[stylist] Beautiful creative nonfiction essay to learn from

[Bridgit Pollpeter]

This is a creative nonfiction essay written by Scott Russell Sanders.
It is titled Cloud Crossing, and it is wonderfully crafted.  It is a
great essay to read, but also to learn from.  In particular, note how
well he uses metaphor and descriptive language.

Cloud Crossing 

Scott Russell Sanders 

Clouds are temporary creatures. So is the Milky Way, for that matter, if
you take 
the long entropic view of things. I awake on a Saturday in mid-October
with the 
ache of nightmares in my brain, as if I have strained a muscle in my
head. Just a 
week before I turn thirty-three, just a month before my son turns one, I
do not 
need physics or nightmares to remind me that we also are temporary
creatures. 

Baby Jesse is changing cloud-fast before my eyes. His perky voice begins

pinning labels on dogs and bathtubs and sun. When I say, "Want to go for
a 
walk?" on this morning that began with nightmares of entropy, he does
not crawl 
towards me as he would have done only a few days ago. He tugs himself
upright 
with the help of a chair, then staggers toward me like a refugee
crossing the border, 
arms outstretched, crowing, "Wa! Wa!" 

So I pack baby and water and graham crackers into the car, and drive
thirty 
miles southeast of Eugene, Oregon, to a trailhead on Hardesty Mountain.
There 
are several hiking paths to the top, ranging in length from one mile to
six. I choose 
the shortest, because I will be carrying Jesse's twenty-two pounds on my
back. I 
have not come here to labor, to be reminded of my hustling heart. I have
come to 
watch clouds. 

Markers on the logging road tell us when we drive up past 2,500 feet,
then 
2,750 and 3,000. Around 3,250 the Fiat noses through the first vapors,
great wrinkled 
slabs of clouds that thicken on the windshield. In the back seat Jesse
strains 
against his safety harness, his hands fisted on the window, hungry to
get out 
there into that white stuff. I drive the last few hundred yards to the
trailhead with 
lights on, in case we meet a car groping its way down the mountain. 

Beside a wooden sign carved to announce HARDESTY MOUNTAIN 
TRAIL, I park the Fiat with its muzzle downhill, so we can coast back to
the highway 
after our walk in case the weary machine refuses to start. I lean the
backpack 
against the bumper and guide Jesse's excited feet through the leg-holes,
one of his 
calves in each of my hands. "Wa! Wa!" he cries, and almost tips the pack
over into 


SANDERS / CLOUD CROSSING 

the sorrel dust of the logging road. Shouldering the pack requires
acrobatic balancing, 
to keep him from tumbling out while I snake my arms through the straps. 
Once safely aloft, assured of a ride, he jounces so hard in the seat
that I stagger a 
few paces with the same drunken uncertainty he shows in his own walking.


Clouds embrace us. Far overhead, between the fretted crowns of the
Douglas 
fir, I see hints of blue. Down here among the roots and matted needles,
the air 
is mist. My beard soon grows damp; beads glisten on my eyelashes. A few
yards 
along the trail a Forest Service board, with miniature roof to protect
its messages, 
informs us we are at 3,600 feet and must hike to 4,237 in order to reach
the top of 
Hardesty. Since I came to see the clouds, not to swim in them, I hope we
are able 
to climb above them into that tantalizing blue. 

On my back Jesse carries on a fierce indecipherable oration concerning
the 
wonders of this ghostly forest. Giddy with being outside and aloft, he
drums on 
my head, yanks fistfuls of my hair. Every trunk we pass tempts him more 
strongly than the apple tree could ever have tempted Eve and Adam. He 
lurches from side to side, outstretched fingers desperate to feel the
bark. I pause 
at a mammoth stump to let him touch. Viewed up close, the bark looks
like a 
contour map of the Badlands, an eroded landscape where you might expect
to 
uncover fossils. While Jesse traces the awesome ridges and fissures, I
squint to 
read another Forest Service sign. No motorized vehicles, it warns, and
no pack 
animals. 

