ÿþ<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title> Poetry and Prose from In Posse Review</title> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html" charset="utf-8" /> <meta name="author" content="In Posse Review, http://www.webdelsol.com" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="19_a_style.css" /> </head> <body> <center> <br /> <table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"> <tr> <td valign="top" width="35px"> <p> <img src="insposse.gif" width="30px" height="187px" alt=" " /><br />&nbsp;<br />&nbsp;<br />&nbsp;<br />&nbsp;<br />&nbsp;<br />&nbsp;<br />&nbsp;<br />&nbsp;</p> </td> <td valign="top" width="15px" bgcolor="#0f0000">&nbsp;</td> <td width="15px">&nbsp;</td> <td align="left" valign="top" width="400px"> <h1>The Wheelbarrow: The Passage of Time Allows For All Things to Fall Into Place</h1><br> <h2>Michele Murray</h2> <p> They say the rogue salmon are running again, already ahead of their migrating clan. They say the humpback whales will be returning soon, too. Then, after the big whales come, the orca will follow. Time has been ambling along the entire Time I have been lost here at this mine on Admiralty Island. I've been isolated from my family, away from the inhabited shores of Douglas Island, the Gastineau Channel, and especially Juneau. Civilization seems a thousand miles away. </p> <p>I am mentally exhausted from logging core all winter long, biding my time in the Inside Passage like an abandoned object, like an inanimate artifact of the Ancient Ones left forgotten on the forest floor for tens of thousand of years. I miss my home on the Colorado River but I had to stay here, two thousand miles north. There is nothing like the monotonous toil of working one's way through a hefty backlog of stacked skids full of drilled rock core in the winter months on a remote island in Alaska to keep one's mind from the event of loosing a brother. Once the wooden lids of the core boxes are lifted and stacked to the side, and the muddy details of lithology, alteration, mineralization and structure are revealed under a wet rinse, the rhythmic pattern and sound of retracting metal tape-measure make a life-sustaining routine of focus to hide from one's grief. </p> <p> <em>ZZZZZip! </em>The tape retracts. My poor brother has died. Total length of core: 3.2 meters. <em>ZZZZZZZZZZZZip</em>! The tape retracts. My brother is dead. Length of longest piece: 27.5 centimeters. ZZZZip! During this routine, a transition gently begins to occur between intense, constant anguish, to a more benign state of tolerance for the aching pain inside my heart. My brother is dead. Total number of fractures & My brother is dead. And so on, all winter. </p> <p> Now, with the light in the sky growing with the return of the new season's sun, I feel a need to return to the Gore Canyon and Yarmony Mountain. I crave my old life. I want to drive my own pickup truck with my dogs sleeping on the seat and the windows rolled down to let in a hot breeze. I want to see the Colorado River again and to listen to Emily Lou Harris singing "Red Dirt Girl" as the hills cloaked with aspen fly past behind my tires' roiling dust. I want to be with my husband on the road together again before those days are gone. </p> <p> There is a big doe here at Hawks' Inlet, (big by Sitka Deer standards). She's at least as big as a malamute and bigger than her buck counterparts. She likes to walk through the open core barn. The doe walks in one end and out the other with delicate deliberation. This way is not any shorter than the route around the building and there is no obvious reason for her diversion. It seems as though she likes to feel the hard, dry floor beneath her feet in contrast to the deep, spongy tundra of the rain forest. Perhaps she likes the sound of her own footsteps on boardwalk in the tall building, <em>click, click click</em>& </p> <p> If someone is in the barn, she waits. She'll look inside from around the corner and ask in very plain language: </p> <em>"I want to come in, but I can't because you're in here."</em></p> <p> Even a stupid human can understand her. The geo-technicians step out of her way. They let the errant deer pass through and watch her gingerly looking here and there in the dark places for danger. This animal is not sensible, but her communication provides an example of trust on both sides of the <em>genus</em> barrier. </p> <p> This same fat deer has been snoozing on the melting snow behind the barn through all the gray morning throughout a drizzle of warm, nearly constant rain. I stepped outside the office to flex my stiff back and refresh my cramped spirit from the confines of entering geologic observations into the computer database. I stopped short to see her staring with radar-like ears cupped toward me. Our eyes locked, then I blinked and averted my eyes because prey animals feel uncomfortable under a predator's stare. She exaggerated an attempt to rise, communicating: </p> <p> <em>"Must I REALLY get up?"