Sunshine Falls

By Kyle David Torke

A collection of autobiographical essays that glean meaning from everyday life by the poet and author of Tanning Season and Still in Soil.
 
Sunshine Falls is Kyle David Torke’s beautiful, elegiac account of living in a world rich with mystery and impermanence. In twenty far-reaching, story-driven essays, we follow the author from his first love in sixth grade to the demise of his marriage thirty years later, experiencing the full potency, confusion, and promise of human interaction, loss, and triumph. In crisp, sparkling prose, Torke shines focused light into the cracks of human experience, causing us to laugh—and wince with recognition—at the awkwardness of growing up, the joys of love, the pangs of loss, and the death-defying adventure of life as we know it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9781629218779

Book preview

Sunshine Falls

Some of the pieces in Sunshine Falls appeared originally in these fine journals: Amoskeag, Audience Review, Epiphany Magazine, Mount Hope, Sliver of Stone, The Front Range Review, The Write Room, TransLit Magazine, Two Hawks Review, Ward6Review, and Word for Things.

Dedication

A special thank you to my mother, the industrious, multi-talented, loving artist whose drawings grace Sunshine Falls. Her spirit and omnivorous intellect and passions continue to startle, amaze, and inspire me. And to my father, whose generosity and wisdom have righted my canoe more often than seems fair and without whose guidance I surely would have drowned long ago.

Sunshine Falls is dedicated to my parents and also to my amazing partner, Ellie, and our four charming, challenging children: Conrad, Coover, Ava, and Liv. They are the air just above the surface of the water, the sweetest and most refreshing gulp each time I surface.

1. Sunshine Falls

Only the tops of several small trees and some deep snow kept us from being some hiker’s grizzly spring discovery.

On a cellular level, we die every day, but we are also reborn—a minute-by-minute trick where our hair grows longer and follicles pop and fail to regenerate. We seem to enter the world fresh and full of pink promise, pushing into the vigorousness of youth and young adulthood before teetering into middle age, senility, and death; but the truth is death begins at the point of conception, and we spend all moments of our brief cattle-run on earth in the process of decay, rushed to the slaughter house, dodging bullets, swollen creeks, and rattlesnakes at each turn. I concede that some elements in the world try to give us life—food, water—and many claim love or spiritual sparks keep us warm, but stand on any cliff over-looking any ravine, and the world spreads before us not as a well into which we can throw the pennies of our dreams, but a dark hole at the bottom of which our bones will bleach, one set of phalanges reaching toward the light.

I nearly died in the fall of my forty-second year while rafting the Royal Gorge with a group of eighteen-year-old students. As a supplement to The River in Literature course I was teaching at Colorado College, twelve of my students and I split into three rubber rafts in September to challenge the Arkansas River, which was running low and fast. The day started cool, and the green water coursed through exposed rocks like spit through worn teeth. I spilled in Sunshine Falls, a collection of granite slabs sheered from the cliff face and their unruly, smaller neighbors piled at their feet, when the guide yelled right, over! and the raft hung on boulders the size of two vans welded together. As commanded, all in the raft lunged to the right, bracing against the upsurge of water. The shift in weight should have freed the rubber boat and sent us merrily on our way through the gorge, safe inside our vessel. As the current pounded the bottom of the raft and water surged across our legs and hips, the student directly across from me, Eleanor, lost her balance and, out of the corner of my eye (distracted as I was by the splashing water, the yelling, the effort of trying to stay inside) seemed as if she was about to fall overboard. I removed my hand from the safety rope encircling the boat and reached toward Eleanor, intending to keep her from pitching into the narrow gulley of water. I lost my balance, noticed Eleanor’s eyes lock on me for a moment, and tumbled backward into the foam.

I quickly discovered myself in a hydraulic, trapped three feet beneath a waterfall of about four feet in height, the falling water keeping me underwater, circulating with just enough pressure that my life jacket could not bring me to the surface. I could feel the bubbles on my face and, as if through clouded glass, barely make out the contours of the mountains rising majestically on both sides of me.

I have nearly died in traffic, at dinner, and while sleeping; I have avoided the casket and headstone by careful attention to medical advice, by the intercession of strangers, and by luck. How many times does each of us nearly die, in a car accident or a sinus infection that spreads, before the reaper finally gathers us? How many of us throw away the tuna sandwich laced with botulism because a friend asks us to lunch and we never know how close we came to a messy, unpleasant death? Ask any mosquito (carrying Malaria or West Nile or simply looking to breed), the ways to die are numerous: frogs, fish, hand slaps, dehydration, starvation, disease.

