The larks trilled their cries that
Nested in my ears in birdsong.

I saw the thaw of winter had begun.

Soon spring would rush in on her
Pastel heels bringing forth blooms.

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To read Linda’s bio and enjoy more of her verse on WIZ go here, here, and here.

the hand of winter stretched out
his grey gloves and poured snow
out of his pitcher it fell upon the
world in cold numbing waves it
washed away all the colors of fall —

it beat back my favorite lilies into
the hand of white dust like people
are prone to beat one another into
the dust for a sense of self worth. I
don’t understand why winter thinks

he needs to be such a bully he beats
his cold fiercely upon the land blasts
his wailing banshee winds upon the
zephyr and rips remaining leaf missives
from trees with such force they yelp.

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To read more of Linda’s verse on WIZ, go here and here.

I watched as the white of snow
starched the earth clean of sins —

like the Savior washed me white
by his blood.  It seemed a stark

contrast of his shedding white for
red and the earth shedding scarlet

for white, but I think He favors the
irony just as much as we do. I stood

in the bone numbing cold of winter,
letting its reflection embrace me tight.

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To read Linda’s bio and more of her poetry on WIZ go here.

In the tar-like black sky
structures float like ghosts
through the illumination from bulbs
hovering like flying saucers over
the road. No heavenly
luminaries accompany me on this lonely journey.
Only those cones of light brighten the route ahead.
Nevertheless, I must persist.
I am a modern Hebrew
fleeing the Egypt of the office, escaping to
the Promised Land of the field. There,
as I stand on nude ground,
a lunar face and stellar eyes will look
upon me from the depths of the universe
and remind me of the Creator of this grandeur.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Ashley Suzanne Musick was born in Fountain Valley, California, on February 26th, 1989, and raised and homeschooled in Anaheim.  In 2010, she moved to southwest Kern County, where she lives and works on a farm and writes in her spare time.  You can read more of her verse on WIZ here.

For late November, Crossfire Creek was running high.  Usually, a few flash floods in October knock things around a bit, then bone-dry air siphons the water off into the sky, leaving the creek bed bare except where beavers have gardened two springs to create a year-round water park half a mile long.  As I stood on the bank above a pond contained behind one of the lower dams, I turned to see a young couple I didn’t know walking toward me down the trail, my neighbor’s Welsh corgi, “Goliath,” loping ahead.  November weather in the Four Corners region sometimes runs to the mild side.  The couple wore short-sleeved shirts and were holding hands as they strolled.  Seeing the dog, I supposed the pair to be relatives of my neighbors whose house lay east of mine across a city block’s worth of pasture.  I greeted them and Goliath.

Upon reflection, I’m tickled at how the couple’s relationship to my neighbors was glaringly obvious to me, not because of any physical resemblance they bore to my neighbors but all because of that small detail of Goliath’s presence.  Had he not been there, I’d have supposed nothing about the couple–certainly not their relationship to my neighbors. Stocky but diminutive Goliath is not a wanderer; I’d never seen him in the canyon before that moment.  His accompanying the couple was probably a considered choice on his part. After all, the surrounding desert is predator-dense.  Plucky as he is, on his own he’d be no match for the coyotes, eagles, bobcats, and the occasional cougar that patrol the desert looking for their next feed.  He knows that. He stays pretty close to home performing his duty of keeping my neighbors’ twenty acres in order in company with a mixed breed named Buddy my neighbors acquired two years ago.  Buddy came with a sister, Precious, but Precious developed a bad habit of chasing another neighbor’s horses.  One day, she took a lethal kick to the head, and that was that.

Seeing Goliath triggered pangs of sadness and envy, not just about Sky’s death. The apparent normalcy and leisure of the scene contrasted with my own life: a young couple, at their ease, loose in the canyon, holding hands as they strolled along, escorted enthusiastically by a dutiful dog.  Because of Sky’s chase-and-kill instinct, I couldn’t bring her into the canyon.  I missed the companionship of a dog in my wanderings.  A dog reveals the landscape in ways you wouldn’t see it were the dog not highlighting with its lively athleticism the surrounding contours. And I hadn’t felt the level of comfort in my married life that I imagined this young couple enjoyed since just before my special needs daughter was born nearly two decades ago.

The couple introduced themselves by way of announcing their relationship to my neighbor–of which fact I was already aware.  I told them I knew Goliath and where he lived.  “What did you say his name is?” the man asked.  “Goliath,” I said.  “I would have never guessed,” he said, looking at the squat, compact dog.

The topic being dogs, I told them my own had died just the night before.  The woman murmured in sympathy.  “How long had you had her?”

“Almost fourteen years,” I said.

“Oh, that’s almost as long as a child,” the woman said, her voice soft.

“It is. In fact, I have a fourteen-year-old daughter,” I said, holding back on expressing my anxieties about her. Too complicated a story.  But I appreciated these strangers’ interest in my grief.

We spoke a few more words between us then I went on my way, heading north on the trail and homeward.  Goliath started following me but the couple called him back.  Just as well. My mind being in the state it was, for simplicity’s sake, I wanted aloneness for the remainder of my walk. I headed up the steep part of the trail that I take to the rim, stopping to sit on a lichen-encrusted stone where I sometimes rest and look back on immature cottonwoods growing along a spring, where also grows, in the summer, wild mint, wild roses, watercress and water grasses, including that ancient, single-stalked plant with telescoping joints, horsetail.  Those young cottonwoods had lost all their leaves, but as I looked at them, a piñon pine standing a few feet away caught my eye.  The November light silver-plated most of the tree’s needles, almost like an ice storm would do.  The low-angled sunshine got into the depths, thinning shade and shadows that usually hang about a tree’s inner branches.  So the piñon stood, well-lit in places, clear to its trunk.  My light-tuned eye savored the shine. I remembered noticing the tree in this state last year during approximately the same pitch in the sun’s angle and wondered if this is the only time of year this particular tree–along with many others, no doubt–is so transfigured. Interesting to mentally map this tree yet again in its same place but at a different spot in the year.

Then I went on my way, satisfied and somewhat soothed by events as they’d happened, climbing the steep wind of the former ATV trail.  I crossed the spring again higher up, just a few feet away from where it plunges off a stone lip and transforms into a thin waterfall whose voice dominates this part of the trail.  Then up an even steeper section where last year I found the Pure Life water bottle .  As I breasted the last rise before the ground relaxed into a gentle slope, a hard gleam of light from a juniper tree next to the trail caught my eye.  Unlike canyon light on the cottonwood leaves, glazing pine needles, glinting on water and hanging about stones, this reflection had a distinctly artificial sheen to it. My mind snagged on it and curiosity sparked.  Did I want to know?

Probably, someone had left a pop or beer can jammed into a fork in the tree, or maybe something else. After a moment, I stopped thinking and simply followed my curiosity, approaching the tree cautiously then circling to the side turned away from the trail.  It took a moment for my mind to register what my eye saw. A camouflage-printed, latched, plastic case hung on the side of the tree opposite the trail, tipped at such an angle that the afternoon light hit it and cast the plastic glare that my eye detected. Oh, I thought, someone hid their camera here while they went into the canyon. Best not to touch. I don’t know why my mind didn’t accept that explanation and leave well enough alone. My hand seemed to reach of its own accord and lifted the case.  A thin twist of wire tethered it to the juniper.  When I raised the case, I discovered a cable running from its bottom and up into the tree.

Awareness dawned: This is some kind of monitoring device. I backed out from beneath the branches the way I ducked in and circled back to the trunk’s trail side.  Now that I knew what to look for, finding the lens peeking from beneath a stringy, mad wig of juniper bark was easy.  I stared at it grimly, looking it straight in its artificial eye.  I felt extreme distaste for its presence in a place that for me has become a sanctuary.  When I was a child, cameras were a relative rarity.  Four decades later, they’ve become prevalent, for good and for ill. The line between “security” and “intrusion” has grown increasingly hazy and is more freely crossed.  I have a unique image which I feel more inclined to protect than I do my written words, for various reasons. I had no idea how long this equipment had been planted in the tree or how often I’d passed it, unaware.

