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Another pair of hikers
paused within my cypress grove last week, stepping down from
the flickering time that humans follow to something I can
see. With some warning, I can speed myself up enough to hear
them, too. Trees are easier to watch.
As usual, they settled
on my broad face and flat shoulder to take advantage of the
valley view below as they ate their meals. Crumbles dropped
all over my lap like seeds after a flock of starlings has
passed. The morsels of food didn’t remain long; ants swarmed
up my ears and through my lichens to carry the plunder off
to their nest deep within the mossy crevices of my navel.
In their short time, the
hikers moved off, packing their detritus away in brightly
colored sacks like tidy elves. Once they were gone, I spent
the next three sunlights remembering them exactly as they
were. I recalled their words a dozen times over, syllable by
syllable, the sounds falling like fat raindrops from the lip
of the sky. I amused myself imagining they’d had other
conversations. They might have argued about who was going to
cook dinner. They might have discussed whether there was
life on distant planets. They might have dispensed with the
talking and made love.
I’ve seen it all since
I’ve been here. A troll sits in the same place enough
decades, he sees plenty of things.
Plenty.
People, if they believe
in us at all, think we came out of old Europe. Grendel-monsters.
Cut from the bones of Norse gods, forest demons of the
Teutoburger Wald, children of the Alps, fairy-tale myths to
scare the children. Or they make statues of us under a
bridge in Seattle and write cute books about us trolls and
our rockhead brains.
But we are real. And
we're not so different from you. We fight with our parents,
screw around when we're young, look for a decent place to
raise our kids.
The hardest thing to
grasp is that, though we're not so different, we're really
not like you. Thing is, we were always here, and we’re not
going away any time soon. The earth has bones just as much
in Mendocino County as it does in Milan, or Macao. And
trolls are not the backbone, exactly, but part of the
structure of the world nonetheless. Not gods, oh no, but not
transient either. We can be killed, or so I’ve heard, but on
our own, we never die. We just grow bigger and older and
slower…or get trapped.
Think about that. Most
people hope or imagine they have an immortal soul. Trust me,
we’ve heard it all. Some faiths are more organized than
others, but everybody secretly believes that their candle
will never quite snuff out.
Not us trolls. Some of
us will survive until the burning girdle of the sun reaches
out to envelop the Earth in a few billion years. But if we
die, our thread is cut from the skein of the universe.
Imprisoned by life, with no hope of anything beyond.
You live in a dream you
all secretly believe you'll wake up from.
We live in a starlit
world from which we will never fall asleep.
I wasn’t always like
this: a stone half-wedged into the side of a mountain, a
pleasant place to pause on a hike.
Once I roamed the earth,
in my own lumbering way. I made friends, and I made enemies,
as anyone does. Unfortunately, one enemy had a cruel and
capricious nature.
In time, he tricked me
out into a bright moment of daylight.
Yes, it was foolish. We
all know the rules: trolls cannot abide the direct light of
the sun. All magic has a price, a cost, and this is ours. I
managed many centuries before it happened. But in the
summertime, the days are long and the nights are short, and
— well, no excuses. It happened.
I raged and roared and
wailed against the whim of fate. All that happened only
inside. There is nothing quite so helpless as a hunk of
rock. After a lengthy time insensate, I awoke to an
acceptance of my fate. What choice, in truth? I sat while
the lichens grew. I played host to birds and animals. I
watched the sun rise, and set, and rise, and set. The
daystar has a splendid, awful beauty writ in unnatural
colors of orange and red and glowing pink. I stared for
decades, until the sight ceased to terrify me.
As if I could be harmed
further. My future was ensconced in the slowing of my own
thoughts to the heartbeat of stone. Finally, I became
comfortable in my imprisonment. It pleased me to be some
small part of the bones of the Earth, in a way that I had
never been as a troll of motion.
Even the novelty of
daylight and the pleasure of rockness eventually wore thin,
and I again fell to contemplating my former life. I wanted
to move. I wanted to walk, run, wander. Or at least turn my
head.
