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Non Fiction |
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There’s a saying I once heard on the Hawaiian island of Lāna`i that is the heart of this story: The only ghosts on this island are the ones the traveler brings with him. The saying virtually disappeared from local speech years ago. I haven’t heard it since my very first visit in the summer of 1973, when my wife Mary and I were taking a tour of the outer islands on our way back to Oklahoma. We’d planned to stay much longer--another year, in fact, long enough for me to complete my M.A. at the University of Hawai`i. But a few weeks earlier I’d resigned my graduate fellowship at UH, and Mary had quit her secretarial job at a geological consulting firm in Honolulu. We were heading back to Oklahoma, we told ourselves, because Hawai`i just wasn’t right for us. We needed familiar territory, the soothing twang of Okie speech, to get our life together on the right track. We were lying to ourselves, though perhaps we didn’t know it then. In this lie, we created a ghost, one of many we would bring with us to this island, and everywhere else we would travel on our long journey together. The story I am about to tell is not about failure, though there are many failures in it. Nor is it about triumph, nor starting over, nor even survival--though everyone involved has in fact survived, at least so far. Neither is it about confession, nor revenge. Confidences I have held in my mind and heart for years, for good reasons or bad, will not be revealed in these pages. They have no part in this story. This story is about ghosts. Ghosts we create in the lives we live. Ghosts who travel with us to the end of our days. * * * Mary and I met our sophomore year at Yukon High School, about twenty miles west of Oklahoma City, when she transferred from the local Catholic school. I’ve never believed that old cliché that opposites attract. Nevertheless, it’s true that Mary and I were different. She was slim and pretty, with large hazelnut eyes and shoulder-length brown hair that curled out on the ends like Mary Tyler Moore’s. She was friendly, but conservative and extremely shy. She always had something to say, but seldom said it. Instead, she maintained a quiet dignity that teenage males, struggling to cope with such behavior, referred to as either "classy" or "prudish." I, on the other hand, was a skinny smartass who never passed up an opportunity to skewer someone, unless I knew I’d get pounded for it. Our senior year I was voted "wittiest" in our class. Which meant the pep squad girls thought I was funny, and the jocks were afraid of me because they rarely understood what I was saying, but felt uncomfortable anyway. If anyone on our team could carry Roy Bell’s jockstrap, it’s you, man. When Mary and I started going out the summer between high school and college, our classmates thought we were an amusing but appropriate match. Neither of us had much experience with the opposite sex. Mary had been on a few dates (one with a football player who got a scholarship to the University of Hawai`i, then flunked out), but hadn’t had a serious boyfriend. I’d had a steady girlfriend for about a year. I broke up with her just before starting up with Mary. Neither of us had any idea what we were getting into. Why did Mary and I work so well, for so long? Maybe that’s the question I should be asking now. At the time, we felt natural together–even though, unlike every other girl I knew, I couldn’t tease Mary, except in the gentlest, most nonthreatening ways. I always sensed a strong person somewhere inside her, and this person would emerge in the years ahead. But when she was young, she was too easily hurt. What can you do with a woman when you can’t make her laugh? Maybe that’s what I had to find out, what secretly charmed me. In any case, we kept seeing each other through our undergraduate years at Oklahoma State, until the realization finally hit us: We were in love. What this meant was clearer to Mary than to me. Everyone assumed we’d get married
immediately after graduation. But I surprised them all, including Mary, by
moving to Colorado with my friend Rick, the philosophy major. Graduate school
was in my future, Mary and I both knew that, but I wanted to work with my hands
for a while first. So I got a job in Boulder, packing paperback books into
boxes. My big plan was to be a writer, but the truth is I was too afraid of
failing at the art to actually practice it. So for an entire year, I packed
