This is for Alex and Jeff
Somewhere back of the camp a creeper burrs. A great chill serves its summons, opens my eyes. The morning is pale, brushed nickel, holding her ace for now: maybe later the she'll let the sun through, relent, or maybe she'll turn dark and drench us with icy silver.
For now we're held in suspense and we must shift ourselves and make our own heat. I scrub down and do this, get busy fumbling with the firewood, inexpertly bungling the strokes in a series of ugly creases and white, glancing blows... Pretty soon, despite all, I have enough for breakfast and baths. I hear the zipper and Alex crosses to the table, muttering something about "twice warmed." Later Jeff appears and disappears, returning again to praise Alex's oatmeal pancakes and arrange his kit in a pre-bath ritual.
We all keep our voices down, cowed by the straight, grey hemlock trunks in their robes of spanish moss and the cold gloom of their infinitely receding galleries, whose other end, we imagine, opens on some jagged trail marked by cairns, the front porch of an awful personage, a spirit all rock and ice who does not like visitors... And a hike for another time.
For we are pretty sure by now what we're capable of and resigned to it– for now, in our camp in the hemlocks, we take what the morning is pleased to give us and we don't press her; don't even think of it, because she is so effortlessly beautiful and terrible even in this well-worn campsite. And anyway, we are still drinking our coffee and reeling from the novelty of the sight of each other's morning selves...
After the pancakes we are seized by a blissful inertia, staring at the glowing coals, then the ragged continents of pale blue sky between black needles. But the morning takes off her robe of silver and underneath she's all green and gold invitation, smelling of warm fir and oxalis.
Unready as we are, we obey, clear the table and spread the map. X marks the spot, we go there today on paper anyway. But each of us keeps to himself where we would go ultimately, what silent understanding we would seek.
Yet later there's a time... Across the lake, in a tiny clearing of jagged orange stumps and a blackened fire ring. We peer from our cave of sweeping branches and follow the line of the trail behind silver whales of driftwood, heaped blocks of talus, trunks like the palings of a great fence... And wonder where those men went, those men so sure what they could and couldn't do, what they would and wouldn't do... We wonder idly, full of a surplus of fierce joy in the blue-green of the lake and the water closing like icy hands around our ankles and calves, rinsing the rinds of fatigue, then anxiety, then, yes, even regret and perhaps grief... And there is no question we can prolong the moment indefinitely, sure, because it occurs to us we've done this before, not sure when, but the fact remains...
And we sit on the soft duff and stare at the reflected forest and hum with the soft breeze off the water and tilt our faces into the broken sun, silent, smiling gnomons charting the arcs of our youth.
