Landscape: Memory

by Matthew Stadler

  Flora's spread out in the big room, camera parts arranged in neat rows, the glorious box itself sitting high upon its tripod, gazing out over its dominion. Flora spent the day reading each and every instruction through, making certain she knew the full range of problems she might encounter and their various solutions. She'll take our portraits tomorrow, if the sun comes out.

  26 JUNE 1915

  The sun burned through so glorious and bright. The branches of the trees steamed, letting off wisps of vapor in the early morning when the first sun washed over them, drying off the mists of the last two days. Our morning swim was a frisky frolic through dewy grass and then a wild leap off the rope swing and into the brisk clean water. We were told the intimate details of portrait-picture taking over breakfast. As Flora wanted to do Father first, Duncan and I went back to the pond for another swim.

  This was the best yet, all naked and lovely among the flowers and trees by the south side of the pond. Duncan did me as I'd done to him, me lying there in his arms all stretched out as far as could be reaching back over my head to grab handfuls of grass as he pushed his warm mouth down over me and I came just bursting out my middle. I'd been unsure about his wanting to but he did, without my asking or even hinting the way you can do by how you move your body. He just took me there and then, while Flora took Father's picture.

  When it was done I did a funny thing which, now that I think, perhaps I've often done. My muscles were all collapsed in sweet exhaustion. My head was resting on his ribs and I rolled my face over, like I do into my pillow sleeping. Then I began growling and humming, making sounds into his ribs, my mouth pushed up against him. It was a noise like a sleeping dog might make exhaling, a sort of humming, buzzing throaty sound. An odd song exhaled into him through the ribs and into his bones. It has a tune, but one I can never remember. Only when I'm dead-tired and spent does my body give in and let this little song emerge.

  I've chosen the setting that I'll use as the matrix for my memory system. The landscape of the gullies east from the lagoon. Cicero suggests using houses or buildings but allows that one may use a familiar landscape, if one is so inclined.

  I get lost in big buildings so I thought a landscape would be better. It has more places and could go on and on forever, and getting around it is easier for me. I know the way it goes. With buildings, though, I'm always being surprised. I turn a corner or go up a stair and it looks just like the last place I was.

  The landscape I'm memorizing is in my favorite woods, up the east side of the lagoon. It's the same woods where Duncan and I went to find the ruins. Bourne's Gulch, and Weeks Gulch. I know them both well enough to get a good start, and I'll have three more in place by the end of summer, if I work hard. five gullies, like a hand, you see. Once that's accomplished, Cicero says, my mind will have a reliable, structured organization. The organization of the landscape brought inside my mind will then allow an organization of my memories, giving a place for each one.

  Flora took my portrait in the evening light just after supper. She set up across the road from our path where the low golden sun was still shining, casting long shadows of trees south and east, but bright and full on my face and body. She had me stand holding a wooden staff like a native's spear, my hand around its shank, leaning my weight against it. First she took one and fretted about this and that, complaining that her shadow was visible toward the bottom of the frame. So she made me stand for a second one before the sun sank too low, and said she'd develop both and we could choose our favorite.

  Last night I dreamed I had a boyfriend who was the King of France. We sat in a field of flowers nuzzling and necking and a biplane flew in, bouncing about importantly on its landing. A man in goggles rushed over and told my friend he had to meet presently with the Prime Minister, and I said, "Oh, yeah, that's right. You're the King of France." We necked and nuzzled more, falling back into the flowers, and he told the man in goggles the Prime Minister would have to wait.

  * * *

  26 JUNE 1915

  We watched a schooner get stuck on the sandbar. I thought it was a wreck for certain, but the waves kept coming, lifting it up in dolphin kicks from prow to stern and finally it wiggled free. I got bitten on the toe by a crab, ouch.

  The sun is so hot when there's no wind and you're inland off the water. I lay down in a dusty hollow imagining I'd been captured and forced to lie exposed to the sun and die of thirst. I just lay motionless, and still sweat beaded up on my chest and rolled down my tummy in trickles.

