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The Embodiment of Applause
As the weather raged, I journaled about a trip we’d taken to Camp Ocoee the week before. I had stayed in the car while Jim gassed up at Cherokee Corners, studying how the late-day sun had its way with the grassy fields; how it made the Queen Anne’s Lace at the road’s edge glow. I wanted to try to record that particular quality of light as the cloud towers built in the distance, raising their boiling heads toward heaven. While I studied the pebbled whiteness of the spindly plants, something called in the distance—a goose or a dog with an odd bark, maybe, or a man gone crazy with grief. Only the deepest pain would have made a human run out into the afternoon and scream at nature like a howling animal, I thought, realizing as this popped into my head that my imagination was growing overactive in my pursuit of material. As soon as the admonishment sprung to mind, it occurred to me that to make a judgment like that was ridiculous because using the imagination was the purpose of being creative, especially for a writer!
I was thinking about this as I drove along the beach road the next morning—protected from the suffocating humidity by the whirr of the air conditioner. The waves of heat radiating from the hood and the memory of Queen Anne’s Lace brought to mind another time when scorching temperatures and these leggy plants were fused in the experiential. A field of the “weeds,” as the United States Department of Agriculture classified them, had stretched out for about a quarter of a mile behind our house when I was a girl. I sometimes walked up to its edge and marveled that something considered a blight could produce such graceful Victorian-esque blooms.
I watched one day as they bowed their heads, wilting in the mid-day light right before my eyes. I understood—the air felt like a furnace as I turned away to trudge toward the library with my little sister in tow. When we reached the spot where the Hosely’s creek gurgled beneath the road, we looked longingly into the rushing water but knew we’d be in major trouble if we ruined our clothes so we kept moving, slogging on toward the elementary school to see what books were on the shelves. The antiquated air conditioning in the library provided little relief as we searched the rows of fiction for books to take home, and it wasn’t until we’d returned to the dark coolness of our house with all the shades drawn that we’d felt the relief of being chilled to the bone by air conditioning that actually made a difference. I recalled how the covers of the books we’d carried home were soaked with our perspiration as we tossed them onto the kitchen table. I liked this memory because it was one of my first recollections as to how much books had meant in my life. The sacrifice of making my way through stifling heat to find new inspiration had been well worth the effort.
On that hot Florida morning, I sat in the car lost in thoughts of that far-away time for only a few minutes after the air conditioning had quieted, the memories falling away as I realized I was suffocating. I roused myself from my reverie and hurried out of the car in order to begin closing the condo, as we would be relinquishing the oceanic air for that special brand of Chattanooga humidity. We were returning home that afternoon to prepare for our first trip to South Dakota, and I dreaded it, a fact that made me feel guilty and sad.
Once home, Chattanooga was living up to my memories and there was only one outdoor spot that afforded a dependable escape from the heat: the screened porch. I spent most of my mornings there and had decided it was the perfect place to entertain. We had invited our next-door neighbors for dinner, and they remarked that we’d found a great spot on the bluff as we settled into the comfortable furniture. As the breezes flowed up the mountain, the talk turned to our work in Costa Rica and South Dakota as it always did with people in our lives. Jim mentioned a mutual friend, a dentist, who had just returned from Haiti with a strain of incurable malaria. The conversation lulled for a few moments as Walter, a doctor, closed his eyes. When he opened them, he said, “I don’t think I can imagine doing that. I could not put myself in such a situation as I’d have to choose between myself and myself.”
The astuteness and raw honesty of his comment ricocheted through my brain. I spent a great deal of time thinking about this as the days rolled along, dawning murky most mornings as the sun sparred with fog to gain a foothold in our patch of sky. The dampness of those precious mornings made me hug my cup of coffee close to my chest as I stood at the edge of the screened porch watching the mist play with the leaves on the trees. They flapped like the rotor blades on helicopters, the constant movement reminding me of how applause would look if the sound were made physical. What would the leaves be applauding? I wondered. Certainly not the choices I’d made…
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The Bottom of Discontent
I journaled most of the trip south, admitting in writing that I’d fallen completely in love with the mountain house, which was becoming hidden from the road as the woods dressed in shiny green—the lushness making me feel poignant about missing a minute of the ever-changing beauty. It seemed the only place I was ever able to relax was the screened porch with its “eye” on nature—her cooling breezes accompanied by an elemental soundtrack that included the splash of the waterfall and birdsong. But leave we always did and when we arrived at the fairgrounds in New Orleans, the festival was vibrating with so many types of music that the percussions shook the ground, a feeling akin to the earth having an oddly rhythmic form of palsy. The tents spreading out as far as I could see held gospel, blues, reggae, calypso, contemporary jazz, big band, Cajun, Zydeco and other genres of music I’d never known existed. The mass of people flowing through the grounds created a psychedelic ocean of color that not even Jackson Pollack would have thought to splash on the same canvas. I felt as if I were floating through a kaleidoscope of sound, hues and aromas.
The food ranged from barbecued alligator and crawfish étouffée to oyster poboys, and of course, beignets, which were brought to the festival by the famed Café du Monde. The aroma of barbecue was tantalizing as it floated above the row of food booths, battling it out with the smell of hot grease emanating from the proliferation of deep-fat fryers. Drinks were almost as varied as the dishes served—wine, beer and Bloody Mary’s tempting at every turn. I reached a point at which I declared I had to stop putting things in my mouth because the run I’d taken that morning was becoming a token effort given the excess of food and liquor I was consuming. There were so many outlandishly dressed people that my brain couldn’t fully process the scene as I scanned the crowd, trying my best to remember details that would color the backdrop of any story or poem I might write about the experience. My favorite fair-goers were the ones who stood as close as they could to the stage and swayed their bodies with the music—eyes closed as if they were making love to the rhythms.
One such guy was dancing in the grass by a steel police barricade that protected the acts on the stage from the public. He was moving to the music of the Bluebirds—his skinny hips gyrating in shiny tight leotards. His scrunched socks were pillowed neatly above his Reeboks, which shifted on the grass as he flexed his knees to coincide with the whine of the guitar and the pulsing drums. His tan was obviously hard won and he would monitor it as he went along, shifting a sleeve farther up his arm when he sensed the beginning of a tan line or adjusting his shirt at the neckline as he spritzed himself with a spray bottle he kept at the ready in the beaten-down grass next to a bright blue towel he used to keep the sweat from his eyes. His hair was the color of cinnamon sticks and was clipped short except for a skinny braid that flicked around on his thin brown neck. His head was the liveliest part of his body—it shot to and fro as his arms stayed glued to his sides. Watching his thin butt vibrate to the grinding of the blues made me chuckle, and I was irritated that Jim and the gang were determined to move me along because I could have watched him for hours as I absorbed details that might have explained a bit more about how he lived his life away from the gregarious activity he was enjoying so keenly.
