The Last Word On Nothing

I have begun to visit the trail behind my house with religious devotion. It switchbacks up a sundrunk slope, mostly melted out from the snow, and tops out at a cliff overlooking the valley where I live. I go because it’s spring, and the smell of thawing soil and sweetening ponderosa bark calls me outside. I go because, for a short time at least, I can feel the fingers of sun kneading my neck and shoulder muscles, releasing knots of worry for my family, my friends, my community, as the novel coronavirus licks through our people like wildfire. The first flowers are out. White flickers of spring beauty scatter the ground, and yellow pinches of something I can’t name. The first green grass threads between orange fallen needles. Snowflakes bluster from a few clouds in the otherwise blue sky. Things are beautiful; things are terrible. Cognitive dissonance has become my forever feeling.

Five days ago, I perched on an outcrop at the clifftop and contemplated the shelter in place order my state was expected to issue to slow the virus’s spread. Across the valley, the high peaks remained luminous with winter. My eyes crept from their snowy summits down slopes thick with conifers, to the winding river at their toes.

The highway paralleling the river was silent. Cars have thinned to local traffic, and just a few hundred people live at my end of the valley, which is also the end of the road, until the pass opens again—if it opens again. No plane flew overhead. I thought idly of how long it will be before I am on a plane again. Or even driving a car beyond the valley, let alone across state lines. I looked out at the rugged landscape and imagined those motorized and mechanized connections severed.

I suppose it should have made the world feel smaller. After all, my sphere has mostly shrunken to my one bedroom apartment, my dog, remote connections with my loved people, rare trips to the grocery store and post office, and the places I can reach on my feet. But the world doesn’t feel smaller. It feels vast in a way that hums in my very bones.

It is not hard to recognize space intellectually. The miles or kilometers between here and there, the minutes or hours or days of travel, slotted into a tidy schedule, one thing following another. Space, within those parameters, is a nameable, predictable thing that fits easily in the mind. Recognizing space with the limits of your body, however, is something entirely other.

Before me, below me, the swath of trees looked as unbroken as darkly pooling water—a wild spreading away in all directions. I closed my eyes and imagined crossing on foot, in any of those directions. A sense of space unfurling suddenly to he horizons like tossed scrolls, with a crisp snap. Opening my eyes again, I no longer saw the valley as a discrete feature, but as a small green divot in this rumpled, huge and breathing place.

Disasters like this one dole out gifts alongside losses, I suppose. If this is mine, I hope I can hold to it—turn it over in my palm like a polished stone—in the hard weeks ahead.

Photo by the author