“Hola amigo, can we come sit on your porch?” asked my neighbour’s young daughter. Her and her brother had been riding their bikes and watching me unload a new blue upholstered chair from the boot of my car.
“Sure kids,” I replied and hefted the easy chair up to my screen door.
Within a moment or two we were all socially distanced and settled in our seats. The boy eyeballed the remnants of a case of ginger ale on the deck next to the freezer. His sister thanked me for a world atlas I had given them to peruse after the lock-down and their school closure some months before. We talked about schools, truck tires and cats. I practised the few St'at'imx words that I have learned to date. The boy taught me a new one. Because it was Summer, I asked him what was the St'at'imx word for hot. I agreed to teach them the Spanish word for hot in return, as they seemed to be acquiring some words and phrases in that tongue.
“It’s stotz,” said the boy.
“It’s calor in Spanish,” I said.
“Can we all have have one of those soda pops?” he then asked.
Their father had told me years before that he didn’t allow his children to drink pop but I saw them several years later washing down fries with root beer, so I told him to check with his Dad.
The little girl and I continued conversing and I watched over her head as her brother ran across the road and up the three wooden steps to their door. He opened it and closed it, paused a moment and ran back to where we sat.
“Well?” I inquired.
The boy avoided my gaze, smiled at his sister and announced confidently, “We’re good to go!”
My wife provided glasses from the house and we split a couple of cans between the three of us. Afterwards, I dismantled my old IKEA chair to make room for the new chair. I placed the bentwood pieces into the cloth string bag that the new chair had shipped in. When I began tying the knot, the children became fascinated and wanted to try tying the knot themselves. The little gal took three tries to master it. Her brother tied it perfectly the first time. When I commended him, he looked at me, then at his sister and tapped his forehead with his index finger.
I carried the bagged chair into my storage shed and the children followed like baby geese in my wake. When I found a suitable space for the unwieldy package and moved to close the shed door, I was handed a knob the boy had quickly and quietly unscrewed from my lawn-mower’s folding handle. I screwed it back on. As we all exited the stifling shed, he tapped the side of his head with his forefinger and smiled at me. The siblings decided to go home to play Medal Of Honour and bid me a hasty farewell.
The following day, the children were again riding their bikes and greeted me when I came onto the porch to let my cat Dusty out for his morning hunt. My wife and I had removed the remaining ginger ale from the porch the night before. The little girl asked if they could sit on our porch and I said yes. They dropped their bikes and clambered up the steps. After settling into their former socially distanced seats, they both remarked how terribly hot the weather was. It was really mucho calor. It was suggested that maybe us amigos might have a wee beverage to cool ourselves off.
After the boy had lifted his gaze from where the case of soft drinks had been the day before and faced in my direction without betraying his surprise, I tapped the side of my head with my finger and winked at him. I went into the house and returned with three glasses of cool water.
“Amigos, we ran out of ginger ale but we’re good to go for tres vasos de agua fresca!”
My chair buying exodus to Kamloops had been precipitated by the discovery that I suffered from blocked arteries in both legs. After learning the news, I found my living room chairs to be intolerable and was determined to find a chair that in no way restricted the blood flow behind my knees. I took an entire day to test all the chairs in several large furniture outlets. The one I finally chose was upholstered in gun metal blue cloth, well padded, high-backed, high-armed and comfortable when sitting proper, slouching or semi-reclining. Magically, without its packing crate, it fit into my tiny car with a clearance of an eighth of an inch all around.
You may well wonder if their were any signs or symptoms leading up to the medical revelation mentioned above. Yes, there were many, but alas, they are only clear to me in hindsight. From the vantage of today, I can see that warnings littered my path even before I retired from Canada Post, some six years prior. In fact, to quote from my story called, Tip-Toeing Into The Extraordinary about the last postal route I walked before retiring, “my calves began to cramp at fifteen kilometers and there were still over twenty blocks to go.”
