Outview (10 page)

“Could you just tell us who you are and how
you know our names?” I asked.

“Nathan Ryder, everyone knows your name,
just not yet.” We stared at him. He looked straight at me.

Linh broke the silence, “Do you want us to
leave?”

“Doesn’t matter what I want. He just ain’t
going to understand this place yet.”

“Would you explain it to me?” I asked.

“Sure thing, Nayyy-thonn, then I’ll teach
you about the origin of the universe, how to walk on water, and the trick to
time travel.” More silence. Linh took a picture of him.

“Don’t do that,” he said firmly. Linh put
her camera away.

“Why don’t you want me here? I need to
know. Please, will you help me?”

“See where you are,” he said, waving his
arm in a circle over his head. I gazed out at the lake. “Not with your eyes.
See it, don’t look at it.” I stared back at him. “You’re just too early to
understand.” His expression softened, but not by much.

“I’m sixteen, I don’t understand any of
this.”

“Because you think you’re sixteen. You
believe that. Too bad, because you’re not.”

“How old am I then?”

“How old are you? How old am I? How old is
the sky? Why don’t you ask me a question that is important to know right now?”

“Like?”

“Why am I here,” he offered.

“Okay, why are you here?”

“You boy, not me. I know why I’m here.
You’re here because this is one of the great earth vortexes.”

“An earth vortex?”

“A portal. A crossroads of
multi-dimensional fields. It occurs here.”

“What does?”

“So much.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re not ready, boy. Come back when you
are. Come back in a week.” He tossed something at me. As I caught it, I looked up
at the old man, but he was gone. In my hand was an almost black but tinted blue
stone, smooth and round, a little smaller than a poker chip and nearly as thin.
Kyle and Linh were looking for the old man.

I showed them the stone. “It’s from the
bottom of the lake,” I said.

“How do you know?” Linh asked.

“I don’t know, but I do.”

“Where did he go?” Kyle looked around.

Hastily, we got back to the car all weirded
out and shaken by the encounter. It was their first experience of something
unexplainable. No one wanted to talk about it. A couple of minutes later, we
found the next overlook along the rim road. Linh read from a guidebook she’d
borrowed. “‘At 1949 feet, Crater Lake is the deepest lake in North America. But
if you go by average depth, it is actually the deepest in the world that is
entirely above sea level.’”

I wasn’t paying
attention. I was still thinking about the old man and wondering what a vortex
was while considering the possibilities of a multidimensional portal.

Linh read, “‘The
lake was formed by the cataclysmic eruption of Mount Mazama in about 5680 BC.
Geologists estimate the mountain was 12,000 feet high when the top 5,000 feet
of it blew into the sky in one massive blast of rock and earth.’”

“It’s
enormous,” Kyle said, looking out over the lake.

“No rivers or
streams flow in or out of it,” Linh said. “It’s probably the purest water on
the continent. They’ve found plants photosynthesizing three hundred fifty feet
down.”

“Yeah, even
from here I can see down pretty far into the water,” Kyle said. “But where does
that unreal blue color come from?”

“Listen to
this!” Linh said, looking up from her book. “‘One of the most fascinating
mysteries of Crater Lake is a floating tree trunk. This remarkable ancient
hemlock has been bobbing, absolutely vertical, for as long as Crater Lake has
been documented. Its earliest known reference is from 1896, and it was first
photographed in 1902.’ It’s like an iceberg, hiding most of its bulk beneath
the surface; those who get close to it can see some thirty feet down into the
depths of the lake. This is so amazing; it’s completely straight as if it’s
growing right out of the lake.”

I wasn’t sure
what the big deal was until she added that it was called, “The Old Man of the
Lake.”

“Let me see,” I
said. The picture showed a bleached gray and white tree trunk sticking four or
five feet out of impossibly blue water. The reflection was perfect but also
visible was a branchless tree towering deep below the surface. “It’s him,” I
whispered.

“Okay, now I’m
starting to think you
are
crazy,” Kyle jabbed me.

“Come on, you
saw him, we all saw him. It wasn’t just me this time, right? He came out of
nowhere and disappeared right back into the trees,” I challenged.

“So?” Kyle
volleyed.

“He gave me
this stone, see it looks like the lake, same shape and color. He said this
place is like a door to other dimensions.”

“Kyle, he knew
your real name,” Linh shot back.

“I know,” he
conceded.

“Wait, I took
his picture,” Linh said. She fumbled with her camera. “Guys, you won’t believe
this.” The shot showed me on one side but where the old man had been standing
there was nothing, only trees behind where he had been. “He was there when I
snapped it, I saw him in the screen, I swear,” Linh said. Even Kyle believed
her. The angle of the shot would have made it impossible for him to have not been
in the picture.

I read, “‘It’s a mystery how the Old Man of
the Lake floats upright, freely traveling over the entire twenty square miles
of the lake, sometimes at great speeds. Once rangers recorded it moving almost
four miles between dusk and dawn. Some think it is the guardian of the waters.’
Listen to this; ‘In 1988, when scientists were exploring the lake by submarine,
they decided the floating trunk could be a dangerous hazard, so the Old Man was
tethered where they found him on the east side of Wizard Island. Restricting
the Old Man’s freedom had immediate repercussions. A storm quickly descended
upon the lake and only subsided after the Old Man had broken away from its
anchor and was able to glide the lake once again.’”

I took another look at the photo in the
book and then handed it back to Linh. “He’s the ultimate shapeshifter.”

