One day I will manage to get my lazy backside out of bed early enough to catch the sunrise from the Echo Mountain Resort ruins. One day, not today, today I was only a third of the way up the trail that more or less follows the bed of the funicular that used to shuttle visitors between the bottom of Rubio canyon and the White City, the Echo Mountain Resort, when the sun peaked over the ridge on to the east. The trail was steep and overgrown, maintained mostly by its infrequent users, looks like, and that’s perfect. About a month ago, I was shocked, and a little weary, to find two couples here who, to add insult to injury, had been directed to the spot by Yelp. Fortunately, today I was happy as a lonesome lark as I bushwhacked my way, brushing up against the wonderful fragrance of wild sage and thyme, staying clear of them spiky yuccas, and checking for ticks every so often. Those little pesky bugs like to latch onto warm-blooded bodies passing by, and I was definitely warm, sweating like a hyperhidrosed high -schooler on a first date is more like it. Cooling off at the summit was easy. I joined an ongoing party; the bees in the neighborhood were throwing a pollinating bash, loading up on the stamens of Coulter Matilija Poppies like they’re going out of style.
I left the foraging insects, who will one day save the planet, to follow the Lower Sam Merrill trail back to the Cobb Estate, and ultimately a nice little coffee place on Lake. Now. I like people. I am even happy to witness the increased usage of trails in the area, ‘my backyard’. I am not selfish, but this was extreme. I didn’t count the number of hikers, joggers, dog-walkers and mountain bikers I crossed, but maybe I should have; the number would have been telling. And I repeat, it’s all good, but I’m not used to it, as I’ve said many times before, I much prefer solace, the company of ants, bees, chipmunks and the occasional rattlesnake. I belong to that species that goes into hiding when crowds of tourist flock to their turf, the ‘local’. Next time, I think I’ll go back the way I came, or follow the mystery path I will not speak about, and get lost in the chaparral. I’ll still have to get up early though.
Rough year to be homeless in Los Angeles, especially if you’d taken up residence on the islands of dirt and debris occupying the center channel of the LA River between Burbank and Figueroa. A year ago, a resident of the area told me they’d moved to the islands when the city dislodged them from the higher, safer, gated zones between the 5 freeway shoulder and the bike path. Where did they find refuge this winter, during our exceptional rainy season? Some have built shacks on the cement shore, in the mouths of smaller drainage arteries, but that can only be a small portion. A man loaded with a grocery bag slips through a breach in the fence next to the Griffith Park tennis courts. The brave soul who had settled halfway up the ridge leading to Beacon Hill, in Griffith Park, has vanished. Not surprising, the hill is invaded by black mustard (Brassica Nigra), or is it shortpod mustard (Hirschfeldia incana), tall and dense, and quite pretty in full bloom like today, but not habitable. They say you can eat the greens and flower though. I won’t try it. Not today. Today, I’m surrounded by the color of this invasive, non-native plant and I’m thinking of a Mingus tune, “Orange was the color of her dress, then blue silk.”
Evidently, it’s the colors in the title that prompt the connection–or is it ‘conection’?–but I also find that the many tempo changes, the many conversations that take place between the players, the sense that at any moment the thing can unravel into anarchy but doesn’t, the drive of Mingus’s bass, somehow fit a good ramble across Griffith Park. The many changes of pace–fast going downhill, slooow uphill–the subtle changes in scenery, the inevitable urban incursion–“Cristo Viene” spray-painted on rocks, trash piles and the need for a multitude of signs forbidding entry, marking property lines–all contribute to a complex composition that gently comes together during a nap near the wisdom tree. So, yellow was the color of the hills thanks mainly to the sprawling mustard, and then blue made an appearance in the shape of a single flower at first, then patch of lupines.