As I sat in the hotel room the next day watching the ships coming and going, I pondered how life kept me tossed about, supposing it would for a while no matter how much I hoped for a better balance. I was grateful for experiences like the jazz festival but I wanted so keenly to be able to be still and write. It was almost comical how many people asked me, “What problems could you possibly have?” I couldn’t explain even to myself why I considered it to be an insult except that it brought about waves of guilt to think about how well off we were materially and how unhappy I could be at times. I guessed people believed this because for most of them, their nemesis had always been a lack of money. Even in moments when I doubted I had a “right” to my grumblings, there was one valid point at the bottom of my discontent and for this I wanted to give myself the acceptance to continue my search. I was extremely happy when I was bettering myself intellectually and creatively. In fact, doing so helped me to relax into a part of myself that was calm and loving. Therefore, I believed my desperation for betterment and for creative time was a valid one; not merely a phantom of psychological dis-ease. The bottom line, though, was that time for neither of these treasured things would fit into my life as it was, and my creative flow was drying up under the pressure of relational issues.
Knowing the spiral that took place when these subjects were uppermost in my mind, I decided that sitting and mulling them over would only push me into a darker place so I decided to take a walk. I headed to Jackson Square where I saw one of the most curious specimens of humanity I’d ever come across. It was a man who must have spent hours in front of a mirror putting on makeup and wrapping himself in rags. He had glued small tusks into his mouth, which pointed up into his painted, tortured expression. His eyes had been a lively shade of green before the bleeding of red had overcome them. He was a study in torn cloth, string and burlap—all smudged with dirt except around his shoulders where he’d fashioned the “costume” into a cape of sorts. At first, I couldn’t tell whether his skin was black or just so dirty that it appeared to be black.
His hairline answered the question, proving that he’d used dark body paint or some such substance to color his face because it had seeped into the hair framing his forehead. Were the blond and red goatees real or were they applied with glue as they extended from the bottom of a patch of white he’d painted to frame lips bulging with tusks? I wondered, standing completely absorbed as he slowly crawled toward a cigarette butt that someone had flipped onto the sidewalk. He extended his hand toward it in slow motion, picked it up with fingers slightly hidden by torn rags and raised it to his nose. He sniffed it like an animal would investigate something before eating it and then rolled it around in his fingers. I felt shy snapping photos of the man but the interest didn’t phase him—he must have wanted the attention given the trouble he’d taken to draw a crowd in a busy square.
Afterwards, I sat in a café recording my impressions of him, curious as to what type of person would think that doing what he was doing was fun. There had to be some thrill in it or he certainly wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble! I wondered what his mother would have said if she’d seen him in his get-up. Were there hints of his bizarre personality in his childhood? I questioned. Or was he perhaps merely a frustrated actor getting his kicks on a spring weekend? My musing made me think of a radio program I’d heard the week before during which Alex Haley said American family values were disappearing. While I listened intently to the interview with the famed author, I marveled at how he made me feel as if I were sitting on the back porch with him as he talked about his aunts, great aunts and grandmothers. He charged every person to interview his or her parents and grandparents because the current generation would be the first to not know who they were in terms of family if they did not. “Go and hug your grandparents,” he commanded. “Say thank you to them because it is from them that you received your life.”
I wondered about the swaddled man in Jackson Square. Did he stay in touch with his grandmother; was she still alive? Did his mother “get him”; was his father kind to him or did he see a man who was either insane or practicing his performance art in an embarrassingly bizarre way? Did the savage-looking man crawling along the cement know “who he was”? Did he care? Somehow it seemed to me his unique way of expressing himself was one of the most sane examples of individuality I’d ever witnessed, even while his behavior was about as demented as any I’d ever seen!
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In Defiance of the Cold
The mists on the mountain bluff were my only solace—spinning, lifting and descending during the morning hours. We were in the clouds so much their filmy breathing fanned my morning world more often than the sun christened it with its dawning light. I could see the wispy pirouettes as they danced above the falls—water regaling water. The city, still dressed in drab winter garb even with early spring at hand, took the cloudy tears and used them to wash its streets. There were only tiny bits of color in the dullness of the muted world with the first burgeoning of red buds beginning to glow. The bulbs were still sheathed in soft green but seemed to be thinking seriously about opening their faces to the chilly air—tiny star-shapes in pale shades of their future colors aching to slice through the tips of their bulbous heads to celebrate their tender splendor. Japonica was pushing its Carmine-colored blooms from its bare stems as if in defiance of the cold while everything else preferred to patiently await warmer weather.
I thought about how most people wouldn’t think to describe a dreary world as lush but abundance was everywhere. This realization was unfolding in my mind as I grabbed a scrap of quiet for writing in the midst of the events surrounding Jim’s oldest son’s wedding. I lamented to my writer’s notebook, “I can’t wait to get back to you. I have missed your comfort.” Once life had become my own again, I tentatively approached my writing but it felt far away—a foreign thing after the busy-ness that had left me worn. “I have been away from my heart, so now I touch myself tenderly as I review that piece of me that shows through in the faint strokes of my own anxious pen,” I wrote. “Certain words touch me in return and I am sure they are mine. It is an acknowledgement when they whisper back, and deep emotion sparks in me; brings desire rushing forth and my emptiness is filled. My fullness greets me like a friend, but tentatively as if it is unsure how to approach me in my sadness. How can I fault either of us? I had to erect the walls in order to survive, and she was always forced to wait until I was ready.”
As the weeks progressed, the air warmed and the bony tree limbs sprouted their buds like a fine covering of mesh. I made it a point to enjoy the morning lights of the city knowing that the leaves would soon hide them from my view. As I stared at the awakening landscape, I let my mind skip across scenes from my life like a blind person’s hand touching brail in a delicate search for knowledge. As I did, a thunderhead plumed and I marveled at the power it so magnificently wielded as it drew the perimeters of its iridescent edge with a giant finger of light. It fashioned itself into a gilded pillow of moisture and when it unleashed its contents, the deluge wrapped me in a gray world through which puny light fought its way, entering the room tentatively like a tiptoeing mime bent on remaining silent. The storm thrashed against the windows as if angered that I was out of reach. I stood calmly, daring it to try and touch me.