The camera contained no “Property of” statements nor any other way to identify the device’s owners, although its location on the trail twenty feet down from the carsonite sign forbidding the use of off-highway vehicles suggests it might be the BLM’s doing.  Probably, there was no sound device included, just a lens and video recording equipment. So there was no use lecturing the wired tree. But if the camera had been able to read my mind, its lens would have cracked.

I’ve hiked Crossfire since the notorious September 2007 closure of a seven-mile stretch of the canyon to motorized vehicles. Some months, I’ve gone down as often as three or four times a week. I can say with certainty that at this trailhead violations of the 2007 prohibition have been few and far between.  If the BLM had indeed planted the camera (or cameras, since what’s to stop those with a mind to monitor public spaces from installing more devices in rocks and trees) to track offenses, the low and mostly nonexistent number of ATVers who drive vehicles past that point hardly justifies the camera’s constant intrusive presence.  There simply haven’t been that many scofflaws interested in making a statement in that way. In the meantime, plenty of foot travelers, like myself, have passed the camera without knowing we were photographed or noticing the tree’s unnatural eye.  I may be old-fashioned, but in non-posted environments like this one, I think it impolite verging on violative to collect someone’s picture without his or her knowledge or permission. If the canyon were posted as being under camera surveillance, I’d at least have the freedom to choose whether or not to enter it and have my image collected.  In most other public places where cameras collect images for security reasons, their presence is advertised and obvious.  Every time I pull up to an ATM, for instance, I’m aware of the prominently visible camera and I consent to having my presence recorded.  But here in the canyon, I find the use of a hidden and undeclared camera an obnoxious trespass.

Yet on another level, the sentry tree interested me.  It’s another artifact revealing how people have used the canyon for a broad range of reasons stretching back into prehistory.  About a mile and a half up canyon along the north branch of the bottom trail is a (to me) fascinating bridge built over an arroyo to help make the crossing safer for ATVers. It’s part of the “improvements” my neighbors made to the canyon that got them into legal hot water with the BLM. Interested parties, some members of the Great Old Broads for Wilderness included, find the bridge another example of heavy-handed human intrusiveness.  I wouldn’t have built such a structure myself but now that it’s there I find it something of a delight to come across out in the middle of nowhere.  In fact, all over the canyon, scattered across the ground, is a trove of wonder-sparking and telltale artifacts: lithic flakes, pottery sherds, arrowheads, and prehistoric pueblos, fallen down or half-buried.  In some places, they’re just sagebrush-feathered lines of rocks running across the ground or depressions marking the remains of subterranean structures.  There are more prominent, tumble-down towers and other sorts of rubble mounds all over the place. Flat-rock-lined, subterranean cysts dot the trail here and there. Petroglyphs adorn the rock faces.  In a few places, you find modern graffitti carved into the sandstone.  Like swallows’ nests, cliff dwellings and masonry fill cracks and wrinkles in cliff faces. Many of these use juniper and pine support beams.

Cattlemen’s barbed wire fences and gates mark off canyon sections.  In fact, one of the men who runs a herd of cattle in the canyon recently repaired–I would even say “remodeled”–a barbed-wire gate on his fence line that has been prone to collapsing.  He reinforced one of  the two gate pillars with a green, metal fence post and strengthened both posts with taller and sturdier juniper logs, cut, I suspect, from dead junipers another man left strewn about the trail after illegally “topping” them for fence posts.  The rancher strung taut wires between the two, tall pillars to provide tension and support for the pillar logs and wove a juniper branch into the lintel wires so that horseback riders will know to duck when they pass beneath the wires. It’s kind of grand. Then, of course, there are the cattle themselves, present in Crossfire off and on from about October through May every year. Let’s not forget the beavers, who have completely modified Crossfire Creek’s character, changing it from an ephemeral stream to a series of year-round, dam-reinforced ponds, in the process completely altering the creek’s liquid voice.

I’ve heard rumor of an old trail that Ute Indians stamped into the canyon making visits to my neighbor’s grandfather way back when. Crossfire has old mines in it. There are dozens of other signs of human presence, here-and-now and from long, long ago. In the overall scheme of canyon use–especially since its closure, in the political and ideological struggle for rhetorical control of its ground–the camera was just another artifact of human utility. I might even go so far as to say that, like the contested bridge, the camera is an attempt to “improve” the canyon.  But to my taste, it maintains a far more intrusive presence on the trail than does the bridge.

I stood in front of the camera a moment or two, knowing that my discovery of it had become a recorded fact.  I waved to the lens to punctuate that record then left, considering the new dilemma finding the contraption had placed me in. Some months back, one of the neighbors who’d been convicted of constructing the trail asked if I thought the canyon had cameras in it.  I’d dismissed the idea, believing it over the top. Who would go to such trouble, and for so little gain? Now I had hard evidence that the canyon was indeed wired. What were my obligations to my neighbor and to “the truth”?

Complicating the question were a pair of misunderstandings between myself and my neighbors since the canyon had been closed to OHV travel.  Although the Great Old Broads for Wilderness published a victory article announcing their part in documenting the “damage” two of my neighbors had done widening the trail for ATV use, and other groups like SUWA have described their own roles, some neighbors believed I–a recently arrived “outsider”–was responsible for the canyon’s closure.  The narrative for what actions gave rise to what results, including the closure, is still emerging, but I had nothing at all to do with the ATV prohibition.  It was as big of a surprise to me as it was to my neighbors.

The second misunderstanding was more serious.  In the spring of 2011, I discovered that when the BLM began investigating who’d build the ATV trail into the canyon, some community members thought I provided information that led authorities to two of my neighbors, Dustin and Ken.  They were arrested in the fall of 2010 for their work on the trail, fined $35,000 in total for destruction of government property, and placed on probation.  The Blanding community still feels the burn from Operation Cerberus, the 2009 federal raid that rounded up several locals for violations of antiquities laws and that led, at least indirectly, to the suicide of another of my neighbors, a beloved community member. To this day, the town’s anger still waxes hot.  My neighbors’ arrests for their work on the ATV trail made matters worse.  I lived blissfully ignorant of the arrests until I asked one of the neighbors involved what was up with the presence in the neighborhood of all the official-looking vehicles.  He told me, in somber, cautious, but truthful tones that he and his father-in-law were being prosecuted for building the trail.  At the time, I wasn’t conscious of having knowledge that they had built the trail.  Later, I remembered conversations with one of them prior to the 2010 investigation that could well have caused them to think that I did.  At the next opportunity to speak with one of the men, I asked if he had an idea who’d turned them in.  He said he didn’t, and really, he wasn’t interested anymore in knowing. He just wanted the ordeal to be over.  I said, “Well, it wasn’t me.”  He said something like, “I’ve figured that from the conversations we’ve had about all this.”  I told Mark about this interchange, and the next time he saw that neighbor he likewise told him that I had had nothing to do his and his father-in-law’s arrests and convictions.  Mark reported that the neighbor said that he knew that now and had told other community members to “lay off”.

Damned camera.  As if I didn’t have enough on my mind.

I broke off looking into the prying eye and walked home in mixed mood.  I’d been away from the house longer than expected and had to return to tasks waiting there.  It was Thanksgiving, and I had a grave to dig in hard ground for a dog who’d lived perhaps too long.  While I was at it, I might as well lay to rest in that same plot the remains of fond hopes that life would ever turn smooth and serene. Current developments had burst the seams of those old, constricting desiderata.  If I kept trying to force them to fit, they’d only slow me down and eventually choke me into unconsciousness.  They’d almost certainly become delusional, and we didn’t need any more delusions in the house.  By whatever power, we’d been sent into deep layers of life where there are no guarantees of peace and safety, only the incessant call for prodigious effort.

