Fiction, the Hard Way
1st Place, Ridge to River Contest
Adventum Magazine, summer, 2011
SUNSHINE
You never told me, Jack, when I pored through a collection of your stories after winning the London Prize, that I’d be thinking of you on a freezing sandbank, ass in the air, trying to get a spark out of dry sticks. “To Build a Fire” had held me spellbound. Now it held me hostage, under two pieces of lukewarm tinder that weren’t going to heat up no matter how hard I rubbed. Damn you, Jack, and Bradbury too, with his Fahrenheit 451. Thoreau, too: that thing about firewood warming you twice, first when you chop it, then when you burn it. Damn you all, and damn the memories fluttering through my addled mind like snippets from the guy in Tobias Wolff’s bank heist. All was literature now—stories, books, essays, and the novel I was writing, the worthless, dripping piece of junk on the sandbank behind me.
For hours I’d scraped, climbed and ducked my way through tangled brush of the clogged stream that I thought was the South Fork of the Tuolumne River. Purple tote bag slung over shoulder, I’d left camp a happy writer, telling my friend Penny I’d be back at six, and I’d walked about a mile to a spot where I traipsed around with the butterflies and then went rock hopping up-river to look for a sunny rock where I could kick back and take out my red pencil for the fiftieth rewrite of the novel stuffed in the tote bag. The manuscript was supposed to get me to an agent, who would get me to a publisher, who would get me into print as a fiction writer and save me from anonymity. Ah, the literati’s illusions, the things they never taught you about the writer’s life.
After a while, rock hopping became the only route because when I tried to go by land the thicket at the banks of the stream drew blood from my sleeveless arms and stuck branches and thorns into my uncovered legs. So I picked my way stone by river stone, until a huge tree lying dead in the water sprawled bank to bank, demanding a clamber over its massive trunk.
Using the stubs of its broken limbs as ladder rungs, I got to the top and gingerly reached down the other side to drop feet-first into a shallow stone-strewn pool. There, canvas bag aloft, I was able to wade for a time, manuscript safe in the air and feet steady in the water, moving along the river bed in quest of a shoreline writing spot—or at least a trail, any trail, to deliver me from the water.
In front of me, the way was blocked by a forest of water plants growing from the cracks in river boulders. Probably, I figured, this was stage two of the chaotic wood-and-leaf mass that formed the dam I’d seen earlier, before the downstream trail veered inland and I lost sight of the river. It seemed that the chaos wasn’t a one-shot deal, but was more like an ongoing siege on the waterway. Enormous round leaves, one per stem, sat atop their long stalks like open umbrellas, stretching in clumps across the river, blocking my way, hiding what lay ahead. Dozens of them, hundreds of them: gangs of green umbrellas stealing my vision and defending their liquid turf. I pushed against them, through them, past them, only to find more and more of them, as my wet sneakers hunted on their liquid jungle floor for stones to support my feet, away from the rivulets of waterfall that made everything slippery. Only when I had a secure footing could I let go of the fistfuls of brittle plant stems I clutched for balance, and then I could move forward, rock to boulder to ankle-deep river, to more umbrella thugs and tree trunk barricades, to find a trail.
It had to be here somewhere. My famously poor sense of direction was no handicap this time; I knew the difference between upstream and downstream, and the laws of nature said that going up would get me back. I’d followed a trail downstream, for a ways beyond where the path split off from the river, and I’d flitted with the butterflies through a field teeming with ladybugs, then fought through the jumble and started on this slow rock-hopping trek in what was obviously a very twisty river. Soon there had to be a trail, and beyond that, the camp. Between the two, if I was lucky, there would be a comfortable spot to work on the manuscript. Years before, when I was writing introductions for essays by Martín-Baró, I’d discovered forests and riverbanks as the premier places to work without distraction. “Aren’t you scared?” people would say, “A woman going off by yourself like that?” Scared! It never crossed my mind. While Martín-Baró was writing those essays, the Salvadoran soldiers who later killed him prowled around outside his office window. That’s scary.
Adventum Magazine, summer, 2011
SUNSHINE
You never told me, Jack, when I pored through a collection of your stories after winning the London Prize, that I’d be thinking of you on a freezing sandbank, ass in the air, trying to get a spark out of dry sticks. “To Build a Fire” had held me spellbound. Now it held me hostage, under two pieces of lukewarm tinder that weren’t going to heat up no matter how hard I rubbed. Damn you, Jack, and Bradbury too, with his Fahrenheit 451. Thoreau, too: that thing about firewood warming you twice, first when you chop it, then when you burn it. Damn you all, and damn the memories fluttering through my addled mind like snippets from the guy in Tobias Wolff’s bank heist. All was literature now—stories, books, essays, and the novel I was writing, the worthless, dripping piece of junk on the sandbank behind me.
For hours I’d scraped, climbed and ducked my way through tangled brush of the clogged stream that I thought was the South Fork of the Tuolumne River. Purple tote bag slung over shoulder, I’d left camp a happy writer, telling my friend Penny I’d be back at six, and I’d walked about a mile to a spot where I traipsed around with the butterflies and then went rock hopping up-river to look for a sunny rock where I could kick back and take out my red pencil for the fiftieth rewrite of the novel stuffed in the tote bag. The manuscript was supposed to get me to an agent, who would get me to a publisher, who would get me into print as a fiction writer and save me from anonymity. Ah, the literati’s illusions, the things they never taught you about the writer’s life.
