Isostasy

            When I was small my mom took me to the local pool and showed me how to float. “People are buoyant,” she demonstrated, “You just have to relax.” She held me while I settled down. Gradually, she set me free and we drifted languidly, side by side through the heavy chlorine vapor. “If you get tired,” Mom said, “Just float.”

            Eight millennia ago, Klamath ancestors hunkered in Mount Mazama’s shadow watching a dispute between Llao, Lord of the Underworld and Skell the Sky God escalate into outright war. Hot stone shot from smoking peaks. Sulfur steam fouled the air. The culminating battle between the raging deities blew Mazama’s top. The explosion vaporized a vertical mile of rock and left a hole so deep it took 300 years to fill with rain and snowmelt. Thus, Skell sealed Llao within his smoldering red domain, underneath the world’s bluest water.

            My wife Asha and I first visited Crater lake on a misguided whim, a tangent on the home stretch of a balmy spring road trip, just to take a quick look. Consulting our map, we calculated the scenic detour would add merely three hours to our leisurely drive. No big deal. But halfway up the winding approach, ominous storm clouds obscured the April sunshine. As we neared the summit, dark mist spilled over sharp ridges and the temperature plunged. We had arrived too early in the season. I slid the car sideways into a plow-carved rift between snowdrifts twenty feet tall and we stumbled out into a rising gale. Cold but resolute, we staggered to the abrupt edge of the alleged caldera and stared out forlornly into nothing. The Jewel of the Cascades was totally invisible; we couldn’t see past our frozen noses. We stood, hoping blindly for a glimpse of something, until vertigo prevailed. Holding onto one another, we cautiously retreated. The wind howled our disappointment. Snow swirled. Retracing our footprints and cursing our poor judgment, we found our vehicle, dug it out, and raced the rising blizzard back down the icy grade. We got home nine hours late, edgy and exhausted.

            Wiser, we returned to Crater lake the following August with my Mom and half a dozen of Asha’s Sri Lankan family. We arrived on a clear morning to a stunning vista. After enjoying tea and fish bread in the jammed parking lot at the Cleetwood Cove trailhead, we started down the dusty mile of steep switchbacks toward the lake’s rocky shore. Recovering from her second knee replacement, Mom took it slow. I hung back with her while Asha and the restless Sri Lankans hurried ahead. By the seventh turn, we caught up. The trail became congested where a small crowd was gathering. Asha had spotted a distant blip floating way off in the distance on the lake’s cerulean surface. As Asha pointed, other hikers found it too. Soon we all saw the tiny dot but Asha’s mother. Squinting against the bright sun, Asha tried to help Amma find the peculiar object.

            “See that peak’s reflection? Look just left, where the surface riffles. It’s a little whitish-black thing.”

            “I don’t see it,” Amma said.

             Asha put an arm around her mother’s shoulders and leaned against her, using a stick to point.

            “Follow that rockslide down to the far shore. Now come toward us halfway and slightly right.”
            “I don’t see it,” Amma said.

            By now the growing throng bristled with lenses. Digital devices captured and magnified the distant anomaly. Technology forced obscurity into submission.

            “It’s a stump,” someone said.

            Actually, it was a whole tree. More than a century ago an old hemlock slid into the lake and has been adrift ever since. Bleached, splintered, and balanced upright, four ragged feet protrude, like a prehistoric periscope. Thirty feet of stout trunk extend down into the transparent water to a gnarled root ball. It’s called the Old Man, and it glides freely about Crater lake, propelled by prevailing winds. Geologist Joseph Diller documented it first in 1896, then photographed it six years later. He towed the Old Man a quarter mile with bailing wire, to confirm it was free-floating.            

            Amma still couldn’t see the Old Man. In Sinhalese the word ni’kung means plain. In a culinary context, ni’kung signifies absence of sauce or seasoning. Fries without ketchup would be ni’kung, or tea, without cream or sugar. Amma wanted to find the Old Man ni’kung —without the sweet boost of modern binoculars, or the rich gravy of electronic enhancement. She insisted upon locating the Old Man with her own unaided eyes. But the more we helped her, the more frustrated Amma became. Finally, she grew so impatient with the search that she pretended to spot the Old Man, just to get the show on the road.

             “Okay, okay, I see it,” Amma claimed.

            “No Amma, don’t give up!” Asha said.

            “I see it, I see it,” Amma insisted. She took Asha’s stick and pointed vaguely toward the middle of the lake. “Right there. Small, blackish-white. Now let’s go.”

             In 1886  Captain Clarence Dutton  led an expedition to  Crater lake for the nascent US Geological Survey. From a half-ton boat hauled up from Ashland, Dutton and his crew took 168 soundings at various points using lead pipe and piano wire, pegging the lake’s maximum depth quite accurately at almost two thousand feet. Dutton’s extraordinarily thorough exploration yielded poetic descriptions of the vicinity and lucid explanations of its fiery formation. His study of Crater lake, however, was only a footnote to Dutton’s illustrious career. Three years later, elaborating on ideas set forth by John Pratt and George Airy in the 1850s, Dutton coined the term isostasy (from the Greek equal standing) to describe the mechanism by which huge blocks of Earth’s crust float predictably in equilibrium upon the deeper, softer mantle. Mountains sit low like icebergs, Dutton hypothesized, their dense roots pushed deep by enormous weight. Perhaps, as Dutton repeatedly crisscrossed the lake, collecting data and taking notes, an encounter with the soggy Old Man inspired him.

            We continued down toward the cove. With her new knees warmed up, Mom took the lead. I matched her brisk pace and we talked. She lives in Florida, and I live in Oregon. With a whole rough continent between us, we don’t often get together. So we spoke of crucial things: about her new boyfriend and Dad’s old girlfriend, about death in the family and sickness close to home, about engagements and reunions, accidental pregnancies and deliberate deceptions; intrigue, love, disappointment, hope. We discussed ancestors and associations, relationships and affairs, and how specific choices fill our sails as we navigate life’s sea. We agreed that Emerson nailed it neatly down in his essay Self-Reliance: “All the sallies of [a person’s] will are rounded in by the law of [that person’s] being, as the inequalities of  the Andes and Himalaya are insignificant in the curve of the sphere.” Nobody can resist their own nature. Nothing can. “The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks,” Emerson elaborated, “See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to an average tendency.”

            “It’s all about perspective,” Mom said.

            “It is,” I agreed.

            In 1988 underwater exploration of Crater lake commenced. Deep Rover, a 7000 pound, six-foot orb of five-inch-thick acrylic, fitted sleekly with batteries, thrusters, and more extendable tools than a Leatherman®, arrived via helicopter on the conical pumice heap called Wizard Island. Anticipating perhaps twenty dives, each lasting six hours, the Old Man’s random wandering presented a significant navigational hazard. So researchers temporarily tethered him to the island. As the story goes, the moment they secured the Old Man a sudden storm arose, whipping the lake into a furious frenzy. Unable to work, the team waited impatiently through several nasty days until the strength of the squall broke the Old Man free of his ties and the weather immediately calmed.

