At Nodder Butte

By John Mogan

At Nodder Butte, Robin, a recent graduate of geography, begins work for the National Weather Service with a Native American climatologist. As well as the science of her work, she learns to observe in ways she hadn't imagined, and experiences the strangeness and mystery of desert life. Her co-worker is a Navajo seer who refuses to accept his gift. The novel explores the consequences of this refusal, and its effect on Robin.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Oct 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9781426939952

John Mogan

A Journey Towards Poetry begins with the author’s examination of the long history of efforts to define poetry. He moves through what poetry says to how poetry sounds. His approach examines not what poetry is so much as what poetry does and how it achieves that function. His entire lifework has brought him to the essential emotional component without which there is no poetry.

Book preview

At

Nodder

Butte

John Mogan

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© Copyright 2008 John Mogan.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval

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and Archives Canada at www.collectionscanada.ca/amicus/index-e.html

Printed in Victoria, BC, Canada.

isbn: 978-1-4251-6975-6

isbn: 978-1-4269-3995-2 (eBook)

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

Dedication

This work is dedicated first to Donald Smith,

a high school teacher who opened my ears

to the world of tone-color and imitative harmony

through the melody and rhythm

of vowels long and short, and

of consonants voiced and unvoiced.

It is dedicated secondly to four authors –

to Kenneth Grahame for The Golden Age,

to Mary Webb for Precious Bane,

to Robert Nathan for Portrait of Jenny,

and to Rachel Carson for Under the Sea Wind –

four authors whose lyrical prose

wrapped my life

in the sound and song of language.

Thanks

My thanks go first to Ann Levison, for 30 years the

editor of the Harvard Post, and the editor of all

my writing. For seven years she edited and

re-edited this novel; so of course, I had to

re-write and re-write and re-write.

And I must add a special thanks to JRR Tolkien

for the wonderful lesson that what is written

can be more real than reality.

The grey shape with the palaeolithic face

Was still the master of the longitudes.

The Titanic by E.J. Pratt

Table of Contents

Chapter

1

Chapter

2

Chapter

3

Chapter

4

Chapter

5

Chapter

6

Chapter

7

Chapter

8

Chapter

9

Chapter

1

So that was Nodder Butte. The Weather Bureau was right: it looked like the launching pad for a giant spaceship. And that – where the pilot was pointing – was the weather station, a flat wooden building huddled on the sand at the butte’s southeast foot.

The station stood on a small patch of sage-green which spread around it for a few feet. Beyond that green islet, in every direction, stretched a faceless ocean of brown with ripples like waves casting rows of shadows on the sand.

Nodder Butte itself was a sculpted block of grey stone three hundred feet high whose top stretched like a giant landing field four hundred feet wide and a half-mile long. At each corner on the southern end, a square buttress stretched east and west a further fifty feet. At its northern end a ramp four hundred feet wide ran for a mile, sloping down slowly, evenly, to sink into the sand. All sides, east and west, were perpendicular and every edge was chiseled square.

The whole landscape trembled in the heat – or maybe it was the vibration of the helicopter. The trip had felt like forever. Shaken by the chopper until her teeth chattered, deafened by the rotors, and roasted in a smell of sweat and burnt plastic, Robin’s body was one aching agony. From a small desert town they had flown southwest over a flat brown desert under a flat blue sky. Overhead, somewhere, flamed a molten sun.

The largest soft sand desert on the continent, it looked as if millions of tons of beach had been dumped into an empty basin. Low hills, like the edges of a huge shallow bowl, contained it on its west, north, and east sides. On the south side it ran without containment into Mexico. Grass and grey scrub crept down those surrounding hills to the inner edges of the bowl, but salts in the sand stifled all plant life. Nothing grew.

With the most changeless aridity and the most seasonless milieu, the butte was a climatologist’s dream of constancy. No place else had fifty miles of desolation between itself and any life; no place else had unclouded skies for observing sun, moon, and stars. For those reasons, the National Weather Bureau had set up an observation base, but they had a problem – most people wouldn’t work there. It was accessible only by plane, and it was dead. Now, for three months, it was to be her home.

