Flashes
11.13.02 - I know how to get home when it's cold and dark at ten p.m., through empty downtown streets. I know to avoid the darkness below the ridge. I know where I live, how to turn the key, to carry my bike up the wide staircase to the third floor. I don't have to think about each step. I know to turn left at the top. I feel I shouldn't know these things effortlessly. It is too new to be so easy. I am slightly dismayed to know that I can do this alone. It can't be right.
This morning I ran down to the water and followed the shoreline, grass, sand, and rock, until I was running next to the waves, below an overhang. Heading north, I could see neither the city nor the opposite shore. In my mind, I was running by an ocean, in a wilderness. Only then did I feel the ease of his strides with mine, in the pattern of the rocks, the footprints in the sand, how he breathed with me as we ran.
In our old house, I used to know when he was about to walk through the door. I knew before I could have heard him. I knew before I should have known. I don't know how I knew, but I knew. I never told him this. I never explained the ways my body changed when I felt him coming down the street and up the walkway.
1.10.03 - It is cold tonight, the coldest it has been all season. I can feel a draft coming through the glass next to my bed. I have not slept here the last two nights. The numbers might almost balance of nights I have spent here and nights I have spent away since I moved in. I call it my compartment, rather than my apartment, because it's small and square, and sometimes it seems I store everything inside it but myself. I come and go with my arms full, only to return, exchange the things I carry, and leave again. I am beginning to avoid what keeps me away because it is silly to say I live downtown, to pay rent in the city, by the lake, just for the opportunity to park my car a mile and a half from work and ride my bike to the office.
Still, sometimes I feel that I live here. When I wake in the morning and run down the hill to the lake, along the water to the beach, across the sand, back up the hill and past the old lighthouse and water tower on my way home.
Some mornings the lake is silent and peaceful. Other mornings it is brooding. On the best mornings a wind from the northeast blows so hard across the water that when the waves hit the breakwater, they sail thirty feet into the air, and I pretend it is the ocean. On these mornings, I taste salt in the spray that hits my face as I run by. I feel the pull of currents that want to take me far away.
I resist the idea that this could be good for me. Yet I am finding a space for myself here, setting up structure, wrapping the city around me. I know how hard it is to leave a place after becoming attached in so many ways, but if it's temporary, why waste a moment of it? I am here now.
And sometimes I am not here. I find myself on distant stretches of road and trail that I know so well. Any obscure reference can trigger these images and take me away. I could be walking down Water St., by the river, and suddenly I am on my bike in Left Hand Canyon at mile 14 with red sunlight shining on the canyon walls.
Each day, I ride on the bike path toward the art museum, veer right up the hill to Mason, go down the block to Jackson, and wait at the traffic light. During the wait, a flicker of light off the windows of a nearby building might take me to the San Juan River. When a pedestrian walks by, I am at the top of Mt. Sanitas at 1 a.m., and I know I'm not supposed to be there. 'Don't walk' begins to flash, but I am in southeast Alaska with the high peaks of the Fairweather Range off the starboard bow. Then the light turns green and I'm sprinting to make the next one, yellow, every time. I turn right and carry my bike up the stairs of the building entrance. But before that, as I'm dismounting, a woman walks by holding a child's hand. I hear a tiny voice, and I am gone. I am in a crowded tram in Albuquerque. The moon is full, and a small boy calls out with the voice of an angel, "mama, mira la luna."
On another day, I am driving my jeep, and the visions are of a high-speed rollover or some equally acrobatic accident. I am wondering if I should really trust my life to the whims of a fourteen year-old SUV at freeway speed. I am listening to public radio through the right front speaker, turned up to drown the vehicle noise. I have to change from 90.7 to 89.7 when I enter the city, because I lost my antenna at 6th and Pleasant four years ago. The thought of which takes me to Stanley, Idaho, of course, and an ice-cold stream, the sunset behind the mountains. From Idaho, it's Indianapolis, a concrete velodrome, a set of rolling hills in Bloomington, and I'm in Wisconsin again, but it's 1998 and I'm racing my road bike in the kind of windstorm that uproots trees. When I enter my apartment, I smell eucalyptus, a recent gift, and then I am on an endless climb through the eucalyptus forest in the hills east of Half Moon Bay.
