| western watershed romance |
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A young woman died somewhere around here a few
weeks ago, near my favorite river, which rumbles 2,000' beneath me. I
lounge on the ridge, sun nearly sunken; I'll be down there tomorrow,
early. I saw her pictures - pretty girl. Lush, curly chocolate hair;
smooth vanilla skin; big ol' doe eyes; full lips. Only 26. Cause of
death not reported, but easy to guess given she'd been defiled by
depression: suicide. Why here? This is among the lovelier places in
California - I wonder if she chose it for that, wanting to die
surrounded by wild beauty, the pines and firs and robins. Maybe she
came here hoping for a reason to live beyond humanity; if so, her death
suggests she didn't find it. Maybe she chose it because she figured no
one would be here to interfere if she took the soft ride to oblivion, a
narcotic monster dose. Given how deeply this world can hurt, I couldn't
blame her if she did ride on softly out.
What'd she do, what'd she feel? Did she bow her head down onto her
knees and cry, or could she not even cry anymore, and that's why she
killed herself: quoting Uniform Choice (I know, of all bands a Minor
Threat derivative), "the feeling of no feeling is the worst kind of
pain"? Nearly needless to write, she certainly felt helpless, hopeless,
worthless, the black-hole vacuum of death promising more than the
extension of her young life that still held so much potential left to
actualize, to do and be something.
Although...maybe the converse was true, maybe she was a vile,
narcissistic or psychopathic cunt, a bitch or parasite to all who
detracted from life, and her death freed the energy and flesh and bone
that was her to be used by better life. I've known some real fuckin'
ugly people whose place in this space would be better used if not them
- some really selfish, cruel, cowardly, petty motherfuckers. But, nah,
that wasn't this girl - those sociopaths, they lack the capacity to
feel the despair that leads to suicide. And suicide is, from one
perspective, the ultimate magnanimity. So I can only conclude the
opposite - this poor, damaged girl, she was able to feel so deeply, so
deeply that she just couldn't stand it anymore, and if that feeling,
that depth, could've only been inverted - she might've been able to
touch the stars.
I nearly killed myself
around her age, just a year younger at the quarter-century mark, a
clearly exaggerated response to failing to live up to totally
unrealistic expectations. The drink-myself-to-death Western America
drive. My version of Leaving Las Vegas - Leaving the West.
I, in my own way, looked for some pretty Wild for the final scene -
into the verdant, expansive conifer-clothed ranges of Washington and
Idaho and Montana and Utah, but then somehow, regrettably, ending up in
the barren squalor of Las Vegas, Nevada, and, worse, worst, Lancaster.
The abyss was chillingly close - my skin'd jaundiced from my abused
liver. But unlike that poor, pretty girl who stepped over that
precipice to black-ice vapor, somehow - I halted at the edge, I stepped
back, I survived, and then clambered out and revived. And though I've
wallowed through many low periods since, none have been as deep. I've
been mysteriously resilient, but I can't deny that I'm still fragile -
one stupid move, and I'm snuffed.
I somehow still live, and so I mourn for the dead girl.
On the river proper now, and the dead girl floods my thoughts. Her energy - where'd it go when she died? It - she - didn't just disappear - she couldn't: that'd violate physics, where energy can only be transformed and not destroyed. Maybe her energy left and expanded as a slight breeze, ruffling the leaves. Maybe a little heat that was just enough to spur new leaf growth on the billowing black oaks. Maybe she permeated the soil, exciting microbes a touch more, stimulating the worms and other scavengers, priming 'em to transform her lifeless body to them had her flesh and blood and bone been left here, to then be eaten by larger animals, up and up and up, 'til she's a sparkle in the eagle's eye. Or maybe I passed her death site on the way down here, somewhere, and a vestige of her entered me, and now I write her requiem with her last flash. Whatever - she's not just gone: she's this place, and that includes me.
∞
I found out right after returning from a wild trip in the wild Warner
Mountains, where I challenged a cougar, where I plunged into a freezing
lake with blue-backed rainbows and my bones shivered to snow, where I
marched along a rusty Martian landscape swirling in dust and smoke and
wailing winds, where I basked in a pulsing meadow of rainbow color and
energy and music coming from a trilling little stream, where a big-ass
slab rock sailed out from under me on a steep slope and I banged my
shin up real bloody bad. The cat, the rock - could've been much more
intense than just a racing heart and a big bruise - could've held me
there. He'd died - 45 years old - much, much too young, and with three
kids. Despite the stony wall imprisoning my softer emotions, it struck,
his death, it struck, hammering down into the marrow of my heart, just
a loss, a sudden vacuum. I bawled like an abandoned baby. He was one of
my best friends - for a decade, we were tight. Such an awesome dude,
ton of energy, so magnanimous, ruddy - a real brother. I'd lost contact
with him after my second breakdown, as I did most the old crew, too
ashamed of my weaknesses, my damage. After rebuilding myself, I thought
of him often, often thought I should rekindle that friendship, but I
was just too scared to pick up the fuckin' phone and ring him up. And
now it's too fuckin' late.
