Give Way Ye Gates: A visitor comes to camp with steamy and unexpected poem.

June 2020

The phone rings and I fumble through several pockets before I find it. Hello. Have you ever noticed that

some visits pick right up as though no time has passed, as though the caller was already on your mind? Others seem to pop up and out like sock puppets from a wooden drawer opened while looking for something else.

“Ooh,” I say to myself, “I wasn’t expecting to hear from you.” I don’t say that part out loud. I said, “Wow, what a great surprise to hear from you. Yes, yes, I’d like to get together. What do you have in mind?”

“Well, what’s your schedule like these days, are you retired, what are you doing, where do you live now? are you still working?”

“I go camping every week,” I say. That should sum it up.

“Camping? Camping? Where do you go camping, do you stay in a tent, how far do you go, do you stay around here, have you ever gone camping before? Is it safe with the Coronavirus? Do you wear a mask and everything? What’s it like? What do you do? Where do you go?”

I can’t keep up with this, to make it short, I tell her when and where I’ll be next.

“Oh, I’m so excited, so excited, I can’t wait to visit you, is it OK if I come next Tuesday, I’ll come next Tuesday right after work but I won’t spend the night, should I bring something to eat? What if it rains Should I come anyway? Do I have to bring anything? I’ll bring hand-sanitizer.”

Oh, boy. “Just text me when you get to the gate.” I give her directions and say, “I’ll have something for us to eat, don’t worry if it rains.”

The weekend unwinds. I plant geraniums, bake cookies, do laundry, and pack food in Snowball. In the morning it’s off to camp. I get there early and plop down in my green gravity free chair in a patch of sun. Reading, I get to chapter nine, “Raging Billows,” with the British still clinging to New York City after the battle of Yorktown, Alexander Hamilton decides to move to Albany, but that book by Ron Chernow is just too fat and heavy; I fall promptly asleep.

When I wake I take my bike and backpack and ride a half mile to the corner store for firewood. That was dumb, I had to push the bike back to camp, the basket of wood lurching from side to side, three times a log falls out - once on my foot. I trudge mercilessly on with the heavy backpack of wood. A pickup truck stops to offer me a lift, but I say, red-faced and panting, “Oh, no thanks, this is exercise.” As they drive away I hear them say, “What-ever, old lady.” I eat half a dozen cookies when I get back.

Meanwhile, Hamilton enjoying domestic life in Albany says, “I lose all taste for the pursuits of ambition.” You’re not kidding, let’s just be lazy and I fall asleep again. Awakening in a splatter of rain, Chernow’s book will be papier-mache if I don’t get inside soon. And there goes today and a few more cookies.

Tuesday dawns, the sun sparkles glinting in the puddles around Snowball, the sky is blue and I take a morning ride on my bike to wake up. Company is coming this afternoon; along the way I gather thimbleberry blossoms, and returning spread a red and white cloth on the table then fill an empty can of beans with water and thimbleberries for a centerpiece. Looks good. I think about building a fire.

My friend arrives and we sit six feet apart in my campsite. I offer her fresh dark cherries from Yakima and a cookie, there aren’t many left. She spies the book Hamilton on the table.

“Do you like Hamilton? I like Hamilton, did you see the musical? I saw the musical it was so wonderful, I know all the songs, my daughter and I listened for weeks before we went, oh, it was so wonderful, my daughter wants to be an actress on Broadway that’s her goal, she’s majoring in drama in college, oh, I would love to be in the theater, too, but I’ve never gotten a part but I tried once, I really tried.”

And she told me about her audition for a local production of Mama Mia. “I nailed it,” she said, “The monologue, but messed up the song and dance. I can’t really sing,” she said, “But at least I tried. I majored in communications in college and memorized a long poem, I worked really hard on it, but I didn’t know what it was about, I went to the library and just chose one by someone named Theodore something Retty, Rekky, I can’t remember, I gave the most dramatic reading you ever heard and the professor didn’t even give me a grade, he was just quiet, for a long time, and then he told me what it was about.”

“What was the poem?” I ask.

“Give Way ye Gates.”

I get out my phone. “Let’s look it up and see who wrote it. Oh, Theodore Roethke.”

Believe me, knot of gristle, I bleed like a tree;

I dream of nothing but boards;

I could love a duck.

Such music in a skin!

A bird sings in the bush of your bones.

She holds her breath. I read some more: In the high-noon of thighs, In the springtime of stones, We’ll stretch with the great stems.

She claps her hands over her mouth, doubling over she wails. “I went to a Christian college, I had no idea what it was about. I rehearsed with friends, none of us knew. The professor said it was about master, master-baay-tion …” Thirty-five years of bottled up embarrassment gushes out like June rain filling every rivulet in the forest. And in the rising flush of her story she has slipped off her shoes. Clearly her feet want to be naked, she pulls off her socks with joyful abandon and sinks her feet deep into the wet mud.

“Have another cherry,” I say.

“I can’t say no to this,” she says, “I can’t say no to this.”

“Should we build a fire?” I ask.

“No, no,” she says, “It’s already too hot.”

With thanks to Bonnie Hull whose enthusiasm for poetry can’t be beat!