MOON STORY

THIS IS NOT AN ECLIPSE STORY.

I grew up in Houston in the 1950s, ’60s, and early ’70s, so yeah, the moon shot was a pretty big deal. One of the Apollo astronauts was from nearby La Grange, where my mother grew up—not a moonwalker, but one of the first ones to get blasted away from this sweet blue planet, out into the unknown darkness, to the moon and around and then back, and returning to tell about it.

My own orbit from those days is widening, casting further and farther toward what someday I suppose will be the territory of old age—outer darkness, with only the cold pinpricks of stars for company, while far below and closer to the warm center run and laugh and play the living, almost scurrying, though also with a leisure that approaches nonchalance, even as intergalactic static crackles and bounces off the dry skin of an old outlander like pellets of stinging hail dimpling the fragile heat shield of a spacecraft. Look how small they are all becoming below, the young, as one’s orbit widens, with the distance between one year and the next becoming smaller, like the growth rings of an old tree bunching up out at the perimeter, too close together now to even count.

From those childhood days, I remember the cool NASA ball caps. I had one as recently as last year, with its whirling proton-loop, atomic orbit emblem—until my pup, a French Brittany with the decidedly un-French name of Otis—chewed it to blue and white shards.

(From what oil well first came the plastic that made the hatband? I mean, what farmer’s field? What year, and where was I, and what was I doing when that black-green oil first rushed up the borehole? And what of the days before any of us existed? What dinosaur lay down its sleepy head in the Paleozoic swamp and slept forever, being blanketed then with mud and leaves and the slowly warming rising waters, dissolving to no longer be a dinosaur but instead a soup of carbon and hydrogen, baking and sliding away, up one fault and down another, traveling beneath the surface as it had once in its brief assembly traveled above the surface; ascending, finally, to an anticline with an impermeable cap, like the dome of a cathedral, and pausing there, trapped for eons, and reassembling into oil, before the drill bit—1955? 1958? 1963?—pierced the crypt, released the oil, sent it to the plastics factory, where the hat I wore as a child was birthed?)

Farther. The living are specks. As one ages, time compresses. We perceived, believed, fairly early—in our midtwenties or thirties—that time is circular, like the four seasons, or what used to be the four seasons, before we drilled too many holes in the earth. (It is not the moon that is made of Swiss cheese, but our own sweet earth. There are experimental technologies that can convert carbon dioxide into a chalky solid, and it’s theorized we could use this solid—in paste form—to fill in every well we ever drilled: burying the carbon we burned and used, for a while.)

My own belief is that the genie is out of the bottle; it’s hard even in the fiction of science fiction to imagine filling every old borehole, sucking CO2 out of the sky and putting it back in the ground it came from, like putty or cement, repairing or patching a fractured, shifting, quaking substructure with the brittle paste of CO2 chalk.

And yet I’d like to believe. Where I live now, in northwest Montana, is the site of the world’s largest asbestos mine. The ore there contains a certain kind of asbestos, tremolite, the mineralization of which results in its fibers being extraordinarily tiny. Seen under the microscope, they resemble quilled arrows with barbed arrowheads; they lodge in the lungs and stomach lining and then work their way inward, a billion microscopic darts fired by unseen archers. The word Yaak is Kootenai for arrow, for the way the Yaak River charges down out of the mountains and into the curved bow of the Kootenai River, largest tributary to the Columbia. There used to be porcupines up here but they have vanished in only the last fifteen to twenty years. My dogs, especially Point, were always getting into them; the barbed quills made it hard to pull them from the dogs, resulting always in much blood and tissue trauma as I wrenched them free. Indigenous folklore refers to porcupines as the Old People of the mountains, and prophesies that when porcupines disappear from a landscape, it means the landscape is in deep illness.

Time may indeed be circular, for the centripetal pull of it out here on the farther perimeters is starting to feel pretty enormous. What if we could suck all the asbestos fibers out of the air around the town of Libby and convert it, like that CO2, to a solid form, able then to be buried deep? Future generations might know this valley, the Treasure Valley, for its beauty without the bittersweetness of such scourge, such price, awaiting all who breathe.

I meant to be writing about the moon but feel compelled to say a few words about Point. He was the sentinel case of mesothelioma in a pet in Lincoln County. Mesothelioma hits hard and quick; you have six weeks, max. It’s best to have one’s affairs in order. When it hit him, I drained the pinkish cancer-fluid from his stomach with a syringe each night before we went hunting each next day. God, he died hard, swelling like a pumpkin every day, but still tottering on, hunting even on his last day of life, until I realized I was torturing us both and had to let him go, had to release him to that which was pulling at him so hard.

In high school, Einstein’s elegant E = mc² was easily memorized, but the assumption of constancy seems an assumption that gets us in trouble in all other matters. Maybe he meant constancy in the moment, the split second in which the equation was applied, but for a long time the string theory people (not to be confused with the performance artists, the Blue Man Group) have been saying nothing we see is a constant, nor can we, nor they, be 100 percent sure anything is real, instead calling all matter, all things, an extreme likelihood of quivering assemblages always in motion, assemblages of smaller things arranged to look like, feel like, etc., the thing that we in turn (also a swirling arrangement of matter at any point in time) are feeling, touching, smelling, hearing, tasting, identify as real.

