Meg Houston Maker

The Story, Unseen

I saw the bear this morning, from the big picture window in my bedroom. He was near our shed, ambling unconcerned toward the woodpile. He was a small bear, probably young, his body coal-black against the weathered planks. I caught just a glimpse before he dissolved into the green-gray tangle of woods beyond.

A few weeks ago there was another bear, or the same bear (who knows?). I’d noticed a small chunk of shadow in the woods, something that hadn’t been there the day before, not a stump or a rock. But the woods are tricky, changing every day, and I've not memorized each element of the landscape. I’ve not memorized the placement of each branch, or the way sunlight slants against each ash and pine in that particular spot in the woods, at that particular hour of morning. But I do trust my instincts, so was not surprised, just gratified, when the dark chunk moved, then resolved itself into bear face, bear ears. He paced slowly through the trees, then was no longer there, or at least no longer there to my eye.

Fifteen years ago, I saw my first bear, also from my bedroom window. He moved like flowing water over the jumble of logs just delivered for firewood. I saw my cat Juno approaching, out of friendliness or curiosity. I suspect it was Juno’s first bear, too, because he quickly realized his error and fled. I loved that bear instantly, the beauty of him. But he was also competition: Shoo, bear! Those are my blackberries, almost ripe!

This morning’s bear didn’t stay long enough. I didn’t have enough of him. I kept looking at the woods where he had entered and vanished. But it’s like watching falling stars, or fish jumping. You see one; you look where it was, then another jumps, elsewhere. You have to look nowhere if you want to see one. Sometimes, you get lucky.

 

 

I found a wild orchid growing by the stone wall. It’s nothing like the one on my kitchen table, the one brought by a guest to say thank you for a nice meal. I had said: Bring nothing. Of course she had brought something. My kitchen orchid is a phalaenopsis, a Moth Orchid, which casts a line of big, moony blooms along a single slender stalk. Many of the species are white or pink, but mine is pale yellow, veined with scarlet. It had four blooms when it landed on my table eight weeks ago, and now there are eight, with still more to come. The breeder’s hand is evident here; it’s colorful, effusive, profligate. Bred to spend the inheritance, go for broke.

The wild orchid by my wall is more demure. It’s not blooming yet, but I can already see it in my mind’s eye. I’ve been on the lookout for this orchid for three seasons, since I found a few growing in the roadside waste a half-mile from my house. “Epipactus helloborine, leaves lanceolate,” the flower guide told me. Each has a single stalk with twenty buds the size of raindrops. Each flower will be no bigger than my thumbnail; each a perfect, miniature corsage, pale green, tinged with pink. But mouths open, agog, they’ll show a deep red throat.

I had collected seeds two years ago, each as small and weightless as a speck of black pepper, and spread them in a corner of my shade garden, hoping. No orchids sprouted there last year. I found another specimen this morning, farther up the wall, so maybe my own breeder’s hand is at work after all.

There are twenty thousand species of wild orchid in the world, and fifty native to New Hampshire. Each is a tiny ecstasy. This spring, hiking the Appalachian Trail on Moose Mountain’s western shoulder, I came upon six pink lady slipper orchids, blooming in a cluster by the side of the trail. Each pointed her bulbous pink bosom a different direction, looking like nightwalkers at a shipyard: Hey, sailor. These weren’t bred for show, but you’d never know it for looking.

I check the wild hellborines almost daily, but they’re on their own, they don’t need me. My kitchen orchid is a captive, domesticated. We have a deal: I give it water, light, maybe some plant food. It might need me, but who am I to pass judgment on domestication? There are few wild humans left, few who don’t live in captivity, if we define that as a life in which inputs and outputs are circumscribed, defined.

 

 

Two evenings ago, I offered a nectarine in the mulch under one of our big birches. The fruit was tragically molding on its blossom end a day after being brought home. At $2.49 per pound, I figured it was about a dollar’s worth of exotic, rapidly decaying produce, and damned if I would eat it, but damned if I would throw it away. So I gave it away instead, to the red squirrel; someone who, I imagined, would enjoy it. Nectarines are a luxury for the squirrel, but equally so for me. Neither of us has any real right to them, transported as they are from thousands of miles away.