On the album where I thought I’d heard “orange was the color of her dress…”–memory lapse, it wasn’t–there is another superb performance of another tune fitting the occasion, “I’ll Remember April”. A classic, with a memorable Bud Powell piano solo, full of reverence for the music that Mingus, in much of his work, pushed forward, beyond its comfortable boundaries. This ‘conection’ didn’t occur to me until later, long after I’d exited Griffith Park proper, skirting its southern perimeter along Mulholland, and I’d run into a library of sorts, which, in typical LA fashion was nothing but a facade, or rather a cleverly decorated garage door. Some titles of note: Marx and Hegel, Think, Conections of the world, and my favorite, Aphorisms.
What you do as an editor is search for patterns, at both the superficial and ever deeper levels–as deep as you can go.
Walter Murch, in “The Conversations, Walter Murch and the Art of editing film”, by Michael Ondaatje.
Walter Murch along with Dede Allen, Thelma Schonmaker, David Lean, all great minds of the film editing craft have inspired me throughout my career, and beyond apparently.
Heading north on sixty-two in a slate grey gas-saving Prius, an episode of “The voice of the desert”, The Desert Oracle on the stereo. The sun rises over Desert Hot Springs and the Coachella valley to my right, bathing the imposing east-facing slopes of the snowcapped San Bernardinos in early morning warmth. On both sides of the road, a sea of bright light yellow blooms blankets the valley floor. It’s like this everywhere, drawing crowds of wildflower chasers, like the gazillion pollinating insects buzzing about, taking their cues from the sexy colors on display. I’m looking not to run into them, the crowds that is, because avoiding nature’s exuberant spring show is impossible.
I pretty darn near succeeded; the trail was almost lonely, gave me plenty time to do what I like to do on these walks which is think. What would it have been like to live out here before the internet and National Parks? Is that a Joshua Tree or a Mojave Yucca? They claim to have recorded the first image of a black hole, what does that mean? Is the next step images of a parallel universe? Like Tatooine, or whatever the Star Wars galaxy was named? (That’s on my mind because apparently scenes of the original trilogy were shot in these parts), Or is it a hoax, like they say the Apollo moon landing was? Does it confirm or refute the existence of a god (a god of your choice)?
In the end, here is what I think I know: tomorrow the sun will rise a minute or so sooner that today and set a minute or so later because the earth’s axis is tilted, which is why we have seasons, i.e. variations in temperatures, which is why we have life cycles on this very unique planet of ours. And in the springtime, in the otherwise arid climate of the southern California mountains, it’s a real feast to ramble and absorb the energy emanating from this orgy of renewal. It’s miraculous really.
I kept walking (actually, for full disclosure, I drove ten minutes from the Lost Horse Mine trailhead to the Ryan mountain trailhead, and then kept walking). I’d seen my fill of joshua trees (see previous entry) but my legs were rearing for some more exertion. Must have been the need to burn all the extra energy I got from the generous dose of honey I spiked the thermos of tea with, which I had just sipped sitting in a rare shaded spot, on the trunk of a broad, lazy leaning joshua. Or perhaps I was all charged up from the breezy weather. Or I felt like I had to reach a certain level of exhaustion before calling it a day, having paid a whopping thirty bucks to enter the park. Beats a gym membership, but I’m used to walking for free.
At any rate, if I was statically charged when I started up the short climb, I got juiced to the bones by the time I rambled back to the car, hanging on to my hat.
