When Gypsy, a circus elephant, trampled her keeper to death

I started thinking about the Civil War. In Confederate towns, like Valdosta where my mother was raised, families, fiancées, waited years to see their loved ones. And because all of the men had left, they had no choice but to wait; they had to cling only to sporadic notes about geography and frostbite and where was God in that great death. And in those flimsy camps of young boys and old men, a letter was hard to come by. Like their women wondered about gangrene, didn't those men wonder about another suitor, visiting from the mountains?

In later wars, those fears were more rational. When writing from Laos, a soldier knew some pacifist could be wooing the girl whose picture faded inside his helmet. A deserter in 1862, living in the mountains, sneaking into town to cuckold a loyal soldier, was all but impossible. The Confederate infantry should've concerned themselves only with self-preservation, but men can't control those jealousies and fears.

What is striking to me is the length of time apart. I don't know how many years those men spent in trenches. And then some returned, and I'm sure the reunion was more frightening than any pain of absence. Did their women wait? Are their parents still vibrant and capable of driving the plow? Has the town grown—is it full of transients and broken windows?

I've written letters, not many, and since Vietnam the world has changed even more. I'm returning home in three weeks. It's been a long absence, but not like six months, not like years of war. I bought a postcard today. Like a soldier, I'm afraid of things changing.

What brought all of this to mind was a story, a true one.

In Valdosta, not long after the war, an elephant rampaged through the streets. The Chief of Police made a posse, and after a night search they found and killed her in a field. Veterans of the war were old but still alive. I imagine some of them sat on their porches while that African monster trumpeted past.

After combat, and distant spouses, they surely thought they had understood fear. But like their letters, the world is so unknown. A marauding elephant is not an adulterous wife, is not the Spencer repeating rifle. I imagine, on their porches, they remembered the fears of infidelity, of other men—resurfaced by a new terror. Did they shake and cry? Did their women, old now too, dismiss how bothered their husbands seemed by the enraged animal? "Strange things happen," the women might've said, starching a shirt while the veterans paced and groaned.

"Can't you see," the men might've said back, "the world is crazy?" The women might have glanced up from the wash, and the men remembered these were their prizes of war, the reason they fought. "What do I have to say to you for God's sake, dear? I never forgot about you."

Darkness

I should've expected it: so further North, the cold turn of the earth in winter. This isn't Iceland, but the nights are growing like months, and even noon is dim under the clouds. Seasons are cold! How does the sun suddenly vanish? I have a little picture frame to encase it, but things haven't come to that.

I am spending more evenings, which used to be afternoons, indoors, and across the street last week I saw a group of Chinese students puffing out a paper globe. They stood in a circle and lit a torch beneath it, which filled out the wrinkles with warm air. I thought of a lantern, but just like that: it was pink and floating above the street, higher, above a fabric awning, out of my seated view. They could still see it. I watched them standing in darkness, still in the circle, their hands cupped at the brow, as though this light they made was blinding. I nearly stood to watch it again. It was less than the moon. Another man, passing, looked up and stared. He still thought it was the sun.

Coast

In the farmhouse are growing blackberries: a frontier chimney full of ravens, a kitchen and wild fruit. The sky releases gray water like a sieve on the land. Roofs can't sink lower. The dairy cows mull around trees; the women of Beaver, Oregon walk along the ditch with colored sweaters and Coleman boots.

Two dairy farms let their animals roam across the river and plank fencing--even in the summer the grass doesn't wither. Until the sands beside the ocean, all the earth is fertile. Out there, beside the ocean, jeeps drive up and down the beach; two girls hold hands; the schools write statistics about methamphetamine and suicide. Except for the salty air, the same is true here, a dozen miles inland, but the farmboys drive ATVs not Grand Cherokees through the mud and herd all the clusters of Jersey cows.

The skinny roads, then, have little traffic: empty black lines between Cloverdale and Hebo, over the Wolfe Creek to Beaver. The Sixth Bridge Inn is under construction. The pool hall is down. "One in three women in Tillamook County face domestic violence," says a billboard to visitors. And the air is green with pines.

An Oregon Message

When we first moved here, pulled
the trees in around us, curled
our backs to the wind, no one
had ever hit the moon—no one.
Now our trees are safer than the stars,
and only other people's neglect
is our precious and abiding shell,
pierced by meteors, radar, and the telephone.

From our snug place we shout
religiously for attention, in order to hide:
only silence or evasion will bring
dangerous notice, the hovering hawk
of the state, or the sudden quiet stare
and fatal estimate of an alerted neighbor.

This message we smuggle out in
its plain cover, to be opened
quietly: Friends everywhere—
we are alive! Those moon rockets
have missed millions of secret
places! Best wishes.

Burn this.


-William E. Stafford

Interesting planet

I went reading yesterday in the cemetery, and later beside a nearby lawn that rises behind the library. I was reading Gilead, and without clouds the wind felt just cool, not bitter, through the pines and over the green slopes. Marilynne Robinson writes often about God. "This is an interesting planet," she said as I sat there. "It deserves all the attention you can give to it."

Maybe it was half an hour later, maybe in the same moment, a heavy man ambled off the sidewalk and around the lawn. I hardly noticed him, except that we were both alone. He had glasses and thin hair; his arms swept upward, flinging bread into the sky and onto the grass. Aimless. A wave of crows descended from the trees and surrounded him like hungry ants. This continued past morning, him feeding, them swarming. He would disappear for a few minutes, then again crossing the field: more bread, more gestures.

I want to believe I was the only one noticing him--other benches, empty, the unused sidewalk--though I wasn't thinking about an interesting world. I didn't make the connection. By then in the novel, Robinson had announced that history could make a stone weep. She knows the world is very hard. I wasn't sad but still had a view of the cemetery, and it was perfectly natural to think of the graves.

Willamette

Oregon is wide. From Idaho's edge, there are seven hours of dry, empty roads that lead to the forests I expected of my new state: trees taller than most Texas buildings, and old. Most of the east is desert or farmland, climates for horses and coyotes. Over the mountains is alpine, a land for wolves. I had a map, but after crossing a wasteland into Bend used a GPS to find Eugene. It took me on an indirect route--an hour's drive longer, through the national forest called Willamette.

Leaving the town of Sister, a narrow road twists between trees and occasional hills, but the way is empty of life except for the infrequent car, or bird darting in the shadows. Even with the sun strong and high, the pine trunks and branches block out most light. I expect only at high noon it isn't dusk along that road (McKenzie Pass, I later read it is named).

Many photographs have come from this forest: lush, the postcards of Oregon. I expected miles of trees, but like a Midwestern tornado had suddenly manifested to destroy and then vanish, a clearing just as endless appeared. The trees disappear at the heaping edge of dark rubble.

The mountains nearby are sleeping volcanoes, and in the middle of the forest are their past triumphs. Lava, thick and black, amasses until and past the horizon. Though centuries old, the desolation looks immediate, as if airplanes had just filled the land with hard rock, or the trees themselves disintegrated into stone. I saw an end to the forest like an extinction. There wasn't a word except juxtaposition. There isn't a climatic equivalent. Oregon is old. It is lush and hard.