Ashlandia

CHAPTER ONE

This is my take on the story.
Call me Beth. I don’t know why some people call me Red Flower.
This is how two fine citizens sent this town spinning like a hub cap down Main Street then down Lithia Way, how they brought into being two tribes of townsfolk used to doing as little as possible and thinking about nothing at all, how they motivated the Zen champions to free up the window seats at the coffee shops and fight despite peace and loving kindness.
And despite the numbing quantities of Lithia in the water supply.
Is Phillip Maddox the greatest guru in the world? Will Ashland be written up in the next New Testament? There’s a chance!
Or, as an Ashland native might respond: Whatever.
So come one, come all! Come learn about a town that has a street name that sounds like an anti-depressant! There’s also Lithia Park and the Lithia businesses, all in the 2004 phone book as if with divine alphabetical accuracy.
Phillip Maddox didn’t mean to do anything wrong. His intentions were innocent. But we all know what happens when one man has the One answer and the next has the One answer as well.
I wasn’t involved. Not a bit. I was just watching from the sidelines.

I’m going to begin one day at the fairy ponds and I‘ve just gotten the call about my father.
I come here when I need to breathe. There’s the children, the television, the dog, the fish, the internet, the car that needs break fluid, all the itsy bitsy breaking my heart like one discord after the next, tightening my lungs, constricting my throat. There’s my dead husband, my dead father, more fathers, more mothers, all of their itsy bitsies, fathers of mothers, mothers of mothers, long since buried.
There’s the town of Ashland, a place we fondly call a light hub. One day maybe it will radiate like an angel. From the highway (for now) it’s a town in the mountains where the real estate is a hell of a lot cheaper than in Los Angeles.
I know what I don’t want. I don’t want alien encounters or humans who can photosynthesize; holistic lawyers, devotional drum circles or goddess dances in the plaza.
I do want the real beauty, the real pain, just like everyone.
I think of the homeless who line up at the manicured I-5 exits. They stand near the brown state signs that point to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and hold their own signs (Iraq vet with no place to live.) I press the automatic lock button under the automatic windows of my Toyota mini-van, slow from 50 mph to 40 and stop. I only have to read the road signs.
I think of the symphony I've written, the one Phillip Maddox has rejected. I’m not supposed to know yet.
“Love,” Phil Maddox once said, his teeth as white as tennis duds, his eyes as warm as Pinot Nior, “is what happens when a man can turn God into industry and walk away unscathed. He knows in his heart he has gotten away with it.”
So I sit on dry rock and gaze at water flowing. It’s late spring and the world is green like wheat grass or legal tender. The water is Oregon snow, a wall of ice breaking clean in mid-flow and surging over granite dropped from glaciers centuries ago, folding before my bent knees, skidding over trunks of trees and tiny sticks, gushing in spirals with scraps of leaves, flat stones, skimming and collapsing with liquid muscle, spitting up from tree roots and crevices, trembling, frantic, flowing hard, sweet, explosive in the sun, lost in the shade. It’s a torrent that can’t be placed in a box. It can be used and it has been.
I suddenly wonder what designer item I should wear to my father’s funeral. Problem is I haven’t owned a designer item in years.
I think of the slab of east coast sky, the frantic cabs of Manhattan, the whispers in Westchester homes in May. One thing I know, some people want me to be part of the funeral arrangements, the returned widow fallen to a state between San Francisco and Seattle.
There's no breathing now. Just a creek in Ashland. I smile. Phillip Maddox has told me to read books about the Oneness of God! A Oneness that could create a new paradigm with One love (and maybe One big orgasm) in each and every backyard! Monty, my friend, has said he’d rather fall into a black hole than read that stuff. Just as abstract, he moaned one day after a Cadillac Margarita, and a lot more of a thrill.
These people, Monty said another time (after a hard day as Macbeth on the Shakespeare stage) paint their gods with ego and sell them for thousands a pop.
I stand and hold my arms wide. My breasts are heaving and I feel the air flowing into my mouth, my lungs. It’s creek air, tree and earth air, rising from damp leaves, naked roots and ribbons of sunlight. I exhale, bring the light to my skin, and stare at my reflection, the cheekbones, lips. My fingers follow neck to breasts. I’m crying and for that moment, I am real. Pain isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you, I think, except when you stub your big toe.
I remember I have to buy bread on the way home and hop to the side of the creek. Soon I’m on the road to the water tower that has been locked and gated to avoid terrorism in the Pacific Northwest. Then I’m jumping the sign that says No Trespassing.
I pass a big horse tied to the gate, white with a black star on the forehead. I hesitate. I’ve seen it before. I’ve also seen the man with green eyes, face slightly unshaven, mid forties, rugged and tan. He has that dusty look, as if he’s been hunting all day or digging grave after grave. I smell jasmine when I pass him not sweat. I smell his long cowhide poncho with the braided fringe, see the spurs on his boots, the banjo under one arm. He smiles at me and tips his hat. I feel content.
“Hi Red Flower,” he says.
“My name is Beth,” I say.
“Can I play a song just for you?” he asks.
“Oh no,” I say, “I have to get home.”
“Have a good day.”
I smile all the way to my mini van.