Date: 2005-12-11
To: So many things seem filled with the intent
Miles today: 0.0

Apologies: Which I owe to all of you who¢ve been asking where I am and what happened and whether I¢m still alive, or have been eaten by a bear, or what. If you¢ve written me personally, I promise to respond in kind soon.In brief: After hiking carefully through Maryland, I met up with Longhaul and we jumped up to just south of the Massachusetts ¢ Vermont border. At the time, I was planning to hike the northern section of the trail before the snow hit, and then to go south again and pick up the rest. What actually happened was that I hiked Vermont, and by the time I reached Hanover was forced to conclude my troublesome foot wasn¢t really adequately healed. It was better than it had been before, but even though I'd worked back up to 15-mile days, it took two 4-mile days afterwards each time for my foot to recover, and at that rate, I knew, I wouldn't finish the trail until Christmas: freezing cold, massively in debt, and possibly seriously injured. I sometimes like to do stupid things; this seemed too stupid even for me. So I got on a bus and went home.I wasn't especially pleased to be leaving, but neither was I a wreck - it seemed like the necessary thing to do. (Although I then quit emailing people for a while without ever explicitly deciding to do so, so I was probably a little more thrown than I thought I was.) I'm still planning to go back ¢ I¢m not sure exactly when or how soon, but I hope it will be in the next few years ¢ because that trail and I have unfinished business.At length: The clouds were hazy and heavy the day I went home. The doors were locked and I had no key so I climbed in a window, and not thirty seconds later the first thunderclap sounded, and the rain sheeted down. It was a closed parenthesis, and a pathos so obvious I felt absurd. But later I went for walks in my neighborhood, frowned at the concrete, wandered into the woods, stood on the verge of the valley and looked out over the summer trees. I thought about the trail, and about this journal, and about all the writing I¢d been dreaming up all summer, of the plans for a new project, something really big. And I thought about how I¢d been afraid that when I came back I¢d decide the story wasn¢t worth telling. And for a moment ¢ for as long as the moment lasted ¢ I wanted to tell a story as big as the sky.The trouble is that I tried, and I couldn¢t manage it, quite. It was too much, too soon. To tell a story is choking. Where do you draw the line when the horizon insists on receding? I sat down with a notebook and pen. The phrases floated away.I still have some of them, scraps of unfinished phrases written on pieces of paper I was likely to lose, all of a piece, all of a peace, piecemeal, falling to pieces, walking after midnight, and ¢ as Patsy Cline would have it ¢ half crazy:It escapes so quickly. I am swarmed with this overwhelming feeling ¢ not necessarily of It seems like the worst thing you can possibly say to someone ¢ to tell them to hunger less.Edith Piaf rolls her rs. The sound of violins is uncanny.So. I chose ¢ semi-consciously, but I chose ¢ to hang back, to wait, to let the dread of losing it all work itself free. And, knowing how quickly it escapes, to fall backwards, uncurl clenched fingers, to let it go. I fell from time to time into momentary expected sadnesses, sweet and ludicrous. (I still do.)Is there a point where the space of disaffection curves back on itself, comes back until ultimately it is indistinguishable from limitless compassion?In the meantime: The trail hovers in the back of things, sometimes barely so, sometimes more. I¢ve been spending days working at an outfitters¢ on the junction of two highways; when they put me on the front cash registers, I watch from where I stand as the headlights grow brighter and the sun dims. I have a manager so enamored of corporate-speak he offered me ¢an exciting opportunity to interact with product as it enters the store!