June 27

I’ve run up the game trail on Antler Creek before, through the brush & along the scree falling off the ridge, up toward the point where you have to cross-hill to attain the saddle that lets you get to the peak, but I’d turned around before crossing over to see the other side. Earlier this week, ground-pounding for a search & rescue that ended favorably, I finally eased over the cusp & saw a great swath of unbroken tundra spreading easy & rolling toward Savage River. & just south of it, the complete opposite: an interconnected network of narrow ridges that gave out on a steep bowl criss-crossed with sheep trails winding down to the headwaters of Dry Creek, tucked in where the sun can’t find ample purchase to melt off the mazarine shelves of ice lingering on well past their season. & though I’d hiked up at a brisk pace under grave enough auspices, I still marveled at it & couldn’t help but eye routes for longer runs. It’s astonishing to me how this landscape opens up, how you think yourself adequately acquainted with a place & then of a sudden you take one more step & in so doing unveil endless miles you could never have imagined. A topo line a scant millimeter from its parallel on the map opens into a granite tor jutting out of the alpine tundra with shale & basalt flaking off & marmots jutting out of sunken holes & wind-weathered boulders carpeted over in sphagnum moss & endless sky & cloud.

& it would seem that my life entire works this way. Look at a map & walk among its vermicular lines, & then lift your eyes to an unfathomable vastness & richness. Come out of hermitage & open yourself to love & then suddenly you step over its known cusp & there it is, bountiful & giving & greater in reach than you knew possible, & beautifully unadorned, blessedly free of any dissembling, easy, even. & so with the rest—where there was the blind embrace of uncertainty, there is now a sure foot in a place I can’t imagine leaving for any considerable length of time. Where one life’s goal sputtered & grew quiet, another stepped into its place from the wildest corners of my childhood imaginings. Those dimly adumbrated yearnings rise like a sliding note to find union with the life I am living, day in & day out. It’s just plain lovely is all, & it makes me say the same things over & again, I know, but really, their repetition sounds pitch perfect to me.

Comments

kristin said…
Telling you I love you never gets old. I love you.
June 29, 2011 at 3:57 PM
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