OF MARKERS AND MONTE CRISTO

I took a much-needed day off a couple of weeks ago and Flynn, the Dalmatian and I drove Moby, the great white Jeep out of Seattle and up into the mountains. Our destination was Monte Cristo, an old gold and silver mining camp Circa 1890, way up in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie national forest in the Cascade Mountain range. I had been there for the last time over 35 years ago with my children's father well before those children were born. We had been accompanied by three other couples, and had stopped for breakfast in a then-wide spot in the road called Carnation. There, we were served whole-wheat and sunflower seed pancakes by a waitress wearing a stoned smile, a peasant shirt and a prairie skirt. Her colorful, hand-made wrist and ankle bracelets tinkled with the soft sound of silver on silver as she gestured, served us, and walked about. She had ready and raucous laughter for everyone seated at our table, and the scent of incense, sandalwood and patchouli mingled with the tummy-rumbling aromas wafting from the kitchen. I remember that the old Victorian home that had been transformed into the hippie restaurant in which we sat had all manner of old farm tools hanging from the rough-hewn cedar paneling perfuming the walls. We all enjoyed a hearty breakfast, and then went on to delight in a truly memorable day together, one that I have thought about now and then throughout all the years passing in between; it was a day that clearly informed my decision to return there on that Thursday last week. A marker.

Only 20 miles from our destination and steeped deeply in mental time travel, I stopped at the ranger station to pick up the now-required day use pass. When the forest service worker stamped the date, "August 20, 2009" I realized that, if my children’s father and I had remained together, that day would have been our 38th wedding anniversary... and I hadn't even thought about it until the date stamp reminded me. Another marker.

I stopped along the way to take lots of pictures because I wanted to share the day with my “Ordinary Joe” in Ireland. As I drove along, I thought about the fact that every single one of the people to whom I was close back then on that trip into the mountains is no longer in my life... through divorce, suicide, estrangement, geographical separation, different life paths... life. All that remains of those days are fading photographs taken with an inexpensive camera, my own memories, and recipes from wives and girlfriends of my husband’s friends. One of those recipes has become a classic in our family, shared with me by one of young women who accompanied us on that day so long ago. Her father was Italian and her mother was Irish, and thus she came to be named Colleen Nardone. She had married my husband’s friend, Danny, whom he had met when they served together as Marines in Vietnam. It is her lasagna recipe that has won over friends and family, colleagues and coworkers over the last three decades at my table, and I think of her with a smile every time I bring out the well-worn, tomato sauce-stained recipe card from my file.

In the winter that followed our summer outing to Monte Cristo, my then-husband and I returned to Bothell, Washington where Danny and Colleen lived, to spend New Year’s Eve with them. I have a vivid memory of waking in a sleeping bag spread upon the floor of their front room. It was barely light outside, and I looked up to see that Colleen had fallen asleep on the couch. Bright, overhead light from the dining room not far away made me squint my eyes, but what completely disoriented me was the noise that had awakened me, the sound that persisted unrelentingly as I struggled to clear my head from sleep. I awoke feeling as if I were imprisoned in an old Underwood typewriter, but the sound that originally resembled metal on metal became clear in my wakening head to be that of plastic on plastic… it was accompanied by much male roaring, light-hearted cajoling and testosterone-fueled threats of mishaps and mayhem to come.

When my eyes were at last accustomed to the light, I propped myself up on my elbow to look into the dining room. Seated on the edge of their chairs at the table, my husband and Danny were fully engaged in a rousing rencounter of “Rock ‘Em, Sock ‘Em Robots. ” Danny, at that point a 27-year-old man, had requested and received this toy for Christmas from Colleen. Danny and my husband sat in opposition to one another, furiously punching the buttons manipulating their respective plastic pugilists with all the abandon of eight-year-old boys. I noticed that my husband’s long, twine-wrapped bamboo bong was nearby, and it went a long way to explain a great deal in that moment.

