Memoir

The leaves are endless! Beatific green, prodigal green, unfurling continually alongside this path, pacing me. Round every curve green and green and green again! How long could this go on? Such is the temperate rainforest in summer. The wild currants are in profusion, on stalks so intensely magenta they verge on hurting the eyes. Really the only discomforts here are mere inconveniences and not hazards. The fecundity at times becomes cloying, as when earth clings to the sweat on your skin and won’t brush off but would sooner turn to mud, or when your face is the first thing on the forest morning path to break all the webs the spiders strung in the night. There are no hurricanes, no volcanoes, no deadly cold nor heat. In contrast to, say, the American West, which in places is rife with things to scratch, bite, sting and poison you, and the grass is often too brittle to lay on. This Blue Ridge is old, decaying, millennia past its peak — the silence on the high outcroppings interrupted only by loosening and chinking shale, slatey plates yielding now to gravity and piece by piece slipping down.

So it is not exciting or stimulating here, not building or erupting, and life here is largely unchallenged. Tranquil. More fiery people grow restless and split, undone by the pull to stillness and slowing. For me it has been perfect these last years, helpmeet for the dissolution of my own hard plates. Any place with so many songbirds and tinkling crickets and cottontail bunnies in daybreak dew has to engender an innocence. A friend who had never been east of the Mississippi once visited me here, and one evening we stepped into a grove lit by fireflies. They were thick and the trees soaring, and he stumbled backward clutching his head and called out, “My god! Is anyone seeing this?” When he was told what they were — creatures he had read of and imagined as a child but thought were only the stuff of fairy tales — tears came to his eyes and he said, “Don’t you see what’s happening? It’s a miracle!” It happens every night in this place.

It is said there are only remnants left of the great Eastern forest, but in the humidity here I can feel the expanse of it, exhaling into us from antiquity, so I know somewhere it is still whole.

~

The garden was vast by backyard standards, and more to a child’s eyes. The yard was an acre and all of it cultivated, either in fruit trees inherited from the previous owner or in my dad’s visions and labor. I’m not sure where he came up with gardening, as certainly the tending of living growing things was nothing he was raised with. Even the blue ticks they kept for hunting were regarded only as work animals, nothing too far removed from livestock. They went unnamed and spent their whole lives in a sturdy wood kennel at the back of the property. H.C. never could bear too much life staring him in the face.

I’m fairly sure most of the food my dad was raised on came from cans. Perhaps a childhood of potted meat and sad gray green beans is enough to make anyone crave a garden. For my father, though, it was something more, because he didn’t just make a garden. He made an empire of fruiting and flowering things — Kubla Khan’s pleasure dome in our backyard. Watermelons, plums, tomatoes — snap peas as sweet as the fruit. He built permanent beds for strawberries and irises, and a trellis the length of the garden for vining Concord grapes. He kept compost in chicken-mesh barrels taller than me, where grass clippings and fallen autumn leaves and manure from the neighbors’ ponies got layered in with other things that had once been alive and left to winter over. Every spring by the same strange forces that produced things like the fairy stones, the mixture of death and decay became the purest, most innocuous soil ever, a potent and concentrated fertilizer. And in remarkable homeostasis, there was always just enough to dig into everything that needed it.

There were hills for sledding in winter and a Seussian mimosa that blew pink and white tufts all over in spring, and you could go barefoot everywhere because there was nothing but soft grass to step on. And to working all this my father brought impossible energy. He was in his thirties then and strong, built for the hauling and digging the growing of things requires. He could run the tiller for hours and be energized rather than tired, and sometimes he jogged the loaded garden cart around just because he could, because it felt good. His body and the sun and the air and the earth task at hand were things he rejoiced in, and they infused his academic life with simple natural vitality. In those days he often seemed happy — peaceful in the way of one satisfied with life.

The yard was strange in its excess, and stranger yet because we lived in an ordinary neighborhood — a straightforward residential street of ranch houses and brick duplexes on the south end of town, not three blocks off Main Street. Part of what had appealed to my parents about the property was that the street was developed on only one side and all the houses looked out on a sweeping apple orchard. Good for raising kids and right in town. Shortly after they moved in, the town bought up the orchard and turned it into subsidized housing, so I grew up with other kids over there instead of apples. When we piled off the bus after school, we’d slip our backpacks and wander the tenement’s culverts and elaborate drainage system — a practice my parents roundly discouraged, but all the concrete and ditches and trickling scum in the tunnels fascinated me because it was so different from my own yard, which was colorful and flourishing and alive.

There were crabapples we didn’t do anything with, but it was fun sometimes to eat one or two for the rush of sour, and on other trees hung pears, apples, cherries and peaches. When I was eleven, the six peach trees caught a blight and began weeping an ominous winedark sap all over themselves and, on one of the saddest days of my youth, had to be chopped down. I cried as my father axed, sweat running the length of his arms, onto the handle and over the blade. We all cried a little, because they were family — their peaches perfect year after year, in all my summers just hanging there, silent, volunteering themselves and companionably waiting to be picked. As he slayed them, some mangled sounds wound out from high in my father’s throat — presumably cries at the shame of otherwise strong and innocent trees being reduced to this, being vulnerable enough to be damaged beyond repair. It was as if he related, as if he knew how it felt to meet such a fate.

