The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (4 page)

Both Juan and Robert are associated in my mind with the moving of great rocks. Blue boulders of serpentine, dug from the reddish dirt above the road. The menfolk and my great-aunt Betsy built a drylaid wall of them. The end rock nearest the house, a beautiful blue-green monster, is still called by all members of the tribe Juan’s Rock, though some of them may not know why. He selected it and directed and labored in the levering and rolling of it from above the driveway down to its present place. No one got killed or even maimed, though the women worried and lamented in the kitchen, and I was told two thousand times to
keep uphill
from that rock.

Then, or before that—there was definitely some competition between the two men, some matter of my rock is bigger than your rock—Robert built us a marvelous outdoor fireplace. It is both technically and in fact a sacred place. It is built as a Yurok meditation shelter is built, and so oriented; but the fire burns where the meditator would sit, and so he completed the half circle of the shelter with a half circle of flat stones for people to sit on around the fire. And there my people have sat for seventy years, to eat, and tell stories, and watch the summer stars.

There is a photograph of my father and Robert, one listening, the other telling, with lifted hand and faraway gaze. They are sitting on those fireplace stones. Robert and Alfred talked together sometimes in English sometimes in Yurok. It was perhaps unusual for the daughter of a first-generation German immigrant from New York to hear him talking Yurok, but I didn’t know that. I didn’t know anything. I thought everybody spoke Yurok. But I knew where the center of the world was.

MY LIBRARIES

A talk given in 1997 at a celebration of the renovation of Portland’s Multnomah County Library.

A library is a focal point, a sacred place to a community; and its sacredness is its accessibility, its publicness. It’s everybody’s place. I remember certain libraries, vividly and joyfully, as
my
libraries—elements of the best of my life.

The first one I knew well was in Saint Helena, California, then a small, peaceful, mostly Italian town. The library was a little Carnegie, white stucco, cool and sleepy on the fiery August afternoons when my mother would leave my brother and me there while she shopped at Giugni’s and Tosetti’s. Karl and I went through the children’s room like word-seeking missiles. After we had read everything, including all thirteen volumes of the adventures of a fat boy detective, we had to be allowed to go into the Adult Side. That was hard for the librarians. They felt they were hurling us little kids into a room full of sex, death, and weird grown-ups like Heathcliff and the Joads; and in fact, they were. We were intensely grateful.

The only trouble with the Saint Helena library was you could only take five books out at a time and we only went into town once a week. So we checked out really solid books, I mean five hundred pages of small print in two columns, like
The Count of Monte Cristo.
Short books were no good—two days’ orgy and then starve the rest of the
week—nothing but the farmhouse bookcase, and we could recite everything in it by the time we were ten. I imagine we were the only people in the Napa Valley who regularly hit each other on the head with quarterstaves while shouting, “Varlet! Have at thee!”—“Why, fat knave, think’st thou to cross this bridge?” Karl usually got to be Robin Hood because he was older, but at least I never had to be Maid Marian.

Next in my life was the branch of the Berkeley Library near Garfield Junior High, where my dearest memory is of my friend Shirley leading me to the
N
shelf and saying, “There’s this writer called E. Nesbit and you HAVE to read the one called
Five Children and It
,” and boy, was she right. By eighth grade I sort of oozed over into the adult room. The librarians pretended not to notice. But when I arrived at the adult checkout carrying a thick, obscure biography of Lord Dunsany like a holy relic, I remember the librarian’s expression. It was very much like the expression of the U.S. customs inspector in Seattle, years later, when he opened my suitcase and found a Stilton cheese—not a decent whole cheese, but a ruin, a mouldy rind, a smelly remnant, which our friend Barbara in Berkshire had affectionately but unwisely sent to my husband. The customs man said, “What
is
it?”

“Well, it’s an English cheese,” I said.

He was a tall, black man with a deep voice. He shut the suitcase and said, “Lady, if you want it, you can have it.”

And the librarian let me have Lord Dunsany, too.

