Falling Through Space (29 page)

“How are you?” you immediately ask.

“Well, my allergies are better but I've had to go to the chiropractor about a hundred times this week for my neck. You should see my cherry tree. There are five million cherries on it and about a thousand birds. There are twenty differenr species in that tree. There are redbirds and bluebirds and blue jays by the dozens. There is a piliated woodpecker the size of a dinosaur. How are you? How's your leg?”

You know me like a book. I can't fool you. You know what I am saying, don't you? Like you know how much it pleases me when something I write shocks you. Scares and pleases me. In your presence I am not a writer. I am a hyperactive, redheaded child whom it is your duty to love and civilize.

You don't know how you have civilized me. You will never know how much you've taught me and how deep the lessons go. I think you know I love you. I know that you love me.

Don't die. Love, Ellen

My father's father was a famous hunter and horseman in North Alabama, who loved to take his silver and his servants and go out and live in the woods. Because of this everyone in our family was taught to live in the woods, to make fires and leave trails and know where to camp and what to do if they were lost. I carried a compass with me at all times from the age of six to twelve although I was never sure I really knew how to use it.

My brother probably really knew how to use the compass. Anyway, at some point he and my father began to go off camping without me. They had tired of my constant complaining and wanted to go deeper into the woods and stay longer. At about age eight, they stopped inviting me on their expeditions, and my camping education was turned over to the wonderful summer camps my father found for me to go to. The first great camp was in Ohio. Columbus Girl's Camp. Months before I was to go there, Daddy brought a small black trunk into my room, and we began to pack it. There was a list the camp had sent of things I was to bring and we followed it exactly. Two small sheets, a pillow, a wool blanket, six pairs of socks, six pairs of underpants, three pairs of shorts, a pair of long pants. Every morning when I would awake, I would see the trunk sitting at the foot of my bed, a promise of great things to come.

My father died three years ago this week. It was two years after his death before I could bear to have a photograph of him in my house. I had his Auburn tie hanging in a back closet with the black gown I wore to receive an honorary doctorate from Millsaps College, one of the few important events of my life that he attended. He was not a public man. He was a man to take a little girl off alone and teach her to make a fire. He was a man to load five children into a pickup truck after the first long freeze and take them off to spend Saturday clearing a pond for ice skating. He was a man to buy enough ice skates for every child in the neighborhood who could not afford a pair. He was a man who could create huge excitement out of nothing.

He would come home from a hard week's work carrying a box full of long underwear and ice skates, and by Saturday morning at nine we would be in the truck going to find a pond. We were living in Mound City, Illinois, but we were from the deep south. None of us knew how to ice skate, including my father, but he was a great athlete and he had been asking questions of the people he worked with. Also, he had found a farmer who would lend us his pond. It would be my father, my seven year old brother, me, aged five, and three other children in the neighborhood. There were never any other girls along on these expeditions but that was a way of life for me, as all of my cousins were boys. The only time there were girls was when we were horseback riding. My father's grandmother had been a famous horsewoman in North Alabama, and he approved of women riding horses.

When we had found the pond, we collected firewood and built huge fires on both ends of the pond. Then we took two by fours out of the truck and began to push them across the ice, smoothing it down for skating. Nothing was ever simple with my father. Everything he thought up to do included hard work. The ideal was Sonya Henie and the little Dutch boy who skated miles to save his city from disaster in a story book we had. The reality was pushing the two by fours across the pond and hauling brush to keep the fires going.

Finally we put on the skates. Then we stood up and began to learn to use them. To this day I can still go to an ice rink and put on skates and skate on them. The body does not forget skills it learned to save itself from falling. I am sixty-four years old now. When I was sixty-two, I was stuck in Tulsa, Oklahoma for twelve hours because of flight delays, and I took a taxi out to the indoor ice rink and rented skates to see if I could still skate on them. I wasn't Sonya Henie but I sure made it around the rink a few times.

I woke this morning thinking about my daddy and all the things he taught me to do. He was the most exciting person I have ever been around and the most exacting. I miss him greatly and I am glad my mind has decided to let my memories of him return. I have to go to New York City to talk to business people next week. I think I'll get out the Auburn tie and wear it to make me strong.