books into boxes and wrote nothing. Meanwhile, Mary moved into a trailer in Yale, Oklahoma, taught middle school English, and waited for me to figure out my sorry life. We were both fools; that much is clear now. But even today the year apart seems like the right decision. By the summer of 1972, I was ready for graduate school, as far away from Oklahoma as I could get. That turned out to be the University of Hawai`i in Honolulu. I had only one more decision to make. So one weekend in early June I drove seventeen hours to Stillwater, Oklahoma, where Mary was taking a summer graduate class in reading education, getting on with life without Steve, and asked her to marry me. Unlike me, she didn’t hesitate. At the time we became engaged, Mary was a practicing Catholic. She was the oldest of eight children, not counting her six half-siblings from her father’s first marriage. Her family was deeply religious: Midnight Mass, altar boys, tithing. My family was different. I’m an only child, baptized Catholic in my infancy, but never confirmed. My parents were agnostic at best. When you’re dead, you’re dead, Father used to say. There ain’t no ever-after. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that in both our families the church played the same role: to inspire guilt. I fault myself for not taking you to Mass when you were young, my mother still tells me from time to time. You should have had a choice. Whenever I point out that I did in fact have a choice, she shakes her head. It doesn’t work that way. When Mary called her family with the news that we were engaged, her mother’s first question was: What about the church--is he going to be confirmed? Mary didn’t have to ask. No, Mom. He’s thought about it a lot, and it’s just not right for him. The next question was tougher, and I could feel Mary’s hesitation as she gave her answer: . . . We’re going to talk about that. We did. Again and again, round and round. We may not even HAVE children, I would point out. We need to decide before, Mary insisted. A couple of weeks before the ceremony, I gave in and agreed to receive Father Robinet’s instructions on how to raise all our children Catholic. This means a lot to my family, Mary assured me. And to you, I replied. Which is why I’d agreed. The truth is, my concession was a bald-faced lie, and we both knew it. Despite the priest’s instructions, I had no intention of raising our children Catholic, nor any other faith. I had no intention of having children at all, at least not right away. From the beginning, Mary wanted a family. But she was willing to defer her desire. And she did, for nine long years, until we had both finally finished our postgraduate educations, when I made another concession–this one willingly–and David was born. Despite the nine years and my change of heart, the lie was never moot. From the beginning, the lie haunted us. The lie of faith was our first ghost. Years before we had children, Mary stopped practicing her faith, though she continued to believe. As I write these words, David, is a nineteen year-old college freshman. Like me, David and his two younger brothers have been baptized but never confirmed. Our youngest, Rachael Lehualani, who lived two of the first three months of her sweet life on Lāna`i, is five. She has never been baptized. A few weeks before our wedding, I was stunned by the verse of scripture Mary selected for Father Robinet to read at the ceremony: the one about the wife vowing to love, honor, and obey her husband. This was 1972, and feminism was already having its effect. Mary and I both wanted our marriage to be an equal partnership. A vow to honor and obey me was not what I expected nor wanted from my partner. It’s taken me almost three decades, but I think I finally grasp Mary’s vows as they were intended: as a pledge of loyalty. A pledge she would always keep. For my part, I pledged to love, honor, and cherish, till death do us part. For the next quarter century I would keep this pledge, through better and worse, through sickness and health, until the ghosts who travel with us finally taught me there are forces in this world stronger than death. * * * In September of 1988 I was invited to give a public reading of my fiction in the old Lāna`i Lodge, at that time still the only hotel on the island. This was my fourth trip to Lāna`i, my first without Mary. If I’d stopped to take stock of our life then, I would have been amazed at how far we’d come together. The fall semester had just begun at Kansas State University. I was a tenured associate professor of English; Mary was tenure-track in elementary education. My second book had just come out; her first was on the way. We had three beautiful sons: David was in first grade, Michael in preschool, and one-year-old Daniel was home with one of us or a sitter. We had a model life, our colleagues told us. A perfect marriage of the personal and the professional. That’s the way things looked from the
outside. On the inside, things had begun to sour. At the time, I thought our
growing problems were mostly the result of raising a third child, a child who
was different: slower, more needful of our attention and energies. But there was
much more to it than that, as I would begin to discover here on