Hang peace and security anyway.  I’ve tasted the lotus blossom of peace. My mind savors it a moment then spits it out in impatience and boredom.  As much of a strain as these events have so far proven to be, clearly, they’re only the opening steps of the journey.  That’s both unsettling to know and exciting. Getting anywhere from here will require loose-fitting clothing and non-restrictive language that allows for free movement and is roomy enough to suit big changes in the ways we see the world.  Rapid-paced technological advances have given the impression that progress just happens as the result of free enterprise, occasional outbursts of genius or perhaps heaven-bestowed inspiration. More compelling advances occur where trenchant events exert enough strain to compel us to abandon ontological settlements that no longer hold up.  Old narrative stances for new–that’s where Mark and I are now, trading up to a world that we hadn’t known existed and whose vicissitudes we’ll perhaps survive if we can get across the wreckage of ideals that we thought we had the right to have and hold.  And making a go of that, my friends, requires better wording–flexible, recombinant, adaptive language by which power we can make something more of ourselves.

.

Contested Bridge in Crossfire Canyon

Camera hidden in juniper tree in Crossfire Canyon

In which I make my way into Crossfire Canyon and meet a wondrous bird.  I muse upon the experience of eye contact with other species, referencing N. Scott Momaday and Martin Buber.  I see the light, loose and free in the canyon–it’s beautiful. Part one here, part two here, part three here.

As I worked my way down the trail, I discovered that my right knee was finally healing from a months-long bout with tendonitis and perhaps nerve damage.  As recently as two weeks earlier I hadn’t been able to raise that leg very high, so I tripped frequently over stones in the trail or fell on my backside on that more difficult-to-negotiate rock outcrop down which I had to lower myself to get where I wanted to go.  But this time, no trips, no falls.  Still worried that I was inviting further trouble, I forced myself down the trail. As I walked onto an overlook I frequent to see what’s happening in the canyon below–whether or not cows are lounging on the trail, for instance–something fine happened.

A mature golden eagle flew across my line of vision, very close and nearly on the same horizontal plane where I stood.  I halted and reached after the bird with my gaze, wondering if it would do something I’ve witnessed several times since I began hiking in Crossfire Canyon.  Knowing that eagles can see our eyes far better than we can see theirs, I maintained eye contact, looking steadily at its head.  The eagle appeared to be fleeing in a straight line angled slightly away from me but then turned in a slow, tight arc and circled back.  I kept still, moving just my head to follow its flight and maintain eye contact.  The bird dropped in altitude and swooped in so closely that I could see its yellow feet and curled toes and talons tucked up against its body.  I heard the “whush whush” of its infrequent wing beats.  The eagle circled six or seven times, keeping me at the center of its flight.  During its last couple of passes, I remembered my manners and removed my hat so that the bird could see my entire face.  After another minute or two of what I supposed to be eagle-style, close-in inquiry, the bird spiraled north along the cliff faces.  It rose above the rim, disappeared, and I was gone to it.

What was the bird’s intention as it regarded me from its wheel in the air, holding me at the hub of its interest?  This episode was the third or fourth time I’ve met with eagles in this slowly turning fashion, eye-to-eye, spinning in an orbit of mutual encounter.  As the eagle left, I felt soothing effects from the bird’s attentions but avoided the temptation to think of it as awareness of, sympathy for, or interest in my suffering. Nature is not sympathetic, like a kind nurse.  It’s ready to make hard use of me at the least lapse in judgment. Were I to fall to my death from the overlook, that same eagle might not hesitate to strip me of morsels of my remains–in particular, those very eyes by which we had spoken. What we’d said to each other I didn’t know, but it isn’t necessary to know.  In The Man Made of Words, Scott Momaday says of pictographs in south-central Utah, “We do not know what they mean, but we know that we are involved in their meaning.” The same is true of those moments of eye contact with other species–an event that occurs more frequently than humans realize because too often we look at other species seeking only our own images. Animals are all the time looking at our eyes to judge our intentions or to express concerns or interest. The philosopher Martin Buber understood something about the quality and intensity of animal eye contact, saying, in his remarkable treatise on relation, I and Thou, “An animal’s eyes have the power to speak a great language.” He goes on to describe what he thinks an animal’s gaze means:

The language in which [the mystery of becoming] is uttered is what it says–anxiety, the movement of the creature between the realms of vegetable security and spiritual venture. This language is the stammering of nature at the first touch of spirit, before it yields to spirit’s cosmic venture that we call man. … Sometimes I look into a cat’s eyes. The domesticated animal has not as it were received from us (as we sometimes imagine) the gift of the truly ’speaking’ glance, but only–at the price of its primitive disinterestedness–the capacity to turn its glance to us prodigious beings.  But with this capacity there enters the glance, in its dawn and continuing in its rising, a quality of amazement and of inquiry that is wholly lacking in the original glance with all its anxiety. [Speaking of the cat] … The animal’s glance, speech of disquietude, rose in its greatness–and set at once.  My own glance was certainly more lasting; but it was no longer the streaming human glance (pp. 96-97 in the 1958 Smith translation).

Animals as small as hummingbirds and lizards have engaged my attention by way of their gaze touching mine.  I wouldn’t presume to fix and so impose myself upon the meaning of such encounters, but I do know that during that moment of contact, fleeting though it may be, that creature and I are involved in something. In the case of this eagle, were I dead and my eyes fixed, its interest in them would be of a different and, to our thinking, brute nature. But we were both alive, looking across at each other, the eagle aloft in its element and I rooted in mine.  I’ve seen, I think, how golden (and bald) eagles display anxiety.  They catch sight of you and rise quickly into the air well out of the reach of both your weapons and your eyes.  I don’t think this most recent encounter had anxiety to it, though there might have been a tension between us, an uneasiness braided up with the magnetism of curiosity.  And though the eagle’s interest was not sympathetic, I might risk calling it “considerate” in the primary sense of the word “consider”–”to contemplate”–and maybe, too, in its possible root sense of searching the constellations (sider, sidus) to determine position and calculate direction or to glean intimations of other kinds of relation from circling fields of stars.

The eagle gone, I returned to the trail and continued down, pausing now and then to watch the few leaves remaining on cottonwoods ripple in cool breezes running up-canyon. The low-angled, late November light flickered sharply on the trees’ scale-like leaves like sunshine on wind-ruckled water.  When cottonwoods sport their autumn regalia–full coats of yellow, heart-shaped leaves all a-flutter in the wind, sunlight flowing over the tree like firelight over gold–I feel a spike of pleasure, hard to contain.  Something about how cottonwood trees’ leaves glitter when they’re all stirred up with breezes puts my mind in a prickle.  Even when the trees’ plumage is sparse and turning brown, like it was that day, there’s a kind of native beauty to how sunlight and currents of air play around the largest of Crossfire Canyon’s trees.  If I had not needed to portion out my time, I could have spent an indefinite amount of it standing there mesmerized on the trail, lost in the light fantastic of wind-shimmied cottonwood leaves.

This time of year, mid-morning light, wide-angled as it is, shines with brief intensity.  In only a few hours the west canyon wall would sheathe the sun.  A shadow would begin to form on the stone, almost as if seeping from the rocks.  It would lengthen, darken, spread toward the ground. A chill would set up in the shadows while the east wall and its talus slopes and bench remained brilliantly lit, the stones seeming to stand up on their shadows and the juniper and piñon pines taking on a polish, a forest of glowing detail and eye-straining intricacy.  Winter dusk that falls early upon low ground in late fall and winter will gradually fill the canyon wall to wall, while up on the mesa daytime blazes away a few hours longer.

But at the hour I was there, autumn light glazed both of the canyon’s sandstone faces.  Just at the rim, the ripest blue sky, a broad vein of turquoise bluest were it appeared to just touch the skyward stones and the canyon’s tree-line fringe.  I’ve never, ever gotten over the color of this planet’s daylit sky–that blazing blue.  It has never grown old. And here, at the November sun’s downward slide toward winter’s solstice, that cool but deep blue went in at the eye and provoked a physical response, a warmth that ran deeper than a blush, throat-down into the upper chambers of my chest.

To read part five, go here.

