It’s been said that a person in a crisis falls back on what they know best. Sophia packed a few belongings, rented out her home to tenants and began to travel again. She had no itinerary, no destination and no plan. Her sense of adventure kindled again by the still recent epiphany in the garden, she set out to seek experience, to open herself up to both pleasure and pain in a free form experiment, testing this new understanding to see if her life would find it’s own way. She purchased an open railway ticket and headed west, watching the landscape which started out in the soft curves and folds of Pennsylvania, slowly smooth itself out into the flat, often treeless plains of western Ohio, Indiana and beyond.
The swaying of the train rocked her gently like a sympathetic and loving mother, the monotonous clacking of the rails a cooing assurance as the barely perceptible pressure of forward movement held her like a hug against the seat. She sat for hours at a time staring out of the window, moving in the momentum of crises into an adventure which still lay veiled ahead of her. That she had, this time, chosen the trip allowed for little distinction in her experience of it. She was in many respects, once again the little girl of twelve riding the train and wondering what she would find ahead of her. Sophia did not disembark until the train reached a small stopover in the middle of a vast, changeless expanse of land . Suddenly aware of the cramped confines of her car, she gathered her things and got off.
Standing silhouetted against the lights of the station house, Sophia looked around wondering what to do next. The escaping steam from the departing engine coiled around her feet and baggage, rising in the chill evening air and sticking in wisps to her clothing. She watched the train recede into the distance.
Then, stooping over, she picked up her bags and set out walking down the graveled road which extended straight as an arrow from the station platform. Several people stopped to offer her a ride, but she declined. She needed the time to think and was grateful for the opportunity to stretch her legs and breath deeply the heavy, musty smell of farmland which she had known in her youth. Suddenly she realized where she was. She had left the train apparently at random, but with a sudden jolt she realized that she recognized this place. Slowly, with measured anticipation, she walked towards the town. The circle had been completed. Sophia had come home.
Arriving in town, she found it to be a small, slightly deteriorating collection of buildings facing each other across a single main street. They stood like sentinels, staying their post and ever watchful for the return of the people and prosperity which had long since moved on. In the window of the small general store hung an advertisement for an all purpose remedy which had not been produced in twenty years. The town served the farming families which occupied the surrounding country of 250 square miles and so very few people actually lived inside of it’s limits. There was however, a small boarding house, it’s presence an ironic comment on mid-western tenacity. Not surprisingly, there was a vacancy and Sophia checked in. As she related this to me years later, she had little to say about the months which passed in that small town. Sophia had decided to stay, with no particular reason, but with no compelling reason to leave either. She took a job in the small general store, waiting on customers who did not know her nor seemed inclined to try. She passed her days and nights waiting for a moment of revelation, waiting for something to happen. It never did. She told me later that one of the lessons she learned during this time was not to develop a need for big, emotional experiences since they were really a very small part of life and perhaps an even smaller part of spiritual growth. She said that she learned that what is important is the ability to be fully a part of the everyday , and how to look for very simple satisfactions in the midst of life’s sameness.
But that came later. At the time, she was still waiting for an experience which would validate her presence in this small town out in the middle of nowhere. As you might expect, in time, with the monotony of landscape and life, Sophia began to recede back into a dull sense of frustration and subtle irritation. "What kind of flow was this?" Whatever had brought her here had certainly not resulted in anything significant and as the intensity of her experience in the garden softened, she began to think about her losses and to nurse the quiet discontent of bland existence, an endless sepia-toned picture of resignation.
One day a man came into the store and, with apparently nothing very pressing on his schedule, sat down next to the coal stove, nodded hello to her and fell asleep. The owner of the store, told Sophia that the man’s name was Orrin Whittle, that he had lived in the area all of his life, and had probably known her father and mother.
She was initially uninterested, but in the weeks which followed, as the man continued to stop by the store from time to time, Sophia’s curiosity was piqued. Eventually, she approached him, moving quickly to introduce herself before he fell asleep and asked him if he had known her parents. He had, and also seemed to know most everyone else who had lived in the county during his seventy three years. As they talked, she began to feel herself warm to this quiet old man, and began to look forward to his visits to the store. He told her stories of the land and of the people who had settled it, but rarely spoke of himself. When Sophia would ask about his life, he would often simply change the subject, gently but with resolve. She sensed that he was not being secretive but selective, as if he were assessing her.
They began to spend time together outside of the store, often taking long walks, neither speaking much. Sophia had accepted his reticence and was content to simply enjoy the company of this man, who felt so much like the her remembrances of her own father. Still, from time to time, she would again ask him to tell her something of his life.
