A Burned-Over District

by Charles Hibbard

  Chapter 11

  The geological evidence strongly suggests that the broad, dark, high promontory of land now known as Devil’s Table, which is shoved like a shoulder into a sweeping bend of our beautiful West Rapid River, is a dormant volcano that last erupted more than 15,000 years ago. This was well before the Creation itself, according to some of the town’s strict Biblical constructionists, and even some archaeologists think that was before any of our ancestors had infiltrated the neighborhood. Also according to the geologists, many of the valleys of the Sierra to the west were at that time filled to the tops of their ridges with glaciers creeping down and eastward, to soften and melt in the desert, which as a result wasn’t so much of a desert then. In fact, the whole basin through which the West Rapid now winds was at that time a giant lake of chilly meltwater. Thousands of years ago the lake broke through a notch to the east and rapidly drained, at the same time cutting the notch downward so that the only reminder of the lake now is the sparkling river and the ghosts of ancient beaches perched high on the surrounding hills. But the volcano that became Devil’s Table had erupted under the water when the lake was still there. Thus, the slopes of the mesa consist of dark volcanic deposits, as you’d expect, but the top is a nearly level plateau made up of lake-bottom sediments, stirred up by the eruptions, peppered with some of the black cinders, and then resettled to harden into a light-colored rock.

  There is a faction in Mildred, to which I’m afraid my naive wife belongs, whose members would strongly dispute, if not the physical facts, at least the time scale of the above-described events. I myself belong to a different sect, the one that accepts the volcano as a kind of geological gospel – although provisionally, of course, since new research could still alter the tale.

  Despite this major disagreement, the origins of Devil’s Table are not at all controversial around Mildred, for the simple reason that the two extreme factions have tacitly agreed, like Lu and me, not to discuss them. Thus town peace and my marriage are preserved. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the townsfolk belong to a third, centrist group, those who couldn’t care less about the origins of Devil’s Table and rarely consider the question at all. And then there are a few renegades whose thoughts flow in none of the three major channels – loners like Matt Matawan, who seems to juggle the scientific and the religious somewhat uneasily in his mind, and my brilliant and troublesome student Arnold Barns, who adheres to a scenario involving a trickster coyote and a series of cataclysmic lightning strikes – those bolts explaining the one thing about Devil’s Table that everyone else agrees they don’t understand, namely, the network of deep fissures that scores the top of the plateau.

  These cracks are so narrow in places that a child can step across them, but they extend to a depth of nearly 100 feet. Only Arnold will assert that he knows definitively how these features formed. The geologists have their suspicions, of course, but are unable to agree on a single explanation. Some cite a generalized horizontal stretching of the whole Basin and Range province, which they claim is manifested on a small scale at Devil’s Table. Others suggest thermal expansions and contractions of the rock caused by the underwater eruptions. When I mentioned this controversy in my American Democracy class during a discussion about the “particle physicist’s” website posting, Arnold Barns raised his hand and said:

  “The Great Spirit was angry because Coyote had caught Roadrunner and was running with him slung over his shoulder across Devil’s Table. The Great Spirit threw giant lightning bolts that split the ground behind Coyote as he zigzagged across the plateau. That’s where the cracks come from, and that’s why there’s some black ash mixed in with the other rocks.”

  “So the lightning bolts missed?” I asked him. “Coyote obviously survived, and Roadrunner too.”

  “Coyote always survives, no matter what happens to him,” said Arnold, completely deadpan. “He’s a universal principle. Haven’t you seen the cartoons?”

  “Yes I have.” I kept my cool. “And have you ever seen a lightning bolt big enough to split the ground on that scale? Has anybody every seen one?”

  “They don’t happen any more,” said Arnold. “Like in the Bible people used to live 900 years, but they don’t do that any more. And the Iliad – he’s always saying how much stronger men used to be, they could lift up rocks it would take three men to lift now, and that was already three thousand years ago, or something. Same thing.”

  “Well, it’s a theory, although not a very likely one,” I said, not wanting to be drawn into a debate with the coyote-like Arnold. “I can’t prove you’re wrong.”

  “It’s all right,” he said, “I can’t prove you’re wrong, either.”

