A year ago

Posted by Chris Clarke on June 16, 2009

Starflower was beginning to bloom near the beaver marsh. The remains of lady’s slipper blossoms rustled against their pedicels, fluttering as yet another rainstorm approached.

We came together and the skies opened up. My hand took hers and roads washed out, the river overtopping its banks. It might have been sublime were I less of a disappointment, were she less a storm herself. Hopeless on the fifth morning, I dressed. “I’m going for a walk,” I said and went outside, the cloud of biting flies a relief after the leaden atmosphere inside the little house.

Yellow violets beside the dirt road. Timothy stem swaying under its burden of white admirals.

One misstep upon another. Passion blunted. Scar upon scar. Who is this stranger in the house with me? We each of us wondered and the walls closed in.

I went for a walk.

Hemlock and white oak, sugar maple and silver maple. A decade since I’d been in the northeast. My bootsoles took the landscape with them. A week left before my plane, and I wondered whether I should ask her for a ride to the city this afternoon, get a motel room there for the duration. Blue eyed grass on the bank above the river.

On the bank above the river I stood a while and watched the river flow. Smooth granite cobbles shone in the dappled forest light.

A mirage, I thought, and began to laugh. Here, in the wettest place I’ve been in twenty years, trails that pull the boots from your feet, passionless beds still soaked through with sweat, roads washing down off the mountain into the lake, this place full-drowned in sorry, stultifying wet: a mirage nonetheless. I’d seen it on the horizon for months, tempting and cool. I would lay me down along this water side, I’d thought.

I’ve fooled myself, I thought. This isn’t working.

There was a little bridge where the dirt road crossed the river and I stopped there. River too shallow to drown myself, bridge too low to permit effective hurling of myself therefrom, I sat on the abutment. I closed my eyes. The river sang accompaniment to the mosquitoes’ doppler whine, and off to the south and west came a low drumming from the clouds. I breathed deep, ponytail held across my nostrils to bar entry to mosquitoes.

I had forgotten it, the smell of decades’ forest duff and rain and soil, the smell of air saturated with wet and a shirt soaked through moments after showering.

Something landed on the bridge of my nose. I opened my eyes: the world had turned stained glass. It was a dragonfly, green-winged, a chitinous pair of tinted spectacles.

A male red-winged blackbird sang mating season songs from the beaver marsh cattails. Sparrows fluttered in the high-bush blueberries.

The notion presented itself: I could just stay here, peaceful serene, happy to be back home in the moist forest until the mosquitoes drained me and the rain sloughed away what remained. She would come looking, and she would find me and accuse me of drama.

A mirage, I thought. This isn’t going to work. I will submerge myself to make it work, and it will not work with me submerged. I cannot make her happy if I think myself insane, and sane I make her desperately unhappy. This isn’t going to work.

And then it came, the perfect moment before the storm, a cold front to drop the temperature ten degrees and cool the sweat, the mosquitoes seeking shelter in the trees, a handful of minutes before the drops started to fall in earnest, and I wanted nothing else but to be there. All of it lost, my past now buried and three thousand miles away, the future I had thought there for myself shown up hollow, immediate past and future wracked with awkward wrangling, all that was left the immediate present, now.

It finds me wherever I am, this wild peace. It grants me solace where there is no solace, allows me to remember who I am.

I remembered who I was.

Some days later I got on the plane.