Stories. Out of a Fired Ship.

Throwing Rocks at Playa Negra, Brian Kershisnik

They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters;
These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.
For he commandeth and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof.
They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble.
They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wits' end.
Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and he bringeth them out of their distresses.
He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still.
Then they are glad because they be quiet...

Psalm 107:23-30

When I was little I wanted to run away to sea.
Rather, I wanted to run away to the sea-faring England of the nineteenth (eighteenth? seventeenth?) century where (or should I say when?) first my heart and then my whole self might be carried off by a dashing captain instead of by the honorable but bloodless, um, curate? chosen for me by my careful but unimaginative landed gentry parents, to his ship (not the curate's ship, the captain's ship; keep up), The Black Emerald (or something), where I would win over his at-first-reluctant-crew and bring them luck and prosperity though not until the accomplishment of multiple and significant plot complications. Or, wait, no, be decorously courted by the same or a similar dashing sea captain after he spied me through the window of a, let me see, bookseller's establishment, instantly losing his here-to-for brave and unyielding heart to the lovely, book-buying vision who, alas, vanished (without a trace or clue!), till at last, but only after requisite strivings and sufferings on both our parts taking up page after page (in my journal, I suppose), he might wed me in the ancient rose-bound garden of my father's manor. Or, no--listen!--move the manor till it's high atop wave-lashed cliffs, where I can grow up watching the brave ships come and go (brave because rocky cliffs are murder on boats), frolicking among the roses (which are loving the salty air, we have a wonderful gardener, been with the family since...always; his loyalty will figure in later), kissed by their spray (the waves' spray; roses don't, of course, spray) and also (kissed) by a handsome reckless lad I played with as an innocent child, who, though not as high-born as some (the lad, not my winsome self) still made good through derring-do on the high seas and came back to my father's aforementioned salt-lashed, rose-swept garden for wooing both decorous and reckless, as occasion required. And, at the end, a wedding. After the wedding there need be no further recording of this story. It'll be too...fast-paced.

Here are the salient points of this particular facet of my childhood desires, in case you were overcome and missed them. Grip your smelling salts, loosen your corset and pay attention.
1-Ocean and more ocean. Ships with it.
2-Reckless, gentlemanly boy, taller than myself. Wind-swept. Laughing eyes. Reads by candlelight. Understands the use of a sword. Can sail, ride, not panic, perform advanced maths, fix what's broken even including animals and people, carry a compass and map in his head, is honest and true and a crack shot. My father taught me these are the essential characteristics of the ideal man and I never doubted him.
3-My self desired and sought after by said boy.
4-Comfortable life with sufficient means in an era before antibiotics, reliable communication or transportation, general understanding of basic sanitation, easily accessible chocolate, air-conditioning, reasonable health and dental care, and toilet paper. What mattered paltry, mundane, domestic detail to my ten year old self? All I knew was that satisfying description of the abundance and richness of such a life would demand an adjectival overload resulting in a significantly greater number of hyphens, exclamation points and parenthetical statements than ever I encountered in my own dull, dry century.

One might with reason assume all this was primarily about the boy.
But it was, in fact, about the ocean.
I was born in Seattle, lived in San Antonio and then in San Diego. Water was big, and it was there. I was about three years old when we moved to California. There was the beach and there was the bay and they were salty and you went into them, often, as often as your parents' lives allowed. There was also the marina where you walked up and down the bobbing sidewalks with your dad to look at boats and maybe get fish and chips at a water-side shop with gorgeous dark blue and green albacore-topped tables, marlins and swordfish stuffed on the walls and your dad unaccountably ordering fried clams. This is the birthright; smoothed stones and sand and salt water and gulls and sailing ships and sun and shells and fog and wind that tastes of the sea.

I am the captain and I have been told
That tomorrow we land and my ship has been sold.
Now losing this boat is worth scarce a mention
I think of the crew most of all the first ensign.
For all we learned the sea.

Not long before I turned eight we moved to Utah, where there are mountains instead of hills and wildfires on the desert and where bright little fast-moving streams tumble down over slick rocky beds through mountains to each of the valley towns pioneers built, intercepting, re-channeling the water through webs of irrigation ditches, garden and field furrows, flood plains, town just as big as each creek could sustain on its way out to the west deserts (you see on which side of the mountains I have always lived; I have no idea what happens to streams that flow down on the eastern slopes of mountain ranges). And, really, that was all the water there was. Fresh (but don't drink it; cows, you know) and noisy and shockingly, achingly cold with darkly glimpsed trout where it was deep and water skeeters zooming around where it was shallow, a teensy, invisible water frisbee under each of their six feet. You went to this new water as often as your parents' lives would allow. Between times you could run in the sprinkler and wade in the town ditches or, once you were big enough to ride that far on a bike, go slide down the spillway at the fast and dangerous dam. And Utah was weirdly comforting, oddly familiar because it had those unexplainable gulls. The child that was me knew the story about the gulls and the crickets of course, but no one ever explained what had possessed them to stay.

The summer after we moved to Kanosh we drove back to California for a visit and the strangest thing happened. I was lying down in the back of the gold station wagon (when I was little the color of a car functioned like its Christian name. We always spoke of cars by their full names; white van, green Dart, gold station wagon) on the folded-down seats with the little sisters and all our vacationing stuff eating fruit we had denied at the border. It was dark and we were nearly to Somewhere, California, my dad kept saying "about half an hour more" and all of a sudden the breeze changed. Just for a minute the air was utterly different, alive to me and I could taste it all the way to the inside of my soul. I yelled "what's that!?!" and sat up so fast I almost got sick and caused an accident. "What?" my dad asked but it was gone! and I waited but it didn't come back and I was too, too sad so I said "nothing" and lay back down on a sister that had usurped my spot. During the ensuing necessary fighting that magical air thing happened again and I yelled and lunged over the seat between my parents. "That! What is that smell!?" because smell was the closest I could get to this living, quivering sensation I could taste and feel. My parents were too nonplussed, I think, to get irritated at my histrionics but they had no idea what I was on about and then after a little moment my dad said, "Oh. I think she can smell the sea," and my mom said, no, we were way too far from the coast (it was a fib about being only half an hour away from "there") but my dad was right. It was the smell of the sea and I hadn't known it was gone till it came back. All my baby and little girlhood are bound up in that smell as my older childhood and teen years are in the of smell river willows and rain on fields of dry grass and grain.

