Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 6 Number 3, December 2005

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NATES

by

Per Brask

It was one of those blasted forty-below January days and though the bus's heater was on high, Nate still felt bone cold inside his parka even twenty minutes into his ride down to his office.  He'd been reading over and over, he now realized, the same verse of Ezekiel since he'd risked taking off his gloves and opening his King James, which he'd promised himself, though not at all religious, that he would read from cover to cover because, well, it was a major achievement in English literature.

"And I looked, and, behold a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire unfolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst as the colour of amber, out of the midst of fire." When he yet again came to the end of that verse he felt, no he knew himself to be in the wrong place.  Not merely on the wrong bus, but entirely in the wrong landscape, the wrong temperature.  Of course, he did know that the bus was hurtling him towards his office at the university to meet with one of his more promising Ph.D. students, to be followed by a graduate seminar on Bill Gaston's Sointula. "and every one had four wings." His suit and tie constricted him, his hair felt too short.  He knew himself to be know as "The Desert Poet," as much as he knew that he had no business going to teach any kind of seminar.  He had the kind of thirst only a huge shot of Jim Beam could quench and his feet screamed for snake skin boots.

Nate began shifting, scratching his bum against the seat and as he looked out the window, he didn't see exactly, but he had a vision of his trailer sitting up against a rock face in the Mojave Desert just outside Twentynine Palms, CA.  His dog was lying in the early morning sun and he himself, with bushy beard, fifty pounds heavier, in T-shirt, dirty jeans and snake skin boots, sat writing in a scribbler in the shade of the rock at a table made from at turned-over wooden cable thingy with an umbrella stuck in its centre.  There was a bottle of Jim Beam in front of him  and a pot of last night's macaroni and cheese drying up next to the bottle.  He'd been sitting there a long time.  He was the kind of man Nate felt very uncomfortable around, rough and quick-witted. Nate knew that the poet was writing a poem beginning, "walking into Murray Canyon today/ was like entering creation's workshop," The poet had a drink that Nate felt go down.  Coughed.  Then he got up and whistled to the dog who came, tail wagging, ready for the daily hike in Joshua Tree, followed him over to the truck and jumped into the back.

He love hiking in the sand dunes of the Pinto Basin.  It was hard to walk there and he began perspiring quickly.  He enjoyed that, like he enjoyed the sun turning his skin into leather.  The dog knew to stay by his side.  From time to time she sniffed at the hem of his jeans or nudged his right hand.  He bent down, not breaking his stride, patted her between her upright ears, "Good girl."   "And I looked and behold, in the firmament that was above the
head of the cherubims there appeared above them as it were a sapphire stone, as the appearance of the likeness of a throne." He didn't know why that verse suddenly showed up in his mind. But he recognized it as being from Ezekiel because months ago he'd given himself the task of reading the King James from cover to cover.  As he looked up, though, he was startled by the coincidence at a gleaming light emanating (sure, throne-like was a possible description) from a creosote bush near the top of the dune on his left.  He approached it. The light grew sharper and more colourful.  His dog was wagging her tail.  But as he got up close, he saw that it was a piece of tinfoil caught in the inner web of branches.  He reached down to remove it when saw, through the light, as it were, this man sitting in a small classroom with seven or eight young women and two young men, discussing a novel he'd never heard of before but he somehow knew was about a couple of quirky characters and their journey by stolen kayak and by bus from Victory on Vancouver Island to a tiny place called Sointula on Malcolm Island.  Outside the classroom everything, absolutely everything was covered in snow, snow that glistened like a rainbow when looked at through the patch of ice on one of the windows.  The man looked like him, albeit a good deal lighter (in both meanings of the word) with much shorter hair and no beard.  Still, the closer a look he got of him he knew that this man was no trimmer look-alike.  It was indeed himself in some deep freeze world. The longer he stared, he began to know things about this man. He was a contented man, living a good life - not prosperous but certainly privileged.  His passion was Canadian Literature, though it had been Pope, his wife Deborah whom he'd know since they were both sophomores at USC, their three children and four grandchildren.  This man lived an orderly, neat life spiced by holidays abroad and a conference or two a year.  His scholarship was respected and the reason he lived in this cold city was only that it was Deborah's hometown and she'd been tight with her folks.  This was his one irritation - he simply couldn't abide the cold.  He'd accepted that this was where he lived his life, though he did often during cold snaps, such as today's, feel quite out of place.

The man Nate was communing with was, of course, the man he would have been if he'd taken up Prof. Kirshoff's offer to become his last Ph.D. student thirty years ago.  He had wrestled with that decision for weeks.  He'd loved the academic study of literature back then, but he'd just published his first small book of poetry and he really wanted to pursue that path and he desperately did not want to become an academic poet.  In the end he'd said no thanks.  Prof. K. was deeply disappointed, saying all sorts of nice things about how his promise as a scholar was now lost - and the tragedy of that, as far as Prof. K. was concerned.  Deborah left him just a few months later.  She wasn't interested in travelling the life of partner to a poor poet.  Oh, well.

He called on his dog that was busy rooting around in a rabbit hole and their continued their hike. Life's been good, he thought.  I have no regrets.  And neither, it seemed, did northern Nate apart from the deep freeze.