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Pestles on a Pounding Stone

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APT. 20

   In Apt. 20 one memory plays over and over: the day that you climbed over the barbed wire, careful not to hook your clothes, following a trail to the creek, wading through a turpentine scent exhaled from blue curl--tough stalks with tiny purple steer's skulls--the silence heightened by squirrels and lizards scurrying over cinnamon-colored leaves curled into boat shapes as you touched the silver puzzle of the bark, knowing you could never fit it back together as you pulled it apart, noting the bones like huge drum-sticks scattered on the slope just before you turned to discover the pounding stone for the first time--all this keeps replaying to the exclusion of everything else, as if something were about to fit together, thousands of years flooding the hillsides, yet there was no time, the far-off howl of a coyote joined by another howl, children in the distance or the faint cries and laughter of some tribe, somehow near and yet far away, reaching you in the stillness.

(You realize that you are still on the right path because in a corner of the room you find an old box containing Pendulum Dreams by Justin C....)

Wind Poppies and Chinese Houses near Native American Village Site

PENDULUM DREAMS: 

SIGHT

"Our lives are destroyed so that we have the empathy and courage to lift and carry the cross for the crucified of this world."  

   Justin C.

   I stood peering beyond the clouds, glimpsing the shadow of a surfacing turtle, then turned and reached into the cracks between rocks sprouting star moss, the pounding stone always at the center, the mortars filling with leaves and bugs and creek water and pounded only by rain for over a century, the smooth cups in the stone my only evidence. A slightly haunted satisfaction washed over me even though I found nothing but dirt or slime under my fingernails, even though merely sitting by the creek as the breeze stirred my hair, the leaves, the languid water.
   I have experienced, in this life and another, the two signs of the final terror while ravished by the flowers and trees, the purling water, the breath of all the species flowing around me.
   Once, I had driven toward the obscured mountains, straight on an avenue past orchards where a snow of blossoms revealed budding leaves, the road suddenly straying from the grid and veering northeast into the grasslands at the base of the foothills, across a canal that contained in concrete most of the San Joaquin River heading south now instead of north in its natural course to the delta, the road winding over a ridge into a small foothill valley. I knew they would pursue me until I paid, but I kept accelerating into the curves, suddenly noticing a slightly opened gate.
   I felt an uncharacteristic desire to trespass, so I turned around, parked the car, opened the loosely chained gate, and dashed down a short trail, over a berm with large boulders meant to hide a once-oiled road, now cracked, eroded, and quilted by cow droppings that sprouted red maids and miniature lupine. After hiking down the hill about half a mile, I wandered off the road onto a path next to the creek. At dusk alone in the foothills, the woods breathing peacefully as the air darkened and cooled, the bats looping soundlessly overhead and crickets chirping in the still-warm grass, I saw a flock of wild turkeys, resembling small dinosaurs, scurrying along the bank about fifty feet away. In the quiet, my chest heaved slightly from an inexplicable rage.
   It wasn't just that I was trespassing, which I was considering an act of civil disobedience, or that I was six months out of work. I had walked straight to a pounding stone, the mortars in the rock black with slime and decaying leaves. I suddenly knew without a doubt that I would find a path leading to another pounding stone. I stumbled a few feet and found the path right away and followed it. Soon I found another pounding stone about two hundred yards away on a ridge overlooking the creek.
   The two pounding stones were close but blocked from view by a slope on the north side where the creek bends. I went back to the first pounding stone I had encountered and sat near a shallow mortar, which someone had not had time to deepen. Feeling the coolness of the rock and trying to empty my mind, I closed my eyes and felt the breeze and in spite of myself heard the laughter of women. I opened my eyes to the stone that had not changed in over a century, only now there were no people.
   Picking up an oak branch to use as a walking stick, I was suddenly seeing through the eyes of someone else who was bent and dizzy and deeply troubled, ready to lie down forever. The walking stick was in my hand which was also someone else's hand. I had someone else's face or no face at all. I held the stick away from my body, imagining myself stretching out on the earth many years before as the trees turned, everything passing away except the stone and the sun, and then my arrival.
   Listening to long, almost human groans of utter despair, possibly from a bullfrog being swallowed by an eight-foot garter snake that ruled the evaporating creek, I returned to the pounding stone with the feeling that I was on the verge of remembering something. All that surfaced was the overwhelming urge to find my way to the top of the opposite ridge. I hopped over the rocks without getting my feet wet and climbed up the slope, avoiding poison oak, seeing nothing at first but dry grass and gray pines and a few bare spots with a little rosinweed. I strolled back and forth on the ridge several times, sure I was missing something, until, sweaty and tired, I surrendered to the shade.
   I looked first to my right at a large stone under an old oak tree, and then to my left, seeing poison oak near a stone that the earth had nearly submerged. Looking down I realized that I was practically sitting on a shallow mortar. Suddenly drawn to the oak tree, I discovered in the stone beneath it that a large pestle was plugging a mortar. With oak leaves needling my fingers, I cleared the pounding stone, finding ten other mortars. Looking back, I decided to check out the other stone and discovered that it also contained mortars, filled with earth and grass. I was in the middle of another ancient village site, the round hollows of the house pits still faintly etched in the earth.
   I suddenly felt like a woman. Before I could begin to cope with that feeling, a terrible sorrow overcame me, as if I had lost someone I had deeply loved. Even though I had suffered many times from loss, this grief was different, right on the surface. I felt the emotional surges of a teenager coupled with the maturity of an adult. Then I found a trail down to the creek, and suddenly imagined that I was in some procession, and that I was about to say goodbye to someone for the last time. The grief was different from any I had experienced, nearly unbearable, impossible to suppress. I felt compelled to go on, as though it were out of the question to stop, crossing the dry creek and snaking up a trail to a level stretch of land where I found more round hollows in the earth.
   I knew right away that the round hollows were house pits, which confused me at first, until I remembered that the Yokuts often buried the dead under their houses. I felt an absurd desire to keep anyone from being buried there. The woman in that other time must have fought with all her strength to stop the burial. I imagined that others, overcome by their own grief, did what they could to comfort her. Somehow I knew that she had remained inconsolable, and I had no rational explanation for how I knew this or why I had found my way to those house pits.

Go on a different adventure.