12.15.2010 (8.2010)

For my twelfth birthday, my father bought me a telescope through which I could see the rings on Saturn. I would stand in the backyard and peer into the lens, tapping the machine's electronic focus button until each band of dust stood out as though etched in the graphite of the night sky, and I would count the tiny dots of the gas giant's moons as they danced in and out of those precise artist's lines. I could see the moons of Jupiter, too, and the dark red maw of the Red Spot, and on clear nights I could turn the North Star from a pinprick radiance to a perfect, tiny disk, flat and round like a coin frozen in a crystalline pool. 

I once witnessed a lunar eclipse through that telescope. Alerted to the impending excitement by the weather page of our local paper, my dad and I fixed thermoses of hot cocoa and trooped out into a miraculously clear October night to watch our presumptuous little planet starve its only satellite crater by crater for light. I remember peering through the telescope's lens before the eclipse began, absorbed in the revelation of sharp lunographic distinctions. I traced the outline of dusty craters, followed the path of a dry, jagged ridge, until my dad finally laid his hands on my shoulders and drew me backward. I looked up with weak naked eyes and saw the disc of the moon half-gone. Dad smiled at my horrified expression and sat me down in the grass, leaving my birthday present sagging a little in the early dew, and I fell asleep on his shoulder before the moon returned. I woke up in my bed feeling like the morning after Christmas, but without the smell of wrapping paper on my fingers. 

Now, ten years later, I have left my first automotive love, a gold Toyota pickup truck called Obie, at a notch in the Sierra crest and gone seeking my moon. 

I did not understand, when I patted Obie's bumper and shoved the car keys into a deep pocket in my pack, that I had set out with such a mission. Nor did I understand that, unless you enjoy the taste of adrenaline on your tongue and the harsh, shallow breath of your own fragility whispering in your ears, you should not leave your car in the windswept parking lot of a nine thousand foot mountain pass and set off up an eleven thousand foot ridge just as the August sun is sinking into wisps of red cloud in the west. I find adrenaline briefly satisfying but ultimately bitter and destabilizing, like hard liquor or a shouting match. And when my fragility attempts to start a conversation, I generally attempt to slap it back across the room. 

The setting sun is beautiful. The whole western sky glows with its wrenching farewell, setting the Sierra granite afire at my feet and pouring liquid garnet through the needles of scattered stubborn scrub pines. The air on the ridgecrest whips downslope, shivering, carrying garnet-crusted pine needles in its wake. The needles stick in my hair and the wind in my mouth tastes of snow. 

The setting sun is beautiful. I just wish it wouldn't set so fast. 

I am waiting for the trail to drop off the crest and descend the other side of the ridge. Up here, waiting loses all connotations of passivity. Waiting demands the single-minded focus of a chef who waits for a stirred sauce to thicken, the passionate faith of the heartbroken and crippled who wait for their wounds to heal. Waiting means running, at as full a tilt as I can manage with a pack, along a faint strip of level ground cut into the rocky slope, with the setting sun at my back and the wind sending all my hair straight out from the side of my head like a proud flag. Chips of Sierra granite skid under my shoes. Under the flat glow of the aging sunlight, the trail and the rocks and the trees all begin to blend to an equal shade of red, so to that I feel as though I am climbing a single unremarkable tongue of flame to the crackling apex of a breathtaking inferno.

I stop only once. Ridiculously, I stop to photograph the setting sun. The wind pushes me off the trail, and I have to plant my feet wide apart, like a football player taking a tackle, to stay upright while I steady the camera against my chest. I take ten shots, each a little darker than the last. The last image shows only a strip of fire against a black background. I have to use all ten of my icy fingers, and my numb, chapped lips, to close the zipper on the camera case. 

As I push forward, kicking against the deep current of wind, I squeeze my right hiking pole, hard, and then the left, to bring the feeling back to my hands. Right fist, left fist. Right foot, left foot. The red of the rocks and the trees and the black of the sky all soak into the trail and spill out again. i lose track of my tongue of flame and move forward on trust and instinct alone. 