18

We continued around the rim road, stopped
at a few more overlooks where I snapped some nice shots of the scenic lake, ate
lunch at the pinnacles surrounded by towering pumice swords rising from the
mist, and took more photos. Mom had sent delicious sandwiches and desserts from
the Station, prepackaged party assortments grouped as: Grammy Winners, Solo
Artists, Number Ones, and Girl Bands. For us, she sent their largest called
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, with all the sandwiches named after inductees.

I pulled out the gold box and carved wood again
and handed them to Kyle, then gave four small pages to Linh.

“I agree with you. If this box was solid it
would be much heavier,” Kyle said, “but I can’t see how to open it.”

“It’s gotta be those jade inlaid designs.”

“I think you’re right. If it opens, that
pattern is the way.”

“What about the carved wood?” I asked.

“It’s almost like a language, and there are
ten words,” Kyle said. “The rest of it is just pretty flowers or vines for
decoration, I think.”

Linh had been studying the writing on one
of the four sheets. She read the list of names out loud. “There are nine names,
but one of them is the word ‘you.’ Your dad wrote these, right?”

“Could it be for you, Nate? Are you the ‘you’
on the list?” Kyle asked.

“I have no idea who he wrote it for.”

The other three sheets were no help.
Although they appeared to be just gibberish, Kyle was positive they were really
English written in a kind of scrambled code. We weren’t able to decipher
anything.

Driving again, eager to get to our campsite
still a couple of hours away, I detailed several recent Outviews.

“Do you think we’ve all died in such
horrible ways like you have in all your Outviews?” Linh’s voice was thin.

“The world’s been a rough place for most of
its history. Even in the last hundred years when we’ve supposedly been our most
civilized, more than two hundred million people have died in wars, genocide, or
man-made disasters. Brutal diseases have taken millions more, auto accidents,
fires . . . life is hard,” I said.

The campground stretched along the southern
bank of the Umpqua River where lichen-draped cedar, Douglas fir, and deciduous
trees provided a dense canopy. That, combined with the thick understory of fern
and thimbleberries, gave the area a lush, semitropical feel. We found an ideal
site atop a slight rise on the bank of the river. The rapids were loud and
frothy. Linh thought our site was too close, but Kyle and I convinced her it
was fine.

A guy selling fruit boxes of firewood
walked up while we finished setting up the tent. It was the Old Man! Kyle and
Linh actually backed up a little.

“You’re the Old Man!”

“And you’re a young kid. Need some wood?”

“Don’t you remember us?” Linh asked.

“Yeah, I think I saw you on the trail
somewhere.”

I dug the blue stone out of my pocket.
“Remember this?”

“I do,” with a glint in his eye, “but
you’re still too early.”

“What happened to you before? Where’d you
go?”

“Had business to tend to.”

“Are you really the floating tree?” Linh
blurted out.

“You know my people, the Klamath tribe,
witnessed the eruption and were here at the formation of the lake. It’s a
sacred site. We still use Crater Lake in vision quests. Our warriors climb the
caldera walls, as they have for centuries, and dive from the high cliffs. The
strongest and bravest are revealed to have extraordinary spiritual powers.”

“Will you tell me about the lake being a
portal?” I asked.

He considered me for a moment. “The legends
say that ancestors come and go from there and that the living can sometimes
find a way through if they are pure of heart and reasons for the voyage are
good.”

“It sounds hard to believe,” Kyle said.

“This river, these trees, and the great
blue lake have taught me there is nothing I should not believe. Everything
happens in cycles, over and over again.”

“You sound like my history teacher,” I
said.

“School teachers are wise in the world of
what can be seen, but that’s only a tiny stream that flows into the river of
what really is.” He moved his arm away while wiggling his fingers.

“I think I know what you mean,” I said.

“There is ten thousand times more in the
invisible world, more that we don’t understand than what we do. It’s all around
us, and we are too busy to see. Most of my people have forgotten the way, lost
the ability to see beyond the material world. The whites lost their way many
generations before they even found this continent.”

“I’m trying to figure it out,” I said.

“I see things written on your face; your
struggles are just beginning, boy.”

“That’s not real encouraging.” It was
similar to what the guide told me during my meditation in the car. “What do you
see?” Up close, his face suddenly seemed even older than when we first met.

He studied me again. “Great learning. You
will begin to swallow knowledge. That is something I’ve not seen until you. You’ll
find lost spirit dances. But be cautious, boy, there’s darkness waiting, a very
strong force that will stop you if it can.” His face contorted into despair.
“There is a tiny hope, maybe even a chance, you could fight past this battle.”

“Nate!” Linh gasped. A week ago what he was
saying would have seemed like the ramblings of a madman, but with each passing word
his message resonated deeper within me.

“What should I do?”

“There are many who will help you. You’re
not alone. Some will appear real, but remember, the ones you can’t see can help
the most. They are around you now.”

“You can see them?” Kyle asked.

“I don’t have to. They are there.”

He was looking at his old truck full of
boxes and scanning for the next tent. I could tell he wanted to go.

“Thanks” was all I could think to say.

“And Nathan, you are going to buy a box,
aren’t you?” he asked.

I gave him four dollars.

“You asked me what you should do. You need
to remember. And once you do, think of the lessons from your previous
conflicts. Sometimes it is the Great Spirit who pushes you, or earth guides,
but in any kind of battle, strategy is not to be overlooked.”

He handed me the box of wood.

“Thanks, Old Man.” Our eyes met briefly
before he turned. Strategy, I thought, would be a good thing to think about.
While watching him make his way to the next campsite, I hoped we’d meet again.