By Eric Le Roy
A couple of days ago, my wife and I took our young Ridgeback Retriever, Baron, for a long autumnal walk near a monastery up in the hills here in Varna. Toward sundown, when a faint mist wettens the twilight air, then sinks, mixing fallen leaves and black earth into pliable sod, tramping along this multi-colored corridor gives great pleasure. Not many people are about – a blessing in a way that is not intended as anti-social. Any empty shopping mall is a sad, depressing place. So is a loudly peopled forest.
Another benefit of the solitude is the relegation of time to irrelevance; it’s enough just to understand that it’s autumn, or Fall, as you wish. Or maybe what is really achieved is the dismissal of time as a forward-driving engine and its rebirth as a circle, which is what I have always believed it to be. In the case of the evening we spent thrashing about with the impetuous dog, trying to rein him in, we trod along the floor of the woods, surrounded by stout trunks and curved brackets of branch and reddening leaf, all under a canopy of looping early night wind rounding overhead like the ceiling of a bridle chamber in a medieval castle.
I became a boy again. I suddenly found myself looking for a lost baseball in a West Virginia autumn as long ago as when weather and wind were first born to animate a dreary paradise and thereby create the miracle of memory. That was up on Carson Street in Charleston, the chemical infested capital, where the Kanawha River was a mustard-colored, undrinkable syrup and – in the industrial end of town – factories with musical names like Nitro, Dupont, and Union Carbide emitted smog so thick as to make an old Victorian peasouper look like the shimmering air on Juliet’s balcony as she called out to Romeo. It was an atmospheric aquarium of toilet flushings – our ‘river’. And this was in the late 1950s and early 60s – long before words like ‘environment’ and ‘ecology’ had entered the lexicon. Come to think of it, it’s a wonder people weren’t pouring tankards of piss and shit from their balconies. Actually, there were no balconies, or they might have.
But near the woods behind my house, my best friend Kelsey and I were far from the maundering muck of city streets, gasps of tubercular and lung-sick city air, and the repugnant canal where, if you were daft enough to go swimming there, the water would stick to you, and you would stick to the water. There was grass back where we played at the edge of a cavernous, dipping forest that sprawled for miles all the way across the landscape before rising to the small city airport on the other side. Planes with propellers. Twin-engine jobs. Not quite like the ones they used to bomb the Germans and Japanese with, but a long way from the flying hotels of present-day jet air travel.
The summer-long streaks and stems and sprouts of green were gone, and here had come the chilly pinch of Mr. Frost, and the smeared and vivid finger paintings Jack was famous for. Nothing could have been better. Riotous leaves, as if revealing at last something ungovernable in their nature – something that had grown weary of the stately summer palaces with emerald gardens and officious gardiners whose commands they were obliged to obey – now burst out with the frenzy of a Van Gogh painting, and locked me in a vision they shared with me, anointed me with, claimed me like their entitled cargo. It was as if Autumn alone understood the way my hedonistic and melancholy spirit formed in the long ago. Being far more articulate than I, it said that the way forward was winter.
But that day, Kelsey threw the ball over my head and down into the woods, and I went looking for it, while he, rather ungraciously but surely following the odd, perverse terms of adolescent friendship, stood there singing “Give me that old time religion” (why I remember that, heaven knows) and finally abandoned me, ambling on back up the hill to his house where supper was waiting. So I searched for that doggone ball as darkness fell. I don’t recall, amid Kelsey’s damned singing (caterwauling, I’d have called it), whether I ever found the ball or not. If memory serves, I didn’t.
But what I remember – and recalled during my walk with Liubov and Baron as we trudged forth – was the all-encompassing, sempiternal embrace of that red, brown, orange, and yellow evening, bedecked in the living garments of the season when the richness of the earth was never wealthier or more like a twilit parent or a living soul in the heart of a wind. At such times, there occurs a raising of the shades one pulls down to get through life. Such a moment as then.
Logically, technically, you know that nature doesn’t care. It appears that caring was never part of the plan when molecular architects, recently escaped from a black hole, invented slime. So the galaxies, somersaulting into unfathomable distances, do not mind what we do, nor monitor our brief comings and goings. Yet, we humans, who in our microscopic way seem to be the guardians of many things, even those multitudes we destroy and all else we desecrate in stunning arrogance, remain not only the ones who hear the tree that falls in the forest, but are driven to record such events and so, in our wavering and transient thoughts, reproduce the thunder and its imaginary sound.
