My Love
My love. West Texas. The Big Bend. Loves me not. Sure. There’s the sparkling smile of a midnight sky. The warm embrace of the morning sun. The sweet kiss of a soft breeze. But it’s only a place and its warm embrace can easily turn me to dust. It’s a blind lover. I doubt it even knows I’m there. How can a place that has held a sea in its arms, think my footfalls are anything more than a random stone falling from a cliff. It can’t. It won’t.
But that’s the beauty of the place. It’s depth. It’s breath. It’s past. It’s future. The place is enormous, and I am physically small; but my mind can go anywhere, can time travel. It knows about the marshes and wave lapped shores, the tuffaceous flows and the basaltic dikes. It can feel the continent being ripped apart, smashed together. It can feel the land ripple. It can see the basins and ranges. It knows the mountains are apparitions waiting to be flattened. It knows the past. It knows the present. It knows what might lie ahead.
And whenever I leave the place of big vistas and long history, there’s a sadness that comes upon me as I travel and reenter civilization. As its tendrils reach out, I feel the pace of life quicken within me, with its constant urge to hurry, hurry, hurry, to always do. And I begin to understand why Harry Truman stayed at his lodge even as Mount St. Helen’s rumbled and eventually buried him in ash. He was part of the mountain, the continent, and why would he want to leave that, only to live the rest of his life at the pace of a fruit fly. He loved his place, as I love mine. And he knew that none of this is forever and he was just doing what mountains do.