Its in the instant between taking that long last breath between sleep and letting my eyes roll back into their dirty-dry -sun-burnt lids that it makes its move. In the bluish light raining down on the rocky peak around me from the crescent moon, all I catch is the ass end of rat jumping into my pack. My pack is close enough that I could lick the kiwi juice off the corner pocket where some unlucky fruit got an extra rough ride up the mountain, if I so desired. Nightmarish images of rodent teeth barging down through layers of nicely crafted rip stop nylon to get at my breakfast inject enough adrenalin into my horizontal self to jerk up just enough to grab my head lamp. The commotion startles the kangaroo rat just enough for it to bound out of my backpack and perch itself right upon the sandy grits next to my head where bright blue light now from my LED head lamp light up the black oversized eyes of the fist sized thief. The darn thing is so cute, little white and mauve markings and eyes bigger than the biggest puppy eyes you could ever imagine. It almost turns my fight or flight adrenaline response into a nurturing emotional roller coaster. I just want to hold him and feed him. I'm about one slip in consciousness from turning into a dunnock feeding a cuckoo chick. Dawkins and the rest would marvel at how the organism was able to act upon pre-existing neural networks in my brain that allowed me to be susceptible to such baby eyed wooing, but luckily for our species, I'm selfish to a fault and an emotional barrier is erected. The little guy moves to within 10 cm of my face, coming closer for some reason – maybe anticipating the wooing winning me over, when I of course grab for my camera. The movement startles the little guy and he takes off just as fast as he appeared.
I slide out of my bivy gilded sleeping bag and prop up my tripod, so I can hang my food from it. The compression sack is only about half a meter off the ground once I get it strapped up on the camera mount, but I figure its enough for the types of vermin running around in the middle of the night on top of a skree field at about 10,500 feet. With breakfast now safe my head falls back into the bag of scavenged plastic, sandals, clothes I'm not wearing, and other items from the pack suitable for a make shift pillow. Above the sky lingers, like the lofty body of a lover, constantly moving, beads of sweat glistening and occasionally rolling off and disappearing into the space between us. In a moment I bleed away, bleed out, bleed into…nothingness or something like what this word makes us feel. I am not myself for that instant. My skin has peeled back, my veins, my arteries, my blood has suspended their motions for this joining. My ribs open like a flower ready to be joined with another flower, but in this metaphor lies the paradox, the disconnect that is essential to why I am here in the dirt tonight. I am the pistil and the stamen at once, always seeing the other flower with its equal sexual duality, the other lover, but never of my own inertia am I able to reach it. I am fixed here on this earth on this plane of existence. It is only in the insect, the muse, that we may touch each other, pollinate each other. I have no concept or way to understand if my grains ever make it to the flower out there, I only know that the pebbles of pollen that are dropped to my chest germinate. Inside me the decompression takes place. Songs, conversations, ideas, wanderings slowly burn out as if each were a candle in a jar that has just had the lid screwed on tight. And there finally in the smokey after life of these fires, it is. Nothing. Absolutely Nothing. How is it that the universe germinates within me absolutely nothing? And why is it that I go to great lengths to become ripe for such pollination? Its because I always return from nothing that I must go to it, invite it in. The feeling of absolutely nothing is the closest I've ever come to feeling everything all at once, its but one of two absolutes…neither which are truly obtainable. I see polar opposite absolutes as existing on a number line. One end of the line is the complete opposite of the point at the other terminal end of the line, the hash marks in between are mere measurements of how close the thing evaluated is to either one of the extremes. However, the interesting thing about a line is that it need not be straight, its just usually assumed. One could bend the line into a horshoe and eventually into a circle. In the circularization of the line an interesting thing has occurred. The polar opposites now are the closest points to each other one might even go as far to say that they are now the same point. In nothingness we find the infiniteness.
A few in discernable bleeps in time and I'm back out, concerned once again with the immediate world of detail around me. I crouch up onto my knees high enough to see over the stone fortress I've made and there on the horizon behind a river or red light is Mt Diablo's double peaks about 200 miles away. Beneath them the valley is burning with cities, little pockets of hot embers from Stockton to Fresno. The San Joaquin valley ripe with sun, soil, and sweat grows the crops of the world including human shelter lit with lampposts and porch lights. I shift my gaze eastward and not a light, yet the stone, the granite of the sierra coolly burns in the summer's night light.
I wake before the sun to enjoy the twilight hour and find the kiwi's have expedited my excretory system. Between some stones I take care of business with smooth stone in hand for what smooth stones do towards the end of business. All of a sudden a bolt of pure radiating light hits my back. In my awkward position I wrench my neck to realize that I am ontop of the first thing within visible range to receive light. A triangular shadow extends west ward into the central valley and as the morning expands the shadow contracts to the base of Madera Peak. Chickarees and pikas sing my presence out to the world in chipper-chapper tones across the mountain holly dotted loft. After filling the CCD with a couple light trappings, I pack and head back down the skree field toward Jack Ass Lakes where wandered up from yesterday. A couple of tiny pools of water high above upper Jack Ass Lake has tad poles in their last stage of development and a few fun plants scattering the edges.
Past the upper and lower lakes memories only a day old of grouses, deer, and a father and his two sons fly fishing resurface. The sun is strong as normal against the white rock of the sierra, but the lumbering trees provide shade. A landscape of white granite sweeps out in all directions with veins of trees following cracks, undulation boundaries, and any other shape in the stone that pockets water or at least allows a few fibers to sink into soil. And from these fibers, great green lineages of leaves, and barrels of brown, red, and gold hold fast to the landscape for a time that seems like eternity.
August onion scented skies of Atwater
A murder spreads upon an
Easternly gradient of blue to pink to purple
And the truck
Still unregistered, still running,
Lumbers on down the 99,
Crows are some of the few animals
In the west whose populations increase
As humans move into an area
At night from Madera peak
The murder falls into the black
The coal fire of cities burn bright
In the disguise of electricity
Burn burn burn burn
Churn churn churn
Toil and trouble
Nuke it
Fuck it
Why is the sierra granite white
With flecks of black?
Images from the trip:
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