Time Pressure
Page 11
“Christ, i’nt he something?” Tommy said admiringly. “Gets such a kick out of little pictures.”
“They’re going to change the world,” he assured her.
“For sure. So is Ruby’s chili. Come on!”
We filled up the Franklin while Nazz found his poncho, and all left together.
The sun was below the trees on our left, throwing long shadows across the Wellington Road to the trees on the other side. We walked in the ruts that trucks and cars had made in the snow. Usually there were just the two, right down the center of the road, but infrequently there was a place where two vehicles had met and managed to pass each other.
The trip from the Holler to Sunrise Hill can be done in five minutes, if you don’t mind falling on your face on arrival. It took us nearer twenty. It was beginning to get cold out, making the footing slippery. Gertrude the Guitar slowed me down. And the Nazz lit a joint, an enormous spliff which he said he had been saving for a special occasion. He always says that. Always means it, too. To pass a doobie on slippery surface, you have to stop, so everyone else has to stop to wait for you, and eventually it seems sensible to just form a circle. So we did. Rachel joined it, but politely refused the joint. “Perhaps later,” she murmured, and the Nazz beamed at her. The rest of us shared it in silence.
The forest on either side of me began to sparkle. The random dance of shadows on branches suddenly became a pattern, that teetered on the edge of recognition. I was suddenly aware of my position, clinging to the face of a vast spinning planet, whirling through the universe. I heard the stream behind me, every leaf that fluttered for a hundred meters in any direction, the sounds of birds and a deer to the north. My friends became Robin Hood’s Merry Men. And I was very hungry.
“Good shit, brother,” I said to Nazz. My voice came from a hundred miles away through a filter that removed all the treble.
He beamed. “Xerox PARC.”
Snaker broke up. “Xerox Park? Like, where people go to reproduce?”
We all cracked up. “No, man,” Nazz said, “Xerox pee eh are see. On the Coast, man, Palo Alto. Dude that gave me this weed works there. Synchronicity, man—he’ll freak when I tell him about my flash. All I need now is a way to point to stuff on the screen…”
None of us had the slightest idea what he was talking about. But you don’t have to understand joy to share it. We congratulated him, and finished the joint, and resumed walking.
The Wellington Road was a fairy wonderland, a winter carnival. Magic was surely in the air. And soon enough, we came upon some.
Mona and Truman’s place came up on the right. Mona and Truman Bent were locals in their mid-forties, products of a century of inbreeding and poverty, and some of the nicest people I knew. (If you are going to giggle about the name Bent, would you please do so now and get it over with? It is an extremely common and highly respected name in Nova Scotia, as are Butt and Rafuse and Whynot.) Their home was a small showpiece of rural industry, ingenuity and courage, inside and out. It sat close to the road, with a little bit of a lawn and a swing-set out front. A driveway led past it to the big tired-looking barn in back. Truman’s immense one-ton truck was pulled halfway into the barn so he could work on the engine out of the weather. As with many properties on the North Mountain, the area around the barn was littered with almost a dozen wrecked vehicles and their guts—but the garden beyond the barn and the area around the house itself were neat as a pin. Mona is a fussbudget, and tough as cast iron.
And a sweetheart. When we were close enough to recognize what was lying in the center of her driveway, right by the road, we stopped in our tracks.
“Oh wow, man,” Tommy said.
“Is that far out or what?” Snaker agreed.
Nazz shivered with glee. “Rat own, Mona!”
The Bents kept a pair of old tires on either side of the driveway, with flowerboxes set into the hubs. In summer they brightened the driveway considerable. In winter they were usually buried under snow. Mona had evidently had Truman dig one up, remove the empty flowerbox, and leave the tire in the middle of the drive.
“I don’t understand,” Rachel said.
“They heard our tire blow,” I explained. “That one’s for us.”
“How do you know?”
I shook my head. “I just do. Come on, I’ll show you.”