I spent the rest of that night struggling to keep my head and to work up plans to get Mark the help he needed, even if he refused it.  The next morning, while he still slept, I rose early and scrambled to discover our options, making some phone calls.  The PCP wanted me to bring Mark to the emergency room for a CT scan in case he’d suffered another stroke.  A stroke could account for such a radical change in his behavior.  With as many CCMs in his brain and brain stem as he has, the possibility that yet another malformed vein had ruptured or begun seeping was significant.

But a phone conversation with the manager of the local clinic sparked sudden insight that rang jackpot bells.  I told her that I’d only ever seen Mark behave like this when he’d begun a new medication.  “Has he started a new medication?” she asked.  “No,” I said, but her question prompted a few facts to drop into place. “But a month and a half ago the dosage of one of his old ones was doubled,” I said, realization dawning. I’d forgotten about the dosage increase.  A cardiologist Mark had visited had increased the previously prescribed dose of a drug that Mark seemed able to tolerate. I thought that might well be the cause of his latest personality bump, but I needed to talk him into meeting with his PCP to find out for certain.  I told the clinic manager I would try to get him to come in as soon as I could manage it.

I happened to be walking by the bedroom when he shuffled out.  I paused to appraise his condition.  His aspect was completely different; he looked like himself rather than a paranoid king. There was pain and confusion in his eyes when he looked at me, but I saw with relief that he looked at me, not at a heartless Jezebel. His first words, in familiar voice and much changed from the night before: “I’m sorry, honey. You don’t deserve this.”

“We both know this isn’t about what we deserve,” I said.  We’d talked about this: Nothing either of us had done during our lives separately or together could account for the outrageous degrees of hardship we’d faced since shortly after marrying.  The idea that we had “earned” our flamboyant state of affairs by doing this or that or by not doing this or that was meaningless, as were platitudes like, “God never gives you more than you can bear.”  If indeed God was authoring our unlikely story, he had certainly provided us more plot twists than many people would find believable let alone bearable. For whatever reason, the cosmos has gotten into the habit of dealing us ridiculously rough blows. If we went by the popular “you get what’s coming to you” model of justice active in many cultures, only a pair of heinous criminals could have behaved badly enough to come to such punishing conjuncture. But both of us are actually pretty nice people, if I do say so myself.  No–something else was at work in our lives, something we’re still seeking words for.  But “just desserts”?  Huh-uh.

In Christian scripture, Jesus devoted himself to upending this take on “fairness” rooted in the eye-for-an-eye economy born generations ago as the Law of Moses.  Its narrative continued to be used to shore up legal and religious justification for judging, shunning or killing the “not us” (folk not of the tribe) and, within the tribe, women, animals, and–when reasons seemed especially compelling–men, including Jesus himself.  Jesus brought to bear the entire rhetorical force of his Sermon on the Mount, including The Lord’s Prayer and The Golden Rule, against the Law of Moses, intent on breaking the stranglehold that this entrenched narrative had exerted for generations on a people he loved.  It had stopped their development and held their concepts of human relationship to the transactional thrift of tribal bargaining: “You watch my back, I’ll watch yours.” It prescribed retribution for all perceived wrongs, from those done you by others to those you did yourself and for which animals would be sacrificed in your stead. It enabled thinking that if something unpleasant happened to someone–especially someone you didn’t like or that you perceived as not serving the social or religious code the way you did–then he must have done something to deserve it, and God has had his way with him.

Master, who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?

At every opportunity, Jesus flipped this social code prescribing negative reciprocity on its back, or else doubled it over on itself, turning it toward the good.  “Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” And the wry, “Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even to them”–an invocation of the Law of Moses meant to disarm the violent, dark side of the “an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” law of reciprocity set down for Israel in Leviticus.  Jesus’ bottom line on God’s own distribution of good: “… for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.”  In other words, you can’t appraise the uprightness of another person’s soul based by whether good circumstances or bad befalls him. To Jesus’ thinking, the time had come for the children of Israel to grow up.

The negative-reciprocity model inherent in “you get what you have coming to you” was not unique to the Jews. Jewels of The Golden Rule shine in many cultures as teachers have tried to spark the imaginations of their people and open up their rigid narrative stances with words that, if the mind yielded to them, could clear ways to better prospects.  “Tsekung asked, ‘Is there one word that can serve as a principle for life?’ Confucius replied, ‘It is the word shu–reciprocity.  Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you (Analects).’” “Comparing oneself to others in such terms as ‘just as I am so are they, just as they are so am I,’ he should neither kill nor cause others to kill” (Sutta Nipata). “One going to take a stick to pinch a baby bird should first try it on himself to feel how it hurts” (Yoruba proverb).

Centuries and centuries of such teachings have not yet completely replaced the miserly and still common practice of accounting for others’ misfortunes by assigning them debts of trespass, either by way of public rhetoric or in the secret, self-sedating whisperings of the fearful heart: “He got what he had coming to him.  _________ has served him his just desserts.” (Fill in the blank with the name of the CEO of whatever transactional power structure you’d like.)  A contemporary, ostensibly equitable saying, “There but for the grace of God go I,” seems to acknowledge that another person’s misfortune could have happened to anybody, including the words’ speaker.  But the phrase “but for the grace of God” suggests that, through his grace, God has deflected what without grace would be deserved, or at least, not prevented.  A natural question that arises, then, is, Why would God’s grace intercede in one case but not the other?  Thus what seems on the surface to be an expression of empathy and an acknowledgement that misfortune may befall anybody actually separates those who receive God’s grace from those who don’t.  Better to leave out the “but for the grace of God” and say, “There go I.”  Better still: Where possible, turn in your footsteps and actually, truly, go with the Other, even into inhospitable, unexplored countries of the mind.

To his sorrow, Mark remembered everything he’d said and done the two days prior.  More importantly, he agreed that he needed to see a doctor.  That afternoon, I drove him to the ER at San Juan Hospital in Monticello.  He talked non-stop the entire, twenty-plus minute drive, expressing fears he was coming unhinged.  I said, just once, “I think it’s the meds, dear.” His psychological symptoms weren’t the only clues; he showed physiological ones, too.  He’d been severely congested, suffering a constant flow of mucus and saliva that made him cough and choke whenever he lay down. An inexplicable flow of involuntary tears ran from his eyes.  Our PCP did some research and discovered that at the higher doses that the cardiologist had prescribed, one of Mark’s meds becomes “non-specific” for some users, resulting in the drug targeting other major organs beyond the intended ones, including the heart and brain.  One reported side effects of the drug at those higher dosages was noted as a personality change.  The PCP told us that the heightened production of body fluids was the result of the burden the drug had placed on Mark’s adrenal system.

The PCP remarked that he’d never before seen anyone successfully “talk down” a person from the heights of what he called paranoid delusions and convince him or her to come in for help. I wasn’t sure that’s what I did; I might simply have accompanied Mark through the end of a manic phase and kept the process rolling when he came out of it. While the drama had been stressful and frightening, looking back, I see it as the destruction of a familiar home–settled ways of thinking–and, in its wake, the opening of a frontier with a “come hither” vista.  Exciting, after all. We pray for protection against such disturbing circumstances, or when we’re in them, we pray for delivery from them, calling them evil.  We amass wealth and power in an attempt to ward off destroying angels of every ilk. When I went down those stairs, I felt frightened and full of dread, afraid of the worst–whatever that might have been.  When I came back up, I was tired but awakened to yet another layer to life beyond what I’d seen from my previous standpoint until that older way of thinking buckled under the weight of another world breaking through what I’d thought to be a stable sky. That new view was  stunning, though I’d barely begun taking it in.

In his via dolorosa, Mark needed me with him, though he seemed to spurn me as unsuitable company. My uncertain but insistent presence affected the course of the journey.  Should we try to pray away such waking nightmares? Perhaps.  But if our prayers for protection are answered, what do we give up  in the bargain?  Whatever drug therapies or other treatments may be found for mental illness, sure progress rides on the depth of our willingness to join ourselves to persons squirming in the grasp of such powerful circumstances.  It isn’t just for the sake of the mind struggling to find balanced expression of its differences, but for the sake of those of us abiding in the cozy stability of our “normal,” chemically consistent, cerebral hemispheres.  If we label the experiences of the brain variable folk as “faulty wiring” or “meaningless suffering,” we may well be missing the invisible door in the wall of our own demarcated thinking that opens onto greater prospects for the human condition.  What prospects might those be?  I wouldn’t risk limiting them by saying.  Let’s just get through and see what our choices give rise to.

