Issue 3:1 | Non-Fiction | Fred First

On Eagle Wings
Fred First

 

There are a few days like this in late October when the air is clean, the sky is far-away blue and a few crisp yellow leaves still cling to the top of a tulip poplar here and there—ragged pinafores that remain along the rim of hills around us. Such days are made for the scrapbook of seasons—perfect samples of fall—so we will not forget in mid-January how good life has been in this cold valley.

 

This is a good day to be in a high place. Ridge views are everywhere from the high ground that envelops us, but to reach them we must climb. The north ridge begins just outside our back door. Two hundred feet beyond the edge of the yard we stand seventy feet above the metal roof, looking down on a toy version of our white farmhouse. A fine blue-white wisp of smoke connects the chimney with the clear air above. A few hundred yards farther away and we are by then so high that the full arc of valley opens below us. Gasping for breath, we look out on ridges past ours, waiting like breakers. The gravel road is a thin, gray line snaking between the pines. Here and there the bright reflection of silvered water flickers through the spicebush and alders that have grown up through the old rock wall along Goose Creek. We hear the rise and fall of voices from the cold creek below and far away. From this place we take our bearings. We come up here every year this season and look back.

 

*  *  *  *  *

 

It was late October, 1997—a time in our lives not destined to become a scrap of pleasant memory for our book of days. In a sudden blur of events, I found myself alone in a small cabin on Walnut Knob, just off the Blue Ridge Parkway in Floyd County, Virginia, thirteen miles from the very small town where I had just begun work. On a clear day after almost all the leaves had fallen, fifty mile views opened in three directions from that high peninsula of land that beetles out above the piedmont, gently rumpled a thousand feet below. Clear days there were spectacular but rare in that first fall of my new life alone. For days, weeks on end, the cold fog rose up from the wet lowlands and roosted in the bare trees along the escarpment—a wet brooding shroud of muted grayness and silence. Fog pressed farther and farther down into my own thoughts, cut me off from sight and sound, from place and the passing of time.

 

I had no choice but to be there in the fog, in no one's company but my own. My wife, Ann, and I had decided that, should a job in my field be offered me here, I would take it. We had been away from the mountains for ten years, and it was time to return and settle down for good. But my move was badly timed. Ann was half way through a degree then and wouldn't be able to join me for a year. We would see each other on weekends, occasionally. Getting back to southwest Virginia was our greatest good, now that the kids were out of the nest. We could do this hard thing, live apart for a year, make do. The cabin would be temporary. It was a place to store our accumulated belongings from our large urban house in North Carolina, just for a year or two—no more than that—until we found the home we felt was waiting for us, tucked back somewhere on a quiet country road. I would be busy with the clinic; she would be consumed by work and classes. The time would pass quickly, we told each other. But I hadn't known then of the days and weeks of fog or the terrible empty weekends alone.

 

The tiny cabin was surrounded by dark forest. Trees were stark and bare and their branches bore the marks of bearing up year after year against north winds. Monochrome paled the mountainsides where only weeks ago the brilliant colors of autumn had been dazzling. Most of my neighbors on the Knob were seasonal. They left when cold weather came and the crowds of leaf-lookers wouldn't be back up for another year. I rarely saw anyone else as I drove the windswept Parkway to and from work. After a week of cold drizzle and rain, the endless fog gave way to a frigid and stern artic wind. I stood at the window of the cabin alone on that late fall Saturday morning and could feel the wind pulling at the panes, drawing the heat away faster than the wood stove could make it. Over the roof and across the yard brown leaves blew, out over the sad gray bones of the fruit trees huddled inside the garden fence.

 

Wind harbors a pernicious misery all its own. You can dress against the cold, but there are days when you can’t hold out the wind that blows cold to the bone and bears down on the spirit.  I was a prisoner trapped inside by the wind and coming to grips with my sentence.  These two barren days were merely a foretaste of the winter to come. The walls of my cell sucked the life from me, and by mid-day, the confinement was worse misery than the wind.

 

Dressed as if I were about to walk on the surface of the moon, I ventured out into a hostile world, and found busy-work making kindling on the lee side of the cabin. There under the back deck, I was sheltered from the abrasive full blast of the wind. Still, the eddies of frigid wind licked over the roof and spilled like a cold liquid into my gloves and down my neck under the old plaid scarf. The heft of the hand axe and sharp resolve of a clean split brought me back to the ground under my feet. Here was a purpose to go on. The busier my hands became, the less my mind settled into miseries. I fell into the motions, felt my muscles warm and my pulse pick up.

