The Shasta Gate Page 6

  …He was thirsty. Should have stopped back in town. Up ahead was a caravan of vans and campers off the side of the road, Americans going home, in an area of sandy underbrush used by many for camping. He wanted to keep going but now he had to piss too. He pulled in, feeling the stares of the others, and walked back into the brush. The heavy stream of urine sent a lizard that he hadn’t noticed scurrying for drier ground.

  There was a spigot by the roadside, but turning it produced only laughter from a lean brown woman in her mid-30’s who was holding out a bottle capped and still dripping from the cooler. “Here ya go,” she said, “this is better’n water anyway.”

  “Not much satisfaction for a man, is there,” added the big beer-bellied man beside her. Eugene smiled and walked over to the group. Country music blared from one of the vans. He took the cold beer and looked into the honest gray eyes of the woman offering it.

  “Thanks.”

  “Been on the road long?” asked the blond surfer—twenty years later—who walked up to establish his proprietary relationship to Ms. Gray Eyes.

  Eugene smiled and nodded, stretching his legs, back, shoulders. The surfer gone soft glanced at his friends and grabbed a beer from the cooler himself, popping it open and taking a good long swig. Then he looked over at a man leaning into the gaping jaws of a camper pickup, apparently the primary reason for their pit-stop. “Sid, that truck a yours burns more oil than the power plant you live next to.”

  Sid, dark and lazily aggressive-looking, pulled his head out and glared with disdain at his heckler. “I’m glad you got your sense of humor back. I thought you flushed it down the toilet in Pichilingue.”

  “Yeah, Mike, I don’t think you got out of the crapper the whole time we were there, did you,” laughed Sid’s pretty wife or girlfriend from the other side of the truck.

  Eugene felt those gray eyes beside him and glanced into them. They were so warm and easy. Here was a woman who’d found some peace in her life, who knew and trusted herself. “Where you comin’ from?” she asked pleasantly, the slight huskiness in her voice perfectly matching the eyes.

  “Down the coast a ways. Been here since the first of the year.”

  “We’re comin’ back from Pichilingue—near La Paz. Rented a house on the beach. It’s so beautiful there, Beaches so clean…I got up two hours earlier down there than I do at home just to walk on them.”

  “Didn’t matter what she’d had t’ drink the night before either,” the surfer chimed in. “An’ we had a bit, let me tell ya.”

  Eugene ignored him, his attention held by the woman. There was a momentary silence that was almost awkward. “It is beautiful isn’t it,” he finally murmured. “Thanks for the beer,” he said, saluting them all with it, before pulling his gloves from his jacket pocket.

  Suddenly the guy who’d done most of the talking grabbed a beer from the cooler. “Want one for your canteen?”

  Eugene felt something: the little boy in the man.

  The guy had aroused enough irritation in him that he’d automatically and unconsciously screened out most of the sense of his presence. It occurred to him that this was probably the kind of reaction post-Surfer Dude got from most people—which gave Eugene a sudden glimpse of his own aloof nature. As usual the revelation was disappointing, reminding him of karma and dharma, the Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee twins of the East who claim that as a man soweth so shall he reap, and that for this kind of husbandry each of us has his own path cut out for him. Or maybe these made better sense reversed: dharma was the row to be sown (and hoed), karma the fruit of our labor, sweet or bitter. In any case the twinge of empathy or compassion for Mike, and himself, became a surge of confident encouragement. Right on! he said to the universe, exulting. The surfer’s insecurity-born boorishness was neither his own nor his captive audience’s cross to bear. It was the human race at work.

  Did the guy pick up on any of this? Of course not—but if Eugene were to lean over and clap him on the shoulder, he’d probably only embarrass both of them. That was life too. “Thanks, I’ll stick it in back for now.” He took the cold beer, nodded to the group again and walked over to the bike, pulling his gloves on. The glistening machine started at once, momentarily transforming the quiet morning from light to sound. You could hear that splitting self-assertion in your mouth, your insides.

