One afternoon, a week after the stormy Kali appearance, I headed down Fernald Point fire road through a forest of red spruce and fir spotted with brilliant fall colors, to Somes fjord. I edged my way along the Valley Cove Trail next to the water, over exposed roots, mossy earth, fern-laden glens, and climbing up and down the hand-formed gray rock stairways.
From my favorite spot on one of the boulders, I looked up at the sheer cliffs rising above and at all the giant boulders that must have tumbled down Mt. Sauvier during an earthquake. A loon called its eerie tune. I caught sight of the black bird with its characteristic white spots, floating not far from the shore. Another loon answered in the distance.
As I watched the loon gliding along the shoreline, I couldn't believe my eyes. There was the old woman sitting where there had only been rocks just minutes before. The sight of her struck me with fear and delight. Still filled with awe and a raw inner tenderness after the phenomenon of Kali appearing out of the ocean in the storm only a week ago, I hadn't been able to figure out the old woman’s obvious role in the experience.
Something about the old woman attracted me, though, yet I was hard-put to say why. Though certainly the fact that she’d arrived on the scene without my noticing was in itself compelling. Never mind the chipmunks crawling on her, one on her shoulder chewing on spruce pinecones, dropping the petals on her. And the raccoon, with its hand-like paw pulling on her arm as if begging for food.
The old woman, still wearing beat-up L.L. Bean boots with laces missing, beckoned for me to come near. I picked my way the several yards across the gray boulders and sat next to her.
“Today you’re going fishing,” she said as I settled on the rock next to her. She handed me a fishing pole, and then, clasping her small Igloo ice box with her elongated fingers, climbed down the boulders towards the water’s edge. I followed her.
“Go ahead,” she said, pointing with her chin. “Fish,” she said, as though it was the most natural thing in the world.
I suffered from an anger problem, which was one of the reasons I’d moved to Maine, to get at the bottom of it. Now I felt the heat of anger rising from my abdomen. I glared at her. “You have to tell me how.”
Her hands were folded in her lap and she stared into distance, her eyes glazed over.
My pulse quickened. “You’re not going to tell me, are you?” I crouched down nearer to her and followed her gaze, to see if I could see what she looked at so intently, but couldn’t figure it out. “Are you a Penobscot Indian?” I asked.
Nothing. Only water lapping on the rocks.
“Damn it!” I yelled. “It’s not a difficult question."
She didn’t answer and the mystical calling of loons did nothing to settle my ire.
“You tangled bundle of weeds,” I said, “you’ve got to tell me who you are or I’m not going on with this fishing game.”
Her face and body were as still as water on a windless day. Her nose was aquiline, her chin pointed, firmly set, her cheek bones high like an Indian’s. I still couldn’t figure out what the shawl was made of, but it looked rather rough-hewn and I knew it wasn’t.
Remorse pinched my heart, as it always had when I got over-the-top angry. I remembered a recent ruinous encounter with a dear friend. I had to stop hurting people, stop hurting myself. But in spite of my resolve and in spite of the beauty and peace surrounding me, in spite of this charmingly strange and beguiling woman sitting next to me, I couldn’t hold back. “For God’s sake, you foolish old woman, tell me your name! What’s so God-awful-hard about that?”
“Okay,” I said. “You’re not answering. Then please just tell me this: Why should I trust you?”
After a long silence, with the sound of chipmunks picking at pinecones and a gentle breeze fluttering the leaves, it came to me why.
I had to trust her. No matter how bizarre it was, I needed to believe in something, something above and beyond what I was used to trusting. And in the moment, I decided to believe that she had the power to help me because I wanted to believe it. And on some core level I knew I had no choice except to believe. She’d come to me on prayer. I knew it.
With a sigh of resignation, I reached into the pocket of my parka and pulled out a banana muffin wrapped in a napkin. I’d saved it from Jumpin’ Java café this morning. I split the muffin in two. “Do you want some?” I asked, holding out half.