I was all of 19 years. Their antics were endlessly annoying to me at the time, and yet when I looked back on those days as I drove up into the mountains so many years later without the company of all who had accompanied me before, I realized how much that memory typified my innocence in those days. Danny and my husband were both still steeped in the horrors of Vietnam. That toy was a harmless way for them to reconnect with each other and, at the same time, to let go of a great deal of enforced aggression and personal agony heaped upon them by the circumstance of their drafted service into a war they did not believe in. Before PTSD was part of our lexicon and post-war counseling was mandatory, they were simply coping in the best way they could. I get that now. A definite marker.

Later that day, the four of us had all piled into our four-wheel-drive Chevy Blazer. We returned to Monte Cristo in the deep, soft quiet of mountains couched in snow on the first new day of 1973. We arrived in late afternoon and gamboled in the snow as only the young can do. We drove back out in the dark, completely unaware of the enormity of the gifts that we held in our hands: our health, our strength, our youth, and our relative naïveté. I realize only now the richness of having experienced that country in both its summer and winter extremes while in the company of the same people. More markers.

I carried all of this forward as Flynn and I made our way up the gentle grade over the 78 miles from Seattle. There was spectacular scenery all around us, just as I had remembered, as well as comical, whimsical and rather sad slices of American rural and mountain life. I caught glimpses of the riverbed through the trees. I couldn’t help but notice that in the shallows of the river, all of the rocks had been smoothed and shaped in the down-river direction by the full force of the spring runoff coursing over them. Not far upstream, after just a couple of bends in the river, deep green pools and flat rocks invited late summer bathers to spread out towels, dip babies in pools, and to languish in the low-hanging fruit of a pre-autumn afternoon. It made me think about the river as a metaphor for our own lives. The shallower we are, the more the force of life running over us shapes us. The deeper we deliberately carve out our own pools, our own areas of quiet, solace and self-examination, the less impact the impending surge running by ultimately has upon us. Our footing in the riverbed remains constant, something we Know because it is of our own design; it provides us with our own self-examined stance and, for those with the courage to examine it outside of ourselves, that stance serves to instruct others. It is those deep-pool people who become teachers for the rest of us.

I was disappointed to reach the end of the road and learn that Monte Cristo, itself, is now a four-mile hike in. The road had evidently suffered extensive damage and it is no longer feasible to drive it. I could have pushed this reconstructed leg to walk four miles round-trip, but eight miles seemed foolhardy and I had no supplies.

Flynn and I instead headed back down the trail and did a little hiking, we found a mountain pool to bathe in, and spirits were replenished. We dawdled back down the mountain, taking pictures and stopping at a fish ladder and at a farm stand along the way. As we entered back down into population, I found a classic rock station, and it served well to underscore the nostalgia of all that I had experienced on that day. The first song that popped up on the “seek” search was, appropriately enough, Van Morrison’s classic “Moondance.” One of my favorite contemporary Irish musicians, and one of my all-time favorite songs. A body smile ensued, and replaced the sadness and deflation that I had felt beginning to creep back in while driving back down from the mountains to the city. Steve Miller’s “Space Cowboy,” The Eagles’ “Heartache Tonight,” and, most importantly, as I continued to mull over the current status of my life in general: The Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want (But If You Try Some Time, You Just Might Find… You Get What You Need”)…. I chuckled to myself as traffic began to choke up around me, two lanes were replaced by eight, and strip malls swallowed up farm stands. I had learned what I needed to learn on that day, and I was most grateful.

After I returned from the mountains, lighthearted, appreciative and full of joy, a dear friend shared the story below with me through e-mail. Receiving this on the heels of what I had just experienced in the mountains, I had been gifted with perspective that I may not otherwise have had... once again, Synchronicity was alive and well, and I rejoiced in it. I set about the business of editing and sending photos to my loved one in Ireland, the internet providing me with the miracle of sharing every moment of the day with him pictorially, much as I had in my heart all along.

I found myself wondering…. what would happen if we were all to go through our lives, even on what could be the very mundane commute to work and back, with the idea that we are looking for something special to share in every moment with someone else in order to tell a story? Perhaps in the doing, the real pictures of our lives would become clearer to us, both visually and in our hearts. Presence in the present. Stories that we could carry with us for all our days to come… irreplaceable markers with which to measure our own evolution and growth.

http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/bell.asp

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myq8upzJDJc