I’d like to think that I can show my erudition by claiming I listened to a certain Irish band during the longish drive from Altadena to Joshua Tree National Park. I didn’t. That musical memory only emerged a couple of days later, thanks to the not-random-at-all algorithmic nudge of a certain search engine. But I’m listening to it now and I have to admit that the flashbacks don’t come flooding, and for good reason; in the late eighties I had turned my back on rock, dug my head in the sand–under the shade of a joshua tree?–to explore the jazz universe, and missed the Irish invasion. Regrets? Nah. Not at all. If a life can have a soundtrack, a musical theme, mine would absolutely feature Monk on piano; Trane, Bird, Lacy on reeds; Dizzy and Lester on trumpet; Mingus with a twenty minute bass solo; two or three drummers: Elvin, Jack and Max; Yusef on flute; Don on clarinet; you can stop me anytime, or maybe you can’t, but anyhow…Now, they might play a beefed up version of “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” just to get things warmed up, you never know, I’d leave that up to them, I’m no musician. Actually, I’d have to slip in a request, since we’re talking about my life, my lyrical memories, and get some dangerously-slow-tempoed reggae in the lineup, “Stir it Up” maybe, and some guest appearances, like Claude singing “Tu Verras”, Abbey with “Throw it Away”, Lady Day with anything she damn pleases. You see what I mean, this could go on, and I haven’t even brought up FZ, Duke or Horace. But this isn’t my life, and the only soundtrack that accompanies these walks is that which the shitty microphone on the iphone captures, which on this glorious early spring day in the high desert, was the sound of high winds beating on everything standing. A wind that was chilly enough to be pleasant while walking in the sun, but quickly got cold while lunching in the shade of a joshua tree. A reminder that, even when this landscape is picture perfect, surviving in it is, in so many ways, a challenge. The Cahuilla managed, making thorough use of scant resources, including the notorious trees, long before Johnny Lang lost his horse, discovered the Lost Horse Mine and began digging for gold in the area.
What I’d like to know, is how long have these trees been here? They look prehistoric, or timeless, and walking among them was like walking along a procession of creatures frozen in twisty, often leaning, sometimes broken but always unique poses: an orchestra conductor, an old man bent under the years, a policeman directing traffic, a yoga instructor, rock climber, and my favorite, the one I chose to rest under, a hiker lying in the grass, legs crossed, back leaning against a joshua tree.
In conclusion, with a nod to those Irish rockers, I climbed a high-ish mountain (see next video), I ran–okay trudged–through the fields of cacti and spiky trees, but I still haven’t found what I’m looking for because what I’m looking for may be a trail that never ends, traversing ever-changing sceneries, evoking constant renewal, new and old stories of all the people, all the valleys and mountains, the oceans and rivers, the birds and the trees of the universe.Keep walking.
I’d hang out in the morning updraft above Rubio canyon. The creek is running again, after years of drought, and it attracts all sort of mammals perfectly sized for my consumption. Earlier, at dawn, this coyote pup came trotting up from the people neighborhood, all giddy from his own feasting on some pet, he stopped to have a slurp, his stomach so full he threw caution to the wind, forgot to look up and whoof! Benny and I shared a succulent breakfast. Benny’s my hunting partner. We’re stocking up energy, we’ve both got kids on the way, eggs in the nest, literally. Not that Benny needs to put on any more weight, he’s already hefty, which means he struggles in mild winds and over long distances, but when he dives on a prey, he’s got me beat every time. So he gets first dibs, but since his size allows him to pick out bigger targets it all evens out, there’s usually plenty to go around. We make a good team, he’s the muscle and I’m the brains.
Anyway, just because I’m a hawk doesn’t mean I’m hawkish; I only kill what I need to survive, nothing less, nothing more. It’s what I was built for, you know? The fun in it is just hanging out with Benny, who I have known since our first flying lessons, that and watching the bipeds walk up the mountain it takes us a mere two or three wing flaps to cross. I don’t get it. They’ve got machines, even ones that fly, and yet they flock to the mountains to climb them on foot, at considerable effort. They even bring their own food. I guess when you’re a biped that’s what you do: walk, but if I were in their shoes, I’d pick easier trails, flat ones. Watch me, no unnecessary movement, I let the elements do the work, follow the law of minimum effort. Hah! Look at them, trudging up the steepest ridge, like ants in their neurotic ceaseless dance to feed the colony.
Look at that guy in a bright yellow soccer jersey pointing a shiny device up at us? Grandpa used to tell us stories about humans pointing shiny objects at the sky, followed by sharp earsplitting noises, and friends of his falling to the ground, dead. Let me gain some altitude here, get within safe distance. Benny says we should skedaddle. He’s probably right. I wouldn’t want to end up dead, or worse, like Grandpa, in a cage.
