Yesterday was anxiety ridden and uncomfortable for much of the day. I had to play my little game of fighting the anxiety, doing my best to not flee while standing in line at Borders to buy The Lost City of Z with my 40% off coupon. Part of my courage came from the story in the book itself: an aging explorer going off into the Amazon one last time in search of Eldorado. After reading The River of Doubt about Theodore Roosevelt’s Amazon adventure I eat up such stories.
All went well at the counter as I knew it would, as it always does. I walked back out into the dripping early May air and drove down Franklin Road to Radnor Lake. It was about five thirty, about the latest I’d ever been out there. I took my camera and walked the lake trail in search of trilliums and other wildflowers to photograph. I think I was too late. The delphinium and may-apple of a couple of weeks ago were fading as well. But despite the lack of wildflowers I thoroughly enjoyed my walk in the gloaming along the cushiony trail. The air dripped from days of rain and was as fresh as anything I remember in my life. It was wet, cool and heavy on my skin. The living forest floor sent up its humus smell and I felt alive, the anxiety fading.
I nearly steppe don a young squirrel digging something out of the foot path and twice walked upon a doe nearly close enough to touch.
I love the Tennessee forest in May and June. There is nothing greener in the world, not even the Amazon. I’ve never been to the Amazon but I’ve ridden horses through the jungles in Panama so it’s got to be similar.
I once wrote a poem about a rain washed Tennessee May morning:
Slow day, May 1997.
Coffee sipped on her couch
Knowing I would never be the one
Grateful for the warm rain on leafy green maple trees
That makes falling so much softer than
Nothing at all.
Where was the other one?
Working at the bakery?
Curled under a light blanket in her bed?
Wondering where I was or (true love)
When I’d come back to see her…
But I sat unwanted on the couch
Sipping coffee
Knowing I had to be at work at eleven,
Hoping it would stop raining by then.
That poem was about a real event. It took place on a Sunday morning. I worked at a garden center then and I had to go in and work a short shift though with the weather I remember it not being too busy. Afterwards I went out and planted a big Bradford pear for an older lady. That evening I drove back out to Jackson County to my grandmother’s house. We had a supper of fried salmon patties. I was dead tired having spent the last two days working, drinking, and sleeping on couches. I took a shower that night and slept as peacefully as I ever have.
I still like what that poem has to say and the feeling that comes over me when I read it. It is relaxed. Sometimes I think about the “other one” from the poem and the evenings I spent with her in that little fresh air house she lived in that college town. There was something right about the whole thing, something I ran away from and occasionally still wonder “what if” when I think about her. All of us in the poem have moved on now but I think I have moved the least distance emotionally. I’m still working at a garden center chasing girls that marginally like me. But I’m getting too old for that. I’m retreating into the woods more often now. There’s a freshness I can get from the rain which recharges me more than the smooth loins of a convenient girlfriend.
In the forest I go back in time. I remember the layer of fog that settled into that little creek bottom where my granny lived as the air cooled after a warm, rainy day. The immense greenness of all that I love and embrace as my domain. The grey-skinned hackberry and moonlight seen filtered through the boughs of a walnut remind me of exotic places and new worlds to explore. I’m ready to explore. I’m ready to flee. I’m ready to find a good woman this time, who is more substantial than a morning after, who is as embracing as the rain washed air, who is a well spring of life and an inspiration to higher levels of achievement.
After my walk the evening improved. I met up with Kyle at The Pub in Brentwood. Wesat talking to the bartender, watching the NASCAR race at Richmond, sipping on a couple of tall boy cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, planning a day of smallmouth fishing in the near future. An award winning Nashville songwriter sang in the background. She was voted Nashville’s songwriter of the year last year. She was good but I don’t much enjoy singer-songwriter material. Having spent three years in Nashville I’m over it…even though I still write and play such songs myself. Her rendition of Bobby Gentry’s “Ballad of Billie Joe” was the highlight of what I heard. Afterwards we met up with a couple of more friends for a late dinner at O’Charley’s, a move that would have been unthinkable to me earlier in the day.
Eventually we wound up Applebee’s, our old standby. I chatted up a girl who had just moved up from Florida but wasn’t having any of it. She had to get back to her baby. She was well on her way through a series of mixed drinks. I made sure she was alright to drive before she left. Then I left and slept well.
Now it’s a slow Sunday morning in May. I sip coffee and look out on a rain washed world. The forest behind my apartment is a wall of green. The flowers have fallen off the locust trees. I’m waiting to go to work.
