Wind, Bridge, Ghost

Recently, while cleaning out the closet in my office, I found a binder-clipped stack of printouts from my LiveJournal, ca. 2006-07. The LJ is long defunct and I am a different writer now, yet I still hear my voice in the best of the work, particularly the three below. Perhaps not coincidentally, these three reach back/reflect upon my tumultuous youth, an impossibly distant time to me now. These have been lightly edited for clarity but otherwise untouched.

wind

Swaying under the stars, listening to the wind. Something’s breathing out there, something beyond the surface. Close my eyes and listen for the voices. The morning voices are sharp, crystal. The afternoon voices vague, tired. The night voices burn with a hunger that demands everything. I would be more than lost in darkness if I could not hear these voices; I would be nothing. I would no longer sway in the breeze but instead scatter, yellowed and dried alfalfa hay drifting through the fields.

Hear that? The wind is picking up. The rest will follow. A half-remembered song about imagining yourself as a thousand points of light. A thousand leaves? That too a phrase half-remembered. Half-memories carry the most elusive truths with them. They put on a hell of a burlesque show, always leaving the customer wanting more.

The wind of voices gathers steam, pushing the walls and threatening to break the windows. There is no option but to listen. Yet it takes years and years to understand what the wind is saying, and even then I can’t be sure I’m getting it right. All I can do is leave these field notes as a marker saying “I was there. I listened, and bowed my head. Thank you.”

bridge

Among other things that year, there was the empty bridge.

They shut the bridge down for remodeling in the fall, but for a time—about two months—foot traffic was still allowed. I walked to work in those days, my bike having been twice stolen, the second time for good. A six mile walk one way. Five, six, sometimes seven days I walked it round trip. I had time; I never slept in those days. Sleep, I believed, was for when you were dead.

So, the Monroe St. Bridge. It stretched over the Spokane River. It seemed like it was miles and miles above it. I don’t have any idea the true distance between the water and the bridge; all I can say is that it felt like a yawning void that was right on the edge of incomprehensible. It was pretty amazing to walk over it. It was even more amazing to sit in the middle of it, where there would normally be four lanes of traffic, with not another soul around. Oh, you want to talk about wild desolation…the wild quiet…The Wild. The way the wind danced over this unnatural object suspended in the sky, as though it were offended. Far below, the rush of the waterfalls and threatening whitecaps. I sat there for hours, listening to the voices.

In the winter a storm dumped over four feet of snow across Spokane. I was walking home from work when the storm started. By the time I made it to the bridge everything had disappeared beneath the white. How incredible it was, standing on that bridge at night, snow falling around me with increasing intensity, the fierce wind causing the light poles to clang. As if saying, “I mean it, little boy. Get inside while you still can. Or do you really want to find out what being blown away is all about?” I took the hint. But I didn’t rush, didn’t run. I walked backwards for a while, watching my tracks disappear. I took mental pictures, memorizing every detail. I thought that someday I might name every snowflake I saw that night. I have not done so but they are still here, frozen inside of me.

On that bridge, especially at night, even the echoes had voices. That bridge, a place of great power. A place of unrest. No, unrest is not the right word. I was meeting a power I could not possibly understand, causing a great unrest in me. But I loved it, you see. I loved what that bridge did to me. I loved being so close to something inescapably grand and mysterious. I listened to every voice, every tale, every word and every moment of silence there. Alone, but not.

the road, a ghost

I have ghosted many roads. On snowy nights, on rainy nights, on nights when the stars shined bright and true, hurting my tired eyes. Wheels spinning on gravel, on ice. Thinking that somewhere in the darkness, hope would shine. But I never believed it, not really. I drove with those phantoms and the tamarack pines looming over me, a canopy of night broken only by the sliver of road. A road forever winding, never straight. Point A to Point B does not ever happen. I think I am grateful for that. Mostly.

A trip with my best friend J. We pulled into the Conoco at the edge of town, bought two six packs of Icehouse beer and a couple of packs of Camels, then drove off into the hills as the snow began to fall. We did not speak, words not being meant for the night forest. Gears shifted, the headlights revealing only a few feet of distance ahead, the snow thick and serious. Both of us knew these roads and maybe a few other things. In time the empty bottles littered the floor of the car, rattling around my feet like chimes in a steady breeze. We shared the last cigarette, the orange glow a beacon in the darkness around us. The phantoms inside made room for the phantoms outside.

Another trip I made alone and stoned, an empty bottle of tequila on the floor and another, mostly full, nestled between my legs. The gravel bounced beneath the wheels of my pickup. To my left was solid mountainside, to my right a straight drop-off into the yawning chasm of the forest. No guardrails to litter those roads. I took a pull from the tequila and lit a cigarette, eyes never leaving the narrow road. Thinking the recklessness might kill me, but I would miss it if it died. I never feared driving off into the chasm because I had made my offerings. I knew the phantoms. I could feel them in me, deeper than the dope and booze and whatever other shit I had dumped into my too-skinny, wired body. You don’t drown them or chase them away. You dance, motherfucker, dance, or you go off the edge into the chasm. I danced with a grace that I would never find in the daylight.

There were other times, so many others, too many to count. A marriage between body and mountain, between mind and forest. Reckless as only someone so consumed, so young, can be, I opened the doors and let it all in, a slack-jawed phantom. My eyes gone. My pickup weightless and indifferent. Ghosting the road.