Traveling East, Driving West: Nine Stories

By Jeffrey W. Klausman

These stories are about rebirth: learning to live in the world again after facing an emotional and spiritual desert, facing space where questions and answers end. Most of the nine stories rely upon imagery and sound to create meaning where story ends. All present characters with life-creating questions, questions whose answers cannot be sought in the company of others or through the words of others; these are questions whose contemplation gives rise to answers as large as our world and as silent. The reader is left at the end of each facing the landscape of the West while oriented toward the spiritual East.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 20, 2000
• ISBN: 9781462831968

Jeffrey W. Klausman

Jeffrey Klausman spent three years in the desert mountains of southeastern Idaho completing a doctorate in English and hiking and driving the countryside. He has published poetry and short fiction in numerous journals since earning an MFA at the University of Oregon. He now teaches creative writing, Asian and Asian-American literatures, and composition at Whatcom Community College in Bellingham, Washington, where he lives with his wife, Kelly Quinn, and their dog, Taiyah.

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Copyright © 2000 by Jeffrey W. Klausman.

ISBN #: Softcover 0-7388-3898-5

eBook 9781462831968

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

THE MOON AND THE DOVE

THE RIVER OF CROWS

LIGHTFOOT CANYON

CROSSING THE MOUNTAINS

JORDAN CREEK

THREE FORKS

TETON PASS

RED HILL

WHITE PASS

This book is dedicated to my friends, colleagues, and professors at Idaho State University, whose support and care saw me through.

THE MOON AND THE DOVE

It was a relatively warm evening for January, above freezing at least. The sky was thin and high and, just after sunset now, the moon shone full and bright over the bare hills. From the deck of her house, she had a view directly up the hill and then to one side down the narrow ravine in which her house was tucked to a wider valley where a meandering river snaked like a ribbon of mercury through the fertile, desert farmland. A scattering of houses, their rooftops black under the moonlight, stair-stepped down the ravine toward the valley floor. These belonged to ranchers or smalltime farmers who often held several other jobs around the valley to make their living. Some raised goats, some raised llamas, and there was a poultry farm down the road which sold fresh eggs to the grocery brokers in the area as well as to passers-by. That was pretty much the economy here in this small-time, high-desert town tucked against the folds of the mountains. There was Montolive College, a small, private, four-year college where Claire Paige had been teaching English and French since completing her doctorate at Michigan fifteen years before, and there was a fertilizer plant at the other end of town, thankfully downwind most of the time. But otherwise, there was little to do.

The neighbors below, the Hazlitt’s, had a farm house nestled into cottonwood trees that grew along the wash which, in spring and early summer, was a running stream. They grew hay and fixed farm machinery and raised doves. Each clear evening when there was a moon (and for reasons Claire has never discerned but had always meant to inquire about), the doves alighted from their roosts and rose in a flurry of wings which attenuated, arced, and then swooped down again in a hook. But there was always a straggler or two, a rebel, which extended, even abandoned the arc of the flock, flying in solitude against the sky before falling, as if shot, into the roost once more. It was an amazing sight, this flurry of the flock and then the flutter of the solitary ones, and she had come to revere the regularity of it, this phenomenon, even to arrange her life so that she could be on her deck just after dusk to witness it.

Tonight, the fourth of January, as she waited for the doves, she also awaited a phone call. Roger Jenkins, the new psychology professor, with whom she had started something like a friendship or even an affair, said he would be calling her as soon as he returned from his Christmas break in Vermont. He had kissed her at the airport as he left, the burliness of his beard scratching her lips, and the way he held her promised more and suggested that he did not really want to leave but would rather stay here with her. But he had family back East, obligations, and she had family back West, obligations, and they could not abandon their commitments. So she put him on the plane and waved goodbye and returned to her house alone with a hollow in the pit of her stomach she had not experienced in some time.

Had it really been fifteen years since she left Ann Arbor? It hardly seemed possible, and yet there was no denying that she had turned 42 recently and that she’d been an amazingly young 27 when she completed her dissertation on Elizabeth Bishop. That made fifteen years. And where had it gone?—a scattering of articles, which lately had become even more scattered, a now out-of-print book made from her dissertation, and a few teaching and service awards. She’d been hired directly out of her PhD program, had come west to Montolive, formerly associated with the Jesuits but now non-denominational, and had come without the person she had plans to marry, a young man studying philosophy and religion appropriately named Phil. Phil decided he’d stay behind to finish his PhD but that she should take the position at Montolive since there were so few jobs to be had in her field; he would join her as soon as he finished. He never did join her, though, because he met someone else, someone in his department who spoke his language, as he put it in his goodbye letter to her. She’d been wounded worse than she could have imagined, and after she recovered she realized that whatever piece of her had felt so much for him had died or gone out inside of her. Over time, she came to realize that it would likely not be rekindled or resurrected, though until recently, she had held out a secret hope that it might.

Phil married the woman who spoke his language and, last Claire had heard (through common friends), they lived in Philadelphia where they both had teaching jobs at different universities; they had two children. Though she’d never been to Philadelphia, in her mind she carried an image of the house Phil lived in: a colonial house on a tree-lined street, with a Saab in the driveway and a Volvo in the garage, toys and bicycles scattered about (he’d never been very tidy). Friends and colleagues came often to their house for dinner, sometimes bringing their own kids to play on the lawn. And over wine or coffee, the adults talked of their publications and promotions, of college politics and back-stabbing, of retirement plans and vacations, and of their children’s illnesses and victories. She had no idea how accurate this picture might be, but that was not the matter. The matter was that it was a foreign life to her, the path not taken. It formed a sort of perfect antipode to her own existence and, therefore, balanced her, gave her a purpose and meaning, if only by that of the quieter, more subtle energy of the negative.

