Falling Through Space (20 page)

Everything in the Ozarks is very simple still. Even pollution doesn't seem to have made great inroads into the beauty. Still, I remember when I first moved here, in 1979, and the scientist Anderson Nettleship, now deceased, would proclaim to me about acid rain falling on our forests from smokestacks thousands of miles away. I felt helpless in the face of that but Dr. Nettleship did not. He protested it loudly all his life, in person and in many letters to the Powers That Be.

Another thing he used to lecture me about was the sheer idiocy of romantic love. “Childbirth, of course,” he would begin, “is the true manifestation of the creative urge. But that is another matter.” The Trout Fisherman and I knew Dr. Nettleship and loved to talk with him. If he had still been manifest he would have made a wonderful companion on this trip.

9:50: At Tuttle we get our first view of the river above the dams. Here the river is at its widest, sixty to a hundred feet. This is the river before it starts being fucked up. Wide green flood plains, bottomland as it's called in the hills, the watershed, what the river drains. Near Brashears we pass a house with white ceramic chickens and a red wagon beside a well. Perfect and right.

Near Combs there are white cattle against green and red fields. In the background a stand of white birch trees against a gray sky. A patch of sunlight beginning to show in the east.

I have been in this country this time of year when it is so golden and orange and transformed by sunlight that you can barely hold the car on the road. Black trees, orange leaves, blue skies, green moss, still green pastures, the rise and fall of a thousand hills, mountains in the distance. Dazzling. But it is proper that today is all gray drizzle and black trees and gray water pouring over white rocks. This is “water poetry time,” as the Trout Fisherman calls it. Water falling from the sky, and all around, and underneath where the great aquifers stretch all the way to Alaska.

A day for mist and rain and water. I am feeling very chic in my hand-me-down raincoat, wondering if my boots will fit over my heavy wool socks. (We each have a pair of fine new socks, a gift from the Tentkeeper when we went by yesterday to pick up the tent.)

The Trout Fisherman hands me a cookie. He is always feeding me. He thinks I don't pay enough attention to myself.

11:00: We stopped at Fleming Creek to watch a flock of mallards on the water. The bridge over the creek is so old and rickety it's a wonder it held our Isuzu. We walked out across the rocks and stood in the middle of the creekbed watching cars go by, watching the sagging timbers of the supports sway and hold.

“What's keeping it up?” I asked.

“Acts of faith,” the Trout Fisherman replied. “I hope it doesn't fall while we're watching.” The Designated Driver had wandered off into the underbrush looking for photographs. We stood in the water admiring the sawdust blowing off the top of a huge sawdust mountain beside a sawmill. High hills all around with green pastures, ducks and cows and woodpeckers. Pollution seems so harmless when there isn't much of it.

11:30: We stopped again at St. Paul. Sugar Tree Mountain is visible from here, rising up so high and covered with a crown of mist. We went on, past Slow Tom Hollow and Hawkins Hollow Creek, past Dutton and on to Pettigrew. We had grown quiet, getting near our destination.

11:45: Four miles from Boston, at No Name Knob after Pettigrew. The river is getting very small, lost below its rocky red clay banks. The Designated Driver is driving. The Trout Fisherman is making up water poetry. I am almost asleep and wake just as we go up a hill past a mailbox marked
Love
and there is the Boston, Arkansas, post office, deserted on the crest of a hill. We stop the Isuzu and get out and take photographs. A book called
Married Sexual Happiness
is lying facedown on a box inside the deserted post office. The Trout Fisherman picks it up and smiles at me. The Trout Fisherman and I are always talking about getting married but we never do. We are both too gun-shy and selfish and set in our ways to make promises.

“Let's look for markers,” the Designated Driver says and the three of us leave the post office and start down the hill toward the ravine.

12:40: The Designated Driver and I walked down to where a geodesic survey marker stood up in the blackened leafless briers. The marker was about twenty feet below the shoulder of the road.
WH
it said in large block letters.

“White River,” I announced. “This is it.” Dave climbed down another thirty feet and found a second marker on a steeper incline above a gully where water runs in torrents in the spring. I had visions of the ridge covered with snow and the sun of early March melting the snow and sending it in rushes to fill the trough. “Oh, yes,” I said. “This is surely it.” It was all very mystical and cold and wonderful. What had started out as a lark, a created adventure for a magazine article, had turned into a mystery with deserted ridges on gray November days and a lost post office crowning the ridge exactly where it should be. The Designated Driver stood at the edge of the ravine holding his camera. I was above him imagining I was standing upon an aquifer, loving (more than ever) this craziness called Arkansas, a place where men are still free, in the old sense of the word, meaning some of them at least still create and live out their own destinies. Until recently there was a usury law in effect here. No human slavery in Arkansas, no licenses to steal.

The Designated Driver and I kept looking at each other. We weren't satisfied yet. The Trout Fisherman came back across the road and announced that the water came from higher up and we would have to climb. We crossed the road and followed a leaf-covered ridge that curved along the side of the hill below the post office. We could hear water, a steady drip and gurgle about a hundred yards back. Following it we came to a waterfall and twenty feet above that another one.

“Let's hike,” the Trout Fisherman said. “Let's do some climbing.”

“Let's go to the truck first and get some dry socks,” I said. “We might be gone for a while.”

“Let's talk to those folks across the road,” the Designated Driver added. We left the waterfall and went back to the truck. A red Buick was coming down the hill from the post office. The driver was kind enough to stop and answer our questions. “You need to talk to Mrs. Hunter,” she said. “She knows everything around here.”

