Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (17 page)

Not west the wind in Texas, though, but north … Nothing but a bob-wire fence …

Or maybe just “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” There was no self-conscious prizing of violence in that—he prized everything.

I baked a slab of biscuit bread, dry and toast-tasting, beside the fire, ate it with thick slices of broiled bacon, and
went to bed. The rain thickened, then slacked, then came down again in floods; the night crackled and roared with change and iron cold. Drunk with coziness. the pup wallowed beside me and groaned, and I remember wondering, before I slept, a little more about the relation of storms to man.… If, being animal, we ring like guitar strings to nature’s furies, what hope can there be for our ultimate, planned peacefulness?

But night questions don’t have answers.

BEHIND the wide blue roll of cloud the Canadian air moved down frigid but crisp and clear, and in the mornings by the fire, when I would set my coffee cup aside nearly empty and pick it up again a few minutes later, the sugary dregs would have become mush ice. Yelping flights of geese, convinced now of winter’s imminence, V-cut the blue sky. At the caprice of the little man at Possum Kingdom, or of his bosses, the river dropped three feet; channel became a study, and the pup developed a stubborn habit of leaping ashore at shallow and difficult places. In John Hittson Bend dropping-splotches painted the high red-and-gold sandstone cliffs white below ledges. Eagle’s nests? Falcons? I should check, some spring, and get my head ripped open by a defensive parent.… One day the big cold wind blew from morning until late afternoon, and under its bleak sweep there were only I and the pup and the canoe and the river and frost-dead leaves whipping across the air, and from time to time a great blue heron gliding away from a perch before us with a cry of protestant rancor. A dozen dead foxes lay
heaped on the bank at one place, victims of the new squeak-squawk callers that lure them at night within reach of spotlights and shotguns; the hound people, ritualists, hate that innovation.… In a sand-bottomed canyon once, a stallion and two mares and a big colt, alert under the season’s spur, came pounding down the beach at the strange thing that was the boat, then threw sand high stopping and pounded away as the strange thing broke in two and I began to lead it through a shallows.

Change. Autumn. Maybe—certainly—there was melancholy in it, but it was a good melancholy. I’ve never been partial to the places where the four seasons are one. If the sun shines all year long at La Jolla, and the water stays warm enough for swimming over rocks that wave moss like green long hair, that is pleasant, but not much else. Sunshine and warm water seem to me to have full meaning only when they come after winter’s bite; green is not so green if it doesn’t follow the months of brown and gray. And the scheduled inevitable death of green carries its own exhilaration; in that change is the promise of all the rebirths to come, and the deaths, too. In it is the only real unchangingness, solidity, and in the alternation of bite and caress, of fat and lean, of song and silence, is the reward and punishment that life has always been, and the punishment itself becomes good, maybe because it promises reward, maybe because after much honey the puckering acid of acorns tastes right. Without the year’s changes, for me, there is little morality.

If you tell me that that is a poisonous northern puritanism and has no validity for the sun-warmed mass of the world’s peoples, and remind me that the Greeks sired our cycle in a climate much like southern California’s, I won’t argue. I’m only talking about what is mine.

Looming over the outer edge of a bend called Poke Stalk is a line of high bluffs, an escarpment where the mountain country falls abruptly away to farming land. I camped beneath them that night near a place where, in an October years before, Hale and I had stopped and had eaten fat blue-bills out of season, shot by kids upstream who had run off with their guilty consciences and left the ducks on the water when they saw us paddling down. Skinning them out that night we broiled the breasts over drift-mesquite coals and burned the evidence, feeling guilty, too, but having eaten well.…

The wind died at sunset. The night, its wisp of a moon not yet out, was clear, with stars, and so still that I found myself resenting the fire’s hoarse whisper and snapping against a boulder that bounced its heat into the little tent. Screech owls, rare in that country since the big drouth, were quavering tentatively to one another near where I’d seen a deserted flagstone house across the river. Masses of tangled dead timber overhung the tiny flat I was camped on; six inches from one of the rear tent stakes the earth fell away into an eroded pit eight feet deep, eaten out by the river in flood.