Sure enough, there was a note stuffed into the hub:
This ai’nt much but it wil get
you to the gas station I gess
“See, there she is in the window,” Tommy said. We all waved our thanks to Mona. She gave a single wave back. Snaker pantomimed that we would pick the tire up on our way back from dinner, and she waved again, then closed her curtains.
“Wow,” Snaker said. “We gotta do something nice for those people.”
“Right field,” Nazz agreed. “Let’s get the whole family thinking on it.”
We trudged on. “Mona and Truman are amazing people,” I told Rachel. “They can’t have kids, so they foster parent. Constantly. There’s always five or six kids around the place. She’s strict as hell with them, and they always worship her. She’ll take retarded kids, kids that are dying, kids that are crippled, whatever the agency sends. There are a couple of social workers that would die for her.”
“And as you can see,” Snaker called back over his shoulder, “she’s adopted the whole goddamn Sunrise Hill Gang.”
“I look forward to meeting her,” Rachel said.
“She’s a trip,” Nazz called. “You’ll love her.”
“I already do,” Rachel said, so softly that only I heard.
It was only another half a klick before the forest on the left side of the road ended and we were come to Sunrise Hill.
We all came to a halt again, because the sun was just setting over the Bay. Rachel took my hand and Snaker’s.
After a time we roused ourselves, trudged past an acre of snow-covered garden, and came to Sunrise itself, also called The Big House.
It was a simple wood-frame two story perhaps fifty years old, a much more conventional structure than either the Gingerbread or Tree Houses, and larger than both of them put together. Unlike them it stood right by the roadside, in the middle of five or six more or less cleared acres. The only external signs of hippie esthetic were the small sprouting-greenhouse built onto the house in front and a solar shower in back. Fifty meters back from the house, and about the same distance apart, stood a small cedar-shake toolshed and a smaller outhouse. Between them was an ancient Massey-Ferguson tractor covered by an orange tarp, and next to that an even more ancient one-lung make-and-break engine under a black tarp.
We entered through the usual woodshed airlock, which also contained a wheezing old freezer and huge sacks of grains and beans. Inside, the Big House looked much more like a hippie dwelling. The downstairs was a single enormous room, with a giant front-loader woodstove at either end. The bare wood floor was completely covered with a once brightly colored painting, now faded, involving rainbows, dragons, and an immense myopic eyeball that stared biliously at the ceiling. The parts that Ruby had done looked great. On the left, a J-shaped counter and a small cookstove defined the kitchen. On the immediate right, a stupendous table which had begun life as the west wall of a boatshed defined the dining room and conference area. On its surface was painted a large vivid sunrise. Assorted wretched chairs lined one side of it; on the other was a single homemade bench three meters long. Beyond that an open staircase took two zigs and a zag to reach the upstairs. Past the staircase was open area. Beanbag chairs, ratty cushions, cable-drum tables, shelves of hippie books, milk crates full of this and that, drying herbs hanging in bundles from the overhead rafters, a bunch of Ruby’s canvases arrayed by the east window, a small shrine to the Buddha in the far right corner.
The kitchen window was the only one on the north or Bay side. It let in enough of the glory of sunset to make the enameled sunrise on the table even more vibrant, but it was getting time to fire up the kerosene la
mps. Both fires were roaring away, with a lot of birch in the mix, and the whole building was suffused with the overwhelming fragrance of simmering chili.
Ruby turned as we entered, left off pumping water and made a beeline for Snaker, drying her hands on her apron as she came. I liked to watch those two meet. Their joining was like slapping together two chunks of uranium: the energy levels of both went through the ceiling. I envied them.
When they were done hugging and kissing and making small sounds of contentment, Ruby backed away. She looked Rachel up and down, smiled and opened her arms again. Rachel took the cue. “Hi, I’m Ruby,” Ruby said over Rachel’s shoulder. “Hi, I’m Rachel,” Rachel said over hers. They disengaged in stages, first pulling back to hold each other by the upper arms, then backing away further until their hands joined, then separating altogether, a spontaneous and oddly graceful movement.