She eyed me and looked away again as she picked the muffin from the palm of my hand and began dropping bits of it into her mouth.
We chewed for a while and then she said, “Sometimes you can find out what you need to know when you go fishing.”
I didn’t know what she meant and I still had no clue how to catch a fish. The last time I had gone fishing was in a row boat on a small lake in the Cuyamaca Mountains above San Diego when I was about seven years old. I had a lot of fun, but I’d never caught a fish. But now I felt had to and so I opened the old woman’s Igloo where I found a bag of large worms. I dug the fish hook through one and a slippery mess squirted out. “Yuck,” I said. Then I tried to cast the line out to the water in the way I’d seen fishermen do, but the hook and writhing worm dropped onto the rock a few feet below.
“You need the bobber,” she said.
I figured she referred to the red and white plastic balls, that they needed to be attached to the line somehow, and so I did my best, trying to remember what I’d seen when I’d watched fishermen. I tied the bobber to a bit of line about three feet above the hook. This time when I pitched the line out towards the deepest part of the water, I heard a plop and splash, like a frog diving. I looked at her and smiled.
“Now you wait,” she said.
A few seagulls called from across the sound, but no fish pulled on my line. “Am I supposed to find something in the distance to look at, the way you do?” I stared at her. “You’re not going to tell me, are you?”
And so I searched for something other than her to focus on, supposing it might help me catch a fish. First I looked out at the buoys floating above all the lobster traps, and then across the water to the Northeast Harbor side of the sound and the occasional home you could barely see behind the fir trees. I ended up gazing under the water at the rocks below us, and at the green slime on them, and listening to the rhythmic lapping of the water.
Time passed, but I don’t know how much, because she’d asked for my watch and had put it in her pocket. All at once my pole shuddered. I yelped. “I’ve got one!” As fast as I could, I wound the reel until the wiggling fish, a salmon about a foot and a half long, lay all shiny and silvery on the rock below my feet. I felt like a kid at a first communion and a full emersion baptism all in one. And, for the first time since I’d met her, the old woman smiled. Her teeth were as white as I’d ever seen and her face soft and glowing.
I was dying for her to show me what to do with the fish, but instead she pulled her feet up under her in a cross-legged position and got that glazed look in her eyes as she focused into space.
“Now it is time to tell you a story:
“There was once an elderly ruler who, during one of his hunting expeditions in the forest, shot a deer. The problem was that the king’s arrow didn’t kill the deer and so the buck ran and the king raced after it. Since the king was not a young man, though he was strong for his age, he was not as powerful as he used to be. Breathless and exhausted, hungry and thirsty, he happened upon a cluster of huts in the woods where a holy man sat outside with eyes closed in deep meditation. The king paid no heed to the exalted state of the holy man, and asked him for a glass of water. The holy man didn’t answer and didn’t move because, in his deep meditation, he was not aware of his environment. The king kept asking for water, but the holy man didn’t move. Finally, the king, in a blind rage, gabbed a large snake slithering through the grass, beat it to death, wrapped it around the holy man’s neck, and stomped off.
“Now the holy man’s young son was just about as holy as his father, but when the son returned from chopping wood in the forest and saw his father wrapped with a dead snake, he demanded to know who had insulted his father in this manner. Such action was against all acceptable behavior for those times. The holy man’s son cursed the evil-doer and pronounced that within seven days that person would die from a bite of the king of snakes.
“Word got back to the king that the holy man’s son had cursed him. Knowing that the curse would come true unless it was recanted, the king sent a message of apology to the son and his father. The son refused to withdraw the curse. No matter how thirsty or hungry the king had been, his disrespectful act against his father was unforgivable.
