fruit, and cheeseboards, and books
lattes, and glasses of lemonade
on small, circular, wood-slat tables
bathe in the sun
reading books
reading phones
standing in line staring at bread
waiting for the line to move
salivating
the parking lot empty
the intersection full
the wind turns
the trees dance
children shout
wafting toast aroma flutters out the door
Sleeping faces
Nose-in-a-book faces
Enchanted by smartphone faces
Hidden-by-sunglasses faces
Laughing faces
Straight faces
Pale faces
Dark faces
Multicultural faces
Animated faces
Faces in repose
Faces in love
Profiles of faces
Children’s faces
Teen faces
Adult faces
A beautiful face directly across from me
Smooth and youthful faces
Pockmarked and wrinkled faces
Bearded faces
Clean-shaven faces
A tattooed face
Inquisitive faces
Concentrating faces
Looking and questioning faces
Apologetic faces
Weary faces
Calm faces
Sunlight through the windows on all of their faces faces
There’s an orange peel under one of the seats
And this train is hurtling along at incredible speed.
Just found this in my journal while looking to post some fresher writings. Well, can’t go forward without going back. So…
San Francisco. Hayes Valley. Ritual Coffee Roasters. I feel like I’m in a participatory art project, or, unbeknownst to me have wandered onto a movie set. White chairs scattered around a gravel lot like bird droppings, in no discernible pattern. Pedestrians lounging in the warming sun, some peering at a phone, others gazing into space or watching me taking in my surroundings as I write, or observing passersby themselves, but impossible to tell as most are in sunglasses. Regardless, they all look like extras in a movie waiting for the director’s call, or are extras in a movie, currently rolling, of which I am the star. A pigeon waddles by on orange, matchstick legs like a child’s toy. It should be pulled by a string and rolling on castors. A skateboarder at a grind box interrupts the general state of quiet calm, only briefly, but the clatter sounds of a rockslide. A blow to one’s reveries. A violent shaking awake from an aqueous dream of surrender. I can’t ascertain the use for the enormous blank board that leans over the lot like a spectator, pale and on the edge of his seat during the climax of a play or the last few meters of a too-close-to-call foot race. And the orange metal planters and tables, triangle shaped, the only splashes of color in the space, and so, humming with energy like tiny incubated explosions popping off repeatedly. There is the ever constant breeze which whisks through this dream of mine. I wonder if it will carry me home when I leave.
In the Yard, Everywhere a Garden, Frisco
The rustle of the aspen leaves like strings of soft wooden beads gently pushed aside by a hand.
Swallows soaring swirling acrobatics tracing the world’s most complex roller coaster clear into the blue, chittering happily and madly because they are swallows and it is theirs, and theirs alone (but this they do not know: that it is also mine).
A hummingbird’s thrum as it zips there (where?) dashing lines in a picture book, now stopping—hovering stationary—motionless but for the soft blur of wings, in front of a purple flower its slender saber-like bill inserted like a bank card into the slot of an atm. Then, ZIP! from my watchful eye, the flower crystalline still.
And the sun filtering through clouds sweetly and warm, an exquisite hand, fingers wriggling, reaching through soap bubbles for something. The touch of my only lover on my skin.
On the tall green grasses
Water droplets
The mountain peaks
Obscured by rain clouds
A young boy
The pebbly shore
He picks one up
_________
At Lake Dillon Marina. On a large boulder along the shore. The sky perfectly blue. Indescribably blue (indescribably perfect). The sky indescribable at any time. It’s more like an emotion than a physical thing, the sky.
The clouds punctuate long rambling sentences that are meaningless, wholly without sense. They’re beautiful and white. As monumental as the mountains, though they be so much more ethereal, insubstantial, always shifting, changing, bits vanishing like an old flag torn to tatters by the relentless wind. Of course, the mountains do too, just slower. So much slower, like the eternity it takes to find someone you love, and then they’re gone.
It’s been ages since I’ve sat like this, down by the water, just observing. Some time ago in Annapolis. Months ago. The breeze a mere whisper today—a comforting pat on the back by a missed friend. More ripples in the lake than unaccountable footsteps in the world. Infinite and everlasting. The sky contained within, but only a part. One could sit out here forever.