Grandpa got caught because he was curious, and greedy, and a little blind in his older days. He was swooping around one day, on his daily morning constitutional, when he spotted this bleating lamb in the middle of a meadow in Griffith Park. He was a little hungry so he gained some altitude and went for it, only he hadn’t noticed the rope that extended from the lamb’s front right leg to a nearby sycamore, and the two uniformed parkies–park rangers–hidden under the tree. No sooner had Grandpa dug his talons into the lamb’s wooly skin that the parkies thrust a net over him. These days, when they catch you, most of the time they just tag and release you. You have to fly around with that stupid ankle bracelet, which is kind of embarrassing, but it doesn’t land you in a cage. Sadly, that’s where Grandpa finished his days, and those stories he told us, we had to listen to them through iron bars, when the rangers weren’t paying attention.
It wasn’t all bad though. One day, he said, this guy with a rumpled suit and a funny hat, carrying an odd size case, walked through the park early in the morning. He stopped and stared. Grandpa didn’t feel like being ogled, so he turned his back to the stranger. He heard him open the case and fought the itch to look back. A couple of minutes later a sweet sound filled the air. Instantly, the general cacophony of birds all around doing their morning routine ceased, even those pesky, and loud, green parakeets shut up. Grandpa couldn’t help it anymore, he glanced at the stranger over his shoulder. The man was holding a shiny, sinuous, horned object to his mouth, from which this tantalizing disturbance of the morning air emanated. At first the effect was plaintive, hurt. The player was still staring, only now Grandpa held his gaze. The space that separated hawk from Hawk–for I imagine it was the famous saxophonist Coleman Hawkins Grandpa was talking about–collapsed, reduced by the notes that flowed out of the instrument to an emotion, a flurry of emotions that was at once completely removed from the world and encompassing the whole universe. It spoke of pain, joy, betrayal, love, existence. Grandpa scanned the surroundings, looking for reactions from other caged birds but he couldn’t see any. He must have thought he’d died.Could this be what happens when your heart stops beating? But no, his pulse was strong, and not only that, it was magically in tune with the music. Hawk closed his eyes. A robin flew down from a nearby oak tree, to land on his shoulder. It started singing, as if in response to the horn, and Hawk in turn, responded, effortlessly moving through keys to join the robin in dialogue. Grandpa, the hawk, laughed; the kind of laugh that is infectious, indisputable and so profoundly real it echoes through time and the universe, maybe even into the far reaches of Rubio canyon, where a lone hiker, who’s just quenched his thirst from the raging creek, feels rather than hears a flutter and looks up at the misty morning sky. He recognizes the silhouette of a red-tail hawk, no, two hawks circling above him, rapidly gaining altitude.
I did not visit Paramount Ranch in search of this year’s already mythic superbloom, I swear I didn’t. And let me disclaim right away that no flower was trampled in the making of the above video. Let me also confess that the only wildflowers in the piece that I can identify with confidence are the california poppies, the purple lupines and the yuccas. Needless to say, I felt quite ignorant roaming the various trails in the park, surrounded by bright green fields in every hue dotted with patches of orange, golden yellow, princely purple, violet and white. But life is a learning process, right? And I haven’t delved into the chapter about wildflowers yet. What I did notice, was the total disappearance of the chaparral I am slightly more familiar with. Laurel, manzanita, ceanothus, toyon and scrub oak were comprehensively consumed by the Woolsey fire, leaving only charred, spiny carcasses stubbornly planted on the hillsides. Only the shaded north-facing slopes retain more visibly the barren, rock and dirt, lunar landscape look. On the sunny slopes and in the valleys, grasses have sprouted like wildfire, thanks to all the rain we’ve had, leaving a green carpet swaying gently in the breeze and from which the silver and brown remains of old growth oaks, many of them famous like movie stars, still stand. They will not be written off so easily, already, only three months after the blaze, tufts of green leaves adorn their less ravaged limbs; they will be back! Like the landmark Western Town that is already being rebuilt, and the ants that are already busy gathering who knows what from the ashes, and the butterflies.
