Above the Treeline

For Ed

“It is difficult to adjust because I do not know who is adjusting; I am no longer that old person and not yet the new.” —Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

I would have dragged you down to the trees, had I known the heart of things. I would have sacrificed those trials. I might have even fostered care. As it is we—none of us—know the end of what begins so we do not understand when it is the middle. These things are only known in the looking back. I just didn’t know how heavy that bottle was in your hand.

Ten treasures may grow in a sapling, if your hand is wise enough to bend it. But a thousand artifacts awaits you in the grown oak if you can out wait it. If you dare you might find a feast table in that black walnut or a bench for resting.

Yet here we are hewing lives out of old dishes lent us by our mothers. She lent them to us for safekeeping not understanding the burden they would become. Delicate things of earth and fire, these ceramics. The things we make so pretty that will not last.

How you ever carried those plates and cups over landmines and through sorceries I will never know. That old green rucksack such has humped a life of days has been a friend to you. How you made it through the hard range above the treeline will remain a mystery. We mountaineers of the lonely well know what no one can understand.

I suppose some were made for hardships, that’s all. Only I don’t know why some go south while some go north, some becoming criminal and some few others—such as I hope for us—saints.

You’ve crossed below the treeline again, I see. You look strong and healthy from the picture they sent me. I hear your kids are doing well and your wife is proud. As for me I remain in these empty regions from where I send my dispatch. It is me and a dog named Phato.

Until then… until the next ascent. Until the next treeline. Until a time when things will surely disappear again in the fog air solitude of a land without green, into the thin atmosphere of our pilgrimage… until that time we need again our desperation and our mothers’ prayers… may the tree valley of hidden things tend you with it’s treasures—a feast table, a board for cutting fish, a chair, maybe a desk for writing—as only growing things can do (leave the plates and cups to the mothers and to God, who better understand the clay and heat). So when again the dry air altitude prevents you reasoning you might at least recall the feel of things remembered—grown and broken, wood and clay, the world and man. So you might remember me still adrift on stone and gravel, but stronger now in my lungs for the long stay at an altitude suited for tigers no one yet has seen but me.

Amen.