“Welcome to Sunrise Hill,” Ruby added. “That’s a beautiful headband.” Rachel thanked her gravely. “Hi, guys,” she said to the rest of us. “You’re just in time; dinner’s nearly ready. Somebody set the table, a dishtowel for everybody, somebody else pump water and get the cider, somebody give a hoot out back for the others. Rachel, you sit, you’re a guest. Sam, I could dig some music; would you mind pickin’ a little?”
“Not if the Snaker can join me.”
“Well,” she said, glancing at him, “I had some other uses in mind for his hands. But that’s a choice I’ll never confront him with. Go ahead, babe. Oh, yeah, was it the Beatles?”
Snaker pulled a blank. So did I. And it was up to Rachel to save the situation. “I think we are agreed it is not. The drumming is too good to be either Pete Best or Ringo, and the accents are wrong. But it’s an excellent fake.”
Ruby nodded, said, “Too bad,” and went back to the kitchen area. Snaker and I exchanged a glance and mimed sighs; we had forgotten the excuse we’d originally used to get Snaker over to my place. “Well,” I said, unpacking my guitar, “there’s the old philosophical question as to why a near-perfect forgery isn’t as good as the real thing.”
And we jawed about that while Snaker and I got tuned together and warmed up with instrumental blues in E. Ruby scatted along with us. As Tommy came in with her younger brother Malachi and Sally and Lucas, we were just starting that Jonathan Edwards song about laying around the shanty and getting a good buzz on, and everybody joined in on that one. When it was done, the table was set, Ruby was in the final stages of her magic-making, and there was barely time for a verse of Leon Russell’s “Soul Food” before supper was on the table. As the lid came off and the smell reached us, Snaker and I stopped in the middle of a bar and put away our axes.
There were four loaves of fresh bread, two whole wheat and two rye, baked Tassajara-style. There were about fifteen litres of cider in one of the ubiquitous white buckets, with a dipper. There was an equal amount of well water in another bucket. There was a bowl big enough to be the hubcap off a 747, overflowing with lettuce-based salad; another full of carrot flake and raisin salad. Four homemade dressings. There were great bulk-purchase slabs of margarine (the Sunrise Gang were strict vegetarians). There were tamari and brewer’s yeast and tofu and peanuts and sprouts and tahini and a little bit of soybean curry from the day before. To accommodate all this there were plates and bowls and mugs and silverware (no items matching). And in the center of the table, in a pot large enough to boil a missionary, were about thirty litres of Ruby’s Chili.
When we dug in, the table was groaning and we each had a dishtowel of our own. A while later the dishtowels were all saturated with sweat and we were doing the groaning. And grinning.
“Is there a recipe written down for this, hon?” Snaker asked his lady, gulping cider.
“Sure,” she said.
“Better destroy it. It’s evidence of premeditation.” She threw a piece of bread at him.
Between the happy cries of the scorched and the clatter of utensils and the roar of eight conversations going on at once and the growling hiss of the stoves and the thunderous volley of farts that attends any gathering of vegetarians, we made the rafters of the old house ring. Nonetheless most of my sense-memories of the occasion are oral. Ruby made good chili, so good I actually didn’t miss the meat. I never did get to observe Rachel meeting Malachi, Lucas or Sally; it must have occurred at some point when my eyes were watering and the wax was running out of my ears. (I did notice that while Rachel shoveled in chili as rapidly as the rest of us, she didn’t begin screwing up her face in Good Chili Spasm until all of us had been doing so for a while, and didn’t begin to sweat until a few minutes after that. By the end of the meal she had it down.)
We drank the cider and water buckets dry, and another bucket and a half of water. We ate everything on the table, save for perhaps five litres of chili, which tomorrow would be folded into chapatis for lunch. And then the conversations all trailed off into heartfelt compliments to Ruby, and there was a moment or two of silent respectful appreciation, a contemplation of contentment and a sharing of that awareness. Shadows danced by kerosene lamplight, the simmering of dishwater on the stove became the loudest sound in the house…
Lucas broke the silence, with a diaphragm-deep “AAAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMM—” Malachi and Snaker picked it up at once, an octave higher, Malachi on the tonic, Snaker on the dominant. The rest joined in raggedly in whatever octave was easiest for them, and the sound swelled and rose and steadied as we all sat up straighter and got our breathing behind it.
