Origins of the Universe and What It All Means (18 page)

“You
can
name at least one element, can't you?”

This question came from my father, sitting in the passenger seat next to me as we drove the steep mountain highway toward the Sierra Nevada high country, headed for a day hike up Moro Rock in Sequoia National Park. As I drove, my father wanted me to prove I'd been paying attention to our conversation by repeating back to him the list of chemical elements he had just named—the elements that compose the Sun. He wore water-stained, high-top leather hiking boots laced and double knotted just above his ankles, and tucked into his Levis, a faded J.C. Penney T-shirt that bulged at the left breast pocket with a folded white handkerchief. This was supposed to be a celebratory day, but clearly he was on the intellectual clock.

We drove the steep, narrow road that traverses the edge of a mountain high above Kaweah Canyon. Inspired by the beauty of nature as he gazed out the open window—the Kaweah River raging some three thousand feet below us, the snow-covered spires of Alta Peak and Castle Rock piercing the turquoise sky overhead, spent yucca blooms and dried buckeye leaves fluttering at the road's edge—my father had already, inevitably, shifted from general proclamations of awe—“My, how beautiful it all is!”—to scientific and philosophical speculations of ultimate origin—“None of this—the trees, the mountains, the canyon, even
us
—would be possible were it not for the Sun. All life is dependent upon the Sun, you know.
You
would not be possible without the Sun.” My father still thrills in his ability to amuse me with his detailed scientific pontifications, most of which I've heard so many times I could recite them word for word—and as usual, I'd egged him on that day.
Yes, I know, Dad, but please continue
, I'd urged him earlier, knowing full well that the trajectory of his current train of thought would first lead to his naming the chemical compounds of the Sun, which would then lead to a lecture on the lifecycle of stars, and would culminate with his favorite trick of all, where he rattles off the entire periodic elements table from memory in under one minute. We were still on step one, though: basic chemical composition of the Sun.

I was negotiating a particularly tight hairpin turn in the road when he asked me to repeat back the elements he'd listed few moments before.

“Well,
can
you?” he asked again.

This is a fun little part of our banter, the part where he quizzes me and I often fail; and in the amount of time I hesitated to respond because my attention was on the road, he spewed his list again, gleefully ticking off each item with his fingers like a schoolboy showing off rote arithmetic facts. “74.9 percent hydrogen, 23.8 percent helium, and about 2 percent metals, which include oxygen, carbon, neon, and iron.” He beamed. “Ha! Beat that!”

 

Thirty-Eight

 

Perhaps “celebrating” is the wrong word to describe why we drove into the mountains to hike Moro Rock. Moving to Visalia was a transitional time for my father, a bittersweet occasion of uproot. Marina, his wife of thirty-some years, had died a few months prior, and Liza, his twenty-year-old daughter, my half-sister, had died of cancer the year before that. It grew from necessity, then, more than choice, that the old man came to lean on me, his once-estranged, now newly familiar daughter; it was a time to admit his need for someone to look after him, a time to loosen his tight-fisted grip on his own independence.

Not long after he'd settled into his new house, we drove the steep, winding road to Moro Rock in Sequoia National Park. As I recall that day now, two voices compete for attention inside my head. One voice, my father's, expounds the physical characteristics of the Sun—photosphere, diameter, light-years, magnetic fields, ionized iron, solar flares, white dwarf, red giant, black hole—quantifiable facts and theorized algorithms. The other voice, mine, struggles to articulate what the relationship between sunlight and a person might be, and what that relationship might reveal about a particular man standing atop a particular rock in the high Sierra Nevada Mountains; and then, by extension, what does that say about me? What does sunlight reveal in me? What sticks in my mind is the difference in our perceptions that day, my father's and mine, in the ways we each perceived, still perceive, the role of sunlight. What my father sees and what I see are two very different things. With confidence, he identifies indisputable facts. With uncertainty, I intuit shaded variations of humanity.

