Loowit, Cowlitz: A Pentaptych

I.

I have known the mountain since I was young. She first appeared in our family photos when I was two months old. That was when the mountain erupted, turning everything grey. This should have been a sign.

The mountain made everyone wear a mask. We all had to vacuum and dust twice, and put nylon stockings over the air filters in our cars. No one had a choice. The mountain made men build machines to dredge her ash from the flooded rivers, to harvest the corpses of blasted trees. The mountain made men move.

Those who did not move became entombed where they lay, embalmed in the pyroclastic flow of the mountain’s blood. The men had faith that could move mountains, but the mountain still moved them.

II.

When the mountain erupted that morning in May, we were all outside. My mother hung socks on the clothesline, my father read a book, and I napped in the shade in my playpen.

We had to go inside. They forgot me at first, two months old, asleep beneath the filbert tree. That’s why I am part mountain. She found me and adopted me, and I swallowed her, inhaling the fine ash of her deepest flesh. She coats my lungs and my brain to this day.

If you eat a mountain, you will end up with a mountain inside of you.

The mountain inside of me took some time to grow, to break out of its seed, to put down roots and stretch forth leaves and a stem. The stem became a trunk, and the trunk became a cliff. The leaves became glaciers, and the glaciers cooled around my heart.

So now I have a mountain inside of me, and I can never leave.

III.

I lived next to the river for twenty years. Just like me, the river was full of mountain, but the men dredged her depths and I played in the ash dunes. Maybe other

children played in piles of leaves the same way, I don’t know. But I waded in the shallows of the river, and the children of salmon nibbled my ankles. I threw stones and branches in the river, and the dogs fetched them.

The stones floated. This is why I know magic exists. Some say the stones float because they are pumice, spewed from the heart of the mountain when she blew.

I say pumice is proof that magic exists.

IV.

The river runs through my heart and carries me away sometimes. When I’m not thinking, I slip into the stream, riding the bends at lightning speed. The river is cold, cold as a bear’s foot. And sometimes, when the rain pours down like a flood from the sky, the river floods, too.

When the river floods, you will know, because the first thing to go is the power. No electricity! All wind, all rain. The river swells up, ready to swallow the land where the people live.

This land once belonged to the river. When we dammed the river and took the land, we made the earth bulge with all that extra water. She can’t help but leak out, into puddles and creeks and streams. And sometimes, when the river runs through me I get carried away, and my heart bulges, and my eyes stream.

All that extra water has to go somewhere.

V.

Years ago, the men dammed the river in several places. This flooded the people who lived on the land, the people who did not build boxes but instead lived in harmony with the earth. These people became one with the river, their blood mingling with its mud.

Now the river is dammed, and all of that power is siphoned away day by day, sold to light the living rooms of people too sedated to go outside and find their own light. Too frightened to leave their boxes.

If only their mothers had forgotten them in their backyards when the volcano erupted—they could have had a mountain in their hearts, and a river running through them, and then they would be afraid of nothing at all.