After a while, rock hopping became the only route because when I tried to go by land the thicket at the banks of the stream drew blood from my sleeveless arms and stuck branches and thorns into my uncovered legs. So I picked my way stone by river stone, until a huge tree lying dead in the water sprawled bank to bank, demanding a clamber over its massive trunk.
Using the stubs of its broken limbs as ladder rungs, I got to the top and gingerly reached down the other side to drop feet-first into a shallow stone-strewn pool. There, canvas bag aloft, I was able to wade for a time, manuscript safe in the air and feet steady in the water, moving along the river bed in quest of a shoreline writing spot—or at least a trail, any trail, to deliver me from the water.
In front of me, the way was blocked by a forest of water plants growing from the cracks in river boulders. Probably, I figured, this was stage two of the chaotic wood-and-leaf mass that formed the dam I’d seen earlier, before the downstream trail veered inland and I lost sight of the river. It seemed that the chaos wasn’t a one-shot deal, but was more like an ongoing siege on the waterway. Enormous round leaves, one per stem, sat atop their long stalks like open umbrellas, stretching in clumps across the river, blocking my way, hiding what lay ahead. Dozens of them, hundreds of them: gangs of green umbrellas stealing my vision and defending their liquid turf. I pushed against them, through them, past them, only to find more and more of them, as my wet sneakers hunted on their liquid jungle floor for stones to support my feet, away from the rivulets of waterfall that made everything slippery. Only when I had a secure footing could I let go of the fistfuls of brittle plant stems I clutched for balance, and then I could move forward, rock to boulder to ankle-deep river, to more umbrella thugs and tree trunk barricades, to find a trail.
It had to be here somewhere. My famously poor sense of direction was no handicap this time; I knew the difference between upstream and downstream, and the laws of nature said that going up would get me back. I’d followed a trail downstream, for a ways beyond where the path split off from the river, and I’d flitted with the butterflies through a field teeming with ladybugs, then fought through the jumble and started on this slow rock-hopping trek in what was obviously a very twisty river. Soon there had to be a trail, and beyond that, the camp. Between the two, if I was lucky, there would be a comfortable spot to work on the manuscript. Years before, when I was writing introductions for essays by Martín-Baró, I’d discovered forests and riverbanks as the premier places to work without distraction. “Aren’t you scared?” people would say, “A woman going off by yourself like that?” Scared! It never crossed my mind. While Martín-Baró was writing those essays, the Salvadoran soldiers who later killed him prowled around outside his office window. That’s scary.
Around the bend up ahead I could see an eroded hillside, sign of a trail for sure. But getting there would require some tricky bouldering and major battles with the umbrellas, and I’d already fallen three times, knocking bare knees and vulnerable elbows into the unforgiving walls of granite boulders. Occupied with thoughts of safety, I forgot to watch my feet. Before I knew what was happening, a fourth fall dumped me sideways into the river, washing the tops of my thighs through the water. No time to move the purple bag. Its lower edge turned black from the wet. Frantically I pulled the paper from the sack as soon as I got my footing. Dry! The manuscript was all dry except for the bottom margin. What luck! Never mind that everything not covered by my simple summer clothing was a scratchy mess of scraped and bleeding skin; eight-and-a-half by ten inches of my passport to the future was unharmed! The unexpected splash into the water brought home to me, though, how treacherous this country was; I’m not usually a faller.
The eroded hillside up ahead did seem to have sunshine at the crest where a trail might cut through, so I beached again and thrashed through a tangle of blackberry vines to get to it. It was not easy going. Nearly an hour had to pass before I was close enough to the top to read the bad news that sometimes an escarpment is only an escarpment and not an advertisement for a road. But an acre of sweet berries in a California forest, I knew, is nearly always the garden setting for a bear’s outdoor café. I’d been helping myself to berries as I smashed through the heavy brush, sort of the way the bears break into our cars to help themselves to our lunch. Was some furry thing going to come after me for stealing? I beat it down the hill.
Sorry for all the time I’d lost, I plodded on upstream, though I gave more than a moment’s thought to reversing course and heading back the way I’d come, through the boulders, downed trees, slippery rocks, and umbrella monsters. My banged up arms and legs begged me not to put them through all that again. I yielded to their pleas. Onward!
There were no recent signs of human life in this wilderness. None. I’d seen a rusty cable around a big lodgepole pine, left over from logging days some eighty years ago, and near it an old drum, same vintage, that once held Mark’s Chocolate Icing. I’d smiled at that, Mark being my favorite man and chocolate my favorite flavor, but these old relics also brought on a lonely awareness of how far I’d traveled from phone reception, roads, trails, anything to connect me to the people I cared about. What if I were to die out here? Nobody would ever find me. What if my birthday, coming in a few days, were to wind up being my death day? No, that was absurd. I wasn’t going to die out here. Up ahead I was going to find a trail to take me straight to the edge of the camp. I probably wouldn’t get much writing in today, I’d been out here so long. All these obstructions and detours had kept me trekking through this meandering river for a good five or six hours.
