As I head back up towards the lodge I pass a wide open expanse of dirt, into which has been laid a maze of flat stones. A sign declares that this is The Labyrinth, and that one is to follow the path at a leisurely gait in a “journey to one’s own center enhanced by the song of the nearby river.” I see two men dressed in white close to the center of the maze, their heads down. The journey is supposed to take 45 minutes to complete. I decide I don’t have 45 minutes to waste and besides, I feel like I’ve had enough mazes in my life. It would be nice, just for once, to walk a path that didn’t twist and turn back on itself constantly.
Beyond the labyrinth is a pavilion beneath which sit five stone tubs in a circle. Each tub is supposed to be a different temperature, the idea being that you move in a circle, gradually working your way up to the hottest one. When I approach, I see that one tub is occupied by a large, attractive middle-aged woman sitting by herself, looking slightly uncomfortable. Another tub is filled by a young couple with their appendages wrapped tightly around one another.
I strip down, feeling very self-conscious, and slip into a tub that is not adjacent to the occupied ones. The water is the hottest I’ve felt so far. I sit on the little underwater ledge and stare out over the meadow, which seems rather scraggly and ugly from this close. The couple gets out and moves into the tub to my immediate left. They only stay there a moment before they leap out and relocate to another one. The middle-aged woman gets out and takes their original tub. It’s like they’re all playing a game of musical hot tubs. For some reason it makes me nervous.
A young curly haired boy approaches the pavilion, striding confidently. Casting his gaze about regally, he smiles as if approving of all he surveys. He shrugs off his clothes and makes a beeline for my tub. There’s enough room for three or four people in each one but the moment he steps into the tub I feel it shrink dramatically. He stretches out and sighs. I try to forget that he’s there but cannot.
The middle-aged woman climbs out and lies down in the sun on a wooden platform made for sunbathing. Her flesh spreads out beneath her as though it were melting; she has transformed into a shapeless blob. The young couple has stopped cuddling and is just sitting in their pool.
A maintenance worker comes by and my tub-mate engages him in conversation.
“Man, finally some water that’s hot enough for me,” the kid says.
“Yeah, we been having trouble with these other ones,” the worker replies. “They’re supposed to be gradated but they all seem to be the same temperature.”
The kid says he’s in the middle of a long bike tour across the state with a friend. They chat for a while; I wish they’d shut up. Finally the worker says he has to go do some stuff, “Otherwise nobody’ll have any hot water tonight.”
I stay a few minutes longer. The kid looks at me and smiles. I climb out and put my clothes on.
On the way up the path I run into Noodle again. She’s ready to get back in the water, so we cross the meadow to the closest pool.
We’ve noticed that calling one another “Nood” is problematic in the hot springs, as it causes every nude bather within earshot to look around when they hear it, so we try to use the ridiculous nickname as little as possible, though it’s hard, as I hardly think of her as Jasmine anymore; her real name feels strange on my tongue.
There is a girl alone in the water when Noodle and I get there. She’s gorgeous, with very pale skin and red hair pulled up into little pigtails that stick up from the top of her head like ears. She sits in the water up to her neck but even so I can see her wonderful round breasts floating just below the surface. I instantly feel a little nervous. She says hello and smiles, so Noodle and I strip and lower ourselves into the pool.
The two girls get to talking right away. Her name is Halley. Although she looks young, when she smiles a set of wrinkles fans out adorably from the corners of her eyes. She speaks only to Noodle; even when I ask her something, she directs all her answers to her and not to me. I wonder if my presence is making her uncomfortable; I’m not staring, and I try not to show any excessive interest, but perhaps she can pick up on how attracted I am to her. Part of me feels angry at having to stifle such natural impulses and feelings. And part of me wants so much for her to be attracted to me that I feel an almost unbearable tension rise up in me. Eventually I just get out of the pool and sit on the nearby bench.
Halley tells Noodle that she’s an artist who lives in Portland but has a summer job tending a rickety wooden ranger tower deep in the forest, on a hill overlooking Mt Hood and the surrounding valleys. Her job is to keep an eye out for forest fires. It has been an unusually hot, dry summer, and lightning storms have sparked a number of major fires all across the state. She says she spends most of her time up in the tower reading and painting, and when she isn’t up there she spends her days traipsing through the conifer forest.