The games of imagination and adventure I authored and choreographed fell roughly into one of three fairly equally important categories.
1. Huts. Building and maintenance.
2. Quests. My children called this game Gypsies or Faerie Wars. Some good friends called the same game Hobos. You dress up, fight people using sticks, make forts and shelters which must constantly be moved and remade due to famine, sword and fire, and fight more people using more sticks. It was for me mostly an excuse to wear the best cape, walk loudly and carry a long stick.
3. Ships.

Huts was played mostly alone amongst the sisters, we tended to fight over decor and made good neighbors but bad roommates.
Quest requires cast, we all played.
Ships was really for me alone. Played in groups it became just water bound Questing. The tall ships of my imaginings were no place for small sisters. You had to be always thinking on a ship, you couldn't be watching out for little landlubbers; they tended to be swept overboard and you just had to grit your teeth and carry on, admitting it was probably the best for all. Of course, you wanted to be careful, overly cavalier behavior could get you in some real trouble with the Admiral of the Ocean Sea when you made land and re-entered port for provisions at dinnertime.

In the deep back lot of the house my grandparents bought for their retirement, where we first lived in Kanosh, there was a massive tree trunk, limbs lopped off, burned on much of its surface, its sides and bottom covered in a thick charcoal. The top was not burned though, so once you accomplished the tricky ascent (tricky because my mom forbade any charcoal on clothing) the tree was so huge it was plenty big enough for seven year old me to walk all over it with ease, sit or even lay on it, far too broad for me to straddle it like a horse (I have never been a limber human). It was my first ship and it floated in a field of grassy waves, undulating like the surface of the bay where we used to swim, green waves in spring turning to gold as I sailed the great log through that first summer. Handily, if little sisters came clambering to join the crew, a captain longing for solitude could simply not throw them a line, lie back and close his eyes knowing they could not scale the charcoaled sides alone. If they ran crying to tattle, Mom would tell them she didn't want them to play there, anyway. In this way I learned a ship is both island and mountaintop. The deck of my ship was smoothly gray and softly fibrous, almost fraying like fabric, which I associate with old and weathered cottonwood or poplar. After my grandparents came and we moved up the street we still played endlessly on that tree, always a ship, in crews or as solitary sailors. Then one summer our tree ship was just suddenly gone, an enormous emptiness awaiting us beyond the watered, mowed lawn, in the dirt between it and the horse corrals. All that was left was a pile of its charcoal, as if it had slipped clean from its black cracked skin; a footprint, a shadow where it had faithfully floated all those years at anchor. Grandpa had burned it to make it go away. He told us it was in his way. The grasses grew into the space it had held but no use was ever made of the ground there. I knew how Grandpa disapproved of our daydreamy games, the way he disapproved of a pet, a dog that didn't work, herd or hunt, and I always wondered. "Why did he burn it up?" I asked my dad, heartbroken. "Well, honey." He stopped, sighed. "It was there."

Guiding a ship, it takes more than your skill,
It's the compass inside, it's the strength of your will.
The first ensign watched as tempests all tried me,
I sang in the wind as if God were beside me.
For all we learned the sea.

Miraculously and inexplicably there was a boat dry docked in the middle-to-deep backlot of the house my parents moved to, out beyond the blacksmith's shop and therefore hidden from the house. Not hidden from the other houses on the block, but who cared about them? Maybe no one even lived in them. Your own parents are the only ones you have to hide from as long as you're doing nothing wrong. We played there voraciously. Interestingly, this ship required crew. I never wanted to sail our acre-and-a-quarter lot solo in that vessel, I was too worried about the things I was pretty sure lived in it. Rats, you know, live in boats, and I was quite certain black widows lived in this one, too. Black widows seem appropriately associated with ships, don't you think? The mourning souls of the widows of sea-lost sailors hiding and rustling and scuttling about, avenging themselves by secret poison. Shudder. If it's a dangerous game, get younger people to play it with you so you can all be unsafe together. So I rode the grass billows of our backlot with a crew of sisters and cousins, all younger than myself, made brave by their busy humanity. We were very busy on that ship. Every moment of every day of that good ship's log recorded exercises in narrowly averted Tragedy and Disaster. You know, some of those things can take just hours and hours and a huge amount of yelling and throwing yourself about to avert. We came off conquerors, but it was always, always a near thing. I can't tell you how many times one or other of us stood on the burning deck, desperately bossing people, till mysteriously it fell someone else's turn to direct the narrative flow and another crew member shouldered the bossing. One day when we were all gone on bikes, my dad burned our boat. He explained, taken aback at our fury and outrage at the destruction of our possession, that the boat wasn't worth anything. "You could never use it, it could never float again. It wasn't ever going to be sea worthy. It was a terrible boat." It certainly was never going to float, dry and dusty in the center of a county that regularly receives less than a foot of precipitation a year. Worthy, though, is an interesting word. What gives worth, and how shall we judge it? I honestly believe that to my father (who has saved every issue of Wooden Boat since Noah first made up a subscriber list and began printing in order to raise money to fulfill his commandment from the Lord) that clunky, ugly boat rotting on the backlot, probably built by a Millard County farmer with pretensions to water, was an abomination. My dad was generally amenable to and supportive of our games so long as we held no one hostage and damaged no property. I think he must have truly assumed we all hated that landlocked plywood corpse, felt as strangled and trapped as he did whenever we looked at it. I believe my father's was a purifying fire.

You take the wheel, one more time like I showed you.
We've reached the straits once even I could not go through.

