Nature, be damned.
The first thing you notice is the quiet. It is haunting. Stillness that makes the wind sound like a rushing waterfall in the far off distance. The stately pine, brave like a sentry, gifts a crystalline resin. The scent is not woodsy but acerbic and sweet.
Needles carpet the ground, rust brown like the packed earth. Everything sleeps, frozen in the slowness and the calm. Does the tree argue it’s own mortality?
Black raven flies, harbinger of the inevitability of fate. The tree affirms it’s own mortality through the salience of its relationship with other autonomous things.
The tumultous and trembling wind that carries a single seed.
The roots buried and burying deeper still.
The nimble squirrel that gathers and stores…..
No. Let’s try this again.
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I am sitting here, in the forest off of Hart Prairie road. Pete is chopping wood for the fire pit. Or, should I say, he is sawing wood with his new bowsaw. I want to sit and write something profound and contemporary and artistic like Walden, or Oliver, or Thoreau.
But I am not them. Nor will I ever be.
The landscape around me is beautiful but not inspiring. It is dry. The trees are changing and dropping leaves and needles and resin. And whatever else they are dropping. I mean, seriously, what was that I just felt on my head?
The sun is playing peek-a-boo. Dropping its UV rays, like a spider that drops on you in the shower, when you have shampoo on your face and are temporarily vulnerable and defenseless. Thus, the sun and I are avoiding each other on this day. Me, because the heat and burning pain is too much. And it, because it prefers when I can’t see it coming. So it feigns retreat only to, in its true malicious form, spring upon me again the moment I strategically manuever my $37.99 collapsible chair into a safe space.
Hmm, safe space and open nature, where I see trump flags and banners, American flags, UTVs, ATVs, pickups, campers, and camoflauge, seems incongrous.
I attempted to write something tender and graceful, like Dickenson even Morrison. But, when I am in this exposed, god-awful place, I can only channel Yeats’ Second Coming…the center cannot hold.
Firewood is nice but the cost of buying it at Safeway for $12.00 a bundle is the better deal.
It ends up costing my soul much less.