“What I’ve seen from spending so much time in the woods is that there are so many diseased and rotting trees just taking up room where new growth could be taking place. These areas need to be burnt down. It’s actually good that there are so many fires.” She pauses. “Sometimes I think we should just let them burn.”
“So what do you do when you see a fire?” Noodle asks.
“Well, when I first started I would call the fire fighters at the first sign of smoke,” Halley explains. “But now I wait a little. Give the fire time to clear out some dead wood.”
I ease back into the stone pool, taking off my glasses and setting them on a rock in the hopes that it will make her more comfortable and less afraid that I’m checking her out. No sooner have I slipped into the water than another cute girl comes running up the path. Halley squeals with delight at the sight of her.
“Where have you been, girl? I thought you’d never get here!” She leaps out of the water and quickly wraps her lovely flesh in a towel. The two girls run down the path towards another, presumably more private pool without a single word of farewell.
Bradley comes by and asks if we want to go into the sauna with him. Noodle and I dress and follow him back down the path. On the way is a little pool I hadn’t noticed before, totally fenced off. A sign beside it warns people not to swim in it, saying that the temperature of the water is 180 degrees Fahrenheit. Nailed to the fence is another sign with a diagram that shows how the hot springs were formed. The heat of the lava beneath the mountain melts the glacier that covers the peak, and some of this water collects in pockets beneath the earth. The lava further warms the water in these wells and the heat sends it shooting up towards the surface where it bubbles out and forms pools. The power of the hot springs generates electricity and heat for the entire facility. According to the sign, Native Americans used to come from hundreds of miles away to take advantage of the natural healing powers of these springs.
The sauna is a little shed right next to the lodge. It has wooden door so tiny I have to crouch down and practically crawl through.
The room is thick with steam and the crash of churning water. It feels like I’m entering the inside of someone’s mouth. I sit on one of the little benches that line the walls. There are tiny windows that you can slide open if you need a breath of fresh air, which I do almost immediately. Within seconds I feel like my lungs are filled with water; I can hardly breathe. I sit still and try to relax, but I can’t, it’s too uncomfortable. I am completely coated with sweat although I can’t really feel it; my flesh has become indistinguishable from the air. I close my eyes and breathe deep, but it feels worse. After a few minutes or hours or days I burst back out through the little door and turn on the shower head affixed to the outside of the shed, sighing as the cool water cascades down over my body.
I sit on the porch and read and after a while my companions meet me back there. Bradley tries to call his brother in LA to ask him to pick him up at the airport the next day, but there is no cell phone reception way out here. He goes inside to use the phone but comes back out a few minutes later looking discouraged.
“What’s the matter, Babe?” Noodle asks.
“They wouldn’t let me use their phone. They say it’s for emergencies only.” He pauses. “The lady wasn’t very nice about it.”
I think about the museum. How am I going to call in sick tomorrow? I’m supposed to be at work at eight in the morning, so I need to call before then; preferably as early as possible so I can just leave a message with the night shift.
“We’ll just have to get up really early,” Noodle says when I voice my concern.
There is still some time before supper. Anxious to get hold of his family, Bradley decides to drive out to where he can get some cell phone reception. Noodle says she wants to do some reading, so she and I head out to sit in a few of the wooden lounge chairs clustered in the middle of the lawn in front of the lodge. The sun casts long shadows across the brown grass. She takes out a book about the afterlife, written by some ancient old lady living in the middle of the Arizona desert, just like Noodle herself has been doing.
“Is that book yours?” I ask. She says no, she’s borrowing it from the lending library inside the lodge. I ask her if she believes in the afterlife and she shrugs.
“Is the book any good?” I ask.
“It’s… interesting,” she says, burying her face in the pages.
A large brown spider inches its way up the chair leg towards my hand. I flick it off lightly but two seconds later it’s back in the same exact spot. I think about deadly spider bites, brown recluses, and decide to take my chances and let it live.
