Church of the Dog (2 page)

Perhaps saying I dedicate my life to creating spiritual windows was a bit hasty, because I certainly spend a fair amount of my life working as a public school art teacher. I get to teach young people to look at light and life. I get to encourage them to appreciate themselves, and appreciation is a form of love. I get to teach them to be kind to other living things, which is a way of acknowledging the God that resides in all living things. And I certainly get to help them learn about their own power of creation. In that respect, I see it as working in support of God. Therein lies happiness.

I confess, though, that today I’m not happy I’m a public school teacher because I’m working in support of God. No, today I’m happy to be a public school teacher because I have one and a half weeks of summer vacation left, and I’m off on a road trip to see the Grand Canyon.

It’s the only letter I received all summer, the only time the captain handed me anything other than credit card offers. And there’s not much to it. I look at it sticking out of the pocket on the shirt that hangs on the wall near my bed. The shirt sways as the boat rocks. Feels like a good-sized summer storm tonight.

On the other side of the room, Jack snores loudly. I’m obligated to pretend it bugs me, but really I like it. I like the sound of him living. Steve used to share this room with me before he was promoted to first mate. He slept too quietly. There were nights I’d wake up terrified that he had died, which I knew wasn’t logical. I’d lie there in a state of panic and self-loathing until finally my anxiety grew so great that I would make myself get up and watch him breathe. With Jack I get to stay in my bed. There’s no question he’s breathing.

Steve knocks at the door, opens it, and looks at me. “Your turn.”

I put on the flannel shirt with the envelope in the pocket, slip on my fleece pants, and climb the stairs to the wheelhouse as the boat continues to rock.

Fifty-foot waves splatter the windows of the wheelhouse, common in the winter but impressive in the summer. I take the wheel, and Steve staggers through the interior door and down the stairs to bed. I hold the wheel and watch the droplets of water from the waves hit the window. I don’t like it. Then it begins to rain, and the rain hits the windows. I don’t like that, either. I don’t like any precipitation of any kind hitting any window. I especially don’t like windshield wipers. But I hate snow. I hate the sight of snow hitting glass. I hate it.

I watch the radar and check the electronic charts and GPS to make sure our tender boat, a crab fishing boat in winter, stays away from icebergs and off sandbars and rocks, and that we stay on course. Tomorrow we’ll deliver seventy thousand pounds of king salmon to the land plant in Valdez. Night duty in the wheelhouse is usually painful. Quiet. It’s usually so damn quiet. At least the heavy sheets of water that pelt the window make noise. It’s a tough toss-up what I can’t stand more—silence or precipitation on windshields.

And then there’s the envelope in my pocket. So much is wrapped up in that little envelope. Failure, mostly. My failure. My cowardice. The disappointment I’ve been to the only two people on this earth who love me. At least Grandpa’s words are not kind. They’re not unkind, but they’re not kind. They’re neutral. They’re straightforward. And usually I can handle that, but this one contained a straightforward request: Come home. Come home to the land of my losses and failures, to my inadequacies and irrational fears. Come home to the people to whom I owe more than I could ever repay, to the people I abandoned. Come home.

I open it and reread it. He says nothing about my failures, nothing about the humiliation and confusion I caused him. He says nothing about forgiveness, either, but even if he offered it, I would have to believe they were just words. You can’t forgive someone for just disappearing.

There is one thing I do like about piloting the ship at night. It’s the reason I chose this life. It’s the sense of disappearing all over again, disappearing into a night so dark I cannot be seen, in a sea so vast I cannot be found. I hold the wheel in the storm and just disappear.

“Dammit,” I say as I nick the side of my neck. I reach for some toilet paper to stop the bright red blood that gushes out of the tiny cut and press the tissue hard into the cut. Under the cut I feel a lump, a little lump about the size of a gumball.

Maybe it’s just the mother of all ingrown hairs . . . or a pimple. I haven’t had a pimple since I was nineteen, but, still, it could be. Except the skin wasn’t red on top of the lump. Ingrown hairs and pimples are red.

Hey, it’s just a lump. My old dog, Blue, used to be covered with them. They were just fatty cysts. That’s probably what this is, a cyst.