At the time alluded to, I was concerned only with the welfare of my family and figuring out an exit strategy for affordable retirement as a renter. My own discomfort had been taught not to intrude on my thoughts when I was a very young Texan. In a place as expensive, competitive, corrupt and unsympathetic as Metro Vancouver in the twenty-first century, admitting to being sick, scared or injured was not an option anyway.
Post-retirement, any physical limitations I felt when working around my house or while hiking were attributed to my new environment in these dry mountains. After all, I had spent over forty years in the damp sea-level coolness of the Lower Mainland. Prior to that, the searing sea-level heat of the Texas Gulf Coast and the steaming below sea-level heat of Louisiana. After a few years in Lillooet walking the Bridge Walk Circle, one trip to the Red Rock, several Power Canal Walks and other local hikes; I began to spend many hours in a chair at my writing desk creating radio shows.
When I took up chopping and stacking firewood for the first time, I discovered that my arms and shoulders were fine for doing those activities. I had many other pains in my lower back and legs which I attributed to thirty years of carrying mail. The part of my brain that processed pain was overworked and had been ignored for so long that it had ceased speculating on possible causes.
On Christmas Eve 2019, my Suzuki slid off black ice on Izman Curve and into a frozen ditch. Four of us walked away, all shaken but not stirred. We were told by ICBC to ascertain over the next few weeks if we could detect any new pains or unusual aches that might be related to the crash. I wound up laughing when I realized that I would never be able to sort out any “new pain” from the kaleidoscope of pains that I was already living with.
As the first Chinese citizens in and around around Wuhan tried to report on events related to the Corona virus outbreak on social media and were swiftly silenced, I focused on finding new wheels. It was bitter cold when the New Year 2020 started. A Texan without wheels in double-digit negative Celsius temperatures, horseless and two kilometres from the nearest groceries is not concerned with anything more than transportation.
One frigid morning in the New Year, I took our cat Dusty to his vet appointment. It was only a three or four block walk from home, so I opted to carry his cage. I placed the critter on a towel, covered the cage with a blanket and set out into the razor sharp wind. After less than fifty steps, I was seized with a pain in my right calf that I could imagine an animal feels when the steel teeth of a leg-hold trap clap shut. I perceived it as a demonic cramp. I sat the cat cage down in the snow and tried to stretch out my calf.
The stretching had no effect. That told me it wasn’t a cramp, but I lacked the vocabulary and pain reference to label it otherwise, so a cramp it remained. As I stood rocking on my legs, the feeling became slightly different. It was now like a metal coat-hanger had been wrapped around my calf, tightened with pliers until it disappeared into the meat and then had been slightly loosened. What a relief!
Perhaps a minute had transpired. Dusty mewed his alarm and annoyance at the extreme cold. I hefted his cage and began to walk again with almost no discomfort. At precisely the same distance as before, I was stricken in the same way. When I was a mailman, I had been bitten by a big German Shepherd. He had taken my entire calf sideways in his jaws and squashed it like a banana. That remembered pain was similar to this new pain and I actually looked down to see if some crazed animal had chomped onto my leg.
From that day, my experience followed that pattern. A number of normal steps halted by withering pain. A wait of a minute, a gradual subsidence of pain and repeat. Suspecting that my recently acquired skill of ice-skating backwards might have damaged something in my leg, I began deep tissue massage with some olive oil, a stick to bite on and a smooth stone. It didn’t work. Suspecting the car accident had done new damaged my already ravaged spine, I did some cat yoga. That didn’t work either. I began to suspect voodoo.
Finding a car that I could afford took much research. When the task was complete, I hired an intrepid local gentleman to drive my wife and I to North Van to pick up a new little Mitsubishi. It was a step-down from our Vitara. Four cylinders had become three and 185 horses had become 98. The taxi ride was accomplished over the most dangerous road I have yet to experience.
The Duffy Lake road was coated with solid ice. We proceeded at a snail’s pace. Once, when our driver stopped to let the tension drain from his arms and neck, I stepped out onto the roadway and slid five yards. The man asked me if I would like a job driving one of his taxis. I said no thanks. Not just yet. I had already been asked by the owner of the towing business who had salvaged my stricken Suzuki if I wanted a job driving one of his tow trucks around the canyon. I had given him the same answer.
