let's get a look at it

I am watching birds. American Avocets, meadowlarks, black-crowned night herons, red-head ducks, shovellers, perhaps a least bittern. 

Northern pintails, immature marsh hawks, barn owls, red-shouldered black birds, California gulls, mallards, egrets of some sort. Plenty of Canada geese. Killdeer. 

But mostly, the curlews. In the marshy grasses north of Borax Lake they scream at the dogs and me, protecting their nests and searching around for who knows what on the white salt flats where nothing but black greasewood grows. In the distance, the wind blows down off Steens Mountain and whips up dust devils on the Alvord playa. The dust devils spin, shimmy, and die before reaching the Wildhorse Ranch country to the east.

The dogs vie for a thin patch of shade by the wheels of the truck, and I huddle in a cheap lawn chair with them. The sun burn squares into the tops of my sandalled feet as I peer through binoculars. I contemplate getting up and putting more sunscreen on. Instead, I drink water from a plastic jug. 

A white Isuzu Trooper turns off of the main road and, a half hour later, pulls up to the rusted borax refining vats by the lake and stops. The dogs start up a rolling bark which I do not discourage. The driver and I talk while he waits for a trailing van full of high school students from the Willamette Valley to arrive.

“Aren’t there some hot pools around here for the kids to see?” he asks. 

I point to where a faint road heads out past a series of boiling water potholes and marshy pools. I volunteer, “There’s also the chub in the lake here.”

“Fish? In this lake? Tell the kids when they come along, they’ll want to see that.”

I tell the sweaty kids about the famous Borax Lake Chub. A two-inch long fish whose habitat once stretched out across a vast inland waterway. Then that water dried up and the fish’s range shrunk and shrunk until it learned to make do with a ten acre pond. A pond filled by a hot springs and what a BLM sign warns is twenty-five times the safe level of arsenic for human consumption.

One of the chaperones says, “It only lives here and you might never have a chance to see it again. Let’s get a look at it. Let’s go.” The kids shuffle to the bank and stare out at the water. One or two think they see something.

The kids and the other chaperones wander about while the driver of the Isuzu makes an assessment of the southern sky. “I think,” he concludes, “that I might be able to get the Blazers' game from here.” He gestures to a satellite dish tucked in the trailer behind his Trooper. I agree that he might. 

But now I wish he would leave, so I walk back to the edge of the lake and stretch out on the ground. I ease my chin onto a patch of sedge and focus my eyes beneath the water. It takes awhile, but a minnow-sized chub darts by. And then another. And then another. 

mostly built by slaves

The man who met me at the Lexington airport was driving a new diesel truck with two chainsaws and some firewood in the bed. He was talking on his cell phone and when he finished he apologized and said he was a tree contractor just finishing his work day. He didn’t look like an arborist; his clothes were clean and his hands were soft. “I just run crews now,” he said with a shrug. “It’s a comfortable job. And I don’t miss being in the tree.” I believed him. He had a placid way of talking, like someone who had come to a still point after a lot of turbulence. His phone kept ringing, but he ignored it now.

We drove along and didn’t actually talk about the reason I had come, to retrieve the Volkswagen van I had bought from him on the internet. The plane ticket had been a pot sweetener, an incentive to get more money for his vehicle. “I must confess,” he said, “I thought I’d get more for it. But my son said ebay was the way to go.”

I got the feeling that selling the van was about more than money. It can be that way when one has lived out of a Volkswagen for awhile. So I told him I planned to drive the van down to Tennessee, to an old commune where midwives would deliver my child, that it would be our first home of sorts. 

He nodded a bit but said nothing, and I watched the edges of Lexington slip past the window. As we got further from the city, the country became filled with horse farms, and the horse farms were often bordered along the road by old stone fences. We came to a turn and he pointed to the stacked limestone and said, “Those were built by Scottish immigrants. They didn’t use any mortar. A couple of years ago, some people came all the way from Scotland and were able to tell us where the builders had immigrated from, which area they came from, because each had a different style.” He stared at the stacked wall in silence, and I did too. It is the kind of moment that happens in the South, the kind where the past asserts itself. 

After the turn, there were huge pastures, a few horses in the dappled winter light, and it made me think of bourbon labels. There seemed to be an impossible number of horse farms, and I was relieved when the man’s house turned out not to be one. It was old though, a narrow two story colonial with peeling paint, surrounded by a yard of very big trees and a barn that looked like it could have been a livery. The house was small but fronted with an enormous columned facade, the way it was done on plantations. 

The man explained that he was part of a barter co-op, a group of people who traded their labor for scrip with which to trade for other people’s labor. He had cashed in some of his scrip to have the van detailed for me. A crew of young guys with buzz cuts was still blasting away with a pressure washer. So we went inside to sign papers. 

