It’s been said that writing
fiction is lying to tell the truth.
In order to say what I wanted to say, I’ve had to tell big lies. That’s the nature of this novel, the
nature of magical realism. Something true lies beneath the lie. This is the opening chapter to the
book.
The
Raven
The raven rode the uplift past the
face of the granite dome, rose above the world and began to turn slow
meandering circles above the Sierra ridge as she croaked her message into the
wind. To the east the raven could
see the world was still locked in snow and ice. Thousands of feet below where she circled the raven could
make out a movement by the river.
Maybe the figure far below was who she was looking for. The raven pulled out of the uplift and
began a descent toward the river.
The old man emerged from a pool at
the edge of the river where he had carefully stayed away from the fast current
in the middle. The water was
snowmelt cold, but his body had adapted after all the many years of daily
ritual. Cleanliness was next to
godliness. He wasn’t obsessive,
but he had to daily wash away his memories of the red dust world below the
mountains in order to stay alive.
Too many memories, ancient memories. He heard the distant cry of the raven carried on the
wind and looked up, nodded in her direction in a slight bow. Something or someone important would be
coming.
Off to his left another old man
stirred where he lay on a narrow strand of stark white sand cupped in the
hollow of a granite slab that tilted gently toward the river. The slab was a confection of shades of
reds and rusts with great intrusions of black shot through. Grey/white boulders that had swept down
from the higher elevations during high water snowmelt years gathered in pockets
along the river where they had been trapped as the water receded. The old men had sometimes sat up all
the night during these runoffs, the mountains dark around them under the stars,
and had listened to the boulders growling and crashing against each other in
the riverbed and watched as the sparks flew underwater as rock struck rock like
flint on steel. The river
illuminated itself.
Though her message was delivered,
the raven flew lower and watched. The two men were obviously different. The one emerging from the river was
Asian, more slightly built than the man lying on the sand. The man on the sand was darker and
rounder, his skin a deep reddish-brown.
He too looked up toward the raven and smiled, then greeted his friend
emerging from the river. Up
canyon, snowcapped Alta Peak jutted above the more immediate tree covered
ridges. This terrain had had been
home for a very long time, broken by forays to the great valley below.
Slightly upriver from the men, the
raven silently glided toward a dying pine that protruded above the surrounding
trees and settled out over a dead branch, then extended its claws. It was still winter in the low
mountains, yet some trees were starting to sprout new growth. The raven studied the men’s actions,
tried to understand what they might need for their ongoing existence. After an hour the raven took flight,
satisfied with her observations.
The
raven ascended a few hundred feet as she flew upriver, then curved behind a
crumbling granite ridge, her mission complete. The Great Mind had watched through the raven’s eyes and now
dwelled on the information. The
raven flew on, homeward bound.
Upstream
in time the fabric shifted, made accommodation.
