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Pine needles
The line between sleep and wakefulness is indistinct at the best of times. After four hours’ driving in the dark on roads not visited for a decade, peering into unlit corners of the woods hoping for an empty space and finding none, dark massifs looming and receding with only a void of stars to betray their contours, the boundary can vanish as eyes in the wooded verge when the low-beams pass. A lifetime spent not getting lost, or at least not badly, and twice in an hour I found myself turned around on the June Lake road and heading back the way I came, without meaning to. One had best go back to the point of origin. I went to Lee Vining, took a breath, filled the tank, then tried again.
And in the campground, another bout of getting lost. The Off-Roaders have enjoyed the place to death. Why go fifteen feet out of your way when just enough space exists between those pines there to make a new, more direct road? Twice, ensnared in a web of two-rut, I thought of simply parking, sleeping until either daylight or the horn of a blocked F-350 woke me, but I found a place to make a cup of tea, to roll out my sleeping bag in pine needles and pumice.
Pumice is an aerosol inverted, a suspension of air in stone. South Pacific sailors have encountered massive drifts of it vented into the sea by volcanoes, pebbles and stones and rocks afloat in conglomerations ten miles long and a few feet high. They appear solid, but step out onto them and they part beneath your feet. The sea will swallow you up. And so I should have known better than to try to sleep on a mountain of pumice, landlocked as it may have been. Land did its best to swallow me.
At 8500 feet each breath brings just three-quarters the oxygen of a breath at sea level. Come up from sea level in a day and the body strains to adapt. I lay motionless on my back, my heart pounding, Cassiopeia above me and curling westward. My eyes strained to adapt as well. The moon was new and dark. Only stars lit the landscape, and though there were thousands more at altitude the day’s fire smoke masked their light. There on the surface of the earth, thin air alone and pines between me and the faint stars, noise off the highway two miles east, I waited for sleep.
Sleep did not come.
Or if it came it came suddenly, with vivid dreaming of reclining on the surface of the earth beneath the Jeffrey pines, smoke-masked stars casting pale light on my upraised hand, the galaxy a pumice raft of light afloat in a sodden sky, and me in conversation with myself. Or was it me? There seemed two people there, not me alone, and though the other flitted in and out of mind like a postponed task forgotten, his presence, or hers, was still distinct. Call her her. A discrete person, there or created out of mind’s whole cloth, and keeping me awake at that. I rolled onto my side to close my eyes, to smell the soft breezes that coast along the ground, rich needled humus and the butterscotch of Jeffrey pine bark, and she would tap my shoulder and remind me. Open your eyes and watch the sky.
I must have been dreaming. I must have. There was no one there with me, no task assigned, and yet aside from her soft whispered reminders the dream was wholly unimaginative. To lie on the ground in a particular spot among the trees, to fall asleep, and then to dream that you are lying on the ground in that spot beneath those trees? A possibility prosaic enough that it is extraordinary. The pine branches fifty feet above blocked swathes of starlight, and the breeze played around the nape of my neck as the tarp crackled beneath my sleeping bag, a meteor streaked from the White Mountains to disappear somewhere near Tuolumne Meadows and I jerked alert, and then her nudge and a voice telling me I had work to do.
There is a third possibility, of course, a straddling of the realms of wakefulness and sleep. This could have been some sort of fugue, a mental trauma, the nervous grief and isolation and excruciating love of the last months boiled over in my head in a froth of metaphor. I am no mystic, or at least I am not when Coyote is not in the room. I already think in broad and capitalized terms about Purpose, about Time and Love, about The Land. No need for hamadryads or devas: even skeptical and sane I can pan the landscape’s placer for bright meaning, discern the personality of place. But she was there, and real, or dream-real, or mere star-story froth from this aching tête brûlée, she was telling me I had work to do.
I had to fall into the land. No mean feat, this. Even with my skin ripped off this year, as porous to the land as I was that day, to meld into that pumice-land would have exfoliated me to the bone. I tried my best, once I understood what was being asked of me, and yet each time I thought I had melded with the land a nudge and voice would tell me that I had only fallen asleep. To meld one must sleep, but be conscious of one’s sleeping: to mind well the skin-boundary between viscera and vastness, but forget which side of the line you’re on. Mere sleep stops up the sleeper’s ears, deprives the land of voice. My voice, or hers, or the ten thousand things I hear only when awake? I don’t recall. Maybe all of them. Six hours or more I lay there, Cassiopeia spun one-quarter turn, until I saw the beginnings of dim light toward the east, and then I fell asleep for real. I dreamed improbable events with people I had not seen in years, placed myself two thousand miles from the pines and pumice, and woke for real when raven’s metallic hork rang above my head. A Steller’s jay stood on my food cache and when I rose to chase it, the least chipmunks raised a shrill alarm, but not for me: a red-tailed hawk had swung low over the spot where I had slept, and curved around the base of the far pines and on.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Note: A database glitch in 2008 ate a bunch of archived comments. Don't be offended if yours isn't here, or confused if the conversation seems disjointed. Thanks!
Oh, man.
The way you use language, and the images you project with it ...
In this moment, it seems that the words used to praise a piece of writing must somehow be greater—grander and more colorful and yet more subtle and conscious—than the writing being praised.
If there were words to praise this post in those terms, I would use them. But damned if I can think of them.
So: cruder and simpler? Maybe that’s it.
Fuck, that was good!
...
And I’m going to go around all day today delightedly subvocalizing “metallic hork.” :D
By: By Hank Fox on 2007 07 19
*appreciative sigh*
The passage about the pumice is especially good. (I’m in a geological mood these days.)
Someday, Chris, I want you to collect all these essays together into a book, so I can hold it in my hand, carry it in my bag, and take it on road trips with me.
By: By Rachel Shaw on 2007 07 19
And I dream about game shows and college exams.
-sigh-
By: By KathyR on 2007 07 19
argh.
By: By Rachel Shaw on 2007 07 19
argh, part 2. Chris, please feel free to delete these!
But your gravatar’s so cute! I wanna collect ‘em all. - C
By: By Rachel Shaw on 2007 07 19
=v= To lie beneath Jeffrey Pines is the type of thing dreams are made of, so it seems perfectly reasonable to dream about it.
By: By Jym on 2007 07 19
Well, here’s another one for ya, then! *grin*
By: By Rachel Shaw on 2007 07 20
I read this and feel shame about the banality of my own thought processes.
By: By Lesley on 2007 07 20
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