Next month, my father is turning 60. My brothers are flying in from New York and Alaska, and we’re taking him over the hill for a birthday bash on the west slope. He’ll be 60. Tomorrow, he is graduating from the University of Nevada, Reno, with a bachelor’s degree. Education has always been important to him—self-education, formal education—but he never had the kind of opportunities he provided me. I worked construction for him when I was in high school. When I told him I wanted to be a philosopher and a filmmaker, that I planned to double major in film and philosophy, he didn’t scoff, he didn’t disown me. He and my mother actually bought me a camcorder for Christmas, along with Richard Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and the collected writings of Plato, Hume, Kant and Nietzsche. Later, he supported my writing career, even when I wrote some rather painful stories about his life. Like all savage Romantics, he’s large of spirit and tough as hell. Ours is a dogged pursuit of grandeur. And now I get to watch him graduate. I’m very proud. Speaking of grandeur, I wrote a story based on my father that was published by The Nevada Review in 2012. It was called, “The Frontiersman: Audience of One.” Here are some passages: Bridger Canyon bucks northward like a green bronco. Its lower foothills are round, cocked muscles covered with pasture and pine. Its upper mountains are a rocky spine flexing against the sky. In the middle of the canyon, where the two-lane road bends, the green hills trot like a pony. The hills trot and open their stride in smooth busting green to the edge of timber and the high mountains galloping above. Mark Ash grew up in the ranch house by the bend in the road, where the fire-green grass is drawn smooth like a sheet and tucked neatly in the side-gulch of the mountain. From the gulch there runs an icy creek that disappears in the stand of quaking aspen by the house. As a child, Mark owned the meadows. He owned the golden rails of sunlight that ran the chirping grass. He owned the willowed streams where the speckled trout loitered in the deep pools. He owned the thin, straight poles of the pine forest and the brisk, bending sounds the boughs made in the breeze. He owned the squirrels and rabbits and grouse and deer and the elk that bugled so clearly in the high glades where the dusk lay. He owned the smell of Bridger in the summertime: the heady smell of sweetening grass and sapping pine and sunburnt wildflowers and huckleberries all mixed together in a distinct perfume that he and his siblings and cousins and second cousins wore in their clothes and skin and hair. He owned the moose that snuffed and the stag that looked up when the children flashed by soaked in the summer smell. And he owned the brush-leaf that whipped in the wind’s clear circles. In the beginning, it was pure image. It was paradise. Not the paradise of lush gardens and tropical birds, but the paradise of the American frontier. Mark felt that he had an audience, as if people were watching the movie of his life, even as he visited the hidden spring in the forest around which his father had built a box, even as he kneeled down and used the metal cup to scoop the clear water and let it trickle sweetly down the back of his throat. They watched as he visited the barn where the meat hung in the hay-smell of the air and where the men carved the meat in big, reddish chunks. They watched him as he made his way back to the house in the quaking aspen where his mother, beautiful as a movie star, was cooking dinner. They must have watched him when he got his first cowboy hat and his first pellet gun, and when his grandfather took him on his first ride in the arena. He rode the semi-lame gelding and dug his heels into its sides to make it buck. They must have watched as his grandfather yelled, and the horse threw his tiny body in the dirt. They would have seen the grandfather slapping the boy’s grinning face, but they must have known that the grandfather could have slapped the boy as hard as he wanted — it wouldn’t have altered the visions in the boy’s head. For the boy dreamed himself sleek on a horse whistling through the great empty, the cattle brown dots on the boundless green sweep. And he was to follow the sweep higher and higher until, like the break of a wave, it dove beneath the forest’s edge, where pine trees sprang as houses for black bears and huckleberries. In the warm, cooling summer nights, Mark lay with his brothers and sisters and cousins on a pile of blankets in the front yard. A heavy tarp was laid over them, and together they listened to the wind in the trees and watched the night sky. The stars throbbed like seeds of white fire in the black soil of the sky. The treetops swayed and snapped against the stars. As the hillside whitened with moonlight, the children could feel moonflowers unfolding in their hearts. Mark Ash listened for a light that he would hear off and on for the rest of his life. It was a fine white light that hummed in the nighttime air. It hummed and flashed over the canyon hills. It sung and melted the mountaintops. It threaded and unthreaded his spirit then surged and lifted him above the Earth’s ranked and terminal horizons, to where holy enchantments bloomed in the dark like fiery-clear white roses…. ------And then a bunch of sad stuff happens. So let’s skip to the end------ There is a valley in the desert where the soil is black, and the grass is as green and sharp as our pain. It rolls gently to the edge of the whitened lake beds, where the water can travel no farther and the desert begins. When plows upturn the lower fields, the tillage lies in moist black furrows against the bone-white salt flats. A man can stand in the lushness of paradise and gaze out on the scorched tabletops of the forsaken Earth. Against the desert, he can find water and raise food and build a home for himself and those he must love. It’s same the valley in which Mark Ash wakes one morning in the early spring of 2010. He steps from the truck, half-frozen, and kneels in the new grass. He breathes the rain-wet ground. He takes the loamy soil in his hands and smells it, its fragrant tilth, presses it to his face, its fading kiss. His fingers are black. His heart is broken and filled. He lies weeping, clutching the Earth. When he’s finished, he stands up to receive the valley. The mountains jut whitely in the sun. To the east, the lighted buttes of the desert are humming. Life to him is renewed in the wild fowl lifting from the grain fields at the edge of the salt flats, in the dark clouds thundering overhead and the lone horse bucking as jaggedly as a lightning bolt. Then the horse is galloping smoothly through the green pasture, and the rain is unraveling in black streaks down the blue sky. Later in the day, driving back to civilization, Mark Ash realizes he’s closed the old window of pain. His mind is clear. His heart is a tender cup. Together they drink creation. The broken stone and wild bunchgrass of the desert. The green fuzz and purple wildflowers in the cupped ridges of the rimrock. In the coming weeks, he will find that something as simple as music breaks his heart. He will find women whose simple softness negates the machinery of centuries. He will taste food that ends wars. Beauty will fill his mind the way wine swirls in a glass decanter. For now it’s the ashy sagebrush of Nevada. He’s traveling southwest, towards the fiery freedom of the sunset. The center of the spectacle is hot blood-red. The edges are liquid gold that melt the horizon. Life in the American West begins with the blind creeping of covered wagons across the desiccated plains, and it ends with a fifty-five-year-old man returning to the city in a road-worn pickup and a clear conscience. It ends, like it always does, with a cowboy who is no longer a boy heading into the sunset.
Posted on: Sat, 06 Dec 2014 02:47:18 +0000
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