Ridgetop

A chilly January dusk in the Coast Range. Rain-soaked daylight dropped away like a stone disappearing into deep water. With the woodstove at the Johnny Gunter place in full roar, I pulled on a pair of aged running shoes that used to be white and squished down the two-track driveway that tunneled beneath a closed canopy of young Douglas-fir branches. Each rut was a thin rivulet of rainwater running toward Upper Smith River.

Just beyond the driveway, a road turned up the ridge, climbing abruptly. My breathing and heart rate quickly rose to match the incline. I am not particularly fit, a cardiovascular deficit brought on by short days, holiday eating, a nagging left hamstring, and that inevitable entropic shit-storm politely referred to as the “aging process.” The road then showed a little mercy and began to switchback up the steepest inclines. On this drippy winter afternoon transforming into night, I was driven to visit the top of the ridge.

Although the New Year is an artifact of the Gregorian Calendar, it does form a societal vantage point for viewing the past and anticipating the future. On the cusp of this unfolding year I remembered the words of a long-time friend who once imparted a little wisdom from Coyote. When Coyote hits the top of the ridge, they stop. Look around them. Look back where they have just traveled. Finally, they look ahead.

Coyote looks around. As I approached the top, a grove of old Douglas-firs sang in the wind. I knew they weren’t singing for me. Still, I loved listening to their big-treeness disrupting the course of the oncoming storm. I spread my arms wide to capture a little of their energy. One of the firs was in the process of becoming a snag. Its dead top had become a skeleton of naked branches that jabbed against the fading overcast. When summer finally circles around, Band-tail Pigeons will roost there after gorging on the purple berries of Cascara and Elder.

Along the ridgetop, the road changed from switchbacks to easy undulations. Each dip was a low saddle through which the wind hurried eastward. I turned my face parallel to the breeze and let it rush across my cheeks and past my nostrils, trying to catch the scent of the new storm. But this was a cold gale, aromatically stealthy, stingy with its smells. My nose found only a swirl of frigid air. The rain was gentle but insistent in the lee places, accumulating in the overstory, becoming drops on the tips of conifer needles that plopped and splattered on the forest floor.

Coyote looks back. My turnaround was at another saddle above an old clearcut. I stopped and looked southwest, in the direction of sadness. Young Douglas-fir poked their thin tops hopefully skyward. Fog hunkered in the bottom of Boulder Creek Canyon.

The darkening ridges gathered me toward nightfall like the soft paws of Bobcat leaving her daybed for a night hunt. Twelve miles down Upper Smith River was the house where Mom and Dad lived while Mom’s father was in Eugene dying of lung cancer. It was the house where Tommy Glen, Mom and Dad’s firstborn, arrived in these dark January days. He left the living world at three months of age, while April's Bleeding Hearts bloomed in the valley bottom and nodded in silent sorrow.

My science mind stepped aside for a moment so that I could have a conversation with Tommy Glen. He and I have had these talks before. This one began similarly. Why did you leave so soon? The answer usually trails off into biology. Congenital heart defect. Not enough oxygen-rich blood to feed the needy cells of a growing human. The sometimes brutal and inescapable reality of genetics without a modern technological bailout.

This evening was different. Fragments of words and feelings rose from a wet space within my brain above and behind my ears. You could say that these were Tommy Glen’s voice. You could mean this literally. Or you could mean that they came from the black-and-white pictures of him in a family photo album. Or you could mean that they were transfused directly into me through the womb of my still grieving mother. Or you could mean that they came indirectly through a lifetime of living with Mom and Dad, who rightly never shed their grief. All may be true. Who’s to say? Regardless, these shards of sadness coalesced into a realization, into my voice:

“I left so that Mom and Dad could love you in the unique and urgent way that a child born into the void of loss is loved. I left to make space for you to grow. You are still expanding into all that I gave you.”

Coyote looks forward. The accelerating breeze broke me out of my reverie. I hadn’t brought a headlamp. I didn’t want to wear a headlamp, any more than I wanted a phone in my pocket. This could be construed as poor planning (at best) for a walk on the ridges in midwinter dusk. Yet January nightfall in the Coast Range is complex. It rises from canyon bottoms flushed with creekwater. It is a foggy exhalation from mist-shrouded ridges, a deepening blanket of conifer branches intertwined. Becoming a body in motion in oncoming darkness is to engage with the varied landscape of ambient light. I turned back toward home on a road that was never truly dark.

The late John O’Donogue, philosopher and poet, wrote often about stepping through doors and emerging into new beginnings. From “For a New Beginning”:

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,

Where your thoughts never think to wander,

This beginning has been quietly forming,

Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

When Mom passed last summer, I didn’t really step through a door—I was drug through it kicking and screaming like a cat being stuffed into the car for a vet visit. Because I was born only ten months after Tommy Glen died, I am the eldest surviving child. The task has now fallen to me to disperse my parent’s estate. Although I did not ask for this job, circumstances and planning have been my good fortune. Mom and Dad laid out relatively clear guidelines, and their four sons are practical people who want the chore handled as expediently as possible. Even so, my life already resembled those rivers brimming bank-full with last fall’s heavy rain. This extra administrative chore has caused me to run over my banks.

Beyond the darkness, I could see an outline of the coming year. It is flooded with responsibilities. Some were chosen, and some are required by circumstances beyond my control. While the volume of a river is limited by the depth and width of its channel, the human spirit is not confined by a bottom and banks. Some say our capacity for growth is unlimited. Even though I won’t go that far, this is a trivial issue. What matters most is that we have large malleable brains capable of adapting to new circumstances (or to old circumstances newly perceived). We are continuously unfolding. John O'Donohue said so. My older brother says so.