As soon as October rolled around Artie's mother began asking if he was still planning to perform a mikvah on the eve of Yom Kippur. In her mind the purification rite was obligatory. Artie replied: "Yes, Momma. But listen to this. I am going to perform it outdoors!"
"That's crazy. You'll catch your death with cold."
"Nah."
"Might I ask where?"
"Somewhere up the Hudson."
"Oy, veh."
His heart still felt like roadkill. Solange had hinted many times that she was not satisfied, and now she was gone. He realized now how thick-headed he had been. Once she suggested they visit Times Square for a night of porno. He did not understand then. Now he understood, woefully too late.
*
His idea was to commune with Nature.
Most Jews immersed themselves indoors. He was obsessed with finding a place much like that pictured in the 1849 painting "Kindred Spirits" by Asher Durand. The poet William Cullen Bryant stood upon a stone shelf above a waterfall in the midst of primeval forest. The vista of pristine America showed the romance of the age.
Artie had seen a rendering of it on a page devoted to the poem "Thanatopsis." Both the art and the poem had resonated within him since the Tenth Grade.
I want to immerse myself in Nature. The Nature of William Cullen Bryant and Ralph Waldo Emerson. I want to sing my Niggun loud!
*
On the way to the place chosen for his mikvah Artie rode beneath the boughs of a splendid sycamore. A crude sign was nailed to the trunk. The rustic calligrapher had woodburned an iconic finger beneath the word ENDOR. Intrigued, Artie resolved to explore the matter upon his return.
*
It was late afternoon when he halted his 1953 80cc Indian safely off the road. The geezer bike had belonged to his late uncle Izzy, who maintained it religiously and stored it in a dark private garage. Whenever Artie took off on it he heard Steppenwolf. He parked it in a blind behind the sycamore. A faint woodland trace led from there into a purple and gold forest said to be haunted by whistling spirits of the old Knickerbockers.
He had walked a hundred yards when he heard a raucous chittering above his head. Two frenzied squirrels were zigzagging up the trunk of a tall elm. Whisking out to the end of a single branch. Like a Stukka bomber, the hawk came diving. It snatched up the screaming male and climbed with mighty strokes into the forest canopy.
Artie's mind, filled with thoughts of Goethe and Emerson and Thoreau and Transcendental Bliss, was horribly awakened. Nature's guise fell away and for a brief moment Artie beheld a portion of the world shed of Glamour. Then, like a spider, Maya, the Hindu goddess of Nature, spun a stitch to repair the worldwide web of illusion.
*
He passed through a coppice of newgrowth chestnut. Rough symmetry belied a planter's hand. From the heart of this matrix a footpath led forth into a smokey hollow. Nestled in the shade of a great oak, the cabin grew like an enormous mushroom. Squat and mottled, with blond timber seemingly blotched with burgundy wine, it commanded the crest of a bald hillock, furrowed for legumes, carrots and Queen Anne's lace. Off to one side stood the white lattice of a concord grape arbor. Smoke curled from a fieldstone chimney.
Artie knew the tale of King Saul and the witch who conjured forth the ghost of Samuel the Prophet.
He pictured a dusky copper-eyed woman garbed in a leopard pelt apron and a mauve tunic open to bare her right breast.
A breeze coiled among the beech boughs.
Suddenly a wicker ewer skittered across the lawn, issuing a riot of scarlet ribbons. A jack-o-lantern carved from a humongous turnip strung from a porch rafter grinned like the Cheshire Cat.
Already the enchantment had begun.
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