First World Existential Angst As Seen Through a Windshield

 Back in September I set out for Northwest Arkansas in what would be a frenzy of mechanical motion, too many grand vistas, geologic and human history given a nod of recognition but left unsounded. Nearly six thousand miles in the going and returning. Smoke choked the air through the Cascades well into Utah, the Escalante dawned apocopliptic, then came the Grand Canyon with all it's unfathomable treachorous magnitude. On and on I drove stopping each day to walk some place, any place. Somewhere on the western slopes of the Rockies the finitude of life felt tangiable and that ledger of moments well lived, oppurtinties siezed, and the remainder of what's to come diminishing with each revolution of the tires. Not to say I let all moments pass: I rise before dawn, usually find myself in the forest at the blue hour, helped rescue an injured woman five miles down into the canyon. Her mistake? Carrying the weight of her late husbands dreams. Perhaps a mistake more of us should make. One night speeding down the western slopes thinking back to that old lady, dehydrated, ankle grotesquly aranged, recalling dinner with my nephew, and walking above the Buffalo River with a man who's become a father to me felt like a revalation of the value of a thing discovered long after it's been lost to time. The next day I crawled into an ancient graniery left by the Anastazi not daring to discard prematurely what would one day be marked as "squandered" under the heading of oppurtinities. That frenzy of motion didn't cease; I returned from that trip five days premature. Learning nothing, perhaps.

Inertial Force

Three years ago to the month I stood at the pass looking down on these impossibly blue bodies of water nestled neatly some five hundred feet down below. Sat for a moment on a lichen encrusted out cropping then turned and left to make it the ten miles back to the road swearing I'd return to spend the night. Life, as we know, has it's own inertia, choices kick off rock slides we feel powerless to extract ourselves from once the decent is begun. So on the sharp edge of gains and losses I drug myself up the mountain, half out of my head with grief, to make good on that oath; escaping the inertia created when this place was covered in snow. 

Early spring the salmon berries send out their precocious blossoms at the first hint of warming weather and longer periods of sun; trillium, if not for their triune symmetry of petals and bracts would be gaudy, too starkly luminous against the deep greens of the forest floor, signal not the beginning but a time become. Walking this weekend through the low land forest and sub alpine ridges the feeling is one of unraveling, grand last stands. All things seemed to be anticipating the cold, clinging to the vestiges of the waning sun: a transient time. 

My feet are bloodied, tan wool soaked through with the color sub alpine blue berries leave on fingers. My hips are raw from the ill fitting pack and my arms are creased with gouges from from the rocks as I moved too quickly down the scree in fog dense enough to make me question the wisdom of my path. A transient time, a time to overcome inertia with a force greater. 

 

Autumn Haint

Plans change. Infrastructure is at the mercy of ambivalent forces: roads are swept away, bridges collapse, things, being subject to entropy, fall apart. So after several such collapses I woke at three to catch the early ferry. There's a ridge line on an island where one can stand facing south by south east and if such a person is lucky dawn will provide answers to questions we ask without the symbolic intermediary of language.  It's this ridge line I sought this morning and one particular Gary Oak, which seems to have survived the last glacial scouring, to sit beneath. 

These northern latitudes provide ample time to cross through the channels and then ramble through the lodge pole pines, maples, and occasional fir still in the dark hours before first light. This morning I could feel the clouds before I saw them, dense, compressing the air between them and what lay beneath. The darkness was tangible, a thing that perhaps photons would be unable to penetrate, unable to push into the valleys. An evolutionary memory rises on such mornings, irrational as it is, you feel your softness, vulnerable, your sight is poor. You are more exposed in that moment than the first time you lay beneath another. As I walked my headlamp shown back at me with a singular pair of eyes, then two, then three: deer. I stopped, switching off the light, hoping to let my eyes adjust or at the very least let my ears learn the task of sight in darkness but all was still, compressed. Neither the bipedal or quadrapeds stirred. We, two and four legs alike, are prey in the darkness, similarly vulnerable. Disconcerted with this feeling of kinship I found my oak in the dark and sat underneath it's gothic branches. 

