It is one of those evenings you live for in the Northwest. The sun is setting as the moon is rising, and the Sound lies in front of me between the arching Madrones like a big indigo plate, rimmed by deeper blue mountains. I am on my evening walk, not really in the city and not quite beyond. I can walk for hours and for miles in any shoes and any weather here. But when people tell me they are going “hiking,” I cringe. I can’t stand gear, or shopping for gear. Gear seems to be what makes a person a “hiker.” That, and not stopping, and accomplishing something.
I stop constantly. I accomplish nothing. I walk, and I am in constant awe, and I am hungry. The mountains stretch as far as I can see, the glazed sky speaks of Hokusai and all the great nostalgics and rhapsodists of days gone by. Rilke, Rachmaninoff, Grieg. An eagle flaps slowly overhead. There is no audience and so there is no soaring, only the pedestrian flap of immense wings.
I like that where I live there are houses, and their amber lights blend with the first star and the distant freighter. I like that in March I go down into the ravine and in the rain and listening to its clatter on bare branches I hear the unmistakable keening of a woodpecker, and look and look and then discover him two feet in front of me, suddenly sharp in the foreground. And then someone walks by with their golden retriever, with the sound of metal and panting tongue and leather leash. I live in nature, without having to go to nature. She is everywhere.
As I climb the last hill I see the moon between the trees. We are not druids now, and who checks the tides before taking a walk on land? And yet we want to know. A woman passes, dressed in black sweats and reflector tape. “The moon! Is it full?”
“Full enough for me.”
Industrial Landscape: Unique transferprint ©Iskra Johnson
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