We stopped the medication and the most severe symptoms receded or softened, but only temporarily.  With this incident, it seemed that we’d passed a point from which there was no return. Over the next several months, Mark continued to present symptoms of rapid cycle, bi-polar behavior. None of these episodes reached the delusional heights of the July incident but each required my focused attention, often well into the early hours of the morning. At the end of August I started work at the local community college, now a branch of Utah State University.  I taught a freshman composition double class–three-fourths of which was made up of concurrent enrollment high school students (a new experience for me, and a mind-bending one).  Also, I began tutoring for a program on campus intended to increase the retention rate of its Native American students and help more of them reach graduation.  During this time, helping my husband navigate such choppy psychological seas reached nearly epic intensity. Nearly two decades earlier, when my special needs daughter was born with (unbeknownst to us) a quarter or more of her brain virus-ravaged and liquefied, I’d had to strip away cherished expectations, one by one, in order to fit through the barely visible opening between us and grope my way toward her in the netherworld where she’d been confined. My husband’s needs had begun running nearly as deeply.

He stabilized somewhat around the time of Sky’s death. I thought that maybe we’d passed through the worst and that I could relax a little.  But four days before the old dog died, my fourteen-year-old daughter–my last, big roll of the reproductive dice–collapsed suddenly in the kitchen.  Her thudding fall caused unwashed pots and pans stacked on the counter to rattle and silverware in drawers to jingle.  I crossed the rooms between us in seconds and found her lying on the linoleum, one arm outstretched in front of her, her legs folded back. She opened her eyes and blinked.  “What happened?” I cried.  “I don’t know,” she said as she sat up slowly.  My husband and son heard the commotion and converged on the kitchen.  We helped her up and led her out to the couch where we could sit her down and examine her.

That night Mark and I sat up ’til four in the morning talking, worrying that my daughter’s inexplicable collapse recalled some of his symptoms.  While not very much is known about the dozens of malformed blood vessels scattered throughout his brain and knotted into his brain stem, doctors informed him that he probably had a genetic form of the mutation and that his children had a fifty-fifty chance each of having inherited his condition.  I didn’t know if I’d be able to handle it if my daughter turned out to have CCMs, too.  Or my son. My special needs daughter–her brain had already experienced terrible destruction.  Overcome by fear and weariness, I said to Mark that night, “Every hope I had for my life is gone.” “Then we must find new things to hope for,” he said. We didn’t know whether or not our daughter’s losing consciousness signified an unwanted inheritance.  But the extravagance of our circumstances during nearly twenty-two years of marriage has conditioned us to expect extremes.

Then, of course, the old dog died.

So as I left the yard on Thanksgiving morning, seeking something in canyon–a glint of insight, maybe, or a meaningful, even if slight shift in perspective–I forced myself to walk past Sky in her winding sheet.  I touched her.  “Good-bye, old dog,” I said, patting her body.  The walk to the canyon felt unmanageable, an act of foolishness inviting further disaster.  Yet I pushed into the fear and made myself do it.  You never know.  Something bad could happen, but then something wondrous might happen, too.  This is the risk we run with every choice, including that routine decision to drive to the grocery store three miles up the road.

To read part four, go here.

I spent the next five hours in the basement with my husband trying to find him in whatever place it was that he had gone.  I don’t think I’d ever heard such despairing, angry, tormented and tormenting words.  I asked if he was having a bad reaction to a medication.  He scoffed.  “What difference does it make what I say?” he said.  I understood that to mean that it didn’t matter what I said.  As I told him later, “I could feel that the connection between us had gone quite cold.”  I recognized his response to the question as a non-answer and guessed that that line of inquiry would take us nowhere, so I returned to the two he’d asked earlier.  “You asked me two questions upstairs: Did I ‘think you were unintelligent,’ and did I ‘ever even like you.’  I said that I thought you were brilliant and that I loved you. Did you believe my answers?”

“After twenty years of being snubbed by you, I don’t believe them,” he said. I had to move fast to mentally outrun the pain such words could have inflicted. After all, this wasn’t about me; it was of highest importance that I not snatch his wildly shot arrows from the air and stick them in my chest.  He said that I had begun cutting him out of my life years ago, going all the way back almost to our beginning together. He ticked off what to him were irrefutable examples of my mistreatment. I listened, setting my mind on staying as calm as possible, trying to quiet unquiet impulses toward fear, humiliation, even panic. Our household is a language-rich environment. The deep-running, highly metaphoric, playful, intricate and intimate language he and I had developed during our marriage had been one of the most powerful wellsprings we’d tapped to help us overcome tremendous obstacles, including the birth of our special needs daughter. Over our two decades together both of us had developed a rooted faith in the efficacy of good words.  As I sat there with him in the basement, listening to the torrent of accusations and seemingly unstemmable agony, I wondered if there was any language at all by which I could reach him now.

My thinking turned back to the journals. What was there to lose?  “I’ll be right back,” I said and hurried upstairs to find volumes from the early years of our marriage.  I brought three or four down to the basement, not remembering exactly what was in them but knowing they contained years and years of my love for him and the children. I sat down and read to him for at least two hours. The following is a sampling of entries I read from my 1989 – 1991 journals. Warning: extreme lovey-doveyness follows.

July 20, 1989. I haven’t kept a journal since August 1988.  I was living in Provo, which I still am, and I was seeing a lot of a young man named Mark. We were both thirty-two years old.  On November 19, 1988, in a room warm with candlelight and sweet with the smell of hot wax, he knelt down before me on both knees and asked me to marry him.  We were married in March 1989 in the Provo Temple. What a garden we had discovered together, and how we had both changed!

The rest of March passed, then April, and at the end of May the time was right and we felt it necessary that we try to conceive a child that we might begin to fulfill the commandment given to us in the temple, “Multiply and be fruitful.” Also we were conscious that we had married relatively late in life and so were compelled by time and mortality, along with that holy charge, to allow those most obedient particles of us a chance to cross wildernesses to each other and fuse their histories into a new present and begin preparing the body of the first child of our marriage.  I was a careful vessel those days, guarding the path as carefully as I could, but in June I began to be disappointed, thinking there was no child.  I had barely given up my expectations when I noticed a change.  My breasts became quite enlarged and tender beyond any swelling they’d ever had before. A test confirmed we had, indeed, conceived.  When the woman who did the test told me the results were positive, a wave of emotion seized me and I nearly cried. But I was too proud to cry in front of someone I didn’t know and I saved the tears till later when I told my husband he was a father (for as far as we were both concerned, conceiving made us parents instantly.) He burst out with a joyous, “I am?!?” and we held each other for a while, until he had to return to work. Nearly two months have passed since the conception.   I was frightened at first and shocked by the extraordinary changes in my body. I needed more sleep, and at first that was the only outward sign of my pregnancy, but I became increasingly more emotional until I hardly recognized my own soul; I developed aversions to foods and colors that previously pleased me; I was sometimes sick. The emotional upheaval was a torment to me.  I had always thought my stability to be the most attractive feature of my being, but now I was always crying and I felt robbed of my reason. My poor husband.  Resentful as I was of this incredible change, I only garbled it and made my sorrows infinitely worse.  I continually turned to him for help, but I was a bewildering creature and he didn’t know what to think.  Still, he held me at night and I often woke in the morning to find myself encircled by his arms.  Such patient tenderness helped smother my fears, among them the belief that I was undesirable company.

