The Life We Live

Below is an excerpt from one of my current writing projects. It is in fairly raw form in this incarnation, but I wanted to share a portion. A man, Jacob Masters, lays on his death bed. In this time he attempts to resolve what his life became and make sense of it all, to discover if there was any meaning in this fleeting moment. In this excerpt Jacob's brother ventures north to visit his ailing brother. This is the tale of his journey and conversation with Jacob's wife Colleen upon his arrival.

III.

            “Miles, I think you should come!” Miles cocked his head to one side and frowned slightly at the sound of his sister-in-law Colleen’s voice on the other end of the phone. It was now a Tuesday in early August and apparently his brother Jacob was bedridden by some kind of suspicious ailment.

            “Alright, that would appear to be a good idea,” Miles said a bit of worry in his voice. The fact that his brother was seldom waylaid by illness combined with the seeming severity of this particular one added to the typical anxiety one would normally feel when informed that their aged relative was ill. “Just let me pack and get ready tomorrow and I will head up Thursday morning,” he said. “Depending on how things are I can stay as long as I’m needed.”

            “Thank you,” Colleen said excitedly. “I know seeing you will lift his spirits. He has been talking about you quite a bit these last few days.”

            “Good, I am sorry I have neglected to visit for so long. I am an old man now I suppose and stuck in my routine down here. I often think of visiting, but when the time comes to do it the energy required often seems to extreme,” Miles said contemplatively.

            “Well don’t worry about that now, just get up here and get him out of bed,” Colleen said laughing. Though she was worried about her husband it felt good to laugh and speak to her brother-in-law in a jocular manner. Worry had consumed her throughout the weekend and now into the week. She had not been out since Jacob had fallen ill and was beginning to hunker down and fall into the trap that so many elderly spouses become entangled in when their other half becomes feeble and ill.

            “Has he seen a doctor yet?” Miles asked, knowing that unless his brother had become comatose there was no way that he had been dragged to see a physician.

            “That is something I was hoping you could talk to him about as well,” Colleen said. “You know how he is with doctors, but this is serious, he is old and there is definitely something wrong.”

            “Well I will do what I can, but I know my brother and he can be a dour stubborn son of a bitch,” Miles laughed. “I’ll let you go Colleen, you take care of him until I get there.”

            “Thanks, Miles. I’ll tell him you’re coming, stay safe on your way up and I’ll see you then,” she said.

            “Bye,” he said.

            “Bye, bye.”

            Miles hung up the phone and stood stoically in the kitchen for a moment. His eyes slowly turned to the dining room picture window and he saw the bright afternoon sunshine softly touching the land beneath him. He sighed and tried not to think too much about the possibilities of what could be going on with his brother. Miles had a job to do and that was to get ready for the eighty mile trek north to help his brother with whatever he needed. It was not as if the fact that his brother falling ill was all that surprising. Jacob had always, though a reasonably fit and active man, not led a life which took much account for his physical well being. Also he was at least to most who observed him an especially dour man at times and in fact Miles had always feared his older brother would succumb at an early age due to his dark outlook on life. This fact gave Miles pause as he wondered how Jacob was doing emotionally with his newfound physical maladies.

            The fact that up until this point neither Jacob nor Miles had ever really had a major health scare is quite remarkable if one considers it. Even the average person at that age is bound to have had a few major health issues, but not the Masters brothers. At least not until that fateful summer.

            It had taken Miles much of Wednesday to get his house in order for his trip and though he thought about leaving when he had finished packing that afternoon he quickly realized how exhausted he was and decided it was best to start fresh and early in the morning as he had originally planned. He quickly went next door to give the neighbor boy a twenty dollar bill and instructions to collect the mail and mow the lawn on Saturday and then promptly slumped into bed and fell dead asleep at five-thirty in the evening. He slept well until about four in the morning, when he suddenly realized that he was lying in bed wide awake. Miles cursed to himself knowing that he could not leave this early as he would arrive at his brothers home long before his sister-in-law would be up in the morning. Thus for the next several hours he proceeded to drink coffee and pace in the kitchen waiting for a late enough hour to get on the road.

