Shadow Grounds
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THE REDWOOD COAST Volume 12, Number 2 REVIEW Spring 2010 A Publication of Friends of Coast Community Library in Cooperation with the Independent Coast Observer PLACE & PEOPLE Shadow Grounds Julian Hoffman t was that time again; each year it occurred as an unexpected grace note, Ia sudden flourish to accompany the slow fading of summer, like the lifting of haze from the lake, the leaving of birds. Increasingly, though, it was a quieter affair, signaled by the heaving chorus of fewer and fewer animals. The Sarakatsani were on the move again, bound for their winter quarters, and they were taking with them the cows, goats and sheep that con- stitute their livelihood. The fully loaded trucks and trailers had wound their way down the frosted mountain valley early that morning, and were now paused in our village square: there were last goodbyes to be said, wishes for a safe winter, a AMICK coffee for the road. While some of the AD TERRY drivers mingled around their trucks, smok- ing cigarettes or checking oil levels and brake lines, the deep moans and tremulous lowing of the animals rose and fell like a collective breath. The warmth of their THE ARCHITECTURE OF PELICANS jostling bodies materialized through the slatted sides of the trailers as a thin film A vertical walk on the cattle ranch of cloud. The air was rife with the reek of herds. The Sarakatsani are transhumant Carolyn Cooke shepherds, pastoralists who move with the turning of the seasons, journeying t begins, of course, with cows. back and forth with their animals between defiantly vertical, creating depth abruptly, sheer walls 30 or 40 feet high and slick You walk the rungs of the iron summer and winter grounds. Tradition- where before all attention had been, as it with waves. But there is, as there almost cow-grate, slip between the fence ally they wintered their large flocks on usually is, on horizontal movement—ve- always is, some man-made artifact of iron and the gate into the zone of Black the plains and coastal flats of central or locity, trajectory. or wood impaling the air. Angus and Holsteins, the tags southern Greece, and migrated on foot to A squadron of pelicans flies architec- This is the real Pacific rim, the jagged, Iin their ears twitching as the herd turns turally just beyond the headlands, honing crumbling edge of the continent. The reach summer pastures in the mountains toward you, stolid and inscrutable. Some- of the north. The earthy tumult of those themselves into a sharpened line. You waves toss ionized particles up the walls times, they run. It is a decision not made marching herds was replaced long ago by wonder whether taking flight is the pelican of the sandstone cliffs in which twenty lightly—cows prefer rumination to sudden the convenience of trucks. Many of these metaphor for going deep—an avid, up- or so cormorants are nesting, their long action—but like any overly domesticated vehicles have now also been silenced ward plunge into the sublime. black swanlike necks rubbing and curling mammal, they’re prone to small anxieties as the Sarakatsani become increasingly At some point the rear pelican moves against each other. You walk danger- and panics. settled in their lowland villages. Despite to the front and the front pelican moves ously close to the edge, spying, testing, The earth rumbles, and the herd high- this, a few small communities can still to the rear. The bird at the front uses reminding yourselves that the ground tails it across the field, usually in the most be found on the high summer meadows, the most energy, so the stronger pelicans you walk on is temporary, these arrange- direct path away from you, but sometimes continuing their centuries-old custom of agree to trade off. They know how to use ments—conservancy lands, towns, cities, not. Sometimes the herd runs beside you, calling two places home. their bodies to create a spontaneous aero- states and nations—are temporary. You eyes wide, unable to correct, and lands, dynamic structure in the air; they know walk along the bluffs then peer respect- sullen and embarrassed, in a grove of I HAVE OFTEN WONDERED ABOUT how to flow. In flight, the birds are at fully into the actual sinkhole, an inverted scrub pine just where you’re headed. the nature of home. I was born in the home, maybe even most at home, in their cone in the ground perhaps 35 feet across. After a while, when the cows have northeast of England when my parents most familiar structure. Such surges of The sinkhole is too steep to climb into, so arranged themselves at some mutually were in the