Angle of Repose

I went with Dash's class on a four day trip to Mt. Lassen, the southern most volcano in the Cascades. Mr. Lassen and Mt. St. Helens are the only active volcanos in the 'lower 48.' In the museum at Manzanita Lake, there's a mural sized photo taken by a man named Loomis on May 19th, 1915 documenting Mt. Lassen's last eruption: an atomic bomb of cloud swelling up to 25,000 feet, which delivered ash all the way to Reno, 200 miles away. These days the park is quiet, save for the eerie sound of wind smoothing through the pine trees, like the sound of distant surf or a new airconditioning unit. To children there's no suggestion of the ambiguity all around. The land is so docile you can pet it, yet underneath, there's all that magma roiling and boiling. Up at Bumpas Hell, the earth's ass farts sulphur out the fumaroles. Incidentally, one story about this man Bumpas, who owned land around the sulphur pits, is that one day he invited journalists to come up and see the place. When they arrived he stuck his leg into a mudpot, to show them it was safe or just as an act of daring. He was never the same again, his leg had to be amputated, he lost his land and fell into ruin. Another story is that nothing happened to his leg but he disappeared and no one knows what happened to him.

These things happened during our trip....

In the middle of the night, beneath the volcano, a child shouted out from the next campground. A boy by the sound of it. He seemed to be yelling, "forsook" or "forsooth." He said it once, there was a pause, then again and again. I zipped down the tent flap to hear better, but then he stopped.

*

We walked up a cindercone, to the top. I was to mind stragglers. One girl, a stick of 12, kept falling down, every few yards, on her back, arms spread. The book on her is that she's a drama queen, always does this kind of thing, always coughing in this Camille like way. She came from Hollywood a year ago. Single mother, absentee father. Mother's always gone. Girl doesn't get along with others in her class. Is always alone, blond and wispy. At breakfast one morning she used up all the jam for a sandwich and then asked for more. She was told there wasn't anymore and perhaps in future she should be more mindful of others. Her expression didn't change. She's heard all this before.

*

The park rangerette has long gray hair. She was past prime and kids thought she looked like a witch but I thought she was exotic and interesting. I thought of her as Becky Thatcher's mom. She talked all about the 50 kinds of fungi in these forests as opposed to a handful in Germany and how in Europe they take away all the fallen trees and so the forests are dying, there are no animals. She pointed out how different it was in America and how the 'Dougs' lived for 350 years, sometimes 500, and didn't drop cones until they were 175. She said it took them one hundred years to fall and two hundred more years to disappear, except maybe for a row of progeny. "One hundred years to fall," I thought. From the outside in. A hundred years to fall. So what does it take a man, or a woman, to fall? Ten, twenty years. Sometimes, life demands a long denouement, if you don't get cut down first.

*

Another straggler going up the cindercone was a one-armed girl. The armless arm ressembles a sausage end, tied up like a balloon. She didn't cough or swoon, but kept going, a few steps at a time. It's 1,000 feet to the top, at a 60 degree angle. She's overweight, unpretty and odd. I liked her. She doesn't talk much and when she does it sounds strange. She answers questions enigmatically, often with a nonsequitur. I caught her hand and lead her up to the peak and for a long while we just watched the world and nothing at all. I explained to her about the angle of repose, the angle after which there is no stability and gravity pulls everything down.

*

The nights were not good. Yellowish and still. On the second night I heard things but I assumed raccoons or bears were trying to get into the lockers to get food. The rangers make a big deal about putting everything away in the bear lockers or in your car. But the next morning it turned out someone had gone through the cars and stolen money. About $500 all together, $35 from me. They were good whoever they were, went in and took only cash, no credit cards, nothing that could be traced, although they did take a digital camera at another site. They hit four sites. The ranger thought they must be bad 'uns from Redding come up to pay for a drug habit. But they had to be sophisticated too. That they came the second night, not the first was significant. The first night nobody sleeps but the second night, after hiking all day, you're dead to the world. The ranger shook his head, claimed that this was the first time this year any thieves had come into the park. Later, he also said even though he'd voted for George Bush he wouldn't again. I asked him what to do about Iraq. "I'd go in there and round up all those bad people and just shoot 'em. What can you do with people like that. Just shoot 'em. That'd be the solution. That's the way they handle it. But we ain't gonna do that, so better just scatter outta there."

*

The nights were bad until you got used to it. Epic bad dreams; the mind does ugly shit when it's caught in the silence like that. As though it's trying to get out of itself, and out of your skull. I kept imagining a mechancial horse, in burnished blue armour, each leg and its neck tethered to chains, making this horrific sound the way horses do when they get spooked in their stalls. That was it, spooked in a stall, unable to get out, the smell of smoke. If only my mind could be bigger, I kept thinking. The same old ideas, the same old hopes and fears. The thing needs a bigger pot.