radiant fracture

Four days with the family at the SCFWA was gorgeous, and there was an eclipse, of course, and I hope to make reports on all of that, especially the writers I saw and heard and (haltingly) spoke to.

But I'm very tired: possibly going directly from one conference to another conference wasn't living my best life, but I didn't want to miss either one. Conference. Not life.

Therefore, I am just going to report the discovery of a new directional vortex in a hitherto-untested-by-me region of the city.

Wednesday was designated for working on the painfully late book review, so obviously I spent the morning dithering and the afternoon trying to become lost. There's no feeling quite as light as not quite knowing where I am or what time it is, provided I also feel I will eventually work out how to find home.

I chose a neighborhood northeast of the university. I found a promisingly irregular green polygon on the map, half-hidden greenspace I half-remembered, and approached it up a street overhung with high branches. I went haltingly because R. Knee does not like it when I carry heavy luggage, or even luggage of a moderate weight, for any distance, and I'd taken an ambitious number of books with me to the conference.

I found an entrance almost immediately, satisfyingly unmarked and ragged, but since my psyche is composed 98% of deferral (2% procrastination), I went 'round by the road to see if I could find a second way in. I did, eventually, through an empty lot. The entry was marked by this official signage:





(Yes, those do appear to be pieces of cut-up Styrofoam tray.)

As promised, the blue survey ribbons did indeed go straight up the hill to my right; hence so did I -- directly up the face of a steep incline, in the exact opposite direction of the sea. Further Styrofoam trays gave updates:



Trail restoration would imply that there was a trail.



Then all trails stopped together. I rested on some rocks with this view, beautiful though unbeachy:



Fortunately, even without blue ribbons, there seemed a fairly clear trail continuing up the hill, presumably to some lookout point with tidy stairs down to the water.

I pressed on. I came to some uncomfortably cultivated-looking ground cover, and I realized that I was going to have to climb up through what looked very much like someone's back hedge. Still, this sort of merging of trail and yard is not unprecedented in my experience, so I breasted the hill, crunching through the leaves.

With dawning horror, I found I had illicitly entered an enormous gated community.

It was proper gated. Very gated. So gated I could not get out.

I wandered haplessly into dead end after dead end. I found a sign marked Exit. It took me to a locked gate with a sign (not Styrofoam) depicting a body arced backwards, receiving a violent electric shock. I hunted around its edges, but I would have had to do something gymnastic and arboreal to escape that way, and R. Knee argued firmly against this. I backtracked and followed a second road -- to another unbreachable gate.

Obviously, I could have crossed back through the yard and the hedge, climbed back down the hill and tried to find the blue ribbons again. Others had clearly gone before me. By great good fortune, though, it happened to be five-thirty, and the gainfully employed began to arrive home. I waited until one of the electric gates swung open and the car had cleared it, dodged through, and gained the outside world again, without being crushed or electrocuted.

And here I am to tell the tale, etc.

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In the week between classes, I've been trying to take proper long rambles each day, to make more space in my head and all the spaces in me.

Trying isn't the word, really. I'm compelled up and out of the house to wander the earth. Fortunately this bit of the earth is damn pretty right now.

Here, then, are some photos from various park-hunting expeditions of the last few days, organized around the theme of awesome local species rather than chronology, because I'm too tired to explain the chronology.

( Distinctive Regional Species and general springiness )

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Even in the rain, the cherry blossoms are luminous, though less distinct, like a vague cool glance from someone beautiful thinking of something else.

Their smell, though, coaxed loose by the precise and insistent raindrops, seems stronger and sweeter than on a bright day. Beyond the familiar peppery scent, something in them admits finally to being flowers.

There's a good cedary smell tonight, too, like a new fence, a young smell maybe also lifted up out of old wood and stain by the water's alchemy.

A fat black-and-white cat surges like a storm cloud into a foggy window, as if responding to me, but not looking at me.

There is a hole worn right through the concrete here, near the new sidewalk, showing through to the storm sewer like a wound.

This was a long day, and not a happy one, but these small witnessings are more than compensation; they are a clear rain that drives the ugly fragments into the gutter, down the drain, out into the great night-soaked ocean.

Though sometime I may have to retrieve and make sense of them, right now I am just grateful for a small clear space.

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