Last
There is a last time for everything. Of course there is. This is the last evening I’ll be sitting in this dirt on a sagebrush hill, my back against a lichen-encrusted boulder, right leg stretched across the arthritic gray gnarl of a dead sagebrush. My ribs ride hard against the rock, my face easy in the breeze. Glass Butte bulges like a junipered knuckle beneath wannabe cumulonimbus clouds, prepubescent thunderstorms who need to vent but are stuck in their immaturity. Sun taunts the clouds, bending around ragged edges to hurl spears of light against the mountain. From the juniper to my right, Mountain Bluebird sends up a plaintive mew, then flashes cobalt beneath the cloud-broke sky. Strong wingbeats measure every fraction of every second riding east on the wind. The juniper trees smell suspiciously like cat pee.
There is a last time for everything: last meal, last words, last sex, last breath. I’ve decided this is my last trip with students around the vast steppe and deserts of southeastern Oregon. I’m not grieving. Maybe I’m too tired to grieve. At the end of these adventures, I’m always surprised at how a human can function on so few brain cells. Maybe I’ll grieve later, at some unexpected moment like standing beneath a hot shower watching rivulets of accumulated dust stream off my legs and down the drain. Maybe knowing this is the last trip is a gift. Or not. I’m too tired to think my way through it.
Grieving is a gift. But I can’t mourn every death-struck moment of this evening with seconds flying by on blue wings, entering some strange version of eternity where time goes to die. Instead, I choose to be dumbfounded. I am flat out gobsmacked by this child-cloud, light-shaft, wind-tickle nightfall with no-see-ums squirming under my hat and into my ear hair. By Sun stabbing through a cloud gap, the sage-laced breeze carrying a bolt of feathered sapphire into a juniper spire. I choose amazement because mortality drives all that is miraculous in our lives. There is a last time for everything. And everything is for the last time.
[For about a decade I’ve joined my Amphibians and Reptiles of Oregon class in two creative writing exercises based on a one hour solo meditation in the field. Last is my second offering for 2022.]
Thanks again for your heartfelt, honest, and well-written sharing. If this is your last, many students will miss out on a wonderful teacher. And if it is your last, congratulations on making what must have been a hard decision.
Sounds melancholic. Also reminds me of a story about myself. I used to take students to Costa Rica every other year (since 1991), and I kept a journal each time. One year I noticed that my previous journal had an interesting entry the first night after arriving at our San José Hotel, all in capital letters I wrote: "THIS IS THE LAST TIME! NEVER DO THIS AGAIN YOU IDIOT!!!" Then when I looked in the rest of my CR journals it turns out I wrote almost the same thing every single time! And yet, when the next odd year rolled around, there I was again, in a cheap hotel in San José, writing in my journal. So I guess it must be like giving birth. At the time, you swear it is the last time you'll go through that shit. But then... you forget how bad it was, or maybe it's just that the pleasant memories get larger as the bad ones shrink away?