Winter Count by Barry Lopez

Author:Barry Lopez [Lopez, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781480409163
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-06-24T22:00:00+00:00

The Woman Who Had Shells

THE LIGHT IS BLINDING. The vast, flat beaches of Sanibel caught in the Caribbean noon are fired with a white belligerence, shells lying in such profusion that people unfamiliar arrive believing no one has ever been here.

The shells draw July heat from the languid air, shells brittle as Belleek, hard as stove bolts, with blushing, fluted embouchures, a gamut of watercolor pinks and blues. Shivering iridescence rises from abalone nacre. Hieroglyphics climb the walls of slender cones in spiraling brown lines. Conchs have the heft of stones. One shell hides both fists; others could be swallowed without discomfort, like pills. A form of genuflection turned over in the hand becomes a form of containment, its thin pastels the colors to chalk a prairie sunrise.

Here at dusk one afternoon, thinking I was alone, I took off a pair of pants, a light shirt, my shoes and shorts and lay down. On my back, arms outstretched, I probed the moist, cool surfaces beneath the sheet of white shells still holding the day’s heat. I flexed and shifted against them until I lay half buried, as if floating in saltwater. The afternoon trailed from me. I was aware of a wisp of noise, like a waterfall muffled in deep woods. The pulse of my own heart faded and this sound magnified until in the mouths of the thousands of shells around and beneath me it became a wailing, a keening as disarming, as real, as sudden high winds at sea. It was into this moment—I remember opening my eyes suddenly to see flamingos overhead, their lugubrious flight etched against a lapis sky by the last shafts of light, the murmuring glow of pale crimson in their feathered bellies—into this moment that the woman stepped.

I turned my head to the side, ear pressed into the shells, and saw her first at a great distance. I was drawn to her immediately, to her tentative, cranelike movements, the reach of her hand. I imagined her fingers as polite as the waters of a slow and shallow creek, searching, sensitive even to the colors of shells, the trace of spirits. She was nearer now. With one movement she bent down and raised two shells, scallops, and cupped them to her cheeks. I saw clear in her face a look I have seen before only in the face of a friend who paints, when he has finished, when the mystery is established and accepted without explanation. I held that connection in my mind even as she turned away, knowing the chance these emotions were the same was only slight, so utterly different are human feelings, but believing we could, and do, live by such contrivance.

I wanted to speak out but could not move. She grew smaller, touched one or two more places on the beach, like an albatross trying to alight against a wind, took nothing and disappeared.

I stared across the white expanse into the vault of the evening sky, toward the emergence of the first stars.

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