The unseasonably hot autumn days earlier this week remind me
of a road trip in July over sixteen years ago that took us in a twelve-thousand
mile loop around the United States with a stop in Big Bend National Park,
Texas.
We were younger then:
early to mid thirties. And we thought we were as impervious to the
elements as we had been several years before then, traveling in our late
twenties on a sixteen hundred mile bicycle trip in torrential rains down the
rolling coast of the Western U.S. But in Texas we had to learn a new way, to be
like the local wildlife – to move, and even to breathe, like them. We’d awaken
and slowly rise up just prior to dawn, in the lonely almost cool of first light
in southern Texas. A few hours moving and we’d suddenly hit a wall of stifling
wet heat (not as dry there as we had expected; not as wet and thick as the East
or Southeast). I recall a wild pig, Javelina, who boldly wandered into our
campsite in search of food even as we sat there, still, barely breathing. But
even that aggressive local was deterred from too much raiding: we watched as she wandered near and then
slowly crawled back to wherever she took shady respite. It seemed she, also,
was too roasty-hot to engage in boisterous food gathering.
We could barely move ourselves. We sauntered, at best. Lying
down caused too much heat transfer between bodies and lied-upon surface. So we
would perch in low camp chairs in some semblance of shade - hard to come by
there and only recognizable for the darker shadow on the ground from some
sparsely-clad desert plant – and spread our appendages out: maximum surface area, unjoined one to the
other. We’d write, journaling probably. But very slowly and with utter quiet, all
but still… Breathing made us sweat – so low and shallow during those midday
hours. It was too hot to talk much, or to sleep, or to move upright.
Then, even though it was still much too steamy to move about
(the other wild creatures still remaining hidden in secret havens of late
afternoon refuge), we’d slowly search for a trickle of water: a river, a faucet, a water bottle’s contents
dumped atop the crowns of our heads. And there we’d stand…as the water slowly
dripped down, miniature rivers we could wear for a few minutes…until the dry surrounding
earth magically drew it off us – onto its slowly respiring surface. Dry. Not
even brown, really. But gray. The soil so dry it couldn’t absorb moisture –
like it had forgotten how. As if the cracks in its parched surface were not
seep possibilities but rather water-repellant sleeves. Only gravity was strong
enough to pull the water into the ground. The rock hard surface, the very dry and
arid-accustomed earth there, seemed to need time to remember how to open up and
accept the gift of Life: water. And even
when it did so, at last, the trace of moisture was gone, invisible in a very
few seconds. Quick return of memory – parched earth… As if it had forgotten it
even needed the water. As if the land had forgotten what water is.
I love these reveries – the pen moving across the page,
seemingly animated not by me but by some unseen director – as the memory stirs
itself into a concoction I couldn’t have anticipated. I haven’t thought about this
in years – perhaps couldn’t even write about it back then. But for some reason,
the recently hot days have brought it bubbling up this morning, in this moment.
Like a wellspring, oddly enough. Even in parched landscapes (of memory) there
is the possibility of a wellspring of Life-giving fluid(ity). Oh, this earth -
she feeds me, over and over. It is as if my insides and her outsides are joined:
and I actually believe they are… harmoniously interconnected.
All blog photographs taken by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted.