(I often think too that if Einstein, instead of labeling space as being the thing relative to time, had referred to it as place, we’d all have done better in school. Place, not space. A positive, tactile thing, mortal. Place: the back 40, the Panhandle, Indian territory, Madagascar, what-have-you—rather than an invisible thing, space, as in outer space, and the association of nothingness. A little frozen rock dust, ice crystals at the end of comets. A smear of yellow in all-else blackness, all-else emptiness.)

As our landscape, our place or space, becomes more fragmented and poisoned, burned, eroded, flooded, and paved over, and as our relationship with time also explodes—all of us moving faster and faster, dervishes until we can whirl no more, and must lie down upon that broken landscape, the broken space across which our churning altered version of time howls—well, what happens next? Does even our own certainty, or the likelihood of us, begin to doubt us, until one by one, we each and all begin to vanish, as if to the Rapture?

Or what if we are eradicating—squandering, even—the possibility for and of a rapture, and an afterlife? For if we destroy the land and wound mortally the concept of time-here-below, does not the concept of or likelihood of beyond-time also go down with that sinking ship?

No ideas but in things, wrote William Carlos Williams, less than a generation after Einstein, as if not so much resisting but instead modifying his equation. Williams’s dictum resounds more with the Texan in me, and the boy I was at ten who, every time my mother drove me across town to the Houston Museum of Natural History, ran straight to the exhibit of moon rocks. In my memory, I recall there being a small handful on a plain white surface, nondescript in every way. The geologist I would one day become might describe them as appearing clastic, dry, friable, with an apparent low level of compaction—mafic, brecciated igneous—possibly alkaline? They looked almost chalky, like the pale carbonates of the Hill Country, though even as a child I noted the obvious lack of fossils. But weren’t those tiny vesicles testament to gases, suggesting the possibility of a once-upon-a-time oxygen component? And speaking of air—how did the astronauts do that? How could they carry that much air with them, or that much water?

What I remember most, beyond the moon rocks’ extraordinarily dull dirt color, was my desire to touch them, and my still dogged if now slightly diminished belief that because they were different, rare, hard-gotten, other, they possessed power. They had to be treasure.

And if so, why were they displayed so casually—a typed index card stating MOON ROCKS? There was certainly no need for source or dateline.

Surely they contained such power—radioactive or otherwise—that mere three-eighths-inch plexiglass could not contain them. I hovered; paced, stalked round and round the small handful of squarish buff-colored stones. Was it a joke? Were the sapphires, moon diamonds, amethyst, and beryllium in vaults somewhere else while the astronauts pranked us with these chunks of road rubble they’d picked up on their way home from the airport?

I drifted away. The other things—the living—pulled me. The aquariums, brilliant with tropical fish; the huge-eyed little caiman sunning beneath its heat lamp. No one had a clue then what global warming was. It was upon us but we could not see it. We could see it but we did not notice it. The baby snapping turtle, black as tar, as elegant underwater as a ballet dancer, his long Stegosaurus tail trailing, ruddering, as his oversized feet, with claws like a grizzly’s, waved in slow motion. His red eyes were studded with an asterisk for each pupil, leading one to suppose he perceived a different world than the one I beheld; and which of us was to argue the other’s reality?

The rocks were an embarrassment. The geologist I would become wished the astronauts had stayed longer, dug deeper, searched farther. Climbed a mountain. Gone around to the back side. To have not returned until they found something better.

The moon. I believed then and guess I still do that the landing really happened. Though I do sometimes wonder, why has no one gone back?

I know NASA wasn’t all about the moon—that one little speck of light out there in so much darkness—but it’s interesting to me that I grew up in a culture where often the dominant association with any mention of the moon was to “shoot” it, to launch missiles or rockets at it. At the other end of the spectrum, there was plenty of lame poetry about the moon and stars, dewy meadows and so forth.

And yet, other times, it could be so great. The moon in literature.

Walker Percy, from The Moviegoer:

“The train has stopped and our car stands high in the air, squarely above a city street. The nearly full moon swims through streaming ragtags of cloud and sheds a brilliant light on the Capitol dome and the spanking new glass-and-steel office buildings and the empty street with its glittering streetcar track. Not a soul is in sight. Far away, beyond the wings of the Capitol building stretch the dark tree-covered hills and the twinkling lights of the town. By some trick of moonlight the city seems white as snow and never-tenanted; it sleeps away on its hilltop like the holy city of Zion.”

Amy Hempel:

“‘Tell me things I won’t mind forgetting,’ she said. ‘Make it useless stuff or skip it.’

