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.
