Song of the Humpback

Before heading west the journeyman printer

closed his hands in prayer and breathed Amen.

It was a craft once, you know, to shepherd words

to paper, arranging shards of lead in

precise rows, letters backwards, sentences

read right to left in a silver language that might

be all that gods and men have in common.

They packed the house into a moving truck and

the family into a 1967 Dodge Coronet

and drove ten thousand feet upward where even

trees begin to struggle for air. The boy was

promised a cowboy hat and boots (grounded),

the girl (why hadn’t he thought of this?) a horse

called General on which she later corralled clouds.

This was their playground then: A cold river filled

with rainbow trout, two dozen mountain peaks in

every direction, a landscape measured

vertically and lacking any definable horizon.

A lake so frigid that, even warmed by

August sun, would kill you if you fell in.

That lake. In 1956 the Army Corps built the dam

that trapped the lake, drowning the clapboard town

residents had left, finally, only days

before. The boy wondered at the buildings

beneath and if anyone had been stubborn

enough to stay behind in protest.

It took a certain stubbornness to live at
altitude. Stoicism when drifts piled up

to twelve feet in December, courage when

wind blew to thirty-odd below in February,

patience for the black flies in August, some kind

of common sense to make a living and a home.

That lake. Was where he learned the secrets of life,

the buzz and flutter. Once, fishing for Kokanee,

this pregnant question from his father: “So,

what do you know?” About what? “Sex.” Not much.

A pause. “Best to keep it that way.” Advice

both fatally flawed and eternally sound.

It was not all harsh. Stars liberally salted

the clear night sky. Snow perfect for toboggans

and skis. Mountains meant summits and places

beyond. So every day was filled with dreams.

People could be unbearably kind. One

memory: The family dog gone missing

drew a county-wide search party.

The house the printer built was practical

and stout, but not without heart. It took shape

in a valley so deep the sun struggled

to crest the ridges by 8 a.m., then set

early, exhausted. The house the printer built

by hand, eleven hundred nails in one room’s

hardwood floor alone. From this the boy learned

to shape headers and walls from two-by-fours,

to drive nails in four blows (the father did in one),

to use a framing square and to calculate

the pitch and rise of stairways. “It’s more

complicated than you might think to build

stairs,” the father said. “Things that bring you

closer to heaven are never simple.”

The boy learned patience and perseverance,

qualities that life erodes and then returns.

He read to his father’s distraction. Books

were both escape and revelation; there was

just one TV station and radio waves

didn’t fare well, either. One phone line for

four houses meant everything was shared.

There were no secrets. Gossip in a small town

is both candy and lifeblood. Perspectives of

neighbors and strangers alike shift weekly

so it is not who you know that matters

but what you know about them. We blithely

forget to ponder what they know about us.

The house sat at the back of two acres, small

by local standards but a yard anyway.

Or maybe yard was a kind word to describe

the tumble of sagebrush that filled the space. Yard

is a word for suburbs, which crave definition.

Yard is a fence and grass, a swing, a garden;

order. Yet in this disorder, beauty: Columbine

sprouted beside a plant they learned to call

Indian paintbrush. You could pluck the long red

flower and suck dew-sweet nectar from the tip.

A fenced-in corral in the back held the horse;

not ten yards east lay a grave for one of

the family dogs that hadn’t held up to winter.

He’d been loved, which is as much as you can ask.

* * *

They called nearby Montezuma a ghost town

but there weren’t enough buildings to qualify

as a town in the boy’s mind. Or maybe the

buildings themselves had turned to ghosts. Structures

must have a kind of soul if you could draw a blueprint

of the house you lived in twenty years past.

The rooms and all the memories in them. Ghosts.

Someone had made a home in one of the old cabins

there. One day it burned in a blaze quick as that.

They called the printer who also volunteered as

a paramedic. He brought the boy. When they carried

the body out it looked like a blackened log.

He wouldn’t have known it for a body

but for the fact that it was on a stretcher.

Jerry Peterson, Dick Scheafer, Jackie Pierce,

each volunteered as EMTs, too. That’s how

it works in a small town, everyone pulls

a share. Dentist, rancher, nurse, in that order,

it’s hard to say how their friendships with the

printer took shape, but not why. They all shared

the view that one can ask nothing of life.

