Having Everything Right

by Stafford, Kim; Pyle, Robert Michael;

  DECEMBER MEDITATION AT CAMP POLK CEMETERY

  You have to listen real hard to hear anything at all: a little snow ticking down through juniper trees; the click of the chain around a family plot flexing in the cold. Wind. You hear it quite a while before it arrives. Then the eastern half of your face might just as well be stone.

  Ten years ago I was here to do a formal study of the cemetery layout. As part of my folkloristic fieldwork, I made a systematic ramble of thirteen central Oregon cemeteries, stepping respectfully in the August dust of memorial plots at Grizzly, Antelope, Ashwood, Grandview, Madras, Hay Creek, Bakeoven, Warm Springs, Simnashio, Camp Polk, and three without names. I wanted to know how the adjacent communities of the living marked, laid out, and maintained these trim little cities of stone and sage. I wanted to know how many gravemarkers listed family relations, military ranks, professions, hobbies, wise proverbs, and the verses of grief or hope. I wanted to know how these stretches of sacred ground were isolated from the forest or cattle range surrounding them: wood fence, iron gate, barbed wire, poplar tree square. On the main street of how many towns would there be a sign for the “Cemetery: 2 miles”? How many plots would be local secrets tucked away up a side canyon?

  I wanted to seek and listen, to map and ponder the visible artifacts of religious belief my people hold. I did all that. The study is in the archive. The memory works on me.

  But now it’s dusk at Camp Polk, and I’m visiting old friends. Here’s Ray, by the champion juniper gnarl he loved to paint. His name in my mouth brings up a riff of banjo jangle I heard him play. There’s a snow-swirl dancer over his place now.

  I remember my discovery ten years ago, that graves everywhere planted heads to the west. This marks a Christian readiness to rise up facing Christ as He will bloom from the east on Judgment Day. And I remember how many of the thirteen cemeteries marked the end of a dead-end road: the Ashwood plot up a dirt track with no sign. The Grizzly cemetery at the ripe heart of a wheatfield with no road at all, forgotten like the town of Grizzly itself, which some prosperous corporation had bought. I drove around and around that field, knowing I was close, my map fluttering from my hand in the heat, until finally I squinted my eyes past the shimmering wheat and saw the cemetery fence out there roadless in the middle of the standing grain.

  Somewhere near the cemetery here at Camp Polk, a hundred odd years ago, the U.S. Army buried a cannon before fleeing from the Indians. Treasure hunters have sought it, as if it were a memory they owned by rights, as if that brass body might be raised up and carried away. You have to brave a series of “No Trespassing” signs to get to Camp Polk. Ten years ago there was a sign to invite visitors on toward the cemetery on its little hill beyond the most handsome of falling barns. This evening, there is no sign. You have to know.

  Driving into Shaniko, on my cemetery route in 1975, I remember slowing the car to ask directions of an old-timer crumpled easily beside a shed, whittling steadily at a stub of wood. I didn’t realize until too late the impertinence of my opening question: “Excuse me, sir, could you direct me to the cemetery?”

  There was a tremendous pause, as he turned slowly up from his work to unroll a vacant smile. No answer was on the way. I thanked him, and drove on to the Eat Cafe. This time, I tried to be a bit more discreet, making my request in hushed tones to the waitress as she came rollicking across the room with half a dozen steaming plates along her arms.

  “Excuse me, I’m trying to find the cemetery—for research.”

  She lurched expertly to a stop without jostling a plate, and shouted to the long table of white-haired ladies at the far end of the room, “Hey girls, we got a cemetery?” They vaguely shook their heads.

  “Mister,” she said, “we ain’t got one. Try Antelope.” I explained that I had already been there, and learned what I could.

  “Well,” she said, “then I don’t think we can help you. We don’t figure to do much dying in this town.”

  If you lie on your back to watch the snow come down, you will hear little rustlings in the grass, and you seem to see a long way up into the sky. You can try to be as still as everyone else, as hopeful and content.

  I remember the gravestone at Agency Plains, the one with the sheriff’s badge carved deep into the marble beside one name. Neighbors told me later he had never been Sheriff, but that was his life-long wish. Deputy, yes. Sheriff, never. Until then.

