Read Online Having Everything Right by Robert Michael; Kim; Pyle Stafford - Free Book Online
Authors: Robert Michael; Kim; Pyle Stafford
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in the air. We did not know how to end the class.
I left the car at the rim of Joseph Canyon, and started down. A snow squall ended in sunlight, where elk bedded across a meadow ignoring me, and I followed their trails where my people had made none, down through pines that flavored the wind I sipped, rollicking through damp needle-duff with a swinging step all afternoon. Up on the rim, huge helicopters lifted whole trees from where the loggers had felled themâdistant as dragonflies carrying twigs of grass. And I plunged down the slope.
The story is not what you do, but what fits. The story is not a sequence of actions, but a whole quilt unrolled in the story-makerâs mind. My walk down Joseph Canyon was filled with sensation, with danger, meditation, discoveryâpitch and smoke, rain down my back,a bed of rock at the top of Starvation Ridge. An owl called as I crossed the net of moonlight filtered through trees. By the charcoal of a fire, I found a book of camp songs the mice had chewed. I fed on nettle and fern root, and wood ticks fed on me. And I was lost three hours in the snow, getting slowly chilled, afraid to sit down, tipsy with confusion, until I stepped abruptly out from the trees by the highway, and hitchhiked home.
None of that was the story. No incident had enough of the tight terror and swirl, the exhilaration of change. Pitch and dragonfly, owl and moonlight, a cabin where no one lived for yearsâthose are fine in their way, but when I told the children at Wallowa School, they all got righteously bored. I could tell by how they got polite. They folded their hands. One glanced at the clock. Another got interested in the boots I wore. So I asked them to tell me about what it was like when they were old. In the third grade, this is an easy task. They told me without fear. One paper I carried away told this:
            I Was Old
       God woke up and he herd a Dinusor but
       he was old and he sed to myself how
       come he am in The old day how come
       he donât no why and then I died and
       he died for a little while and then he
       came out of my graveyard and he
       went back to sleep and he died
       again and he woke up and Then
       he was young and he Loved to dy
       young and The End.
Vicki was the quiet one. She could be Coyoteâs wife. And, the end. But there were seven minutes before the class was done. I remembered one more little thing from Joseph Canyonâthe time I bent down to drink. It was the smallest moment, but Vickiâs story about being old made me know something, and I started to tell it anyway. This time, the children forgot about me and listened to the story itself:
It was a hot day, and I was clear at the bottom of Joseph Canyonâhadnât taken enough water. But Joseph Creek, you know itâs a big muddy torrent this time of year with a couple of cow pies floating by every so often. I wasnât going to take a drink of that.
Well, pretty soon I came to a little stream flowing in from the sideâclear little stream about a foot wideâand I bent down to fill my hat. Water was real cool on my hands as I dipped the hat in, but as I stood up, a whole story went through my head. You know how fast a story can flash past your mind? Itâs a story my parents told me, sitting on the couch at home, when I was just a little guy:
Once upon a time there was a king, and this king liked to hunt, liked to take his hawk on his arm and ride out looking for game. He would send that hawk up to circle around until it saw a little rabbit, or maybe a quail, and then the hawk would swoop down and grab that little critter and bring it back.
Well, this one day it was
I left the car at the rim of Joseph Canyon, and started down. A snow squall ended in sunlight, where elk bedded across a meadow ignoring me, and I followed their trails where my people had made none, down through pines that flavored the wind I sipped, rollicking through damp needle-duff with a swinging step all afternoon. Up on the rim, huge helicopters lifted whole trees from where the loggers had felled themâdistant as dragonflies carrying twigs of grass. And I plunged down the slope.
The story is not what you do, but what fits. The story is not a sequence of actions, but a whole quilt unrolled in the story-makerâs mind. My walk down Joseph Canyon was filled with sensation, with danger, meditation, discoveryâpitch and smoke, rain down my back,a bed of rock at the top of Starvation Ridge. An owl called as I crossed the net of moonlight filtered through trees. By the charcoal of a fire, I found a book of camp songs the mice had chewed. I fed on nettle and fern root, and wood ticks fed on me. And I was lost three hours in the snow, getting slowly chilled, afraid to sit down, tipsy with confusion, until I stepped abruptly out from the trees by the highway, and hitchhiked home.
None of that was the story. No incident had enough of the tight terror and swirl, the exhilaration of change. Pitch and dragonfly, owl and moonlight, a cabin where no one lived for yearsâthose are fine in their way, but when I told the children at Wallowa School, they all got righteously bored. I could tell by how they got polite. They folded their hands. One glanced at the clock. Another got interested in the boots I wore. So I asked them to tell me about what it was like when they were old. In the third grade, this is an easy task. They told me without fear. One paper I carried away told this:
            I Was Old
       God woke up and he herd a Dinusor but
       he was old and he sed to myself how
       come he am in The old day how come
       he donât no why and then I died and
       he died for a little while and then he
       came out of my graveyard and he
       went back to sleep and he died
       again and he woke up and Then
       he was young and he Loved to dy
       young and The End.
Vicki was the quiet one. She could be Coyoteâs wife. And, the end. But there were seven minutes before the class was done. I remembered one more little thing from Joseph Canyonâthe time I bent down to drink. It was the smallest moment, but Vickiâs story about being old made me know something, and I started to tell it anyway. This time, the children forgot about me and listened to the story itself:
It was a hot day, and I was clear at the bottom of Joseph Canyonâhadnât taken enough water. But Joseph Creek, you know itâs a big muddy torrent this time of year with a couple of cow pies floating by every so often. I wasnât going to take a drink of that.
Well, pretty soon I came to a little stream flowing in from the sideâclear little stream about a foot wideâand I bent down to fill my hat. Water was real cool on my hands as I dipped the hat in, but as I stood up, a whole story went through my head. You know how fast a story can flash past your mind? Itâs a story my parents told me, sitting on the couch at home, when I was just a little guy:
Once upon a time there was a king, and this king liked to hunt, liked to take his hawk on his arm and ride out looking for game. He would send that hawk up to circle around until it saw a little rabbit, or maybe a quail, and then the hawk would swoop down and grab that little critter and bring it back.
Well, this one day it was
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