chase scenes serial #21
delight of having an experience that you were not expectant of touch you and awaken within you a pleasure that you felt was lost as you grunted up the muddy slope.‡ I notice that I am transferring again. Of course the preceding musing should be in the first person. Did I revert to that comfortable didacticism out of an intense will to connect and to share? Or was it just sloppy and lazy. I am having my fourth tonic water of the trip, one for each flight. I also just ate a peanut butter granola bar left over from the hike. I had to take the peanut flavoured one which we did not eat because my father and mother’s household is peanut free in order to welcome their grandson, my nephew, who is allergic to peanuts. The association is causing me to wonder whether someday it might be fitting to invite my nephew along on one of these expeditions, it has been a wonderful way to share a bond with my father but also to explore the nation’s tucked away spots. Perhaps as a vegetarian he will also appreciate the dinner of the backwoods martyr, the iceberg lettuce salad. I fear that we are probably halfway through the flight at this point. We
‡ I don’t feel like I captured that moment at the top of the grassy plateau adequately enough. I think I may have been still too close to it. These, or, this is the distance, the detachment that separates the writer from the diarist, although I fear calling myself either, or anything at all. I had walked, climbed into another world, distant in all measures, time, space, consciousness; if innocence and dawn are a place, they are rolling upon native grasses, they touch the sky completely at all points, they are found by accident, one cannot seek contentment or solitude, in the search for quiet and regression one finds only distraction and stress, always, for in seeking I establish implausible standards, contentment, in the home, as the silent cat innocently looks out the window in an overcast sky [she does not know the disarray she looks out across], as I read at two AM (2AM) by lamplight in a dark room, or at the most bustling moments in a busy street on foot, walking just to feel the air cool your back, my back, is fleeting, generally once it is recognized it is gone, but the landscape on that high plain sustained the feeling by its very continuity, had it not ended, my wonder would have continued, but it was me that left it, it is still there, perhaps overcast slightly, like Atlanta today, Sunday, like Bismarck one week ago, getting closer, the silence of Medora, tucked behind badlands and empty, closer, the tracks of bison north, the breeze blowing the tufts of their wool shedding for the summer and carrying it through the air in high currents to the top of a plateau, a narrow worn trail with bison hoofprints and a small herd, some creatures nestled down in the high grass, their heads slowly moving from side to side, slowly and deliberately turning a horn to the sky, an ear to the precipice, two figures ascend quietly and make their way around the opposite hill and safely out of sight.
