Scrublands, Part IV

Yes, we are brief. Yes, we are more than cells...

Photo by Chris Hardy on Unsplash

I finished my scribbles and sketches of the road, the lake, and the countryside. The practice of scribbling and sketching is part of keeping memory. There were a couple of more sketches and a few more notes I wanted to complete before we headed back south. We were leaving on Sunday. We had two more days.

I packed up my journal and went back to the tent and slept. I woke up after an hour and read. Books are part of every trip. For this trip, one of the books I brought was Olav Hauge: Selected Poems. I read the collection and marked a poem called “Everyday.”

But it’s possible to live
in the everyday as well,
in the grey quiet day,
set potatoes, rake leaves,
carry brushwood.
There’s so much to think about here in the world,
one life is not enough for it all.
After work you can fry pork
and read Chinese poems.
Old Laertes cut briars,
dug round his fig tree,
and he let the heroes fight on at Troy.

Along with Hauge’s work, I brought Neil Theise’s book, Notes on Complexity. I underlined a paragraph about the passing of generations, about the passing of us:

Thus, we have yet another complementarity: each of us is, equally, an independent living human and also just one utterly minute, utterly brief unit of a single vast body that is life on Earth. From this point of view, the passing of human generation, in peace or turmoil, is nothing more than the shedding of cells from one’s skin.

The poet tells us to “fry pork/and read Chinese poems.” The scientist tells us that we are “utterly minute, utterly brief.” Perhaps the truth of one gives intention to the other. Yet, for some of us, there is Old Laertes. He cut briars. He sailed on the voyage for the Golden Fleece. He mourned and waited for his son.

I put the books away in my backpack. As I did, I recalled men I have watched in Greece. Men carrying groceries. Men untangling ropes or sharing a wooden bench, as they stared out at the sea. I thought about the “nothing more than the shedding of cells from one’s skin.” And I thought about “rake leaves, / carry brushwood.” Yes, we are brief. Yes, we are more than cells.

The day passed, and Dad stayed with me. It was strange that I had associated Dad with a volleyball game. He had been around fifty years old in the dream. We were living in Utah. But why volleyball? I could have seen him on his motorcycle. I could have seen him in his church office. I could have seen him reading in our home. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe I needed any image of Dad alive to replace the one I had of him dead. For two decades, Dad and I shared adventures together or, as my grandmother insisted, caused trouble. I was sick as a child, and I missed a lot of school. Many days I stayed at home. If I felt well enough, Dad took me on his ministerial visits. I went with him to see people in the hospital and to see people in what we used to call old folks homes. I went with him to meet other preachers, though he didn’t often meet other preachers. Once I went with him to the juvenile detention center in Beaumont, Texas. I must have been nine years old. I sat in the waiting area, while Dad had gone back to the holding area. After he came back, I asked Dad who he had seen. We were in the car by then. “A young woman,” Dad said.

“A young woman?”

“That’s right. A girl.”

“What’d she do?”

“I’m not sure I should tell you.”

“You can tell me.”

“Do you want to know?”

“Yes sir.”

“She and a group of her friends killed an old woman. The old woman had befriended them.”

“She killed an old woman?”

“She did. She and her friends.”

“Why did they kill her?”

He shrugged.

“People are mean.”

“That’s really mean.”

“After they killed her, she told me that they felt hungry. So they went into the old woman’s kitchen and made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The girl said she was disappointed there was nothing else to eat.”

I don’t remember what I said.

“They killed the old woman. Then they ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,” he repeated.

Again, I don’t recall saying anything. Perhaps I tried to imagine the girl and her friends, eating sandwiches, and the old woman dying in some room. It was a meanness, a terrible, terrible meanness.

Dad had invited me into his life. He spoke with people like that girl who had murdered an old woman. He ministered to people like her and to people who had done considerably less evil than her, though I am slow to rank degrees of evil, but Dad told them that Jesus had been put on earth to forgive them. They needed to accept Jesus’ forgiveness if they hoped to wake up to something better than this life. There wasn’t a person in the world that I loved more than my dad. And this was my first camping trip since Dad had died. I had been one of his caregivers. During that time of care, this man of stories, my Dad, sunk deeper into silence. In those last weeks, movies sometimes gave him a chuckle. He watched television with the sound off, but closer to death, he turned up the volume. Mom and I would help him get from his room to the living room multiple times a day. In the evenings, he would sometimes try to watch a movie with me and Mom, but he couldn’t settle, even if he enjoyed the movie. He got restless. Mom and I would be getting further into the plot of whatever movie we watched, then Dad would want to move. He insisted on going back to his bedroom. Mom and I moved him. We got him comfortable in his bed. We said our goodnights. Then ten minutes later, Dad wanted to be in the living room again. I must have lifted him off the floor fifty times. His mind wouldn’t tell his legs that they didn’t work anymore. He weighed one hundred forty pounds. He once weighed two hundred pounds. His body was finished with him, and he was finished with his body.

