1.

I passed Weaverville west to highway 101 and arrived like daily fog. It was once a logging town, but the logs I saw now weren’t logs yet, they were still upright in Earth. So I dropped down and ran with them through the canyon following Mad River into ocean—passing silent giants in groves older than the first gatherings of Wiyot.

It was once on these beautiful beaches of Trinidad, blending ocean inland, that the salty marshes stretched tide and home for generations. Before the massacre in 1860, before the woman and children were slaughtered and their skulls split open spilling blood from pool to stream. 

And for once I wish we could be something beyond hominid. That we were able to see the beginning in the end, the spinning wheel unraveling the threads from the spool. That we could look inside a redwood without cutting it open, see how the rings ripple out from center.

2.

When I left for Lassen that summer, flat black roads became trail, upward and out to the homes of Jeffrey pines with personality. Scorched silver without needles, lodgepoles incinerated half-smiling stretching deeper into painted portraits, deeper into grayscale and graphite. 

When the forest is an old thing, but the soul is even older, one will have to change. They are similar enough in their renewal, in their life cycles purifying in fire—the soul shedding its container, beside the charred bark, the saplings lifting from the remnants of red fir. 

In those mornings the sky rose light and quiet, entered through the mouth of a nylon womb. To be reborn every day, to crawl out of oneself and into oneself, they are only so many tasks left undone. 

The short walk to the lake, the purifying of water, the cultivation of awareness in observation—the transience in the exoskeletons of dragonfly still stuck to lake rock, changing form like water in a Jetboil, over coffee grounds and oatmeal. 

The evenings were the unwinding of the circadian rhythm, the bullfrogs ribitting into the night, repeating into the night, purifying the mind in mantra, stilling the mind in repetition, until all sound became void—trailing off into the remains of late snowpack over no named lakes.  

3.         

Tonight over casual conversation, you brought up the redwood we free-climbed in Arcata. Not one but four spires split from the same trunk. You said we had to climb it barefoot, that it was a safety hazard if we didn’t. So we climbed it like fire fed air and fuel, and at three-hundred feet up you said not to look down, but I did anyway. 

And tonight over cold beers, I told you about the time John Muir climbed a Douglas fir in a winter windstorm in 1874, somewhere off the Yuba river. And how Muir walked the San Joaquin valley pressing a hundred flowers in every step, he had cause to think that the world would never be the same.

That tomorrow if there’s a world left waiting, if there is anything left saving, let it be one last walk.

Each breath a bead, a step on the rosary of the eternal, the way you told me not to look down and step on the flowers.