The next bend exposed a beautiful granite cliff over a chunk of solid rock as big as a flat-roofed house. Early on I’d been seeing boulders as smooth as ducks, as big as elephants, as round as a turtle or flat as a whale’s back; but ever since that feeling of loneliness had draped itself over me, my metaphors, as if traumatized by the absence of humanity, shied away from nature and led my searching eyes to things that people use—refrigerators, Volkswagons, coffee tables, houses. Once, I saw what looked like a bright yellow flashlight that someone had lost in a pile of rocks under a dead tree. I grew so excited at the prospect of a careless hiker being close by, that I almost wept when I got near enough to see it was a colorful shelf fungus. A dented beer can would have been a joy.
I contemplated going up to visit that gorgeous hunk of granite shaped like a house, but it required a technical climb of the sort I hadn’t done in more than thirty years, and never without ropes and a belay. Caution said no. The river, though, had other ideas; there was no way to continue forward unless I went up there. A dam of clogged boulders and branches in the water had formed a pool so deep that I’d have to swim it, and a swim would soak the manuscript; I had to go for a land traverse.
On the huge ridge, reached by arduous maneuvers of pressure holds and finger grips, I was rewarded by a true sign of human life. So what if it was a thousand years old? This Native American metate used for grinding edible plants told a story of a time when the river flowed clear and a friend from long ago sat as I was sitting, safe, warm, happy, in love with the view. I ate a piece of French toast I’d set aside from breakfast, saving the other for later, and I washed down half my ounce-and-a-half box of raisins with the river water I’d been drinking all day from a plastic bottle. There were warnings back at camp about parasites in the water, but parasites are curable, I figured; death isn’t. The woozy-headed stumble-footed jig of dehydration could be fatal in a situation like this.
It was three o’clock. I had traveled for miles, for hours, a cartoon version of the Haitian proverb: Beyond the mountains, more mountains.
Where was I? Penny was expecting me back at six. If I turned back to struggle through the morass that brought me here, I’d never get there in time. If I pushed on upstream, I was bound to get to the camp, and it couldn’t be much farther.
After a rest on the happy ridge I pushed on through the water, dodging umbrellas, crossing logs, climbing boulders, and falling—falling on slippery rocks, falling from algae-coated sloping banks, falling from ledges and logs, falling in the umbrella leaves, in the rivulets, in the river, in shallow trickles and deep pools, falling completely submerged, manuscript and all, in the never-ending, never clearing stream which I later learned was not the Tuolumne River, but something called Soldier Creek, taking me deeper and deeper into this impenetrable wilderness. Way back by the butterflies there’d been a confluence of streams, but I hadn’t known that. I’d seen water flowing, and followed it upstream.
At six-thirty I spotted a sandbank and climbed out. I had another hour of daylight, but I had fallen twenty-one times. I looked around, thankful for a stretch of land without brambles.
That’s fresh bear tracks, said the intellectual in my head.
Bears don’t want to hurt you, said the writer.
You stole the berries.
Bears don’t know from stealing.
Think claws.
Think Goldilocks.
The voices in my head argued over the risks of camping so close to what might be a bear’s lair, and finally came to a TINA truce: There Is No Alternative. The terrain hadn’t changed over the last couple of hours, but I had. I was depleted of energy and sore all over. My judgment was shot. If a fall into a boulder knocked me out, that could be the end of me. Footprints or no, I would have to spend the night in this desolate place.
I rubbed my sticks and cursed the writers. Hanging my stash of bread and raisins in a tree as an offering to the animals, I gathered long branches for a shelter. Enough to break the wind if it came up, and hold in a little body heat, the three-sided wood structure wasn’t much good for anything else except as a message to the bear: This isn’t a bear kind of thing, Please don’t disturb.
You think that makes sense?
You don’t?
I thatched the roof with those wicked umbrella plants, though that meant having to wade back into the river to fetch them, and it was already getting cold. I’d decided those umbrella thugs weren’t killers after all, just accomplices—the guys who hid the body when the homicidal boulders finished you off.
The eroded hillside up ahead did seem to have sunshine at the crest where a trail might cut through, so I beached again and thrashed through a tangle of blackberry vines to get to it. It was not easy going. Nearly an hour had to pass before I was close enough to the top to read the bad news that sometimes an escarpment is only an escarpment and not an advertisement for a road. But an acre of sweet berries in a California forest, I knew, is nearly always the garden setting for a bear’s outdoor café. I’d been helping myself to berries as I smashed through the heavy brush, sort of the way the bears break into our cars to help themselves to our lunch. Was some furry thing going to come after me for stealing? I beat it down the hill.
Sorry for all the time I’d lost, I plodded on upstream, though I gave more than a moment’s thought to reversing course and heading back the way I’d come, through the boulders, downed trees, slippery rocks, and umbrella monsters. My banged up arms and legs begged me not to put them through all that again. I yielded to their pleas. Onward!
There were no recent signs of human life in this wilderness. None. I’d seen a rusty cable around a big lodgepole pine, left over from logging days some eighty years ago, and near it an old drum, same vintage, that once held Mark’s Chocolate Icing. I’d smiled at that, Mark being my favorite man and chocolate my favorite flavor, but these old relics also brought on a lonely awareness of how far I’d traveled from phone reception, roads, trails, anything to connect me to the people I cared about. What if I were to die out here? Nobody would ever find me. What if my birthday, coming in a few days, were to wind up being my death day? No, that was absurd. I wasn’t going to die out here. Up ahead I was going to find a trail to take me straight to the edge of the camp. I probably wouldn’t get much writing in today, I’d been out here so long. All these obstructions and detours had kept me trekking through this meandering river for a good five or six hours.