In my experience, the question of eternal futures has mostly passed from my worries. In fact, the question of life after death is now less interesting to me than another tray of pretzels to a drunk at the bar. Enough to say I don’t know, like someone trying to guess the winning lottery ticket. If there is a God, it’s no sense saying sorry now. I am not of the flimsy ‘born again’ mentality. I am a person from morality’s flophouse, a secondary bum looking for a grate to toast my hobo ass a little when the February winds are blowing in a northern city, a sailor coughed up by the sea, lingering on the docks. Degraded, not by any Original Sin, but by my own choosing,
I have tried to do better. Not to win redemption, but to find the mental forest of the waterfall where I can take a shower, the all-cleansing shower, that most of us secretly crave and many have been known to cry out for in church. Born again, No! – and yet there is mystery and magic somehow in the word baptism. It works; it doesn’t work. Back and forth, like hands that scrub a rack of flesh. Oh, when will it be clean? Long depression comes after sunset, though sometimes dreams awaken urgent celebrations, and life starts barking then.
Kelsey and the baseball are long gone. My two beloved dogs, Cassie and Poppy, have disappeared as well. God, tell me where they wandered off to! The calendar expresses its incredible doomsday mandate with innocuous flutterings. Those dogs, you know, first Cass died of a heart attack. Poppy lingered for a month, incontinent and senile, in my bedroom. But I let her live because I cursed the power I had to put her away. That avid dog, who had waited by the door for me when I left Varna to go back to Moscow, was now blank in the eyes, though cool in the nose. Piss was everywhere, but she still had an appetite. I couldn’t bear, I say I couldn’t bear to end her life – to kill her – until, at great length, I finally understood that her trial had become more of me than of her. So I called the doctor.
Liuba and I buried both of our soul-mates in the field where we used to walk, frolic, and enjoy. We are old people, but we went with them at night – first Cass, then Pop – and dug into the rocky earth until we could submerge them with the dignity they deserved. We see now that the builders’ machines have churned and hoisted this earth, and thrown it back down again with all the flat finality of an airport runway. And that is where they will build. Our dogs’ bodies, if not torn in little bites by insects, or big bites by foxes or stray dogs, or lifted out of their graves by a forklift, are nowhere to be found. Luckily, eternally, the dog’s body is not the dog. The uncorrupted creatures live on; they are not dead because I am not dead, and neither is the earth. All of us in flesh, fur, or spirit and memory are children of the fruitful and germinating soil. And the wild young Baron is proof of our united greatness. A supplier of life.
This is why our autumn day in the woods by the monastery explained itself with something better than human language, though not beyond our comprehension. The woodsy forest had come alive – better than an ancient Roman festival, better than the Can-Can at the Moulin Rouge, better than a playoff game at the ball park, better than a sermon in a tent, a soliloquy from a balcony, or a war cry from the field. No, it had become a place where we could shed all admonishment and tidings good and bad, advertisements full of promises or warnings of disappointing outcomes, and just be whatever we have been, are, and will become as years evaporate like steam from a kettle or dwindle like a match attempting to light a fire in a gale. One tries. Then things settle down.
So it was – that evening among the grunting of tree trunks, the mutterings of leaves, and abstract humming in my soul, an evening to me oddly suggestive of the barrels of dark beer that humans drink to douse the gloom of winter days. All that and more, so much more, will lead us through these days and enable us to sing in the dusk. Eternity is not the friend of beauty, but on beery winter evenings, it can seem to be. That’s when old memories of baseballs disappearing into autumnal thickets return like the smiles of leaves that bear the human faces of one’s lifetime partners, pals, and princesses – the green ones of spring and the great copper and fiery ones of autumn. All of it was of a season.
Life, I see, goes by like an anonymous man at a train station glancing at a schedule, or a milkmaid in the meadow pausing to blink at the green world in her opening and closing moment of peerless fecundity. Or even the blank facade of some imperious building, places of a thousand flirtations and a million deals, the stirrings of day, the writhing of nights. The material of sand.
And no, I do not expect explicit answers or absolution from the autumn. Descending leaves and leaf-cluttered paths, fertile and moistly aggressive like hungry virgins in springtime, will never excuse me from the conundrums of life and the horror of death. But autumn makes young dogs happy, as I can see, and this makes me happy too, the way a father gives power to a son, and then gives way.
The red-orange curtains part to let the bright browns and vivid yellows in, so much that I believe, despite myself, that at last I have achieved an understanding, and, as the dog bounds and barks like the little mad creature he is today, I have formed a covenant with autumn and all such windy colors that the lighthouse of the soul gazes out upon in rapture.