  Religion in the desert has a lot to do with patience, and patience has a lot to do with silence. Beyond my feet where I lie at Camp Polk, there is a stone with an infant’s oval ceramic photograph fixed to the pedestal. Someone sometime has used it for target practice, and the gray print of the bullet shies away low and to the left. There are so many children, and they are all so silent they are a chorus. The desert is big enough to hold that wind.

  At Ashwood in that ten years back I heard a wind coming. All was still where I crouched, but I heard that wind. Hot. There was a permanence to every stone crumb and weed-stalk in the little enclosure of wire where I stood up. About a quarter mile away, a single tree was moving. The others were still. I folded my map and put it away. Then the little whirlwind moved down the hill into another tree and left the first tree alone. There was a weight to the afternoon. Then all the trees were still and the wind was a slender spiral of dust coming down toward me.

  Even under the snow I can see the varieties of hope at Camp Polk: the ring of stone, the chain perimeter, the lichen-shredded picket fence, concrete moat, rusted cast-iron rail around a rich man’s plot. In the sweep of open desert ground, the grave plot is a pouch, a box, a small fenced span of certainty. That’s all. That’s enough. It’s nearly dark.

  As I rise up, fervent and happy for every movement I make, snow shakes off my coat into my body’s print on the ground. There is one thing still I must do. One of Camp Polk’s oldest stones has fallen from its pedestal. Carved on the stone are the twin gates of heaven thrust wide. An orange swathe of lichen has covered the spirit’s name. I can see only a submerged swirl of graceful lettering where the stonecutter engraved a name, a year, a lamb, and a verse.

  I bend to lift the stone back into place, but it is frozen to the earth. I try to kick it loose, but my toes go numb. Then I see the initials. Chipped ruggedly at the base of the stone, never intended to be seen once it had been fit forever to the pedestal, are the stonecutter’s secret letters “J.A.W.O.S.” What for immortality? Public proclamations are prey to time. Only the secrets survive.

  Was it at Grizzly? Was it at Hay Creek: the nameless stone sunk almost gone into the earth, with its moss-word “Mother”? Or was that Warm Springs, among the gifts of favorite things, the scattered trinkets love makes us give back to a place where we believe?

  Good night, Ray. Bit windy, wouldn’t you say? One thing about snow, though. It don’t ever last.

  A WALK IN EARLY MAY

  Solitude is the scientific method of the human spirit. If you decide to fast, a full day and its night will be one arc of experience. If you decide not to take a map or to follow a trail, the path you make through broken country will be a chain of sensations. If you decide to take no warm covering for the night, you will change with the world, from warm and light, to cold.

  South of Eureka lies a coastal country now dangerous with marijuana farmers and their guerrilla ways, with federal agents marauding in infrared helicopters and armored jeeps. But that was years away. I was there before, without a map, without food. I left the car and walked out onto the beach. The air was hot and still. The waves were an old rhythm beside me. I knelt over flat sand, where the tallest wave had sorted a ribbon of shell. Some four-footed creature had been along, leaving a trail that turned aside, as mine did, for every cluster of debris, every drift-bundle in the sand. One clear print told me it had been a coon, with two little ones. Inside the print, a gray scorpion the size of a ladybug was turning in a pirouette with its hands together. I was already hungry enough to understand that much.

  In the midday shimmer, tw
o women were talking in the waves. I turned: two seals, their eyes and whiskers level with the slick pelt of the water that rose and fell, rose and fell with a whisper. Not fear or purpose: a gentle curiosity came between us. An invitation to know. When they disappeared, kelp swirled from rocks that punctured the surface. I sat on the hot sand a long time. Then they came up, one little one bobbing behind them. This time they did not look at me. In seal, this was a compliment. The swell rose and they were gone again. Like the rocks, they had shown between waves; like the water, they had flowed away.

  I walked south from the car, because it was easier to walk than decide. After a time, it was easier to stop. The inland dune glittered white above the tide-line. I held my hand above my eyes. It was a midden, a packed hill of rotted shell where the Indians had opened clams together. Generations of cockles to make one human life; generations of those lives to make a low hill waves had begun to carve. When I climbed it, deer in the meadow beyond bounded away into the blue-flowered scrub.

