Elk Cove & The Farmer's Elevation...

When all his footsteps were done, he stood at the snout-end of an alpine meadow, diamond-clear water licking the stones to his right, splashes of aster blossom lilac and Indian paintbrush red dotting the knee-high grass to his left, a splintered glacier poised in the midst of its frozen fall some two thousand feet above. He pulled his pack-straps from his shoulders, eased his backside down into the comfort of the dusty scree, untied the laces of his boots, and cracked a half-chilled beer.

To escape for an afternoon was not an optional thing, not a choice of convenience or recreation. He just felt an instinctive need for a solitary retreat, for complete quietude, for the damp and almost frozen air of an exposed place above timberline. He lay back and sipped his hoppy froth, closing his eyes. Tipping his head backward and sucking oxygen, he felt each unimpeded breath flow through his lips, his windpipe, into his lungs, and back again.

He felt he should do no more thinking right then. Isolation and respiration were all he required. They were the only indulgences he’d grant himself, those simplest of graces, those most unadorned and precious blessings of all. He lived in such a state of existential frugality for a couple of hours and change, immersed something like a sending-and-receiving meditation on his own selfish condition, a kind of cheap tonglen which exchanged the sticky toxins that owned his innards when he left home with pure cleansing and renewing energy. He drank his can of Olympia, kicked at the gritty earth, breathed slowly, relaxed eventually. And then somehow, up there on the high base of the mountain, the Farmer fell asleep and dreamed something good.

“Slim,” came the voice accompanying the work-worn hand of his grandfather as it gripped and warmed his arm. “Sometimes a man doesn’t gain a thing by filling up perfectly good quiet with a bunch of goddamned words and theories. Sometimes the smartest thing is for a man to shut up, drop outta sight for a while, and remind himself to breathe…”

On Dreams & Wreckage...

“You should know better,” was the last thing he heard her say before the crash that he couldn’t take back. He’d just been turning to respond when reality crumbled and folded and split and broke into pieces all around him. There was a sound, like a click. Tears poured across his field of vision, everything was blurred and indistinct. He shook his head and saw the flash of those two unforgettable eyes. “You should know better,” he whispered, echoing her words. And then there was nothing, just emptiness and nothing until he found himself again, a long time later, totally confused, more alone than he could ever remember feeling before, broken.

He pauses and lets out a slow breath, a purge. After all this time, Lena is missing and fear of her absence possesses him. He feels down in his gut that she's really gone, though that feeling makes him curl inside, makes him shrivel like a drying leaf waiting to fall loose, to be blown away, to disintegrate. What can he do but remember?

“Your hair is exquisite,” he confessed that first evening. He felt like an idiot for loving her effortlessly soft, loose braids as they slipped across the tips of his fingers like fine dark silk. But he did love the way she felt from the start. There was a moment back then, while parked high above the gorge, when they sat next to each other in that piece-of-shit truck which may as well have been a Rolls, their hips touching, hands brushing, lips smiling in togetherness. She felt natural to him, more natural than anything or anyone ever had. He told her that he would never disappear from her world. And when he made that promise, he truly meant that he would never disappear. “Dreams can never disappear when two people share them in their hearts,” he mumbled as they kissed, and he believe she understood somehow, though he couldn’t be sure she heard him.

Beneath the weight of such memories, the Farmer leans across the sill of the western window and stares into the sanguine marbling of this first September dusk. An album he started spinning before the hurt caught up with him sounds through speakers in the other room, but he’s no longer listening to its fizzy vibrato. Smoke drifts across from his slowly scorching cheese quesadilla, but he’s not noticing the delicacy of its tendrils as they curl, passing between his eyes and the flickering lamplight. At the very seam of the horizon, night’s blackness, suddenly full and deep, reveals the first brilliant pinpoint stars, but the Farmer doesn’t see them. He just leans halfway out through the opening in a kind of bruised and pained solitude, lost in the heart of his own emotional wilderness, blind to the sparkling beauty of the heavens, feeling just as lonely and bitter as hell.

Oh, Those Fields, Those Beautiful Fields...

He’d created his lacking place out of something solid and rich and reassuring, something he’d relied on for much while passing through the nothing he felt he’d become. He’d flipped some kind of switch inside himself. One morning, there was a support to turn and lean upon, then came evening with nothing but empty space where all had been. Somehow, he’d made himself hard enough to draw a line behind which he felt safe, if hollow and sad. It was if, after working through a long green spring and the promise of a golden summer, the heart-and-bone beat Farmer had willed his best fields fallow, browned and withering, choked and bound by tangling weeds. He’d exhausted himself out there and it felt like there was nothing else to be done. He’d lost track of time, of days and weeks and even months. When he’d finally noticed night's arrival, he walked inside the Mas des Rigolos, shut and latched the heavy door, made his way down the hall to his bedroom, blew out the oil lamp, and eased between rough sheets. Later on, he thought to himself, after he'd rested, he’d rise up again, get back to the work he'd abandoned, see what might be done to fix the mess he'd made of things. But for tonight, just for this time, he’d try to get some sleep, tossing and turning, half-listening to Lena’s sadly sympathetic voice in his head, whispering into his dreams - Oh Farmer, poor busted-up old Farmer, what the fuck were you thinking?