After that came the Berkeley Public Library itself, which is blessedly placed just a block or two from Berkeley Public High School. I loved the one as deeply as I hated the other. In one I was an exile in the Siberia of adolescent social mores. In the other I was home free. Without the library I wouldn’t have survived the school, not in my right mind, anyhow. But then, adolescents are all crazy.

I discovered that the foreign books were up on the third floor and nobody ever went there, so I moved in. I lived there, crouched in a spiderwebby window, with
Cyrano de Bergerac
, in French. I didn’t know enough French yet to read
Cyrano
, but that didn’t stop me. That’s
when I learned you can read a language you don’t know if you love it enough. You can do anything if you love it enough. I cried a lot up there, over Cyrano and other people. I discovered
Jean-Christophe
, and cried over him; and Baudelaire, and cried over him—only a fifteen-year-old can truly appreciate
The Flowers of Evil
, I think. Sometimes I raided the lower, English-speaking regions of the library and brought back writers such as Ernest Dowson—“I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion”—and cried some more. Ah, those were good years for crying, and a library is a good place to cry in. Quietly.

Next in my life was Radcliffe’s small, endearing college library, and then—when they decided I could be permitted to enter it, even though I was a freshman, and what was far worse, a freshwoman—Widener Library at Harvard.

I will tell you my private definition of freedom. Freedom is stack privileges at Widener Library.

I remember the first time I came outside from those endless, incredible stacks I could barely walk because I was carrying about twenty-five books, but I was flying. I turned around and looked up the broad steps of the building, and I thought, That’s heaven. That’s the heaven for me. All the words in the world, and all for me to read. Free at last, Lord, free at last!

I hope you’ll understand that I am not quoting those great words lightly. I do mean it. Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom.

So then, after a mad but brief Parisian affair with the Bibliothèque Nationale, I arrived in Portland. Our first years here we had two little babies, and I was at home with them. The great treat for me, the holiday I wanted, the event I looked forward to all week or month, was to get a sitter and come downtown with Charles and go to the Library. At night, of course; no way to do it in the daytime. A couple of hours, till the Library closed at nine. Plunging into the ocean of words, roaming in the broad fields of the mind, climbing the mountains of the imagination.
Just like the kid in the Carnegie or the student in Widener, that was my freedom, that was my joy. And it still is.

That joy must not be sold. It must not be “privatised,” made into another privilege for the privileged. A public library is a public trust.

And that freedom must not be compromised. It must be available to all who need it, and that’s everyone, when they need it, and that’s always.

MY ISLAND

Written for
Islands
magazine.

Invited to write about a favorite island, at first I couldn’t think of a real one—only the unattained or the imaginary. Islands are by definition separated from the ordinary world, not part of it. Isolate . . .

So I thought first of the Farallons, those foggy rocks sometimes visible from San Francisco’s Cliff House, dimly seen way out in the grey sea. When I was a child they were my image of the loneliest place, the farthest west you could go. And they have such a beautiful name.
Los farallones
means cliffs, crags; a lovely word, and in English it gathers echoes—far away and all alone. . . . But that’s all I know about the Farallons, where I will never go.

So then I thought about islands I’d found in my own mind, the ones I called Earthsea, a whole archipelago occupied by wizards, housewives, dragons, and other fascinating people. I know those islands well; I have written books about them. I gave them fine names, Gont and Roke and Havnor, Selidor and Osskil and The Hands. I never expected to see Earthsea in the real world, but I did, once. I was on a ship that sailed right round the British Isles, up to the Orkneys and the Hebrides, out to Lewis and Harris, to Skye and down the western coast past Scotland and past Wales . . . and there they were, my islands, scattered before us in a golden sea, fantastic, unearthly, surely
full of dragons: the Scillies. Another lovely name. Why are you giggling? Because I saw the Scilly Isles!

But a real island, not a dream or a name or a glimpse?—I couldn’t think of one I could write about. Until I remembered that not all islands are in the sea.

