Landscape: Memory (15 page)

Our swim was brisk, chilly cold and wonderful. We plunged in directly and leapt and dove as much as we could, though the rocky lagoon ran quite shallow. Flora spotted us from a distance and marched right down despite our nakedness, asking politely if we minded and of course we didn't, being so desperately modern, as we were. She stripped off her clothes and dove right in, fast as a kingfisher, bobbing her head back up and smiling brightly. She was always one to set the tone, directly and unmistakably, and so she did.

We were back to breakfast (right on schedule), all wet-haired and noisy. Father joined us, alerted, no doubt, by the salty sweet smell of bacon and the hot black coffee. Duncan and I showed him our Day Plans, as we'd shown Flora last evening, and he clucked his approval of our busy schedule, promising to join us at mealtimes and advise us on exploration and mischief.

I did dishes with Flora, and Duncan went out in search of suitable planks for his boat, deciding to draw up plans after he'd found what materials were at hand.

"I think it's wonderful about you and Duncan," Flora said through steam clouds billowing out from the boiling water. She was pouring it over the piled-up dishes.

"Us being such good friends?" I asked.

"Oh, yes, that certainly," she answered in a leading voice. "That and everything else."

I looked out the foggy window and thought about "everything else": Mother and Father and Mr. Taqdir and the two houses; all the trouble I'd had thinking through it all. It was wonderful being so close to Duncan through all of that. Just how wonderful, I thought, she certainly didn't know. Still, to think everything else was wonderful too, just because it brought me closer to Duncan, seemed wrongheaded.

"It is wonderful,
despite
everything else," I said. "I wish some things had never happened. Though he makes things better for me."

Flora put a firm hand on my shoulder and leaned in close. "Not despite, Dogey, not
despite
everything. You shouldn't feel ashamed."

I felt a bit confused. I didn't feel ashamed.

"All that 'else' is
also
wonderful," she insisted. "As it should be and completely natural, no matter what society says." Though my selfish thoughts were just the opposite, I'd come to accept Mother's action enough to agree with Flora.

"I know it's natural," I said, still a bit reluctant. "And of course my friendship with Duncan is all bound up in it. It just still makes me cry and get mad and hate that it happens sometimes."

She pulled me close to her and cooed, "Oh, Dogey, Dogey, you mustn't bring the judgments of society inside you. Just let it go. Feel what you feel without shame. Friendship, loving, all of it."

She was right and I knew that. Part of being here was to help me feel better about Father and Mother as things were now, not just feel a need for them to change back again.

"I know," I said simply.

Flora stayed in to read with me, us feeling very close because of our little chat, and she snuggled up on the rug with Ruskin while I started in to Mr. Spengler's book.

This part I read over and over because I thought it must somehow make sense: "Some men in the presence of considerable stimulus have no memory owing to disease or age, just as if a stimulus or a seal were impressed on flowing water. With them the design makes no impression because they are worn down like old walls in buildings, or because of the hardness of that which is to receive the impression. For this reason the very young and the very old have poor memories; they are in a state of flux, the young because of their growth, the old because of their decay."

First I thought of water, dreaming I was adrift at sea, and the problem of memories stamped into water. So often I'd felt as if my mind was washing away. It made me think also of that river I'd imagined running through me and how I finally felt satisfied and complete really, only once it had washed a part of me away. It wasn't erosion so much as the making of something, like rivers make their riverbeds. It wasn't loss so much as gain. That's what I thought about first.

Then I thought of old buildings, the walls all tumbled down and worn, like the ruins and like Maybeck's Palace at the Fair. This guy was wrong about the buildings, I figured. Old buildings hold so many memories. All the story and past of them crumbling is held and revealed right in the pattern of the dusty ruins. Old buildings hold so many more "impressions" because each event that happens to them leaves a mark. Their whole past is visible in the pattern of their decay. It's these new buildings that are unreadable, I think. Like the Fair. That must be what he meant by hardness. Those walls can't hold any "impressions." They're just rock-smooth and finished, and fake to boot. They're just frozen fake monuments. And then they'll just be gone and disappeared, blown up by dynamite before they've even had time to accumulate a real past.