The next bend exposed a beautiful granite cliff over a chunk of solid rock as big as a flat-roofed house. Early on I’d been seeing boulders as smooth as ducks, as big as elephants, as round as a turtle or flat as a whale’s back; but ever since that feeling of loneliness had draped itself over me, my metaphors, as if traumatized by the absence of humanity, shied away from nature and led my searching eyes to things that people use—refrigerators, Volkswagons, coffee tables, houses. Once, I saw what looked like a bright yellow flashlight that someone had lost in a pile of rocks under a dead tree. I grew so excited at the prospect of a careless hiker being close by, that I almost wept when I got near enough to see it was a colorful shelf fungus. A dented beer can would have been a joy.
I contemplated going up to visit that gorgeous hunk of granite shaped like a house, but it required a technical climb of the sort I hadn’t done in more than thirty years, and never without ropes and a belay. Caution said no. The river, though, had other ideas; there was no way to continue forward unless I went up there. A dam of clogged boulders and branches in the water had formed a pool so deep that I’d have to swim it, and a swim would soak the manuscript; I had to go for a land traverse.
On the huge ridge, reached by arduous maneuvers of pressure holds and finger grips, I was rewarded by a true sign of human life. So what if it was a thousand years old? This Native American metate used for grinding edible plants told a story of a time when the river flowed clear and a friend from long ago sat as I was sitting, safe, warm, happy, in love with the view. I ate a piece of French toast I’d set aside from breakfast, saving the other for later, and I washed down half my ounce-and-a-half box of raisins with the river water I’d been drinking all day from a plastic bottle. There were warnings back at camp about parasites in the water, but parasites are curable, I figured; death isn’t. The woozy-headed stumble-footed jig of dehydration could be fatal in a situation like this.
It was three o’clock. I had traveled for miles, for hours, a cartoon version of the Haitian proverb: Beyond the mountains, more mountains.
Where was I? Penny was expecting me back at six. If I turned back to struggle through the morass that brought me here, I’d never get there in time. If I pushed on upstream, I was bound to get to the camp, and it couldn’t be much farther.
After a rest on the happy ridge I pushed on through the water, dodging umbrellas, crossing logs, climbing boulders, and falling—falling on slippery rocks, falling from algae-coated sloping banks, falling from ledges and logs, falling in the umbrella leaves, in the rivulets, in the river, in shallow trickles and deep pools, falling completely submerged, manuscript and all, in the never-ending, never clearing stream which I later learned was not the Tuolumne River, but something called Soldier Creek, taking me deeper and deeper into this impenetrable wilderness. Way back by the butterflies there’d been a confluence of streams, but I hadn’t known that. I’d seen water flowing, and followed it upstream.
At six-thirty I spotted a sandbank and climbed out. I had another hour of daylight, but I had fallen twenty-one times. I looked around, thankful for a stretch of land without brambles.
That’s fresh bear tracks, said the intellectual in my head.
Bears don’t want to hurt you, said the writer.
You stole the berries.
Bears don’t know from stealing.
Think claws.
Think Goldilocks.
The voices in my head argued over the risks of camping so close to what might be a bear’s lair, and finally came to a TINA truce: There Is No Alternative. The terrain hadn’t changed over the last couple of hours, but I had. I was depleted of energy and sore all over. My judgment was shot. If a fall into a boulder knocked me out, that could be the end of me. Footprints or no, I would have to spend the night in this desolate place.
I rubbed my sticks and cursed the writers. Hanging my stash of bread and raisins in a tree as an offering to the animals, I gathered long branches for a shelter. Enough to break the wind if it came up, and hold in a little body heat, the three-sided wood structure wasn’t much good for anything else except as a message to the bear: This isn’t a bear kind of thing, Please don’t disturb.
You think that makes sense?
You don’t?
I thatched the roof with those wicked umbrella plants, though that meant having to wade back into the river to fetch them, and it was already getting cold. I’d decided those umbrella thugs weren’t killers after all, just accomplices—the guys who hid the body when the homicidal boulders finished you off.
DUSK
Cold and wet, I sat down in the sand next to my house of sticks to review my assets. No serious injuries: that was a plus. A face-first crash into a boulder hadn’t broken my nose, hadn’t cause a nosebleed, didn’t even hurt. My game leg was holding up, and the wounds on my lacerated arms and legs weren’t dirty; no sign of infection. Add to all that the wristwatch that hadn’t stopped running despite total submersion over and over, and the sum was good news. Food? I glanced at the tree in my front yard, its cache hanging down like a clump of bananas. Bears are messy, there might be a few leftover raisins after a raid. And I had water galore. I wasn’t going to go looney from dehydration.
What’d you say?
Nothing, forget it.
Healthy and in good shape, I wasn’t going to die of exposure from a single night in the woods, even if all I had covering me was a sleeveless tee shirt and a pair of shorts. I had a toy flashlight half the size of my thumb; I knew how to signal an SOS in case an airplane flew over. I had a friend who would start to miss me pretty soon, and maybe tell somebody. I had a pocket knife.
Aron Ralston.
Oh God.
Jack London himself could not have thought up Between a Rock and a Hard Place, Ralston’s true story of a solo climb in Utah, where he got trapped by a falling boulder that hopelessly wedged his arm in the rock. Ralston saved his own life by cutting off the arm—with a dull pocket knife.
