North College, you are something of a pleasure now. Once, I cut through some fields, headed for Albertsons, for there was enough snow for X-country skis, and work was cancelled due to blessed snow. In a small copse of trees I spied a hammock, pack wedged up higher, and a small fire pit cobbled together from cinder blocks. There was smoke, rising faintly, with no one discernable. Now there is a vacant lot of dirt, and an odd columnade leading up to King Soopers. Before that, I think there was a farm here. Sugarbeets were grown and tended by Volga Germans, who were replaced by Mexicans. This entire square mile was farmland and sugar refinery, and I traipse through like an interloper bent on a more comfortable ride. Time scattered the farmer; sagebrush, kosha, copse of trees, wild rye, and homeless person became the succession.
The bike lane is well delineated and wide, and where one barely had room to spit previously, there’s now enough room to lean back and fiddle with headlamp, arc lazily as you balance, just before mounting the hill for your first view of Terry Shores.
The intersection at Willox bares redbrick and concrete red crosswalks. Your lane is clear. Peddle south, and, depending on the traffic, hie close to the road at the carwash, for here it narrows precipitously, or you swing into the wide walkway there. The potholed and cracked shoulders are the vestigial reminders that only a few years ago, this area met 12 out of 14 criteria to be categorized as a slum. It is cold; there are cold faces waiting solemnly for the bus, and snow barely precipitates out of the sky. Now at the bridge, ice has formed a thin veneer where you dove and shot back up, the bonechill giving way to soft heat of sun as you clambered up the roots to the mud. The Poudre is a quiet simulacrum of its recent past. Who dares be baptized through this patchwork ice now?
And so the workday proceeds. In the morning your tone and attention to minute details sets the stage for failure or success in the afternoon. Not always, but often. Experiments planned weeks in advance have had a chance to ferment and change. If this was my work, I could keep going, and this would be the post breakfast tea. Lunch would be a cold sandwich beneath the streamside oak at Rolland Moore Park. I like to walk in the meadows on the outskirts of that park, which is like most parks, too well-groomed for their own good. Your afternoon tea is a book you’ve read, but there’s a newness and familiarity not detected before. You write. Supper is the ride just outside of town, looking for a new route, and a new place to sit and write.
The ride home is a call-to-arms. The gentleman cutting stone tile this morning at Mulberry and Howes is wrapping up for the day. What a wonderful job that must be. Cut and carve, fit just so. See what you’ve accomplished on an hourly basis. The light is green. You go. A large car turning left cuts in front of you, and you avoid a collision with a gentle squeeze of the brakes. The cop which was behind the car flashes lights and blares his siren once, pulls up behind, and you go forward. It is good to have reaction time. You take a jaunt over to Mason, turn north at the bus depot, and a car turns down your lane, going the wrong way. Brake. Hop off and pull bike onto sidewalk. Make your way down College, now wide. Beautiful stone address markers are going in. This all must have cost millions. On the road in front of now-abandoned Showtime, a station wagon cuts in front of you. This time your clenched reaction barely saves the crash, and you stare incredulously. She stops and rolls down the window, “I’m so sorry!” That’s okay, you say. The large German Sheppard in the back regards you coolly. You double check that all your lights and blinky are working. Headlight, check. Today might not actually be a bad day to die.
Dinner is quick, but refortified, you take your children to their evening engagement, then it’s back south down College, back on your bike, for an uncommon treat – bookclub at The Crown. Tonight, Annie Dillard’s A Writer’s Life. The moon is an uncanny, slightly globular spider egg, encased in an oblong ring of silk. It is a luminous caul from which it will have emerged this time tomorrow. You are thankful for this cold. You peddle slowly beneath lampglow, down a largely quiet street. The Crown has the soft glow of warmth that you feel before you step in, then down in the basement, fellow booklovers are gathered around the corner table, the discussion on-going. Friendly faces all around. You drink water, drunk on exhaustion or the remembrance of certain passages, or likely both. Where are the soothsayers warning us to read more?
In The Wasteland, T. S. Eliot says, or rather, one of his polyglot voices says – Stop. Sympathize. Control. I say stop, be quiet, read. On the ride homeward, wondering about one’s need to sketch out what is this mundane life, what is salvageable but disillusionment, I begin to feel perhaps it is to refine the disillusionment. A slow pull into the world of literature, its body a massive, still-changing canon, with ever more writers being packed in as onto a giant clay globe. The world that I ride upon is not the real one either, but also my projection of the form, my incomplete projection. No amount of beverages will see me through this. There is not enough. There is not enough liquor in the world. Our discourse lies before us like a newly-laid, black tarmac of pitch and resin, in the low night. Even this wide, white line which hems me in is artifice. I wish to be uncorrupted by the writing, or the speaking of the writing. The form might be found in silent despair, also known as prayerfulness, or ecstasy which comes right after the despair, and perhaps it motivates this slow movement from place to place – slow, even long-suffering movement, as if against a tide, and then stillness. The writing, or is it the creating, of the new, slackjawed understanding that we are mostly alone.
No comments:
Post a Comment