Scattering
Some days we cannot be sure what is real.
Scattering: the process by which light looks pale or white on the horizon.
“But peace abhorreth artificial joys”
From the II Canto, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
-Lord Byron
The earth rolls out from the road above my house and all along the roads everywhere in pillows of green. All this green and the sun like we have now, some days we cannot be sure what is real.
The hour is early. I am pacing between the living room, where I have two books open on the couch, and my library, where a notebook sits open on the desk. Going back and forth, I sometimes pause to read and then write about the connections between what I am reading and what I am thinking. I do not need these connections to make sense to anyone else but myself, and I need them to amend the space between the couch and my desk.
I keep thinking I will settle soon. Settle into this new season, settle into the fact of my job ending, settle into a kind of peace. I am not a consistent person. I am not good at sustaining anything. It has been years since a moment of peace could carry me for days. After I left home in my late teens, I lived alone in the high country of a handsome mountain range. The mountain range was a two hour drive from the fields where I sometimes watched the sunset. I never minded driving down from the mountain, though I often felt like I needed an excuse to make the drive. So, if I needed food, I could drive down to the village and shop for groceries and then drive another twenty miles out to the farm country where the fields lay. There were other times when my boss asked me to move horses or gather up saddles or fencing equipment from his property in town. Running errands and getting ready for trips was part of my job, and doing those things gave me a reason to drive to town, which meant another chance to catch the sunset. There were days, too, when I left the mountain to watch the sunset without permission or excuse. I could be impulsive. I could do something superfluous that cost me gasoline and hours and sleep. But what were hours to me then? What was sleep? Whenever I felt heartbroken, lonely, short of dreams, missing my family, missing stories from back home, missing myself and who I thought I could become, then I would drive for the sunset. I could feel it as I drove. I anticipated that moment when I would feel all that goodness and beauty of this life. Maybe that feeling would sustain me and remain sacred and linger on somehow. After I found just the right field, I would settle into the back of my truck, at least if the weather was warm enough or not raining. Then slowly, slowly the sky changed. The world entered the sublime, and all that country, all those fields, the sky, the deserts to the northwest and south, the mountains to the southeast, were all kindled by another heaven. That’s when the peace came. It ran through my body like good, fresh air, like how the air smells when lilacs or chestnut trees are in bloom. All that filled my soul. I tried not to think about that peace too much, not while I sat there. It took years before I understood that if we inject ourselves into conversations with whatever gives us peace, then that conversation, that moment is over, and we are left with ourselves again. Back then, the peace stayed with me. I could go weeks without seeing the sunset. I carried this peace. Or maybe the peace carried me. It sounds prettier to say the latter, but it also implies the peace might not carry me or might not carry me anymore.
I wonder about that, about peace not carrying me anymore. Early morning like it is. The school bag packed. The coffee consumed. The machine turned off. The cereal eaten and the bowl washed. If I could wait a while longer then maybe more would make sense. A little onward, as I sometimes pray, lend thy guiding hand/ To these dark steps a little further on.
There are two weeks remaining in the school year. Students are ready for the school year to end. We are all ready for the school year to end. There are no more exams. No more parent/teacher conferences. We all wish to be outside. The sun is up. The sky is blue. The trees are green. We have spent plenty of days bundled up, huddled up, and sometimes cozy. But now it is summer, and some of the children will travel with their parents over the next few weeks. Some of them will spend days in the mountains, staying at the family hytta. Maybe all of them will enjoy the freedom of these freer days. I continue to be an observer and a misplaced instructor. Admittedly, my attention span has grown shorter. I want to be inside my own head, dreaming about those books I will read this summer or conjuring up hotels and rooms that fall almost instantly silent after crossing their thresholds. In Europe, hotels and rooms achieve this with a magnificence. We can leave the busiest street in Milan and enter a hushed sanctuary within a step or two. Suddenly there are paintings we feel we should recognize. There are hallways that lead to reading rooms and rooms where we can forget what century we are living in. With summer here, I find it easier to drift into these heady rooms. I do not want my thoughts to be interrupted. I have grown more protective of time spent inside my own head.
There continue to be stories at school. I do not want to forget these stories. I try to write them down when I get home, but I cannot keep up with them. Stories can appear as a nod. A glance. An unexpected email. Light in a room. A view from a window. A trace of perfume. A cobbled alley between crowded streets. The sound of music we love coming from somewhere. For these encounters to become stories, they must enter the heart. We can stand along any number roadways. We can sit by the sea and stare at sunlight until we go blind. We can stop and study the light in every room. We can watch the snowmelt and make notes year after year about the sun’s return. But until something enters the heart, we will not find a story. And like peace, a story may not find us.
