| I’m off again. But there will be no sitting in an outdoor cafe in the 4th arrondissement in Paris, a string of long pearls draped around my neck, sipping a cool Reisling. Instead there are clouds floating in an azure sky like dollops of whip cream, rolling fields, barns and silos, spotty herds of grazing cows along a slanted horizon of vacuous prairie sky, empty wheat fields. The land, eerily silent, derelict with once verdant grasslands. Granaries droop in ridiculous isolation, gullies intercepted with blotches of dying wildflowers: Queens Ann’s lace, fading puffy tufts of goldenrod , purple asters, and pale stalks of brown-eyed Susan’s. Overhead, a dry windless heat hosts smooth flights of Canada geese with their tuneless cry. I’m aiming for the ocean where my body and soul can speak with more consideration, more constancy. Maybe it will be a reset to wonder, to be blissful: to live in tree time, indifferent to news. To ‘un-languish.’ That alone should be compelling enough to undertake a “expedition”. A woman can go for a little to collect herself. Disencumbered. Free. Space. Life whittled down to the bone. Don’t get me wrong. I live for cities—its libraries, bookshops, cafes, public art, architecture, and apricot cocktails. But I need both – urban and wild. Julia Baird writes in her book Phosphorescence: “When you shrink, your ability to see somehow sharpens. When you see the beauty, vastness and fragility of nature, you want to preserve it. You see what we share, and how we connect.” Historically I have missed more turn-offs than you have probably had opportunities. Finding the right one was usually slower than time. Squinting at my navigation system, it stared at me like a threat. It was the first time I realized what a traitor it could be. But there was freedom between my ears, and I don’t mean what you think I mean. I like getting lost as much I like banging my head on a beam. And today, I was the hungriest in the history of my stomach. And tired. My eyebrows started to go in opposite directions. I felt they were going to be consequences, and one of them was not going to be bursting into glory like a fountain at Schönbrunn. But wrong turns change you, because either you change, stay the same, or something in between. And me, I may have been staying beyond my welcome. So I thought, I may not have personality, but I do have promise. So, I exchanged minor pleasantries with my car, geared up and promptly slid backwards into a ditch. At best, a bleak little place. Mud and water and rocks. One white birch stuck out at an angle. At worst, stuck. I thought that this experience may, in the future, if I ever get out, be substantially appropriate to recount (as some of us weather difficulties better than others), but at present, I found no material evidence of it. Some of us believe in bad luck and take appropriate measures to guard against it. Just thinking about this makes me short of breath. I have always made a business of mostly ignoring what goes on around me, like not looking up while taking garbage into the back alley, and nodding imperceptibly instead of acknowledging, having learned the potency of mystery and silence. Suffice it to say, I’m not a general-public fan. This practice, admittedly and at present, is not serving me well. So when you are at a particularly uncomfortable junction, you have to decide. What are you going to do next? What’s the next move? Decide. After all, when you stop and think about it, there isn’t really much of an alternative. When else can you cross a bridge, or go in a ditch, except when you come to it? Pondering my dilemma, sitting there completely alone, no noise, I realized I was actually found, not stuck. (Metaphorically speaking only – I was still in the ditch). I thought then, that maybe I could just drive absolutely forever in what Colette called “…the necklace of my days.” I was doing what I wanted to do; and I wasn’t totally sure how to feel about that. Except that this experience was now becoming as pleasant and relaxed as one might find the cleaning of a polar bear’s teeth to be. Let the records show that this was becoming a wee bit nerve-racking intense, as I recounted that I hadn’t seen nary a car or cow for hours. So I sulked. Sulking is a big effort. I’m sure you are relieved to know, and I won’t bore you with details, I eventually managed to extricate myself, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this – unless there was some kind of powerful cell service in Some Ditch, Alberta. Ocean-wards. Ho. |
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| Thank you for reading. |
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