Cool and still

The air is so cool tonight, and the evening so still. There are crickets and other animal sounds, but their calls seem to resonate with the night and with me. I can feel the wetness in my hair from a recent shower. My skin feels like it is the most porous of boundaries between my body and the rest of the world. I can feel my heart beating. I heard recently that most animals live as long as it takes their hearts to beat about 1 and a half billion times. Thanks to several factors, humans live significantly longer than that. Yet it seems that any beat past that count is something borrowed. I walked out of a hotel this morning before breakfast and sat on a bench to smoke a cigarette. A tall, slight black man, bald and perhaps in his 50s, but maybe older, too, pushed through the double doors with some speed. Four paces from the doors, he stopped and looked straight out, his arms dangling from slightly stooped shoulders. "Whoa," he said, in a voice that suggested either dimness or wonder. "It's a beautiful day." He looked at me and I agreed. He walked past the bench and maybe just to himself, but definitely out loud, he said, "I'm glad I'm here to see it."

Later today, the following quote from James Michener's "Centennial" ran through my head.
"In the year 9268 B.C. at the chalk cliffs west of Rattlesnake Buttes, a human being twenty-seven years old, and therefore ancient and about to die, studied a chunk of rock which a younger man had quarried from the mountains."

Right around age 27. Biologically speaking, that's how long we're supposed to live. Everything else is a gift of hygiene, medicine and our relative mastery of the natural world.

Old thought made new

I wrote this back in February 2003 and had forgotten about it. I came across it today and was surprised by how much I liked it.

When Kelly Wilson went missing, a cloud settled over the town. People moved from their homes to work in their cars and didn’t walk the streets or sidewalks. They kept their eyes on their grocery carts and telephones went unused. A ringing phone became a terrible intrusion into the stillness of a home. The invitations of grassy green parks went unanswered; eddies in the river ran unbroken by children riding inner tubes. Every day was Sunday.

Photocopied sheets with various pictures of Kelly appeared like mold on telephone poles and on downtown walls. They took the place of real people in those places.

The town had at once been silenced by her disappearance and populated exclusively by her visage.

The middle

Here’s my favorite part of a picture: the middle distance. Not those things closest up, nor those farthest away. I like what’s going on between here and there. It could be children pushing wooden wheels with rods, or a pair of legs disappearing into the ocean or just a field of wheat between a girl and a barn. Not the ploughman up close, not the castle being attacked, not the boat out at sea.

I look at the landscape like that, too. Today, I climbed a hill north of town and got as far as I could go without trespassing. From up there, you can really see how the river carved out its path, leaving precipitous drop-offs that, up-close, look rather mild. The horizon seemed too close, though. I wanted it to be farther, to be able to see all the way over that planetary hump to the ocean on the other end so I could focus on what's in between here and there.

And much as I used to look east when I lived in the West, I found myself looking west today. I wanted to know what’s going on in that middle distance before the continent hits the water on the other side. For some reason, today, that seemed to be where everything is. Not here, not there, but between. And it made me feel like everything that has ever happened to me happened a long time ago.

As I walked down the hill and home, the town and its houses were quiet. There were no people outside. It was a little cool, but dry. The trees made up for the silence of the people. The wind made branches and leaves rock and thrash in broad currents and whorls. It was very much like a stormy sea.