The Opposite of Fate (26 page)

This year, I believe I have reached a new level of harmony. I have let go of anger, frustration, catch-and-release traps. I have come to think of the squirrels as inspiration for a book, in fact, a story like Stephen King’s
The Shining
or
Misery
, or Alfred Hitchcock’s movie
The Birds—
only scarier.

The story begins in a cabin by a river. The cabin is occupied by a nice, quiet writer. But she is kicked out by a bunch of randy, rowdy Ski Patrolers who buy the place. One day the writer returns with a bag of muffins, which she sprinkles around the cabin at midnight. As for the rest, you’ll have to wait. I have to do more research.

The muffins are just about ready to come out of the oven.

• my hair, my face, my nails •

I’m usually self-conscious about off-the-cuff writing, but sometimes the situations I have written about warrant the immediacy of an unedited form. This e-mail was written to friends who knew Lou and I were in Tahoe, in response to their question, “Are you all right?”

F
irst, we’re fine, back in San Francisco. The cabin, however, is another matter. We don’t know how it will fare, given what we left. On Jan. 1, we saw the Truckee River was rising. Normally, the river flows about seven feet below our bridge; most winters you can ice skate under it. On Wed. the water was only inches below the bridge and roiling with logs and debris. The road to Truckee and Tahoe City was closed due to floods, and we decided that since we were warm and snug in the cabin, we should simply wait it out. But, to cover our bases, we moved the car to across the bridge. That way, if the bridge washed out, we could walk thru the snow along the river the other way to River Ranch on Alpine Meadows Road, then make our way over to the car. So we thought . . .

Much to Lou’s annoyance, during dinner, I plugged into my computer and the message board to chat with folks on the weather channel. I described our situation, making sure I exaggerated the danger. “The river might rise and take out our
bridge,” I typed. “Do you need to be rescued?” someone typed back. “Nah,” I answered.

Thursday before dawn, Lou and I heard a rumble, different from the pounding rain (which had not stopped in five days). It sounded to me as if the river had risen so high it was now flowing by our cabin. Jan, our houseguest, was fast asleep downstairs. Lou and I got up, looked out the door. “Wind,” he surmised. And I said, “Then why aren’t the trees blowing around?” At 8 a.m., John Leavitt, from a neighboring cabin, came by and said the whole area was devastated. The roar we heard last night was a mudslide that was only 50 feet from the back of our cabin. The slide which started higher up the mountain took down dozens of huge fir trees, boulders the size of cars, and sent this morass tumbling into the river. The river was brown with mud and swirling with hundred-foot-long trees. Our one-lane gravel road was now bisected by waterfalls and streams. Along this wrecked road were downed power lines. And closer toward the bridge was a giant mudslide that had cut a football field–sized swath down the mountain, felling trees in domino fashion, upturning the earth so that it looked as if the gods had done a bad rototilling job. Some of the logs knocked out the back end of one of the cabins. Kitchen appliances lay strewn in the mud. The propane tank had been whacked open and gas was leaking. Another cabin was pierced through its roof with the pointy end of a tree, which must have been catapulted through the air by the slide. Other cabins had mountain streams gushing through them. Fortunately, our cabin and John’s were the only ones occupied, and our places were intact, although without phone, electricity, or water. Our cabin still had heat,
provided by our propane tank, and, if need be, a woodburning stove.

The bridge was completely underwater; even the railings had disappeared. Leaning against the bridge was another bridge from upstream, as well as numerous logs. We had ourselves a beaver dam. And if our bridge went, then it would take all this debris and the other logs floating in the river down the white water, missing the bend, and it would land, most likely, in the bar and dining room of River Ranch.

We decided we had to get out before another slide occurred and cut its way to the river via our cabins. Lou and John went hiking across the mudslide in back of our cabin, thinking they might reach River Ranch and fetch us some help. But Lou got stuck in mud, chest-deep, which was the consistency of quicksand. And John, who is in his 60s, was tiring and didn’t think he could help Lou out. The mountain started sliding again, sending down more trees and boulders. Finally, Lou and John extricated themselves and returned to the cabin, pale and exhausted, telling us that route was impassable.

