A Bright House

As suddenly as it had opened, the sky above Ray Townes altered its course and grew very silent, moodier, yet free of rainfall. Winds that had reflected the tumultuous mind of the man in his truck, heading northwest to greater unknowns, lost their will to impose. A preternatural calm fell down across his favored North Saskatchewan river bend; an arc that transcribed itself gently and broadly on its way to the province of Alberta.

As did the weather tell, Ray felt himself become the lull. His blood left the rapids. This was an isolated spot that he had found through beauty’s calling, many years before when driving to Edmonton, espying a most brilliant curtain of dancing Aurora Borealis as it crackled across a broad wintry horizon. Not very high into night’s icy dome, which was liberally sprinkled with a universe of stars and a galaxy’s rim, the constantly shifting predominantly emerald phenomena held him as it hadn’t ever before.

He was, at the time, living the first December and Christmas without his mother. The yearning for her sign had become a devourer. As always, Ray sought to see what he knew to always be; a reality teeming with symbols, clues, choices. Back then with that superb view of magnetic energy’s polar ballet, the young Ray felt shot through as though from a splinter of a comet. A duality of intense belonging and abandonment.

Therefore, this had become a chosen place for many return visits at all times of the year. Never again did the Northern Lights display quite as vibrantly, which furthered Ray’s belief in signs... the precious warm months of Summer and early Autumn wrapped him up for long hours of sitting by the river water, then walking with an eye to the bank, finding eroded stones and embedded fossils from the last great ice age. It was an easy place to find, for the local First Nation peoples had used it over centuries as a canoe launching site.

A wide cutaway into the narrow tree ribbons that flanked her flow became one dirt pathway to the place of canoe and kayak for Saskatchewan River’s children. Equidistant from two population centers, this was a little known place and yet Townes nonetheless occasionally found items of litter tossed into the trees and river bank stones. It was his parking site, but he always walked northward at least a mile to a spot where the stands of mostly coniferous trees thickened somewhat and afforded him a delicious feeling of being embraced, shielded, ever connected.

And so, with his truck parked as far as possible to the right of a widened section of path where it abuts the river, Ray reached into his medicine pouch to remove the bound together photos of his mother and her lover. These he tucked within a wide pocket inside his jacket lining, then out of the vehicle and up river he went. Crunching stones beneath his hiking shoes, like the finest music that can never grow old. The wind patterns must have shifted to a much higher elevation, for he could see the sheer speed of those higher lighter grey clouds as they were bullied fast across his field of vision. Lower, hanging heavy and darker, the canopy bottoms floated in place. Rain no longer fell.

He settled into his usual leisurely gait, stone crunching and scanning the bank for anything to catch his eye and earn a keepsake pocket. Here, the river ran deep and leisurely, issuing a muted gurgle along its rocky shorelines. The trees were a rich tapestry of lovat hued needles and scaly bark. Firs were predominant; Balsam, Fraser, Douglas. White Spruce and Scots Pine chimed in with their own fragrant contribution. Ray loved it so. He levelled out emotionally during the walk to his favored place, and realized in the lessening of his tension just how wound up he had become.

By the strike of half past two, Ray entered the broad and gentle arc of his favorite place. There were larger stones and several areas of wide, flatter boulders that tumbled over each other as though in play, or left to form a query of clues. Trees here, mostly the firs, huddled tight in angular west-facing bunches, tilted twenty degrees toward the azimuth of a perfect star’s life-giving sunshine track as it inevitably circled downward to the horizons of British Columbia.

This being the strange new day in one man’s unusual tale, Ray found himself once again recalling words from other minds. Authors of collected tongues, crossing bridges ahead of the masses... he found a well-loved rock table top and lowered himself down, cross-legged, very near its lip so that he could be with the river spirit. The edge of the small frame that held his mother’s portrait reminded him to remove the two photos, which he did slowly, eyes to moving water.

He was in no immediate hurry to gaze upon the faces of his biological parents. His left hand held the two, bound by sweetgrass and a love story not yet read by their son. His right hand supported the weight of his leaning torso as he gazed out over the width of a river always there for him. It was the keenly felt presence of those trees, and not his beloved North Saskatchewan waterway, that brought Ray back to the memory of a much admired Emily Dickinson poem.

Talk not to me of summer trees

The foliage of the mind

A tabernacle is for birds

Of no corporeal kind

And winds do go that way at noon

To their ethereal homes

Whose bugles call the least of us

To undepicted realms

He moved his lips but did not give voice to the music of it. It seemed that it was Jenny’s voice thus speaking, or his mother’s, perhaps even a goddess of the wood and water. To even think in such a way, let alone pen its heart, its essence... as so often when tuned into the beauty, Townes became emotionally swept, held, sparked. He looked to the sky, then at the photographs in his left hand. Two people whose lives had intersected in a powerful way, not able to be together or stay united in the love of their wants.

For the first time on that Saturday, Ray was able to genuinely feel sadness for them. He had been the living result of their love, and an abandonee as was Jenny, but he could no longer summon the burn of anger. It was wasteful. His ego wanted to whisper that he had been wronged, but here in front of him, all around his flung open senses, LIFE. It kept coming back to choices. To see a thing so clearly... maybe falter beneath its withering power... cowed by the long shadows of fear... his thoughts scattered into a fray of loose strands. It either matters or it doesn’t. I decide. Fear has no mind of its own, and therefore it wants mine.

