Back in January as I was contemplating the new year, I wrote about how I was thinking 2015 might be the start of a cycle of renewal and positive change. Perhaps I had some intuition about what was to come, or maybe I only needed to say it to bring it into being. Either way it turned out to be prophetic, because even as I wrote those words there were things in train which I was not completely aware of but which were certainly the start of something new. It's not been a lack of things to write about that has been behind the silence here. Many, many things have happened, but I have been engaged in the business of living, and that can be a time consuming business indeed.
Someone, after scanning the previous posts, wanted to know what happened next. I thought this was funny because he knew very well what happened next, yet he seemed to want to see it chronicled. But how could I chronicle the last six months? They've been crazy, mostly in a good way. There were times in the last few years when I felt time itself was crawling, that the long months of waiting for something to happen would drive me mad. When I look back I can see that things were happening all along, that the work of rebuilding a life worth living was continuing at a steady pace. Then, starting in January, things sped up so that it was a bit like being shot out of a canon. I had the best birthday of my life, visited two new countries, flew on 7 different airplanes, staggered through 4 different airports with entirely too much luggage, met 4 new family members, drove a big diesel truck, went on four wheel drive forays into the desert back country, began to learn to trust again, and drove thousands of miles for the sake of love. And those are only the highlights, because amidst all that have been a hundred other adventures, both great and small.
I want to write about them, but finding energy and time . . .well, there's the rub.
When things went to pot almost four years ago, I was fortunate to have a good support system in place. I had friends and family who rallied around me and bore me up during the worst time of my life. There were also some people I loved and trusted who, inexplicably, grew distant or were silent or even cruel. That was extremely painful, but for every such loss there were compensations, new people who stepped in and filled the void. Eventually I learned that this phenomenon is not uncommon. When you go through tough times there are always going to be those around you who, for one reason or another, withdraw, or blame, or simply fail to recognize your pain. Maybe they don't have the right information. Maybe they are seeking an explanation for the inexplicable, or trying to avoid facing a painful truth about someone else they know and care about. The universe, however, can be bountiful, and if you seek solace you can usually find it.
And yet. The most loving and sympathetic of supporters cannot really know your pain unless they have been where you are. It is in that moment, the profound relief of looking into the eyes of someone who has been through the same fire as you, that you find true consolation. Grief shared is grief lightened. The wordless understanding of a fellow traveler is a jewel of great price.
How do we find such people? We can seek them, but I suspect it is serendipity that guides us to them. I found one, and I have asked myself if it was just chance or if there was a guiding hand behind our meeting, if our stories really do share the same narrative thread that I think they do, if there really is some purpose in our telling each other our griefs and losses, the things that make us wake at four in the morning sweating with nightmares or weeping with a grief that will not let us sleep. The answer is found in the heart. There is a purpose and a common thread, there is a guiding principle behind our finding one another in a place we least expected to find someone we could trust.
Last month we took a flying trip up the coast to deal with some business that had to be handled in person. It was not a happy errand or a trip we wanted to make, but it had to be done. We had the usual agonies trying to reach escape velocity, getting mired in traffic and the gravity that always seems to make the first part of a trip so painfully slow. Finally we were free of the mess and running up the fast highway. The weather was hot but weirdly overcast, and the big wildfire burning to the west created a towering pyrocumulonimbus cloud and a blood red sunset.
The moon rose, the famed Blue Moon, and it cast its light on the Siskiyous so that scenery that would ordinarily be shrouded in the darkness of night was outlined in silver, breathtaking in its beauty.
We turned off toward the coast, driving through a long, narrow valley bounded by tree clad mountains. I had taken a turn at the wheel and fell into the rhythm of mountain driving, following the road as it snaked between the hillsides. The moon lit this place too, flooding the slopes with silver light that edged toward pale gold as the moon sank lower, picking out trees and rocky outcroppings and vistas of receding summits that framed the curves of the glimmering road. Tiny, slumbering towns sprang up in the headlights for a moment and then were left behind in the darkness. Around every curve was a fresh scene, paintings made as variations on a theme, each one only glimpsed for a moment before giving way to the next. It was a long, deep drink from a well of heart stopping beauty, painted in silver, indigo and black. I forgot my tiredness in the silent wonder. We stopped for a break at a little roadside park where there was a covered bridge and pit toilets. The night air was mild and sweet, filled with the scent of pine.