The End (not to be confused with the Birdhouse skate video)
Walking by Royal (in so much as one can walk by a mountain). I’m thinking about how my time here has nearly come to an end, and how this all seems like a dream, how all life seems like a dream, and that I’m nothing more than a wisp of smoke, an amalgam of gas and ashes that has somehow been bound together into a corporeal body, and that it makes no sense, but that trying to make sense of existence is like digging a hole in the desert hoping to strike water. That the beauty and the strangeness and awful magnificence and senselessness are to be loved and cherished and enjoyed (or not, if you so choose!). That it matters not if this is all just a dream and every leaf I touch and mountain I climb are mere tricks of these senses (those senses themselves being tricks, too), that their apparent solidity is nothing but an illusion, and my own solidity as well. I laugh! Because it is the air let out of the balloon, and it flies around the room making that silly noise. It is a revelation. But also the genesis of a dream or a reality (is there truly a difference?) that begins anew every moment of every uncountable moment which is this one singular moment that is and forever will be.
How does one draw a line for eternity, yet never move the pen?
Observations, thoughts, etc. with line breaks.
Sunset, Nevada
hazy citrus sky swimming in a champagne cloud.
the painted pale blue mountains: a curtain of curling waves.
the setting sun a flaming disc of death.
the hot steel of the railroad tracks burning beneath,
and glinting like a diamond-edged knife.
the earth is harsh, dry, orange and arsoned.
the sun is a killer.
black asphalt cuts through it all: an arrow into the horizon.
Colorado, South to North
the stillness of the train cars beneath the ageless mountains
the white clouds looking down like gods
casting shadows the size of cities
almost dwarfing the mountains, cliffs, and bluffs
which are this West’s forests
these huge, vertical masses pointed skyward
but growing smaller by the ages unlike the trees which press ever higher
and the people whose numbers grow greater
but, yet, like these mountains and cliffs
their wisdom erodes
Dreaming in Taos
i crawl from my tent
and upward peer brightly—there is the moon
and overhead the trees
shaking silver in its light
shooting stars skip like stones across the sky
like fingernail clippings flung from a god
into this landscape illuminated night
and the small tree beside me, a companion
lying down black in the grass
sleep comes gradually
I’ve been in Berkeley for a month now. My second day here I decided to take a couple hour walk around the neighborhood and the main commercial area, Shattuck and University streets, with my camera for fun, exploratory purposes.
Oh, and the picture of the boat was taken the morning of my drive over from Davis. It’s perched on a bluff, a few hundred feet above a reservoir. Why it was left, I couldn’t say, but it had obviously been there a long time (months? years?).
California, so far, is like a dream. Specifically San Francisco, Berkeley, Point Reyes, Marin County, the mysterious pacific coast shrouded in fog: in short, much of the Bay Area.
Point Reyes is a beacon of Earth’s agelessness and perfection. Of what is possible. Ancient trees tower above one like monuments, like ancient colossi. Douglas Firs with their ridges of bark as thick as one’s fist, like ropes to be climbed up. The hiking trail twisting its way up and down and through, soft and damp, spongy, loamy, guided on both sides by the lushest, greenest vegetation I’ve ever seen, all fragrancing the air with verdant, earthy aromas of life and amazement, of how this world once was all over ….
I wish to put what I’ve seen into words, but how can I!? The magnitude of the task binds the gears of my mind and wrenches the cogs off track. How does one translate the colossal magnificence of such an ancient, prehistoric world (or anything, for that matter) into idea, into these scrawny characters that even when strung together into something greater than their individual selves are little more than a whisper in a storm, that are not truly experience, but merely place holders for experience. How can one translate a piece of bark into a string of characters and somehow communicate all that is that piece of bark and what it means to be present to it?