The best of my ships was our hay derrick. A box marked off by huge logs like the first layer of a log cabin, four smooth gray uprights leaning into the center, one from each corner, acting as lines or as mizzen and fore masts, the great central trunk of the derrick making a mighty mainmast with the triangular crane at the top for a sail. Derricks are made to move fairly easily so the crane swung a bit in the wind, creaking and groaning just as masts are supposed to groan and creak. Best of all, my father had laid stacks of rough-sawn wood on the derrick base and tied them down to cure and to dry straight. These made decks and ooh! below decks, cabins and a hold. This was the best ship of them all. This was where I played alone. I loved it most in a storm. Under normal summer conditions it was just too blazingly hot to play there, any metal on the derrick a branding iron, the decks of my ship searingly bright and blindingly hot. Who wants to play Crossing the Equator every darn day? I didn't have a clue what the Arabian Sea was like but I imagined it somehow as dry and dusty as Millard County, ships sliding down white sand dunes like the ones where people rolled Easter eggs at White Mountain. I wanted to sail something more like the Cornish coast. On a sunny day I avoided my derrick like a plague ship but the minute the wind shifted to the south west and brought the scent of rain, big clouds racking up behind South Mountain and then flooding over, spilling across the valley with the sound of thunder and far away flashes of sheet lightning and the suddenly cooler wind whipping around now out of the east, out of the canyon, I would abandon my huts, dump my sisters and cast off in the derrick, three sheets to the wind (not drunk, except on wind; look it up), headed north where the blackest clouds were now. That's the storm pattern in Kanosh, wind and clouds from the south west, twisting around to stack up big rain in the north. I would stand forever on the top deck, holding a line, wind whistling through the rigging and whipping my hair (released from its stupid braid) all over. Watching the storm, feeling it come. Holding on to the central pole, big enough I could really wrap myself around it, watching the lightning snaking all over the valley, feeling the gust and tug of the sails in the twisting of my mast, running before the wind. If it got really wild I could go below to sit in the storm's strange, yellow-gray half light, riding out the lightning and the thunder perfectly safe in my cabin under the lumber, only driven to the house by actual rain, and how often was that going to happen? Not having to defend my solitude as no one really wanted to play ship with me in a storm. "You're like your dad," my mom said, "watching tornadoes outside in the night." I came home from college and the derrick was gone. I was stunned. Too big for games? Over the loss of the last ship? Hardly. My dad loved the derrick, he'd never... "Where's the derrick," I asked my sister, "what happened to it?" She made her eyes big, responding to my anger and to her superior knowledge and to the drama of it all, the downing of The Derrick. "Oh," she breathed, "Dad had to take it down. It got hit by lightning and just blew up. It wasn't safe at all after and he had to burn it."

It's like four o'clock in the morning in some time zone, somewhere, and it's freezing. Noah's trying to wake me up, roll me off the bench in the snack bar where I'm wrapped up and trying to sleep, to sleep. "Come on, Mom. Wake up. You can see the White Cliffs of Dover. Come on." Everyone is asleep, Tom is sleeping and smiling because he's not going to get up, he's seen these cliffs. "Go without me," I say, and Noah leaves, disgusted and disappointed, but now I'm not sleeping. I leave the sleeping girls with the sleeping painter and walk to the top, pulling my scarf tighter against the cold, cold air. I don't tell Noah I'm there. Good thing the girls are asleep, the youngest gets so sick. England is rushing up and down but hardly getting closer. The further off from England, the nearer is to France. Is that how it goes? I look at the cliffs, the houses hugging the bay, the boats hugging the docks, my son hugging himself. Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, won't you join the dance? I turn away from the chalk cliffs so that all that I can see, as far as I can see, is water.

I am a captain and I have been told
But I am not shaken I am eight years old
And you are still young but you'll understand
That the stars of the sea are the same for the land.
And we came to learn the sea.

We Learned the Sea
Dar Williams


White Boat, Brian Kershisnik

Help. Chasm. The Penultimate Part.

The painter says he believes Descent from the Cross is nearly finished, so I suppose I must finish the stories I set out for myself when I first thought through these ideas of Help and helping. Five stories, five chapters falling out before me in order like a fan, like stones in an arch. Nearly finished. I decided early to post them every other week to give me time to think. To wait. To avoid. Of course it was inevitable I would arrive at the one I have been carefully skirting in my thoughts all along. One, two, three, four, and here it is.When I was very tiny I began to have awful nightmares of falling. They stayed with me till in college my dream self set me the task of learning to fly. That was rough and messy and took about a school year. I got it in the end, and the dreams went away. This story has to do with falling.

Horatio. You will lose, my lord.
Hamlet. I do not think so; since he went into France I have been in continual practice. I shall win at the odds. Thou wouldst not think how ill all's here about my heart--but it is no matter.
Horatio. Nay, good my lord--
Hamlet. It is but a foolery, but it is such a kind of [gain]-giving, as would perhaps trouble a woman.
Horatio. If your mind dislike anything, obey it. I will forstall their repair hither, and say you are not fit.
Hamlet. Not a whit, we defy augury. There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come--the readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows what is't to leave betimes, let be.
Hamlet, V ii

For my twelfth birthday my parents took my sisters and a bunch of my friends to Lehman Caves. They also took lunch and cake; candles, even. This was an unusually elaborate birthday celebration in our family. The adult I am now thinks it must have been quite an undertaking for my mom as it would have been an all-day excursion, including the healthy drives between Kanosh and the caves. I think there were about six friends plus the six of us. We had a fifteen passenger van. The important feature of our van was not the number of people it could legally carry (admittedly handy on occasion, though who cared what we drove, really, we stacked up, it's not like safety was an issue, I'm not sure the van even had seat belts) but that its four bench seats gave each sister a berth in which to lie and read while our parents drove us in the summertimes through glorious and scenic sections of this great country of ours. That they were glorious and scenic I have on hearsay. "Suzanne!" my mom would say, "Sit up! Sit up right now and look at this! Just look at this!" I would sit up, look carefully around on all sides, say, "Mmm!" and lie back down and read. In my defense, the balance of drives made in the van were between Kanosh and southern California; this instilled in me very low expectations of landscape potential. By the time we drove the coastal highway in Washington and Oregon I was a grownup myself, sitting in the front seat to claim my own slice of view, fighting a bit of carsickness, braking sympathetically and uselessly as my dad took the cliff turns at bracing speeds, his own eyes on the view, my reading times reduced to the drive from the eastern edge of the Cascade rain shadow to Kanosh. So, a goodly chunk. I still find when I read while riding in cars or buses or trains, even through England and Wales where I might be expected not to read at all but rather drink in view to the last drop, I carefully scan the windows every so often, on all sides, making sure there is nothing I should be looking at. Mostly in Britain it's just trees and more trees or in America dirt and more dirt but you can tell when the light changes on your book page it's to come up time for a look round. I discern from comparative conversation with fellow passengers who eat up views like they're starving that I don't miss much. (Close and careful readers may by this point have worked out that I mentioned four van seats, one to a sister, while all the world knows there are five of us. Well, Close-and careful, by the time the youngest came along to skew the math, the oldest was gone.)

