The heads of roses begin to droop. The bee who has been hauling his gold all day finds a hexagon in which to rest. In the sky, traces of clouds, the last few darting birds, watercolors on the horizon. The white cat sits facing a wall. The horse in the field is asleep on its feet. I light a candle on the wood table. I take another sip of wine. I pick an onion and a knife.
And the past and the future? Nothing but an only child with two different masks. --Billy Collins, "In the Evening" Prelude: Victory Lap The worst possible thing you can do when you''re down in the dumps, tweaking, vaporous with victimized self-righteousness, or bored, is to take a walk with dying friends. They will ruin everything for you. First of all, friends like this may not even think of themselves as dying, although they clearly are, according to recent scans and gentle doctors'' reports. But no, they see themselves as fully alive. They are living and doing as much as they can, as well as they can, for as long as they can. They ruin your multitasking high, the bath of agitation, rumination, and judgment you wallow in, without the decency to come out and just say anything. They bust you by being grateful for the day, while you are obsessed with how thin your lashes have become and how wide your bottom.
My friend Barbara had already been living with Lou Gehrig''s disease for two years on the spring morning of our Muir Woods hike. She had done and tried everything to stem the tide of deterioration, and you would think, upon seeing her with a fancy four-wheeled walker, needing an iPad-based computer voice named Kate to speak for her, that the disease was having its way. And this would be true, except that besides having ALS, Barbara had her breathtaking mind, a joyously bottomless thirst for nature, and Susie. Susie, her girlfriend of thirty years, gave her an unfair advantage over the rest of us. We could all be great, if we had Susie. We could be heroes. Barbara was the executive director of Breast Cancer Action, the bad girls of breast cancer, a grassroots advocacy group with a distinctly bad attitude toward the pink-ribbon approach. Susie was her ballast, and I had spoken at a number of their galas and fund-raisers over the years.
Barbara and Susie were about the same height, with very short dark hair. They looked like your smartest cousins, with the beauty of friendly, intelligent engagement and good nature. Barbara''s face was set now, almost as a mask, like something the wind is blowing hard against, and she''d lost a lot of weight, so you could see the shape of her animal, and bones and branches and humanity. Yet she still had a smile that got you every time, not a flash of high-wattage white teeth, but the beauty of low-watt, the light that comes in through the bottom branches; sweet, peaceful, wry. We set off. She was our lead duck, our cycling leader--the only person on wheels sussing up what lay before us at the trailhead, watching the path carefully because her life depended on it. Susie walked ever so slightly behind. I walked behind, in the slipstream.
Even on the path that leads through these woods, you feel the wildness. The trees are so huge that they shut you up. They are like mythical horse flanks and elephant skins--exuding such life and energy that their stillness makes you suspect they''re playing Red Light, Green Light. The three of us had lunch in town two months earlier, before the feeding tube, before Kate. Barbara used the walker, which looked like a tall, compact shopping cart, but moved at a normal pace. She still ate with a fork, not a feeding tube, and spoke, although so softly that sometimes I had to turn to Susie for translation. Barbara talked about her wellness blog, her need for supplemental nutrition. Breath, nutrition, voice; breath, nutrition, voice.
(She posted a list on her blog from time to time, of all the things she could still do, most recently "enjoy the hummingbirds; sleep with my sweetie. Speak out for people with breast cancer.") Now she is silent. When she wants to talk, she can type words on her iPad that Kate will then speak with efficient warmth. Or she can rest in silence. She knows that even this diminished function and doability will be taken one day at a time. When you are on the knife''s edge--when nobody knows exactly what is going to happen next, only that it will be worse--you take in today. So here we were, at the trailhead, for a cold day''s walk.
