Ashes Twice on the Silver Fork Trail

          When my friend Kate and I hiked up the Applegate's Silver Fork trail in early July, we walked through God's own flower garden.

Every few yards, it seemed, another wildflower held up a stop sign. We stopped to exclaim over a new little blue jewel (a variety of Jacob's ladder). We stopped to climb up a bank of marsh marigolds alongside a small stream and found rein orchids and monkey flowers not visible from the trail. We stopped at steep hillsides of blue flax, red Indian paintbrush, yellow cinquefoil, purple penstemon so rich in color I wanted to wrap myself in it. The floor of the woods was pied now with yellow arnica, now with white yarrow, now with scarlet gilia. We identified seventy different kinds of flowers on the three-mile hike.

          When we reached Observation Point, where snow-streaked Mt. Shasta shimmered above green valleys and forests, we climbed an outcrop of rocks and ate lunch with that magnificent view before us.

          I had brought some of Mike's ashes with me. After lunch, I stepped up on a rock, looked towards Mt. Shasta, Pilot Rock, and the whole stretch of the Klamath Knot, where the Cascades and the Siskiyous snarl together, and I gave it all to Mike. I read a poem I had written called "Change of Vocabulary," about loving being able to say, "I am Mike Kohn's wife" for almost a year, until:

                     Now 'wife' smacks up against

                    the fence of the teeth.

                    Lips try to form the word,

                    but the tongue with its truth-telling

                    forces 'widow' out instead

                    to hang frozen in the air of reality.

The poem ends with the word "widow," which hung in the air for a moment before I thanked Mike for making me his wife and threw his ashes to the glory of Mt. Shasta.

          After I got home, I was haunted by the beauty of the flowers on the Silver Fork trail. I wanted to give Mike to the flowers, too, so the next morning I got up early and hiked again, alone this time, up the Silver Fork trail.

           I knew where I wanted to be and went straight there: to a mound of black rocks, not quite at Observation Point. I climbed to their top, took off my pack, and wandered down the hill towards the Dutchman Peak side, where I wasn't visible from the trail.

Completely alone, I climbed among the flowers. I counted nineteen varieties just in that one spot. Bees buzzed and butterflies flitted all around me. I lay down among the penstemons and paintbrush, being careful not to lie on a bee.

I took pictures, ate a bit of lunch, drank some water. And I talked to Mike. I told him how beautiful it was there among the flowers. I told him how much I missed him, how much I wished he were there with me. I said, in a burst of anguish, "Why did you have to die? Why did you die now, when things were only getting better and better?" The tears came in a downpour.

          Grief is not a constant ache. Grief comes and goes. I can read my poems and shed a tear and spread Mike's ashes in a beautiful place with a pang in my heart. Or, as now, my heart can twist with pain and the sobs come like hailstorms.

         Emotional outpourings, whatever they might do for the living, change nothing of the fact of death. I stopped crying and read the poem I had brought, "Spring Promises," which asks whether spring "promises me renewal from this now of sorrow." Maybe. Renewal is certainly the promise of spring, but I am still in the now of sorrow.

          Nonetheless, I was surrounded by beauty: the flowers, the mountains, and the forested slopes. The scene was soothing and peaceful. I stood up, took a deep breath, and hesitated with the vial of Mike's ashes open in my hand.

          "Rest in beauty," I said, and threw his ashes with an ecstatic flourish over the flowers.