Lāna`i. None of that was on my mind as I lugged my carry-on up the front steps to the rustic ten-room lodge where Mary and I had stayed on our previous visits. All I could think about was the way the island had changed. The Lāna`i Mary and I saw in 1973 was a sleepy little place known as The Pineapple Island. When I first observed the neat grid of Lāna`i City, home of Dole Plantation, spread out below us as our small twin-engine prop circled to land, I turned to Mary and said: I’m going to write about this place. That was the romantic vision of a naive visitor speaking, but in the years that followed I would spend enough time on the island to learn to love it. The gritty music of the voices of the men and women who planted and harvested the pineapples would never leave my head, and many of them became good friends. A few years after that first visit, I wrote a short story called "The Red Dust of Lāna`i" about a young pineapple worker who faces the choice of leaving the island he loves or remaining even though the things he loves about it are about to vanish. In 1988 the changes predicted in the story were coming true. Pineapple was being fazed out. Dole was building two luxury resort hotels, changing the island’s economy over to tourism. The tough, sun-hardened Asian field hands Mary and I had seen driving the dusty red roads and working the golden green fields in 1973 would soon be trimming hedges and making beds and cleaning bathrooms and showing wealthy visitors to their rooms. Or they would be doing nothing at all, just sitting on Old Man’s Bench in Dole Park, collecting their pensions and talking about the old days. From the narrow lobby of the old lodge, where Mary and I had once sat on a white wicker sofa and dreamed of our own future, I stared out through the picture window at a corpse. At that moment, I made myself a promise: Before I returned home, I would visit the one place on Lāna`i I had never seen: the sacred, forbidden valley of Mauna-lei. The valley of ghosts. * * * Mauna-lei da kine place great kapu, a Lāna`i man once told me. "Kapu" can mean many things: forbidden, sacred, consecrated, special, filled with spirits. Mauna-lei literally means "wreath mountain," drawing its name from the way its sharp cliffs snag clouds, encircling the head of the valley in a ring of mist. The forbidden valley is actually a deep green gulch carved into the windward side Mount Lāna`i-hale. Somewhere up near the head of the gulch stands Ho`okio Ridge, a cliff-top fortification where in 1778 the warriors of Ka-hekili, king of both Maui and Lāna`i, were defeated by the invading army of Ka-lani-`opu`u, king of the big island. Fighting on the side of the big islanders was Kamehameha, who would one day unite all the islands under his rule. The invaders hurled sling stones at the brave men defending the ridge, and cut off their water supply. In the end the defenders were slaughtered, driven off the ridge and crushed to death on the rocks a thousand feet below. Some say the spirits of the defenders of Lāna`i dwell in the deep shadows at the bottom of the Ho`okio Ridge, an open vault of living souls. If this is true, the ghosts of Mauna-lei are unique on this island: They were not brought here by visitors. In any case, the forbidden valley is consecrated with the blood of the dead. On my last day on Lāna`i I borrowed a key from Jim Parker, manager of Dole Plantation, who had given me permission to enter the valley and drive my rented jeep all the way to the pump station at the edge of the upper forest. From there I could hike up the remainder of the valley as far as my skinny legs could carry me. After a twenty-minute drive over the mountain, I followed a path of dusty white sand until I came to a heavy chain stretched across the road between two posts holding up a wire fence. A signed nailed to the left post read: KEEP OUT DOMESTIC WATER AREA From my pocket I removed Mr. Parker’s pass key and unlocked the chain. After re-locking the gate behind me, I drove on into the forbidden valley. Kiawe and ironwood trees lined both sides of the jeep trail, blocking my view of the valley. Suddenly I emerged from the trees, and the sky opened blue above me. The valley was more than half a mile wide at this point, hot and dusty in the rising sun. I drove inland, the valley walls growing and steepening, cutting a deeper, narrower grove in the mountain. As the walls closed in on me, I felt my own small life linking up with the flow of great natural and historical forces that had shaped Mauna-lei. I suddenly remembered the story I’d told David the night before I left for this trip: the legend of the ghost killer. A millennium ago another kind of ghost inhabited this valley and the entire island of Lāna`i. The Hawaiians called them`ai kanaka. Man-eaters. Mortal spirits made of flesh and blood. For five centuries Lāna`i was known as The Island of Ghosts, for no human could set foot on its shores and live. Then one day around the year 1400, the King of Maui banished his mischievous son, Ka-ulu-lā-au, to Lāna`i for playing a series of pranks on the people of Lahaina. Prince Ka-ulu was only a boy, so when the king’s paddlers dropped him off on a windward beach not far from the mouth of this valley, no one expected to see him again. But to everyone’s astonishment, the clever prince outwitted the ghosts of Lāna`i and eventually killed them all, reclaiming The Island of Ghosts for the living. I smiled, recalling the incredulous look on David’s seven-year-old face. Aren’t you scared to go there? he asked. After about a mile and a half of twisting ruts, I rounded a hillside curve. Through the V-shaped opening before me loomed the tall jagged cliffs of the valley’s head, its serrated green peaks rising like the spires of a great natural cathedral. I pulled the jeep to a halt in the
