Wonderland

Chapter 4

“Something’s going to happen. Something wonderful.”

I wish that were true. You see at the end of the film 2010, Stanley Kubrick’s sequel to the venerable 2001, an unknown force creates a new star out of Jupiter. Out of the moons, this alien entity forms new planets for us to inhabit, and Dave, the protagonist from the first film, in an enlightened state compels us to believe that the “something wonderful” is a gift to prolong the life and prosperity of our species. After all, by 2010 we are at the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union and all we really need for peace are more resources to exploit and more planets to annihilate.

Well now it is 2010 and our supernatural savior is not coming. We are not at DEFCON 1, our computer driven spaceships aren’t filled with useless blinking lights and that optimistic date is not the only thing Kubrick got wrong…

but it is what depressed me this morning as I glanced at the calendar. The end of the oughts have come and gone and we are closer to our oblivion than ever. Twenty ought eight and we hit the apex of our civilization. Twenty ought nine and I couldn’t stop shaking. Twenty ten and I packed my bags.

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You see, D.C. had nothing for me anymore. The only part it had to play in this end game was the antagonistic fool. Cold storied concrete filled with geared hands ticking away with no concept of the future. No eyes, only idle hands that had found someone’s work to do. This place was a prophet and it is why I began here. I needed to see our future, and this frigid March with scouring winds and septic ice was it. I was the Cincinnatus, for I could have stayed in the belly of our government and been hailed for my service to the mission and lauded for clearing the path for the country’s march to wealth and prosperity, but it was really nothing more than a death march. The soldiers and prisoners were equally ignorant about the end awaiting them. Some had brought along cooking utensils and others had pen and paper for letters home. All were immensely sad symbols of doomed hope. Anyway my work was done, and it was time to go. The elevator dragged me down three basement levels where I took my last ride on the metro hurtling beneath the surface and the prophesy for me was fulfilled. When the trees are gone, and the sky is black we will be living like this, moving through the earth guided by false light and knowing only steel and concrete and shadows.

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My desk had been cleaned out the previous week and I had just gotten confirmation of my new position as the IMNC for the NCCN PWR of the NPS. That last acronym is the National Park Service, which served under the Department of the Interior. Protector of the wilderness with the passage of the Organic Act this government agency was the one thing stopping the machinations of capitalism. The park I was headed to was called Dark Cedars comprised of 97% designated wilderness. The most stringently dogmatic of environmentalist laws protected that land. Not a single entrepreneur except possibly a climbing guide could profit from the immeasurable resources sequestered behind the Wilderness Act, and my new position was to be the observer of those resources. I was to observe the effects of wilderness left untrammeled, which meant the essential removal of Homo sapien sapien along with all his friends Equus ferus caballus, Canis lupus familiaris, Ovis aries, and Bos taurus from the environment. I was also to study the effects of the pollutants that entered the wilderness from the man made world. Those included exhaust from the rush hour traffic 40 linear miles away, night light from the cities up to 100 miles away, and invasive plant seeds that fell from the wheel wells of the hundreds of vehicles that streamed through the park’s non wilderness arterials each day. Even under the protection of some of the strongest eco laws in the country we couldn't really stop the flood of people. The park service like any great socialist idea had a conflicting mandate. We were tasked with keeping man from destroying the country’s non renewable natural and cultural wonders, yet we were forced to open up our most vulnerable parts to ourselves, so that we all could share in them equally.

Here I was a reformed bureaucrat on an adventure. My park was 2000 miles away. I had the Prius packed with my newly pared down life and my head filled with the most idealistic of notions. I pulled out from the underground parking of my former condo and was on my way.

Twenty ought nine, now twenty ten. End of the oughts, I don’t know what I’ll do but I know what I ought.

Rhyme nor Reason

Chapter 3

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting rocks we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had froze in their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the whistle
Of wind sidewinding softly behind anvil rock.

Stealing, this poem from Wildfred Owen, was all I could muster to keep me from falling back. If the rhyme could reveal the illogical concept of war then perhaps it might be used to explain why we hurtle uphill to no particular place that you definitely do not call home. In this case, not home is Camp Muir.

Sitting down, with a typical backpacked brown bread cheese sandwich, were the tomatoe somehow always manages to always find itself on the outside of the bread layers and the cheese forms a paste that sticks to your gums like toffee, I find myself contemplatingmy life here at Dark Cedars, so far it's been all prologue, even chapters 1 and 2 were prologue, as there's just no way to begin the story. Why no rhyme or reason so far? Well, I have two different voices competing, trying to make one story. But, there's no hope for a single story, there are two voices in my head; one from the time before, and one for the future, both are scared, real scared. Only hurtling up this damn hill seems to make the mind forget itself. Is that it? These bent beggars are marching asleep to forget away there city troubles, while I'm here marching asleep to forget my former troubles and my future troubles, there ain't much sleep for a man like me, so I should take it when I can get it.

A short time later I wake, my glove is frozen to a stone, my hand is lost inside the glove, numb to my arm, my arm is weary, unable hardly to lift my pack. But I feel better, clearer, despite the mind bending altitude tricks. It is time to stumble like the low slung sun back down over the sharply broken white glass horizon line. The comfort of a warm fire, with good whiskey, and quiet company will get me there. Where? To the beginning of the story, that's where. There may be two voices in my head, but they both had to have emerged somewhere, and that's where I should start, if I am to make sense of any of this.