The days seemed to careen along and suddenly the dogwoods bloomed. They unfolded their creamy flowers in concert with the azaleas, which plumped with profusions of color seemingly overnight. With our last Costa Rica trip about a month away, our destinations for the mission work were about to change. We were meeting with Craig Anderson, the Bishop of South Dakota, about repairing and building churches in his diocese, which held nine of the poorest counties in the United States on Native American reservations. We would be working with the Dakota and Lakota Sioux, and he showed us a video that broke my heart as to the conditions these people were enduring. I wondered what had transpired that would have brought them to the point of the poverty and despair I saw in the documentary.
The film led me to search bookstores in Chattanooga for anything I could find that would help answer this question and the options were slim. I found the book Black Elk Speaks and had a difficult time with the pain the story evoked. I also felt an immediate kinship with the keen connection the Native Americans in the story had felt with nature. I looked at everything around me with a newfound awe—wondering if the owl visiting the bluff at night, being a nocturnal creature, ever felt it missed the visual lushness the daylight hours brought to life. Did he sense the excitement of nature bursting forth all around him? I wondered. Of course he would, lighting as he did on tree branches, which a scant few weeks before had been bare, to find a spiky growth like the prickly surface of a piñata beneath his feet.
It was finally warm enough that I could write on the screened porch in the mornings and I loved being so much closer to the waterfall that its splashing was an accompaniment to my musings. I looked to the horizon and recognized the haze that had spawned the name Smoky Mountains—though we were not officially in the chain, I believed our ridges, which held a similar mix of mists and haze between their expanses, were close enough to share the same characteristics. These gaps and gullies, peaks and valleys were once home to a band of Native Americans with as painful a past as the one I would soon find myself greeting. Would I be up to “representing the church” with these people who painfully tapped into my wounding without even knowing it?
With that question resonating, I scribbled a poem on the empty page open in my lap. It would remain a rare first effort that turned out to be a final draft—even more unique because it predicted my experience in South Dakota and Alaska with eerie accuracy:
Plume
It is difficult
to face
someone else’s struggle
when it stokes the fire
of your own
painful burning,
especially when
you’ve labored for years
to swallow the smoke.
-Saxon Henry
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Cold, Clear and Uncaring
It stopped when its backside met the deck railing and stood there, just far enough away to feel safe while being close enough for its pointy nose, which it held high in the air, to identify Sam’s scent. I imagined this must have been as foreign a smell as it had ever encountered in relation to an animal given that Sam, who trembled with desire to get at the raccoon, had been to the groomer that day. Little did my beloved dog know he would have been no match for the teeth in that pointed snout.
Suddenly out of nowhere, a smaller fur ball came rushing in, tumbling under the larger animal as it playfully nipped at its feet. Sam was beside himself with the desire to play, prancing on his hind legs in frustration. The smaller creature, who had no fear whatsoever, stepped right up to the screen and stood nose to nose with Sam. I was guessing by then that the larger raccoon was the mother because the little guy was herded out of harm’s way the minute Sam ran his manicured nails noisily down the woven metal mesh. As the duo skipped out of range of the floodlights flanking the deck, Sam moaned in disappointment that his potential new friends had escaped without a properly sniffed “meet and greet.”
I’d never been able to experience raccoons that closely and I had to admit, even while knowing they were dangerous, I’d loved to have cuddled both of them to my chest. It made me realize why people fooled themselves into thinking that they could domesticate wild animals. I’d always been fascinated with the outlandish behavior of non-domesticated species, and some of my favorite childhood memories were when my father and I watched Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom.” We’d tune in and find ourselves crying over a dying bear cub during one episode or fighting back hysterical fits of laughter during another that involved a flock of wild birds being startled by an airboat. My dad had a passion for auto racing and had owned his own series of quarter-milers for years so when the leggy birds bolted, wings flapping and feet skimming the shallow waters of some exotic glade, the skinny wakes they made in the surface of the water made them appear as if they were in a dead heat in mother nature’s version of a quarter-mile race.
This was the only program, besides sports, that my mother would allow us to watch together because we were prone to being overly emotional and our tender psyches seemed to feed off each other. “Little House on the Prairie” had long been forbidden as the drama never failed to cause us to sob by the end of each episode. Before she nixed the show all together, she would walk through, roll her eyes and change the channel as we wiped our eyes and blew our noses, laughing a little too self-consciously at our silliness, which she thought was ridiculous! I’d never seen “Wild Kingdom” feature raccoons—maybe they weren’t exotic enough for Jim Fowler, who seemed to prefer eagles, ocelots and monkeys—and I wished I’d known more about them when the duo visited again and again as winter progressed.
Sam never lost his desire to tussle with them—an ever-present frustration in his life as the weather grew colder and we had a second significant snow near Christmas. As the holiday loomed, I was determined not to admit that I was battling a serious case of depression, plagued by nightmares and bouts of sadness that left me feeling spent and wasted. I would make the briefest of entries in my writer’s notebook and then go days without logging anything as I filled my personal journal with dark struggles: “The sky dulls with evening and my mood takes on its color.” I felt like a the protagonist in a movie I’d watched—a dying man who knew his life had been lived in vain—when he said, “All those memories will be lost in time like tears in the rain.” Would I succumb to a life lived in futility? I wondered. As I journaled about it, the red-tailed hawk patrolled the bluff, drawing me away from the page. I watched as it clung to a tree in strong winds, its talons gripping the limb as its body swayed in anticipation of its next move. Suddenly, it flattened itself against the currents and dove through the icy air, disappearing beyond the stony outcroppings at the edge of the yard.
I was trying to write poetry but only snippets emerged. As the new year dawned, I made a resolution that I would put more words on the page, hopeful that I could hold my resolve better than I had in the past. My first entry for 1989 felt like a strong start and as was most often the case when I was at home, nature was my inspiration: “The sunrise burned to expose itself as the knobby heads of mountaintops penetrated wispy clouds. The moon was as thin as a clipped nail last night, bent and useless in its loss. I watch the falls and wait for the water to take on the color of the awakening sky but it refuses to be anything but itself: cold, clear and uncaring—it falls not for orange glory but for its own clarity.”
Life kept reaching out and I couldn’t help but intertwine my fingers with its tentacles, which meant I was being pulled headlong after it and all it had to offer. I was often fooled into thinking I was planning the music of my days when more often than not I would end up dancing to songs I’d never intended to have as my soundtrack—all chosen by others. Why was it that life played its own tunes, forcing us to dance along while knowing the loving stances were the hardest to strike?
