collected writings

A Garden Of Leaves

He was sure the mountains had been closer when he was a little boy. He could clearly remember looking up at the mountains and they had been so very close. He did not know when exactly he had been a little boy, because he had forgotten exactly how old he was, but he knew the truth about the mountains.

On the side panel of a solid pine door, the door that divided his tiny cabin into two equal but forever separate squares, he had marked a notch every thirteenth of October, the day that he thought was his birthday. It was not important whether his birthday actually was October thirteenth, only that he didn't celebrate it more than once a year - so the first marking he made was a rough 10/13 . Beneath the date, there were almost fifty marks, but the last few years he had started to worry that he had actually started marking his birthday when he turned fifty the first time, counting back down from the high water point in his life till he died. He certainly hoped he was only almost forty-nine, because he did not want to die, but then again, he felt like he could be ninety-eight.

It was, of course, not important. What was important was that the mountains had once seemed so very close, within reaching distance outside his shuttered kitchen window. Now they were distant, miles off, and he did not understand the difference between his memory and the reality he saw before him.

When he was younger, when the mountains were closer, he remembered living in the same small cabin that he did now, only then it was in the mountains and not in the city. Back then, his closest neighbors were a quarter mile away, at least, and he had never spoken to them because they respected his Privacy and he respected theirs. Hippies, their long hair gray and fading like long-stemmed daisies drooping in a July heat, moved nearby to plant gardens of weeds, become hermits and eventually die. It was peaceful, living in the mountains.

Now, though, there were many things he did not understand. He did not understand why there were so many houses now in his neighborhood. He though of how, after a long, hard rainstorm, white bubbles of mushrooms would sprout everywhere within minutes of the rain's ceasing, mushrooms that would make walking difficult for several days until they faded back into the forest floor to slumber until the next rain's call-to-arms. He thought that the houses were like this; perhaps it was the weather, a particularly dry summer, maybe, that made the houses sprout out of the ground like mushrooms. He waited for several years for the houses to sink back in the thick layer of pine needles that carpeted his extended yard, but they never did - at least, he thought he waited several years; he could never be sure of time passage because he could not remember any date anymore other than the thirteenth of October.

He did not understand why all the new mushroom houses had turrets and watchtowers and bright shiny metal roofs. He did not know that Architects and Engineers had come in and stamped their feet on the ground and said things like Frank Lloyd Wright be damned, we're going to build a stucco house in the mountains. He would not have understood what they were talking about, anyway, so he paid this new breed of fungi no mind, and went about his own business, planting his own personal garden of weeds.

He did not understand why one day, when he went into the Village Inn, the same place he had had the same bowl of lukewarm chicken noodle soup in the same booth for lunch every Sunday for as long as he could remember, he was told he could no longer have French fries with his meal. Instead, he was given Freedom Fries, which he gathered were rather patriotic French fries when he was served a porcupine nest of fries that bristled menacingly with tiny American flags on toothpicks. He was told that they no longer served French fries, and that the change had something to do with some war that was somewhere being fought. He did not understand what French fries had to do with fighting a war. He thought these thoughts while sitting at the same booth he had always sat at, drinking from a tall glass of ice and Freedomade.

He did not understand why two young ladies had come into the same restaurant one day when he was there and one lady had ordered every kind of salad dressing for her salad, each segregated to its own little ceramic cup so she could dip her carrots in the ranch dressing, her lettuce in the house vinaigrette, and the tomatoes in a honey mustard. This too he did not understand.

When driving his beaten-down truck to buy groceries, a tiny blue truck that had holes of rust in the bed from where some lost winter ancient sandbags had been thrown, worn open, and the wet sand had slowly worked its way through the metal, he almost ran into a massive car that easily could have fit his truck in the back seat. He was thinking about the grains of sand, and how he thought he remembered a story he read when he was a little kid, about magic red hot grains of sand that were kept in a special paper envelope, lest they be spilled, because they would eat they way through anything, including the world, and come out the other side.

He desperately wished he could remember where he had heard this story, because he would have liked to read it, to prove it was real and not a dream of his. He wished he had a couple grains of that magic sand, but he did not know what he would do with them. He had been so lost in thought that he almost drove up the ramp that someone had installed on this massive car, a ramp that unfolded with the touch of a button to let a woman he did not know effortlessly push a shopping cart into the belly of the car. Seconds later, the car sped away, woman, shopping cart and all, and he did not understand why.

