A Match to the Heart (20 page)

Underwater I was lost again; it was like falling through white leaves. Earlier I had read a description of a neutron star's interior as being nuclear matter interleaved with sheets, strands, or droplets of quark matter, which is matter that has been compressed by extreme pressures. That's how my body felt; I feared I would never be able to breathe, and in my panic, gulped water.

My head broke through the surface, shooting up in foam. As children, Hillary and I had been in the same dance performance of “The Little Mermaid.” Because she was tall and dark and I was small and blond, she was the witch and I was the mermaid. We did not remember each other when we re-met forty years later when I came across a photograph of the two of us—in costume on the lawn of my parents' house. Now, coughing up water and gasping for air, I saw Hillary facing me like a dancing partner, pulling my arm up as if to place it on her sun-darkened shoulder—the mermaid and the witch—and she was laughing hard.

 
 
At the end of the day we pulled anchor and headed home. Along the edge of the island, the pounding surf had carved out openings. In some of those caves, suns and planets and spider-handed humans had been painted by the people who had inhabited the islands for at least ten thousand years. It was too late in the day to go in; the surge, like a boulder rolling against the opening, would have trapped us. The dome of the cave looked like the bone-vault of a skull full of passing thoughts, the ocean filled and drained from it, the way blood fills and empties out of a ventricle. As we turned homeward, the Potato Patch jounced us hard. “Don't worry, there's only another hour or so of this,” Jim said wryly. The swells were bigger than the boat. There was no view over them, and I wondered if there really was a shore.

chapter 30

June marked the end of spring on California's central coast and the beginning of five months of dormancy that often erupted in fire. Mustard's yellow robes had long since turned red, then brown. Fog and sun mixed to create haze. The land had rusted. The mountains, once blue-hued with young oaks and blooming ceanosis, were tan and gray. I walked across the fallen blossoms of five yucca plants: only the bare poles of their stems remained to mark where their lights had shone the way. I was still trying to get my bearings. My blood pressure had normalized but I groped along the path.

Walking had become an obsession. It was the way I moved in the world, achieved some rudimentary intimacy with a place. I had walked on almost every beach from Malibu to Big Sur, and though only in increments of four miles at a time, I did it often enough to parlay the distance into a thousand miles. My walks nearer to home were also vertical: up and down the mountain from beach to a ridge eyelashed with pines.

As I trudged, my feet planted themselves in vertigo. Where was I? Why was I there? No matter how far and often I walked, I was still living in exile from the ranching community that had been my home. When fog came, only the weather buoy off El Capitan, lost in grayness, offered a bearing—if only one of sound-its plaintive blast was the tip of my tongue touching I don't know what—the place where the bardo had been, which was now nothingness.

 
 
Early one morning I walked to the top of the road that led into the mountains. Far below, kelp beds and current lines carved the channel into a thousand watery islands. A hurricane off Baja sent warm air dripping—more like sweat than rain—and the storm surge lifted waves in fast-period jade panes. High on a slope of tall oat grass, a redtail hawk whistled impatiently as if trying to summon prey up into its talons, and a bobcat—one that had become quite friendly—played king of the road as I approached, then jumped sideways into chaparral. The Spaniards called the oak scrub that covers much of the southern and central coastal mountains chaparral, thus the “chaps” needed to protect the legs while riding these brushy hills.

Where marine air mixed with dry canyon winds, chaparral broke open into savannah and coastal live oak,
Quercus agrifolia,
thrived. Twin-trunked, stiff-armed, wizened, and venerable, the oaks were elephantine; their thick bark wrinkled at the crotch of each limb like skin. Mottled with pale gray lichens, wind-contorted, hung with green wisps of moss, they seemed to be the reservoirs of some ancient memory of this human-tormented part of the world, and from beneath, their canopy looked like a brain. These oak are judicial, their gray trunks leaning into a hill, balanced by a long arm that reached the other way, almost to the ground, then lifted up to suspend its green cloud of foliage.

