A Big Black Cloud
Don Juan told me, turn to your left and ask advice from your death. An immense amount of pettiness is dropped if your death makes a gesture to you, or if you catch a glimpse of it, or if you just have the feeling that it is there watching you…When you need an answer, look over your left shoulder and ask your death.
Carlos Castaneda
Theres a story wanting to be told because the words about it are fading, and what remains are moving pictures, memories to bring the words back.
Swinging from a thick rope, hung from the bridge. The rope in a tight grasp, leaping from the muddy cliff edge and flying out over the water. Dropping into the river at the furthest reach of rope. Do it again until the kids come and there are no more turns for us. As the years are many gone by since that brimming day, no more turns for us feels a poignant phrase. Now, despite my age, could I be there today, I would take that rope in hand again and fly.
We settled on a familiar and long stretch of sand and tied our tents to river bush deeply rooted in the riparian. We left the canoes loose, keels up on the sand and set to making dinner. This is my all time favorite kitchen. A cook stove of red coals in the sand. Kitchen gear especially for camping. The silvery steel frying pan. My knife with a wide blade, a sweet edge made in Japan, and doubles as a spatula. It lay on a flat rock near the fire while the fire worked its heat through the pan, crammed with fish for tacos. Another pan on the earthy stove held wings and breasts on chicken bones. Theres another woman tending a meal for her family. A trio of tenderness that family. Impossible to argue with. Exponentially and synergistically, an inalienable force of gentleness they are.
The other side of the river offers no purchase for settling. A rock ridge reaches straight up from the water and overshadows the river. A similar stretch upstream, lower and set back from the edge, was once a buffalo jump. Buffalos, dinosaurs, and highway men move freely in the imagination, along the ways of this river. All along the Red Deer River where the locals smile and say, if you run into trouble on the Red Deer, stand up. A gentle river, shallow and wide, with vistas into a prehistoric past. Albertosaurus skeletons and marker artifacts of the Great Dying were unearthed from these badlands. Sometimes, white pelicans with black wingtips fly out in front of our canoes, just over the surface of the water and the sight of it collapses time into this. here. eternal. moment.
The other side of the river from my favourite kitchen is that rock ridge like a giant wall. As the food warmed and the chicken pieces sizzled, the sky over that wall began to darken and the darkening moved out past the ridge and over the river and with it came a wind, sudden and full of strength.
We all looked up. The Most Positive Woman I have known in this lifetime said, its bound to blow over! You so want to believe her in all things because she is positively sincere and so sincerely positive. Her first response to most things, honest and wholehearted, assumes the best possible outcome. I didnt believe her.
Everything was moving, and moving fast. It moved us fast. We picked up our pans of food as a heavy rain came down and darkness rained down and we ran for our tents. The tender family raced up above the riparian to theirs, my life partner and I dove into ours on the beach. Sound was everywhere. The wind threatened to lift our tent up and away, so we cleaved to the windward side and the force was otherworldly. Lightening and thunder with no time between crashed all around us. With all of its might the storm was upon us, roaring on the outside, while on the inside I tangled with the fast diminishing threads of my life. Then a different noise. Was that the canoes, shouted my partner, yelling over the din. No! I shouted back and jumped into his lap, wrapped my body around his and my last dying words to him were, lets meet!
A shame I have to interrupt this scene with terminology, that in the cult when two people were deeply and profoundly in a heart to heart connection, it was termed meeting. Sexual relations could also be labeled the same. To invite my partner to meet had meaning with possibility.
There have been two occasions in my life when I was sure I would die. That evening on the rivers edge was one, and the other was in my vintage Porsche, flying through an intersection and meeting with a GMC pick up truck turning left in front of me. My last thought before I didnt die was, If I have any control over this vehicle, where to aim it and not hurt anyone?
Between these two tangles with fate, I can be sure of certain things inside of me. That on the fly, with no time to choose, I was once honestly altruistic. And that at the end of my life, what I wanted most was to meet with another, to connect before it was too late.
You just didnt want me to leave you alone, said He. Reminiscent of a different He, whos first response to my call from an emergency room was, you totalled the Porsche?!?!
We cannot let others make up our lives for us.
At the end of my life what I most wanted was to meet with another, to connect with another human heart before off roading into the unknown blackness. I cannot see that Cimmerian shore from here, yet by meeting in the eyes of another, I imagined departing this shore with real knowledge to share on the other side.
For the rest of my life, I want to depend on something inside of me that, when tested on the fly, is concerned about others, that they live, and that Im not causing any harm.
Of course, in those near death experiences, I was also very afraid, thinking it would be my end. Yet how strange I had little thought for my own life! Living day to day and most of the time, I think mostly of myself and the details of life that must be dealt with.
And as details often bear witness to, this story does not end here.