It was far
colder than I expected it to be. I walked quickly, into the breeze that carried
the whooshing of the water from the nearby creek. I pulled my cocoon of
sweatshirts closer and wondered which was more chilling, the late-winter breeze
or the sound of the winter water. As I followed the creek, its gurgling sotto
voce mimicked my rapid pace.
I had
walked there many times, listening intently to the creek’s susurrant mystical
language, unintelligible to me yet tantalizingly wordlike. It was always trying
to tell me something that I couldn’t understand.
The trees
along the banks were brown and bare, crowded as though seeking warmth from each
other, lifting as one supplicant bony fingers to the featureless white sky.
Except for one, which mutely called to me. I stopped, puzzling. Then slowly, over spongy early-spring ground, with
a mysterious sense of presence, I approached it. The creek ran smooth there,
silky and subdued.
That tree
was darker than the others, and it wasn’t just beseeching; it was screaming.
Long thorns burst from its branches and a spiral of thorns entwined it. How had
I not seen its pain before, and why did it seem familiar to me? It was at once
new and known. Why? What was it? The winter-bound trees stretching their
scraggly fingers to the pallid sky, the black tree with its girdle of thorns –
they settled in me and unsettled me. What was it?
I continued
on my walk, chilled in a different way, slowed, turning again and again to look
back at that tree as it gradually receded into the wooded tangle, assuming its
previous anonymity. What was it?
Days later
it came: Dachau. The memorial sculpture. The same frozen reaching, the same
silent screams, the same motionless writhing. In the background the ovens I
would not walk through. I had had no thought of encountering such a thing on my
walk. I wasn’t looking for it. But there it was and will be, every leafless
February.
How is it
that some things in our daily landscapes are suddenly seen with a new eye? How
is it that something so obvious – like pain – can be hidden? Were these the
mysteries carried in the current of the creek?
The Dachau
agonies and the cold trees grasped at the same indifferent sky. By accident or
design that I saw the one in the other? No matter. Enough that I did.
- Maureen
O’Hern
Maureen O’Hern is a former English teacher, a botanical artist, a graduate of Purdue University and a member of the Indiana Writers Center.