At the car dealership everyone was sneezing and coughing. The media’s pandemic campaign was not yet under full steam, so nothing looked or felt any different than any past flu season. My wife and I ate some boiling hot Vietnamese phở soup after our paperwork was concluded. When we finished our meal, it took us a few moments to find the car buried between two massive black Hummers in the parking lot. We drove home up the Fraser Canyon to avoid the ice-covered Duffy. We stopped in Hope to top off the gas tank. I squeezed the handle of the gas pump and it stopped at six dollars. I smiled. Our route brought us past the site of our accident and it was good medicine to lay down some new memories over the old ones.
Winter reluctantly gave way to Spring and with the warming weather, I began to venture outside to do chores. The fire-wood stacking was easily accomplished but I felt a pronounced fatigue in both legs that had never been there before. When I went to mow the lawn for the first time in May, reality hit home hard. I could only proceed several yards before stopping, turning off the motor and waiting for the incredible pain to subside. An unavoidable awareness that my mobility was rapidly deteriorating took hold of me. So much so, that during the month of May, I did something totally out of character. I went to a doctor.
After reaching my late teens, I kept my doctor visits to a minimum and only went if I already knew what was wrong. I believe that a person should take responsibility for their own health rather than rely on medicine to alleviate the symptoms of their own negligence. I had also noticed a down-curve in the ability of doctors to diagnose when compared to my childhood. I attributed this to a heavier reliance on diagnostic aids provided by pharmaceutical companies and the side affects of their products. Disenchantment gradually curtailed my doctor visits.
Before I went to have my leg examined, I researched my symptoms online for several days. I settled on a diagnosis and wrote the strange name down on a paper which I put in my pocket. I read the prognoses, treatments, procedures and statistics from medical websites in America, Canada and Europe. I duly noted that there was no cure. The procedures employed for treating my alleged condition were few and contingent upon factors yet to be determined. Several drug therapies existed for lessening the severity of symptoms and postponing mortality. According to statistics, from first presentation, the average patient in my age range lived another five years on average. Armed with that sobering information, I sought the help of a professional.
The doctor listened to my story, listened to my heart and listened to my arteries. He asked some pertinent questions about my diet and lifestyle. He ordered blood and urine tests.
“Do you smoke?”
“Yes.”
“How much and for how long?”
“Well, I smoke Drum. It’s a Dutch blend of shag-cut dark Kentucky leaf and yellow Virginia. Its cured with honey, strong as hell, sweet and spicy. It’s over two hundred years old, adored across the world and I’ve smoked it for over forty-five years. As far as how much, I never counted. I have coffee cans on each of my porches and I empty the butts every Friday. The only time I am not smoking is when I’m asleep. I do not smoke indoors, however.”
He encouraged me to consider quitting and offered assistance in that regard. He said it would definitely improve my general health. I was put in touch with a vascular surgeon who ordered other tests. Very promptly, I was sent on several journeys to Kamloops and the Royal Inland Hospital. I underwent blood-pressure monitoring that used three cuffs on each extremity. Measurements were taken before and after a five minute session on a treadmill. After four steps on that treadmill, my right calf felt like a tree had fallen on it. It was a long, demoralizing five minutes.
Afterwards, in Lillooet, my doctor gave me the considered diagnosis. I listened intently and pulled the paper from my pocket, on which was written the word, claudication. It was a match and, I told him that he had my trust and that I was proud to be his patient. My problem was a case of peripheral arterial disease. I had compromised arteries in the painful leg, whose muscles were starving for oxygen when called upon to work. It remained to see how much sclerosis had occurred and where it was located.
I obtained a prescription for nicotine replacement therapy that day. I will mention here that the Queen pays for this cessation therapy on a once per year basis and I heartily thank her for having that kind of class. Nicotine has the effect of causing blood vessels to temporarily constrict. The effect lasts for about six minutes. In my case, those intervals equalled several hours per day of constriction. Strangely, my blood tests all showed lipid numbers well within healthy Canadian guidelines.
