The early Shoshone called this
the land of healing waters. Soaking here with my 9-year-old twins
beneath gray skies at the Lava Hot Springs in eastern Idaho, I try
to imagine the earth opening, get flashes of my children running,
terrified; I am terrified as well.
The death toll from
the tsunami had risen to 20,000 as we left Boise. Water on the
other side of the earth had carried off people and buildings and
trees. Because they are not our families, our shock and sadness are
intermittent, different than waking up each morning to the horror
of our own dead children, our own lost home.
My sons dunk
their head under the warm water and wait for icicles to form in
their hair, but these seven days since the winter solstice have
been unseasonably warm. Normally, deer would already be down low,
grazing along the sides of the foothills surrounding the spring,
but there is enough food still up high. The mountains are bare
except for their highest points.
Part of living in the
mountain West is living with the possibility of fire or earthquake
or avalanche. We half expect some natural disaster, the way people
in some cities half expect their car to be gone when they come out
from the movie theater.
Local news tends to involve
nature. Last winter’s stories: 89 elk crashed through the ice
while trying to cross a reservoir during a January thaw; an
avalanche filled a cabin, killing two; an out-of bounds skier who
had lost his way Dec. 31 was found five days later, frostbitten but
alive.
In summer, there are almost always the fires. Our
house is just above the tree line, where brush turns to kindling
during dry years, and where hospitals are an hour’s drive
down winding roads. We clear foliage from the side of our houses
and build using fireproof siding and steel roofs. We stay because
it is our home and we don’t really believe we could outwit
nature by moving.
To live with nature is to give up the
illusion that we can conquer it. Most of the time the mountains are
peaceful, the snow glistens and the trees provide shade. Elk wander
through our yard on cool mornings, a scene as serene as the liquid
blue that laps the shore of Thailand and Indonesia.
My
son, Dylan, stands up and walks off into the fog, the last of the
large pools, the hottest, shaped like a long rectangle. People are
the quietest in this pool, and I realize when I reach it, that it
is because it is too hot to move or speak. A bright-eyed couple
with faces etched by wrinkles leans against the stone wall and each
other. Dylan’s brother, Gabe, hands me a dark smooth stone
from the floor of the pool. He believes that rocks have souls and
he’s half convinced me.
Sometimes I sound like a
Buddhist to myself and other times a Native American. Jesus is as
real to me as my breath, and I’ve known too many resurrection
stories in my own lifetime to doubt his own. I realize I would
drive a strict constructionist of any faith crazy. But the text
I’ve learned to listen to best comes from a wild river or the
mountains, the surf pounding the shore. Here, too, where the water
is peaceful, we seem to inhale steam and exhale prayers. Hot water
streams down our forehead and necks.
When we arrive home
the death toll has risen to 140,000, and we weep at a loss too big
to imagine. New York Times columnist David
Brooks writes, “If you listen to the discussion of the tsunami this
past week, you receive the clear impression that the meaning of
this event is that there is no meaning. Humans are not the
universe’s main concern. We’re just gnats on the crust of the
earth.”
These seem odd sentences to me. Does humanity
need to be at the center to be important? And I realize, again,
that I’ve been shaped by living in the lightly populated
West, a region suffused with the history of tribes long gone. We
wish we knew their stories, knew what forces they faced that were
greater than themselves.
To admit that nature is powerful
doesn’t diminish us. Nature is us.
Now, when I
think of those corpses floating in the waves, I imagine souls
rising — over a hundred thousand souls shimmering in the now
tranquil seas — like healing waters, like grace.
Laura Stavoe Harm is a contributor to Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org).
She is a writer who lives on the outskirts of Boise,
Idaho.
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