middle of the trail, and just stared. Lāna`i is your special place, not mine, Mary told me just before I left. She was being kind, trying to make me feel better about leaving her behind with the kids. After all, I’d be gone only three days, no longer than other professional trips we’d both taken regularly over the years. But as I stared up at the green saw-tooth cliffs vaulting into the sky, I couldn’t help recalling our first visit to Lāna`i, when I thought this would become our island, not mine. Lies are not the only ghosts who travel with us. The specter of memory is another. Like many spirits, this one is hazy, ethereal, difficult to see. Sometimes, not even real. The ghost I saw in my mind’s eye as I gazed at the great open cathedral of Mauna-lei was a vision: Mary and I sitting on a small white wicker sofa in the lobby of the Lāna`i Lodge, the very same sofa where I had sat earlier this morning, waiting for Mr. Parker’s assistant to bring me the key to this valley. In my vision it was nighttime, the narrow lobby lit only by the dim indirect glow of a small flourescent light behind the glass counter marked "Office & Bar," and the flicker of sandalwood-scented candles scattered across the room like fireflies. There were perhaps a dozen of us, visitors and locals, listening to a Lāna`i man named Sol strum a slack-key guitar and sing about net fishing. He wore a straw hat and faded aloha shirt, and his voice was low and smooth and peaceful. Through the picture window I saw not a corpse, but the towering shadows of Cook pine trees piercing a starry sky. Nestled against my shoulder, Mary lay her hand on my wrist, and I heard myself whisper a promise that we would come back here again some day. She turned toward me, a sandalwood glimmer in her hazelnut eyes . . . I allowed the vision haunt me for only a moment, then put the jeep back in gear and drove deeper into the valley. Soon the rutted trail followed a curving line of short electrical poles. With each turn, the gulch narrowed, bringing the tall cliffs closer. Around a bend, the pump station loomed into view. I pulled the jeep to a stop outside the white-washed clapboard building. No other vehicles were in sight. I could hear the pumps humming, but the station appeared to be deserted. The building was surrounded by healthy banana and palm trees, but in the dark doorways the sun revealed the silver geometry of spider webs. Long-legged black nasties with bright yellow spots hung in the center of each web like gruesome bull's-eyes in silk targets. Beyond the station stood a wall of trees: the upper forest. From here, I would have to walk. Beside a shed I found what appeared to be a broken broom handle that had been used to stir aluminum paint. The silver-tipped end was sharp. I thought of David, who surely would have regarded this as a sign. Pick it up, Dad, I could hear him say, his voice straining to mimic the depth and resonance of the leader of The Thundercats. Use it for protection. I smiled, then suddenly felt alone. The wood felt solid in my hands, not warped or rotten. It struck me that in the forest I ought to have something to keep my balance and bat away spider webs. "Ok, David," I whispered. I jabbed the sharp end into the earth, and levered my way forward, using the broom handle as a walking stick. A moment later, I found a narrow opening in the trees beside the trickling stream, and pushed into the forest. Inside was another world: a live cavern with a ceiling of green and a floor of black volcanic stone and mashed leaves. The first thing I noticed was the hush. The caressing breeze, the salty breath of the sea I had taken for granted in the open areas of the valley did not penetrate the wood, and the sounds it brought to my ears moment by moment--birds warbling, leaves rustling--vanished with the sky. But the forest was not silent. Every noise was sharp and distinct: crunch of stones, snap of twigs, pitter and shush of water sliding over rock. Each sound carried. Not with an echo: a lingering resonance, like a lone note held on a piano. The depth and weight of my movements were amplified; instinctively I fell into a reverent silence, proceeding in slow, almost mincing steps. The valley narrowed noticeably as I advanced, crossing and re-crossing the narrow stream. Tiny fruit balls crunched beneath my feet; ferns clutched at my khaki pant legs. Tree limbs drooped across my path, and soon I began to notice the silver netting of spider webs sparkling with dew. I hacked through them with my silver-tipped broomstick, and kept going. After a while, against the encroaching right slope of the gulch, I noticed a meandering three-foot wall of black stones, the remnants of an ancient taro terrace. The wall was the only visible sign of the valley’s first residents, farmers from Maui who paddled across the channel to make a new life here after Prince Ka-ulu had killed off the island’s original ghosts. When the stream bent to my left, I came upon a waterfall, perhaps sixty feet high, pouring over a notch in what I guessed to be the southern wall of the gulch. The "fall" was hardly more than a trickle, white water slicking its way down the cliff side, emptying into a stale-smelling pool covered with green foam and scum. Not pretty, I thought. Nevertheless, I stabbed the silver-tipped stick into the earth, sat down on a rotting log, and rested. Mary would hate this place, I realized.
