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A vision assailed me yesterday while hiking along
Moore Creek. A bony alder held hands with a stately, ochre madrone,
both framed by a soft Douglas fir and backlit by a soft blue-and-grey
winter sky, all saturated by a breathless atmosphere, an enveloping
silence, an austerity. That scene, all components, the sound and feel
and sights, they touched something in me, and it seemed deep, deep in
the recesses of memory, of lost lives. That scene - it fired memories
of the Upper Truckee's dappled blue-and-white sky shrouding pines and
firs this summer, it tripped the east-facing Mayacamas overlooking
Sonoma Creek in winter a year ago, it triggered the stormy mouth of the
Mattole in 2012, Shellrock and Hideaway lakes eons ago in my life back
in Portland, a white picket fence edging a verdant field peppered with
oaks on some rain-covered road in the southern California of my youth,
a cheesy painting in a Carl's Jr. of a pastoral Wyoming-esque scene
framed by a dilapidated shack window while Lancaster's slate skies
pounded out more rain than my child's soul could leach tears. It felt
primeval, primitive, digging so deep that it penetrated past the
Cenozoic into the Cretaceous with Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops.
Features of all: cool but not cold, moist, silent but for the raindrops
drumming, trees (oaks, conifers, and, in that painting, a cottonwood).
Could've been a west-central European racial memory being plucked since
those scenes resemble what Ireland and Poland and Germany must've
looked and felt and sounded like to my ancestors. Could've been even
further back in time to simply humanity, before differentiation of the
races, where cool, damp, tree-covered habitats were most conducive to
human survival, and entering a similar area tapped an even older
genetic template in the mind, tugging and pulling with the promise of
flourishing. Could've been, even as a child, the flowering of my
misanthropy commensurate with the increasing realization of humanity's
association with ugly-ass fucking urban right-angled roads and strip
malls and asphalt- and concrete-embalmed cities, and the calming
contrast bucolic scenes promised. Those open pastures and swaying oaks
sweetly signified a dearth of people, rendering 'em safe to my mind.
While standing stock-still and staring at that surrealist vision of
Moore Creek's, I tried to feel the fucker, tried to fuse my minds and
emotions with the environment to become one, tried to broach that
undeniable, forceful sensation to something profound within my reach.
But I just couldn't break through, just like so many times in the past
- just couldn't do it. I then tried to think my way to it, but shunting
the experience through conscious, logical thought, through serial
processing, it fucking fails - it's too slow to absorb and integrate
all the sensations streaming in at once through eyes and ears and nose,
the course it runs through is way too constricted to funnel everything
billowing forth in a sliver of time, so reducing the experience to
linear sequencing, it captures merely a fragment.
It's a holistic understanding, recognition, relationship that extends
beyond words and into music and integrates both. My error: I heard the
melody, I read the lyrics, but, somehow - I missed the song.