She lived on her own in a house that had been little more than a shack when she’d bought it ten years before. She’d rebuilt it over the years, so that now it had taken on much of her own character; it seemed to her a second skin, a part of her, like the well-worn barn jacket, jeans and boots she crawled into when she came home from work and had to check on the chickens she kept for eggs. Her house faced east to catch the sun rising over the yellow mountains covered with scrub and sage and rosemary; it had plenty of windows, a vaulted ceiling, a stone fireplace she built with her own hands and a friend’s help; and books lining the walls of nearly every room. The pleasure of living alone, she’d realized not long after moving in, was that there was no need for a clear demarcation of living space; all of it belonged to her, the living room, the bedroom—it was all one space for living. Like the architecture of the imagined space within one’s own mind, the different rooms were only variations of the here and now.

Since the end of her romantic life, as she thought of her relations with Phil, she’d had several short term relationships. But Montolive College was too small for anything to go unnoticed or unreported, so she avoided the men she worked with since she was not really serious about any of them. And beyond the college, there were remarkably few possible partners: lawyers and bankers, doctors and dentists, but no other real professional class; there certainly were few artists or musicians, with whom she might align more of her interests. She had tried a long-distance relationship, once, with a professor of modern languages at one of the UC schools; but he got tired, eventually, and went back to his wife, which, she had to admit, relieved her.

Roger was not unlike the UC professor. He was separated, in the process of getting a divorce, had just turned 50, and had two teenage children in Connecticut. He was kind, gentle, intelligent, and good looking. She could imagine herself with him, could imagine his reddish beard over the collar of a barn coat—someone else to check the chickens!—which is why she allowed herself to begin to hope as much as she had. Before she went to Portland, she began to imagine what it would be like with Roger’s stockinged feet padding about the living room, perhaps as he mumbled to himself over a book, as she sipped coffee in the kitchen. She’d gone to Portland with this image in mind, thinking that she would find the perfect gift for him in the city and bring it back to him like a treasure from a great quest. This gift would fulfill the possibility of that image; it would complete it and make it real. It was sweet, she had to admit, to have such an ulterior, secret motive for her visit to her family which, in most ways, tired her.

She hated airports. Who wouldn’t, who lives in the country and has space? Every airport in every city in America is identical. They are close, crazy, antiseptic, filled with acrylic and pastels, the same bagels and the same coffee, the same incomprehensible announcements run over one another, the same bars and, finally, the same people. She hated to see the people reduced to this sameness. At Christmas, during the rush of travel, everyone had packages for everyone, and all the packages were the same, which is why she did all her shopping in the last days before Christmas, buying with a flurry of credit cards. Get the damn shopping done, is how she saw it. Cross the names off the list.

But as she waited for the connection out of Salt Lake, she began to imagine the gift she’d get Roger. What would it be? What would it look like? It would not be large, and it would not be utilitarian. Perhaps a globe, or globe shaped? Yes, she could imagine holding it in both of her hands, about the size of an infant’s head, but smooth, reflective, perhaps of glass or ceramic. It might be sculpture, something beautiful but non-representational. It would suggest, it would glow, it would be but it would not mean. Above all, it would not mean. It would signify, but in all directions at once.

As she boarded the plane amid the crush of baby strollers and over-stuffed carry-on luggage, she placed into the back of her mind for safe keeping the image of the gift she’d get Roger. This gift would be cupped in her hands and be offered to him as a sacrament. She felt a little giddy, a little school-girlish.

The plane arrived in Portland after dark, in the rain of course. She had forgotten how much she hated the rainy winters of the Northwest. She had grown up here, walked to Lincoln High School through dreary rainy mornings, but since moving away to Michigan and then especially the Intermountain West and its high, dry, bitterly cold winters, she had come to appreciate the open skies, the thin white sun, and the feel of dry air in her throat. And then the Portland airport was just the same as Salt Lake’s (and Cincinnati’s, and Atlanta’s, and Houston’s), so when her sister, wrapped in a

Gore-Tex rain jacket, waved at her through the crowd, she felt sadness mixed with pleasure: Her sister was so conventional; she looked like an ad out of an REI catalog.

Claire!

Margo.

Is that all you brought? You didn’t check any luggage?

You know I like to travel light. Where’s the car? Did you come alone?

Yes. Bill’s working late, trying to get ahead so he can take a few days off before New Year’s and the boys are busy doing something.

How is everyone?

They were speaking as they moved with the crowd, lemmings or salmon on the move, hard to tell which. A Starbucks went by, a Powell’s Bookstore outlet, some odd metallic sculpture.

Fine. Everyone’s busy.

How’s Mom?

Doing pretty well, actually. Her bronchitis has cleared up and it looks like she’s going ahead with that cataract surgery.

Good. I’m glad to hear it.

They ducked through the rain outside the terminal and across to the parking garage where Margo had parked the mini-van. Claire sat with the smaller of her two bags on her knees and watched through the fog on the windows the planes landing and taking off, the lights of the signs outside the airport, the passing shapes of towering Douglas fir trees, and she felt herself fortunate, even as the fatigue of the trip settled about her, to hold in her possession a secret, an image that held for her the power of magic.

It was unspoken but understood that Claire would stay with Margo and her family, since hers was the largest house (her husband, Bill, sold commercial real estate and did very well). Their mother lived alone, it was true, and had an extra bedroom, but Claire would not stay there. It is hard to say whether there were ill feelings between them, but it was clear that Claire would be much more comfortable around Margo and her family, with whom she’d always gotten along well. With her mother, on the other hand, there seemed always to be an unvoiced