I could hardly blame her. The forest was dark and sultry. And, for a first-time
visitor like me, a little frightening. What, exactly, was I doing here? David would love it, I had to admit. For David, every walk around the City Park in Manhattan was an adventure. Especially if it was just the two of us. David was that age when step his father took was charged, magic, a clear mark on the enchanted path toward a vast, mysterious future–that scary, unknowable place that lay somewhere around the next bend, the place only adults who kept secrets could see. David would love the green mystery of the forest. Sitting here on the log beside the sour waterfall, I began to feel them again: the ghosts I had brought with me. The lie of faith had been Mary’s and my first ghost, but there had been other ghosts in my life long before Mary. In 1942 my father’s older brother, Louis, married my mother’s older sister, Elenora. My father’s brother and my mother’s sister had a total of nine children; my father and mother of course had only me. Uncle Louis, whom I called "Oodie," worked for Upjohn, which in the 1950s transferred him from Kansas City to Denver. He brought his family with him, of course, including my paternal grandmother, Rose Heller, and moved everyone into a large two-story house in a suburb between Denver and the eastern slope. When I was a boy I used to wonder if I was somehow a greater burden to my parents than my nine double-cousins and my grandmother were to my aunt and uncle, because a few weeks after the school year ended, my parents would send me by bus–or, if it had been a good year, by plane–to spend the bulk of the summer with my cousins. The boy needs somebody to play with, Father claimed. This was true: We lived in a stone house five miles north of the farm community of Yukon, Oklahoma, with the nearest playmates my age more than a mile away. After a long career as a diesel locomotive mechanic, Father was repairing televisions for Sears; Mother was a secretary for Kerr-McGee. In the summers, I was home alone all day. So the prospect of spending June and July with my cousins on the edge of the Rockies was ok with me. They’ve got plenty of room in that big new house of theirs, Mother added. That was also true, although I usually wound up sleeping in the same bed with one of my non-identical twin cousins, Gary or Greg, who were the same age as I, or my younger cousin, Dennis, who shared the same room. My oldest cousin, Carol Ann, had her own room upstairs. The older boys, Bobby and Jimmy, shared another room, as did the identical twins, Christine and Catherine, who were five years younger than I. The ninth and youngest, Tommy, was only a baby when I came out for the summer of 1960, when I was eleven. It was a good year. Father had recently settled an old injury claim with the Frisco Railroad, and he and Mother put me on a Braniff turboprop to Denver. It’ll be a lot more fun in Colorado, Mother assured me before the stewardess took me aboard. This is going to be your best summer ever. In my own recurring act of faith, I tried to take Mother at her word. This wasn’t easy, for my cousins’ world was both familiar and strange. In the summer of 1960 Uncle Oodie no longer looked like an altar boy. What he looked like was my father: same beady gray eyes and jowly red cheeks that burned even redder when he was angry, as if he’d been drinking, which I never saw him do. The only noticeable difference between Uncle Oodie and Father was Oodie’s thick head of prematurely gray hair. Aunt Elenora, whom I called "Noanie," looked like a slightly older version of my mother: same straight dark brown hair; same slim, pear-shaped build. My aunt and uncle looked so much like my parents, and my cousins so much like me, that I often thought I was living in some kind of alternative universe, with the larger, more complete family I’d have if I were a more respectful, more dutiful son. As the summer unfolded, I gradually forgot about how strange this alternative life seemed. In the end, Mother was right. The summer of 1960 was the best ever: BB guns, mountain hikes, pond fishing, bicycles, Little League Baseball, fireworks, and crowded trips in Uncle Oodie’s "woody" station wagon to Colorado Springs and the top of Pike’s Peak. But even the best of times have their ghosts. One hot July afternoon while Uncle Oodie was at work, my cousins and I decided to go to our secret place and play war. Our secret place wasn’t really secret. Aunt Noanie and Uncle Oodie knew where it was, or they wouldn’t have let us play there. We called it the Willows. It was really just a ring of willow trees around a small pond. That summer the pond was dry, and its sandy bed formed a soft open area where we could ambush enemy troops when they came by on patrol. It was the Germans or Japs versus the Americans in those days. President Eisenhower had spent his two terms teaching our parents that the Russians and their atom bombs were the real enemy now, but the lesson never got through to my cousins and me. Our parents had fought in World War II, the great patriotic war we saw John Wayne fight in the movies. How could you play atomic war, anyway? Duck under a table? Hide in your storm cellar? So the seven oldest of us–Carol Ann, Bobby and Jimmy, the non-identical twins Gary and Greg, little Dennis and me–we all ran off to the Willows to play war the old way. In a family our size, there were never enough weapons. So for our U. S. Army-issue M-1 rifles we used Little League baseball bats. I carried mine parallel to the ground, as if it were strapped to my shoulder like the weapon Vic Morrow carried on Combat. Before we reached the Willows, we divided our forces. The Germans (Bobby and Jimmy and Dennis) took the long way, along the creek. The Defenders of Freedom (Carol Ann, Gary and Greg, and me) took the straight path so we