One day he took her a meadow which she had not visited before. It was treeless except for a single, huge oak tree near it’s center. Orrin walked toward the tree and Sophia followed, assuming that he was looking for a bit of shade under which to rest and catch his breath. As they approached the tree, she noticed it’s odd trunk, which had a V-shaped hollow in the trunk and in it’s rear a vertical gouge running straight up from the ground to the first split of branches. As they reached it’s base, Orrin looked down. Following his gaze, Sophia saw a plain whitewashed grave marker. The grave itself had long ago blended back into the area around it.
"You asked me about my life" he said. "Here it is"
There was something written on the stone, but Sophia couldn’t make it out in the shadow that Orrin cast as he stood , hands folded in front of him, looking down in silence. She was quiet as he bent down to brush back the moss from the marker and in a quiet voice continued his story. He explained that he had a wife and a daughter. He said that he was a plain man and never thought he would have a woman love him.
That he did never stopped being a miracle to him, and when his baby was born, he knew that he must have been the most fortunate man alive and thanked God every day for his gift. They loved to walk through the fields and picnic sitting in the middle of the wildflowers, chasing the butterfly’s and playing hide and seek in the tall grass. They were almost always together.
Sophia started to speak, and as she did the wind suddenly blew up, rustling the oak leaves and bending the grass, the air around her filling with sound as if to whisper an urgent shhh! Orrin stood looking at the top of the tree and as his eyes followed the crack down the length of the trunk , he continued…..
"You were a young girl when you left, I don’t know if you remember how quickly a storm can come up. One day, as they were a long distance from the house, one blew in, real bad, lots of lightening and high winds The kind of storm you can see coming when it’s miles away and still not have time to react.
They must have seen it in the distance and tried to get back in time. The winds were strong enough to turn the current in the river and with my daughter so young and all, it must have been hard going. I don’t know what happened next, I guess they gave up trying to make it home and took shelter under this tree. Even then it had this hollowed out center at it’s base, and they must have huddled inside that opening to wait out the rain and winds. The lightening hit the top of the tree, blew a good ten feet of branches right off and traveled down the center of the trunk, splitting it in half. That’s why it seems to grow in two pieces now. I found them lying at the base of the tree, the earth blackened around them, my wife’s body lying across my daughters. I don’t know if they ever knew what had happened. God, I hope not. I buried them right here, nearly buried myself with them. My wife was a good woman, strong and caring. Afterwards, a friend of hers came to see me, gave me a bit of a poem which she said was my a favorite of my wife’s. I didn’t understand it then, still don’t really, but I placed it on the marker. It was important to her, and that made it important to me. Funny, but I still see her face, and the face of my daughter as clear as if it were just yesterday whenever I read it. Oddest thing really.
It was at then he stood up and moved away from the marker and Sophia was able to read the inscription. She recognized it as a piece of a poem by Walt Whitman:
‘Be not ashamed, woman - your privilege encloses the rest,
and is the exit of the rest;
You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul’
"Well, the days and months that followed are not clear to me, I was numb. The only thing could feel or wanted to feel, was anger. I was plenty angry after that. Angry at myself for not finding them in time, angry at them for being so foolish, angry at a God who would create a storm to kill my family. I had been robbed, my family destroyed and there was no reason for it. I fought against this, I demanded an answer. I wanted to know why. I felt as if I had grabbed God by the shirt and I knew I would never let go until he gave me the answer I was looking for."
"Did you get it?"
Orrin shook his head slowly from side to side, but so gently and with the hint of a sad smile playing across his lips that for a moment she couldn’t tell if he was saying yes or no, or both.
"Sometimes it takes a while for news to catch up with you. That’s true now, but thirty years ago, a person might only get into town once a month or so. I didn’t need much, and since I was alone I hardly ever left my land. But one day, I needed to go into town. While I was waiting for my supplies to be loaded I was talking with a couple of the fellas standing around, hearing the news and so forth. They told me that the old man Palmer had been sick and died, and that the daughter of Jacob Hatcher had had a baby boy on the same day. It seems that everyone thought that kind of odd, and so they always mentioned those two events together in the same sentence. ‘Yep, its a shame old man Palmer is dead, but Hatcher’s grandson is a handsome boy’
"I knew it was just a coincidence, and that things like that happened all the time, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind. One man dies, one baby is born. Death and life. Somebody crying and somebody smiling.
That seems obvious don’t it?"
He looked at her for a moment, and then said, "Come on, let’s walk a while more. I have something to show you".
They walked together, sometimes speaking of simple ordinary things, sometimes not speaking at all. They walked for hours, through parts of the land that Sophia had never seen as a child, or on her walks with Orrin. He seemed lost in his thoughts and memories, and in the silence, Sophia was doing some thinking of her own. She could understand his pain, but didn’t find his story of the old man and the baby to be much of a revelation. Life is pleasure and pain? So what? That didn’t answer anything.
