, sedge, yarrow, elk thistle, and cinquefoil, all punctuated with wild-flowers of every shape—paintbrush, gentian, elephant-head, blue penstemon, American bistort, just to name a few, and the strange western coneflower, with its dark center and no petals, as if, like a monk, it had shaved its head.

  Pairs of sandhill cranes waddle in front of me eating grasshoppers, then fly up, landing a little farther ahead. Every reed-lined pool is home to families of ducks: mothers and ducklings and protective, busybody drakes. In the larger ponds, the beavers’ dome houses look like pavilions, with pond water as a moat. To have been made one of the animals and to live here … how envious I am.

  Evening. Allan Savory, who taught me what I know about holistic management on our ranch, and is on this pack trip with us, talks of growing up in the African bush. He lived in a house with no windows or doors, and the animals—all sizes, from mosquitoes to lions—came and went. He talks of the remarkable intelligence of animals, how one bull giraffe, routed out by a contender, went miles away to live. When his opponent died, ten years later, he knew and returned to the herd. Over a sumptuous dinner of curried rice, with beef and trout, white wine and sourdough bread, he talks about going into the bush for months as a tracker with only rice, tea, and a gun; how once, on a cold night, he took shelter from rain under a dead elephant’s ear, hacking away at its neck for meat; how hungry he was.…

  Morning. Mist on the river. Two moose grazing across the meadow, smooth as water moving. A raft of pink clouds rises over the mountain like a wing, then sandhill cranes fly up, their bodies the color of the sky before first light. “Karooo, karooo, karooo …,” their cries so deep they sound like bells echoing off basaltic rock, carried back across moving water …

  What is this wild embrace? This slipping away of heat from air at daybreak, these clothes made of bird cries being peeled from my body? Who is holding me? Why do your arms keep sliding down my back and hips, then start again at my face? What is in my throat, what have I said or swallowed? Is it foam from the river where it collides with pointbars and cutbanks, or the rolling r’s of sandhill cranes?

  Lao Tzu exhorts us to listen to the world “not with ears but with mind, not with mind but with spirit.” Some days I hear what sounds like breathing: quick inhalations from the grass, from burnt trees, from streaming clouds, as if desire were finally being answered, and at night in my sleep I can feel black tree branches pressing against me, their long needles combing my hair. Later, when the man I love holds me, I am astonished that such an intense feeling could come from the embrace of only one body and two hands.

  Late August. North of the ranch, I walk to stone tablets that rise three hundred feet from a steep mountain slope. At midday they throw pointed shadows like black teeth down to me, and I climb them, slipping on rotted granite and scree. Wind-pruned shrubs punctuate the slope. Like a bear or a bird, I quench my thirst eating rose hips along the way. Then I’m at the base of the outcrop and have to tilt my head all the way back to contemplate these monoliths.

  Set like false fronts, bermed in the back, a sheer drop on the side that faces the world, they are the twin bulletin boards for the cosmos, a tabula rasa that has pushed up from under the ground. One eroded rock looks like a pushpin. Is this the spindle on which the tablets swivel, revealing secret rooms? Are there messages pinned to the rock, ones I can’t read? Small pine cones litter the ground where I’m standing, though there are no trees. Who throws them here? I wonder. And from where?

  The tablets are limestone—sedimentary rock deposited like icing on top of two-billion-year-old granite by the coming and going of shallow seas. In a time of geologic violence, the granitic basement rose and tipped so that the sedimentary layer faces outward in vertical flatirons. The more fragile shales and mudstones broke away at this point, leaving much of the limestone tablets exposed. Rock that breaks when stressed is called by geologists “competent rock,” and those that bend under stress, “incompetent.” On the scale between “competent” and “incompetent,” limestone falls somewhere in the middle.

  The tablets’ surface is milky. I am told it is calcium carbonate, secreted by algae and corals. Here and there chunks of maroon chert show through: a fossil record of those tiny organisms that lived and died at the bottom of a sea.

  Making my way along the base of the tablets, I come on a tiny cave, an outdoor tokonoma or a place where a saint or a hermit might have been installed. White-throated swifts dart out from nests built in rock niches and soar over the valley, diving for insects, their sole food. If a sudden freeze hits, as it can anytime in August, these birds can go twelve days without eating, losing sixty percent of their body weight in the process. Is this the kind of fast my heart must take on?

  Now the sky above me fills with birds: ravens zigzag through false fronts, then birds I can’t identify fly out in slow-m
oving pairs. I glass them with binoculars. Is it possible these are pigeons? What are white-banded pigeons doing up here?

  Rain clouds come. The sound of North Beaver Creek crescendos and softens in tidal winds, and the narrow edge of these stone shoulders take on gold at the end of the day. As clouds spread white across the sky, then drip—not with rain, but with milk—I think it must be pigeon’s crop milk sputtering down, a wondrous substance belched up from the esophagus, which has more protein than mother’s milk or a cow’s.

  We think of pigeons as being domestic creatures, but at the turn of the century passenger pigeons boasted a population of thirty billion. While watching one migration, Audubon estimated that three hundred million birds flew over his head every hour, and when they landed to rest, their colonies were often forty miles long. They are gone now, of course, hunted out of existence, so these few pairs of wild pigeons are more precious to me, odd as they seem in such an austere, windy place.

  Inching my way along the base of the tablets, I stand with my nose to rock. Here, they are an open book to me, my feet toed into the spine. Fingering the jagged edge of the fracture between the two halves, I wonder if a page has been torn out. Tabula rasa. Is there a codex inscribed here, and if so, how can a blank be deciphered? Or is it a song too old to have words? The rock is pink, white, green, sand, nubby, and frosted. When no one is looking, I lick it and taste salt and milk.

  Time for a nap. Downslope under a many-armed Engelmann’s spruce. Dreams wing through my head like swifts, fast and sure, but gone in an instant. The sound of the sea and of rivers running into the sea is continuous. Here, on the ocean floor, brain coral and red sea stars thrive; vents let out juvenile water in warm streams where bacteria and tiny organisms can live. Finally, the tablets are laid to rest and lie flat. I walk on them: they are a foundation for a great house, or else I dance, and they are a table.