Nine Mile Falls

by Rick Higgerson

I went for a walk with Professor Oliver Hudson the day before he hung himself from the steam pipe over the desk in his office.

I was on my way back from Moses Lake where I’d been doing a hydrology study for a conditional use permit, when I found him walking in the freezing drizzle on Division Street across from the Museum of Native American Cultures. Id been thinking about a cup of coffee and a slice of cherry pie.

I was slowing down to let a group of preschoolers, roped together like mountaineers, cross the street when I saw his white mustache through the rain and the sweep of the wiper’s on the foggy windshield. Dressed in his green waxed cotton trench and clutching a buried walking stick with his knobby fingers, he glowered at me as I pulled abreast of him; the oversized tires of the truck displaced a filthy puddle which leapt up onto his leg and coat, soaking his shoes and trousers.

"Goddamnit boy," I heard him bellow over the noise of the engine and the weather. Not knowing it was me inside, he wheeled, the hem of his coat spinning out around him, and brought the knobbed end of his stick down hard onto the hood of the truck several times.

I rolled down the passenger window, raised my in hand in greeting and called out to him, Doc. Hey, Doc.

His mouth opened wide on a crooked row of smoke stained teeth, and

as he recognized me, warm and dry inside the cab, he barked, "You retarded son of a bitch, I'm soaked."

The hood of my new truck was badly dented, enough so that I could see flecks of red paint being washed out of the divots and swirling in the rivulets of water pooling and running in snaky streaks across its waxed surface. The dented, exposed metal reflected nothing, the sky held such a depth of gray.

In three years the hood would have two fist size abscesses, their rims flaked with dull, brittle rust. A damaged Dodge Ram and a few words was the legacy Professor Hudson left me.

"Doc, I'm sorry. C’ mon, get inside." Even though I was almost fifty years old and had known him since my college days, I had never called him by his first name and I think he preferred it that way. I leaned across the seat, pulled the handle, and swung the door open for him. He stooped lower to get a look inside and stood there for a moment, silent. The blood was beginning to drain back out of his face and he seemed much smaller than he had just a moment before, as if the exertion of his anger had left him dissipated, somehow diminished. He gripped the edge of the roof, stepped off of the curb onto the running board, pulled himself up into the seat next to me. He grimaced as he slammed the door closed. The handle of his stick, propped between us like a wooden gear shift, was flecked with what looked like blood.

"Sorry about that outburst," he said quietly, "It isn't so much that you got me wet, but that you startled me out of my own thoughts. Your driving brought me right back down to earth, though, didn’t it? I knew it'd have to be some stupid government son of a bitch to be capable of something like that." He wasn’t joking. After college and the Army Corps of Engineers, I had gone to work for the U.S.G.S., a choice he considered a deliberate waste of talent.

"I'm sorry I splashed you. I didn't see the puddle as I pulled up." I glanced down at the legs of his trousers and his once fine shoes, splotched and blackened with water and gutter grime. "Do you want a lift home to change?"

Hudson lived on Nine Mile Road, just outside the Spokane city limits, not far from the falls. Since his wife died, he’d been known to spend most nights on the pitted leather sofa in his smoky office on the third floor of the Geology Building at Gonzaga University. They had had no children. He was adrift, dissolving into academic vagrancy; between the library, the infrequent classes, his office and the museum, he was never at home.

"Jesus, no," he said, "what the hell would I do there?"

"I just thought you might want to change, is all. Being soaked and everything."

"Well, I've got some spare clothes at the office. But I could probably stand to retrieve some fresh things from home. If you don't mind, that is."

He unbuttoned the top of his waxed coat and reached beneath his tweed blazer into the chest pocket of his shirt, producing a thick cigar with a red and gold band. His oiled mustache, glistening with a few beads of rain, rose and fell on the left side of his face as his yellowed teeth parted then clamped shut on the rolled tobacco. He pushed his wire rim glasses up with his index finger and turned to me, "Give me a chance to enjoy this a bit, too. If you don't mind, that is." He looked, to me, at that moment, just like Mark Twain.

"Not at all."

It was rumored that Professor Hudson smoked between six and eight

cigars a day, although the exact number remained as elusive as the vapors they produced. In 1972 he had almost burned down the Geology Building when, during a brief catnap in his office between lectures, a smoldering Monte Cristo had rolled out of the ashtray, off his desk, and into a wastebasket full of mimeographs of a pop quiz on plate tectonics, which burst into flame. Hudson awoke to find his office choked with smoke, the side of his desk, a family heirloom from the eighteenth century, charred, and the wastepaper basket in ashes. Keeping a level head, which was still possible for him back in those days, he pulled the nearest alarm and cleared the building out with shouts of "fire," earning himself the nickname 'Sparky' amongst students and faculty alike. And although it was only ever uttered behind his back, much to his chagrin, the nickname stuck until the day he died. He was certainly much too grave, much too somber, to have been a Sparky Hudson.

A gold lighter appeared out of his sport coat and soon the car was thick with the essence of the Dominican fields. I cracked my window, hoping visibility would improve.

"Home, then, Doc?" I asked through the haze.

"Yes, I suppose you could call it that."

