CATHEDRAL - Patrick Sean Lee (best books for 8th graders txt) 📗

Isabella

Oh, it’s so peaceful here. I’d so forgotten the majesty of this place.

After all those years of hating these mountains, I think that now I could stay here for eternity. I’d like that, like to be away from L.A. and noise and the constant roar that saturates the air back there, like swarming bees that have grown by their gluttonies to become the size of cars. Millions of bees the size of cars. And takers everywhere. Everyone back in the city wants something, has to have it. Here it’s different, but maybe that’s just because there are so few people around. Yes, I’m certain that’s part of it.

I remind myself, it’s September twenty-third—my thirty-sixth birthday—and I’m going to celebrate it alone, at least for a few hours. What a delightful yet depressing thought. The lake can’t be very far away, now, if I remember right, but somehow the path seems so different today. The twists used to be straighter, and the hill was not so steep. But then again, the last time I walked this path I was only thirteen.

The sudden noise of a woodpecker draws my attention momentarily away from my thoughts. She is ramming her beak into the bark of a tree somewhere in the distance, high above me, in search of…what, dinner? Or is she just pecking away at the skin of the pine for the heck of it? For the exercise, or because she’s simply just wired that way? It hits me that her place in the world is so simple, so uncomplicated, unlike mine. The noise she makes—the strange reverberation of her hammering in this thin air—it’s almost restful in a way.

The sound of her hammering is filtered magically here in the thin Rocky Mountain air. I’m entranced. It’s as though someone pulled thick cotton from my ears the minute I stepped out of the car a week ago, allowing a hundred new octaves passage. Every sound is so different, so melodious and rich. I imagine myself in a true cathedral for the first time in my life. I’m certain angelic beings inhabit this place, the lodge below, too.

Oh, God, it’s so nice here on this trail, so far away from everything that rules my life and makes me want, sometimes, to walk off the end of the Santa Monica pier.

The wildflowers dancing in the breeze along both sides of the path stop me. They’re stringy little things compared to the climate-controlled, perfect blooms I get at the mart for the boutique. These delicate flowers seem to long for the warmth of sea level nights and the endlessly long growing season back on the coast…but that can’t be true. I bend over and start to pick one, but then decide against it. It’s brilliant purple, with twenty or thirty tiny blossoms clinging to its stem like so many velvet grapes, and it would be a shame for me to steal the few remaining weeks it has to live. I touch it with my fingertips, then move on.

The path inclines more steeply upward suddenly. Fifteen feet ahead is a sign on a leaning, greenish-colored wooden post at the side of the umber path. “Lake Roosevelt-elevation 9,200 feet”, the top line says. Below it in smaller lettering, “¼ mile”. I’ve come three-quarters of a mile up the mountain; almost there. A tangle of yellowing leafy vines have meandered up the shaft of the post, but stopped a foot below the weathered wood of the marker. I wonder why? I shrug and then laugh. It isn’t important at all, just one of those hundred inconsequential things that have invaded my head here in this marvelous place. I don’t have to answer the question or ever worry about it coming back to complicate my tomorrows. Questions like those I’ve been asking myself lately about Brad and me. I forgave him silently without saying a word to him. I think I should have told him that I knew. How complicated has that gotten?

I continue on, enjoying the earthy smell of pine needles and the sometimes-fragrant invasion of a wildflower’s perfume. My nose has been reborn along with my ears—and my eyes. The scents carried along on little breezes don’t exist anywhere else. Colors melt and flow as though the air is an artist’s palette. I love this place today. The peace. I love it.

That wasn’t always true.

The sign and the vines jog my memory for some reason, taking me back for an instant a quarter of a century. I was eleven when Daddy brought Caroline, Sammy, Mother and me up here to the lodge for the first time. The Great Barrington Excursion. The thing I remember so very clearly about that ugly trip was how much I despised this place from day one. Mr. and Mrs. Davenport didn’t have a TV. Not in the rooms we stayed in, not in the Great Room on the first floor. Nowhere. I loathed the thought of no MTV, the silence of the outdoors, the isolation. They didn’t even have a radio. There was nothing but trees and rocks and Caroline whining constantly. There was nothing here but nothing. We stayed for three weeks, and by the time we packed our bags to return to Pacific Palisades, I swear my long blonde hair had gone snow white from the excruciating mental agony of being buried alive in a vast Colorado mountain coffin. We returned every year, as though Daddy’s imagination for recreation had gotten its legs chopped off and was stuck in this God-forsaken place.