His death, though, closed our
circle, and reconnected for the first time in a long time a lot of
really wonderful people, my real family that I'd let escape me. A
regeneration, the nostalgia flooding from over 20 years ago to now,
where we've all diverged but still have common ground. A profound
event, like an electronic funeral in a way, since we all used the phone
- had to, since we all now live far away from each other - to
communicate. "Funeral" - ostensibly it's to honor the one who died,
but, really, it's about regeneration of resonance among those still
alive. And so "funeral" really ain't the right word - "ritual" is.
∞
Surrounded by towering, emerald ponderosa pines and incense-cedars and
Doug firs, in indigo shadow, rambling honeysuckle and prickly
blackberry vines at the pool's edge, a few stout young alders and baby
conifers rising within the tangles of the scrambling brambles. A harsh,
dry wind shakes the dawn-lit tops of the pines and firs, and a sickly,
blackened little brook, raped by the miners, trills nearby, a deceitful
music, a dirge masked as jangle, but the black pool lies motionless,
deathly and deceptively silent, reflecting perfectly the spiring trees
above, the brambles and infant trees to the sides, an all-seeing
mother-eye. Still, I can see below the mirror surface a fallen old dead
log, though not quite dead, seemingly reaching far down below, but my
vision only penetrates several inches to where some branches start, so
I can't see if that log or those branches ever reach the bottom - or if
a bottom even exists. Starlight flashes splash like fireworks all over
my vision, and I swoon, needing to lean on one of the young stout
alders to stay upright - my feet tingle, feel unsure, unstable. And
into the black pool the branches reach, and I don't think a bottom does
exist, that the black pool falls forever through time, the branches
reaching ever back, becoming ever smaller, ever more sensitive and
tuned and plucked and waved with the subtle rustle and sway of the
pool's nearly undiscernible currents, becoming one with 'em, and though
I can't see 'em, it's as if, starlight fireworks blowing up in my eyes,
that I can feel 'em, feel 'em in the soft velvet moist grass of a
verdant island within earshot of the swing and swoon of the ocean's
mighty tides of ancient time, in the hunt for a wild boar through the
fog-shrouded sable forests of ancient time, in the swoop of the land
down the slope to where rain-drenched pines and firs embrace a soft
meadow in ancient time, and then rising up, up, and up, ever
contracting, constricting, walls, mud walls turning to stone and then
concrete, ever constricting, and the spirit crumbles, withers, and the
branches retract into the billowing big broad trunk, no room for
branches any longer, just a big fuckin' trunk where branch scars remain
the only memories of the branches, and the stout trunk reaches the
surface, insensitive to the murmur of current, and then...I can see
again. The starlights dim, I feel my feet more solid to the ground, and
the world becomes sharper, resolves, and I look on the surface of the
black pool and only see the reflection, the beautiful expansion of the
conifer trunks to branches to twigs to needles, the tops of the gallant
trees waving with the wind, and the frothing vines ranging with gangly
limbs here and there and everywhere.
I get
down on hands and knees, on the soft duff blanket of the pine and fir
needles, and I look into my face of the black pool. Is that really me?
I'm not sure - I see my face, uncouth big ol' Elvis-like chops, cheap
cap like a teenager's, weathered horn-rimmed glasses for myopic eyes,
face creases of a middle-aged man - but I see beyond it, too, into the
water, but just a little bit, and what I see I can't resolve - it
blurs, wavers and blends, it just won't fuckin' stay in place for me to
be able to identify it. Seems as if I'm not supposed to identify it,
put words to it, reason it out - I'm supposed to see it without vision,
to understand it without thinking. I slowly reach out my finger and
just barely touch the surface, myself, and just that tiny touch ripples
me totally out of focus, my intrusion disintegrating the vision, the
feeling, and all that remains is the icy cold of the black pond on my
finger, numbing it to ice. Like Death. I quickly pull my finger out,
but the ripple continues, slowing, but continuing nonetheless, the
image dissolved, the ripple reaching then nearly silently lapping the
shore, and a lone little auburn fir needle sways, ever so subtly.