I’m skeptical. The idea of being outside for no reason, of “communing with nature”—these are new ideas. We used to go on trips all over the island in rented minibuses full of cousins and aunties and uncles. But we always stayed in hotels or guesthouses. In those places there was no question of sleeping outside where a wild elephant or a boar could find you. I remember singing loudly as the bus careened along graphite mountainsides or followed the curve of the southern coast. We sang baila, but often everyone’s choice was “Hotel California.” As if there was a yearning for a view completely at odds with what was around us then. This is a song about an arid landscape, a place that sucks you in and doesn’t let go (and drugs, of course, but we didn’t know that then). We sang “Hotel California,” but never once did I think that one day I would be in the landscape of the song. Now he wants to show me what it really means to be in California.
I protest, but he is persistent, and weeks later we are out in the woods, walking deep into redwood groves. At a certain point he pulls a sketchbook and pencils out of his backpack. He wants to study how the moss clings to the bark, he says. He wants to capture the various permutations and textures of green. He says he’ll be quick, but I know he’ll be lost for hours. I kiss him and walk off on my own. The ground is rough beneath the new sneakers he has insisted I buy. I walk along, sweaty and slightly annoyed. There are noises I cannot identify. What creatures live in this place? Are they dangerous? I don’t even know. Then the wind rises and ruffles my hair. A short way from my feet there is a great drop and the valley spread out beneath. In the distance a silver river snakes through the lush growth. I drop on the ground cross-legged and study the valley, the smooth velvet slopes, the craggy mountain edges. It feels like I am drinking beauty. An intoxicating beauty that rises in waves stills my breath. I lie back on the bed of the earth. It cradles me, soft as down. Far above, birds wheel, small in the distance, carried on the current. I lift my arms and am carried high into the sparkling air.
Later that night, when we are lying side by side in sleeping bags, staring into the exuberance of redwoods far above, I say to him, “It’s like being a child at a party. The grown-ups are so much bigger than us. They’ve been here so much longer. We can see only their calves.” I point my chin up at the trees. He laughs. I say, “No, really. Think about how old they are. We’re like infants to them.” He falls asleep and I lie there in the magic grove, being hummed at by trees with ancient memories, lulled by their stately breath, held in the embrace of their roots. I feel the sway and pull of the planet, the curve of it under my flesh, that gorgeous, voluptuous roundness. The stars spin circles overhead until I too, lost in this darkness, fall asleep.
*
He takes me to Lake Tahoe on a certain specific weekend in October. He wants to show me something, he says, and is as gleeful as a child. We stay in a small hotel because now it is too cold to sleep under the stars. We head out in the morning, walk through a parking lot into the woods. It’s pretty, with meadows and, just off the path, squelchy wetlands, signs set up here and there to illustrate the life cycles of frogs and water birds. He stops to read each one, and I am bored but humoring him. I don’t see why we have made this trip in a month when the sunshine is watery, but then he takes my hand and we round a corner and I gasp at the sight.
Almost at our feet: a creek, narrow and tumbling over rocks, and in the water, hundreds, thousands of flame-colored fish. So many they push into one another, each of them pointed upstream, swimming against the water’s flow. I go closer so the fish are directly beneath me, oblivious of my presence, fighting the water to get up, up, up. The stream is narrow but deep, and there are layers and layers of fish. The living flash bright red, and under them, the dead, silver fleshed, flaking, blind eyed. Konakee salmon, he says. They spawn only here in this creek. They come from Tahoe and then swim upstream.
I wonder about this, the obsession with home, with finding their way back to the place they were born. “They aren’t native,” he says. “They escaped here from the fisheries.” So this is their adopted home, I think. This place they are fighting to recover, it is not their native place, but still beloved, still worth fighting for, dying for.
*
We walk around the rim of Lake Tahoe, its cold, perfect blue bowl of water reflecting the sky. A silver line at the horizon. The depth of this lake is unfathomable, leagues and leagues of water, down to the unknowable depths. We hold hands and walk in step, our motion rhythmic and in synch. We walk out onto a pier that stretches long and narrow over the frigid water. At the end of it I lie longways on my stomach, my head dropped over the side so that my entire vision is taken up by blue. He sits cross-legged next to me, talking to my dropped-over head so that his voice comes to me as if it belongs to the lake itself.
He says, “Do you know the story about Jacques Cousteau coming here?” I shake my head, just feet over liquid, the tips of my hair almost piercing the surface. He says, “I don’t know if it’s true or not, but they say that Cousteau came here in the seventies and dove down in one of his submersibles. When he came out hours later, he was terribly shaken. He said, ‘The world is not ready to see what I have seen.’ He left the country and never said what he had saw.”
I say at the water, “What was it?”