But it was the last part that bugged me most: ". . . the very young and the very old have poor memories; they are in a state of flux, the young because of their growth, the old because of their decay." It was just like his mistake with buildings. In fact "the very old" have the best memories, the most cluttered and colorful and interesting memories. Just like old ruins holding more of the past. They are in a state of flux and will, I've found, often change their account of some past event, but always for the best. That is, the story gets closer to the truth, it's refined by their changes. That seemed to be the nub of it: this stuff from the book implied that any change in a person's memory would make that memory somehow worse, that memory should be a frozen, fixed thing, like a photograph.

I thought of nurselogs. It was hard not to, what with "decay" and "growth" written right there next to each other on the page. It seemed fitting, the thought of those big trees, felled by age and their own weight, blown over and rotting. Their decay is what gives rise to new growth. All the sturdiest saplings, the healthiest of the young trees rise from those fallen, rotten giants. And I think memory could be like that. What seems to us to be decay could be growth. Maybe good memory isn't simply like a camera. Aren't photographs as smooth and frozen and finished as those thin plaster walls of the Fair? Aren't they just as flimsy?

Duncan came back all dirty and breathless, dragging a bleached gray plank and sporting a willow wreath. 

"I've found treasures," he called across the clearing, beaching the wooden whale with a solid boom on the ground. "This isn't even the biggest." I came out, my bare feet tickled by the decaying pine needles carpeting the cool ground, and took a closer look.

"Why'd you drag it all the way up here?" Our little yard seemed the wrong place to build a boat.

"To show off," he explained, flexing his sweaty arm. "I wanted one for here. I'm going to carve a prow and take it down to the boat when I'm done." We stood above the prone prow, admiring its fine solid curve.

"What else did you find?"

"Lots. Flat planks, two-by-fours, all bleached out and worn. I found half a wreck too," he added, shaking my shoulder. "Most of the front's busted up but the back end's intact."

"A trawler?" I asked, imagining something I'd never seen.

"Nope. A rowboat," he corrected. "But a real big one, five feet from port to starboard, at least," and he stretched his arms as far as that.

We went to the wreck first thing for exploring. It was up the east side of the lagoon, not far from where we swam, and partly sunk in mud. The dry stuff was great, shipshape and ghost-gray from the sun and salt. Where it got wet it crumbled rotten and soggy.

Duncan and I started kicking it loose, breaking the wet wood off and tugging the rest out from its resting place, dragging it up onto the dry dirty slope that rose up along the lagoon. There was a good third of a boat there. Its rudder was strong and operable, screaming loudly from its rusty hinges as we tried it right and left.

Scattered all along this same stretch were scraps of boards and huge twisted gnarls of trees washed in on storms. It must be from the logging, I thought. They take the trees down off the hills and float them off to sea. If storms wreck the barges, you get trees, whole and in parts, riding through the waves and washing up all along the coast, even dragging in on the lagoon. I nestled into the lap of a big mess of roots, sitting back into a hollow where the wood reached out in a tangle, now washed clean and smooth by the battering waves.

"Tree house," Duncan punned.

"Root cellar," I replied. "Only a buck fifty." Duncan squeezed in by me. "This could be the captain's bridge."

"Or the crow*s nest," Duncan suggested. "I'll put it up top, on the mast." I imagined us hoisting the grotesque tangled roots by ropes and pulleys, dragging the ugly bulk up a tall thin mast.

"Your rowboat's got a mast?" I asked, teasing him.

He shook his head no. "I thought I'd try to make a sail. Something very simple, but one where we wouldn't have to row." He looked out across the water, its face all rippled by the strong breeze. "Your dad's got tools, and I've got plenty of time."

We explored along the east side, past the gullies of our earlier summers, and on to the mouth of the lagoon. The current drew strong out to sea through the narrow channel there, with Bolinas just a stone's throw away. We didn't try to cross, knowing we'd probably end up somewhere out in the freezing waves. We raced back for lunch, getting hungry and sweaty and tired and found Father and Flora setting out big bowls of cold potato soup. After, we swam first and
then
we napped.

