Читать книгу Howl - Susan Imhoff Bird - Страница 8

big mountain big mountain

Three weeks into April, winter eases. Snow pulls back from soil and road, melting underneath itself. My belly is lean, muscles on fire. Each breath hurts. The road tilts up, more so than last fall, and with each push on the pedals my quads quiver. I will ride to where the snow stops forward progress. I’ve cycled up a gradually climbing canyon, down a short descent, alongside a crystal-edged reservoir, and around a metal gate stretched across the road, its Closed to Motor Traffic sign chipped and rusty. The road is mine alone on this late winter morning. I’ve skirted narrow strips of ice, and navigated slick black pavement. Rivulets of snowmelt follow the path of least resistance, which sometimes angles left, sometimes right, rarely flowing straight toward me.

I’ll be halted soon. I know that when the road curves again it will position me due east, where the sharp hillside on my right blocks sunlight. I will gain the shady stretch where winter’s blanket lies thick and frozen on the ground, its blunt edge confrontative, where my skinny tires become useless.

I dismount. Snow covers the road and lies on gray branches and leans against boulders. It clings to clumps of autumn’s late grasses. I walk my bike from the last clear patch of asphalt to the road’s edge. I lean it against the trunk of a gnarled scrub oak, its bark cracked and scarred.

Below my handlebars, attached by a loop of zip-tie, dangles a small, metal cylinder. The container is just over two inches tall, an inch in diameter. I peel off my gloves to unscrew the lid. I hold the open tube and walk to the snowy edge of the road where scrub oak grow thickly down the hill. I shake some of Jake’s ashes into my hand, then send them floating out over the crusty snow. I love you, Jake. I miss you. He is everywhere here. I walk to the other side of the road where the red dirt hillside soars, and scatter the rest of the ashes over the scarlet earth, the snow patches, a stream of meltage running in the berm.

He’s been gone three years and three months. He would have turned twenty-two today. He is twenty-two.

This is my third observance of this ritual, my solitary ceremony. Me. Jake. We meet here surrounded by what appears dormant but is filled with life. Moose and deer stand motionless, hidden by willows and pines. A beaver silences its gnawing, a squirrel pauses, a magpie gazes my way and keeps its peace. All I hear is trickling water; even the wind has calmed its constant whistle through bare branches. These gray trees, not a bud in sight, will burst into thousands of leaves unfolding with green life in mere weeks. I breathe in crisp air, then let it go. The silence is broken by birdsong, a solo.

The canyon walls press, constrict. My lungs no longer burn, but my chest aches. A whisper, somewhere else. Go, leave. Head north. True north.

When I married Daniel eight months ago I thought we would share this, that he’d be here beside me. But instead, I am more alone than before. I ache today for Jake. But I’m devastated by my failure to create the relationship I crave and need—the profound connection I thought was finally in my life.

I sprinkle ashes.

I write Jake’s name with my finger in the snow at the edge of the road.