We drove out Northwest Boulevard, turned onto Driscoll and headed out of town. The fickle deluge came down in varying degrees, light mist and then sheets of fat, heavy drops. We drove along in silence, each one of us a passenger inside our own thoughts.

The motor hummed under the dented hood. Hudson stared intently out his window, taking an occasional puff on his cigar. I thought of my younger brother, Sam, over in Coeur d'Alene and the white power youth summit he and his wife had organized at Hayden Lake for the coming weekend. he’d tried to give me a Chinese made assault rifle for Christmas which id refused.

By the time we reached the turn off to his house, the cigar was almost half gone. As I pulled into the driveway he coughed and then spluttered, "Don't pull in, just keep going. I can't go in there. Not right now."

I slowed the car to a stop on the grass and looked across at him. He was visibly shaken, frail and small compared to the demon that had crushed my hood with a knobby piece of cherry wood less than twenty minutes before. Averting his gaze from the sight of his own home of thirty years, he glanced up at me with red rimmed eyes. "You understand, don't you? I just can't, not right now." His wife had been dead for two and a half years. I still wanted a cup of coffee and some pie.

"Sure, sure," I said, "No problem, I understand." We sat in silence for a long minute. "Where to then?" I asked.

"Keep driving out Nine Mile, out towards the falls."

Nine Mile Falls was one of Hudson's favorite places because there were few other locations in the world where the earth exposed itself so unabashedly. The striation was remarkable, the ages of the earth stacked one on top of the other like a petrified historical lasagna; a geological feast.

Hudson had a soft spot for the Mesozoic, more specifically the very beginnings of the Mesozoic, the cusp of the Permian, which was still Paleozoic, and the Triassic. Maybe it was the dominance of reptilian life forms during the era, I don't know, but he was crazy for it. I was more a denizen of the Quaternary, the Pleistocene in particular, because I felt it was more accessible, more palpable, more recent. But Hudson argued that if you had the vision and you looked hard enough, even the Precambrian was recent, in evidence all around us. But I liked the glaciers, the mammals, and the formation of modern continents. What was here now was more exciting to me than what was buried.

All through college I had been dogged with comments on my fascination with the recent past; it seemed that to be considered a serious student of modern geology, you had to be interested in an age or era more than 63 million years old. Hudson repeatedly told me that I was just skimming the surface, that I hadn't gone deep enough. I repeatedly told him that he had gone too far.

We arrived at the falls. I parked the car and we both got out. Hudson's pants were almost dry but an advancing gray sheet of rain that hung in the sky to the west promised to soak us both before too long. We headed off on a path that curved to the north, a path we had both been down together many times before.

At the first clearing that overlooked the Spokane River and the exposed layers of the earth's crust, Hudson muttered, "400 million years." We were looking directly out at a system of sedimentary deposits obviously Devonian, a time when the first amphibians evolved and crawled out of the sludge onto dry land. "A remarkable period, really," he said, pulling off his glasses to wipe them

dry. With his face turned from me and his glasses in his hands, he started to cry.

An awkward moment passed as I watched the flow of the river, a moment

of indecision. Whether he knew it or not, the man had given me much of himself, but there was still a canyon between us.

I walked over next to him, placed my arm around his shoulders, and gently squeezed him closer to me with my left hand. "I know," I said, and then,

"I'm sorry." It was the closest id ever been to him. We stood there together, two grown men who had spent their lives digging deep into the dirt.

"This earth," he said and trailed off. "This earth, you know, seems so solid under foot, so substantial and unshakable. But it's all just an illusion, isn’t it? I know that now. That at the times when the earth has stood as strong as it's yet been, it's been hammered to it's knees by something unsuspected and a new age begins."

The wind picked up and the first fat drops of a torrential downpour began to stain our coats. The car was too far to run to and there was Hudson’s cane to consider.

"Solid as a rock he said, what a bullshit phrase." We stood in silence, the pounding of the rain began to swell around us. Fog lowered on us from the sky.

"The structure, the origin, the history, all of it, all, hangs in such a precarious balance," he said, turning towards me. "There's nothing that won't outlast the natural course of destruction and rebuilding. And you'd think, after all these years, after facing the simplicity of that fact, after building my life, my

career, on the premise that nothing lasts as it is, that everything exists only to be

destroyed, transformed, covered up or changed by something else, that that simple premise would be a comfort to me. But it’s not."

I thought of my wife, pregnant and due any day with our first child, at home, probably reading in front of the fire or at her wheel, working slaggy clay up into glazed beauty, in the house we had built ten years ago, down in Mica. She was fifteen years younger than me, roped into my world by luck and love and circumstance; selfishly, I hoped to be spared the pain that Hudson had laid bare before me, like the striations of Nine Mile Falls, vulnerable and exposed. But for me to die before she did would leave her alone to face a new age, a changed world, without me.

The rain beat into the decay of late fall all around us, the downed leaves and dripping moss; another thin layer for the crushing weight of the book of the ages was building up under our feet. The double blast from a powerful air horn on an unseen truck, miles to the south on I-90, cut through the fog like a lost ship at sea and brought me back down into my boots, back to Nine Mile Falls. We both knew it then, but I know it much better now.

"Such a precarious balance," Hudson said, gripping his cane and turning back in the direction of the car.