9:37AM
To begin...
I added the other DL;BR shirt options from the voting awhile back. It's easy enough to bring them all onboard, so why not.
Otherwise...
I'm tired, boss.
While the United States continues to languish in a k-hole, I just returned from a long weekend in Canada and I'm feeling anxious.
I lack all sorts of luster.
While I was there, two back-to-back snowstorms pummeled southern Quebec with record-breaking wind and snow.
When the second one hit Sunday afternoon, I was on my way up the vast snowshoe trails cutting through 1200 acres of dense forest in the Laurentides to see the lake they call McGuire. A hike that takes thirty minutes on a good day.
But on a day like today, it took well over an hour. A slow marching rhythm of my own dry bootcrunch on powder and the creak of dead or dormant trees.
I considered turning around, but the lake felt close and I wanted to see it. Ten minutes further on, I passed a shuttered summer cabin with the lake spread out below, frozen and windswept.
Anyone else who might have been nearby had already fled home to the city, escaping the storm. But I sat alone for miles, near the shore with the sound of the wind blowing over the drifts. A deep boreal emptiness that only became emptier the longer I stayed out in it.
That singular spell which the wilderness lays upon certain lonely natures, and he loved the wild solitudes with a kind of romantic passion that amounted almost to an obsession. The bleak splendors of these remote and lonely forests rather overwhelmed him with the sense of his own littleness.
After 20 minutes (during which the photo was taken), the sky had turned the color of slate and I stood up to leave. But coming the other way, nothing looked familiar.
I went up the wrong hill almost immediately, course-correcting as soon as I saw the cabin I'd passed off in the distance, and admonished myself to stay aware.
This is how you get lost.
At the top of the ridge past the cabin, my footprints had already been obliterated in the shifting drifts and I was already nearly lost again.
I stepped off toward an arrow someone had nailed to a distant tree in warmer weather, but sank up to my waist in snow. I rolled part way down the hill, sinking even deeper when I tried to extract myself, and realized my leg was stuck in the compacted powder.
I laid still with snow dusting my lungs and stuck to my face like the crystal beards of doomed Arctic explorers. My heart beat away in my ears, ticking over and above the wind, racing less from panic and more from exertion.
I took deep breaths to calm it down.
This is how bad things happen.
This is how people accidentally disappear.
Fuck.
Fuck.
For the panic of the wilderness had called to him in that far voice—the power of untamed distance—the enticement of the desolation that destroys. Any moment, it seemed, the woodland gods, who are to be worshipped in silence and loneliness, might stretch their mighty and terrific outlines among the trees.
"Not today."
Maybe I said it out loud, maybe I didn't.
I dug my leg out with my hands and swam out of the drift, pushing the snow like thick waves. I used another tree to pull myself up to solid footing and followed what I could only hope were the snowshoe ruts down into the valley below the ridge where the wind blew less and the path was more clear.
I watched for sinkholes and tree wells, stumbling the rest of the way with burning snow leaking in all the cracks in my clothing, stealing quick looks in the distance for the possibility of a Canadian black bear, normally shy of humans - but in the dead of winter with all other food scarce, maybe not.
After an hour, I stumbled out onto the trailhead where the snowshoers park their cars, then walked the remaining quarter mile up the road to the cabin. My heart returned to a normal rhythm, and my jaw unclenched itself.
I stoked a fire and took a hot shower. Poured a small belt of bourbon and felt the prickling blood return to my wind-burnt face, unfolding like the slow realization I'd met something out there in the dark.
Something very real.
(With gratitude to Algernon Blackwood.)
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What I’m reading: The Art Spirit (Robert Henri)
What I'm listening to: What Else Is There? (Röyskopp)
Goddamn, man. Don't make me worry about you. 💀💙