By morning the fruit had vanished without a trace, without evidence of either struggle or delight. I contrived a story about the squirrel finding it, licking it quickly to appraise it, then stuffing hunks of its wet yellow flesh into her cheeks and hauling off the loot to her nest in the wood’s margin. 

Last evening I scattered a small handful of moldering strawberries in the same spot, imagining the squirrel would find these, too. This morning they were still there. It had rained overnight, and the fruits were now sodden and collapsing, though still jewel-red. They’ll be gone later, though. I will not see them go. There will be no one around to witness the feast, except for the squirrel herself. So I must imagine another story, and tell it to myself again, keeping it fresh.

Or maybe I have it wrong. Maybe it wasn’t the squirrel who nabbed the nectarine. Maybe it was one of the chipmunks who lives in the stone wall by the orchid. Or the bear himself, or a skunk or raccoon I’ve never met. But Occam’s razor is sharp, and I like to keep it stropped. The squirrel is the answer that makes the most sense, because I see him running up that very birch trunk every day, to taste the sap leaking from its scars.

It’s impossible to know. The squirrel ate the fruit, and also did not. Schrödinger’s cat is dead, or is alive; the observation makes it real. But doesn’t the cat know? The cat doesn’t need anyone to tell her whether she’s dead or alive. She’s around to notice.

 

 

There’s a seasonal brook in the woods behind the house. It’s alive from April through early June, then dries up, mostly, except in a fissure under a large stone, where it relaxes all summer, black and stagnant. The water is still, without percussion, no sound in any sense, imagined or real. The mouse can come to drink the idle water, and the wood thrush can wash herself, and the mosquito larvae can drift undisturbed before their hatch. The deer is too big to stand in the gap between the rock and tree, but still, she could dip her head and nuzzle wet earth. And the owl can perch above, watching the night around him, sighing Who-ah! at the end of his phrase, waiting for the mouse.

We do hear the owls.

 

 

The tree falls, and there is no one to hear, but it still makes a sound, or at least it makes a compression wave, and the compression wave makes a sound. But if there is no human around, there is no human to hear the sound. So it does not make a mortal sound.

I see the world through a drinking straw. Only the smallest shards of light and life make it through to my eye. It’s easy to see the showy, sparkling differences. It’s easy to see contrast. It’s harder to look at the diminutive weeds, the blackness of a shadow, the trace of rotten fruit, the stillness of a pond and see the orchid, the bear, the squirrel, the owl. It’s harder to look at the evidence and divine the true story. But there’s a payoff if I look, and keep looking: I see.

 

Written July 2007.

Heroes, Goals, and Readers

Every good story, fictive or true, has a hero. The hero is a character with whom the reader can identify or sympathize, or whose interior is at least somewhat transparent. He may be good or despicable, but he is the person who forms the lens through which the reader sees the story. She follows him, willingly. She wants to see what happens to him next.

The hero has a goal, and his actions toward that goal, sometimes called his through-action, form the arc of the narrative. He begins in one place, and ends, changed, someplace else. He encounters obstacles in pursuit of his goal, and dispatching these obstacles, acting upon them, is the stuff of real drama. Not only does he act—he must act. It’s what keeps the engine of the plot stoked and rolling. It’s what keeps the reader reading.

Even mid-quest, though, the hero may not be able to articulate clearly what his goal is. The reader often knows much more about it than he does. She may be able to deduce it via the context of the narrative, the revelations provided by other characters, a foreshadowing of story line, or by the author’s naked prose.

The hero, meanwhile, knows only he wants something, and wants it badly. But the contours of this longed-for thing can be fuzzy in his mind, and it’s through his encounters with obstacles that he understands more clearly what he doesn’t want, and what he does. Obstacles sharpen the image of the goal, and sharpen the hero’s will.

Fairy tales are a special case. Here, the hero’s goal is usually set forth clearly at the beginning:

Once upon a time, a [    ] decided he wanted [    ] and so he did [    ].

He wanted to marry the princess; he wanted to kill the dwarf; he wanted to capture the flag. Since this is a fairy tale, we know he’s going to get what he wants, although probably not in the way he’d expected. The princess was really a frog, the dwarf was really his father, and the flag turned out to be a dragon’s tail:

… and so he got [    ].