About that time he should have thought to check on the mountains, to make sure they were still close, but the thought did not occur to him until they were already gone. He should have checked when he heard a conversation between two men wearing tucked-in polo shirts and matching black belts. One man had told the other man that he looked tired, and the second man had replied that, yes, he had played hard over the weekend and had, indeed, been up in the mountains.

At first he was caught on the playing aspect - he did not know what kind of games grown men in tucked-in polo shirts played (perhaps polo?), but he wished it was Wall Ball because he thought he had enjoyed playing that when he was younger. But then he heard it. Up in the mountains. What did that mean? They were in the mountains. How much more up could you go? Were they playing Wall Ball on the very cliffs and pinnacles of the mountains? Were they bringing ladders so that they could have contests to see who could go up more?

Then it became obvious that in order to go up to the mountains, one had to purchase a great deal of equipment, equipment that was lovingly referred to as toys. This solved the aforementioned riddle of what game to play, but he did not understand why he had to have irrigation boots that went up to your chest to go fishing, when going barefoot had always worked fine for him. He did not understand.

Maybe he had been so caught up in a perpetual state of not understanding that one day, when he looked out his kitchen window, he did not see the mountains. More exactly, he did see them, but they were miles off. Ten miles, a hundred miles, an infinite number of miles. He could not remember when they moved. He assumed that mountains must move very slow, slower than even the trees move, but even then, he assumed that he would have seen the mountains move. After all, he had been looking out that same kitchen window for so very long now.

He could not remember the last time that the mountains were close, and this only added to his misery. Maybe they had moved the one time he had ever left town, but he could not remember when that was or where he had gone or even if he had gone at all. He then thought that mountains must make a lot of noise when then move, slowly or not, but he could not hear anything over the grating chainsaw the man down the street ran day and night, cutting down everything living within reach and replacing the trees with tiny red rocks that crunched like chalk being squeezed when the man with the chainsaw walked on them. You could not walk on the rocks barefoot; it was like walking on coral.

He had known every tree in the forest around him; he had played games with them when he was a very small boy (ten years ago? more? less?). He and the trees took turns; they were the Monsters and he was the Hero, they were the Heroes and he the Monster, and sometimes they were all Heroes. Very seldom was everyone a Monster, although more and more, trees were protesting the deaths of their brothers and sisters, taking action the only way a tree can, by ritual suicide.

He had heard that a long time ago, in some country in the orient that did not exist now, monks had set themselves on fire to protest something worth protesting. He wondered if the trees had learned this strategy from the monks, burning themselves alive to protest the slaughter of the innocents. Then he thought about how a country could possibly not exist anymore, and he was once again reminded of the mountains.

The day he looked out the kitchen window, a window he had installed himself years ago and opened sideways rather than up and down, and saw that the purple and white faceted diamond, the mountain he had always had seen, every day, had moved many miles away, was the day he decided to go up to the mountains.

He did not take anything except the battered pick-up truck and a green baseball cap that was given to him when he walked into a gas station once. He thought it was strange, a gas station giving away hats, particularly strange because he was the only one that day who had received a free hat. So he pledged to never set foot in that gas station again, and he never did.

The mountain that he drove to saw him coming, and started running away. It took a great deal of effort, and some tricks, to catch up to the mountain. He did not understand why the mountain was fleeing from him, but then it occurred to him that maybe the mountain would not recognize him, just as he did not recognize it now. He wanted to call out the mountain's name, to let it know that it was All Right, it was only he coming, the way someone calms a spooked horse, but he did not know the mountain's name. He doubted it ever had a name, and he began to think that he did not have a name; he could not think of the last time he had heard anyone call it. He was sure it was not important. The mountain was all that was important now.

It was about halfway between his home and the mountain that he decided that he was going up to the mountains to die. He did not know why he felt this way, having never died before, but it made sense. He thought about his house, how he had left everything there, because he though he would be coming back in the evening. If he had known he was going to die, he probably would have locked the door. That made sense too.

It would be nice to die, he thought. After all, he had been alive for so very long, he was starting to forget things that he thought were important, like the names of wildflowers that blazed past, and he was starting to remember things that are best left forgotten, like the fact that ninety times every minute his heart went lub-dub. It was a lot to be conscious of, and he wished it were something he could forget again.

His truck turned a corner, and he saw a sign that said Slow Down Entry Station Ahead. He did as he was told, and soon found a young girl with the name Dawn asking him for ten dollars please so that he could continue going up to the mountains. He had never died before, but he still thought ten dollars was a little steep to charge for something that everyone had to do sooner or later. He looked in the glove compartment for the emergency ten dollars that he kept (ten dollars seemed to cover most emergencies, he had found) but he could not find the note. He had spent it on a parking ticket several years ago.