Coastal live oaks have ancient origins. They have grown on the California coast for twenty million years, and their more ancient predecessors are very much like today's species. I picked up a leaf. It was tough and leathery, many-pointed and waxy—a botanic strategy to hold moisture during months without rain. Even the tiny stomata that cover the surface of the leaf like little mouths, letting carbon dioxide in and water vapor out, can shut down quickly in case of extreme heat or prolonged lack of rain.

Under those trees there was no wind. The green acorn pushed its pointed tip out of a stippled cup and grew hard. Each oak gathered stillness with its brawny arms and brightened the ground below: everywhere, oat grass ripened to the color of maize.

 
 
 
“Beware the ash, it courts the flash,” one European legend warned, but oaks, on the other hand, called “thunder-trees,” were known to protect against lightning. Said never to be struck by a thunderbolt—though in fact, they sometimes are—they provided a place of shelter during a storm. Even the branches or acorns lent safety to a house, and the wood from an oak that had been struck was hastily gathered as a charm against misfortune.

Oaks are sacred trees, trees of peace, marriage trees. They live for hundreds of years, and the felling of an oak is still deemed a sacrilege. In
The Natural History of Wiltshire,
a British naturalist wrote: “When an oake is felling, it gives a kind of shriek or groanes, that may be heard a mile off, as if it were the genius of the oake lamenting.”

Marriages were performed under isolated oaks, and lovers who wanted to know if they would marry floated two acorns in a bowl of water. If the acorns drifted apart, one lover would be faithless or else the marriage would not occur, but if they moved close together, marriage was certain.

I'm not saying whether I floated any acorns, but the moon on water that night was a silver oak leaf folded on my tongue, and on it was written my fortune. Later, an eclipse—I watched it through open doors from my bed—covered those words, but I imagined myself as a tree pushing up through hard soil, or as a wanderer with a knapsack walking across the face of a blackened moon.

chapter 31

It was June again, almost two years since I was struck by lightning and I found myself packing for Wyoming—saddle, boots, slicker, hat, bedroll, and, of course, Sam. I had to smell sage and feel the crisp presence of autumn in summer winds. While I was packing the papers from my desk, a roadrunner appeared at the window of the living room. A dead lizard hung from his mouth. He moved from one window to the next, tapping, desperate to come inside. Earlier in the day I had heard his plaintive cries, a whining sound like that of a puppy tied up and abandoned. Through an open door he found his way into the room, and before I could stop him, he jumped onto my computer, lizard still dangling. I finally convinced him to leave. What did he want? I wondered. As I shooed him out through the French doors, he didn't fly—he ran, his long blue tail feathers a balance pole that swayed up and down, back and forth, both ends of the dead lizard bouncing.

I looked up “roadrunner” in
The Lives of Birds.
As part of a mating ritual, male roadrunners present food to a desired mate but won't relinquish the gift until after mating has taken place. I felt honored by the offer, but chose not to dine on lizard that night.

 
 
Friends met me at the beach, among them, Blaine. He talked about the heart's atrium—how, compared to other cardiac muscle, its muscle was “uncomplicated,” by which he meant perfectly smooth, so that it could conduct electrical impulses more efficiently. That's how I wanted to be, a smooth conductor—not of electricity-I'd done that—but of whatever else blew in on the hurricane's breeze, so that, kneeling on the altar of sand and swimming in the ritual of tides, I could listen and watch and see and hear.

We sifted through rocks and shells, taking a sand dollar to commemorate the day. The sun had long since risen out of the sand dollar's hole and was getting ready to return. A night heron landed on a post, cocked one leg up until it disappeared into breast-feathers, then flew away. A month before, after a round of tests, Blaine had given me a clean bill of health, but some weeks later chest pains nagged me again. It seemed fitting enough. How could there be a certain end to anything?

Who could say of the Phoenix after it made its nest of sweet-smelling wood which the sun set on fire, and burned itself to ashes in those flames, that it then rose from them, it would not face more trials?