Fairy tales are mostly about the consequences of ardent desire. We read them to remind ourselves that we cannot master fate, that we are human.

In novels, the hero’s objective is usually more nuanced, and a good part of the exposition consists of both reader and hero trying to figure out where, exactly, the hero is headed, and what will become of him then. The author knows all, but she’s not telling, at least not at the get-go, because what happens to the hero in the meanwhile (all those messy complications) is so entertaining. We read novels in part to see what happens when the strange and special characters that populate them bump headlong into complexity, just like we do, sometimes.

In nonfiction—say, biography, autobiography, or memoir—the hero actually knows the goal, but only in retrospect. His actions are revealed as a series of expressed intentions, choices, trials, missteps. This is the stuff of real life, not fairy tale or fiction, although it can be profoundly dramatic. The reader, too, may know the goal, if she knows something of the subject’s life, but she willingly dips into the drama anyway, and, if the author has been skillful, is prompted to set her own life’s choices on the golden scale opposite her hero’s, and weigh them out. And since nonfiction tales usually do not begin in birth and end in death, the author must choose which portion of the story to tell—which part is the story, in other words—so that our hero, who started somewhere, arrives somewhere else at last, at the culmination of something, whether a day’s labors or a lifetime’s. And then the story is done. Or done for now.

 

Moved

Suppose you’ve just moved into a new house, and you get a note from a friend asking how you’re doing. You could say that the move went fine, and that the new house is nice, you like it very much. That it has three bedrooms and a kitchen with a big deck, and it’s convenient to work. That you expect you’ll be happy there.

But you haven’t said anything real, at least not yet. You’ve said what you think without saying what you feel. This might be fine if you’re writing to an acquaintance, but not if you’re writing to a friend.

Or, you could say that the move was easier than last time, when your ex-boyfriend, the one you were leaving, jumped town the day before, but his mother, whom you’d met only once but who asked you then whether you planned a large family, showed up to help and insisted on driving the moving van, even though she wasn’t registered as a driver. But that turned out okay because you ended up having a problem with the battery in your Subaru, so you got to drive her new Audi, but you spilled your latté in the car and it was a good thing you’d grabbed your sweater at the last minute, because you were able to get almost all of the latté off the leather seats before she arrived with the van. So it wasn’t like last time, and although you had to make a lot of trips you got it all done in one weekend, and there were no bruises.

You could write that the new place is surrounded by lavender and rosemary hedges, and that these remind you of a pensione in Fiesole where you stayed when your boyfriend came to visit midway through spring semester Junior year. You didn’t tell him then about the long weekend in Paris you’d spent with the guy from life drawing class who wanted to go into architecture, because it didn’t seem to matter anymore by then. And that you found yourself thinking about that pensione and about them both, those boys becoming men, on the first few mornings you took your tea out onto the new kitchen deck, as the sun steamed mist off the hedges. It must be something about the season, too, because the light is almost the same as that early April light in Tuscany, the light that makes you feel twenty years old.

But you know this feeling is fleeting, you’d say, because the days are getting warmer and soon it won’t be like that old spring anymore, that antediluvian spring before it all got started, and you’ve already noticed that particular memory receding a little more each morning as the new house becomes more about now and less about then, displacing associations of elsewhere, creating or starting to create its own significance. And if you roll your life forward in your mind five years, ten years, you see yourself walking barefoot onto another deck in another springtime somewhere else, where you'll smell the rosemary and lavender hedges, and you know you'll be transported back here, to this house. So you’re starting to see clearly how life stitches together, and how now is both now and the nostalgic future past. Moves do that to you, you say.

That’s what you might write to a really close friend.

 

Hell Brook

Hell Brook Trail. Classification DDD – Extremely Difficult. The trail climbs steeply to the ridge, frequently on precipitous ledges. Descending the trail is not recommended.

 

 

My husband Steve and I had been hiking a lot that summer. I was feeling strong and balanced. I was pretty sure I could handle a “steep, precipitous trail.”