For humans, perhaps the list is even more numerous because so many people have designed ways to kill each other. In addition to food poisoning, AIDS, genetic defects, errant drivers, chunks of chicken in the esophagus, necrotizing fasciitis, falling electrical wires, ice storms, heart failure, aneurisms, blood disorders, fires, floods, hurricanes, lightning, poisonous snakes, rabies, staph infections, avalanches, drowning, the Plague, the Flu, the Ice Age, alligators, careless pharmacists, ex-wives, muggers, drug dealers, allergies, tetanus, cholera, lightning, macadamia nuts, and pilot error, we also have guillotines, AK-47s, firing squads, death squads, the Janjaweed, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Attila the Hun, hand grenades, pipe bombs, mortars, snipers, bouncing betties, F-22s, razor wire, electric chairs, sodium pentothal, thermolite, machetes, straight razors, Saturday Night Specials, nooses, axes, chainsaws, Iron Maidens, cyanide, poisoned arrows, napalm, wood chippers, garrotes, nuclear submarines, IEDs, smart bombs, anthrax, shrapnel, fragging, suicide bombers, hellfire missiles, switchblades, repeating rifles, and flame throwers.

Most of us simply wither and die of our vices—destitute, coughing up a lung, ultimately alone on a hospital gurney or in some back alley surrounded by garbage bags.

When we were juniors in high school, my friend Aldo and I took my father’s 1976 VW bus across Colorado to see my brother at Ft. Lewis College in Durango during Christmas break. We nearly died three times. The bus, shaped like a loaf of bread, sported a four-cylinder engine and tires fit for the highway—if the highway is dry and not too rough. We charted a path through the south west of Colorado that included an excursion over Red Mountain Pass. A series of switchbacks and steep descents cut into the side of the mountain, the pass looked squiggly on the map, but the highway, closed for more than half the year as impassable, was the shortest route. Looking at the map was nearly the extent of our planning, though we did bring some warmer clothes and a few candy bars.

We started late. We hadn’t consulted a weather report, but we knew the temperature was dropping, and when we stopped near Dillon Lake to refuel, ice had formed on the hubcaps and undercarriage of the car. Snow was beginning to fall, and already shadows spilled toward us down the mountains like a tipped can of paint.

We travelled safely, and slowly, through Glenwood Springs and then Carbondale on highway 133, but we decided we’d better stop and rest before tackling McClure pass in a blizzard: the snow came toward us horizontally, careening through the area of darkness the headlights illuminated as if we were a spaceship in hyperdrive and each flake a star whizzing past. The storm obliterated the trees and flattened the landscape; even the road-signs were transformed. The van handled the packed snow on the highway, but we were getting sleepy.

I turned off a side road into a heavily wooded area, hoping we could find a cut out where we could sleep for a few hours. The snow made it difficult to tell how fast I was travelling. A sign said road closed ahead, but I didn’t see any other construction cones or barriers, so I assumed the sign had been accidentally left behind. I had just asked Aldo when he would take the SAT when we came around a corner, pinched on both sides by large clusters of pine, and faced directly in front of us a large collection of boulders piled in the center of the road nearly fifteen feet high.

I slammed the brakes, and the rear wheels of the van immediately began to slide out toward the right side of the road. I attempted to correct, but I had lost control of the front wheels, too, and the question was not if we would hit the rocks but rather if we would hit them sideways or head-on.

Fortunately, the slick asphalt road gave way to gravel ten feet before the mound of stones, and the van struck the gravel nearly parallel to the rocks, shuddered, seemed to want to tip on to its side, and settled back on all four wheels, about three feet from the rocks. The engine stalled and quit.

Aldo turned to me, both hands on the safety bar just above the glove box. He hesitated. This seems like a nice place to rest.

The snow settled on the windshield, and the wipers cleared the glass. The scene in front of us was spectacular—deep woods flooded with snow.

I started the van and pulled out of the gravel. I parked as close to the edge of the road as I could. The snowfall was already erasing our accident, smoothing the tire marks.

Neither of us felt sleepy anymore, but we tried to stretch out on the back seats. We had not brought sleeping bags or blankets, and once the heat from the engine dissipated, the inside of the van absorbed the cold air from outside. After forty-five minutes of shivering, we decided to move on. I drove cautiously toward the highway. We had traveled nearly three miles from the main road; no one would have found us for days.

I don’t know if we would have died had we wrecked the van, but the conditions were right—frigid night, blizzard conditions, a long way from rescue, inappropriate clothing, no food or water. By the time we were on the highway, though, ready to tackle McClure Pass in a 1976 Volkswagen van at one in the morning during a blizzard, we didn’t think or talk much about our near miss. We were young. Graveyards were for the valleys, and they were covered in white.

A plow, clearly, had gone over the highway recently, and the snow seemed to be thinning. I had to back up, rev the engine, and slam through the two feet of plowed snow that marked our road from the highway, which, when we finally were hurtling forward again, stretched before us like a ribbon leading to some fabulous gift, and we needed only to see the bit of silk directly in front of us to keep moving. What lay ahead, in the box, would be the morning and sunshine.

