This story begins here, in the middle, if in fact it is a story at all, if in fact one can call the middle of something its beginning, if in fact I am not talking through my hat. Stories more often than not are chronological. A plot line threads its way through the weft, the background, over and under becoming part of the warp, the events that make up the narrative. Narratives are connected by characters as well, although characters come and go, as life will have it. Dialogue, too, provides threads that capture their conversations, their thoughts, their feelings. And description tints the weft to add a visual element to the piece. Stories, of course, are fictional; they may be true, but the truth is usually stretched quite thin with the telling. Essays are factual. That is the expectation, though many are not; for truth is not only malleable, but elusive as well. Error and mendacity often twist the truth so that the essay does not always say what is, but says, instead, what the writer wants you to believe or simply what the writer thinks is so. If poetics are applied to evoke mimesis and catharsis, an essay may become something more like a story and facts may become actual or figurative.
My friend, who was for thirty-five years an editor for the San Jose Mercury News, told me what I had here might be called a fictional essay. He scoffed when he said it, so nearly a sneer. There are such things these days, he said. All the lines are blurred. We were sitting on his porch, he and I, watching the river and drinking whisky.
Words on paper are prose or they’re poetry. No need to split hairs.
So he said.
His dog laid at his feet. A dusky brown with limpid brown eyes to match her heavy coat, the dog’s head was huge with a body to match. She looked, at first glance, quite intimidating; but subsequently, once she had determined your intent, she became quite friendly.
Frank had returned my first drafts littered with red and blue lines, the margins cluttered with notes and comments and many exclamation points. Once, in college, Oregon perhaps, or San Jose State, I sat beneath the withering gaze of a diminutive, grey haired woman, who perched on a straight backed chair and lambasted each one of the seven or eight students sitting apprehensively at a rectangular oak table for the many deficiencies she had found in our initial essays. Composition 301 or somesuch class that I had taken as a lark and that had turned out to be purgatory at best.
Your sentences are too long. Diction is flabby. Say what you mean and be done with it. Frank, speaking frankly, tended to be irascible these days. He had said, Got the big C. Dead in six months. End of story. He poured whisky and we sat in silence listening to the river rush by below us, a spring freshet, his last apparently, boulders audibly rolling, that dull pronounced thud they have, woody debris carried along quickly, pillows of white water over large rocky obstructions, back eddies circling away from the main stream, a respite where broken limbs and cast off flotsam gathered.
I had been a slovenly young man both in my physical appearance and my intellectual proclivities. In retrospect, my grey haired hectoring tormentor who tyrannized the entire English department and who became the bane of my existence, taught me all that was essential about putting words on paper, and like Frank’s dog, once she had determined your intent, became quite maternal.
“You are a Catholic boy,” she informed me during our first session together. She insisted on these ‘chats,’ as she called them, our one-on-one meetings, to provide access to each other’s intellect and emotions. “No progress comes when barriers are present.”
“I was,” I told her.
“There you are,” she said. “Change the tense of the verb, and the world turns upside down. And now you are what? agnostic? atheist?”
I hesitated.
Her glare, in that moment, stripped away all pretension.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You are how old?”
“Nineteen.”
She lifted a delicate, translucent cup, sipped, and returned the cup to its dish.
Her office, a narrow rectangle, dominated by an oaken bookcase of such simplicity that it provoked immediate approbation, contained a worn maroon rug on the floor, a small trestle table for her desk, and two mandatory straight backed chairs. Two lamps provide a soft sufficient light. A smallish drawing that at first glance I took to be a heavyset man sitting in an armchair, turned out to be a portrait in brush and ink of a woman named Gertrude Stein, the sketch perched on the end wall of the room where one would expect a window. A cream colored paper, corners wrinkled, held by wooden push pins just below the drawing offered this sentiment: It’s up to brave hearts, sir, to be patient when things are going badly, as well as being happy when they’re going well. An improbable quote, it would seem, from Sancho Panza.
“Why are you here?”
Her question, direct, perplexing, felt like a blow. I could not hold her eyes.
“You must learn to think beyond the narrow confines of your skull, young man.”
My father had committed suicide; my mother had run off with the Fuller Brush man, a quip, a diffusion, not literally, and I had been adrift for a half dozen years awash in angst and uncertainty. I could not say these things to this woman, and, indeed, I did not. I said nothing. I stood, shook my head, and left her office.
“What’s her name?” Frank, as his illness progressed, spoke in truncated questions and declarative statements. From silence to perturbation, he spit out his queries and conditions.
I was grooming Stella, the comb extracting swathes of her coat in clumps of feathery browns and blacks, and the question coming as it seemed pulled from the air, or the grumble and splash of the river, unexpected and, seemingly out of context, begged an answer. What was whose name? Context eventually provided an answer, as we had been discussing, if that word is correct for the brief intermittent questions and answers we exchanged, my long past education.
“Bluebell Fulton you mean? The tartor of grammar, syntax, and diction?”
