Last evening my running tribe came together for yet another solstice trip to the top of Mt. Pisgah, one of the sacred natural areas near Eugene. We were uproarious, then became reverent as darkness inundated the shortest day of the year. Back at the pickup, I realized that my keys had not made the descent. No immediate worries. There was a spare wired into the frame for these occasions.
I’m awake early the following morning, agitated and sad beyond reason. There is the usual routine of cats and coffee. Then I pull on layers and drive back to the mountain to retrieve my wayward keys. Twenty-six degrees in the parking area. Overcast is broken by gray tabby cat striations stretching parallel to the ridges on the southwest horizon. Clouds carry a small breeze that grinds like frigid sand into exposed skin.
I’ve always been a contrarian, always looking for excuses to ditch the status quo, and always embarrassed by my complicity. This morning I choose to ditch out again and forsake the solstice tradition of evergreens, focusing instead on the nuanced and pervasive browns of a white oak savannah winter.
The trail wastes no time gaining elevation. Trekking poles tick against frozen mud. Breathing accelerates as my pace slows. Brittle grasses and forbs stretch uphill toward leafless oak silhouettes hung with dark spheres of mistletoe. A few branches still cling to clumps of leaves long dead.
The soft rasp of air streaming into my nose and mouth is broken by the nasal mewing of a spotted towhee tail-flicking across the trail. A flock of fifteen golden-crowned sparrows are brown-striped and lumbering through the straw-like leftovers of summer, searching for whatever seeds remain. A solitary savannah sparrow, half the size of its golden-crowned cousins, flits above steely seed heads of Queen Anne’s lace. At the trail's edge, a circular crustose lichen seeps like a fine-grained galaxy across gray basalt.
I’m talking to myself. Out loud. This might be alarming, except that I’m also looking around to make sure no one is within earshot. There is no meditative rhyme or reason for my solitary outpourings. I possess only a half-blind hope that thoughts given voice will carry the agitation out of my body and into the frigid wind, where it will thin to vaporous nothingness above dry December grasses.
I slide onto the freezing metal slats of a trailside bench. Feet dangle toward the flat river valley of the Coast Fork of the Willamette. Farm fields flaunt their artificial boundaries of ownership. I smile and say hello to a passing hiker, as though nothing could be better than sitting here on this frigid morning of agitation and early winter browns.
Behind me lie my keys, a silent jangle in the frosty grass. Mission accomplished. I point the poles downhill and lean into them in a gravity-assisted descent. But I’m still muttering to myself. To the mistletoe. To the sparrows. To the density of dead stems. To the wind, gentle and cold and incessant.
Sparrows lumbering? This I gotta see. You really nailed the feeling of solitude on Mt. Pisgah.
Lichen a galaxy, gray sky a tabby cat, keys lost, out of balance at the turning of dark to light, finding keys in the calm stillness.....thank you for this gift. (And yes--I lost my car key when running up a hill in Missoula a few years back in winter with friends--and never did find the key, and had to run five extra miles to get home for the spare--back when I was fitter!).