Between Here and There

Emma Lou Thayne
Volume 23, No. 4

That crazy lady, they might have thought. A big rock off the mountain? from pretty high up? 

But then again, they might have been at least curious. And a lot more after we all got up there. In Mt. Air Canyon, where all parts of my life fused into a mystical connection: with the horizontal – people and places – and the vertical – the Divine and the ineffable. Hardly something to explain in a phone call to my cousin of the same canyon, who also happens to be owner of the park-like family cemetery of all flat headstones. Thirty thousand buried there since 1936; my mother and father with relatives of four generations; many near the plots my brothers and husband bought decades ago, laughing enough about stacked burials and "first in, last out" that the somber seller of such properties could hardly hold the pen out fast enough for them to sign. 

Could my request have seemed any more ridiculous? "Peter, could we bring down a slab of Castle Crags to make a bench for our plot, Mel's and mine?" This when my long-secreted wish was tossed on the altar of the traditional, the wish my family could not countenance – my ashes scattered over the gully and wooded hillside above the cabin where the pure stream of our water supply made its way through moss and brief tangy meadows, curling around rocky falls to the foot of enormous, imposing, magnificent granite-like Castle Crags overlooking our growing up with cousins, our bonfire pit, our tree huts in the pines, our Tarzan swing off the mountain, our hikes and undergrounds, our intimate acquaintance with squirrels and birds and butterflies and snakes, our coming home as earthy and full of yoo-hoos as the sage and mountain mahogany on Echo Point across the canyon. So, what more reasonable? If I could not go to the canyon, why not bring the canyon to me? 

And so they came, that day in early September, Peter, my cemetery cousin, his landscaper, and his stone mason to see what this crazy lady had in mind. I gave them cran juice on the screened porch as we scanned the arena of Mt. Air Canyon from our cabin tree house. I gave them each a copy of Never Past the Gate, written twenty years before, the novel every writer has to write about the loss of innocence, about the summer that I was ten in Mt. Air Canyon. The kindly men and I hiked that warm day in September to the foot of Castle Crags, me hanging onto the back of Peter's belt to manage my unsteady climb. There it was, the slab just below the steep final path to the enormous outcropping above us. Peter and I reminisced about climbing there, running on its uneven top, sitting there to throw rocks at pine cones in the trees below, taking in the view of the whole canyon. On the pine needle path where the rock lay in the shade of a thorough forest, the landscaper began to plan how to winch the two-ton rock off the mountain and into a truck to take to the cemetery, there to become part of its own garden. 

The stone mason figured the mounting, not to polish or shave an edge or surface to become the bench I had so intimately imagined, later to create a marker with names and dates and part of a poem from a book I'd written a quarter of my lifetime before: 

This is my place. 
Finally I have turned away and walked into the morning. 
It is as I knew it would be: I do or don't do. 
At last that is not the thing. 
What is is this: I am here. 
And whatever is calling in the crags knows. 

In less than a week they had it. How, I still don't know. But it lay through the winter near the tool sheds of the cemetery – the Park, they call it because all headstones are flat, creating wide expanses of lawn with only trees interrupting the view to the Wasatch mountains and sky. I saw it there on walks, and my cousin told me it would be in place by spring. Mel liked the idea, laughed, saying he had never seen me more happy than when I talked about it. 

On Memorial Day, as Mel and I took flowers there to graves of our dears and asked directions to find one we couldn't locate, my cousin grinned, saying, "Have you seen it?" No. But we followed his directions, and there it was. No marker yet, just the Rock in its own newly cutout bed planted with mountain rose of Sharon and yellow blossoming privet, an irregular, enlarged shape exactly that of the Rock and with a slender new maple barely blooming like a flag to guide us from blocks away to this suddenly sacred and humorous landing. The Rock sat as if still part of Castle Crags, rugged, untampered with, inviting anyone to sit and look up, not down, as we did, smiling, to watch the clouds playing over the mountains and, I swear, smiling back. 

Months after our rock had been planted with such reverence near where we would be buried, I read a delightful book, Stalking the Wild Pendulum: On the Mechanics of Consciousness, by Itzhak Bentov, a scientist. It tells about the consciousness of a rock’s evolving by contact with birds or animals into a spirit of the rock.... So when a human being finally comes to this rock, one who is sensitive to Nature will feel that there is something about the rock that produces some particular feeling. A man at the cemetery told me that many have already stopped to sit on the rock and look to the mountains. I think the rock is as happy as we are to have brought the canyon to us. 

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