As they continued, Orrin broke the silence:
"One night I was walking outside and I was missing my family something awful. I walked for so long and crying and yelling and thinking, that I was just empty. You ever see a camp fire do that? Just blazing one minute and then it’s out. I was empty, I had nothing left to feel. I layed down in the tall grass and I remember just staring straight up, at nothing in particular and feeling the burn in the back of my throat from the tears that were dripping from inside my head. I couldn’t understand anything. Then I saw the stars. Millions and millions of stars, and it was like, just for a moment, I cleared up a little. I thought how many people there were in the world, millions of them, just like the stars, and how many things are happening to them all the time. Good things and bad things. And I wondered how many of those millions of people had asked God to give them their wife back, or their children or their crops or jobs or homes destroyed by flood or tornadoes or other men. And I thought, what if God made everything right, fixed everything for everybody so that they had no pain or trouble or never lost anything or anyone? And as I thought that, it just seemed, well I don’t know, not the way that things should be, sure not the way they are."
"I can’t explain it any better than that, but it just didn’t seem to make sense that would be how things should happen. And I guess I just gave up trying to understand it all. I don’t know how to explain what happened next, I was still confused in my head, still didn’t understand why any better, but somehow when I stopped trying to get it here, it seemed that I understood it here."
As he spoke, Orrin touched his head, then his heart.
" I felt that I wasn’t alone. The Indians used to say that we are part of this world, like the wind, the trees and the animals. For just a minute, I understood what they meant, I saw that everything changes, sometimes by growing and sometimes by dying. It all happened in a second, like the moon just peaking out from behind a storm cloud, and then it was over and everything was the same again. My family was still gone and I was alone. But I didn’t forget. Not to this day."
They crossed a meadow, long and thin, bordered at one end by a range of hills, their faces mostly rock which lay exposed and cracked as if straining under their own weight . Orrin led them through a number of switchbacks as they cut their way deeper into the groove between the folds of the exposed rock face. It seemed that this was a small box canyon and Sophia began to think that he had wandered off and walked them into a dead end, but Orrin stopped for a moment to orient himself, then began an unsteady climb to a small outcropping no more than twenty feet or so from the ground. Sophia followed him and when they had both made their way up, he pointed out a small space where the rock seemed to have split and then folded in on itself, forming a narrow passage into which he squeezed himself and in a moment disappeared. He called Sophia to follow, which she did with some effort. As she squeezed through the opening, she was startled by where she found herself. The cave was huge, very high and wide, not the efficiently carved space of a miners cave, but an erratic, meandering natural formation with a small stream running through it, the wetness causing the layers of color and texture to glisten , the plop of water echoing off the walls.
The change from sunlight to darkness, the sudden drop in temperature and the moisture had the effect of shaking off the drowsiness of their walk in the heat, and suddenly she was very much awake and feeling something she couldn’t put her finger on. There was something oddly familiar about all of this. Something expectant.
She was jolted from her thoughts by Orrin’s voice:
"Well, This is something aint it? I’ll tell you, I don’t know how I ever found this. In the weeks after the night I told you about I wandered around a lot in these hills, thinking and trying to make sense out of what had happened. I went back to trying to figure things out again, except now I was also trying to figure out what happened that night too. I felt like I couldn’t stop thinking and everything was so fuzzy. It had all seemed so clear at the time, but later I couldn’t make heads or tails out of it. It was like walking through mud, I was doing my best to think things through, but it all felt slow and sticky like the way it feels sometimes when you’re dreaming that you’re running but not getting anywhere. Once in a while, I’d think that I got to something, but it was just a feeling that would disappear if I tried to put it into words, like tuning in a show on the radio, where the static is so bad that you can tell you’re close to your station, but can’t really ever make out what they’re saying. Well, my thoughts were all jumbled up together and I couldn’t sort them out. Have you ever been in a crowded bar or dance hall, and the jukebox is playing loud, and people are talking louder and there’s a TV on with some football game or something and you suddenly realize that you can’t even pay attention to your own words? You just want to go around and turn everything off, just to stop for a minute and clear your head? Well, that’s what it was like, and I just wandered around in the fog and the noise, not paying much attention to things until one day I found myself at the entrance to this cave. That’s why I said that I don’t know how I ever found this. It was like I just sleepwalked right up to it and into it and kept going. It was deeper and twistier than any cave I had ever been in before and I just kept walking. At one point I thought I might never find my way back out and that was just okay with me."
With that, he turned again and began to walk deeper into the cave, turning only once to see if Sophia was following him.
