He didn’t see until I pointed. The whole stretch of stream was covered in cairns. Stacked-up rocks rose everywhere, from both banks and from the boulder tops in the middle of the stream. They looked like Neolithic standing stones or tapering Towers of Hanoi.
Robin quizzed me with a look, still not understanding.
What’s wrong with them, Dad?
“Those were your mother’s worst nightmare. They destroy the homes of everything in the river. Imagine creatures from another world materializing in our airspace and tearing up our neighborhoods, again and again.”
His eyes darted, searching out the chub and shiners and trout and salamanders and algae and crayfish and waterborne larvae and the endangered madtoms and hellbenders, all sacrificed to this turf-marking art. We have to take them down.
I felt so weary. I wanted to set life down and leave it by the side of the water. Instead, we went to work. We demolished the towers within our reach. I knocked mine down. Robin dismantled his one at a time, peering through the clear water for the best place to replace each stone. When we finished with the stacks on the near bank, he looked across to the stacks in the middle of the stream. Let’s get the rest of them.
Two thousand five hundred miles of rock-strewn rivers ran through these mountains. Human industry would reach them all. We could dismantle cairns every day, all summer and fall long, and the towers would rise again next spring.
“They’re too far. The current’s too strong. You felt how cold it is.”
A look comes into the eyes of every ten-year-old, the first hint of the long war to come. Robin wavered on the threshold of daring me to stop him. Then he sat down on a rock covered with lichen a thousand years old.
Mom would do it.
His mother, the salamander.
“We can’t today, Robbie. That water is pure snowmelt. Let’s come back in July. The cairns will still be all over the place. I guarantee.”
He gazed at the green-lined channel that plunged through the forest and down the mountain. The song of a veery seemed to appease him. His breathing deepened and slowed. A hatch of gnats swarmed above the rapids and a flurry of early bluish-white sulphurs puddled around a pool near his feet. In this place, it would have been hard for anyone, even my son, to remember his anger for long. He turned to me, too quickly my friend again. What are we making for dinner? Can I work the cookstove?
-
IN CAMP, NO ONE could touch us. We pitched the tent close to the riverbank and spread our sleeping rolls on the ground. We set up kitchen in a blackened fire ring, and Robbie cooked lentils with tomato, cauliflower, and onions. The meal left him ready to forgive me everything.
We hung our packs in the same old sycamores, by the water. The sky through our gap in the tulip poplars and hickories was so clear that we tempted fate again and took off the tent fly. Soon it was dark. We lay side by side, on our backs, under the transparent mesh, looking up into the blue-black wash, where stars remade the rules in all quarters of the night.
He nudged me with his shoulder. So there are billions of stars in the Milky Way?
This boy made the world good for me. “Hundreds of billions.”
And how many galaxies in the universe?
My shoulder nudged his back. “Funny you should ask. A British team just published a paper saying there might be two trillion. Ten times more than we thought!”
He nodded in the dark, confirmed. His hand waved a question across the sky. Stars everywhere. More than we can count? So why isn’t the night sky full of light?
His slow, sad words stiffened the hairs up and down my body. My son had rediscovered Olbers’ paradox. Aly, who had been away for so long, leaned her mouth up to my other ear. He’s quite something. You know that, don’t you?
I laid it out for him, as clearly as I could. If the universe were steady and eternal, if it had been around forever, the light from countless suns in every direction would turn night as bright as day. But ours was a mere fourteen billion years old, and all the stars were rushing away from us at an increasing rate. This place was too young and was expanding too fast for stars to erase the night.
Lying so close, I felt his thoughts racing outward into the darkness. His eyes skipped around the sky from star to star. He was drawing pictures, making his own constellations. When he spoke, he sounded small but wise. You shouldn’t be sad. I mean, because of the telescope.
He spooked me. “Why not?”
Which do you think is bigger? Outer space…? He touched his fingers to my skull. Or inner?
Words from Stapledon’s Star Maker, the bible of my youth, lit up in a backwater of my brain. I hadn’t thought about the book in decades. The whole cosmos was infinitely less than the whole of being… the whole infinity of being underlay every moment of the cosmos.
“Inner,” I said. “Definitely inner.”
Okay. So, maybe the millions of planets that never launch the telescope are just as lucky as the millions of planets that do.
“Maybe,” I said, and turned my head away from him.
That one, there. He pointed. What’s happening on that one?
I told him. “On that one, people can split in half and grow back as two separate people, with all their memories intact. But only once in life.”
His arm swung to the far side of the sky. And that one? How about over there?
“On that one, chromatophores all over a person’s skin always give away exactly what they’re feeling.”
Cool. I’d like to live there.
We flew around the universe for a long time. We traveled so far that the waxing moon, two days from full, rose over the mountains’ rim and blotted out the stars. He pointed to one of the last bright lights remaining. Jupiter.
On that one? All your memories never get weaker, and they never go away.
“Ouch. A broken bone? A fight you have with somebody?”
The way Mom’s skin smelled. Seeing that heron.
I looked where his finger pointed. The light was dimming in the full wash of the moon. “Do you want to go there?”
His shoulders lifted off his sleeping pad. I don’t know.
Something called in the woods. It wasn’t a bird and it wasn’t any mammal I’d ever heard. The cry pierced the dark and hung above the roar of the river. It might have been pain or joy, grief or celebration. Robbie jerked and grabbed my arm. He hushed me, although I made no sound. The shout came again, farther away. Another call provoked another response, overlapping in the wildest chords.
Then it stopped, and the night filled up with other music. Robin turned and grabbed me harder, his face lit by moonlight. Every creature alive would feel all things they were built to feel.
Listen to that, my son told me. And then the words that would never weaken and never go away: Can you believe where we are?
-
IN THE DARK OF OUR SNUG TENT, ten inches from my face, Alyssa whispered, Why does it matter so much?
We’d hiked for eight hours until my feet bled. We’d swum together in the wild cascades. My exhaustion was so complete that I had struggled to light the camping stove and cook our dinner. I can’t remember what we ate. I only remember how she asked for more.