28—Phantom Limbs

To: Friends and Family

Subject: Phantom Limbs

From: walden@intermind.net

This afternoon, I’m writing on battery power as gale-force winds swirl around my house. I’d hoped to spend the evening watching heron and the seals as the silvery peach hue of sunset slipped away into my last night here. But with the horizontal bullets of rain blasting in from the south, my window on the world is a blur. 

With the furniture back in place and all the dusty fake flowers, ceramic chotchkies, and crocheted knickknacks I'd stashed in drawers now filling every nook and cranny, the house has that feel of death that comes after the spirit that once inhabited it has gone.

cd is annoyed that the angle of the sofa no longer gives her comfortable access to the window. Mitts is confused at finding a table in the spot where she always meowed and sat up for her evening treats. And I’m dreading the next four months of urban pollution.

While I’ve always had a rich dream life, my sleep here has been dreamless. It was as if every morning I woke to a dream—the dawn of each day like Genesis with the spirit of creation moving across the face of the deep, revealing the old myths in a new light. Living apart from the system, I experienced these myths not as a collection of spiritual relics or emanations of ancient truths increasingly inaccessible to the modern mind. What I did experience was a fullness of being that has changed the way I relate to the world in ways I'm only beginning to understand.  

This morning on my way back from Tillamook, I pulled my truck off the highway and sat looking up at the clear cut I’ve passed so many times. As clear cuts go, this hillside is not a big one, just an acre or two of tree stumps, conspicuous along the wooded road like a smile with a missing tooth. As if still alive, the fresh stumps radiate a warm ruddy light. Between the stumps lay tangles and scatters of the small and commercially useless brush called slash.

An impulse drew me from the truck and up the slope through the slash toward a big stump in the center of the cut. If fairy tales were real, this is where Princess Rosamund would have been lying among the thorny tangles, asleep for a hundred years under the spell cast by the resentful woman not invited to the baptism feast for the princess. And why? Simply because there weren’t enough plates! For this trifle, the entire kingdom fell into a sleep with the beautiful and virtuous girl at the fateful prick of her finger. I felt a similar eerie stillness had taken possession of the clear cut. 

Trampling the thorny tangles of blackberries growing around the stump, I eased myself past the spikes of the jagged hinge where the tree had fallen way from itself and lay down on the sawed-off surface. I fit perfectly, except for the soles of my feet. 

The wood was damp and cold. I sat up and counted the rings inward, piecing together the spruce’s history through the wavy marks of the chain saw—a dry, narrow season here, a rapid spurt there. I stopped at ring fifty-six, my age. It had been an average easy-going year. With three times as many rings to go, I laid my hands across the sawed-off years. 

Sliding down over the dark, elephantine roots, I felt something under my boot and lifted my foot. Up boinged a tiny tree, not more than six-inches high with a tiny curl to its top branch. A hemlock. Reaching down to apologize to the little tyke, I realized the ground around me was covered with these little trees and even tinier flowers, delicate pink stars covering all the open areas between slash and thorns. On every bit of walkable ground between me and the road, there was no place to step with impunity. 

Suddenly, from all around the clear cut, phantom limbs reached out to me from their stumps. In an anxious blur of the real and abstract, I began my descent and sank into a tangle of slash covering a narrow gully. Like an animal caught in a trap, I sank waist-deep into my own struggling. Blackberries poked through my jeans and socks. Several cars sped by on the road. I thought about yelling, but who would hear and how silly to have to be rescued from a pile of twigs. I pulled the sleeve of my sweatshirt down over my hand and grabbed hold of a branch. A thorn hit a nerve in my hand. Pain radiated through my body. I held on and after willing myself free, fled the grief of the phantom limbs that bid me stay.

We’re scheduled to arrive back in Las Vegas on Groundhog Day. It’s hard to imagine what shadows I might encounter between then and my move back here in May. I’m in somewhat of a quantum state, that strange place where the math for moving forward is the same as for moving backward. 

The other night, Jane and I went to Art Space, an art gallery and restaurant where I enjoyed acorn squash ravioli marinara, salad, and peppermint ice cream pie with chocolate sauce and whipped cream. The place was bright white with polished wood floors and maybe dozen people dressed in their best fleece and flannel, all oblivious to the giant plastic tarp hanging over the entrance to the art gallery where the roof had come crashing down during the recent rain. 

Not since I left Las Vegas has anyone told me to have a nice day. Nice here is a blend of fatalism, fleece, a reliable pair of water-proof shoes, and humor, both dark and light. Candles are still used for ritual; but on nights like this when the wind drops trees over the power lines, ritual becomes indistinguishable from life, and chain saws cut right through philosophy.