But he got out alive, I said to myself; take heart! A moment later a song started up in my head, a corny show tune from the ‘fifties that I’d never liked, never sung, never realized was on deposit in my memory bank—“In the cool cool cool of the evening, tell ‘em I’ll be there…” The infernal tune had been taking over my brain for the last few hours, exactly the way an equally obnoxious song took over Ralston’s while he was prisoner to the boulder. Why were we haunted by these horrid sounds? Oliver Sacks: didn’t I remember something about one of his patients who couldn’t get rid of “Easter Parade” blaring through the radio in her head? She was stuck too, as I recalled—in a convalescent home. Was audio punishment the fate of people who were trapped? Sacks had talked about musical epilepsy, seizures in the frontal lobes. I should pay attention to this queer symptom, try to document it for science. But that was not possible, because all I was able to think when I tried to focus on science, was “In the cool cool cool of the evening, better bring a chair.” Bring a chair? Not likely. Probably “save a chair.” Yes, “save a chair.” Or was it “grab a chair”?
Was I really out here in the setting sun, sitting next to a house of sticks on a piece of property owned by a bear, debating the lyrics of a stupid song? Was I losing it? I forced myself to get back to basics: how to make it through the coming night when I was already shivering. No jacket. No cover for my battered arms and legs. Wet shorts, wet tee-shirt, wet manuscript in a wet canvas bag. Using my raw elbows as anchors, I scooted into my three-sided shelter and worked out a plan: no looking at watch, that would be too depressing; no peeing in bed, despite the wet; too gross. At the crack of dawn get up and go back—the only sure way to reach civilization. Meanwhile, keep flashlight at the ready in case an airplane flies by.
Here, just outside Yosemite National Park, wildfires had been raging all summer. If only I’d had matches, I could have safely built a fire and a smoke spotter would have seen it, and sent people right away. Possibly they were patrolling right now, content that in my neck of the woods the red dragon was asleep; unaware of a stranded writer who would not sleep at all, who would stare into the ghostly night thinking she’d gladly trade a lifetime of royalties for the touch of a human hand, the sound of a human voice. Mailer had called his book on writing The Spooky Art. Little did he know.
The bear’s fresh paw prints were only steps away from my shaking body. Having recently read Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation, I asked myself, How does a bear feel? How does he think? Grandin’s deep sensitivity to our animal cousins brought comfort to my troubled mind. It showed me how to think of the bear as my friend, as someone who would understand that I meant no harm, as one of the benevolent forest creatures like the ones in the fairy tales who had helped Hansel and Gretel. If there were eyes upon me in these dark woods, they were most likely friendly eyes.
You believe that?
I believe it.
On what grounds?
Logic was toughing out another round against Faith when the referee stopped the fight to make way for a quartet coming through from Tin Pan Alley, tickling the needles of the overhanging conifers and rattling my tired brain with yet another soppy crooning of “In the cool cool cool of the evening, tell ‘em I’ll be there...”
In my windy shelter I lay shaking in the frigid night, cold to the bone, more alone than I’d ever imagined possible. If morning would ever come it would be September first, an eerie date, a strange coincidence, as Auden had a 1939 poem by that name, with lines so uncanny that my freezing, bloodstained arms lurched with violent spasms as I recalled them: The music must always play… Lost in a haunted wood… Defenseless under the night…
Cold and wet, I sat down in the sand next to my house of sticks to review my assets. No serious injuries: that was a plus. A face-first crash into a boulder hadn’t broken my nose, hadn’t cause a nosebleed, didn’t even hurt. My game leg was holding up, and the wounds on my lacerated arms and legs weren’t dirty; no sign of infection. Add to all that the wristwatch that hadn’t stopped running despite total submersion over and over, and the sum was good news. Food? I glanced at the tree in my front yard, its cache hanging down like a clump of bananas. Bears are messy, there might be a few leftover raisins after a raid. And I had water galore. I wasn’t going to go looney from dehydration.
What’d you say?
Nothing, forget it.
Healthy and in good shape, I wasn’t going to die of exposure from a single night in the woods, even if all I had covering me was a sleeveless tee shirt and a pair of shorts. I had a toy flashlight half the size of my thumb; I knew how to signal an SOS in case an airplane flew over. I had a friend who would start to miss me pretty soon, and maybe tell somebody. I had a pocket knife.
Aron Ralston.
Oh God.
Jack London himself could not have thought up Between a Rock and a Hard Place, Ralston’s true story of a solo climb in Utah, where he got trapped by a falling boulder that hopelessly wedged his arm in the rock. Ralston saved his own life by cutting off the arm—with a dull pocket knife.
But he got out alive, I said to myself; take heart! A moment later a song started up in my head, a corny show tune from the ‘fifties that I’d never liked, never sung, never realized was on deposit in my memory bank—“In the cool cool cool of the evening, tell ‘em I’ll be there…” The infernal tune had been taking over my brain for the last few hours, exactly the way an equally obnoxious song took over Ralston’s while he was prisoner to the boulder. Why were we haunted by these horrid sounds? Oliver Sacks: didn’t I remember something about one of his patients who couldn’t get rid of “Easter Parade” blaring through the radio in her head? She was stuck too, as I recalled—in a convalescent home. Was audio punishment the fate of people who were trapped? Sacks had talked about musical epilepsy, seizures in the frontal lobes. I should pay attention to this queer symptom, try to document it for science. But that was not possible, because all I was able to think when I tried to focus on science, was “In the cool cool cool of the evening, better bring a chair.” Bring a chair? Not likely. Probably “save a chair.” Yes, “save a chair.” Or was it “grab a chair”?