The hours of the night wore away, but the moon hung as though stalled, rare and pale gold, and in the east a cool, colorless light began to spread. Morning was coming as we drove on and on, and slowly color filled the sky on our right, turquoise and pink and yellow, flooding the mountainside with the sun's first light while on our left the moon lingered, bathing that side of the valley in titian gold even as the sun touched the trees on the opposite side. It was coming up on 24 hours of wakefulness for me and I was very tired, but I realized that if I had not been there in that very place during those exact hours I would not have seen that amazing beauty, stunning and otherworldly in the moonlit darkness, doubly lit by moon set and sunrise at the coming of the dawn.
Flags and shreds of fog arose and drifted over the changing landscape. We came out of the mouth of the canyon into a gray seaside town where the air was damp and chilly and filled with a peculiar, musty smell, the sweet scent of the pines gone. Here there was the low lying vegetation of the cool coast, a maze of marshes, brackish creeks and tidal inlets. A few miles more on a winding road and we reached the town that was our destination. The sun was up and people moved about, but there was not a single place open for breakfast and coffee seemed an unknown commodity. We tried to find lodging, but offices were closed or no-vacancy signs were lit. After driving aimlessly for awhile, we ended up parking near the harbor and waiting for the restaurants to open. Breakfast, when we finally got it, was mediocre and the coffee was pale and watery.
I had heard the story of what happened in the aftermath of an appalling series of events, the suspicion and blame and heaped up injustices that made my own story pale in comparison even as I recognized the similarities. I wanted to believe, and I did, but betrayal in one's past makes rebuilding trust difficult. There was always the little voice in the back of my mind whispering a reminder that I had been told other stories that turned out to have had some inconvenient facts left out. What I found in a certain little Oregon town astounded me and put my doubts to rest. I saw evidence of the backwardness and obfuscation that had been described to me, the sketchy ethics, a bank that was like stumbling into the Bedford Falls Building and Loan just after Uncle Billy lost the money, but without that fictitious institution's underlying decency and good intentions. The people seemed slow, dazed, and slightly inbred.
Then I stood on the site of a tragedy, looked at the mute artifacts of a violent ending, the shards of broken glass and blackened foundations, the grass growing up unmowed, a single, brilliant poppy that bloomed amid the sad wreckage of my companion's old life. I was stunned by the reality of it, the sight of him weeping for the loss and senseless tragedy, the helplessness to turn aside a mad and plundering train of insanity and destruction driven by someone he had loved. His tears could have been my own. It was like looking into a mirror.
"This was my home," he said in a choked voice. And I knew. I understood.
I looked out to the tangled back of the property toward the hidden creek, and murmured in wonder and mostly to myself, "There was a creek running behind my house, too."
In the midst of my own grief and loss, as I had stood and regarded the fresh ashes of my own former life, people sometimes said things to comfort that only caused more pain. With the best of intentions they tried to find a perspective or a few words that would somehow make it better. I could not tell them that their attempts at sympathy and support had been like salt in the wound. What had I needed most in that terrible time? Not words, just understanding. An honoring of the terribleness, an unspoken recognition of my pain. I had needed others to know what I felt. But that was not possible, for they had not experienced what I had experienced.
And so I knew there was nothing I could do to take away the pain of my companion. I could help him bear it a little, but only by standing in solidarity with him in silent recognition of what had transpired, by bearing witness to the tangible evidence of the story he had told me, by seeing with my own eyes and feeling in my own heart the sorrow and loss, and by sharing that knowledge with him because I, too, had experienced something like it.