I turned fourteen finally, finally, and he let me stay home with my best friend, Danielle. I vowed never to step foot in the mountains anywhere, ever again. I kept that promise until my…until I had to find solitude and sort myself out, or go crazy, three weeks ago. And so where does fate throw me? That is the story of my life. Keep returning to the trough, to the things I once hated. But for once I believe I’ve done the right thing.

A lark sparrow high above me in the branches begins to sing, or maybe it’s been singing all along and I was listening too hard to myself. Its mate answers from a distance, and the sparrow nearest me shoots from its perch like a miniscule feathered missile, heading in the direction of the other. No, birds don’t fall in love, that’s not why she’s going to him. It’s survival. That’s all. Maybe he’s sick of tending the young in their nest. She has all the food in her mouth. It could be any number of reasons, but none of them driven by love. It’s just duty, or blind instinct.

I walk on. I’m beginning to think everything will be okay, because everything here is perfect. Life here is in perfect balance. In this wondrous place I can take the time and figure me out all over again.

The sun is intense at this altitude, but this afternoon the air is cool because a storm is moving in from the north. I can see huge, dark thunderheads forming through the breaks in the trees to my right. A phalanx of smaller clouds leading the march gathers around the sun, then urged forward by the storm, rushes away toward the south. Within an hour, I think, the downpour will begin. I think, too, that if I turn and start back right now…but, no. I’ll go on. I want to see the lake again, and I want to rid myself of the burden I’ve been wearing like a spiked belt for a year. The lake is the ideal spot.

I shift the weight of my nylon backpack from my right shoulder more to the left. The edge of the book of poetry that I put there digs into my lower back with every step. There. The repositioning helps.

Brad gave me the thick volume for my birthday two years ago, six months after we’d met. In the table of contents he underscored thirty-five different love poems, written by the great Pablo Neruda just for me, he said. Maybe the most elegantly beautiful thing both of them ever did. I remember the ending of one piece in particular that Brad had tagged “ours”.

       So close that your hand on my chest is my hand,

       so close that your eyes close and I fall asleep.

That was us, and I cried when I first read it. I read the poem again and again sitting in front of the silent fireplace at the lodge last evening, but this time the tears were of quite a different sort, falling on the letters between them that I found.

The sky is darkening.

She professed her deep love for him in the letter she wrote, still smelling faintly of perfume. Why did he keep it, I’ve asked myself over and over? I guess it doesn’t matter; he did. But his response both killed me and brought me back to life. How he loved this woman, but loved me more. He was sorry, he said. He wouldn’t see her again. But why didn’t he send it? Did he have second thoughts? Did he tell her to her face? It was dated six months ago. March 5th. I remember March. He showered me with affection that entire month, and when I stumbled across the letters five weeks ago, it hit me why.

The woodpecker clacks away behind me as I climb a small rise that bends slightly near the top, a dogleg between two moss-covered boulders the size of Volkswagens. Beyond lies the lake. My lake. When I reach the top of the rise I stop and loop my thumbs into the straps of my pack and take a deep breath. Before me lies what might be the culmination of all God’s creation. The lake is three hundred feet across, and stretches like an anxious lover awaiting the arrival of her prince. A layered creature of dazzling depth and color, something that the Almighty would have composed, but only the artist Maxfield Parrish could have rendered in all its magic.

Light shimmers ethereally above its surface. The water is sapphire and still, but breathing almost imperceptibly. Twenty feet ahead of me the path dies, separates into the tawny sand and emerald pebbles of shoreline that circle the lake until it reaches the interruption of a wide rock precipice. On either side of the mass of rock the shoreline juts upward very quickly, and I can see the ledge twenty-five feet above the water where Sammy jumped after I dared him the second year of our trips. Four dares, each more pointed and prodding than the last. He did it, and I can still see him falling like a white spear, long black hair rippling above him, forefinger and thumb pinching his nose, eyes riveted shut. When his feet hit the surface there was barely a sound or a splash. He was an Olympic diver, upside down. I climbed the rock once and peered out over the edge, down at the water.

He was crazy.

The wind is picking up just slightly, coming down in little gusts that brush the top of the water and make it dance. I walk briskly along the bank to the south end where a slab of gray and black spotted granite reaches out at the water from the shore. There I intend to plant my feet and set the pack down. Maybe I’ll sit beside it, open it, and remove the wondrous volume of poetry. Yes. A fitting cantus ad introitum. And I know I will read again the letters I discovered.

I step out onto the rock a few feet, sit, and then pull out the book. “The Poetry of Pablo Neruda”. Thick, weighty, containing streams of language designed to throw even an illiterate into a swoon. I am