This is the Earth's Body (Third Place - Creative Nonfiction)

by Jerred North

 

Though it’s been some hours since I’ve returned from the Geology field trip to Lithia Park earlier this morning, my lungs have still not emptied out the last of the fresh riparian air. While the diaphanous fog still hung low on the blue and green dichromatic mountains, I and my classmates had been parceled into three white vans, which were to tote us from A: Ashland creek, to B: granite quarry, and then C: floodplains. To the tourists in the park who had defied the early sprinkling dew, we must have seemed like a beaded train or a sterile carnival as we surreptitiously braided through the parking lot en route. Although my classmates and I have shared a common appointment for the last eight weeks we couldn’t talk long in the pew-like rows of seats inside the vans without letting slip our ignorance of our fellow’s names. Even still, there was an ebullient vibe of familiarity between us, which I would guess, is because of our having collectively dined on the same course of brain-fodder throughout the term. But also I think because all of us, including the older outlier students, have germinated in American elementary school in which every child has the carrot of a field trip dangled before their eyes. As soon as the van’s doors curtained back – the transformation that took place…if only you could have seen it – it was as if our humors had been swapped out with the scintillating mirth of children on recess. 

On location our professor Jad gesticulated conservatively while his crossed eyes gyrated, one pupil perennially lagging behind the other, between us and the creek, mountains, and valley. He spoke to us in low undulating tones of authority and we absorbed the history of our monolithic specimens with dawning awareness of alien worlds beneath our feet, under our noses. This is earth’s body, a macrocosmic projection of your own. The newest organic skin on top, cropped over in tangled brown and green hair, awns above the deeper folds of tissue. Even the capillary movement of water that splinters into webbed tributaries as it meets the rock with Judo-like fluidity mimics your own sanguine turbidity. We jotted this down furiously on papered clipboards while walking as if we preferred the details more in ink than in nature. More than one of us stubbed a toe. But I admit there is a kind of poetry in raw facts and theories, a lyricism of distilled revelations. Someone sweated for this knowledge so we could gobble it up with our ears and pens, but not I fear, with our hearts. Cleaved from the story of their birth, our over active metabolisms digest the naked data like sugary starch, whooshing it through one end and out the other. Color me curmudgeon but damn it there must be such a thing as ‘too easy.’

In all the recent talk of these unprecedented times and its cresting generation of which I am a hapless member, I notice one similarity between we the I-gen and the ‘others’ before us. We believe, though we know it is not so, that the world has always been how it is now and that it will remain so into the future, like a ship we feel will never come in. I can even see this phenomenon on a personal level churning in the cogs of my own psychology. When the optimism disease throbs feverishly in me I witness it penetrate like the slow deep percolation of rain to my deeper memories and infuse them with my present temperament. It happened today when I smelled the earthy humidity rising from the composting grass, leaves, and mud that lined the steep switchbacks of the quarry trail and was sent spinning back through synaptic wormholes to my time in the Argentinean Andes. That itinerant period of my life flooded into me as a montage of postcards highlighting the pictorially poignant memories: me nestled between shouldering boulders beside Don Del Rosa’s small shanty where the chicks beak for worms in the vegetation alongside the river surging with the recent snow melt: me shielding the sun from my eyes while I hop scotch in flip-flops up the bare mountainside, scanning the many peaks connected with cursive grace for the white horse Paloma and her newborn colt: me at the window of the small crooked mercado with ten pesos in my hand twisting my mouth into the castellano pronunciation for Marlboro and cerveza: me walking that endless serpentine gravel road coiling to higher and higher elevations until the buckbrush thins as if the last patches of hair on a balding head. Like most of my memories, I saw these still-lifes from a third person perspective, as if I were the one snapping the shot, the one telling my Kodak doppelganger ‘cheese’! Yet as I recalled these images, splaying them out with nostalgic iridescence onto my mind’s canvas, soaking in each image for a time until clicking over to the next slide, I felt drawn to reach out to them despite a voice that admonished me: ‘don’t’! You would embrace a lie. An embellished and warm lie. Remember you were so lonely then you sometimes couldn’t sleep, without your friends, family, culture, you were as helpless as hairless Samson – you were anxious for a home, for a glimmer of familiarity in another’s eye, for a friend you could talk to without fear of misunderstanding, ensured in those friendships in which intimate insight cleaves through the bramble of fallacious words. Remember what you would have given for a pillow with a worn groove molded to your head, one saturated with the daydreams and fantasies that leak nightly from your head and pool into the seams? If you remember that, then you will also remember the scars you covered like pornography from the doctors best fit to help you. Yes, the propaganda of individualism was too firmly established on your altar, sacrosanct, metaphysical, that you rejected love’s treatment and marched off alone into the woods to lick your wounds. Bootstraps and all that, or isn’t it so? Yet there those memories were, revitalized under the sun, and I found myself wishing my wormholes weren’t merely synaptic. 

The field trip ended in Ashland’s floodplains. Houses were built there before FEMA began to enforce its zoning laws. Come next flood they will be inundated and torn down. I wonder if they will rebuild? Humans are a tenacious bunch and even when caught in the winds of existential labyrinths we keep on. It may be our sense of humor that saves us; as far as I know we are the only animals who can laugh, although I swear I’ve noticed some dogs grinning when the weather is just right. Monkeys, too, I’m told, can split their sides when the jokester of their herd is on a role. So often I feel my lips tugging up into the seeded shape of a watermelon slice when confronted with pain, and I often wonder if in a world without a macabre blemish if we would need the liquor of laughter at all. This field trip was the last our professor would teach; he was forced out of the ivory tower because the University’s malnourished wallet couldn’t keep him. After he said his last formal words we clapped but I wonder why instead we didn’t laugh.

Before leaving, I squinted my eyes at the greenery for a final impressionistic soak in: white alder, aspen, mahogany, birch, both the bog and water kind, green briar, and golden currant blended together under a halo of pollen. This cacophony of color is the scab over a troubled paleoseismic history. I need only point to the barren tongue shaped grooves carved into the granite slopes where landslides have lacerated the land’s body or the stretch marks in the soil where creeping faults have contorted the ground and you will see how green has since grown to cover these wounds. This is earth’s body, a macrocosm of my own. 

I too once suffered a personal landslide of sorts although I cannot point to its head, that is, the precise moment the surge began. Whether it happened while I slept or in the middle of the day, I honestly don’t know. But after an eon of erosion and foreshocks, the slide had been inevitable. It took only the mainshock of adolescence, the unsettling vision of worlds orbiting my own, to shake the jumble of sedimentary deposits, gospels, palisades, pennies, and superpowers, down in a cascading sluicy charge. Sometime after the dust drifted off into the still wavering air I caught my first sight of the long gash that remained. For years this spot was so sensitive the slightest adjustment would congeal the air in my chest. These pains, as you know, were not volitional. Like poor Prometheus who was chained to his rock and forced to daily suffer the beak of a voracious eagle at his liver, I also was wed to a moratorium of stone. But Prometheus’s troubles are eternal and the bird that, for a time, returned each night to pick open my own closing wound eventually grew bored or died and I healed.