I see Things When I Walk (For Claude Nougaro)
The angel sat cross-legged on what remains of the ‘love seat’ when, after much sweating, I reached the ruins of the Echo Mountain Resort. He sat on the very spot where Thaddeus Lowe, father of the ill-fated Mt Lowe Railway that used to take visitors on an hair-raising ride from the resort to the Mt Lowe summit, twenty-four hundred feet higher, used to sit with his wife Leontine admiring sunsets over the Los Angeles basin. The ageless face turned slowly when I approached. He smiled with his deeply set dark eyes, shadowed by thick, abundant eyebrows that matched his bushy black hair. If I had to guess I would say he was from Toulouse, but who knows. Regardless, I was surprised; in twenty years of hiking to this spot regularly I’d never encountered anyone. The crowds that reach the resort tend not to drift this far over to the eastern edge of the ruins.
What do you see? Asked the angel.
What do you mean? I replied, and aware, for the first times that I’d identified this dark-haired buddha-like apparition as an angel.
When you walk…he explained.
When I walk? I see–things? I threw out. Why an angel?
What?
I see things when I walk. Why not an old man with an angel face?
Do you see what I see?
What?
What I see.
I see what I see. Why not an old man with an angel face twirling an angel feather over his head? I see things buzzing, blooming, flying, crawling, floating, shining, shimmering, I pointed at him, sitting, rotting, pollinating, scampering, scattering, cawing, chirping…
WAIT. The angel interrupted.
What?
Do you see this feather? He leaned forward and said, in an enthusiastic, overjoyed, almost ecstatic whisper, because if you do the world is saved! SAVED, You hear me? Love will prevail! Beauty and goodness will rule the earth!
I see.
Walking Project 119_early spring, unedited # 02 – altadena crest trail from chris worland on Vimeo.
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