Chapter 5 #2
I took my time getting back into the car. I made a display of climbing slowly into the seat, and slowly checking my mirrors, and slowly buckling my seat belt. The angry truck driver was now back inside his cab, glowering at us from behind his windshield.
“Did something just happen?” Sarah said, picking up on the negative energies.
“That guy in the truck is mad we took his spot,” I said.
“This wasn’t his spot,” she said. “He said he didn’t want it.”
“I know,” I said.
“You tried to let him go first,” she said.
“I know,” I said.
“So what’s his problem?” she said. “Why doesn’t he just pull into the spot behind you? Or back up into the spot when he had the chance? What a fucking asshole.”
“I agree,” I said.
“So then what’s he so pissed about?” she said, craning her neck to see the guy’s ongoing gesticulations.
“Ask him,” I said rhetorically.
“I think I will,” she said. And before I could start the car and get moving she climbed out and slammed the door, walking over to the idling white truck to instigate a confrontation.
“Sarah…,” I said, but it was too late.
I watched in the rearview mirror as she tapped the guy’s window and started talking to him in a way that looked hostile. Things quickly got heated. He was shaking his head, grimacing. She was talking a lot. Finally, I got out and went over to do what I wasn’t sure.
“Is everything okay here?” I said.
“I’m asking this man what his problem is,” Sarah said. “But he won’t answer me.”
“I told you,” the guy said. “I don’t have a problem.”
“Is your truck too big?” she said. “You can’t control your own truck?”
“Just waiting my turn, ma’am,” he said.
“So why the attitude?” she said. “Do you have some issue with us? Do you have some kind of grievance?”
“Dude,” he said to me. “What is this?”
“Why are you asking him the questions?” Sarah said. “Am I not here? I’m the one talking to you, not him.”
“Dude,” he said. “Come on. Get your wife off me.”
“I’m not his wife,” she said. “And even if I was, don’t turn this into some man-on-man thing. I just want to understand what you’re thinking.”
“Sarah…,” I said. “Maybe we should just—”
“I just want to understand what’s going on,” she said.
“Look,” the guy said. “My tank is over on that side of my vehicle. You see that?”
“Yeah?” Sarah said. “So?”
“So the hole is over there, nozzle is over there,” he said. “And the body of this truck is long. Do I have to draw you a map?”
“So you need both spaces to tank up,” she said. “How are we supposed to know that?”
“Using your eyes, I guess,” he said.
“Do you measure every car that comes into a gas station?” she said. “Do you note every gas cap?”
“I could’ve communicated better,” he said. “I’m sorry. It’s true.”
“I don’t see why you had to turn it into a thing,” she said. “It was an innocent mistake we made. We’re all just people here. We didn’t understand.”
“You’re right, ma’am,” he said. “We definitely are. We’re all just people, trying to get along.”
Ten minutes later, we finally managed to get free, but only after Sarah had brought the guy completely to heel using her charms. She’d invited him to see a play in Ashland, and had been invited in return to visit a swimming hole outside Redding.
The guy lived there, he told us, and although he harbored wishes to move somewhere else, he couldn’t do that any time soon because he’d recently put his mother into an assisted-living complex so she’d quit giving her money away to scammers.
Today, he was on his way to a fishing hole specifically to contemplate what the next three to ten years had in store.
Pulling away, leaving the truck in the distance, I felt sorry for him, even as I could still feel the adrenaline numbing my fingers and toes.
“Glad he didn’t have a gun,” I said.
“Yeah, no kidding,” Sarah said. “I didn’t think about that. Shit.”
Onward we pushed. We cruised along between towering walls of evergreens and wended our way up the northern shoulder of the mountain, and arrived a little after noon at Candy and Merle’s meadow.
They were busy making piles of brush, giving the plants and grass room to breathe, healing the world at their own turtle’s pace.
It was a lovely, peaceful clearing now, warm and fragrant and subtly colorful.
Wild grasses spread between happy maples and conifers; the tattoo of a pileated woodpecker floated in the air.
This was a patch of land that barely seemed like it needed healing.
Greetings were fond all around. I was now considered an old comrade in arms, and Sarah was practically a sister.
I sat Candy and Merle down on a fallen pine trunk and got them to repeat their presentation for my phone camera, Sarah helping by holding the external lavalier mic I’d purchased.