            The break of dawn found Miles leaving Eugene heading north on Interstate Five behind the wheel of his old Volvo sedan. Before him the alluvial plain of the Willamette Valley spread out as a carpet and in the early morning light, streamers of fog and mist rose from the fields as the warm summer sunlight cut through the chill of the morning and called the dew unto the heavens. On both sides of the interstate were a patchwork of fields, some of harvested grass grown for seed, others were golden with drying wheat soon to be reaped, and others were irrigated and green on which sheep frolicked in the early cool. To the east rose the vanguard of the Coburg Hills a miniature front range of the Cascades. The bottom of the valley was mostly flat, but at times was interrupted by strange hills dotted with oaks which as one could easily observe were more prevalent to the east of the highway. On fence posts every so many miles were red and sharptailed hawks, their keen eyes scanning the dying grasses of the dry season for any hint of movement, while in the skies above the hovering kestrels and falcons did similar work.

            Though Miles was a focused driver he nearly always noticed not only the landscape through which he was traveling, but also the more subtle details, such as the aesthetic interplay of the light, or the swooping of a bird of prey to snatch a rabbit who had strayed too far from a thicket of blackberries. Having been blessed with excellent peripheral vision he was able to focus on the road and notice things that even most observant passengers would miss. Often when riding with companions, Miles would astonish his friends by pointing out various landmarks or wildlife visible from the road, while seemingly paying sole attention to the task of driving. Even more amazing yet, was that this innate ability he possessed had not appeared to diminish with age. Yet, while it would seem to some that such ability was nothing more than useless or trivial at best it would be wise to mention that such keen powers of observation had in the past alerted him to the erratic behavior of fellow drivers and were undoubtedly an invaluable asset to him as other driving skills began to diminish with age.

            However, on this morning as he made steady pace northbound through light traffic, Miles thoughts were on other things than hunting birds of prey or frolicking lambs. To be certain he did take note of the fertile country through which he was traveling. It was indeed a land which he had seen many times before and on this day he pondered how unchanging in his eyes this country appeared. It had been nearly seventy years since he had passed through the length of the Willamette Valley and though he knew that many things had changed it still appeared to him the same as when he had first cast his youthful gaze upon it. Perhaps now there was an interstate highway, and the towns were bigger, and there was a new house here and there even in the most rural stretches, but at its heart the valley was still the same broad shouldered big hearted land that he had fallen in love with as a child.

            Some look at the world and see what has been lost. They look out on our planet and remember what it was like when they were fresh upon it. To them that was a time when our world was perfect and as it should be. These are those who embrace a time and a reality that never was so, they speak of a virtuous race of man that never existed and people who lived by a moral code that never was. In their eyes the land was a wilderness and an earthly paradise, a paradise lost. Lost and spoiled by progress and greed, the trampling minions who they do not know and cannot name, but whose destructive force they decry daily. Perhaps they are dinosaurs in a sense, people of a past world who cannot adjust to the one that has become. For the world is always changing and nothing is static, if there was no change, no progress would we not regress to a state of being to which none of us would want to return? Thus there are individuals who rue the aesthetic aspects of advancement, though they are more than eager to enjoy in its comforts and advantages. When faced with the reality of growing cities, and burgeoning populations they speak of the need for population control or make derogatory statements about other religious or ethnic groups who experience high birthrates. In this world people who may not normally be considered by most to be pessimists see the world as something lost, a tarnished place in which something has passed away that can never be again. They have existed for generations and time eternity, since man began to ponder such questions there have been those who pined for a bygone day whose problems merely did not exist because they had been forgotten.

            Miles on the other hand did not belong to this group, nor did he belong to the overly optimistic collection of souls who saw nothing but beautiful progress in the achievements of the human race. He did not cheer the clear cutting of virgin forest or the draining of native wetlands so that industry, vacation homes or strip malls could rise up, but he did have a realistic and centered view of the world in which he lived. That humans acted as they always had, that perhaps they possessed more knowledge now then they had at some rudimentary earlier date, but in that knowledge they had come to no more wisdom or sense of moral superiority. The race of man as a whole behaved as it had always, with its own selfish interests in mind and for its own advancement. There were competing factions within this dichotomy, some working in ways that produced mostly a net positive of benefits while others acted in ways that were ultimately or overtly maladaptive. All told people were people, they were equally capable of greatness and disappointment, they were rarely altruistic, but yet they were not an entirely lost or forsaken race, albeit just a misguided one.

