Cold Fire

They sat at a redwood picnic table on the playground, after Holly checked the bench to be sure there was no dirt on it that might stain her white cotton dress. A jungle gym was to their left, a swing set to their right. The day was pleasantly warm, and a breeze stirred an agreeable fragrance from some nearby Douglas firs.

"Smell the air!" Louise took a deep button-popping breath. "You can sure tell we're on the edge of five thousand acres of parkland, huh? So little in of humanity in the air.”

Holly had been given an advance copy of the book, Soughing Cypress and Other Poems, when Tom Corvey, the editor of the Press's entertainment section, assigned her to the story. She had wanted to like it. She enjoyed seeing people succeed-perhaps because she had not achieved much in her own career as a journalist and needed to be reminded now and then that success was attainable. Unfortunately the poems were jejune, dismally sentimental celebrations of the natural world that read like something written by a Robert Frost manque, then filtered through the sensibilities of a Hallmark editor in charge of developing saccarine cards for Grandma's birthday.

Nevertheless Holly intended to write an uncritical piece. Over the years she had known far too many reporters who, because of envy or bitterness or a misguided sense of moral superiority, got a kick out of slanting and coloring a story to make their subjects look foolish.

Except when dealing with exceptionally vile criminals and politicians, she had never been able to work up enough hatred to write that way-which was one reason her career spiral had spun her down through three major newspapers in three large cities to her current position in the more humble offices of the Portland Press. Biased journalism was often more colorful than balanced reporting, sold more papers, and was more widely commented upon and admired. But though she rapidly came to dislike Louise Tarvohl even more than the woman's bad poetry, she could work up no enthusiasm for a hatchet job.

"Only in the wilderness am I alive, far from the sights and sounds of civilization, where I can hear the voices of nature in the trees, in the brush, in the lonely ponds, in the dirt.”

Voices in the dirt? Holly thought, and almost laughed.

She liked the way Louise looked: hardy, robust, vital, alive. The woman was thirty-five, Holly's senior by two years, although she appeared ten years older. The crow's-feet around her eyes and mouth, her deep laugh lines, and her leathery sun-browned skin pegged her as an outdoors woman. Her sun-bleached hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she wore jeans and a checkered blue shirt.

"There is a purity in forest mud," Louise insisted, "that can't be matched in the most thoroughly scrubbed and sterilized hospital surgery.”

She tilted her face back for a moment to bask in the warm sunfall.

"The purity of the natural world cleanses your soul. From that renewed purity of soul comes the sublime vapor of great poetry.”

"Sublime vapor?" Holly said, as if she wanted to be sure that her tape recorder would correctly register every golden phrase.

"Sublime vapor," Louise repeated, and smiled.

The inner Louise was the Louise that offended Holly. She had cultivated an otherworldly quality, like a spectral projection, more surface than substance. Her opinions and attitudes were insubstantial, based less on facts and insights than on whims-iron whims, but whims nonetheless-and she expressed them in language that was flamboyant but imprecise, overù blown but empty.

Holly was something of an environmentalist herself, and she was dismayed to discover that she and Louise fetched up on the same side of some issues. It was unnerving to have allies who struck you as goofy; it made your own opinions seem suspect.

Louise leaned forward on the picnic bench, folding her arms on the redwood table. "The earth is a living thing. It could talk to us if we were worth talking to, could just open a mouth in any rock or plant or pond and talk as easily as I'm talking to you.”

"What an exciting concept," Holly said.

"Human beings are nothing more than lice.”

"Lice?" "Lice crawling over the living earth," Louise said dreamily.

Holly said, "I hadn't thought of it that way.”

"God is not only in each butterfly-God is each butterFly, each bird, each rabbit, every wild thing. I would sacrifice a million human lives-ten million and more! — if it meant saving one innocent family of weasels, because God is each of those weasels.”

As if moved by the woman's rhetoric, as if she didn't think it was ecofascism, Holly said, "I give as much as I can every year to the Nature Conservancy, and I think of myself as an environmentalist, but I see that my consciousness hasn't been raised as far as yours.”

The poet did not hear the sarcasm and reached across the table to squeeze Holly's hand. "Don't worry, dear. You'll get there. I sense an aura of great spiritual potentiality around you.”