Finally, the weathered gray face of a Forest Service trail sign looms up out of the darkness in front of me. I pull out my headlamp, but even with its help I can't make out the writing on the lonely wooden post. One branch of trail goes right and down, the other left and up. I turn right. The lower trail winds a little and then drops, and I follow, leaving the last of the sunset licking the ridgetop above me. 

Before, I waited for the trail to drop; now, I wait for it to flatten. The first downhill steps are steep, and I fall on my butt and hands and yell at myself to please be more careful, and I lose the thin gray line of trail amidst the gray of rock and scrub as it winds and switchbacks. I think I feel blood trickling into my sock and my glove, but I cannot see it and so pretend that it isn't there. I wave the headlamp in an arc in front of me, looking for flatter places in the steep slope, patches where the rock looks broken and disturbed and free of the few small plants that grow this high, looking for the distinctions and interruptions and subtle consistencies that signal human interference in smooth chaos. But the narrow beam of the lamp shows the landscape in piecemeal fashion, bits of dialogue all out of context, and without hearing the background noise unbroken I have no means to pick out the words. 

So I translate the language of the trail directly and painstakingly, one three-foot syllable at a time, until I have descended into a world of grass and trees, where the words of the trail contrast sharply with those of the landscape and I can follow both by the music of the dialect alone. 

And now I can look up, and I can notice a milky glow all along the eastern horizon, like a weak and washed-out sunrise. I think of photos I have seen of the Northern Lights, photos taken far from California. I watch as the glow brightens, gathering itself into a brimming pool at the center of the sky. I watch the moon rise so fast I can taste it, until my shadow stretches behind me into the west, until every crease in the ground at my feet shouts its name into the air. The crystal granite boulders scattered in the grass seize the light and fling it through the branches of the pines. Soaked in gossamer phosphorescence, I feel reverence rise rich and scalding in my throat, seeping into my blood and my heart and my fingertips until I know I cannot contain so much. I drop everything and raise the camera, and in a single desperate motion close my warm hand over the shutter. The photo captures only the moon, a fuzzy alien globe bobbing in a sea of darkness, and nothing else. I tip my head back and gaze through salty tears upon a million scattered stars. 

12.2.2010

I saw the greatest little bird this morning.

First of all, I made it up to the Dish, and I ran part of the way. Running frightens me now, but I think that it still thrills me more, and in any case the fear and the thrill mix up in my throat so that in the end I just feel as though I sipped something sweet and hot a little too quickly. And maybe that’s exactly where running and I stand these days. Much as with those sugar-syruped concoctions that arrive in Starbucks paper cups, whipped cream melting rapidly as steam rises at its edge, once I start running I always lose it and slurp like a five year-old as though at any moment some cruel grown-up might swipe the cup from my hand.

But I behaved at the Dish. The Dish makes moderation easier. Between the steep hills and the view, the sun rising over the foothills and lighting up the early December frost between blades of grass, it seems okay to slow down and walk occasionally. It seems important to look up and savor the air, all the air, between bouts of gulping whatever stray oxygen happens to have settled near my feet. 

I ran up the first big hill, and then I walked, and then I ran down some of the rollers backward, which feels gentler on my bones despite the odd jarring encounter with the odd elderly couple out for an early-morning stroll in front of me. I met the bird at the very top.

He was a handsome little guy, with a white belly and black wings and a bright-red head that put me in mind of an enormous cranberry. He preened a little as I approached, burying his small, sharp beak in his chest, and then resumed pecking devotedly at something in the grass. He looked great. Not that he spoke to me in some deep, love-of-the-wilderness kind of way. He just looked very full of purpose. He looked like he had a lot of character.

And best of all, he was fearless. I drew alongside him, waiting for him to startle and fly away, and I passed him, still waiting for him to startle and fly away, and when I looked back I saw him standing on the same patch of frosty grass, watching me out of one keen black eye. His gaze was relaxed – not defiant, not aggressive, but regal, curious, and unafraid. I might even belong in his little world. I might already have earned the right to set foot on his ground. But he certainly belonged there, and I was certainly the least of his reasons to move.

The trail rolled and began to drop. I turned around and ran backward again, landing on my toes at every step, spinning my heels into the sunrise. My shadow stretched in front of me, then bent sideways as the sun turned into my face. Blinded now in all directions, I spread my arms and toppled downhill, shadow spilling into my outstretched hands, wondering idly if the early-morning amblers would get out of my way.  