            As the years since his childhood in the Willamette Valley had passed, Miles had seen the sleepy agricultural and college towns of Salem, Albany, Corvallis, and Eugene transformed. Certainly these changes had not happened overnight or even within one decade, but over the course of a lifetime an area that had been incredibly rural and almost remote had been changed into a place of cities and suburbs, mixed with farmland between them, and flanked by agriculture on its peripheries.  Yes, much had been lost, but had not so much also been gained? Perhaps the area was not as remote as it had been before, but the wild was still there for those who looked. The people had been good stewards of the land, remarkably so in fact, and though the strain of an increasing population had worn on the land, the land itself had weathered it quite well. This perhaps was a testament to the foresight of the people of the Willamette Valley and the state of Oregon. There was no doubt that Miles recognized the changes that had taken place in Western Oregon and in fact throughout the whole of the Western United States whenever he traveled those regions over the course of the fading years. He had been to Southern California when there had still been vast orange groves and berry farms on the land where now only a suburban jungle stood. In his lifetime the desert cities of Boise, Salt Lake, and Las Vegas had bloomed from mere regional hubs to cities of modest importance on the national stage. Certainly throughout the long length of his life Miles had been privy to many changes in the world, be it in changes to the landscape, politics, or culture.

            Some of these changes were disconcerting and mind boggling to be sure. All who live to see such days are no doubt made uneasy by the remarkable transformation they are to witness over the course of their days. But such things are an unchanging facet of life on earth, and as Miles drove north on that August morning he no doubt many thoughts drifted through his mind. The condition of his only brother weighed heavily upon him, but despite that he undoubtedly took stock of what had changed in the valley over the years. Perhaps, not overtly but more as a subconscious reflex, for that is what is natural for humans to do. However, change was not the only thing Miles saw as the miles of that broad valley slipped by as the diesel engine of the old beaten down Volvo whined in response to the heavy pressure his foot applied to the accelerator. As was his nature Miles saw the comfort in the familiarity of a valley which had served in one form or another as the only home he had ever known. Yes, there had been changes, some dramatic ones at that, but those failed to temper his enthusiasm for the land which was his home. There still existed the familiar things, a tractor with a cloud of brown dust behind it as a farmer ploughed a field, or the fast expanse of fields stretching out until the green and blue foothills of the Cascade Range. For certain the valley had changed, and morphed into a less rural and increasingly suburban place, but much of it still held the familiar charms and qualities which made it easily recognizable and comfortable for an old timer such as Miles Masters.

            The trip up the valley from Eugene to his brothers house on the banks of Abiqua Creek in the foothills of the Cascade Range just to the northeast of the quiet town of Silverton usually took Miles a little more than an hour and a half, but on this morning he made quite a bit faster. It was only a bit past eight in the morning when he pulled into the narrow circular drive in front of Jacob’s home and pulled his car to a stop right outside the front door. Having been a couple of years since he had made it up this way he took time to look around the yard and examine how well his brother had been keeping things up before his convalescence. With one quick glance he surveyed the neatly mowed lawn and finely pruned bushes and hedges in the front of the house. After all he was an attorney and had an eye for detail as well as the finer points. It was evident that Jacob must have been in good health in the days leading up to his sudden bout with illness as the grounds showed every bit of evidence that he had been hard at work in their up keep in the time preceding his physical unraveling.

            No sooner had Miles raised his fist to knock on the solid oak front door when it opened suddenly and he heard Colleen’s sweet familiar voice. “Well he has arrived, the great Miles of Eugene, and early at that!” Colleen laughed as she said that and the excitement of seeing her dear brother-in-law shone brightly in her eyes. “I wasn’t expecting you quite so early, but I’m glad you are here!”

            “It’s good to finally see you again sister,” Miles said. “I know I am early, I was just so anxious to get on the road. It was a beautiful sunrise over the Coburg Hills as I drove up the valley.”

