What the Stones Remember

by Patrick Lane

  As a child I flew in my sleep. Why did such dreams leave me? Addictions and obsessions drape a shroud over the child, but now that I am older and no longer clouded by drugs and alcohol perhaps I will find that early place where I knew the sky. I had petit mal when I was a child. I loved the deep swoon of the seizure, the darkness rising like wicking water in my skull.

  There is no answer for the losses of a child, just as there seem to be no answers to my life these days, only questions. Yet what will come will come and be welcome, no matter its shape. Perhaps my poetry has been a flying dream for me. I can recreate in poems the paling forests and valleys I saw in my dreams sixty years ago as I flew in the night toward a thin light I never reached.

  The fragments I remember come unbidden. The anecdotes and stories arrive from nowhere. Why a cairn of stones and why a dead child at the dump? Why, of all the possible memories, are they the ones that came to mind? Yet I will let them come. Somewhere there is a story that needs telling.

  The ancient tale of the dying swan’s song drifts through the morning as I watch the great birds’ flight against the gray skies. Their song follows down the west-bearing wind. Seeing the swans slip from my sight I could say with Virgil, “Now I know what love is.”

  The swans are beautiful, yes, and so is what I feel for the things around me, but depression still creeps like a mouse under my skin. The lack of light, the cloudy days, and the nights without stars lower a dull helmet over my skull. Swans can lift my spirit for a morning, but swans alone can’t heal a grievous mind.

  Daily I feel amazed I am not drinking or taking drugs. When I climb into bed at night I’m astonished I’ve come through a whole day without them. The quiet thank you I say into my pillow is sometimes the smallest of mercies. My addiction consumed me three months ago. Every waking hour was spent trying to figure out how I could get enough alcohol, where to hide it, and how to consume it without anyone knowing. From the first sips of whiskey or beer my mother gave me as small child to the inch of beer my father let me finish, I knew what I wanted. As a child my body craved alcohol. What was it in me that needed to be caged?

  There is neither grace nor pleasure in the life of the addicted. My drinking transcended the ordinary world of a glass of wine at lunch or a couple of beers in the evening. I needed forty or more ounces of vodka every day in those last years. That was maintenance drinking for me at the end. That’s what left me flopping around like a beached salmon on the hall floor. My flesh and bones had a life of their own. My self was gone, only my spirit remained to watch its body trying to die.

  It takes an effort each day for me to go to the store or the mall, for everywhere I go my truck wants to turn in to a liquor store. I know where each one is within thirty miles. I wince each time I pass certain corners or drive down familiar streets. My body quails as if it is being threatened by a pit bull. I still twitch and shiver uncontrollably. Small hallucinatory creatures slip along the edges of my sight and I glance here and there as if I could actually find them beside a tree, on a bench, or down an aisle in the grocery store. Loud music hurts me.

  This morning I was cleaning ivy away from the side of the compost bin and found two empty vodka bottles tucked behind the vines. Vodka still pooled at the bottom of the bottles, a translucent liquid jewel behind the glass, a thimbleful, no more. I thought of the day I must have lifted the bottles and drained them, held them to my lips until the last vodka slipped down the glass. A thimbleful left, a narrow swallow, a lip, a tongue away behind the glass walls, the metal cap.

  Addiction is a disease that is my body. It lives in me, a creature with the same cells as mine, the same blood and bones. I stared through the glass and I was so frightened I thought I would die. Then I walked around the house, opened the garbage can, and dropped the bottles in. As I walked away I felt I was leaving behind the oldest, closest friend, the dearest lover I ever had. I walked away, and I am still afraid.

  Weldon Kees, the American poet and alcoholic who committed suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, had a couple of lines in one of his poems: “Whatever it is that a wound remembers / After the healing ends.” Sometimes I think every poem I wrote in this life has a death in it. Everywhere my imagination looked I found violence. The people’s lives I had been witness to as a child and as a young man were brutal, swamped in aggression, suffering, and despair. Their occasional joys were always fueled by drugs or alcohol. A grinding week found its miserable release on a Saturday night at the local hall. A dance always ended in blood.

