Leaving Ancient Nights Alone

Sleep didn't come easily last night - the phone started ringing early, and I had to tell several people that "I'm retired" to be met with heavy sighs, one distinct expletive, or silence. So, up late, I finished one of the final chapters of my next book. My thoughts go out to the teams working the ground in SDF, the families of all affected, and everyone at UPS. 

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Leaving Ancient Nights Alone

 Before this fire of sense decay, 

This smoke of thought blow clean away, 

And leave with ancient night alone

 The steadfast and enduring bone. —

The Immortal Part, A. E. Housman

 I woke at about 3:30 a.m. and entered the bathroom, only to be confronted by what was either a giant gnat or a drone. In either event, I dispatched it with a size seven moose slipper, crawled back into bed, and tried to go back to sleep, which was easier now that I was retired. Being on call always wore me out. I'd put in a full day at work, but I might also get called out in the middle of the night, so I would go to bed extra early and then wake up in the middle of the night. That is not good for the waistline or any sort of regular social plans, but it was a rhythm as familiar to me as the sound of wheels hitting a runway, and the memory of one of those nights came back with the flip of a light switch.

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There’s a band of severe weather to our southwest right now, creeping on up as if it’s slow enough we won’t notice. I hope the phone doesn’t ring tonight. If I’m lucky, it will just be heavy rain and I won’t be standing outside somewhere looking like a five-foot-eight lightning pole. I have a mental picture of how that might turn out and think of a sign on a restaurant wall in St. Petersburg that said: Parachute for sale, never opened, used once, small stain.

 It looks like thunderstorms are building, but I hope for only rain. Rain I’m familiar with, the family having left Montana, but for a summer vacation to move out near the Washington coast. I like the rain. The rain washes clean, but it also leaves its mark. Gouges from rivulets in the calloused summer soil as if scraped by hard nails - bullet strikes on the hard earth. Marks that will not fade until further rain falls, warm spring rain that nourishes and renews. Just as my first spring here in the Midwest was a revelation, my first winter was an eye-opener despite being from a Montana family. Dense fogs of ice crystals that coat everything; thundersnow; winds that would blow off the prairie from the West, and rampaging clippers that came down from Alberta, bearing with them not a friendly greeting, but rather a sudden, sharp slap in the face. 

It’s a cold-blowing truth that there’s something within all of us that can be gathered up and strengthened. Something that can commandingly change the course of a life. The weather brings components of force, some deep and innate, working in our souls. Lightning cleaves the sky as a machete, the smell of cordite in the air lingering like gunpowder. Thunder echoes as a brace of artillery booming under a gunmetal sky; the power of the sky becomes a transcendent weapon that can form or scar the landscape of our world. 

Sometimes one has to work outside in it, bundled up in farmwear or Arctic military gear. You do what you need to while the wind laments, whispering of darkness in the earth. Your own voice, the sound of another voice in your ear evocative of evenings of past warmth, compels you forward; for to stop moving out here is to freeze to death.

I delivered my first calf in the cold; the calf not budging from his mother’s womb, the mother not helping in any fashion for reasons known only to her. There was no easy way to do this but to go in and help position the calf, hoping I wouldn’t get a broken arm from the contractions for my efforts. There, the head, my fingers finding the mouth; the feel of the unborn tongue, there tasting, life and breath, and air in my fingers. There is nothing in the world lonelier than being there for the birth of a solitary creature or the death of one. A little repositioning, a good push from his mama, the spreading of bone, and he was out, protesting heartily as outside thunder flashed, illuminating sweat and blood and, for this night at least, new life.

It is a wonder to me how that bone spreads for birth; yet when I see those telltale marks upon the bones in human remains; those marks on the dorsal side on the pubic symphysis near the margins of the articular surfaces and in the preauricular groove or sulci of the ilia to my eyes they aren’t notches of childbirth, they are the scars of sacrifice to save just one solitary life. I stayed in that place, in the shadow of that barn, until the house was empty and the land grew blood: looking in the mirror one day, motionless, eyes downcast, looking as if I was waiting for that blow I’d already received. 

It was then that I realized that it was time to move on, back to graduate school, back to myself.

