A Dark Morning

I woke up Sunday at about 6 and I began reading a selection from Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain, a part I have read before.  It brought me back to the Ouachita Mountains in Arkansas and Oklahoma, and the Talimena Scenic Drive which I rode along and hiked from several times on my way to San Antonio from Virginia.  I also remembered dipping into the icy tailwaters coming from the dam on Broken Bow lake.  It was bittersweet because in my present state, fighting refractory kidney lupus and several other health problems, I don’t think I will ever return.  That sadness deepened when I read a passage that I have quoted several times in my writing career: “Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe.  He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it.  He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it.  He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind.  He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk.”  Like many, I have cherished places, Yellowstone, which Momaday calls “the top of the world, a region of deep lakes and dark timber, canyons and waterfalls.  But, beautiful as it is, one might have the sense of confinement there,” the Canadian Rockies, The Brooks Range, Big Bend National Park, to name a few.  But only two places have ever  held me in a way that Momaday speaks about.  Both were homes to me for many years, the first being the Neversink Gorge, which I hiked and fished for many years and published a book about titled The Legendary Neversink, and Reese Hollow, where I lived for over twenty years, wrote heavily about and eventually put in a forever-wild conservation easement.  

This may be the start of a book based on my blog experience, started when my ex-wife Tracy left me after spending fifteen years together, and living in Reese Hollow for almost a decade.