He turned his head away at a raven’s caw, poked a finger into the cold ashes of his pipe’s bowl, and then stared off across the river at the wooded slope beyond. Stella and I had walked to the swimming hole and back, and she had plunged in and swam circles, biting at the ripples she pushed out ahead of her. A good shaking and the warm rising sun dried her as we hiked the mile or so back to the cabin. I came most days ostensibly to walk Stella, but my intent of course, unmentioned and concealed, was to look after my recalcitrant old mentor despite his protests and apparent disgust.
“Wipe my ass for me.”
“If necessary.”
His daughter came three times a week, driving 200 miles round trip to do so, bringing soups and stews with onion and carrots and celery and mushrooms all chopped fine and bottled water which he ate and drank with difficulty and reluctance. She ignored his rebukes, swept the floors, washed dishes, dusted, kissed his cheek and left. I lived, at that time, just a few miles down river from Frank; and I timed my arrivals to coincide with Nadeen’s departures.
“How’s the head?” Frank’s query, not about the essay I was trying to write, but about an injury long past healing.
Months before, snow still covering the ground, I had fallen and hit my head while out with Stella.
“Good story, that,” he said. “Not front page though.”
The essay? I thought. Where’s he at?
“Give it a 24 point hed, couple of columns.”
A bowl of tomato soup had skimmed over and his spoon and Saltine crackers sat untouched beside the bowl, the setting just as Nadeen had left it.
“Damn fool. Saved your ass. She did.” He slouched in his wheelchair and stroked Stella’s head. “Cracked his skull, he did.” He snorted to think of it, then said, “Whose story, the ass with the barber’s basin?” but began to cough, the cough, now chronic, grated his throat, and he bent over clenched fists, rasping, choking gasps coming from the man until sobs broke the gradually diminished coughs and he spit into the small basin beside him.
Rising quickly I had brought a towel to his mouth, and encircled his shoulders with support, there being little else I could do. I had pushed the soup out of the reach of flailing arms. Stella had laid her head in his lap, her gentle whine, punctuating the raucous coughs.
He had paled, but managed to get his shoulders squared, sitting back in his chair.
“The jailbird, that Spaniard,” he said. “Rambling sentences longer than a dead man’s dream.”
Cervantes, he meant, whom he ridiculed but thought beyond reproach.
He still thought of me as I was when I wore a younger man’s clothes and had just begun learning a trade though twenty years had passed and I had three novels, a biography, and a collection of essays to my credit, a reputation of sorts, and enough sales to maintain a modest living which suited me. The concussion had not cracked my skull, fortunately; but Stella had saved my skin. The story remained unwritten though I had made several attempts all of which came to nothing. The perspective of thirty-five years finally brought out the words and phrases that had eluded me for so long.
Frank had begun to weaken and walking had become a burden, rising from a chair, lifting a foot up a step or two, climbing a hill, all efforts that taxed him beyond endurance, frustrating the man to distraction until he finally stopped trying. Stella became my charge, and I came daily to walk her regardless of weather.
The light snowfall, typical of the Cascades, had littered the hills with two or three inches of fairly dry snow. Overnight, clearing skies drew away any of the day’s warmth, and rime covered the rocks along the river. Instead of the waterhole, Stella and I had decided to take the fork that led across Old Maid Flats to the falls to see if they, too, had succumbed to falling temperatures and hardened to ice.
The shortcut across the flats wound its way through stately firs and massive rhododendrons; and, of course, was no shortcut at all, simply gave that illusion. By cutting the arc of the river trail which followed the ridge line with its many creek cuts and circuitous trail, one avoided the many ups and downs, and, as a bonus, had the mountain’s west side so prominent in the background.
When the story at last began to write itself—so it seemed, in my senescence, that once begun my stories and essays (how arbitrary the distinction would be if a distinction were to be made) literally wrote themselves— the necessary incidents and dialogues appeared as my fingers struck the keys and then in a trice the story was done.
Saska provoked the imagery. Smaller than Stella, Saska was that rare breed, a Sarplaninac, first bred in southern Yugoslavia of all places, and named for the Sar Mountains. She weighed something over 100 pounds and possessed enough strength to tow a plow through the lava field on which my house was built. For the past 14 or 15 years I had lived on a high broad saddle between the Big Island’s two massive volcanoes, Kilauea and Mauna Loa. Volcanic islands are not noted for their aquifers compounding the issue of water supplies. An abundance of rain provides a good source, but that necessitates a complicated storage and purification system, or so the government bureaucrats would have it. I had been preoccupied of late with the acidity of my water tank. A phone call to the agency responsible for testing our water had me pacing my deck oblivious to time and the beauty of another day spiraling to a close, the sun drooped to the horizon, the colors diffused through the atmosphere in yellows and reds. It was well past Saska’s dinner time.
The creature barked once, which I ignored, rose from where she commonly laid in the shade of the umbrella plant, and came to my side, nudged, barked again, to which I said, No Saska, and the bureaucrat said indignantly, I beg your pardon, and I said … well, nevermind the ‘I said’ ‘he said’ and the rancor that quickly arose. The upshot was that he would review the test when time allowed, check that procedures had been properly followed, and call me in three or possibly four days’ time with the results. As I turned to chastise my importunate beast, she took my wrist in her mouth ever so gently and commenced to drag me across the deck towards the kitchen and her dinner.
