Jena Webb

 
Discomfited she might be, but determined Carmen still was. We kept on at it, the falls coming less and less often. It was increasingly possible to take in the scenery. We heard a pecking from above and clumsily padded around a tree on our skis in the soft snow that had built up there. This kind of movement is ridiculous on even the most experienced of skiers. We were finally at the right angle to see a piliated woodpecker banging on a dead branch. I had an electric shock of memory through my migraine core. The chips of wood flung about, gleaming in the sun like so many pieces of confetti. Perhaps we would have our New Year’s celebration after all. Out of nowhere, I guess from staring up and not down at her skis, Carmen fell into the deep snow, this time laughing. I crept over and purposefully fell, landing just shy of her in a puff of snow, also laughing. She retaliated by flicking a handful of light, powdery snow right down my neck. I rolled on top of her in an awkward hug, our skis clanging and tangling.

It was too chilly to stay there for any length of time, so we continued on. Sometime later, off the side of the ski trail I could see markings in the snow that looked like a string of parenthesis in an E.E. Cummings poem. Curious, I inched off the path to get a closer look, leaving Carmen on the trail. The snow had melted and refrozen a few days ago, and the wind had blown the new dusting into drifts, leaving bare patches where the surface was a crust – spring-like conditions. I cautiously creeped over one such patch on my skis. The markings were created by slender, curved, short branches that had blown off the bushes and made indents in the snow upon falling. As I tiptoed around, one of my skis hit a patch of ice and I landed on my bottom – in a mess of asides. It was then that my father’s comment hit me. The whole world needed fixing, and I was lashing out in all directions with my parenthetic, snarky remarks – a character, me, and a setting, an imperfect world, with no plot. Carmen’s singular drive, her ability to focus on her chosen issue, while all the while acknowledging the rest, crystallised into brilliance in that moment.

There were some downhills on the way back. I had planned the route accordingly, to give her time to practice. Her eyebrows did a better snowplough than her skis, but we made it home with limbs and dignity intact.

That night Carmen invited me into my bed with her. I was ecstatic, but not getting my hopes up too high and going real slow. She stopped my hand with a sad smile and whispered, “Moi aussi.” Me too. Two loaded words. In that moment everything coalesced and nothing more needed to be said. I felt grief for her, of course, but also so much relief, a relief that having had sex with her could not have come close to approximating. Here was Carmen, opening herself up to me – divulging an assault – in a way that was so much more profound than anything the skin could have shared. We slept side by side in the cocoon of this new shared understanding.

Before heading back to Montréal the next day, I climbed up into the Witness Tree. The snow drifts had made convenient steps, allowing me to get fairly high up. Once in the crux of the bouquet of main trunks, I was able to use some smaller branches and tension to shimmy a little farther up. I let my mind go blank, inviting the Witness Tree to share its vision with me. My hands caressed the surface of the bark, and my fist probed the solidness of the wood. My eyes followed the rough surface of the trunk up into the canopy where smaller twigs branched off in many different directions. Despite the messiness of the secondary branches, the trajectory of the main trunk was obvious. The plot of the trunk did not get distracted by the bracketed, interposed branching off of intention.

The character (the Witness Tree) was not only an observer of its setting (the transformations and transgressions of an imperfect world). It set in motion a plot, it was a change agent by providing shade, food, habitat, memory and peace.

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