Was I really out here in the setting sun, sitting next to a house of sticks on a piece of property owned by a bear, debating the lyrics of a stupid song? Was I losing it? I forced myself to get back to basics: how to make it through the coming night when I was already shivering. No jacket. No cover for my battered arms and legs. Wet shorts, wet tee-shirt, wet manuscript in a wet canvas bag. Using my raw elbows as anchors, I scooted into my three-sided shelter and worked out a plan: no looking at watch, that would be too depressing; no peeing in bed, despite the wet; too gross. At the crack of dawn get up and go back—the only sure way to reach civilization. Meanwhile, keep flashlight at the ready in case an airplane flies by.
Here, just outside Yosemite National Park, wildfires had been raging all summer. If only I’d had matches, I could have safely built a fire and a smoke spotter would have seen it, and sent people right away. Possibly they were patrolling right now, content that in my neck of the woods the red dragon was asleep; unaware of a stranded writer who would not sleep at all, who would stare into the ghostly night thinking she’d gladly trade a lifetime of royalties for the touch of a human hand, the sound of a human voice. Mailer had called his book on writing The Spooky Art. Little did he know.
The bear’s fresh paw prints were only steps away from my shaking body. Having recently read Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation, I asked myself, How does a bear feel? How does he think? Grandin’s deep sensitivity to our animal cousins brought comfort to my troubled mind. It showed me how to think of the bear as my friend, as someone who would understand that I meant no harm, as one of the benevolent forest creatures like the ones in the fairy tales who had helped Hansel and Gretel. If there were eyes upon me in these dark woods, they were most likely friendly eyes.
You believe that?
I believe it.
On what grounds?
Logic was toughing out another round against Faith when the referee stopped the fight to make way for a quartet coming through from Tin Pan Alley, tickling the needles of the overhanging conifers and rattling my tired brain with yet another soppy crooning of “In the cool cool cool of the evening, tell ‘em I’ll be there...”
In my windy shelter I lay shaking in the frigid night, cold to the bone, more alone than I’d ever imagined possible. If morning would ever come it would be September first, an eerie date, a strange coincidence, as Auden had a 1939 poem by that name, with lines so uncanny that my freezing, bloodstained arms lurched with violent spasms as I recalled them: The music must always play… Lost in a haunted wood… Defenseless under the night…
Auden was writing of one war; I, awake and shivering, began thinking of another one. Isolation, sleep deprivation, and miserably low temperatures were three forms of torture my country was using in its war on terrorism, at Guantánamo Bay, at Baghram and Abu Ghraib, and in black sites all over the earth—against prisoners defenseless under the night. My suffering, I knew, was no match to theirs. My wet from a high Sierra stream was not the same as the piss of a prison guard on your face. The drowning of my novel was not the same as having to watch your holy scriptures flushed down a filthy toilet. I, blinking my pathetic SOS at the gloomy sky, knew that if my signal was seen, people would come to help me. The prisoners, in the jaws of cruelty, believed what their torturers screamed during hours of interrogation: Nobody can hear you, nobody knows where you are, you’ll never get out of here alive. For me, there was every confidence in the world that once people knew I was lost, they would mount a rescue. Auden again: We must love one another or die.
So I might survive. And the novel? I contemplated the inky words dripping down the pages of my ravaged manuscript. There were other writers who knew the sorrow I was feeling. Not too many years ago Maxine Hong Kingston lost an entire book in the Oakland Hills fire; she was left with mere ashes. The protagonist in an Isaac Singer story, a writer, lost his manuscript somewhere in Buenos Aires and was left with nothing at all. And me? What did I have? I had three hundred waterlogged pages in a soaking wet canvas bag. Shit.
Get real, said the intellectual. What matters here is your survival, period.
But all that work, said the writer: All those drowned phrases, gone.
Suddenly a light switched on in my house of sticks. Those pages! They weren’t burned to a crisp. They weren’t disappeared in a strange city. They were right here, in the bag, tangible—maybe not salvageable the way a terrible first draft is salvageable, but weren’t they good for something? Paper! Orwell had covered himself with paper to keep warm when he was down and out in Paris and London. Bettelheim had written about prisoners slipping somebody a piece of newspaper in the concentration camp, to put under a threadbare jacket. Paper! Was it like goose down, losing its insulating properties when it got wet? Or was it like wool, continuing to give protection even when drenched with water? The canvas bag was under my head, being used as a pillow.
With fingers stiff from the cold I removed the bag of sodden manuscript from its pillow position. I set it over my heart, an eight-and-a-half by eleven-inch trial blanket. I was shaking and shuddering from the cold, but I held it in place. I waited, and… it was almost unbelievable! In the cool cool cool of the evening I felt the chill leaving my left breast. It was working! I moved the tepid cover to my right shoulder for a while, and later to my hip, and to my battered right leg. Left leg. Right arm below the gash. Left arm above the lacerated elbow. It was the Yosemite Hokey Pokey, danced all through the night, warming up each and every part of my poor, lonesome, freezing self, eight-and-a-half by eleven inches at a time, choreographed by my precious, ravaged, illegible manuscript. I trembled through the long and sleepless night, finding comfort in the blurry words that lay so close to my heart.
