LETTERS 

The children loved to play in the water that pooled beneath the waterfall. From huge granite rocks they jumped, laughing with glee, or took the tire tied by rope to the tallest tree to swing back and forth over the water.

There were a dozen children added to a few babies and one woman who was ready to deliver at any moment. While the men looked angry a lot and the women looked tired, the children were like God's perfect creatures and hooted and howled without a thought in their head. They often led me into the overgrown paths. "You watch yourselves now," I'd tell them. And they'd laugh or look at each other with quizzical expressions.

One time I stopped them in a clearing. It was one of those insufferable hot days that seemed to leak from the earth itself. A tree had fallen from the previous winter and lay half in decay across the crude path we were following. The area was hot and dark with the stream purling in the distance with a clean sound; I could hear the old waterwheel churn in the distance.

Five of the children were with me. They caught their breath. I decided to tell them a story I had been saving. It was about a man who felt confident at the entrance to a foreboding wood.

"The man had been a great man in his life. He had accomplished great deeds and looked at the woods as a new obstacle to his task waiting for him on the otherside. When he entered the woods he began naming the trees to himself. They were so familiar! And when he heard the sounds of animals he knew them as well and felt buoyant at the intimation of a variety of animals hidden in the nooks and crannies of the wood. Now, he would follow the path of the sun and when the sun rose he would wake and as the sun traversed the sky he would follow its ascent and descent and when the sun set he would sleep. Oh, he was so happy! He thought about the deeds he had accomplished and how free he was in the woods and how everything was familiar. Then one morning he woke up by the side of a stream and the sun was nearly above him and he was in a panic and suddenly the trees and sound of animals was unfamiliar to him and he could not remember his deeds and didn't know where he was in the woods and started to run and felt the murky stare of the woods and birds and lingering, stark pressure of the trees as though now he had become the obstacle. This started another adventure which is too long to relate."

When I finished the story a kid named Jason asked me where I had heard that story. Was it referring to the woods we were in? Was the man in the story lazy? Did he get eaten by a bear? Did he eat roots and leaves?

I thought for a moment and then said this, "Why, I just made it up." And one of the kids asked, 'It was just in your head?" "Yes, that's how it was, it was in my head."

© 2000 David Eide. All rights reserved.

David Eide
June 7, 2000
Back to Jobs page
Back to Letters
Back to Laughing Sun
Back to Oasis