We stopped for a late lunch in Montrose and decided if we were going to get to Durango, we needed to push on after only a small nap, which lasted three hours once we found a spot in the sun. The snow had stopped, but the day was cold and clear. The joviality that began our trip had begun to fade; we were both tired and uncomfortable and ready to reach our destination. The drive was beautiful, lots of trees, a reservoir dotted with ice fisherman, cascading rivers shielded by frozen bridges of ice, etc., but we wanted the Inn.

We arrived at Ouray as the sunshine was fading. The rim of mountains announcing the Uncompahgre National Forest were bathed in orange, an orange more fluorescent than the orange of the barricade preventing us from staying on Highway 550. Red Mountain Pass Closed, the sign said simply. We sat in the van looking at the map as the engine idled. If we didn’t go over Red Mountain Pass, we would have to drive back for nearly an hour and then detour through Cortez to the west or South Fork to the east, adding five or six hours to the trip. Red Mountain Pass was a straight shot to Durango.

We drove around the barricade. The snow didn’t look so bad, really, and the van was handling pretty well. Detours were for people who were afraid of a little adventure. We’d conquered McClure Pass in the dark and only slid a little.

We could not immediately get back on the main highway, but a side road seemed promising—we figured we could follow the side road around the ditches lining the highway and jump back on in a more hospitable spot. The smaller road led to a forestry cabin and dead-ended at a river. A logging road inclined at about thirty degrees and ran along the river.

We let the van idle as we got out and considered our options. The falls paralleling the road had accumulated ice, which billowed and boiled in a magnificent, irradiated portrait of nature at its most wild—frozen as if in a snapshot. The snow was deep. When we stepped off the road, our legs dropped to the hip, and we had to help each other back onto the packed snow. The forestry cabin was abandoned, covered with plywood and padlocked.

We could see what’s at the end of that road, I said.

That road? said Aldo, pointing. It’s pretty steep.

The van can do it, I said. Otherwise, we’ll be on the road for another eight hours.

Aldo is one of the smartest, most clever men I’ve known. He nearly aced his SAT/ACTs that year. He took all the Advanced Placement classes, attended a good college, received a masters degree, and writes for a large, urban newspaper. I always thought I was smart and clever, too. Despite our intelligence, however, we decided to try and drive up a steep, unplowed, snow-covered, and icy road in an underpowered, awkwardly weighted, and decidedly unstable four-cylinder van with worn tires.

We made it up the hill nearly twenty feet before we realized we would be unable to go further, so I put the van in reverse and began sliding down. We gained speed quickly, and I was unable to stop the van from progressing off the road into a small, mostly buried clump of juvenile pines. When we got out to assess the damage and to determine how best to free ourselves, we stood at the back end of the van, barely clinging to the pines, and realized we were moments from tumbling nearly two hundred feet into a ravine at the bottom of which was a gash of blue water, an assortment of sharp rocks, and an entire winter’s worth of ice.

Only the tops of several small trees and some deep snow kept us from being some hiker’s grizzly spring discovery.

We found some loose timber near the cabin and successfully freed the van and ourselves. We traced our tracks to the barricade and drove back through Ouray to Ridgeway where we turned east onto Highway 62 and began the long drive through the San Juan National Forest to Dolores. The roads were snow-packed, but not too icy; wind swept loose snow through the headlights. I was disappointed that we had not been able to travel Red Mountain, and I drove too quickly over Lizard Head Pass. I never noticed, because Aldo and I were chatting amiably about Dorothy and the other cheerleaders, about trying to become valedictorians next year, about finding a place to stop for a burger, how narrow the road was and how tight the curves. Several times, I hit gravel on the side of the road but kept my pace quick.

Years later, when I drove the road in the daylight, I realized how close to death I had come again. Most of the road follows a river, and the highway is cut into the side of the mountain. No guardrails protect the one to two feet of shoulder that keeps the road in place. Just past the shoulder, the mountain tumbled five, six hundred feet toward the river and old railroad lines.

But we managed to stay on the road, and we arrived in Durango around two in the morning. My brother attended Ft. Lewis College, and Aldo and I drove the mesa to get to his dormitory. The snow had started again. My brother’s directions were bad, but we finally found a place to park, and I backed in, thinking, wisely, that it would be best if I could pull straight out in the snow. Once parked, Aldo and I went to the back of the van to get our duffels and nearly stepped off a cliff. The wheels were, again, feet from the edge of a precipice. No one had marked the cliff with rocks or timber; if I hadn’t stopped on instinct (what made me stop rather than back up further?), we might have found ourselves at the bottom of the mesa.

I never acknowledged those near misses other than with