They explained their theories again and went on some new digressions about the Indian plantings that dotted the western landscape, how the Indigenous people had cultivated batches of yarrow, chamomile, and giant trillium, how all the American West was in a sense a man-made garden.
They also gave us a lesson on how trees drink, which was interesting.
“We don’t even really know how trees pull water up their trunks to their crowns, if you can believe it,” Merle said.
“The old theories of capillary action and transpiration don’t really account for the physics of it.
Osmosis, either. Now they’re saying the inner tubes of the trees have tiny carbon dioxide bubbles in them, and that’s just more confusing. ”
“You can hear them drinking if you listen real closely,” Candy said. “This time of year, especially, you can hear the water moving in the wood.”
Sarah scowled, disbelieving.
“Come on,” Candy said. “Come over here. Put your ears to the trunk.”
Sarah and I followed Candy to a nearby Douglas fir whose trunk was mottled with lichens, slashed by a big, white bolt of crusted sap ten feet up. Almost shyly, we placed ourselves on either side of the trunk and pressed our ears to the wood.
“Just listen,” Candy said. “Give it a minute.”
We waited, feeling the fissured bark against our cheeks. It was a good feeling, rough and warm and almost pliant.
“Maybe I hear something,” I said.
“Shhh,” Sarah said.
We kept waiting, listening. I heard my own breath flowing in my nostrils, into my lungs.
I heard a squirrel’s toenails scrabbling on a branch.
Between breaths, I might have heard the faintest murmur in the tree.
Somewhere deep in the trunk, I imagined a trickle of moisture traveling upward through the grain, like a slow seepage.
Whether I really heard it or not, or only willed myself into hearing it, I wasn’t sure, but Sarah claimed she heard it, too.
How could you not choose to hear it? How could you not love these kindly people?
“If you’ve got time,” Merle said an hour later, as we backed into the dust cloud from our rolling tires, “there’s a really nice waterfall a couple clicks down the road. It’s on your way back, mile marker 9. It’s worth a visit if you’re out here already.”
We had time. We still had our lunch to eat, and the days were long this time of year.
We drove to the trailhead and collected our things and took another walk into the forest, through red earth this time, and more pine trees.
The forest was drier this far south and east, without the dripping fronds and moist leaf litter of the rain forests on the other side of the Siskiyous.
There were no other hikers on the trail.
Apparently, we surmised, Thursday afternoon wasn’t a big hiking day in these parts.
Soon, as advertised, we arrived at the falls, which were humbly impressive.
Over a broken granite proscenium, a mountain stream tumbled in beautiful, rugged cataracts, pooling into a huge basin where giant, calm boulders were semi-visible in the mossy gloom, shafts of light bending in the green depths.
The basin drained through a narrow granite throat that opened into an easy, free-flowing stream where trout were twitching, tadpoles squiggling.
The air was filled by the raucous, peaceful sound of crashing water.
The air was a little chilly near the falls, so we made our way downstream to a spot where the current became almost slack.
Water striders made tiny dimples in the river skin, and crawdads lazed on the floor in pools of Dalmatian sunlight.
The rocks on the banks were nice and wide, offering ideal, sun-warmed tables for a picnic lunch.
I sprinkled our soba noodles with sesame seeds and diced scallions, and spooned some chili sauce on top, nothing special, but after a day of hiking and rewilding, very tasty.
“This is nice,” Sarah said. “I guess you’ve probably been here before, haven’t you?”
“No,” I said.
“Really?” she said. “I thought you would’ve been everywhere around here. Growing up here and everything.”
“We almost never went into nature when I was a kid,” I said. “My mom was against it. She thought it was better to leave Nature alone. It doesn’t want us. The kind thing to do was stay home.”
“My dad loved camping,” she said. “He had all the gear. He really got something out of that. Being prepared for anything. I guess it was a kind of imperialism, it’s true.”
“I could see getting into camping,” I said. “It’s always nice, being out here. It’s easy to forget.”
“Even if it is a tree plantation,” she said.
After that, we didn’t talk much. Candy and Merle had tuned us to the mountain’s silence, and now it was only more silence we craved.
Sarah had an app for identifying birdsongs and we sat and allowed the phone to tell us about the life hidden in the boughs.
She picked up seven different calls in a five-second window.
Poorwill, nuthatch, chickadee, kingfisher.
Hummingbird, killdeer. And then one faint, faraway water ouzel, that snob John Muir’s favorite.