My stances had been as far from loving as any could be, and it truly bothered me but I was dancing as fast as I could, the poses I managed to hold not so graceful. Besides Sam, the natural world surrounding the Signal Mountain house continued to be the only bright spot in my life. I studied the raccoons as the baby grew, interacting with Sam beyond the screen in guarded but curious ways. I watched the hawk as it rode the thermals, circling above the falls for hours on end. I wished I could glide as effortlessly through life as it was able to sail on those stiff breezes.
I had been watching for several weeks as a highway was being bulldozed through the landscape below—a connector that would make the morning and evening commutes for thousands of people easier. The machines were busy at work day after day, mowing down trees and cutting into hills. I realized that I had a problem with development in some ways. It took strength for human muscles to brandish an axe against a great tree, but I felt it took minimal effort to bulldoze one flat. As I watched the “progress” day after day, I thought how ironic it was that we were a people professing strength while simultaneously being a culture that plowed across the land without any consideration for the future. Would anyone ever be able to see this? I wondered as I walked away from the windows that looked out onto the long brown ribbon of a scab growing on the land below.
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Did I Do Alright?
When there was moisture in the air, morning meant fog’s dull mask would overtake us and the waterfall would rage when rain had been present, hissing as it spilled itself over the indention in the bluff that allowed it an outlet to the rocks below. I couldn’t see it when the fog moved in but its smattering filled the house. It sang me to sleep at night and I often set the alarm so I could awaken before the sun rose in order to watch the sky change. The lights of the city seemed frenetic in the cold air as daylight took over—vibrating intensely as if they were attempting to ward off the passing of their torches by amping up their energy. There was, of course, no way to compete with the sun’s eminence and I thought about how so much of life was like that—a lesson in futility.
The silhouettes of the mountains ringing Chattanooga’s verdant valley seemed to meander when seen from an equal height, their profiles rugged as they rose against the soft orange that went white as morning launched herself with abandon. The trees beyond the windows looked as if they’d been stamped there—so dark against the coming day they were like a serigraph embedded in a lively watercolor. There was one bright star glimmering like a beauty mark just before the night lost its grasp on the firmament. The “changing of the glowing guard” made me question whether light in life was similar to the “light” of knowledge. Neither was consistent as it meandered through its conduits, and I felt there was a similarity to avenues of thought and paths of light, though I couldn’t yet explain how. I was merely left with the question, “How far do we have to travel to grow into consciousness and is there any way to predict where the road leads?”
I was scribbling about this as we drove to Davenport Gap to scout Jim’s next hike on the Appalachian Trail. We faced some wild weather as moments of intensive sunlight were followed by obliterating clouds that seemed to devour the car, spitting sleet and snow before they swirled away to reveal another spell of glaring light. The sunset was blood-orange as it bathed the hills and trees in tones that made them seem as if they were born of fire. Everything was tinted in warmth, which was such a paradox given that it was brutally cold beyond the windshield.
We stopped at a restaurant nestled into the front rooms of a log cabin where there was a glorious fire in the fireplace. The ladder-back chairs were hard and knobby but the flames bathed the room in welcoming heat. One woman tended the restaurant—waiting and bussing tables, and keeping the fire ablaze. We were the only customers and after she read us the specials, she removed the large screen covering the yawning opening of the stone fireplace, then teased us about not bringing in any wood—a comment that had Jim sliding back his chair in order to grab some logs from the porch. She put her hand on his shoulder as she passed, telling him that she was teasing. When she reentered—followed by a blast of frigid air as the screened door slapped closed behind her—she had an armful of small logs that she tossed onto the back of the fire. The blaze caught but the flames were still a bit softer than they had been when we’d first arrived.
“Now come the big ones!” she announced as she disappeared through the door again. Jim couldn’t let her carry them by herself so he went to help her, following her back inside and standing like a good Boy Scout as she picked the pieces of wood from his grasp, placing them in a careful pattern atop the flames. “I’ll scotch it now!” she announced as she placed one in the back. “Did I do alright?” she asked as she returned the screen. Jim told her she’d built the best fire he’d ever seen and I could tell he meant it. When she came to take our order, I noticed she wore no makeup and I wondered if every facet of her life was so free of pretense. I thought about her as we drove home in the dark: there was something about this woman that was so genuine it deserved attention. It didn’t matter that her clothes were rumpled and her hair was disheveled. In fact, it could have been these very details that made her so interesting to me because they were the ones I couldn’t shake. These bare facts made her seem more real than anyone I’d ever met, especially the women in my life who were dressed to the nines and wore slathers of makeup beneath their perfectly coiffed hair.
We were going through one of those periods of being deluged with parties, which meant we were spending far too much time with the “perfectly put-together.” I was hanging on for dear life yet again, and I wrote my notebook, “This writer feels empty: no words flow willingly from her pen.” The only thing that soothed me was nature and her inexplicable moods. She brought me a sparkling gift when she left a blanket of snow on the bluff—so softly and gently it fell, muting the world and making me feel like a child tucked into a nursery wearing my footie pajamas. I was noiselessly padding my way through my cloistered world when the sun came up, the woods glistening and the trees turning to pristine lace. Spaced down the bluff as they were, the frosty progression of limbs joined with the liquid that had frozen as it cascaded over the mountain’s edge to create the illusion that a beautiful bridal veil had been unfurled. This was Bridal Veil Falls, as it had been named decades before on just such a day no doubt. The house was so blissfully quiet in the snow-pack that I could hear the steady rhythm of my shallow breathing. What a miracle for a winter morning!
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Mountain Song
* * *
We sprinted through the Miami airport to make our connection because the customs queue through which we had been processed from Costa Rica was a bogged-down mess. Once we were finally on the plane to Atlanta, my excitement was making it difficult for me to write—the fragmented thoughts, scattered words and jumbled feelings exploding onto the page in an incoherent mish-mash of joy and impatience. A friend of ours, Jerry, had made the trip with us, as had our priest from Chattanooga. It was the first time I’d been around either of them for as long as a week and I’d grown fond of Jerry’s voice, the inflections that made his southern drawl so friendly had a lyrical charm that only a down-home boy could convey. He and I had laughed for days about the fact that when Jim sent the Padre to the hardware store to buy rope, he’d asked for ropa, which garnered him nothing. The clerk obviously couldn’t understand why he was intent on purchasing clothing when they didn’t sell garments there!
