Meditation and Water

Mimbres Hot Springs, March 1998

We had only been married a few months. My wedding band had barely begun the smoothing of the lines on my hand beneath it. We decided to take a trip to see the places he'd visited and lived in, his southwest geography. I thought if I knew him better I would understand what it meant to be a wife.

As we neared Silver City, sand blew over the road in ethereal little waves. On either side of the highway, gnarled scrub clung to the sifting ground, and shacks squatted amongst the sparse growth. It was unlike the previous landscape one hundred miles back--where the ocotillo held their blooms to the wind like defiant torches. There, the dense red rock was the same softness and hue of raw liver, or the inside of a body.

Godforsaken, I thought as we passed the WalMart coming into Silver City. Every town had the obscenity of a WalMart. We drove to the small downtown, a stucco version of a ghost town with its flat facades and simple store fronts selling antiques and used books. We parked the car and walked about, past the theatre, the most ornate of all the buildings, its smooth lines jutting upward, decorated with colored bulbs running its height. The Marquee boasted Snow White in red letters, the "S" an upside-down "5". I hadn't seen that movie since I was a girl, and only remembered it in a vague, ominous way: the woods' red eyes will conspire against you, there's poison fruit, a glass coffin and an intruder in a house of little men.

Mike went into the used book store while I stayed outside, watching cars pass on the narrow street. I bit my nails, tempted to ask him to see Snow White. After all, hadn’t I sewn myself into that ending? Most fairy tales end with a wedding, as the bridal magazines reminded me, in case I'd forgotten since girlhood.

Mike emerged, an old copy of The Family, Ed Sanders' book about Manson, and Moby Dick in his hand. "Look--" He held out a map written in a wizened script, the name THOR printed below it. "I got directions to the hot springs. It's really pretty there, used to be an old commune, but I don't think anyone lives there now, besides Thor." He was smiling. There wouldn't be a discussion, we would forgo the movie for Mimbres.

As we left dusty Silver City behind, we passed the vast copper mine. The earth gaped open in a chasm spanning miles, the sides of which were striated with many colors ranging from yellow to the deepest, bloody red, like a giant wound. Several retirees had stopped their long, boat-like cars to stand at the lip of the open space, to take pictures and shade their eyes against the sun. The immensity of the hole was so great that it was illusory. All the motes of earth and dust floated in the sunlight, graying the distant wall as we passed in the car.

We turned off the main road onto a smaller, curvy dirt path, and the sun began to descend. I worried whether we would make it back in the dark. A wooden sign pointed the way, "To Mimbres Hot Springs." The yellow hills on either side grew as we drove onward until we found ourselves in a canyon, the hills green. The sun hung low in the sky, abandoning the crack of earth we drove through, and the black shade sheltered a small creek running beside us.

The wooden planks of the old bridge wobbled and sprang up as the weight of the car passed. Now I knew we would never get back in the dark. I decided to try to relax-- to look forward to the water which would be warm, like an amniotic sac.

Thor lived in a large shipping crate which once carried a Bentley across the ocean, and circuitously the crate found its way into his possession. It had some modern amenities, like electricity and a telephone. The land outside the wooden box was landscaped lushly, with bougainvillea and ivy, succulents covering the ground around it with thick, moisture-laden fingers.

He must have seen the car from far off, as we had our lights on. He sat in the shade of a large cactus and watched us approach.

We pulled up the dirt road and Thor rose as the engine was turned off. "You two come for a soak?" he asked, leaning into the car’s open window. He surveyed the paint job, the tiny sparkles.

He used the word "soak." The way he had put it to us delighted me. His blue eyes and wild white hair combed back from the square forehead made him look like his namesake.

"Do you remember me? From the lodge in Kingston?" Mike reminded him they had common friends.

Thor stroked his chin with his thick fingers, the nails rimmed with a fine line of black dirt. It didn't seem like he remembered.