T
HE REASON
to write is to learn. The more I write, the more I am forced to learn. This winter I am having to study geology so that a teenage detective named Ingersol Manning can discover a map to a kimberlite pipe in Berkeley, California. A kimberlite pipe is the source of diamonds in the world. “… a relatively small hole bored through the crust of the earth by an expanding combination of carbon dioxide and water which rises from within the earth's mantle and moves so fast driving magma to the surface that it breaks into the atmosphere at supersonic speeds. Such events have occurred at random through the history of the earth, and a kimberlite pipe could explode under Moscow next year. Rising so rapidly and from so deep a source, a kimberlite pipe brings up exotic materials the likes of which could never appear in the shallow slow explosion of a Mt. St. Helens or the flows of Mauna Loa. Among the materials are diamonds.”
*

A kimberlite pipe is about a half a mile wide. If there is one underneath Ingersol's neighborhood, he and his friend, Tammili, and their mentor, the pianist, Mrs. Coleman, will have to decide whether it's worth telling anyone and having their neighborhood destroyed in the process.

Anyway, I had to study geology for many nights. Two things happened because of that, and both of them may prove to be irreversible. First, I have begun to view the world from an entirely different perspective. I live in the Ozark Mountains, soft, old hills left by glaciers ten million years ago and since then eroded and worn down by rain and snow and forests. I have always thought they were beautiful and always been fascinated by the huge rocks that seem to spring up from the earth. Everywhere there are boulders of many sizes still working their way to the surface. My house is built of that rock, much of it broken up from larger stones.

Now I can no longer look around me and see the spring trees and the soft, new grasses and wildflowers. Now all I see is geomorphic time, the long processes that brought that rock down here from Canada.

The basins, ridges, shelves, gullies, erosions, roadcuts, all have taken on huge, exciting lives. I am outside five hours a day exploring this and wondering and thinking. This is exciting work. This is an exciting life.

When I am through for the day I go to the bookstore and buy all the books on geology I can carry home. I have started giving them to children.

The reason I have become so excited about this subject is that I have found a use for it. I am a Scot. Most of the blood that runs in my veins came from County Cantyre, Scotland, and I don't like to waste things. If I can't see a practical use for something, sooner or later I get rid of it or give it away. I am using this geomorphic information to write a book that someday I might be able to sell, and that someday young people might read and be amused by, or learn something from. With that in mind, I began my study of geology with enthusiasm. It has developed into a passion. I have not yet bought a rock hammer and a set of cold chisels but that will be next. I did almost have a wreck on a mountain road last Wednesday. I came to a roadcut with a great fall of granite. I must have passed that place hundreds of times as it is on the main road south from my home. “Granite,” I screamed. “Granite, granite, granite.” I threw on the brakes and was almost rearended by a Highway Patrol car. Fortunately, the officer had been maintaining a proper distance and was able to swerve around me. I was preparing a defense in my mind, but he drove on and did not bother me.

The second thing this new passion has done for me is to bring me back to consciousness after a long winter's sleep. Three weeks ago I was so bored I was watching television. While watching The Learning Channel I became convinced that there had been an Atlantis and that it was now Anarctica. I talked of nothing else for days, boring all my friends to death. While buying the geology books I picked up Carl Sagan's
The Demon-Haunted World
, and was brought back to consciousness about pseudo-science, even when it's on The Learning Channel. There may have been a city in the Aegean that toppled into the sea, or was covered by an earthquake, but that is a far cry from “the destruction of a continent on which had sprung forth a preternaturally advanced technical and mystical civilization.”

The reason to write is to learn. The red streaks on rocks are iron. We are made of srardust, you, me, this paper, your thoughts, dreams, and hammers. Your diamond rings and number two lead pencils. How blind we usually are. Not only to the real phenomena, which our five senses cannot see, but to the wonder that is here, beneath our feet, in Central Park, in every stone, the real history of the world, written in granite and marble and Feldspar and Dolomire and Gypsum and opals and rubies and diamonds. Diamonds enter the earth's surface at Mach 2. How's that for a birth process?

__________________

*
John McPhae

F
OR YEARS
people have asked me why so many writers come from the south and for some reason that question has always annoyed me. It seemed obvious to me why writers come from the south, and yet, when I tried to articulate an answer, the answer was always lacking. No matter how many ideas I advanced, no matter how many theories I created, it wasn't enough.

“Why do so many writers come from the south?” the person would say, and I would see in my mind's eye the south I knew, the wonderful, mystical place from which my parents came and to which I was driven every summer so that I would not become a yankee even though we had to live in Indiana and Illinois until the United States won the Second World War and my father became rich enough to “go home.”