He was able to pull together roughly ten dollars between some crumpled bills in his jeans' pockets and the loose change that had jingled in his truck for half a century or more and now would be stuffed into tight round envelopes and driven to the city by a man in a gray suit to be melted down and replaced with new shiny coins. The girl named Dawn gave him a brochure and a receipt To Be Kept On His Dashboard and let him go on his way.

He was embarrassed that he did not have a ten dollar bill; if he had known how much it cost to go up to the mountains he would have gone to the bank to get a crisp, unfolded note. He thought that such a note would impress Dawn, and it would impress the mountain he was trying to find.

As soon as he started the truck moving again, he was struck by color. He had for so long assumed that colors came in every shade of the rainbow, sixty-four colors of American Crayons and more, but here, there were only a few individual colors that picked up the slack everywhere. There was no light green, forest green, emerald, dark green, yellow-green, or any type of green. There was just green. The same went for the blues and the whites.

There was still a fair amount of snow on the mountains, and some of it stretched down to the roadside. He stuck his arm straight out the window, and in the narrowness of the one lane road he could sometimes bury his arm to his elbow in the soft summer snow; the white summer snow that melted into the air and became the blinding white trunks of aspen trees.

He passed the snow and a meadow opened up, completely covered with the uplifted faces of countless dandelions. He had never seen so many before; he thought that someone must have planted the dandelions in that meadow to carpet it so. The rolling yellow set against the aspens was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and he instantly regretted a long lifetime of pulling dandelions out of his garden of weeds. Instead, he now knew, he should have planted more dandelions, more and more, encouraged them, until his yard too was blanketed in yellow.

Counting the colors from the ground to the sky, he saw yellow, white, green, the purple of the mountains, and finally blue. He thought that this combination was a much better spectrum than the R O Y G B I V that he had learned in school. Somebody up here had done things right, although he could not think of a catchy way of remembering the new color spectrum, certainly nothing that compared with Roy G. Biv.

Looking around, he noticed a distinct lack of red, a color that for a long time he had called his favorite color until he had recently forgotten about it, and he thought the lack of red a shame, after all, red really is a nice color. Then he remembered the aspen leaves in the fall, and the Indian Paintbrush, and he decided that maybe red was such an important color that it could only be used sparingly, or not at all. This made his stomach, which was slightly tense over the prospect of dying, feel much better, and he drove on.

Around a green corner he saw the road come to a stop before him, and he knew that he would have to continue going up to the mountains on foot. This sounded like an honest enough of an idea, but not more than ten feet down the path he was stopped by a sign that said Take Only Memories Leave Only Footprints. Above this sign was a much larger and more colorful sign that said Please Stay On The Trail. He wondered how this could be reconciled with the concept of leaving only footprints, and looked around for a sign that would direct him as to which specific memories he was allowed to take.

He passed a billboard that spoke wonders about this magical element called Water, as if it was something that was newly invented by men in white suits in a laboratory somewhere, and the billboard informed him that, yes, water did tend to flow downhill, and came in many varied and wonderful forms like Rain and Snow. To all this he nodded his head with acknowledgment and continued down the dirt trail.

Soon the path veered to the left, and he was faced with a fork, a choice of following the path to the left, or continuing on the path that he saw before him; green and soft, or hard and brown. He did not know it, but only one being before him had stopped at this particular fork, a squirrel several years ago had been utterly exhausted by a no-doubt important journey (squirrels spend just as much time traveling up and down as forward, so naturally the wear out easy) and had stopped at the exact same place where he now was stuck, searching for the same path.

It was the proverbial road less traveled by, and he thought about how much he hated that poem and Robert Frost for it, because everyone always quoted from it and yet no one ever actually took the less traveled path. So he proved to them that it was possible, he showed them all, and took his first step off the dirt path and into the unmaintained wilderness, his first step towards freedom and his first step towards death.

The first thing he did was take off his shoes and socks. He had always thought that shortcutting did not cause erosion, shoes did, and he did not was to create a path to where he was going lest someone get lost and accidentally follow his footsteps to their own deaths.

The grass felt good around his feet; with every step he took he looked down and was happy to see the grass growing quickly through and even on his naked foot, then receding like liquid only to regrow a stride further. He wrapped his hand around the trunk of an aspen, and under his hand that was carved a long time ago from a solid chunk of callus, the tree felt smoother and colder than any woman he had ever touched. He would have liked to stay a while with that tree, to get to know it better, but he knew that his time was running short, and so he had to flee like the knowing lover the morning-after, when the sun had finally forced the lights to turn on.