"This guy in town gave me directions. So we thought we would come." He was trying to explain away our intrusion. Mike got out of the car and offered his hand to him. He shook it once, hard. "This is my wife." I waved from the car meekly. Wife is an alien and meek-making word. The sky was getting bluer, deeper.

"Well, the baths are up the way," Thor waved in the direction of a hill with a cluster of buildings squatting at the foot. "And next to them, follow the path, there’s some guest houses. Just pick one."

He gave us two sleeping bags from his box-house and sent us on our way. I did not want to stay, but it was too late.

The cluster of buildings was part of the old commune--a main building and a series of one-story strips of rooms, all centered around a courtyard of scrubby dry grass and cracked dirt. The buildings had been newly painted a bright aqua-blue. The community room had new hardwood floors shining in the dusky light from the bay windows flanking each wall. There was a kitchen with a refrigerator, humming but empty, and a new sink with running water. Beyond that was a library--shelves and shelves of dusty paperbacks and dry-rotted leather bound copies of Robinson Crusoe and Shakespeare. The shelves smelled of must and wood pulp: The Farm Cookbook, A Vegan Diet, The Bhagavad Gita, Smart Water Use, the I Ching. I took down a well-loved copy of The Cat in the Hat and paged through it: The long limbed cat ushered in Thing One and Thing Two as the uptight kids worried, watched them paint the house and make mischief. Now I understood the appeal of this agent of chaos, but as a child the cat terrified me.

A sign read, "Please bring back whatever you borrow." When was the last time anyone had borrowed anything from here? I put the Dr. Suess book back, fingering the broken spine.

"Look--" Mike pointed to a large posterboard pinned to the wall, decorated with photographs. "That must be all the people who lived here." We surveyed the faces in the faded snapshots. They seemed a collection of amiable, healthy ghosts.

"That must be Thor." I pointed to a photo of his bear-like presence, but his face was less lined, and his thick hair was not all white yet-- his temples smooth. And beside him stood a woman in cut-offs and a t-shirt, her blonde hair tucked behind her ears. She was smiling, a gap between her teeth giving her a homely, distinctive look. Like most of the other women in the photos, her face had been tended by the sun to a glowing reddish brown.

There was another photo, a woman sporting a mane of Pre-Raphaelite waves parted in the middle, thin and hunched by the weight of it, or by the weight of her own humility. Next to her the same blonde shone like a Nordic goddess.

There was a photo of a dark-haired, bearded man wearing a bandana on his head, sitting down to a plate of spaghetti.

A pregnant girl in a sundress held her belly like a big beach ball she’s about to toss.

Two other women with dark eyebrows stretched gluten.

Another bearded man bottle-fed a baby.

A young girl kneaded bread with her mother, both in gingham aprons, smiling proudly up at the camera. They all looked like pirates or gypsies.

We looked up at the faces pasted to the board. "There isn’t usually some guy around with a camera during the good moments. Like look at that guy, prime example--" Mike pointed to a particularly unflattering photo of a resident who had sparse, long whiskers and sideburns, his nose upturned, hair pulled back severely in a pony tail, pulling his temples and arching his eyebrows up wickedly, his irises red from the flash.

"Creepy." I agreed, laughing.

We chose a small room connected to three others by shared doors. The room had two narrow pallets on wooden slats, kept up from the floor by cinderblocks. There was a pretty Chinese tapestry of a dragon framed on the wall, and the floor was swept and everything was dusted, even the bedside lamp on the small wooden table. I sat down on the pallet, dumping my backpack on the floor.

"Somebody keeps this place clean," I noted, running my finger over the frame and then turning around and inspecting the nightstand. Somebody was a better housekeeper at this empty place than I would ever be. I picked up a copy of The New Mycologist lying on the floor. I paged through it absentmindedly, looking at the photos of mushrooms veined with black and white streaks, like little fairy houses. Mike checked the empty adjoining rooms, just to decide that this one was the best. It was definitely dusk now--I needed the light on to read.

