Spoonwood by Ernest Hebert

Author:Ernest Hebert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dartmouth College Press

SPOONWOOD DOCUMENT: Radioactive

We came down off the El Capitan Mountains on Route 380 in New Mexico in a celebratory mood, down through the tiny town of Carrizozo onto flat desert land. For the next sixty-four miles we would pass through only the ghost town of Bingham, which consisted of a weather station and a rockhound shop. Current population seven. Sounded like my kind of place—forgot and forlorn. As we drove I imagined establishing a homestead in Bingham, finding an abandoned shack where my son and I could set up housekeeping. Maybe grow some hot chili peppers, keep goats, hunt rattlesnakes for food. Of course I didn’t expect to find such a place, but the thought of it occupied my mind. We had been crisscrossing the country for half a decade and I was looking for a place to settle down. Every time I found a landscape that I liked I asked myself, Is this home? The answer was always: not quite.

A few miles outside of Carrizozo was the Valley of Fires National Recreation Area, a broken landscape of mainly black rocks and black wrinkles in the earth, the result of volcanic activity. I pulled our van off the highway and drove a short ways to the campground. There were about twenty camping sites that included outdoor grills, a rest room, and the dreaded (by me) RV hookups. Normally I’d avoid a place like this, but no other people were recreating here but us. We left the van to look around. It was March, the air cool but the sun hot.

I scanned the horizon and saw grass, junipers, a few other shrubs. No trees. And yet it was all so beautiful.

“This is God’s country,” I said. “God doesn’t need living creatures to make Him happy. He can make do with sunlight, rocks, texture, and color—these are His amusements.”

“What about people?” my son asked.

“Some people say that God made us in His image and likeness and so we’re special.”

“Maybe He likes bugs better,” my son said, “because He made so many more.”

As a toddler my son did not talk for a long time. All the evidence suggested that something was wrong with him. But I could tell from the very beginning that he understood everything I said or did and that he would talk in his own good time. When he finally spoke it was in complete sentences, without baby diction or baby elocution.

“Good point,” I said. “If He exists. I’m a doubter.”

“I believe,” my son said with fierce conviction.

I have never treated my son like a child. I’ve always insisted that he speak clearly and articulately. I’ve kept him away from other children. Childhood is cruel, full of erroneous thinking, and like other kinds of abuse best left unexperienced. The result is that my son does not know how to talk or behave like a child.

A self-guided trail wound from the campground for about a mile across the lava flow. There had been no volcanic explosion here. Lava just slowly spilled

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