by Brandt Legg
A state trooper passed us. Linh put her hand on Kyle’s shoulder. For the next mile or two, he checked the rearview mirror compulsively. We were riding through thick forest now. Linh commented on the beauty of the trees. I knew she was still trying to lighten the mood, but it was my topic and I took the bait.
“Do you know what the world’s largest, oldest and tallest living things are?”
“Haven’t you told us this before?” Kyle’s quizzical eyes narrowed.
“I haven’t heard it,” Linh said.
“Trees,” Kyle said.
“It’s no surprise the tallest living thing is a tree, a sequoia sempervirens, better known as a coastal redwood not far from here in northern California. Its name is Hyperion.”
“It has a name?”
“Most of the tallest trees do. They’re important. But the largest living thing is a grove of aspens in Utah called Pando. They count as one thing because all the trees in the stand are connected by a single underground root system. Pando covers over a hundred acres and is probably eighty thousand years old. Some say it could be much older because when one tree dies, others grow up out of the same roots.”
“So that’s the oldest?”
“Not technically because each individual tree only lives like a hundred thirty years. The oldest single tree is a bristle cone pine called Methuselah, also in California. It’s almost five thousand years old.”
“Wow!” Linh said.
“There was an even older one in Nevada named Prometheus, but some grad student cut it down in 1964 to find out how old it was.”
“You’re kidding!” Linh said. “Was he arrested or anything?”
“No. There are different accounts of whether he actually knew what he was doing but . . . I mean it’s really a crime what we do to trees. The cure for all our diseases is probably in the rainforests, but we may never know.”
“It’s sad,” Linh shook her head.
It was just after eight a.m. when we arrived. I’d been to Crater Lake before, but something was different this time. The glassy indigo water reflecting cotton clouds and two thousand foot volcanic cliffs disoriented me. Only the pines, firs, hemlocks, and the solitary Wizard Island rising out of the incredibly deep lake kept me from falling down. Gravity also helped. It was cooler because the elevation was over a mile higher than Ashland, and, although it was a beautiful day, it smelled like snow as always because the lake was filled almost entirely by snowmelt. The silence sounded like meditation, but slowly I began to hear a rush of water, lava, and steam. It grew so loud that I screamed to Linh and Kyle, “What’s that noise?”
17
“What noise?” Kyle asked, just mouthing words because I could hear nothing above the roar, which increased to the point I believed the lake might erupt. A shimmering ripple crossed the surface of the water, then instantly, complete silence. A tall, Indian-looking old man emerged from the trees, scruffy, leathery, long, thin, tangled gray hair, light gray pants and white shirt faded and worn.
“You boy, you shouldn’t be here.”
“Excuse me?” Kyle answered.
“Not talking to you. It’s that one.” He waved a spindly finger at me. “He shouldn’t be here yet.”
“Why not?”
“You’re not ready to be here. You’ve not studied; you’ve not practiced. You ain’t even awake yet.”
“I think you’re confused,” Kyle said gently.
“Confused? I’m way beyond confused, but you’re not even up to confused yet, so maybe you should mind your own business.” The old man wasn’t aggressive or threatening, but he didn’t look like he was going to leave. I was uncomfortable, but at the same time he was magnetic, like a bristly, cranky old college professor adored by his students because of his sheer brilliance.
“Look, could you just please leave us alone?” Kyle tried once more.
“There are three of you, so even if I did leave, you wouldn’t be alone. I belong here, so I’ll not be leaving.” He threw a stick at me. “What about you, Nathan?” Linh gasped, and Kyle looked at me with stunned concern.
“How do you know my name? Who are you?”
“If you were supposed to be here, you would know my name already. I’m the Old Man of the Lake.”
“Okay, old man, how do you know his name?” Kyle asked.
“Listen to me. I’m not just some old man; I’m the Old Man of the Lake. And I already told you to mind your own business, Dac.” He called Kyle by his Vietnamese name, which almost no one knew.
“Seriously, who are you?” Kyle was looking around, worried. I was scanning the area as well, remembering Amparo’s warning that we were in danger.
“Could you just tell us who you are and how you know our names?” I asked.
“Nathan Ryder, everyone knows your name, just not yet.” We stared at him. He looked straight at me.
Linh broke the silence, “Do you want us to leave?”
“Doesn’t matter what I want. He just ain’t going to understand this place yet.”
“Would you explain it to me?” I asked.
“Sure thing, Nayyy-thonn, then I’ll teach you about the origin of the universe, how to walk on water, and the trick to time travel.” More silence. Linh took a picture of him.
“Don’t do that,” he said firmly. Linh put her camera away.
“Why don’t you want me here? I need to know. Please, will you help me?”
“See where you are,” he said, waving his arm in a circle over his head. I gazed out at the lake. “Not with your eyes. See it, don’t look at it.” I stared back at him. “You’re just too early to understand.” His expression softened, but not by much.
“I’m sixteen, I don’t understand any of this.”
“Because you think you’re sixteen. You believe that. Too bad, because you’re not.”
“How old am I then?”
“How old are you? How old am I? How old is the sky? Why don’t you ask me a question that is important to know right now?”
