Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011 (click on image to see it full-frame).
I BEGAN KEEPING a journal in my 16th summer a few months before I got my first newspaper job, and I have done so ever since. Though many of these annual collections of notes and letters and poetry fragments and other such personal memorabilia were destroyed by fire in 1983, the dynamic of memorization and recall that is a central part of writing enables me to remember enough of a given event – what happened and how I felt about it – to be reasonably comfortable applying the first-person form to anything that happened in my life from mid-1956 onward.
But my pre-journal years are notably different: whether in intellect, psychology or physique, I am no longer the boy who had yet to discover the advantage of paper mnemonics, a present-day biological reality underscored by the fact that while my pre-journal memories remain vivid, the emotional anesthesia that is both the curse and blessing of nonverbal time has given them a curiously once-removed quality akin to that of film footage or old sepia-toned photographs, of events in which I was an observer rather than a participant or – if reincarnation is more than just a comforting fiction – perhaps of memories from other lifetimes.
Clearly this is why now whenever I try to write of my boyhood years before the decisive moment I committed to a lifetime of writing, it seems gravely dishonest to do so in anything other than the third person, presumably a recognition that these circumstances demand the I (and eye) of the autobiographical present be replaced by the reportorial he and him – an expression of necessity and therefore not of some Norman Mailer affectation.
There is also the fact that until my emotional and intellectual vocabularies had expended to something approaching maturity – another milestone I associate with the advent of journal-keeping and its associated decision to study and practice accurate description – there was much that happened during my pre-journal years I frankly found impossible to verbalize until years later; I lacked both the words and the vital sense of metaphorical relationships – for example the clear image of Nature as a womanliness so huge and powerful and yes seductive that even now I can find no adequate synonyms for her timeless magnificence in any language beyond the visual arts or the haunting virtuosity of music, especially tribal woodwinds, their summons like fire-blue Clyfford Still brush-strokes against an umber cadence of drums, the heartbeat of a forest, a river that murmurs in the Mother Tongue, the wordless invocations so beloved of Celtic or First Nations peoples.
The following describes an event I as a boy never dared reveal, one of those pre-journal episodes I can only relate in the third person, a true story I could not write until I was a 70-year-old cripple and no longer gave a damn if people thought me a liar or crazy or both.
Bear in mind too that children of my generation yet enjoyed a freedom that in the United States of today has become not only unthinkable but has in many jurisdictions been suppressed as a felony perpetrated by criminally neglectful parents.
*****
THE BOY WALKED in conifer-dappled sunlight along a road so old and unused it was scarcely more than an underbrush-obscured trace through the forest. He had long wondered where the road might lead and what he might find along the way, and now today he followed its hide-and-seek ruts of pale yellow sand westward from the charred remnants of a mysteriously destroyed bridge that in the late 19th Century had briefly spanned the South Branch of Michigan's Au Sable River.
Local elders called the former bridge-site “The Abutments” and – curiously, the boy thought – spoke of it with the same subtle implied-capitals proper-noun reticence he observed in adult conversations about graveyards and funerals or disasters, a fact the boy had noted immediately. After the boy had seen the reality of the place, the name had perplexed him even more, the quiet weight of its syllables clearly unexplained by what was there: the bridge could never have been anything but a crude structure built of hand-hewn logs, and that scarcely a single lane wide. It had spanned a watercourse no more than 30 yards across even at maximum flood. Its defining relics were merely two pairs of fire-blackened pilings, one pair on each side of the river in the shallows just beyond its banks, each piling a tight cluster of three or four maybe 12-inch diameter logs bound together by a few wraps of iron cable that had long ago oxidized into dull brown coagulation now barely discernible from the underlying charcoal, the pilings on each bank matched like gateposts perhaps 10 feet apart.