Once home, I managed to capture a few days to myself because Jim was off on a business trip. Sam slept beside me as I journaled the first morning—all fours up in the air, a snoring mass of golden-hued hair. As I stroked his belly, it occurred to me that the value of home was truly priceless. Storms had roared through the night before, trailing in their wake a shooting star. In another mood, I might have taken that as a sign of promise but I was weary and bereft. My goal for the day was to let go of my gaunt frame of mind so I could enjoy the atmosphere in which I was luxuriating as Bridal Veil Falls sang over my shoulder in an earthly percussive arrangement of smattering water against unyielding boulders. A dove’s contented coo reproached me for having any feelings other than gratitude given that I was finally tranquilly at home. I’d been pouring words into my personal journal, which had helped to clear my head somewhat—there was something about spilling the quandary of my life onto its pages that always made room for a modicum of ease. The sun, which had made a personal call as it rose above the fog-choked valley, was casting long shadows on my writer’s notebook and causing the point of my pen where it met the page to gleam.
I was made for this quiet, this solitude, this calm, and I reveled in the fact that Jim’s trip had given me the time to myself, which I believed would help me sort through the mess we’d made of things. As I sat there wondering what changes we could undertake that would help us right our wrongs, the wind rode up the mountain, whistling like the engine of a speeding train. It was then that I noticed it was happily marking time on the porch, its rhythm moving the rocking chair as it took a breather. I loved the idea that the undulant currents wanted to take a respite, and the fact that they had chosen my deck as a hangout delighted me to no end.
Questions as to the quality of my writing were surfacing—the realization dawning that when it was rushed my work lacked the vivacity of the material created during times of complete absorption. Had my work reached the level at which I should be so concerned with publishability? I wondered. I longed for more time for revision, but I had also seen that the process was not always my friend; that the flesh of my poetry was too tender to be ripped apart and expected to heal without exhibiting scars. Was I a skilled enough practitioner to prescribe the proper ointment for the treatment of these lesions?
This question was a quirky one because I wasn’t inclined to write what would be considered “publishable” work anyway. I simply didn’t see myself creating the type of poetic constructs I saw in most of the magazines I read because I felt the work I came across in the mainstream press lacked a certain narrative beauty I wanted to achieve. And yet, I had to admit that I wrote for the approval of others because. “It’s impossible for me to give myself the very thing that I need to feel accomplished: an appreciation from a source other than myself,” I wrote that morning. How vulgar this looked in black and white! I thought; yet, vulgar as it was, wasn’t this the truth for every writer? Even if a writer was unaware of the fact that he or she needed this give-and-take, I bet there were none among us who didn’t crave attention for what he or she produced.
I finished my coffee as these thoughts reached an unresolved end, stilling my mind to focus on the sun as it broke through the cloudbank. The scene was hyper illuminated as she infused the towering billows that fanned out like a long ball-gown with her verve. How glorious would it feel for the upper reaches of your hair to burn—a filmy, shimmering cotton, torn, singed and arranged in a glittery display? I wondered. As I stared into the blazing harshness, a hawk skirted past, dipping just below our rock outcropping as silent as night. I picked up the book I’d chosen to read, watching as the attentive raptor made several circles above the falls. As I caressed the tattered cover of Strains from a Dulcimore, a book of poems by Emma Bell Miles, the hawk keened twice and then dove earthward.
I thought the moment was remarkably serendipitous, as Miles had once ambled along this very bluff gathering inspiration for her writing, her watercolors and her sketches. Had she also marveled at the quality of the light, the hawks, the waterfall as she traipsed through the woods so long ago? Her world—in the 1890s—was one of a densely forested mountaintop sprinkled only with the occasional cabin, a far cry from present-day Walden’s Ridge with its pricey real estate and busy streets.
Her other published works included The Spirit of the Mountains and Our Southern Birds, but it was her poems that moved me, and I felt grateful to have had the time to sit with them as the sun climbed ever higher in the sky, setting the yellowed surface of the worn pages I flipped through aglow:
Mountain Song
Sing me another song tonight—
Tell me a story, Love—
A queer old dear old dreamy tale
Of gulch and cliff and cove;
A song of wimpling waters where
The trout’s white bellies gleam;
A story scrolled against dark pines
In wood-smoke blue as dream.
Sing me a song, low, elfin-sad,
That mountain-folk know well;
Tell me a tale of candle-light
In cabins where they dwell.
For O my heart has ached to these
Ere love began to be,
And you, Dear, are but part of this,
The life you lent to me.
-Emma Bell Miles
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Otra Ves
Our move to the “mountain house,” as we had dubbed it, was in full swing. I was surrounded by boxes and awaiting the arrival of the moving van. I would be so happy to get the chaos behind me and snuggle into the new surroundings as I put life back together piece by little piece. And yet there was a bitter-sweetness to it all: it was my last morning at lakeshore and Mother Nature had sent a fogbank to wrap me in cotton wool as I sipped my hot mug of coffee standing on the deck that now had none of the homey touches it once held. The sun, dulled by the moisture’s mantle, was rising ecru, its reflection dimmed on water bathed in wispy steam as the lake’s warm body fended off the chill of the air.
I was pouring as much creative energy into my writer’s notebook as I could snatch from my busy days—knowing my nesting into a new home would make it difficult for me to settle into any intensity of writing beyond what felt like water in the desert—a meager smattering of liquid on a vast expanse of parched sand. The mornings were becoming quite chilly, the blooms on the flowers shivering as the cool breath of changing seasons touched their softness. A cloud, flat and gray—looking cold as marble—obscured the sunrise as it floated a delicate orange through powdery blue with the day’s progression. The phenomenon of a mood only a morning could hold was fleeing right before my eyes as I watched in wonder.
As the light changed, I wondered how I had managed to build a relationship with someone whose thinking was so opposite my own. Jim and I had watched the movie Barfly the night before and as I was admiring the acting, he said he saw no point to the film; that it was ridiculous. I disagreed but knew better than to challenge his stance. As far as I was concerned, in one line, the plot made its point when Mickey Rourke’s character, Henry Chinaski, remarked, “No writer can actually write in peace.” The comment seemed off-handed, of course, but that was just good screenwriting and directing. The line exploded in my head, haunted me as I slept, and stayed with me to jangle my nerves as I watched the orange sky spark into a burst of light. Could this possibly be true? I wondered. I craved peace, craved a settled life in which I could breathe and write. Would it be more of the same procrastination if I did somehow have the calm I believed would support a writing life? This thought unnerved me because it was the idea upon which I was pinning all of my hopes and dreams.