On May 2nd, I received an email from my friend Lizzie, letting me know that her grandfather had died. My family has known Lizzie’s family and her grandfather for almost two decades. In her email, Lizzie referred to her grandfather as, “the Wonderful Walter Middleton.” She is correct, of course. Walter was wonderful. Walter and I had visited with each other over the years. These were visits outside the expected family conversations, though he and I rarely talked for more than a few minutes at a time. We told stories. I learned about his farm and how he grew up, how he plowed the family fields with horses when he was a teenager. He was not called to service for the second World War because England, like other countries, required farmers to grow food. He enjoyed bowls (the English game) as an older man, and he loved trips to the coast. He raised sheep. He wore a tie when going about the farm. He wore a tie until he wasn’t required to wear one. His only wife, Margaret, had insisted that he wear a tie. After Margaret passed, plus a few years more, Walter felt respectable enough not to don a tie every morning. Most days when I was around Walter, he wore a tattersall shirt, a wool jumper, as the English prefer to say, and often a cap and brown farm shoes or dark green gumboots, depending on the weather. He was a tall, lean man, with a large face, and irreplaceable hands. I am not sure how old Walter was when he died, but I will guess he was 94 or 95 years old.
I read Lizzie’s email and tried to recall details about Walter. I wanted to speak out loud what I remembered about him, to usher those memories into the air. I did this, and I found him again on those occasions when we visited over the years. I am not sure that I grieved, however. Walter had lived all the life he had been given, as far as I knew him. I will miss Walter as Walter, as someone who I admired and who I ate dinners with and spent holidays with, as someone who drove my sons around on a tractor and let them tend to newborn lambs, as someone who was very dear to his family. But I also found myself missing Walter as a man from a time I have not known, and yet a time that does, somehow, remain present. There is an echo. I thought of how my grandparents courted each other to the voice of a young Sinatra. I thought of standing under ruins during a rainstorm. I thought of farmers who farmed wearing ties.
The same morning I received Lizzie’s email, I was expected to be at one of the local farms where I would meet students. The farm is less than a 10 minute drive from my house. Anne was bringing the students. They were going to learn how local farms operate. They were also going to assist with proper farm chores. Come lunch time, they would eat together in a lavvu the farmer, May-Hege, had set up on her property. I was a few minutes late that morning. By the time I arrived, the children had already been divided into two groups. The one group was inside the barn. They were watching the cows get fed and washed. The other group was outside, working with May-Hege. Together they hauled rails to the vegetable garden. The vegetable garden was a few meters below the hillside where the rails had been stacked. They were heavy, too, and it took the entire group, plus one adult, to carry them down to the garden. After the rails were situated, May-Hege and I brought over fence posts. The rails were secured by the posts, which created a series of raised beds. The children were expected to participate. I encouraged them, but I admit I wasn’t very interested in what we were doing, not because I don’t like farms or farmwork. There are plenty of fences and ditches under my bones. I like May-Hege, too. She is a generational farmer and knows her land and can tell a story worth keeping. But my thoughts were elsewhere. It was cloudy outside, and I am romantic about cloudy days. I daydream and try to sniff out ghosts from the air. For all the cows mooing, the children telling each other what to do, what not to do, and the sound of pumps and strange machines, there were still veins of silence. I was glad for this silence, as I couldn’t hear much of anything that morning.
I held on for time. I did what I do. I facilitated the kids. We carried rails and laid them in the garden where May-Hegge wanted them. I studied the farm and noted where the barns stood, where the birch logs had been left to dry, where there were clearings and two-track roads leading into the mountains. I looked for stories. I listened for them. But my heart wasn’t there. I don’t know why. It didn’t help that an ear infection had reduced my already limited hearing to next to nothing. It happens from time to time. My hearing has been damaged since childhood, and the upper registries are gone. This was the consequence of a mis-dosage of antibiotics. It is almost necessary for me to look at someone while talking with them, if I wish to hear them. As a child, I naturally developed an ability to read lips. Most people have no idea how consistently I read lips. I also talk funny. People who have relationships with other hearing impaired people can identify my deficient hearing whenever I speak. All that aside, I couldn’t hear much of anything that morning. When I spoke, it sounded like I was speaking inside a fish bowl, one filled with water but no fish. A hearing impaired person can beg “what,” “excuse me,” “pardon me,” “come again,” “what’s that,” and “I’m sorry” only so many times before he’s tried, frustrated, and will give up and will isolate himself. Of course the children figured out I was deaf. They did what kids do: they tested my deafness. They exaggerated when they spoke, moving their lips and mouths with exaggerated annunciation to judge my lip reading ability, this without realizing that lip readers read ordinary conversation through ordinary lip or mouth movement. Anything out of the ordinary screws us up. Then a few of the kids experimented with how low they could talk before I heard them. I wasn’t upset with these antics. I expected them. Kids are more curious than they are mean. Besides, I was in the fishbowl. I was also no longer interested in the children. Parts of me were gone that morning, and I wasn’t going to give any more away. What I did was ask Anne to contact the doctor’s office for me and to find out if my doctor could squeeze me in for an appointment. Anne was understanding. She made the call, haggled with the secretary, and I was given an immediate appointment. Then I left. It was a mercy.
While driving away from the farm, I wanted to be in a time of afterwards—after the doctor’s appointment, after I would be given antibiotics, after I could be at home again and respond to Lizzie’s email, after I had thought about why I could not find a story that morning, why I could not connect with anything, not with the kids, not with the farm, not with the fact of my standing in a world I claim to love. I wanted to be elsewhere. Enough had been there—the barns, the kids, the countryside—but the heart, my heart was missing.