“I began. I told her insects fly through rain, missing every drop, never getting wet. I told her no one in America owned a tape recorder before Bing Crosby did. I told her the shape of the moon is like a banana—you see it looking full, you’re seeing it end-on.’”

The poet Jim Harrison, in “Sketch For A Job-Application Blank”:

“My left eye is blind and jogs like

a milky sparrow in its socket . . .

. . . I strain for a lunar arrogance . . . .

Light macerates

the lamp infects

warmth, more warmth, I cry.”

And in “Returning At Night”:

“. . . in the root cellar

the potato sprouts

creeping through the door

glisten white and tubular

in the third phase

of the moon.”

Patty Griffin does the best cover of “Moon River.” Nanci Griffith’s “Once in a Very Blue Moon” is very fine, as is (duh) Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising” (I’m told two of the Fogerty brothers lived in the Yaak Valley when they were younger; how I wish to believe that the lyrics to “Run Through the Jungle” were informed by that wild if unprotected landscape.) Oh, yeah—like I’m gonna forget—Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon,” also covered admirably by the Shook Twins.

It was Emmylou Harris, long ago, whose Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town first suggested to me that in art, a moon need not always be perfectly round to be noticed or appreciated.

My dad—a geophysicist and a hunter—and my mother, a schoolteacher, before I was born—saw to it I had a taste for nature, not just in the museums, but in the woods. We would go deer hunting every fall up in the Hill Country, at a place we called the deer pasture. A wild, feral land of incredible stargazing. Gillespie County. One night when my cousin Randy and I were outside gathering firewood, a meteor tore through the curtain of black sky like a rock thrown through the thinnest pane of creek ice. We looked up and saw it go sizzling past, scorching and sparking, then nothing but gray smoke with the stench of burned stone. Its velocity might have carried it another five or ten miles past us. Still, I look for that stone yearly, and like to imagine I might yet come across it and will, when I do, somehow recognize it when I see it. That it will be so much superior to the moon rocks of my youth.

My youngest brother, BJ, and I were dinking around at the deer pasture one summer when I decided to pursue a goal that had long intrigued me: to climb nearby X Mountain, even thought it was on someone else’s property. In Texas, the feudal notion of private property, the sanctity of personal territory and ownership, is deeply entrenched, ridiculous as it might seem from a biological perspective. The gridwork of fenceposts and barbed-wire lattices the entire state as if dicing it as if into so many croutons. Every strand holds tufts of hair or fur or feathers from all the other passers-through but our own kind.

I had been living in Montana long enough by that point to have become more than comfortable with the concept of the commons.

A little about X Mountain: a little about the rumpled Hill Country, the ragged land updip from the Balcones Escarpment. Geology’s cuts and cleavings are almost always beautiful, made slowly more sinuous by time and wandering like a beach’s strandline of before and after. We rip with saws, we bulldoze straight lines through the forest, we dig trenches for pipelines, our railroad lines and interstates fire through the forest and across the prairies and even beneath the seas like arrows fired or like missiles disgorged from silos tilted onto their sides, so that they now face us and only us directly, rather than pointed with a trajectory toward Siberia, the Irkutsk, Iceland, Moscow. Nature is rarely if ever linear, or even geometric.

I digress. I’ve exceeded the orbital pull of the subject. The Texas Hill Country contains some of the oldest stone in the world that can be found at the surface—Cambrian sandstone, what was once the floor of the new-made world, the dawn of all life, simple one- and then multi-celled organisms spinning in the sunlit seas, being drawn forward and backward with the tide—organisms so tiny they can’t even be seen in the stone in which they now exist forever—though I like to think sometimes that when I’m building a stone wall or flagstone driveway with those rocks, and I drop one, releasing a wisp of arid dust, what I see and smell in that plume is the ground-up ephemera of what life was like a billion years ago: the first scent of us and our kind approaching that long, slow on-ramp.

It is a pleasing smell, and while it arouses no memories in me other than the here and now—hot summer days working in the rock fields with my family, making slow order out of disorder, the disassembled and broken becoming beautiful and whole once more, scent of bluebonnets with solitary bumblebees feasting on their nectar, and grasshoppers rattle-clacking away with wings spread, gliding, the most primitive of flying machines, and yet the most enduring—Ah, shit. Where was I? Contact.

The deer pasture where we hunt also possesses some of the world’s oldest granite—rock that’s younger than the Cambrian sandstone it pierced from below with its once-upon-a-time tongues of flame, the mineral-rich magma surging upward along any vertical fissure it could find, any thinness or weakness in the overlying Cambrian strata—and, where there was no weakness, creating one: the thing which had never seen sunlight before, the minerals that have existed in the great furnaces near earth’s dense center demanding their time in the sun.