I took my drawing kit with me south along the shore, watching Duncan running off ahead, disappearing around a bend, off to Stinson Beach or Half Moon Bay or Mexico or however far his legs could take him in two hours. I walked as far as Weeks Gulch and turned to look out at the actual setting of the memory I'd been trying to paint, afraid of what I might see. There were, it appeared, some problems. The painting I'd made was markedly different from what lay before me. The beautiful hills I'd drawn were much higher and their descent to the water much sharper than what was there now. The lagoon itself—that is, the lagoon in front of me—spread out farther and into more mysterious nooks than I could find in the lagoon I had drawn. The position of the sun was impossible.

All in all I found my painting a good sight more satisfying than the actual landscape. I had several choices and I faced them boldly. I chose to make excuses and go with my aesthetic impulse. My impulse was to leave my work as it was and forge ahead. My excuse was that my memory was more like a nurselog than a camera. I was remembering the trouble I'd had with Cicero. If he was right, if my memory ought to be an accurate replica of the original experience, if that was so, my painting was hopelessly inaccurate. It was a bad painting of a fuzzy memory. But I preferred to think that memory is never frozen, nor should it be. My painting was a successful rendering of the dynamic memory that had simply begun with the original event. It accurately captured the decaying grotesque of memory that lay rotting in my head, that fallen nurselog out of which so much of value must be growing. My painting, I figured, was so very accurate in its depiction of this memory that it would inevitably look wrong when compared to the original model.

I packed my little kit and walked back toward home feeling glad I'd come to look. Several loose ends had now been tied up neatly, thanks to this dilemma, and I was confident my picture might eventually turn out right. I had trouble keeping my complicated conclusions straight, so I kept repeating them, like an incantation, as I walked, and jotted them down straightaway in the front flap of Mr. Spengler's book. I sat out in the soft cool dirt and looked into the trees, trying to put my thoughts straight, scratching and scribbling and reworking till they were clear. And that's how you see them here.

 
* * * 

We all four swam in a beautiful small pond Father led us to up the road going north from the lagoon, up closer to Dogtown. It was a watering hole for cattle and horses dug by some ambitious farmer who hoped to save himself running the cows off to the neighbor's hole. All pristine clean and blue from the sky, thick green grass snuffling up to its edges and big broad oaks gathered in a shady group on its southern side. We wore costumes, I'm glad, as I'm not too keen to swim naked with Father and Flora both. Flora alone is something new for me and a bit of a shock. The water was a good sight warmer than the lagoon, and clear and fresh, leaving no salty traces on the skin.

Tonight we're going during mischief time to ask if we may tie a rope swing up into one of the trees. Father says there's rope and I fancy making this our morning, afternoon and evening spot, rather than tromping down to the salty brine each time.

Dinner was exquisite. Father roasted beef and I drowned it in a horseradish-soured-cream sauce. Mr. Squashtoe said yes, we may tie a rope swing but we weren't to tell any other kids, or otherwise attract gangs, and we spent the rest of the evening digging out ropes from this or that hidey-hole where Father had stashed them and tying them into a suitable length. I am sleepy and it's just past ten. I see Duncan out there in the dark dropping his ghost-white shirt and climbing into bed.

22 JUNE 1915

We swam at Squashtoe's pond today, morning, noon and night. It was the same as yesterday. Flora, Duncan and me naked in the morning, Duncan and me after lunch, and then all four of us in costumes before dinner. The rope swing is a great success, reaching back to a big high branch in an oak, and swinging out a good twenty feet over the pond and ten or fifteen feet high (if you give it a good swizz of the hips). Father even tried it, though he dropped in with his nose plugged, which gave the whole feat a comic effect. Plop and bubble, dropped like a rock into the water.

Yesterday I thought I'd come to a good position, giving up a bit on my hope to remember right. Not exactly that, more giving up on the idea that a "photographic" memory is a right memory, I'd decided my memory was like a nurselog in glorious decay, full with mysterious small saplings of unquestionable value. It was a seductive thought, given my love of the woods and the neat way it allowed me to justify my painting. It was so enormous and fragile, that thought. I carried it back home in my head like an overgrown exotic flower, some incredibly lush thing on the verge of falling apart. It held together, so long as I didn't touch it.