  Oh Pshaw tonight, three hours long. It's the longest we four've spent together at a stretch since getting here. Father won and claims we'll never beat him.

  27 JUNE 1915

  Duncan's made a pitch from pine and says he'll seal his boat by it. I did my reading by the shore so I could watch him all lovely and brown in his rough twill shorts, barefoot and shirtless and sweating. He made mincemeat of Cicero. After, we swam.

  Another note from Father, this in the pocket of my shorts. ''It is possible the wisdom of cows goes far beyond ours. Sit quietly in the field by them and listen. Watch them watching through their big brown eyes."

  28 JUNE 1915

  A fire must be burning in the brown hills to the east. The air's been sharp and hot with smoke smell all day long and the sun set so gloriously blood-red I'm sure something's drastically wrong. Father says we can volunteer if a call goes out for firefighters.

  The skeleton frame of Duncan's boat looks like fish bones. A big fat central beam, feathered down its whole length with even, sturdy ribs. He's dug up some tools, various hand saws and awls and clamps and buckets full of nails. I watched him hoisting the whole heft of it up on a pair of sawhorses. He eyed it down its length and planed away at bumps and bulges, and he pounded the hammer hard against the rib ends just to see if they'd bust, and they didn't.

  Flora posed a photo with Father, Duncan and me. Father sat in the old swing that hangs in the big oak by the road. Flora made him wear his hat all floppy and pulled low so he looked like Walt Whitman. Duncan and I sat high up in a tree limb, our arms around each other and our legs dangling down. She took the picture so you could see the whole enormous oak tree all filling the big square frame of her photo plate.

  29 JUNE 1915

  There was an explosion in the night, an enormous boom that came rolling across the water, shaking our bed and raising us all up with a start. That was all. No one knew what happened, though everyone was abuzz with possibilities this afternoon at the mail drop. Mrs. Bladt says that German U-boats are blasting tunnels in under the Continent by shooting torpedoes into land. They aimed high, she says, and the thing blew up in air, leaving no trace.

  We went back to sleep.

  It says in Cicero that the simple and ordinary slips easily away from the mind, leaving our memories crowded with images of the grotesque and uncommon. "We ought, then," he concludes, "to set up images of a kind that can adhere longest in memory. And we shall do so if we establish similitudes as striking as possible; if we set up images that are not many or vague but active; if we assign to them exceptional beauty or singular ugliness; if we ornament some of them, as with crowns or purple cloaks, so that the similitude may be more distinct to us; or if we somehow disfigure them, as by introducing one stained with blood or soiled with mud or smeared with red paint, so that its form is more striking, or by assigning certain comic effects to our images, for that, too, will ensure our remembering them more readily."

  It confuses me some. What is it I'm remembering if the image I place on the locus is grotesque and comic and exaggerated? I guess I need to use the uncommon image as a marker, one that triggers the actual recollection. That still leaves the problem of remembering the actual recollection, but I suppose it will just trail along, following the grotesque image to which it's wedded.

  The mind is left in layers, real memories lying under odd creations, odd creations populating memorized landscapes. Something present becomes hidden, like the weight the undersides of painted clouds somet
imes have, hanging heavy with what's not seen, what's been painted over, in the sky of a landscape painting. (Ruskin would hate my little painting. I don't seem capable of rendering things as they actually are, present to the eye.)

  The architects of the Fair must have been reading this Cicero stuff. They too seem intent on populating their elaborate "matrix" with grotesque images, clownish tableaus meant to stand for some more prosaic thought or thing. Mother, for instance: a monstrous winged angel meaning "Victory." Though at the Fair I see no layers, only a thin plaster surface. Beneath the plaster is nothing but junk. Wood lathing, spare metal parts, the garbage of the Fair's construction.

