air up there

Oh hello world.

I am beginning to awaken from my summerness.

Last week we rented a place in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The air is at least 10 degrees cooler up there. We hiked, canoed, swam in the lake, played games, watched Seinfeld. I went on one morning hike that left my quads shaking and a loopy smile on my face. I recently read On Beauty by Zadie Smith. In it, one of her characters talks about her poetry in the early years versus her later ones.

Theirs was the poetry of character, of romantic personalities, of broken hearts and emotional warfare. Claire, who had experienced more than enough of this in her life, populated her poems these days with New England foliage, wildlife, creeks, valleys and mountain ranges.

I have always been in love with nature. As I may have mentioned before, I grew up climbing trees, and running barefoot. I and my family camped, hiked and swam in the great outdoors. I had the ocean and rivers, mountains and deserts, and a stint in the lush gardens and hills of England. We weren't ones for pools or treadmills. I still can't run indoors on a track or machine, it feels claustrophobic. As I stood in the morning breeze overlooking a valley and scaling the rocks to get a better view I thought of the passage above. About the heartbeat of the earth and how you can only hear it when there is nothing else to distract you. About how my teen and college years could have been bereft of wildlife if my parents had not instilled in me from youth this comfort with dirt. I could have been simply boy crazy and fashion obsessed and brace faced. As it turned out, I was those things as well as being opened to what being in nature does. I have vivid memories of swimming across a chilly river in Hawaii just where river meets the ocean. I remember the current and its strength, how I started off way upstream so that by the time my skinny arms and legs got me across I was just where a waterfall dumped into the fray. Such success, such pride to have made it there. To lay on the rocks and listen to all that water collide. I remember filling an empty, plastic milk jug with water and freezing it overnight, so that my brother and I could trek across the Nevada desert toward the Sierras and have the water slowly melt as we went; and what the desert sky looked like after that long desert hike with its dry heat and blaring sunshine. The stars in the desert are your reward for its lack of green. That sky that taught me my constellations.

I hope to take my smallers to these places and let them see it all. That hike was wonderful, and we took them on a shorter version the next day. They loved it. It really was just beautiful up there.