Leaves

by m. gantee

There is a ways to go from here.  Keep heading down the train tracks.  They’re unused, so don’t worry about listening for a whistle or a rumble on the rails.  They’ve seen no freight for fifty years.

Down the tracks.  A mile.  Maybe a mile and a half.  And then look to your left and a path runs into the sumac and tamarac and dives straight down the embankment into the shadowed green below.

Walk now.  Don’t worry about listening.  If you hear anything, it’s a ghost.  Of a memory.  A ghost of a memory.  Donny Waller used to live west of here.  Was plucked out of that hamlet west of here and sent to the highlands of Ia Drang.  Was sent from this green into that green.

In the beginning, the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over a great abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters and God said: Let there be light, and there was light.  And that is when creation stopped in the Ia Drang.  There, it was only chaos and light.  Except for the nights.  Then, it slipped back into the dark and then all was chaos.  And fear.  And the smell of blood.  And piss.  And the sound of the wind stalking the elephant grass.  The wind or the whispering black shapes that brought death.  And more blood.  And viscera.  And blood and viscera cannot be scooped back into the body.  No matter how hard Donny Waller tried, the insides cannot be scooped back inside.  And that is when Donny Waller learned of the chaos of un-becoming: when the wind and the black shapes and the bodies have emptied themselves of their efforts, they are left as things rather than meanings of those things.

Donny was sent into that green when he was still Donny, before he carried the violence home with him in his grey matter, before he was arrested for embodying that violence in his then-aging hands, before he was booked and charged as Don Waller, 9256682.  Before he slipped, dissheveled and lost in his own memories, into a kind of un-becoming.

Two arrests was enough for Donny.  He left his hamlet to the west, came east to these tracks, and rode the rail.  And the rail carried him away.  Carried him far away so that he couldn’t hurt anyone and no one could hurt him.  Man is an island; or when he is an island, he is no longer man; or an island that is man seeks to overcome the abyss… or something written by Thomas Merton.

And so, as you’re walking the track, you may hear the wind in the sumac.  Or it may be the memory of Donny Waller remembering the wind in the elephant grass half-a-world away.

Take a left then, a mile down the tracks, and go into the shadowed green below, down the embankment, and down further into the ravine.

I’ve been there.

Me.

Who else has been there?  This land was once peopled by Natives.  However, did their small numbers ever find the ravine, walk its cool-rocked bottom?  Water oozes from various gashes along its sides.  Trees, too large for the scant soil to hold, have tumbled into the bottom and, with time, have shed their leaves, sloughed their bark, and sit bone-naked as perches for an errant crow and the plentiful and silent turtles.  Has anyone trod this bottom land? 

Walk through Donny’s memories along the track.  The scent of rusted steel is analogous to blood on the air.  The birds don’t sing along that forlorn mile.  The green swallows your thoughts.  You may hear the clicking of crickets or of teeth.  It’s hard to tell.  Hard to tell.  To tell.

And then turn onto the left-leaning path.  Down and down and down.  At the bottom of the ravine, the air is cool.  The crow descends to find a turtle or a frog.  The turtles mottle themselves into the shadows.  All is cool and dark and maybe there – maybe – light loses itself back to a formless dream.  And the dream you may have there can be your own, untouched by the separation of light and dark and land and sea.  It can be a miasma of beginnings.  Miasma.  Beginnings.