From the Empirical Archives: In the Shade of a Cave

In the Shade of a Cave

Wally Swist

Originally published in the February 2013 issue of Empircal

We hike halfway up Mount Toby to where the gorge drops

off and takes the thin stream of Roaring Brook down

toward the culvert beneath train tracks to Cranberry Pond

I explain that the water is normally roaring every spring

from the snowmelt; however, not having much of a winter

has affected the watersheds. I illustrate that usually

the force of the brook hammers the stones, that the sound

mixes with the ionization of the water rising above the cliffs,

so that you can see, hear, and smell the torrent all at once.

In giving Bob a guided tour of the flora bordering the trail

this mid-April, I find the Quaker Ladies grouped in blue

and white clusters at the bottom, in the scrub meadow that

overlooks the pond. Farther up where I warn him

that here is where the trail begins to become steep, I spot

one nodding purple trillium, then point out the others

blazing their own trail up the slope. He aims the camera

to shoot his photographs of what he describes

as their flowers looking downward, and I explain that is why

part of their name includes the word nodding. He blurts out

how he was an infantryman in the Battle of the Bulge,

one of four soldiers out of a platoon of forty who survived

the surging stormtroopers. I point to the bright yellow

discs of inflorescence of coltsfoot flourishing beside

a trickle of a stream cutting its way through the black mud.

There! I exclaim, and identify the four-lobed lush purple

flowers of hepatica, whose royal hues can be easily missed

due to their diminutive size among leaf litter. I speak

with an intended ebullient clarity that I hope he remembers

when we find the clearing beneath the mossy cliffs halfway

up the mountain, speckled white with the luscious

blossoming of bloodroot. I inform him that there is only

a two-week window of our seeing this perennial in the wild,

of which he shows his rapt appreciation by taking one

photograph after another. Do you see that one, I say, placing

one of his hands in one of mine, as I draw a straight line

to where one bloodroot flower grows in the shade of a cave

in the cliffs. Oh, I see, he answers, then continues:

Yesterday I couldn’t feel my hands and feet from the trench foot I got

in the battle. They only gave us thin gloves, so we could fire our rifles.

My feet froze, since the boots they gave us were not much,

and the socks were too goddamn thin! We look at each other,

with mutual understanding beneath green cliffs, whose

natural architecture we both admire, among blossoms

of bloodroot that star the entire vertical rise in the sunlight.

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