would reach the trees first, and set up our ambush. As we were getting into position, climbing up into our favorite willow trees, something happened. Greg, the non-identical twin who of all my cousins looked the most like me, eyed me from head to toe, then said: You know, you’re the skinniest runt I’ve ever seen. As childish taunts go, this was mild. Greg was a smartass who could have said something nastier, and I was in fact the skinniest soldier on the battlefield that day. But he said this in the presence of Carol Ann, who was 15 or 16 that summer, commanding our troop on this day as a favor to Aunt Noanie. At 11, I couldn’t bear the insult to my future manhood, not in front of Carol Ann, who had shinnied up the next tree with her own M-1 bat, as quick and soldierly as any of us boys. So when Greg decided to change his ambush position, and move from one willow to a taller one across the dry pond, I was burning with the bloodlust of righteous indignation. As Greg padded across the soft sand, about ten or twelve feet directly beneath the drooping willow limb that served as my own ambush position, I held out my Louisville Slugger M-1 by its handle, the fat part of the barrel pointed down–and dropped it on his head. It struck him square on the noggin beneath his red unmarked Little League baseball cap, hardwood meeting cloth with a sickening thud. He fell flat on his face and lay still. In the trees, Carol Ann, Gary, and I held our breath. A moment later, I saw a vision. It was really just a spontaneous fantasy, a denial of the moment. Or maybe a recognition. Whatever it was, it stood up out of Greg’s motionless body like a spirit rising from a corpse. It looked just like him: red cap, white T-shirt, blue jeans. It lifted the bill of its cap, revealing a tuft of hair a lighter shade of brown than my own, almost blond, then gazed straight up into my eyes and said: You killed me. And for what? I swallowed my own spit, and said nothing. A moment later the vision vanished. There was only Greg himself, lying face down on the sand like a Yank machine-gunned on the beach at Normandy. The red ball cap remained on his skull, concealing the wound like a camouflage helmet. One by one, Carol Ann, Gary, and I dropped out of the trees, and approached him. For a moment we were too awed by what lay before us, to say anything. Then Carol Ann, trembling and moist-eyed, knelt beside him. Greg? she said simply. When Greg did not stir, Gary asked the question for all of us: Is he dead? I didn’t believe in such things even then, but the reply seemed to come straight from god himself: The red cap moved. Over the next two decades, I often wondered what my life would be like if the red cap hadn’t moved. Who would I be today? Later on, after I had begun to teach others how to use their own imaginations, I began to think of that afternoon at the Willows in a different way: Creative Writing Exercise: Transform a real life incident into fiction by describing the event from a different point of view. Do not change the essential "facts." Instead, imagine yourself as your cousin Carol Ann, perched on a tree limb, keeping an eye on your younger brothers and your double cousin Steve, the skinny little runt from Oklahoma who looks just like Greg, when out of a clear blue July sky, your cousin drops a baseball bat on your brother’s head. Imagine yourself looking down from your perch in horror, too stunned to move, even though you’re the oldest, responsible for everyone’s safety. Imagine how it was a short time later, when the paramedics carried Greg away, groggy but conscious, on a stretcher. What did you feel like saying to your cousin who almost killed your brother? What did you feel like saying instead of what you actually said: It’s ok, Steve. Greg’s going to be all right. It was an accident. We all know you didn’t really mean to do it. Or imagine yourself as your Uncle Louis: the man your nephew Steve Jr. calls "Oodie," the good Catholic who still uses the rhythm method as the church has taught you, even though you and Elenora already have so many children, so many that your secret fear is the statistical law of probability: that XY by XX times 9 equals the strong probability that at least one of your children will not outlive you. In the panic brought on by your feckless nephew, the one your misfit brother sent you to babysit for the summer, you fear the doomed statistic is Greg, who is secretly your favorite. You have no choice but to witness the predicted outcome unfold before your disbelieving eyes, right here in the emergency room of the hospital in Denver to which you drove frantically after receiving the call from Elenora at work. You believe you have no choice but to pray and wonder why, what you did wrong to allow this to happen, how this absurdity fits into God’s mysterious plan, how you will maintain your faith and your life anyway. You wonder this, not knowing that you and the statisticians are wrong and Carol Ann is right, that Greg will be ok, just a medium-to-severe concussion that will not affect him in any noticeable way in the years ahead. You pray, not knowing that all your children will in fact outlive you, though one of them just barely. You don’t know, and you will never know, that Greg will die not from a sudden blow to the skull but from the slow, relentless ravages of cancer, in 1998, at the age of 49, two years after a stroke has taken you, and emphysema has claimed Elenora. Or imagine an alternative version of yourself: Smarter and wiser than you are. So smart and wise that when your cousin calls you skinny, you respond not with violence but with words. So smart and wise that, at the crucial instant, you draw the Louisville Slugger back to your chest like a rifle in the ready position and shout down at your smartass cousin who looks just like you: Heads up, moron! I could’a