  “He’s got you, Mr. Houba,” said Brad Pentane. The other kids all nodded their baseball caps in sober agreement, leaving me with the feeling that the result of my “lesson” had been to put the best current geological thinking on an equal logical footing with the violent fantasies of a couple of Warner Brothers cartoonists.

  Standing on the broad, almost flat top of Devil’s Table, you won’t really notice that it’s any different from the rest of the surrounding desert unless you walk to where the downslope begins. At that point you’ll find yourself gazing out onto a wonderful panorama of nearby brown hills and more distant mountains, volcanic cones smoothly upholstered in black, and hundreds of square miles of gray-green sage, the whole landscape bowing slightly toward the green river that ribbons through the middle of it all. It’s one of the best places in the world for watching the clouds.

  One of the many magazines that came into our house around the time of all this excitement had on its cover a reproduction of a painting by Frederic Church, a 19th-century view of the Hudson River, the hills covered with snow and flocks of clouds above, all washed with the sentimental light of that epoch. I gazed at that picture for many minutes, trying to isolate the peculiar feeling it gave me – something about the fact that those particular clouds, so real at the time (although the ones in the painting were doubtless only generic clouds from the painter’s memory banks), and so like the ones I could watch any afternoon coasting across the desert toward Nevada, were now so gone, along with that long-ago winter afternoon, that light, and that Frederic Church. I suppose Frederic Church was just painting what he saw, but the slow roll of the intervening century had invested his picture with a meaning and a tenderness that I’ve never quite been able to pin down, and that he may not even have intended.

  Thinking about those painted clouds reminded me that back when Matt Matawan was still sane, the first summer after I joined the staff of Mildred High School, I got in the habit of accompanying him on his frequent natural history excursions out into the desert and the mountains surrounding Mildred. One thing I admired about his mind from the very beginning of our friendship was his inexhaustible fascination with the variety of nature and the innards of its machinery. I learned a tremendous amount about birds, about the desert plants, and about the geology and history of the West Rapid Basin just by tagging along and listening to Matt think out loud. He never tired of reminding himself that it was a Green-tailed Towhee that was singing from that gnarly madrone tree, or that the dark rock perched in a saddle between two peaks was the remnant of a set of mountains that preceded the current Sierra by millions of years, or that every vertical foot of decrease in the water level of Random Lake produced such and such a decrease in its square meters of surface area. Of course, even after tagging along with him for a whole summer I was never quite sure whether it was a towhee or a Lincoln’s Sparrow I was listening to, or just how old that brooding “roof pendant” of rock really was, but it pleased me to know that such things were known and available even to slackers like myself. And for some reason I’d never forgotten what he told me about clouds.

  We’d spent a morning birding Spud’s Meadow, up at the head of Maude Canyon – a wonderful spot carpeted with wildflowers and deep green grass and laced with glassy streams hurrying into a little lake whose palette of blues and gr
eens shifted constantly with the angle of the sun. At lunch time Matt drove us back down the winding canyon road, talking about birds even faster than he was driving, and pulled up in the tourist overlook above the PetroMall. On the other side of the broad valley rose the silent black slopes of the Cones, dotted with dark green Jeffrey pines; and above them loomed a much loftier range, this one of giant, orotund cumulus, white with gray shading that matched the Cones, and looking as solid as granite.

  “It’s like they’re made out of concrete,” I marveled. “You could almost pick them up.” Matt instantly left the birds and launched into a long talk about clouds: the usual third-grade stuff about droplets of moisture condensing in the rising, cooling air; followed by the more subtle idea that the particular size of the water droplets causes them to scatter all the different colors of light, making them look white; and finally, most interesting of all, that no matter how motionless they may look, they’re really not the same entity from one second to the next, since the air is constantly moving through them, and all that persists is the slowly changing outline of the region in which the droplets happen to be condensing – a sort of ghost that defines not a thing, but a place where something is happening.

