Turning Into The Light...

The gearbox made a peculiar whine as Straw Hat coaxed his vintage '61 Scout over the rock slabs once intended to form a ridgeline road. In my left hand, I held a pink swatch of fabric torn from a beach towel and was responsible for assisting the anemic windshield defroster. Out the right-hand window - through the early morning mist - the sheer fractured face of Hellcat Rock rose like a lonely stone tooth from the conifer-bound jaw of the eastern slope. Somewhere out in the as yet unilluminated depths of the canyon lay the coordinates - included in Smacky's suicide note - of a sheltered basalt tumble within which the skookum apes were said to have maintained an infrequently occupied nest.

Crunching gravel complained beneath the knobbed tires as they rolled to a rest at a rusting metal gate long ago put in place to bar vehicles from the back acreage of the Longview Fibre Company. Straw stepped out and pulled on a grease-stained mackinaw jacket before setting up his spotting scope on the branch-scoured and dented hood of the truck. I placed an eight-track cassette into the jury-rigged deck and turned the volume up just high enough to make out the voice of Red Sovine crooning the words to Teddy Bear. Unscrewing the lid to the stainless steel thermos, I poured two steaming doses of boiled coffee into small tin cups and unfolded the waxed paper surrounding one of the smoked elk and local chevre sandwiches I'd prepared the night before.

With as much focus as could be reasonably expected of any hillbilly savant, Straw steadily and methodically glassed the line of dawn as it crept down the far wall of the Little North Fork drainage, met the glimmering ribbon of water at the nadir of the gash, and danced like luminous flame back up the slope below us. He mumbled something about not seeing the spot that our recently departed mentor had mentioned and I vaguely thought I heard him kick the International's fender with the tip of his heavy Georgia boot.

Though I wanted to care about his concerns, I couldn't. By the time that dull thud registered, I was already somewhere else, somewhere far away from thoughts of ape trails and Sasquatch nests. Standing with my face to the light and my back to the shadows as the wild lands manifested ever more vividly about me - my heart and my mind filled with imaginings of some barely tangible sweet tenderness to come - I felt the warmth of a new day touch me and dared to dream of a future I'd forsaken prematurely all those years ago.

A Blessing in Surprise...

In the ease of this moment, disparate sounds gather in the mind and build toward a force which is excessive of word and language and the clumsy inelegance of tongues. Hidden in the dark office of Mas des Rigolos, the listener leans back into something called a chair with blue eyes closed and white skin tingling. Lost and soaring as he is – snared helplessly in this rich context – the poor Farmer’s blushing ears are transformed into conduits for a liberative erogenous vibration which drives his consciousness from enstasis to ecstasis with a lilting and quite irresistible momentum.

As the band plays on, his heart realizes a secret he’d forgotten recently - if paradise is extant and eternal, it reveals itself most vividly within the wavelengths of such music…

The Balancing Act...

There are many secret places in the windward foothills of the high Cascades which he comes to - almost always - seeking solitude and which he leaves - almost always - desiring to share and describe the good rewards he took from his private wanderings...

Today, he wants to paint an image of the spot - where the hemlock snags have long ago crashed down and begun the moulder of many decades - from which he noticed nubuck boletes craning their thick stems up into the morning shade...

Today, he wants to reveal that overgrown green skid-path where - scattered widely and with no discernible pattern or structure - he discovered that in the midst of maturity the orange-gold chanterelles were shriveling and parching to leather with the lack of autumn rains...

Today, he wants to describe the sucking rushy fringe of a series of old beaver ponds - layered one above the other beneath the Lookout Mountain cirque - where he managed to pick his last handful of fading wild blueberries and savor their late-harvest sur maturite character...

Today, he wants to confess the simple pleasure he felt in the expanse beneath Table Rock when - a few yards from the clearcut bracken-bed where the young elk fell - he plucked the first delicate yellowfeet of the season into his backpack before picking up the butcher's knife once more...

Today, he wants to sing at the wild beauty of his western homeland as it walks a tight-rope - caught in an exquisite state of indecision - between the clear chill nights of autumn and the warm sunlight days lingering over from a long lost summertime...

There are many things which have weighed upon his heart for all of this black October and many more are sure to add their full measure.  But today is a good day...

Today, he wants to rejoice in the singular wonder of this creation and to know that it will last forever in the safe warm sinews of his heart...

The Birthday Dream...

In the dream, every black canyon and jagged river cut was contiguous with - and embraced by - its neighbors. The traces of every familiar watershed curved unevenly and intertwined like a dozen braided spider's arms across the sweep of the eastern mountains and the western hills. Countless in excess of the named places were the smaller gulches and draws, the green arroyos of the north, shade dappled deep places where the only known inhabitant was the clear water which ran briefly after the rain.

Illuminated by a gaping hole in the clouds of October, my shadow proxy stood high on a lichen and moss flecked promontory, found his exact place in time by taking note of the rusting vine maple leaves which mottled the distance, by listening to the insistent honks of a slow flow of Canada geese passing like ebony ghosts through the dense mist which filled the chasm beneath the overhung tips of his boot-clad toes. Motionless in such exactness, that figure understood that - for the thirty-six years preceding - he'd experienced life as a strong young cedar might. He'd been a low life straining to grow tall against a harsh backdrop.

Up there - in exposure to the cold wind blowing east from the swell and chop of the distant Pacific - the moment which was in perfect balance revealed itself to be nothing more than an ephemeral pause in transition, a flat-spot on the fulcrum of life, a nicked knife-edge separating the past from the future. He knew it as a point so fine that it could not support - even for an instant beyond an instant - the eider-light weight of a dream-shade. And as dark cloudbellies rolled in to obscure the space where the bright light shone, he heard the voice of an older self-to-be whisper - "time for the young cedar to stop growing tall... time for him to begin feeling his age... time for him to learn how to weather and gnarl..."