The following is an excerpt from a novella/novel I am working on. In it massive
earthquakes have broken off a piece of the California coast—the Point Reyes
Peninsula— into the Pacific Ocean. Those left living in this severed world must
learn the primordial rhythms of the tule elk that inhabit the unmoored
peninsula in order to survive. Rather tongue in cheek, I have described it as a post-apocalyptic
bildungsroman that blurs the boundaries between body and landscape, using the
anatomy of elk as its roadmap. It is told from different perspectives, one of them the voice of the rocky peninsula-island itself, who conceives of herself as a granite elk mother leading her stony herd, ever north.
I've included some photos throughout, to evoke a world collapsed and re-claimed by vine and stone and wind. And yes, several of them are NOT in fact, on the Point Reyes Peninsula at all, but in Greece (which is at this moment, of course, experiencing its own set of catastrophes).
I. Ursula
This
is the story of a lost boy and a slim black box that was once called an iPhone.
This is the story of a scrap of granite, a furl of limestone, quaked off the
North American tectonic plate and onto the Pacific. This is the story of my
hooves dark as biotite, dark as the center of the world, darker than your
nightmares, my hooves that walk the ocean floor, ever North.
This
is the story of a boy who lost his way with one of your dark black nightmares
in his hands, searching for stories that were best left dead. They were best
left where they lay under the refuse of your condominiums and banks, your
endless plastic bags and take out cartons, your days even and bland as cement.
At least the weeds had gotten to that refuse. The dandelions broke through first
and grew blossoms as yellow as fire, as yellow as sin, as yellow as a coyote’s
eyes watching in the dark of night, waiting to howl and then to eat your lambs
or fuck your little white dogs.
It’s
always an old elk cow who leads the rest, the hundreds, when mounting bulls
with their velvet antlers have subsided, have laid it to rest. An old elk cow
who’s pushed out dozens of calves, whose tits are dry, who kicks her sharp
hooves at the bulls with their hard cocks, who leads the other females to the
secret, quiet places where they can drop their babies, to the safe green places
in spring time, to the water holes. I’m that old cow, that old silver sack of
bones. I have been leading them behind me millennia by millennia, on hooves of
magma and schist. I keep them close to me. I find soft pastures.
Sometimes
we move against the continent, following its easy trail. That’s when I’m lazy,
and tired, and the winds have been laying their wild fingers on me too harsh.
We scrape granite full of mica into our stomachs, four each, the stomachs that
grind and grind as we walk with our hooves darker than nightmares in an ocean
deeper than any one of your cranes or submarines, your sonic telescopes, your
Mars Rovers, could have ever fathomed. It is full in its salty wombs with
creatures who generate light inside their own bodies. They glow more beautiful
than any light bulb, LED or Edison.
It
was nice to rest against the continent, that other groaning mass of
lithosphere. Things crossed over onto our backs when I leaned into it. They
made homes in our skins, our dark fur. Hundreds of species of bird. Pine trees.
Mountain beavers. Once, saber-toothed cats. Mammoths with hooked tusks and dusk
songs deeper than the moan of a tractor. Eventually, people. We liked the first
ones.
Later,
when we’d had enough, I changed our course. I left the sharp pathway of the
continent. I broke away, and my granite-boned cousins followed me on their
biotite hooves. They bugled as we went.
Much
later, the few people who were still left made up stories. They’re not so bad.
They’re very apt, in fact. They must have figured out how simple it is to press
their ears down to the dirt and listen, between the bishop pine roots and
stones. How to hear us, moving, grazing on oceanic crust, walking onward,
taking them with us. Someone listened close enough, and heard me calling back
to the rest through the fog, through the heat and grind of our stone bodies,
our hundred hearts beating, hot as fire, slow as stars. That someone, I guess,
started to catch on.
So
they have these stories about my organs—my guts, wombs, heart, brain—and the
land they call Tomales Point, which is also my granite and prairie grass body,
which is also my tangled and wind beaten old heart, which is also my strong
nose, pointing the rest toward the North, finding the easiest footing, making a
new trail through the ocean.
 |
| There is an elk cow peering from behind the alders... |
II. Intestines
The
intestines of an elk are very long. Colias knew this because he had held them
in his hands many times, long and wet and folding, while he helped with the
butchering. They always did it outside, so the blood ran back into the dirt and
grass. Colias’s mother had him collect some of the blood in an old metal tea
pot. They cooked it up later and drank it, like hot cocoa.
When
he held the intestines for the first time, Colias thought about all the grass,
chewed up and still sitting in the wet coils. What that last meal had tasted
like. That spring, the spring Colias was eight and big enough to hold the
curving mass of guts without dropping any piece of it, they were camped in
Divide Meadow, just off the Bear Valley trail. Colias liked to walk along the
remains of an old barbed wire fence, sunk almost to the brim in tall grass, and
touch the metal spikes with his fingers. Fifteen other families were there too,
in the portable round tents with thick felted walls that everybody lived in
during the Moving season. The other twenty-two families on Point Reyes were
scattered across the peninsula throughout the warm, open meadows of spring. The
tent Colias lived in with his mother, father and great-aunt was admired by
everyone else in Divide Meadow that spring; Opheodrys made the strongest felt
they had seen, tight and rippled and sturdy. She used wide sheets of bubble
wrap found in a rotting closet in the Inverness Post Office building to agitate
the wool, and carefully crushed soaproot bulbs to produce a fine suds. And she
was patient, rubbing and coaxing and muttering to the neat rows of wool. When
she was done, the long banners of felt puckered and shone in the wind. She
embroidered them with antlers and wheels, with wings shaped like pelvic bones
and the silhouettes of cars, which lay at the sides of roads, growing
blackberries and fennel from their plastic seats, casting long feline shadows.
