seemed to contain some different vision of the Ozarks sky. Now I could isolate the fragrances in the room. There was the faint scent of honeysuckle and morning glories, the smell of the lake before the sun has warmed its waters, the crisp aroma of roses, the winey scent of daffodils, the musty tang of deep-woods cedars wafting on an afternoon breeze.
Fascinated, I looked at each bottle as the old man stood silently by, watching me.
There was one bottle with ribbons of clouds colored gold by the setting sun. There was another with high thin altocumulus stretched all through the container. In still another, I saw silvery cirrocumulus lit by dazzling sunbeams. Each one seemed to contain a special part of our sky here in the Ozarks hills, a miniature fragment of the heavens. A chill crept up my arm, the hairs on the back of my neck rose prickly as a spider’s thread.
There was more.
Some bottles contained sections of a mighty river, white-capped and frothy over the rapids, serene and motionless on wide bends. It seemed I saw wild trout leaping in one bottle, a flock of geese rise off the miniature surface of another. One bottle had what appeared to be a spring bubbling up from a deep cavern, spilling over flat stones, into a woodland brook. My heart caught in my throat to see those wondrous, unexplainable things.
"I don’t understand," I said, turning to the man at my side.
"Relics," he said. "For those who have forgotten what it’s like to see blue sky, wild water, and sun. Look at this one."
He handed me a bottle that radiated a pure bronze light at the very bottom, then turned the color of peach in the middle and shimmered golden at the top.
"Sunrise over the White River," he said. "The old White River, before it was dammed up, tamed."
"Incredible."
"These are very valuable bottles, my friend," said the man, his voice a serious rasp in his throat. "They are worth a great deal. In fact, they are as precious as life itself."
"You mean these represent atmospheres that we no longer have on earth?"
"Yes. The pure air, the clean water, is all gone. This is the last place in the world where people can see the sky and taste the air. Do you understand?"
"Yes," I said. "I think I do. It’s been some time since I’ve been to the big cities, but it was very hard to breathe there. May I buy a bottle or two? For souvenirs?"
"Oh, no. They’re not for sale, my friend. They’re not for sale at all. You see, this is a museum, this bottle shop. This is where all of the beautiful vapors of this planet, the last airs and humours of life on earth are stored."
"But, it’s not all gone. Not yet," I insisted.
"Isn’t it?"
He led me back into the other room before I could say any more. He ushered me straight out the front door, back onto West Highway 76. I stepped into a sunny world that was every bit like a magnification of the substances inside the bottles.
Dazed, I walked to my car, got in. I drove to the park on Table Rock, near the dam, to the place where the pretty girls go in summer, where the boys bring their boom boxes and Frisbees, where children fly kites and swim by the shore. The lake was dancing like a blue mirror. There was laughter. A few clouds floated cottony over the hills. The sky was a piercing cobalt.
The old geezer was crazy, I thought to myself.
Later, I drove back down West 76, stopped and parked the car. I looked for the sign that read "The Bottle Shop."
It wasn’t there.
Instead, there was only a vacant building, ramshackle and weatherworn. I walked up and down the boulevard a long time before I gave up and went home.
It felt good to walk through our woods, to look out at Bull Shoals Lake from our back porch. The air was clean and fresh. The sky was clear. What a wonderful time and place to be alive in, I thought.
It was good to breathe deep of the good air and to look up at the sky.
I drove to the park on Table Rock, near the dam,
to the place where the pretty girls go in summer,
where the boys bring their boom boxes and Frisbees,
where children fly kites and swim by the shore.
The lake was dancing like a blue mirror.
There was laughter.
A few clouds floated cottony over the hills.
Taking A Walk
I have been down through the woods again on a rain-sodden day. There was a sound, through the trees, like a mighty river roaring. The wind was up, booming this illusion through the hollow, as if the earth here was shaped like a huge sea shell that magnified certain vibrations in the ear; the blood coursing through veins, the throb of the heart muscle, the silence itself.
What is here for me among these newly leafed-out May trees? My boots sink into the mud-sog, touch hard stone. It seems so desolate here, so bereft of life. As if the hanging-on winter had stopped the breathing of creatures, imprisoned them in some kind of hibernative somnolence long after the sun finally found its way through the clouds.
There is something here. There is life. Some of it invisible. In the wind, a pulse, a scent, a hint of deer bedded down, squirrels in their dens, quail under brush, in soft wallows. Rabbits hiding in stony crevices, noses twitching, whiskers quivering.
How do we find such places as these? Why do we come here? Stay? There are other places, maybe places just as good.
Somewhere, here in these thickening woods, there are answers. It is enough now to stop and touch a tree. There is energy in its trunk, in the tactile sensation of its rough bark. There is a message in the pattern its limbs form against the sky. Shapes, outlines, patterns, frames. Something to sketch in thoughts that crowd the mind, some good empty spaces to search through for whatever may be found: answers, perhaps; meaning.
Stopping here, I am conscious that something is breathing in these woods besides myself. The trees breathe, of course. Oxygen is poison to them, so they expel it, as I expel carbon dioxide. One’s waste is another’s need. The rocks are alive, too, formed of the same star-dust as everything else on this planet, the fine silt of long-ago explosions when there was only Void. And now I sense the rocks and trees, myself, pulsing with the same vital rhythm that courses through the entire universe.
I think of Gustav Mahler and the sobbing plod of percussive patterns forming a backdrop to the brassy, soaring horns, the strings all fighting for a foothold in the Fifth Symphony. Here, in the apparent silence, I hear the bugling of ancient hunting horns in a sylvan glen, the distant baying of hounds on an English moor.
It is so solemn here that music rises up out of the morning dankness, some of it soft and slow, some bright allegro.
Back up the hill, at the house, I can hear the wind chimes on the front porch, delicately melodic. Man-made, these pipe-bells seem oddly apropos here, faintly Oriental. They make clear pure sounds like fine crystal struck with a silversmith’s hammer.
I walk on, out of earshot, beyond the reach of the wind chimes, deeper into the woods, beyond the gurgling, rainy weather creek. A friend tells me there ought to be morels up in the hardwoods, or in the cedar stands where the grass grows a thin carpet in cool shadows. But, I have been to these places and the wild mushrooms still elude me. There is something mystical about these little fungus creatures. Someday, maybe my timing will be right. Maybe I’ll find a sack full. I looked early this year, and late, and while I saw a few edible varieties, they either grew too high on trees, or were too few to bother with, singles, no bigger than marbles.
The walk is rugged, takes me in no particular direction.