🎭 Path 10: part one

In 5 parts

“There cannot be only one path toward such a great mystery,” said Symmachus.

Dressed in the red feathers of a male Northern Cardinal, I joined a parade of alligators, jellyfish, and mermaids as we made our way to the river.

When we got there, a pirate or goddess broke a branch into pieces and handed them to me and some others.

This is creosote, she said.

Creosote! I shoved it in my mouth to wet it and showed my hawk friend this trick. This is what the high desert smells like in the rain, I told her. A warm spiced-honey note you can’t find anywhere else.

Why the pirate-goddess had brought it, I didn’t know. Even a wannabe outsider like me knows that walking with St Anne’s on Mardi Gras, these things just happen, especially the closer you get to the river.

This was my second year going to Mardi Gras, though I’d been to New Orleans several times and am always just a stiff wind away from moving there.

Last year, at my first parade’s end, I was a pineapple beside my friend the strawberry, watching a party sing and put their beloved’s ashes in the river. This muddy and terrible American Styx.

We watched with reverence as they bent over the rocks and flung a canister containing grey and white remains into the wind—and into our faces. Ashes stuck to my lips and my strawberry friend’s pink false eyelashes. We laughed, honored.

So I knew Things Tend to Happen at the parade’s end that defy easy explanation. Standing there holding a gift of mouth-wet creosote that smelled of the high desert, I noticed that the drums around us had been beating a steady rhythm, low and constant and with something behind them that I recognized in my bones, something carried down from thousands of years—tens of thousands, from First-Dog Times—a DNA memory of grief drumming, maybe.

I have no idea how many people were drumming—five? Ten? But it began to feel like everyone was drumming, that I was drumming, that I was the drums, and my body pulsed and nodded in time. And then I was shaking my creosote branch in front of my body, and my mother came up from the river and I was crying beside all these mourners whose loved ones were also coming out of the muddy river toward them.

To be continued tomorrow.

Paths:

“Death is a Way to Be,” a gorgeous essay about a certain type of New Orleans funeral, by C Morgan Babst in Guernica