  Yesterday the sun broke free for ten minutes and I ran downstairs from my office and stood in the driveway with my arms outstretched. My body ate the sun. I knew I needed to do something, go somewhere, leave the house and garden, so I phoned my friend Brian Brett and told him it was time we made our annual spring trek for slate. He immediately said yes.

  Yellow Slate Mountain is what we call the tumbling mountain slopes of the rain forest near Port Renfrew, the last stop on the highway west along Juan de Fuca Strait. We have made this trip four times in the last five years. He searches for yellow slate and I search for the pearlescent mica-sweated slate. I also would love some of the yellow, but have given it up simply to enjoy his pleasure at finding yet another piece to add to the ones he has from previous years.

  Our journey is for slate but is as much for friendship as for stone. We’ve known each other thirty years, since he was a teenage rebel on his way to being an adult one. Back then I was deep in the wandering, drinking, and drug life that took me across two American continents. I was lost, riddled with guilt, and tormented by the death of my brother, the murder of my father, the collapse of my marriage, and the loss of my children.

  My brother Dick, who died of a cerebral hemorrhage when he was twenty-eight, was a poet like myself. He suffered from confusion, self-doubt, bravado, alcoholism, and depression most of his young life. His death blew my family to pieces. It was the beginning of the end of everything I had known, trusted, and understood. I’ve spent much of my adult life trying to understand why his death caused such ruptures though perhaps they might have happened anyway and he wasn’t a catalyst, only a first tragedy among many tragedies. He was my blood. We had shared the same womb.

  He quit school at fifteen, drifted into trouble with the law, drank too much just as I did, joined the air force under my father’s urging and, upon returning home three years later, slipped straight into deeper trouble with drugs, alcohol, and crime, until finally getting married. His was a shotgun marriage, the same for my other brother, Johnny, just a year older than I. Both their weddings were a few months apart in the summer of 1957. My own shotgun marriage followed six months later in the slush and bitterness of February 1958. Children, poverty, boys married to girls, none of us old enough or responsible enough to recognize anything other than the prison we found ourselves in. We turned to our parents for help and understanding and were refused. You made your bed, now lie in it, my father said to each of us. My mother was silent.

  Back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, while I struggled with my early poems, I lived in a trailer park in Merritt, a wretched, dusty mill town in southern British Columbia. My two children were three years and one year old and my young wife tried and failed daily to be happy in the miserable trailer the bank owned. I left that flaking aluminum prison each morning for a job in the sawmill, the only life I knew then, though I labored late into the night on writing my poems. I think it was poetry that saved me from killing myself or killing others. There were times when I sucked the steel barrel of my Lee-Enfield rifle or, worse, aimed it at a passing pickup truck. What saved my wife I do not know.

  In December 1964, there was a phone call late at night from my sister telling me my brother was dead. I borrowed my boss’s car and drove crazily over the winding mountain roads to Vernon, where my birth family huddled, waiting for his ashes to be shipped up from Vancouver.

  In four more years I would be gone, my wife remarried and my children lost to me. After my divorc
e I lived in a fury. I ranged from woman to girl, friend to stranger, bar to barrio, city to village, all designed with one end in mind, to kill myself or at least kill whatever it was that daily ate me alive. I made women fall in love with me and then discarded them like chaff. Guilt, fear, self-pity, self-loathing, self-destruction, all and none of them. I remember little of those years. Much of them is blacked out by depression, alcohol, and drugs. I remember waking up in a car wreck in a snow-bound field south of Prince George and wondering why I was still alive. I pried the barbed wire off the door and walked away in search of a bar.