Have you ever done an Om with a large group of people? Large enough that the drone chant takes on a life of its own, and doesn’t ever seem to change as individual chanters drop out to inhale? If you have not, put this book down and go find ten or fifteen people who aren’t too hip to learn something, and give it a try. So many things happen on so many levels that I’m not sure I can explain it to you.
On a musical level alone, the experience is edifying. The harmonics are fantastic, and they actually get a little better if one or two folks can’t carry a tune so good and the note “hunts” a little.
On a physiological level, there is a surprisingly strong tranquilizing effect. The AAAAAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMM syllable is the oldest breath-regulating chant on the planet, basic and irreducible and autohypnotic.
On an emotional level, it’s together-bringing and happy-making. It’s proverbially impossible to get any three people to agree on what time it is; to get ten or fifteen together on even something as simple as a single pure sound is exhilarating. If you Om with people you don’t know, you’ll be friends when you’re done. If you do it with friends…
On a spiritual level—well, if you’re alive in the Eighties you probably don’t believe there is such a thing, so I won’t discuss it. Just try an “Om” sometime before you die. Come to it as cynically as you like.
Sunrise Oms were just a trifle frustrating for me, though, at that point in history. When the group had first spontaneously formed, a few years before, the Oms were the best I’ve ever been in, before or since. Partly because we had more participants, nearly thirty that summer, but mostly because the Oms were freeform improv, an unrestricted outpouring of the heart. Those who were not musicians—the majority, of course—held onto the tonic or dominant to keep us all centered, and those with musical talent jammed around the basic drone, sometimes adding harmonies to make chords, then spontaneously mutating them in weird shifting ways; sometimes throwing in deliberate and subtle dissonances, then resolving them creatively; sometimes doing raga scales, or Ray Charles gospel riffs, or whatever came out of our heads and hearts and mutual interaction. The results were always interesting and frequently breathtaking.
But of late the Sunrise Gang had, typically, gotten a little too spiritually conservative (read: “tight-assed”) and had decided that having people chant all over the place offered too much encouragement to E
go (a word which had for them roughly the same emotional connotation that “Commie” held for their parents). Surely Ego was out of place in a spiritual event. So the current Agreement was to limit the Om to the tonic and dominant notes. That was more democratic. More pure. More basic and simple.
Also more boring—and as a guest, I was of course required by politeness to conform, and listen to my own solos only in my head. It itched me a little—and I knew it itched Snaker too, because we’d discussed it. Still, any Om is better than no Om, and I was simply too well-fed to sustain irritation. So I settled into contemplation of the sound we were making—
—and Rachel began to improvise—
—brilliantly, from the very first riff, I hadn’t been fully aware until then that she was participating in the Om but Jesus you couldn’t miss her warm-honey alto when she started to blow, it was something like the sudden appearance of a darting trout in a pellucid pool, and a shared thought-chain flashed around the table in an instant, what the—? Oh, it’s cool, she’s a stranger, doesn’t know any better; Jesus, listen to her do it, as she wove a strange liquid melody line around her drone, and after a very slight staggered hesitation the Om steadied and came back in strong behind her.
Well. The ice having been broken by the guest, I wrestled with the part of me that Malachi insisted was my ego…and went into the tank. When my current breath ended, I sucked in a joyous deep new one, paused an instant, and took off after her. Her eyes met mine, and we both thought of our lovemaking that afternoon, and wrapped our voices around each other. We did a modal thing, started it simple, cluttered it a bit, brought it home again—measuring each other, feeling each other out, her alto and my baritone seeking harmony—
—and I caught Snaker’s eye and lifted my brows, and he took a deep breath and jumped in an octave above me, duplicating my line to show that he understood what was happening—