What the Stones Remember

by Patrick Lane

  The moment I was aware of innocence, I knew I no longer had it. Memory is not continuous. It was not meant to be, and innocence is lost in its small fragments. Each time I remember the past it comes to me in pieces, each an event that expresses something gained or something lost. Guilt and remorse are the companions of healing, just as happiness is. The past is the present illuminated. It is a small house with many windows. I stare from each one at myself.

  I stood once with Lorna on the stones at Knossos outside Heraklion in Crete and was struck by how small history is. The ancient palace and temple complex covered only a few hectares and yet this was where Daedalus fabricated the wings for Icarus while the monstrous Minotaur waited for sacrificial virgins in the spiral labyrinth somewhere below, somewhere never found and perhaps existing only as metaphor for the unconscious.

  The Knossos of my imagination is far greater than the scattered stones on that little hill in Crete. When metaphor becomes reality, it stops the spirit. Yet somehow I think I am in search of the real. The bits and pieces of the past that have intruded in these last months are only steps toward what I wish to know. The only gift I can take from them is the opposite of innocence, wisdom, and that is a humility I am learning to accept. Perhaps the past does not exist at all and is only an obsessive fabrication.

  This is the month for rhododendrons. Some can bloom as early as January but the majority flaunt their flowers from mid-April till June. There are two wild rhododendrons native to British Columbia. One is the white-flowered rhododendron and the other the Pacific rhododendron. There is also a false azalea that is sometimes called fool’s huckleberry. The false azalea and white-flowered rhododendron are often found together along with the copperbush. There are hundreds and hundreds of other kinds of rhododendrons growing around the Pacific Rim from Alaska and Siberia to Tierra del Fuego and the Philippines.

  Across from the three rhododendrons water falls into my fishpond from a bamboo spout. The bamboo is buried among the leaves of a skimmia and a hydrangea. The spout above the pond is a small dark cave balanced upon stones. It looks as if it has been there forever.

  This morning I watched a chickadee bathe in the spout as the cool water flowed between her tiny black legs. A private bathing spot, much safer than the birdbath out in the middle of the lawn under the apple tree. Basho hunts there and has been busy catching pine siskins. The chickadee had seen his daily hunt and had decided to take her bath elsewhere. Bathed and refreshed she flitted up into the fir tree, found a sunny spot, and rearranged her damp feathers to her liking. Finally, dapper and pert as ever, she flew to a blue columbine blooming at the edge of the salad garden and perched there a moment. The columbine bent under her weight and she lifted away from the uneasy perch to the feeder, where she busied herself choosing just the right seeds for lunch.

  I must always remember to think my way into the space of a garden. I don’t run around and throw plants wherever there happens to be a bare spot. When I first came here with Lorna I tried to picture myself in the garden of my mind. That was a good place to begin. The garden I imagined had always been there inside me. It just needed letting out.

  I didn’t squat in my living room in front of a book. I sat in established gardens. I spent time among plants and trees. I looked at them and felt them. I absorbed textures and smells, observed the landscape, its levels and planes, the way it rose and fell. When I stared into its depressions and stood on its miniature promontories, I imagined a pond or a rockery. I planted a Japanese maple above a rhododendron and added a small bamboo to a corner long before I acquired the plants themselves.

  This garden is an extension of my hands and feet, my eyes and ears and nose. Do you like stone? Then search out stones, little ones or big ones, it doesn’t matter. Choose them for color, shape, or texture. For years Lorna has picked up what she calls moon rocks. They’re stones that have a circle of white quartz in them. Our pathways and garden pond are decorated with hundreds, from rocks the size of a walnut to hundred-pound stones. Why moon rocks? I don’t know, she just started collecting that kind of rock. Friends have brought them to her from as far away as Haida Gwaii, Provence, Cape Town, and Kyoto.

  In my garden the common spreadwings are already hunting tiny flies and early mosquitoes. These slender damselflies are wonderfully delicate. The blue-eyed darner is huge compared to them. I’ve read that falcons learn the skills of flying by chasing dragonflies. What a delight it would be to see a peregrine falcon coursing my garden in search of blue-eyed darners so he could improve his aerial arts.

