by
way of explanation
26.2.2008
This
is where I am from: from the naked ridgeline and the dry
crunch of snow. Where I come from the wind has one thousand
voices. I come from a line of red-nosed men with scraggly
beards who weighed their words like the silver they dug
in these yellow hills, silver they traded in town for
liquor and cans of baked beans, words they spoke to no
one. In this country there is a white tree that grows
always in the company of his brothers: white trees that
announce winter with their yellow leaves. In one night,
the wind can rip these leaves from their branches. She
can pummel and twist. She can howl, moan and wail. She
can destroy a house and shatter a man’s frail sanity,
but in the spring she makes the flowers grow. Something
to be missed, the wind here is a part of the landscape.
The trees are frozen—their rigid branches contorted
into the unlikeliest positions. What I miss most about
that place is the yellow grass.
Now I
live in Charlotte and in the sky there hang no more than
ten sad pale stars and a lopsided moon. I have a dog to
stave off the loneliness that comes in like the waves
I saw through the fog on the sea, a brindle mutt with
a wide muzzle and floppy lips. I walk with her to the
Center in the morning, she waits for me while I do my
workout and then I walk her home. We go to the Center
every day to train for this game I have chosen: whitewater
slalom. The Olympics are in six months and every now and
again I am startled when I realize I might really go.
Everyone
has goals: what is a goal but a destination, a place to
go to? My goal is to go to the Olympics. It’s as
good a goal as any other, maybe better than some. It is
for this I left my big dry mountains, why I came to this
city of dust and green water. I deserted my family, a
friend or two, my ice skates and that spot on the hill
where I used to sit in the afternoon sun. I dropped out
of school.
I have
been busy these last six years. I have raced in Germany,
Slovenia, Slovakia, Greece and Brazil. I have raced in
Spain, where the old men smoke cigarettes in the invariable
shade of the square and the mountains smell a little of
home. At a race in Prague I ran into a guy who used to
know my father. I couldn’t remember his name, and
for this I felt so guilty I drove with him to a town where
I had never been to have dinner with his wife, whose name
I had also forgotten. We arrived in the dark and left
before morning and I will never know the name of that
town where I ate roast duck with potatoes and drank the
bitter wine of northern grapes to the memory of my father
and this stranger, his friend.
Most recently
I raced in Australia. I rode my bike through the daily
rain and I walked barefoot along the sun burned coast.
Once again the wind spoke in a language I could understand.
I saw that inverted night and I saw one lost gull fly
with a flock of bats, an endless flock of bats that flew
in from the sea. I have been to all these places, but
there is still someplace left that I would like to go.
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