TRAVEL: Sierras, Day 2

Autumn comes quickly here.  Quietude seeps from the boulders, the steep slopes, the darkling green brown lake ponds.  Down in Devil's Postpile, the raucous wind is foiled, and the faces of Starkweather and Sotcher Lakes are only glazed by wide rippling breezes.  On the shore, midday is warming, and summer's date seems lengthened by a few more days of incomparably bright Sierra sunshine.

The rainbow seem confused when we fish for them today.  They only nibble and spit the Power Bait they love in spring and summer. Only a few tiny ones are fooled. We give them back so easily.  Their speckled sparkling beauty remains.

Aspen are finished, mostly.  A lone long dancing yellow golden fairy bush-tree pops up along the road to greet our solitary auto on the precipitous down-curving road.  Soon the thin powder of snow on the crests and the north slopes will make the Postpile road as never was.

The downhill stroll from Minaret Vista to Starkweather is ochre, pumice-gray, and so silent today.  The checkerspots no longer flutter, and the stream's monkshood and all the other summer flora have laid down their faces to the dust. 

Even already attenuated moments lengthen as I gaze at lake face and sky; in some way they trick one to think they shall be held in memory's eternal lines. And this is enough.  

TRAVEL: The Sierras, Drive Day to Mammoth

Bishop Creek Canyon was my first Sierra place. It's one of many steep canyons with snow-fed creeks' inevitable fall from mountain pass to valley floor. 

I learned to love to hike here, took burros to Bishop Pass, and learned to fish for the small and elegant dashing rainbow, stocked for our amusement. Yet still was our wonder  engendered, in this virtual shelter compromise place: between power, water, and its silent powerful creation.

Western aspens, small and tough, grow along the plunging diagonal drainages, towards the low place stream bed, alternating chevrons striping the canyon walls with lemon burnt orange slashes of dancing leaves.

Over 20 years of Sierra autumns have accrued to me when I come to see them now.  

So easy to forget that the Sierras' scanctity was looted by wily municipal water and power companies who dammed and drained the power for California's southern growth. 

South Lake is the damned gem of Bishop Creek Canyon. Today I find it almost drained. Two years of drought conditions and water demands legislated and purchased have left a sad portion of the once sparkling bountifully full lake.  Its water is pumped to distribute to the Bishop Cone, Los Angeles swimming pools, and stream flows to maintain fish populations.


It's ghastly to see the ramparts of  of the dam, white concrete matching the granite bouldered lake bed, so stripped, so sêche, not even dried water plants remain.  Like seeing thousands of bald heads caused by chemotherapy at once, or your spouse's.

You-Tube has a short video about this small scale shame, with only 27 views.  When I think of the Sierra lovers who come here, I'm grieved beyond measure.  I guess Americans reason that that snow and rain will come soon again, and this only need be borne short time.

We drive up to North Lake, high and windswept, the aspen groves stripped of gold, and winter nearing.  It is full and lovely yet, too distant to drain and receive the elusive promises of replenishment the Chandler Decree protects.

      

BOOKS: Sophie's Choice, by William Styron - Walking in her Shoes

Following Deliverance with this novel added bias-ridden substance to my idea that modern culture seeks ever more shocking novelties of experience to consume.  Perhaps consumption of fictional violence enables us to remain desensitized to real world violence.

In this novel, however, the actual historic violence of the Holocaust is used as narrative within the fictional account, both sensitizing and desensitizing the reader at once.  Styron seems to intend this, partly as a didactic function, and also as apologia; he quotes Elie Weisel's analysis of how the meaning of the Holocaust is devalued in artistic product at the same time he attempts to address the issue.  It produces the effect of literary fingernails on a blackboard.

Sophie is an overdetermined ultimate victim: of patriarchal society, of racist stereotyping, of female objecthood.  All that is left to her is sexual oblivion and death delivered from an uber-male "savior" who turns predatory and fiendishly cruel when a paranoid schizophrenic episode occurs.

She is an unusual victim in that she is quite a guilty one. On the platform at Auschwitz, the Nazi officer performing the selections between work and crematory offers her the choice to "save" one of her two children from death; the other must go to the gas chamber. She chooses her daughter and keeps her son alive, a reverse completion of the sacrifice of Isaac.  Where is God? the chorus sings.

She has so little identity left that she cannot choose martyrdom; or perhaps the life force in her drives her to survive no matter the cost.  Styron compels every reader to cast himself in a revival of her play: what would your choice be, walking in her shoes?  

And, having made the choice Sophie did, how could she/you/they all go on living after surviving the death camps, anyway?  

Her delivery is accomplished by a lover sufficiently mad and sadistic to provide them both with an operatic love-death; an irony because the one transcendent path, music, was also denied her by the total entrapment of her circumstances.

But Sophie's story is only one of three in the novel. Stingo, the Southern-born narrator, has his own guilt he needs to expunge, an American version of geno-doom, slavery.  His writing sojourn in New York is financed with recently discovered blood money from the sale of a family slave. 