  Spring azure butterflies have been cavorting in my garden these past three weeks. They are my earliest butterfly. They’re quite small, about an inch long. They will be my garden’s companions until the end of May when they will become shabby and tired. It’s the males I see. They’re out searching the garden for females to mate with. Three males had a territorial battle yesterday. They chased and battered each other until one of the butterflies left the garden altogether. The other two decided to call a truce and share the space. Their wings are the softest of blues. They are the color of the morning shadows that touch Lorna’s small shoulders when she is reading in the shade of the apple tree.

  A gardener has nothing but time. Stooping to pull yet another creeping buttercup I looked under the sharply serrated leaf of the perennial cilantro that grows by the viburnum near the deck and there, hanging quietly and safely concealed from birds, was a silvery-blue butterfly. It was a gossamer-winged butterfly and normally it keeps his wings tightly closed together when resting, but this little fellow had his wings spread. The underside had a pale gray hue with telltale black spots circled by white around the outside edge of the wings. He rested there out of the sun and I finished my bit of weeding and went back into the house. There are many small worlds in the garden, each one a place to rest.

  This morning I found a full mickey of vodka tucked under the corner of the deck in the shade of the overhanging viburnum. My hands shook as I picked it up, doubly so because it was full. The weight of the clear glass bottle, its shape, the color of its red cap, and the dense swirl of slight oiliness in the liquid made me feel I was holding an old and trusted friend. It was all I could do to carry it into the kitchen, break the seal, and watch the alcohol chug slowly down the drain. It was like watching both ambrosia and poison vanish at the same time. How my body yearned to drink it and how, at the same time, it rebelled against the thought.

  I dropped the empty bottle into the garbage and went down to the pond, where I sat alone in the slant sun of late afternoon.

  Desire is feeling elicited by something or someone else. It is a powerful pain as sweet as Lowry’s cold agony as he stood in his garden with his bottle of gin and drank it. The power the body has to go willingly toward pain is something no one understands, not even the addict himself. It was pain that made me empty the bottle in the sink. It was pain that made me turn away. I felt no triumph of will, just a terrible longing as if I were asking for a blade to be held to my own throat.

  Almost six months sober and a bottle of vodka can still hurt me. I sat by the pond for an hour before I felt capable of getting up. As I walked across the lawn I felt a dozen other possible bottles beckoning me from the daphne and the bamboo, the woodpile and the toolshed. The whole garden seemed a drinker’s minefield, a place of terror. I lay down beside the golden bamboo and closed my eyes. I woke an hour later to shadow and a long evening of unsteady peace. In the morning I rose, shook off the weight of the night, and began to drive to a nursery to pick up some water plants for the pond.

  At the side of the road a few blocks from our house a hermit thrush flew up from the gravel verge and thrashed in the chill air of this unseasonable May morning. He rose and fluttered with a kind of hysteria that belied his quiet presence in the brush, which crests in fragments among the intrusive suburbs that have slowly eaten away at his habitat. I pulled my truck over, parked, and got out slowly and quietly. It was a male, a little smaller than a robin with a freckled b
reast, rusty tail, and olive, buff-colored head and back. Pale rings circled his black eyes. He rose in a dance I’ve seen before.

  A car came and the bird lifted as if to attack the oncoming thunder of rubber and chrome, plastic and steel. The woman behind the wheel saw nothing but the road ahead. She had to get to somewhere in the hurry that is only human. She did not see the thrush with his breast lifted and his beak open. The car passed in a rush of wind and sprayed gravel.

  I watched as it ran to the body of his mate. The female had been struck by a car or truck and her body was folded upon itself in the small desert of gravel between the pavement and the yellowed grass at the edge of the drainage ditch. The male bowed to her and cried a new, impossible song. It was not the song of warning and not the song he sang when he was trying to win her attention this past month. And it was not the rare single high cry of late summer and early autumn. The notes I heard didn’t carry that rise of hope. This was different. It was a trilling that stuttered into wild squawks. He grasped her wing in his beak, and pulled it a bit, urging her to fly. When she did not respond, he flew up once more, threw his head back, and sang again.