Zigzagging haphazardly from bloom to bloom, migrating painted ladies cross my path by the dozen. They see me coming, I know, and they tease me; one after the other they land as if to rest, or pose, on a goldfield, I think, only to take off as soon as I approach. I’ve tried talking to them, slowing down my approach, waiting for them to land in frame, all to no avail. Either they’re camera shy or in a hurry. I guess when you’ve got thousands of miles to cover and only a limited time to do it, optics are not a priority. Besides, I don’t care, I get ensnared into their dance, a smile blooms in my soul, and eventually I take note, the ladies spend a few more seconds on the blue flowers.
Speaking of painted ladies, Abbey Lincoln recorded an album entitled “Painted Lady” and I’m spinning it right now, because life is like that, right? you look for connections. It doesn’t always work because it’s often forced, artificial, but this music is doing something very sweet to my disposition, kind of like dancing with butterflies. And when it fades, I’m left lying in the grass, happy like the poet.
My preferred route to the ruins of the ‘White City’, or Echo mountain resort, follows the steep incline on the eastern ridge, where the funicular once hauled visitors from the bottom of Rubio canyon to the resort. It avoids the crowds that flock to the very popular Sam Merrill trail on the western slope. In fact, it avoids them so well that hikers are as scarce as mountain lions on that trail; I haven’t encountered either in the fifteen years I’ve frequented it. But, as the saying goes, this was one of those first times. I passed two couples on the way up. It’s not a crowd, and I really don’t care. Actually, it’s nice to have company sometimes, and to see others ‘dwell among the mysteries and beauties of the earth’, as Rachel Carson puts it. What gives me pause however, is that both couples found the trail thanks to our friend Google. How long before some googlorithm of sorts sends crowds to this secluded spot? Another thing I don’t remember seeing in Rubio, except in thin, rare patches, is a steady flow of water in the creek, gushing downward, carving yet a few more inches out of the floor of the canyon, sculpting the ever changing landscape, and occasionally washing out a portion of trail.
Itinerary for a wander around northwest Washington DC
Brioche sprinkled with sugar like thick snowflakes wolfed down, before wandering westward to meet the Potomac, in a boulangerie that bears my namesake, if you drop the last letter, like my aunt and a chain-smoking high school administrator used to do. The brisk, damp March morning reminiscent of those same school days and walks along the shores of the Lac Léman, not too far from where Lord Byron composed his romantic tale of a martyr imprisoned in the medieval Chillon castle, whose walls, erected onto the rocky shore of the lake, have been battered for a thousand years by fresh water waves gorged with runoff from the snowy alpine peaks that surround it. Picture Byron’s prisoner dreaming, not only of a free Geneva Republic, but of adventures. He escapes by diving into the frigid waters on a winter day, then boards a small fishing sailboat he’s arranged, with hefty bribes to a sympathetic guard, to have moored nearby. He first sets a westward course, with the hope of returning to his native Geneva, but soldiers are already waiting for him. By cover of darkness he sneaks past them and steers his vessel into the Rhône river, carried by the strong current, bearing due south now. It’s a spectacular ride; a good mistral barelling down the Rhône valley fills his sails from the stern. He reaches the Camargue marshes and bursts into the Mediterranean in no time. He’s got a big decision to make; make a left to follow the established silk and spice trade routes to the Orient, or make a right to seek his fortune west, in the new world. He crosses paths with a speedy Portuguese caravel returning from Alexandria, whose captain convinces him to follow them to Lisbon where he will be able to gather the best, most experienced maritime information. “After all, we’ve been doing this exploring and colonizing longer than anyone else,” the captain says. The prisoner, unfortunately, buys the argument and finds himself robbed of all his belongings and supplies save the clothes on his back. Unceremoniously, his vessel is sunk, which is a good thing because, while it was lake and river worthy, the small fishing dinghy would never have withstood the far rougher seas of