It all gets stripped away in time. Layer after layer peeled off, one skin and then another, until what is left?
The moon shining like gauze on San Pablo Bay.
Another year, and I have likely seen more than I have yet to spend. Doors unopened and trails not trod, promises left lingering on bare coffeehouse tables, and what is left?
The bay gleams pale silver under the oblique moon.
They are asleep and I have walked out. Some nights like this I have lain on the ground blanketed in stars, the cold a comfort. In the outback it is all home, every square inch, and I am just another small, flickering light against a dark sky.
In town it is not so simple. I will walk away from the dark in a while, back through the streets to the house where they sleep, and the chill that would have lulled me to sleep in the Mojave will be a cramp in my leg.
We wait these days. We wait. He is healthy enough, merely disabled. He cannot be left alone for more than two or three hours. In eleven days Becky’s job resumes, and I must make a decision. We wait.
I can smell the creosote off the railroad ties tonight. I smelled them on cold air the night before I first came home, sleeping in a Wyoming ditch when the rides stopped. Two books and a rock in my pack, and what do I have now after a quarter century? Becky, and Zeke, and aside from them nothing but things.
The next day in Wyoming I rode a bus. It was in the middle of an oil boom. A roughneck a few years older say next to me for a couple hundred miles, describing life on the rigs, warning me away from drinking in Evanston bars. The sun slid down into the Great Basin and we followed, the walls of Parley’s Canyon flashing past, and I began my life on the Pacific Slope that night.
Aside from Becky and Zeke, I have gained nothing but things since that night. In the wind and moonlight I am the same, as the lights shimmer in Sonoma and Marin I am the same, as the New Year’s Flood rolls down Pinole Creek to meet the brine and the pole tilts slightly toward the sun, white gravel along the path in tonight’s shadow becomes twice-melted snow of a childhood February, the Dog Star reflects in brimming creek and I fold my collar up against the wind blown down my neck I am the same, the same vague man who peered out at midnight salt flats wondering when his life would start.
Last night’s wind storm took down a few of the acacia trees along the levee. In the moonlight I could see the splintered heart, stress fractures in the still-living wood. It will be some days before the branches realize they are dead.
