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.