“Is that her house across the road?” the Trout Fisherman asked.

“Right there,” the woman answered. “Just knock on the door. She'll be glad to talk to you.”

Maybe Mrs. Irene Hunter is just the friendliest and most trusting person in the world. Or maybe it was the pair of long white socks the Trout Fisherman was holding in his hand when he knocked on her door. One way or the other she came right out and offered to help.

The driver of the Buick was right. Mrs. Hunter did know everything. In the first place she had been a forest ranger until her retirement several years ago. In the second place her nephew owns the land that holds the spring we were seeking. She went back inside for a coat and returned and got into the truck. She pointed out directions with beautiful sweeps of her hand. “Yes, four rivers rise on this little knob. The White runs to the north, the War Eagle to the west, the Kings to the east, and the Mulberry to the south.” We were enchanted. She was a lovely graceful woman, widowed five years but not the kind of person who gives in to grief. Her children grown and her husband dead, she keeps on living in her house, a comfortable-looking white wooden dwelling across from the deserted post office.

With Mrs. Hunter giving directions, we drove past the post office and up a red dirt road to the crest of the rise. Tall yellow grasses bent beneath the rain. We were all very excited, we were on a great quest and had found the mythical wise woman who would show us the way. We drove through the high yellow grasses and got out and marched along to a small clear pond with a black tree growing up in the middle. “Right there,” she said. “The spring starts underneath that tree.” We walked out onto a narrow dam and stood transfixed. The dead tree stood up in the water like a symbol. It must have been a proud oak or maple before the first dam on the White River killed it and left its skeleton for a statue to mark the place.

We stood in the cold light rain and took photographs and whispered about the source of water. Not far away, in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, there is a spring whose waters are part of an aquifer that has its beginnings in Alaska.

Below the small dam the water continues down the ravine in waterfalls and comes to the place where we had left our footprints an hour before. Then on down and along its watercourse to where it meets up with the West Fork. Between here and there a thousand million trickles make music and run past the Designated Driver's dome and on to Fayetteville. Then the river doubles back and falls all the way down the state of Arkansas to meet the Mississippi across from Rosedale, where the Famous Writer's father was born, at the beginning of this century, when men still knew rivers and shared and used that knowledge.

We got back to Dave's house in the afternoon and made a fire and heated up the Wok Stew and started talking. It was the best of conversation, about night and the size of the universe and black holes and what fish do in the winter and fish the Trout Fisherman had caught and photographs the Designated Driver had taken and books we all would write and plays we would put on and movies we could film if they would only give us the chance. About the death of rock and roll and the secrets of DNA and how people lived a long time ago and the houses they built and who invented the hearth and what the hearth means and whether the world will end in fire or ice and if we will get what we want out of life in the meantime.

We talked about babies in the womb and ecstasy and poetry and songwriting and how to catch trout and how to print photographs that will last forever and how the Cajuns put their photographs in enamel on their graves and Leonardo da Vinci and Walter Anderson and Ginny Stanford and the upcoming wedding of Kathleen Whitehead who started wearing her wedding band the day her fiancé bought it. We talked about the hard job of being a young man in the modern world. About how hard it is to figure out what to do for a living and how hard it is to come up to everyone's expectations and how young women are so strong nowadays that a man has to really get cracking to catch and hold a good one. About how to be a man and who to emulate and what to learn and what to know. “You got to know when to hold 'em,” as Kenny Rogers sings. “Know when to fold 'em. Know when to walk away. Know when to run.”

Finally, we threw the last log on the fire, finished off the brandy, and went to bed listening to the river and the dry branches in the November trees. “Goodnight,” I called out. “I love you both. Thanks for taking me.” “We love you too,” they called back.

Love
, it said on the mailbox. What else does a Famous Writer want from a magazine assignment?

T
HERE WAS
a wonderful piece in the
New Yorker
in which the writer explains the Zeitgeist, the way ideas or fads or states of mind spread throughout a culture with the speed of light. All of a sudden everyone has a crew cut or marches on Washington or decides to be very very thin or decides to give up on being very very thin.

I have always been a bellwether of such fads. I was one of the first women in New Orleans to go out running in Audubon Park. I was one of the first ones to quit. Anyone who has ever known me will attest that I have been at the cutting edge of every diet and exercise fad in the United States. All this time I have weighed exactly the same. Except for times when I was too busy to think about my body, during which times, for some mysterious reason, I would become quite thin.

At the moment I have given it all up. As an adult in a world where eating disorders have become a real problem and a menace, I think it is my place to stop acting like a neurotic teenager and set an example of harmony and balance. So all I am doing now is walking a few miles a day and eating anything I want except sugar. Also, I have vowed never to eat another salad unless I really want it and I am having an easy time keeping that promise to myself.

Here is the good news. It is eight weeks later and I haven't gotten fat. I've been eating when I was hungry and nothing bad has happened. Amazing. It is like some terrible spell has been broken. Also I quit weighing myself. I have thrown those damn scales away for good. A steel box with a set of revolving numbers is not going to have the power to ruin or make my day. What a metaphor the body-weight obsession of our century makes. Scales and surrogate mothers and nuclear warheads and mean-spirited people being delighted that young men are dying of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. I've got about thirty more years to live here, in this culture, with this madness. I may not escape all of it, but I am running as hard as I can. I'm going to begin by learning to love my own little soft round useful hungry healthy body.