Far and away

“I don’t want to imagine, not even for a moment, wearing the shoes of the parents of a toddler attacked by an alligator at Disneyland. I don’t want to try and plumb the shattered feelings of the children of a British MP attacked and killed, apparently, over rage about something as sterile as a trade and immigration deal.”

I don’t want to imagine, not even for a moment, wearing the shoes of the parents of a toddler attacked by an alligator at Disneyland. I don’t want to try and plumb the shattered feelings of the children of a British MP attacked and killed, apparently, over rage about something as sterile as a trade and immigration deal.

Enough. It sounds callous, but sometimes, I reach a saturation point with the grief of others.

I’m going to throw my thoughts into the river instead, and hope to have my soul washed clean. Just for a while.

Below the road from Broad Cove — “Which one?” you ask, but I won’t say, and there are many — below the road, down the steep embankment littered with brush and the parts of last year’s moose people didn’t want to keep, from head to hooves to hide, and out across the bog. That’s the easiest way in, leaving dimpled moss craters filling with brown bog-water behind you, clustered sleeves of last year’s pitcher plants dried and standing like small pipe organs, feet sinking far down but the moss rising again behind you. Rarely more than eight or ten steps in sight before the rising fills in again, so it looks as if you were dropped into the middle of the bog.

The fine small bog flowers out now, too many kinds to count, many, up close, with scents you wouldn’t describe as fragrance — they’re not looking for you — notes of rot and even old flesh, pollinating traps set for different kinds of flies and bees.

The juniper out full, but with its needles still soft and rubbery, so that they drag on your face as you pass through their thickets, but don’t stab. Water’s high now, not spring flood anymore but the hangover of two-day-old heavy rain, and it’s darting into the feet of the bushes on both sides. Quick fleets of white petals — all of them the same, like dorymen heading back to the mother ship — cruise into the shallows over the bright small gravel and out again, and I wonder if they are from chuckley pears or pin cherries. They sail off before I’m close enough to see clearly.

I sit for a while below a kneehigh chute falls on a shearing tiny cordillera of peaking slate, the rock shot through with a single inch-thick bar of opaque white quartz. Cracks in the quartz band are stained like smokers’ teeth with orange iron, and the blackflies dogfight above me, landing behind my ears, along my hairline on my neck, to refuel, and there are trout below the falls. Sometimes, even a falls has a way of standing for a moment, enough of a break to let the surface settle to flat, and I can see six or seven fish pointing into the current, rising fast to sip flies, diving back down again to hold in formation.

I’m not fishing. My baseball hat is old enough to have faded, old enough that the fabric has started to tuft apart along the taut line of the front of the bill, and the back is stained with fly oil and a white cloud pattern of dried sweat.

The movement of small birds in the underbrush catching at the edges of attention, the light off the disordered water, the falls-charged bubbles streaming up through the fast clear water. There is much in this. Much to see, much to say. If only I thought there was clear proof of someone, other than me, truly listening.

I want to yell at the stars in a big and otherwise empty sky. I want to leave inhumanity firmly on the other side.

I want peace, big and small — but I’ll settle for just enough to hold in my hands today. And drink.