A scruffy-looking man in his forties or fifties approaches. He’s holding a guitar. A few young people also clutching guitar cases are making their way across the lawn towards us, stealthy as wolves.
“Hey, you guys mind if we make some noise over here?” the man asks, grinning.
“That depends on the kind of noise you mean,” I say.
He chuckles and holds up his guitar. “Well, I was thinking of playing some tunes on old Janis here.”
I wave halfheartedly to the other empty chairs. Noodle glares at me over the top of her book, giving me the look that our friend Teddy once described as “staring at you as if you were a bug.” I smile and shrug.
The three musicians settle down and take out their instruments. The two youngsters are a hipster looking boy with a bushy black beard and a skinny, blandly pretty brunette. Right away they explain to the older man that they are definitely not a couple, just “buddies.”
“Oh, okay, I was just going to ask if you guys were together,” the older guitarist says. “Not that it matters or anything…. What kind of tunes you in the mood for?”
“Well, we were thinking sixties, seventies kinda stuff,” the boy answers. Noodle and I exchange an alarmed glance.
“That’s great, cause that’s mostly what I know,” the man laughs, and after a few warm-up strums he’s belting out a sluggish rendition of Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold,” a song that until now I was pretty fond of.
The girl takes out her guitar when he’s done. “Wow, what a beautiful instrument,” the man says.
“Thanks,” she says. “It’s a limited edition Gibson. The owner of Gibson himself designed it. They only made 300 of them.” She pauses. “I’m not that good, I’m afraid.” She starts tuning the instrument, twisting the knobs and pulling the strings tighter and tighter. Suddenly with a twang one of them snaps.
“Oh shoot, I didn’t bring any spares.” She frowns at her buddy.
He shakes his head.
“Man, I didn’t either. I totally forgot.”
They both look at the older guy.
“Hey guys, I’m sorry, mine are all out in the van.”
“I can just sing, I guess,” the girl says, and starts in on “Blackbird.” The others accompany her.
After about ten minutes Noodle puts her book down, looks at me and says, “I can’t read this stupid thing anymore.” We decide to go inside so she can pick out something new to read. The library is a large room inside the lodge right across from the dining hall. A sign by the door reads “Please remove your shoes before entering library.” I reluctantly slip off my shoes and step onto the thin carpet. It’s just a room with some couches, some bookshelves and a piano. Anyone can take any book they want; there’s no librarian or anything.
Noodle sits down at the piano and starts to play a tuneless plinking and plunking as I scan the shelves. The books are separated into subjects such as “Nutrition”, “Metaphysics”, and “Self-help.” Happily, I find a brief shelf of poetry. The books have all been donated, so it’s a pretty random selection; a lot of Khalil Gibran, a few Bukowskis, a handful of thin chapbooks. I pull a battered copy of the Song of Hiawatha off the shelf and plop onto the couch. I never could be bothered to read this thing.
As Noodle bangs on the keys I start singing from the book, making barely melodic yowling sounds like a cat. She starts laughing and playing more fervently, and in response I yowl with greater passion.
"Annnnd the laaaast of all the figuuuuures
Was a hearrrrt within a cirrrrcle,
Drawn withiiiiiin a magic cirrrrrcle;
And the iiiiiiimage had this meeeeeaning:
“Naked lieeeees your hearrrrrt before me,
To your naked hearrrrt I whisper!”
.
Poor Longfellow is no doubt turning over in his grave, but we are laughing and laughing. She is doing that thing where she’s laughing so hard she’s not making any sound, nearly falling off the bench, doubled over with silent merriment.
Bradley appears at the door. He stands there listening with a smile, then kicks off his shoes and throws himself onto the couch next to me, picking up a magazine and reading as my little Indian and I continue to crack each other up.
When dinnertime arrives we put our shoes on and join the others in line for the meatless smorgasbord that awaits us in the dining room. While we are waiting, Bradley tells us about the article he’s been reading, about this guy who is a vegetarian except that he cooks and eats road kill to supplement his diet. The man sees it as a form of recycling.
At the table, Noodle breaks her vow against cooked food and shoves slice after slice of cornbread into her mouth, a devilish gleam in her eye, as if she’s daring us to say something. We don't say anything.
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