Early in the season when the dawns were still cold and the plants new and just taking root, we’d head out before bed with a bevy of sawed-in-half milk cartons and cover the seedlings to make sure they made it through the night. Then in the morning before the bus we’d tiptoe through the frost to take them off again. On and off, on and off, until the cold snap passed or the weather warmed for good or the plants really started to grow. Occasionally we lost a crop to a late freeze that took everyone by surprise, and sometimes the bushes got chewed into frivolous lace by hungrily iridescent Japanese beetles, but mostly that was not how it happened. Mostly everything took and produced and multiplied with astonishing vigor.

Over the weeks I made sure to watch everything happen — the squashes and pumpkins that at first were just vine but later gave way to blossoms and then the weird green aliens that grew and colored and hardened beneath the leaves, and the ears of corn that at first were so much silk they were more like milkweed than anything solid. It was miraculous how all those baby kernels grew up and got their color right under the husk, how it was happening all the time even when I wasn’t there to watch it, how each one knew to grow up and be corn. Occasionally some bits didn’t, and that’s when we’d get runts and mutants — fruits that hadn’t quite come into themselves and never would, so went to the compost to be reduced to their basic elements, which were still useful even if the whole lacked concert.

In the height of the season when everything was going off, there were times the whole family harvested together. I remember standing barefoot in the dirt looking out across rows of plants at my family, the sun breaking over us all. My mother in a shade hat amid stalks of corn, blending in and half-hidden and checking the ears for worms. Regina squatting at the raspberry bramble dropping berries into a colander, eating every third or so. My father throwing the mesh off the blueberries’ hoop frame like a fisherman casting a net. It was here that I learned of the seamlessness of life and death, and that any line between the two, if it exists at all, is actually quite fine.

~

i’m on the shore of a horseshoe bay. the day is bright. the others i travel with sit off at a distance, looking down from their towels. no one wants to know me. the beach is strewn with colored umbrellas and people in bright bathing suits, but their language is one i don’t understand so i am alone. the water shines. this bay is too small, ringed with mountains that contain us all here.

i go to the water’s edge hoping for sea creatures. at least there is this sun, at least these lovely mountains. in the shallows billow dancer skates and rainbow ribbons of fish, but once i’m in to my neck the water is agony — hot, and filled with something tiny that stings. a million of something i can’t see that scorch my skin, and all the colored fish bite. no wonder i’m the only one in this water.

and while my back is turned, from the horizon comes the suck. the familiar massive drain. the great drawing back that will leave the basin empty and its life exposed to wither in the sun, and i don’t have to turn around to know what it is. all the dummies on shore absorbed in each other and loose conversation don’t even notice. for a moment it has me, and i think i might go out with it, but one foot grabs some sand, and then the other, and i break its grip.

from the waterline i head for high ground, but slowly because i’m tired, and behind me the wave gathers. the others finally see it, and i know it’s towering now because panic scatters them screaming. i tread steadily upward. i’ve done this before.

at the top i find forest cover amid a brace of stone ruins — a place where surely life once ran warm. the wave is consolidated now and speeding for shore. as i turn and squat to watch, imperceptibly the wave crests and begins to spill out. water rushes forth, topping the hill into my ruins. with it washes a person, and fear stains her face. it is my childhood friend anne, and she is struggling. this wave will surely get her. i extend my hand and she almost catches it, but it’s too late. the wave’s broken and water floods the ruins and anne is swept under the surge. it rises to cover my feet, around my ankles plashing me madly, wanting me. then — in the barest of moments — the onslaught stops, and holds, and grudgingly starts to recede.

it’s all over and i am safe, but i’m the only one who’s made it. everyone else is dead — all the buildings and bungalows washed away. i step from the grove into a devastated world, into crushed palms and fallen power lines, to look for signs of life and some way to survive.

~

My whole life I’ve had dreams about big waves. Not waves like the churning Bering Sea or the rhythmic North Shore of Hawaii — big waves. Precisely formed towering walls of water, tall like skyscrapers, gathering and towering and rushing forth solid. Sometimes they come in succession, and sometimes there is just one. At times I am in them, and others I watch from a vantage. Some are terrifying, as when I stood on a high rooftop while everything below was wiped out, and when the waters receded I was the only human left. And some waves are familiar, like kin coming home. Numinous.

The settings and events and tones change so technically the dreams aren’t recurring, but the waves are. And they are always massive, always possess incomprehensible force. My sister attributes them to my having been swept from my mother’s arms as an infant in the Gulf of Mexico by a rogue wave. Taken by surprise, my mother went down, and amid everyone’s thrashing and hysteria, the wave furtively and gently carried me ashore and deposited me face up and smiling on dry sand. It was my first run-in with the truly dwarfing forces of nature and my first evasion of death by natural disaster. Perhaps the dreams are recollections of things that happened long ago — events from the first world patching through the collective unconscious. And perhaps they are dreams of some watery grave that awaits us all. In any case, the waves are in me, and I am in them.    

riding down the coastal highway looking out on the sea and noticing the waves getting pretty big. sea swelling, waves nearly even with us on the elevated roadway. then, far out, the big one coming together. perfect wave, perfectly formed shining wall of water. takes my breath away with its size and crisp perfection. and what is that on top? looking far now — a surfer! a lone surfer! standing firm on his board, riding high on the crest of the giant wave. topping it easy, as if in cooperation with sea spirits. my heart leaps with the victory of him getting up there, making it safely to the top. how did he do that? now he will be able to drop in. and i ride, and he rides.

~

© 2024 Carrin Rich. All rights reserved.