process of emigrating to Can- consciousness in a group require planning, it’s impossible to determine what kind of satisfactory distance, you let the dogs off ada. As a result, I spent the first few years communication, subtle agreements like opening or pothole leads to the bottom, the leash. So much open space brings of my life seesawing between our native the cows make when they decide when and where the “bottom” might be—an on a kind of madness and the dogs run in port town and the north shore of Lake and where to run. underground world of hollow galleries, wide, whizzing arcs that blur at the edges. Ontario, while they searched for work and The pelicans fly above the caves and stalactites, stalagmites, siphons and slen- You walk along the barbed-wire fence a place of possibilities. Eventually they the rock arch and the sea stack, a mesa der, sandy supporting columns harassed past the old AT&T housing that looks over settled near Toronto, where I grew up, of shale perhaps an acre around. The by subterranean streams constantly the trans-Pacific cable to Hawaii, already comfortable with that placid landscape. sea stack seems marooned, impossible to straining against the membrane that holds talking intensely about the deep subjects Soon after finishing university, though, I reach, too tall and vertical to climb, the back the Pacific. You might be able to —sex at midlife, how best to work, long, felt an overwhelming urge to go back, to wriggle down or fall, Alice-like, into this involved stories about the past (childhood, return to the country of my birth. It was a other world, but you might not come back men, mistakes, choices, witchy coinci- The story drops land I was familiar with from the accents again; the whole Army Corps of Engineers dences) or stories about people you know and recollections of my parents and their suddenly, like a body could not save you. that unravel like 19th-century novels, or transplanted friends, through brief sum- as if you were Freud or Jung, and your mer holidays and the doting attention of from a plane, defi- hat we think of as “underground” is subjects were splayed on a récamier like relatives. In the end, though, I was drawn Wwell within the area of the Earth’s Manet’s Odalisque, prepared for intense antly vertical, creat- back by something incalculably smaller crust. Beneath are less hospitable regions: inspection or analysis. The walk, with and more difficult to define: the resonance ing depth abruptly, sedimentary rock, metamorphic rock, talk, takes an hour and a half. If you of place. the granite layer, the basaltic layer, and were different people, content with one Certain places follow us, like shad- where before all deeper, hotter places approaching the pleasure at a time, you might walk in ows. At times they lengthen and stretch earth’s core—the sun at the center. Walk- a companionable silence, humbly (or attention had been, implausibly tall until they tower above our ing now across the clifftops you feel at the arrogantly) letting in the visions and the lives, or slant decisively away as if trying top of the world, though sea level is just salt air, allowing yourselves to be passive, as it usually is, on to flee. Occasionally they appear not to be one precipice away. Seventy-five hundred penetrated. But you are greedy girls—you there at all—so exact is the overlay of self horizontal move- miles distant Everest soars above us, walk and talk. Your goal is to cover and place, so precise the meridian sun. dwarfed in turn and immediately by the ground—skim a certain surface of the ment—velocity, Whether seen or not they are undoubtedly dimensions of the troposphere, the strato- world, and at the same time go deep. The close, tethered by subtle threads spool- sphere, the mesosphere, the thermosphere, story is, for this purpose, a sinkhole. It trajectory. drops suddenly, like a body from a plane, See SHADOW page 4 See PELICANS page 8 Page 2 The Redwood Coast Review Spring 2010 EDITOR’s noTE Salinger’s Masterpiece: 50 years of silence Stephen Kessler olden Caulfield is a sensitive, sympathetic young man, and The Catcher in the Rye is, ac- An exceptional artist, cording to critical consensus, among the more perfectly a popular artist, an Hmade works in American literature. When I artist who in some way read it, some 45 years ago, I was already out of high school but not what I’d call a mature enchants us, we often reader, so while I could tell there was something different about this book—about find a way, through the voice of the narrator and the author’s the very intensity of use of language—I can’t say I was all that captivated by it.