[stylist] Beautiful creative nonfiction essay to learn from

[Robert Leslie Newman]

Interesting, the author so happen to mention the only tree that was  named
after a blind guy! The Douglas Fur. (True. Another story of human spirit, of
carrying on after severe vision loss, accomplishment of note, and eventually
a tragic death (if the guy had only had a cane.) 


-----Original Message-----
From: stylist-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:stylist-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Donna Hill
Sent: Friday, April 08, 2011 1:50 PM
To: Writer's Division Mailing List
Cc: Bridgit Pollpeter
Subject: Re: [stylist] Beautiful creative nonfiction essay to learn from

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

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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!"
>
>
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