But I Won’t

The cock’s crow rattled me and sent my mind marching through memory’s journeys: into an old barnyard where I once stepped on a rotten egg while watching a big black-and-red rooster send out his call, the sickly pop of the decayed shell followed by the stink of the gas that hung in my nose for hours after Mother came and hauled me home; or down the muddy chuckholes of Beech Street where roosters sparred in a chicken coop beneath an ancient mesquite tree that the neighborhood kids said housed a spirit who could speak to rattlesnakes.

Betty and I have been on the road for a little over two weeks and are now snug in a three-hundred-year-old adobe in New Mexico near where the crowing cock lives. We’ve been here several days, admiring the ancient pine vigas holding up the roof and the micaceous clay plaster shimmering on the walls and the ancient floors that once felt the thump and thunder of dancers hundreds of years past when this adobe was part of a larger rancho.

One of the details about this area, called Talpa, is that it is a place of “brujas” and memories keep ghosting into my recall—not just rooster and cock crows, but other things that I suspect have barged into my mind because of all the things we’ve seen on this trip while motoring through rain and snow and peaks and deserts, canyons, ponderosa forests, redwoods sweeping the fog off the tops of ridges; days so clear they sting because of the singular lines between the blue of the sky and the snow-capped peaks beyond; and the cattailed marshes in the foreground are as pure as a spirit who tells no lies. Who knows, maybe the recollections are haunted by the spell of a local bruja living down Archuleta Road.

My memories usually turn to something more visceral, where I am captured in a concrete space where actual time has taken leave and left me mired—but not always, sometimes I’m in a sweet space that candies up the moment—in the details of a particular incident ten, twenty, thirty years gone, or maybe more.

This time it could be all the fog on the trip. As we drove, the clouds hung like shifty gray shrouds on the black macadam winding through the wild country between the Sierra Nevada and the White Mountains. And then we encountered the fog that rises from a warmer, damp ground when smothered beneath cold air hovering overhead.

As I lay on the bed and looked at the log vigas in the old adobe, those recent fog images hurled me back fifty-plus years to a bleak and lonely night on the Laotian border when me and a Sioux Marine we called “Chief” were on a listening post in a curtain of mist so thick I damned near drowned in a pool of it as I crept down a trail I could only sense beneath my muddy jungle boots.

Chief and I tried to sneak about our grim business, like quiet death after a long coma, but we scraped and jingled where our dungarees met our web gear and our steps in the mud sounded like the sucking noise you make when rocking your boots out of wet, red clay.

We set up our listening post on the lip of a huge bomb crater and tried like hell to make out what ghosted within the haze that hurried past our chilled faces as it traversed west to east like a thief leaving Las Vegas heading to Salt Lake.

It’s funny how the imagination dredges up specters full of danger when you can’t see, and we listened for anything other than the sound of the fog, its cold voice like a low sonorous chant from an all-male chorus in an ancient Capuchin monastery.

And, in my memory at least, the fog was gone before we could contemplate it leaving, and we were stunned with a night so bright that the wet mud from the bomb crater reflected light at us that rendered me naked, a frightened waif, waiting to die.

The moon was full and as big as the snout on a five-hundred-pound bomb, and off in the distance, the flicker of stars went on and off like interstellar messages sent via semaphore.

And then, as if the night was meant to be a parade of differing tempers, a thunderstorm roared in from the same direction the fog had come, and we were lit up not by moonlight, but by lightning that crashed and boomed so close, the ground we sat on shook, and the rain came at us like cat’s claws followed by hail as hard as machinegun rounds and then the rain beat upon us again. Sheets and sheets of it shrieked out of the black.

We rolled up in poncho liners and donned ponchos, but soaked to the marrow of my backbone, I began to shiver, and then I began to shake and my teeth chattered so hard, I feared the enemy could hear them.

Chief, a man of few words, grabbed my poncho and pulled it over my head and I began to scrabble, all arms and legs, to make him stop, and then he yanked my poncho liner from around my body and exposed me to the horrible blare of the rain and thunder. Then he rolled up against me and put his arms around me and we were suddenly beneath poncho liners and ponchos and then he whispered, “Blue-eyed boy, you got hypothermia”—something I’d never heard of and something I felt Chief knew nothing about. “Settle down, Blue-eyed boy, hypothermia can kill your dumb ass.”

Those words frightened me and as the rain settled into a steady drizzle, I gradually stopped shaking.