"Where’s the bathroom? Did you find it?" I asked, thinking he must have stumbled on it while exploring.

"Uh, wasn’t there one back at the main room?"

"No, I checked." I got up and joined him in the next room which was a bit bigger and had three beds made up with sheets and pillows, but they were just foam mattresses on the floor. When he brought our backpacks from the car, Mike had seen the old, doorless outhouse on the hill. While looking through the rooms he hadn’t seen a bathroom, just a porch with a broken sink.

There was no bathroom. There was an outhouse, a long walk away. This I did not want to think about. My uncle had one, and there were things crawling inside--black widows, brown spiders, centipedes--you name it. I was set to avoid it, no matter what.

We decided to go for a soak before it got too dark.

We walked out past a pond which was decorated by metal sculptures of merpeople made of found parts of motors and bejeweled with polished stones, their hair made of hundreds of rusted springs soldered together.

"This place must have been really special once," Mike said, pointing to the figures and their reflections in the black pond. He leaned in and looked more closely at the rusted face of one. "But also weird."

As I passed them their eyes shone in the dimming light of evening.

We found the baths, light blue concrete boxes filled by a steady stream from a green hose. There was a changing room were we and tossed our clothes in a combined heap.

A noise startled us, just a slight movement in the water, then a gruff male sound, like someone clearing their throat.

"Somebody’s in there," Mike whispered.

"Thor, Maybe?" I whispered back.

Then we heard the rush of someone lifting themselves from the water, and a sprinkling of drips.

I put my arms around my breasts.

"Well, we don’t have to be afraid. He knows we’re here. Let’s just go in." Mike offered her his hand and led me out of the changing room to the concrete square of steaming water, rippling green in the dusky light. There was no one there. We looked around at the hills--nothing. Mike shrugged and lowered himself into the water, taking in air through his pursed lips with a hiss. I watched his chest flush red. I dunked myself in all at once, shuddering at the sudden heat. I took air in with little gasps and raised my wet arms up to the evening air, and the skin answered with goose bumps.

Mike crossed through the water and held me, his body cooler, soft and bluish in the hot water. Steam rose over our faces, smelling of a sharp mineral tang.

"This must be good for us," I said, breathing deeply. As a child I’d suffered from asthma attacks, catching everything. All the health food and yoga was an attempt to make up for lost time, re-invent myself as a healthy girl. But Mike was the picture of health, a perfect specimen. I could not believe my luck.

My mascara streaked down my face. He wiped it away with his thumb, thinking I was crying. He never cried. I hid my face in his shoulder, feeling the sulfurous water of the bath dry and tighten on my skin.

We broke away from each other and went to opposite corners, submerging ourselves and watching the naked image of the other flatten and wobble through the rippling surface.

I looked away first, to the dry grass marked with wet tracks, to something like the ball of a human foot, dotting the hillside.

The light outside was a deep blue, dispelled from the room by the small bedside lamp and porch light. I looked out into the courtyard, to the yellow grass that was now gray and black in the waning light. It was much too dark to drive back to town now.

I had to go. But where? I wasn't going to the outhouse. I was angry, "One outhouse--these people lived here for years--building this place with formica counters in the kitchen--hardwood floors--a refrigerator! Goddammit--somebody even goes to the trouble to dust this place, but there’s no toilet? It’s medieval!" I wanted to fight over this.

"Well, actually," Mike spoke, clearing his throat, his knuckles white gripping the towel around his neck, "the first part of this century has more in common with the middle ages than it does with us, our time. I mean, in terms of modern conveniences." Mike wasn't going to fight. We were married; we would live through things like this.

There was an awful silence, a silence that spread out beyond us, the kind of silence you could only have in the desert. If one was unused to it, as we were, it resembled the dreadful silence before an earthquake or another divine and violent re-ordering of things.

Then there was a strange moan, half human. It sounded again, high and woeful.

