Logging Roads

Broken light. I went for a walk and even the diffused light was too bright for my winter eyes. Old logging roads follow the contour of slopes like rice paddies. Dry snow reminds me of Colorado. I get slightly lost, traveling west from the cemetery, but I know if I head north I'll intersect Upper Twin. I could walk these ridges all the way to Cincinnati without incurring a single town. I carry an extra Bic lighter in my pack, a metal cup, for melting snow, and a sling-shot, with a few ball-bearings and marbles for ammunition. I'm already finding cat-tail shoots, and in protected hollows, water-cress, that wonderfully bites the tongue. I could walk as far as Denver, to make a point, but I refuse to climb those mountains because they remind me of my driveway. Something about the drifting snow has me in a reverie, and I go a few miles too far. I manage to get back home, blinded by the light and starving, open a very good zin (a Ridge) and make a clam chowder. I changed into sweats, with slippers and a bath-robe, the Linda hat (which always makes me feel homeless), and the fingerless gloves that allow me to roll a cigaret and pound on the keyboard. Life is grand. In the folly today, my hike, I actually twirled around a couple trees. Fred meets Henry. The thing about a complex zin, is that it reminds you of things; not just tastes, but smells and places and people. This Ridge, a York Creek, 2004, fairly fucking explodes in the front part of your mouth, then trails tannin down your throat. I love it. The snowflakes are larger now and I take a glass of wine out onto the back porch, with the one foot square piece of foam that is my universal cushion between me and the world, catching snowflakes in my hand, watching them dissolve. On one of the logging roads, the skid-cut went below a rock over-hang. Not a cave, exactly, but a protected place, an over-hang, where you could build a fire and feel relatively secure. There was a ledge, bench height, and I stopped to roll a smoke, cleared a place in the leaf-litter, to drop my ash, with my right foot, and listened to the third Cello Suite in my head. Walking in the woods is a science. Stopping is a practice. I could never find this place again, but there were flakes and gnawed bones. It was a niche in the rocks. Almost an altar.