Big oceangoing freighters sail past it every day, sometimes cruise ships, often sailboats, but my island is some eighty miles inland. A faint lift and ebb of the tides is still in the water that flows past it, but it’s not salt water. Sauvie Island lies just downstream from where Portland’s river, the Willamette, enters the immense Columbia.

Sauvie is one of the biggest river islands in the country: fifteen miles long and three or four wide. Along the grey beaches of its outer side runs the broad, powerful current of the Columbia. On the inner side, a slow-flowing slough lets fishermen’s rowboats drift along between the marshes, the clusters of houseboats, the landing stages of old farms. Canals intersect the island, irrigating the farms. Shallow lakes deepen and dry up with the seasons.

In the old days before the dikes were built, before the upriver Columbia was dammed and dammed again, Sauvie Island flooded every year. It was all dairy farms then. The farmers rounded up the cattle when the water rose and drove them onto the few bits of high ground (still called “islands” within the island). There they waited out the flood, some of them mooing and some of them chewing tobacco, I imagine. Then they came back down to the rich, silty pastures. They sent their milk and butter by boat to Portland, just upstream. There was no bridge from the mainland to Sauvie Island until 1950.

There used to be an old man who rowed his boat round the whole island, from farm to farm—every farm had a boat ramp—selling trinkets and buttons and thread and candy: a kind of one-man, two-oared dime store for the islanders. Hearing about those old days, you get the feeling it wasn’t the islanders who wanted the bridge. They were quite content. It was the mainlanders who longed to get across the water.
But, racked by the huge trucks we use now, the bridge is threatening to break down, and the farmers of the island are getting a bit desperate, worrying that they won’t be able to get their produce to the Portland markets.

Long before the pioneers, Sauvie was a home and a trading center for the peoples of the river, those marvelous canoe makers for whom the Columbia was not a barrier but a highway. Lewis and Clark called it Wappato Island for the food staple that still grows there, an underwater root with tall lance-shaped leaves. But epidemics brought by early white explorers devastated the Columbia River peoples, and a fur trader wrote of the island people in 1835 that “there is nothing to attest that they ever existed except . . . their graves.” When the Oregon Trail led homesteaders to the island, they found it desolate. And it still keeps a deep quietness, which sometimes becomes uncanny.

These days, the downstream half of the island is a wildlife preserve—a dreamy silence of marshy woods, huge old oaks, vast flocks of ducks, geese, and trumpeter swans feeding and flying—until hunting season, when it gets noisy for a while. The upstream half is still farmed. I know no place in America that looks so
gardened
, the way old farmlands in England look; the care and thought with which it’s planted and tended and cherished make it beautiful. But behind the thriving nurseries, berry farms, and pumpkin patches rise the great blue hills above the Columbia, still forested, still half wild. Turn around, and to the northeast see snow-crowned mountains: Hood, Adams, St. Helens looming low since her eruption, and farther north, Rainier. Then all at once, like a mirage, a huge Japanese freighter carrying cars floats quietly by between the pumpkins and the mountains.

Sauvie is only half an hour’s drive from downtown Portland, a city of three-quarters of a million people. The highway to it passes the busy Port of Portland and an industrial district of warehouses, storage tanks, railway sidings, factories; then suddenly there’s a turn to the little two-lane bridge, and you’re deep in the country. Though it is so close, so easy to get to, and so many Portlanders love to go “over to
Sauvie’s” to pick strawberries, raspberries, marionberries, blueberries in the summer, buy squash and onions in the autumn, play on the beaches, swim in the river, fish in the slough, hunt or hike the woodland trails, or bird-watch and picnic under the oaks—even so, it remains rural and peaceful, as if it were a piece of the past, timeless between its rivers.

How long can it keep that quietness? So far, it has defended itself against such fatal intrusions as a huge garbage dump and a Japaneseowned golf course for millionaires. So far, no ticky-tacky developments, no McMansions have been allowed on the farmlands or the fish and game preserve. But land-use laws are so easily tossed aside, silence is so easily broken. How long can an island in an ever-deepening sea of humanity remain far away and all alone?