The Place you Love is Gone
This weekend I sat by myself on a rock outcropping overlooking the rolling patchwork of the Catskills. I'd finally shed my noisy companions, and was thrilled at the half hour of solitude which afforded a rare chance to breathe like a naturalist. And I did, in full, lungs-to-bursting gulps. When one is in such a mindframe, one catches stimuli that might otherwise go unnoticed. In full quiet, save the hum of insects and a persistant, far-off wood thrush calling his two-phrase pattern over and over, it was easier to catch the eye of a tiny chipmunk foraging not three feet away, to notice a scrap of purple flowers growing between the rocks, and to look up at an almost mechanical drone to see a hummingbird dip its beak into trumpetlike flowers overhead.
I looked over the mountains and realized that this was how I felt all the time in Arizona. This was stepping out my front door and seeing the Santa Catalinas and saguaros and tumbleweeds and feeling that I could subsist on air and beauty alone. I knew in 2003, as I knew on Sunday, that I'd be going back to the city. I wrote in my journal: "I think I may have to move."
When I got home I had an e-mail in my mailbox with the news. It's not unexpected, but each step toward inevitability feels like stretched elastic, part limp, part painful as each tiny fiber snaps under the increasing tension. I look at those pictures and I wonder if there will ever be places like that again, or if our species will one day destroy our chances of future generations learning to breathe like naturalists, to find shapes in a clear night sky, to cultivate solace and growth in a desert.
It goes against everything, to add another home to the collective, but I think -- or rather, I know -- that I may have to move.
I will have to move. I just wonder when, and how, and where exactly that will be.
I looked over the mountains and realized that this was how I felt all the time in Arizona. This was stepping out my front door and seeing the Santa Catalinas and saguaros and tumbleweeds and feeling that I could subsist on air and beauty alone. I knew in 2003, as I knew on Sunday, that I'd be going back to the city. I wrote in my journal: "I think I may have to move."
When I got home I had an e-mail in my mailbox with the news. It's not unexpected, but each step toward inevitability feels like stretched elastic, part limp, part painful as each tiny fiber snaps under the increasing tension. I look at those pictures and I wonder if there will ever be places like that again, or if our species will one day destroy our chances of future generations learning to breathe like naturalists, to find shapes in a clear night sky, to cultivate solace and growth in a desert.
It goes against everything, to add another home to the collective, but I think -- or rather, I know -- that I may have to move.
I will have to move. I just wonder when, and how, and where exactly that will be.