            We all arrived at Crater lake’s hypnotic perimeter together, breathless and sweating. The day had grown hot. The view from lake level was utterly disorienting. The reflection of  surrounding crags, bounced upside-down off the water through the thin air, appeared clearer by half than the cliffs themselves. Asha and her father proceeded, with her brother and his kids, further along the shore, looking for native crawdads. While Amma carefully set out tea and leftover fish bread on the slick, uneven rocks, Mom and I waded out into the water-filled volcano. The sharp chill distilled ephemeral thoughts as I slowly submerged. From the silence above the atmosphere, the clamor of civilization is muted, and the arc of Earth looks graceful and even. Seen from a little way off, all existence drips with luscious, ethereal beauty. Closer in, upon cursory inspection, our planet is just a grinding jumble of crust buoyed precariously on an ocean of goop. With slight magnification, a curmudgeonly old tree appears, suspended perpetually in a majestic young lake. Zooming in further still, hearts upon hearts of all types beat simultaneously, and eyes of all kinds gaze back, for this globe is bursting with life. The closer we look, the more magic we encounter.

            Skell’s intention in trapping Llao under such breathtaking loveliness was not to destroy him, but to contain him. All the grand mountain ranges we revere depend on Earth’s inner turmoil for their dynamic survival. Just as the relentless convection of the invisible underworld fabricates and decorates the magnificence we enjoy on Earth’s surface, so our anxieties and our fears, our aspirations and personal turbulence, produce our loftiest ideas and our best creations. We each develop along a unique path, as more connections and greater understanding emerge from uncomfortable churning within us. We can’t force our point of view, but we can share it. We can’t control the world, but we can affect it. We can’t avoid life’s brutality, but when we stop fighting and rest, reality’s underlying splendor returns to focus.

            Mom and I reached deep water. Floating isn’t as easy now. Mom’s metal knees tend to sink, and years of hard work and tough times have left me wiry and lean. But as we relaxed and gave our weight to the lake, some of our old buoyancy returned and we floated, not horizontal, as we once did, but upright, like the Old Man, bobbing with our heads barely up and our eyes to the sky, sopping up the immensity of the looming walls and the overhead enormity of infinite space. From way up there all our crooked paths look straight. Our aimless meandering, over time, observed from afar, appears more purposeful than our solitary experience feels. “Society is a wave.” Emerson wrote, “The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.”

Complicity

            Life can get uncomfortable, but rarely so awful as Samuel Huffman’s final moments. In 1845, at nineteen, Samuel Huffman pioneered west to Oregon with the Nahum King party. Yearning for something more, Samuel survived Stephen Meek’s calamitous shortcut, tending the sick and scouting for water. Maybe he even handled the legendary blue bucket gold. With luck and gumption, Samuel arrived alive. He carved a farm out of the rolling hills of Wren and started a family. Then, according to the King Folk newsletter, in 1854, at twenty-seven, Samuel Huffman caught rabies and got so sick his brave friends put him between two mattresses and smothered him.

            That’s about how I felt, crouched, suffocating, wedged between my urge not to play the fool and my impulse to please Pop. Light rain gently pattered. I looked out, watching the evening fade through two tiny, round windows. The descending night draped a chill over the ridge as I struggled not to faint in the synthetic stench of my sweltering shelter. Several minutes remained before my cue. Feeling forced, as if fate had pushed me into this senseless situation against my will, I reminded myself why I was here:

            Pop drove my young nephews Jaden and Beckam up from California for a short visit. Along with the boys, Pop brought a rented item, and a stealthy plan. After lunch, while the boys played Frisbee, Pop and I sat at the table.

             “Remind me about the two Buddhas,” Pop said, “Who’s who?”

            “One Buddha, from different angles.” I said, “Different transmissions of Siddhartha’s epiphany traveled different directions in separate tongues. Mahayana means ‘great vehicle’ and Theravada ‘school of elders.’ Theravada trickled south exclusively in the Pali language, through Sri Lanka, Thailand, Burma, Laos and Cambodia. Mahayana diffused north through Tibet, China, Taiwan, Japan and Korea, rooted in Sanskrit, but absorbing local languages along the way.”

            “Which Buddha is laughing,” Pop asked.

            “Mahayana. The fat one.”

            “That’s my guy!” He smiled. “Let me show you something.”

            We went out to his car and he opened the trunk. I looked inside and gasped.

            “I want to give the boys an experience,” Pop said.

            “You can’t use that here, Pop. People believe.”

            He paused, taken aback by my honest alarm.

            “Well, no… I was hoping you would.”

            “You want me to do it? No way, Pop.”

            “The boys should get a feel for the Northwest!”

            “Not like this, Pop.”

            “We all need to laugh more!”

            “No, Pop. No way. We just moved here. The neighbors…”

            “It’ll be fun. Think of the wonder,” Pop insisted.

            “Pop, It’s hunting season. There are crazy people. Big rifles. Eyes everywhere. Itchy fingers.”

            “But I can’t do it,” Pop said. “If I’m gone the boys will suspect something.”

            “They will,” I agreed.

            “You’re our only chance,” Pop pressed. He laid out his plan, and how I fit into it.

            Pop has always orchestrated overly intense pranks: counterfeit lottery tickets, real gold for pretend prospecting, alarming calls from contrived consulates. As I pondered, I recalled other experiences he had provided. Once he came home wrapped in a toga, driving a borrowed DeLorean he claimed was a time machine. Another time he staged a fake break-in, staying late at work, using an old cassette recorder to capture a long, loaded silence followed suddenly by smashing glass and conspiring voices in hushed, menacing tones. To replicate furtive, aggressive rummaging, he screeched an obstinate couch across a wood floor and knocked over an old console television. He smuggled the tape machine home in his briefcase and hid it near the window behind the peace lily. Then, after M*A*S*H,  he pressed play and cranked up the volume while Mom flossed her teeth. They went to bed. Forty minutes later, well you can imagine it. What infuriated Mom most was that Pop wouldn’t get up to check. She called him something that she won’t repeat, grabbed a shoe, and went out by herself. Pop bit his pillow, swallowing giggles and feigning sleep.

            In fourth grade I learned first-aid. Pop hired a friend and a make-up artist to simulate an accident in order to sharpen my skills. Walking home from school, my friends and I encountered a man sprawled awkwardly in the shrubs under the eaves of a church, gushing blood from several mortal wounds, compound fractures protruding everywhere, barely breathing.

            “I fell off the roof,” the man gasped weakly.

            “Don’t move,” I said, my mouth suddenly dry.

            While Pop’s friend bled out, softly moaning, obviously dying, I gathered sticks to fashion splints, too shocked to think. My friends mulled uselessly around, chalk-pale, hyperventilating, trying not to puke.

            “Really Pop, I can’t.”

            “Please, do this for me,” Pop said.

            “What kind of person do you want the boys to think I am,” I asked. 

            “Please,” said Pop, “I’d do it for you.”

            “I know you would, Pop. Okay. All right, I will. Give it to me.”

            So, with a million excuses, I did it anyway. Why? What changed my mind? Viewing myself momentarily from a wider frame of reference, as a small part of everything, I just figured, why be a stick in the mud? We’re barely even here, and then for only a short moment. So, reluctantly, I acquiesced. Life is hard enough. Why be dull? I’ve spent my time at the school of elders, searching and studying. Why not mount the great vehicle and blast off?