He becomes enthralled with Nathan, a madly brilliant and handsome Jew, and tangled in a love triangle with Sophie as their common object, a woman so beautiful she summons gaze and desire in most any man she meets, a modern Bathsheba/Suzanna. 

He is a deeply funny narrator, until he isn't, tormented as he is with urgent sexual need and his attempts to bed a woman.  His graphic descriptions and language of his sexual life, at first amusing, come to have their own repellent quality, a counterpoint to the abusive cruelty and downward spiral to death Sophie experiences with Nathan. 

His fulfillment comes during a misguided flight attempt to "save" them both from Nathan's slimy power.  Their sexual interlude has a disturbing wrongness about it; their escape to freedom was always doomed. 

Isn't his "love" for Sophie really narcissistic homo-erotic yearning for Nathan?  His monstrous creative gift feeds on and yearns for Nathan's attention, as he competes with Sophie. Nathan feeds on Stingo's artistic freedom, his need for attention, and his non-Jewish birth circumstance.

During his stay in a mad pink-painted boardinghouse, Stingo's stash of money is stolen. Styron doesn't tell us who took it - but probably Nathan, just to make Stingo more dependent and anxious.

Sophie's Choice is compelling reading.  But I found it lurid, didactic, and obvious. The best writing in the novel, to me, are descriptions of and reactions to fine weather and music. 

They ring with revelation of the power and nature of music, and make Sophie's tragedy profound in a way that none of the other misfortunes she suffers can do. Even the power of music can no longer sustain her life after the grotesque events she suffers in war.

I think this novel would have made a fine opera; it has a hyper real, naturalistic quality that fits American realist style as set for me by Theodore Dreiser. 

BOOKS: Deliverance, by James Dickey

Bored with my summer lite reading, I browsed our bookshelf and found an unread book I'd purchased during my 100 Greatest Novels of All Time Reading Project.  

I remember when the film came out; it was 1972 and friends who saw it were shocked.  The film's subject matter and imagery breached taste levels with a level of graphic realism not yet seen in popular culture.   An expanding media reality expertly created vacuums of expectation and filled them with ever more shock content which became an ongoing spectacle and staple.  

I did not see Deliverance. My life then was about Baby World and the intimate delight of little feet and first words, and I wanted little else but an occasional Hawai'ian vacation.


So, now, tough and clear, I read.  From its first sentence, Deliverance is a fine work of compelling descriptive and narrative power. The would-be adventurers survey the map of the wild river they intend to canoe, and it snaps and tenses until they subdue it by staking it with their beer steins.  Was ever there a clearer warning of the debacle to come?

Their macho-survivalist leader, Lewis (Lewis & Clark?)persuades them to make the trip because the river basin will soon be forever hidden by a new dam. He does nothing to prepare as a true woodsman would, and I marvel that his charisma is so persuasive. 

Ed Gentry is a civilized middle-class family man, Lewis' thoughtful and admiring buddy.  He knows himself and his limits and accepts his artistic and marital dimensions. At one point when his wife asks him if she's done something wrong, he tells her no, but "...it partly was, just as it's any woman's fault who represents normalcy". 

Gentry has constrained his sexual rapacity by transforming it into the energy of an observer and voyeur; this strategy permits his fidelity. But his inside isn't tender, it's raw and ruthless, and Gentry will soon need this power to survive.

He should know better than to make the trip but he goes along because Lewis models macho, allowing him a tourist version of an explorer/pioneer past. And the fantasy of recovering his manhood, lost to the tool world: office, city, sports, and monogamy.

I've seldom read nature writing that conveys its power with more clarity and precision than Dickey's. As Gentry is connected to the life of the river, with its "packed greenness", I am too, as memories of singular rafting and canoe trips are summoned for me.

A description of Gentry climbing out of the canyon to save his friends is breathtakingly cinematic. His ascent of the cliff is so intense he describes it as "fucking" the cliff.

They "get away with it"; but they will pay.  Dickey's view is a dark one.  The seekers' encounter with primal forces does nothing to deliver them from a terrible trial. 

There is a certain solemnity in viewing a lake created by a dam upriver. The vast surface of the water presses upon the land it took, doing what led water will do.  It covers and hides, smothers past and possibility. It has the beauty and poignancy of a veterans' cemetery, this river grave.

What would the valley beneath hold this present day, if not water?  What denizens of the air living on valley updrafts escaped drowning?  What shelter did the creatures of the craggy rocks and grassy alluves find?

Are the beneficiaries of this watery largesse deserving? Is that a question one can ever answer?

The blue volume above, the blue volume below, halves of this lost space; the shape of plaint to sere and inattentive souls.

Ed Gentry and his wife, years later, sit evenings on their porch overlooking another dammed lake. The lost river remains in his soul, he says. But he seems to have no scars,  his countenance as calm as the ersatz lake he watches over.

 "The world is easily lost", says Gentry.  He is, after all, a modern man, a private ambiguous hero whose distance from his deed has deepened as the years have passed.  The dam has made a funeral for his acts, but the lake testifies mutely to his soul every day.