In another test, which was designed to locate and measure any blockages in blood vessels, I was fitted with a needle in my arm for remotely injecting iodine. I was in a silly gown and laying on a movable bench which slid in and out of a scanner. I told the nurse that I used to donate blood regularly when I was a mailman and that was why I had over fifty puncture marks on the big vein of my arm.
“We don’t judge,” she said.
“Everyone judges,” I replied.
I was warned that the iodine would feel very hot and that the heat would begin in my earlobes and run all the way down to my groin. It would feel as if I’d peed myself but not to worry, it was a sensory illusion. The needle was attached to a long rubber hose to allow for the movement in and out of the scanner. I closed my eyes as if to protect them from the rays emitted from the beige plastic contraption before me. The nurse quickly taped the hose to my arm and disappeared. I was told through a speaker that I would be moving into the scanner and soon get the first iodine injection. A delicious heat began in my ears and ran down to my groin, I was asked if I was OK.
“Yes. I’m fine. In fact, you can hit me again. This is better’n vindaloo.”
On my second trip under the scanner I felt something wrong at the injection site. I opened my eyes just in time to grasp the rubber hose before the needle would have been yanked out. The hose was snagged on the nurse’s stool and causing the needle to oscillate inside my vein. When the scan was through, I was hastily unhitched, taped with a cotton wad and told to get dressed. Buttoning my shirt in the change booth, I felt something sticky. My shirt was soaked and blood was dripping on the linoleum. There was a wicked blood blister where the needle had been dancing. I found help down a dimly lit hallway.
After that test, I was summoned to the surgeon’s office and presented with my options. I had two total occlusions and due to the length of the worst of them; balloon and rotary therapies were out of the question. Due to the location being behind my knee, a stent was ruled out. Thus, my only option was by-pass surgery. That option necessitated the mapping of a suitable vein to harvest and use. When I attended that ultrasound session, I overheard the technician mention something called collateral vessels to her student. Evidently, I had at least three of them in my right leg.
I came to understand that my body had some time in the past taken the initiative to deal with a problem that my mind wasn’t yet aware of. It was the reason that I hadn’t lost my leg to gangrene. My own research had shown me that a leg by-pass at my age usually had a useful life of five years. I told the surgeon that I was leaning away from the surgery option. I was more excited by the possibility of growing more and bigger collateral vessels through vigorous exercise. He grinned as if he had guessed my response and told me that an internist he knew would be calling me soon.
During those medical trips to Kamloops, I hobbled around the deserted streets and eventually found a world class vindaloo joint that hadn’t yet gone bankrupt. It was take-out only and so I sat on the sidewalk out front chowing on a big plate and washing it down with volcanic hot chai. My walking style was to go a quarter block, stand and rock back and forth while the pain ebbed away. A pain like a stupefying case of brain freeze oddly located in my ankle, foot, calf or shin. No panhandlers approached me.
As June First presented on the calendar, I took the stack of clothes off a stationary bike I’d bought two years earlier knowing it might come in handy and had never used once. I began my nicotine replacement therapy and cycling for forty-five minutes, seven days a week upon rising from bed. After a light breakfast, I went walking.
Those walks began with a distance of approximately a city block. I tried different breathing techniques to cope with the incredible pain. Over time I began to go farther on the walks. During the cycling, my right leg felt no pain at all and my left felt deep fatigue. The walks were the opposite. My left leg was fine while my right leg felt like a root canal with no anaesthetic. I continued cutting my grass although I now dreaded that heinous chore.
By August, I had incrementally extended the daily walks to the six mile Bridge Walk Circuit. It took me exactly three hours to accomplish. When I retired in 2014, that walk had taken me just under two hours. The distance I could travel before being stopped by the overwhelming pain became decidedly longer. The pain recovery time became somewhat shorter. The pain presented in different parts of my leg over time. In effect, I now walked like a cat. A bobcat, if you will. I began to see much more of nature than I ever did at my normal mailman’s pace. The nicotine patches petered out in late August.