 

Then, out of that vast moving sea of cold that spread south from the tundra, one tendril of air licked down and found the scarf. It lifted up the smell of the cedar from our closet back home—what used to be home. The scent filled my memory like a thing alive—the aroma of a safe place we had abandoned forever. The fragrantly brutal truth abducted me, took me back to a place where I had belonged. Could this have been my life only a few months ago? Peace and security and warmth wafted from those aromatic dark lost places—a memory that made clear the loneliness ahead of me.  Under that scarf at my throat a sob swelled, lifted and left on the wind, tumbling down over the garden fence, south, toward Carolina.  

 

I was not a rock that feels no pain. For almost five months I had pretended for Ann's sake that I was. I had to make it seem as if I was untouched by the strains we were under, that I had no serious concern with the losses we had brought on ourselves or fear of the risks that lay ahead. She had so many of her own crosses to bear, and she, too, was alone with them. The illusion of strength was shattered by that whiff of cedar—such a small thing, a few molecules, an invisible catalyst. What had we done? Where were we headed?

 

*  *  *  *  *

Though the timing brought many hardships—including the year of living apart—many things had in fact worked out for good. Doors opened in auspicious ways that seemed to show it was ordained we should go to Floyd for the next chapter in our lives—perhaps the permanent, happy last chapter. After waiting for almost two years for the position to open there, I had been called with the job offer. We found the cabin on the Parkway that matched our needs and our budget. The big house in Carolina sold in a week at our asking price and Ann found reasonable housing nearby. So much had fallen into place. Now, five months later, we were both living alone. I was in a flimsy modular home and she in a single-bedroom upstairs apartment a half block from the perpetual wail of fire engines and the sound of breaking glass.  We were three hours apart and there were stretches when it was many weeks between our visits, split between the uncomfortable hospitality of "my place" or "her place". We were not at home in either.

 
We found small comfort in each other's occasional company. Ann's studies were difficult. They took every bit of her energy and attention away from me—with the exception of those tense moments face to face or over the phone when we wrestled with the Gordian knots our family affairs had become. Both of our children had moved to new towns far away. Suddenly our nest was empty—and not only because our children no longer lived at home. Neither did we.

 

*  *  *  *  *

 

I was at a loss for the next step. I buried the blade of the hand axe into the tough locust of my chopping block and stepped out to the edge of the terrace. The yard sloped away down past the garden into forest and the forest fell away, on and on until forest became a gray abstraction against an empty sky. I scanned the faint line between cloud and mountain as if I might find an answer there, a clue to explain what was to happen to us now. Just then, the wind blew back the hood of my parka and I was no longer under its shadow but under sky. Maybe it was this that made me, at just that instant, look up.

 

On a morning when apparitions of past and future had come and gone like scenes in an endless bad dream, at first I doubted my eyes. Maybe this too was a wraith, a mirage. Above me barely higher than the roof of the cabin, an adult male Bald Eagle floated motionless as if painted on canvas of low clouds. Each feather was distinct, sharp-edged. His powerful beak parted the wind like the prow of a ship against strong current. Facing into the gale, the massive bird did not move, neither forward or back. He turned his head slightly and looked down with one piercing-cold yellow eye, as if he had expected me to look up. Maybe he had been there watching all along, from the moment that the cedar had brought me face to face with my new life here. I will never know.

 

I do know that the overshadowing of those wings at that moment was my burning bush. This was my sign, this bird that spread its wings above me like an angel, motionless while the wind lifted him, held him up. This was my messenger come to proclaim that, while there would be strong winds in days ahead that would make us pull inside ourselves unsure of tomorrow, we would stay the course, face the hard times, and make our way forward. The eagle hovered there until the winds slacked and he could move ahead into that force that both opposed and lifted him. Then, the seraph came unpinned from the sky, moved out of the painted canvas of heaven, and moved on. He was heading north.

 

* * *  *  *

 

Ann and I made our peace with the uncertainties. We agreed that while we would go on planning and dreaming, we would be patient, present in each day, ready when the right place came along. She moved up to join me in the cabin in the fall of 1998. Six months later we were working to restore the old home place here on Goose Creek. Two years after the eagle came, we spent our first night in our refurbished farmhouse on a plot of land we call “Here’s Home.” We seem to have been moving to this very place for many, many years.

 

And so in late October on the anniversary of the day of the eagle, we climb to the rim of our valley and look down on what is now our home. It is a time of remembrance and thanksgiving, a time to look back and see the Providence that has hovered over us as we have walked haltingly by faith. We reach the summit and stand, breathing heavily, facing due south. We remember the day that the eagle looked down on a bewildered man who did not understand then that a few miles north into the wind, he would one day find home.