This is a summary of the events that have occurred during the last few months.  From here on I hope to provide a record of our experiences during the gestation of our first child, and with more detail, for I mean to write when the dew is yet on the grass so that I won’t find myself in the evening saying of the dew, “I remember that it was beautiful,” but otherwise knowing nothing …

Yesterday, for instance, I kept myself to the house, because I felt ill in the morning and was a jungle of emotions.  I watched television during the day and was frequently moved to tears by a startling array of stimulants. I cried during an episode of Magnum, P.I., and my heart broke at the announcement that a commercial airliner had crashed in Sioux City, Iowa.  When I thought of my husband, I was overcome by unnamable feelings, like a flower must feel for the sun when it slips behind some clouds during the day, for he was at work, and as though stripped of my independence, I longed for him to be with me. I began to wonder at all these uncharacteristic stirrings; I was surprised at myself.  And then it came to me that my pregnancy was making it possible for me to feel emotions I had never felt before in my life, and that they really were my emotions, and not intruding waves of passion artificially imposed upon my otherwise rational soul. I was these feelings now, and they were a different place, or places, where I was standing.  It was a though my senses were heightened and I could see colors outside the usual spectrum to which my eye was confined.  This new understanding gave me pleasure and freedom.  I no longer resented the weepiness and the sorrows.  I was happy I had them, that I was them.

When Mark came home from work I told him my revelation.  He put his arms around me and hugged me, and later said how smart I was to be able to figure that out, and so soon.  His praise pleased me; I was happy the remainder of the day, and even this morning have been filled with peace and delight.

July 27, 1989. Since my acceptance of my state I have been far happier.  The skies of my heart are clear; there’ve been no more storms. I still tire very easily and if I push myself too far I get very sick. But these days I cheerfully accept and guard the boundaries of my capabilities, and if I get my naps and eat when I should my health and alertness are near normal. Both Mark and I are very cheerful and easy with love for each other.  How many times during the day does he rest his forehead against my cheek, or embrace me, or bare my spine and tickle me with a barrage of kisses along that very sensitive chord of my life.  His face is a sun of happiness, radiant and clear.  We exchange dozens of little love jokes during the day.  Our home is a peaceable kingdom, if somewhat unkempt, because I still cannot bring myself to go into the kitchen and clean it up or spend a couple hours ironing …

Sometimes I experience brief periods of light melancholia in the afternoons, and when I do, visits to either [of our] gardens for both disperse it. But in spite of these shallow spells, a deep pleasure seems to be descending on me. Witnessing Mark’s joy, which is even more consistent than my own, multiplies my own hopes and keeps me well.

August 15, 1989. … A convexity has begun to form between my breasts and pelvis; already, I’m finding my clothes to be restrictive and uncomfortable. I am proud of this bulge; I can barely wait till I can feel the child for certain under that great dome of my flesh. How grateful I am to be pregnant, to have my womanhood come fully upon me with such promise. I gave all this up a long time ago when it looked to me that I should never marry, since so few people, it seemed to me, knew how to marry, and they writhed in the intrigue of sterile relationships, unable to make whole their hearts. This kind of paralysis looked to be all around me; I, too, had fallen into its habit more than once.  … God showed me another soul who through his own desire to sell all he had had come to the same place [as I had]. This man loved me and held me, and we entered into covenants, and in the wreathes of these covenants, we conceived a child.  … We two are as fortunate as any of the blind Christ restored sight to, or any of the others he healed.

August 17, 1989. Last night we had a full lunar eclipse.  Mark wasn’t here–he was out wrangling with [a friend's] troubles–though when he arrived home near ten in the evening he burst in on [another friend] and I and excitedly inquired as to whether or not we knew the eclipse was in progress.  [My friend] and I had been checking every little while, and had seen nothing; Mark, on the other hand, had been out in Orem and had seen everything.  When [my friend] left, Mark drew me to him and said that he’d been disappointed when he realized the eclipse was on and we weren’t able to watch it together because he was in Orem with [his friend]. He says things like this–little nods to our marriage–which never cease to touch me and remind me of something, something often forgotten in the course of daily work and preoccupation–that we have given each other a different context in which to consider the workings of the world–and of the planets. And then, each event alters the context, and if we do well, life becomes more wholesome and gracious.

… Day by day we become more sanctified; we strive to understand well enough that we may repent for the better way; we are amazed by the blood of the law, which nourishes and cleanses those parts not gangrenous or dead, and by which everything else living and being is animated.

September 28, 1989. … Sometimes little anxieties arise about actually raising up a child, but they are less frequent these days as the anticipation (and my girth) magnifies.  I look at my relationship with Mark to see how it will be with the child; I see nothing to terrify or prophecy misfortune or unhappiness. Mark and I grow more graceful in our marriage, and while his work is sometimes an unwelcome intruder in our home, with all its intrigue and drama, we are all right and happy in our covenant.  Mark continues to gain weight … he likes to come home at night.  I think he is very handsome, especially as his confidence increases and he takes more into his hands …

November 26, 1989. It has been a pleasure to have Mark here so much, working beside me in the kitchen and sleeping beside me in our bed … Things haven’t changed much in our marriage–we still feel deeply grateful to each other and tenderness and playfulness rule the house. We’re growing more settled, and as I’ve learned to rest in my pregnancy, we’re quite peaceful. Life has become so simple, we have so much fun, and we agree on so many things important to us both.  To say we’re happy doesn’t really capture the whole of it. We feel blessed beyond our greatest hopes. We could neither of us have imagined life could be this good for either or us or both of us together.  Our thankfulness is part of the atmosphere of the house.

January 8, 1990. I suppose we can say we’ve moved, but some of our belongings remain in the other apartment, and much cleaning remains to be done.  We sleep and eat in the other apartment now and it’s only moderately disheveled; Mark has forbidden me to do any more lifting and carrying and has slaved away at the cleaning, but I’ve set up the household here and done what I could.

… He holds me close at night and doesn’t neglect me; he tells me how precious I am to him; he strokes my belly, inside which the little frog (as we call the baby) squirms and kicks, and he does everything within his power to see to my well being.  When he cleans the oven in the upstairs apartment, which he has forbidden me to touch, he spends hours and comes back with oven-cleaner burns, and he’s tired and dazed, but he stills cuddles me to him and tells me I’m the one thing he never feels disappointment in.  He speaks to me as an equal; we discuss the world together.

January 16, 1990. Mark and I both look forward to starting our family and shaping it and being shaped by it for the better. We so want children to whom we may be good teachers and companions, and who will themselves increase happiness in the world. … And as I cannot imagine–could never imagine–a more wondrous creature for a husband than Mark is, I have profound trust in his ability as a parent.  The children will have one of the most gentle-loving fathers they could hope for, a constant spring of strong good sense and sensibility.  How remarkably things have turned out so far; how promising they are.  How grateful I am to Mark for marrying me …

January 29, 1990. Last night Mark sat in the rocker and I sat of the floor against his knees while he stroked and played with my hair and brushed my neck and face with his hands and lavished many kinds of soothing and consoling attentions on me …

October 3, 1990. It’s been a very long time to let precious detail go, but now that my womb is empty, my hands have been full. Saul was born on March the eighth …. It didn’t seem to be all that difficult.  I remember Mark fixed to the side of the bed, looking neither to the right or to the left, but intently and calmly offering me his faithfulness and any physical support I needed.  The midwives were very impressed with him and have showered him with praise since.

… There was much concern for Saul’s well being since the pushing stage had taken two hours … He was put in an oxygen tent for a little while.  Mark followed Saul’s every move and held his hand while he was in the oxygen tent. He said Saul was clearly rooting for food in the tent.  At one point, when the nursery cleared out for a moment, leaving Mark alone with his new son, he gave Saul a blessing …

Anyway, Saul was back in my arms for his first meal in about 45 minutes, and after all the phone calls, etc., had been made, we all settled down for some sleep.  I laid Saul down between my knees in a nest of blankets and kept watch over him.  This I did for two days following, after we were home and safe.  I didn’t even want to sleep.  I wanted to monitor every meal, every breath, every movement. I loved him with a manner of love I never knew existed, and also my feelings for Mark changed and intensified.  To my mind, his behavior, his devotion and protective instinct had been heroic. During those earliest days he took time off from work to care for us since there was no one else we felt comfortable enough with to have in our small apartment.  Every day, several times a day, he would exclaim how beautiful Saul was and thank me for what I’d done.