            “Good, good, I think it will be a nice day, perhaps you can take Xavier down to the creek this afternoon if David comes to visit us,” she said. Referring to David her grandson and of course his son and her great-grandson Xavier.

            “I would love that,” he said. “It’s been years since I’ve seen Xavier, I’m sure I wouldn’t recognize him. I’m bet he’s grown a foot since then. You know I did see David last summer, he came down and we fished the McKenzie River.”

            “Hmmmm, that’s interesting, I never heard about that,” Colleen said as they both sat down at the kitchen table. She was not really interested in her brother-in-laws fishing story, but she said it anyways as she could think of nothing else to say. Her mind was far away on the panorama of her life, looking across it and seeing it all in one moment. There was a distant look in her eyes, but Miles did not notice. He was nervous and content on talking about details that did not matter, perhaps because those that did were too hard for his mind to bear at that time.

            “Yes, it was a warm day last July, David came down in the morning on a Saturday and we drank coffee and walked by the Willamette. Then we decided to head up the McKenzie for an afternoon of fishing,” he rambled. “The sun sparkled off the water and the trout did not shy away from our offerings. I netted seven native resides and David caught five. Of course I out fished him.” Miles chuckled and did not care that Colleen was not listening. She obviously had other things on her mind, as did he, but they were perhaps more personal and definitely more pressing for him.

            “That is nice,” said Colleen, though she had not comprehended a word of what Miles had said. Who could have blamed her for not listening or caring. The man whom she had shared and given her life was gravely ill and here was his only brother and all he could do was ramble on about some mundane fishing trip. In that moment she was indeed quite angry with him and thought him selfish. If she had thought she would have realized that he was merely speaking out of nervousness and that he had not meant to come off as rude or insensitive. Really she knew better, Miles if nothing was a sensitive and caring man who would do anything for those he loved and if she had not been so wracked with worry she would have immediately felt guilty for thinking ill of him in that moment.

            “So how is my brother,” he said.

            “He is the same as he has been,” she replied. “He has not left the room. Not to mislead you that he cannot get up, he can get up and use the restroom or sit up in bed and lean over to pick a book off of the nightstand. But other than that he is an invalid. It is quite distressing. He was such a healthy man you know.”

            “Yes,” said Miles his eyes becoming a bit glassy. “He was always such a robust man, in his own way.”

            “But he is still asleep, however he should wake up soon, he knows that you are coming and that will cause him to wake up a little earlier than he has,” she said. “Please talk to him about seeing a doctor, will you?”

            “I will do that, it is important he gets some medical attention,” he answered, but now he was the one who was not paying attention. He was lost in thought, in a place somewhere between ponderance  and dream. This was not the house he had grown up in, but its proximity was close enough to fill him with memories of the land. There were also memories and stories in his mind from this home, the home in which his brother had dwelt for more than fifty years. Many a summer afternoon he had cooled his toes in the icy waters of the Abiqua.  While he philosophized on the issues of the day, and the mysteries of life with his brother, as they wiled away the lazy afternoons. Some afternoons they had waded up the creek to hidden pools where they cast for the wild trout that lay hidden in their underwater lair. When they were on the water of Abiqua Creek they were as children in their demeanor, as they laughed and hollered with every bite and snag. The brothers would be transported back to a time that in the moment had been so care free and everything so full of life. When their mother had been young and alive and had taken it upon herself to take them up to the river and teach them to fish as their father toiled in the fields of their little farm.

            Miles could recall the smell of the dry grass unique to the latter part of the summer during the end of August and into September until the first rains of autumn fell. The sweet smell of the maples and Douglas Fir trees that lined the streams banks filled his nostrils as well as the smell and grit of the dust that came up from the gravel road, that followed the stream toward its  headwaters in the Old Cascades, whenever a log truck came rumbling by. In those early years their mother Margaret generally took them to a place called The Rock which lay on a quiet stretch on what in those days was known as the middle reach of the stream. In later years when the city of Silverton built a water supply dam a few miles downstream from The Rock, people began to refer to just two sections of the stream, the lower reach below the dam, and the upper reach above it. Jacob had built his home along the stream a few years before the dam had been built on a little plot a couple miles downstream from the dam site.