  We four met at the pond at the usual time. Father sporting a sunbonnet and his reading glasses. Duncan and I dove in straightaway and paddled about all wet and breathless. Flora stood by the shore and as we pulled ourselves out onto the grass she announced brightly that we ought all go unclothed. Father was, at the time, sitting calmly on the grass reading. I said, "No, thank you very much" quiet and to myself, jumping back in as quick as could be. Father just chuckled and said he'd blister and peel from embarrassment alone and thank you, he'd rather indulge his modesty. No discussion, thank God, ensued.

  30 JUNE 1915

  It was a day like all the other days—woke and wrestled and kissed and loved fooling around with him and us both just wrestling to exhaustion. We pulled our shorts on and ran to the pond to go swimming in the clear cool water.

  We ate breakfast in the meadow up by Father's. The sun shone down through the broad green branches and dappled across the thick damp grass.

  * * *

  Fish filled the lagoon very suddenly today and birds came swooping in from all quarters, a thick carpet of them collapsing down onto the water, diving in furious flashes a good long hour till they were fed or the fish were all eaten or they'd swum away. I did a flip off the rope swing.

  This from Maury:

  Dear Robert,

  The spring has been unthinkable, lost on this dead landscape of trenches, mud fields and artillery craters. There is no land over which to maneuver.

  Yesterday I was allowed light duty, told to scavenge a fresh battle sight for useful salvage. From a distance it looked plain enough, a sea of mud pocked by craters. Four of us set out to search haphazardly through the waste, dimly aware, though not saying so, of what must be buried there.

  There are no trees here, any longer, no shrubs or ground cover, no grass or wheat or rye, nothing. Good land is solid and the rest is mud, sometimes waist-deep and impossible to tell until you're right in it. We'd been issued rakes and ropes for our operation. You can imagine the first find, my rake dragging into something heavy but manageable, the boot end coming up first and then it popping clean from the sucking mud just above the knee where it had been severed. One can be so willingly blind until slapped in the face, and then be blind again.

  1 JULY 1915

  This morning I slipped out of sleeping and felt Duncan's warm breathing across my neck. He was still asleep, his body all splayed and spread across me, our middles mushed together and our fingers tangled out at the ends of our arms. I was on my back and he was on my front and the covers were kicked down around our feet. We were just lying all bare and lovely in our boxers. So half-sleepy as I was, I found my throat growling its queer song. My mouth was pushed in against his throat, and when I exhaled I groaned and hummed, making my head bones buzz a little bit, and stirring up some unplaceable pleasure inside me.

  I opened my eyes and there was Flora. We neither of us said a thing, though I felt myself blushing all flush and hot in the cheeks and I smiled as if an irresistible giggle was growing in me, but I kept quiet. She reached over and pulled the covers up on us and patted my shoulder and went in.

  I walked up in the woods today, working to memorize the landscape, taking close account of the topography, the jibs and jabs of land, the clefts and crevices and sheltered places. I'll need to divide up each canyon into simple parts and know their order and interrelation.

  I spent most of the afternoon in Morse's Gulch. Like the others, it's a steep-sided gully which rolls out onto broad shoulders, once you climb out of the woods and up into grasslands. (I remembered catching the squirrel up in the scree back of Weeks Gulch. The ruins still remain. They're so small and unremarkable. I cannot connect them to that memory.)

  I watched a heavy barge out at sea, out past the high hill behind Bolinas. It was a long black speck on the wavering sea, sailing beneath its high white sails. The wide blue water quivered through the heat shivers rising up from the dry land between here and there. The ship crept along steady and slow, carrying some heavy black cargo south.

  2 JULY 1915

  Father sat by the open fire in our house today and read his little book while I sat near him and read too. I haven't done that in a long time. It was misty and gray out, that wonderful sad weather that just soaks into your bones, damp dank ocean clouds rolling low to the ground.

  After lunch Father went back up to his gazebo. I felt housebound, so Duncan and I went for a swim despite the gray. It rained a real rain while we were out there, heavy drops splashing on the dusty road and raising that special summer smell. We ran to the pond and stripped in the grass and dove in, the cool water all over our skin and the heavy rain pelting into the pond.

