explorethetempest

You’ve decided that living is temporarily doable because you are wholly interested in binging that series, playing that video game, or making that cosplay better.

Good for you!

A mountain, two-thirds of one, anyway. Not nearby. Most of a day’s travel. A mountain’s top and western slope dropping four hundred feet to the centerline of the stream. No fish bigger than my toe, but plenty of movement along the bank.

There was a structure here once. Two wells, power poles, a road. Two vaults, one where the well pump used to be, judging from the bare wires and the rusted pressure tank. The other is a mystery.

Abandoned lamp posts, conduit climbing like albino snakes toward missing fixtures. An old satellite dish pokes its nose from the tall grass.

The mountain with few hardwoods, oak and elm. The smell of pine is heavy on the mist that settles here in the morning. This hill has been timbered within the last five years or so.

My phone has no signal from the road. Perhaps, near the top, which will be left for a full day of bushwhacking on another day. But this isn’t so remote. Houses and trailers along the stream on the gravel road leading in. Porches held up by the precious junk stored on and around them. Somebody’s hustle, stripping old lawn mowers and washing machines. Dogs follow me in, and then lay down in the gravel, guarding the way out.

This is where I start. Something. The plan is still forming. I wasn’t sure, until I saw one doe. The others were near, rustling the bush. And the bear scat on the dirt path. Bear poop, yes, this sealed it.

Owning land, absurd as the idea is. Keeping it, maybe. Wild, overgrown, green. Snakes, ticks, poison ivy. Honeysuckle, gneiss, and night sky. Work for sure, perhaps cutting a footpath to the peak, or cleaning out some of the dead wood. Just a tent, a man, a dog and time for now.

This climb, too slow. Not even a crawl. Words have always been loose scrabble to test the grip, wind to tilt the frame.

They stop looking, and you keep moving.

The start so far away that it is lost. At those times you stop to inhale, you steal a glimpse of the larger here. You don’t wish to share this view. It is yours, fat and full.

It is curious. Unexpected. Until it shrinks back into the now.

Every finger forward is solitary. The screaming weight of the sky that opens over you and rains down on your face is lost to the world of the next centimeter.

This is the way of you, and you only now notice. You find heaven in the accumulated grace of centimeters.

When you train your eyes to see the magic and miracles in little things, you open the door for your whole life to shift.

Carol Woodliff