A Living Magazine - Day 154 - The Calmness When Falling

I was in a rainforest. For some reason I'd crossed a precarious rope bridge, which dropped away behind me just after my last step was taken adventure-drama style, almost pulling me down with it. And, I wasn't really on the other side of the five hundred foot deep canyon yet. The remaining jagged broken part of the bridge in front of me led only to an impassable fence. On either side were old planks and pieces of corrugated metal roofing, stuck into the side of the cliff to prevent erosion. The boards on the right side were too short for standing on. I had only one option; climb over the railing to my left, make my way along the edge and then try to climb up onto the bank.

I turned and looked behind me to see the vast chasm and the broken bridge, now limply swinging back and forth, with bits of it still falling into the shallow muddy river below. I knew I would probably not survive this. It is at these times that what I've learned to call "the calmness" overtakes me. And, such was the case on this day. I had my heavy backpack on, and had to constantly adjust my footing to lean slightly forward so that the pack wouldn't pull me backwards.

Instead of climbing over the railing, I crouched under it, grasping the outside of the rope supports, but kept snagging the tent poles in them. I finally freed myself enough to swing around and onto a wooden plank. It was quite a bit more solid than I thought it would be, and I rested for a moment. I wanted to just take the backpack off and let it drop so I'd be lighter and more agile, but I knew that if I did get up onto the bank above me, my supplies would be the only things I could use to survive.

Facing the cliff, I scooted leftward holding onto roots and small tree trunks, while stepping over onto each succeeding plank. The bank angled down closer to me with each step sideways and things were looking pretty promising.

When I'd almost reached the lowest part of the bank, there were no more roots to hang onto. Shit! I held the current one in my right hand and pawed around above my head for anything I could grip. Digging my fingers into the surface of the ground, I felt a hard plastic or maybe styrofoam edge. I tugged at it to make sure it wouldn't pull out of the ground, and it held my weight fairly well; though there was a tiny bit of play up and down. I realized that I had run out of any other way out of this situation. Intense and dizzying fear kept trying to flood me--paralyze me. But I used the technique I had when walking through the dark woods, or facing wild animals, or trekking through the bad parts of cities late at night, to swallow that fear down. What it took was simply saying to myself: You WILL survive this, there is much more to do. 

I pulled my focus back onto the circumstances at hand, and with the thought that soon I'd be up on that bank and able to set up my trusty tent, I held on with my left hand allowing all my weight to be suspended, as I shifted one more step to the left grasping the other side of this embedded object and holding on, while I raised my right foot to a large rock that would be perfect as a step up to the bank. When I did, the object began to pull up out of the ground and I felt the weight of the pack tugging me backward. The awful feeling that there was no escape from falling penetrated my consciousness with an extreme clarity. And, the last thing I remember was thinking that it was okay, because I'd done my very best. I'd made no serious errors. The calm returned, and I let myself go... 

* * * * * * *

When I opened my eyes, I was beyond relieved to see ole' Saggy lying there beside me, and I felt the rolled up shirt under my head; my makeshift pillow in the hood of the sleeping bag. I exhaled completely and then sat up to see that it was just another morning in the tent.

It was so strange that I had been dreaming about wearing my backpack and using my tent lately. This wasn't the first. More and more, my present circumstances seemed to be filling my unconscious life, where, in the past, my dreams never had anything to do with IWALLKing. What did it mean? I had no idea. I didn't even speculate. And, even as I write this, I don't think it really matters in any practical way. The reader may tire of my dream sequences being related here, but they truly are somehow related to all that I am doing, and going to do. I'm just not exactly sure how yet.

I rose and packed up. It was a Sunday and no trucks were going by on Golden Flake Drive. In fact, the whole town seemed strangely silent. Birmingham is a bubble of calm predictability. By that, I mean even the Saturday night just passed was not overly active. Yes, there was a five minute fireworks display, but no racing cars, no screeching brakes or peeling out, no screaming or yelling, no loud bars, no police sirens (well, any more than on the other nights). The town was almost surreal in its steady way. In the last six weeks I could always tell the difference between a weeknight and a Saturday night. Here, not so much. I didn't know how I felt about this balanced and level city-wide behavior.

I made my commute downtown in the usual fashion, taking 6th Avenue back to 20th Street...   

A leaf.

I worked hard on the daily post at Starbucks for a while, with very little distraction. There was hardly anyone at the tables. The rotation of trendy tunes - now well known to me - was comforting and I felt like I was with my co-workers--the Starbucks staff.

As the sun outside fell across the building on the other side of the street, a very pretty woman (maybe 35ish?) came in and sat beside me, pulling her MacBook out and plugging into my outlet.

So far, the women of the south--at least since my time in Memphis, were very much like the women I described in Portland, Oregon; smartly dressed, unpretentious, often petite, proud to be feminine, and full of smiles. I'm not saying that other sorts of women aren't attractive, only that these kinds of ladies are everywhere here, and I like having them around.