There was mystery here also, another quality the boy sensed about the place: the fact The Abutments was where his maternal grandfather dug gray clay from the otherwise brightly pebbled riverbed for the boy's aunt to use in her ceramic sculptures, and that – because the boy correctly recognized his mother's older sister as his sole defender in a family poisoned to hatefulness by the toxins of dysfunction – such a place, if only by its association with the sanctuary of his aunt's studio, should therefore have emanated the same comforting sense of home with which the rest of the river unfailingly welcomed him, its murmur like the gentle voices of women conversing fondly in some immediately adjacent room, voices that sometimes even seemed to call one's name – an eerie but somehow comforting quality the river guides and their adult-fisherman clients would acknowledge only after several whiskeys and about which the boy thus knew to keep silent. But uniquely the clear water that coursed past The Abutments did nothing of the kind: it gurgled ominously, and though the bottom beyond its ruined pilings plunged quickly to the come-fish-me depths of big-trout habitat, the boy could not comfortably cast into it or even look long into its cold green shadows without involuntarily shuddering, as if someone had drowned there or something deadly dangerous lurked just out of sight within its strong currents
As a result everything about The Abutments aroused his curiosity, and he repeatedly questioned his elders about what had happened there until finally his persistence pried out of his maternal grandmother a reluctant, obviously pared-to-the-bones story about bridge-builders thrice thwarted by fire that always struck at night and did so always inexplicably, without apparent cause, so that after the third blaze had dropped the third span of timbers into the river and for the third time left only monoliths of charred pilings, the builders surrendered to whatever pyromaniacal namelessness seemed to rule there and abandoned not just the bridge but the entire road-building project, never mind it had been hailed as the shortest, easiest-to-complete route from Luzerne to Grayling and back.
Again in that oddly wordless childhood mode of reasoning the boy soon concluded the reality that echoed in his elders' voices was neither explained by his grandmother's story nor by the fact a place so seemingly innocuous – at least until you peered into its deeper waters – would bear so emphatic a name.
Denied all other sources, the boy began wondering what the road itself might tell him – and now today he intended to find out.
*****
You got to The Abutments by a seldom-traveled and severely potholed two-rut road that followed the river maybe a half mile along its west bank downstream from the George Mason Estate and ended in the sandy expanse of a turnaround that sloped gently to the water's edge, an obvious if curiously underutilized launching-site for canoes and the AuSable's uniquely long and flat-bottomed riverboats.
Here a Norway pine, the broad scales of its bark the color of red rust, had sprung from the middle of the intended Luzerne-to-Grayling roadway exactly where the west end of the bridge had been. The tree had since grown to a towering height, as if it were adding its own exclamation point of obstruction to the message of the fires.
On the river's east bank the old road had long ago vanished, conquered by an unlikely jungle of marsh grass that grew chest-high beneath a grove of white-trunked paper-birch, but here on the west side of the river the way had been preserved well into the 20th Century, probably by hunters using it to access the deep woods beyond. What was now a turnaround had until recently been a riverside junction on the upstream side of the big tree, a 90-degree L-shaped intersection that ended the north-south road from the Mason Estate by connecting it to the remnant of the Luzerne-Grayling road that continued westward toward Grayling to whatever point the roadbuilders had reached when the project was terminated by the fires that thrice destroyed their bridge. But this passage too had finally been by closed by winter windfalls that for some unknown reason no one had troubled themselves to clear away and now it was dwindling to just another of the innumerable forgotten tracks that thread northern Lower Michigan's ruggedly mature second-growth forest: scrubby jack pine and its less frequent but far more stately cousins, white pine, blue spruce, other Norway pines like the one that seemed to stand sentry here where the boy began his quest.
It was 1952, near the end of that fondly remembered era when the electric lines and telephone wires went no closer to this portion of the South Branch than Grayling, the Crawford County seat a dozen crow-miles further west. Though the entire region had been clearcut to a biblical barren during the 1860s – raped for Christian profit and then burned to inquisitorial ash by the Great Michigan Fire of 1871 – in 1952 its distance from modern utilities preserved its wildness and fostered the ecological healing that made it also a place of healing for humans. It was middle August, hot and nearly without wind; the sky that pure back-country blue you don't see much below 44 degrees North latitude; the few clouds white and billowy as raw cotton; the late morning air pungent with sweet fern, loud with birdsong.