  Eugene rolled onto the highway and accelerated. As the lusty, chesty growl of the motorcycle faded in the distance, the gray-eyed lady glanced surreptitiously at the others to determine the impression he had made on them. There was the vague sense of discontinuity, of aberration, that she’d expected, a closing of ranks behind the biker.

  She pictured again the distinct spartan lines of his face: piercing eyes sheltered by brow and cheekbones like the deep pools of a spring in rock basins. Jaw and chin, under a day’s growth of beard, hard but gracefully hung. A tousle of black hair thick and clean, sculpted by the wind and his restless hands. She saw again his hard lean body and smiled to herself, feeling the diminishing sound of the bike settle in the pit of her stomach.

  Chapter 9

  Catherine crossed the Bay Bridge following Interstate 80 north on the Eastshore Freeway, which ran along the bay so low and close to the water’s edge it always made her a little nervous. She felt the need for a dike or levee between herself and that eye-level expanse of blue water supporting the distant familiar spires. This morning they appeared to be huddled on the peninsula like survivors fleeing a catastrophe, desperately but in silence lining the shore. In the momentary fantasy it was the muteness of the victims that disturbed her. They had the devastated faces of an Edvard Munch painting.

  She tore herself from the soundless screams in alarm, her pulse racing. C’mon, girl—get hold of yourself! Right up University Ave. was the UC campus. And here was blue-collar Berkeley flashing by monotonously on her right. Minutes later she was skirting the refinery reach of Richmond, then ascending eastward into the parched hills of the San Pablo Ridge overlooking the bay of the same name. Like man-made pillars of Hercules, the monumental green trusses of the Carquinez Toll Bridge, spanning the channel between Suisun and San Pablo Bays, marked the gateway to the hot dry valley that ran up the center of northern California to the green highlands above Redding and to Shasta.

  Her BMW ate up the miles effortlessly, the sere brown land, the blue sky powdered with dust endlessly repeating themselves like a mantra. Near Red Bluff, Shasta’s sister peak Mt. Lassen materialized on the eastern horizon. It was the southernmost in the pantheon of volcanoes which marched in majestic procession through the center of the Pacific states into Canada. If the Sierra Nevada was the West Coast’s spine, then these exhilarating peaks of the Cascades, each rising free of range or foothills in splendid symmetrical isolation, were surely its metaphysical counterpart: the chakras or energy vortices of a geology primeval yet alive—as Mt. St. Helens had so awesomely demonstrated. But not St. Helens alone; the dormant energy in the rock was stirring in other peaks as well. Lassen, Shasta, Mt. Baker in northern Washington, all had murmured recently in their sleep. When would these ancient centers of transcendent power speak again?

  Now Redding lay hot and green to her left. She couldn’t see much of it from the interstate, but the city made its presence felt. What a shame that it presented so unremarkable a face from the freeway. Viewed from the canyon highway which sweeps down from the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, Redding is spectacularly situated. She could still recall seeing it for the first time as a child of 11 or 12.

  She and her parents were driving inland from Eureka, the ugly coastal lumber city where her father’s largest mill was located. With its endless switchbacks the narrow road was like a mountain escalator, obstinately defying gravity to lift them into a world of forest and cloud. Huge logging trucks lumbered past them and dotted the dirt roads on the mountainsides like an infestation of beetles. Finally her father stopped the car to point out a stand of timber that was being clear cut. Even her mother had been taken aback by the scen
e of devastation.

  With her naked eye Catherine could make out only an area of relative smoothness in the middle of what appeared to be a vast field of faded clover, the green paled by haze and distance. But through the expensive binoculars her father handed her, she learned the meaning of the term “clear cut.” For acres and acres not a tree or bush had been left standing. The scarred ground was as ugly and denuded as a scalp wound stitched and naked in a boy’s hair.