            The Rock was in fact a massive basalt boulder which lay along the far bank of the stream in the middle of a deep pool which measured roughly one hundred feet long and thirty feet wide. On account of The Rock’s hulking mass the pool curved and narrowed in the middle in order to work its way around the massive edifice. When the boys were still small, and unable to wade up and down the creek by themselves, The Rock was their favorite spot as it was easily accessible and generally provided excellent opportunities to catch small pan sized rainbow and cutthroat trout. Miles often thought back to those days, of casting into the fast water as it slipped off the rifles and into the deep blue waters of the pool. As he sat in the kitchen with Colleen on that bright August morning his mind was busy drifting back through the years, a sweet diversion from the painful possibilities that were racing through the back of his head. Instead of thinking about what a doctor may find if Jacob actually allowed himself to be examined, he preferred to sit and recollect the flashing of his lure on a sunny late summer day as it dropped off the shelf at the head of the pool and how his line snapped taut as a feisty rainbow trout impaled itself upon the sharp three pronged treble hook. He could hear himself shriek with excitement and see his older brother Jacob a ways down the bank drop his pole and start running excitedly in his direction while his mother smiled on from the shade of a large maple whose leaves were slowly beginning to fade with the season.

            “Was it really so long ago,” Miles said audibly, to his own surprise.

            “What was so long ago?” Colleen asked, though she knew the answer, her brother-in-law was reminiscing on his life and relationship with Jacob.

            “Fishing up at The Rock with Jacob when we were children,” he replied. “You know back then it was all we lived for during that late summer season, when the green of the world is fading and when one can feel that those glorious carefree days of the season are coming to an end.”

            “Doesn’t seem like so long ago does it?” Colleen said.

            “No, no it doesn’t seem as if it was so long ago, it is still fresh in my mind. Moreso in many ways than many of the events of the past few days even,” he said. “But in some ways  I can’t believe it was in this lifetime, I hardly recognize the child I remember as myself.”

            “And why is that Miles?” Colleen questioned. “Are you really that different as a person than you were as a child? Have you and the world changed that much?”

            “I do not know. Sometimes I think that is the case, but when it comes down to it I do not know. We all become different people then we were when we were fresh upon the earth. We gain perspective and understanding that we could not have had at a young age and as we become old we realize that many of the things we were led to believe are false. This jades us in many ways, some more than others. I think of myself as that boy fishing this very same creek that flows beneath this house and I think about how I viewed the world and how I view it now. What I have lost…” With that Miles voice kind of trailed off and he looked away unable to continue. Colleen thought she could see a tear in the corner of his eye, but she did not quite understand the exact reason for it. However, she took it to be as a result of his uncertainty over the current situation, and she was unnerved by the doubt she read on his face.

            “Life leads us all in so many strange directions,” she said. “It leads men to do so many things they could never have dreamed of and causes countless women to forgive and overlook the acts of men that they could never have imagined looking past. It is not all bad though, there are tender gentle moments on this earth which bless the heart more than could have ever been scripted.”

            With this Miles merely nodded, the distance fading from his eyes and a bit of a sparkle returning. He felt his heart warm and thought of a kind word to say to Colleen, but he did not utter it. Instead he kept the thought to himself and enjoyed the warmth it gave him as it crept up through him and spread throughout his entire core. He was glad that he believed that there was some goodness in people, perhaps he had seen the worst of our species during his time as an attorney, but there was some altruism and hope mixed in there somewhere. “Thank God for people like Colleen,” he thought to himself and turned and smiled at the aging woman.

            “Perhaps you can talk to your brother about all the facets of life you wish,” she said breaking the momentary silence. “He seems quite eager to talk about the meaning of his life and such lately.”

            “Yes, it’s about time we roused the old bugger isn’t it,” Miles said smiling as he stood up from the kitchen table. He winced a bit as he got up, as his knees were certainly not those of a young man anymore. “I’m gonna get the old man to see a doctor and then we can go about seeing if anything can be done. Or if nothing else it has been far too long and we are going to do some serious catching up!”