Words are like fake fruits and pastries in a display case, but even more pathetic, because at least those things, as false and unreal as they are, maintain a resemblance to that which they imitate, but words, words are nothing. Just amalgamations of parts of an alphabet. Just attempts to translate a feeling, an emotion into a communicable symbol that still can’t ever communicate properly that which they must. They’re idea, and idea is only something in the world of idea. In the world of experience, which is Life, they’re just “POOF!” They’re even less substantial than the fog that rests just off the Marin coast, the fog that appears so thick, so heavy and luxurious that one would delight in wrapping oneself in it like a blanket, or weaving it into a sweater, or filling a pillow. Yet the world of idea is a fun world nonetheless, because it is an imaginary world. It is unreal and completely made up. And that, of course, is its virtue. And the challenge of describing something! All one has to do is read a few quotes from Giacometti on painting and sculpture to get the gist of what that’s like.
The trees were tall. Colossal like the dreams of history’s greatest thinkers, but greater and older still. Untouchable. Incomparable. Point Reyes, you stir something in me that I can only call awe, but what is that, and what does it mean? I’d like to smash it with a hammer…. The temperature cooled as I moved closer to the shore, like the Pacific itself was washing over me, and when I did finally gain view of that vast, empty nothingness that had no horizon but vanished into the fog like life into death, I could only stop running, and stare, thunderstruck. “THIS is what is meant by eternity, ” I thought. “This is immortality.”
It’s like digging a hole. Digging after something buried there that can’t ever be excavated. But this isn’t a physical hole, it is a hole in my mind being dug. It is a metaphysical hole—the idea of digging the idea of a hole.
Not a whole lot here because I spent little time as I was driving to California, but there’s a few not terribly shabby photos.
I think I hate road trips. Of the vehicular kind. Not so much the self-powered-on-a-bicycle kind. There is, obviously, a greater sense of adventure, and a more seamless connection to one’s environment—the relationship is felt more acutely; the suffering, if there is any, is different (of course, one doesn’t suffer much sitting in a car other than perhaps from monotony and ennui, so maybe in this case they are similar), and the joys are greater, the pleasures more pleasurable. Less is lost, more is gained and seen. To stop for something, say, to take a picture, is a simpler task. You are not polluting…
Sure, in a car one covers more ground but feels like a slug. Just sitting. Sitting, sitting, sitting. At least today I hiked part way up a mountain. I think my photographs of the salt flats should turn out nicely.
The fifty or sixty year old waitress at the Black Rock Grill, where I’m having dinner, across the street from The Cadillac Inn (a homey, inexpensive, little place that I would recommend, run by a single mother) in Lovelock, NV, is having a conversation with a cook. “We’re shaking our cans out here!” she exclaims (she and the other server mercifully are not). But she is so mirthful. So friendly and amicable. Would that all the people of this world be like her on a daily basis.
The sunset. The Nevada landscape. Can one be separated from the other? They will forever be inseparable to me. I’ve recorded myself rhapsodizing over them… it, while driving.
Nevada is vast. It is like a piece of classical music, Beethoven’s 9th perhaps, become geography. All vertiginous highs and vast, yawning lows (that Great Basin!), and those highs erupting from the dry ground of the valley, apropos of nothing, like stalactites up, up, up! from the floor of a cave, nonetheless, projecting harmoniously, and all the while the shimmering interstate insinuating itself in thread-like fashion through the warp and weft of the land, winding on continuously over tall masses and plummeting back down again whatever the topography be.
A narrow scrawl on a limitless sheet of paper.
It wasn’t that long ago that I was in the state of New Mexico after having spent most of the days of the previous two months on my bicycle meandering my way across the United States. Hanging out here in Frisco, Colorado for the past month living with my friend Doug, meeting new people, adjusting to a routine of waking up in the morning making a cup of coffee and reading for an hour outside, breakfasting afterward, deciding when I’d like to go for a hike or a trail run (or both), spending time at the coffee shop just around the corner, editing manuscripts and photos, brainstorming ideas, journaling, and so on and so forth, it seems like that bike trip was nearly a lifetime ago.
This trip I speak of ended with a knee injury, minor though it was, on my way from Taos to Santa Fe. To my surprise and enormous delight I found that after a day of rest I was still able to walk, hike, and run pain free. I ended up spending a couple weeks back and forth between Taos and Santa Fe debating on what to do, eventually purchasing a cheap car with which to continue my westward, photographic journey. But here I am now, and for the foreseeable future.