What, you are asking, has this got to do with a birthday party on the Utah desert?
Nothing. I'm avoiding it.

The caves are amazing; if you haven't been, you should go. We all thrilled and grabbed for each other when the guard turned out the lights and thick solid blackness slammed us into our separate existences, revealing us suddenly as we always are, really are, so totally, so utterly alone in our heads that we are forced to reach instantly out to the humans on each side, squeezed by true dark into a spasm, a hiccup, of unpremeditated hand-holding if only to regain balance and a sense of things as they truly are outside our skin. Are you there? Are you? I am. I am. An unlooked for chain of twelve year old girls with the odd sister haphazardly strung among us, shuddering, astonished and giggling, gripping tightly where we joined, eyes stretched wide on black that pressed between our open lids like cotton wool, listening with horrified joy as a United Stated Forest Ranger told us there was a mile of rock between the tops of our naked eggshell heads and the fresh, free air and the wild and natural light. He paused to let that sink in and in our blindness we strained our ears for any sound that wasn't people trying to breathe normally in air gone thick and damp, cold, used-up air the earth exhales. He allowed me plenty of time to wonder if he had abandoned us below the desert rocks, finding his own way back through passages he'd come, like a mole, to know, while we felt our way alone, round and round this great room till we fell down in a heap in the middle and then he would come back like he always did saying, see, silly, I told you it was dark, now come along, and lead us out, blinking into the autumn desert evening, fading light easier on eyes grown used to the black. There are reasons I'm uncomfortable in the dark, I don't find it leads me to good narrative. Then our guide (who was of course right there all along, just imagine) brought us back one step into the known world, holding up a star in all that dark, a lighter from his pocket with the flame turned up rather high, pushing the black back a bit from our center to our edges where it turned and pushed back at us. He told us all the hundreds of people who came to the caves before the sanity of electricity only saw their wonders by the flames they themselves carried and that, worse, the first man who came here came alone, with only matches. I thought how easily a flame blows away. Embracing our day and age, the Ranger turned on the safe, fake, canned light modern men take underground with them and we breathed easy in that light without bearing all the burden and knowledge of the weight of earth or the flickering uncertainty of fire. Some hands we dropped now, flustered, some hands we held. And we walked after the Ranger in obedient single file through light that ran comfortingly ahead of us, chamber to chamber, room to room, leading us on from hidden wonder to hidden wonder while the black licked us from behind, closing down the way lest we be tempted to stray. The Ranger shepherded us meticulously, counting and shooing. "Can't go on till I know you're all here, don't want to lose anyone." He said it standing close to me and I guess my dread (I was swiftly spinning out a few pleasant little tales concerning "losing anyone") showed on my face because he said quickly,"Oh, it's not that I would lose anyone, it's that people are always trying to stay behind. Can't have that." And off he went, into the next light, us behind him, looking where he pointed, scanning all around, watchful lest a casual caress from a human hand halt the creative work of centuries, vigilant in our stepping that we mar no wonder belonging to our descendants, chastened that even our moist breathing and weak dependence on light brought to this mysterious, delicate labyrinth algae that, unchecked, might one day shroud its glories in the same slick, dull green draperies cloaking the stones in the creeks where we played on summer days. It was marvelous.

We ate lunch and cake afterward in the picnic ground, easy in the air, casual in the sun now beginning its descent, slanting through the shortening daylight of an autumn birthday. It was chilly, I remember everyone had on coats. We conscientiously picked up the bits of wrapping paper. Dad said, let's drive home through Eureka, I've always wanted to see it.

It's the way things happen. You take an extra drive on a birthday. You go up to Jerusalem for Passover. Some people see the unfolding and ready themselves against events, some people are unfolded by events they never thought to look for. If we could see our coming future simply by looking around, would we dare take any steps toward it at all?

I didn't check this, I'm going to tell it as I remember it. I've never been back so you're getting a foreshortened view, barely twelve years off the ground. My youngest is twelve, just barely. I put her in my place in this story as I shape it here, she keeps me honest, helps me fathom what must have happened. How it unfolded. My dad parked the car. We got out. Is there a ghost town at Eureka? Or near there, maybe? That's what I remember. We all jumped out of the car, itching to run around, to explore. I was full of myself; my mom had made me a great birthday, everyone liked me and I had lots of presents. I took off the instant my feet hit the ground, racing myself to the top of a little hill nearby with a funny beam standing upright on it, a railroad tie, I thought, running, racing myself to the top.

Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place?
Psalm 24:3

No one came after me. I was a pretty fast runner, not the fastest in seventh grade (late birthday) but maybe still in the top ten or so. I was going to run, I don't know why, to the top of that little hill, past the upright beam, and jump up and down in the middle up there. Yelling, I think. These were my unformed thoughts as I ran. Not a story, just intent. About halfway up the hill my goal shifted. Now I was running to that railroad tie standing up there alone, I was running to grab it and swing around. My plans changed again, of course, about ten feet away. I had had sufficient experience with railroad ties to want to avoid the mass of infected slivers that would have followed any serious swinging. My whole goal was to just run my heart out to the tie and grab it. And I did. It was standing at one corner of a square mine shaft which bloomed under my feet, opening like a mouth, a wound, and into which the gravel and dirt I kicked up as I stopped were now falling soundlessly, without a whimper or a scream, down and down into velvety blackness without a bottom. There was no sound as they vanished. No sound. No sound. The tie stood at the corner of the pit as solidly as if it stood in stone, bearing my weight and the speed of my headlong ascent easily, casually, as it would a song bird come to rest on its crown. I clung to it, frozen, emptied, revealed to my very young self for what I always have been, an eggshell human, alone, perching with my back to the cliffs, and to darkness. The railroad tie was the only friend I had in the world. I clung. I was a limpet. Not one part of me worked. My tongue was solid in my mouth, my eyes were split wide apart and staring unblinking at blackness, the grain of the wood was printed into my cheek and I'd still be there, eternally narrowly not falling, had little sisters not come running up the hill to me. I had to save them because there was only room on the tie for one supplicant at a time.