            Certainly we do all need to laugh more. Maybe the enemy is not corporations or guns or republican or insane or immoral or religion or anarchy or management or federal or oil or buried or secret or sin or conspiracy. The trouble could reside in our own overblown sense of order, our insistence upon measuring ourselves against each other and our environment, quantifying everything. It’s not our fault. This habitual differentiation naturally results from eons of obsessively scrutinizing various berries for poison, discriminating between harmless and rotten meat; our brains easily jam in low gear, antique programs looping, running uselessly on and on. Our actual foe might be our rampant drive to divide and subdivide everything into tiered groups. These compartments aren’t real, they are just old tools, obsolete metaphors. There are no legitimate boundaries to anything at all. Perhaps qualities exist in us from more primal times that we should just find the courage to smother.

            Science and religion agree that we are all the same in substance, and that that substance is slippery, sometimes here, sometimes there, sometimes nowhere. For even the densest matter is only statistical mist, and the closer we look the less we can measure. Miraculously, here we are anyway, hoping and feeling, breathing through this electromagnetic dream, flying by the seat of our pants at the random whim of something infinite, steering a meteor. With chaos always at our heels, we ought to enjoy the world’s cornucopia without judgment, examining and expanding, understanding without rating, observing without critiquing, trying without expecting. Living with heart and enthusiasm, perhaps we can outrun pessimism, naming and appreciating the components of our shared universe along the way, searching always for truth, reaching for answers, wringing knowledge from stone, sustaining our journey. But until we confess that we as humanity comprise a single organism, that we are one with our Mother Earth and with one another, taste buds on the tongue of God, we can’t create the reality we deserve. Without love we will not last. Void of awe, we are nobody. Progress requires a deeper camaraderie. And we ought not pass our cynical burden on to another generation.

            After we finished dinner, I snuck outside. While Beckam commenced his incessant handstand practice, Jaden sat on the sofa next to Pop, reading. Pop, flinging angry birds on his ipad, surreptitiously texted me.

            In an unreachable pocket, my phone buzzed. Through an inadequate breathing hole, I seized three deep breaths, sucking rubber hard against my sweating face, pulling in sweet fresh air. Evening, fading into gentle darkness, kindled wildness inside me. I arose, unconcealed at last, and loped, hoping the neighbors wouldn’t see, lanky and feral, in a shaggy, matted gorilla outfit, through the bushes, over the ditch and out into the open. Then I turned and meandered compellingly through the yard and past the living room window. Lingering as long as I dared, I paused in a posture of vague perplexity, cocking my head momentarily toward the chicken coop, displaying mild interest. Then I looked all around, sniffing at the air, and ambled away toward the woods.

            “What was that?” Exclaimed Beckam, running to the window.

            “Wow!” Jaden dropped his book and they pressed their noses against the glass.

            “There’s something weird out there!”

            Pop looked up gleefully from his ipad, breathless. “What is it?”

            “Something big and dark,” Jaden said. “It’s not a bear.”

            With no desire to deceive my nephews or stoke Pop’s dangerous obsession, I really didn’t want to don that costume. Carl Jung called Sasquatch a manifestation of our collective unconscious. The Tao points beyond the ten thousand things to a flow of wholeness where every possibility exists simultaneously, namelessly. Buddha followed an eight-fold path to similar relief. Jesus, Muhammad, Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, Jr. and countless others spent their energy spreading the same peaceful message. Ken Kesey and the Pranksters pushed it further. Bob Marley, the most familiar figure on the planet, called it One Love. Perhaps they’re all trying to coax out of us an endemic rabidity that, instead of inducing dread of water, makes us afraid of each other, skeptical of ourselves, oblivious to nature, petrified by our own and only situation. They worked to eradicate an epidemic of isolation in this enormous crowd, guiding us toward a more simple reality. We imagine the world as complicated, but it is not. One Buddha sits earnestly, while the other laughs.

            What kind of person do I want my nephews to think I am? Well, I suppose I want them to know the real me, Pop’s kid, the type of human who, for the right reasons, might put on an ape suit and become Bigfoot. It’s easy to think it’s too late, that we’re too far gone, that humankind has spun out of control. It’s natural to feel doomed. But it doesn’t have to be so. Now that this new age has arrived, I am hopeful we can learn to get along and love one another the whole world over, taking trouble less personally and ourselves less seriously. Things are not so grim. Whether we meditate stoically, or hoot like the world is a joke, we must treat each other as we would ourselves, acting and reacting always with kindness, respect, honor and equality.

            Sadly, another small gravestone snuggles against Samuel Huffman’s. Chloa, his two year old daughter, drank from his water glass, caught his rabies, and died too. It’s a deep and genuine bummer to end your life between two mattresses, mad-ass rabid, squirming and drooling, thirsty and terrified, raving, smashed and blue. But it’s much worse to take your precious offspring with you. So, to the misguided powerful and the selfish rich, to the bored, the fearful, and the stiff, the unsatisfied and the indignant, to those who refuse to let in the light, to change, and change again, and keep changing, embarrassed to become and remain flexible and spontaneous as little children: There is still time. I entreat you, for Pop’s sake, in the words of the great liberator Moses, and in the distinctive voice of Charlton Heston, “Let my people go!”

            Laughing or weeping, we are temporary and aggregate, stuck here together, complicit with all, a compound singularity. Rising Buddhas. Ghosts dancing. 

Reciprocity

When I was a kid my brother and I let our ski passes accumulate on the zippers of our parkas all winter. When we actually skied, these growing bouquets of heavy paper and wire flapped wildly in the icy wind, painfully beating our frozen faces. But we took great pride in our collection, knowing our peers perceived our prowess and admired our dedication.

One day in spring when the wind warmed, whipping into the valley, we put away our skis and assembled our kite, always bat-shaped, with big bloodshot goggle-eyes, and sent it aloft. When we reached the end of one spool of heavy duty string, we tied on another, and another. By noon we had added six or seven spools. The kite was a speck, impossibly far away at the end of the curving, straining line, pulling with such force that we took turns holding it, sometimes tying it temporarily to a fencepost to rest our arms.

Then, one by one, we snipped our ski passes off our parkas and hung them securely on the kite string. Up the passes would rise, twisting and flapping in the strong wind like tiny sail powered trams, sliding steadily up the stretched line toward the ominous kite. As one pass disappeared from sight, we added another. Gradually, our zippers were empty and all the ski passes reached the kite. And though we couldn’t clearly see them, we felt their pull and imagined them, huddled together in a growing crowd at the kite’s keel, rattling and flapping together in an increasing cacophony. Eventually, as the afternoon wind intensified and the kite grew unwieldy with it’s proud burden, the string would snap and the distant kite would twist and loop out of control, spiraling madly down toward some remote part of the world. Gone.