killed you if things were different! But that would be changing the facts. On the rotting log beside the stale, scum-smelling pool in the forest of Mauna-lei, I stared at the silver-tipped broom stick poking out of the earth in front of my knees, then turned once again toward the trickling waterfall. Where do we all go from here? I wondered: Mary and David and Michael and Daniel and me, our parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins and double cousins, all the apparitions of our lives. How hard was the rest of the journey going to be? If I had somehow divined the answer as I sat on that rotting log in 1988, I would have immediately turned around and taken a different route home, a new path to the rest of my life. But I divined nothing. Instead, I shook my head and turned away from the past, and all the ghosts I’d brought with me. I yanked the broom stick out of the ground, rose from the log, and pressed on, deeper into the valley and the forest, trying not to think about any of it. A few yards beyond the log, the dappled light began to fade. Soon after that, the walls of gulch converged on the stream, and the fading trail disappeared altogether. Encroaching tree limbs left me no choice but to clamber over slick stones in the center of the stream, using the broom stick as a crutch. Icy water, incongruous in the sweltering atmosphere of the forest, stung my feet through my sneakers. Would you like this part, David? I wondered. I began to sweat through my clothes, as the stream ahead became a trail of wet boulders. The gnarly green roof of the forest descended on me as I crawled and levered my way over the slippery, water-worn rocks. Then all at once the roof opened . . . I emerged from the upper forest and found myself standing in bright sunlight at the bottom of a giant ravine, ten times as high as it was wide: the deepest cleft in the mountain. I stood in little more than a rut, sliced into the volcanic rock by the headwaters of Mauna-lei stream, at this point barely more than a trickle around the rocks beneath my feet. On each side of me, mossy green walls rose a thousand feet or more, turning to bare gray stone as they approached their crests. Up ahead, just before the next bend in the ravine, I saw the vertical white ribbon of a second waterfall. This one was much larger than the first, pouring several hundred feet over a notch in the wall of the chasm, a little below what appeared to be the summit of the mountain. Suddenly I realized what lay somewhere just around the next bend: the bottom of the precipice of Ho`okio Ridge, where the defenders of Lāna`i had fallen to their deaths, driven off the ridge by the invaders from the big island. The open vault of the dead. I paused and listened for the echo of ghosts. But there was no such sound, only the numbing caress of a vacuous breeze. Finally, I took a deep breath and made my way up the ravine in silence. I’d advanced maybe thirty yards when all at once a wall of gray cloud spilled over the summit of the mountain, forming a roof over the ravine. The midday sun disappeared, and the ravine darkened like a grave. A peel of thunder rumbled down the chasm, and I shivered as the air turned cold. I halted right there, feet straddling the narrow stream. I was exhausted, my shirt and pants soaked from the hike through the stifling woods. But that wasn’t what stopped me. All at once I felt edgy, as if at any moment the walls of the ravine might collapse. I remembered feeling this way only once before, twelve years earlier, in 1976: the morning Mary and I had driven our VW campmobile up the Big Thompson Canyon in Colorado. That trip was Mary and I at our best: exploring, questioning, trying to get closer to each other, trying to work things out. We were both about to begin working on doctorates in English Education at Oklahoma State. Teaching others how to teach wasn’t my future, though, and we both knew it. What our future would be was a subject we wanted to discuss at a higher elevation than one could manage in Oklahoma. So we were headed up to Rocky Mountain National Park. Our goal was to reach Milner Pass, on the Continental Divide, in the early afternoon. At the picnic grounds on the backbone of the continent we’d find a panoramic view that offered the illusion that we could see through time as well as distance. There we would lay out the lunch Mary had packed at our I-25 motel near Loveland, and talk about our future. In places, the winding walls of the Big Thompson are almost vertical and cannot be climbed by anyone but a professional. Nevertheless, log cabins and small trailers dotted the banks of almost every bend in the river. On the morning Mary and I snaked our way up Highway 34 toward Estes Park, a rolling ceiling of gray poured down the canyon, shutting off the sun. The clouds were heavy with rain, but none fell. That’s when I started feeling edgy. You know, I said to Mary, if there was ever a flash flood in this canyon, there’d be no way out. You’d just be swept away. Mary looked at the shallow, stone-filled stream and the sheer walls rising on either side. What would we do? she asked. Climb, I guess. If we had time. We drove on through the gathering gray, until at last the canyon opened up to the wider space where the tourist town of Estes Park sits. The blue sky lifted our spirits. This is a pretty town, Mary remarked. We should spend some time here. But it was almost noon by then, the restaurants and shops brimming with customers, and before I could find a parking space, Mary changed her mind. So we drove straight through and started the steep climb into the national park. In the early afternoon, we reached Fall River Pass, about four miles from the Divide, well above the clouds still gathering on the eastern slope. Near the Alpine Visitor Center we altered our plan and parked beside a meadow