A truck’s working-groan to the east, where Two Eighty-one climbed the scarp … Southward, a freight train threaded the T. & P., and sounded faintly the Cadillac honk of its Diesel, importunate, lacking the lonesomeness of the old steam wails we had once listened to from there. The day’s wind and bright light and paddling had washed me with clean fatigue, and my muscles felt good, in tone. A week it had taken, seventy unhurried miles, longer than it had used to, but I was older now. The skin of my hands from work and from the alternate wetting and drying and the
cold had chapped hornily, and at the knuckles of my thumbs and forefingers had broken in bloody stinging cracks. Cuts and little sore knots where sandbur tips had embedded themselves finished the disfigurement.… If one had a modern-tragic viewpoint like—oh, Graham Greene’s, one might make symbols out of those fingers. But one didn’t. One felt damned good. One was for the moment a simple puritan, soaking reward from the glow of a fire on one’s front while at one’s tail the creeping cold of night only italicized (puritanically?) one’s simple comfort, and in the embers one’s simple supper, a potato, lay baking.…

The pup wanted play. It was his main trouble and the root of the insubordination that had invaded him. After gnawing neurotically for a time on the blanket, which since the norther was becoming important for warmth at night on top of the sleeping bag, he tried to make love to it, and yipped with rebellious despair when I made him stop, and came to chew on my raw hands.

After eating, I walked around behind the tent to look at the night and, forgetting the big pit, fell into it. I landed flat in slimy mud, stunned, a tangle of old barbed wire six inches from my forehead, and when I’d pulled up onto all fours, still a little faint with the feeling you have after falls and wounds, the pup scrambled down to me and began to lick my face. I pushed him away, and a whole memory came back to me of a lost two or three months after the war when I’d stayed at a ramshackle hacienda in the uplands of Vera Cruz state, with the slightly crazy old recluse whose people had owned the place since the seventeenth century. We had drunk habanero one night, and had discussed loudly, and I’d wandered out the back door to fall into an unroofed cellar pit among broken glass, and had come back to consciousness
with a little dog licking my face. Like an old man’s repertory of stories, experience begins to repeat itself after a time, even or maybe especially in its meaningless phases. On the fringes of the middle age and after, the déjà-vu is likely not to be illusory.

No worse off than before except for another layer of filth on my clothes, I climbed out of the pit and went to bed and slept hard, half hearing things that screamed on the heights above us and once, as though in a dream, the tearing, splintering progress of a frost-freed boulder that bounded down through brush and trees and came to its next eon’s resting place in the river, with a splash.…

When I got up, the thinnest of horned moons hung in the east and stars were bright all over the sky. Under the cold air a rounded roll of fog followed the river’s course exactly down its twists and bends, and when light came the day had a windless clarity that would have been worth undergoing ten blue northers to see. It was old Parson Herbert’s sweet day so cool, so calm, so bright, and I even had a small catfish on the throwline. I skinned and gutted it by the waterside, and when I was back at the tent feeding twigs to the embers left over, under ashes, from the night’s fire, a man of about fifty carrying a thirty-thirty Winchester came picking his way among the boulders of the shore. He wore a Stetson, brogans, and striped bib overalls under a denim jacket, and looked embarrassed when I told him good morning.

“I guess you got permission to be here?”

I had to answer no, embarrassed myself. Though the tangle of barbed wire I’d fallen beside in the pit served no purpose, it was part of a fence, flood-flattened, on whose un
public side I had camped. There hadn’t been any other level ground. I told the man what I was doing.

He stared at me, then smiled. “I was thinkin’ it was somebody slipped in for a deer,” he said. “Found one last week with just a ham cut off. It makes you mad.”

I offered him coffee and he took it, black, refusing anything to eat but staying to talk while I fried and ate the catfish. He was not a loquacious sort, but he liked the look of what I was doing, and people will open sometimes to a stranger, met strangely, whom they find partly sympathetic and whom they will not likely see again. It is a principle that gets one into involvements in the third-class carriages of French trains.… He’d run away from home down the country a way when he’d been seventeen, and had come to work for a rancher in that bend, tending cattle, batching in the flagstone house across the river. He’d met his wife there one day, when she had come to the river picnicking with a party of people.