“Like?”
“Why am I here,” he offered.
“Okay, why are you here?”
“You boy, not me. I know why I’m here. You’re here because this is one of the great earth vortexes.”
“An earth vortex?”
“A portal. A crossroads of multi-dimensional fields. It occurs here.”
“What does?”
“So much.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not ready, boy. Come back when you are. Come back in a week.” He tossed something at me. As I caught it, I looked up at the old man, but he was gone. In my hand was an almost black but tinted blue stone, smooth and round, a little smaller than a poker chip and nearly as thin. Kyle and Linh were looking for the old man.
I showed them the stone. “It’s from the bottom of the lake,” I said.
“How do you know?” Linh asked.
“I don’t know, but I do.”
“Where did he go?” Kyle looked around.
Hastily, we got back to the car all weirded out and shaken by the encounter. It was their first experience of something unexplainable. No one wanted to talk about it. A couple of minutes later, we found the next overlook along the rim road. Linh read from a guidebook she’d borrowed. “‘At 1949 feet, Crater Lake is the deepest lake in North America. But if you go by average depth, it is actually the deepest in the world that is entirely above sea level.’”
I wasn’t paying attention. I was still thinking about the old man and wondering what a vortex was while considering the possibilities of a multidimensional portal.
Linh read, “‘The lake was formed by the cataclysmic eruption of Mount Mazama in about 5680 BC. Geologists estimate the mountain was 12,000 feet high when the top 5,000 feet of it blew into the sky in one massive blast of rock and earth.’”
“It’s enormous,” Kyle said, looking out over the lake.
“No rivers or streams flow in or out of it,” Linh said. “It’s probably the pur
est water on the continent. They’ve found plants photosynthesizing three hundred fifty feet down.”
“Yeah, even from here I can see down pretty far into the water,” Kyle said. “But where does that unreal blue color come from?”
“Listen to this!” Linh said, looking up from her book. “‘One of the most fascinating mysteries of Crater Lake is a floating tree trunk. This remarkable ancient hemlock has been bobbing, absolutely vertical, for as long as Crater Lake has been documented. Its earliest known reference is from 1896, and it was first photographed in 1902.’ It’s like an iceberg, hiding most of its bulk beneath the surface; those who get close to it can see some thirty feet down into the depths of the lake. This is so amazing; it’s completely straight as if it’s growing right out of the lake.”
I wasn’t sure what the big deal was until she added that it was called, “The Old Man of the Lake.”
“Let me see,” I said. The picture showed a bleached gray and white tree trunk sticking four or five feet out of impossibly blue water. The reflection was perfect but also visible was a branchless tree towering deep below the surface. “It’s him,” I whispered.
“Okay, now I’m starting to think you are crazy,” Kyle jabbed me.
“Come on, you saw him, we all saw him. It wasn’t just me this time, right? He came out of nowhere and disappeared right back into the trees,” I challenged.
“So?” Kyle volleyed.
“He gave me this stone, see it looks like the lake, same shape and color. He said this place is like a door to other dimensions.”
“Kyle, he knew your real name,” Linh shot back.
“I know,” he conceded.
“Wait, I took his picture,” Linh said. She fumbled with her camera. “Guys, you won’t believe this.” The shot showed me on one side but where the old man had been standing there was nothing, only trees behind where he had been. “He was there when I snapped it, I saw him in the screen, I swear,” Linh said. Even Kyle believed her. The angle of the shot would have made it impossible for him to have not been in the picture.
I read, “‘It’s a mystery how the Old Man of the Lake floats upright, freely traveling over the entire twenty square miles of the lake, sometimes at great speeds. Once rangers recorded it moving almost four miles between dusk and dawn. Some think it is the guardian of the waters.’ Listen to this; ‘In 1988, when scientists were exploring the lake by submarine, they decided the floating trunk could be a dangerous hazard, so the Old Man was tethered where they found him on the east side of Wizard Island. Restricting the Old Man’s freedom had immediate repercussions. A storm quickly descended upon the lake and only subsided after the Old Man had broken away from its anchor and was able to glide the lake once again.’”
I took another look at the photo in the book and then handed it back to Linh. “He’s the ultimate shapeshifter.”
18
We continued around the rim road, stopped at a few more overlooks where I snapped some nice shots of the scenic lake, ate lunch at the pinnacles surrounded by towering pumice swords rising from the mist, and took more photos. Mom had sent delicious sandwiches and desserts from the Station, prepackaged party assortments grouped as: Grammy Winners, Solo Artists, Number Ones, and Girl Bands. For us, she sent their largest called Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, with all the sandwiches named after inductees.
I pulled out the gold box and carved wood again and handed them to Kyle, then gave four small pages to Linh.
“I agree with you. If this box was solid it would be much heavier,” Kyle said, “but I can’t see how to open it.”
“It’s gotta be those jade inlaid designs.”
“I think you’re right. If it opens, that pattern is the way.”
“What about the carved wood?” I asked.
“It’s almost like a language, and there are ten words,” Kyle said. “The rest of it is just pretty flowers or vines for decoration, I think.”