“My writer self finds only tiny cracks in which to sink her fingers as she climbs the shear rocky wall of this bustling life,” I wrote later that day. “She squeezes me down to try and seep through, just as a footfall on the crack blocks her light. She muses her next move only to crash into a ravine—bruised, battered and silenced.” This frustrated piece of me held sway—pouting through the throngs of life’s activities that included a mix of formal gatherings and private parties, vestry meetings, and a brutal exercise class I was taking to try to punish myself back into shape. She grew even more silent during a ski trip to Steamboat even when I spent a gloriously quiet day propped in front of the fire while the others were off skiing. I couldn’t eek a single word from her, and she and I seemed to be officially polarized in a nasty standoff. I just kept making notes, even inane ones, hoping I could tease her out but she was a stubborn conscientious resister.
As I settled into the mountain house, there was plenty to record. I was in awe of the natural mood of the landscape surrounding the home stepping down the cliff. The fog was different at the higher altitude—like sheets of milky white tissue paper that hung behind the trees, coming and going as it desired. The lake in the distance below blazed like a diamond when the sun burned the cottony moisture away. It was colder “on high” as well, and the wood slats on the deck sparkled with dainty flecks of ice. Frozen veins of it had carved lifelines into the glass-topped table, the pattern sophisticated and intricately elemental.
Though I was reveling in the newness of these surroundings, it took the desert surrounding Santa Fe, New Mexico, where we went to shop for fine art for the house, to bring my writerly voice back. As we rose above the clouds on our way there, we broke into sunshine illuminating a tightly knit cloud-front that could have been a lumpy sweater made of knotty virgin wool. It was unrefined and rough, but plush. I wanted to run my fingers over it and fondle the softness, even if it would have disintegrated at my touch and wisped through my outspread fingers like the vaporous matter it was rather than the wooly coat of a sheep that I imagined it to be.
“Snow should look like this as it falls thick and heavy, clumping here and there,” I wrote, “but Mother Nature retains the control when the wet flakes fall, orchestrating the blanket to be flat and uniform, each flake joining hands with another to bond in a perfect union. Yes, control is everywhere.” Why couldn’t my own humanly bonds hold this level of perfection? I wondered. I suppose the answer should have been obvious—I was not even remotely in control of my situation, but then who ever is?
We drove to Taos while we were in Santa Fe, through a vastness that illustrated how ethereal rain could devour the much weightier earth, chewing great rivulets wherever it willed. The sun glowed crimson on the rocks, the sheen of the dirt seemingly aglow from within. Snow rested in rocky furrows worn by time and weather, and I thought about how this was certainly another world—stranger than any I’d ever known. I wrote a poem entitled “Otra Ves” on the plane on the way home, a few good moments entering into the mix but not much of it remaining worthy of a mention. The point of the poem is missed opportunity, particularly where dealing with Native Americans was concerned. In hindsight, I see now that life was preparing me to deal with this issue head-on. “Otra Ves” ends: “We wouldn’t force custom to sleep/ We’d teach the wilderness to be wild/ We’d cling to our land like a child to its mother.”
I came away from the desert of New Mexico feeling awed by the light and the landscape, questioning, Where else in the world would cacti bloom from heaps of pure white snow? And with that paradox looming, I turned away from a time of materialistic gluttony to prepare to head back to Costa Rica. What might the tens of thousands of dollars we had spent on art have done for the people we were “serving” there?
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
I had great fun in being featured on the Building Moxie site yesterday. To see a few poems that I continued to work over the years (I didn’t abandon many, only the ones like “Otra Ves” that could never find their centers) click here.
A World of Reverie
* * *
After a week’s worth of struggle that found Jim and I trying to settle back into our lives in Tennessee, we managed to call a truce. We simply had to; we were heading to Seattle with a group of his business associates and it made no sense to go if we were not even speaking. When we arrived, we were shown to a room on the fourteenth floor perched above the downtown business district. The buildings surrounding us rose into the palest blue sky, interrupting distant slices of water that curved to shore and mimicked the same subtle arc of the hotel window. It was as if the spots of aqua were placed in perfect geometric alignment at the edges of the man-made scene, natural baubles to ornament the uniformity of the city’s architecture.
Sailboats dotted the dissected pieces of blue, looking as though someone had tossed a basket filled with magnolia blossoms, gleaming white in the sunlight, onto the water’s surface to let them bob in the breeze. Being at the whim of the tides, a cluster of them eddied toward the shoreline as the mountains rose behind them—some speaking in amplified voices of deep charcoal while others farther afield whispered in the coolest shades of blue-gray. As I pulled the heavy drapes to one side of the room, it was as if the buildings confronting me were as varied as a pile of river rocks—some slick and new, others worn from perpetually tumbling at the bottom of a swift-flowing stream.
I took my writer’s notebook to Pioneer Park so I could record my impressions of the rather downtrodden part of town. I sat on a bench and surveyed the filthy cobblestones, the dirt in between them littered with cigarette butts, and pigeon feathers and droppings. Large trees mottled the courtyard with leaves along one edge where a group of Native Americans were lolling. They were nearly replicas of each other—long black hair tied in ponytails; dark skin; faces, pocked with past acne scars, built of high cheekbones and flat noses below dark eyes. They talked of prison, hard times and detox units, the word “man” ubiquitous in their laments.
My vigil was interrupted by a dirty man carrying a soiled denim jacket and a plastic bag. When he plopped down on a nearby bench, a rush of breath escaped his lips as his butt met the wood slats. He began throwing dried husks of bagels from the plastic bag onto the stones, drawing scores of pigeons. They pecked the filthy ground, skittering into each other in their attempts to grab as many crumbs as they could. As I sat there, I had the strange feeling that I was intruding on a world of constant pain—almost as if I had not earned the right to sit on that bench which had likely served as someone’s bed the night before. I have not paid my dues, perhaps, I thought, and I could tell by their glances that the ragged beings gathered in that park agreed with me.
They were certainly curious, yet they seemed to palpably hate what I represented. They openly jeered at several women passing by but for some reason they left me alone. Maybe this is an homage to my silent suffering, I thought as I made my way out of the plaza, happy to no longer feel like bacteria under a microscope. Little did I know this wouldn’t be the last time I would come under the scrutiny of these marginalized Americans.
That episode convinced me that it was best to stay away from the inner city so I was happy we were immersing ourselves in nature for the lion’s share of the trip. We boarded the Victoria Clipper to make our way to the British Columbian capital, and as I took a seat, I felt the rolling of the ocean rocking us as if we were perched upon a piece of driftwood it had set sailing for its own amusement. I was in awe of the vibrating hulk of a vessel that made my feet feel as if they had been hooked to jumper cables. When the horn exploded, the blast of noise was all the more startling in tandem with our lurch forward. As we clipped along, the water spraying from under the hull foamed and churned, marking a trail behind us.
