Searching for Joy

Midway through another October rollercoaster, I’m searching for joy on a tooth-rattle road twisting into the Coast Range. Sunlight stretches thin through wood-ash clouds. Languid air warm with incoming rain floats through the open pickup window. Rounding another potholed corner, vine maple leaves shatter into pumpkin-colored shards that scatter amid somber conifers.

I’m searching for joy after learning that my friend has died. Again. She already died once last summer. But a few seem to keep raising her up to strike her down. When a person lives larger than life, things sometimes spill over the edges. It can be messy, and some of what she left is a mess. But if you’ve helped a thousand people, do you really need to die a thousand times? I just can’t figure my way through it.

From somewhere in her mess, my friend admonished me to find some joy every day. Right now, I’m searching at the entrance to the two-track driveway, with parallel ruts that bend gently left into second-growth firs. I’m always relieved when the lock on the gate is intact. From here, the old house can’t be seen. I know the driveway will find it in the meadow, but I’m never sure if the house will still be up. The wiring is old and unstable, and the valley has already seen arsonists who scent-marked their territory with burned foundations.

The house is still standing when I arrive. But I see from the driveway that there are far fewer apples in the orchard. I know what has happened without looking—only the particulars need investigating. Last summer I broke a corner post on the orchard fence while falling the last tree for the portable sawmill. I propped up the post to make it look like an intact fence. But the bear knew. It leaned against the woven wire, pressed the wounded post against an apple tree, and used the lowest limb to hoist itself over. The party was on. Now, most of the apples we had planned on pressing for our family cider day on Saturday are reduced to bear shit applesauce heaped beneath the trees. Some choice words fly out of my mouth that are not charitable toward the bear. There is no joy that I recognize.

Light begins that subtle fade into afternoon, aided and abetted by thickening cloud cover. I came this afternoon to continue rehabilitating the north wall of the house, a project I started in the easy sun-struck days of September. I was hoping to finish before the rains, but it’s too late for that. Big storms will be blowing off the not-so-Pacific Ocean all of this coming week. I figure the house can wait another hour, and walk through the meadow to search the darkening old forest. I love to hunt for things. I love to hunt for joy. I love knowing when I need to hunt for joy. My friend taught me to feel that vacuum in myself, to act on it. 

On the silty bottom of a spring-fed pool lies a not-so-giant coastal giant salamander about the size of my pointer finger, still as a stick. Its brown back is mottled against the mud, divulging a motionless presence. From either side of its head, larval gills feather into oxygen-soaked water frigid and fresh from the sandstone heart of the ridge. I move closer, hoping for a photo. The salamander squirts away and hides beneath the flaking stub of the intake pipe that sends water to the spring house. Most pictures are meant to be held only in the gentle hands of our memory.

From deep inside the grove of big conifers a small patch of chanterelles delivers, pushing like orange knuckles through a cushion of moss. I don’t pick a single one. I never have permission to pick the first mushroom, nor do I have permission to pick the last. Sometimes this is the same mushroom. When I don’t have permission, I reach my hand out, allow a small breath to escape, and walk away. The breath is a gift of carbon dioxide to photosynthetic ferns and mosses and needled boughs. It is an exhalation of plenty. The forest always gives back; sometimes as a future abundance of mushrooms, at other times simply as gratitude. This patch tells me that chanterelle season is beginning elsewhere on the surrounding ridges. May it always be so for as long as I can walk. And beyond.

Back on the front porch, I cradle a bowl of warmed-up stew. Daylight is bleeding away in earnest. A few tentative raindrops peck at the metal porch roof. The dying light carries the swampy smell of wet frogs, of a storm waiting for a place to happen. I sort through my basket of memories, bits and pieces of the day. I feel the words emerging from her earnest smile. Find some joy every day. What she didn’t tell me is this: joy is the invisible night stare of an owl; joy is the deep-eyed lover who never leaves; joy is the five-dollar bill you forgot was in your pocket.

Joy is always there without caring how you feel.

***

Barring any curveballs from the blessed supply chain, Dancing with an Apocalypse is still set to release in late November.

Check out this wonderful blurb from the inimitable Peter Brown Hoffmeister, author of This is the Part Where You Laugh:

“Narrative and lyrical, Dancing with an Apocalypse is part love-letter, part challenge to the spaces we choose to inhabit. Titus is a clear, strong voice at the beginning of the end.”