One
of the structures from Before, a collapsing wood and cement bathroom, sat under
the trees to the north of the meadow. The plastic signs for Man and Woman—white
form on brown background—were still there, crooked and smudged. Pinus Jefferyi
taught his son to leave small offerings at buildings like that whenever they
camped near one. A handful of dried manzanita berries, strung up with glass
beads. A splash of elk milk. An arrowhead tip made from car door metal. Just to
keep the sadness of the people from Before away. It was a feeling that sat down
in your chest. Colias felt it once, near the collapsed picnic tables and wooden
lockers at the place that was called Wildcat Camp on a faded metal sign. The
ocean was just down the hill. The elk were grazing meadowfoam and checkerblooms
in the thick grass, and Colias sat on a corner of one of the tables. He saw
initials, A + M, carved into the top. A heart around them, messy. His chest
felt so tight, then, that he thought he couldn’t breathe. It was a dark
gripping feeling, like dread and like grief and fear, all at once. He stood up
so fast that he caught a splinter in his palm, and ran over to sit down in the
grass near the elk. A small calf came by and nudged his legs, sniffed around
for a seedcake with her wide nose. The seaglass looped around her neck, which
Opheodrys looped over all of their elk, to distinguish them from the other
herds, tinkled and glinted amber. The ocean threw its big blue waves against
the sand down on the beach, and Colias felt better. The tightness lifted.
The
day they arrived in Divide Meadow the spring Colias was eight, Pinus took him
to the falling down bathroom structure with the two white and brown people
nailed to the walls, and left a crabshell full of the black seeds of California
poppies just outside the door. A pile had grown there over the
centuries—polished pieces of blue glass, old photographs worn to cracking
pieces, the whole skull of a pelican, the dust of hundreds of bouquets of
flowers.
When
Colias stood holding the guts of a bull tule elk in his hands for the first
time, he thought about the chewed up grass inside. Then he dunked the
intestines in a big plastic tub full of cold water, and cleaned them, turning
each section inside out. He carried the tub far away from their encampment, up
an old trail into the Douglas fir trees, and dumped the dirty water into pine
duff. He wrapped the intestines like long wet snakeskins around both of his
hands walked back with them to the tent. Inside, his great-aunt, Ceryle Alcyon,
uncoiled the guts from his palms. She hung them, loop by loop, over the low
wooden ceiling poles. Colias tried to imagine how that slimy river of skin
would become the smooth tight strings on an instrument. He couldn’t.
“Before all the work,” said Ceryle,
cupping his chin in her hand, “you can read the intestine like a roadmap.” She
drank a long swallow of cliffrose liquor mixed in cream from the morning’s
milking. She always kept a bottle of it in her belt, pushed against her left
hip like a new organ. Colias had a tiny sip when she offered it. He liked how
just one swallow made warmth spread all over his chest.
“It’s not like fortune telling or
tarot cards or any of that shit—” continued Ceryle Alcyon.
“—Aunt Ceryle,” said Colias’s
father, who was outside the door, smoking the meat.
“It’s just like reading tracks in
the sand, or books. It’s a story and a map together. Look.”
Ceryle Alcyon
pulled the intestine skin down and laid it out on the packed dirt floor. It was
wrinkled, amber-grey, and so long it could have wrapped around the edges of the
tent more than once if spread all the way out.
“It’s like a windy road,” said
Colias.
“The guts know all the things about
what the body needs. When they digest the grasses, they turn them into
something new and useful for the body. They send the nutrients all back out.
You can see all the creases from folds, weak places that cause stomachaches,
they’re letters. When you kill your first elk, I’ll tell you what they say. And
when you’re older, a man, after you hunt Tomales Point for a wild one, well,
then you can read them back to me.”
“Is it always true stuff?” asked
Colias. He was remembering how hot the elk blood was when it splashed on his
hands earlier, collecting some in the teapot. How the bull’s eyes changed when
his father pulled the knife over the throat with a strong hand. By the time the
knife reached the other side, the eyes were endless and glazed. Colias wondered
if some of the soul could have gotten into the teacup, or if it all blew
straight out to sea and into the fogbanks. He wondered if his father felt sick
in his stomach too.
Aunt Ceryle looked at Colias, and
smiled a small smile that made her white widow’s peak raise slightly with her
forehead.
“Here,” was all she said. “Look how
it kinks. Look at this little red scratch. What do you think? A sudden turn, a
wound.” She put her hand on Colias’s chin again and laughed. “Let’s clean these
out fast, before the fat congeals.”
They soaked and salted the feet and
feet of amber coils. Turned them inside out, split and stretched, twisted and
scraped, soaked again in water mixed with wood ash, twined the fibers together
like rope. It took days, checking and twisting and curing and cleaning, hands
growing so used to the weight and suppleness of that long tube that they barely
had to look at their fingers as they moved along the joints. When he closed his
eyes at night next to the fire, Colias saw gut-colored pathways, strange and
looping, on his lids. Those gut-pathways made him a little afraid of what might
be at the other end, of where they were leading and what they might feel like
under his feet.