She weighed nearly as much as I did, I was 75 and somewhat frail, and resist as I might I was no match for the dog. She got her dinner. I got my story.
Stella had saved my life. To reach the fall’s trail across the flat one had to cross the Muddy Fork of the river. The Forest Service had erected a succession of bridges to accommodate the growing number of hikers, but each bridge failed to withstand the spring rains and snow melt that gave rise to floods that easily removed these bridges. Logs usually remained in place throughout the year to cross dry shod, and it was across one such that I tentatively made my way. Vertigo took hold halfway across, and I thought it prudent to straddle the log as best I could and scoot across, but could not bring myself to adopt such an undignified position. I tottered on until the inevitable happened. Off I went, a short fall, five or six feet, but into the icy cold stream with its rock strewn bottom. My shoulder struck in such a fashion that my clavicle snapped and my head in turn struck a rock hard enough to render me unconscious. I regained my senses, aware that I was being dragged up the bank and clear of the river by Stella who, once getting me clear, hovered over me whining and licking the wound on my forehead.`
We huddled together. I slowly became sensible, and ran various scenarios through my head to find a solution to this little contretemps. Clutching Stella with my good arm, her warmth and comforting presence revived me sufficiently to begin my evacuation. My belt, with some difficulty, was removed from its loops and used to strap my useless left arm to my side, teeth providing a grasp unavailable otherwise. I cinched the belt as tight as I could manage, pulling my shoulders back and aligning the cracked bones of my clavicle. My bandanna served as a sling. Leaning on Stella, grasping her collar, I stood, closing my eyes, breathing deeply against the initial dizziness, and began to follow our footsteps back to Frank’s cabin.
Hypothermia proceeds ineluctably by stages. As one’s core temperature drops, shivering begins. This shivering is the body warning of impending doom. When shivering stops, insensibility follows. Consciousness, always a dodgy business, becomes impaired. Climbers beset with such a condition inevitably feel overheated, fooled as they are by insensible signs. They remove gloves and hoods and caps and parkas and freeze to death all the quicker. Death seems inevitable, yet many cases have been reported of this death held at bay and the victim brought back to life.
I shivered. I groaned with the pain of my broken bone. Plodding on, my feeble brain focused solely on staying upright and taking the next step as Stella pulled me along. We arrived. Frank was asleep in his chair, and I slumped as quietly as possible to the floor by the fire. Stella stretched and shook and laid beside me. The cell phone sat on the end table well out of my reach, but at hand for Frank. I would have to make my way some ten feet to retrieve the phone. That task seemed beyond my resources. Clutching Stella’s ruff, the fire in the wood stove burning brightly, my head throbbing, I concluded that I would simply sit and die where I sat, that I deserved no better fate, that intelligence was no match for the perfidy of one’s perceptions and subsequent conceptions. Couldn’t think my way out of a goddamn closet. The phone may just as well have been in Turkestan.
William James brought me to my senses. Or rather, thinking suddenly of the man’s thoughts on the subject of sense perception, entire paragraphs came to mind.
Thought alone can unlock the riddle of space, and that thought is an adorable but unfathomable mystery.
Thought alone unlocks perception, and conception is an unfathomable mystery.
Between normal perception and illusion we have seen that there is no break, the process being identically the same in both.
An engaging speaker, affable, knowledgeable, mellifluous, his voice at once both melodious and clear, a tenor, soft spoken, but easily heard.
Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness.
I gathered my knees beneath me, my consciousness focused completely on that movement, the precise position to hold my left arm, the support I needed from my right hand, and went on hand and knees slowly and carefully to the table. Sitting back on my heels, I breathed for a bit, just breathing in and breathing out. Reaching for the phone. Using my thumb to push each numeral. Dialing 9-1-1.
And waited.
Frank softly snored.
Stella rose up, stretched fore and aft, then went to her water bowl and drank.
This story began somewhere near its middle with Frank alive but not well and Stella realizing that her future was with me. If in fact it is a story at all. I seem to have called it an essay at one point.
“You shoulda had a hard hat. And wings,” snorted Frank, raising a fist up and then gently down on the arm of his chair. An exclamation point.
And so I am here back where I started, an old man with missing teeth, and soiled trousers, patched shirt, and a mind to match. Stories, of course, are fictional; they may be true, but the truth is usually stretched quite thin with the telling. Essays are factual. That is the expectation, though many are not; for truth is not only malleable, but elusive as well. Error and mendacity often twist the truth so that the essay does not always say what is, but says, instead, what the writer wants you to believe or simply what the writer thinks is so. If poetics are applied to evoke mimesis and catharsis, an essay may become something more like a story and facts may become actual or figurative.
Nothing but the facts here, ma’am. Mimesis there is, but catharsis is up to the reader.
Saska no doubt will outlive me.
Sadness resides in all relationships.
Frank cast upon the waters of his river; Stella as well.
All things come and go as life will have it.
Ineluctably.
Inevitably.
Gone.
Saska trotted out to the deck, staring down the drive, and barked.
majikwoid 