  What I do remember has little joy in it, beyond the writing and the publishing of my early books. I hurt anyone who came close to me and sought safety with strangers. There was always a drink or a drug and usually at the end of a months-long bender a pretty woman I’d wake up to who had been crazy enough to take me home with her for the night or the week until I left her for a place called anywhere else.

  I would stand on Fourth Avenue, Queen Street East, or Avenue C and drain the last of a bottle of whiskey before pulling out. I had no plans other than to go. Driving nowhere numbed me. The long road across the country was the same as all my journeys. My dead brother with his bloody brain sat beside me and my dead father with the hole in his chest where the bullet had blown apart his heart sat behind me, both of them whispering in my ears the lyrics to poems and songs I didn’t want to hear but wrote down anyway. Drugs and alcohol, rock and roll, the Band, Dylan, the Stones, and Woodstock. When I tired of the eastern summer heat I drifted northwest to British Columbia, to Highway Sixteen and my friends who were squatting on a deserted farm north of Smithers. We drank our way through the summers in the local bars, went hunting for goat in the mountains, or sat around with a stick of Lebanese gold and smoked ourselves into illusory satories.

  Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I think I ranged through those years looking for innocence and examining nothing. I think I wanted to be a child again. I think I wanted to kill someone.

  I shake the years away as Brian gets in his truck and we start out in our separate vehicles for our trip to Yellow Slate Mountain. We need two trucks for our booty. Journeys and quests are for the maddened young and both Brian and I have chewed on the years. Now our trips are as much companionship as nostalgia and we can both joke or cry a bit about the times we had together and apart in the bars and cars, rivers and lakes of this land of mountains and plateaus.

  The long drive along the southern coast of Vancouver Island is replete with vistas of long beaches of sand and stone. Logs and the broken shards of trees lean from stone cliffs or lie partly buried under a seethe of rocks, shells, and sand lifted into dunes by the winter storms. Every day the beaches shift and change and every day the waves heave their burdens onto the land only to bear them away again the next.

  Partway down the coast we stop in Sooke, an old-time logging and fishing village now dependent on kayakers, whale watchers, sports fishers, and beachcombers who drift through here in the spring through summer looking for a taste of paradise before returning to their offices and apartments in the cities.

  Our stop here is as much anticipated as the slate we are journeying toward. It is breakfast at Mom’s Café. Steaming coffee; loggers, fishers, and highway workers talking about the day ahead and the early morning behind; a waitress who looks like she eats what she serves; and then three eggs over easy, four strips of thick, crispy bacon, three fat sausages, enough fried potatoes to feed a family of five, four chunks of dense toast smeared with butter, and all piled on a plate the size of my imagination, served with seconds and thirds of coffee and the thought of following the whole thing up with a wedge of lemon pie and meringue five inches high.

  After Sooke, the Pacific beaches begin and while we are tempted to turn off and wander them in search of nothing more than the crash of waves without the interruption of a host of tourists, we don’t. Our journey today is for slate. The stone is back in the mountains a dozen miles up a narrow bush road that’s so rutted and potholed it is a danger to walk it, let alone drive.

  Hanging over the scar of road are salmonberry, evergreen huckleberry, and salal. They are reaching for the scattered bits of light that filter down through the canopy of hemlock, Douglas fir, and western red cedar. Bigleaf maples and red alders crowd the edge of the forest. Their leaves are yet to come. Around them grow licorice, maidenhair, sword, and deer ferns.

  I pull over and watch a banana slug make its slow way around a puddle toward a belly of moss at the end of a rotting alder stump. These slugs are the largest mollusks in the world. This particular one is eight inches long, a pale yellow with a leopard’s black spots dappled down its body. Herbivores, they graze the forest floor and grind down the leaves and stems of plants, bracken fern, and anything else that grows low to the ground. Each time I see one I think of the poet Buson’s haiku about the slug’s cousin, the snail, “One horn long, one short, / I wonder what’s on his mind?” At the quarry we turn in a wide area of road and park. The slate has been taken from here for years by gardeners and stonemasons. Each time they remove some, more slides down, leaving the trees above precariously perched. Thirty-year firs hang umbrellas of roots in space as they wait for just a bit more slate to slide or a heavy Pacific wind to blow contrary and tilt them into oblivion. We both look up and the same thought crosses our minds: Is this the day that one will fall or that other one beside it? The thought flits by and we climb up the slanting slope of shale and push the larger pieces down to the trucks, ignoring our imminent, possible deaths.