“Even though he was old and his end could draw near at any time, the king wanted to avoid death at all costs, didn’t feel he deserved to die for such a reason, especially since he had ruled his people fairly and decently most of the time. He ordered a seven-story tower built near his castle where he would hide out and where no snake could enter. Around the tower he posted guards and placed special gem stones, herbs, and spices as further protection against the king of snakes. In addition, he requested priests to chant to him from the scriptures, twenty-four hours a day. With so much prayer and worship he thought he stood a chance of lifting the curse, but if it didn’t work, at least he would die well, with sublime thoughts on his mind and in his heart.
“One of the king’s subjects approached another respected holy man and asked him to cast a spell to reverse the curse, but that holy man said it was the king’s time to die. The king’s subject didn’t tell anyone about his attempt to reverse the curse or the news of the king’s impending death.
“On the seventh day, the king of the snakes turned himself into a holy man. He thought, ‘Surely the king will allow a holy man to pay homage to him with a bowl of fruit. In this way I will achieve my destiny.’ With a basket full of bananas and apples, he journeyed to the tower and requested to be allowed to come before the king and pay his respects. The guards did not let him pass. The king of the snakes, still in disguise, said, ‘If I may not be allowed to enter, please be so kind as to give the king this bowl of fruit.’ The guards thought that was a harmless request and took the gift to the king. Little did the attendants know that the king of the snakes had transformed himself into a worm inside one of the apples.
“The king received the fruit, gave several pieces to his attendants, and then bit into the apple that was meant for him. When the king saw the worm, he knew his end was near. He accepted his fate with a calm mind, even spoke sweetly to the worm, ‘Ah, so there you are,’ he said. ‘I’ve done my penance and am ready for death.’ The king affectionately lifted the worm out of the apple and placed it on his neck. The king of the snakes pierced his fangs into the king’s flesh, releasing the lethal venom. After the royal cremation on a pyre of sandalwood, the king’s soul entered into holy union with all that is.”
When the old woman finished her story, she stood, tossed her shawl over her shoulder, and climbed up the boulders towards the trail. The raccoon and chipmunks must have been waiting for her there, because I spotted them up there. She called down and said, “Tonight for dinner, you pray, and then eat the fish. Later, you write a chapter in your book about what happened today.”
I stood like a foreigner trying to make sense out of street signs written in another alphabet. I watched her and her creatures disappear around the bend. How had she known I was writing a book? I looked down at my fish. I didn’t know how to take the hook out of its mouth or how to clean it or how cut it open. The salmon was too big for the Igloo and I wasn’t about to try to cut its head off now. And so, I grabbed the line, pulled the salmon from the rock and dropped it down into my nap sack, cut the line, and hiked to my car.
Early that evening I found that slicing into the salmon wasn’t much different than dissecting frogs for high school biology class. Only the head bothered me, with the eyes black and empty, and the plastic fish line, like fiber optic spew sticking out of the mouth that was fixed in a gasp. After cutting a couple filets, dropping them into freezer bags and into the freezer, I buttered the remaining filet and baked it. While it cooked, I wrote in my journal. I wasn’t ready to write a chapter. I’d not fully absorbed my experience, nor had I comprehended it beyond the obvious allusions to death and how to prepare for it.
I lit candles on the dining table where the view through paned glass windows looked out onto white of the breaking waves lit the half-moon. As I brought the salmon to the table, I recalled India, the sound of the mridunga, the drums, the brown men, naked from the waist up, with their sacred threads hung around their chests, pounding the drum head with long sticks, the clashing of cymbals, and the piercing oboe-like instruments bleating, echoing through the temple. Now I lit incense while I imagined the ringing of temple bells and the priest in the dark alcove, waving the camphor flame round and round, from the feet to the head of the black granite Goddess. Mentally I offered the fish to Mother Kali. Then, with my fingers, I slipped a piece of Salmon into my mouth.
POSTED COMMENT
Lock myself away in a tower to avoid death? Hide yet it will still surely come. How comforting! Sarcasm. Welcome death as my friend. Twould be the most peaceful way to give in to the inevitable. Though, I fear and defy it now.
