Hoh

Many years ago I was fascinated by the Walking Man and the Running Girl. I had watched them, each isolated in a lonely world of traveling up and down Lamar Blvd and the Shoal Creek Trail, waste away with every mile. Just a few months ago I saw the Walking Man after many, many years of having forgotten him. His feet were wrapped in bulky cloth and splayed out at an awkward angle. He trudged along only with the aid of a walker.

Somehow he has made it much longer than the Running Girl whom I have not seen in years. She was rail thin, a skeleton really, always dressed in a pink jogging outfit. I suspected a dire case of anorexia. Had she eventually wasted away completely, or had her family finally made the decision to hospitalize her.

Now there is a new Running Man. A young African American in his early to mid-twenties. He runs shirtless with long braided hair and a sleek muscularly sculpted body. He is always carrying what seems to be a heavy backpack on one hand.

It has occurred to me that he may just be training for something. But always as I pass by, he catches my eye with a vacant look that is somehow at the same time defiant.

I am drawn to these three because I think I find that tendency in myself—the possibly romanticized desire to just walk until I can walk no more, like Peace Pilgrim, but without the mission of faith. Mine would be a mission of escape from everything in this world that is profane. The traffic and the materialism, the grave destruction of the whole natural world for own social gain. I would carve a holy path of harmlessness.

Carl Pope said of John Muir that it was his radical act of just walking that brought him to the Sierra Nevadas and made him into the man he was.

As we hiked into the Hoh Rain Forest the words of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness lingered in my mind:

“We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we were traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign—and no memories.”

There were times on the trail when I truly felt that we were in the night of first ages, exposed to the elements, yet taking some comfort in the knowledge that there were others on the trail with us, less alone I imagine miles away from a car or a building or cell phone service than the Walking Man or the Running Girl and the Running Man—whose radical act of defiance created a singular space in the midst of the bustling city.

shrine

I made it to this café, to sit in front of this computer with a beer (although not the most tasty one) after hunting down my son at Yosemite National Park with the expert assistance of super-sleuth Levinski. Yes, my only, magical son, who has dreams swirling about him and histories of grandfathers and mothers who have told me in my own dreams that he will be special, that he IS special and nothing should surprise me. But it does—and infuriates me.

I have made the commitment to do this—I have made a crazy airline reservation and ungodly travel itinerary to fly to Iowa to take a workshop on writing about Place. It’s funny because Place for me is Many Places, but not here—not Austin. It is the cold biting wind of the farm in Dimmitt, or the arroyos and cicada sounds of Palo Duro Canyon—but it is as if this town is sterile for me, except of course for The Springs.

I remember writing a poem (now long burned in the fire) about swimming, about life below the surface of the water. That is an experience almost holy.  Which reminds me of another poem – long ago when Eliza was tiny, about lying beneath the Cottonwoods at Deep Eddy. The orgasmic Cottonwood. Gasp.

I guess I am wrong then. There is magic here. Here be dragons, and magic and grottos with random offerings and burning red dragonflies, and maidenhair fern.

If I were to do this right this would be a weaving, woof and weave, story and naturalism. The shift in my life, the “natural transition” as the Black Cohosh bottle calls it, and the loss of self somehow dovetailing into the life-cycle of the dragonfly, all told in books, not the internet. This will be my challenge.  Or maybe I don’t even know. I feel the urge to explore, to travel, to question and research and watch light shifting over a room, to see what is not being seen. I guess then I would like to be the see-er, the one who wonders what the burning red dragonfly notices about a woman standing by a grotto before a random collection of offerings at the statue of St. Francis and why she doesn’t want to move as long as it holds still, apprehending.

shadow

It is the time of year when the sun loses its crisp starch on things which draw themselves out far from their seat on the earth, leaning at an awkward angle toward evening. It is a time when you might see a woman walking alone along a cold trail, shrouded in the shadows of barren trees. The bridge casts a dark stain across the water and a grey heron calmly glides overhead, its ghostlike other skimming the ground.

There is an emptiness to winter, as if all the sand of time had drained away, and the glass jar aches to break, as if breaking might lead to relief at the end of a year painfully distended with days. A woman walking on a cold trail is an empty hour glass aching to break, a fleeting shadow, a ghost.

The sun illuminates the water and in the glow the fish and turtles appear. There is nothing more than this but a child sleeping in a warm bed on a cold night, or the vastness of an early morning solitude, or the shattering glass of an abrupt freedom that calls a woman to walk alone in winter on a trail filled with shadows.

burning

Winter came and went, and before long I was nestled in a tiny cabin in the piny woods 13 miles outside of Bastrop, Texas. There was considerable downsizing involved--going from a 3-bedroom house in Austin to a 400 square foot cabin required selectivity. Among the first things to be abandoned were plastics. Anything plastic: tupperware, kitchen utensils, toys. It all went to a good home somewhere in Austin, while we rebuilt a tiny life in the woods where room could only be spared for natural materials, heirlooms, ceramics,glass, and hand-crafted furniture. This is what life was like: I (or my daughter and I) would arrive home before dusk, make dinner, then sit on the porch until night, watching first the pileated woodpeckers and finches at the bird feeder, the lizards and possums and endangered toads who (finally) had discovered our little pond. Later the tall pines would grow dark, and the owls would begin to call to one another far and near. I imagine the life of a river stone, tumbling downstream toward it knows not where. Maybe this is the best way to describe how it has been since the fire. The fire took everything, left nothing but ash, and sifting through that ash for remnants of who I might have been did not help recreate that being, not yet anyway. Still tumbling. But I have an unusual, lingering fascination with fire. I watch the heat rise and wonder: Was that what it was like? Did it hiss, was it fast? How long did my animals suffer? Tonight as I watch the dying embers of the chiminea, I am alone, and I am thinking of books lost: Annie Dillard, Adrianne Rich, and I think of this fragment of Song:

If I'm lonely it's with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore in the last red light of the year that knows what it is, that knows it's neither ice nor mud nor winter light but wood, with a gift for burning.

okra

returning home on Christmas day, it is cold and tonight it will freeze. The garden is barren except for the okra that juts up like punji sticks, leafless and yet continuing to produce, miraculously, okra, inedible and alien in shape.

this day extraordinary blossoms emerge. overnight a hard freeze, and I wake to check on them. they are vibrant in the morning sun bathing fragile petals in warmth. tonight another, harder, freeze. I am not sure they will make it, these hot summer plants that delight me with their insistence upon bringing forth beauty into the gray cold day.

present

Leavenworth, WA Summer 2010

My God, I look at the creek…If I seek the senses and skill of children, the information of a thousand books, the innocence of puppies, even the insights of my own city past, I do so only, solely, and entirely that I might look well at the creek…
Here is the word from a subatomic physicist: “Everything that has already happened is particles, everything in the future is waves.” Let me twist his meaning. Here it comes. The particles are broken; the waves are translucent, laving, roiling with beauty like sharks. The present is the wave that explodes over my head, flinging the air with particles at the height of its breathless unroll; it is the live water and the light that bears from undisclosed sources the freshest news, renewed and renewing, world without end.
-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, pp. 102-3

Escape

It often feels best to lay low, inconspicuous, instead of waving your spirit around from high places like a lightning rod."
--Annie Dillard