"What is that?" I asked, "It sounds like it’s coming from under the floorboards." I looked down at them as if they were transparent and would reveal the thing to me.

"Aaaoooww," it cried.

"A cat. A hungry cat," Mike offered, reaching out his hand to me, but he was clearly impatient and a little regretful of bringing me here, I could see that.

"Don't be mad--I’ll go out in the courtyard with you and you can go out there. OK?"

"Go out there--in the grass?"

"Don’t worry," he took my hand. "I’ll keep a watch out."

As I squatted in the courtyard, I cursed the fact that I was born a woman. I chewed on the inside of my lip, feeling the slight breeze on my bare legs. The four white walls of the courtyard pushed in, as if they were breathing, exhaling. I quickly pulled up my pants and buttoned them, looking around once more. The sky was a page saturated in ink, the white walls now blue, and the grass black. I had the distinct feeling that I had desecrated something.

"I’m done," I cried out, a girl singing past a graveyard. I was a city girl, unconcerned with the mysteries of nature. Even if I wasn't, how could this ground know?

We sat across from each other on the wood floor, sharing the food we brought with--trail mix, apples, soy jerky, and some packaged cherry pie.

"There’s nothing better than eating after being in the water," Mike said.

I laughed and then was silenced. "Do you hear that?" The faint cry again, louder, coming from outside.

"I told you, it’s a cat."

"Ok, but don’t you hear something else?"

Mike stopped chewing and listened. There were muffled voices, and then the sound of music, bluegrass or The Dead.

"Sounds like Thor’s having a party," Mike whispered, feigning secrecy. "Look," he pointed to the screen door. The white face of a cat hovered like a little moon, its yellow eyes reflecting the light of the room. It yawned when we looked and caught its claws on the screen, pulling.

"It’s hungry." I said, taking a bit of soy jerky in my hand and crawling toward the door.

"If you feed it, it will never leave us alone."

I looked back at him, and then at the cat who was still clawing the screen, purring. I crawled to the door. But as I opened it, the cat sprinted away.

We lay in the two sleeping bags. They zipped together, tapered like a mummy’s sarcophagus, pinning us to each other.

At one point Mike had turned completely around, his back to me. I was certain he was asleep, and I felt betrayed. I put my nose up to the nape of his neck, moving it back and forth, trying to tickle him, but he didn't stir. Beneath us rose the dolorous moan of the hungry cat. It paced the substrata like a cursed soul. I tried to pull away from Mike's body, his heat suddenly unbearable. I unzipped the bag a bit. And then I heard it: four steady beats, loud, close by, like a hammer striking an anvil.

The middle of the night. My heart racing.

"Did you hear that?"

"It’s the cat," he muttered, waving me away sleepily.

"No--that hammering."

He turned to me, his eyes half-lidded with sleep. "It could be anything. Sound travels far in the desert."

"But hammering in the middle of the night?"

"Do you want me to go see? I’ll go see." He got out of the sleeping bag, obviously losing patience with me, and I followed him to the door.

"See, it’s nothing," he said as he opened the screen door.

"Then why is the porch light out? It was on when we went to sleep."

He looked up at the dark bulb, "they probably want to save energy."

"I have to go again."

"OK, I’ll watch." He gestured out to the courtyard, like a model on a game show displaying a prize.

"No. Not out there."

"What?"

"I think I should go in the outhouse."

He led me up the hill. There was only a shred of light that followed us from the bedside lamp, becoming useless as we walked farther away from it. The moon was absent, the hills surrounding the canyon completely shrouded in black, so that the depth of the landscape was eradicated by the lack of light. If one were to look on it long enough, the eye would take it in as immensity, spreading out forever, like the sky that arched to meet it.

He tried to not let me see he was frightened, so he talked.

"Just use your peripheral vision--that’s where all the rods are. Look forward, but concentrate on the sides."

I did what he said, and it was strange. The ground seemed to glance past in white arcs of light, a simulation of dog-sight, a blood hound on the scent of a lost girl.