I hadn’t always felt that way. In grade school I was a last-picked kid. A series of operations on my leg and hip had made me weak and limpy, and for a few years I couldn’t even run. Ballet helped me, and gymnastics. But outdoor activities, especially in the woods, where every part of you has to be focused and strong, were beyond my reach.

Nonetheless, I was drawn to the outdoors. I begged my parents for a pair of cross-country skis for my 13th birthday. My parents obliged, shelling out a handsome sum of $100 for the package. That week my older brother Chris and I went out together on the trails beyond town. The equipment felt floppy and awkward, and I tripped over the sticks on my feet and at the ends of my arms. My brother soon disappeared ahead of me into the drifts. I lagged behind, tired, alone, lost on the unknown trails, unable to make my limbs work right, unable to move forward. I remember crying, having to press on to find my brother, feeling last, and utterly alone. 

I continued to try to use my skis, not because I enjoyed it, but because I knew how much a hundred dollars meant to my parents, and I wanted them to feel like they were getting their money’s worth.

When I enrolled at Dartmouth College I signed up for a Freshman Trip, a hiking experience that’s somehow supposed to prepare you for four years of academic rigor. I took an easier trip, a three-day jaunt over the mountains with a dozen other first year students and a couple of adult guides. I’d never hiked before, let alone carrying a 35-pound pack, and I was never one for indoctrinating group activities. But this was something almost every freshman did, so I figured I should try to fit in.

I was miserable. The tendons in my knees and hips became inflamed the first day, and I trailed behind the others. One of the trip leaders was a man who seemed to me to be a hundred years old (he was perhaps seventy). By the end of the trip he was carrying my pack, plus another young woman’s pack, plus his own, an added humiliation. The lone photo I have from that experience shows our ragtag band posing on a rocky summit. I’m sitting in a corner of the photo with taped knees and a thin smile, looking not quite part of the group.

My first husband was outdoorsy and liked to hike. He wanted to take me out with him and I obliged, mostly because I wanted to please him, but I’m sure I held him back. My hip continued to bother me, a sharp, searing pain deep in my joint from leftover scar tissue. He carried my water and our extra gear, protecting me from exertion. I approached each outing with trepidation, a fear of having to endure not only my physical pain, but also my shame about being so slow and imperfect.

Later, after that marriage ended, I started going to the gym and lifting weights. I got stronger. I got some physical therapy on my hip and legs. I developed muscles and endurance. For the first time I began to feel physically competent.

I started dating Steve. Steve is a mountaineer and a rock climber, and he has summited all the mountains taller than 4,000 feet in Vermont and New Hampshire in both summer and winter. (Actually, he’s missing one in winter, and this slightly irritates him.) He’s been on a one-month trek to Denali in Alaska, which, at 20,320 feet, is the tallest mountain in North America. But he can’t technically say he’s climbed Denali, even though he got 97% of the way to the top; after almost three weeks out and two attempts, his party got within 600 feet of the summit when weather turned them away. They knew they could make it to the top, they just weren’t sure they could make it back.

Steve feels most fully alive when he’s in the mountains, and, like my first husband, he wanted me to share this with him. Sharing it would mean sharing himself: a deep intimacy. And so, despite my trepidation, we started to hike together. Again, at first, I went along to oblige him. But this time it felt all new. Steve gave me space to take my time and learn to do it by myself. Being stronger made a difference: my hip no longer hurt, and I could carry my own weight. I could focus less on the physical work of hiking, and this let me lift my eyes, see past myself to the wild beauty beyond: a breeze blowing a flurry of hobblebush petals into a black stream; a riot of mice boiling from their forest hole, driven mad by disease or a snake in their den; a pine marten, huge eyed, peering at us from a tree; the woods lit gold with beeches in fall’s final curtain call.

The summer Steve and I got married we took almost weekly excursions to the mountains. Often I led the hike, setting the pace. Though I’d begun to like hiking, I still tottered on the edge of belief in my competence, and my fear of being left alone, left behind, was not yet in abeyance. My leading the hike wasn’t really about not wanting to feel second to Steve, it was about not wanting to feel second to world, falling behind with every step.