  His was a song of grief. There is no other way to describe it. I have heard the same song in the streets of Peruvian villages, in the mountain towns of Mexico and Colombia, Xian and Rome. I have heard it in my own land. It was a cry to God. It asked for impossible answers. It was the song that precedes Kaddish, precedes mourning. This was outcry.

  It is one of the oldest songs the world knows and the male thrush sang it and would go on singing it until he was exhausted. Somewhere in the crotch of a tree or shrub was a nest with spotted, pale green eggs. The male would sing and do his dance of death until driven away by the steady rush of traffic or by the ubiquitous crows, one or two of which were already perched on the gable end of a nearby house.

  They recognized the dance, they knew the song. The male thrush would try to keep them away with audacious, raging attacks but eventually he would give up the ground and a crow would carry away her prize to the ditch where she could eat at leisure. The male would stay around for a few days and then he would be gone. The nest would be deserted. There would be no incubation there, no further life.

  Whenever I see this I am enraged, not at the death by misadventure, for such deaths on the roads and highways are common enough and the bodies left behind are provender for hawks, eagles, vultures, crows, raccoons, rats, coyotes, and whatever else hunts the highway’s verge for food. The death of one songbird is not of great consequence. There are many thrushes in the forests and fields near where I live. My cats kill the occasional siskin or junco and I do not grieve their deaths, though I am saddened a bit when I see the cats play with their still-living bodies. I have my own griefs. I understand that.

  I am enraged by the carelessness. I wanted to bring car drivers to this stretch of country road and ask them to watch this creature, this thrush, as he mourned the death of his mate. I would ask them to pay close attention as he touched her dead body with his beak as if with his touch he could bring her back to life. I would ask them to be aware of what occurs at the edges of their busy lives.

  The hermit thrush rose on flared wings, fell, and rose again. The crows cocked their heads in anticipation and cleaned their beaks on the shakes of the gable. They waited with the patience of their kind.

  I got back in my truck and drove slowly away.

  I want at times to speak of everything in my garden. How the clematis weighs down the lattice bower and the wisteria in full bloom climbs the front porch and runs from there to the peak of the second-story roof. The wisteria is one blue breath against the red shingles of the wall. The clematis is a bird warren, the house finches with their rose breasts are one with the blooms they play among.

  Today I will stand under the eaves and listen to the plaint of the rain in this young garden of mine. I will stare through the mist at the yellow blooms of the Japanese iris by the pond, how they seem to hang like wet suns among the bare stalks of the golden bamboo. I will wish my people well. Selah.

  PLANTS

  Alaska violet – Viola langsdorfii

  Albida water lily – Nymphaea “Marliacea Albida”

  Anemone – Anemone magellanica (multifida)

  Astilbe – Astilbe x arendsii

  "

  – Astilbe japonica

  "

  – Astilboides tabularis (formerly Rodgersia tabularis)

  Baldhip rose – Rosa gymnocarpa

  Bamboo – Polystichum cristata

  Cleavers – Galium aparine

  Columbine – Aquilegia spp.

  Copperbush – Cladothamnus pyroliflorus

  Creeping buttercup – Ranunculus repens

  Crested lady fern – Athyrium filix-femina “Cristatum”

  Crowberry – Empetrum nigrum

  Early blue violet – Viola palmata

  False azalea – Menziesia ferruginea

  Indian plum – Oemleria cerasiformis

  Lady fern – Athyrium filix-femina

  Ligularia – Ligularia stenocephala, przewalskii, dentata

  Monkshood – Aconitum carmichaelii “Arendsii”

  Nootka rose – Rosa nutkana

  Pacific rhododendron – Rhododendron macrophyllum

  Red huckleberry – Vaccinium parvifolium

  Rhododendron – Rhododendron spp.