Some made it out and cooled rapidly; others made it almost all the way out, but not quite—though cooling now, far from the maddening heat and resting just beneath the surface, the minerals in that magma had all the time in the world to rearrange themselves according to their polarities and chemical charges and valences, spinning and rotating as if governed by magnets or twin poles, their earth-center miles below, and the strange moon-rock in the sky, which was maybe related to them or maybe not: and it was in this slow cooling, just beneath the surface, that great beauty was achieved. The crystals began adhering to one another, blossoming into fantastic spires and cathedrals, with each elemental mineral, and each assemblage of elements, having all the time in the world to form and grow. These are the crystals—the slow crystals—I wanted to believe comprised the heart and soul, the inner being, of the moon. Dig deeper.

What is the sound of the psychic stall horn, the command to point the nose back down now or be lost forever, when one lives so far from humanity in a place like the Yaak Valley, talking only to one’s dogs and even then not much, using hand signals—drifting, keeping the crazed world, the lunatic world, at arm’s distance, or beyond? It’s a hermit existence that fits some of us better than others. It’s the way some are meant to be. Moon-like, in that regard, I guess you’d have to say. “We loved the earth but could not stay”—Wallace Stevens.

At the deer pasture, BJ and I prepared to climb over the barbed-wire fence and set out toward the previously mythic X Mountain. Because it was on the other side of fences, it seemed far away. In reality, it was ludicrously close; we were there in a blink.

But before we got there—in that first fence crossing—I snagged my leg on the taut and newly strung barbed wire.

The difference between old rusted barbed wire and the moon-bright silver knife-blade of the taut unblemished product, so ratcheted to its full tensile stretch that the wind passing over it causes it to hum a faint dog-whistle keen—is like the difference between, I don’t know, cooked and uncooked spaghetti.

I stood on the firm lowermost strand and lifted my other foot toward the top strand, which is what one can do when they’re stretched that tight. But even then, there’s usually a little stretch or sag beneath one’s full weight. I was expecting it, and when there wasn’t, I wobbled for a moment, and in so doing raked my calf across one of the fence’s twisted teeth, the tip of a single barb sharper than the point of a knife.

It was the kind of wound that cuts so cleanly there is no pain, only the sudden tickle of blood’s wetness on skin. It was not cool enough for the blood to steam but it went from warm to cold quickly as it trickled down my leg and into my sock. In John Prine’s great song, “Lake Marie,” he pauses in the song to query the listener, “You know what blood looks like in a black-and-white video? Shadows! That’s what it looks like. Shadows.”

I’d never quite understood the leap in allusion there, but looking at my leg in that hyperbrilliant silver-blue light, I was reminded immediately of the song—the blood had the gleaming quality to it of the scorch of old-time flashbulbs. And it was definitely the darkest thing in that mercuric, floodlit world: the only dark thing, I realized, which might have been what Prine was seeing and describing.

The tear—the slice, slash, gash—was right in the balled-up meat of the calf muscle. That one’s gonna leave a scar, I thought—who needs tattoos?—and as we proceeded on toward the hill, it grew smaller the closer we got—the mythic mesa we had seen all our lives but never visited, due to the vagaries of private property—land the colonists took from Mexico, who had taken it, if in name only, from the Comanches, who may or may not have taken it from someone before them—the Athabaskans?

There were shadows now. We passed through a grove of small oaks, the shadows as dark as the trunks of the trees themselves, and I left a smear of blood on blades of grass and on the silver-fire leaves of agarita and shin oak.

We started up the admittedly steep slope, but with every step, the mountain before us shrank until it could not even really be called a hill. It was a flat-topped bump—a little neck of caliche, limestone, remnant of older sea times, compressed to chalk; not as ancient as sat atop, and with many of its onetime contemporary chalk-strata eroded, ghost-whispered tumbling downstream back toward the new ocean, the Gulf.

We stood on it, looked out. I felt like a child. I was, what, maybe forty? Perhaps not even.

The moonlight bathed us as we strolled around the hill’s flat top and through its scrubby wind-blasted juniper. I know this is a wretched cliché, moonlight bathing, but it’s true, it poured down and over us as if molten silver. Sometimes a cliché is a cliché for a reason. It was brighter than most daylight, yet there was no danger of moonburn.

The reversal in scale—the grand becoming almost minute—made me dizzy, as did the moonlight itself. Back when photographs were taken with cameras, not phones, and you took the film to a print shop for developing, you had to look at the strip of negatives to decide which reprints you wanted, if any, from those sepia strips. Dark became ghostly bright, and light became unseeable dark, and I felt that I was getting a glimpse of the way the world really was, if not to me, then to someone—someone else’s reality—and whether that was raccoon or scorpion, bumblebee or night-blooming cereus, hummingbird or swan, I could not say, only that we were in it.

The top of this great mountain—visible from thirty miles away—was not much larger than some of the shoulder-to-shoulder suburban lawns where I had grown up in middle-class Houston. It was about the size of a burger joint’s gravel parking lot.

And yet: it was so level, in a land where nothing else was. We walked around on top, feeling much closer to the moon now—hundreds of miles closer, rather than a hundred feet—a jackrabbit, pale as bone, looking like a snowshoe hare in winter, or the white rabbit in a magic trick, leaped from hiding and dashed away—and at the southern end of the mesa, just as I was about to turn around and go back to the other end, I noticed something I might not have seen in daylight: smooth white round river stones, atypical for that country, and spaced evenly in an arc.