the Mediterranean. Some members of the crew demand the execution and disposal of the prisoner; he has to be fed and food and water supplies are running desperately low after their long voyage. The captain refuses to murder another christian–the prisoner is wise enough to conceal his true faith in the reformed protestant church, as he is well aware such a confession would have earned him a speedy catholic hanging from the main mast. Instead he is abandoned in the very busy port of Lisbon. Penniless, hungry, physically diminished by the journey and years of imprisonment, and free the prisoner laughs out loud, as he walks along the Restelo, and even louder when he sees the Belem Tower, a chilling visual reminder of the Chillon dungeon. In a flash, he sees himself back in his dark and danky cell. Understandably, he doesn’t linger in the neighborhood. With the incessant traffic of ships in the harbor, it is easy to find work on the docks, and so in a short time, the prisoner rebuilds his strength and composure. At night, he earns a few extra coins serving ale and rum in a tavern, a well-frequented watering hole for travel weary sailors full of tales from around the globe. The word is there’s trouble in the east. The dutch, the brits and the frogs are gaining control of the African coast, east, west and south, rendering the journey to the ‘land of spices’ perilous. Real opportunities for enrichment lie in the west, where mountains of gold await, guarded merely by bands of pagan savages. Such are the rumors that emanate from the tavern’s piss and vomit-soaked sawdust and smoky haze.
Almost five hundred years later, after brushing brioche crumbs off my beard and jacket, I set my own northbound pedestrian course through Georgetown and the greater northwest District of Columbia. Every other street named, in ascending order, after a letter in the alphabet. Dead presidents surveying the lazy Saturday morning foot traffic, young couples walking babies and dogs. The stately neighborhood library on top of Book Hill Park, open early with a very clean bathroom and large high-ceilinged reading rooms with tall windows giving readers southern views of the park, the elaborate homeless encampment sheltered by an evergreen tree and the national monuments in the far distance. Daniel Boone guards the southeast corner of the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, half a block away from a brightly painted donkey hiding behind a manicured bush that I only later recognize as a political figure, a statement–didn’t see any elephants. What is the connection between Daniel Boone and Duke Ellington, a frontiersman folk hero and a musical genius? Could they have both treaded these grounds? Not likely. Yet today they cohabit this block on the north side of Reservoir street, the explorer who inhabited my youthful fantasies of the Wild West and the master composer so eloquently praised by my first favorite writer, Boris Vian. who wrote in L’Ecume des Jours, a love story so potently infused with a cocktail of emotions, satire, Ellingtonian tunes, and surrealistic botany that it could very well have reverberated back in time, turned back the clock as it were, to infuse the burgeoning love between our escaped Chillon prisoner and Felicidad, the mulatto cleaning girl in the boarding house where he’s taken residence while saving money for whatever the next stage of his journey is to be. Their journey, as it turns out, because Felicidad is ferociously homesick. She has been planning her escape since long before she met the dreamy prisoner, saving every escudo for her return to the land beyond the sunset she was abducted from, five years earlier. Besides sailors and bandits, the tavern hosts a nightly troop of buskers, traveling actors, troubadours, poets and a poet in particular who has ensnared Felicidad’s and the prisoner’s imagination with the virtues of what he names his drunken jalopy. “Needs no sails, no crew, no captain, no compass, but pour me a little more of that ale there lass, before I tell you how this enchanted vessel will take you wherever you wish to go.” At the end of a long and very wet night, Felicidad and the prisoner walk the poet home, carry him is more like it. “Where can we find such a jalopy?” They ask him. “Find it? You can’t find this heroic schooner, this transformative galleon, this precocious submarine, this…this…Ah, fuck it. I’m all out of images. You can’t find it. It finds you. It is you and you it.” Befuddled, the hopeful lovers drop the poet in the middle