"In all the years I lived here , I explored this land as a boy and hunted it as a man, and I never knew this was here. Neither does anyone else that I know of, and I never showed it to anyone up till except you.
That’s odd isn’t it? No one knows anything about it, for most people it doesn’t exist at all, yet here it is, as real as you and me"
Orrin continued to lead their way through the cave. In one or two places, small traces of diffused light from openings on the surface made their way through the gloom, highlighting the wetness and the color of the mineral deposits on the walls to give not so much clarity, as assurance in the hints of shape and void, so that they could see the next step and not much more. In the absence of the light, they felt their way along.
Suddenly, Sophia noticed that the walls seemed to be getting lighter, she could make out the texture of the rock, the outline of Orrin as he walked in front of her. And then, they were out, holding their hands over their eyes against the sun, taking a moment to let the heat bake into their chest and faces. Sophie could hear the sound of turbulent water, and as her eyes adjusted, took her hands away. As she looked up, what she saw caused her to gasp.
Framed in her vision was a waterfall, at least a hundred feet high, bouncing down a rock face and emptying into a natural basin of smooth stone scooped out of the ground. The waterfall and basin were surrounded on all four sides by hills, which sloped gently up and away from ground level and continued up at least another hundred feet above the waterfall. Apparently the source was an underground stream which poured out of the hillside after making it’s way through the underground, much like they had just done. It was a painting, a postcard, a dream sequence in the last moments of sleep as you are waking up on a cool summer morning, the wind blowing through your windows, lifting the curtains and gently slapping the shades against the sill. The place you try to hold onto as you feel it slip away into daylight and wakefulness, except this was not slipping away. It was a picture of paradise and in the foreground stood Orrin, watching Sophia and smiling with delight at what he knew she was feeling.
"Well, this is something, aint it?"
"When I was groping through that cave, it was like I was living everything in my head. The darkness, the not knowing where I was going. And all of a sudden, here I was. I remember sitting by this waterfall here and just staring. And this was my answer, maybe it’s yours too".
"Orrin, this is a beautiful place, but I don’t see how this answers anything. This doesn’t help me make sense out of the things that happen in our lives, why we go through the pain that we do"
"Well, I guess that’s true Sophie. I never did get those answers, but I did see something else. As I sat here, I sort of dozed off for a minute and suddenly, like I was dreaming, I saw myself walking through that cave again, but this time I was flying, watching myself from outside and high above. I saw everything as a whole, the cave, me, and the rest of the land surrounding the cave. I saw that when I walked through that cave the rest of the world outside had not vanished even though it was gone for me. I saw that when I was walking through that cave, it was me that was inside of it, not the whole world. I mean, the rest of the world was still out there, on top of me and beside me, all around. The cave wasn’t all there was to the world, it just seemed like it, since I was so deep inside. It’s hard to remember that the rest of the world is still there but it is. Well, it’s the nature of a cave to be cold and dark, and maybe its the nature of the world to have caves, but from the air I could see that the cave was just another side of the hills, the grasses and wildflowers which cover them, the sun which warms them. It was the inside, the deeper side. Because I kept on, because I refused to turn back, I eventually found the way out which led to this place. It was inaccessible any other way and I would never have found it by any other route. From the distance, I could see all of this, I could see the darkness of the cave and the waterfall at its end, but the me in the cave could only grope through the darkness. The me in the cave didn’t have the perspective of the dream me. I realized that it was harder to go through the cave than to simply turn around. The me in the cave had no promise of this place, only the darkness. But the dream me wanted the me in the cave to keep going, to not turn back, because I could see the end. And then I understood that in the darkness it is harder to go through life than to go out of it, but how else do we find the waterfall at its end?"
Orrin stopped for a moment, looking at the hills and the circle of clear blue framed overhead by the hills.
Turning back again he continued:
"Sophie, I’m not a smart man, I don’t know why things happen the way they do. But I know this, I would never have gotten here, unless I had wandered into that cave, and kept on going till I came out the other side"
She, listened quietly and thought to herself that he was, perhaps, smarter than he thought.
They made their way back home, arriving late that night. Sophia went right to bed without eating, and lay awake for a long time, thinking of her father, her husband and child. Thinking of the many twists and turns which her life had seen, and yet how like the lives of so many others she now saw it to be.
She thought that perhaps she was ready to let go of her questions and expectations. It was a thought filled not with resignation, but with a gentle quiet. As her body relaxed and she allowed her mind to drift into the soft places of beginning sleep, she heard in her thoughts a soothing assurance which seemed to rise out of her childhood , her mothers voice bringing her day to a close with the promise of care and comfort in the deepening shadows of consciousness:
‘And I shall have some peace there, for
peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to
where the cricket sings;….’