I surely qualify as a pack animal. For long spells in my adult life,
while moving 
house or humping rucksacks onto trains or hauling firewood, I have felt
more 
like a donkey than anything else. I have felt most like a beast of
burden when 
hauling my two children, first Eva and now Jesse. My neck and shoulders
never 
forget their weight from one portage to another. And I realize that
carrying Jesse 
up the mountain to see clouds is a penance as well as a pleasure-penance
for the 
hours I have sat glaring at my typewriter while he scrabbled mewing
outside my 
door, penance for the thousands of things my wife has not been able to
do on account 
of my word mania, penance for all the countless times I have told
daughter 
Eva "no, I can't; I am writing." I know the rangers did not have human
beasts in 
mind when they posted their sign, yet I am content to be a pack animal,
saddled 
with my crowing son. 

As I resume walking, I feel a tug. Jesse snaps a chunk of bark from the 
stump and carries it with him, to examine at leisure. Beneath one of the
rare cottonwoods 
I pick up a leathery golden leaf, which I hand over my shoulder to the 
baby, who clutches it by the stem and turns it slowly around, tickling
his nose 
with the starpoints. The leaf is a wonder to him, and therefore also to
me. Everything 
he notices, every pebble, every layered slab of bark, is renewed for me.
Once 
I carried Eva outside, in the first spring of her life, and a gust of
wind caught her 
full in the face. She blinked, and then gazed at the invisible breath as
if it were a 
flight of angels streaming past. Holding her in the crook of my arm that
day, I rediscovered 
wind. 

Fascinated by his leaf, Jesse snuggles down in the pack and rides
quietly. 
My heart begins to dance faster as the trail zigzags up the mountain
through a 


PART 1 WRITING CREATIVE NONFICTION 

series of switchbacks. Autumn has been dry in Oregon, so the dirt
underfoot is 
powdery. Someone has been along here inspecting mushrooms. The discarded

ones litter the trail like blackening pancakes. Except for the path,
worn raw by 
deer and hikers, the floor of the woods is covered with moss. Fallen
wood is soon 
hidden by the creeping emerald carpet, the land burying its own dead.
Limegreen 
moss clings fuzzily to the upright trunks and dangles in fluffy hanks
from limbs, 
like freshly dyed wool hung out to dry. A wad of it caught in the fist
squeezes 
down to nothing. 

A lurch from the backpack tells me that Jesse has spied some new
temptation 
in the forest. Craning around, I see his spidery little hands reaching
for the 
sky. Then I also look up, and notice the shafts of light slanting down
through the 
treetops. The light seems substantial, as if made of glass, like the
rays of searchlights 
that carve up the night sky to celebrate a store's opening or a war's
end. 
"Light," I say to Jesse. "Sunlight. We're almost above the clouds."
Wherever the 
beams strike, they turn cobwebs into jeweled diagrams, bracelet limbs
with rhinestones 
of dew. Cloud vapors turn to smoke. 

The blue glimpsed between trees gradually thickens, turns solid, and we 
emerge onto a treeless stony ridge. Clear sky above, flotillas of clouds
below, 
mountains humping their dark green backs as far as I can see. The sight
of so 
many slick backs arching above the clouds reminds me of watching
porpoises 
from a ship in the Gulf of Mexico. Vapors spiral up and down between
cloud layers 
as if on escalators. Entire continents and hemispheres and galaxies of
mist drift by. 
I sit on the trail with backpack propped against a stone ledge, to watch
this 
migration. 

No peace for meditation with an eleven-month-old on your back. An ache 
in my shoulders signals that Jesse, so near the ground, is leaning out
of the pack 
to capture something. A pebble or beetle to swallow? A stick to gnaw?
Moss, it 
turns out, an emerald hunk of it ripped from the rockface. "Moss," I
tell him, as 
he rotates this treasure about three inches in front of his eyes. "Here,
feel," and I 
stroke one of his palms across the velvety clump. He tugs the hand free
and resumes 
his private exploration. This independence grows on him these days 
faster than his hair. 