  She hadn’t said a word, but her mother bitterly questioned the practice of clear cutting until her father’s driving became punctuated with his emphatic points in favor of the timber industry’s position on the environmental issue—his vigorous presentation periodically obliterated by the steady stream of onrushing logging trucks that made the road seem considerably more narrow and winding than it actually was.

  Car-sick and frightened, Catherine was sure the trip was the worst she’d ever been on until at last the highway joined the Trinity River to justify its tortuous path by following the fast-flowing stream down from the highlands. Mile after mile the clear sparkling river raced her through the gorge it had carved through the mountains, drawing even her parents into its spell.

  * * *

  “That little river reminds me of you, honey,” her father said finally, raising his voice not so much to reach her in the back seat as to prevail over the silence which isolated the three of them. In attempting to deny this silence, however—opaque strata of unspoken needs and unshared feelings which had collected around each of them like so many dead layers of life—he succeeded only in calling it to his daughter’s attention.

  He was so clumsy: an inept magician who instead of making the lion disappear, sets it down in the middle of the audience. Invariably, when he thought to ask her about a hurt of one kind or another, it was after she had forgotten about it. She had had the same thought herself about the river, but she certainly wasn’t about to share it. The sound of the stream was suddenly like mocking laughter.

  Narrowing her eyes, she leaned out the window, pulling the spruce-scented air through her nostrils deep into her lungs, letting her vision go out of focus in the glitter of the water, hearing the delicate tremolo it sustained against the rocks grow louder and clearer until the music had become her very essence and she was in fact this joyous river—carefree and needing no one.

  Eventually it left them but soon afterwards the road burst out of the canyon that had contained it for so many miles, presenting them with the vista she still vividly remembered. They were coming down off the southern rim of a vast bowl. In the middle, beneath them but higher than the valley floor which shimmered in the distance, was Redding, a city of light, carpeted and canopied in green. The Trinity Alps were the northern rim, purple in the afternoon against the pale brown of the valley. Straight ahead, crowned in white, was Mt. Lassen.

  …While from the freeway there were only exit signs. The sudden blast of an air horn stood the hair up on the back of her neck. She twisted the wheel violently and swerved back into the right lane as a huge tractor-trailer rig thundered past, all gleaming metal and hissing tires like some gigantic reptilian robot: the future, furiously chasing the tail of its past.

  Catherine shuddered and forced open her hands clenched about the steering wheel. The molded plastic was sticky and her perspiring fingers ached. Her neck and shoulders were on fire. She massaged first one shoulder, then the other with the opposite hand, swinging her head from side to side until the crackling of cartilage subsided.

  Then suddenly there it was: Shasta—looming beyond the peaks of the Shasta-Trinity highlands with a grandeur that struck her sympathetic soul like the chords of an anthem. Her eyes filled and her whole body seemed to constrict about some point in her chest so that she sobbed involuntarily. Surrendering to the response, she opened her mouth wide to wail an unearthly disharmony of despair and deliverance. The sound took her completely by surprise. Had that really come from her?

  Maybe the anguish, as terrible as it sounded, was emotion locked in awaiting a release which she had been unconsciously unwilling to acknowledge until it could be neutralized by an equally powerful feeling of joy. Catherine felt as though she had given herself away—to whom?—or committed some minor social faux pas. On the other hand, she was as impressed as we all are upon glimpsing some hidden reserve or depth of feeling in ourselves; when, without having to confront it, we are swept along in the revealing moment, with time only to look back and wonder.

  And now, although a good hour’s drive remained, she was in Shasta’s realm, under the mountain’s benevolent if implacable gaze. She was being pulled inexorably toward the ranch, as if she had entered Shasta’s gravitational field. The tension and weariness were lifted from her in a benediction from the mountain as she began the long, steep climb into the foothills of the Cascades.