  This idea struck me with great force, and I began to see the same principle at work all over the place: in the seemingly permanent bends of a river, although the silt that formed its bed and banks was constantly being washed away and replaced; in the persistent swirls and vortices of the river itself and the standing waves of its rapids; in the apparently changeless forests that clothed the ridges, even though their individual trees came and went with age, wind, and fire; and of course in the bodies and minds of all the beings that grow, walk, creep, crawl, fly, and slither on this earth, not least humans. They say that all of us, serpent to senator and everything in between, if there is anything in between, replace most of our atoms every couple of years. Why, then, do we continue to look and act more or less the same? I don’t know. But the fact is, we’re clouds! The cloud grows and thickens, then thins and fades, its edges eventually weaken, break down into wisps, and vanish, but the air flows on, just as any whirlpool in a smooth-flowing river slows and finally dissipates, the final speck of foam at its center drifting away downstream with the rest of the river. The stubborn (although of course gradually altering) outline of the region where the process we call Matt Matawan, for example, is happening first grows, then shrinks and wrinkles and grows ratty-looking, its motion slows and finally totters to a halt in some hospital bed, but the gentle breeze of matter (and maybe even spirit, too) that’s been flowing through that outline for however many decades doesn’t stop just because that particular process has stopped. It continues to blow, endlessly forming itself into new shapes – new clouds. When Mervyn began to fade and Janet Blythe went into hospice, I immediately applied my Cloud Theory to their inexorable metamorphosis, and even convinced myself for a time that the idea that all us living beings were temporary wisps or vortices in a Vast Universal Stream was a consoling one. Maybe it is.

  I had plenty of time to pummel these and other obsessions while I was out trolling for extraterrestrials with the various members of my team. After the preliminary reconnaissance, in which the whole squadron participated, we generally went out in pairs, one pair every afternoon. My detachment from the actual search for extraterrestrials was nearly complete. I was confident there was nothing to see up there, so I was free to stroll more or less contentedly through the sagebrush, admiring the scenery and refining my own theories in discussions with my various patrol mates.

  Sometimes I found myself out there alone with Father MacGill, who was more than happy to talk about clouds and life and afterlife with me, although of course he rejected my gloomy view of the human prospect and disapproved of my attempts to promote a rationalist, materialist system. The faithful churchliness of my wife made the Reverend indulgent toward me, I suppose, allowing him to hope that she would ultimately bring me into the fold, much as Patty Milano tolerated me because of her admiration for Albert.

  Patty herself, who was my patrol buddy on other occasions, had little to say about the passage from life to nonlife that increasingly occupied so much of my late middle-aged thinking. I’ve always admired the way she keeps her orthodically corrected feet planted on the linoleum of life and her eyes fixed on her surroundings, especially the human ones. In this way I have to say she’s thoroughly representative of the solid mainstream of Mildred civilization. She did once surprise me with an arresting image of the dying human being as a snake crawling through an uncomfortably tight hole – I think she actually said a keyhole – in a sort of spiritual wall, scraping off its dry, used skin and leaving it on the human side as it passed through, and emerging all gleaming with fresh colors on the other side. She also entertained me with her re-creations of the conversations in Stirling’s, complete with accents and mannerisms of all the participants. I assumed the other members of the group were treated to my own quirks when she was out alone with them. With Patty, though, you knew it was just her irrepressible art, and always good-natured. She imitated dogs, trash cans, and Lombardy poplars with the same zest and precision.

  Lu and I had more or less agreed not to argue about our differing speculations as to the origin of the lights and the other odd phenomena, and as a result, although her companionship was always soothing to me, we usually didn’t spend all that much time talking on those expeditions. Parnell was on-again off-again, due to the pains in his knees and his general crankiness, so sometimes it was just Albert and me up there in the wind. I talked to him a lot as he rode on my back, and he answered me by whacking me on the head or drooling down my collar, responses I found refreshingly direct and devoid of cant.

  At other times I was paired with Margaret Quitclaim. Those were actually some of the best patrols, because Margaret, bucking the stereotype that blind people have preternaturally sharp hearing, was also somewhat deaf, and so was virtually useless in the project of scouting for aliens. This meant we could devote our full attention to the things that actually interested us. I had to escort her, of course. We strolled through the sagebrush arm in arm like young lovers, and she was a delightful companion, immensely well read and curious, willing to excavate any topic to any depth I liked, with enthusiasm but without prejudice or heat, and passing no judgments. The loss of her sight seemed, counterintuitively, to have produced in Margaret a complete fearlessness. Or perhaps she’d always been blessed with the same confidence and optimism, whose gleaming surface her blindness had been unable to mar, or had even burnished somehow. She shared all of my interests (and everyone else’s too) and none of my anxieties.