Sixty-three-year-old Anne Demaree picks up stakes and moves to Maine. She's fed up with the way she's lived her life, never getting to the bottom of who she really is, and especially the cause of her wild temper that alienates her from friends.
One stormy day, with waves crashing against cliff, Anne meets an old woman with diamond blue eyes, white braids littered with lichen, and wearing old boots with laces missing.
The old woman keeps showing up in unexpected places, to teach Anne, in unusual ways--blending reality, dream and vision. Meanwhile, Anne falls in love with Adam and falls into trouble trying to help Adam's drug-addicted grandson.
I woke up with my heart pounding, remembering a dream of Kali dancing, her long hair flying as she twirled around with her trident and sword, shaking the earth with the rhythmic beat of her feet.
As I came out of my slumber, I wasn’t sure where I was. Then as the pieces of myself fit back together, I remembered I was in the loft of a guesthouse where I lived in Maine.
Wind was whining through the pines. Tree branches lashed against one another, one scraping against the building. Waves pounded the shore, tumbling large stones, sounding like a percussion of bowling balls. Thunderclouds darkened the early morning sky. No rain as yet.
With an urgent sense that I had to out and search for something, I skipped my morning meditation, splashed water on my face, threw on my down jacket. The cold wind bit into my face. Ocean waves were cresting higher than I’d ever seen them in the short time I’d lived here. I imagined Poseidon rising out of the frothy sea.
A couple of miles away I pulled my Honda into Acadia National Park's Ship Harbor Trail parking area.
As I made my way down the now familiar pathway, thick with red spruce and pine, I could almost see forest nymphs hiding behind ferns and moss-covered rocks. Lichen hung from branches near a rocky grotto a perfect place for faeries dancing under full moon nights. Even in this howling wind, I thought I might catch a glimpse of the little folk in their lichen-covered veils and tiny pinecone hats.
A chipmunk scolded, interrupting my reverie. Next I stopped in front of a fallen tree, its dark root ball looking like a giant creature rising from the earth.
Slowly I continued down the narrow trail, my mind lingering on the uprooted tree. At the fork in the trail, I went to the right, along Ship Harbor inlet. It was an odd name, hardly big enough even for a tiny pirate galley to fit in the small cove where seagulls squawked and soared.
Ducks bobbed on the water as if oblivious to the storm. After the estuary where the river of the rising tide was rushing into the harbor, the surf pounded against the granite cliffs, splashing onto the trail, misting onto my face. I waited for a lull, then I scooted past and out to a ledge and into a sparse grove of red spruce.
There I stood still, waiting, smelling the salt air, watching the ocean churning. All at once my heart surged. A swell, that looked big as a tidal wave, rose threatening to engulf me. I backed away. The wave sailed on by, towards the adjacent bluff that jutted farther out than where I stood. There it crashed with a hollow “Boom!” and the spray rose like a geyser thirty feet into the air.
I was so mesmerized by the ocean’s drama that I didn’t notice the old woman right away. At least I assumed she’d been there looking at me when I finally did notice her. I sucked in air. I couldn’t figure out how she’d crept up so close to me without my noticing.
I hadn’t heard her or seen her, not even out of the corners of my eyes. It was as though she was a tree that suddenly shed its bark and now was standing before me, short, plump, with white hair in one long braid, and with bits of lichen dangling from her shawl.
When I took note of her, she pulled her shawl over her head. Strands of her silvery hair flew in the wind around the edge of the cloth. The cheeks of her oval-shaped face were red, from the cold wind, I supposed. Her gray-blue eyes, stony and deep, matched her stole.
She looked into me, way down inside of me it felt like, farther than I’ve ever been. I swallowed. What does she want? Why is she just standing there not saying anything?
The back of my neck prickled as we stared at each other, in the way I’d heard wolves do when they meet for the first time. Unnerved by her eyes and the over-all strangeness of her appearance, I glanced about for the quickest way around her and back to my car.