blooming with wild flowers. From here we could look back down the Fall River Canyon toward a bank of silver clouds that had moved in behind us, concealing Estes Park and the Big Thompson. We spread a blanket beside the camper and ate ham and cheese sandwiches and talked about our life. The ghost of that day is especially ethereal. If you’re going to be a writer, be a writer, I’m sure Mary said. I knew what she meant: Wherever that life took me, she would follow. A writer can write anywhere, she believed. Spouses, children, good or indifferent jobs; these things all came with the writer’s territory, she believed. She was right, of course. But poised up there on the fulcrum of the continent, I didn’t feel the stability of her vision. The world could tip either way, it seemed to me. Nevertheless, I said: I will. Among the ghosts of memory that make up my life, there are a few moments in Mary’s and my history I believe I can recall exactly. In my mind’s eye I can see perfectly the ankle-length royal blue dress she wore to our anniversary dinner (our fourth) at a small restaurant in Stillwater, Oklahoma, just a few days after our return from this trip. I’d bought the dress for her at a mall in Boulder a few months before we were married. At our anniversary dinner, I confirmed what we had decided on the mountain meadow in Colorado: We would both finish our doctorates, then teach if we could. When we had our terminal degrees in hand, we would finally start a family. And I would continue to write, no matter what. The life we envisioned for ourselves wasn’t going to be easy, but we would manage. I can’t remember what Mary wore on the mountain that day. Brown shorts, maybe, with a matching brown tank top. Whatever she wore, it fit both her and the moment, for the world tipped her way that afternoon. We could have picked another route home after our picnic lunch; we could have retraced our path back down Trail Ridge Road to Estes Park for a romantic dinner. Then, because hotels in Estes Park are always booked that time of year, we would have driven back down the Big Thompson in the fading light, to Loveland. That choice would have pleased us both, and we talked about it. In the end, we decided to strike out for new territory instead, on across the Divide and down the western slope toward Lake Granby, then who-knew-what. On the western slope the skies were clear and the views dazzling. We wound up driving all the way to the Maroon Bells, near Aspen, where we camped for the night. The following day we drove down to Durango, where we checked into a Best Western. While I unpacked our bags, Mary turned on the TV. Steve, look at this. I raised my eyes and took in the first galvanizing images of the flood: twisted, mud-coated automobiles lodged on sheer cliffs. Entire cabins ripped apart, washed away. Telephone poles shooting down rapids like spears. Car-size chunks of asphalt bobbing like apples. Brown, indistinguishable bodies. Some moving, some not. Mary and I sank onto the edge of the bed and stared at the television for the rest of the afternoon. The statistics came later. Fourteen inches of rain in four and a half hours. Fifty million tons of moving water. Three hundred sixteen homes. Forty-five mobile homes. Fifty-two businesses. One hundred thirty-nine lives. One statistic we had to calculate for ourselves: six hours. The time between the moment we emerged from the Big Thompson and the initial cloudburst at the western end of the canyon. Sometime in the middle of the mind-boggling afternoon in front of the TV, I turned to Mary and said: How lucky can we be? I was lost in this memory–feeling edgy, ready to bolt–when all at once the ceiling of clouds collapsed. The canyon walls on both sides vanished, and I stood enveloped in billowing gray. For an instant, I didn’t know where I was: in Mauna-lei or the Big Thompson. Then it began to rain. The stream, merely a trickle moments earlier, began to surge around my ankles. I gripped the broom stick, but it was useless. There was no escape. Whatever spirits inhabited this place would claim me now, if they wished. I could do nothing but stand and wait. Then, as swiftly as it had come, the gray cloud passed. On each side of me, the nearly vertical cliffs of Mauna-lei sparkled green in a thinning mist. I stood, soaked and shivering in the returning light, and drew a deep breath. Ahead of me, near the head of the gulch, the second waterfall tumbled in a spindly white ribbon from its notch in the cliffs. I just stood there and stared at it. Any life, no matter how solid its foundations, can be swept away in an instant, leaving behind nothing but the clean bright walls of a scoured canyon. Standing there, drenched and exhausted, somewhere near the vault of spirits in the sacred valley in 1988, I thought I grasped all that. But I had no idea. It would be another decade before I experienced for myself the irresistible power of the flood. I could have hiked further into the valley that day, into the silent echoes of brave souls. But I didn’t. Instead, I stabbed the silver-tipped broom stick into the crusty volcanic soil between two rocks beside the stream. For all I know, it still stands there, marking the point where I stopped. Later that afternoon, I got on an airplane that returned me to my life. One question haunts me more than any other: Why were Mary and I spared, only to fail each other decades later? I have no answer, just a way of continuing. After all these years, I know only this: Unlike the mortal spirits Prince Ka-ulu slew on Lāna`i, the ghosts who travel with us cannot be killed. Each day I hike once again through a valley of ghosts, indomitable spirits who climb tall mountains and cross great oceans, traversing every expanse of our lives, until at last the journey is over. |
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