They were grown over with grass and lichens, but the moonlight brought them out in bony relief. Now I could see more of them, each no larger than a skull, but enough of them, I realized, to form a circle. The circle was grown over with grass and low juniper. But it was by God a real teepee ring, which made sense to me, though I’d never seen one around here, only in Montana.

What was a hundred or a hundred and twenty-five years to a stone, or even the placement of a stone?

I didn’t really mind being up there, uninvited by the absentee landowner, who simply had his cattle grazing below, but I was a little rattled by having stumbled into a ceremonial spot uninvited. It had long been unused, of course, but still: the incredible light made me feel superilluminated in a way I did not want to be, and I apologized for barging in, and we made our way back down, with my leg still painting bright red the low vegetation through which we passed. Indian paintbrush, it’s called, Castilleja indivisa; one of the perhaps hundred thousand or so microaggressions with which we bruise our way through the world daily.

We made our way down the steep slope following a trail worn not by humans but by the hooves of deer—too steep for cattle, which was likely why the ring was still intact—and walked back toward the glimmering silver fence.

We had not gone far at all when we encountered an immense white-tailed buck, his velveted antlers glowing, as if he carried above him a silver nest of fire.

Big bucks like that are always nocturnal. This one looked uncomfortable, however—as if he were being called upon to swim through that silver light. It was so strange and thick it seemed like a chunk of light, elemental, like a mineral, rather than reflected waves of light. After watching us for a few seconds, the buck turned and ran and vaulted high over the fence, arching like a rainbow, with not even the tip of a hoof touching the top strand.

He landed lightly and continued on into the thick juniper beyond, bobbing like a spark: the living, taking refuge in the living.

We approached the same illuminated fence, touched it first, as if it might be hot, and then climbed carefully over it; there could be no squeezing through or under it. Easier perhaps for a fat man to get through the eye of a needle.

The Old Ones who had sat up on that little hill—who were they, how long had they sat there, what thoughts had they considered? Where were they now, and will each of us one day become just as invisible? It seemed impossible, yet I knew it was so. Still, it seemed to me that if one lived, burned brightly enough, one might exist always as a kind of echo, or shadow: in the way that, in beholding the mirror of the moon, we are seeing an echo of the sunlight that was cast many years ago—light-years—and which, reflected, falls down upon us, the echo of an echo, encasing us as if in amber.

A suspect theorem, and yet, what is the downside in believing it, or even hoping?

It was hard to imagine, however, there could be much downside in the just enduring, in the hanging on—the extension or attenuation of a once-bright burning by echo or reflection. Come what may when darkness falls, I find it difficult to believe we are not sometimes already in some sort of betranced afterlife, walking around on petrified ocean floors that are a billion years old, following caliche roads white as summer clouds, all of us bathed—sometimes—in silver.

It seems important to live as if this is all there is, and if something remains or carries forward for a while after we dive back down into the soil, then so be it. But now! On a good day—on the best days—who would want anything more?

Much is made of the moon’s pull on tides, and of the way it scrambles our soft brains, pulls them this way and that. D. H. Lawrence might believe such tugging reveals who we really are—the raw soup of us still so newly emerged in the world that, evolutionarily speaking, we are but jellyfish, still being shaped, molded, rolled around; an experiment, a farther braiding off the ancient tree of all other life. Not the trunk, by any means.

Lawrence wrote:

“Blood knowledge . . . Oh, what a catastrophe for man when he cut himself off from the rhythm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. What a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magical connection of the solstice and equinox. This is what is wrong with us. We are bleeding at the roots.”

He announced also, more famously:

“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

Also this: Cormac McCarthy, from his novel, No Country for Old Men:

“It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had his blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon.”

As with the previous pondering, about the half-life of any echo of our physical selves remaining after we’ve moved on (fill in the blank: Elysian fields, greener pastures, better things, just rewards), I don’t presume to wax about what comes next, not even tomorrow.

As one of the last or next to last generations before the heavily cloned or the lightly modified begin to walk among us, it can often seem as much like game over for Homo sapiens as it must have, at some point, for Neanderthals, or Cro-Magnon. That the fire in the horn is flickering.

Maybe there is a further and farther realm out there, to which we are all headed, at which some of us are reserving a booking in the penthouse suite while others are destined, this go-round at least, for the mansion’s basement. I think my own aspirations in this regard might be to be the groundskeeper, outside as much as possible. I’m remembering now the end of Jim Harrison’s 1978 novella, Legends of the Fall:

“If you are up near Choteau and drive down Ramshorn Road by the ranch, now owned by Alfred’s son by his second marriage, you won’t get permission to enter. It’s a modern efficient operation, but back there in the canyon there are graves that mean something to a few people left on earth: Samuel, Two, Susannah and a little apart Ludlow buried between his true friends, One Stab and Isabel; and a small distance away Decker and Pet. Always alone, apart, somehow solitary, Tristan is buried up in Alberta.”