I felt his presence subsumed in the darkness. He was a man; there was some small comfort in that. But he was human, as vulnerable as I, and I squelched a surge of contempt. Why had he brought me here?

"So the thing is, they probably thought: don’t shit where you drink, you know? They grew their own food and stuff. That’s probably why they have an outhouse."

"Hum. Yeah," I concurred, "chamber pots would be a good idea. Is there a rule against them? Maybe we can put that in the suggestion box before we leave." Any talk felt absurd in the quiet; we were giving ourselves away.

The outhouse was right in front of me and I hadn’t even seen it.

I walked into the small black room, like a magic wardrobe, someplace that would take me in, send me away. "Hippieland," I thought bitterly, squatting over the hole, which I could only see by its being the blackest of all the blackness around. I distracted myself by imagining Hippieland as a place you enter spinning like a whirling dervish, homemade gauze dress flying out about you, where you are met by others who are also dancing.

Once I went with a co-worker named Elaine to a Dead show on Halloween. She was dressed as Ophelia. Elaine fascinated me; she would talk to herself and get confused about what time it was, staring for long minutes at the basement walls where we sorted periodicals in the university library. She was what you'd call an acid casualty. When we got to the Dead show we wandered around, Elaine shedding wilting flowers, and I following, trying to tell who was sober and who was tripping. A frightening shadow danced up to me; it was a man dressed as the Cat in the Hat. He stamped my arm with a butterfly stamp and said, Hey, Butterfly. I spent the rest of the evening checking my hands--did they still look like mine? I was worried I’d been dosed by Cat man, and Elaine teased me about it, insisting I was too uptight.

The night closed in, so I talked to dispel it, "If you were in Hippieland, what would you be like?" my voice shaking.

Mike didn't hear, or didn't answer.

"Mike?"

He ran to the opening of the doorless outhouse, "Spider?"

As we started back down the hill hand in hand we were relieved, following the yellow orb of light shining from the room, illuminating the shadowy white box of courtyard. "Well, that was easy," Mike said, smoothing my hand. And then we stood perfectly still on the hill, in complete darkness. The light in the room had gone out.

He pulled on my arm and I knew he was as frightened, but I followed him. We came to the bottom of the hill and noticed the white wall of the courtyard when we were almost up against it.

"I hope there isn't anyone waiting for us in there," I whispered.

Mike yelled, "Hello!"

There was no answer, so we walked through the courtyard up to the door, and opened it.

Mike went in and turned on the light. No one. He searched the adjoining rooms. Nothing.

The cat began its low, mournful cry, welcoming us back.

"I can’t take this. I just can’t."

"Ok, it’s all a little weird, but look," he shook the light and it dimmed and brightened with the motion. "This light’s kind of broken. It could've gone off by itself."

"Well, I’m not going to sleep. I’m not turning off that light. I’m going to read."

"Ok, I’ll just lay next to you."

So we lay together on the pallet, Mike with his hand over his eyes and I with the copy of The Family raised above my face.

The last survivors of a band of nude and long-haired theives who ranged Death Valley in stolen dune buggies have been rounded up, the sheriff's office said yesterday.

There it was again, that same deliberate hammering--four strikes and then silence.

"Did you hear that?" I asked, turning to Mike, who'd already fallen asleep.

I could not decide which was worse, laying there with the light on, clutching The Family, or laying there with the light off. So I turned it off, and closed my eyes, opened them, closed them. There was absolutely no difference, except with my eyes closed it was definitely womb-like and phosphorescent, and with them open it was like being jutted out into nothingness. I played this game with myself until I, too, fell asleep.

I dreamt of the copper mine, the vast open space in the earth, but it looked like an opera set, and I was to sing there, hovering on wires. Up and down and up and down dwarves went, carrying their pick axes and gems that looked like candy. And there was Snow White below. She had the face of Elaine and was laden with withering flower vines. I yanked on her wires and saw a sea of expectant, wrinkled faces--tourists sitting on the hoods of their cars, waiting. Snow White was stretching gluten, singing whistle while you work. I couldn't sing until she finished.

