“Derek watched her car vanish into the mist, then set off to finish his trek. He listened to the rain gush, listened as it turned into a steady patter, into muttered tinklings, into occasional drops, and, finally, into the quiet dripping of aftermath. The night was pregnant with moisture. Crickets came alive and renewed their songs of enticement; earthworms oozed onto the sidewalk to escape newly drowned burrows. He was soaked to the core, both with the wet and the evening’s magic. Life was good – or as good as it could get in Sahaptin on a hot August night when all that was needed was a little rain to make the day effervesce; when all that was needed was a good cleansing of the soul.”
Stephen C. Ellis, Son
“Even when you look for it, you’re never prepared for it.
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes: It’s a Magical World.
There are plenty of advantages to a rural life. One of them is the morning walk to the mailbox to pick up the mail and the newspapers. You can’t do that in the city for the simple reason that urban mailboxes snuggle close by, refusing to make you take any significant effort to discover how the day has chosen to deal with you. Rural mailboxes serve to prolong your expectations of what the day might have in store, often spicing your hopes and desires with bits of magic designed to dampen the inevitable disappointments brought on by the dreary succession of bills to pay or advertising circulars destined for the recycle bin without benefit of having been read.
Sundays are especially blessed: they are not only devoid of the dreary discoveries common to the postman’s work week, but are bright with the twin promises of The New York Times Book Review and the Sunday comics. So imagine my distress yesterday when, standing within the shelter of our covered porch in my shirtsleeves, I discovered that I was inappropriately dressed for the morning’s venture because it was raining. My initial reaction was to consider delaying my walk or making the trip by automobile, but I abandoned both notions when I realized that the rainfall was so wimpy that it failed to qualify even as a drizzle. What was, after all, only a mist on steroids called out for fortitude, a windbreaker, and a hat – not for my best impersonation of the Gorton Fish Sticks guy. So, I went back inside, regrouped, and began again.
The day was drenched in enough moisture to dampen the distant sounds of the nearby freeway and the more outlandish songs of the usually raucous birds. Accordingly, I walked into a somewhat hushed and cloistered world where magic was afoot. It was so quiet that the sound of intermittent raindrops falling onto Gor-Tex™ became the incantations of a magic spell by means of which I soon found myself walking on a dirt road plowed through a small, man-made clearing among the wind-screwed pines on the forested ridge that overlooks the Pacific near Iron Springs on the Washington coast rather than navigating a humble rural driveway composed of asphalt and gravel. The pines that line our driveway had somehow conspired to close in around me to form that clearing – a clearing across the road from where Helen and I had once stayed with our friends Tom and Carrie, a clearing as real to me in the moment as it was the last time we actually walked there with them several years ago.
In both of my shared worlds, raindrops clung to the underside of tree limbs or withered blackberries as yet undisturbed by the birds: I had to search for them in the real world as the day was not yet wet enough for saturation; but in my magic clearing raindrops dangled from every branch, twig, needle, and leaf and the sound of their constant dripping commingled with a pervasive piney scent to produce an aphrodisiac designed to enhance memory with imagination. By this means I was transported back in time to a long ago walk in the woods with close friends, my walking shoes transformed into laced boots and my footfalls silenced by a layer of pine needles covering a dirt road bulldozed through the well-remembered clearing. Muted conversations murmured in the background, hushed as much by the kind of silence only possible among close friends gathered in the presence of natural majesty as by the tranquility demanded by forests everywhere and the reaches of time, distance, and memory.
My memories flickered in and out of existence, scattered at the farthest reaches of my walk by the indisputable realities of mailbox and covered front porch. In between these extremities, a forest reigned: nurse logs slumbered while giving birth, stones and boulders lurked in the gloom in hopes of tripping the unwary walker, tree roots slunk across the forest path as if mighty snakes lying in wait, clumps of ferns watered the underbrush with the leftover rain they could not use for themselves, fallen twigs and limbs rested upon the path’s verge where they had been piled up by those who preceded us, and the air was perfumed with pine scent and suffused with a mist composed of equal parts rain, imagination, and memory. But it was no less real to me for having been imagined.
God knows what I may discover during today’s walk to the mailbox. I never know. Some days I walk alone down my driveway through the infinite reaches of Humptulips County; other days I walk with Helen, with various members of my family, or with good friends along distant shores shrouded in the limited fog of memory or in the unrestricted mists of imagination. When all is said and done it doesn’t really matter which it might be, because it all springs from the same wellhead of memory, good companionship, and love.