The internist phoned from Kamloops as promised and introduced herself. She told me that she wanted me to take a statin. I told her that perhaps it wasn’t necessary because my cholesterol numbers were so great. She told me that I already had two blocked arteries, so she wasn’t overly impressed with my numbers. She wanted those levels cut by half, sooner than later and added that if I were her own father, she would insist on it. I decided I liked her and went on the medication forthwith.
I had to look up the definition of the word internist after we spoke on the phone and gleaned that they are people who study the organs in more detail than say, a surgeon. I reckoned that perhaps they were drawn from the pool of students who fainted in the dissection theatre early on in med school. As my problem was likely to be liver related, I was happy to have such a person on my case. I must say at this juncture, that I have received very prompt, considered and honest medical care for which I heartily thank my local doctor, our nurses, clerks, assistants and all their colleagues in Kamloops.
My concept of death gained a new dimension. My childhood awareness of death in general, laminated by my mid-life crisis had now become a benign hooded shadow who shared my water bottle. His bony fingers were draped over my shoulder. No longer stalking, he now easily matched my pace. We munched dried cherries and shared beef jerky. We sought the shade of telephone poles and rocked back and forth sending our pain into the ground. Fundamentally, I believe we are here to learn, to procreate, to teach and to refine ourselves. Nothing more. It is highly likely that the process continues on the other side of the curtain.
I sometimes cried involuntarily when I saw young, sinewy men and women. Groups of mothers behind high-tech baby carriages and one intrepid fellow who passed me often, all jogging the Bridge Circuit. Not from self-pity or envy but from the compassion of knowing that some of them had things going on under their hoods that they were blissfully as yet unaware of. When I saw folks my own age and older some tears fell out of compassion for the pain that I imagined some of them were bravely coping with. I began re-reading some hermetic texts that I had been unable to understand in my younger days. During the short Summer nights, to a symphony of crickets, they were now making a good deal of sense.
My only regular social contacts were a young male yellow-bellied marmot, whom I named Pasquale, a young bald eagle and a young osprey. I have jingle bells on my belt and when Pasquale heard them, he would pop halfway out of his burrows and prop his little arm on a rock. His complex had about eight different entrances. I would linger and talk to him while the pain drained from my leg and he seemed to really enjoy our visits. Several times, the eagle glided overhead and I learned to find him easily each new day by searching for his shadow rather than his body. The salmon never came. I encountered my doctor, his wife and their dogs on several occasions. I saw other friends and neighbours randomly when our walks coincided.
A woman appeared at the Old Bridge one day who had the same problem as me. She was also a former Drum smoker. She said she was also rebuilding her collateral vessels but with Co-Q 10 enzyme. She had met another local man for whom that method had been successful. She rode a big three-wheeled moped. It sported the largest knobby tires I have ever seen. In her prim skirts and blouse, she resembled Ceres in her chariot. Her husband was on foot and appeared to be fit as a fiddle. While we chatted, an old St’at’imx man walked by, paused and held out his leg which was crisscrossed with a network of veins that cascaded over his shin bone and down to his foot.
On the last day of August I lay down for a nap with Dusty in the afternoon and was treated to a series of vivid mental images. I saw an old stone church and its attached graveyard. The images flew by in time lapse as snow after snow appeared and disappeared from the crooked, moss covered tombstones and the mountains around about. On September the First, I turned the page on my desk calendar and it bore the image of a female Welsh Saint whose name was Melangell. Never having heard of her, I sought, found and read her story.
She was an actual Irish Princess who ran away to Wales to avoid an arranged marriage in the early Seventh Century. She disappeared into the wilderness and hid. A Welsh Prince went on horseback hunting rabbits with his hounds in a valley his family owned one day about four years later. When a hare they were chasing ran into a thicket, his dogs followed, went silent and came out with their tails tucked. The Prince rode into the thicket and found a young woman kneeling there with the rabbit among her skirts. Both were looking coolly at the dogs, the horse and the rider.