Immediately upon arriving in Frisco I was to be shown around, starting with Mount Royal which looms over the town like a minor Mount Olympus—residents and tourists alike hiking up it to offer their gratitude for perhaps the nearly always fine weather, or perhaps the magnificent views, or perhaps this beautiful, awe-inspiring place where they are lucky enough to live or visit. Or, perhaps it’s all of these things. There are no bloody sacrifices that I know of though, unless one counts anyone who might have taken a tumble descending the trail a little too swiftly and carelessly (raises hand).
Another thousand feet above Royal is Victoria, and then another thousand or so feet above Victoria lies Peak One of the Tenmile Range, and this is where we were to go on my second week in town.
The idea was simple enough. Wake up not too late and hike up to Peak One, then from there see what’s what and maybe traverse a few of the other peaks, weather permitting, and wander back down and find our way back to town. Unfortunately, Doug had been working his construction job rather maniacally that week, and the week previous, and was really hurting. Specifically, his calves were like red-hot staves, and we were only to make it to Mason Town (about a third of the way up the ungodly steep trail on Mount Royal) before we decided to call off that particular challenge and instead change direction and go for a hike along Peaks Trail which runs south to Breckenridge.
He really must have wanted to hike up to those peaks, though, because at the confluence of Peaks Trail and Miners Creek Trail Doug changed his mind again and asked if I still wanted to hike up there, to which I replied with an affirmative.
After an hour and a half more of hiking, and stopping several times to turn and look around and wonder to myself how it is that he who has both run and cycled across the country is moving so slowly (obviously never underestimate the power of being overworked), and having made our way to the rather patchy, ragged snow line, and attempting to avoid stepping in snow at all costs as we were both just wearing running shoes (and I in shorts), we came to an impasse: snow, at least knee deep and blocking the trail for as far as we could see through the trees.
However, as luck would have it we were in a breach in the forest that, looking up towards Tenmile Peak (Peak 2), seemed to continue all the way up the slope, like some giant had taken a monstrous axe and, raising it above his head took one massive swing and clove the forest in two leaving behind a field of boulders and loose rocks that began far upslope against the impenetrably solid rock of the mountain projecting itself towards the sky—indifferent to the fact that it is crumbling and eroding away slowly, inexhaustibly, over millennia, but realizing too that that doesn’t matter this day because it is still, and will be for our lifetimes and many other humans’ lifetimes to come, utterly there, inflexible and unyielding—and ended, basically, at our feet on the trail.
I suggested hiking up that way as the best course of action being as our choices were rather limited: continue on off-trail, or turn back.
And so it began.
As is often the case, things aren’t always quite so clear as they appear to be at first observance. Farther up there were stands of pine trees and firs along with the snow they harbored blocking our progress. At this point it seemed utterly absurd to turn around out of fear of our feet getting wet and cold and so we clambered through, sometimes post-holing, other times finding strong foundations which we could easily hike on provided by smaller trees still bent over and buried by the snow’s weight. Eventually we came out into an open scree field that quickly steepened so that we were using our hands at times to almost crawl up the slope. We had to make a decision too about what the best line might be to continue up the mountain.
As I seemed to be leading this part of the hike I took the bull by the horns, spotted a section that looked a lot like an enormous set of stairs and headed off that way, Doug looking on from behind me probably wondering why I had taken what he perceived as the more difficult of the two options we had debated over.
It wasn’t long before he was following me, but the skies had been clouding over for an hour or longer, and we had received some scattered bits of rain while clambering through the open field, but now thunder in the not-so-distant distance was making itself heard, and we even dealt with a brief shower of hail while I waited for Doug near my “stairs.” It was at this point, with resignation, that we thought it best to make our way back down the mountain, especially after he took a tumble when a seemingly solid hand hold broke loose. The question was, then, “which way?”