A slam at the flimsy wooden door, a single, vehement thud, as if the door had been kicked or hammered, woke us. It struck with such force, it should have pushed the door open, should have broken it down, but it didn't. The door stood perfectly still.

Mike sat up in bed suddenly and hollered, "hey!" a guttural, football yell.

I turned on the light. Mike got up and walked to the door, cursing. He seemed angry, afraid. He opened the door and looked out into the courtyard.

Nothing.

He left me alone and went to check the other rooms. I repeated to myself I must be brave, I must be brave, though I was terrified, trapped. He came back shaking his head, and sat on the bed.

"Why don’t you read to me," he said, leaning against the wall, stretched out on the pallet. For the first time since I'd known him, he looked sick--dark circles rimmed his eyes and his lips were pale and chapped.

"Ok." I opened Moby Dick instead and began, Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happens to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are wedded forever.

I stopped. "Are you our metaphysical professor, or am I?" and then stiffened, "there, hear it?" The four hammer strokes.

"Hammering."

"Yes!" I leaned into him.

"The only way we are going to get through the night is to imagine it as it was."

I tried to think of the children’s faces on the poster in the common room, and then I recalled the dream. "It’s all gone, isn’t it? You’d have to be optimistic to go about having babies, farming, living off the land."

Mike just nodded. That kind of hope was missing from our lives and always would be. We were wedded to that certainty.

As we waited for daylight, I thought with paranoid wonder that someone had found us. I decided not to say anything. Twisting my wedding band, feeling the smooth bluish skin beneath, I looked at Mike, his face set thoughtfully. How earnest he was, so certain he could be brave. He wanted the world to be good, and he couldn't make it so. This was the end of the fairy tale.

"Maybe it’s a bunch of local kids, bored, trying to scare us. Or maybe it was some kind of bird that knocked into the door. A buzzard."

"Should I keep reading?" I fingered the yellow pages.

"Please," he said, head in hands, listening.

A note on the images:

The images in "Rephotographing Beth" were made of my daughter Beth in hot springs pools in New Mexico in 1995. I had raised her in Virginia and photographed her extensively as a child. When Beth was 13, I left her father. Beth chose to remain with her father in her childhood home — a painful period for both of us. These images were made six years later in hot springs pools, ancient places of healing, near my home in the Mimbres Valley in New Mexico, as the wound was fading and I knew we were once again becoming mother and daughter.

In making the images, I now understand I was attempting subconsciously to integrate Beth with this new landscape I now called home and with my new life. I was also creating a tranquility I had only occasionally glimpsed as the future. Twelve years have passed since the divorce and Beth, now married and very happy, lives 10 miles away, in the same valley in New Mexico. Life is good.

About 6 years ago I started making zone plate images. The zone plate, which was invented by Lord Rayleigh in the 1870s, is composed of concentric opaque and transparent rings that resemble a target. This target is photographed onto film, which then becomes the zone plate and is put on the camera in place of a lens or pinhole. The opaque rings block light rays that would have cancelled out one another, and the clear rings allow only those light rays needed to create a coherent image to pass. Because the zone plate focuses to a point, it must match the focal length of the camera.

Since a zone plate diffracts light, a zone plate image is closely related to a pinhole image. One advantage to using zone plates is that the exposure times are about 7 times faster than those made with a pinhole. Zone plate negatives tend to look very soft with low contrast, yet they are not like soft focus lens imagery and their look is not at all like pinhole imagery. The beauty within a zone plate image is the recognizable "halo" or "glow" surrounding any strong contrast edge. Foliage such as grasses and leaves under certain lighting conditions may resemble infrared imagery. Zone plate imagery is a fairly unexplored area of photography.
--Nancy Spencer