Journal Excerpts
10 November, First Night in the Andrews
A good mantra for the week: writing as a verb, not a noun.
Saul sent me these good words before I left home: “Good writing, sitting, watching, walking…. Enjoy the trees, my friend, keep the world close.”
Just back from nightwalk on the road. A bit of geographical bearings: I am just above Lookout Creek, roughly a quarter mile above its confluence with the Blue River, which, in turn, is about three miles from its confluence with the McKenzie. We’re about 1500 feet above sea level.
A bit of bearings on the light (and lack thereof). In the forest, in the dark, I at first had difficulty distinguishing what was positive, what negative: I reached my hand down to the pale patterns, wondering if somehow they were snow—to find the soft springiness of ferns. The moon was casting a diffuse light through clouds. This fuzzy circle was the closest thing to sun since my dropping in to this bioregion two days ago.
I feel like I’ve landed on another planet, albeit one I’ve visited before. The light is the single most striking difference—even more than the tall trees, or the wet earth. The lack of shadows, the lack of crisp definition, the narrower palette of colors—all this is so strikingly different.
11 November
The November rain has moved in with a sense of momentous purpose—ready to soak the humus, swell the rivers. The rain falling completely vertical—no deviation from the shortest route between cloud and soil. I sit on the front porch admiring the rain as others might enjoy sunrise over Cape Cod Bay. A cup of Yunnan tea perched on the railing, the light still dim enough I must squint to read the page— this though we are almost two hours past “sunrise.” Sun, sunrise, sunset—these become more conceptions, intellectualizations here. The last I actually saw the sun—the last I had to shield my eyes—was on the plane as we descended toward San Francisco three days ago.
Been thinking about love of place. I’m somewhere in the middle, I suppose, between someone who samples broadly across the globe and one who digs in very specifically and locally. My focus has been on North America, broadly defined, but also something like serial monogamy—when I dip into a place, I do so very wholeheartedly, with field guides blazing, attentiveness ripping, synapses open. But that spotlight has shined upon several different landscapes: Pacific Northwest forests, mountains and coasts (which are so interfingered I can’t separate them); the canyon country—sandstone land—of the Colorado Plateau; the Sonoran Desert, land of erect cacti and leguminous shrubs and trees; and the Gulf of California—rich miracle of a sea, bubbling (almost literally) with mammals and birds (the former bubbling upwards, the latter’s frothy entrance to the sea from above). As with human companions, the question arises: how many can we love at once? Is there an inherent limit to intimacy? How do we love both deeply and broadly?
The Rain of Patience [While walking on Forest Roads 130 and 134, in morning] The first serious winter rains have arrived, and I walk headlong into them. Where I live, rain is a wild and tempestuous presence—rarely seen, but felt vividly, in all its slamming, swooping, stinging glory. But here—west side of central Oregon Cascades, 1500 ft. elevation—at the onset of winter…. The time when the rain steps into the room and dourly announces, “I’m here—get back in your seats; sit down.” The rain is formless and ubiquitous, it’s everywhere at once: on the brim of my hat, in the spongey humus, in rivulets in the ruts along old logging roads, and in Lookout Creek, which I hear surging, somewhere down in the valley’s mists, far below.
You could fit twenty of these fine droplets into a single big, gaudy Arizona monsoon season rain pellet.
But here, this is the rain of patience. The rain that knows it has all the time in the world, the rain that speaks in quiet, assured tones, saying “There’s no turning back. You’re mine.”
Read more from Thomas Lowe Fleischner’s Journal Excerpts here.