I try to move it with my finger. It doesn’t move. Don’t cysts move? I think cysts move. Did Blue’s lumps move? I can’t remember.

It could be a bone spur growing off the side of one of my neck vertebrae.

But what if it’s not? What if it’s the Grim Reaper stalking me from the inside out? Dammit. I look at my reflection in the mirror and see an old man. When’d I get to be such an old son of a bitch? When I was a boy, I used to pass men like me outside the feed store, and I used to think they looked like they had lived a good long life. I figured they were ready to die when God called out their number. Now I look just like them, and I can tell you, I do not feel ready to have my number called.

Such a small bump. Funny how the smallest things bring down the biggest beasts. Bullets. Germs. Cancer cells. Yeah, it’s the small stuff that gets you.

I turned seventy-nine last May. I suppose seventy-nine is technically a good long life, but I figured I’d be kicking away at ninety-three like Henry O’Toole down the road, out there fixing fences and moving irrigation pipes. I figured I was at least as strong as Henry O’Toole. Seventy-nine is not that old. I mean, yes, it’s not that young, either, but it’s not even eighty. I’d like to make it to eighty.

I’m probably getting excited about nothin’. Probably just a cyst.

Seventy-nine isn’t old, but it is too damn old to put myself at the mercy of my crack physician. The hospital is like a roach motel to us old people. You go in, but you don’t come out. Seventy-nine is too old to put myself through chemo. If my days are numbered, I sure ain’t gonna waste them puking. No, I ain’t gonna live out my days in no goddamned hospital.

Plus, you gotta figure I’m gonna die anyway. No use rackin’ up bills and losing the ranch trying to fight it.

Listen to me. This is ridiculous. It’s a cyst. I leave the tissue sticking to the clotting blood on my neck and walk out of the bathroom.

I ain’t gonna tell Edith about these bumps. No use in her worrying about it, especially since they’re just cysts. Plus, you know, she’d make me go to the damn doctor.

Earl sits at the dinner table with me. He chews his food and looks down at his plate. He is a man of few words, I suppose. In a way it’s like living by myself, only with more work in some areas and less work in other areas. I glance at the wedding band on my finger and wonder if it’s true, if I am really married. Faithful, yes, but celibate. Love? Sure. We’ve got history. Partners, absolutely. But friends? I mean, do I think Earl likes me? Not really. It’s not that I think he dislikes me. I think I’m just part of his landscape, and he simply accepts and expects my presence. A long time ago his eyes sparkled when he looked at me. Now, nothing, nothing but same old, same old. I get up and do the dishes.

We’re both tired from a long day of putting up silage. It’s fast work, since we can’t let the cut grass dry. Whitey’s been coming out to help. I drive the swather with the self-propelled chopper that blows it into a big semi. Whitey drives the semi to the pit where he dumps it. Finally, Earl packs it down tight with a tractor. The compaction seals it and keeps it fresh. The fermentation process softens even the toughest weeds. Kimchi for cattle. It’s high-energy food in the winter.

Earl goes back out to check on the contractors who have been swathing and baling our hay. They’re good this year. We used to bring in our own hay, too, but ranch help is almost impossible to get anymore. It doesn’t pay as well as the jobs in town. Most people who do it aren’t particularly educated. I don’t have anything against uneducated people, but a lot of uneducated people are also not particularly motivated or hardworking, and this is very hard work. Really, though, by the time we put up hay, pay fuel costs, and keep our machinery maintained, there isn’t a lot left over to pay a hired hand anyway.

This isn’t the most profitable business. We’re able to make it because we own our land free and clear. Still, no one is in it to get rich. You have to love working with cattle. You have to love this life. I don’t need much. For me, taking a moment to sit on a hill and just be in nature is as good as it gets. What I have is enough for me.

I put on my boots and go to the barn to check on a sick yearling I found yesterday. He had pulled off by himself. Cattle are herd animals, so that’s always a red flag. His nose is still dry, he’s still pulled up in the flank, and still humped off in the back. I give him a thousand cc’s of penicillin. I remember when I found him last spring. He didn’t get on his mother’s tit fast enough. They have just an hour or so to get that first colostrum milk in them. After that their bodies won’t absorb it, and their chance at any kind of natural immunity is blown.