Later, after I told him how this trip had ripped the scab from my own wounds and filled me with a towering rage at those who had hurt and betrayed him and a renewed grief over my own losses, he said, "It was a mistake to take you there."
But I don't think it was a mistake. Some things are terrible but necessary. I could not quite put my finger on the sense of it, of what I was feeling as I stood there and looked at the scenes which I had heard described, and I wondered if there was no sense at all to any of it. But I think I was meant to see it so that I would know that yes, this did happen. It was not a fanciful tale told to me by a stranger. It was a real account of real loss and tragedy in the life of a fellow human on a journey of his own that was, at least in part, much like my own.
Standing at the burnt out foundations of his old house, he said, "There's nothing left. I shouldn't have come back."
Yet I think this was also a case of the terrible but necessary. We could have finished up the official business that had forced this trip, then hastily turned tail and run back south again. But something had compelled him to return to this part of his past for one last look, one final farewell. He had thought he would never be able to return yet he had gone there as surely as though drawn by a beacon. Perhaps I was able to give him this one small thing, just the measure of strength he needed to face it one final time.
And so I stood silent, telling myself to be like a tall tree, a thought which came to mind because I remembered someone who once comforted me in a terrible moment by doing nothing more than standing tall and strong like a young tree I could cling to in the storm. He had walked back and forth as he wept, a kind of desperate pacing as though he sought a doorway out of this reality, some way to escape the awful, immutable truth of what had happened. Now he stood quiet, leaning against his truck, that steady and dependable companion in adversity who had never betrayed him or abandoned him through the most terrible times. That good and faithful servant who had sheltered him from the rain and allowed him to ride away from ruin to the peace of the desert.
He shook his head and said, "It's time to go. There's nothing here for me."
I took his hand and said, "Then let us shake the dust of this place from our feet, and never come here again."
He pulled the gate closed for the final time, and we left that place.
Life and the events that make it up are messy and complicated and don't always lend themselves to a smooth narrative. And so it is here. We actually spent time in several towns, and not all of them were as despised as the one that shall remain nameless. The tragedy I allude to mostly took place in another community a few miles away, and the people there seemed decent and genuinely glad to see their former neighbor, pleased to see him somewhat recovered from a terrible time. I met some of the people who had been part of my friend's story. They had become, in a way, like characters in a book to me. Seeing them in real life was a little like meeting a minor celebrity.
For several reasons we ended up staying in the general area for a couple of days, which was at least one day longer than we'd intended. There is beauty in the rugged coast here, interesting things to explore and see and do, and we tried to do a little sightseeing. We happened by a wildlife viewing area where you can look out to a community of sea lions noisily conversing and sunning themselves on a group of offshore rocks, so we stopped for a breath of fresh air and a gander at the big, goofy creatures. You can't quite make them out in this picture, but they're out there.
We should have been grateful for the cool ocean breezes, having escaped the punishing heat of the central valley. We should have been enjoying the fresh green and the abundant wildflowers.
Yet the overcast sky was dreary, and the coastal highway seemed lined with dingy, somewhat run down little buildings. There seemed to be a lingering hint of damp and mold and dissolution, even in the midst of high summer, and the temps barely got out of the sixties. I tried to appreciate the new things I was seeing, but the area, however undeservedly, was tainted by sorrow. I was downcast after somber visits to several landmarks of a shattered past. I found myself yearning for the desert, despite the fact that we had fled temperatures there that routinely soared into the triple digits, mornings where the low at six am is 90 degrees. Perversely, I didn't care. I wanted to be back in some secluded canyon, dressed in my birthday suit and turning brown in the sun.
I wanted the vastness of it, the way it is so far from everything that reminded us both of what we had lost. I wanted to hear that voice that speaks there. Whose voice is it? Some have heard it as the voice of God. But if it is the voice of God, it does not tell you how to win the lottery, it does not promise you the things you desire, or offer you justice or to restore what has been taken from you. It gives no answer to your question of, "Why?"
The voice says only one thing, and that is, 'I am."
And somehow, that is enough.
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