Geography

107 Ryan Walsh Geography The pickup parked on Main Street full of moose belongs to the guy sitting in the diner booth with apple pie & cheddar on his plate. No one dares touch it, though we gather round the bed the way folks do at a county fair when blue-ribbons get paraded. And though this heap of flesh animating dusk with a halo of swarming flies has no names to mark its flank, no words to flag the region of fine hairs near its marbled eyes, nor the provinces of long and tapered legs it once used to clamber—clumsily, gracefully— up slopes of birch and spruce, the body’s stillness offers access: a topography ripe with thresholds to imagined existence. Its ample form reminds me of an enormous raised relief map I’d seen as a boy in West Virginia: the Monongahela Forest dwarfed, housed in glass. Brierpatch Mountain to Spruce Knob, the wimpled earth swirled with contours, a work done in great blotches of green and beige and brown, revealing lookouts, balds, and creek gullies. I began there— Ketterman Knob, Timber Ridge, Sinks of Gandy— and followed the easy slip into remoteness, possibility. Red switchback roads, little clutches of black 108 Ecotone: reimagining place (Elkins, Harman, Whitmer, Judy Gap), the North Fork of the South Branch running blue into the heart: old place I am forever returning. Carry me. Carry me back. In the afterglow of evening in this village in Vermont, Butternut, Whiteface, and Madonna peer into the truck bed like some perverse nativity as the wind unhinges a skein of scarlet leaves that swirl and light onto the hide. Gloaming smolders to night and the lines of moose are lost to shadows. I walk away, speaking the names that let me wend again through that land of slantwise tobacco barns, silviculture, endless extractions. ...