Linh had been studying the writing on one of the four sheets. She read the list of names out loud. “There are nine names, but one of them is the word ‘you.’ Your dad wrote these, right?”
“Could it be for you, Nate? Are you the ‘you’ on the list?” Kyle asked.
“I have no idea who he wrote it for.”
The other three sheets were no help. Although they appeared to be just gibberish, Kyle was positive they were really English written in a kind of scrambled code. We weren’t able to decipher anything.
Driving again, eager to get to our campsite still a couple of hours away, I detailed several recent Outviews.
“Do you think we’ve all died in such horrible ways like you have in all your Outviews?” Linh’s voice was thin.
“The world’s been a rough place for most of its history. Even in the last hundred years when we’ve supposedly been our most civilized, more than two hundred million people have died in wars, genocide, or man-made disasters. Brutal diseases have taken millions more, auto accidents, fires . . . life is hard,” I said.
The campground stretched along the southern bank of the Umpqua River where lichen-draped cedar, Douglas fir, and deciduous trees provided a dense canopy. That, combined with the thick understory of fern and thimbleberries, gave the area a lush, semitropical feel. We found an ideal site atop a slight rise on the bank of the river. The rapids were loud and frothy. Linh thought our site was too close, but Kyle and I convinced her it was fine.
A guy selling fruit boxes of firewood walked up while we finished setting up the tent. It was the Old Man! Kyle and Linh actually backed up a little.
“You’re the Old Man!”
“And you’re a young kid. Need some wood?”
“Don’t you remember us?” Linh asked.
“Yeah, I think I saw you on the trail somewhere.”
I dug the blue stone out of my pocket. “Remember this?”
“I do,” with a glint in his eye, “but you’re still too early.”
“What happened to you before? Where’d you go?”
“Had business to tend to.”
“Are you really the floating tree?” Linh blurted out.
“You know my people, the Klamath tribe, witnessed the eruption and were here at the formation of the lake. It’s a sacred site. We still use Crater Lake in vision quests. Our warriors climb the caldera walls, as they have for centuries, and dive from the high cliffs. The strongest and bravest are revealed to have extraordinary spiritual powers.”
“Will you tell me about the lake being a portal?” I asked.
He considered me for a moment. “The legends say that ancestors come and go from there and that the living can sometimes find a way through if they are pure of heart and reasons for the voyage are good.”
“It sounds hard to believe,” Kyle said.
“This river, these trees, and the great blue lake have taught me there is nothing I should not believe. Everything happens in cycles, over and over again.”
“You sound like my history teacher,” I said.
“School teachers are wise in the world of what can be seen, but that’s only a tiny stream that flows into the river of what really is.” He moved his arm away while wiggling his fingers.
“I think I know what you mean,” I said.
“There is ten thousand times more in the invisible world, more that we don’t understand than what we do. It’s all around us, and we are too busy to see. Most of my people have forgotten the way, lost the ability to see beyond the material world. The whites lost their way many generations before they even found this continent.”
“I’m trying to figure it out,” I said.
“I see things written on your face; your struggles are just beginning, boy.”
“That’s not real encouraging.” It was similar to what the guide told me during my meditation in the car. “What do you see?” Up close, his face suddenly seemed even older than when we first met.
He studied me again. “Great learning. You will begin to swallow knowledge. That is something
I’ve not seen until you. You’ll find lost spirit dances. But be cautious, boy, there’s darkness waiting, a very strong force that will stop you if it can.” His face contorted into despair. “There is a tiny hope, maybe even a chance, you could fight past this battle.”
“Nate!” Linh gasped. A week ago what he was saying would have seemed like the ramblings of a madman, but with each passing word his message resonated deeper within me.
“What should I do?”
“There are many who will help you. You’re not alone. Some will appear real, but remember, the ones you can’t see can help the most. They are around you now.”
“You can see them?” Kyle asked.
“I don’t have to. They are there.”
He was looking at his old truck full of boxes and scanning for the next tent. I could tell he wanted to go.
“Thanks” was all I could think to say.
“And Nathan, you are going to buy a box, aren’t you?” he asked.
I gave him four dollars.
“You asked me what you should do. You need to remember. And once you do, think of the lessons from your previous conflicts. Sometimes it is the Great Spirit who pushes you, or earth guides, but in any kind of battle, strategy is not to be overlooked.”
He handed me the box of wood.
“Thanks, Old Man.” Our eyes met briefly before he turned. Strategy, I thought, would be a good thing to think about. While watching him make his way to the next campsite, I hoped we’d meet again.
“Wow!” Linh said.
“Strange dude,” Kyle said, “but not a floating tree.”
“I don’t know,” I said softly.
Kyle rolled his eyes.
We had started to build the fire when I spotted a huge bull with gray horns. “Look at that bull coming at us!”
“Where?” Linh shrieked in alarm.
Kyle scanned the trees casually. “It’s not real, is it?” He held out his arms and lowered them, looking from side to side. “Let’s not attract attention.”
He was right; it was gone. “It’s just the roots of that fallen tree,” I said, pointing. “That’s how the shapeshifting happens.” Two raccoons appeared from behind it. “Do you guys see those?” I asked quietly.