  Still, brilliant and accommodating and provocative as she was, Margaret couldn’t shed much light on the Christmas Eve events, let alone clear up the mystery of the ultimate disappearance of people and cats. And she maddened me with her refusal to discriminate between the airy towers of belief erected by some of the gullible citizens of Mildred and the bedrock of my own rational system.

  “They’re just like you, Simon!” she’d say. “They want explanations, that’s all. Most people are uncomfortable with uncertainty. They don’t like to believe everything in this world just happens. They need to think there are reasons for what happens. Frankly, I think their reasons are more fun than yours are.”

  “Fun?” I’m sure she used the word quite deliberately, in happy anticipation of its corrosive effect on the facing of my philosophy. “Fun? Is that how we evaluate the cosmos now?”

  “Of course,” she replied. “The scientists like to talk about ‘beautiful’ theories and ‘elegant’ theories, but they’re just trying to make themselves sound more important. If there are two theories that fit the facts, it’s the one they like the best that they always settle on. That’s fun, isn’t it? They never ask why they like something the best, and what their liking it might tell them about the universe. They just say ‘Oh, it’s elegant.’ Or ‘it’s beautiful.’ But what does that mean, it’s elegant?
” She couldn’t see the waves shimmering above my head, but I’m sure she could feel the heat, which probably delighted her. I could never budge her from this frivolous tolerance.

  On one clear and windy afternoon, curious about what kind of currents might develop, I dragged both Parnell and Margaret out on patrol with me. “He’s like Lear out on the blasted heath, isn’t he?” she said later, after we’d dropped him off at his dark house. She’d listened in uncharacteristic silence while the gusts of Parnellian rhetoric had torn through our hair – mostly sarcastic rumblings about his increasing irrelevancy and dramatic, obscure hints about various unlikely forms of self-immolation, but interspersed with entertaining tales of his liaison mission with what was left of the Italian air force after World War II and his brief experiment with the demolition derby circuit. In fact, it seemed to me that Parnell was a bit peppier than the last time I’d seen him. Of course, I knew most of his stories by now, so he didn’t usually bother to run them past me, and Margaret’s presence had given him an excuse to air some of them out again. But maybe the patrols were actually doing him some good. “He’s had quite a life,” Margaret added. “But he’s having a little trouble reconciling himself to the thought of ending it on a low note in Mildred.”

  “More than a little,” I agreed.

  “We’ll have to get him to the book club,” she said. “I like his voice. I think he’s very tall, isn’t he?” I assured her that he was, although I was unclear about the relevance of that information to the book club.

  I was relieved to note that after the excitement of the town meeting and the first week or so of patrolling, things slowed down considerably. To my satisfaction but not my surprise, none of the teams found anything, although there were a few vague but hopeful reports of strange noises, rustlings of foliage, and flickering lights – presumably the stumblings and the flashlights of other patrols. Madame Malesherbes’s Research Committee had generated reams of paper about previous UFO sightings without reaching any firm conclusions, and only the Town Security Committee had maintained their original high level of esprit, holding daily training and practice sessions with their various armaments and diligently employing Harold Clare’s GPS unit to map a fine-scale grid onto the summit of Devil’s Table so as to facilitate the calling in of pinpoint artillery strikes, should that become necessary, as they devoutly hoped it would. As the timeless slumber of the desert gradually resumed, even the Cowboys were reduced to mere grumbling and dark head-shakings. The problems with their phone lines had apparently cleared up of their own accord, while the “Italian” tourists continued to be merely friendly and eager to please. Matt Matawan hunkered further and further down as the empty days piled up. In his few public appearances he wore a scowl that seemed calculated to discourage questions. The conversations at Stirling’s relaxed into the usual mundane topics – the shifting array of teenage romances at the high school, a feud at the post office, the new attachment on Dale Twombly’s prosthesis that allowed him to tie trout flies with one “hand”. Inhaling the pungent desert air and savoring the broad vistas from Devil’s Table, I began to relax, and even to enjoy myself. Mildred, after all, is not in general a very exciting place. A few sparks of activity, especially in the long, tourist-free winter, were not unwelcome, as long as they didn’t ignite the powdery duff of the town’s boredom. But we seemed to have sidestepped that fate, and it appeared that the whole crazy episode was going to evaporate like one of the wisps of cloud I followed dreamily on my afternoon patrols.