The Question Has Vanished, But I Remember Your Eyes

Funny how a few simple paragraphs in an email from an old friend can be transcendent, words transformed into elegies for what they signify, words that are metaphors of memory: for love and happiness and pain. Everything becomes measured by tangible markers of time, so we will always remember where we have been, where we are, and where we will go. Eleven years ago, I first arrived. Seven years ago, I watched the trees fade into the darkness behind me as I left The Mountain for the last time, a life permanently, irrevocably, altered. Four years later, and three years since that I closed my eyes and realized all my dreams of the forest were real, if but for the briefest of moments. I should have lingered there much longer, long enough to memorize again the shape and meaning of the forest. As much as I knew that part of my life couldn’t last forever (forever always seems too long for me anyway), hardly a day goes by that I don't still, always, long for those days, the mountains, the forest, the people. It was a time when I could be as self-centered as I liked, with hardly a thought toward a future of any kind, because I was young and it simply didn’t matter. I even find myself longing now for all the horrible memories I have of those years, just to be able to return to that time. I can honestly say that there have been only a handful of perfectly happy moments in my life, moments when everything feels magical and amazing and perfect and just as it should be. My first season in sequoia is one of them. No matter how much time passes it remains an inextricable part of me. I would not be who I am now without having been there, without having been forever changed by the experience.

I tell my friend: It would be lovely to one day be able to show you all the many places I have loved here — even the place which long ago held the pay telephone where I would stand in the dark stillness of Sierra nighttime and whisper your name.

Forgiveness is
letting go of all
hopes for a better past.

Gutter and Downspout, Rock & Ripped Leaf

The only thing that gets me through the winters here in this part of the country is knowing that summer will arrive. Almost June now, and for weeks, weeks, weeks the temperature has rarely approached even 70 degrees and there is simply rain, rain, and more rain. The ten-day extended forecast remains uninspiring. I keep waiting for a sign, a hint, an omen, anything that promises warmth and sunshine and summer. My toes long for liberation, Gore-Tex makes me feel uncomfortably claustrophobic and I'm tired of contemplating the mysteries of my umbrella. My seasonal affective disorder lingers and I grow impatient. Ever, ever impatient.

Thirst for Salt

Not even plenty of caffeine can make snow fun. Nope. Uh uh. My dream of an endless summer has become buried under a blanket of slush. Just a week ago I looked out the window at the grey, endless expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. The lullaby of high tide reminds me of moments of utter bliss: swimming in the moonlit, wine-dark sea during summer solstice in Rethymnon, Crete, reading alone in Santa Cruz, snapping blurry photographs of my brother at Big Sur, the stinging wind and rain at Les Falaises d’Etretat and not even caring the boy I loved was about to leave me, dancing unabashedly on the cliffs above the Golden Gate Bridge, getting stoned (the last time) at Muir Woods on the way to Napa, falling asleep with C.S. and Delta the dog in Venice Beach…I only now remember drifting last night in a blueblack sea and overflowing calmness. Something spiritually healing about the sea. Something that resonates with Home. Something in the way the salt air murmurs and beckons me unknowingly its wholeness. It envelops, embraces me, and I cannot stop myself. I drink hungrily.

Will Not Give In to the Cake

How is it that I could have wasted six complete hours so easily? Effortless and imperceptible. Not spent sharing how I really feel about Joan Didion or reading Tripmaster Monkey. Not spent putting down on paper the words to the examination of landscape and self in Gretel Ehrlich that are cluttering up my head and begging for release. Not spent doing a single work related task. I appear to be on a bender of utter laziness. The current weather (grey, rainy, cold) doesn't help. A former student once had the awareness to notice this unfortunate quality in me. On the evaluation he wrote: "How the classes went seemed to be tied to the weather. Good weather = good class. Bad weather = bad class." I'm still not sure what to do with that. Being intuited on my own perception and psychological influences of place and space by an eighteen year old boy I will never see again.

About Broken Things

Unable to push away these persistent thoughts of snow. The television this morning shows me that by evening, there will be snow in the mountains. The first snow of the season in the Sierras. Makes me think of my brother, tall trees, lifetimes ago, snow so deep you couldn’t find the cabins sometimes. When he visits next month, it will be alone now. How long since he has been alone? It is different for me, but it is my loss too, a loss I mourn. We do not leave it that way, do not agree to go on with our lives when they inevitably go on with their own lives, separated by distance and space and intention. We even promise each other that nothing has changed, nothing will change. That we will both be the same people, the same friends, as we always have been. Always. A gesture that is meant to bind and connect, rather than split apart. It remains unsaid, unsettled, but we both know our words carry little truth anymore. Change rises and swells and our voices cannot be heard in the silence. In this moment I feel the grief strongly. For everything that came before (driving and singing ‘take the skinheads bowling,’ inviting random strangers to Christmas dinner, drinking coffee in the mountain mornings). For the choice between two things I did not ask to make and all that I now have to relinquish. Letting go as if it never mattered in the first place. For knowing that there is no other way.

Something Like Summer

Eighth floor, big window overlooking the clutter of too much traffic, human and not. Construction on a building in the distance, and the ground in front is covered in filmy, almost transparent plastic. I spend whole days up here thinking of leaving, not leaving, wanting to leave, looking out the window instead, rarely talking to anyone else. Each time I see the building out there, see that pale glint of almost white on the ground, my heart pauses, falters. Every time I am tricked into thinking sometime in the day, while I've been trapped in this cubicle, snow has fallen. I know it's not far off now, those long, long nights and bitter days. I have always dreamed of finding an eternal summer, a place where there is little darkness and much light and life. A place defined only by the warmth of the landscape and of the people who live there. Three times today I was tricked. Three times (and more) that I'm dreaming of a place where there is no snow. Not here. Not yet.