Last night I sat in the park for perhaps twenty minutes. Cross-legged on the grass, just looking out over the drop of land that precedes the street; watching the occasional car go by. One-thirty in the morning and there isn’t much traffic moving through a light rain that is easier to see in the street-lights than it is to feel falling on your skin. The thoughts I had were drunk ones, full of all sorts of possibility.
Moments before I’d come down a small hill I knew from growing up about a block from this very park. Upon reaching the tennis courts I’d pulled the bouncy ball out of my pocket and sent it skipping across the surface; you have to walk fast to keep up with those things, keep your eyes open for the reflections of light off the metallic stars embedded in the orb; otherwise it’s gone.
There’s one pine tree at the peak of this slight series of stone walls, and even in the rain, I knew I had to stop there.
I’ve been disdainful of driving lately, it helps that the weather has been fairly co-operative, it also helps that I’ve been poor enough to not afford gasoline. There is something about walking though, especially when you get up into the fifteen minute plus distance; your body and your brain assume a kind of awareness you simply can’t find anywhere else. Besides that, all the little details that don’t even register as scenery from the car are right there for you to touch, to step on, to stop and consider from multiple angles. I’ve been using it as something of a metaphor for life and trying to find neglected passages that cut across town.
You take five solid steps away from your last valid light source and the woods will swallow you up. If you know where you’re heading, then there are dozens of clever ways to get out.
I have a good friend who’s backyard meets the woods of the park. I stepped into the drizzle last night and headed into those woods.
Take the path beside the garage and you’re on the hill, if it’s about one-thirty in the morning you have to stand still and let your eyes adjust, listening to the sound of your breathing and the indistinct splatter of rain. Even when you know where the path is, you can’t quite believe it when you see it, all the turns seem wrong and it’s primarily drunken gusto that pushes you along that half-seen stretch of gray in all the black. A night-light in a window bobs into view as you wind up into higher ground.
And then there it was; an exit. Before me, the asphalt of my youth; the house to my right had still been woods, there had been a track for dirt-bikes tucked into the trees when I’d lived nearby. It’s such a change to go from a dim path in the woods to well lit streets, I only left the woods because there are some fierce tangles, half-buried fences and other human detritus that I was in no shape to navigate in this light. On the street the shuttered windows of houses can seem like they’re watching you when you pass by at the right hour. I put a quick block under my feet and ducked back into the park.
I get to do a lot of thinking while I walk; I think there’s a tempo set by my feet that allows my thoughts to weave back and forth in some exquisite way, but even better is when those thoughts stop and the next conscious notion I have is an excited little revelation which chases that novel sensation away simply by recognizing that it exists. It never fails to make me smile; last night I sat down beside that one pine tree at the top of a series of walls and let my thoughts drift lazily about and look at one another, wondering where that absence fits.