Valmiki’s Palm

“In the beginning,” say the Upanisads—a scripture composed, according to the rishis of ancient India, by no one; a scripture self-created, found floating like mist, or the bands of a rainbow, in the primordial forest air,

there was nothing here at all . . . Death alone covered this completely, as did hunger, for what is hunger but death? Then Death made up his mind: “Let me equip myself with a body” (Sanskrit: atma). So he undertook a liturgical recitation (arc), and as he was reciting, water (ka) suddenly sprang from him. Amazed, Death thought: “Recitation caused water to spring from me!” This is what gave the name to and discloses the hidden nature of recitation (arc-ka). Truly, water springs up for he or she who knows the secret of recitation. Recitation is running water.

I. Adoration of a Hose

I was born in a hospital located on the flanks of a volcanic cone. This cone, named Mount Tabor, looks innocent as an over-turned teacup as it rises over densely populated southeast Portland, Oregon. Decades before my birth, scientists had declared the cone unimpeachably extinct. The hospital, however, afforded a nice view of another cone, thirty-five miles away in the same volcanic system, also declared extinct in those days: Mount St. Helens. Forgive my suspicion of certain unimpeachable declarations of science.

My birth cone’s slopes were drained by tiny seasonal streams that, like most creeks in that industrialized quadrant of Portland, were buried in underground pipes long before I arrived on the scene. There were also three small reservoirs on Tabor’s slopes, containing the water that bathed me at birth, water I’d drink for eighteen years, water that gave me life. But this water didn’t come from Mount Tabor, nor from the surrounding hills, nor even from the aquifer beneath: it came, via manmade flumes, from the Bull Run River, which drains the slopes of the Cascade Mountains forty miles away.

I was born, then, without a watershed. On a planet held together by gravity and fed by rain, a planet whose every creature depends on water and whose every slope works full-time, for eternity, to create creeks and rivers, I was born with neither. The creeks of my birth-cone were invisible, the river from somewhere else entirely. Of course millions of Americans are now born this way; some of them grow up without creeks, live lives lacking intimacy with rivers, and become well-adjusted, healthy, productive citizens even so.

Not me. The dehydrated suburbs of my boyhood felt as alien to me as Mars. The arid industrial life into which I was being prodded looked to me like the life of a Martian. What is a Martian? Could Mars support intelligent life? I had no idea. My early impression of the burgeoning burbs around me was of internally-combusting hordes of dehydrated beings manufacturing and moving unnecessary objects from one place to another in order to finance the rapid manufacture and transport of more unnecessary objects. Running water, on the other hand, felt as necessary to me as food, sleep, parents, and air. And on the cone of my birth, the running waters had been eliminated.

I didn’t rebel against the situation. Little kids don’t rebel. That comes later, along with the hormones. What I did was hand-build my own rivers, breaking all neighborhood records, in the process, for amount of time spent running a garden hose. . . .

In the beginning in Southeast Portland, there was nothing much there at all. Dehydrated Martians seemed to run the place completely. So my atma and I fastened the family garden hose to an azalea bush at the uphill end of one of my mother’s sloping flowerbeds, turned the faucet on as hard as Mom would allow, and watched hijacked Bull Run River water spring forth in an arc and start cutting a miniscule, audible river (ka) down through the bed. I then camped by this river all day.

As the Hose River ran and ran the thing my mother understandably hated and my atma and I loved began to happen...