If the surf didn’t spray onto the path again, I aimed to escape by running around the spruce closest to the ledge. Even at age sixty-three, I was athletic and fairly speedy when the need arose.
She squinted, her eyes holding me fast. Her shawl blew off her shoulder, and then she flung it around herself again with the grace of a soaring eagle and in rhythm with the limbs of the trees that swayed in the wind. I didn't stand a chance against such grace. I looked at her again, hoping to find a clue, hoping I wouldn’t loose myself in her diamond blue eyes. I shivered and drew back. Who is she?
Then she beckoned with her chin. “Come,” she said. Her voice was mellow and raspy.
“Where?” I asked.
She pointed up into the gray sky. “We don’t have much time,” she said. “They’ll be here soon.”
“Who?”
She didn’t answer.
I felt caught in a rift between two worlds, wondered if I’d taken a wrong turn somewhere. Then, absently, for no apparent reason, I was drawn to touch the fibers of her stole. I wanted to find out if it was soft or hairy. She lifted her shawl and swung it back and forth, causing it to ripple in the wind and then graze my cheek. It felt like soft the weeds of spring. Her eyes seemed to laugh.
She knows I wanted to touch it. “Who are you?” I asked.
She said nothing. There was only the sound of the roaring sea and the whipping of wind through the firs. In many ways she looked just like any other Mainer on a stormy October day—wool pants, down parka. Only the shawl and the long braid were unique, and the beat-up, rubber-toed L.L. Bean boots with no laces.
“Couldn’t you tell me who you are?” I asked.
“You’ll find out in time,” she said with a slight grin.
One again she pointed towards the trail with her chin. I studied her face. Something about her looked familiar, like a character from a recurring dream. She gave me a sidelong glance and then turned to leave, motioning for me to follow.
An umbilical attachment tugged at me. The more I held back, the sharper the pain in my stomach. When she disappeared around a bend, I had to follow her. I was compelled like the tide pulled by the moon. I ran after her, along the path, past the cliffs, over reddish-tan boulders etched with nature’s abstract designs, and then down to the jagged shoreline. When she paused and I stopped behind her. I thought I knew where we were, but I wasn’t sure. We settled on a rock that seemed too close to the edge of the turbulent sea.
She bade me to look at the waves.
Some swells rose ten feet high and then crashed in a wrath of foam and spray. After a few minutes, a score of seagulls landed on rocks nearby, quiet, not pestering, just standing there. One by one, more gulls flew in, until there were twenty or so. And then I spotted several deer gathering at the forest’s edge, joined by a few raccoons that climbed onto boulders and sat, and then a dozen or more chipmunks huddled on limbs of trees. Why all the animals? The animals remained perfectly still, posed like sentinels and facing the sea.
Lulled by the rhythmic crash of the waves, my mind fell into a calm. And my body grew still and receptive as if I were in a meditation-trance. My lids grew heavy and I closed my eyes. And then soon, I was drawn to open them again.
Through the mist of a cresting wave, I spotted a gathering of black ducks. I’d seen them often, bobbing near the shore, but never so far out or in such large numbers. There must have been hundreds of them. Then I realized they were not black ducks, not black ducks at all. They were beasts and men, an army of demon-like warriors with spears and swords, wearing dark clothing, accompanied by boars, hairy horses, hyenas, and black tigers.
A pin-prickling sensation coursed through my body. I hunched down on my rock. The visions, elaborate dreams, and epic-like visual poems I’d seen in dreams, during waking hours, and during meditation had been nothing like this. I wondered if we should escape while there was time, but as I made to leave the old woman held fast to my hand, her fingers, like roots of a tree, binding me to the rock.
I turned to check if animals that had gathered were still there. I calmed when I saw that they held their positions, still as statues. I figured if they were watching the same phenomenon and had not fled from the scene, then I must be safe.
