VA Life Summer 2010

I.
it's strange trying to figure out time. there never seems to be quite enough or perhaps there's way too much. lately, i feel as if there is a shortage of time. my first crew has come and gone and i look back and think, all we had was time. where did it go? it's not fair that time should move so fast as you grow older; you're not equipped to keep up.

where should i take you? should i recount time? i spent a month camped out on a forest service road named Pocahontas. we named our place camp Taiwan on a night of bleary-eyed sleep deprivation. we felt we were in another place altogether, half-magical, half-far, far, far off. the beaten path was laid down into this place well before our arrival. we were second rate settlers, though i doubt that Pocahontas was the first. the road meanders for about 3 miles, gravel and dust that illuminates sun rays which are otherwise much too shy to reveal themselves. the heart of camp Taiwan was open and large as it needed to be to direct the coursing of a curiously crafted collective. we strung up a tarp in this center area and deemed it a kitchen. bulky Rubbermaid tubs stuffed with food and supplies squatted under the plastic shelter like big league catchers. the propane stove sat on the earth like a primitive robot and our cardboard boxes full of miscellaneous materials tried their best to look contained and collected in the corner. my co-leader and i sat in the back of our shiny red Ford SUV rental and looked at the home we created. our little red wagon was hitched to a star and all we could do was hold our breath and hope we wouldn't fall out of the sky.

the kids arrived at the airport on time. we split the group such that i took the first 3 kids to arrive and we hung out in the college town of Blacksburg. my co-leader took the other 3 kids and met us later.

it had been a little while since high school and i wasn't sure what to say. i was sure lots had changed since my time amongst the upper echelon of teen years. the girl from France sat up front. i studied French in high school but i was in no way prepared to speak French. forget it. i turned on the radio. country music. forget it. the drive was a blur and i looped and loped and lost myself in these brand new creatures. they were silent, a moment. i felt myself sweating. perhaps i'm not fit to handle such fragile beings. we talked in the way that one does when moving your face around and making sounds is nothing more than an attempt to achieve comfort. i couldn't explain to you what was said. i don't think i made much sense of it. i might as well have been speaking French.

i got cold feet that night. i felt like throwing down my apron and kicking off my cute little house slippers and running full tilt for the hills. no way, no how, was i going to make it out of this alive. perhaps i dreamed right through my teenage years and now that i was faced with real, breathing adolescence, i had no bearings. i felt lost.

work. can be a saving grace. i awoke the next morning in my tent, somehow resisting the urge to take flight in the night. things look different in the morning light. the kids rubbed their eager but shy little eyes and looked at me, looked into me. the look of a teenager can be empowering. i felt in that morning, sitting around the big bag of granola, that they needed me and i knew full well that everything is a balance, a give and take, high tide, low tide, ebb and flow, wax and wane, and therefore just as they had made a plea to me, i was making one to them. we needed each other and furthermore we agreed that we wanted to need each other. in their silence i heard the truest words. this was going to be something special.

we hiked up the trail and i felt instantly better. i told them about rock work and trail design. this was familiar ground, this had the sturdy sound of the known, this was teaching. i saw, in part, why i had come all the way to Virginia. we were going to change each other's lives. it was a scary thought and i ruminated on it a while as we advanced further and further into the woods.

II.

Anthropologist in the Field

Under the kitchen tarp, I live in a fragmented world. Most lines of thought are jumbled and snipped too soon like flowers stolen from bloom. But this is the life of teenage madness, a life in which I brace myself, wondering if my adult knees, beaten in with rationality and relativity, will be able to hold my weight. I am an anthropologist who has somehow managed to sneak inside. There is a red light around me and glossy pictographs of googly-eye inducing guy glam hanging from clothes pins. There’s a complex equation being figured and personalities being pieced together. Who are we? Only the pop magazines know. People with marshmallow peep voices mumble and suddenly there is a violently ecstatic outcry; there is a discrepancy in the calculation. Wake in another dawn and you are a new creature. This place is an etch-a-sketch, each day a tabula rasa, the lines shaky, barely permanent, fluttering inattentively like an acid tripped butterfly. “shorty got low, low, low” they chant. I’m in a primitive dance club, an open heart spasm consecrated by stobe-matic head lamps. Where am I? These are graffiti artists, Jackson Pollacks on this tabula rasa, manic smatterings of self proclamation. My mind is reeling and the ears shrug; what can they do? They’re only delivering the message.