Next, they went toward the bridge. Again, Lou got stuck in the deep mud, and when he pulled himself out, he headed down toward the river and spotted a couple of sheriffs across the bridge. They used a bullhorn to talk to him. Suddenly, one of them shouted, “Get the fuck out of the way,” and Lou heard the unmistakable rumble of another slide. He jumped into the river, which got the sheriffs sort of excited, until he made it to shore.

So Lou and John came back and told us and Nancy, John’s wife, who had joined us with their two dogs and a cat, that we were basically stuck. Our only way out was the river. There was
some foolish talk about inflating our cheap summer raft and paddling across. But we all nixed that idea. Around 1 p.m., two sheriffs, dressed in wetsuits, came upon us. They had been struggling to get to us for about an hour and a half. They suggested taking us across the slide, then tying ropes to us so we could pull ourselves across the bridge. Lou said he didn’t think we could make it across the slide, especially since we had four dogs and a cat with us. The sheriffs did a survey up and down the river, and via walkie-talkie, arranged a rescue using a Zodiac raft. We had to wait another hour and a half while things were set up. So Jan made the sheriffs breakfast, lunch,
and
dinner, since they hadn’t eaten in two days.

At 3:00, we were ready. We’d received lessons on how to swim in the rapids should we fall in, the dogs were in bags, our computers were in backpacks.

Nancy and I were the ones chosen first to head for the river bank. We put on helmets and lifejackets, secured the dogs, and grabbed onto a rope to ease ourselves down the slippery slope. Below was the Zodiac raft with two more sheriffs in wetsuits. The river looked less turbulent and amazingly, the section right in front of our cabin had become, as the sheriffs told us, the most calm part of the entire river, the perfect place to put in. It was still raining, the dogs and cat were quiet. We took off.

The rest of our journey over was like a pleasure boating trip, smooth sailing. On the other shore, four sheriffs in wetsuits were on hand, standing in the river, ready to help us out. The minute I got on shore, a man held a TV mike to me and said, “How does it feel to be rescued?” And I missed my once in a lifetime chance to say, “My hair, my face, my nails—I must look a fright!” For
those of you non–Tallulah Bankhead fans, that was her line in
Lifeboat
when she was finally rescued after a near-death experience. The reporter and cameraman did not know, of course, that I was a writer. But he did say we were his best rescue visuals for the day, what with the dogs and cat, the raging river and mountain mudslides, plus the beefy sheriffs in their wetsuits. You couldn’t have scouted a better location for the evening news.

The sheriffs made three more trips to get John, Jan, Lou, and then the two sheriffs who found us. As the others stepped onto wet land, the TV reporter was there, asking the same questions. At the bridge we found our dumpster had been tossed like a cardboard box, but our cars were intact. The river water was running over the bridge and the bike path. Like tourists at Niagara, we happily posed for John as he shot photos, the devastation now behind us, literally and figuratively.

Later that evening, the TV coverage of our rescue was shown several times on CBS affiliates, and then also broadcast the next morning on NPR, or rather, they both provided coverage of “writer Amy Tan’s dramatic rescue,” leading Lou, who had twice defied death, to remark that had we died the headline would have read: “Amy Tan and four others killed by mudslide.” This morning the phone calls came from friends who had heard that I had to leave behind my computer (I didn’t), which contained my new novel (just part of it). The book editor at the
LA Times
heard that I had to be airlifted (rafted does have similar letters in it) and asked if I would write about that.

Now you know how fiction is written.

• the ghosts of my imagination •

W
ho is the muse?

I’ve answered this question in many different ways. Sometimes I give the practical answer: The muse is really the personal process by which you synthesize your life with the work before you. It’s memory added to imagination, subtracted by false starts, and multiplied by a fraction of the tons of hard work you’ve put into the mess.

Other times I say the muse is my mother, the woman who gave me both my DNA and certain ideas about the world. Or I pay homage to my grandmother and say that it is she who inspired me to find my voice because she had lost hers so irrevocably.