  Our clothes were all muddy so we dropped them in the pond for a cleaning, but that did no good. We put our shorts back on, all wet and clinging, and walked back through the rain singing comical songs. We gathered our clothes in a pile and put on some water to boil, giving them a good soak and a scrub in the washtub, and we sat the rest of the wet afternoon, bundled naked in our comforter, sitting by the fire reading books.

  3 JULY 1915

  Gray rain beating down from the clouds like it was winter in Seattle. There's a leak (happily, above the sink). We've almost run out of wood.

  4 JULY 1915

  The clouds've kept on, shutting out the sun, but the rain has let up. I told Duncan that soldiers chop wood for fitness. Flora is attempting a self-portrait. She wants to be captured flying off the rope swing into thin air. The ground will not be in the frame, nor will the rope. I'm to snap the shutter.

  * * *

  I went to the woods again, looking once more at Bourne's Gulch. Father was walking far ahead and I decided I'd follow along at a distance. The clouds rumbled in off the sea, butting up against the high ridges east of us, slinking in amongst the hills. Father had his spyglasses and a worn wood staff, that floppy felt hat all pulled down tight.

  He walked past the head of the lagoon, cutting inland around another bend, walking up through a long grass meadow, stopping to run his hands over the blades now and again, sniffing it seemed, and generally looking for a direction. I stood quiet and hidden by trees, nearer to the shore and above him on the first shoulder of the northern ridge of this gully. He raised his glasses and watched, looking up and down the thick trunk of a fir, and then he walked forward through the grass, up into the first trees.

  I felt curiously at home and comfortable, a bit tingly from the challenge of going unseen, but generally as though I was engaged in something very familiar, something with its own certain rewards. It was as if I'd been doing this all my life.

  Father had disappeared into a thicket. I hurried along, up the gulch, running swift and silent over clear ground among the firs. I dropped down low coming up to a little ledge and peered over, across a broad bowl, cut through its middle by the creek bed. Father was down by the creek, bent over, sipping water, crouched like a little boy.

  I lay low on the ledge and caught my breath, watching his progress east through a stand of redwood. The heavy trunks grew tall and straight, gathered together in small circles, family circles, the many offspring of a single giant all emerging from the crumbling stump. It was frightening to see how big the old trees must have been, their girth mimicked in the arrangement of the new trees. They were cut and hauled out on boats to build the city. Most of that lumber burned
in the big fire, after the quake.

  I'd lost him again, certain he'd headed up the other rise, going to higher ground on the south side of the gulch. I'd have a difficult time getting around where I could watch him now. The approach from below was too open and the path around the top of the gulch would take too long. I waited and listened. The clouds had come in low and heavy, their bottoms dragging down into the dark green tops of the trees. There was just the wind and some chattering up in the higher branches. No twigs snapped or spyglass straps squeaked. I scooted down off the ledge and scrambled across the bowl, jumping the creek in a smooth leap and running on up the opposite side. I kept checking right and left and straight ahead, but saw no sign of him.

  It was raining now, high up in the trees. I flopped down in a hollow and looked up into rain, all of it washing down onto the canopy, leaving the forest floor dry. I wanted to strip my clothes off and run naked through the woods, up onto the grass ridges, and let the rain run muddy streaks across my skin. I wanted to run and grab my father and throw him into the sea. I lay still and listened for the rumble of the quake, the terrible roar. Nothing.

  I ran up the hillside, going for higher ground, and kept an eye on the gully. But maybe he was ahead of me, at a vantage point above the trees, where he could look down and see if there was any nesting here. Coming over a rise, I stopped and looked up through the trees and brush, looking for a glimpse of his dark green sweater, his dirty brown hat. There he was, looking back at me from above, looking through his spyglasses. My eyes locked into those impenetrable lenses. He dropped them from his face and continued over the ridge, disappearing from view.