My soul hath been redeemed from the gall of bitterness and the bonds of iniquity.
I was in the darkest abyss; but now I behold the marvelous light of God.
My soul was racked with eternal torment; but I am snatched, and my soul is pained no more.
Mosiah 27:29

Way down the shaft I showed to my father after I had a terrible fight with my sisters to keep them away, hit one of them when she wouldn't obey me, said yes! yes! go get Dad! when she screamed at me that she was telling, way down and lodged across it at an angle was what at first I thought was a two-by-four but what my dad told me in tones of sickened, agonized assessment, still thorough and methodical in explanation, was another railroad tie. There were four, you see? At the corners? They've been coming loose and falling in over the years. I looked at mine, anxiously, and it looked back at me, unconcerned. You'd have hit that, he said, grim and calm, if you fell. Below us, my mom was loading everybody into the van. This is a bad place. We're going home. That jammed tie, too far away in the fast-fading light for me even to judge its dimensions, was for the twelve year old kneeling carefully by her dad and is now for the mother of a twelve year old, a fast runner, the most upsetting part. I can see it clearly, clearly in my memory and I can give to the horror some words I didn't have then. Everybody dies. I don't want to bounce and spin off a railroad tie on the way. Oh, my soul, almost as it were, fleeth at the thought. My standing railroad tie looks back at me, solemn. Everybody dies. Try to take precautions.

Safety is an illusion, Costis. A Thief might fall at any time, and eventually the day must come when the god will let him. Whether I am on a rafter three stories up or on a staircase three steps up, I am in my god's hands. He will keep me safe, or he will not, here or on the stairs.
The King of Attolia

I sit with friends in the fading light of a summer Sunday afternoon, talking about this story which now they have read, and one asks me what the terror was I tried so hard to avoid in this writing. Did I miss it, she asks. I stumble, unsure of my writing but still solidly horrified by the memory. No, I tell her, it was just that. Just the hole. She looks across the twilight at me, her face open and unconvinced, and then slowly her countenance changes, bleaches into bleak remembering, and slowly she tells a story of an afternoon in a park with a baby and hole hidden by tall grass. An opening into a culvert with fast running water, a long way down, and a mother who suddenly looked up, not for any reason but in the nick of time. More stories come, of holes and water and missteps, of children and of big people, too, saved by a casual glance, a slight shift in direction, a straight-up prompting. None of the stories are tragic. They are just about holes.

We camp with our children in a canyon that was once a goldmine, thousands of people living stacked on top of each other where now are only woods and stones, "improved" roads and Forest Service bathrooms. We hike to a waterfall past a sign warning us to be careful of open mine shafts. Exercise with caution. It is a momentary freezing thought on a hot day; I tell my children a fast, bare bones version of this story to frighten them into wariness, one of the only times I'll ever tell it. I'm pretty sure my sisters have heard it, maybe not though, maybe only the ones who know it were there and old enough to remember, and maybe they no longer do, or only remember that I yelled and hit one of them. I didn't fall down the shaft because for no reason a slight, unbidden thought came that I might change direction.
I try to ready us for the way things happen. Don't do anything stupid, I tell my children whenever they leave; we walk carefully the edges of our abyss as once a lost and wandering prince walked a cliff's edge, all unknowing, at night and in a fog, accompanied only by a Voice which suggested direction and took the edge-side for its own. The young prince loathed and feared the Voice speaking out of fog and dark and never till morning light showed him the narrow slash of dirt under his feet and the straight drop beyond it learned there are worse things than help with direction.

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.
My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.
He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber.
Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.
The Lord is thy keeper: the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand.
The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.
The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul.
The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.
Psalm 121

Hole, Brian Kershisnik

Noah's photo

Meditations. Lonely. Thinking about it.