Ray wasn’t quite ready to look upon the face of this blood-father; he whose ancient Cree heritage lived within him. For the many times Ray had used his clairvoyance to tap into the raw power of his sight, finding and shedding light for they in need, this hour of his own deepest questioning brought with it a reticence... somewhere down inside its depths, a chasm loomed that he could not identify. “Where did you meet?” he asked what was held in his hand, eyes closing. The river gurgled. The stones and boulders remained mute. Nothing arrived by way of answer; not a hint or flash.

“Where did you meet him, mom?” Ray spoke to the back of her portrait, thinking of the two of them facing each other, their visual reproductions actually touching. If he had vision to see it, what new manner of energy was this medicine creating? As moments before, no information came to him. He opened his eyes to look at the back of his hand. For the first time in many a year, Ray regretted the tattooing there. Though it was of positive meaning and a well executed example of “living art”, he would have gladly rewound those years and days to preempt his youthful notions. Ensuing decades had stripped him of the need to express his interests and beliefs so outwardly; a spiritual billboard. As for the wingspan emblazoned across his back... this now seemed, meant.

Sitting there in the bosom of his thinking spot, watched over by fir trees and sang to in river tones, Ray felt strangely flat. His knack for tactile telemetry had taken a day off. Where a held object would usually radiate something for his detection, the two portraits kept their secrets and he gave up, returned them to his inner pocket. It felt that this off kilter day during the hours that followed a shock in a floor joist space, was also meant to be just as it was.

This brought him back to the concept of feeling a placement or event as predetermined, orchestrated, meant to be. There had to be choice within the illusion, didn’t there? To choose to see and recognize all of the aligning signals that said “you are on the right path” or the antithesis of that. He had built a professional clairvoyant career on the truth that most people subconsciously choose not to see these signal flares. Even that twist of a phrase, to “subconsciously choose”, mocked the narrow bandwidth of language.

He thought of the two hundred thousand Cree natives in Canada. Finding one man in that weave would be a daunting task if he had to search coast to coast, but here in one of the smaller provinces within a very specific region and population base, the chances of learning about his blood-father had to exist inside the scope of success. Ray glanced again at his watch and decided that he would leave sooner than later. Sleep before Monday was essential, what with that abyss of unseeable stretching before him. His lower legs had begun to tingle, so he pulled himself back on the table rock to stretch out with two hands clasped behind his head. The sky was an inscrutable grey. He gave silent thanks to the impulses that guided him here. His next thoughts were of the innumerable Thunderbird legends among Saskatchewan’s various native people.

Viewed as a benevolent spirit by many tribes, seen as an agent of great wisdom, the giant raptor existed in retellings of both lightness and fearsome darkness. Chippewa and Ojibwa viewed the creature as powerful yet benign. The Kwakuitl spoke of Thunderbird teaching them to build houses. Assiniboine tales never mention the bird harming or killing anyone... but in the many legends there existed a dividing line between the true Thunderbird and a darker being; a giant impostor that was feared by the Comanche. Ray’s years had eroded many of the details of these old stories, but one that stood out anew concerned a Cree named White Bear.

This man became through marriage a member of a Blackfoot tribe. The tale said that after successfully hunting and killing a deer in 1850, White Bear was suddenly carried away (along with his kill) by an omaxsapitau; a massive bird of prey known to the Blackfoot that resembled an eagle but was far larger. White Bear found himself deposited in the nest of two juvenile omaxsapitau who deigned to dine upon him.

He escaped by hurling the juveniles from the nest by their feet, hanging on for dear life and using them for makeshift parachutes as they flapped to break the plummet. He released them just before the moment of impact, surviving his ordeal and retaining a couple of souvenir tail feathers. White Bear was an actual person who died in 1905. He was a well-known eagle hunter whose grandson, Harry Under Mouse, shared the tale with a man who worked for Montana’s Museum Of The Plains Indians.

Pure invention? Self aggrandizement? Ray thought of the feather in his medicine pouch, and of the huge bird that had appeared when he and Jenny were on the Toronto Islands, then lastly he thought of Jenny and her old garage. Worry. Something to tie all of this between them, and her missing husband, together. Ray existed in a wide open mind and with both feet planted on a world where only a fraction of what truly existed was made known. He had been born of European and Cree blood, the beneficiary of a type of mind mutation that allowed him to perceive and interpret signal beyond the ordinary channel path of most others of his species.

For reasons only now clicking into place as the dominoes fell, and after five decades of uncomfortable growth and ultimate spiritual acceptance into blossoming, Ray Townes had finally arrived at the critical conjuncture. He rose from the river rock to hike his way back to the truck, with a head full of Thunderbirds, a noose, a glimpse at a secret mother, a new father, a lurking fear, a determination to Know, and a woman very much on his mind.

Traffic had picked up during Ray’s time at the river. He found himself comforted by the presence of other head and taillights during the return drive into waning light under thickening clouds. It would rain that night, steady and hard, straight down into the command of gravity. Ray’s odd emotional flatline became something softer, more relaxed into a what-will-be-will-be mindset. He drove and thought about Jenny. His visions were of her face, the fine features there, that diffused gentler energy of her leaning into him during their shared time... he could see so clearly, that morning on her bed. There were bizarre knots tying much of this new journey together into a bundle not yet identifiable. Had she brought this new illumination of truth to him? Was this unfolding more about

the woman on Bright street than it ever was about Ray Townes and how he came to “find” her?

again

again