It doesn’t rain here so much as speckle. Ten thousand fine grains of sand landing on my head, melting in my hair. Twenty-eight ballpoint pens tapping my face, moving with complex rhythm on my cheek, above my eye, now on my upper lip. I open my mouth and they dance on my tongue. Speckle.
Daylight barely seeps through the low cloud layer; the diluted sun complements rather than counteracts the drizzle. The rain softens the ground, and the shade blunts the rest of the Earth. The buildings are more pliable and they bend in the soft but persistent wind that pushes the speckle into the back of my neck. Three hundred little fingers prod me lightly; a friendly reminder, a gentle caress. Whispering in my ear shapeless words with long, drowsy sounds of lethargy.
“Rest.” It tells me.
“Sleep.” It implores
Trees bow their assent. They dip slowly, so slowly, bending with water weight and not un-contented weariness.
It is the quietest rain I have ever experienced. On my left a Honda drives by, the tires kick up streams of water, and I hear nothing. Everything is muffled; sound is pushed downward by the thick of thin speckles. It reaches the ground and moves laterally, funnels into the sewers where the rats are treated to a symphony of transplanted noise from the world above.
I walk and I don’t bother to pull my jacket tighter. I am not sad, not happy, not ambivalent. I fade into and become the grey all around me. My clothing and skin become translucent. The scent from my deodorant sloughs off and joins the sewer creatures. I move with the wind and the water moves through me, cleansing the small plaque from my arteries and irrigating my dry lymph nodes. Heart gets a bath, liver a quick shower.
From behind, I hear the faint notes of a slow, solitary guitar.
I turn the corner and before me is green, green unlike any green I could possibly be seeing in this weather. Green that is to color as the sun is to a 40-watt light bulb, as blood is to ketchup, as a concert hall is to AM radio.
The impossible green is from a mesh of vines growing on the ground; they sprout thin leaves and wind around each other and over each other and under each other into a thick net that obscures what must be grey ground underneath but I can’t see it. The sound of the rain on the leaves is LOUD, not like a train but loud like a stare from across the room, loud with depth, loud like the unspoken understanding of an inside joke. Even though the green is only about 10 x 5 feet in size, it is larger than everything and I fall into it.
and I remember a river in Scotland.
….
I remember how that rain sounded, landing on the thick foliage above and around us (slap!), and then dripping onto the mud and roots more softly (plop..). Slap and then plop, goes the falling, migrating raindrop. The infinite noise of the forest made any effort at spatial orientation seem futile. How could left and right, up or down, forward or backwards, how could they mean anything when nothing would ever change, whichever way you go. Turn this way or that way and yep, it’s the sound of the forest again.
When you close your eyes, it comes closer, hard glistening bark one centimeter away so you can see the ant circumnavigating the small growth of an aborted branch. You can smell Scotch oak that might one day become a whiskey barrel. Hands out: caterpillars swing from the nearby vine to tickle your palms.
The cacophony of the downpour wraps around your torso like a harness. The earthworms are crawling skyward through the dirt, and they push upwards on the soles of your shoes. You breath in the thick moisture; it feels like aerosolized Red Bull, and you fly just below where the leaves start to grow, and the caterpillars hang onto your thumbs for dear life, shrieking their little pseudo-lungs out with terrified excitement.
I open my eyes and realize that my cheeks are sore: I’m grinning. The thought of a gleefully screaming caterpillar is really hilarious.
That scent. Oh god how can I describe it. (Do you remember, J?) The river is what makes it special; the light foam makes me taste and smell at the same time. Homeopathic amounts of minerals bind both to my upper palate and in my nose. Iron and copper mix with sap and soil: syrupy swords and dirty pennies latch onto my tongue and light up my taste receptors.
Wilderness!! Even with twenty other college kids around me, it’s hard not to feel like Lewis sans Clarke, pushing open the mystery of unblemished natural beauty and feeling it close again behind you, so that even when you come full circle to the same spot, the newness is there all over again. The trees nod their greetings, the caterpillars wave all their feet.
Magic!! Even with all the insipid realities of modern life less than five miles behind me, right now it’s effortless to believe that the forest teems with living mythology. The light slightly fades as I enter a particularly lush thicket, and the glowing fireflies could easily be luminescent fairies. A flash of movement is some other mythical creature keeping watch over the kingdom. I start to see faces on the big oaks gain eyes and crow’s feet around them. 100% of me laughs at my own stupid fantasy, and 100% of me believes it all.