The boy's every step flushed huge coveys of those big brown Midwest grasshoppers that always make you think of butterflies as they fly away on purple-black wings edged in yellow or orange. Small for his age, the boy nevertheless had already learned to move with the watchfulness of a seasoned hunter, his obvious comfort in woodland solitude a rebuttal of his urban origins, the quiet economy of his stride suggesting it might have been the fraction of First Nations blood inherited from his maternal ancestors that colored his hair and gave his eyes their vaguely Asiatic shape. He was dressed in khaki work clothes and a floppy-brim khaki field hat of the type the Army had issued at the beginning of World War II; he wore a razor-sharp hunting knife in a brown leather sheath on his belt and carried a .22 rim fire bolt-action Remington rifle, loaded, locked safe and slung by an oiled leather sling diagonally across his back; the area was infamous both for its small but notably deadly Massassauga rattlers and its occasional rabid animals, but with the rifle as his companion, he feared nothing in his environment, and he was supremely confident of his ability to perceive any incipient risk in time to defend himself against it: he was in the mindset his father had taught him, a way of paying attention, the lessons imparted during autumnal weekends afield before the boy's ninth birthday, eyes focused on nothing yet somehow also on everything as he scanned his surroundings seeing whatever might thrust itself into his consciousness: perhaps a snake on which he might otherwise have stepped; perhaps a quick subtle whisk of tail revealing the presence of another mammal whether belligerent or benign; perhaps a discarded tool or the rusted relics of a logging camp from the 19th Century; perhaps a swamp, a pond, even a new place to fish; perhaps another vanishing passage through the woods; perhaps so-called Indian Mounds he sensed might explain the mysteries suggested by the thrice-burned bridge and this fading remnant of road.
Songbird morning gave way to cicada afternoon; a vast chorus of insects droned in Gaian harmony; a Yellowhammer drilled a hollow snag for beetles. The day basked in summer fulfillment, at ease with itself.
The road curved slightly upward along a low knoll, dipped toward a shallow basin – now bone dry but every spring a vernal pond – a space shadowed to momentary cool by a dense grove of spruce; the boy welcomed the quick respite from the heat, paused for just a moment to relish it, then walked on.
When he re-entered the dappled sunlight on the far side of the spruce he was thinking of that time in Florida when he was six years old and he had wandered away from his playmates and followed a white-sand road deep into the perpetual shade of a cypress swamp; a year earlier his mother had tried to kill him and in the aftermath of sirens and cops and frantic adults he had been told his mother was safely locked away forever and that she would never be able to hurt him and that he would never have to see her again. Because it was easier to make sense of it when he was alone he began spending as much time in solitude as relatively unlimited childhood freedom would allow, but at last in the cypress swamp that afternoon he sensed he was going too far and he stopped walking and looked out over the suddenly ominous expanse of dark water on both sides of the road: the cypress boles reminded him of the swollen ankles of a beggar he had seen on a street corner in downtown Jacksonville and the Spanish moss looked like witch hair on Hallowe'en and off in the distance something maybe big enough to eat him alive announced its presence with a swirl of disturbing ripples and suddenly he was a little frightened. But he did not run; somehow he already knew better. He merely turned back and walked in the direction from which he had come and when he walked out into the hot sun and then beneath the towering shade of a huge tulip poplar growing to his left just outside the swamp a leaf spiraled downward from the tree and touched his forehead and it felt like a kiss, exactly the kind of kiss he had seen other mothers bestow on their own children, and all at once he sensed he was being embraced not by a woman but by something female he could not describe: a sense of womanliness itself, womanliness big as nature that had just kissed him as if to tell him not only that she would be his mother from now on but that unlike his birthmother she would never betray him.