We are not the only ones who are directed this way and that by the swing and pull of neap and full, by the release of first quarter and third quarter, attentive and perhaps addicted to the solace of distance and, less frequently but with greater intensity, to the intimacy and passion of proximity. On full moons, zooplankton rise to the surface as if in the rapture; oysters spread wider their limestone lips; deer, bedded down, rise as if in a trance no matter the hour of day or night when the moon (which is always full, we must remember) is either directly overhead or, curiously, on the other side of this small earth, directly underfoot.

Preceding the full solar eclipse of 2018, there was a frenzy of billboards throughout the West, with every lucky farmer whose land fell beneath the dashed line of the eclipse’s path across the country—not from east to west, in the style of Manifest Destiny, but reversing the curse, many hoped, from west to east. It’s gone now, as forgotten as KC and the Sunshine Band, a one-hit wonder that people of a certain age will remember briefly. The arc fell on the just and the unjust, on the rich and the poor alike. Jackson Hole, south Bozeman; Gooding, Idaho. At the perimeters, on overgrazed pastures of dirt, looking like something from Steinbeck’s America, wooden towers were erected to serve as billboards a year, even eighteen months in advance, advertising parking spots and viewing locations. Such was their anticipation that the hand-painted sheets of plywood became sun-faded long before the event, giving the appearance that the eclipse had come and gone many years previous; or that the eclipse itself had aged the signs, delaminated and dilapidated now after having dared profit from such a holy phenomenon. The red spray paint—PARKING, $5.00—blurring now, wavering like old bloodstains. As the months melted and we were all pulled closer to the day of reckoning, a sweet kind of unification seemed to be happening: the mass of us becoming increasingly aware of the time, date, location—the countdown—with our minds adjusting like crystals in cooling magma, or iron filings attentive to the movement of a powerful magnet, aligning in parallel and then converging from all directions to behold the approaching singularity.

As will be understood by now, bearing a few pagan tendencies if not quite a willingness to commit fully to the requisite ceremonies and customs of such a sect, I was torn between wanting to take off work and hie down toward the Bitterroot or Gallatin country—only about eight hours, each way (by car; on foot, days, even weeks)—and wanting to behold the phenomenon in my own home valley, reduced or partial though the show would be.

I wanted to feel what my valley felt: wanted to take note of the wind, or breeze—if there was any shift in current, in direction, when the partial darkness fell, as is reported in the Bible for such events, “over the land.” I wanted to take note of any possible skip or stutter in the pull of gravity beneath my feet, in my home; wanted to hear if the calls of ravens became different in that darkened hour, and whether the hermit and varied thrushes—crepuscular singers, lovers of the gloom and gloaming—began to sing.

I also—like almost everyone, I think—did not want to experience it alone. As if only by witnessing it with another of our kind could it be said to be certain, or 99.9999 percent certain.

For weeks and months beforehand, community service organizations—libraries, notably, and other leftist do-gooders—had been passing out free solar eclipse sunglasses, distributing them with the same fervor with which school nurses gave children sugar cubes infused with a dose of polio vaccine back in the 1960s. Imagining—fearing—an entire population blinded simultaneously by a single skyward glance, accidental or otherwise, or turned into pillars of salt, or maybe both at the same time, for having dared gaze upon that which they had been warned not to behold directly.

Having procrastinated until the day before, I called around only to discover all supplies had run out weeks earlier. The next best thing, I imagined, might be a welder’s helmet, so I drove down to town, to the hardware store, arriving an hour before closing. There was one helmet left, but it was so expensive! I wanted the free green plastic eyeshades that were given out at the optometrist’s offices of my youth. To pay for protecting one’s vision? It seemed somehow un-American.

Inspired by necessity, however, I found replacement glass sheets for welder’s masks. The internet had actually said that welder’s masks were not sufficient—I found this difficult to believe—but to be safe, I bought three sheets, each a little smaller than an index card. And when I peered through them, it was hard to see anything. I guessed that was why welders didn’t use three at a time.

The day of, I drove down valley to the office of the conservation nonprofit I work with. I’d read it was also safer to watch the eclipse reflected in a body of water, rather than staring birdlike directly at the change, so I found a child’s blue plastic swimming pool out back and filled it with water.

The staff and I went out into the backyard to wait. There was no morning traffic on the road that runs past our office. We stared at the pool as if awaiting the emergence of the Loch Ness monster; glanced sidelong now and again, up at the same old sun up in the same old sky. Same old birdsong. The in-between time, in the north country: summer winding down, autumn not yet arrived. Torpor.

It came slowly. There was a blurring, a wavering that was, to be honest, a little unsettling: more so, I think, than the coming shadow. To have seen a thing one way all one’s life, for sixty years, then to see it, the previously immutable, waver and sprawl a bit—well, what if everything else contained such waver, such wobble?

As if our very existence—once loosened—could then unravel further, back down into the nothing from which we arose.

