Between one world and the next
I've been fascinated by marginalia for as long as I can remember. Not the sort you find scribbled in books bought from yard sales and college bookstores, though they are of a similar type. What I mean are the transitional areas between two distinct places: the shorelines of rivers and oceans, the damp margins that lie between a marsh and the dry land that helps define it, the thinned-out areas where forests and meadows touch each other like hesitant lovers. These places always seem magical to me in some way, being not wholly one thing nor the other, a sort of commingling of two worlds.
I remember walking a ridge far above Breitenbush Hot Springs one summer 19 ½ years ago. It was a rocky, broken spine like the back of some prehistoric beast, dotted with boulders and crawling with twisted vegetation. To either side it heeled sharply downward into valleys green and lush, but this spot was like a bit of an older, deader world which had eroded into ours. As I hiked out further, where the knife-edge came to a point and the ground fell away on three sides, I noticed something: I had wandered right into a circle of desolation some 7 or 8 meters across.
It wasn't a perfect circle, but near enough for Nature's handiwork in a fractal sort of way. Inside of it there was nothing but rocks, dirt and the dessicated limbs of long-dead rhododendrons and vine maples; the only living things were mosses and lichens that clung tightly to the rocks and the flies that swung lazily through the slow, hot breeze. I found a big boulder nearest the center, a massive shattered vertebra of volcanic andesite, and sat down to smoke a cigarette and ponder this eerie place.
I couldn't finish. The silence, the hot, slow-moving breeze like the earth's breath on my neck, the feeling of isolation in a place where I didn't belong . . . I had to leave, and almost broke my leg sliding down a talus slope in my hurry to be away from there and back in the cooler, damper, greener and more alive valley below.
I know exactly where that ridge is, and could get to it easily; I wonder if that dead zone is still there? Has it grown, even? I'm curious, but I'm not sure I want to know the answer.
I remember walking a ridge far above Breitenbush Hot Springs one summer 19 ½ years ago. It was a rocky, broken spine like the back of some prehistoric beast, dotted with boulders and crawling with twisted vegetation. To either side it heeled sharply downward into valleys green and lush, but this spot was like a bit of an older, deader world which had eroded into ours. As I hiked out further, where the knife-edge came to a point and the ground fell away on three sides, I noticed something: I had wandered right into a circle of desolation some 7 or 8 meters across.
It wasn't a perfect circle, but near enough for Nature's handiwork in a fractal sort of way. Inside of it there was nothing but rocks, dirt and the dessicated limbs of long-dead rhododendrons and vine maples; the only living things were mosses and lichens that clung tightly to the rocks and the flies that swung lazily through the slow, hot breeze. I found a big boulder nearest the center, a massive shattered vertebra of volcanic andesite, and sat down to smoke a cigarette and ponder this eerie place.
I couldn't finish. The silence, the hot, slow-moving breeze like the earth's breath on my neck, the feeling of isolation in a place where I didn't belong . . . I had to leave, and almost broke my leg sliding down a talus slope in my hurry to be away from there and back in the cooler, damper, greener and more alive valley below.
I know exactly where that ridge is, and could get to it easily; I wonder if that dead zone is still there? Has it grown, even? I'm curious, but I'm not sure I want to know the answer.