Chapter 8
I left the lodge in the morning before the heat got too intense.
We hadn’t talked any more about what the future held, the details were too much to contemplate, but we’d agreed on an immediate time frame.
For the next few days, Sarah would stay at the retreat.
She’d already paid for the session, and nothing was going to change before she got back anyway, so she might as well enjoy herself, inasmuch as that was possible.
Meanwhile, I’d head home and keep working on the book.
When she returned, she’d talk to Phil, and depending on how that went, we’d go from there.
We wanted to make this the best possible betrayal for him, the best possible destruction of his life.
We had time to do it properly. We were together in eternity now.
Wending my way back down the mountain, I tried to keep my mind on simple matters.
I had a five-hour drive ahead. I’d get gas outside Eugene at the biofuel station, where I could pick up some lunch.
They had quiche, bagels, and burritos at their food kiosk.
They had kombucha on tap, too, but I wouldn’t get any of that.
I’d push onward and make it home by early afternoon, and maybe manage to get a little work done before dinner.
Tomorrow, I’d have steel-cut oatmeal for breakfast, and a solid workday.
Mostly, though, I found myself thinking about the future and all it held.
It was impossible not to think about it.
Even as I drove, tectonic plates were shifting.
Massive reorganizations were underway. Was I really ready for this?
In the moment, in the yurt, I’d expressed my readiness, if not in words than in deed.
But in the light of day, as the tree shadows flickered on the windshield, my readiness seemed much less certain.
Already, I could sense doubts creeping in, second thoughts blooming.
I’d extinguished the doubting part of myself in the yurt in order to avoid hurting Sarah, but now that I was alone, those parts were growing back like ivy.
Questions of money, housing, friendship, and time swirled all around me.
Sarah probably didn’t understand how limited were the wages of a writer of syncretic, quasi-academic spirituality texts.
She might think that my life was built on a solid foundation, when in fact, without the subsidized rent at my mother’s house, I wouldn’t be able to survive at all.
I wasn’t sure what I’d be able to swing as far as family life went.
And the thought of betraying Phil continued stabbing at me.
I hated to think of myself as a betrayer of friends.
Phil was a good person, thoroughly brilliant, utterly undeserving of our treatment. What were we doing?
Most of all, though, it was my writing that worried me.
I’d worked hard to build a life empty enough to contain my daily practice.
My solitude was a precious substance that I’d sacrificed to create.
It was that solitude that had always led me away from relationships in the past. I’d always feared losing my quiet mornings, losing my thread.
I loved my writing life. Was I ready for that to change?
An hour into the drive, I pulled off into Amethyst Creek, a pocket of old-growth forest just east of Salem, feeling like I needed a little ritual of some kind—a moment of reflection, or cleansing, or celebration, or I wasn’t sure what.
Amethyst Creek was one of the last stands of old growth in the western United States, a few thousand acres of Douglas fir, red alder, and Pacific yew, where two creeks joined to become the Little North Santiam.
I was stopping there because it seemed like a good time for some ancient tree wisdom.
Stepping into the forest, I felt my mind immediately calm, become green.
The trunks were tranquil and enormous, rising in giant, five-hundred-year-old pillars.
They were coated in moss, with little ferns sprouting from the crooks of their limbs, lichens dripping.
The ground was a plush blanket of microbial life, dank with hornwort and diverse mosses.
As I walked, thinking about our new life, the new life we might create, I allowed my feelings about this absolutely world-changing step we were on the cusp of taking to unfurl completely. What did it all mean?
I’d never thought much about being a father before.
I wasn’t against the idea, necessarily, I just hadn’t actively considered it.
My own father had been a nonentity in my life, gone before I’d even been aware of him, although I’d met plenty of happy, dutiful fathers over the years.
No one I knew seemed to regret having children.
On the contrary, they loved it. I supposed I’d assumed I’d have one someday, when the right situation came along.
I’d thought of fatherhood as something that would happen to me somehow, not something I’d actively pursue.