When we were done we looked the van over but I was reluctant to get inside or open the hood. It seemed the man did not want to be drawn into the details, the mechanics of the thing. But when we opened the sliding door, he nodded at the stove and said, “I cooked a lot of good meals in there, the year I lived in the van.” He shook his head, “I saw a lot of things that year. A lot of things.” 

We opened beers and he told me that he had bought the van when had gotten divorced. He had sold everything he owned, and bought it from a nurse. His kids, everyone really, had thought he had come unhinged. He had installed an expensive stereo, packed up some food, and headed west to see the national parks. “Sitting at night, eating the same old spaghetti at that stove. It was just always that much better with the top up and the wind coming in. I saw some things, I really did.”

I asked him where his favorite place had been, and he said, “I went to Big Sur and ended up living there for awhile.” 

I told him I was from that area, that I knew Big Sur well and he had probably met people I knew. He became animated, nodding his head with recollection. He leaned close to me and asked, “Do you know Partington Ridge?”

I told him I did. How one could be there and see the coast stretching out like a curtain along the sea. And how Jaime DeAngulo had danced around there naked and my friend Roland had tried to live up there without money and mostly succeeded. The man couldn’t get over the fact that I knew this place where he had lived in the van. There were tears in his eyes.

His cell phone rang and he took it in the kitchen. It was his girlfriend and he told her, “I can’t believe it. The guy who came for the van knows Big Sur. I know, I know, it’s amazing.”

We drank more beer and waited for his girlfriend to arrive. After awhile, she called back and he made baby talk to her in the kitchen. I felt like an intruder and told him I was anxious to get on the road back to Oregon anyway. I took a long look at his old house, with its heart pine floors and warped window panes, got in the van, and drove away.

Before I was out of horse country, I pulled over to have a look at what I had driven off with. It was a cold evening and already the water from the detailers had frozen into one of the door locks and shorted the yellow check engine light on. But I felt it would be a good vehicle anyway.

I could see a section of rock wall in the sweep of the headlights. The top row of stones was stacked diagonally and pointed up like dragon’s teeth. I made a note to find out whether my own family had come from somewhere in Scotland that was known for its masonry. 

So I looked it up when I got home to Oregon. Evidently the Scottish and Irish first brought the style of masonry to Lexington. But most accounts I read quietly noted the fences had mostly been built by slaves. 

Normally Descended

I was perhaps fifty feet up the crumbling metamorphic cliff and looking down. The glacier below, which had been a scary sheet of ice when I had been atop it, now beckoned like a down pillow. I looked up at the moves ahead. I had tried them twice and concluded the moment of no return would be the third hand hold, where my butt would be hanging in the air and I would be committed to grabbing at something I could not see. It was not a difficult sequence, but the rock was not very friendly. 

I was by myself, and that made it easier to accept that it had been a mistake to leave the glacier. Though I felt enough fear to hesitate, sequence the moves, and understand that I was over my head, I did not feel any dis-ownership of the predicament. When I am in the mountains with others, a part of my brain grasps such situations in terms of how I got there. Did someone else make the suggestion and I just went along with it? Did I not want to do this for reasons that had fulminated earlier, earlier grievances now coming out in whether to buy into the route or not? Was this my lame idea and now I needed to pretend otherwise? 

But in all likelihood, a partner would have increased the chance I would have been part of a more rational route choice and never found myself hesitating in this particular place. I had scrambled along all morning, taking the harder rock problems just to take them and declining to get my butt wet glissading onto the easier snow. Then turned up the staircase of a cliff until it had become a wall. The image of a horn player improvising notes until the song underneath is lost came to mind. 

I pulled out a loose piece of the dark Minaret rock and watched it fall to the snow below. Unlike the cohesive, dependable granite in much of the Sierra, the Minarets don’t let you know where you stand until you stand there, telling yourself if I clean just a little gravel away or toss a handful of loose stuff, something more agreeable is just beneath. Shattered, tricky rock. 

I kicked at the cliff. This is kinda dumb was the only useful abstraction I could muster about the situation. I tightened my shoes, drank some water, and pulled through the moves. As I passed the last hold, I immediately told myself the problem had been elementary, even felt embarrassed to have been intimidated by it. 

I hopped up the easier slope above on lighter feet, regaining the fluid, smug lift of the earlier morning. Near the top of the cliff, I was brought to a stop by a surprising site, a pair of nylon slings and a rappel ring. Other people had come this way, this unlikely line from a to b. But they had been heading down; the route was normally descended. 

The anchor suggested something about the cliff I had come up. I flexed my arm and tried on a conquering guide pose. But that wasn’t it and so I headed off to climb the rest of the mountain.