But there is another muse, one I find difficult to talk about. I cannot say who or what it is, although I can tell you what this muse feels like. This muse appears at that point in my writing when I sense a subtle shift, a nudge to move over, and everything cracks open, the writing is freed, the language is full, resources are plentiful, ideas pour forth, and, to be frank, some of these ideas surprise me. It seems as though the universe is my friend and is helping me write, its hand over mine.

For me, that spiritual-mental high would be sufficient reason for writing. And while I have experienced it with each book I’ve written, I have never been able to decipher its pattern so that I might repeat it as often as I would like. Whatever it is, I am grateful when it happens, fearful that it may not happen again.

To illustrate, let me take you on a journey, one that traces the beginning of a story through to its epiphany, its end. The story is
The Hundred Secret Senses,
which has a lot to do with ghosts, in part because it often seemed to me that ghostwriters were helping me write it. I say this with trepidation, knowing that some people look upon the subject of ghosts as blarney or blasphemy. The skeptic in me can scrunch up my eyebrows and find rational and mundane explanations for everything quasi-mystical that occurred during the writing of the book. But the truth is, those answers feel so utterly lifeless to me, while the way it
felt
to write leaves me with a sense of wonder, joy, and gratitude, elements I need in abundance. And so, in the spirit of Henry James, let us suspend disbelief as I tell you how my life intersected with my fiction and created this particular ghost story.

Let us begin with a sense of place. I based my fictional locale for
The Hundred Secret Senses
on a village in China that I had chanced upon while collaborating on the movie version of
The Joy Luck Club.
I had been on location in Guilin, a city renowned for its magnificent hills, caves, and waterways. One day, with the actor Russell Wong and my photographer friend Robert, I hired a driver and headed south. We had no charted destination, and took only impulse and lark as our directional guide.

And so by chance, or maybe not, we wound up in the middle of nowhere, in this instance a hamlet of pristine scenery and
stone-stacked dwellings. There were no paved roads, no electricity, no plumbing other than the water that ran through gullies and irrigation ditches, and was brought into the village through hand pumps. The two hundred or so villagers spoke their own dialect, and only the children spoke Mandarin, the mandatory language taught in their school.

One woman, perhaps in her sixties, asked to have her photo taken with our Polaroid camera. While she surely must have seen herself daily in the cracked mirror nailed to the wall of her unlit room, she had never seen a picture of herself. She said as much. She peered with great anticipation while the film developed, but her smiling face fell into frowns and creases as she murmured what could only be the emotional equivalent of: “Is that what I really look like? I look so old. Look at my poor wrinkled face.”

The name of the village, as I heard it from the children, was Bei Sa Po. The inhabitants seemed healthy and without evidence of the birth defects we saw in other villages, where the same walleyed facial deformities found among siblings, cousins, young aunts and uncles, along with a phlegmatic expression, suggested that close-knit families had suffered the consequences of generations of inbreeding. These children, in contrast, were bright and energetic. A group of them had built a small palace out of mud, including intricate moats, pathways, towers, and underground hiding places. Each child had his or her own troops, large, shiny black crickets, which were led forth on thin strings into battle.

Russell, Robert, and I walked through the village and climbed into the surrounding hills. From a higher point, we could see the
valley with its stream and ponds, the hills reflected in them, the cluster of stone buildings, and paths that wove irregularly around natural barriers of old clumps of trees, boulders, and turns of the stream.

At the top of one hill, we found a ten-foot-high stone wall running the length of the ridge. It appeared to be some sort of medieval defense against invaders. Yet why would anyone have invaded such a tiny hamlet? Stepping through an archway, we found another valley, verdant and crisscrossed by stone hedges. We saw only two people tending the vast fields. We continued to walk, and reached another set of hills, and again a ridge lined with a high wall of rock. We stepped through another archway to see the valley on the other side.

The atmosphere changed immediately, to one of foreboding. Before us were rocky ruins and mountainsides pocked with caves. The skies seemed darker, and indeed, dark clouds had appeared, although we had not noticed them in the other two valleys. The land looked as if it had never been cultivated, with terrain as uneven as an unmade bed, and mossy boulders bursting from the earth. A collapsed hut of rocks in the center of the valley seemed to have been abandoned for hundreds of years. This was a wild place.