Earlier in the week, my bones were unusually anxious. I’m a little high-strung, but generalized anxiety isn’t generally my jam. Yet there it was, an amorphous troglodyte rising from the dark caverns of my marrow, groping the space beneath my sternum, its cold fingers searching for my heart. My heart tried to run but it was trapped. It needed me to speak that nameless thing into the light, but I had no voice. I thought a nap would help, but when I awoke, the racing in my chest persisted.
My bones needed an infusion of unfiltered spring water. Uncounted weeks have passed since I visited that quiet space in the Coast Range, a living room-size basin where forest water burbles into dim light. A thin slice of chaos greets me at the spring. The last storm toppled an old Douglas-fir. On her way to the ground she broke off a big leaf maple twenty feet up. A compound fracture of bared wood stabs into a new gash in the canopy bleeding sunlight onto sword ferns.
This brief violence of falling wood has tipped my drinking cup into the two-gallon pool that gathers the water before its trip to valley floor. I retrieve the cup, polish the accumulated minerals from white ceramic, dip, then drink in steady pulls. From the pool I scoop out the crumbled bones of mountains, my bare hand gloved in pebble grit, slippery mud, and aching water. These impregnate the fuzzy boundary of my fingertips. Dissolved sandstone percolates into my bones, bearing witness against any illusion of separateness.
A hole the diameter of a sewer pipe is bored into the slope above the seep. In front of the burrow lies an orderly stack of lanceolate sword fern fronds, their snipped stems gathered together and pointing into the hole. A mountain beaver is a rodent that isn’t a beaver. It’s a “boomer,” except that it doesn’t boom either. I can’t remember why I know this excavation and fern harvest to be the doings of a mountain beaver. At this point in life, some things just are.
Sunset on the porch. An audible vapor of frog song and creek water rises from the valley floor. Gentle trill of a Screech Owl from the forest behind my right shoulder. Lavender gape of clouds above conifer silhouettes. Scant breeze out of the southwest speaking of nothing but descending darkness. Warmed up tamale and an apple from last fall. Bourbon for dessert.
Inside the house, tree bones mumble in the woodstove, warming the front room. Clouds beyond the window are broken open by a three-quarter Moon, ivory skull with face averted, her gaze fixed on some celestial object in the north that I cannot see. Moonlight drifts in like new snow. I exhale, search deeply into my chest. There is only an empty wetness of lungs.
My bones rest easy in this place.