A Thousand Faces Jessie van Eerden (bio) Hard to brush the West Texas wind from my hair. All the silt and mesquite smoke knotted up. One morning he climbs the hill, always with pen and notebook, whistling like a surreptitious bird to let me know where he is. The mist rises from the river warmer than the cold air and, still in camp, I pull on all my thermal layers and start to brush my hair. Same long johns and wool socks, same enormous Chihuahuan Desert silence, his man-size self gone small up on the bluff. I spend considerable time on the knots, then climb the hill to him, following turkey and wild mule tracks across the washes, passing signs of an old firepit and possible shelter, some cans and blue glass—no plastics, so an old site. Despite the leave-no-trace protocols, I always want to see the traces, am heartened by somebody’s edibles wrapper, the old blue glass, a shoe sewn together many times, then discarded at the camp on the Mexican side where they once made wax from candelilla. From the hilltop, we can see across the few miles to the canyon we’ve just paddled through. Downriver, a ranch, an old water tower, the invisible sound of someone running a chainsaw. We drove out here to West Texas from Virginia, canoe strapped to the Subaru roof, to paddle the Rio Grande through Boquillas Canyon, to see the world laid bare. Seeking the most elemental sort of revelation: stone unto wind and water and all stages of winter light. Revelation from the Latin [End Page 89] stem revelare: to unveil, uncover, lay bare. We wanted to see how an ancient river has unveiled faces in the canyon wall, cutting the rock downward over millions of years as the western rim of the Sierra Del Carmen rose. How the slow river has shown the path through limestone and shaley slope to the feral horse and the lion. We have made this trip during the COVID-19 pandemic. We minimize contact at gas stations, keep rubbing alcohol in the car and masks on the dash, aware the Texas infection rates are dismal. We both teach at a university on winter break, and our middle-age togetherness, after failed marriages, is relatively new, just over a year old. I harbor that basic desire, too, then, to know more deeply the person I love, to have him laid bare. May we see each other’s faces in a new light, out of our semester routines. From motels on the drive out, he calls his children nightly at their mother’s. I have no children of my own and that I also carry, a question that might yield, who knows, under desert light. It is late December. We have shifted our noses to the southwest, like the lucky beasts we are. In my hair, the wind through the carrizo cane, the black phoebes crying out, tying knots. ________ Come, morning, and remake us and all the grasses and silver-iced trees and the rye grasses, the butternut trees. A small fable of revelation from my childhood: A girl heads out, in the late-fall cold of hardwood mountains, to make a leaf rubbing. How to choose—the poplar, the black walnut, or sassafras? Dawn pinks up her face; she takes her time choosing. She picks up several to press in a book, the serrated and veined, all crisp with color. She holds each petiole, the midrib like a tiny spine. For the rubbing, she chooses a sugar maple glowing gold-orange-red as if painted. She sets the leaf on a smooth, hard place and overlays her paper and rubs her charcoal flat-side down. The outline says hello. Into being comes the jagged lobe, the gutter of sinus, a lobe again, and another, the bones clean in their bright-dark presence. She loves how the leaf is remade on the page torn from her notebook, a full nothing until the charcoal scrubs and discovers. This is revelation. [End Page 90] In this fable, the girl is growing up in a tucked-away mountain church and thus learns young...
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