Naked
in the Road ~ Chapter Twenty-Six
I lived in
that small valley for some days, and a profusion of life played
around me. Until one day, wandering far into the south, seeking
the source of the tiny creek, I found myself growing restless.
As I walked I questioned if I had left a settled, if destructive,
life just to come here and then finally drop, my bones quietly
mouldering into the soft moss. I remember being suddenly still
in the middle of the pool with a hard-won root in my hand, and
the water dripped from the muddy root onto the water's surface.
The drips made tiny ripples that were quickly lost in the immensity
of the small lake. I watched the ants who lived in the large mound
near my house, and pondered on their industry. Surely they must
know-by rumour if not by experience-that winter was coming and
with it blowing snow and ice from which no hole can protect.
I looked out
my door one sunny morning at frigid grass sparkling like diamonds
with the frost. That afternoon a lingering vee of geese flew over
as I wandered far from my hut. I looked into the sky for a long
time and then mounted a hill far from my daily jaunts. Upon that
hill were the remains of several houses. A plough stood as if
it were still hooked up to chain-ganged horses. Although the handles
and traces were rotted away, it was buried in the forest debris
as if ready to rip the soil again. The first house appeared as
a pit, its vague outline framing a one-foot spruce. It must have
been gone some eighty years. All of the houses were blank holes
and when I peered into the dusty depths of a stone-ringed well,
it was shallow, empty, and choked with weeds.
A people had
come here, their wagons heavy with hope, and had made this small
village in the wilderness. Like the giant ruins, their imprint
was scarcely to be discerned or understood now the years had spun
past, and the weed and trees had returned. When I knew the location
of the houses, or, more accurately, their plant-softened outlines,
I saw the walk down the main street, where each settler would
have nodded to each as they went to house or field. I had access
to the memory of the hoary oak trees lining this ancient walk,
so I could see the petty jealousies, towering rages, resolute
handshakes, stolen kisses, and promises that still whispered behind
the bushes and slammed doors in that forlorn glade. I sat on the
low stone wall that at one time housed the well and watched the
ancient village come to life: that lifting branch a beckoning,
that bush a stolid parishioner, the towering pine the neighbour's
stout son who, in one heave, lifted the log off his brother, the
waving maple the daughter who stood in her window and called alive
the evening air, and the playful leaves children running with
a stick after a barrel hoop. I heard the children's high laughter
in the late afternoon sun and was surprised when with the breeze
it ceased and was replaced by a solemn procession that gathered
strength as it passed the houses. When I followed it to the graveyard
under the curve of the hill, I saw how the mirth had stopped and
how when they arrived, by mute assent they had turned to their
separate homes and packed their trunks again. I saw new wedding
dresses, shining axes, clanging pots and pans, children's wooden
toys, rough flannel, barrels of meal, sacks of potatoes, and then
finally the children too, their laughing faces poignant with sudden
surprise. The wagons bumped on the rough road to the river and
they had seen their parents' set faces drawn in the gloom of early
evening.
The ancient
slate stones told the tale well enough. Carved with lambs and
angels, these leaning stones marked where children and their parents
were buried, when some dread disease had washed them from the
world. How terrible and pathetic, how we try to parley with death
and signify by the use of stone our remembrance. Egyptian kings
and queens had built their tombs and temples and pickled their
organs and now their desiccated corpses frighten children in museums.
The mammoth piles of hammered stone Thoreau so lamented are still
there, and like Ozymandias, call out in the dry desert waste,
the kings and queens are gone. For a moment I stood in Shelley's
desert and saw the futility of piled stone.
Walking along
the road they had taken, whose outline was traced in younger trees
that grew in a straight line down the hill, I thought upon what
a human may leave behind. I saw again the world I left, the man
on the corner with his tattered cardboard sign asking for food
or work, my neighbour who had taken a child from the park, the
howl of teenage boys out of windows. This was all pavement trash
washed into the gutter and through tortured serpentine tunnels
to the sea. The broad ocean rose daily and the tide crept ever
closer to old coral and lime houses on far-flung islands whose
voices of protest were faint by distance, and a duck struggled
in water soaked in oil on a northern beach. A murky wind blew
out to sea from a city on the coast; The last bear, moose, deer,
salmon, dolphin, were trapped, their multitudinous bodies tangled
in the deep sea nets left to drift or torn by the coiled wire
and chain link fence that wraps our world. When I glanced around
me again there was rippling water between the trees; I was near
the wide river, and along it would be human habitation.