My fantasy-prone mind got all excited as it sometimes does. She could have sat anywhere, but chose to sit near me. Since I was planning to be there for a while, my hopes were raised high that she might ask me about the weather or run out of money and need some help paying for her coffee. Maybe she would have a technical problem with her AC adapter and I could lend a hand? I worked steadily, despite my occasional glance at her. She even met my eyes, and we nodded a smile at each other.

I got up to use the men's room. Before leaving it, I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked positively AWFUL. I took off my Romines hat, and looked at my bald head, hair drawn back in a short ponytail, with strands that had worked their way out of the hair tie and were now sticking off the sides.

I drew closer to my own image and saw the collar of my faded, sun-bleached Boston Red Sox t-shirt, crumpled under the stretched collar on my longsleeve IWALLK shirt. I had it on inside out, so that I wouldn't stand out as advertising anything. A slight ring of grey surround the base of my neck where my necklace had worn off all of its chrome plating and only the brass was left to oxidize in the damp air of my days, rubbing its patina into my skin like a temporary tattoo, etching in by a drunk ameteur with a shaky hand.

My eyes were slightly bloodshot (a condition caused by touch of uveitis). My beard had grown in a bit since my neat shave at the Nashville Marriott, and was now creeping down the front of my neck. The pants zipper I had fixed in Indianapolis had broken again, and I had to constantly make sure my pants were close against my waist to keep it from opening.

Letting my gaze simply relax, I took an overall review of my appearance and, along with looking a bit disheveled--though not dirty, I simply appeared worn out. My face looked sad. Not like pathetic, but almost as if I was permanently in a state of weeping. For just a moment, I perceived myself as small, lost, crumpled up like a discarded brown paper bag, ugly, barely human........... useless.

I replaced my hat and peered down at my hands still wet from washing them, and - for the first time since leaving Maine - wished so intensely that I could have just showered, put on a fresh white oxford, a pair of soft jeans, a nice leather belt, new black leather shoes; and then walked back out to ask this fine woman if I could buy her dinner that night then go have a glass of wine somewhere afterward. I looked back up at myself and fully realized that these things cannot be, anymore.  

When I returned to my table, a tall, great looking guy had taken a seat in front of my muse; obviously her boyfriend.

Once again, it was time to return to the ground level that was my only existence now. Whether in dreams or in my waking fantasies, only harnessing "the calmness" kept me from letting go of the psychological cliff to which I constantly clung. I felt tired and old. But I swallowed these emotions with my next sip of coffee, and steadied into my routine, eventually finishing my work by late afternoon.

I really needed to just walk; to explore like I was used to doing. But for some reason, as I rounded corners and took streets I hadn't taken before, I felt no temptation to pull out my camera. I even acknowledged this to myself. At one point the medical chopper flew in and hovered over the children's hospital, slowly settling downward onto the roof. My instincts caused my hand to reach for the camera, but I stopped.

After all that I have done, seen, heard, during the harried and random walks of the Manifest Destiny Journey, and more recently through the towns and cities of Northern California, Oregon, Washington State, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Tennessee and now Alabama, I felt as though I had done none of it; dreamed it all. I knew I had documented these adventures fairly well, but did any of it really matter?

I sat down on a bench near 6th Avenue S, where I would have to head back to the sleep spot, and watched the sun drench the corners of buildings with the orange, and then pink, and then red flames of evening, here, at the fall of day. I didn't feel lonely, but I most definitely did feel alone. I knew that like anything, my life and times - all of my efforts, writings; my passion - would not hold up long after I leave this world. It all meant something extraordinarily powerful and profound to me. But no matter how I tried to release this immense and vigorous zeal upon the world, it was just becoming part of the white noise of our times.

The essay about The New Age Of Heroes to come, was still fresh on my mind. It was my version of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Promised Land". I was about to start back over my own "mountaintop", toward the other side. Would it be a smooth but uneventful fading away into old age? Would it be into a place where the fates would smile upon me, opening up an even bigger career with greater future feats to challenge me? Or, would it be my Memphis Lorraine motel room doorway, with the crack of a gunshot as the last earthly sound I hear?

Deciding that I was delving too deeply into my thoughts, and with no one to throw me a life preserver, I put the pack back on and headed east up 6th Avenue S...

I walked by the Golden Flake guard station, which was dark, but still had an occupant fiddling around in there. He saw me, but paid no attention.

When I got to the field, the temperature had really plummeted, with not a trace of wind. It reminded me of Maine, when the first frost-breath of winter swept over the fields and valleys, right before the freezing descends. The insects were silent. It would be the end for them.

I set up the tent, and then paced around the matted grass and desiccated straw that still held dead white flowers in a majestic but saddened posture; as if kept in trust as a bouquet for a bride who would never arrive.

The stars were slightly veiled, and the moon was past-half. Seeing no reason to hold onto the day any longer, I crawled into the tent, zipped the snagging sleeping bag around myself and settled in for what would be a very cold night.