In a nearby corral are my two special calves. I check Ray Charles and Special K. Ray was born blind last spring. It took me a few days to figure it out. And I think Special K might have Down’s syndrome. For whatever reason, they grew on me. I spent more time with these two calves than I did with the other twelve hundred that were born around the same time. I can’t just turn them loose. They’d never make it. I told Earl I don’t know what we’re going to do with them, because I can’t eat them.

Then I return to the house. Earl has already gone to bed and fallen asleep. I’m glad about that. It’s nice to just go to bed in peace and not have to use one more ounce of energy, energy I don’t have, to make polite conversation with someone who is also too tired to be polite. It’s not easy to work together all day and sleep next to each other all night. We work well together, though. Earl doesn’t yell at me. I hear the stories that other ranchers’ wives tell about how their husbands yell at them when they’re working cattle together, and I think, Gosh, I don’t know what I would do if Earl yelled at me like that. Ride away, probably.

I look at his face for a moment before I turn off the light and lie down. He’s a good man—not particularly interesting anymore, but good.

Hey, it’s my birthday, so I stop in Sedona and visit a psychic. I like to get a taste of what I have to look forward to in the upcoming year. This one didn’t talk about my future, though. She talked about my past. She talked about my dad.

“I don’t care how old a person is, when they die, they feel sixteen again.” She says this like it’s fantastic to feel sixteen again. I confess I hope I don’t feel sixteen again because sixteen wasn’t all that great. “But they look down and see all their loved ones grieving, so they come to their loved ones in dreams to let them know they’re okay. Only, Mara, you didn’t wait for your loved ones on the other side to visit you in dreams. You were crossing over at a very young age to visit them . . . a grandmother and two grandfathers. And then later, after your father died, you were a regular.”

It’s true. I think back to all my dreams where I realized I was somewhere but didn’t know where. But it was okay because the people were so friendly and the food was so delicious, it was indescribable. Oftentimes I looked for my father, and oftentimes I found him.

I leave Sedona and drive a little north. I’m pretty sure that all the campsites at the Grand Canyon are full, so I pull off on a dirt road. I open the back windows in case I need to escape into the locked safety of the cab in the night. I get out with my gear, unroll my sleeping pad onto the bed of my pickup, and throw my sleeping bag on it. I say my prayer: “God, Cosmos, Angels, and Guides, please clear me of all nonpositives. Please clear my friends and family of all nonpositives. Please keep a two-mile radius around me clear at all times. Please fill me and complete me with your light and love. Thank you for your guidance and protection. Please give my love to my family in Heaven. Thank you. Thank you for everything.”

I love to sleep under the stars and listen to breezes in trees as I drift in and out of sleep.

At the crack of dawn I start driving north again until at last I reach it. I arrive around five-thirty—before the rangers begin their day, so I enter for free, saving twenty much-needed dollars. I find a parking place near the edge, grab my guitar, and go in search of the perfect spot.

What no one can tell you about your first trip to the Grand Canyon is the inevitable revelation you are bound to have about time. All those lines going down the cliffs for what seems like infinity. We are such a tiny speck on the Grand Canyon time line.

I realize that in Grand Canyon years I am the same age as every single person on the planet today, and this realization gives me an overwhelming sense of unity.

As the sun begins to rise, I can see silhouettes of a few people up and down the canyon rim. Everyone is silent, seemingly in a state of reverence for this wonder of nature. I wonder if they, too, are feeling the unity or if they are still pondering their smallness.

I find the perfect spot and take out my guitar. I very quietly pluck some chord progressions, throwing in some harmonics here and there.

When the sun has risen, I decide to leave so that I remember the perfection of the last hour rather than the zoo it will become in another.

As I turn around to put my guitar in its case, I catch the eyes of a guy who apparently has been sitting not far from me, listening.

“Thanks,” he says. His eyes are so bright that when I look at them, I feel the way I do after a movie matinee when I emerge from the dark theater into a bright day. I think, judging from those eyes, he sees what I do.