“Often a day has so many moving parts, by the time you have a moment to reflect, the day is gone. When the laundry list includes nettle digging to complete a designer cake, plant shopping for a home garden that will likely be dug up immediately by cats & dogs, yurt cleaning during which a major stovepipe failure will be discovered within minutes of the arrival paying guests: I say, all in a day. That I filled my truck with trash and missed the dump’s closing time; paid full price for perennials instead of using my landscaper’s 50% discount; tried to dash into the hardware store but found myself instead dodging a parking lot tag sale and hot dog vendor: ditto. It’s all in a day’s work, some days, and then some, for good measure. Ah, but yesterday. What I recall from my quieter day, my less ambitious day, now, runs like a dream. The mysterious forest road 90. The goal was merely: to turn in, and drive past the first house. Truly, I knew I had less in me than usual, due to having been skunked by a fever. But I was upright. I had my co-pilot. I knew it’s best to keep moving, even slowly. So I did. We drove into the road, with our alert meters on high, not knowing, not assuming, but peering into a very slim roadway. The huge white dog appeared first, the man with the huge white beard, coming second. He lunged, to grab the dog’s collar. My newer Chevy must have nodded to his old vintage truck, by the looks of it, because the vibe was not tense. I rolled down my window, but didn’t stop, not wanting to be forward, but not wanting to act like driving through his dooryard had nothing to do with him. He might be regarded as the gatekeeper to beaver meadows, but he was clearly, not a cop. And I was not a thug, and he was not unused to his town road’s traffic, however sparse. We got a good look at each other, I’d say. Something of a start out here, in the rural areas. A solid beginning. So, my daughter and I drove on, to see what the road did. The map study I’d done, couldn’t tell me things, like the tree across the road, a mile in. It was miraculous however to find, out of nowhere, a pull-off convenient to the blockage. National forest is not a pull-off laden place. Took two tries, and her getting out of the truck & directing me, to get it into position, so that we could make an exit later without having issues. I was still feeling weak, as I pushed the heavy truck door shut, with a half-energy shove. The most obvious thing was the stream, full tilt with water running down from higher plains of willow clogged openings, and gnawed off saplings, I supposed. “Let’s follow it up, see what we find”, I said. We weren’t going to get lost, not on my watch. A world of trout lilies, and tiny buds on trees still furled, a forest in stasis, given a cursory glance, but underneath it all, roiling with life, ready to explode. It was a good half hour of scrambling, a slight incline into dense woods, up & down over old stump hummocks, staying close to the water, but also aware of a distant clearing, maybe, or not, which my map reading had led me to expect, would be a place that we’d like. We stopped to study an old woods road gate. So long ago related to a drivable road, that it seemed a joke, and posing questions about why it had been there. My co-pilot instinctively went ahead of me, and was first to reach the edge of the ponds. Taking what little energy I had, I kept my right ear on the stream. We came together at the beaver marsh’s outlet, a determined, swiftly flowing explanation for what we’d been feeling, a place beautifully managed by old dams and giant rocks, and the majestic knoll of old deciduous trees still crowning the location. But, I knew, I had to stop. I had to let the question hang that I would not be answering. I think, in my life, this has been the hardest thing. To get so far into the wilderness, that a certain familiarity is established. To be lost, and lost again, but always forced to recover and recupe, and go on. Not just for yourself, but for others. So the metaphor of doing this kind of thing, if you want to keep at it, is your own determination, to make connection between incredibly divided lands, and, or, in the micro-verse, chunks of mountain steerage, where humans still feel they must dwell in a world of opposition, and insist upon their own separateness & oppression. Even as they are truly, truly loved.”