"Clouds," I tell him, pointing out into the gulf of air. Jesse glances
up, sees 
only vagueness where I see a ballet of shapes, and so he resumes his
scrutiny of 
the moss. "Not to eat," I warn him. When I check on him again half a
minute later, 
the moss is half its former size and his lips are powdered with green.
Nothing to 
do but hoist him out of the pack, dig what I can from his mouth, then
plop him 
back in, meanwhile risking spilling both of us down the mountainside. A
glance 
down the dizzying slope reminds me of my wife's warning, that I have no
business 
climbing this mountain alone with a baby. She's right, of course. But
guilt, 
like the grace of God, works in strange ways, and guilt drives me up
here among 
the skittery rocks to watch clouds with my son. 

"Let Daddy have it," I say, teasing the hunk of moss from his hand.
"Have a 
stick, pretty stick." While he imprints the stick with the marks of his
teeth, four 
above and two below, I spit on the underside of the moss and glue it
back down 


SANDERS / CLOUD CROSSING 

to the rock. Grow, I urge it. Looking more closely at the rockface, I
see that it is 
crumbling beneath roots and weather, sloughing away like old skin. The
entire 
mountain is migrating, not so swiftly as the clouds, but just as surely,
heading 
grain by grain to the sea. 

Jesse seems to have acquired some of the mountain's mass as I stand
upright 
again and hoist his full weight. With the stick he idly swats me on the
ear. 

The trail carries us through woods again, then up along a ridge to the
clearing 
at the top of Hardesty Mountain. There is no dramatic feeling of
expansiveness, 
as there is on some peaks, because here the view is divvied up into
modest 
sweeps by Douglas firs, cottonwoods, great gangling heaps of briars. The
forest 
has laid siege to the rocky crest, and will abolish the view altogether
before Jesse 
is old enough to carry his own baby up here. For now, by moving from
spot to 
spot on the summit, I can see in all directions. What I see mostly are a
few thousand 
square miles of humpbacked mountains looming through the clouds. Once 
in Ohio I lived in a valley which the Army Corps of Engineers thought
would 
make a convenient bed for a reservoir. So the Mahoning River was dammed,
and 
as the waters backed up in that valley, covering everything but the
highest ridges, 
drowning my childhood, they looked very much like these clouds poured
among 
the mountains. 

"Ba! Ba!" Jesse suddenly bellows, leaping in his saddle like a bronco
rider. 

Bath, I wonder? Bed? Bottle? Ball? He has been prolific of B-words
lately, 
and their tail-ends are hard to tell apart. Ball, I finally decide, for
there at the end 
of the arrow made by his arm is the moon, a chalky peachpit hanging down
near 
the horizon. "Moon," I say. 

"Ba! Ba!" he insists. 

Let it stay a ball for a while, something to play catch with, roll
across the 
linoleum. His sister's first sentence was, "There's the moon." Her
second was, 
"Want it, Daddy." So began her astronomical yearnings, my astronomical
failures. 
She has the itch for space flight in her, my daughter does. Jesse is
still too 
much of a pup for me to say whether he has caught it. 

We explore the mountaintop while the ocean of cloud gradually rises.
There 
are charred rings from old campfires. In a sandy patch, red-painted
bricks are laid 
in the shape of a letter A. Not large enough to be visible from
airplanes. If Hardesty 
Mountain were in a story by Hawthorne, of course, I could use the
scarlet A 
to accuse it of some vast geological harlotry. If this were a folklore
mountain, I 
could explain the letter as an alphabetical inscription left by giants.
But since this 
is no literary landscape, I decide that the bricks formed the foundation
for some 
telescope or radio transmitter or other gizmo back in the days when this
summit 
had a lookout tower. 

Nearby is another remnant from those days, a square plank cover for a
cistern. 
The boards are weathered to a silvery sheen, with rows of rustblackened 
nailheads marking the joints. Through a square opening at the center of
the 
planks I catch a glint. Water? Still gathering here after all these
years? Leaning 
over the hole, one boot on the brittle planks, I see that the glint is
from a tin can. 
The cistern is choked with trash. 


