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

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