It was a hard time. It was a hard time for many reasons. I missed Dad’s stories. I missed them while staying with him, while seeing him to his death. I probably resented the silence he adopted, though I don’t like admitting this about myself, as doing so suggests that I am thinking more about my needs than his. What right do any of us have to tell another man how to die? But Dad’s vitality was in his stories. After he stopped sharing stories with people, he diminished. He became trapped within himself, and there was nowhere for him to go. There were no stories to connect him with others and in doing so, release him. To hear his stories, especially as he aged, was like finding hot coals in a fire bed. You scrape through all the ash and burnt wood until you find those red-black coals. When you find them, you can make a fire again. You add tinder, add some stabs of kindling, and then the fire comes back to life. It warms you, gives you a kindly place to sit, and protects you from whatever is on the outside of all that light and warmth. Five years prior to this summer, Dad was hospitalized with a heart attack. It wasn’t a severe heart attack, as the doctors informed my mother, but it was enough of a heart attack to land him in the hospital for a few days. At the time, my family and I lived outside of Longmont, Colorado. My sister lived outside of Denver. Mother called us to insist that we not to worry, not to drive down, and that Dad would be fine. We all drove the next morning. It was the first time in my life that I had seen Dad in the hospital. Dad had his share of health problems—prostate issues, diabetes, bad knees, and a poor heart—but he had never been placed in a hospital. Yet even then and for years prior, Dad had entered a time of silence. I don’t know why, but his capacity to engage with people grew smaller. He told fewer stories. That afternoon, as we walked into his hospital room, Dad said to us, “What are y’all doing here?” My sister said, “We’ve come to see you, Dad.” “What for?” “Because you’re in the hospital.” “What?” “You’re in the hospital.” “Oh.” “Don’t you know you’re in the hospital, Dad?” Dad nodded. He then shut his eyes and pretended to sleep. I rubbed Dad’s legs and asked him how he was doing. He opened his eyes. He looked at me. Then he saw me, and I saw Dad.

He said, “Let me tell you, there was this woman in one of my churches, and this was years ago, and she was an old woman by the time I knew her. Her circumstances were that she was the child of her father’s child. You understand? Her daddy had seeded his own daughter who in turn gave birth to her. The man was her granddaddy and her daddy.”

“Alright.”

“Incest, right?”

“Yes sir.”

“So she got older, this girl, this woman. She reached her teens maybe, and this man started having sex with her.”

“He started having sex with his daughter’s daughter, which is to say his granddaughter?”

“That’s right.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah. Damn. Anyway, this old man started having sex with his daughter slash granddaughter. And it was this daughter slash granddaughter who grew up to be the woman in my church.”

“Alright.”

“Do you want to guess what she did?”

“I hate to guess, but you can tell me.”

“It was one day or one night, I don’t know which it was, while her grandfather slash father was having sex with her, that she brought up a pistol she had hid in the room, and while the old man was having sex with her, she got ahold of that pistol and shot that old man right in the face. Blew him away. Blew his brains out.”

And much like the child I had been, I did not know what to say.

“That happened.”

“That’s quite a story, Dad.”

“You know what else?”

“What?”

“No one did a damn thing. No one. Not the sheriff. Not a judge. Not a lawyer. Not the coroner. She killed the old man and that was that.”

My Dad’s eyes were glowing with story.

“After that, she went on and lived a pretty normal life. She married the local mercantile owner. He was a little older than her, but they had a good life together.”

“A happy ending?”

“I mean, I would think so. Wouldn’t you? Except you tell people a story like that or you talk about the people I used to know, real people, you understand, who walked around and bred and grew gardens and just lived, they don’t believe you or they don’t want to believe you. They don’t believe such a world or such people could have existed, though they did, both of them did.”

In the moment of telling his story, lying in a hospital bed with his crippled heart, Dad came back to life. It was Dad. Dad as I had known him for most of my life. I wanted to believe those coals might stay warm.

I don’t know if I was awake or asleep when Tore came back to the tent. I may have been asleep. It was after seven o’clock, and I was surprised at the time. You lose time in an Arctic summer. Tore had a bucket of berries with him.

“Looks like you found the berries,” I said.

“This is nothing. I could have picked a hundred times more.”

“Are these the ones we saw a couple of days ago?”

“Not those berries. Those were not ripe.”

“Still?”

“Not yet. I walked to the valley by the sea, the farthest valley. There were thousands of berries. I didn’t even walk to the end the valley but look how many berries I found. Maybe it was warmer there or got more sunlight. I don’t know. Maybe the sea helped them grow.”

He tipped the bucket towards me.

“The girls will be happy,” he said.

Tore was talking about his two daughters.

“I imagine they will be.”

“What have you been doing?”

“I read a bit, sketched a bit. I slept more than I should have.”

“Maybe you needed the sleep.”

“Maybe.”

“If you had my watch it would tell you.”

“I’ll be okay.”

“I am going to get the table from the car. We can set it up outside. Then I can pack the berries in those freezer containers. It’s nice weather now. The wind has stopped.”

“Do you need help with the table?”

“No, no. I got it.”