January 18, 1991. I am proud of [Mark's] courage in our marriage, and I am grateful for his tenderheartedness, which has a depth to it that I have never seen in any other man. He is handsomely intelligent, or perhaps it’s that he’s intelligently handsome …

April 15, 1991. Mark’s vacation has come to and end now.  We have had such a good time playing and working together. We chase each other around the house and “get” each other–that is, attack each other by tickling–and we roll in laughter and joy.  Saul is learning to join in on our gettings, either by marveling and laughing as he watches the chase or by throwing himself into the ruckus.  Admittedly, he has been somewhat ill at ease with Mark’s constant presence and attentions to me, but he has adjusted his own behavior voluntarily and has not expressed his irritation with Mark’s affection that he used to.  He has even begun to go to Mark for comforting, and now that he is walking and waxing in emotion, those opportunities come tumbling one right after another.

And so I read these entries and everything in between, year following year, on and on until Mark interrupted.

“Stop,” he commanded.  I did.  “What are you doing?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Where is this going? I know what happens after this–a spiraling descent into misery.”

“You asked if I thought you were unintelligent and if I ever really liked you.  I said that I thought you were brilliant and that I’ve always loved you. I’m reading this to provide evidence to support my answers.  Do you believe them now?”

He paused. “Those are your words written in your voice, so it’s the truth,” he said, his tone slightly softer.  “You can’t fake that.”

During the remainder of the time in the basement I conceded to several of his points.  Insight gleaned from raising a special needs daughter who suffered debilitating anxiety attacks during the early years of her life suggested that trying to correct my husband’s “wrong thinking” would bring us all to no good. In his contracted state, he needed his prospects opened, if it could be done–not me telling him how wrong he was about me.  When he came to, he’d correct himself.

Here’s the thing about what is popularly called mental illness. Even though, as Mark put it later, he “had never been so wrong,” in his shattering words I still saw tints and glints of meaning toward which my mind turned its attention.  No language, no matter how badly intended or mistaken, is devoid of meaning, relevance and effect.   Wrong words attended to closely can prompt a listener’s inner eye to focus to a deeper depth of field and see matters from different, often revelatory angles.  So even in broken language can be found bright slivers of truth. These can point to unexpected prospects and unperceived pathways. In this case, one of my concessions was that I would find work at a college or university in order to support the family, because, as he said, providing for the family’s survival “was over” for him.  I did not feel quite the same degree of certainty he did about life as he knew it coming to an end, but clearly, until we figured out where we were and what was going on, I needed to do something to make our financial future more secure.

By the end of the ordeal we both felt exhausted.  Though the tension was far from dissolved, we emerged from the cave together, Mark with some enthusiasm restored for the future; me, hopeful that we had relieved some of his anguish. I took care of my special needs daughter–her feeding was hours overdue and her diaper had long outworn its usefulness–and assured my son, who’d also felt the zinging of Mark’s fiery arrows and so had worried for my well being, that I was safe and sound.  Mark went to bed and fell into a deep and lengthy sleep, which is exactly what I hoped he would do.

To read part three, go here.

This multiple-part series is from a longer work-in-progress I’ve begun that recounts my experiences in Recapture Canyon in southeast Utah.  Woven throughout the longer narrative are my ideas about language’s part in evolution, culture, and relationship–including what language reveals about and how it affects the ways we treat with people who live with what I call “brain variables”–conditions of the brain that require those of us with “normal” brains to make an extra efforts to travel beyond ourselves in order to encounter and stand with the people that live with them. As with some of my longer series, this may not be an easy read. It certainly hasn’t been an easy write.  I respectfully request that readers not download this piece.  If you are in need of any language or information in this series, please email me at pk dot wizadmin at gmail dot com to request a copy.

On Thanksgiving Eve, Sky, our family dog, died of conditions related to old age.  If she’d reached her birthday at December’s end, she’d have turned fourteen years old.  Up to four or five weeks before her death, Sky still raced my fourteen-year-old daughter around the yard, loping creakily on arthritic hips.  Running must have hurt but when she threw herself into the competition her blue eyes sparked and her mouth curled back along her muzzle into a wide, tongue-lolling grin.  During those runs she felt herself part of a pack and like a good Siberian husky jockeyed to take lead position. She’d become deaf over the last year; to draw her attention we shouted her name and clapped our hands.  She turned and looked but seemed unsure that she’d really heard anything. I suspect that in the last few weeks she’d started going blind.

Once the cold weather set in she declined rapidly.  She couldn’t keep food down then stopped eating completely. We worried that she might have cancer but the local vet paid us a house call and found no evidence of an ailment of that sort.  What was wrong with her, then?  She’s the equivalent of ninety-four years old, he said, coming to the end of her life.  During the last few weeks, when my daughter took Sky off her cable, the old dog kept up her routine of patrolling the west fence line at a tottering pace.  My daughter followed her patiently, waiting when Sky dropped to the ground to rest then lifting the old dog to her feet so that she could complete a duty she still felt intent on performing.

Sky had never been an ideal family pet. She posed danger to neighbors’ cats and other animals.  When she was a puppy, she attacked our next-door neighbor’s manx kitten. If my neighbor hadn’t struck her with a shovel he had in hand Sky would have killed that kitten, even though she was a pup herself.  Sky and that cat waged war throughout the seven or so years they lived next door to each other.  The cat came into the yard to invade her space and to torment her.  Twice, Sky caught him in the yard when she was running loose, nearly killing him a second time and then a third.  One day I heard commotion and stepped outside to find she’d treed the cat, who was panting heavily and looked to be going into shock. His wild-eyed, gape-mouthed expression suggested that she might have done him harm but he lived to taunt her another day.  She did catch and execute a feral cat that had unwisely taken up residence in our yard.  A little over a year ago, after we’d left Utah Valley for the rural life in southeast Utah, I returned from a trip to discover that she’d hurt herself, perhaps while trying to jump on top of her outdoor shelter.  She could barely walk so I told the kids to leave her off her cable.  She liked this arrangement and took to the shade of a juniper tree growing in our backyard.  I didn’t think she could get very far and let my attention lapse.  Two hours later I discovered her a block up the street, exiting a neighbor’s orchard with a freshly killed black cat clamped in her mouth. I’m not a big fan of cats, but Sky’s drive to kill them appalled and repulsed me. Our own two cats lived in the yard knowing she’d put an end to them if ever she caught them.

Still, she kept watch over the house and policed our acre-and-a-half on the edge of the desert, letting us know when something was amiss.  In the spring, we moved her house near the garden to deter rabbits.  But we could never trust her to remain in the yard or not kill other creatures.  In our agricultural neighborhood, where chickens, cats, lambs and goat kids abound, this meant that she had to stay on her cable unless one of us was outside with her to keep an eye on her every minute.

When we saw the end coming, we released her from the cable–this time, for good, because she was no longer a threat. I threw a heavy, pink baby afghan over the old dog.  We brought her inside the garage to keep watch over her.  For the next two days, I looked in on her as often as I could.  Her breathing became increasingly rough, wheezing, and irregular. Each of us took turns checking on her, but she still managed to slip away between spot-checks.  We intended to be with her at the very end, but on one of my checks I discovered that she’d died. I alerted my husband.  He hurried into the basement to examine her and declared that yes, she’d gone.  My son and I wrapped her in a sheet. He lifted her–the old dog had weighed over seventy pounds months earlier but much of that that evaporated over the course of her dying–and moved her onto a plywood board outdoors.  Then he and I set to work cleaning up the basement where she’d died.  It was a solemn duty.  The atmosphere of the house altered at her departure. I don’t know quite how to put it, but immediately upon our discovery of her death some kind of space opened.  It was as if part of our identity as a family had sheared off. At one point, my husband sat down beside me.  “There is one fewer of us,” he said.  “Can you feel that?” “Yes. Yes I can,” I said. “It’s surprising.”