The sun hung almost straight overhead when we reached the Moro Rock parking area, so we left the car beneath a shady grove of sequoia and ponderosa trees. The rock itself is an exfoliating granite monolith that rises almost seven thousand feet above sea level and protrudes, treeless and sun-baked, over the massive canyon of the Kaweah River, the same river we'd paralleled up the mountain highway. From the trailhead, the hike to the rock's summit is quite short in terms of distance—just a quarter mile—but also rather strenuous, with a three-hundred-foot elevation gain. I followed my father up the rock's trail, basically a series of stairs and ramps either carved directly into the bedrock or formed with massive masonry walls. We stopped several times to catch our breath and take in intermediary views as the path traversed switchback style along the natural crevices and outer ledges of the west face of the rock, but we saved our lingering outward gazes for the dome's top.

I recall so vividly my father's copper hair as we hiked up Moro Rock, a faded hue of the flaming red of his youth, and how it flapped up and down against his forehead when we reached the summit. He leaned against the metal safety rail along the eastern edge, turning his head side to side in order to take in the panoramic view of the Great Western Divide with its striking granite flanks. We stood together in the wind, saying nothing at that moment yet sharing everything in the space and silence of this exposed, barren rock. Far below us, just beneath our hearing, the Marble Fork of the Kaweah raged undetected from our height, the river too distant and masked by terrain to detect with the naked eye. But like the bloodline shared by my father and myself, the river gushed beneath the forest treetops, an artery pulsating through the canyon—fluid composed of hydrogen and oxygen, fluid lit by the sun, capable of supporting life—relentlessly carving itself into the bedrock as if guided by a predetermined DNA map. Like it or not, my father is rooted beneath my skin just as the river flows through the mountain range. We are next-door neighbors, my father and I, partly by default, bound by familial responsibilities and societal expectations, and although he drives me crazy with his certainty, his undisputable facts and well-articulated theories (he is Enlightenment, pure science), he is my spiritual neighbor as well. To experience my father—to spend time with him, peer through the lens through which he views the universe, discover what makes him tick—is to become acquainted with myself. If he is Enlightenment—rational and logical, black and white—then I am Romanticism—experiential and emotional, shades of grey—a difference that vexes me to no end. He responds to nature by explaining the significance of the Sun in terms of a star's physical composition: hydrogen, helium, metals. I noticed something else in that moment we leaned into the guardrail—I noticed the way his body cast a shadow on the rock.

For a moment, my father was not
my
father, but just a man—maybe Old Man Ward Cleaver from the black-and-white sitcom that kept me company when I was a kid, maybe someone else. I saw him as if he were a stranger, or perhaps as he might have appeared to any of the European tourists or local day hikers among us. As he steadied himself against the rail, his frail legs now trembling from the excursion, his heaving chest deprived of oxygen at such a high altitude—this old man before me, fragile in balance yet remarkably resilient for his age, perhaps like the giant sequoia trees we had passed under—this man cast a shadow onto the rock where he stood, not only with his body, but with his spirit as well. While he verbally expressed awe of the panoramic view, his facial expression, his watery eyes and flinching temple, betrayed a thinly shrouded grief, convoluted as it may have been even to himself. Down around his feet, I saw in my father's shadow the grief he must have felt—for his wife and daughter, both dead so recently; for the career and independence and people he'd left behind in Southern California—a grief he had never articulated to me, not since the move, perhaps not at all.

I suspect this shadow of grief had been following him all day. I imagine it nipped his heels up each of the four hundred or so bedrock steps and then spread beneath him as he summited the rock; it probably followed him that day as it must have each day: a dark, ill-defined companion that shortens and lengthens with the rise and setting of the sun, that seems to disappear at dusk but reveals itself again each dawn.

If memory serves, as my father turned east, then north, to take in the view, I noticed how the sun had moved slightly in the sky during the time we'd been standing there, and how his shadow had grown a bit longer. It is the angle of light that determines a shadow's length. We can turn from the light and look down, step into its darkness; or face the light and find the bedrock path lit with revelation, follow the illuminated trail, strenuous or otherwise. I suppose we all carry some sort of grief—opportunities missed, friendships lost, attractions forbidden, relationships uninitiated, risks untaken. It's the human condition. Everyone casts a shadow, short at noon, long at four o'clock. Turn your body north or south, yet the shadow always falls opposite the sun—darkness stretches toward more darkness.