The old woman tugged at my hand and pointed with her chin toward the ocean. Once my eyes were fastened to the sea again, she let go of my hand.
Suddenly an inner buzzing, rapidly ascending in pitch, coursed through my head. The wind picked up into a gale.
Then the hair on my neck rose when, from behind a crashing wave, a brilliant light shone around a translucent figure that breeched like an orca out of the stormy deep. I rubbed my eyes and then opened them wide. A woman’s watery form, with seaweed-like hair tangling down to her waist, shimmered like sunlight on the waves, sometimes disappearing behind veils of mist cast by the thrashing sea. The ocean pursued it own wild course and so it was hard to tell exactly what I saw beyond the blinding light.
Then, as the figure danced over the water towards the marching army, her translucent shape filled out into a body of substance, as polished and shiny as black granite. She was both fierce and beautiful. And in my mind there was no mistaking who she was.
Suddenly an army of strong slender women appeared bearing maces, swords, and ropes. Kali and her warrior women waded through the frothing ocean swells towards the black men and beasts until they thundered into one another. Sparks from the clashing of weapons shot through the air like hundreds of shooting stars against the dark gray sky.
Kali’s red skirt and garland of human skulls swayed as she danced on the battlefield. She snapped the string on her bow, creating a resounding “Hum,” a rumble of distant thunder. She raised her trident and swung her curved sword over her head and tunneled her way towards a crowned, black-bearded man.
All the warriors on both sides of the armies stopped to watch Kali as she came near the demon king. Those two stopped and paused. Then, they lashed out, clashed their swords and shot their arrows and swirled around each other like two tornados. The wind caused by their fighting whistled in my ears with so much force that I had to cover them with my hands. Finally Kali laughed a with a mocking laughter, loud and deep. She pulled the string on her bow and shot the demon king in his chest. And then, leaping into the air, she severed his head with her sword.
The cheers of her warrior women sent shivers through my body.
Now Kali, shining like the moon through the mist, held high the head of the demon king and danced towards the shoreline, towards the rock where the old woman and I were perched. I shut my eyes. But I could hear Kali’s ankle bells jingle and her bare feet pound in rhythm with the jumbo pebbles that tumbled and clacked against each other as the waves rushed in and out.
When I opened my eyes again, I had to shade them from the light, like flames of a thousand temple lamps, that surrounded her. She bore no weapons now, nor the head of the demon king. And she was white, looking serene in the way I had imagined her sitting on her crystal-studded rock throne in the Himalayas, with light filtering through her hair, against a background of shaded mountains.
She unfolded her arms and raised them like a snowy egret’s wings and backed into the waves, disappearing into the foam, into the depths of the sea, and all the while, the spray from the sea swirled around me in a mist.
The wind calmed. The seagulls were squawking and taking flight, some soaring into the light beams that sliced through the edges of clouds, casting a silver glow on the water.
I looked over towards the several deer and they, too, were moving on, stepping away at first, and then with the whites of their tails flashing, they leap into the forest. The chipmunks had already retreated and I heard their sharp calls in the distance.
I didn’t know where the old woman was, but I had a sense she was standing nearby. Then I saw her, with her shawl askew, looking down at one of the raccoons that was digging for food next to a mossy lump at the base of a dead tree.
“There, now,” the old woman said to the raccoon, “you’ve found some morsels.”
On wobbly legs I wandered over to her and opened my mouth to speak but found no words.
“Nine come out of this one,” she said to me. “Each bears a secret.”
Wiping my brow, still wet from the ocean spray mixed with sweat, I stared at her, figuring she was referring to the ocean vision, but my mind was buried too deep inside myself to make much sense of her words.
“You’ll meet them all, one way or another,” she said as she pulled her shawl over her head.
I looked away, out at the sea again, perhaps for clues, perhaps to take in the design of the sun’s light through the clouds. Finally, when I'd found the words to express myself and turned to face her, the old woman had vanished.