Sometimes I find myself in Moab, my legs dangling over the edge of Porcupine Rim; in Durango, riding through the Fort Lewis campus with eight boys on mountain bikes holding on to the straps of my backpack and to each other, laughing with me as I struggle to pull them all; swimming in British Columbia in water so fresh, so buoyant, I think I can rest there forever; in Mexico on a volcano in air I can't breathe, in darkness and biting wind. Or I might be in Scotland, at the top of Ben Nevis in running shoes; in the Bugaboos with mosquitoes that will surely eat me alive, if the porcupines don't get to me first; in Belize watching a native man dive deeper than seems humanly possible with nothing but a spear and bring back dinner; in a sailboat in the San Juan Islands with orca swimming alongside for hours; or I'm 19, running wildly through the street of Venice with my cousin, intent on finding the perfect gift for his then-perfect girl, with only minutes before we have to catch a train.
Then I am in Tlachichuca at sunrise trying to milk a cow. Concholo is laughing at me because no milk comes out, no matter how I squeeze. He takes over and fills the bucket, much to the cow's delight, just as the sun's first rays break over the fence into the courtyard. I look up to see a dog on the corner of the roof, howling, silhouetted against the 18,500-foot presence of Orizaba in the distance. We take the milk inside, and Concholo shows me his birds. He calls me 'novia,' though I have known him less than a day. He has the kind of gentle smile that pushes aside all that's hard in life and says 'keep going.' Later, his wife lets me take her picture while she cooks dinner.
I am too young and too alive to be watching my life flash before my eyes. Yet, my memory is a series of snapshots, moments stuck in time. Each one chooses when it will come back to me. I have yet to see so much. I know so little. Still somehow I am here, and I know how to get home through empty downtown streets at ten p.m., alone.
Elasticity - 4.20.02
I must have been there. I can still feel damp anticipation. The scene blurred in brilliant colors of light reflecting on the wet streets downtown, haloed headlights and the passing buzz, the sluish of water sprayed on pavement rinsed clean by a warm spring rain. And he stood on the curb, watching.
I have an unwitting habit of stressing things to the breaking point, pushing too hard. Ask an old love, my doctor, or my jeep; some things bounce back while others break irreparably. Maybe everything is an exercise in elasticity.
Elasticity is time, when I look back and see that everything has run together like a watercolor wash. While the details blur, patterns emerge. Certain things always seem to resurface. I define life, not in days and weeks, but in periods distinguished by significant events and what occurred before, after, or between these turning points.
Elasticity is the memory of things I treasured, distorted in a union of misunderstanding, fear, and hurt, and then brought back to the original beauty through time, separation, and renewed clarity. Elasticity is remembering all the little things I had forgotten yesterday and why I felt I could not live without them.
Elasticity is a returning to balance, like the water returns to calm after a boat's wake fades away, when the passing incision disappears to leave still water.
Elasticity is forgiveness, the pain voided with an easy smile.
Elasticity is not an '89 Jeep Cherokee with 170,000 miles. It leaks clutch fluid. It leaks oil. I avoid the speed bumps on 55th because the suspension makes them seem like fallen Ponderosa pine. The cruise control works once per trip, so I choose carefully. The antenna is broken off which means it can't even pull in a country station in the middle of Nebraska. But the gas mileage is not too bad for a truck, even better than the new ones. And it made it to Colorado. It even made it to Utah, and back again.
Out with friends in Boulder on a Thursday night, I found myself choosing to spend eight hours driving the following day with the destination of Mexican Hat, Utah and four days on The San Juan River. Only when I reached the tunnels on I-70 did I start to feel the separation, the momentary blackouts, like so much could happen without me if I stayed too long underground. By Glenwood Canyon I had to make a telephone call for moral support. I needed to know why not to turn around. I was afraid that spontaneity in excess might cause me to drop off the face of the earth. I make connections, build attachments, and move on, but the moving is not meant to be a leaving. I don't intend to disappear. I don't want to disappear. Still at times I fear that my inertia in motion is more powerful than my ability to hang on. Sometimes I hold on too tightly. When I remembered that what I wanted to go back to was never really there, and what I was afraid to lose was not going anywhere, I continued west.
The river trip was spectacular, especially given that I had the opportunity to spend most of the time in a kayak playing in the rapids. Veteran river runners would probably consider these rapids laughable, but in my inexperience they were challenging and exciting. And I found them laughable too... couldn't keep the smile off my face. Meanwhile, the big raft and its slightly more experienced crew evolved throughout the four days from the pinball method of river negotiation to a certain mastery of a spin move resembling a pick-and-roll in basketball. The river asks for a whole new skill-set when the water is sometimes shallow enough to keep your knees dry when walking through, pushing the raft.