Today, as winter breaks and the days lengthen, my wife and I are settling into a funky hillside bungalow in Cottage Grove. The low, mossy structure doesn't get much light, but when sun weaves through the morning hemlocks and slides through the chilly windows slanting just so, spilling gold from wall to wall across the low beige carpet in the sunken den, magic flows. The sudden silence such a dazzling glance of sun evokes from the forest induces automatic meditation. The warm beam languidly travels, splashing partway up the stout noisy fridge, illuminating the tattered quotation I hand copied years ago:

“As a result of the war corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed...”

-Abraham Lincoln.

This hastily scribbled passage has presided, stuck with a dangerously powerful magnet, to the refrigerator of every hovel, every shed, every trailer, camper, wigwam, cabin, garage, loft, lodge or yurt I have inhabited in the long years since I left home. Scrawled in urgent red ink, this quotation has served as my philosophical anchor. In trying times, I envisioned Abraham Lincoln, in his dim, flickering study, intensely worried for the welfare of his torn country, mulling over heavy thoughts, bending deliberately over his prescient pen. Because of these words, I never wholeheartedly joined society. I’ve worked on the fringes, eking out my existence from job to job and position to position, never completely failing, but never joining the race. I'm one who has barely hung on, who slipped through with some luck--a perpetual renter; a seasonal employee; a contract worker; a substitute; extra help.

The handyman, dispatched by the landlady, arrived to bolster the dangling microwave oven, and introduced himself. “I’m Steve,” he said. Sure enough, his name tag agreed. I fleetingly pondered the many name tags I’ve worn, like so many expired ski passes, since those bat-kite days.

The boy from next door who shoveled your driveway for a half dollar? That was me, with my homemade nametag. Another knock at the door and there I was, stenciling your street address, white on black, on the curb, careful, neat and lasting. I cleared your table and washed your dishes. I tossed your salad. I knocked and offered you candy, I knocked and offered you magazines, I knocked and offered you Jesus. You checked out through my register at the department store. And later, when you returned the Epilady® hair remover, that was me, too, at Customer Service, smiling. I watched you read my nametag.

“This is just springs that twist and spin,” you shouted, waving the tortuous instrument, “It yanks!”

“I know,” I answered, “All the men bought one. All the women returned them. I tried it on my arm. I know!”

I wore nametags in college, too. You saw me in the bookstore, stocking the low shelves with heavy overpriced texts. I mowed the quad. I irrigated the soccer field, tapping into a main, calculating precipitation. I screen printed thousands of baseball caps with the logo of a movie that you never saw, because it was never released. Then, because of the quote, I dropped out of college and you encountered me on vacation, guiding your raft and barbequing your dinner. I woke you up early for more, I taught you to kayak. I made coffee for the people who read you the morning news, I held lights for the hotel promotional film. I made your sandwich, I filled your order, I brought you juice. Then when you went downtown at night with your shady friends to the punk rock show in the venue that made you uneasy, there I was, schlepping in my broken amplifiers and unwinding the cords, making noise instead of money.

I spent two decades on the move, staying less than a year in each abode over thirty states and six countries. Each place, however humble, had a fridge, and to every fridge I attached my guiding quotation.

I arose from my reverie to Steve laughing, pointing to my cherished Abraham Lincoln quote on the humming fridge.

“That’s a forgery,” he said, waving a sandwich toward my prize possession.

“They’re Lincoln’s words,” I assured him.

“Where’d you get it? Off the internet?”

“I found it in a book. I’ve had it a long time,” I said.

Steve looked me in the eye seriously. “You checked your sources?”

“It’s from a letter to Colonel William F. Elkins dated 1864. Archer Shaw published The Lincoln Encyclopedia in 1950, wherein he traced the letter to page 954 of Abraham Lincoln: A New Portrait published by Emmanuel Hertz in 1938.”

“Hmmm,” said Steve thoughtfully, biting his sandwich, “You ever heard of Joe Cosey?”

“No,” I admitted.

“Lot’s of people haven’t, but what he accomplished was pretty special. He kinked the whole system.” Steve continued:

“In 1929 an unassuming little floppy haired man named Martin Coneely signed into the Manuscripts Division at the Library of Congress as Joseph Cosey and pocketed a 1786 pay warrant issued by Benjamin Franklin. He used it to practice. Over the next twenty years he forged documents by George Washington, Edgar Allen Poe, James Monroe, Thomas Jefferson, Mary Baker Eddy, and two dozen other famous Americans.”

“Including Lincoln,” I confirmed.

“Yeah,” said Steve, “Hertz was duped and cited a fake letter in his New Portrait. Then Shaw, in his Lincoln Encyclopedia, passed faulty information on to you. That quote circulates a lot whenever there’s war, and there’s always war.”

Life, barreling headlong, has firm ideas about how to direct us, blowing whatever sail we hazard to hoist, toward nirvana. If an overseeing entity beyond life exists, she drags us all at our own pace inevitably toward heaven kicking and screaming. Just as our spent ski passes fluttered upward toward disbursement, we humans each learn our lessons, every one, in time. And even if nobody but the wind is out there pushing, we learn them anyway.

I don’t always obey all the rules; I never have had much use for nonsense. But I understand that what holds the kite in the sky is the line linking it to the ground. The kite soars because it can’t escape, and likewise we fly when we clearly perceive our purpose and pursue our principles, adhering to something coherent. Because of its convoluted and disputed history, I’ll never know for sure to whom to attribute my beloved quotation. Because of it I dropped out of college five times and worked half a lifetime of menial labor. I became more obsessed with rivers and flow and dynamics than with gathering and leveraging money. Perhaps I’ve been swindled, maybe I missed out. But I’ve lived a lot of stories, and I take some comfort in what Steve told me as he tested the firmly mounted microwave and gathered his tools:

“G. William Berquist investigated literary hoaxes from 1929 until 1946. He was a real expert, with a lot of exposure to Joe Cosey’s effort. He became enthralled with his work, calling him ‘the greatest forger of his kind in this century.’ Over time, Berquist befriended Cosey, and in 1934, in order to educate the innocent and remove forgeries from circulation, he established a special exhibit of fakes called The Cosey Collection at the New York Public Library. Today, Cosey’s forgeries are considered works of art in their own rite, fetching prices hundreds or thousands of times higher than Cosey ever sold them himself. Lots of them still circulate as genuine. Nobody knows how many. Before disappearing in 1943, Cosey called on Berquist one last time and requested three dollars for train fare. Berquist obliged him, and where Joseph Cosey went nobody knows. But as he left he handed Berquist a note dated August 5, 1907 that read, ‘Taking the pledge will not make bad liquor good, but it will improve it,’ signed convincingly in Mark Twain’s hand.”

I stood at the window for a few moments looking out through condensation, watching the fog drift back over the sun. Having just learned that I tied half of my life to a lie, I felt a little bewildered. My reality rippled. But what a beautiful fraud, what a genius ruse! As Steve drove off in his noisy truck, I slowly, lovingly, removed my worn-out quote, crumpled it gently into a tiny ball and placed it carefully in the smoldering fire. As flame flared, consuming the paper but leaving the idea intact, I looked back at the fridge and saw a picture of my family, a picture of my friends, a picture of my wife. And there, among the others, a faded photo of my brother and me, our fat parkas bristling with crumpled ski passes, and a bat-shaped kite held reciprocally aloft in thin-aired heaven by a delicate cord binding it to earth.