The Canopy

Chapter 2

Neath the blanket of an omnipresent canopy the world seems damp and dark, yet comforting and warm. I have my hood tight about my head and the patter of rain only closes the canopy further in around my back spooning my soul and keeping it safe. Funny to think that a $300 technobabble shell has the same drawstrings sported by the feed and seed red slicker I wore from childhood. One would think from the marketing that the latest rocket science graduate designed this jacket for the “serious business” that is incurred from the inhospitable landscape 14,000 ft above this canopy. However, the truth is that the water still does creep up my sleeves to wet my skin, and I realize that the rocket scientists are just government employees like myself and also have to turn in travel vouchers to their mindful administrative assistants even when their destinations are otherworldly.

Space is far from my understanding during these long rainy days beneath this canopy. The celestial bodies have not been seen in these parts since just after Labor Day and it is a wonder that astronomy is a viable subject in the local schools. For I can’t imagine anyone would believe the teachers with their fanciful tales of billions of lights in the sky.

“Sunlight? Moonlight? Starlight?” the students would repeat in wonder, “All we know is the ambient light produced by the clouds, and the wobbly beams of headlights and lamplights filtered through our rain spattered windows.”

Standing beneath this ancient flora I feel more bounded to the earth than even the bedrock. One hundred percent humidity and I might as well have the whole Pacific weighing me down to this spot beneath these trees with my feet firmly planted on saturated leaves and sticks and earth. Here I am longing to see beyond the blocked periphery of my hood and the meaty vegetation before me and I imagine I can see a slight vertical cut through the tangle of leaves and branches. This would be an old Indian trail that winds its way upward. It climbs and climbs until it bursts above the canopy through the clouds and brings its passenger into another world. Windswept, frozen and dangerous it may be, but also beautiful and unconstrained. From there you can look down on river valleys filled with white clouds settling like glacial masses. The weight concentrates in these valleys keeping their inhabitants in sluggish hibernation.

So with my space suit battened down along with my technical boots and pack I move forward and up. Climbing upward hoping to break through the clouds and the pull of gravity. Hoping to unfetter myself from this earth and look down on my home from above.

Breaking Morning

Chapter 1

Woken by a weeping wind pressing on moss laden boughs. Without strong breath a first cough breaks the puss sealed eyelids. In fits and starts dispersing, the cough shakes the body awake. First awareness is the wet air, laden with molden spores blowing over contorted blankets. A numb arm turns the body over allowing warm air out. A scratching sheet is left to irritate now cold skin. Rubbing rub-worn lashes, a morning light is broken by dust laden gray rays. As the rays come into focus the smell of last nights fire yet still reeks and all around the creaking A-frame moans its morning breath.

This type of awakening leaves you with no doubt that late winter is a reality rather than a cozy dream. Stealing worn sheets to cover exposed limbs the mind reflects on an evening lost. Within a few minutes the bed is no longer a retreat and you stagger for yesterday’s underwear and a still damp towel. Perhaps, that first thought was a wish to be still drunk. Instead the legs carry you to the shower, while the brain considers were the misplaced glasses are. Within fifteen minutes the keys, bag, stone cold bagel and tea flask are outside, but no eyewear to be seen. Back inside another five minutes are spent retracing last night stumbles; finally it is possible to lock the door, cursing wistfully at a brought on forgetfulness. You know this attitude is negative and can’t remain. Soon, coffee will start the day. Alone, the house left behind passes in the mirror, but the drab blue walls and silver grey shingles are quickly hidden by beggar bent hemlocks and a brigade of nettles.

The radio will advise that traffic approaching the city far away from here is snarled up, yet this road stretches all before you. Cresting the hill, a sharp band of transparent moisture laden air cuts across your vision rising from the sag that forms the valley floor. The rising air leads an eye up the pathy hills to a rocky outcrop, known by the name Mount Wow. Well behind Wow, a watery sun is stumbling over a jagged black horizon line. The vehicle slows, approaching the entrance into old growth trees. Venerable respect to natures last strand. Passing with care under the cedar arch you can’t miss the Douglas fir left of the entrance booth is freshly scarred. RV’d by some knight of the road, rushing to leave behind a canopy that with an already low slung sun, darkens day in a valley . In another fifteen minutes the moss laden forest gives itself up to a village of sorts. This arrival at work, with car windows blaring open, comes with a realization that the smell of morning remains constant yet the light is ever changing.

Darkmoss 2

Prologue 1.2

From the white and blue and scoured grey of the glacial tundra to the green upon green upon green of the maritime forest to the green and brown and blue of the costal plain. Your brain can be starved of breath and sustenance in the white out of the mountain’s cap in the faint glimmer of sunrise. Within the same day you can be back down, soaked with oxygen and the H2O around you will be in it’s more fluid state. And by that I mean pouring around your head. The full frontal force of the downpour caught in the green upon green upon evergreen needles only to drip down to you in the form of a torrent. If you are with me thus far we have traveled up and back through eight or nine ecozones.

Woke up this morning, and now the sadness is in front of me.

Darkmoss

Prologue 1.1

"Woke up this morning with sadness all over me. You see darkmoss is my first name, second is misery. As you know, this goes from lines of an old song I heard a whiles back and although it comforts me, it sure as hell don't calm me." -- Darkmoss Misery

This is the story of Dark Cedars, a grand old landscape stretching from the shores of the sea up to a snow capped summit, 13,821 feet high. Between those bottom and top layers lie tide pools, rocky cliffs, sand dunes, coastal pine forest, old growth forest, subapline meadows, snow fields, glaciers --all the way up to one wide angled view of weather, not the weather you see on the tv, but real weather, approaching fast and telling you to shuttle down faster.