The weather base became clearer during their descent – a brown box with a green base floating on a beige world with a shining tiny plastic bubble projecting from the roof. Running north along the building stretched a dark rectangular patch, flat black in the late morning light. While the craft hovered, she spotted a handrail that climbed northward across the steep east side of the butte to the top. As they landed, the motor hum rose in pitch then faded away. Small sandy dust-devils whirled up about the body of the helicopter and then sank to rest. Blessed silence at last, with blue sky, pale sand, and overpowering heat.

She opened the door and climbed down. The black patch she had seen along the station was a plastic canopy strung over what looked like a garden, and the roof of the station was high – at least fifteen feet above the ground.

Before she could ask the pilot one of her thousand questions, a lean man with a black ponytail strode toward them from the station – Tom Council. He was slightly taller than Robin – just over five-and-a-half feet – with a dark pock-marked face, a long straight nose, and brown eyes under a brown headband. Dressed in pale denim, he wore a grey pendant with a flat white stone around his neck. He stared at her then turned with eyebrows raised to the pilot. Clearly Tom hadn’t been told that Robin was a woman; but then she hadn’t been told that Tom was a Native American. She flushed in frustration at the explanations she would have to repeat all over again as she reached inside for her backpack. Slinging it over her shoulder, she walked toward him.

Hi, you must be Robin; I’m Tom. A deep voice – flat, neutral.

Nice to meet you, Tom. I’m not sure that I’m the Robin you expected, but here I am anyhow. She heard a tightness in her voice, but looked him in the eye, slipped her pack to the ground, and extended her hand.

He shook it, saying, You’re welcome here, whatever Robin you are. He bent to lift her bag, but she hoisted it back to her shoulder.

As they walked to the station, she shook her auburn hair matted with sweat, and asked, How long have you been here? How often do we get out? And what is that patch that looks like a garden? pointing to the black plastic.

They took three steps before he spoke. I’ve been here too long. We get out every three weeks, so in two weeks I’ll fly into Toledo for the weekend; on the following weekend, you can go into town yourself. And yes, that is a garden.

There, I asked you three questions at once. I’ll probably have more later.

I don’t mind, he said, his lips twitching in a half-smile.

Walking across the soft sand to the station set in dusty scrub growth, Robin could smell the desiccation, and her skin prickled in the dry heat. The door, instead of being at ground level, stood at the top of a stairway four feet tall.

Why is the station so high? – and what’s that? she asked, pointing to where a windowless wooden wall four feet high stretched the length of the building. Does it have a complete basement?

It’s a snowshoe, the pilot said; Tom added, A box. They were afraid the station would sink into the soft sand. They couldn’t use pilings for a foundation, so they built an empty box four feet high, the size of the building, and built the station on it.

That sounds crazy to me, Robin said.

It is crazy, the pilot said. They didn’t know anything about building on soft sand, and of course they would never ask for advice, so they solved a non-problem with this wooden box. That’s our Weather Bureau!

The men climbed the stairs and went into the station. Robin walked back and forth along the building through the desert bushes studying the substructure – a fortune in lumber – before she hopped up the steps and passed through the open door.

She wrinkled her nose at the smell of sweat. Air flowed past her from two fans hung near the high ceiling. The room was dark, and looked about twelve feet wide, stretching twenty feet from the door to the opposite wall. It was at least ten feet high. The only natural light came from the door behind her and from a large hallway half-way along the south wall to her left. There was a low hum. She asked, Where will I be staying? Tom led her to the opening in the south wall, and down a high passage into the observation room. Over there, he said, pointing to the left behind him.

The room was ten feet deep and maybe twenty feet across, facing south over the desert. Ignoring him, and drawn by the light, she walked to the window, turning first east, then west.