Yet one more morning, lost in lonely shadows, fades slowly, uneasily away. My hair is dirty, my room is cluttered, my feet are dank, and though so much of this is familiar, routine, it is not who I expected to be. Poverty line no man's hero, unemployed, sleeping on a hard wooden floor in a house that isn't a home, pining after a girl six hours away, also unemployed: this is not the storybook after which our childish dreams lust.
There is art here, but it is muted in comparison to the brilliance of goldfinch and cardinal, the stark beauty of white pine, the misty white of lifting river fog each exuberant morning, fading into the mottled grays and browns and dilapidated yellows of city life, covered in a thin, but still lung-pestering, film of smog and haze. I am grateful this is Minneapolis, not LA, but still – it is not open plains or rolling bluffs or mountain grandeur; it offers no refuge of clear, calm water or cool, dark forest floors or horizon-stretching prairie vistas. It is not quiet, it is not lonely, it is not, well, natural. There is awesome diversity here: ethnic foods, cultured shops, neighborhoods of every size, shape, and hue; there are more stoplight intersections in Minneapolis than there were people in the nearest town from my previous home (802 stoplight intersections; Lanesboro’s population: 788); but there is so little of nature, so little of all that has become home, and more than that, so little of what has become my identity.
There is more to life than greasy hair, a sweaty back, and smelly feet – I know this, know it in the center of my very marrow – but this is my most immediate escape, whether by foot or bicycle. This choice – transportation of, for, and by myself – is my closest remaining connection to that primitive life, that which only a month ago was so natural, even as I wearied of some of its trappings. Still, I feel my once-mythological fitness slipping away day by day, limiting myself as I do by diet, fatigue, motivation. If this is the process of becoming city-fied, this slow slide into softness, hard edges and lines collapsing towards the gelatinous figures of so many neighbors, then I fear it.
Neti, neti – I find who I am, by finding first who I am not. City-dweller, I think I am not. So be it; I know this even as I step into the challenge, instead choosing to focus on the room such a venture presents for growth, both personal and professional. Life is a matter of trade-offs, of compromise, cooperation, even collusion, and I want a life with a woman I love. If for now that necessitates city life, I will grow into the role, learn to make the most of it. I am finding the fearlessness needed for navigation by bike, deftly maneuvering my small collection of cylindrical tubes and two tires, weaving as needed to beat traffic and stoplights; this is a city skill, and I find myself enjoying both the rush and challenge of busy streets and unfamiliar territory. I am slowly learning the farmer's market schedules, marveling at the sheer quantity of fresh fruits, vegetables, breads, and other goods available to me. I will learn the ethnic foods stores, step into the myriad food possibilities. I will develop relationships that work towards change, sustainability, that which is good, right, and more-often forgotten. There is power in possibilities, and despite the myriad frustrations – yet another run gone poorly, yet another rejection letter from one more hoped at job application – I will press on. To not do so is to admit defeat, to lie down before hardly having begun.
My high school cross-country coach always admonished us that "there are no shortcuts to a championship." Neither, I am finding, are there shortcuts to a life worth living. Instead, there is only hard work and possibility. Decided, I concentrate on the former to create the latter. There are no shortcuts here.
Saturday, June 23
Sunday, June 3
Bid the Bluff Adieu
Time fades, both hard and soft, into the rapidly warming days. Mornings came hazy, and cool, an almost autumnal chill lingering, waiting for the bright sun to burn it off; afternoons peak hot, sweat pooling in the smalls of backs. The summer is coming both fast and slow: evenings still hold hard sleep, not yet uninterrupted by the heat, even as students disturbingly parade more and more flesh. (I wonder, what does this say about our seasons, that they can now better be told by a fourth-graders wardrobe than precipitation, April and May only impetuously, begrudgingly providing their requisite showers and flowers?)
Weary naturalists, we count the days: five days of classes only, to our June 8th farewell. We make sweet love to the promise of summer: no longer will we plunge toilets, unintentionally eat raptor crap, shovel whole porches of three feet of snow, or do others' work. We will hold our heads high. We survived. Even as we bathe in such hopeful glow, however, we shed bittersweet tears of parting. When again, we wonder, will we play thirty feet above the ground, for free, whenever we want? When again will we have the chance to spend our entire day outside, doing whole-body work with people whose company we enjoy as much as this crew? When again might we inhale such delicious scents -- lilac, plum, wild geranium, blue flox, violets -- with such astonishing frequency that we begin to no longer notice? When again will we stoop to a garden salad of plantain and dandelion, strawberry and violet, all wild, all without fear of chemical contamination? When again will watch, mere inches away, a timber rattler strike, and then stalk, its unsuspecting prey, reveling in the unhinged jaw and the slowly vanishing mouse. These experiences -- so many, so brilliant, so beautifully natural, real-world -- are fleeting shadows, even now steadily pulling away from us, as we lose ourselves in job applications, apartment plans, the return to the real world we so eagerly escaped these past nine months.