  The hillside where the deer had fled was steep above the cove. The old ones had a narrow place to be happy together. Rocks clucked at the sliding water, the seals spoke now and then. There was a great distance in a small space. Before my face where I lay down, wind made the tiny seeds of the grass sway where they were tethered.

  I walked south in the trance of heat, at the rim of hunger. Walking was what the wind did, the sun. It had nothing to do with destination. Not a plan, but a way of being. Where I stopped, the seals were clustered offshore, bobbing in the water between two arms of rock. I was a stranger. They were older with the place. I lay down on the sand, my arms tight to my sides, my feet together. Became a shape for water. They murmured and came closer. They climbed onto the rocks. The curiosity came between us. All about me on the sand were the curved prints of their bodies where the tide had beached them high, where they had slept a while, then elbowed down to the water. Now they said one syllable with all its inflections—oh, oh, oh, oh—from deep in the body. The seals go down into another world, then come back to tell that.

  Behind the beach was another midden, the white strata of shell deep in the bank waves had opened, had spilled. The bright slope I climbed was littered with whole, old abalone shell, each moon-shape just shy of full, with a curved line of bubbles spiraling out from where it began. Clamshell crumbled like ash under my feet, and the white bone too long to not be whale-rib flaked away when I bent to touch it.

  My hand closed over a hammerstone: a cylindrical shape with a rim at the top for my first finger to curve under. The striking face at the bottom was worn down by shell of clam and shattered acorn. It was heavy, hot like the sand it came from, just the blunt, thick shape of a man. It was a tool of abundance even as it opened a hull or shell. The works of food and pleasure had a single way in this stone; each motion with it was a blessing.

  Somewhere up the hill, in a private midden of their own, the bones of the maker lay. I climbed the white slope, my shoes filling with sand. Above, on the uneroded midden roof, a fawn lay still, bunched on its side as if running, the small black hooves joined to the leg-bones in a white articulation repeated in the multiple curve of rib, the compact flex of spine, in the skull turned back over the shoulder, the small jaw open. It moved yet it did not. It slept, more than slept. Coyote would have scattered the bones. It must have been vulture or crow pared away all color from it, all flesh.

  Where I knelt in the grass to know this, at the tip of a grass stem, the flat, round body of the tick reached yearning toward me. I held my finger out. She clung to the grass with two feet, the other six flailing the air. I was the prey, she the predator courting me, embrace aching in her arms. In the old tale it was Coyote who heard the tick call, “Darling, darling, will you marry me?” And then the tick climbed onto his back and they walked away. Soon, the tick was the greater of the two. Soon, Coyote clung to a twig and called to travelers, “Darling, darling, will you marry me?” Things are powerful in proportion to their smallness. This one came blindly onto my finger, not now in haste, having found the broad landscape of desire, to begin the deep kiss that fulfills her life. There is one feast; all are invited. The clam, the fawn, the crow. The tick, the shaper of the stone.

  But the two of us would be hungry for a time. With a buttercup leaf I brushed her gently to the ground, still thin, still stirring her eight short filaments for knowing. She found the base of a tall stem and began to climb. The sun was hot on my shoulders. I felt the cramp in my knees and stood.

  To the north, my car was a grain of light. The sun had gone into mist over the long waves, a haze that rose up in plumes of gray. I sat a while by a drift log above the water. Far up past the beach, over the ridgetop a hawk was hovering low. Maybe, if I climbed there and lay in the grass, the hawk would come back along the spine of meadow, unsuspecting, and be close above my face, its wings open just over my mouth. I had learned to stand up slowly now.

  The slope was steep, perhaps dangerous to one in a hurry. There was no path at first, and I climbed with the speed of the blind. My feet had to know first, and balance was more than direction. Where the slope quickened, I hunched aside into a small cave. On the ceiling, swallows had made their nests of mud like beaded bags against damp rock. They were absent this season, and the nest-shapes were crooked throats. A bit of swallow down flickered at the mud rim of one. There was a line across the cave mouth: water’s blue horizon.

