A Restricted Age

1.08.24

I drive along St. James and Possum Hollow. I pass family graveyards and moldy boats left uncovered on land. Rusty mobile homes. Through forests and over swollen creeks. NO TRESPASSING. POSTED: KEEP OUT. PRIVATE PROPERTY. UNDER SURVEILLANCE. I pass farmhouses abandoned long ago once big and beautiful. Some family lived there. Before the soy came. Hundreds of seagulls have taken respite on a newly formed lake. I wouldn’t myself dare enter its chemical waters. The birds have no idea what we’ve done to them. Neither do we, ignorantly. Marina after marina due west. The roads cut through the fields and forests and stop at gravel lots of shrink-wrapped boats. A welding shop. And there’s Frank’s place my firewood man. He’s got an old farmhouse and a new farmhouse and a trailer where his daughter lives and a boat for sale against a large shed and to the left of the gravel drive shy of the tree line enough giant seasoned logs to split for anyone who calls. Frank the firewood man. His farm rotates corn and soy and wheat. Slow down for the town and I return the smiling waves from those enjoying the out-of-doors no matter the wet cold. The public recycling yard. Water tower. Dollar General. Railroad tracks and post office. Pole barns. Many pole barns. And I pick up speed passing the pastured Scottish Highland Cattle warm in their long and furry coats. And into the big town to fill the tank with gasoline oh gasoline and across from High’s boy that church sure is jumpin’. You may have to be a little crazy to become that excited for the Lord. I wish I was. I circled around to the back of town to say hello to the Guernseys with their yellow milk and neon butter A2A2. I can see the lights of my little cottage from way down the road twinkling through the winter tree line. Warmth. But I first turn the opposite way to wave at the blue cats and herons. Rubber tires crunch on loose gravel and come to a halt. I want to feel the cold brackish water. The rains have left a swollen inlet receding now at low tide. Left a crooked line of brown leaves and twigs. I step through it in rubber boots. The water is clear today. Filled with stones. I kneel. I touch. It is as cold as I expected. I breathe. Time to return.

     Public landing. Trailer permit required. Posting: striped bass. There are many rules. Many regulations. I don’t care for them and I don’t care for their reasons. Whitman’s Song of the Open Road wasn’t only a metaphor but it is now. That long brown path is not opened to me. I was born into a restricted age. POSTED: KEEP OUT.

     Across the big bridge we traveled away from the sodden country. Little cousins awaiting. Browns turned black. The bits of remaining green turned grey. We crisscrossed asphalt highways. The people the horrible people tailgated and weaved. Spiritual Bankruptcy descended with the smog. I exited off the last highway the one where they put the plastic branches on the radio towers as if that were any better. I’ve never seen a species of tree like that. People sat in a room in a building and planned those plastic tree branches. They decided it was a good idea. Through the traffic signal and on my right a housing development: “The Preserve”. Audacious, one may say, having cleared a forest to develop the land. It should have been called the Unpreserved. But they know nothing of meaning of words of names of nature and God. They sat in a room in a building too and thought of their clever name. 4 bedrooms and 2 and ½ baths. 1234 Unpreserved Way.

     Back home I latched my shed door and peered into the midnight sky thinking of Whitman:

The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.*

     I chuckle to myself in the hush hush hush. Of what I have no idea. Each step forward on the grassy earth is less a gift than it is impossible.

(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return.)*

*Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road