Now today six years beyond that Florida swamp and now in Michigan in the South Branch region of the Au Sable River country a squadron of blue jays jeered from a distance in the lesser heat; the boy wondered what had disturbed them and remembered a fight he had witnessed between jays and a nest-raiding red squirrel who had climbed a white pine in search of eggs to suck; the jays had flown at the squirrel and fiercely pecked at its head until bright droplets of blood appeared on its russet-colored fur and it abruptly turned and fled down the tree.
The boy continued westward, his bootheels lifting tiny puffs of dust from the sand.
Cicadas buzzed and rasped; a woodland aviary of small birds twittered.
A new bird warbled – its voice clear and cool as a minor-keyed flute solo emerging from a background of ambient noise, a five-note melody so exquisite the boy gasped at its beauty.
It was birdsong the boy had never heard before – a startling but delightful surprise to one who was sure he had known every bird and bird call in that forest – and now the call was repeated, again and again, each note drawn out with the same slow poignant sensuality, every note pure as cleanest clearest water, a spirit-caress more powerful than anything his flesh had ever known or imagined.
The boy stopped in the road, searched the surrounding trees, hoping to see birds even fractionally as lovely as their song, its compelling suddenness suggesting a mental choreography of something he could not quite remember, perhaps – because already he had begun to understand the associations of sound and color and geometry – a recollection of his aunt at work on one of her paintings while her own daughter practiced the flute, an ephemeral construct of twilight blue and lunar white he could see in his mind but not verbalize; perhaps though not his Aunt Alecia and his cousin Pamela at all; perhaps (though how could that be?) some phantom echo of memories far older.
He envisioned feathers of green and gold; the size of the song suggested birds at least as big as crows.
Perhaps someone's parrots had escaped their cage.
He watched, waited; already relentlessly logical, he knew birds typically flitted from limb to limb. Surely one of these wondrous birds would soon move and the boy would spot them all by the motion of one. But jackpine and blue spruce remained birdless. There was nothing save the song – its notes so unfathomably lovely each was its own microcosm of ecstasy.
No, the boy thought, this couldn't be – birdsong so intense and yes getting closer, louder – but no birds anywhere to be seen.
Perhaps it was another human with a flute like that on which he had heard his cousin sometimes practice modal scales curiously similar to the obviously avian melody that now seemed to surrounded him. Perhaps it was somebody with a flute hiding and playing a joke or trying to frighten him.
He thought of tramps, of grubby men said to prey on children.
The boy unslung the Remington, thumb on safety, index finger resting on the blued steel trigger guard: “I'm armed,” he warned; “I'll shoot.”
Yet even as he spoke he sensed the Remington was somehow irrelevant and he reslung it as he realized the forest had absorbed his shout as completely as if he had whispered into a blanket or yelled into a down pillow and he had a fleeting sense of being trapped in one of those awful dreams in which your life depends on your ability to scream but you cannot make your vocal cords produce even a tiny squeak. Yet the boy knew he was not dreaming; he knew it was 1952 August mid-afternoon and he was here in the river country the only place on earth that felt like home and he was wide awake and all the lesser birds and now even all the insects had fallen dead silent yet these birds of the strange indescribably lovely song seemed to be circling directly above him and now yes around him at no more than arm's length yet there were no birds to be seen anywhere and now the color of the day was changing, the air becoming somehow iridescent, darkening to a kind of stormlight though the sky remained impossibly cloudless and the sun bright as ever and something inside the air and eerily also of the air itself was...
Such terror as the boy had never known or imagined engulfed him from head to foot. He became terror itself.
He turned and ran. He ran east toward the river. He ran harder and faster than he had ever run, than he would ever run again, leaping windfalls, dodging saplings, his lungs painfully craving air, his heart seemingly loud as thunder. He ran until he could no longer hear the strange birds and the forest was again alive with bugsong and casual twittering and there was just the late afternoon and the road and the grasshoppers and the hot westering sun and the air tangy with the cinnamon citrus scent of sweet fern and in the bracken off to his left a whitetail doe with two spotted fawns standing motionless as if amused by his retreat and now finally the Norway pine on guard by the river.