  Both Brian and I are two testosterone-riddled teenagers when we do things like this. It’s not a job, its an excursion lifted to the level of a treasure-quest. One piece of slate the right color, texture, and size seems worth our lives. Working such a piece out from under hanging roots is a joy that passes understanding. Trucks loaded down to the springs and below, we sit on the tailgate of my truck and eat pork-chop sandwiches, pickles, Lorna’s magnificent chocolate-chip cookies, and ripe Bartlett pears, all of it tamped down with hot tea. Neither of us is dead or injured. We haven’t destroyed our already vulnerable lumbar vertebrae or Brian’s knees, which are nothing more than bone grinding on bone, the cartilage long gone. Our hands haven’t been crushed and we haven’t dropped a chunk of slate on a foot. A few scrapes, a couple of scratches, no more. All told, a good day with very little blood to show for it, but a ton of fine slate to decorate our gardens with.

  Tomorrow Brian will send me a poem about our journey. The slate will still be in our trucks, he on Saltspring Island and I on my deck. “Going blind, limp, and weak,” is how I will feel when my muscles and joints sing their song of outrage at what I have put them through again. But what are sore muscles compared to the camaraderie of the journey, the treasure carried down and stacked in seams on the truck beds?

  ONCE AGAIN, YELLOW SLATE MOUNTAIN

  —Brian Brett

  When was the first time we traveled together?

  Thirty years ago, yet here we are on the road again,

  back to the mountains, collecting slate for our gardens;

  though these should hardly be called mountains,

  shadowed by the shimmering glaciers of the Coast Range.

  Say they are hills, hummocks, rises, ridges, earth forced

  into stone. How many have died since the first day

  we walked into the wilderness, adjusting our packs,

  you with your rifle, me with my fishhooks?

  A day that began years of arguments over dinners

  and whiskies and women and wild rivers that

  neither of us will ever see in our lifetimes.

  How many of our friends are gone now?

  One walked into water. One spiderwebbed his brains

  with heroin and cocaine and an odd sense of adventure,

  and another had her brains scrambled by her husband.

  Several boiled in their fiery alcoholic blood.

  The canc
er chased most of the rest. But some were unique,

  you remember them, the ones who surprised us,

  discovering spectacular ways to die in foreign zones.

  Yet every year we return to this cliff-face, taking slate

  released by the freeze-and-thaw of mild winters—

  pathing each of our gardens like the countless other

  gardeners who know the secret home of this generous stone.

  We’re a joke now, getting old, staggering around

  under the big slabs, laughing, just avoiding squashed fingers.

  Why have we survived this long while the others died?

  The doctors said I would go first, yet here I am, stumbling

  down the rutted road with my share of the mountain.

  If we keep surviving like this, our arms full of rocks,

  two aging men, laughing, going blind, limp, and weak,

  we might end up taller than Yellow Slate Mountain yet.

  “You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.” St. Bernard of Clairvaux said that ten centuries ago and it is still true. I learn about friendship when I gather stone with a friend. Brian’s poem reminds me once again how fragile I am, how like a wisp my breath moves.

  Friends have been rare in my life. Staring through the thinning fog of my addiction I can see how afraid I was and how little I trusted anyone’s overture toward friendship. I look back down those far-off years and realize I gave to the men and women I knew the illusion of friendship even as I withheld it from them. Yet there were many times I gathered myself into the arms of friends. As my journey to Yellow Slate Mountain is a measure of the happiness that can be had when a moment is shared, so were there moments in the past.