The edges shimmered in the way that waves of heat rise from highway pavement in deep summer. Holy shit, I remember thinking, it’s happening, and on its own time.

I liked that we all had to be attentive, sitting like schoolchildren, waiting for the teacher to enter the room.

I liked that our office is in an old schoolhouse, back in the woods. A fairy tale.

It didn’t get so dark so much as fuzzy. There appeared to be a kind of static in the sky, in the air—the visual equivalent of the itchiness or scratchiness of a wool jacket, as if there were a coarser weave of pixels registering on our hungry brains. We glanced again and again up at the sun—once, I saw the black silhouette of a witch on a broom riding the crescent black moon across the face of the sun, from west to east—but the hive mind was right once again: the image was much more distinct when viewed in the children’s bathing pool, and in that reflection, the witch disappeared.

I heard a single car approaching. I saw it was the mail lady, in her white jeep, with her silent flashing wide-load strobe light atop—and I got up and walked out to the mailbox to ask if she wanted to come look into the pool, as if into a wishing well. It was hard for me not to think of Sally Swanger’s dark water well in the novel and then movie Cold Mountain, where Nicole Kidman, playing Ada Monroe, stares down into its depths and, seeing a swarm of crows, faints. It takes every bit of discipline for me not to tell you what happens subsequently, but it’s dark. It’s only for your reading and viewing pleasure that I refrain.

The postal lady, amazingly, had not heard about the eclipse. Our valley is surrounded by high mountain walls with relatively little contact to the world beyond those walls.

“Sure,” she said. She turned her jeep off and walked with me to the backyard. I can imagine driving the same route decade after decade can get a little numbing, even though the scenery is amazing. Always driving, never walking. A hundred mailboxes in a 150-mile round trip, six days a week. I handed her the magic panes of dark green glass, told her not to look up without them. Told her to look into the pool first, to prepare herself for what she would see above her.

The day was not exceptionally dark, not the pitch-blackness I had envisioned. Instead, its dominant characteristic was stillness—the stillness of hesitation. As if not only the humans were betranced, but everything with a heart that beat or a spirit within, an essence, that pulsed and throbbed.

The mail lady held the loose little strips of welder’s facemask glass carefully—daintily—her smoker’s stained fingertips suddenly elegant, with pinkies lifted, all delicate.

(Back home, I would put the green glass strips in the kitchen drawer, where I knew they would sift to the bottom, never to be seen or used again. I was only mildly tempted to return them for a refund, and wondered briefly at their provenance—from what beach or ocean floor or mountaintop had the sand been dredged—did it require a special grade of sand grain?—and had an extraordinary furnace of heat been required to process the silica, in order to assist it in blocking, rejecting, one of the most natural and penetrating things in the world, waves of light traveling in a straight line, relentless and pure, falling—again—on the just and the unjust, with equal democratic vigor, so many years after the initial launch of those waves?)

She stared down into the pool, while above us, earth, moon, and sun continued to separate. You could feel it. We were all being returned to our old ways, and it felt—good. Not just familiar, but good.

She liked it. She studied the pool, then—carefully, but also boldly—as if it were for this she had been driving, searching, driving, searching, all her long life—looked upward, through the green glass.

In the forest, the birds were making their little late-morning sounds, but—and I acknowledge fully this may be only my interpretation—they seemed to be a little tentative, indecisive.

I stood beneath the static, the strange dim light that was in no way darkness. I felt cleansed, somehow, lighter. Not so much forgiven as—cleaner. Childlike.

The mail lady stared into the pool for so long that I started to wonder if a spell had been cast; if she might have decided to deliver the mail no more forever. That the little glass plates, unused, would fall loosely from her hands; that she would sit down beside the swimming pool, like the disabled woman in Andrew Wyeth’s portrait of Christina’s World staring up the hill at the big house, and—content now—she would lead a life of such monastic dedication to the baby pool as to forego food—a hunger strike—and, thirsty, would not yet dare to sip from the pool’s sun-black water . . .

I wanted to offer to drive the rest of the mail route for her, that day. I wondered if we had saved her vision: if, driving upriver, listening to music, she might have noticed the black witch on the black broom riding the black moon across the sun, and, staring at it, had her eyesight so damaged that she could no longer drive the jeep, her freedom from the office, nor would she even be able to sort mail with much accuracy, her demotion to the dreaded desk job resulting in the misdelivery of hundreds and then, over time, thousands of pieces of mail, usually with nondramatic effects, though occasionally with such devastating and life-changing consequences that—

I inquired meekly what she thought of it all. She looked up, surprised to see me, I think. The witch was on the back side of the sun now, then free and clear, somewhere invisible out there in all that blue sky. Birdsong did not exactly erupt, but I felt, we all felt, the gears—our gears, as well as the world’s—begin to move again. Our office staff began drifting back into the office, back to their work of saving the forests, the mountains that are, for now, our home. Or so we believe; so we perceive.

