I ran at midnight, an easy 2.5K made more challenging by running harder. It is colder now, and my neoprene climber’s hat came out of summer storage. The Pleiades were rising in the east as I walked toward the creek. Old friends, those bright stars.
Greetings Alcyone, Atlas, Asterope. Lovely to see you back again, Maia, Merope, Pleione. This early morning becomes you, Electra. Light my way against false footfalls, Taygeta and Celaeno, fair harbingers of the bull, the hunter and his unfairly immortal dog. I will see you all in Cima.
And into the dark.
Some nights strip it all away. Some nights I am between lives. I ran down San Pablo Avenue, headlights blinding me to everything but themselves. A train down by the bay shore sounded its horn, and I was 22 years old again, more than a thousand miles east, train whistles waking me where I slept by the side of the road.
Take a map of the US that shows landforms, and look for the most distinct demarcation there not consisting of ocean. You will find it along the east side of the Rockies, a sudden and dramatic rent in the continent, two miles of relief. All my life before that night was east of the divide, and most of my life since far to the west, and that night in transit I lay a few short miles from the crest, in the deceptive flat surround of Cheyenne. No one knew where I was. I wasn’t all that certain myself. I had about forty dollars in my pocket. In my pack were a sleeping bag, a knife, a book by Bradford Angier, a chunk of pyrite.
I watched the stars. I woke with each passing train, each loud clatter of jake brakes on the interstate, and when the sky turned pale in anticipation of a cold sun I blew on my fingers to warm them in those moments when I did not have my thumb out. The cars were few that morning.
Life is a series of nights like that one, though few of them present things to you so plainly. One is always leaving an old life, heading for an unknown new one, and carrying nothing of real value between them. One is always watching the cold stars wheel, in a solitude even the best company salves only a little.