One weekend that summer we headed to Mount Mansfield in Vermont. It isn’t called Mansfield for nothing: from a distance, the ridgeline looks like the profile of a man’s face. You summit him by climbing, Lilliputian-like, up the side of his skull, over his forehead, nose, upper lip, lower lip, until you finally mount the peak of his chin, waving your puny arms in triumph. The Hell Brook Trail, the one we picked that day, accesses the summit from the northeast, bypassing a few of his features and heading straight to the top. We were to go over the summit and back down the Long Trail, closing the loop along the road.

Hell Brook. It was aptly named. The first mile or so was like taking the stairs in pairs. Then it got really steep, and in places it was hand-over-hand climbing. It was wet, because of the brook, and it was slippery. But despite its technical difficulty, plenty of people hike this trail each year, so every time our hand looked for a hold, there was one there, sometimes in the form of a twisted tree root, sometimes in a hefty chunk of rock, burnished smooth with years of wear. It was weirdly comforting to be in the company of these invisible others who’d come before.

We climbed steadily. Each time I cleared a really steep pitch I looked backward with a nervous thrill. Steve was looking out for me, but also, astutely, letting me handle myself. The trail was difficult, but I was gaining confidence, and beginning to taste the delicacy of success.

We soon arrived at a sheer rock face about 15 feet high. I paused and I tried to think it through. The guidebook’s admonition clanged in my head: “Descending the trail is not recommended.” I studied the face for handholds, footholds. I strategized my route. Steve was ahead of me and hollered down a couple pointers he’d learned the hard way. I lifted off, moving smoothly over the rock, pushing down my fear, staying focused, pulling myself up. Arm over arm, placing my feet precisely, putting my weight against the rock in upward flowing motion. Don’t stop, keep moving. The only way out is through, but don’t think about that now, push that aside, think only of now, of what’s right before you, and what’s next this instant, and this.

Soon afterward, we popped out of tree line. The trail turns sharply there, then runs over a bump called Adam’s Apple before tracing the rest of the mountain’s face. The wind was blustery and buffeting. I asked Steve what lay ahead. “It gets steeper for a bit, just before the summit.”

Steeper?  It seemed impossible. I took a deep breath to gather my energy. I was pushing my limits, and I was doing really well, but I imagined a boundary around my success: enough for now, enough triumph, and then I rest. I wasn’t certain how much more challenge I could countenance. It wasn’t so much the physical exertion. Something else had been put in motion, like a slow leak in my psychic energy, imperceptible at any single moment, noticeable only through accumulation, only by looking backward.

We passed a cutoff trail that connected to our return route. Now we were completely exposed, the trail wending its way forward through huge gray boulders, switching back and forth over the stone face of the mountain. I began to list to one side, pulled like a pendulum toward the mass of the mountain, toward its solidity and sureness, away from the steepness below. The wind was tugging at me, and I was fighting it, fighting my anxiety. I became very quiet. Each step sent me deeper into myself with growing dread and worry.

I don’t remember the moment of arriving at that place. It was just a little level pullout in the trail, a jumble of rocks much like the other places we’d passed minutes before. Behind us was the bony path we’d come up. Beside us, like a rough stone ladder, loomed the last few hundred feet of mountain. And ahead of us in the trail just there, right there, was a little weed, and a little stone, and then a ledge, and then a thousand feet of air.

My mind reeled forward in time. I watched myself taking one wrong step, falling, flying, pitching forward into air. I watched Steve taking one wrong step, falling, flying, pitching forward into air.

The blood rushed from my head and my knees unlocked. I crumpled to a heap in the trail, collapsing into my center of gravity, hugging the mountain, clutching at the earth, shaking furiously, completely unhinged, terror pouring through me in waves.

Steve held me and tried to comfort me. I tried to calmed down and stop blubbering. I ate a little something and took some water. We sat there for a long while, in silence. I tried not to look at the ledge, because each time I did I would start crying again, shaking inconsolably.

Three people passed us on their way down, smiling, saying Hi. I thought they must be completely insane. I smiled back meekly, putting on a face that said I was just taking a breather, but I could barely watch them pass so casually along that edge of air.