Like so many other marrow-draining endeavors (which, perhaps, may be all pursuits of both children and love), as labored as it has, at times, been, it has also been plentifully blessed. I proudly proclaim my knowledge of wild edibles, while not by any means complete, manageable: I stand a chance of surviving, left to my own devices. I proudly proclaim my bird identification skills, now a thousand fold beyond even a year ago, when I once struggled to name a red-winged blackbird, and delight in the cacophony I consider like that of friends: warm, friendly, familiar. Goldfinch, robin, cardinal; field sparrow, flicker, junco; rose-breasted grosbeak, bluebird, tree sparrow; woodpeckers: hoary, downy, red-crested, redheaded, red-bellied, pileated, yellow-bellied sapsucker; bald eagles and hawks: red-tailed, sharp-shinned, cooper's, rough-legged. I will not miss the jays, crows, red-winged blackbirds, or the drunken turkey vultures. I know the scents of the woods: red fox, buck, doe, coyote; I am sure of the smell of approaching rain and the color of new growth and the taste of good dirt (yellow; rich, dark, earthy). I say hello each clear evening to Venus, shining proud in the western sky, and run under the brilliant moon's pale, white light. I own two headlamps, and rarely use either, finding no need of them in these woods, which I know at least as well, if not better, than my parent's home.
This has become a home of sweet pleasures, in which we forget our bitter fatigue, ever-present as it may be. We drift lazily down the root, our kayaks sidled neighborly against each other, basking in the warm sun, the gentle breeze, the coolly lapping water. We walk, hand in hand, loved and loving, through the solitudes of prairie field and white pine stand, against the hard breeze of an approaching spring storm, in the fading sunlight of a hazy dusk. Spring is melting into summer, even as we uneasily say our goodbyes. We are worn, tired, dragging, yes, but there has been much good here.
A cardinal sits outside my window; a red-winged blackbird guards a home. This life is as perfect as it is flawed and broken, and, despite the stresses, I could not wish for more. It is enough. It is more than enough.
Weary naturalists, we count the days: five days of classes only, to our June 8th farewell. We make sweet love to the promise of summer: no longer will we plunge toilets, unintentionally eat raptor crap, shovel whole porches of three feet of snow, or do others' work. We will hold our heads high. We survived. Even as we bathe in such hopeful glow, however, we shed bittersweet tears of parting. When again, we wonder, will we play thirty feet above the ground, for free, whenever we want? When again will we have the chance to spend our entire day outside, doing whole-body work with people whose company we enjoy as much as this crew? When again might we inhale such delicious scents -- lilac, plum, wild geranium, blue flox, violets -- with such astonishing frequency that we begin to no longer notice? When again will we stoop to a garden salad of plantain and dandelion, strawberry and violet, all wild, all without fear of chemical contamination? When again will watch, mere inches away, a timber rattler strike, and then stalk, its unsuspecting prey, reveling in the unhinged jaw and the slowly vanishing mouse. These experiences -- so many, so brilliant, so beautifully natural, real-world -- are fleeting shadows, even now steadily pulling away from us, as we lose ourselves in job applications, apartment plans, the return to the real world we so eagerly escaped these past nine months.
Like so many other marrow-draining endeavors (which, perhaps, may be all pursuits of both children and love), as labored as it has, at times, been, it has also been plentifully blessed. I proudly proclaim my knowledge of wild edibles, while not by any means complete, manageable: I stand a chance of surviving, left to my own devices. I proudly proclaim my bird identification skills, now a thousand fold beyond even a year ago, when I once struggled to name a red-winged blackbird, and delight in the cacophony I consider like that of friends: warm, friendly, familiar. Goldfinch, robin, cardinal; field sparrow, flicker, junco; rose-breasted grosbeak, bluebird, tree sparrow; woodpeckers: hoary, downy, red-crested, redheaded, red-bellied, pileated, yellow-bellied sapsucker; bald eagles and hawks: red-tailed, sharp-shinned, cooper's, rough-legged. I will not miss the jays, crows, red-winged blackbirds, or the drunken turkey vultures. I know the scents of the woods: red fox, buck, doe, coyote; I am sure of the smell of approaching rain and the color of new growth and the taste of good dirt (yellow; rich, dark, earthy). I say hello each clear evening to Venus, shining proud in the western sky, and run under the brilliant moon's pale, white light. I own two headlamps, and rarely use either, finding no need of them in these woods, which I know at least as well, if not better, than my parent's home.
This has become a home of sweet pleasures, in which we forget our bitter fatigue, ever-present as it may be. We drift lazily down the root, our kayaks sidled neighborly against each other, basking in the warm sun, the gentle breeze, the coolly lapping water. We walk, hand in hand, loved and loving, through the solitudes of prairie field and white pine stand, against the hard breeze of an approaching spring storm, in the fading sunlight of a hazy dusk. Spring is melting into summer, even as we uneasily say our goodbyes. We are worn, tired, dragging, yes, but there has been much good here.
A cardinal sits outside my window; a red-winged blackbird guards a home. This life is as perfect as it is flawed and broken, and, despite the stresses, I could not wish for more. It is enough. It is more than enough.
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