Temple of Suffering

My four week old son, Milo, cries and wakes. He hasn't been sleeping well. It's all new to him. I'm not upset. It means no dreams is all. It is Friday, which is when I leave. Christy turns him onto his side and he settles for now. My phone reads 3:29 A.M. I watch and wait until the digits flash then listen to the church bells for a few seconds, like the morning call of some era long gone by, before turning off the alarm and heading for the bathroom. My feet leave ghost images on the cold tile and I can hear the leaky shower faucet drip a hearty 4/4.

Thirty minutes later I'm on I-80 heading east toward Wyoming in the back of a van. There are four others, three of them complete strangers (one of which I'd share a bed with that night), and the other a counselor in my Stake Presidency, and the man I hold responsible for my being awake at such an irresponsible hour. As we rise above Parley's we stretch out onto the flats and I'm dozing within twenty minutes. The dark out there is weightless and thin and consistently so in all directions.

I wake up in Green River and switch seats in an effort to be more conversational. Admittedly, in my mind I don't know what to expect.

The snow comes in sideways

and stings

each gust intending to

smooth the ridges out of everything

This storm is a cell

of many cells aching above the earth

the earth itself a cell

all of a body

whose size and proportion

I know not

But that is okay because I'll know soon enough. North from Rawlins, ice is hugging the roads. The wind butts the vehicle next to the yellow line, and we take it slow. We're ahead of schedule. The van has heaters conveniently, dare I say artistically, positioned throughout. There is one just to the left of my feet, keeping them warm. We hold right at Muddy Gap and off to the west we can make out through falling snow the archean granite rising in great bubbles from the land. I imagine a large pot the size of a moon, moving westward, churning the liquid from which mountains are made, sloshing out in kitchen-like spills, haphazard blots upon the high plains, cooled cracked and hardened in the driving wind. A few miles more and we pull off to the left into Martin's Cove.

Is that Devil's gate over there?

It is bigger than I had imagined

It has no door

I'm all set for a day of classroom instruction. I brought my good pen for note taking, and a little folder for the handouts. We register and they hand me an agenda, which changes everything. The afternoon is to be spent pulling handcarts along the trails, over the Sweetwater, and to the base of the cove. We'll then hike in and out of the cove, following trails back to the visitor's center. No classroom instruction after all. Five miles in a Wyoming snowstorm and I'm wearing a thin jacket and sneakers. I think back to the night before when I made my day pack, capriciously throwing in a pair of gloves and a hoodie. I say a prayer of thanks.

We are shown to our handcarts, which are empty. That's not nothing. I jump out front, hopeing the pull will generate warmth. There are many in orbit willing to trade us out. The trail is snow and mud. I pull with Suzanne, from Kearny by way of Australia, and Matt. Both being new we point out things and guess at them. We talk about England and Ecuador. Sometimes the wagon wheel rotates bare and sometimes it cycles up out of the track in a coat of slush and pebble. People are holding their limbs to themselves and spirits are good. No one complains of the weather. No one can.

Gus's face is unreadable

We are saved or we are damned

I can not tell

His nose is dripping and

I fight the urge to reach out

The blocky numbness of my hand to

Wipe away the snot

He'd squirm and twist

Nose reddening

He'd say something like - No

Wipe your nose, I say

And he does

The bank drops off before us and I see for the first time the Sweetwater River. It makes no noise, lost in some ancient reverie. We cross the bridge, built by Riverton Stake, so that none, having no alternative other, would be forced to forge the river on foot again. It takes us a few seconds. Beyond the river are a sculptor's renderings of four young men, D.P Kimball, George Grant, Stephen Taylor, C.A. Huntington. They're portrayed older and strong, faces turned and frozen with urgency. "We wanted to talk to them but they would not listen." I scrunched my cold toes, encouraging blood flow in the ends of my wet shoes. "They were all day in the water." I turned from the small rise upon which the statues stood and looked at the curve of the river, the bend nearest me arching toward the cove, and then turning back on itself again.

I'm too weak to pick up my boys

And it shames me

Weak flesh

I'm sitting over the axle

Cradling Milo's face in a flap of

Great grandmother's fading afghan

And the boy just comes

Saying nothing

And hoists her up like that

Saying nothing

His upper thighs sparkling

With the first beads of frost

It's been hours and they

Have dropped no one

From opposite sides we share a look

But her eyes are all buttoned up

So I secure the flap and look down

From Dan Jones cove we move south. No one speaks. Our only words are our tracking steps. The snow has stopped falling and the sky is one consistent gray cloud, it's umbrage all of us and our lives. There is no flat ground. Several hundred yards ahead climbing leeward on the draw are nine dear. I count twice. They know we are coming but are in no hurry. They acknowledge us and we them, then they continue out, making us room. The trail curves on, past the Lower Cove and we enter Martin's wordless.

Maybe she dies right there

With Milo at her breast

Or perhaps there, back angled against

The incline of that rocky outcropping

Sage branches in her arms

Meant for a fire to warm

Gus's blackening feet

That never will be

I look hard and try to see them. The hundreds in their tents, crooked and glassy eyed, surrounded by death, themselves dying and wondering at rescue. I ask inside if some were, perhaps, afraid to hope. I strain to hear the cries, the distressed instructions, the wind hissing loud off the rock slope scraping into the pinion pine and juniper. Five days and four nights, waiting for rescue. The dead rising and not rising. Twenty, brothers sisters and cousins. Thirty, aunts uncle and boyfriends. Forty, mothers fathers and infants. Fifty, when will it stop? Towards the back of the cove we gather and a missionary tells us stories. She shows us, pointing off to one side, where they stacked the dead. I think about this for a while. I wonder at it, this holocaust of nature, pulling at the context, stretching it around me hoping to see any just and good world in which one would be compelled to "stack" their beloved dead and gone. How did they continue to walk? Why put one more foot forward?

I cannot feel my feet

I prefer not to look

They will come off I am sure of it

Gus fingers the matches

Like I showed him

Trying to light the fire

He's a good boy

Trying to light the fire

Christy was just here

I can't tell if Milo's chest is moving

He used to cry

Back in late summer

Before it became dolorous silence

And the checking of the nose and chest

Which I do again and wonder if it is he

or I

that does not feel

The ground itself sits there, not quite mute under the snow. In the quiet I become quiet myself, and still. The fissures in the rock in front of me jut upward, out of which streams the early runoff, coming from who knows where, living inside that rock somewhere. Living inside the wells of a stone that is broken, but not shattered. Then it comes, the worship, in and out of me, working its way under the snow and the bent blades of prairie grass, through my wet and stinking shoes, hovering about me and all around the sleeping vegetation in a temple of suffering.

My God, this is it, isn't it?