His gas station ball cap was the next thing to be left behind, and the sun felt so warm on his forehead that he quickly stripped off all his clothes and left them behind, to become the playthings of ants and must.

It had been a long time since any of his body had been exposed to the sun, only the back of his neck and elbows turning a deep purple every now and then as he worked hunched over in his garden of weeds, so he sunburned quickly, his body turning a glorious red that he celebrated as a unique wonder in a world of green and blue. He felt that he was special, somehow, and that the world was now watching him and admiring his color and rearranging and reorganizing color spectrums once again.

Green trees spiraled out of control before him, and he, for a brief moment, thought that he was Dorothy walking to the Emerald City, so green it was, but in this case he was missing not only his home, but his brain and heart as well. He hoped he still had his courage, because he was now very excited about the prospect of dying, and he did not want to turn away with fear at the last moment.

He did not know where he was going, in fact, the further he marched, the less he knew and the more he felt. He felt like he was going in the right direction, towards the purple mountain. He did not wonder why mountains were purple; in normal circumstances he probably would have taken inventory of all the colors he could think of and would have declared that green and blue had quite a large monopoly over everything, covering the sky and the sea and every decent, hard-working plant, and if the mountains were green or blue in addition, there would be too much of a Good Thing. He would have thought that it was good, then, that mountains were purple, but he was not thinking any more, and merely felt that it was good.

He wondered (because wondering can be a wonderful feeling rather than thought) what it would be like to die, and as he did so the ground grew moist under his feet. He saw ahead the grass turn blue, and he wondered why he had never seen grass grow blue before, as he stepped into cold waters.

He kept marching, straight towards the purple mountain, and the water grew around him, pulling him forward, past his knees, past his stomach, past his shoulders. He felt that as the water rose around his outside, it filled up his inside as well, only there, it was much colder. It started with a little trickle into his feet (leaking in from under his toenails, he assumed) and then gushed in when the water outside rose over his kneecaps.

Now, as he walked chin deep in the blue water that mirrored the blue of the sky, only one shade of color between them, the water inside him had almost filled him up to his neck, so that when his mouth went under the water, water from the inside was already there to meet it. And still he walked, his head and finally the last remaining hairs fully submerged. He supposed that all the water inside him, which was very cold and therefore must be heavier, was weighing him down and keeping him from floating.

He had heard once that this was how poets die, by walking into the ocean and never coming back, but he was not in the ocean and he was pretty sure he was not a poet. He did not know what a poet was, he probably never knew, he was only a man who had suddenly after much work turned into an old man, and so he kept on walking and eventually he emerged from the water at the far side of the blue lake.

When he was waist deep, as the water receded, he realized that the water that had poured in him was not draining out and was staying trapped in his body. He did not know anything about Hydraulics or Fluid Mechanics, and was concerned by this new turn of events.

He made his way up the distant bank, moving quite slowly because it is difficult to move when one's body is completely filled with water. He felt a wave of sickness wash through him, ripple through the cold water inside him, and the water began to drain downward, loosening the pressure on his head. He was about to celebrate when he looked down and saw the water spitting in a constant stream out the middle of his stomach, out his navel, his navel, the only gift his mother had ever given him, out, his belly-button, darkening the light sand as the water spilled, even from downwards up it came, bubbling up from his toes, and still the water burst through him and he sank to his knees and then fell to his hands and then into darkness.

This was the first time he had ever seen black, true black, and he did not know what to think of it. He did not know what to feel of it too, so new it was. He did not know how long it was black; the child, when asked, does not know how long it had been in the womb, only remembering the time as a long period of black.

And so he awoke, and the first thing he noticed was that he could breath, and he thought it so natural an ability that he forgot completely that he had always had allergies and asthma and only in their complete absence were they noticeable. He also did not feel a sticky needle in his right ankle, from where he had been injured in some war that he had fought, Vietnam or World War I, a pain that had been with him his whole life, through loss and gain, love, and death, and now was gone forever.

He sat up, slowly, and saw that his hands and arms were covered with a thick hair, a rug, a carpet, a fur. It grew long and was already tangled with stickers and pinecones.

And just as suddenly, he neither knew or felt, but just Was. And he Was not alone. Others, like him, helped him to his feet and gave him roots and berries and raw fish to eat, and they were the best things he had ever put in his mouth. Without a word, he was like them, one of them, and they helped him away, where he never spoke another word and he never died ever again.