My quiet valley
was as if I had never left, but my neighbour came close by that
night and cropped the grass around my hut as I gathered my possessions
in the light of my fire. I crushed the tins in order to carry
them out to where they could be melted into more tins to house
the plastic food and packed them with my blackened cooking pot
and axe in the bottom of my pack. I was up late and when I slept
it was not soundly, for there was a murmuring in the trees and
from downstream I heard the steady pace of patient walking, while
a hand that fed the fire waited on the cliff.
I woke early,
packed in the grey predawn, and the stiff grass and yellowing
leaves were still in the soundless glade. My pack was much lighter
than when I arrived, for I carried little food now that I could
find it in the wild. My twine, rescued from the hut's frame, was
in pieces, and some of it was useless. I left those pieces to
compost in a pile of peelings and dirt, the sole sign-other than
the gathered sticks of my dwelling and the blackened rock of my
hearth-that I had lived there for days I could not count. I left
the fossil fern in front of my hearth, for I had traced its cryptic
sign so many nights that my body would remember. Even years later,
I would stand, deep in memory, watching my hand map out that evocative
shape. Walking slowly around the shallow pond, I bid the glade
farewell. I tried to tell myself I would one day return, but the
only way here was the path upon which I had come, and I now think
that the serendipitous happenstance which led me there closed
behind me like a forest trail.
The long hike
to the lost village, as I had come to call it, was punctuated
by the traces of my wandering mind. I had been living for many
weeks, how many I could not count, deep in the woods until forest
enveloped me and I had spent my small day as a frog in the stream.
Like Glooscap's frog, I knew of the passing current, but nothing
of the debris on the creek that signified the coming storm. With
my eyes barely above the surface of the water, I saw only its
murky depths. Like Vonnegut's canary in a coalmine, the frog in
the stream is the most sensitive to the toxins its skin absorbs,
and they limp along the shore offering this visceral warning.
Could the frog be the first to call the alarm, or merely the first
to fade away, missed only by the darting crane's appetite and
the raccoon's germ-conscious hands?
When in the
gloom of late evening I arrived at the lost village, I barely
recognized its sunken basements for the ancient foundations of
houses. I stumbled around until I sank down with my back against
the low, stone wall marking the well. The village was alive with
the murmuring of wind in the trees. A breeze blew southward to
the river. Small animals scurried in the dusk, where they hid
from basement to basement until they achieved their miniature
goals. I ate the green sweet clover I had picked on the way and
sat there in the dark, the last member of that remote community,
having come to the dry well for a final drink. The clattering
shutters and flapping blankets on the line, the pails of water
and barrows of dung, the laughter and the curses, were hopelessly
distant. I watched them as I might the procession of characters
across my mind when reading forgotten records in dusty archives.
From miles away I saw cows in a field, and sheep crop the grass
amidst the stones. I heard a tiny figure shout and the answer,
but could not make out the words, and even as I looked at this
miniature scene, the dusty page was turned and the ancient binding
cracked as the book was closed and placed upon an unmarked shelf.
I wrapped my head in my blanket and sank into the night.
The next morning
it took me a moment to orient myself to the trail leading to the
river. From the stone wall that indicated the well I went south
through the graveyard, where I found an apple to eat on my way
down the long hill. The trees grew taller, and the pines and spruce
were replaced by the beech and basswood. I picked chickweed and
clover as I passed and startled those attentive animals who only
watch the shore of the river. They didn't think a human could
also come from behind them, for that country is empty and inhospitable.
When I arrived
at its side in the late evening, the river was broader than I
remembered, and even as I cast my pack on its wide sandy bank,
I saw the trash that signified my kind. There were bottles like
mine, which I had rescued from the creek long ago, as well as
plastic toys and shoes. They were tangled in the driftwood, which
I used to build a wall to shelter my fire. My fire lit a tiny
hole in the flowing black of the river and its tremulous flicker
reached out over the water seeking reflection in that immensity
and finding only pieces of itself. In the coals I roasted cattail
root, found by the water's edge, and then ate the pulpy mass,
while the river streamed past carrying sticks and once, even an
entire tree.
When I woke
in the cool valley bottom, the sun was just above the horizon
and my view extended for many miles. I first looked back at the
trail to the lost village, but even as I fancied I saw signs of
a path between the trees, it disappeared. Standing on a broad
bend in the river, I looked across its rippled current at a road
that curved over the hills and across swamps and backwaters in
its blatant disregard for logic, attending only to its own internal
need to stay near the river. Even as I watched, a minuscule vehicle
crawled up one hill and down another as it went downstream. The
hills shut in the view upstream, but I had already decided, by
watching the current the night before, to follow the river to
the sea. I felt a sudden desire to see gulls hanging in the air
and to hear, upon the grating stones, the sweep of the deep ocean
swell.