  Rhubarb – Rheum rhaponticum

  Salal – Gaultheria shallon

  Siberian miner’s lettuce – Claytonia sibirica

  Spanish lavender – Lavandula stoechas “Otto Quast”

  Stream violet – Viola glabella

  Trailing yellow violet – Viola sempervirens

  Trillium – Trillium

  Western Saint-John’s-wort – Hypericum formosum

  White-flowered rhododendron – Rhododendron albiflorum

  ANIMALS, BIRDS, AND INSECTS

  Blue-eyed darner dragonfly – Aeshna multicolor

  Bohemian waxwing – Bombycilla garrulus

  Branch-tip spider – Dictyna spp.

  Cedar waxwing – Bombycilla cedrorum

  Cherry-faced meadowhawk – Sympetrum internum

  Grass spider – Agelenopsis spp.

  Hudsonian whiteface dragonfly – Leucorrhinia hudsonica

  Orb weaver spider – Araneus spp.

  Pacific forktail damselfly – Ischnura cervula

  Peregrine falcon – Falco peregrinus

  Silvery blue butterfly – Glaucopsyche lygdamus

  Spring azure butterfly – Celastrina “ladon”

  Swainson’s thrush – Catharus ustulatus

  Wood rat – Neotoma

  6.

  I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,

  And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,

  And the tree toad is a chef-d’oeuvre for the highest,

  And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven.

  —WALT WHITMAN, “SONG OF MYSELF”

  A STONE UPON A PATH knows more than I do of the rain. The hummingbird’s heart has a rhythm greater than Gilgamesh, the snail’s shell more intricate than the stones of Sacsahuaman. When I listen closely in the garden rooms there is a great singing in the earth and in the air that shelters it. The tiniest forms seethe in their immensity. A black ant walking across the pebbled path by the pond follows a trail she and her cohorts laid down a million years ago. There was a time I would have said I was oblivious to the ant, but no more.

  Once in Mexico I watched a line of leaf-cutter ants parade toward their underground nest. Each ant carried a green sail carved from the leaves of trees. The cavernous opening of their nest was two hands wide. Deep in the underground chambers a horde was busy transforming the leaves into provender. Like them, the black ant on my path is followed by her sisters, each carrying a grub, insect, or crumb from the bread I ate an hour ago. One bears the body of a moth a hundred times her size. The ants know more
than I of intricate stones.

  The path to the ant is a great plain, a rubble heap of boulders, which to me are merely pebbles. Like the ant, I have clambered along the screes of mountains. I know how difficult the passage is through a boulder-strewn valley when there is no one to mark my path. These past months have been one such path and I have tried to learn its ways. The ground of my healing is strewn with boulders that once were mountains.

  I step over the ants and continue down the stone path to the pond with my cup of tea. In this late afternoon, solitude eludes me. I am no more than a garden monk who walks the green cloisters with his beads and cowl as he ruminates upon the lives of ants and butterflies, fir trees and ferns.

  I think solitude is other than peace and more than quietude. It’s not a journey to some elsewhere. It’s not the wish to be lost within myself and it’s not a willful silence. Solitude is presence, not absence. It leaves at the moment of apprehension. The contemplative life becomes a struggle as soon as I’m aware of it. I go here and there thinking this cedar tree or stone bench will afford me quiet and seclusion, but within a few minutes I become restless and go to search out some other spot to be alone. But I am by myself most of the time so what is this other thing I seek?

  There have been moments when my body took me away into another world and once there I could not find a way back. My flesh has made choices for me that my mind cannot comprehend. I remember when my body began its great change from boyhood into manhood. I remember standing in the last summer of my family’s first home in Vernon. That house is now a parking lot, the only thing left to mark my time there the stump of a tree cut flat to the cement. I climbed that tree with my brothers and practiced throwing hunting knives into a chalk circle drawn on its bark. I hid stolen cigarettes in a hole under one of its gnarled roots. Five years ago I stood on the stump and occupied the space the tree had known. I stood on its many rings and felt I was growing ancient roots and leaves. Among my fingers a small boy played.