¢ when what he wanted me to do was unload the truck. I spend late intense nights in the theater ¢ community productions; nothing big ¢ but it¢s a needed outlet, and I¢m terribly glad to be doing it again. It is peculiar, and not, to be spending time again starting with nothing ¢ an empty room ¢ and creating a world within it, after having spent so many months moving through, and struggling to be fully present in, this world. It is also another story.I¢m looking for another job, and applying to graduate school, and apartment-searching ¢ trying, literally as well as figuratively, to get my feet back under me. (And the foot in question is healing, slowly but surely.) I¢ve lost a little weight, and I¢ve cut off about ten inches of hair, and I¢ve ¢ albeit grudgingly - bought jeans without holes in the knees. I still think I look like myself, but given how often people on the trail failed to recognize me when all I¢d done since they'd seen me last was shower, I think they¢d likely have to take an extra minute to place me now.For the present: The light these days fades early, casting underwater shadows as it filters through falling leaves, and it makes me think of March, of how early we had to stop and set up camp; of, unaccountably, one late afternoon at Betty Creek Gap where I sat in a stray patch of sunlight, aching knees thrown over a log. I think of it all and it takes on a character at once tender and precious; and, noting a nostalgic tendency, I am suspicious of myself. The edges of memory are soft. The expanses are wide.I said I wanted to fall in love with the trail, and I did. A love story has a strange habit of taking on its own dimensions. It is with a certain smothered embarrassment that I talk silently to the mountains I remember. Who talks to a place? But now and again I wonder ¢ it comes on suddenly ¢ do you think of me? do you think of me? do you think of me?My life just now is not, markedly, about late night coffeehouses or jazz in the darkness or neon signs or the flow of midnight traffic, where the afterimage of everything, the red and green of traffic lights in particular, burns without fail for a second too long on the retina; and yet it feels as though it were. I¢m swept with a prescient aching desire for motion. Everything seems to be rushing around and past me, as the floating world of the bullet train. Do you think of me. Secondhand smoke, and too much caffeine. I wake early whether I want to or not, and walk about tired. On my days off I force myself to sleep in.The quality of loneliness, when it descends, has changed ¢ the space it takes up. I find myself situated differently within it now, subsumed by a sense of the infinitely small rather than of illimitable greatness. I am not unhappy, but the pace of everything has changed, and though I am normally too busy to think much about it, sometimes I stop and I notice the difference, and it disconcerts me.As a counterbalance, I sit in a white-walled attic room with all the bulbs burning, and drink peppermint tea, and listen over and over to Arvo P¤rt¢s ¢Spiegel im spiegel¢, which is like the softest question. And everything is mirrored, and everything is pure, and prismatic, and bright. Somewhere in the third iteration I begin to think that sunrises on mountaintops are, again, possible. I have discovered, said P¤rt, that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played.Come back now, and come around, I find myself ready, somehow, and suddenly, to think of the trail again. Time stretches out and implodes into itself all at once. The trail and the thought of it, each possessing a kind of narrow beauty, highlight the trouble in assigning ending points to a story, in sectioning off a life like so many lengths of rope.All the same, it¢s perilous: To think of a journey, freezing in its preconceived particularity, and to pick it up in one¢s hands; to offset the notion of What Was Planned with What, After All, Was. Personas shape themselves in wet clay like drip-castles: sand, mud, dribs and drabs into witchlike turrets, into storied selves. I try with such curious wonder ¢ like knocking hollowly on a rock ledge, like fingering the paper edge of a house of cards, half-glimpsed but ultimately misunderstood ¢ to grasp the connection and construction of a story, any story, the same story (which becomes, by definition, a different one) through another pair of eyes. And rises that hollow eerie feeling ¢ I have been here before ¢ and, so ¢ I will come back ¢ and I think, how obvious! How lovely! How heartbreaking! How ridiculous!So there is a journey. It is; it is there; it is not what I thought it would be, but there, there, there ¢ ¢ and so I think of the trail, now, and I think of the late light falling ragged among the pines; of sighing knees and songs of jubilation at arbitrary streams; of granite and deer and the shape of the setting sun; and maybe, a little bit, of the quality of mercy. I think, Forgive me. I think, Look here, look for me here. I think of rain in old orchards and Chaucer in the wilderness. I think of hard laughter and of fire. Of stone and silence. The ragged summer light. And, among blessings, of emergence.