The summer of the fire was the summer

death began. First the grandfather passed on the

printer’s birthday. Grandma followed on

her own a year later. An uncle, a cousin.

Unknown bodies piled up, too. A stranger

drowned in the river. No one could say why.

A trucker lost his brakes on the mountain,

almost always fatal. It all could have been

dark, but youth has a way of shielding pain.

For the most part he only felt sad that

others were sad. And he wasn’t sure why

preachers insisted God needed all those folks

as angels. There had to be a limit.

Just so. Life and death are just ways to

measure time. If you were immortal, he

reasoned, there would be no reason to hurry.

He read Jules Verne and Asimov and read

until one day his parents discovered

The Summer of ’42 in his room and

removed it without discussion.

Irony prevailed when years later, the

family watched the movie on TV,

his parents having no recollection

of their single act of censorship.

There were dreams in those years: In one he

stood with rows of strangers at the rim of a vast

void. It was understood they could reach in and

remove anything they desired. I desire

nothing, he said with an inexplicable

sense of guilt, and at the same moment a

woman beside him reached for something,

grasped it, and screamed as her young son was swept

into the void. Awake he was left with a

sense of the profound, though at a loss to

explain why it might apply to him. That

dreams might be omens was assumed. In those

days it was said that if you die in a dream,

you really die, and being a dreamer he

lived in some fear of the associated

risks. So it was with a sense of terror

that he once dreamed he was dead; a sort of

walking death in which he and others of

his ilk were forced to sleep in morgues and played

without fear of consequence in the

icy waters of the Blue River. The next

morning he woke up unnaturally

early and, before the doorbell rang – at that

hour itself an augur of bad news – knew

the girl had died. Jenny’s dead, he spoke aloud,

not understanding the full import, as if

it could have been understood. At the front door

the father sagged against the wall, the three friends

arranged outside in the structure of grief.

“We have to tell mother,” father said, and they

climbed the stairs they had built together, each

step heavy, so that at the top they stood

breathless at an altitude previously

unmeasured. It’s a fact, more people have

died in this world than live upon it.

Years later he would recall of that morning

standing outside the front door, inhaling the

day that was, he thought, inappropriately

lovely. He spoke, unbidden and surprising,

The sky is still blue, the earth is still solid,

the world is still turning. Things that prior

to that moment had been in question.

He marked this as the moment he learned of

irony. The girl had been an EMT,

following in the footsteps of her father.

That night she had taken a late call – a

violent car wreck. She and another

took the victim to a hospital in

Vail. On the way back, the ambulance wrecked,

no one ever knew exactly why, both

paramedics killed instantly, bodies

no longer recognizable as such.

They buried her in the local graveyard,

too poor at the time for anything more

than a common marker. The whole town grieved.

* * *

“Death either tears a family apart or

brings it closer together,” these the sage

words of a cousin who had survived her own

losses. From that day on, geography

stretched between the son and his parents, but

the heart has no measure of distance.

It would be too easy to say of love

that it transcends all things except itself;

we love with this persistent naiveté

that insists despite all evidence to

the contrary that life is not fragile.

And in time it’s not the body that

wears out so much as confidence; the thin

wall that shields us in the darkest hours.

If death marked his first rite of passage, then

one might easily identify other

mileposts: lovers, travel, passions,

and the banal crumbs of daily existence

that add up to a life, until one takes

the sum of who he has become, and sighs.

Just so. Now he stands on the deck

of a modified lobster boat, July in the

Bay of Fundy, salt-licked skin, frayed hair, a

wife, a daughter. The sun is warm and the

smell of the air is pure freedom. In elegant

succession three humpback whales surface, then

dive, a graceful punctuation mark to their

journey from the Caribbean. And back.

They travel purposefully but without intent.

Maps will show you the route but not the journey.

It could have been this way or that. Decisions

made, and not, add up to something. This is

the damn truth: No one gets the final

satisfaction of deeming it all worthwhile.


—Martin A. Bartels