The air was warm. The sage and low gnarled oaks covering the canyon walls clattered and shooshed in irregular gusts of wind. A Santa Ana wind was arriving, sweeping down from the north, compressing over the San Jacintos, warming and losing moisture until it burst out of the canyons hot and dry. “Santa Ana!” Tom said, sniffing. He explained to Nadezhda, touched the back of her hand and she jumped. “Static electricity. It’s a good sign.”
An electric shock with every touch.
After a half hour’s climb they came to Black Star Hot Springs, a series of small pools in a narrow meadow. Sycamore, live oak, and black walnut stood crowded on the flat canyon floor, surrounding the pools. Near the largest pool was a small cabin and pavilion. Hank had rented it from the town for the night, and he unlocked the door and turned on a lamp inside. Yellow window squares illuminated the steam bubbling off the pool’s surface. Stiff live oak leaves clacked together. Branch rubbed on branch, adding ghostly creaks to the susurrous of leaf sound.
“Yow—it’s hot tonight.”
The large pool was two down from the source of the spring. Concrete steps and an underwater concrete bench had been built into it, and the rest of the bottom was a hard gritty sandstone not much different from the concrete in texture. The pool was about twenty feet across, and varied between three and five feet in depth. In short, a perfect hot springs pool.
Hank, Jody, Mike and Oscar put food and drink into the cabin’s refrigerator. The rest shed their clothes and stepped into the pool. Abrupt splashes, squeals of pain, hoots of delight. The water was the temperature of a hot bath, deliciously warm once past the initial shock of it.
Oscar appeared at the pool’s edge, a big white blob in the dim light. “Watch out,” Kevin said. Oscar threw his massive head back; in the darkness he seemed three times the size of a man, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, big-bellied, thick-legged. His friends stared despite themselves. Suddenly he crouched, threw his arms wide, mimed jumping out over them. Just the way he shifted on his feet and whipped his head around implied the whole action of running forward and leaping up, landing in a giant cannonball dive. “No, no! The pool! You’ll crack the bottom!” He pawed the ground with a bare foot, shook his black curls ferociously, took a little run back, then forward to the pool’s edge, then back again, arms outstretched like a surfer’s, tilting with the absurd rhinocerine grace Kevin and Doris had seen in Bishop. Hank and Jody and Mike came out of the cabin to see what the ruckus was about, and with a last great wind-up Oscar took off, into the air like a great white whale, suspended in a ball several feet above them. Then KERPLOP, and an enormous splash.
Wild shrieks. “My God,” said Gabriela, “the water’s two feet lower.”
“And just think if Oscar weren’t in the pool.”
Doris, laughing hard, said “Oscar, you have to stay in so we aren’t beached.”
“Glug,” Oscar said, spurting water from his mouth like an Italian fountain, an immense Cupid.
“What’s the flow rate of this spring?” Mike said. “Ten gallons a minute? We should be back to normal by morning.”
“We’ll have to pour some tequila in,” Hank said solemnly, carrying out a big tray filled with bottles and glasses. “A sacrifice. Here, start working on these.”
Jody passed around glasses, leaning out over the water.
“You look like a cocktail waitress, stop working so hard, we can get this stuff.”
“Hank’s bringing out the masks, then we’re done.”
Hank brought out a stack of papier-maché masks he had made, animals faces of all kinds. “Great, Hank.” “Yeah, I spent a couple months on these, every night.” He gave them out, very particular about who got which one. Kevin was a horse, Ramona an eagle, Gabriela a rooster, Mike a fish; Tom was a turtle, Nadezhda a cat; Oscar was a frog, Doris a crow, Jody a tiger, and Hank himself was a coyote. All the masks had eyeholes, and mouths convenient for drinking. They walked around the pool inspecting each other and giggling. Masked heads, naked bodies: it was weird, bizarre, dangerous looking.
“Ribbit!”
They all joined in with the appropriate cry.
Jody stepped into the pool and whistled at its heat, her long body feline under the tiger mask. Hank hopped around handing people glasses, or bottles for those who needed them to be able to drink through their masks.
“This is Hank’s own tequila,” Tom told Nadezhda. “He grows the cactus in his garden and does all the extraction and fermentation and distillation himself.” He took a gulp from his glass. “Horrible stuff. Here, Hank, give me some more of that.”
“It tastes fine to me,” Nadezhda said, then coughed hard.
Tom laughed. “Yeah, tequila is heavenly.”
Hank stood at one end of the pool, looking perfectly natural, as if he always went naked and sported a coyote head. “Listen to the wind.” He prowled around the pool’s edge. Over the trickle of water they could hear the wind soughing, and suddenly the shape of the canyon was perfectly clear to them: the narrowing upstream, the headwall, the side canyons up above—all that, just in sound. Hank began humming, and some of them picked it up, the great “aum” shifting as different people joined in or stopped to breathe. Over this ground bass Hank muttered what sounded like random sentences, some intelligible, some not. “We come from the earth. We’re part of the earth.” Then a low breath chant, “Hi-ya huh, hi-ya huh, au-oom,” and then more complex and various, a singsong poem in a language none of them knew, punctuated by exclamations. “We come from the earth like this water, pouring into the world. We are bubbles of earth. Bubbles of earth.” Then another language, Sanskrit, Shoshone, only the shaman knew. He prowled around them like Coyote checking out a henhouse, growling. They could feel his physical authority; they stood in the pool milling around to face him, chanting too, getting louder until Coyote howled, and suddenly they were all baying at the moon, as loud as voices could ever be.
Hank hopped in the pool, hooted. “Man when you’re wet that wind is cold!”
“Quick,” Tom said, “more awful tequila.”
“Good idea.”
Jody went to get more from the cabin, and while she was there she pulled the cabin’s TV onto the deck and turned it on, with the sound off. It seemed a kind of lamp, the faces and command centers mere colored forms. Jody dialed up music, Chinese harps and low flute tones, whistling over the sound of the wind. Overhead the stars blinked and shivered, brilliant in the so-black sky; the moon wouldn’t rise for a hour or two. Just over the treetops one of the big orbiting solar collectors shone like a jewel, like a chip of the moon or a planet ten times bigger than Jupiter.
Ramona stood in the shallow end, a broad-shouldered eagle, collarbones prominent under sleek wet skin. “The water gets too hot, but with the wind it feels really cold when you get out. You can’t get it right.”
“Reminds me of Muir’s night on Shasta,” the turtle said. “He was tough, his father was a Calvinist minister and a cruel man, he beat Muir and worked him at the bottom of wells. So nothing in the Sierras ever bothered him. But one time he and a friend climbed Shasta and got caught in a storm up there at the top, a real bad blizzard. It should have killed them, but luckily Shasta was more active in those days, and there was still a hot spring pool in the summit caldera. Muir and his friend found this pool and jumped in, but the water in it was like a hundred and fifty degrees, and full of sulphur gas. So they couldn’t stay in it, but when they got out they started to freeze instantly. It was scald or freeze, no middle ground. All they could do to survive was keep dipping in and out of the pool, lying in the shallows and rolling over all night long, one side in the water and the other in the wind, on and on until their senses were so blasted that they couldn’t tell the hot from the cold. Afterwards Muir said it was the most uncomfortable night he had ever spent, which is saying a lot, because he was a wild man.”