We were soon sitting at the table Tore had brought. He had chairs for both of us. He set up the table between the tent and the lake. He got out the gas stove, and I set it up and brewed a cup of tea. Tore then carried out a block of cheese and a box of crackers from the tent. He talked about the ripened berries and was glad no one knew about them. He wondered if he could get another day of berry picking before we left. We looked out over the lake. The water was calm for the first time since we had made camp. Trout were rising.

“You should catch those trout,” Tore said.

I saw them.

“They’re all small fish,” I said. “See their rise rings?”

“A couple of them are larger.”

We watched the water. More fish rose and a couple of the rings were larger.

“You should try.”

“I don’t want to go through the hassle of rigging my rod to catch a fish that small.”

I held up my hands about five inches apart.

Tore shrugged. “Some of them are bigger.”

The trout continued to rise. There were a couple of bigger fish, like Tore said, but I wasn’t going to cast for them. I started to wonder why I wasn’t casting for them. It was true that the trout were small. Most of them were between four and six inches long from what I could see. The largest fish was maybe ten inches. But it was not the size of the fish that kept me from fishing. Rather, I did not want to make the effort to fish. After so many years of fishing, I lost the desire to prove myself a fisherman. I lost the desire to catch every fish in the water. I was, and I am, a good fly fisherman. If there is a fish to catch, then I stand a fair chance of catching it. Perhaps I had become confident enough as a fisherman that I did not need to catch fish, which, by certain measures, does not make sense. Or maybe something about fly fishing had gone out of me.

I don’t know, but I fished anyway.

I strung up my fly rod and tied on a caddis imitation. I didn’t see any caddis on the water, but the fish were taking bugs off the surface. The caddis fly pattern was buggy. On my first cast I caught a fish. I swung the fish over to Tore and asked him if he thought it was a good eating size. He thought it was the perfect size. “Pan size” is what we used to call fish between six and eight inches long. That was back when I guided, and clients kept more fish in those days. I made two more casts and caught another fish. The second fish was bigger than the previous fish. I swung the fish over to Tore. He took the fish from the hook and cracked its head with the back of his knife, killing it instantly. Two more fish, I decided. I wanted to catch two more, which would make two brace and enough for dinner. I moved and watched for risers. When you fly fish a lake, you need to move. The fish quit biting if you stay in one place. I skirted around the lake, hoping for a bigger fish to show itself. I waited. Made a cast. Waited. Made another cast. Before an hour had passed, I caught two more trout, including a røye.

We cleaned the fish in the outlet stream. It is a beautiful process to clean fish in a stream. You cut a fish from its vent to the top of its jaw. Then with your fingers peel out the gills and pull them downward along the cut you made. Then out comes the offal and sometimes eggs. You splash the fish in the water. If it’s a sunny day, the colors will sparkle. You use your thumb to push out the bloodline and wash the inside of the cavity, and the meat is clean and sometimes pink. It’s bloody colorful and doesn’t smell. Back at the table, Tore dashed the fish with salt and pepper. He cooked them in a pan over the gas stove. He cooked them in lots of butter. They tasted very fine, but part of why they tasted so good was because of the pan. That morning Tore had fried bacon in the same pan. He had fried the bacon and scorched the pan. There were bits of burnt bacon stuck to it, which made the trout extra delicious. We ate. We visited. We talked about fish and berries and warmer days and places to go. We talked about loss and where to find life after loss. I left my fly rod propped against the tent. It was ready to fish. I had tied a crisp new fly to the tippet. It was another caddis imitation. I did this sensing that I would not cast again that evening. But I liked seeing the fly rod there, leaning against the side of the tent and at the end of another story.

We washed our plates and the pan then went separately into the evening. Tore climbed up the hill behind camp to do a language lesson (he decided last year to learn French and Spanish) and to read his messages. I stayed beside the lake. It was good to fish and to catch fish. I had picked a good fly. I had made long, neat casts. I hooked every fish that took the fly. Then I stopped fishing after we had enough for a meal. I felt like something of my old life had returned. There was a sense of being on an adventure. A sense of being alone but capable. A sense that there was such a lot of world to see, as the song goes, and I did not feel judged or unloved or undesired for taking care, for needing to take care. I fished properly and caught fish, as the edges of this world filled my wounded, sometimes angry heart. There was, too, a sense of gratitude for being able to sit beside the lake, for being here, as it were, and for being with Tore, who let me travel into this, his country with him. I felt grateful for the four small trout and the taste of bacon and butter, for my fly rod propped against the tent, for the last dirt road at the end of the world. I thought of Dad and how he loved slow evenings. Dad had known I was a good fly fisherman. He would have allowed me more than that, but that is what dads do sometimes.

Camp was tidy. I had my sleeping bag spread over the cot. I had broken down the fly rod and return it to its tube. My fishing kit was inside the tent. Tore remained on the hill. I decided to walk the road, and I walked in the direction of the village. The sun was at the crest of the horizon, and what was left of it brought out the colors of the landscape. There were the mossy greens of the low grasses and the sharp, waxy greens of berry plants. The sunlight caused outcrops to look like ancient monoliths but preserved. I walked under the same sunlight, and it spoke of souls. Yet I could not think about that too much. The evening was too fragile to risk losing anything.

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Read previous installments from Scrublands:

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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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