He shrugged out of the Remington's sling and flung himself down at the pine's protective base and laid the rifle across his legs and pulled off the hat that had been discarded in 1946 by another maternal aunt's Army Air Corps husband and mopped his sweaty face with the hat's cotton floppiness and sat back leaning against the tree's rough bark until he finally stopped panting and caught his breath.
The boy was surprised to discover that the sun was nearly setting; that his hike along the abandoned road and his frantic retreat to the place of The Abutments had taken much more time than he realized.
He stood; he leaned the Remington carefully against the tree and made sure its butt was enough securely grounded the loaded rifle could not slip sideways and – just in case – he lifted the bolt handle so it could not discharge if it fell.
Then he went to the river and knelt on the damp sand between the western bank's abutments and dowsed his face with double handfuls of the river's icy water. Even now nearly 60 years after the final fire had destroyed the third bridge the close proximity of the charred logs smelled subtly of wet charcoal.
The current gurgled as if in warning. The boy stood again and dried his hands on his pantlegs and fetched the Remington and restored it to readiness and slung it diagonally across his back and picked up the sweat-darkened hat and put it on his head and began walking the river road quickly upstream toward his grandparents' vacation home.
Later that night while he could still remember the melody he whistled it for his grandmother, asking if she knew what species of bird it might be.
“No,” she said, focusing on the boy with a lingering glance so acutely searching it seemed to him she looked not at him but more deeply into him than anyone had ever looked, and for an instant he glimpsed in the robin's-egg blue of her eyes a vastly older and more purely wild female spirit somehow close kin to the powerful womanliness he had sensed in the kiss of that falling poplar-leaf in Florida.
“No,” the boy's grandmother said after a moment; “there's no bird alive that sings like that.”
*****
PERHAPS TWO DECADES later, during one the many evenings and weekends I worked on my own time to document what I still regard as the 20th Century's biggest unreported story – the old Counterculture's eerily spontaneous resurrection of the breathtakingly ancient ethos of the Great Goddess (which but for the fire I would have revealed in the now-forever-lost book of photographs and text entitled “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer”) – I happened to read of a phenomenon described in antique Celtic myth as the Birds of Rhiannon: goddess-sent messengers feathered green and gold, avian couriers dispatched by Rhiannon herself either as a dire warning or a summons that one cannot possibly reject, their song sometimes prophecy and calling combined and in any case said to be the most hauntingly exquisite music in the universe.
Most of the time I am outspokenly, even caustically agnostic, and I am profoundly skeptical of all so-called religious experience including my own, but in the instant of that reading I was smitten by a gooseflesh chill so powerfully indicative I knew it as the core truth of the misused phrase “stopped me cold,” and I remembered the odd piercing look my grandmother had given me when I whistled for her the song of those ineffable birds of strange, her eyes with their almost surreptitious flash of recognition an involuntary reflex that by now I had learned is a telling characteristic of women who are in touch with the goddess even if they cannot (or dare not) speak her name – women who might themselves say what my late friend Helen Farias said of “Dancer” after reading its first draft in the spring of 1971: “you have given me the vocabulary to describe what I always knew to be true but never had the words to express, and I cannot ever thank you enough.”
Now at age 70 I recognize Helen's praise as the finest most important accolade of my life. No matter “Dancer” was burned to cinders, undoubtedly by inquisitorial arson; no matter the 24-year reportorial effort that was to be my bridge to prosperity and the crowning glory of my career died in flames with its irreplaceable research notes and its forever lost photography and all the rest of my life's work. No matter: the odyssey begun that long ago August afternoon in the South Branch region of the Au Sable River country yet prevails, a priceless gift that endures even amidst ashes and ignorance. It is precisely as Robert Graves foretold: “nothing promised that is not performed.”
© Loren Bliss
May 2010-January 2011
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