The Maryhill

South of Goldendale, Washington the road gently rises, to where travelers can see four Cascade volcanoes on the rare cloudless day: Hood, St. Helens, Adams and Rainier. We slow there briefly, fully aware only Adams will be visible today. From that point on, the road will curve down faster and steeper, revolving rubber tires laying muffled percussion beneath us, as we travel toward a wedding in Portland.

Looking down from the new highway, the old road still swerves dangerously, far below. Sometimes sheep graze that hillside, gratefully employing the aging pavement as the flock ebbs and flows with the earliest spring grasses. Nearer to the river the concrete replica of Stonehenge measures each day’s progress toward the midsummer sunrise.

We pull in, to feel the wind rushing up the Columbia Gorge from the Pacific, stopping at each familiar landmark as if stroking a succession of beads on an ornate rosary. I wanted to tell my cousin and his bride about our own marriage, to present them with a modernized epithalamium, these two young people who’ve never heard of such a thing.

But I write from within stylized narratives, where the conventions of language had grown ossified long before I began to tell our story, my intertwined intuitions about the natural world, marriage, Catholicism, and the ages of man lost in a blur of generalities. I fight to speak, as Bakhtin said, in words populated with the thoughts of others.

I find my own way of telling it in reliving the many times we have driven down this particular hill together, from the afternoon of our wedding day to rides with our toddlers in the back seat. In my mind the children transform over the years into adults who now ride down other hills. Life is like that, over and over again doing the same things, each quotidian repetition a new recitation upon a uniquely carved bead of an antique rosary, full of joyful, luminious, sorrowful, glorious mystery. I sense myself falling out of time and into meaning. In the end, the focus resolves, to the multiple iterations of an automobile gliding down the Maryhill, red-tailed hawk soaring high overhead, through layer upon layer of basalt reaching down to the river.