7 or 8, with my friend John Kyler, sneaking from
home to an abandoned mine shaft a mile away.... placing a log across the
hole, tying a rope.... descending, 10 feet, 100 feet, 200... black, quiet,
the shadows of hundreds of miner's pasts filling the void... lives given
to build this country... feeling TOTALLY certain that I'm immortal, that
I could let go of the rope and float back to the top....
Camping... I'm about ten, maybe nine... it's nightime,
maybe 8:00 pm, woodland sounds, the fire's warm... my parents are close,
arm in arm, stirring ashes, adding branches to the flame.... my dad (SO
rare) hugs me, says it's time for me to sleep, gives me a shot of warm
delicious blackberry brandy....
1983...I think the reason we were excited by things
like our joke about the red truck was that they were OURS. We were in a
state of such intense vibration that all these little things meant a lot.
So we said them over and over... Remember "some people's kids" and "and
then there's me"? They're not important things, not by themselves, but
the way we used them... WOW!
Wishes...My words don't come so easily now. They
are shaded by incomprehension, darkened by expectation - a tree, then a
poem, they were glory and desire, saying things that voices could not express.
Running up trails, in the summers of my youth,
I got my first taste of immortality. Rushing far ahead of my parents, deep
into shadowed thickets, across streamlets and hushed marshes, far away
into a silent forest - only whispered wind and the keen whir the sun makes
as it vibrates warm air entered the kingdoms I claimed for myself. I knew
then that I would live forever. That I and the forest and the planet and
the seasons and God were all one. I can still run like that - I wonder,
if I do, if immortality will wait for me - and if it's really a chasm,
a long fall to hell... |