DAWN
It’s light out. Now what? During a fierce argument with myself about turning back versus plodding on, interrupted by more refrains of the idiotic song, I calculated that, subtracting the climb up to the granite house and the thrash up the escarpment, six hours should get me to the ladybugs, and the ladybugs meant certain safety, whereas the upstream direction could go on for a thousand miles, all the way to the Continental Divide.
I would go back, but I would have to be very, very careful, lest a fall knock me unconscious and sink me in a watery grave under the umbrellas. Those umbrella thugs mustered in green camouflage across the river scared me more than the elusive bear who never showed himself. They were the wilderness contingent of the CIA’s rendition squads, ready to strike, to turn me into one of the disappeared and make me equal after all to the prisoners rotting incognito in undisclosed locations. If the umbrella thugs had their way, the people who cared about me, like the ones who cared about the languishing detainees, would be left in a morbid limbo, never knowing if I was alive or dead. It was for those loved ones, my family and friends, that I staggered, climbed, swam, and swayed my way through the crooked stream, ignoring the raw scrapes on my knees and elbows, the dozens of cuts and scratches all over my thighs, shins, and arms, and the pain a bruised tailbone inserted into every uncertain step. I was in worse shape than the evening before, weak from lack of sleep and too little food. This was going to be a longer trip back than I thought.
Seven hours into the bouldering, climbing, and stumbling, when falling had become a way of life and survival an iffy proposition, I rested on a sun-drenched rock wedged in the riverbank, and took a drink of water. Up ahead, one of yesterday’s most difficult boulders, easy to swim around but treacherous to ascend, glistened in the sunlight. I remembered reaching its peak and having to straddle a wide gap to get to a place where I could work my way down without the manuscript getting wet. Suddenly that challenge struck me as hilarious. I started laughing at the folly of it—all those river gymnastics, those daring leaps and heart-stopping slips, to protect a piece of fiction! Fiction! Could anything be more ridiculous? And it got saturated anyway! Who cares if the novel is ever finished? What difference does it make if it’s published? Fiction! A treatise on the insulating properties of paper, or a passionate reflection on the courage of Martín-Baró, or the nastiness of umbrella gangs--those would be worth risking your life for! But fiction? I was giddy with surprise at my own silliness. I sat on the rock, staring at my past and my future, laughing, laughing, laughing at the absurdity of it all.
I was still laughing when I heard the gritty thunks of the chopper.
Without a thought to falling, I leaped from the rock to the middle of the river and waved my red hat as a flag, ferociously, like a patriot gone mad. Laughing still, I put the flag on the end of a long stick so the helicopter would see me for sure if it came back. I laughed at my own absurdity and at the joy of being found, as the helicopter circled above me three times, four times, leaving no doubt that I’d been seen.
I sat and waited, and after a time—how long? I couldn’t say. Time had ceased to exist. I heard my name being called. Saved!
All the way back to camp, wrist-to-wrist with the members of the volunteer search party who had come from all over the state to hunt for me, I berated myself for my folly. They had thrashed through the cruel brush and stumbled on the slippery rocks to get me, a foolish fiction writer. They had talked to my son on the phone, and been in radio contact with the helicopter, and had told all the people at camp that they could relax and call off their ad hoc search teams. They had notified the sheriff at Rescue Central to say that the ultra-violet night flights wouldn’t be needed, and promised Mark he did not have to organize a memorial for a dead girlfriend. Through the trek out of the forest, and all during the highway ride to the camp, my mind was fixed on the foolishness of my sacrifice. All that…for fiction?
At camp they examined me and fed me and brought little children to look at me, a real live survivor. They brought a chair, and I sat there in the cool cool cool of the evening, half stunned, still berating myself for getting myself practically killed for the sake of fiction. Slowly my sluggish brain cells began to absorb how extensive the mobilization had been and how many people were celebrating my rescue, how many had worried, and how they had cheered when they learned I’d been spotted. Only then did my grudge against fiction begin its retreat back to the lunatic place it had come from. I was able to collect my thoughts.
Jack London, I declared when the fog finally cleared, this survivor is going back to work on that book, that novel, that work of…yes, fiction. To finish it, even if she has to start all over and scratch it out on sheets of tree bark. The manuscript had saved me from hypothermia. But there was more to it than that: literature is worth more than the paper it is written on. It’s about life, and what people mean to each other and do for each other. No wonder I’d been thinking of Auden. The poet got it right: We must love one another or die.
So I might survive. And the novel? I contemplated the inky words dripping down the pages of my ravaged manuscript. There were other writers who knew the sorrow I was feeling. Not too many years ago Maxine Hong Kingston lost an entire book in the Oakland Hills fire; she was left with mere ashes. The protagonist in an Isaac Singer story, a writer, lost his manuscript somewhere in Buenos Aires and was left with nothing at all. And me? What did I have? I had three hundred waterlogged pages in a soaking wet canvas bag. Shit.
Get real, said the intellectual. What matters here is your survival, period.
But all that work, said the writer: All those drowned phrases, gone.
Suddenly a light switched on in my house of sticks. Those pages! They weren’t burned to a crisp. They weren’t disappeared in a strange city. They were right here, in the bag, tangible—maybe not salvageable the way a terrible first draft is salvageable, but weren’t they good for something? Paper! Orwell had covered himself with paper to keep warm when he was down and out in Paris and London. Bettelheim had written about prisoners slipping somebody a piece of newspaper in the concentration camp, to put under a threadbare jacket. Paper! Was it like goose down, losing its insulating properties when it got wet? Or was it like wool, continuing to give protection even when drenched with water? The canvas bag was under my head, being used as a pillow.