Ruthless

Grandma Ruth’s long life began when a splash of the doctor’s whiskey shocked her into violent newborn protest, kick-starting her reluctant lungs. She turned from blue to pink and never touched another drop.

After retiring, Ruth led a nomadic existence of charitable service, devoting time and means to anyone in need. She traveled constantly, hanging her sensible wardrobe on a retractable closet rod across the back seat of her Oldsmobile. She kept an extra wig in her trunk and a clock radio in her glove box. She camped comfortably on couches wherever she went.

As Ruth’s eldest grandchild, I ran her errands. Never refusing a favor, Ruth stayed extraordinarily busy. She nurtured a need to do everything for everyone simultaneously. Unable to do so alone, she enlisted me, hastily imparting sketchy instructions and turning me loose in her car to secretly facilitate her benevolence.

“Deliver this casserole to the Murphy’s. Just ring and run. Don’t get seen.”

“I have 4-H at three.”

“Then hurry.”

Before my thirteenth birthday I had logged hundreds of helpful miles assisting Ruth’s covert kindness.

Grandma remained fervently religious in a way that I didn’t. So, as I grew, we disagreed now and again about the purpose of life, and whether an embodied creator watched from space rewarding scrupulous behavior. But Grandma always respected my opinion, and her patience showed that much of our apparent disparity lay in our divergent perspectives and the inherent trouble language brings to the endeavor of sharing experience. Ideas stretch out beyond words, she said.

“Try to touch a rainbow. That’s how it is.”

“What is?”

“The fundamental framework. The bottom line. Where we all agree.”

Grandma Ruth rarely slept. She stayed up nights writing. Obsessive tallies she left indicate that throughout her life she mailed over 18,000 letters. While composing, Ruth indulged in her only vice: Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. She loved conspiracy. Late night talk radio was her opium. An affair. Addiction. Art’s stealthy baritone murmured near her sofa after hours every weeknight. Whether inspecting the Face on Mars, mapping Area 51, doubting the Moon Landing, nailing LBJ to JFK, blaming outages on the LHC and earthquakes on HAARP, suspecting the Masons, mistrusting the FBI, questioning 9/11, or memorizing the Mayan Long Count, Grandma Ruth shared strong opinions, fluently defending outrageous ideas in her continual correspondence.

She was old and ailing by the time a particularly intriguing episode of Coast to Coast prompted Ruth to send me on one more errand. Having returned to college to finish an abandoned degree, I had been kayaking every day, reading my books but neglecting classes. I drifted off early one night in my drafty apartment while composing poor poetry about whether or not to finish school. I woke with a start in the wee hours when my cell phone rang for the penultimate time.

“Hello?”

“It’s Grandma. You’re in Blue Lake?”

“I am,” I exaggerated.

“You still live by that clown school?”

“Adjacent, yes.”

“You’re close to Washington?”

“Close enough.”

“Have you heard of that hole up there Art Bell’s talking about on the radio?”

“There’s a lot of weird stuff up there, Grandma.”

“But you haven’t heard of the hole?”

“Not yet.”

“Maybe you could drive up and have a look,” she coughed.

Magnified by her forthright appeal to my vague curiosity, her harsh hacking convinced me. She wouldn’t linger forever. Old and ailing, Ruth could no longer hunt down evidence for the esoterica Art unearthed between ads for Gold Bond Medicated Powder. She needed a primary source. I decided to blow off school and run her errand.

“I’ll go find the hole, Grandma.”

“…”

“Grandma!?”

“Due to lack of payment, your cellular phone service has been…”

I took a last look around, grabbed my laundry bag, and engaged the deadbolt. I slid my key back under the door. I wouldn’t be back. I revved Grandma’s antique Oldsmobile, cranked the heater, and drove into the cold Spring night, leaving a tall stack of unpaid bills, several collection warnings, and a form letter rejecting me from graduate school.

I zoomed west several miles, crossing the swollen Mad River, catching 101 North to Crescent City then grabbing 199 inland all the way up the Middle fork of the Smith. I careened through the tunnel and over the pass into Oregon, splitting the puckered hills of the Illinois drainage beyond Cave Junction in the rising morning light. Contemplating what little I knew about my objective, I spotted a black SUV tailing me, way back. I disregarded it and lapsed back to pondering.

The caller was an older gentleman, Ruth had explained—a sort of rambler. He claimed to resemble Willie Nelson and seemed uncomfortable discussing the hole publicly. He told Art Bell it graced the Manastash Ridge west of Ellensburg, and that locals had thrown trash and dead cattle into it for as long as anyone’s ancestors could remember, never filling it. The hole stretched nine feet across with smooth walls all the way down. Ancient looking brickwork reinforced its perimeter. It wasn’t a regular hole. The caller claimed to have lowered 80,000 feet of weighted fishing line into it, finally running out of spools and giving up, exhausted. Confounded, he capped it with corrugated metal and sagebrush limbs and left it alone. Other mysteries surrounded the hole. Long-haul truckers gearing down to climb Manastash Grade sometimes reported a beam of penetrating darkness emanating from the ridge in the vicinity of the hole, obscuring the night sky all the way up, covering stars. Perhaps the hole exuded some sort of dark matter or radiated negative potential. Maybe it absorbed photons. Either way, wild animals avoided it, and nothing grew nearby. Suddenly, beyond Ruth’s rattling hangers, the SUV loomed in my rearview mirror then suddenly fell back. Weird, I thought.

Along the way, I used payphones to check in with Grandma.

“Integrity and attention,” Ruth reminded when I called her from a Chevron on I-5 near Grants Pass. “Focus and intent; Perseverance,” she admonished. “Foster a ruthless voracity for understanding!”

“I have to buy another card, Grandma, I’ll call you back.”

I called again from Springfield.

“Grandma, have you ever seen the McKenzie River? It’s amazing.”

“I’ve seen the Metolius.”

“The one that starts from nothing?”

“Your mom says you were conceived near there.”

“Near where, here?”

“It’s none of my business.”

“I have long way to go, Grandma.”

“When you get there, ask around about a resurrected dog. People say Basques used to lower in sheep to cook.”

“I’ll look into it.”

“See if it’s lined with smooth metal.”

“I will, Grandma.”

Some hypothesized the hole might be a vent for Mount Rainier, evidence of volcanic turmoil geologically crucial for predicting Cascade eruptions. Others insisted it must be an entrance to Earth’s secret interior, a portal to a hidden netherworld—spiritually pivotal for humankind. Speeding by a town called Riddle, I figured it was probably a cavernous crock of shit.

However, I immensely enjoyed watching Grandma Ruth’s dogma dissolve into exuberant conjecture. As my own neurotic preoccupation with infinity and accountability peaked, Ruth’s growing flexibility jarred me from my selfish earnestness and offered angles that soothed my existential anxiety. Over the final decade of her life, Ruth embraced the unexplained, perforating the boundaries of her religious devotion and letting in everything. Though I hated watching her go, I loved the vigor and poise with which she faded, for she became a genuine elder, a formidable shaman. As her body crumpled, her mind flew.