PART 1 WRITING CREATIVE NONFICTION 

At the very peak, amid a jumble of rocks, we find nine concrete piers
that 
once supported the fire tower. By squatting down beside one of those
piers I can 
rest Jesse's weight on the concrete, and relieve the throb in my neck. I
imagine the 
effort of hauling enough materials up this mountain to build a tower.
Surely they 
used horses, or mules. Not men with backpacks. So what became of the
tower 
when the Forest Service, graduated to spotter planes, no longer needed
it? Did 
they pry out every nail and carry the boards back down again? A glance
at the 
ground between my feet supplies the answer. Wedged among the rocks,
where 
rains cannot wash them away, are chunks of glass, some of them an inch
thick. I 
pick up one that resembles a tongue, about the size for a cocker
spaniel. Another 
one, a wad of convolutions, might be a crystalline brain. Peering up
through it at 
the sun, I see fracture lines and tiny bubbles. Frozen in the seams
where one 
molten layer lapped onto another there are ashes. Of course they didn't
dismantle 
the tower and lug its skeleton down the mountain. They waited for a
windless 
day after a drenching rain and they burned it. 

The spectacle fills me: the mountain peak like a great torch, a volcano,
the 
tower heaving on its nine legs, the windows bursting from the heat,
tumbling 
among the rocks, fusing into molten blobs, the glass taking on whatever
shape it 
cooled against. 

There should be nails. Looking closer I find them among the shards of
glass, 
sixteen-penny nails mostly, what we called spikes when I was building
houses. 
Each one is somber with rust, but perfectly straight, never having been
pried from 
wood. I think of the men who drove those nails-the way sweat stung in
their 
eyes, the way their forearms clenched with every stroke of the
hammer-and I 
wonder if any of them were still around when the tower burned. The
Geological 
Survey marker, a round lead disk driven into a rock beside one of the
piers, is 
dated 1916. Most likely the tower already stood atop the mountain in
that year. 
Most likely the builders are all dead by now. 

So on its last day the Hardesty fire tower became a fire tower in
earnest. Yesterday 
I read that two American physicists shared the Nobel Prize for
discovering 
the background radiation left over from the Big Bang, which set our
universe in 
motion some fifteen billion years ago. Some things last-not forever, of
course, 
but for a long time-things like radiation, like bits of glass. I gather
a few of the 
nails, some lumps of glass, a screw. Stuffing these shreds of evidence
in my 
pocket, I discover the graham cracker in its wrapping of cellophane, and
I realize I 
have not thought of Jesse for some minutes, have forgotten that he is
riding me. 
That can mean only one thing. Sure enough, he is asleep, head scrunched
down 
into the pack. Even while I peek at him over my shoulder he is changing,
neurons 
hooking up secret connections in his brain, calcium swelling his bones
as mud 
gathers in river deltas. 

Smell warns me that the clouds have reached us. Looking out, the only 
peaks I can see are the Three Sisters, each of them a shade over 10,000
feet. Except 
for those peaks and the rocks where I stand, everything is cotton. There
are no 
more clouds to watch, only Cloud, unanimous whiteness, an utter absence
of 
shape. A panic seizes me-the same panic I used to feel as a child
crossing the 


SANDERS / CLOUD CROSSING 

street when approaching cars seemed to have my name written on their
grills. 
Suddenly the morning's nightmare comes back to me: everything I know is 
chalked upon a blackboard, and, while I watch, a hand erases every last
mark. 

Terror drives me down the Hardesty trail, down through vapors that leach

color from the ferns, past trees that are dissolving. Stumps and downed
logs lose 
their shape, merge into the clouds. The last hundred yards of the trail
I jog. Yet 
Jesse never wakes until I haul him out of the pack and wrestle him into
the car 
harness. His bellowing defies the clouds, the creeping emptiness. I
bribe him with 
sips of water, a graham cracker, a song. But nothing comforts him, or
comforts 
me, as we drive down the seven graveled miles of logging road to the
highway. 
There we sink into open space again. The clouds are a featureless gray
overhead. 

As soon as the wheels are ringing beneath us on the blacktop, Jesse's
internal 
weather shifts, and he begins one of his calm babbling orations,
contentedly 
munching his cracker. The thread of his voice slowly draws me out of the
annihilating 
ocean of whiteness. "Moon," he is piping from the back seat, "moon, 
moon!"