Hung-over – head and gut both protesting a weekend filled with too many happy hours remembered only vaguely – he came alone to the hills to find some sense of renewal. Killing the ignition, he stepped out, pressed the door of his little truck shut, walked from the parking lot to the nearest of the equestrian trails, and moved downslope into the salal-blanketed forest which wrinkled out from the eastern shoulder of the highway. Trying to comfort himself with easy movement and cooler air and solitude, he listened to the creaking of his boots as their new leather loosened and he caught the scent of an invisible stream – heavy with the must of muddy stagnation, damp moss, rotting leaves – on the almost-not-a-breeze which drifted through a thicket whose bare canes were a reminder that he’d missed the salmonberry harvest altogether this year.
Overhead, for passing moments each through the dusk-lit voids stretched between the high crowns of old old trees, ink-feathered crows flapped the dimming skies, drawn toward their own destinations, slow and silent and serious.
He tasted that nostalgic breath of air, reminded of lost twilights spent with screaming young friends atop inner-tubes, riding a different stream, floating the chute of
Five hundred yards away, in a bright patch of logging road, a black bear sow backed into the brush, spooked from her foraging by the approaching sound of an old diesel service truck leading a rooster-tail of gravel and dust in wide arc from north to southwest.
Though it might hold some seed of inspiration, he tried not to cling to the thought, knowing that whatever his opinion of such fate, the power to alter it wasn’t his. Taking another step downward, leaving the dank scent of remembrance back with the rest of his past, he descended without haste into shade half as deep as darkness. His eyes aimed down, their focus landing a foot or so past the tips of his toes, straining toward readiness, toward an alertness which might rouse the dull computer in his skull should black holes in pretzeled roots or the snagging tips of fallen branches try to trip him up and knock him down into a mouthful of trail dirt and dried horse-shit. No matter that he wished for a different sensation, he felt the shadows clutching at his shoulders, slowing him in his progress, diminishing him.
Just to the left of the next fork in the path, set so still as to appear cast from tarnished copper, stretched out in an easy, purposeful awareness atop a long ago blown-down cedar spine, an old cougar lay waiting for the right passing form with all the detachment of a well-fed butcher wondering which lamb to slaughter for supper.
Unable to see a brighter space farther down the trail – and suddenly questioning his direction – he closed his eyes and looked back across the months of winter and autumn, wondering how in the hell he’d ended up at his present state, left alone by the latest of a string of women he’d fallen in love with, mired in self-doubt and regret, lost in the mess of it all. For the first time in years, he wasn’t the Farmer de Ville at ease in the forest – he was just a damaged man, bruised by too much booze and too many hard emotions, stumbling after receding dreams. At the fork in the path he turned back, just wanting to go home, blind to any reality larger than his own private pain, unable to step far enough outside himself to see what might have better inspired him, unable to find comfort in the knowledge that on the set of his own life he was but part of the cast – a flawed actor in a supporting role, an unsteady but ultimately beautiful point of light in a constellation of chaos.