In spite of my skepticism, I found myself sharing Ruth’s enthusiasm for the hole. The search bolstered me. Eager to arrive, I struggled not to strain the worn-out motor. To slow down, I exited I-5 and drove the skinny roads and right angles of the rural Willamette Valley. By the time Ruth’s engine quit, I was thoroughly lost. Securing the steering wheel with a bungee cord, I got out and pushed, heaving a half mile to a defunct service station near a small sign announcing the edge of a tiny town. I limped to the ruined payphone without hope. Nothing. I kicked a rusty gas pump and then, for the hell of it, pried open the cap to the underground tank and idly looked inside.

I imagined, as I peered through the hazy opening, the surrounding oak savannah repeatedly inundated by the Missoula Floods, long before the Calapooia perished and Douglas fir reinvaded. In my mind’s eye, my journey continued. Salem and then Portland rushed by, and I approach the bank of the mighty Columbia, churning along with the intimidating belligerence of a twenty-hand stallion. I floored it up the gorge, running the wipers against the perpetual mist of a million waterfalls.

I awoke staring at the noon sky, my cell phone ringing. My cell phone? Ringing?

“Hello?”

“It’s Grandma.”

“How does my cell phone work?”

“I don’t know,” she laughed. “Who knows?”

“Grandma, I dreamt I passed Celilo Falls and crossed the Umatilla Dam. I was almost there.”

“Those Columbia dams were built to fuel war,” Ruth said, “They’ve put microphones underwater now. You can’t see the rapids anymore, but you can hear them down there, still roiling through the rough narrows under the tranquil surface. Umatilla was the first dam to power itself. When the grid fails, rebooting will start there. During the war, a Japanese balloon bomb disabled the Hanford Nuclear Facility right across the river and stopped progress on Fat Boy. Can you believe that? Are you in Ellensburg yet?”

“I guess I’m still in”…I strained to re-read the sign: “Tangent. I’m in Tangent.”

“Where?”

“Tangent, Grandma. I was looking into an underground tank, and...”

“You found it?”

“I looked down a hole and gas fumes knocked me out. I’m still in Tangent, lucky to be alive.”

“How deep is it?”

I paused, momentarily bewildered, then plowed ahead, “Nobody’s knows, Grandma. I think at least 30 miles.”

“Do you suppose it goes all the way down?”

“Probably, Grandma.”

“The energy it emits, is it good?”

“It’s the greatest, Grandma, absolutely the best!”

“Where is your laundry?”

“I’m losing you, Grandma!”

“I miss you too, son.”

As I repaired the Oldsmobile under the cracked canopy of the ramshackle station, the black SUV pulled silently into the lot. A gaunt, stately gentleman stepped out, looking remarkably like Willie Nelson, and handed me a paper bag. I looked inside. He had generously gathered my laundry as it gradually blew off the roof where I had tossed it carelessly in the blaze of my hasty departure. He trailed me 300 miles to a vacant lot in outer Tangent in order to hand me a sack of dirty underwear. Amazing.

“You drive fast,” the stranger remarked. “I’d catch up and then have to stop for another sock. I figured with your vehicle blowing that much smoke, you couldn’t get far. And wherever you landed, you’d need your clothes.”

Astounded, I thanked the stranger profusely.

I arrived back at school in time to pass finals and trek south to Grandma’s crowded funeral. There I attempted to adequately explain where I had been and how Ruth’s inquisitive and communicative life demonstrated that we all melt back into the same mystical splendor that spawned us, impulsively and pointlessly trying, toiling together through this mad endeavor, moving eternally and beautifully onward, wide-eyed, wild-hearted, noble, and dynamic—completely engaged and totally ruthless.

I walked out of the chilly chapel and across the street to a stuffy pub. Loosening my tie, I threw down my last 10 bucks for two shots of whiskey. I tossed one back, and while it burned from inside, I carried the other glass back over to the emptying churchyard, pouring it slowly into the holy dirt. I hope they have radios in heaven, Ruth, so you’re not stuck there either. Good night, Grandma.

Rhythmites

Lil’wat ancestors occupied the shore of a vast mountain lake that suddenly drained, leaving them high and dry while it slowly refilled…only to vanish again each half century. Legend does not assert where the lake went, only that it regularly departed.

I once spent a pristine winter snowboarding Utah peaks confronting a personal crisis. Should I claw my way through life as an artist, or return home to the family farm? Vexed, I trudged the treadmill of beauty and doom. Prepared to forfeit myself, I doubted inwardly if I had the wherewithal to quit. Could I betray my muse?

I rented a utility closet in a velvety, ghost-infested, black-lit dance club basement. At night I delved immoderately into books, binging on Blake, Yeats, Cummings, and Pound, inhaling Steinbeck, Woolf, Hemingway, Faulkner and London. I savored Vonnegut aloud in Joyce’s voice. Dante, Dickinson, Milton, and Shakespeare whirled darkly in my head to the thumping, throbbing merriment upstairs. I sketched landscapes, wrote sonnets, doubted reality, and explored consciousness. Toting reams of scribbled graph paper in my pack, I sought solace in physics and chemistry. Caught between carbides and the Scylla, I memorized the Krebs cycle, studied Sanskrit, and tracked the Mayan calendar. In poignant prose, I compared Nietzsche to Nabokov, Cayce to Kant, and Joseph Smith to Alec Baldwin. I wallowed with gusto in academic fervor. I dreamt of Coleridge, wrestled with an impulse to punch Francis Bacon. I came ungrounded. Aesthetically overwhelmed, I stalked knowledge and meaning obsessively. Fancying myself an artist of distinctive brilliance, I steadily withdrew. Ultimately, blessings arrive obliquely, through people we meet. A luminous drifter finally burst my ballooning self-importance.

That spring, my Toyota’s overtaxed gasket blew, stranding me in Salt Lake. I reached the end of my rope. Scrounging enough to buy a wrecked guitar, I set about procuring used parts and rebuilding my engine. I performed the overhaul covertly in a shady alley between 7-Eleven and an Ethiopian deli. Up to my elbows in grease by day, knuckles bleeding, I donned ragged clothes and fake teeth to busk downtown by night. I felt like an Umberto Eco protagonist, incognito, bristling with passion and data, yet perpetually puzzled; manipulated by invisible coordinated forces, I imagined myself almost privy to a staggering conspiracy. I integrated poverty into my esoteric voyage. To conserve energy, I meditated. When food ran low, I fasted.

I awoke late one bright morning in my vagrant costume on the university quad, bleary after a long night performing. An insane bicyclist honed in on my indolent attire and made a beeline for my private spot of cool sun. He zoomed off the sidewalk onto the grass, dropping his bike with a magnanimous clatter.

“Language is a cracked kettle on which we bang out tunes to make the bears dance,” he announced, “When what we long for is to move the stars to pity.”

Recognizing the quotation, I furtively removed my novelty choppers. “Gustave Flaubert?”

“I’m Con Keubler,” he beamed, handing me a grimy cassette tape, “Check out my demo.”