With fingers stiff from the cold I removed the bag of sodden manuscript from its pillow position. I set it over my heart, an eight-and-a-half by eleven-inch trial blanket. I was shaking and shuddering from the cold, but I held it in place. I waited, and… it was almost unbelievable! In the cool cool cool of the evening I felt the chill leaving my left breast. It was working! I moved the tepid cover to my right shoulder for a while, and later to my hip, and to my battered right leg. Left leg. Right arm below the gash. Left arm above the lacerated elbow. It was the Yosemite Hokey Pokey, danced all through the night, warming up each and every part of my poor, lonesome, freezing self, eight-and-a-half by eleven inches at a time, choreographed by my precious, ravaged, illegible manuscript. I trembled through the long and sleepless night, finding comfort in the blurry words that lay so close to my heart.
DAWN
It’s light out. Now what? During a fierce argument with myself about turning back versus plodding on, interrupted by more refrains of the idiotic song, I calculated that, subtracting the climb up to the granite house and the thrash up the escarpment, six hours should get me to the ladybugs, and the ladybugs meant certain safety, whereas the upstream direction could go on for a thousand miles, all the way to the Continental Divide.
I would go back, but I would have to be very, very careful, lest a fall knock me unconscious and sink me in a watery grave under the umbrellas. Those umbrella thugs mustered in green camouflage across the river scared me more than the elusive bear who never showed himself. They were the wilderness contingent of the CIA’s rendition squads, ready to strike, to turn me into one of the disappeared and make me equal after all to the prisoners rotting incognito in undisclosed locations. If the umbrella thugs had their way, the people who cared about me, like the ones who cared about the languishing detainees, would be left in a morbid limbo, never knowing if I was alive or dead. It was for those loved ones, my family and friends, that I staggered, climbed, swam, and swayed my way through the crooked stream, ignoring the raw scrapes on my knees and elbows, the dozens of cuts and scratches all over my thighs, shins, and arms, and the pain a bruised tailbone inserted into every uncertain step. I was in worse shape than the evening before, weak from lack of sleep and too little food. This was going to be a longer trip back than I thought.
Seven hours into the bouldering, climbing, and stumbling, when falling had become a way of life and survival an iffy proposition, I rested on a sun-drenched rock wedged in the riverbank, and took a drink of water. Up ahead, one of yesterday’s most difficult boulders, easy to swim around but treacherous to ascend, glistened in the sunlight. I remembered reaching its peak and having to straddle a wide gap to get to a place where I could work my way down without the manuscript getting wet. Suddenly that challenge struck me as hilarious. I started laughing at the folly of it—all those river gymnastics, those daring leaps and heart-stopping slips, to protect a piece of fiction! Fiction! Could anything be more ridiculous? And it got saturated anyway! Who cares if the novel is ever finished? What difference does it make if it’s published? Fiction! A treatise on the insulating properties of paper, or a passionate reflection on the courage of Martín-Baró, or the nastiness of umbrella gangs--those would be worth risking your life for! But fiction? I was giddy with surprise at my own silliness. I sat on the rock, staring at my past and my future, laughing, laughing, laughing at the absurdity of it all.
I was still laughing when I heard the gritty thunks of the chopper.
Without a thought to falling, I leaped from the rock to the middle of the river and waved my red hat as a flag, ferociously, like a patriot gone mad. Laughing still, I put the flag on the end of a long stick so the helicopter would see me for sure if it came back. I laughed at my own absurdity and at the joy of being found, as the helicopter circled above me three times, four times, leaving no doubt that I’d been seen.
I sat and waited, and after a time—how long? I couldn’t say. Time had ceased to exist. I heard my name being called. Saved!
All the way back to camp, wrist-to-wrist with the members of the volunteer search party who had come from all over the state to hunt for me, I berated myself for my folly. They had thrashed through the cruel brush and stumbled on the slippery rocks to get me, a foolish fiction writer. They had talked to my son on the phone, and been in radio contact with the helicopter, and had told all the people at camp that they could relax and call off their ad hoc search teams. They had notified the sheriff at Rescue Central to say that the ultra-violet night flights wouldn’t be needed, and promised Mark he did not have to organize a memorial for a dead girlfriend. Through the trek out of the forest, and all during the highway ride to the camp, my mind was fixed on the foolishness of my sacrifice. All that…for fiction?
At camp they examined me and fed me and brought little children to look at me, a real live survivor. They brought a chair, and I sat there in the cool cool cool of the evening, half stunned, still berating myself for getting myself practically killed for the sake of fiction. Slowly my sluggish brain cells began to absorb how extensive the mobilization had been and how many people were celebrating my rescue, how many had worried, and how they had cheered when they learned I’d been spotted. Only then did my grudge against fiction begin its retreat back to the lunatic place it had come from. I was able to collect my thoughts.
Jack London, I declared when the fog finally cleared, this survivor is going back to work on that book, that novel, that work of…yes, fiction. To finish it, even if she has to start all over and scratch it out on sheets of tree bark. The manuscript had saved me from hypothermia. But there was more to it than that: literature is worth more than the paper it is written on. It’s about life, and what people mean to each other and do for each other. No wonder I’d been thinking of Auden. The poet got it right: We must love one another or die.