I had once
built a raft in order to cross a lake, and although that experiment
had gone somewhat awry-for a light breeze had an unexpected result
of continually pushing me back to the shore from which I came-I
planned to do the same again. The current would take me where
it wished. I spent the entire morning finding and then floating
together two large logs, some thirty feet in length. I chopped
away their brush tips but left the roots, for the roots porous
nature, combined with the amount of work needed to sever them,
was not worth the buoyancy I would lose. I saw other logs I could
use as crosspieces when I sought out the two main logs of my catamaran-as
I took to calling it-so I pulled them together. I gathered food
and cooked while I awaited the night. My meals were getting monotonous,
for my anticipation of the river voyage had ruined my ability
to concentrate on food gathering. I supplemented cattail roots
with the ubiquitous wild onion that grew in the gravel bank.
While my dinner
boiled, I watched the effect of the current upon sticks that came
to a low headland. They would thrash onto its upstream side to
be turned and drift again or stick there until a spring freshet
should loosen them. As I ate I thought of this next stage of my
journey. I guessed that I was going back, but I didn't know what
I was going back to, or in what incarnation. I was not dressed
as others might expect, but that scarcely mattered. My mind was
suddenly peopled with a great crowd of dissenting multitudes who
waved their banknotes and cheques in the air, and punctuated their
exclamations with gestures towards their sleeping children and
the large house upon the hill. I saw anxious fights as they contrived
to pay their bills, saw the conniving at the office as they manipulated
themselves an extra week of vacation, saw how they cursed the
hours driving to the office, their coffee spilling in traffic
and that red light under which they barely slid. The more I understood
the path their choices had led them to, the fainter their images
got, until finally I dismissed them with a sudden sweep of my
hand. When I looked again a few were left and I shouted, but they
came closer and I realized they were friends I thought were far
away. They stood on the darkening shore and prompted me with their
cautious voices, and I listened to their arguments until I fell
asleep.
The river
had risen slightly in the night. I was unaccustomed to fluctuation
on this scale, but luckily had tied my logs to a root on the eroding
bank, beside which their ends bobbed lightly in the water. The
water had risen about my encampment, but my fire was high on the
sand and my blankets had escaped the slow creep of dampness through
the bank. Even before I ate, I pulled the two logs around in front
of my shoal. Tying them to the largest piece in my stacked windscreen,
I positioned the crosspieces that would make up the major part
of my catamaran's frame. Floating gently in the back of my mind
was the raft of Huckleberry Finn, and although I could not emulate
Twain's sawn planks, I could make a platform upon which to travel
and sleep. It must be low enough to not attract unwanted attention,
for at times the river was aprowl with suspicious eyes. When I
had the pieces in place and ready to tie, I was suddenly weak.
I had eaten little the last few days and knew the speed of my
travel mattered not at all if I arrived at my arbitrary destination
a sack of bones.
I wrested
some food from the bank, and even found some small sour apples
on a tree that must have grown from a discarded core, it was so
isolated. I packed the apples and ate more gruel made from cattail
root. I finished my meal with the inner stem of fireweed, which
grew abundantly here in the open sun and which I had forgotten
until I saw its distinctive pink blossoms waving above the other
streamside plants. After I rested, I strapped the crosspieces
onto my raft using more twine than I thought it would take. To
make up the remainder, I untied my pack and let its sticks wash
downstream with the current. Hopefully, this amount of twine was
sufficient, for I had provided for emergencies by wrapping more
cord than I needed onto my pack frame. Between the pack frame
twine and the rest of my fishing line, I was able to supplement
my meagre supply without cutting into my emergency fund, for as
a last resort I could unknot my macramé belt and hold up my pants
with a single piece of rope. The cord sufficed and gave me a solid
frame upon which I piled the flooring of my raft.
The logs that
made up the buoyant portion of my raft were for the most part
submerged, and so it did not matter that they were thirty or so
feet long. The visible portion of the raft was a mere twelve by
six foot platform, made from poles and short logs placed beside
each other in a lattice work over the main supporting logs, and
from the distance it would look like a bundle of drifting trash
to prying eyes. I placed a large flat stone on dirt I'd piled
on the platform for building a fire, and banked the eager blaze
with more earth. A fire could not get away from me on the river,
but I didn't want it to eat up my raft while I slept, if I ever
slept with the fire burning.
Night was
fast coming upon me when I finished the raft, and I went up the
bank to find a stout branch that had broken while still green.