The young noble felt a tremendous, inexplicable power emanating from the woman and was so moved that he gifted her that entire valley for her own legal abode. He further decreed that it would be evermore a haven for all animals. A church was built nearby many years later. I learned that the old church in a village called Pennant Melangell later became a pilgrimage site, a shrine and a spiritual retreat. In the surrounds are a grove of yew trees that today are well over a thousand years old. There are many beautiful hiking trails in the mountains.
When googling up some pictures of the site, I instantly recognized the ancient church, the grounds, the yew trees and the gravestones. I had seen them all with crystal clarity only days before, in my aforementioned remote viewing experience. Inside the shrine, there are many alchemical symbols that I recognized from recent reading on the topic of Hermes Trismegistus and the Emerald Tablet. There is a quote on one of the walls there. It is a lesson that I have been repeatedly learning since I was born. The lesson has to do with the unparalleled strength of gentleness and the gentleness of real strength.
A second surprise for me lay in the window of a dormant art gallery on Lillooet's Main Street, which I passed by on my daily six-mile walks. There, one day in early September, I noticed two dust covered oil paintings both with the theme of a woman interacting with a rabbit. They were the only paintings visible through the dusty front window.
I once had a wonderful encounter with a real girl and a rabbit, many years ago when I was a twice-divorced, thrice-married, overworked, emotionally drained, working poor mailman and the story I wrote about it was called Monsoon Angel. You can hear that story here. I believe that the Lillooet paintings were a further teaching along the same spiritual lines. A lesson about the flip side or the source, if you will, of Saint Melangell's strength of gentleness.
Firstly, consider that she disobeyed her father, secondly that she ran away from her problem and thirdly that she illegally immigrated, trespassed, squatted on private land and stared down the owner. Consider that wilfulness, gumption, fear, courage, fight, flight, sacrifice, disobedience, self loyalty, secrecy and stubbornness eventually led to her Sainthood. Icons of Saint Melangell usually depict clothed skinny white women protectively holding bunny rabbits. The oil paintings in Lillooet depict stout semi-nude black women assisting male rabbits to aim and draw bows and arrows.
By early October, I was craving the cover of trees after traipsing many miles in the bleaching sunshine. I recalled a walk I'd heard of but never done. It was close to home, non-technical and of short duration. The large well-worn path finished at a waterfall where Cayoosh Creek emerges from a crack in the rock barrier that blocks its long journey East from Duffy Lake to the Fraser River. The water first passes through a small privately built dam at which point the whole creek disappears into bedrock. From upstream you can see into the crack. From downstream you cannot see where the water originates.
The forest is riparian near the creek and old-growth fir among ancient mossy boulders piled into glaciated tiers. I have hiked and climbed the watersheds of North Vancouver and those whispering cedar rain forests are noisy by comparison. The fir woods and fields of moss-covered boulders that tumbled off high cliffs before the pyramids were built are God’s soundproof studio. The silence is downright Carpathian, yet it has seen at least ten thousand years of human deeds. You will never hear a cougar here unless it sneezes, growls or farts.
The first time I beheld the falls, I immediately saw faces and figures in the jumble of water-sculpted rocks. The second time, I climbed up over the top of the chasm and saw the dam and reservoir behind. I returned many more times. Each time I gazed at the waterfall, I saw new faces and figures in the ever-changing light conditions, but several main figures have remained clear, unchanging and unavoidable. One such figure bears a face like Beethoven’s death mask. Another is a not yet fully formed water-sculpted maiden and yet another is a bearded magister with a penetrating gaze.
On the hikes in and out, I encountered some very old fir trees whose roots had been all but washed clear of sand and rock. They appeared very much like the ents, or tree-folk in Tolkien’s book. Their collateral roots and major arteries are all exposed, perfectly balanced and when viewed from any angle, they really appear to be walking toward the creek. They gave me especial encouragement for my condition and its eventual remediation over time.