Back in Moab, after returning the rented raft, I again found myself swept into the slipstream of the same two friends who had invited me on the river trip. This time it was a '78 Volkswagen bus with a pop-up top, Kermit green, heading for Flagstaff, Arizona. We camped at the Grand Canyon on the way, fell asleep, and all shared the sensation that we were still on the river. This collective dream was made hilarious when we started talking about it, still drenched in the delusion and the real fear that we were in the van, floating down a river. When I reentered reality and tried to fall back to sleep I found myself giggling and trying to be quiet, only to let out again moments and minutes later the giggles that refused to be contained. The next afternoon, seeking cool water, we headed for a campsite by Mary Lake. Unfortunately we didn't swim. The lake was completely dry, which eliminated any clinging fantasies about floating in the van. Mary Lake became a game of poker with nothing to bet but truths. A diversion that turned from adolescent to acceptable when we started asking questions about the secrets we really wanted to tell.
Elasticity is truth when we realize that we have nothing to hide, the redefining of what is important and real, the decision to live life as ecstasy rather than tragedy, and the knowledge that all we truly need is waiting for the day we chose to accept it. Elasticity is the echo of giggles that ricochet like a super-ball on canyon walls and around the inside of a '78 VW bus, Kermit green.
10.27.01
On the corner of Gilpin and Aurora was a young girl, sodden and smiling in red rubber boots and a rain jacket two sizes too big. She stomped in the water that ran down the cracks of the old cement to a low spot where the sign for the school bus stood.
The swing set at Aurora Seven Elementary became my spot last year. I would stop by after a bike ride to swing. I spent the better part of a summer evening watching the sun sink slowly behind the mountains while the world around me turned crimson. Cars drove by, bikes passed on the path, the children had gone home, the clouds moved gently across the sky, the sun dropped out of sight, but the mountains did not move. Even in the darkness I could see their silhouette. I stayed on the swing that night until the cold air forced me inside, searching in my own small way for some kind of anchor, reminding myself to sit still.
One evening this summer, the water was glass as I paddled across the lake and followed the channel to the deep lake at the other end. The sun was setting again and I waited on the water for the full moon to rise. Two herons flew out of the marsh, swans swam in the channel, a huge fish hit the bottom of my boat and threatened to capsize it, the water steamed, the cattails whistled, the reflections were amazing. I had found a new spot. But I didn’t stay in it.
I have been chasing bears this summer, and I did not find them in the most likely of places. I looked in the Teton wilderness in August and saw moose instead. From a tent in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of New Mexico I thought I heard bear-noises; in the morning I heard only stories. In Wyoming again in October, the Big Horn Mountains this time, two almost-bear-sized dogs kept me from the real thing. While in a wetland between beaches on Stockton Island, two bears feasted on berries. At a party on Ninth St. in Boulder, I walked into the alley behind the house to see a small black bear, frightened and frozen, trying to forage for food. I had chased wildly about to find the object of my search right in the back yard. I told myself again to sit still, to stop wanting the thing I cannot have and cherish instead what I do have.
I followed twelve miles of gravel road in Wyoming, striking in the beauty of its promise and impossibility, as it wound over ridges and valleys of ranchland like a whip, to sit in a windowsill, watching the rain trickle down the glass and the dark sky move lower. I remembered then how hard it is to sit still. I need to be in the thunderstorm, to feel the chill of cold wind on my skin and the ground shake under my feet, to listen to the silence in the spaces between thunder-clap and the slap of the rope on the flagpole, between rustling leaves and falling water.
Rivers cross Wyoming like cat’s cradle. The Snake, The Wind, and The Tongue are aptly named as they slither, twist, and fork, changing their meandering with the whims of the weather and rock and which bank can move water faster toward its final destination. But when the water moves faster, the river turns away; maybe it is not racing at all?
As night fell across Nebraska and Iowa last week, I was struck by bright lights in the cornfields. Harvest time had arrived for the farmers who could not afford to wait for the sun. I returned home to find autumn had nearly come and gone while I was away. The leaves were mostly fallen, the boats stored for the winter, the piers ready to come out of the water, the storm windows cleaned, stacked, and waiting to replace the screens, the trampoline needed to be taken apart, the wood-room was almost full. The fall had not waited for me.
Autumn is greater than a list of chores. Wyoming is much more than rivers and rainstorms. I never intended to chase bears. I have secrets I cannot tell, and you can bet that little girl does too. I met Inconsistency in a dream the other night. He appeared as an indulgence I was not allowed, within reach but out of bounds. He said, "it’s impossible to follow all the rules this world makes for us."
My birthday is tomorrow. I remember when I was twelve and thought sixteen was still so far off. Then I was twenty and no one believed it because I acted thirty. Now I will be twenty-five and I am wishing I could be five again, to return to the pleasure of puddles.