I was looking for a piece about six feet long and forked at one
end, so I could extend fabric between the forks in order to make
a paddle. What I found was much better. An old barn door lay in
the eddy near a cove and I ran to it-as if a sudden current would
arise and take it from me-and brought it onto shore. It was a
feed door, which is to say it was some twelve feet long and about
two feet wide. One side had hinges, and on the boards I could
see writing. I leaned in close in the fading light and saw words,
suddenly realizing while I read them that this was the first text
I had read in weeks, for my drinking bottle had lost its flimsy
paper cover and my tins were likewise without labels. Scrawled
in a loose wandering script were names, and as the light dwindled
into obscurity I read Blackie, May and Fred. What will archaeologists
wonder, having come upon such a message? If this door were all
that was left of our culture-though, considering the ubiquitous
nature of riverside trash, I found this doubtful-what would an
interpreting mind think?
As I carried
the find back to my raft, I thought the names were undoubtedly
the names of cows a gentle farmer had applied to the boards above
their heads to celebrate their presence rather than supplement
his memory. His respect for the other animals with whom he shared
the earth made him rise early and feed the cows before he ate.
He could not tolerate the thought of enjoying a meal while another
was both hungry and dependent on him for food. His fat cattle
would slowly wind their way to the rich pasture, led and followed
by a fat passive dog who would sleep with them if it was cold
or lie panting in the shade under the barn in the heat. The farmer
would pump their water by hand, and when the last cow had drunk,
lift the pail to his lips to drink the rest, unworried about germs
and feeling an unusual kinship.
When I returned
to the raft, I used my axe to pry the crosspieces from the two
boards that were the door. I laid one where the platform was weakest,
with its names upward, and then took my axe to the other until
I made a passable paddle. When I finished, I lay back upon its
unsteady platform to look at the first stars. I pondered whether
to take to the river and sleep upon my raft or stay another night.
I trusted my knots wouldn't loosen and pitch me overboard while
I slept. I listened to the distant whine of cars as they geared
to make the hill. I was fairly confident my raft was sound, but
my first test should not be while I slept, and that fear, combined
with my uncertainty about what lay downstream, kept me on the
shore. For the first time since I had matches, I built a high
fire that reflected far over the water and brought large fish
up from the depths. Moths threw themselves into the blaze as they
confused that wavering light with the moon they used for migratory
navigation, and for the first time in weeks, mosquitoes buzzed
around me.
I couldn't
sleep at first and sat there in the dusk until it occurred to
me my paddle could be fashioned with more grace. I whittled a
long handle and blade from the roughly hewn wood with my knife
until both were reasonably smooth. Then I searched in the dark
until a familiar clinking sound by my foot indicated a bottle
amongst the litter. I positioned the bottle in a groove in the
sand, and as my hand lifted the rock to strike, it remembered
a similar motion. I saw before me that first night on the edge
of the road, where I triumphantly broke a Sprite bottle into a
crude knife. How far away that night seemed. My road was at this
moment a river, and I was clothed and equipped with good tools.
In the gloom before the fire, I methodically scraped the bottle
glass down the paddle's length, until it felt smooth to the skin
and I was tired. I lay in front of the fire on the sand and watched
the leopard frogs jumping around me, their bulbous eyes having
spied the fire. Upon their approach, they found out its scorching
nature, and jumped away. They hopped about in the bush and as
I drifted off they watched me, anxiously wishing me well on this
next leg of the journey.
I was in a
house. Although it looked strangely askew it was a house I knew.
Even as I searched through its rooms franticly for something important,
the scene changed and I was near my hut on the beaver pond, pawing
aside the brush in my anxiety, then my abandoned farmhouse, constantly
looking, until I ended along a small, stream-fed lake and in my
hut of stacked poplars. While I dug in the earthen floor of my
tiny hut-which was packed so hard and brown when I left, it would
never have occurred to me to disturb the hardened soil-I was getting
near the source. I woke, and felt sweat on my body under the blanket
even though it was cold and damp in the river bottom. It was late
morning, and I lay until the sun warmed my nest. I didn't know
what I had been looking for in my dream. In the early days of
my occupation, I had pulled up grass from my dirt floor and placed
it on the fire, since the grass had died from lack of light and
water. Later still, I started small fires in my hut, perhaps unwisely,
in order to burn the grass away so the floor would be clear. I
was concerned because I had almost lost my needle in the thick
weeds near the fire. With that memory, I got to my feet to start
my first day on the river.
The sky was
opening up to a brilliant blue once the mists of morning burned
away, and although I could hear the faint thrum of cars and see
their lights, they seemed remote, like satellites or shooting
stars. I placed my pillowcases full of belongings in the middle
of the platform and pushed off from shore with a long pole I had
grabbed at the last minute. When I was out in the middle, the
raft slowly swung sideways and a deep current pulled me downstream
to where the breeze played upon the rippled surface.
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