Someone close to me asked why I was fascinated with the science of bones. I didn’t answer him at the time, but I will now. I have studied bones untouched by anything but time. I have studied bones in fragments, commingled with so many others, burned, broken, and laid bare to the elements. Still, I am always fascinated by the strength of that which is unfleshed. Bones are what lie at the center of us - not the heart, but that part of us that is the last thing to ever be dissolved, even if cut, disassembled, or burned. It is the hardest, strongest, most unwavering part of us; that which supports us, the last piece of us that remains of this earth when everything else is lost; the surviving remnant of all that was dear to us.

But even the strongest of bones can be broken under the fragility of human flesh, as fate strips us of all integrity, leaving us wrenched asunder of all that was. Smells of cooling flesh and salty tears, illusions of ice and rain and fire, detached and secret, yet oh-so-familiar. How easy when we are so very young to think we are bullet-proof, that our choices are the right ones. Certainly, some of my adventures would indicate that I, too, subscribed to such moments. However, with adulthood comes not only responsibility, but also awareness. Suddenly, for myriads of reasons- the evil intent of man, accident, aging, illness - the people and souls around you, as reliable as the sunrise, can with little warning leave you. In their absence, the sound of their goodbyes resonates in the emptying heart of your soul. You hear it always, but you do not respond to that fading sound, for to do so would be to admit to your own mortality.

But I hear the echo. I see it in the shape and form of things broken past integrity. I see it in a stormy sky, as lightning stains the dark, bitter air, shaping the earth in cold, dark shadows. I see it walking the landscape as the earth warms anew, the sky, blind and warm upon me, touching my skin, my form a wet seed growing wild in the cold, dark earth. I think of that as my cell phone pushes against bone when the truck hits a bump as I’m driving under a night as deep and black as the river Styx. It’s on my hip as I drive miles through county after county, past fields waiting to be planted and later, fields of hay; totems of silos huddled like Iroquois lodges standing solitary and watching. Somewhere out here tonight will be the truth when nature, physics, and fate pour forth their fury, spilling liquid, scorching the earth.

As I drive, I watch the sky for massing clouds, the vertebrates of highway passing underneath, the soft thump of tires as they pass over those small ridges of calcified earth and asphalt bone. I touch a small nail that dangles from the dashboard, along with a small piece of animal bone, found in the woods one day. That piece of bone is a comfort to me, like this landscape - hard and practical, yet capable of great strength and the flexibility to withstand what the heavens can throw at it. So strong and delicate, the bones of man and Earth. 

Later, I stand in a still-smoldering field, placing small flags to mark what my eye has captured. The wind picks up, swirling around the dust of spent lusts and ancient lies. Ghosts of sad reflection, a hundred thoughts never formed, and a thousand words never uttered. The wind sweeps my head of any emotion other than the task at hand, until the very roar of it is a warning to look up. When I do, when I truly look at the sky, I know in a moment when I can safely cast my eyes back down or run for shelter. It’s like listening in an ancient church to a priest chanting in a tongue that I do not even need to know to comprehend. They are words that belong in the defensive perception of light and order, which is our safety. 

I put my tools back into the soil, leaving my own parturition scar, trying to save a life by its closure, even if it’s mine. I keep one eye on the horizon even as I return to work. Whatever you do, don’t blink. You watch, you prepare, and sometimes, like other things in life, it sneaks up on you. One moment calm and upright, the next flashes of light against the sky, wheels running hard and fast either toward the storm or away. Previously dying leaves blown into fence rows, coming back to life with movement. The sky comes hungering after the land like a hungry wolf, something struggling for life between the two while pulled and tossed with need; something flaring up as old as time, as necessary as water. 

You never know when the wind will come up, and how it will touch you. You can arrive here as cold and hard and flat as the armor the land is laid with, and eventually the wind will arise, a murmuring voice that calls you in the night. Warm rain released like coins from above, falling like a gift; seeping in under your surface, leaving only small telltale drops on your skin as the sky clears. You look at the table, there lying side by side is a small envelope and some change, pennies from heaven indeed. From outside comes the crack of thunder, the rain tattooing itself onto the roof as a truck door slams. From inside the house comes the soft bark of a rescue dog, nipping at the wind like the rain itself. - Brigid