  The open slope narrowed to a slot between spicy bushes of a small blue flower, then to a thistle-arroyo, then to poison oak in a broad band, the blond flowers clustered on it sweet, its green leaves bright with oil. Where deer had shouldered through that thicket, I turned aside, went down on all fours under a wind-flattened fir, into the aisle of its shade so dark nothing grew. One tree was braided to the next, the lowest limbs shade-killed and rotten, dropping from my lightest touch as I crawled the dark tunnel upward. In this thicket of limbs, to be straight, to aspire, was death by wind. Side-limbs fattened into trunks, until the trees joined by the rub and link of long limbs, their pitch-wounds sealed in the cambium weld.

  Smaller than aphids, red bugs dusted my hand. A centipede, stone-gray, flowed over a crumpled limb, the lashes of its feet automatic as water. I crouched to watch its grace in the impossible maze of duff. It was the muse of travel, the patron saint of complexity. Past this solitude, beyond the dark interlaced limbs in silhouette, a meadow hummed with sunlight. Flattened on belly and knee, I flowed out from under the last limbs sweeping into the grass and rose up, vacant in the heat.

  Steeper, but impossibly open and easy, the slope of grass and fern led me higher, as I switched back and forth along the quilted trails of the deer to stretch my muscles on either side. Wind hit the slope full force, gleaning away every loose crumb of soil or rock. Rain, frost-clench, seismic nudge made me a participant in scree. I balanced on a pebble, a tuft.

  At the blunt brow of the ridge, I crept low to the peak; the wind was behind me, but my scent would be baffled by the updraft, and there could be deer or coyote dozing on the far falling slope. As I peered over, a stiff wind snatched back my breath. Beyond, through the tears buffeted from my eyes, was green, all green, a variety of shape and tone to hills and cleft ravines dividing them.

  I rolled back into calmer air, spread my cramped legs and arms. Would the hawk swing down now? I sprawled on my back in the deep grass and slept.

  I was a shape stunned by sunlight, inert, compact, my motive exhaled and done. The sun spun through my head and chest; my four limbs lay flung out in limp vines, a dumb warmth in each leafy palm; my eyes were blank slots of sunlight. The sky hung above in a red dome. One shadow, another, crossed the dome in a flicker of blue. When I cracked open my eyelids, the air above me was thick with vultures wheeling close from the pivot of myself. I did not want to frighten them.

  Be still. Know this as they do: first the eyes—by them confirm possession—then the softer flesh about the mouth, and then the rest with time as rot makes easy. I was afraid only of
myself for thinking this—that I might scare them off by moving too soon, too soon to fully live out in mind the necessary accomplishment of my bones, as the fawn had lived it out, the abalone pried from certainty, the hand that made the round stone and left it.

  But then of itself, my left hand twitched, and the broad forms of the vultures—nine, I counted now—rose from me, still silent as wind, and drifted off when my eyes came wide. Their calm was mine; we were patient with each other. Our etiquette was to have no fear. I was now awake.

  I had never seen the world. I was alive. Down the eastern slope, air was cooler, and light in a slant made every leaf testify, every stick and pebble stand bright as witness to itself. Where poison oak seemed to close my way, there was a ravine beckoning to the side. I sat on the shoulder of it, tried to know its poise. From the redwood to the bay tree, a bluebird made of song and flight one motion. There was a water-sound. The honey-colored ant explored my sleeve, slowing to a crawl at my wrist-fur. Inland, the great blue hills, the sky, loomed in a single color beyond the slot of the canyon where the ground dropped away. Tumbling from my finger, the ant set off through the grass with something white between its jaws. Something of me.

  On the east slope I was now in shadow, and as I drifted across a steep meadow I saw the doe, curled asleep, twenty yards below me. I was blessed to see this. I had seen the bones of the fawn lie still. I had slept. I watched over the doe. After a time, she lifted her head slowly to watch the open country below, her wide ears spread away from where I crouched in fern. The wind was toward me, and only a sound or flicker of movement could startle her. A jay cried; the ears swiveled like broad leaves. A small bird sang long and easy; the doe’s ears folded back behind her slender head.