I recall the quality of divine, life-giving light as it radiated and diffused around us atop the rock; I recall the way tourists would slowly turn themselves around to marvel at the view, and how most people would pause a moment longer at the view when they were turned away from the sun. We find ways to enlighten our shaded side—equalize light and dark by pivoting toward the sun and then back again, squint in order to accommodate the light's refraction: ah, the flinch at my father's temple, the watery eyes. Or maybe it's the sun that does all the work, and we need only surrender to a certain state of intellectual or emotional transparency. Perhaps if we stay in the light, and if we can manage to preserve our skin from deadly radiation, we will emerge enlightened.

My father and I lingered on the rock for quite a while. We wandered separately—not black-and-white Ward Cleaver and his (unrealized) daughter Betty, but full-color-spectrum Bruce and Carole. We peered over the cliff drop, read the educational signs, got lost in our private thoughts. At some point we asked someone, a foreign tourist, to snap our photo. Standing over shadows emanating from our feet, we removed our sunglasses and faced the sun so that our expressions would be properly illuminated. In the background of that photo, the Castle Rock spires jut like knives into the sky—dangerous, exciting peaks—and in the foreground, my father's freckled hand rests on mine, both of us grasping the safety rail.

 

Thirty-Nine

 

(2006)—

Save for a few boxes in the garage that he never did get around to unpacking, my father had firmly settled into his new house down the street from mine. It didn't take long for me to notice certain things about him. Like how instead of saying hello to the same cashier several times over the course of a few weeks and exchanging ever-increasing bits of small talk—
Nice to see you again. Ready for the weekend? How'd that birthday BBQ for your kid go?
—he'd dive right in with the chemical composition of the Sun, or the dates of Susan B. Anthony's life.

Like the cosmic theory he studies and espouses, my father is a big bang himself. Things happen suddenly. Rather than letting the process of interpersonal relationships build momentum, he goes from zero to a hundred in nothing flat. Whether it's a clerk at the Mexican motel back in 1994 to whom he gives his (and my) entire life story, or the cashier at Save Mart near my home in Visalia, or the woman he currently pines for, he usually skips the normal dance of getting-to-know-you. I often try to control the explosions—either preempt the detonation by neutralizing the social context that's likely to lead to an explosion, or, if that fails, redirect the shrapnel's trajectory—to lessen the damage.

I recall a particular day at the grocery store. “That'll be $15.27,” the cashier said.

“Right. Do you take coins?” He pronounced “coins” with two syllables:
coy-ins
.

“Of course.”

“Great,” he said. He pulled a fistful of Susan B. Anthony dollars from his pants pocket. Slowly he uncurled his fingers to balance the heap of coins in his cupped palm. “I like to use these instead of paper money,” he said as he counted them out with meticulous precision. He placed three stacks of silver dollars on the counter, five coins per stack. “These coins have been in circulation since 1979, but most people don't use them as legal tender. I do. I think the problem is that they look similar to quarters, but one can see dollar markings if one pays attention.” He held one up and tilted it toward the overhead light so the guy could see the details.

“Yep,” the cashier said.

A Muzac version of
Lay, Lady, Lay
played in the background. Grammatically speaking, it should be “Lie, lady, lie.”
I will lie down on the bed
, or
You will lay me down on the bed
. I wonder what Ms. Loretta Swift—spinster grammarian extraordinaire—would have said about Bob Dylan's poetic license. (Now
she's cold, dead, and alone.
)

“Susan B. Anthony. She lived from 1820 until 1906,” my father said as he placed the last dollar on top of the third stack. He then fished in his other pocket for non-dollar coins. He placed two dimes, one nickel, and two pennies in a straight row next to the three stacks of Susan Bs. “There. Twenty-seven cents. And fifteen dollars.”