They want us to walk on the path, but it’s hard not to wander off just to feel the ground beneath your feet give way slightly.
The river bends to run parallel to the path we walk, and the rain eases.
I remember how it felt to walk along the bank, to hear the babble of water over stone. My bare legs still feel the light splash of near-imperceptible vapor. My feet remember soft soil, brittle sticks fallen from the trees, and small jagged pieces of pseudo-sediment.
I remember hearing the river speak to me. It touches some part of my ancient hindbrain that still craves the sound of moving water, Five miles away the city bustles and creaks and grows with each new barrel of concrete and every fresh bar of steel. But here, it can’t be farther away. Eyes close, and I listen with ears that are forgetting the sounds of trains, planes, or cars. In my mind, it’s 10 million years before Bronze Age, let alone the asphalt era.
The river whispers to me words that my 18 year-old mind cannot comprehend, but my timeless brain, passed down from fish to lizard to ape to man to me, understands completely. Eyes open I’m awake and agape and I’m looking from bank to brook to breaking water. I’m feeling this old part of me relax and drink from these sounds and smells and be satisfied like never before, but my frontal cortex doesn’t understand, and I listen in as it pesters my medulla:
Cortex: “Why, medulla?? What is this? It’s just a river. Twenty six thousand three hundred and seventy-eight of them are spread across five million square miles of landmass. You’ve seen about twenty-eight of those. You were born two miles from another one.”
Medulla: I was born here. Shut the fuck up, listen, and leave me alone.”
Cortex looks at me quizzically. I turn him off and listen through medulla:
…………..
Breathe the way you should breathe, deep in through your mouth and out through your nose. Feel the entire world enter through your lips and down your throat; chew and taste it. Hear each of the fifteen million noises all around you individually, and then hear them coalesce into one note that transcends pitch or timbre
A great need seizes me; my shoes come off and my pant legs roll up. The undulations of water tickle my toes and surround my feet like a homecoming parade.
The rocks are sharp, I will cut my feet. I don’t care. Blood mixes with water, the red is swallowed by, and becomes, the river. Deftly I move from the low embankment to the narrow rocks on the edge of the water. Putting my feet in the smooth spots between the jagged edges, it’s like the stones were built for me. I see my path and destination (a large , gray, un-speckled stone in the middle of the river) and I draw nearer to where the ancient me was born.
Halfway there and I stop to listen to the sound that a small rapid makes. A large pebble points upward. The river rises over it and falls behind it, creating a hole where miniature eddies swirl around in concentric circles. The first hints of white water form and die continuously, over and over again. Squatting on my heels, I bring my hands down and together, up and apart above my mouth to drink my blood. Press on to the center.
Almost there and my heart races. The last gap requires a tiny leap of faith to cross and I take it.
I am two inches above sea level, prostrate, with my nose dipping in and out of my old home. Murmuring low tones of merriment, the river speaks to me about a different way of looking at things. The river is both perpetual and yet always changing, and so am I; new skin every two weeks, a new lung per month. Five minutes do I lay there, but of course it is longer than that. I begin to rise slowly, amphibiously, speckled with moisture, recreating two hundred and sixty million years of evolution in fifteen seconds. Belly. Hands and knees. Feet and hands. Heels and fingertips. And then ten short digits to the ground. I rise sixty-eight inches to survey the geography of an ephemeral constant. Every dead tree pushing against the current is visible, All the competing ebbs and flows of the living river reveal themselves to me. I notice how slightly the river tilts as it doglegs left, and feel the friction of the bank, the bed, the stones. Arms at my sides, shoulders rolled back, I experience the river surrounding and encompassing all my senses. The babble becomes my voice, the current is the track of my lymph fluid. It starts to rain.
It doesn’t rain here so much as the air coagulates. Two hundred and fifty drops of oil landing in my hair, anointing my forehead. Fourteen strings of honey slowly crawl down my cheeks, over the bridge of my nose. I open my mouth and they pool on my tongue. I swallow sweet nectar. I look up and the silver mists part to disclose the mountains in the distance. I look down into the thick sweet water, and see the outline of my upper torso staring up at me. On the tips of my toes, and even now as I write this I’m tilting forward, so slowly, watching my body in the water loom larger and larger. I’m watching the river begin to enfold me, encapsulate me, enliven me with the murmur and trickle that showed me how I was, am, and will always be in that forest, standing on that stone, feeling the rain build me up and wash me down with the river.