We’d not been underway for very long when I saw them: loons! I’d longed to hear them in person my whole life and here I was, frustrated to find myself locked away in a massive boat with the engines throbbing in my ears. They were tiny slips of matter floating atop the choppy straights, beaks turned downward before they dove, disappearing below molten liquid that swallowed them. The empty surface silvered so quickly I thought for an instant I’d made up the fact that they had been there at all. The cliffs that cascaded to the water drew my eyes away from the empty swaths of the sound, firs atop the gray stony plateau fingering into the sky. There was a lonesome lighthouse that seemed so desolate in its setting it made me sad to think it spent night after dank night weathering the cold alone.
As I watched Seattle’s skyline disappear, the rows of statuesque cranes, their tall arms extending skyward like they were saluting some great watery dictator, made it clear this was a shipping town. In the distance, Mt. Ranier was obscured, as it was most days—smoke and haze parting only once since we’d arrived for me to have a glimpse of its mammoth shape, its snow-mottled top rising far above the other mountains with rugged, knobby tops of their own. The ring of peaks reminded me of a bumpy origami sculpture that sprawled for miles. As we passed Whidbey Island, an assortment of waterfowl traversed the choppy waters, diving and resurfacing like continual shivers on the skin of Puget Sound.
We vibrated across the water in the gloomy gray of a northwest morning—the sun we’d enjoyed the day before locked away above a thick layer of billowing clouds. In Victoria, the surroundings were so misty that the seascape read like an endless expanse of palest graphite beneath leaden clouds. The masts of sailboats wobbled as if trying to draw rudimentary letters in the dull sky, and seals swam playfully in the harbor. I could have watched them for days as they nudged each other with their whiskered snouts and heaved themselves onto any surface they could reach. They would drape their big flippers this way or that as they raised their noses high in the air, their barks sounding like hoarse coughs as they extended their necks. I marveled at their muscular chests that puffed proudly as they let the world know they had something important to say and that they were saying it boldly. Large gulls bobbed in the harbor, waiting to be fed by tourists gathering on the waterfront walkways and I realized I’d never seen such an abundance of marine life in one place at one time.
The next day we took a trip to Rainier and I couldn’t believe the proliferation of grasshoppers clicking through the air as we walked through the Grove of Patriarchs where Marmots were wooly and brazen as they posed for photos, their protruding teeth yellowed and their flat black feet shirred like a closely cropped fur coat. The mountain seemed like a felled giant, waiting for the right time to pounce as it felt our light footfalls. It made me want to tiptoe as gingerly as possible so that I wouldn’t awaken his ice-covered fury. The snow gave me the impression that the top of his head had grayed from worry but what could he possibly have to fear?
It was as if the glacier faults drawn across its hulk formed a wearied brow puckered in sleep. Wild meadows running partway up the mountain’s back and arms formed a burly body—like a teddy bear’s, but it was clear that his thrust was far from sweet or serene. We climbed and climbed as we tried to reach his heart but he kept it hidden from us, allowing us only one patch of reachable snow, which was mottled with rock flour, during a day-climb. I felt we’d come upon as much of his forbearance as we would receive just before we crept away. I looked back toward him as we were leaving, seeing his breath form wispy clouds though his chest never once heaved with his breathing.
As we drove back to Seattle, I realized I was nervous about going home because I didn’t feel I was doing anything with my life. Somehow, it was easier to pretend that this was not the case when I was absorbed in the sensory details a new environment brought to bear on the senses. Sure, I made contributions through Jim, but there was no truth in them for me so there was no satisfaction in them either. This was all the trickier since my commitment to him kept me from being myself. I felt that if I didn’t begin to get a grip on this, I would be lost from ever being a truly happy and fulfilled person and partner. I wanted to find something to do that I was passionate about; I wanted to be close to my partner, but to have a piece of me that was fully mine. I somehow knew, twenty years his junior, that I needed to be a fulfilled being in order to be a good wife. I wanted to improve my self-esteem so that I could be happy, to develop my spiritual self and to learn to relax. Was this really too much to ask?
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks again for stopping in!
A #LetsBlogOff Redux on The Road to Promise
It's time for another #LetsBlogOff brouhaha and the subject we are to address today is "what makes a good story?" I think that identifying what constitutes a satisfying read for each of us is such a subjective thing that it's impossible to define the art-form with sweeping statements. I attempt to practice the craft here weekly (usually for #WriterWednesday) as I reveal bite-sized pieces of this memoir I'm determined to write and publish in book-form. Today I celebrate my 63rd post with this #TravelTuesday trip to the Appalachian Mountains near where I grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I received a beautiful gift recently when Rufus, a #LetsBlogOff crony, featured my storytelling efforts on Dog Walk Blog. I'd be interested to know if you agree with his premise that what I am doing is indeed storytelling. Even if you disagree, I'd like to know. To see my fellow blog-off'ers' contributions, click here: you will be well rewarded! And now, without further adieu, this week's chunk of my journey along The Road to Promise:
Berating the Wind
One night, I drank in the beauty of the full moon’s reflection as it cut a wide golden-silver swath across the lake, zigzagging its way from the other bank to ours. It seemed as if the radiant disk was determined to take a shimmering journey—casting off in the darkness as it searched for a mirror in which to view its visage. I reveled in the fact that from my spot on the deck, the lake seemed to have become the moon’s rippling partner in its quest.
The trip to the mountains had made a tremendous impression on me—it was one of the most spectacular days I’d had in quite some time. The pleasure arose from a combination of things: my good mood, the gorgeous weather, the music filtering through my headphones and my heightened awareness of the things around me. I could remember everything so vividly, especially how the sun had drenched each flash of my memory. It was my companion that day, illuminating things so unforgettably that my drive along the twisting and turning highways of the southern swath of the Appalachians seemed hyper-brilliant.
I’d perched for hours on a high bald and from my position on a blanket spread on the dandelion-strewn grass, I read several quotes by other writers about their families, one of which gave me pause for the poet’s use of the word “isolation.” Yvonne Sapia had written, “Aristotle told us that tragedy begins with the family. Isolation begins with the family. I write about the situations that separate us even though we are one. I also like to write about change, self-discovery and recognition of things. Finding a sense of place. Finding balance.” I thought about Aristotle’s premise as I stared at the statuesque stone tower rising above the hilltop, looking taller than a skyscraper from my prone vantage point. Because the ground wandered down a slope, it appeared as if the monument’s shadow had gone and fallen unceremoniously off the hill.