My wife and I were gifted with a few cannabis seeds and managed to get three of them to sprout. Two female plants were transplanted into our big garden and one of those grew to six feet. She was covered in flowers and strongly perfumed the entire house and yard. The scent made me eventually lose my dread of cutting the lawn. I also undertook the rebuilding of the wooden foundation of our metal storage shed which had rotted badly. I installed new taps for the bathroom and kitchen. I harvested the weed just before first frost and hung it to legally dry on my back porch. In time, I tasted it and based upon its particular spiritual, mental and physical attributes, I named it “Good To Go.”
Music has always brightened my path and during the times I speak of I discovered a recording of a Welsh triple harp virtuoso named Llio Rhydderch. She had written a song inspired by Saint Melangell. I purchased her obscure album from an equally obscure online shop in Brittany, France. The liner notes revealed that two very beloved Welsh harp players are buried in the old churchyard at Pennant Melangell. That recording became a favourite daily ambience for my house and the magical notes calmed everyone's nerves. Dusty began sitting on the couch, with his ear as close to the speaker as possible when he heard Llio’s fingers running over the harp strings.
I also came across a random article that spoke of the ten greatest Chinese music classics of all time. Each song title was accompanied by a story and a beautiful painting. I was intrigued by the enormous swath of time involved and painstakingly searched out my favourite variations of each of those ten ancient musical treasures. Sometimes I enjoyed those tunes during my walks on a mp3 player. They are firmly in my spirit now and I can whistle some of them.
One of the songs particularly riveted my attention and the story behind it is about a highly educated nobleman who was a guqin or lute master. This man named Bo Ya travelled up into the mountains to play his instrument. A wood-cutter happened by and sat to listen. When the piece was over he commented on how well the musician had captured the essence of lofty, cloud-strewn peaks and tumbling abysses of rockfall with his musical notes. The musician was mightily surprised by such astute commentary. He began another improvisation that was inspired by the water that trickled, tracked and tumbled its way off the mountain to gather in a large river below. When he finished, the wood-cutter told him that it was uncanny how he had captured the very spirit of water in his song.
The lute master had never met any person who grasped the meaning of his music so perfectly, even among the poets and musicians of his own upper-class society. The two men became instant, if unlikely friends. The scholar implored the wood-cutter to come down to the city and take a government job, so he could be financially comfortable and not have to work so hard. The wood-cutter replied that he had elderly parents whom he cared for and that he would never desert them. The scholar gave a bag of money to the wood-cutter and promised to meet him in a year's time, in the same spot on that mountain.
When the musician returned a year later, he couldn't find the wood-cutter. He inquired around and eventually found the man’s house. The wood-cutter’s parents told him that their son had died of exhaustion several months before. He had used the money to purchase books on many academic subjects in order to be worthy of his new friend's company. After each day’s work he had stayed up all night, every night, reading.
The devastated musician asked to be taken to the wood-cutter's grave. He played his guqin over the grave and then broke it to bits. He took his deceased friend’s parents back with him to his city home and looked after them until they both passed away. He never played any musical instrument again.
Based upon the example of this story, a word was coined in the Chinese language for a rare kind of friendship that one may or may not ever be lucky enough to find in their lifetime. Roughly translated it means "someone who understands your music." The Chinese term is zhiyin, 知音, literally, "to know the tone."
I believe that I’ve encountered the archetypal wood-cutter several times in my life, most recently, right here in Lillooet. I also suspect that I have on occasion been the wood-cutter. As the alchemy of the story teaches us, gold doesn’t react. Many other elements do react with each other and precipitate great changes all around. A measure of how golden one is, could be the degree to which one remains unchanged after such encounters. Like the rock that resembles Beethoven eternally sleeping with his head and shoulders cradled by the waterfall on Cayoosh Creek or like the woman and rabbit in a Welsh forest eternally staring down hound, hunter and horse; gold is to be found within all of us. Once we learn trust our own truth, we’re good to go.
fin