I didn’t doubt I’d be a decent father. How hard was it?
Look at all the baffled people out there who managed it. Yes, I could become one of them.
Walking in the ancient forest, I enumerated all my thoughts again, all the arguments, pro and con, and found, passing under the boughs, that the cons didn’t hold much energy.
I searched my body for grave misgivings, checking my gut, checking behind my sternum, but I didn’t find anything negative.
We’d make our way, I reassured myself. Did a tree choose when to send out its shoots?
Did a raccoon debate whether or not to mate?
Like everything in Nature, they simply obeyed the drives that entered them, without conflict, without qualm.
Only human beings could turn the basic act of reproduction into a problem, mired in stupid, human complications.
Sarah’s body was calling out to mine; my body was answering. It was that simple.
Would Phil forgive us? I could only hope so, but I couldn’t worry about that, either.
“The cut worm forgives the plow,” as the great William Blake said.
Though easy for the plow to say. Better were the words of the sage Meister Eckhart: “And so anyone is quite wrong who worries about the means through which God is working His works in you, whether it be nature or grace. Just let Him work, and just be at peace.”
Walking the leafy trail, listening to the warblers and swallows, spotting centipedes and banana slugs, I felt at peace.
I thought about all the ways that life in the universe divided and multiplied.
I thought about chickens pecking out of eggs; kittens mewling in litters; giraffes dropping six feet to the ground from their mothers’ haunches.
I thought about halibut spewing their millions of eggs; sand tiger sharks cannibalizing their sibling embryos; weird toads squirming out of holes in their mother’s backs.
I thought about the oak’s pollen blowing from the catkin to the female flower and the bee’s hairy, pollen-covered legs touching the sunflower’s stigma.
The spectrum was mind-boggling. Why not us, too?
I came to a creek where soft mossy banks curved over the melodious current and stripped to my boxers and took a plunge.
It was exhilarating. Every cell of my skin vibrated with the shock of the cold.
I pulled myself onto a boulder and let the sun dry me.
It was hot, and the wind was blowing again, harder than ever.
The crowns of the trees were bending and swaying.
I jumped into the water again, and this time the cold was less jarring.
I came back to the boulder, still thinking about life in all its myriad forms. Birds, bees, snapdragons, jellyfish.
Algae, salamanders, ostriches, tulips. I’d lived alone long enough.
Phil would forgive us. The planet wouldn’t die, at least not for many generations.
I was thinking about jumping into the water a third time when I noticed the fuzz of gray coming over the sky, and the sun going blood-orange.
I squinted up and saw what looked like fine particulate floating in the air.
The sun was rapidly dimming, turning into a dull gray circle, and by the time I’d put my shoes on, chunks of ash were floating down.
An eerie quiet was taking hold, and the temperature had noticeably dropped.
On the way back to the car, knocking water out of my ear, I started to smell the char.
I found my phone and did a quick scan of the news.
In the mountains, not far away, a forest fire was raging.
It was only hours old. All summer long, we’d been getting small- and medium-size burns up and down the coast, but this fire was big.
Yesterday, it seemed, the wind had blown down an electric line near Suttle Lake, due east, and sparks had sprayed onto a dry pasture.
The wind had then carried the sparks into the trees, and now, overnight, forty thousand acres were burning.
I’d been driving only a few miles ahead of the smoke this whole time.
I called Sarah but it went straight to voice mail.
She didn’t have service on the mountain, I remembered, but I called her again just in case.
I kept scrolling the news. The Santiam Valley was like a wind tunnel, they said, shooting the flames down the flanks of Mount Hood toward the lower ground.
I looked at the fire map again. The orange blobs seemed to be coursing directly toward the Wy’East Lodge.
I called Sarah a third time and got no answer. And not knowing what to do next, I called Phil.
“Are you seeing this fire?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m driving to Wy’East right now. I’m almost to Grants Pass. But still four hours out, goddammit. What kind of world are we living in?”
“Have you talked to Sarah yet?” I said.