Here was a real hobo. I experienced the guilty dread of a sorry impostor. My ratty bum suit and broken guitar had attracted this unsavory fellow, who mistook me for someone more destitute. When he noticed my high-tech socks, then what? Would he con me out of my wristwatch? I warily gauged him. He had clearly pedaled a long way. Chasing his breath in intense huffs, he uncorked a bottle of Oregon Pinot Noir.

“I found this online. St. Innocent. Temperance Hill. 2003. Have a taste.”

I sipped and nodded. “Berry on the nose. Nutty,” I said. “Clean finish.”

Borrowing my guitar, the tramp hunched aggressively and played a few obnoxious licks. His enthusiasm belied loose screws. His musical fervor eclipsed an absence of talent. He passed back the battered instrument and took a long pull of wine. And another.

Narrowing his gaze, he sized me up. “What are you, some sort of activist?”

“An artist,” I offered.

He cocked his head. “Have you read Catch-22?”

I hesitated.

He proceeded, “Remember when Hungry Joe yearned for a photo of the fertile, seething cornucopia inside the Sicilian brothel? Starting back toward the apartment for his camera, Joe froze in his tracks at the dreadful premonition that the whole lovely, lurid paradise would disappear if he let it out of his sight for even an instant. Stunned, Joe bent to forces beyond his control. He yearned to archive the magnificent moment. But he couldn’t catch it and live it. The decision paralyzed him. Should he stay, or should he go?”

My peculiar guest sighed and gazed out over the shining sterile salt sea on the western horizon for a protracted moment, then continued.

“The plight of the artist, the brute task of trapping impenetrable sublimity, grinds sincere vessels to worn nubs. You look like a sincere vessel, so take it easy. Artists suffer. Your sacrifice propagates and decorates everything, but it consumes you. Hungry Joe tried to accomplish the impossible. Wily as he was, he remained powerless against his own ambition to capture and dispense the essential. Joe couldn’t help himself. The conflict drove him batty even as he confronted it, identifying an enemy to his pleasure, a thwarter of his joy—sensing a menace to all possible happiness. So, with bare flesh lounging everywhere, most of it plump, Hungry Joe began to die. Remember how he paused in the doorway, wiry neck veins pulsing wildly, as the old man watched with victorious merriment, sitting in his musty blue armchair like some satanic, hedonistic deity on a throne, laughing quietly, his sunken shrewd eyes sparkling perceptively with cynical and wanton enjoyment? Relax. Go home. Hungry Joe ended up missing both the party and the picture, remember? Joe Strummer said it best: ‘There is no tenderness or humanity in fanaticism.’ Plant flowers. Grow vegetables. Build something. It takes more to impress practical folks than a bunch of antique tomes and a head full of poems. Who was Hungry Joe’s muse? A bunch of naked hussies, that’s who—muses represent creative drive, not real people. Don’t personify the urge. You can’t paint God!”

The lunatic laughed and laughed, finishing his wine, and then added a thought.

“Art is Science. We’re all notes in the same opus—well, some of us are rests, but even magic can’t fight the truth, right? We always have to do something.”

Confused, I gravely agreed. I wanted no trouble.

“Equanimity,” He warned, retrieving his bicycle, “Keep your leather jacket oiled, and stay hungry” He glowered, furrowing his greasy brow, “But not too hungry.” He ceremoniously handed me the empty bottle. “You’ll need this.” Bewildered, I stood agape, bottle dangling, as he disappeared.

Six hours later it rained cats and dogs out of a howling pitch-black sky as my loaded truck penetrated Columbia gorge on I-84 West. I popped in Con’s demo tape and cranked it up. Rather than music, I heard his poorly recorded voice:

“In 1927 J. Harlen Bretz presented evidence to the Geological Society of Washington D.C. that fifteen thousand years ago gigantic floods ripped over Idaho and raged across Washington, sloshing into the Columbia Gorge and careening out to the Pacific. Colossal walls of water preceded plunging torrents lasting weeks, overflowing the landscape with ten times the volume of all Earth’s rivers combined. Churning with town-sized boulders and saturated with debris, the recurring deluge gouged deep scars and channeled highlands with potholes and scabs. Everything shook as trillions of roiling tons of icy sludge triggered faults and ignited volcanoes. Dormant cones coughed fresh ash and spurted bright-hot lava into the incomprehensible blitz. As the mighty mess thundered over Portland toward Astoria a swirling maelstrom spun south up the Willamette River, filling the broad valley and breaking against the hills of Eugene. Each time the spent surge receded it left behind the cracking mud of billions of pulverized acres, and another layer of the best wine soil on Earth! But Bretz couldn’t say where the water came from. He lacked a source for his flood. Observing rhythmites, sandwiched deposits of sediment between broader strata, indicating distinct deposits settled separately in time, Bretz concluded the cataclysm occurred periodically. But where did it originate?”

I flipped the tape. The rickety player clacked and jolted.

“Bretz didn’t know that an ice dam corking an immense glacial lake in the Rockies repeatedly cracked and failed. He didn’t realize a narrow finger of the Cordilleran ice sheet extended so far south, plugging the Clark Fork over and over again. But J.T. Pardee knew. Probing the Bitterroots for mineral deposits, he had published a 1910 paper hypothesizing glacial lake Missoula. Present at that 1927 meeting, Pardee leaned toward a companion and whispered, ‘I know where Bretz’s flood came from.’ But he didn’t speak up. The society, of course, deemed Bretz’s ideas preposterous.”

I ejected the cassette. As I barreled downstream along the swollen Columbia River, visualizing that ancient inundation obliterating the murky interstate, I ignored my fuel gauge. When my motor coughed I perceived no hint of civilization. The mighty western waterway bellowed along indifferently to my starboard, at its soaked seasonal peak just a residual trickle of a recurrent event so astonishingly enormous. I slowed, fidgeting and cursing, peering into the pelting gloom, pleading for a sign. I needed gas. Where was Xanadu?

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

My engine sputtered and stalled. I drifted onto the shoulder and ignited my flashers. Just as I crunched to a despairing halt, it appeared, shining miraculously in the buffeted distance: Exxon!

Saved, I grabbed the empty wine bottle, plunged out into the storm, and hoofed it to the remote exit. Exhausted and hypothermic, I limped into the cozy corporate glare and collapsed. Stumbling stoically back up into the blowing rain and planting my feet against the gale, I drew Con’s St. Innocent bottle from my sopping jacket. The attendant relieved me as I fumbled numbly with the nozzle.

“Welcome to Oregon,” she smiled. “I’ll get that for you.” I weakly handed her the bottle. “Fill it with premium, please.” I was home.

Perhaps a well-lived life is the best of all monuments, I thought, merging back onto the artery. We ate hardened basalt and drank quickened brine, back then. Now, reborn as light stranded in stuff, we intertwine our intellects to compose our mother’s thorny tiara, sampling the best wines and tasting the richest food, but with reverence and humility. As the station faded, gleaming purple under its dim logo in the heavy haze of my rearview mirror, I drew my first whole breath in months. This dizzy orb requires every wacky one of us, I realized. The Northwest keeps its own tempo. Bretz’s flood baptized the land over and over again, sanctifying and fortifying as it destroyed. Like rhythmites, we each divide and define our own time, garnishing a space in-between—a measured moment embodied. Sometimes, like poor Hungry Joe or J.T. Pardee, caught in an unexpected dilemma, we freeze. Soothed by Con’s taped sermon and cleansed by the vicious storm, my ice-raft of obtuse ambition melted, dropping in my skull a three-pound stone of pure calm. I could keep art at a distance, allowing it to continue provoking my insatiable curiosity through this shifting stage of matter and fact for a lifetime.