“That was something,” the mail lady said, looking back down into the water as if waiting for it to reappear. A more crafty entrepreneur than I might have saved the water from the pool, bottled and marketed it, or served it in the local bar after midnight, a Whiskey Ditch, or Witch Whiskey, Maker’s with a splash of witch water.

She, too, was returning to her old self, but more slowly than the rest of us: not as if she, like Ada Monroe, had seen the future so much, but had been taken back, way back, to some point earlier in her life: young adulthood, or even more distant—back to a time whereupon setting out into each day, one not only expected to see such trippy phenomena, but sought them out, on every path, and was often, maybe even usually, thus rewarded.

She walked—shakily, I thought—back to her little white jeep, got in on what always has seemed to me to definitely be the wrong side, turned on her flashing lights—the amber orbit of them whirling so much more slowly than the strobes of police or ambulance or fire—and continued on up the road, changed, lightened, leavened, undone, remade, like every thing, and every one of us, 99.9999 percent certain about almost anything, and diminished, I think, for that excessive belief, that confidence and security, that assurance and trust. Blinded, even.

I was not quite done. I sat by the side of the road like a wayfarer, not so much waiting as simply decompressing from all I had seen, and the distance I had traveled. The earth to which I had returned.

I felt extraordinarily becalmed. I felt ready to start again. Felt my old self—isolate, but seeking to assemble, unify; to find beauty, as Terry Tempest Williams says, in a broken world.

And to disassemble: to seek to stretch wider, if not fully pull apart or unravel the vertical, humming strings of matter—I picture them as being like the bead curtains favored by hippies in the 1970s—that physicists tell us represent the percentages and probabilities of reality; to test the almost-certain quality of it, and in so doing, maybe sometimes getting a sniff if not an actual peek at what might be beyond that veil.

I heard a car approaching: other than the mail lady’s jeep, the first one all morning on this strange and bestilled day. It occurred to me that other than our staff and the postmistress, I’d not seen another human, and that for whomever was driving the approaching vehicle, it had likely been the same for him or her.

This world is beautiful but it is never quite finished. One can always push against, sand or polish—or prune or shave—its furthest edges. Without even really knowing what I was doing, I stood up, stretched both arms out in front of me in the classic zombie pose, and began walking away from the road, stiff-legged, Frankenstein-like, headed for the woods, trapped by the light, as the car and driver zoomed past and, hopefully, if for even just but a moment, did a double-take, and wondered at what they were seeing or thought they were seeing, before being sucked on farther up the road, as if being drawn toward wherever they were going rather than navigating by free will, desire, hunger: all the shimmering vertical curtains that identify us, get us out of bed in the morning, and keep us moving, moving forward, relentless, if confused.

Horoscopes had promised that everything would be better, after the eclipse. And, for a little while, they were.

The savvy ones did not stay at home like me, but went deep into the wilderness, on their own, to nestle on a promontory and wait to be bathed in momentary darkness, with only the edges of all things limned with a corona of fire.

Do they know the answer now, if even only subconsciously, while I still search? When we see, are we really seeing? We know of the 99.9999 percent predictability that whatever we are looking at is “real,” is true—is a highly probable likelihood of reality—but what does 100 percent look like? Does it even exist? Does it exist in the moon’s shadow, as it occasionally falls upon us?

Does the strange planet of us, in those ninety or so minutes of a total eclipse, sag and begin to disassemble or unravel—down to 99.99998 percent, or 97.63 percent—still real, still true, but with stuttering, shuttered images of either a further reality or a further unreality ahead, depending on whether one is looking forward or backward?

I think it feels like the latter—that the past contains a rubbled foundation of fragments and segments of reality, by virtue of their having endured. That in the old darkness, we feel most strongly the calling of our species—the experiment of us. That if we are not yet fully real, we might yet one day make ourselves real. I have to believe the fire in the horn we carry is the will to adhere, will to cohere, amid the shimmering unpredictable. That even when we rage and destroy or disassemble, it is to some degree so that we may then be employed, so to speak, reassembling that which we have pulled apart.

Much of what we behold—that which we have made and woven—is as but a dream, surreal and even unreal. As if we have lost our way in the darkness. As if where we began—on the platform of the old stone, at the edge of an old sea, craving light, craving shelter and protection, craving food from the garden, craving craving craving—was the thing, the first moment, that came just after we stepped up from out of the stone. That the old implacable stone is the truth and the light, and that the quivering, shimmering likelihood of us, as we exist or mostly exist right now, but an extreme probability. That those things, the events we call coincidence, wax and wane in almost orderly if not predictable fashion—cascading over one another sometimes like dominoes falling, with such pattern or near-pattern that we are disturbed—and other times with such a wildness, a lack of connection on our movements and our days that we feel, once again, alarmed, startled, bereft.

Always without knowing why. Always without being able to see the reason.

We move around in the light, but we cannot yet see. But how we crave, more than ever, those five points of attachment: touch, taste, scent, sight, sound. Come back, rock. Come back, moon.