12.1.2010

“Is this seat taken?”

I gesture toward the tray table, the gaudy blue-and-orange upholstery, the first unoccupied aisle-side seat-cushion-cum-flotation-device I’ve seen since I stepped on the aircraft. At least half a dozen people in front of me walked straight past this row, and I assumed that the little blonde head in the window seat must have a littler blonde sibling in the aisle. But the seat is empty. The slender woman in the middle shakes her head, and I throw my backpack in the overhead and tumble onto my butt before the crush of passengers behind me has a chance to crest into an aggravated stampede.

Did they all walk past because of the little girl? I’ve seen people avoid the rows with babies, who sometimes wail out their claustrophobia and confusion for the full two-hour journey from Portland to San Jose. But this child is eight or nine at least, white-sneakered shoes nearly touching the aircraft floor in front of her seat, far too proud and worldly to show her fears beyond the shiny copy of Cosmo Girl she holds close to her nose. I watch her turn the pages as I arrange my book, my iPod, and my water bottle in my lap, and wonder that her mother would let her read such trash.

The cabin lights go down as we taxi out to the runway. I reach up to click on my reading light, and the woman in the middle raises her arm and punches her light and then the girl’s in two quick, purposeful motions. She checks the girl’s progress with the magazine, points at something. I hear the girl say, “He’s twenty-one, but I know, he looks like he’s twelve.” I smirk behind my hand. It is the kind of comment my mom would make.

In fifteen minutes we’re airborn, the plane a winged, buoyant speck above the vanishing lights of the city. A flight attendant makes her way down the aisle taking drink orders. I request diet sprite, please bring the whole can, thank you. The woman in the middle orders a regular Sprite and a water. When the flight attendant passes, I get up behind her back and scurry to the bathroom, defying the orange glow of two hundred “fasten seatbelt” signs emanating from the ceiling. I remember when I thought that sign was law. I’m hardly the first person to get up.

Returning to my seat, I see that the blonde girl has exchanged Cosmo for a shiny hardcover picturebook Bible, a literary transition that leaves me feeling a bit disoriented. Kid has very broad taste. The book remains unopened on her tray table, though, because the flight attendant has returned with peanuts, which she distributes with an idle flick toward the girl’s lap. It takes a talent beyond what most mortals possess to read with attention while extracting peanuts from thumb-sized slit in a one-ounce bag, as I discover for myself in the process of fumbling the pages of my own book and dropping peanuts all over the cabin floor.

Since I can’t read and eat, I leave the book open in my lap and watch my neighbors with my left eye and the bag of peanuts with my right. To complete the in-flight meal, the girl has brought out a bag of sandwich cookies, white cream filling flattened between vanilla and chocolate wafers. They each take one and twist them apart, separating the vanilla and chocolate halves. The girl’s cream filling sticks to her chocolate half, and the woman’s to the vanilla. They both eat the creamy side first. When the flight attendant brings the drinks, the girl tips back her little blonde head and dispenses the Sprite in three quick sips, then stacks her empty peanut bags neatly in the glass and sets the whole collection on the woman’s tray table.

I finish my peanuts and return to my book, smiling.

An hour passes. Fictional characters celebrate and mourn, kill and forgive, sleep and eat and dream in a world of sharp urgency and deep consequence. The flight attendant makes another pass down the aisle to collect our discarded cups and wrappers. When the woman lifts her arm across my face to dump the girl’s Sprite glass into the yawning plastic bag, I see that she is also reading, a bestselling mystery novel. A notepaper bookmark, soaked in mismatched patches of bright-colored ink now faded from long use, peeks from between the final pages.

The plane dips and turns, and the lights of San Jose pour through the window and splash over my hands. Cottony weight fills my ears. When I look up again, the little girl’s face is resting against the woman’s shoulder. She presses her stomach against the arm rest between them, and the woman holds her awkwardly across this barrier, wrapping her further arm around the back of the girl’s head and with long, thin fingers gently stroking the delicate skin behind the small soft earlobe.