</em></p> <p> I stepped back and she halted her motion. I realized she must be pregnant. She waited for me to leave with only one of her legs pulled out from under her planted belly. I left slowly. Twice today, I returned and snuck a peak at her around the corner. She tilted her face sideways to focus on my head. </p> <em>Hmmm, if I tilt my head sideways I can see better,</em> she might have thought. </p> <p> I retreated to my computer not to bother her anymore. <em>I'll find ANOTHER area to stretch,</em> I thought to myself, <em>so as not to disturb the Great Supine One for the rest of the day.</em></p> <p> I may be biased, but I think she likes the bassoon. I've been practicing my bassoon off and on all morning while waiting for the printer to regurgitate digital maps of sub terrain stratas. I am alone in the office on weekends, which allows me the freedom to practice my bassoon in the shed. My bassoon is lying like a cat across a pile of colorful geologic interpretations penciled on large sheets of paper. My reeds, metronome, etudes, and little tools make a new stratigraphic horizon over the ore deposits. I think the doe likes to listen to the sound of my deep woodwind from her nest in the melting snow: a chubby ungulate with a taste for Mozart! </p> <p> The warm Spring rain has melted the Winter's snow to the point that the handles of our trusty wheelbarrow are exposed for the first time this year. It's been buried under six feet of snow since last Christmas when someone left it in the wrong place (under the roof's eave) for a slough of the first blizzard's snow. Mel ( Little General' as in Napoleon) swore he was, "Gonna find out who done it," (as in left the equipment there&#151;I think I did.) We've been carrying and dragging core boxes by hand since the wheelbarrow became ensconced for the winter. Sometimes, when we are working particularly hard at moving frozen pallets of core boxes, we look to the icy mound that holds our reliable equipment captive to see if we might see some evidence of its emergence. Today is the first sign. </p> <p> I think I saw the North Wind stalking me when I left. When my brother died, I had been in such a hurry to leave, that I had absentmindedly left the wheelbarrow under the roof eave. It was the coldest, darkest, stark part of an Alaska winter's night when I rode the shuttle bus through the forest to catch the ferry that would take me from the island. I saw It in the woods: Winnedago&#151;the Spirit of the North Wind to the Ancient Ones. Winnedago hasn't left the World because the Ancient Ones have changed or died or gone away. Winnedago haunts Admiralty Island, especially during the winter months when the bears are asleep. The fat doe knows Winnedago and soon the bears will wake up, too. Everything seems to fall into their place with Time, and if you wait long enough, you won't be lost anymore. Even the wheelbarrow will surely turn up with the passing of winter. For me, it is now Time to return home. </p> <br><br> <hr /> <h2>Michele Murray</h2> <p>Michele Murray is a Native American writer and lives in a remote, mountain region in South Park, Colorado. She is a contributing editor for the <em>Mountain Gazette</em> and writes intermittently for <em>Discover the Outdoors</em>, <em>EQUUS, Fly Fishing World, Native People's Magazine, New Tribal Dawn, The Aquarian, The Ute Pass Courier</em>, and <em>Why</em> magazines. Her stories are available on coloradofishing.net and are included in two anthologies: <em>Hell's Half Mile: River Runners' Tales of Hilarity and Misadventure,</em> published by Breakaway Books, 2004, and <em>Comeback Wolves: Western Writers Speak for Wolves in the Southern Rockies</em>, published by Johnson Books, 2005. She works from time to time as a geologic consultant to the mining industry.</p> <br /> <br /> <div id="logo"><em>In Posse:</em> Potentially, might be . . . </div> <p><img src="tedhead.gif" align="right" alt="logo" /></p> <h3><a href="http://webdelsol.com/InPosse/index.htm" align="right"> Return</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; </h3> <br /> <hr /> </td></tr></table></center></body></html>