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The Spring Pigeon
The first time
Ellis had been in the sleepy little town of Palouse, other than to pass
through, was during his later college years in Pullman. He had a good
friend that lived there in a rather dilapidated house looking over the
Palouse River. Ellis had just separated from his first wife, and was
living in his painting studio during the day and under a large maple
tree at night. He had tried living full time in his studio, but the
campus police had run him out of there several nights in a row with
some kind of story about it being against the rules to sleep in one's
studio. He had decided, since spring had sprung and the weather was
nice, that he would sleep on the lawn outside the studio. The police
had a fit the first night or two, but they could find nothing written
down anywhere that it violated any rules so they eased up and provided
him with after dark surveillance that he always looked at as his own
personal security system.
At any rate, the
little town of Palouse had come to his attention, largely because his
friend Ray and his wife, had a house guest from San Diego that had just
split the sheets with her husband. With rebounds abounding, they hit it
off immediately. The first day began with Ellis in his studio
struggling with a tricky solder joint on a complex piece of jewelry he
was working on. His friend Ray and his guest Sherry walked into the
studio about mid morning to invite him to have lunch with them in an
hour or so. Ray introduced her as an old friend and almost sister, and
said he had a meeting with the dean in five minutes and would it be
okay for Sherry to hang out here for a half hour or so. Ellis agreed
and Ray left for his appointment. Sherry began looking around at the
clutter that makes a studio out of a normal room. His studio was an
exceptionally full area with the walls hung full of pictures, tools for
jewelry making and gardening, and clothes, and God only knows what
else. There were several tables, and chests, and chairs, and a small
cot, all piled high with his belongings recently lugged out of the old
house where he had lived with his wife. Ellis watched her as she
silently surveyed the contents of his room.
She was a very
pretty girl, barely five feet tall, with light brown hair that hung
well below her waist. Her skin was well filled and tanned more than one
might expect for this early in the spring, and she was sprinkled with a
liberal serving of freckles. All in all, she struck Ellis as delicious
from the very first. They made small talk about San Diego, wild life,
and transcendental meditation while they waited for Ray to return. It
turned out that she was quite struck by one of the recent Maharishi's
that had become popular about that time, and she spent most of the next
hour telling Ellis all about this new Messiah. Her voice flowed on like
a river, holding him in suspension as she smoothed the layers of dust
and confusion that had been lingering in his studio along with the
shadows of his first wife. By the time Ray and his wife Karen walked
in, Ellis was completely lost in a trance that held him focused on a
single molecule about an inch in front of Sherry's mouth. This was the
spot where her breath became sound, and he could see the words form out
of vapor. His body had passed beyond his awareness, and he was left
with only a spiritual presence. He returned, but only slowly, as Ray
and Karen entered the room. Ellis' first real awareness of them
returning was when he looked up and Karen was standing right in front
of him looking as if she knew exactly where he had just been. He was
about to ask her just that, when Ray asked if they were ready to eat
something, and the spell was broken. Ellis grabbed his sketch book and
a jacket, and they left the building.
It was a warm day
in early May. Everything was green and some early flowers dotted the
campus gardens with bits of red and yellow. They all made a "B" line
for Ray's VW bus that was parked in the loading zone in front of the
studio. Ray flung open the side door revealing an area that resembled
the inside of a dumpster, or a Laundromat, or a lumberyard, or all the
above and more. Sherry and Ellis piled in without a word, and Ray shut
the door. He and Karen jumped in the front and they headed for the
little town of Palouse, some fifteen miles North of the University.
Pullman itself was not a large town, and they were soon traveling in
the open rolling hills that make up the bulk of the area in Eastern
Washington they call "The Palouse".
These beautiful
wind blown hills raise high yield grain crops in what was once some of
the richest soil in the country. The topsoil is now all but gone after
only a hundred years of agricultural erosion that takes far more soil
from the land than it can possibly give in grain. The high yields of
today are the result of modern chemistry in the form of dry land
hydroponics. Without the addition of chemicals this land would produce
little more than mud and dust as it moves on to other locations. The
road was like a gray ribbon that meandered through, and over, and
around, the beautiful rolling green carpet that lay for miles in all
directions. The only trees were clustered around the farmers' homes or
left in draws too steep or wet to farm. The hills were smooth, and
organic, and gentle, and they reminded Ellis of the story this new
enticing young woman next to him had been telling earlier. The four of
them glided quietly along the gray ribbon for a measureless time until
from out of one of the larger draws appeared many trees and several
hundred houses and other buildings. This was the town of Palouse
sitting near the center of this area of the same name. Coming into
town, they crossed the Palouse River, running a chocolate brown from
the tons of topsoil it carries every spring further toward the ocean.
They also crossed the main street that was loosely lined with
nineteenth century brick structures in various stages of disrepair.
These fine old buildings had begged for a loving hand for so long that
they were hoarse, and stood mute, stained, and crumbling, but still
giving warmth to possibly the last generation of thankless tenants.
