On the
morning of the 18th of May
by Hariana Chilstrom
I awoke looking out at the night rain’s residue, tenuous drops hanging from the balcony outside my bedroom. A longing for an old lover--or a hope for a new one--was all I could think of. I put out a little spiritual SOS:
Come
walk with me
In the
rain
That
falls
Into
each of our lives.
Forty Years Ago Today, May 18, 1980
by Hariana Chilstrom
I was opening the heavy doors of the Insect Zoo on that Sunday morning, hoping the new ant colony we’d installed was still in it’s enclosure—the previous colony had escaped and invaded the tiny building, much to the distress of most of the other six and eight-legged animals. The doors creaked and wobbled ominously, reminding me the tiny building was wearing out.
A rumbling, like a distant sonic boom, made me turn around to face the lion exhibit to the north, across the pathway from my little shack.
Then the sky blew up.
A racing gray denseness, a dark cumulous expansion, like Jiffy Pop on steroids, was puffing into the sky beyond Portland’s West Hills. In minutes it spread across the spring sky like a million years of dust being shaken from a giant’s sheepskin.
I stood there, stunned. This was like nothing I’d
experienced in my 33 years. Not even news reports of seismic activity over the
past week had prepared me for this. Later, I’d remember a lithograph of
Krakatoa in an old National Geographic.
I ran into the Insect Zoo, grabbed the wall phone and called my boss. “Can you see the sky?”
“Slow down. What’s happening? No, I can’t see much from my
office.”
“Come down. I think there’s a big fire or something. I can
see a huge cloud of dark smoke.”
“What! Alright, I’m coming down,” he snorted. Ever the
skeptic, he knew I rarely overreacted, even by his Spartan standards. He came
running down the hill like an agitated preying mantis, flapping his long arms
like he was going to take flight.
“Wow! You weren’t kidding! That’s incredible! It must be the
mountain.” His tall frame bent over, hands on thighs, as he caught his breath.
Then he glanced up at the sky, his mouth hanging open. He turned, and we looked
at each other, two unprepared primates, watching the morning sky invaded by the
Earth’s rage.
In that frozen moment, eye-to-eye, it seemed we jumped back
into time, a time of many active volcanoes and Earth changes bewildering to the
developing humans of 400,000 years ago. There was no clock time. There was only
the moment of now.
It was a time when:
The Earth spoke to us
And we understood.
Senses merged—
Scents vibrating and
Colors ringing with sounds,
Everything sang.
Everything spoke.
Everything was alive.
We knew all the languages
Of air, water, rocks, plants and animals,
We shared life with everything.
We could smell changes,
Read the signs,
Respect the messages.
We knew that a smile cracking on
Mother’s dry, creased face,
Meant rain, and
Her breath, when it sang of wind and green,
Meant seeds and insects would
Fly into our hungry path.
We listened when
Plants warned, cajoled, and beckoned,
Murmuring scents of pine and sprouting herbs
Directing us to buried bulbs full of water, and
Whispering of dreams and poisons.
We were warned when
Dry grasses bowed down,
Singing scents of a big cat’s journey,
All yellow and hot—
Furred hunger stalking—us.
We watched ants dancing warnings
Of sand storms and listened to
Beetles standing on rocks,
Reciting stories of their tender young,
Asking us to leave a few
To take only what we needed.
We learned that even shadows,
Whispering low and soft,
Could tell us when to hunt for burrowing animals
And where to find water in dry holes.
We trembled when
Mother’s rumblings warned us to
Ask for guidance, to prepare,
Perhaps to leave her familiar lands
Of fire and thunder.
It was a time
When we could not imagine
Forgetting our connection
With all that was.
And, as suddenly as it had come, the memory disappeared. A gritty gray dust began to drift onto the asphalt of the zoo, breaking our locked gazes. My boss shook his head, laughed too brightly. I turned away to spare him my still-entranced look. He called later to announce the closure of the nearly vacant zoo; volcanic dust was a danger to lungs and to even to creatures without them.
Postscript: We wore masks then for days, as the glassy ash coated everything, drifting into buildings and scratching windshields. The University of Oregon began a study of the health effects of the inescapable ash. Four years later ash was still trapped in the veins of rhododendron and other hard-leaved perennials.
About the author: Hariana Chilstrom is a science educator and visual artist who is passionate about pollinators and other (mostly spineless) creatures. She has written for the Pacific Horticulture Journal, several natural history associations, and the Seattle Aquarium. Many of her current creative non-fiction pieces have been spawned by experiences on city buses.
