Ravine
For Asha, Richard, and Anina
Chapter
One: Candle
On September 9, 2006, the gibbous moon showed its dry white face well
after eight-thirty pm. As always, it shone equally over every
landscape and in all directions, including the town particular to
this story, Ben Lomond, California. Some of its light never
penetrates the deep canyons and thick redwood forests surrounding
this part of Santa Cruz County; there, roads snake upwards through
steep hills, vanishing into dead ends, and homes cling for dear life
on half-eroded cliffsides.
A
single street runs through the central part of town; small
businesses, housed in renovated clapboard buildings, line each side:
a seamstress advertising custom slipcovers, an art gallery, a dental
office, a small library, an auditorium called Park Hall where a local
theater company puts on plays, a dog grooming parlor, and a
hairdresser. Here, the principal establishment is the Ben Lomond
Market, as spacious and well-stocked as a rural market can be, with a
bright green awning and posters on the sliding glass doors,
advertising weekly specials. That September, pumpkins, acorn squash,
and gourds had begun to dominate the storefront displays a bit
earlier than usual, crowding out the last of summer’s bounty as
autumn edged in.
When
I remember that night, I always think that the moon must have shone
with a particular coldness on a certain road in Ben Lomond called
Love Creek, named for an actual creek which cuts straight through the
site of ancient landslides. A more recent landslide in 1982 took out
houses during a wild, flooding storm; several bodies, including those
of two small children, still remain under those tons of dirt and
rubble; a wooden sign advises people not to dump garbage there. Next
to the sign, someone has built a large toy box, painted bright red
and filled with faded stuffed animals in memory of the two children,
and a local Girl Scout troop hangs glass ornaments each Christmas on
a Douglas fir planted not long after the storm.
As
the road ascends into the mountains, it changes from pavement to
dirt; landslides rise on each side, masses of chalky brown mud dried
into thick, overlapping layers. Trees grow off plumb, twisted away
by the unstable ground; branches dangle overhead, the very definition
of the word “widowmaker.” The road gradually dwindles to a narrow
ribbon of dusty beige sand and the creek becomes increasingly
shadowed, revealing no trace of itself except for the sound of
rushing water.
For
many hours, light would have shone not at all into a particular
ravine just at the place where Love Creek rises again from the canyon
and becomes, in the dark, a flowing blackness more sensed than seen,
braiding and unbraiding over smooth stones. Eventually, the moon may
have cast a miserly silver on what rested just above the creek,
cradled in leaf litter gathered for years against a fallen redwood
log: the facedown body of a young woman, six and a half months
pregnant, the back of her head a crushed and bloody mangle.
Much
earlier, as the moon slipped above a break in the ridgeline, it
surely must have watched with flat skull eyes the dented
gray-and-blue Ford pickup raising clouds of sand and dust as it raced
away down Love Creek Road, the passenger side empty except for a
crumpled tarp, the driver at the wheel smiling or not, but certainly
satisfied, released from the weight of that terrible burden.
in it (it is just too hard with a small kid) and Zen is what I feel most at home in.Just some thoughts, again: fanaticism and hatred towards those who do not share your ideas is not going to save the world. If you are a person who proclaims
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