There's a story I'm trying not to write so I'll write about today instead.
Today I spent mostly alone.
This is the way I spend most days.
The painter is gone a-painting, my girls are round and about, sometimes someone shows up in the day, like yesterday when my sister came for a long talk, but for the most part I spend my time alone.
I know not everyone is alone. Women, especially, talk about doing things together, driving and attending and lunching and phoning and buying. I can't get it, can't wrap my mind around how that's done. Feels like algebra.
I think about this a lot, about being alone and being slightly uncomfortable and sad and about trying (with no one to see, no one to check up on me) to make sure I'm whiling away my life in a useful and justified way so I will have plenty of good stuff to talk about with God in our inevitable face-to-face. I wonder about trying to live so that I'll be missed when I die; I want a well-attended funeral. I think about a friend from college, her life stacked, racked, jeweled and enameled with family, acquaintances, intimates, who goes out of her way to try to get me to spend time with human people, phones, drives from her city to mine, tries her best to show me another way. I think in the morning that today I will call a dear friend who is leaving for Oregon, who asked me on Sunday to call her any time before Wednesday (so, that was today) for lunch or dinner or a walk or anything at all. My pick.
Today I spent mostly alone.
I went to a meeting, my version of a social life. I messed with my girls, I wrote my son in Hong Kong, I typed brief notes, some of them to people I have met in the flesh. I answered the phone. I missed a visit from the niece I love like a daughter and her own baby daughter because I was in the shower when she came and then I had to run off to that meeting. People to see. I left my visitors for my girls to enjoy. Now I sit at dusk in my empty house writing a story of emptiness, a song of my alone self, to people who may or may not exist, may or may never read it, will almost surely never tell me if they did or did not, nor will care if I never write here again and I know, this is how I do.
I did not call my friend before she left for Oregon.
Because of what happened instead.
The Provo temple closes at the end of this week, closes for a month. I go there once a week, more often when I can, to be alone and be with God. So I am going every day this week before it closes, one day for each week of the next month since I can't count Monday which does not belong to me it belongs to the family and to yard work when we "descend like locusts and get it all done" (the painter's words and the only way he can stomach yard work) and not counting Saturday which will be a Painter family reunion. So that was the early morning.
Then I had to shop, had to, we had no butter or vegetables. Made breakfast, changed clothes. That was the midmorning.
I have to do some yard work and some house work every day, nothing like all of it but enough not to lose my mind when I see all the thousands of things that need, that must, be done pressing their greasy little faces against the outsides of my windows and the insides of my mirrors. So yard work took till after lunch.
Meeting.
Housework. Not a lot. Some.
Dinner.
This writing.
If it had been a day with no meeting in it I'd have read. You can't read and visit with people, sometimes even libraries are too cozy, too social, too chatty.
I will work on this till bedtime, I will tidy the kitchen, fold the last of the clean clothes, type more, pick up my youngest at the birthday party, read to her, scriptures with the girls, good night phone call to the painter, pray, sleep.
This is very like what will happen tomorrow.
I will spend it mostly alone, a bit sad. In my sadness and my work, a knock will come at the door and my temper will flare. Who? What?
I will catch myself in that irritation, reminded that there is a price tag, a bar code, on all of it, all of my life. We pay for everything and I personally pay rent on an internal studio apartment. I choose this, choose to live alone.
Even though it hurts me.
I really did actually live completely alone once, alone in a house as a student at BYU. The house was for six girls, I was the first and, by some strange intervention of my personal gods and angels, only girl who applied that semester. I didn't know at the time I wasn't allowed to live alone as an single girl at BYU, or at least, I don't think I was. The owner didn't mention this, but I could see he was in a quandary. This had never before happened and he couldn't figure it. He kept stopping by in the first few weeks as if his physical presence might bring rent-payers to the scene. He stomped around, inside and out, talking to himself and occasionally to me, wondering whether he should even rent to me alone or just kick me out, or, alternately, whether I shouldn't be paying a good deal more rent for having a house all to myself if I were really going to be alone in the whole thing. I maintained a stoic silence before both these proposals and after a while he stopped coming by and I was alone. Truly alone for the first time in my life. I had just moved to Provo and knew only one soul, my cousin Laura, in the whole place. I never even found my ward. I didn't have a phone. I. didn't. have. a. phone. I have never been so frightened. I came home from class in the evening and turned on the TV and lamp. I turned them off when I went to class the next morning. Have I mentioned I am terrified of being alone in the night? Sleeping, letting go of listening to every sound, every snick and rustle, of watching every shift of shadow and sweep of light, giving up awareness and control sufficient to slide into unconsciousness took more will power than I had had before I moved into that house. I had to build muscle, grow callouses, just to keep breathing. One evening I hopped outside, barefoot, to throw away my trash and heard the door click shut behind me. Locked. Locked out and no one in the world had a key because there wasn't anyone else. Well, the owner had one, I suppose, but how was I going to summon him? He only came by for rent. So, three weeks. I wandered (carefully) around the house a few times, remembered I had been taught to pray and did, not in a focused and faithful way but in a glazed and scattershot way, ricocheting from fear to fear in the fading light and then just started walking mindlessly down the street, heading south. Apparently God understands glazed and scattershot because I ran, literally, into a boy from one of my classes. He wondered, rightly, what the heck I was doing, shoeless and brainless, and I told him all of it while he walked me back up the street (because north is up) to my house where with cruel and silent efficiency he broke in. He went around the back for a little minute while I waited out front; I thought he would come around the other side as I had a few times, looking the situation over but instead he suddenly just strolled out the front door carrying part of a back window. There you go, he said. It took a second for him to realize what that had done to me. I guess I must have looked as shocked and sick on the outside as I felt on the inside because he started stumbling around trying to be comforting. Oh, I don't think most people could have done that, he said, not as quick or as quiet, anyway, you'd probably have heard them if you'd been inside. Really? Great. He twisted and gripped his hardware bits a little then somberly put the window back together, kindly and awkwardly, hung around sort of miserable for a moment before walking off to the south, calling happy stupid empty little things back over his shoulder, leaving me standing on the front walk in the dark now, looking down the black hole of the front hall through the still locked front door he had just opened from the inside. Really, he had been very nice. I still feel sorry for him. Sometimes at night after that I barricaded my bedroom door from the inside. Here's the great gift from that house. My horrible boyfriend who had misused me for eighteen solid months of my life that I can never get back came to visit me there. First, in a theatrically perfect (always perfect, always theatrical) but graceless and idiotic backhand gesture while making a point about nothing he knocked to the floor and broke a very small and lovely old box of treasures, wooden, with tiny dovetailed joints and handmade hinges. Second, he dumped me for the nth time. For a wonder I didn't cry and beg and cajole and bargain. I found myself seething in rage over my tumbled and plundered box, crying in a terrible relief at the unbidden emptiness I could feel washing and lapping like healing water, a vast blessed ocean, up to and all around me for the first time in a year and a half, and cried more in a sickness and agony of sudden clarity; my life, my time, my days irretrievably squandered and stinking now of ashes and smut. I threw him out of my house, like throwing up poisoned food. His whole face turned into a round pink clown mask of surprise. He was so shocked, so hurt, so disappointed that I was lashed, flayed, by fury and self betrayal all over again. Oh, I hated the pair of us. This was all it had been about all along, the drama, and I had just been too grindingly frightened of being alone to see it. He actually came back into the house after I slammed the door (for effect (and where was my self-locking front door now?)) to try for another scene. He held my arms gently (sick! I'm barfing writing this. hang on, it's almost over) and tried to talk soothingly. I grabbed the phone (oh, hey, I had one by now. things were looking up) and dialed the police. Didn't threaten. Dialed. This was the baddest moment of my life. It was like a movie. I had this amazing soundtrack in my head. I can't remember the song, think eighties stadium-rock. Anything anthemic will do. He left, amazed and bewildered but beaten. I instantly hung up on the cops. No police came. No boyfriends came back, either. I had my house to myself. I barricaded myself in my little bedroom and reveled in my solitary splendor, my lonely dignity, new-found. There are way worse things than being alone.
It only hurts, really, in the evening.
How do I explain that I don't keep in touch because I never was? It's terrifically hard for me to connect, usually I'm standing around inside myself, smiling on the outside, offering to help out so I'll disappear, trying to be funny, waiting for signs that people are tired of me. Real human connection is like a rare and terrible drug; I hold those people very tightly, very close, probably too tightly.
Here's what I can buy with solitude.
Reading.
Reading and eating.
Making bread.
Folding clothes. A meditation.
Worship. In some of its forms.
Gardening. Not yard work.
Dancing.
Reveling.
Costumes, jewelry and clothing. The making, altering.
Scripts and play-building. The homework.
Crying over ancient Korean bowls and Revolutionary War American portraits.
Learning a tree with the palm of my hand, feeling the bark and the living spirit with my inner palm, the part most rarely touched.
Practicing. Stories or poems, lines from Shakespeare, working the sounds and the images, learning the meanings of speaking.
Walking. In woods, by houses, near water. Finding the God I've known longest.
Here's when I've got to have people.
Eating and talking.
Talking.
Sleeping. I don't like being alone. No, I don't sleep being alone.
Worship. In some of its forms.
Dancing with people.
Plays. Movies. Concerts. Performance and its audiences.
Books after I've read them.
Writing and having people help me with that by talking.
Celebrating.
Traditions. If I do it alone it's not a tradition, it's a habit. Or a compulsion.
Shopping. No one shops alone. There are no empty shops. Those shops are closed.
Music. The hugest, wrenching, transforming conversation. How can you be alone listening to music? What have you done with the musicians? Music is my sure-fire way to God as I best understand Him. And love. And hate. Anger, jealousy, silly joy, longing, cleansing, grief, crushes, new cars, tap shoes, first dances, babies and old men, swimming, winter sleep and autumn leaves.
Art. When I'm not crying about it.
My solitary father, who hunts alone and walks alone and works alone told me once the world is full of people with nothing to say talking and talking just to be sure they are still alive. Frightened of their own thoughts, the worst thing in the world, your own thoughts. I think of my dusk-time college television and lamp, warming my darkness, filling it with voices.
Together is dialogue.
Alone is for narrative.
Alone I cut the demonic plum trees from the wild-wood-growth of this Provo house. They leap on me as they go down, twist around me, slashing with their two inch thorns. I labor in an effortless storystream as they fall, slice my scalp and the back of my neck, a gramarye of the plum kingdom's methods and motivations, their histories, triumphs and losses, magiks and lore, their fear of me and my saw, their eventual downfall and certain end. You shall not triumph, plum demons. Ooh, gotta be careful of your eyes, turn your head when the tree comes down, that's how they get you. This storifying is always flowing, has been my constant condition as long as I can remember. Unless another person is there. If someone works with me there's none of that. Together we get the job done more quickly, the other person takes a turn, lifts the end, holds the tree, minimizes blood loss. We tell memories and make plans. We argue our point and concede and score and some of us make terrible puns and keep you up all night. Talking.
All day long I talk to myself. In the evening I'd like to talk to you. Call me, if you're not too busy. Otherwise, I'll listen to music. Read. Sightly uncomfortable. Sightly sad. Thinking about it.