And I confess that I have worried about this. I do worry about this. I have worried about what it is to become unmoved or untouched or not to feel. Is that not to lose faith? To lose peace? To lose story?
To be human, we must keep our faith in many things, not the least of which is what echoes inside our own beating hearts. To risk not hearing them is to risk our humanity. Yet to hear them is to invite life into life, even to a point of excess or saturation. Then we can remember these echoes or they will remember us, and we can find them again in places that are sacred because they exist. We can set them beneath stones. Then some later day may arrive when we lift those stones and hear who we have been, hear our elsewhere, hear the very place or very voice from whence those echoes emanate. Perhaps such an echo is beside the sea, in the corner of a potato field, or hidden within the desk of some charming room inside a quiet villa, or someplace where sunlight surprises us back to life. There we might find another echo, if we have listened carefully, if it has reached for us. Consider that we do not seek the dead among ruins. We travel to ruins in search of echoes, of stories, of some human who long ago stacked one stone on top of another or who chipped or painted some guiding image of an animal, of a hand, of a spirit form, of what has returned, or might return, to life. There someone was moved, someone was touched. And still we can abandon all of this. The shock is not that we lose them but that we choose to lose them, that we sacrifice these reverberations upon the idols and alters of the inane.
It’s been said before: the other can leave.
While driving to the doctor’s office, I tried to recall some last moment I spent with Walter. The sea and farms ran past my window. One of the schools where I teach sat quiet. I wondered what would happen at the doctor’s office.
Was it by chance that I met students on a farm on the same morning that I learned of Walter’s death? It is true that I could not find a story. I could not connect with the children. Even after recalling one or two moments with Walter, even after speaking them aloud, I could not ground myself there. I tried to sit inside of memory. A memory arrived when the children began to hammer down the fenceposts. They did this with a large mallet, turning the mallet sideways so that the broadside and not the head of the mallet would connect with the fencepost. The effort was too much for the children though. May-Hege and I finished the job. While working with her, I recalled that setting fenceposts was the last job I did with Walter. Ten years or more have passed since Walter and I did that job. Walter was in his eighties then. I held the posts, and Walter slung not a mallet but a sledgehammer. I scrunched to the side but did my best to keep the post steady with both hands. I don’t recall ever seeing a man swing a sledgehammer with such joy. Walter became the exception. Again and again he swung the sledge onto the post, long and well-aimed swings that started at his knees, circling high and gaining momentum over his head and then crashing down against the head of the fencepost! The more he swung the sledge, the more he smiled. At one point he laughed. When we finished, he squeezed my shoulder.
“We did good work today.”
“I think so, Walter.”
“Good work for a day like this.”
“Yes sir.”
We headed back towards the house.
“We should get a proper dinner for that.”
The last time I saw Walter was two years ago. He was bedridden. His bed, along with a bed for his partner, Grace, had been set up in the living room of his home. A home health nurse came by three times a day to help them. Walter lived a stone’s throw from his family, and they checked on him often. He and Grace lived in the downstairs of his two story house, as it was more convenient to reach the bathroom and kitchen. His mind was good. He knew me. He knew my wife and sons. He asked about them. He told me that he wasn’t at his best anymore. I shook his hand, and he held mine for a few seconds longer. His bed had been positioned so that he could see outside and see his small garden and the acreage where the sheep were kept. The sunlight was supreme that afternoon. It was supreme in a Yorkshire way, which is mellow and brings out the blues in the fields.
“They’re not mine to worry about anymore,” Walter said.
“What’s not yours to worry about, Walter?”
“The garden. The land. The sheep. They’re not mine to worry about anymore.” He took a breath, stared a little longer out the window. “Someone else will need to worry about them now, I suppose.”
“Yes. I suppose so.”
He did not turn from the window. He did not look at me when he spoke.
“It’s a lovely day,” he said, “the sun like it is.”
It was the Easter season. Later that day I went back to our hotel and slept and later still we went to Evensong.
It can be difficult to guess what time it is with the sunlight we have this time of year. The sun doesn’t drop below the horizon. I will have a couple of more hours this morning to scribble, to pace these rooms. The river up the road is clear enough to catch a fish. Maybe I will give fishing a try. I know a couple of pools where the water has carved deeply into the stone, and the salmon like to wait there before they move upstream.
Damon Falke is the author of, among other works, The Scent of a Thousand Rains, Now at the Uncertain Hour, By Way of Passing, and Koppmoll (film). He lives in northern Norway.
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beautiful work, damon. finding meaning where we can. its the little things. the quiet times. the unexpected connections. you weave all of this brilliantly, as always. thank you.
One of your best Damon. I don't know of anyone better than you are at writing of memory, time past, and lost, yet bringing it back into the present moment. And that ending with the fish. Brilliant. Thanks, as always, for the gifts you bring my friend. It always feels like I'm right there with you. You know, our souls like to wander, and sometimes they need to be lost, in order to be found again.