Thinking it a bit boring to just turn around and head back, I ran reconnaissance to a ridge northward we had previously looked at as a way up to the peak, to see what lie over its edge. What did lie over its edge was a gorgeous valley of brilliant green, flecked with the grey of rocks and boulders, like the inverse of a lichen mottled stone; fallen trees that looked like matchsticks from our vantage; and a criss-cross of shimmering ribbons of water: small brooks and creeks which all seemed to feed a much larger stream even farther below as the valley curved towards Frisco between the contours of the mountains.
The issue, perhaps, was getting down to that valley floor some two or three hundred feet below. I called Doug over to take a look. The undulating slopes all the way down were completely covered in snow. I thought it funny, considering all the effort we had put into assiduously avoiding stepping in snow that we were now considering traversing these slopes where there wasn’t a bare speck of ground for hundreds of meters all around us.
Doug first, glissading down on his butt, and then I, attempting to ski in my shoes and failing miserably so that I took the same way down Doug did only to end up with one leg laughably stuck in the snow up to my hip, the other up to its knee, and my left arm jammed up to my shoulder so that it took me a good while of struggle to work myself free.
We still had a couple hundred feet of slipping, and sliding, and sledding to do before we reached the valley floor as the slope that we slid down was multi-tiered and we had come to a stop at a place that was level. After laughing and struggling through more thigh-deep snow we came to another spot that looked appropriate for sledding. I was the first down this time, deciding not to attempt to “ski” it, and quickly focused with my camera on Doug as he wasn’t far behind me.
The rest of our hike back to town was a mostly uneventful, albeit stunningly beautiful, two hours of stream hopping, clambering over the multitude of fallen, mostly rotted trees dry as matches and nearly as brittle, wandering onto and off of unknown trails that while clearly marked had obviously not been used in years, and blundering our way through the forest in what we figured to be the general direction of the town, lost but not lost.
The hike that the two of us went on can be seen as a microcosm of my bicycle trip. In both cases there was a clear plan to start with, but unforeseen circumstances derailed it. From there two choices were made clear: either turn around and go home, or reconfigure things and continue the adventure in a different way. Obviously, the choices were made to keep going, in whatever capacity.
Life is full of unexpected surprises. That’s a statement that sounds cliché, but it’s a reality that becomes more apparent the second one walks out the door on an adventure, whether it be a multi-month crossing of a continent, or something as trifling as a day hike. Had I not hurt my knee on my way to Santa Fe I certainly would not be in Frisco right now, which of course means that none of this that has been written about would have happened, and had Doug and I turned around and just gone back to town we would not have had what was, in my mind, one of the most fun, exciting, spontaneous, and utterly unexpected adventures that I’ve ever had; not in such a long time have I felt so much like a little kid until that moment of brief and inexpressible joy when I slipped, fell, and slid down the snowy slope on my butt. The combination of the risks involved in climbing up some of the steepest parts of the mountain where a tumble could potentially result in serious injury, the sheer joy of sliding down the snow-covered slopes like a child in naught but shoes and shorts, and the rather dull portion of the hike up to the point where we decided to veer off trail provided an adventure with that balance that I think is so seductive of these sorts of things. It’s like that supreme balance of salty, bitter, sour and sweet in a particularly delectable dish that lingers in your mind long after the meal has concluded.
In conclusion, these adventures, which are each just multiple links in the single chain of the odyssey that is my life (or anyone’s life who so chooses to venture out on one) are lessons in persistence, perseverance, and stubbornness, but also, flexibility, open-mindedness, and acceptance. These journeys we embark on, which we can never know their end results, which have no end results but continue on indefinitely like ocean wave after ocean wave roiling upon the shore are in reality one single entity or event, or, as Alan Watts would call it, a “thing-event”—the ocean—each wave being what we distinguish as an individual, distinct event or thing, and as all of these waves are made up of that one ocean, and the forces that work upon it, they are connected in ways that we can not fully, or even partly, comprehend.
Is it not true that the longer one sits on a beach gazing off into the ocean, mesmerized by the rhythm of the waves’ surge and crash and pull, that the waves and the ocean become one, each successive wave becoming less and less distinct than the last?
The Cosmological Eye 