Only to Wilderness

Desolation Nights

The small rise of her breasts, two pure white snow drifts, a radiance of paleness found nowhere in wilderness except in a gentle fall of May snow or the sad sight when I remove my damp hickory shirt & Dickie work pants each nightfall before I fall, again & again, toward sleep, alone. In those dark hours, her slender hips sing a song to my hands, whisper across the tent walls of my mind as I fade, slowly toward dream. But she’s 2,704 miles east of these isolated Ochoco Mountains with its starrified night sky looming above, so big & beautiful but radiated with so many stars that one cannot help but feel sometimes, maybe, impossibly & forever alone here. I’m desolate across nights with nothing to caress, not even a pillow to wrap my arms around. Some nights I grow desperate for the touch of skin upon skin just to remind me I am more than mere muscle, more than aching to the bone.

A Love Song to Wilderness

Do you remember earlier when I wrote how everyone on this crew had disremembered so many words? When we gave those words [cable TV, desk, VCR, coffee maker, air conditioner, commuting] right back to society, almost begged society to dispose of them forever? That this crew no longer even knew their meanings anymore; these exhausted words were just broken sound, glass in the mouth? If you remember, please forget that all for now.

For now I ask you to think of a month living in a tent. Weeks of hitch without showers or shaving [your beard a windswept bush], days without changing a hickory shirt or even boxers [clothes become fur]. There’s no time between work & more work. There’s no need. Everything in these woods is spawned of rock & dirt & duff anyway.

But I’m delaying, meandering like a creek. None of this is what I need to discuss. This time—& always—I need to talk about an ache. It’s my day off [the only one for two weeks]. I knot with another crew leader Ethan in Hood River, Oregon, for a night away from our crews. Tonight, we are human. Tonight, we have wants. To be in love with the world, with our women many miles away. Still, I miss my crew in some new, unknowable way. Some call it love. Some call it responsibility. Whatever we call it, still Ethan & I need a break, so we enter the first bar & discover a midday round of beers waiting in its musty cave-dark.

In this day, there is no twenty-four-hour internet access, no cell phones shoved into pockets, so I find a pay phone in the corner, slide four quarters into its hard belly, & call that girl who owns my heart. She’s everything I am not. She’s big city, pulsating lights, dance clubs, midnight hours. She’s Marlboro Lights burned to the butt. Hands in clay & on a paint brush, hands wrapped around graphite pencil.

When she answers, her voice is so far past a million miles, huddled in that megalopolis larger than my entire world with its scrapping buildings, subway lines, tunnels & bridges. Or maybe I’ve got it backwards & her megalopolis is so much smaller, so much less, than the spread of stars that blanket me at night or the reaching arms of silhouetted trees or the clan of tents circling a fire. Whichever it is [bigger or smaller], in that other world, she answers.

She whispers across broken strands of phone lines that she has kissed another set of lips not mine. Without a word, I sever the line. Without a word, I stumble, not yet drunk, toward the bar. Without using any of those words I’ve given away [or the words I’ve kept], I try to [but cannot] understand my place in the world. It is as if an anchor [another word we no longer need] has come untied. It is as if I’m set adrift, a boat at sea [more unneeded words].

This is when Ethan helps me learn all my last lessons on...