The next day was Thanksgiving, but none of us felt like celebrating. Before everyone else awoke I headed for Crossfire Canyon (Recapture), my mind a knot containing several strings of snarled thought.  Sky’s decline and death was only the most recently added strand. Since July, my husband Mark had been waging a battle against mental illness that was, at least in part, the result of his highly expressive personality’s reaction to various medications he’d been prescribed since his hemorrhagic stroke in 2010.  The significant brain injuries he suffered from the big stroke itself and subsequent brain surgery and his wild reactions to medications converged, each probably contributing to his haywire behavior. The stroke has lingering effects, but increasingly, I think his introduction to common medications is the prime trigger for his really precipitous personality changes. Before his first, daily-basis dance with prescription meds, he was pretty much himself as I have known him over two decades. Since the addition of several chemical compounds to his system, it has become increasingly evident that he has developed some flavor of rapid-cycling, bi-polar or bi-polar-like disposition, .

An MRI for the 2010 stroke revealed that he had an underlying, probably genetic mutation called cerebral cavernous malformations. CCMs are malformed, often thin-walled blood vessels in the brain that are given to rupturing or seeping.  Many folks who have CCMs have one, a couple–maybe half a dozen present in their brains.  Mark has somewhere between one and two hundred. Not only had they laid him bare to the impossible-to-miss event but also they had previously caused twenty or more smaller, “asymptomatic” strokes. Last July, his mental disarray reached “King Lear” proportions. On the one-year anniversary of the 2010 stroke, I found myself parking the car along a less populated street while my husband shouted at me and out the car window, cursing and challenging God.  His speech so closely resembled the Act III, Scene II storm-whipped ravings of the Shakespearian king that I began orienting myself by that paradigm:

Lear.  Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once
That make ingrateful man!

Yes–it was that bad. Moments before I pulled the car to a stop, as he had been driving at me with his words, listing all the ways I had thwarted his plans over the years, he asked if I was listening.  “Yes,” I said, quietly.  “You think I’ve betrayed you.”  “You all have!” he thundered, meaning not only me but also the kids and perhaps scores of other shadowy folk inhabiting the court of his high-minded irrationality.  How sharper than a serpent’s tooth.

Following this paroxysm, he became withdrawn, though highly agitated.  He couldn’t sleep. The next day, as I sat at my computer working, he rose from a failed nap and approached me, the look in his eyes disturbing enough to prompt me to prepare for another outburst.  But he didn’t rant.  “Do you think I’m … unintelligent?” he asked.  His tone was sharp and very cold. “I think you’re brilliant,” I said, keeping it simple. It was the truth. His eyes reflected nothing but a glitter of disdainful doubt.  “Did you ever even like me?” he asked.  “I love you,” I said. “I always have.” He didn’t respond except to turn away and head down into the basement to his “man cave”.

I sat staring at the computer screen, shocked and frightened. Obviously, something had gone very wrong and it wasn’t getting better. Before these two episodes, in the wake of his first prescription and then his stroke which brought another round of prescriptions, he’d experienced a few personality shifts that were short-lived, in part because I called attention to them and he, trusting me, experimented on himself to figure out which medications were the culprits. Once he had isolated the offending drug, he quit it and shortly returned to equilibrium. But this was different. This time, I was the focus of his paranoia.  This meant that my ability to help him had weakened. Not having any close-in experience with the psychological condition that’s perhaps unwisely labeled mental illness, I had no idea what had toppled him from his throne of rationality except that perhaps he was having a late-blooming adverse reaction to one or more of the medications he’d been prescribed since the 2010 stroke.  This was not my husband who had just asked such starkly accusatory questions–it was someone as far opposite of my husband as I’d known him during twenty-one years of marriage as R. L. Stevenson’s Mr. Hyde was of Dr. Jekyll. I didn’t know what to do to help this man.

I sat mentally examining his words, turning them over and over, considering what they might signify.  Behind me on my bookshelf sat my personal journals, which, up to about eight years ago, I kept faithfully. Contained therein is a record of our marriage from its beginning, and, I thought, language that might have the potency to reach him–if any words could. I decided to go after him.  To prepare for what I knew would be a long ordeal, I took a deep drink of water, used the bathroom, and changed my nineteen-year-old, special needs daughter’s diaper. I told my son, “Something’s wrong with Dad.  I’m going down to talk to him.  I want you to stay alert. If I tell you to call 911, I want you to do it immediately. Don’t pay attention to what he says–listen to me.” I stood at the head of the stairs to the basement, hesitant. “I’ve never faced a dragon like this,” I said to my son. “I don’t know what’s going to happen.” Then I went down the stairs, mentally loosening up any imaginings I had about what could happen, limbering my own mental state.

To read part two, go here.

(Edited 1/13/2012 at noon to correct spelling, etc. errors and cut down the intro.)

(Photo found and added 1/13/2012 at 12:25.)

Fire in the Pasture: Twenty-first Century Mormon Poetry, edited by frequent WIZ contributor Tyler Chadwick, made its debut at 2011 end in impressive style. Tyler reports that Fire in the Pasture has “risen as high as #2 in both Hot New Anthologies and Hot New Inspirational & Religious and #12 in Hot New Poetry.”  The Kindle edition “slipped into the Kindle Store’s top 100 Best Sellers in 20th Century American Poetry.”  Congratulations, Tyler and Th.!  For WIZ readers’ information, several WIZ contributors, including Sarah Dunster, Jon Ogden, WIZ’s new contributing editor Jonathon Penny, Steve Peck, Sarah Page, and myself have work included in its pages.  Ángel Chaparro Sainz, another frequent WIZ contributor, wrote the anthology’s afterword.  It’s a pleasure to see that so many WIZ folk threw kindling into Fire in the Pasture’s multi-colored flames.  A poem by Elizabeth Pinborough, another poet published in Fire in the Pasture, will appear on WIZ in February.

Karen Kelsay, a fine formalist poet and constant lyrical presence here at WIZ, has begun a publishing company, White Violet Press. You can reach the press’s accompanying blog with submission guidelines by clicking on the image to the left.  While most publications are by invitation only, WVP will look at unsolicited manuscripts year round. White Violet Press is now open for submissions, so WIZ writers–especially WIZ writers of a formalist persuasion–please go have a look and support Karen in her new creative venture.

In November 2011, my essay, “Plato’s Alcove,” was awarded finalist status and an honorable mention in Torrey House Press’s creative nonfiction competition.  The essay tells about my first trip to the desert.  An earlier version won 1st place in the 2003 Utah’s Original Writers Competition.  The version I sent to Torrey House is a more highly stylized, mixed-genre experiment. Want to read “Plato’s Alcove” at Torrey House’s website?  Go here.

Profound apologies for the lateness of this next announcement, but Fortunate Childe Publications published its autumn anthology, Vintage, in October 2011.  WIZ contributors Karen Kelsay and Carla Martin-Wood also have verse published therein (search on their names in the search bar to the left to read their poetry published on WIZ).  Also featured in Vintage: four of my poems, including “Deer in the City,” “Closing Time,” and two poems not on WIZ.  Leslie Ellison, publisher of Fortunate Childe, nominated my poem “Deer in the City,” which also appears at WIZ, for a Pushcart Prize.  This is my second Pushcart Prize nomination. Thank you, Fortunate Childe!  To find information about Vintage or purchase copies of this lovely seasonal anthology, click on the picture to the left.  I will soon be buying a few for myself. Several poets included in the anthology recorded readings of their work that you listen to here.

WIZ will be running its popular Love of Nature Nature of Love event again in February.  To celebrate Valentine’s Day, all month long we’ll publish poetry, essays, blocks of fiction, art, music (mp3s), video or other media that address the subject of love while making references to nature.  Or it could go the other way around: We’ll publish work about nature that also happens to give a nod to love.  We’re seeking submissions of original work or you can also send favorite works by others that have entered public domain.  So if you have a sonnet you’ve written to someone dear to your heart–even and perhaps especially your pet hamster Roley Poley or faithful horse Old Paint–or perhaps a video Valentine or an essay avowing your love for a natural space dear to your heart–please consider sending it to WIZ.  See the submissions page in the navigation bar above for submissions guidelines.