I''m a fast walker, because my dad had long legs and I learned to keep up, but today a walk with Barbara was like Mother May I? May I take a thousand baby steps? Barbara seemed by her look of concentration to align herself with all the particles here in the looming woods, so she could be as present and equal as possible. She couldn''t bother with saying anything unimportant, because she had to type it first. This relieved all of us from making crazy chatter. This is a musical grove. The redwoods are like organ pipes, playing silent chords. Susie pointed out birds she knew, and moved a few obstacles on our route, as Barbara rolled on. Susie is the ultimate support, a weight-bearing wall. She''s not "I am doing wondrous things," but simply helping both herself and Barbara be comfortable in the duo of them.
She has lots of sly humor, but no gossipy edge, except in a pinch. I have been to Muir Woods hundreds of times in my life, from my earliest days. This was where my family brought visitors. I got lost here at four, amid the crowds, but it was different fifty years ago. For the parents, a missing child was scary, yet you did not assume the child was dead. I was always afraid, lost or not. I got lost so often--once for more than half an hour among sixteen thousand people at the Grand National Rodeo--that until I was seven, I had notes pinned to my coats, little cards of introduction, with my name and phone number: If found, please return, as if I were a briefcase. I have gotten lost all of my life, maybe more than most, and been found every time.
Even though I believe that the soul is immortal and grace bats last, I''m afraid because Barbara is going to die, and Susie will be all alone. I love Wendell Berry''s lines that "it may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings." I have a lot of faith and a lot of fear a lot of the time. The day was so cold that for once Muir Woods did not smell of much; heat brings out stronger smells, but today was crisply delicious. We walked along the path like kids moving as slowly as one humanly can. We rounded the first curve, vrrrooom .
Susie and I spoke of nothing in particular. Barbara pointed to her ear, and we stopped to listen, to the tinkle of the creek, and all the voices of the water. There was the interplay of birdsong and people song and the creek''s conversation, as if it had a tongue, saying, "Keep going, we''ll all just keep on going. You can''t stop me or anything else, anyway." Every sound is by definition a stop, which is how we can hear it. We were walking in step with Barbara, as she held on to her conveyance, and I felt myself take on all the qualities that Barbara brought to the day, a fraught joy and awareness. There was a frozen music in the giant redwoods, like a didgeridoo. The trees looked like they were wearing skirts of burl and new growth.
I asked Barbara and Susie, "When you flip the skirts up, what do you get?" Barbara pointed to the answer: a tree that had toppled over--roots covered with moss and what looked like mossy coral, very octopus-like. Some tree trunks had roots wrapped up and around them, like barber poles. Some trunks were knuckly and muscular in their skirts, with many knees, and some burl seats for anyone who needed to sit. The trees looked congregational. As we walked beneath the looming green world, pushing out its burls and sprouts, I felt a moment''s panic at the thought of Barbara''s impending death, and maybe also my own. We are all going to die! That''s just so awful. I didn''t agree to this. How do we live in the face of this? Left foot, right foot, push the walker forward.
When my son was six or seven, and realized that he and I were not going to die at the exact same moment, he cried for a while, and then said that if he''d known this, he wouldn''t have agreed to be born. Barbara looked at me gently. We studied each other like trees. Her smile was never used to ingratiate herself. This is so rare. The ferns looked almost as if they had sprung from an umbrella shaft--you could click it and cock it, and the spokes would burst forth or could be put away. We picked up speed and barreled around the next corner, going one mile an hour: Susie mentioned that they had to get back to San Francisco for a meeting. The city seemed far away, on another planet, but not as far away as a meeting.
We passed a great show of burl in a thick lumpy flow, as if it had been arrested in downward movement, like mud or lava. One burl looked exactly like a bear cub. Ferns and sometimes whole redwoods spring from burl. The ferns remind you of prehistory. Dinosaurs hide behind them. They are elegant, tough, and exuberant, like feathers in a woman''s hat. I asked Barbara, "Are you afraid very often?" She shrugged, smiled, stopped to type on her laptop, and hit Send. Kate spoke: "Not today.
" The glossy bay trees are so flexible, unlike some people I could mention (i.e., me), with long horizontal ballet arms. They are light and sun seekers, and when you are in the forest of crazy giants, you migh.