An owl called from dark to dark unanswered by my unstudied accounting. It was a diminutive dawn. Darkness changed to grey, the sun choosing modesty, so I continued on to the north. As I've said before we never go alone into the forest and today was no different. I wanted to stay on the southeast side of the island tonight underneath the madrones and next to the salal but what I brought with me today couldn't be held. We are entering the months of introspection, too many hours of darkness, the light seldom more than variations of shadows, the sun a haint inhabiting a memory. A memory already haunted. There, out in the forest, a person is a haunted house he himself can not abide within. 

Too late to sleep too early to leave. I've been telling myself sleep hasn't come because my hands are torn to ribbons from labor and while it is a delicious pain it isn't why sleep hasn't taken me. It's the voice I don't hear, the words to be read have ceased and even those were more far more than I deserved.

Recently I made my way back to the northwest. Although not back to Oregon but to Washington along the Puget Sound for reasons both professional and personal. When I got here from Texas I immediately went to Deception Pass to walk among the colossal trees down to the water worn pebbled beach where I had once sat listening to the loons call over the water. I have seen many beautiful places in my travels; some stark and some so fiercely fecund as to be overwhelming. The Puget Sound is the later. After getting discharged from the hospital and being left alone on July 15 to make my own plan I knew that if my time was coming due this is where I would want to see. Or at least a place I wanted to be that was within my means. In truth I would rather have gone back to Sumber, Mongolia and sat next to the ovo over looking the vast plains from the "holy" mountain sacred to both the Buddhist and Animist populating the region. Walking up the spine of the mountain the wind threatening to blow even the sturdiest from their perch was where the initial thought of a godless universe crept into my mind. But here is where I am. If the medical community can save me it's a good place to be and if they can't it's also a good place to be; if only for the meeting of land and sea.  Driving back the desire to take the original route was strong through Wyoming but I took the well worn route through Utah if only to say goodbye to the places I had fallen in love with over the years. I am as nostalgic as I am self abusing. Even now that I have answers to questions that plagued me and my actions for years I feel no solace in them. A reason is only good to bring clarity not relief and even if relief is found no redemption certainly. So I drove past Lake Powell and Cotton Wood Canyon, the road to the Paria River leading to Kitchen Canyon, had coffee in Cedar, and took the long way through the Kaibab. Drove past in silence, in reverence, a wordless confession. So now I am home and I doubt I will make it there again.

Long ago I used to pray. Those times a cousin's cock was thrust into my eight year old body. I still believed God was good as tissue was violated.

Long ago I used to pray. Those times my fathers fist rained down like a southern thunderstorm. I still believed God was there as bruises painted my skin.

Long ago I used to pray. Those times my mother calmly said I was the worse thing to ever happen to her. I still believed God had a plan as I felt her words, an eroding knowledge.

Long ago I used to pray. Those times my neck enclosed within my fathers grip. Coldly stating my life would amount to nothing. I still believed God was love  as I learned of powerlessness.

Long ago I used to pray. But my knees have not touched the ground. I know there is nothing beyond or within.

Stream of semi Consciousness

Late April, time for spring showers and delicate buds yet snow blows sideways from the west.  Biting wind is ripping through all my layers while the knee deep mud incases my legs leeching moisture into my boots, soaking socks,  finding my bones.

This area is rural poor in close proximity to two rough cities. That is to say ideal for the manufacturing of meth. A drug I have seen in use in other parts of the country....usually in the back of a dive bar. Drug manufacturing is never something that comes to mind when in new places. My mind doesn't go there much preferring historical context, local cultural heritage, and geographical particulars. But the other night an hour before my alarm was set to pull me from my dreamlessness a substantial explosion and the sound of flames broke through. The house across the street from my temporary living situation was a meth  lab now raging inferno probably from a lack of ventilation. This region is one of those sad rural distracts with a  profoundly visible income gap. Trash is heaped in the deep natural water dranages, signs swinging by one hinge; creaking in an eerie cinematic fashion. Once made acutely aware of the presence of meth my understanding of place was rounded out. A place of little social mobility, poor educational opportunities, and a lack of community cohesion.

Perhaps this is merely my own misanthropic perpective. I've seen and done  enough to not romanticize the William S. Burroughs addictions played out against the working poor. Have also seen enough not to venerate the Andrew Carnegie's or the pursuit of wealth.

I'll take the mud, the  hypothermic wind...at least i feel something. The more places I go, which is getting to be a chore keeping up with them, the more hollowed out I feel; a primative canoe set a drift...just like these words...a stream of thoughts unmoored.