Vacation Pictures

 We do need reminding, not of what God can do, but of what he cannot do, or will not, which is to catch time in its free fall and stick a nickel’s worth of sense into our days.

  - Annie Dillard, “Holy The Firm” -

I have considered the old timers, the mountain men, cowboys, and the desert rats and have found intersection.

Not in lifestyle, mind. Their physical lives were a daily battle with nature that, without 21st Century technology, would kill me graveyard dead in a week or a month or a year. But the baseline liminal core of their lives resonates in deep places near my center in ways hard to quantify. They — we — are the people who have failed the ritual passage to full membership in the tribe, the people living forever on the threshold (Latin “limen” — yeah, that’s where “liminal” comes from), the outsiders looking in.

Sometimes.

Mostly, if truth be known, we don’t notice at all. We just live in the between spaces, occasionally sneaking a peek through thin places, bemused or curious about the intricacies of tribal life on the other side of the glass. But too close for too long can be toxic for us. We tend to move another 10 miles into the wilderness when we see a thread of smoke on the horizon. Too crowded.

So, then — vacation in the Big Empty for me is very like going home for R&R from a combat zone.

Sitting on a sandstone rock jutting over the valley floor, skin already cooking in the morning sun, looking to the indigo Wind River Mountains on the horizon a seeming thousand miles away and a hundred miles tall, sagebrush and sand, browns, tans, blacks; just there, a herd of antelope a few hundred feet below me and a mile away shimmering in the mirage-ripple calmly graze and keep wary watch on me, ready to spring to 45 MPH faster than thought on the least indication I’m a threat. The spine and skull and crushed rib-cage of an unlucky one of their number bleaches on the path behind me, a long forgotten sacrifice to Darwin. A small grey rabbit hiding utterly motionless under a piece of sagebrush almost within reach watches me with a liquid eye. My mind is still, a near-meditative emptiness of no thought, just soaking in the world.

I can literally feel my guttering energy recharging with every dusty breath this life-and-death desert exhales over me. Breath and dust and a trickle of salty water from under my hatband — how it all began, right? I lean back against the rock as the morning shadows begin to shorten. Eden stirs.

A couple of hours later, climbing up a terrible road into a cool dark pine forest. Trees and ponds and streams and deer crashing away, beavers swimming — and suddenly breaking out into the open where the sun at 10,000 feet ignites the high-mountain grass around the small river into a fiery lush green so pure it almost hurts.

Lunch, then, and swimming in the freezing water, laying out and drying and dozing on sun-heated granite boulders carved just for us a million years ago from the jagged mountains holding up the sky above us — then on to the lake.

Roiling iron skies falling down from the peaks, thunder echoing down the roof of the world, soft rain loafing across the water to us in sheets. Cool, almost chilly. I sit with The Beneficiary and the Granddaughters and watch the misty dark rain dimple the lake. Beginning to get cold, we head back to the 4X4 for snacks. Soon we’ll start the climb back down the mountain.

All but Granddaughter #2.

“Are you coming?”

“Yes. In a few minutes. It’s so pretty I want to just sit here for a little.”

“No rush. We’re on vacation, remember? Take your time.”

I stand to walk back.

“Grandpa?” she says, stopping me. “I love this more every year. I think I need it, even when I don’t know it. Thank you for bringing us.”

She’s 18 now, and already knows about living in liminal space, even if she doesn’t know the words. Actually, she might. She’s a writer and poet, after all, and a pretty good one. She’s learning to play the game with people who don’t understand her impatience with them. Of all my grandchildren, she’s the one most like me, I think. Poor thing.

…and the next day, more of the same.

So, we are recharged, our memory banks stuffed newly full of our empty places where we can rest when we’re tired and fed up. When it’s time to retreat back to our life between no longer and not yet.

…and how have y’all been?