A Letter From Colorado, January 2001
I am waiting for the sun to set on the shores of Gross Reservoir, nine miles and 2000 vertical feet up the mountain from my Boulder home. As the turning of the year found me lazy in body and crazy in the head, I drove my truck here. I managed to find a chair of granite in the lee of this large rock, to sit and take in the beauty of this place - the sound of the wind-swept waves as they lap upon the shore and the long light running tangent to the mountains showing their layers like a grayscale.
I don't come here often, though I should. I usually stop just short, at a loop of trail on Walker Ranch. It is an eight-mile loop with much elevation lost and found again, a brilliant piece of mountain bike training ground. To ride the loop one time is difficult for many, daunting for some, and a long way to walk with a bicycle for others. For those who ride a lot, it is a fun and challenging playground.
Walker Ranch burned this summer. I was in California at the time, and I heard about our little trail in the news. I had ridden there the week before with my friend Eric. At the bottom of the loop is a crystal pool and a flourish of tumbling water. In the spring, when the snow is melting, the river flows through the rocks like a runaway train. Its force was greatly diminished in late summer when we last rode. Eric and I waded to a rock in the middle of the pool and basked in the beauty and peace of it all. We dreamed about cabins in the woods, pristine lakes, and other wondrous natural escapes.
On a fall day several years ago, I had an encounter with a mountain lion there. I was moving very slowly up a hill when I saw her peak her head out of the brush. She glanced first to her right, and then turned her gaze to me. She looked straight through my eyes to the place inside me where my fear and awe stood naked. Her stare told me she owns this place and I had better stay out of her way. Immediately, I turned and fled, as I knew not to do. With my back turned, I heard her soft and powerful cry. I don't know if she meant to convey friendship and understanding or 'I'm going to eat you alive.' She may have felt both, regardless, the relationship would be held on her terms alone. I wish I could have sat with her. If only I were so bold. I might have learned new wonders and secrets to the animal kingdom. Or I might have been given a tragic lesson in the power of the food chain. I guess I will never know. But I wonder where she is now, and how the fire changed her life.
Photographers in Colorado often shoot black and white photos of Aspen groves. The white trunks stand straight, symmetrical, and in stark contrast to the dark ground. Today, I see the negative of that picture, the trunks are charred black and the ground is white with snow. On the edge of the place where the fire just reached, the evergreens defy their name. The needles are flaxen, but they haven't given up on the trees. This is the first I have seen of Walker Ranch since the fire. It is black and broken, and the life seems gone, but I can still hear it breathing.
2.14.01
In the northern woods of Wisconsin stands a tiny log cabin, on two hundred acres of land split by the Popple River. My great-grandfather built the one-room structure in 1946, as soon as he could after the war ended. He chose a giant rock at the river's edge with a flat spot just large enough to seem it needed a cabin by destiny.
And so was built the perfect cabin on the perfect spot. And perfect is the only way to describe it, in form and function; everything fits. The rock creates a large front porch on which to sit and watch the river roll by, next to a fire in the perfect crevice of that perfect rock porch. The river bends around our rock and just beyond is a pool, perfect for swimming, with a rock in the center that varies in height as the water level changes, but which always served as both a goal and a game during our swims.
Down-river, just far enough for a child to think it was special, was Little Bull Falls, a few feet of cascading water the width of the river with a rock bar just below. We swam beneath the falls, hopped across the rocks, and watched the occasional group of canoeists and kayakers paddle their vessels over the edge.
When the water was low, we leapt across the river from rock to rock. The same rocks created the rapids that we heard when we awoke in the cabin. I emerged from my childhood summer dreams with a where-am-I feeling, and I always mistook the sound of the rapids for a torrential rain. Either way it was a beautiful and peaceful awakening.
Summer nights, we lay out under the stars and listened to the harmonies of nature as it created a myriad of sounds but never made any noise. In winter, when the river froze and the whole scene turned black and white, we followed deer paths through the forest on our snowshoes.
Falling asleep in the winter to the music of crackling embers from the fireplace, I always chose the top bunk, the best seat in the house to watch the dance of the shadows and firelight on the cabin logs. The heat from the fire rose until the top bunk was a sauna, while the floor held at forty degrees. We slept peacefully, as the fire burned down, and the cabin cooled to match the air outside.
When we awoke on those frigid mornings, we fought over who would get out of their sleeping bag to start a new fire and bring the cold cabin to life. The loser was always the person who had been the most uncomfortable in the night, the one with the greatest motivation to move. The rest stayed in the bunks until the warmth of the fire and smells of breakfast slowly coaxed them out of their cocoons. But it was hardly a loss to be the first one up and outside, to breathe the air of the cedar and poplar and see the river glisten in the new light, with a million mischievous winks.