All she can draw are flowers and pine trees and people. What more would you need to know? Flowers and pines and people. No more, no less. Flowers illuminate the pines and the pines draw down the spines of people—all needle-like and fine, all needle-like in a line. There are more words spoken to the points beyond flowers and pines and people and, in fact, it’s probably safe to say that most people think the entirety of existence is perhaps more complex than her drawing of flowers and pines and people. However, most people are wrong. The flowers portray beauty and desire, the exotic, the dreamy. The pine is the fuel, the means, the upstanding continuum, the ever-growing, mutable and yet romantically static concentric rings of the reverberating pulse of the world. Then there are people, agents of light and dark, unpredictable little swaths of fright that could uproot the oldest pine or pluck the most sacred flower.

So all she draws are flowers and pines and people. No more, no less. What’s the point of drawing anything else? The entire lovely mess is scrawled so perfectly on your Tupperware. I wonder if you know that? How else can we tell this story? The first drawings were found in a cave. The subject the same. Time barely moves when you take a moment and think about it.

III.
Virginia and Wristbands

it's difficult to say what has happened in the past two months, to convey the meaning behind the motions, but i'll put these memories before you, let you feel them, maneuver around their soft silky bones, grip their long and uneven edges, let the symbolism slip through your fingers like water. we are all blind once past the present and so let us fumble through the dark and uncertain corridors of memory.

observation:

people put on symbols to express concretely the intangibility of emotional connections.

explanation:

imagine your wrist, imagine every fine hair blooming from your pores, imagine the roughness of this landscape, observe every wrinkle and depression, listen to the echo of light as it penetrates your skin, listen to it bellow in the shadowy hallows where veins dive like dikes and tendons carve out valleys. imagine your wrist is bare, no jewelry, no restrictions, no watch and therefore you have no sense of time. imagine your life as timeless just for this moment. you enter with a wrist that is wholly yours, yours by birthright, a naked entirely known living piece, you uninterrupted. now imagine the world in its varied hues of emotion, imagine a beat, a pulse if you will, felt, rarely seen, but omnipresent circulating all around you. this is meaning, this is emotion, this is spirituality carried through tunnels of symbolism. feel your pulse. alive. feel another's pulse. alive. known but not seen.

we were strangers all wearing the same blue shirt all touting the same phrase, "conservation begins here". nothing else was known but a connection was made immediately through the visual recognition of identical objects. we became a crew suddenly, thrown together like atoms colliding. would this be disastrous? no one could say and either way, we could not stop the momentum, we had been spinning in one another's direction for centuries. in a small airport in virginia we finally met. in a small airport in virginia we unconsciously agreed to change one anothers' lives.

you can spend a lifetime with a person and they will still be strange to you. of course, you know better than most, the intricacies of their being, working your way from the outside to the center. you unravel their physical body, learn the texture of their lips, the angulation of their teeth, map the constellations of their moles and scars, learn the length and loss of their hair. you memorize the iridescence of the iris, the chameleon changes they undergo when in cahoots with the sea during a storm or the gentle, whimsical fall of the first snow or the amber light of a sunset sliding down the trunks of ancient oaks. those eyes are changing all the time and you catalogue these changes and you know just which shirt to pick out at the department store to compliment their eyes. but what do you really know? the slope of their back and the inward turn of their feet, a bum knee that makes them limp. you know the body, whether it tends to chill or overheat, to be sluggish or to run itself ragged. the body then begins to reveal the inner layers of the person. tough little nails that have been gnawed on all their life makes you think of their nervousness, tight muscles, aching bones, migraines all bare witness to the conspirators inside. but what do you really know? the further you get inside the harder it is to define what you know, like traveling to the center of the earth logical thought disintegrates and a glorious entropy of rationality takes over.