We sat there a long time, me wrestling with my rational mind. This was a trail. People walked on it. It was made by being walked on. But no matter how I turned it around in my mind, I could not imagine myself going forward.

And worse, I couldn’t imagine Steve going forward either, the torment of watching him walk past that ledge, his doom so vivid in my mind. Steve is a mountaineer. He can handle himself on this terrain. He wanted to bag the summit. How could I ask him not to? It was a twisted little crux: To turn back with me, or go ahead alone? What would it mean, to do either one?

 

 

We picked our way back down to the cutoff, dipping gently into the woods to join the Long Trail. The way was gradual and easy. I didn’t feel tired. I didn’t feel anything. I felt empty, but whole. I walked along in silence, behind my new husband. I was last at the car.

 

Passengers

Is this the bus to New London?

I looked up from my perch atop my luggage. I was tired of sitting, but too tired to stand. Yes. Well—to Hanover, I said. It stops in New London.

I’m going to New London, he said. My mother’s in the hospital there. For surgery. Her heart. He poked at his chest, his eyes swelling under thick glasses. We thought she was going to be okay, you know?

I’m so sorry, I said, rising. Do you need to use a phone? The din of the terminal swallowed my voice. I hoped I hadn’t sound patronizing.

Oh, I have a phone. I’ve been calling. My sister works in the kitchen there.

At the hospital?

Yes. She’s been there a long time. She’s with my mother. I haven’t talked with her. The operation is now.

Minutes before, I’d been the one asking for directions, from the young man with earphones ahead in line. He’d nodded briefly before returning to his music, attention fading from his eyes. He didn’t need a conversation.

New London has a good hospital, I told the man. She’s in good hands.

I’ve been on the bus since yesterday, he said. Yesterday at three. I came up from North Carolina. The seats were only this wide. He made a gesture and smiled, revealing ranks of crooked teeth. I wish I could take a shower, he added. You know how you get when you travel. I might smell bad.

He smelled like sweat and anxiety, like days without sleep. His tee shirt and pants were deeply stained, and his baseball cap bore the patina of hot work. But his shirt was tucked in, and he wore a belt. He looked like he’d spent years caring for himself.

This bus is comfortable, I said. Nice wide seats, and they show a movie.

I didn’t have money. My sister had to send me money, for the ticket.

There was a long pause. At the far end of the terminal someone began rallying a group of campers boarding a bus to the Cape. Their cheers boomed in the linoleum hall. Travelers looked around warily, knuckles tightening on their bags.

Suddenly the man grabbed an object from his belt and jabbed it toward me. It was his phone. I got three of these for fifty dollars! A good plan, you think?

I nodded reflexively, regaining my composure.

And I get 1,000 minutes and I can roll them over. I always let people use my phone. Because I don’t care. I have a lot of minutes.

He pulled the phone away and thrust his big hands into his pockets. He paused again and looked around. I sat back down. I was interested in his story, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to be the one he kept telling it to.

Is there another hospital up there? he ventured.

Yes, a big one in Lebanon.

That’s where my mother is. The big one. That hospital.

That’s a good hospital, too, I said, then added hesitantly, I have a friend who’s a cardiologist there.

Suddenly he seized at the neck of his tee shirt and jerked it down past his collarbone. I was dead for three minutes!

His pale, arching scar looked ghoulish in the fluorescent lights. I think I said, my goodness.

They were going to leave me, you know? Then I opened my eyes and they couldn’t believe it, because I had no pulse. But the man upstairs, he was looking out for me. It was because of him I came back. It was all gray and fuzzy. I couldn’t hear. I was in the hospital for five weeks. Then a few weeks ago this thing failed, and I had to have surgery again and be in the hospital for another ten days.

I reviewed the math. It’s good you’re well enough for this trip, I said.

I’m supposed to call my sister when I get halfway, so she can meet me. I can wait in the lean-to. Then I can go see my mother.

I nodded. There was another long pause. Finally he said, isn’t it interesting who you meet when you travel?

 

 

I watched him get off in New London and claim his oily duffle. A shapeless gray-haired woman hurried from the shelter to embrace him. He leaned into her, patting her back lightly. She was wiping her eyes, or maybe just squinting.