of the street. “Be the boat my friends. Be the boat.” The prisoner wanted to kick the sense out of the poet, but Felicidad talked him into emptying his pockets first, hoping to at least find some compensation for the many pints they’d sprung him in exchange for information. The verse scribbler’s pockets were predictably empty, except for a map, illustrating a navigation route to the Indies, the new Indies, the ones that lie west of LIsbon. It was a schematic job, with little sense of scale, or respect for proportions–Portugal, for instance, occupied more than half of the Iberian peninsula, and the African continent was represented by a triangle no larger than Europe–and an abundance of crosses, the kind that the King and his wandering subjects had planted all over the shores of the worlds they had ‘discovered’. There was also a name clearly written on the back of it, the name of a captain, Captain Arthur R. The drunken poet smiled and said “you two lovebirds dream of greener pastures? Find someone who can decipher that map.” This turned out to be easy, as if it had been written somewhere that because they’d found the map, Felicidad and the prisoner would find the adventurer that would recruit them, as a cook and a sailor, on his next expedition in search of Eldorado, leaving within a fortnight. And so their voyage began. For her, the hope of returning home, for him, the hope of finding a new home; for both the hope of freedom.
Although totally unintentional, there is a decidedly French bend to this narrative, so it came as no surprise when I passed the bucolic campus of the French embassy before reaching the “Hidden Entrance”. To what? Not sure. But beyond the sign lay a wide meadow, intersected by fallen trees, overlooked by a hospital, and a dedication to Rachel Carson who, I learned, wandered in these parts. Carson, who warned humanity of the danger of acting without perspective, and of being just plain dumb–and greedy–for refusing to assume responsibility for the catastrophe that’s staring you in the face and that you created. You spray enough DDT in an apple orchard, you’re not merely killing bugs, you’re poisoning the apples, the apple trees, the apple eaters. Duh! It’s not a unique chapter in our history, the pattern’s clear: industries with mouth-watering margins of profit–pesticides, tobacco, oil, guns, opioids–turn a blind eye to the monsters they create. Speaking of monsters, the Rock Creek trail was blocked by stretches of “Danger Do Not Cross” tape made all the more visible by the winter bareness of the forest surrounding it, which diverted me to the backside of a University campus, where there were ominous signs of night time activity involving a basketball hoop, and then onto another, less traveled trail, I shared with a couple of deer too busy to munch on budding greenery to pay any attention to me. I found out only the next day that they occasionally find bodies in Rock Creek Park, so there are monsters around, but that’s another story. An unlocked bike in seemingly good shape. A familiar construction with a blue tarp, tent and debris, no trash, all around. And a pedestrian tunnel whose first half is covered in tags and then magically, completely paint free. Then the river, the destination, gorged with the season’s record precipitation, its muddy, swampy shores unwalkable. Disregard the helicopters, the aerodynamic bikers, the neon-clad joggers attached to their earbuds and you might, given the right flight of fancy, suspension of disbelief, literary connection–the kind of connection where two surfaces don’t actually touch though they ignite a spark, like in a Michelangelo painting, or the neurons in your brain–you might see something. Something like a Portuguese carrack anchored downstream, where the river is wide enough, and a row boat tentatively sailing towards Fletcher’s Cove, before it was called Fletcher’s Cove, before we had presidents, before Duke Ellington moved to New York to play at the Cotton Club, before Rachel Carson saved the world, before anyone ate sweet brioche sprinkled with sugar–actually, I’m not sure about that one. The small vessel has only two occupants, a couple. Their eyes are filled with wonder and caution as they step onto the muddy shore, their balance is wobbly from the weeks they’ve spent at sea, and they are completely unaware that they are being watched, with equal caution and wonder, by a young boy who takes off running when he sees them embrace and kiss.
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