THE TEMPEST

tides

(an excerpt from a work-in-progress, while I finish tidying my mushroom post)

There was another dream I used to have around that age, which I had forgotten until recently. I would often lie awake at night for hours watching the headlights pass across the walls and ceiling of my bedroom, sometimes while fiddling with a portable TV/radio under the covers. In my mind, the people passing in the cars whose lights were drawn across my walls and ceiling were always driving towards the city, which sat somewhere in the same direction of our backyard, fifteen or twenty miles off. At night the sky above the trees back there would be distinctly brightened by a sodiumish glow from that direction, where the music and TV shows I was hearing on the radio must have come from too. Sometimes the sense of envy that I felt, as if something deeply important were occurring there that everybody else but me had been involved in, grew so strong that I would get the urge to leave my bed and walk downstairs, go out the mudroom door, and walk into the woods towards the lights. Behind the woods there was a meadow which sloped slightly uphill and was scarred by a dozen pits and cradles from a stand of trees that must have fallen over many years ago. I never actually left my room but would instead stare out of the window towards the trees, or tune the radio impatiently. One night as I looked out the window I saw a shooting star which landed, so I thought then, in the meadow. The next day (it was a rainy autumn afternoon, as I recall) I went back to look for what had fallen and found a rusted two-stroke engine buried partly in the leaves inside a pit. This may have been the kernel around which the dream was built. In it, I would find myself before a door inside our house I’d never seen before. Behind the door a staircase led me to a section of the attic I had also never been inside. The room was dim and musty, filled with shelves on which were stacked a range of objects both unknown and oddly familiar, as if belonging to a former life or distant relative. On the shelf in front of me, for instance, was a carton of mixed board game pieces, a box of broken kites, stacks of catalogs and leather books, a broken tape cassette deck, copper kettles, a coffee can of ivory knobs and handles, dull scythe blades, a German luger with the pin removed, embroidered pillows, glass figurines of clowns dressed up as great depression hobos or vice versa, a few large wooden models of old clipper ships, three pin cushions in the shape of ladies’ feet, a painted sea chest, paper lampshades, a wooden barrel filled with nuts and bolts, a crate of gloves, a singer sewing table with foot pedal, brass candle stands, doll furniture, and a pair of laced-up leather roller skates. The remembrance of the dream only resurfaced years afterward, as I was browsing through Zaborski’s emporium in Kingston, New York, a place that so closely resembled the setting of my dream that I can’t help but view both through the stained glass of the other, and don’t know for certain which one I am remembering as I write this. P—— and I had come up for the weekend on a bus. Every seat was occupied except for one across from us, where an older woman used a bulky suitcase to block off the row. She spent the trip mumbling continuously as she scribbled on a pad of paper held in one hand; after a minute or so she would grip the pen in her teeth and use her writing hand to tear the page away. One by one she tossed them, crumpled, on the empty seat, until they started rolling on the floor from row to row. I hoped to pick up one of the sheets, if only to find out whatever it was she wanted so badly to express, and possibly also how she managed to sustain this energy, writing with one hand as she held the pad, but did not manage to. That night, after we had settled into the cramped attic apartment where most of the ceiling was low enough to bang your head, B——, a friend who lived in Kingston, came to meet us for a walk around the neighborhood. There had been some snow only that week, she said, but the weather was already warm with spring, a remark illustrated almost immediately by a herd of white-tailed deer, a doe with several fawns, who clattered off into a stand of woods just as we turned the corner down a quiet street. Heading for the same trees into which they disappeared, we came along a narrow path to the base of a tall cliff. At the bottom it was noticeably colder and some snow still lingered in patches on the ground and along the chain-link fence which ran across the entrance to the cave below the cliffs. Across the sloping entrance there were scattered several dozen foot-high stalagmites made of ice, fed by the constant dripping water from the mass of rocks above our heads. The water, when it hit the pointed tip of the inverted icicles, was spattered outwardly and as it froze would form a toadstool cap, which was funny, Brigid pointed out, because the owners of the cave once used it to grow edible mushrooms, at least until the 1960s, when the operation was closed up. Before that, starting in the 19th century, the caves were mined for dolomite, a mineral formation of magnesium and calcium carbonate which was dried and ground up for cement. A few small rooms adjoined the entrance, filled with tangled wires, broken plastic crates, and metal vents once used to try and regulate the moisture that suffused the air. Passing deeper, we came into a large hall carved into the rock, with limestone floors and ceilings that glowed with a greenish cast in the beam of our headlamps, and thick pillars of rust-colored dolomite, thirty or so feet tall. The hall sloped gently to our left, until it suddenly submerged quite steeply in a clear pool, through which we could see the mine continue to a great depth under the strangely crystalline water. The water here preserves things well, our friend remarked, that otherwise go rotten, and she pointed out a row of pale green railroad ties below the surface which veered off into the blue-black deep. The miners would scrape out the folded beds of dolomite as they ran in all directions through the earth, sometimes tilted, sometimes up and down, and once the mines were left behind the water table, fed by rain, had filled the empty space. The dolomite, in fact, had first been formed below the water, so that it was only now returning to something like its prior state in the calm, deep offshore regions between sandbanks and the low-tide mark in the warm, tropical seas that once covered the Hudson valley four hundred million years ago. Although there are few fossils in the dolomite compared to the sponges, corals, shells, and shrimps abundant in the limestone belts which formed within the intertidal zone, you may sometimes still come across a ripple in the dolomite left in the sand by gentle waves, or of a crazing fracture that had been preserved after the final tide had ebbed away and the carbonated mud left in the sun to dry.