Noah's photos

Help. Succor. The Middle Part.

Slivers, Brian Kershisnik

succor, v.t. [L. subcurrere, succurrere, to run up to, aid]
Webster's

I don't like to work at a desk. If it's a big project I spread out on the floor or for word-work I sit on a squishy surface like a sofa or a bed with books and paper and pens (laptop, too, now) surrounding me in nesting half-circles. For this reason when I was a freshman in the dorms I made my bed every day, made it like it mattered, like I was in the army; otherwise there was no place good to sit. One day as I was pulling up the quilt my grandmother made for my far-from home-college-bed I stepped all my weight down onto a cute cup full of perky colored pencils my (former) cheerleader roommate had left at the edge of the empty space between our beds where she had been working on an art project, sitting with her back against her bed, paper and pencils spread on the floor, me at the library. The cup, which co-ordinated with the push-pins in her bulletin board, the throw pillows on her bed and brought out the secondary colors in her spread, was supposed to reside on her desk like a fat little vase with a bunch of skinny spring flowers, brightly painted shafts, wooden cones topped by pretty color cores tapering to fine, fine points kept very sharp because she liked to work small, but she had abandoned it on the floor and it had migrated to the very edge of my bed where it secreted itself and lurked in quilt folds till I outed it with my foot. The roommate stored her pencils point up lest they be inadvertently dulled by too long standing.

The people in Descent from the Cross are hurrying. The cross is coming down, coming apart, the whole weight of a man swinging from the nails fastening his hands and arms to the heavy upper crosspiece. The horror at the tearing and twisting in his flesh must be immediate to them and awful in their hearts and stomachs. He's dead of course, he doesn't feel it and though they know that, they feel it for him, as we do for the dead, the sleeping, the comatose. They hurry not to be hurting for him longer than they must. The sun is slipping away, pulling them into the Sabbath and enforced rest. They can work now, set and headlong, fill their minds and eyes but tomorrow will be empty and relentless. No distractions. Now they have him still, now they know what to do; now, in this little moment, they can help him, still. They love him, they believed him, this is not what they expected. There's irony here, rich and dear. Him dead, in his death and with his suffering hammering out for them their greatest help, driving home their most exquisite relief. Them crying, dying inside, hurting from force of his help. I don't know how they could be big enough, old enough, to see this moment as anything other than a disaster, the worst possible outcome. At least he's dead, he didn't suffer as long as he might have and it's over. They no longer must stand back, frozen, breathless observers of suffering. They can work and they rush to him, helping their helper. And he needs them, needs their hands; he can't get off the cross by himself.

Give us help from trouble:
for vain is the help of man.
Psalms 60:11

I couldn't see why my foot should hurt so, so badly and I didn't know what to do. There was no blood and only a strange, hard white bump along the edge of the sole of my right foot, just outside the circle of the heel. If I'd been home I'd have limped out my dad who would have turned off the table saw, taken my foot in his hands and turned it toward the light while I hopped madly around in the sawdust trying not to fall over. Then he would have sighed and taken me into the bathroom where the light was good and worked me over with tweezers and fingernail clippers till I was out of danger and then as final benediction doused me with alcohol for good measure. All on my own, far away from the family table saw and tweezers, I washed the funny bump with soap, returned the scattered pencils to their darling cup, put them on the tidy desk opposite mine, climbed on my bed with my books and studied while my foot sang a hot and throbbing song of pulses and heartbeats.