They headed North
through town turning left and right and then left again. They crossed a
bridge of some sort over something that was too far down to see from
the bus and then they were there. Ray pulled into a narrow dirt
driveway and stopped. They all piled out onto a rough lawn scattered
with dandelions and in need of mowing. It was a small house with a
front porch running the full width of the building. The paint had long
since peeled and faded to where the bare gray wood was exposed to the
elements. The roof was patched with tar paper and a large sheet of
black plastic. They went into a bright room with large windows and
pictures, by various artists, hung over every inch of the walls. The
ceilings too were hung with mobiles, and carvings, and even torn scraps
of colored paper. The place was so full of things to look at that
Ellis' eyes jumped almost randomly, first left, then right, then up or
down, or back and forth. Suddenly he felt Sherry's hands against the
sides of his face, like blinders on a plow horse.
"Does that
help?" She asked smiling. "There's just too much to look at in here."
Ellis looked at
her with what must have been a confused look of disbelief with a dash
of fear thrown in. 'How did she know what he was thinking?' She was
standing in front of him with a soft smile that he could only liken to
the smile Da Vince put on Mona. She took her hands from the sides of
his face and placed the finger tips of one of them lightly against his
lips, as if to hush him. It was comforting because he couldn't have
spoken at the time anyway. Quite abruptly she turned and walked through
the room they were standing in and vanished into a hallway. He stood
there frozen for a few moments without any realization of sight. Slowly
those things he had seen when he entered the room returned, and before
he could move they began to over load his senses again. He thought of
the blinders Sherry had given him moments before and that sensation of
"too much" subsided. He stepped to the center of the room and turned a
full circle or two just to take in as much of the place as he could. It
was full all right, and quite wonderful. He went from the room into the
same hallway that Sherry had gone and found it led to the kitchen,
where Ray was stirring something in a pot on the stove, and Karen was
laying out slices of bread on a large wooden table in the center of the
room.
This was another
bright room, a bit smaller than the last, but it was easily as full of
things to see. The door entered the room at a corner and looking
straight ahead was a long counter with cupboards both above and below.
There were brightly painted doors covering the lower cupboards, but the
upper ones were open to inspection, and inspection they needed. This
built in set of shelves housed a wide variety of items, ranging from
garden tools, to dishes, to cans of paint, along with some food stuffs,
and several cans of motor oil. The cluttered, ten or twelve foot
counter turned the corner at the far wall and ran out some four feet to
the left before ending at a tall narrow window that looked out into a
side yard filled with many ornamental plants. Further to the left of
the window was the sink and a short counter nailed up out of wood
scraps that must have come from a packing crate. Right next to Ellis as
he stood in the doorway was Ray at an electric stove. His shoulder
length hair hung in bunches and gobs, in what we might today call
dreadlocks, but in 1970 they just figured he hadn't combed it for a
while. Ray was small to medium height, and very thin, but not skinny
and he wore a thin blond beard.
Karen's tall slim
figure was still working on sandwiches in the middle of the room, and
the tips of her nearly waist length hair danced in the peanut butter of
one sandwich and the jam of another as she worked her way along the
length of their lunch lined up on the wooden table. She stood a bit
taller than Ray, but they looked as if they could have been siblings
instead of spouses. Their thin straight hair was the same light caramel
color and their sharp British features were pinched up out of the same
freckled skin.
Beyond Karen in
the middle of the room was a cozy little breakfast nook, built like a
bay window, protruding four or five feet out from the wall of the
kitchen into the rambling gardens of the back yard. It was like a
1950's cafe booth with a green and gray speckled table top of some
pre-Formica material and a band of chrome around the edge. It came
complete with slick padded seats, one in red, and one in a green that
matched the table. The three walls that made up this small alcove were
filled with widows above the backs of the booth seats, and the warm
brightness of the day flowed in on Sherry as she sat facing into the
kitchen with her legs stretched out on the seat.
Ray looked up and
smiled as Ellis walked into the room. "Sit down," Ray said softly,
"this will be ready before you know it. Hope you like clam chowder and
peanut butter." Ellis wasn't sure that he had ever tried the
combination, but he assured Ray that it sounded good, and he made his
way around both Ray and Karen to the breakfast nook, and sat across
from Sherry in the booth.
The breakfast
nook looked out over the many small garden plots separated by grass
paths that filled the bulk of the back yard as it sloped down slightly
from the house. Beyond this well-tended vegetable sanctuary was a short
wooden fence separating it from the out back, as it were. Looking past
the varied pickets of the fence, the land dropped off quickly into the
wild natural breaks of the Palouse river.
"You have to see
the river." Sherry said as she swung her legs off the booth seat and
sat up straight. Looking at Karen she asked "How long till it's ready"
"As long as you
like," Karen replied "this stuff will still be here when you come back."
"Let me show you
the river." Sherry said, sliding quickly out of the booth and heading
toward a rear door behind where Ellis was sitting.
"Go see the big
chocolate snake." Karen chuckled as he followed her from the house.
