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Two young fellows, very near my age, maybe younger, walked
by the
old woman’s property one day while I was tending her
pigs. I stared after
them, a part of me running to catch up. I think I called
out. Hello! But
they didn't turn around. They wouldn’t turn around.
I looked down at my
feet and knew instantly they were not going to come loose
of the muck
no matter how hard I pulled. But that other part of me was
still running
after those fellows. Panicked and full of fear, I reached
out to it.
Mercifully, it came back on its own.
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I had to try and leave.
So,
I slept on the beach, and a funny thing happened.
Near the rocks, twenty yards from the shoreline, I don’t
know, seemed a
safe distance from the water. I dropped my pack-sac and one
of the old
woman’s blankets on a rise, a hump, a little sand dune.
I remember sit-
ting up until the red exhaust followed its sun beyond the horizon,
until
the moon brightened. I remember laying down on the sand, and
how the
night sky seized me the moment my head touched the planet Earth.
It’s
a strange thing; the way the sky covers these natural places.
In
the daylight, it’s a vast immaterial blue. You can see
that it goes on for-
ever, but you don’t really care because there’s a
sun in that sky. At night,
the stars, they have color, they twinkle; and while watching
meteors die
out of range, you wonder where all this shit is while we’re
out playing in
the sunshine.
I was
distracted by the fine brilliance, lulled into believing that
my
world was every bit as clear as that night sky. I completely
ignored the
moon. |
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