Next morning I couldn't walk well. The bump was still there. I went to class sans books, I couldn't manage them. I didn't go home for lunch, it was too far to cross the street; by the end of class I was just focused on living long enough to get back to my dorm room and die. I wanted to die lying down. It was for this my parents had send me out into the world, to make me strong or, failing in strength, dead. Limping on my toes was not the ticket at all, better to take a long step onto the heel of my right foot, a shorter, quicker, more painful step onto my left, rest, repeat. I didn't ask for help as I inched and halted across campus, in fact I told a couple of nice people who stopped to inquire that I was fine. They believed me. Sadly, I need to be forced to accept help. No one forceful came along. Must have been a student government meeting somewhere and all the team practices. I had never noticed till I measured it out in handspans that my dorm room was the furthest but one a person could live in and still be on campus. The atmosphere thickened as I edged along, taking up arms against me; accomplishing the Castellia Hall main doors seemed like half way instead of home free, I was rapidly going downhill and the hall all felt uphill. When I finally, finally got my key in the door and opened it I found our living room/kitchen full of people. Male people, and one roommate.

I had one roommate (not in my actual bedroom, that was the (former) cheerleader) who was nearly always to be found in the company of many brainy and attractive men. This was for two reasons. First, she was the most caring, generous, mature and, well, noble person on campus. She lacked physical loveliness of any sort whatever and I hope dearly when she grew up she married the best man on the planet. Second, she was maybe the smartest student on campus. People, boy people, wanted to study with her as often as she would allow them; she was a born teacher and made learning difficult maths and sciences joyful. I think. The learners all looked joyful; I couldn't understand any of their conversations but things seemed to be going well for everyone. Consequently our living room/kitchen regularly overflowed with crowds of the best and brightest male students. It was a splendid situation for everyone and I heartily recommend you always arrange your dorm rooms after this pattern. Blessedly, one of them this time was an especial friend of mine who, like all my true friends, had some considerable force to his nature. He saw my trouble (I was listing and leaning and green), told me I was stupid, got me to a chair and required of me the history of my injury while another friend, a caring, truly good and very tall person (what a lot of lovely people in this story!) put aside his trigonometry or nuclear physics or whatever to go examine the dear little desk cup and its denizens. He brought it into the kitchen, a trifle grim about the face, holding out one pencil, a white one. Where the other pencils all had great long tapers of colored core rising proudly, piercingly yet perkily in softly complementary shades from the wooden shafts, the white pencil's sharp core was broken off cleanly at the base, at the wood, showing no color whatever.

Which explained the funny, white bump in my foot.

My especial friend, who I'm going to call Rick which wasn't his name but is close, took off my shoe and sock, assuring me he would take the broken lead out and wash it and I would be fine. He examined my foot for about three fourths of a second and assured me that his friend and mine, the good man holding the sweet cup and offending pencil, would remove the lead from my foot, wash the wound and I would be fine. You can trust him, Rick said. And that is what happened, Rick holding my hands and talking to me and risking maybe half a glance about twice during the process (there's a scene in Master and Commander which reminds me forcibly of this moment, you know the one, the calm surgical removal via mirror, by the doctor and a crewman, of a bullet from the doctor himself which is accompanied by a lot of deep breathing and not a lot of watching on the part of the master and commander). Our mutual friend went to work, calmly and steadily opening up my foot using the single edged razor blade people who study advanced maths apparently keep about them, (my dad always had one) while my beloved roommate acted as scrub nurse and swabbed frequently with horrible but helpful alcohol. The alcohol swabbing made me press my head down hard on the sofa arm and hate all of them heartily (Rick in particular) while Rick stroked my hair and said all the things a dental hygenist once told me she had to learn not to say, ever. "Oooh boy." "Whoa!" "That's not good."

It wasn't good and it wasn't over because I think we had all assumed the broken and embedded point, once exposed, could be lifted out whole, but the demon-spawned white pencil had a chalk core and the chalk had fed on my fluids, had crumbled and softened to an indistinct and formless mass. There was no lifting it out at all, more like spooning. The good, good man worked steadily away while my angel roommate held my foot and made quiet, useful suggestions and Rick had his head down now, too, next to mine, holding on to me like he was the one dying and told me I could bite his hand, if it would help. I said I didn't want to, thanks, which was a lie but I didn't do it and I thought, this is what happens at college, your friends take care of you, and felt very alone and unsafe and wished for my dad who had been to a bit of medical school and was better than a surgeon.

The next morning I had a bright red line running across the bottom of my foot and about two inches up the inside of my leg, toward my ankle.

What a waste of alcohol.

You need never have heard the words blood poisoning to know how scary it is when you see it. Like seeing a blackwidow spider, certain streetbikes, or a woman all dressed in plether, an ancient instinct tells you, this is bad; run, baby, get help. The first person, miraculously, I met that morning was the boy who was at the time sort of functioning as a boyfriend and who had me into his car and into the emergency room long before I had finished telling him why I couldn't walk so well. I was scolded roundly by the receptionist, the nurse, the doctor (for---???), given antibiotics and taught how to treat blood poisoning. Which I have done since, too many times. Seems I am a bit prone. It was good for me to learn this on a week day when doctors were readily available.

Therefore, let your hearts be comforted;
for all things shall work together for good for them that walk uprightly...
D&C 100:15

That is the end of the story, or very nearly. All these people helped me, rushed in as soon as I admitted my need, tipped my hand (my foot?), as it were. Maybe they saved me from serious difficulties. I don't know what happened to any of them after we all left Snow College, not a single one, though I do know one thing that happened before we left. My good, calm friend had an epiphany that night. At about the moment he set down the razor to wipe the sweat off his hands because nothing was going as planned and the pencil point was chalk and the chalk had become a porridge, he noticed he had started to feel good. Confident. And interested. Realized he was going to change his major, realized he would become a doctor. I wonder now, all these years later, which of us in this story was helper to whom and by what working we all found our places. Helping people can hurt quite a lot. As it can hurt to let them help you.

And he ordained twelve, that they might be with him...
And to have power to heal sicknesses...
Mark 3:14-15

I have a little movie in my mind of my friend; a very tall doctor with red hair fading now to grey, taking a child's foot in his hands to be stitched, to be treated, turning it to the light, working with care and precision, growing interested and confident as he sees things are not what he expected here. I see the mother, holding the child's hand, maybe watching a little, maybe not, trusting this good, good man who is helping them.

And the King shall answer and say unto them,
Verily I say unto you,
Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren,
ye have done it unto me.
Matthew 25:40

Thorn and Sparrows, Brian Kershisnik