What bothered me as much as fog and thunder and mud and lightning and rain was the fact that we—two warriors exposed to the elements and whomever might be crawling through the soggy night to slice our throats—were trapped in a momentary intimacy that felt taboo in a way that United States Marines back in 1967 would never understand. And I felt that lack of understanding and I envisioned myself as weak, unfit, and violated, although I had not been violated. I feared that my fellow Marines up on the hill would find out what Chief had done to…to…save me, and I would be stamped, forever marked.

But neither of us ever said a word and several months later Chief rotated home and I sometimes, at night, see his thin face smirking from my cold, damp dreams. I am haunted by my inability to contact him out there in South Dakota and thank him for saving me; and I have thought about driving back there on one of Betty’s and my adventures and talking to him, but I never have and probably never will.

He may be dead, he may not want to relive the memories of that war, he may not want to see me and talk to me about that night where he wrapped his arms around me and chased the killing cold from my body. He may, he may, he may…I know, they are excuses and I should analyze them, take them apart like a Marine disassembling an M-16 in the pitch black of night.

But I won’t.

Murmuration and Monet

The whacking at the corner of my home office sent me to my feet and the window. I opened the blinds and shadows of birds darted through the naked branches of the nine bark bushes growing against the northeast wall.

An ornamental pear stands close and the birds— a murmuration of starlings, speckled black birds that first arrived in North America over a hundred years ago–attacked the bare branches and devoured the marble sized fruit still attached to the tree.

The ornamental pears fall on the ground in late autumn and make a mess. So even though the notion of an exotic bird—or exotic species of any kind wreaking havoc on local environments—leads me to cringe, in theory, as the yellow-beaked creatures dove into the pear tree’s branches, landed, and ripped fruit from moorings, for a moment I felt…what was it, relief that one more chore was now rendered moot? Or was it something more…joyful? I wasn’t sure.

Back and forth the murmuration swarmed, banging branches against the house, the combined whoosh of their spread wings barging into the confines of my office.

Once Betty and I spent several nights in the French city of Rouen, in Normandy. We lodged in a small hotel with a balcony that allowed us to sit in comfortable chairs and see the old cathedral that the Impressionist artist Claude Monet painted many times. The cathedral—as either a church or something more grand– had been built, destroyed and rebuilt a number of times since the fifth century AD.

Its stately and angular Gothic architecture make a visual feast and I understood Monet’s fascination with it on an aesthetic level. Yet for me, the history it embodied, the Vikings who became the Normans of the region who went on to invade England and add their culture to the Norse, Anglo –Saxon, Roman, Celtic milieu that stewed in England prior to 1066 AD when the Norman Duke William the Bastard became King William the First of England invaded my senses and for a moment, ignited a buzz in my guts that I recognized as something strangely tied to the history of the human race.

In the cathedral, when Betty and I made our tour, we found a sarcophagus where William the First’s great-great-grandson, Richard the Lion Heart’s heart was entombed. Yes, his heart. Not the rest of him. His entrails are buried at Challus, where he died of gangrene from an arrow wound and the rest of him is buried near Chinon, in Anjou, close to his parents, Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine.

In the evenings, after our trips to the cathedral and discovering a smidgeon of its history, or dining on crepes in a local café, or heading off to the Normandy beaches, we’d come back to our room just before sundown and listen to the starlings jammed in the foliage of the trees that surrounded the square between the cathedral and us. We found it enchanting, the singing, like it was happy talk between good friends. In the US starlings are considered by the ag industry as pests and according to a number of articles I read, they can destroy a vineyard or a cherry orchard or a blueberry field in less than a week.

The locals in Rouen who frequented the cathedral district seemed to hate the birds, too and from the looks of the ash gray tinted sidewalk and street gutters beneath the outer branches street side, I understood. Starling scat is probably hard on Peugeot paint jobs.

And now, as the starlings in my little murmuration zipped back and forth like short shafted arrows stripping my pear tree of fruit, I recognized that they were driven by some motivation that reminded me not only of hunger, but more; need, and maybe even the human desire called “greed.” I felt it standing at my window, the ferocious craving they had to eat and eat and eat as fast as possible, before all the fruit disappeared. And that led me to ponder King William the First and Richard, too, how history has portrayed them as men who needed more and more and more.

Yes, I felt it, like a jolt from the business end of a fletched crossbow bolt it hummed through me and for just a second, it felt primal, like knowledge in my DNA passed to me from humans alive way before I was born. I suspected it was kin to our need to survive, something that William the First and his great-great-grandson Richard surely understood as did Monet, I suspect, and if not consciously then down in the bones and the sinew and the soul.