The dandelions, which glowed iridescent yellow when the sun struck them, bobbed their heads as the wind whipped up the sloping ground. It was as if they were nodding in agreement that they were all the prettier for their luminosity. A bird caught my eye, flying in circles above me as it put on a show—all powder-dusted indigo and white-tipped arcing wings. I sat, completely motionless, and forced myself to stare into more blue than any human could possibly absorb even as my vision swirled and my eyes begged me to close them so they could rest from the sky's intensity. Jim had gone off on his hike, leaving me to read and write. The only other person in sight was a boy who was lazing on the grass halfway down the ridge. Surrounded by the thin air, I thought about how Siler’s Bald seemed very close to the top of the world. The sound of the bees buzzing was so strong in the silence that it was as if they’d been primed with jet fuel and had been given extra power.
The hardwood trees had not yet sprouted green and the last withered leaves of winter clinging to their limbs were chattering along with the sere grasses skirting the edges of the field as the wind buffeted any exposed expanse it could find. Looking off into the distance where the mountains fell off to meet the valleys, it seemed certain that were I to put a finger on the seam between them, I would find a pulsing, a velvety green vein more alive than the one that snaked beneath the pale skin on the inside of my wrist.
I was writing in my writer’s notebook about how frightened I had been at one point on the trail when I’d had to traverse a skinny path with steep drop-offs on either side of my feet. I had steeled myself for the ten steps in front of me and had kept my eyes focused straight ahead. It was at that moment that we walked through a cloud. I looked to the sky as it was drifting around me and it seemed to be flying at a precarious speed into the clear air beyond my grasp. I was giddy as it rushed by, and I wondered if birds felt this same excitement when they were skimming along through a puff of fluffy moisture. I’d never thought of clouds as fun but having penetrated one, I’d found an altogether new appreciation for the whimsical side of what amounted to atmospheric vapor.
The sun was hot in the little clearing where I’d spread my blanket and I was contemplating moving closer to a scrim of gnarled and twisted trees weathered by an excessive exposure to sun, wind and rain when a girl came traipsing from the shade they created. She was on her way to Clingman’s Dome and she sat to rest for a bit, telling me that the trees would not be greening because a beetle was killing them. A blight had taken out all the Chestnut trees several years earlier, she said, lamenting that there were fewer canopies left during the summer months that ever before because the trees were garnering so many enemies.
I was anxious to get back to my reverie so when she heaved herself from the ground, the twisted branch with its splintered ends she was using for a walking stick making an indention in the moist earth, I smiled politely and returned to my sky-gazing. The only thing marring the beautiful day was the incessant intrusion of bugs as they repeatedly made Kamikaze dives at me. It was as if every insect in the world had decided to spend the day sightseeing just as I was. I wondered if there was a published itinerary somewhere entitled “Best Bug Spots of 1988” with a ping on a map that let them know this was the place to be on this particular afternoon. Maybe it was written in the star patterns at night and we humans weren’t privy to the language that would allow us to decode the map.
On the drive in, we’d seen first a bear and then a fox, each of them going about whatever it is that wild animals do, which due to their proximity to the road likely meant avoiding getting run down by automobiles. I was hoping nothing that intimidating would show up while I was lazing in the sun contemplating the razorback ridges with all their conifers gone. I was heartened that at least the trees were thinning only on the peaks, proof being that I’d spent almost an hour walking through the hollows on our way to the top of the ridge, feeling swallowed by great clusters of pines and firs that were breathing a chilly muskiness down my neck. I’d shivered more than once at the dense life-force they exuded, the experience reminding me that I’d always favored tree-lined streets to open expanses because they seemed so much friendlier with their protection from full-on sunlight. “If all the trees disappeared, the world would become disagreeable indeed,” I wrote in my writer’s notebook from my perch on high. “When will we humans begin to take this seriously?”
Seeking a better vantage point, I had moved to a large, flat stone, which seemed so ample it could have been a throne. As the sun moved away from the bald with the waning of the afternoon, I noticed that the seat, which was cupping me so generously, grew cooler and damper than when it had been warmed by stronger light. As I studied the scenery splaying before me, it seemed clear to me that when the mountains were formed in this part of the world, it was as if they had awakened to their new surroundings, yawned and stretched their arms to find their rippling muscles forever frozen in a sinewy display.
Because there were absolutely no “people” noises—such an oddity in the dizzy rush of a world I normally experienced—I’d begun to notice natural sounds, such as the groans emitted by the nearby trees. One in particular was decidedly fussy as the wind had its way with its contorted form. It was the saddest of them by far, one side of its leafless profile covered in thick green lichen. I wondered in that moment what the forest must think of the noises we humans make. I mimicked the tree’s sound as closely as I could and was surprised to hear an immediate echo. I said the word “tree” aloud in the best tree-like voice I could muster but it said nothing back. Hoping that it would repeat my word was too much to ask, of course, because it would certainly have wanted to wait until I’d left this patch of near-wilderness before it spoke of the name I’d given it to its gnarled cronies.
Just as I noticed that my hiking boot was perilously close to injuring a clump of tiny purple bluettes extending their faces from beneath the stone’s base, Jim ambled up—satisfied that he’d conquered another strip of the Appalachian Trail, or, as he likely saw it, had put another notch in his hiking belt. We headed back to the car and as I was about to turn a bend at the crest of a nearby ridge, I was startled when I heard the unmistakable sound of applause. I rounded the corner to see a bank of rhododendron bushes slapping their thick leaves. Suddenly I was flanked by two steep walls of them, and the sound they were making was delicious. We exited the ravine just as a cloud lifted its thumbprint from the mountain and I noticed there was a pattern to the twitching the wind inspired.
As I waited for Jim to unlock the car doors, I celebrated the beauty in which I’d been steeped that day, thinking of Henry David Thoreau’s statement, “I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.” I had certainly felt magnetism during my time on Siler’s Bald and it was my turn to applaud nature for entertaining me so thoroughly that day.
During our drive home, I revisited Sapia’s musings, especially her desire to explore “situations that separate us, even though we are one”—there was a time when we were one with nature; a time when “finding a sense of place” would not have been an articulated issue because we were “of a place” simply by being in (and staying in) that place. My life had become such a frantic ebb and flow of movement that I had no idea where “my place” would have been. Isn’t that what makes me feel so off balance so much of the time? I wondered. We were two months away from beginning a new project in Costa Rica and I thought of the prospect with trepidation. How in the world would I find my balance with that challenge looming before me? I asked myself silently, not daring to voice my consternation aloud as the light leaked from the evening sky and we slid silently westward toward home.
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
