[stylist] Beautiful creative nonfiction essay to learn from

[Donna Hill]

Hi Bridgit,
Thanks for posting. This is wonderful, so rich in visual imagery and 
metaphor.
Donna

Read Donna's articles on
Suite 101:
www.suite101.com/profile.cfm/donna_hill
Ezine Articles:
http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=D._W._Hill
American Chronicle:
www.americanchronicle.com/authors/view/3885

Connect with Donna on
Twitter:
www.twitter.com/dewhill
LinkedIn:
www.linkedin.com/in/dwh99
FaceBook:
www.facebook.com/donna.w.hill.

Hear clips from "The Last Straw" at:
cdbaby.com/cd/donnahill
Apple I-Tunes
phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?playListId=259244374

Check out the "Sound in Sight" CD project
Donna is Head of Media Relations for the nonprofit
Performing Arts Division of the National Federation of the Blind:
www.padnfb.org


On 4/8/2011 2:26 PM, Bridgit Pollpeter wrote:
> 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!"
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Writers Division web site:
> http://www.nfb-writers-division.org<http://www.nfb-writers-division.org/>
>
> stylist mailing list
> stylist at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/stylist_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for stylist:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/stylist_nfbnet.org/penatwork%40epix.net
>
>
>
>
> =======
> Email scanned by PC Tools - No viruses or spyware found.
> (Email Guard: 7.0.0.21, Virus/Spyware Database: 6.17270)
> http://www.pctools.com/
> =======
>
>    




=======
Email scanned by PC Tools - No viruses or spyware found.
(Email Guard: 7.0.0.21, Virus/Spyware Database: 6.17270)
http://www.pctools.com/
=======