  The air began to cool and as the mountains clustered and rose about her, eclipsing the sun in the west and Shasta to the north, the afternoon deepened in tone. She could feel the deeper throb of her car’s engine too as it attacked the mountain pass; its hum became a hungry purring growl, like a stroked cat, feeding. She was drained of energy but, for the first time in so long, at peace. Her eyes grew warm, misted, and she was weeping quietly. Was her life so fundamentally dissatisfying that she felt such relief to be coming home again? Was she really that unhappy with it? She tried to peer with the utmost honesty into the depths of her soul for the answer. It didn’t seem so.

  Then was she deceiving herself, for there to be such an apparent difference between how she perceived her life and how she was feeling now? Maybe her cynical and pessimistic attitude was responsible for this disparity. Perhaps the dissatisfaction her mind took for granted, her emotions found intolerable. But what hope was there for her if this was true? Isn’t this what insanity is made of? Or—no need for melodrama, she didn’t really see herself going crazy; she’d kill herself first—wasn’t the prospect of chronic depression just as awful? What point was there in living if you hung in there the best you knew how, did the best you could, but could never really convince yourself that anything you did mattered a damn because your feelings always betrayed you? What the hell was she going to do when it was time to go back?

  She asked these questions of herself not so much in despair at the moment as in the clarity that, like the eye of a hurricane, exists at the center of despair. Suddenly it occurred to her: Shasta, the ranch, Ram were her haven not away from the realities of her life but at its very core. The revelation struck her like ice-lightning. Waves of the most exquisite pleasure swept up her spine, each more powerfully eruptive than the one before; each dissolving in a finer spray of sensation across her back, an icy foam of needles against her skin. It was glorious! For a moment she was as transparent as glass. What in the world is this? Ram would know—oh how much she needed and wanted to talk to him!

  Catherine had left the freeway at Weed, automatically finding the road out to the ranch, when awareness of where she was suddenly returned. Mt. Shasta, which she’d been looking at without the consciousness to respond, seemed to laugh at her surprise. Again that surge of energy—a frisson less powerful than the first but no less delicious or mystifying. This was no mere mountain! This was permanence, might, grandeur—the spine her dreams were built on; the only thing on earth that had not diminished in perspective as she had grown from child to woman.

  On the contrary, Shasta had been enlarged by her investment in it of trust and her visualization through it of hope. Even the sky wreathed its summit with cloud. Overcome, she slowed and came to a stop at the side of the road, peering out at the snow-covered peak over her steering wheel. Shasta smiled at her and she smiled back with her whole being. She could stay here forever…except that ahead of her was a familiar bend in the road, and around the bend was the ranch.

  Catherine started the car again. Suddenly she was replenished and excited; she couldn’t get around the bend fast enough. When she did the ranch opened its arms to her: of blue spruce pla
nted as windbreaks on either side of the rambling wood and stone house with its wide expanse of lawn, then brought together to border the long drive to the highway. She turned into the lane of trees as in a dream, and as she sped past them they seemed to wave and call to her in greeting.

  No, that was a human voice. Douglas’s. He had seen her car from the hayloft where he was helping Normund put away bales the two of them had brought in from the field that afternoon. Douglas leaped from the loft with a shriek that nearly startled Normund off the top of the piled bales, grabbing the hoisting rope in mid-air and sliding to the ground. Fortunately he was wearing gloves, but he’d have done it anyway.

  “Cathrun! Cathrun!” he yelled, half to alert the others and half from sheer joy, his arms like the blades of a crazed mobile windmill as he galloped off to greet her. Catherine pulled into a large parking area packed, like the driveway, with gravel and leaped from the car.

  “Hi, Douglas!”

  He danced around her, plainly wanting to hug her with those long flailing arms but too bashful to do so—unsure of the proper social protocol and awed another summer by the sight of this composed, slender young woman who compressed such power and magnetism into so small a space. It always took him a day or two to get over the contrast between the slim athletic body and his year-old mental picture of her. In her absence it assumed Amazonian stature to match the impression her dominance and forceful personality had left on him. This year his own adolescent growth made the contrast even more shocking; he wondered for a moment if she had shrunk.