Who decreed this stately pleasure dome? Who knows? In any case, I altered my life’s course based on one swig of courage provided by a prescient homeless connoisseur, vowing to stop plumbing such depths. This land still beats like a slow, ancient heart, emptying one sea to fill another, producing and holding us all as we, living rhythmites, mark our time.

I toast Con with each splendid glass. Modern Lil’wat know where their elusive lake kept going. We’re all still enjoying its enchanting effect.

SONOLUMINESCENCE: The discovery and examination of light-emitting bubbles

Nature still harbors a few mysteries, and one of those is Bigfoot. But I will talk instead about the discovery and examination of sonoluminescence, a marvelous mingling of light and sound extraordinary enough to warrant a closer look!

Sonoluminescence is a phenomenon wherein bubbles in fluid emit photons when abruptly compressed by the presence of certain strong sound waves. Sonoluminescent bubbles, driven by ultrasonic fields at discrete frequencies, oscillate with this unexpected side effect: as bubbles are “squeezed” with enough force and in the right way, they emit one short burst of broad-spectrum light for each period of the sustained sound wave (Kondic, 1995). Astounding! Where does the light come from?

Sonoluminescence was first observed in 1934, at the University of Cologne by Frenzel and Schultes. They applied an ultrasound transducer to a vat of darkroom chemicals hoping to expedite photographic development. Instead, they found minute dots on the developed plates, and through the haze of their deep initial confusion gradually understood that bubbles in the fluid were releasing light in the presence of the ultrasonic waves (Frenzel, 1934). It was nearly impossible for decades to scrutinize these sonoluminescent effects, due to complex environmental requirements and the vast number of extremely short-lived bubbles. Today, this initial discovery is known as multi-bubble sonoluminescence, or MBSL (Young, 2005).

Felipe Gaitan and Lawrence Crumin established a major development in 1989 by demonstrating stable single-bubble sonoluminescence. Single bubble sonoluminescence (SBSL) is “the natural emission of brief pulses of broadband light from a micron-wide gas bubble levitated in water by a steady external sound field.” The bubble expands and contracts in phase with the oscillating pressure field (Gaitan, 1999). In SBSL, a single bubble, ensnared in an acoustic standing wave, emits one pulse of light per compression. This more controlled technique allows further systematic study of the phenomenon by isolating the complex occurrence into one steady, predictable bubble.

The temperature inside sonoluminescing bubbles is hot enough to melt steel. Recent experiments conducted by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign report temperatures around 20,000 Kelvin (Young, 2005). Supplementary research on single bubble sonoluminescence focuses on dynamic bubble motion and detailed light spectrum analysis in the 200 to 700 nm range, using various gas blends to produce the sonoluminescent bubbles. Experiments concentrating shock waves on the bubbles suggest temperatures of up to 1, 000, 000, 000 K, while other estimates range peak temperatures only from 10, 000 to 1, 000, 000 K (Young, 2005). Perhaps this broad array of figures bears witness to either the infancy of sonoluminescence research or the inadequacy of current instrumentation. Certainly there is much to be discovered.

Surely such technological magic can only be conjured by humans tinkering with powerful electronic gadgets. Contrarily, Nature herself provides living examples of this odd phenomenon: Snapping shrimp produce short bursts of light from collapsing bubbles generated as they quickly close their distinctive claws. The light produced is of low intensity and invisible to the naked eye--simply a byproduct of the shockwave the shrimp use to disorient and capture prey. However, it represents the first known example of an animal generating light by sonoluminescence, and was wryly called “shrimpoluminescence” upon its discovery (Lohse, 2001). It has consequently been established that the Mantis shrimp’s club-like forelimbs can also strike so quickly and with such force as to provoke sonoluminescent bubbles upon impact (Patek 2005).

The mechanism for sonoluminescent light emission is still not well understood. There is general agreement that the forceful collapse of a micron size bubble to its hard-core (atoms packed as tight as possible) limit is at the root of the light emission process (Young, 2005).

One exotic theory of sonoluminescence, which has received wide-ranging attention, is the Casimir energy theory suggested by Nobel laureate physicist Julian Schwinger (Schwinger, 1994) and more thoroughly considered in a paper by Claudia Eberlein of the University of Sussex. Eberlein’s paper proposes that sonoluminescent light is produced by the vacuum within the bubble in a process akin to Hawking radiation, the radiation generated along the fringes of black holes. “Quantum theory holds that vacuums contain virtual particles, and the fast moving interface between water and air changes virtual photons to real photons (Eberlein, 1996).” If true, sonoluminescence may be “the first observable example of quantum vacuum radiation (Eberlein, 1996).” An argument has countered that sonoluminescence releases too much energy too quickly to be consistent with the vacuum energy explanation (Milton, 2000). Others argue, “The vacuum energy explanation might yet prove to be correct (Liberati, 2000).”

As interest accelerates and technology improves, answers will arrive and sonoluminescence will gradually be better understood. Until that bright day, plenty of literature waits to keep us occupied. I plan to order an inexpensive kit and use household parts to construct a sonoluminescence station in my garage. It will hopefully keep me out of trouble. I anticipate publishing my results in one of several obscure journals I have had the distinct pleasure of perusing in pursuit of this complex, beguiling, yet multifariously rewarding topic. Beyond doubt, the future of sonoluminescence is as peculiar as it is dazzling.

Works Cited:



Eberlein, C. Theory of quantum radiation observed as sonoluminescence. Physics Review.1996

Frenzel H., Schultes, H. Luminescenz im ultraschallbeschickten wasser. Z. Phys. Chem. 1934

Gaitan, F. Experimental observations of bubble response and light intensity near the threshold for single bubble sonoluminescence in an air-water system. Physics Review. 1999

Kondic, L., Gersten J., Yuan, C. Theoretical studies of sonoluminescence radiation: radiative transfer and parametric dependence. Physical Review. 1995

Liberati, S., Belgiorno, F., Visser, M. Comment on ‘Dimensional and dynamical aspects of the Casimir effect: understanding the reality and significance of vacuum energy’. High Energy Physics and Theory. 2000

Lohse, D., Schmitz, B., Versluis, M. Snapping shrimp make flashing bubbles. Nature. 2001

Milton, K. A. Dimensional and dynamical aspects of the Casimir effect: understanding the reality and significance of vacuum energy. High Energy Physics and Theory. 2000

Patek, S. N., Caldwell, R. L. Extreme impact and cavitation forces of a biological hammer: strike forces of the Peacock mantis shrimp. Journal of Experimental Biology. 2005

Schwinger, J. Talk at the Fourth International Conference on Cold Fusion. ICCF4. 1994

Young, F. R. Sonoluminescence. CRC Press. 2005