which brings me back to wrists and wristbands. in the past two months i have met fourteen very unique, very complex individuals. in the span of twenty days i forged strong bonds with these people and yet they are still very strange to me. i look for reminders of our relationship and find my wrist, once bare, wrapped in symbolism. what do i really know? i have willingly put something on, something that has changed my appearance in the most explicit sense as well as changed my thoughts and who i am. i have worked from the outside to the center, my body has changed, this is seen and known, my perceptions and thoughts, the amorphous parts of myself have also changed, this is not seen but known. my wrists are wrapped in warbling memories to tie down the tenuous ties to these two transient groups. i remember in june, pink flagging holding fast to my arm. we bound our wrists to bond with one another. in july a tie dye silly band, vibrant and verifying. how long can we hold onto a symbol? surely the symbolism outlasts the concrete entity that carries it. i imagine this band five years from now in a box with all my letters. i'll shake it out, it's tired wiggle bringing me peace.

IV.
Ode to the Appalachian Mountains

you roll you appalachian mountains. you roll, steady, calm, mystically in misty eyed remembrance over these palms. appalachian mountain memories hardening under my skin erupt as calluses at the base of my well worn fingers. how many times did i brush across new life? how deep did i dig under the soil of my own mysterious existence? how far did i extend into the suns of other universes held gently, timidly in the solar plexus of strangers? my hands hang loose bowed with the weight of my new self, a self stretched over a blue ridge landscape, a self jutting out in open plain excitement, a self light and a heart roaming childishly in the lilting chords of a sweet tea imbibed harmonica solo. what an Odyssey.

you lope in the forefront of my mind like lazy ponies in summertime, you appalachian mountains. the sky dances above stubby pines and long lines of grass lands. i watch my shadow sail in a reflected sky birthed by a mother of muddy water, breaking me apart and setting out silt struck rays of light from my eyes. my pack is heavy, perhaps heavier than it should be and my knee throbs, but for this sight i'd walk myself into the ground, you appalachian mountains, i'd walk myself into the ground, just to keep tracking along the gentle curves of your smokey silhouettes.

atop a ridge the clouds tell stories like grandfather clocks, ticking away in the wind and rocking me to sleep with the whispers of why i am here and why you are here
and why this,
and why that,
peace breathe peace breathe peace breathe

on and on these clouds whisper, cooing their song down into the valleys and around the crowns of these appalachian mountains.

during the day we re-set the bones of these mountains, pull rocks from their slumber and place them in our paths so we might climb these mountains like nerves along a spine. you sweat you appalachian mountains all over my body leaving me soiled. i feel cleansed in a way that only the harmonious understand. i don't quite get it, but i'm beginning to understand. i am slow and you appalachian mountains are kind.

i close my eyes and see the sunsets of appalachian mountains. the wind crashes continuously against the ridge. i hug my knees, i'm in a perpetual state of re-birth. every thought conceived, revealed, then whisked away, perpetual state of newness, perpetual state of now. i feel the stubbornness being knocked out of me, the sense of control lifted from my heavy brow. i am simply a life at the edge of a perfectly designed rock outcropping, watching the world turn. you roll, you appalachian mountains and i think of everything and nothing. you pose, you appalachian mountains like waves caught in a freeze frame and i am everything and nothing. i am forever changed because of you appalachian mountains.

the nomadic life: side b

on another coast in another time zone, i feel the rush of newness. perhaps i'm too much of a sensationalist, careening from one experience to another. but why not indulge the senses? i have to know, i have to know, show me, show me. then i calmly sit at my computer, a cup of coffee by my side and report the wilderness of my current state. the metaphor of an amusement park comes to mind. so many faces and lights and sounds and life. i pick out pieces and pin them to this paper canvas. this is what i've seen, have you noticed? and in my report i aim to find truth, to present others with a story.

i am a happy nomad today, feeling thankful for all i know and have experienced. i try to conjure up my summer but it flickers in front of my mind like a flirtatious fire. when i'm ready, it seems to say, i will show you. my logical self balks. it demands a list. for twenty two days, it wants a list. i think of indulging it, but how horribly boring. rather than the fluid spontaneity of my creative mind, this list loving logical self demands the mechanical facts. less like love making more like text book discussions of sex. either way, it should be done and so, a list:

1. "wild" ponies, jesus and allah
2. hikers and thank yous
3. rain and shelter under a tarp
4. a stolen tarp, regained and placed in girls' tent
5. big rocks--big buck and the last of the Mahicans
6. rotting flies
7. sunsets atop the ridge
8. lord of the rings landscape
9. presidents card game
10. lunch under a shaded tree
11. cobra and the waterfall
12. epic drives with old crow medicine show
13. poison ivy, rubbing alcohol and doughnuts in parking lot
14. vermonster
15. waterfall
16. nightswimming in the new river
17. down pour on pack out day and the trail that was a river
18. ice cream brought by other crew
19. tie dye shirts
20. wild and wonderful state fair, dancing and bull riding
21. arnold palmer and pickles
22. mexican food and the whipped cream incident.

portland, Or. it's beginning to drizzle. a pigeon feather cuts through the air like a ninja star. portland is so edgy. they can't just have leaves dancing in the sky, they throw feathers like weapons, a complicated juxtaposition. but that's what edgy people in an edgy city do. i can see myself becoming cynical here. maybe it's the weather. maybe it's the stoop i'm sitting on. gasp, maybe it's me? i laugh, ha, what a hypochondriac i am, a disease of the writer. in wanting to experience it all, i feel i must have it all. well, not all of it. i amend my statement, i'm a selective hypochondriac. ha, how silly. if anyone else where to put such a label on me i would deny it straight away, but self-labeling, well that's like playing dress-up, and who doesn't want to laugh and pretend they're someone else for a while?

i took a 17 hour train from Berkeley, CA to Portland, OR. the train was fairly comfortable and there were some truly heart aching moments. in fact, the few hours spent outside the entirely green corridor made the entire trip worth it. i wish only that i was a little more awake so i could have written. and yet, i'm beginning to accept that i'm an after-the-fact writer. being in the midst of something, especially something as heart tightening as a coastal view from a train, i cannot write. i must observe it clearly. one of these days (i say that a lot) i will buckle down and write what i've seen. one of these days.

ode to the appalachian mountains

you roll you appalachian mountains. you roll, steady, calm, mystically in misty eyed remembrance over these palms. appalachian mountain memories hardening under my skin erupt as calluses at the base of my well worn fingers. how many times did i brush across new life? how deep did i dig under the soil of my own mysterious existence? how far did i extend into the suns of other universes held gently, timidly in the solar plexus of strangers? my hands hang loose bowed with the weight of my new self, a self stretched over a blue ridge landscape, a self jutting out in open plain excitement, a self light and a heart roaming childishly in the lilting chords of a sweet tea imbibed harmonica solo. what an Odyssey.

you lope in the forefront of my mind like lazy ponies in summertime, you appalachian mountains. the sky dances above stubby pines and long lines of grass lands. i watch my shadow sail in a reflected sky birthed by a mother of muddy water, breaking me apart and setting out silt struck rays of light from my eyes. my pack is heavy, perhaps heavier than it should be and my knee throbs, but for this sight i'd walk myself into the ground, you appalachian mountains, i'd walk myself into the ground, just to keep tracking along the gentle curves of your smokey silhouettes.

atop a ridge the clouds tell stories like grandfather clocks, ticking away in the wind and rocking me to sleep with the whispers of why i am here and why you are here
and why this,
and why that,
peace breathe peace breathe peace breathe

on and on these clouds whisper, cooing their song down into the valleys and around the crowns of these appalachian mountains.

during the day we re-set the bones of these mountains, pull rocks from their slumber and place them in our paths so we might climb these mountains like nerves along a spine. you sweat you appalachian mountains all over my body leaving me soiled. i feel cleansed in a way that only the harmonious understand. i don't quite get it, but i'm beginning to understand. i am slow and you appalachian mountains are kind.

i close my eyes and see the sunsets of appalachian mountains. the wind crashes continuously against the ridge. i hug my knees, i'm in a perpetual state of re-birth. every thought conceived, revealed, then whisked away, perpetual state of newness, perpetual state of now. i feel the stubbornness being knocked out of me, the sense of control lifted from my heavy brow. i am simply a life at the edge of a perfectly designed rock outcropping, watching the world turn. you roll, you appalachian mountains and i think of everything and nothing. you pose, you appalachian mountains like waves caught in a freeze frame and i am everything and nothing. i am forever changed because of you appalachian mountains.