It was bright and
Ellis squinted as he stood on the large flat stone that was the landing
above the two steps that led down to the backyard. "Come on" she said
taking his hand and pulling him off the stone and down the stairs. She
led him through the gardens to a gate in the little picket fence that
looked as if it had been assembled from recycled lumber of different
widths and colors left over from the previous lives of the individual
boards. Beyond this little fence, they left the manicured park
atmosphere of Ray and Karen's hands, and entered another world that
appeared as if it had never been touched by human longings. It was an
area some hundred feet wide, running to the North, down over the
hillside as it broke for the river. On either side of this virgin
ground, were poorly kept pastures of grass, and alfalfa, and weeds.
What few small trees and bushes that sprinkled these fields were
stripped clean up to the height of where a cow or horse could reach and
several had failed to return to life with the recent coming of spring.
To the right, three or four horses had stomped the ground into a
quagmire of mud and manure that had reduced the pasture to a holding
pen for these largely ignored pets.
This narrow strip
of natural land they stood on was in direct contrast to the "man
handled" properties all around it, and scattered randomly in loose
clumps along the hillside were native bushes of Chokecherry and
Honeysuckle, and further down, closer to the water was Redosier
Dogwood, and Service berry, and many more Ellis couldn't identify.
Filling the open spaces between the brushy cover of these shrubs, were
several kinds of thin grasses mixed with a few scattered wild flowers
that added spots of blue and yellow to the otherwise expanse of
different greens that filled the view. As the ground broke off and
headed for the river that lay below them, the soil thinned and basalt
rocks protruded from the steepening slope. At the foot of the hill the
ground leveled out into a large flat, some quarter of a mile across,
and they could see nearly a mile to the North before the bends of the
river led this shallow canyon out of sight. The chocolate snake, as
Karen had called the river, lay twisting and writhing in this green
flat expanse of pasture grass. First on one side of the valley and then
the other, the river meandered back and forth across the flat at will,
carrying with it tons of soil that had been stripped from the exposed
and bleeding fields up stream.
They walked down
over the hill a ways to where a basalt outcropping had made a kind of
natural bench for them to sit on and look at the river. Sherry sat with
her hands folded in her lap, looked straight up the river and closed
her eyes. Her breathing deepened and slowed as she drifted off to some
new plain that left Ellis behind, still clinging to the stones and
stanzas of some earthly tune. He sat quietly beside her listening to
her soft breathing as she traveled to those distant places that he had
only dreamed of. The white noise of the river rose up from the flat
below and mingled with her breathing song, to become a new tone that
crowded out everything else that lay jumbled in his mind. Like a
ringing in his ears this sound filled him completely leaving no room
for anything else, and his sight, and thoughts, and feelings slid
smoothly out of his consciousness. Time stopped as he was drawn into a
kind of union with this mysterious woman that had come into his life
only a few hours before.
Several pigeons
flew overhead from the neighbor's dovecote to a near by grain elevator,
and sparrows and robins chirped out lively mating songs from the trees
and shrubs around them. All the smells of spring rose up out of the
earth, surrounding them in a warm fresh blanket that Ellis tried to
tuck tighter around himself as he sat motionless on the cool stone. The
Sound of a crop duster roared up out of the valley in front of them,
breaking the spell that had been cast on them by the wonderful
combinations of spring, and time, and circumstance. The small plane
rose nearly straight up from the valley, made a sharp turn and swooped
back toward the ground with its engines screaming and leaving a cloud
of some kind of herbicide hanging in the air as it disappeared again.
"I love spring."
She said, putting her hand on his. "It's as if everything has been
saving up all winter, just to jump out all at once and surprise you
with things and feelings you had forgotten about."
As he looked at
her, everything seemed to click. The time was right, even the breeze
stopped for a moment and that very important first kiss seemed eminent.
Their eyes met for a brief instant before they moved instinctively
toward each other and their eye lids closed loosely. Just an inch or
two before their lips touched, Ellis felt something warm and very wet
hit him on his upper lip and slide directly into his slightly open
mouth. He jerked a little and opened his eyes, just in time to glimpse
a shadow pass over them. Looking up, he could see a pigeon making its
way back to the neighbor's dovecote. When he turned back toward Sherry,
with yes, pigeon shit dripping out of his mouth, there was nothing to
do but laugh. First she looked confused, but when she saw his mouth,
she smiled and shrugged her shoulders and reached up with her hand and
wiped his mouth.
"Wow!" She said
"One of springs tasty little surprises."
"Like chalk, it
tastes like chalk." Ellis murmured, as he wiped his tongue on the back
of his hand.
She laughed and
jumped up. "Let's go eat lunch." She called as she headed back toward
the house.
He rose and
followed her, still trying to wipe the chalky taste out of his mouth.
Needless to say, their first kiss was delayed. This delay, however, may
have set a cheery stage for the beautiful week that followed, but at
the end of about a week she returned to San Diego, leaving Ellis with a
whole fist full of feelings, and considerably more inclined to believe
in magic.
He spent
sometime after that looking into various Eastern religions related to
Buddhism. He read books, joined discussions at the university, and even
became part of a transcendental meditation group, and received his own
mantra. Although he didn't practice these rituals and meditations for
more than a year or so with any regularity, he has made good use of
many of the things he learned during those times.
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