That’s where the recent
hikers came in. Or, well, the hikers from some time past, by
now. It takes me longer to tell a story than it used to,
when I had lips that parted and lungs that filled with air.
I beg your indulgence.
After I had rehearsed
their chatter every which way — both how it happened and how
I’d imagined it could have happened — I pondered how humans
had changed, evolved almost, across the centuries of my
life, and the decades that I’ve sat here watching them. And
eventually I understood something, realized something. A new
thought. An idea.
A hope, even?
Simply put: Much as day
becomes night, and night becomes day, one who is a rock
might become a troll again.
There is a saying one of
your tricksy tale tellers first set into words: "Ill met by
moonlight."
But your bard wasn’t
speaking to us, we trolls and all the rest of our First
People kindred. Even those whom the sun does not shrivel or
shatter have long preferred to skulk among the shadows of
eventide. It’s safer in the dark, when the intrusive daystar
has folded under the horizon. Here we remain, yet all you
see are those of us unlucky enough to have been struck down
by the glaring sun.
About those hikers: they
talked, chattered and chirped like fretful birds. They
worried about the coming darkness. Greenhouse gases. Upper
atmosphere clouds. Long term drops in net insolation. I
didn’t understand them, in the particulars, but the greater
meaning was clear enough.
And at long last, I
began to wonder, in my slow, igneous thoughts, precisely
what aspect of the sun it is which draws my kind to their
stony rest.
That ill-met moonlight
is nothing but the sun, reflected off a stone in heaven.
Trollkin do not grind to their final rest while loping under
Diana's silvered glare. So it is not the — what is the
word, photons? — themselves which trap us.
My prison is made of
sterner stuff than the merest wavicle wisps of light. Some
vital essence of the sun, perhaps. A little does not hurt
so. The bravest of our kind can walk in storms, beneath the
glowering clouds of winter, though the risk of an errant
shaft of brightness is always imminent. Restless in the long
days of northern summers, some of us have always been
foolhardy.
As the fate of my kind
is bound into the nature of light, I realized that if the
hikers spoke true, I had only to wait until the terrible
things they described should come to pass. If they filled
the air with a dark shield that lasted longer than even an
Arctic winter night, perhaps my thick blood would flow once
more, my limbs would move, my eyes would blink and roll in
my sturdy head. It would be a slow process, to be sure, but
patience is in endless supply to a rock who does not roll.
Time passes, even as I
tell this tale. I listen for more — more words of doom,
which sound like hope to me. I long to strain against my
mineral nature with a fiery impatience, but here I sit. I
wait. Time brings wisdom, and bright, brittle steel crawling
up newly-cleared tracks to rumble and grumble past where
only hikers once passed.
They take, and they
take, and they take, these talking monkeys, and they burn
what they take. Trees come down, are made into wrappers and
shiny things to go to incinerators. Oil comes up, is burned
inside their vehicles, and given over to the air.
A troll is made of
patience. A man is made of haste. And in their haste, they
are robbing the world of its light. I cannot even smile as
they make their way into ever deeper woods, seeking the gold
beneath the bones of these hills. I think of the lost gleam
of my smile, and welcome their axes and shovels.
Soon enough, as my kind
measures time, I have begun to see a darkness in the
daylight hours. Most subtle, at first; but unmistakable. The
hikers came and went, their clever garments changed style,
then changed again, as they continued to move carbon around.
Such a simple thing,
carbon. Best left where it is.
You know what has
happened. If you’ve sat with me this long, you can see how
my prison door is soon to open. Now you have remade the
world in our image. You hide from cold darkness, wondering
if every fire you light will be your last. Your light was
our prison, our shadows are yours. Once the sun kept us from
your doors, out of your sheepfolds, away from the shrieking
voices of your bright-haired children.
When the sun is
darkened, the trolls will once again roam the earth. And
once we have awakened whomever we can find of our shining
kindred still slumbering beneath the hollow hills, we will
drink our fill of the world.
My merest fingertip has
begun to quiver. |