As we walked we came upon a shark's egg case, called a “mermaid's purse.” The amber pouch looked like kelp, a flattened version of the gas-filled floats that raise the long stems of seaweed to sunlight. On each end, the tendrils that hook the egg case to a kelp bed for safety had lost their hold in the hurricane's strong surge and waved like tiny arms in the sea air. At the point where we were standing, a kingfisher flew in, perched on a rock, and peered down into incoming and outgoing water. Battalions of pelicans flew over in formation and a young seal, ready to molt, hauled out on the sand.

Blaine held the egg case against the sun. There's something lonely and appealing and unnerving about sharks. In the midst of gross biological and cultural mutations, nothing about the shark has changed in the last sixty million years: the corkscrew-shaped valve in their intestine, their rigid fins, the abrading denticulated structure of their skin. Because they lack an air bladder, which gives most fish their buoyancy, sharks have to swim about all the time, never sleeping, as if motion would untie the knot of evolutionary stillness.

Stillness and motion. How does the knot get loosened? In our tepid, human sea of constant change, the shark, in perpetual movement, represents immobility.

“Look,” Blaine said, “I think there's a live shark in there.” Then I saw it too: a miniature inside the rectangular pouch, bobbing in his teaspoon of fluid, so like the amniotic sea into which he would soon swim. “Let's give him a break,” Blaine said, always fair-minded, and, walking out into a turquoise wave holding the tiny shark in his big hand, he let the mermaid's purse go.

 
 
Sam and I went to bed early so we could leave before dawn to avoid the desert heat. Between highway sounds I heard waves and thought how the curve of the coastline here had sheltered and nurtured live-born sharks, humans, and migrating whales. Here, at the edge of the continent, time and distance stopped; in the lull between sets of waves I could get a fresh start.

“Now you are sentenced to live,” a neurologist at the lightning conference had told those of us who had been dead and revived. A sense of panic ensued, but panic is like fresh air. The world falls out from under us and we fly, we float, we skim mountains, and every draught we breathe is new. Exposed and raw, we are free to be lost, to ask questions. Otherwise we seize up and are paralyzed in self-righteousness, obsessed with our own perfection. If there is no death and regeneration, our virtues become empty shells. At best my virtues were small, but at least I could rely on panic. A carapace had been smashed by lightning and all the events that followed-divorce, loneliness, exile, and unmasking—had exposed new skin.

 
 
During the night I was awakened by the window, cranked open, rattling. Leaning over Sam's sleeping body, I looked out: an owl stared in at us. Owls have always been associated with death and night, with the “dead sun,” the sun that has set and passes beneath us in darkness. That's why the appearance of an owl is thought to herald disaster, the other side of the coin from the phoenix who rises from the dead like daylight. But, in China, bronze vessels were made in the shape of owls and used as rooffinials, which were supposed to shelter the inhabitants from thunder and fire.

I peered up as the bird twisted his blunt head to look at me. He was, after all, just an owl who had found a convenient perch. I thought of the lighthouse at Point Conception and took the owl's presence for a middle-of-the-night, messenger-from-the-grave greeting. This was a dead man's wink, a lighthouse's watchful eye turning slowly, allowing me to see inside the ocean, the dark canyons where bat rays mated, the shaking seamounts where tsunamis are born, the perilous ledge where the continental shelf would someday break off, sending us who knows where.

In the morning a thick marine layer of fog that had smothered the coast for weeks broke open. When I put my spurs, snaffle bit, and saddle in the back of the pickup, Sam jumped in and would not leave again. Far up the coast, even in daylight, the Point Conception light still revolved its great head, and just before I turned inland, north toward towering ranges and oceanless basins of grass, I thought I saw that light wink as if to say, “Hell, yes, you're still alive.”

To fall
is to return,
to fall is to rise.
To live is to have eyes in one's fingertips,
to touch the knot tied
by stillness and motion.
The art of love
—is
it the art of dying?
To love
is to die and live again and die again;
it is liveliness.

 
—Octavio Paz