Near the Pool of Bright Fish

I can't count the chapters in the Age of Wandering. I only remember that it is measured in slow meandering travels up, down, away from, and towards... the coast. It is indexed by the meanings of connections I made with the people who went to and fro, into and out of my experiences, my learnings and my troubles.

On quiet days when reading back into that age, I chapter to when I was furthest from the sea. At the beginning there were daytime September storms casting lightning with thunder shaking the foundations of the stony city bed. Enough excitement for anyone to be swept up in it all.

There was a basement apartment I shared with an ex-friend's friend, a raven-haired punkrocker who filled it with cats and lost teens, each blue haired, mohawked and with nowhere to go. There was my job in the bakery down on the tracks, hot work tending ovens, hard work that paid just eight dollars an hour but fed us, the lost kids and the cats with pilfered goods and breads. Ann Arber was a place to which I had known I would arrive one day as I traced the old hippie weather-driven circuits. Knowledge of the circuits had been passed down to me as verbal lessons by fellow hitchhikers and through smokey park bound conversations. Ann Arbor lay at the far borders of the Age of Wanderings' realm.

In that place, a season passed where I aloned my time walking. I would pace trails with my tapes, head-phones and red-high-tops as far as I could circle in a single sleepless trek. Maybe I was trying to drown out my own too fast thoughts. I could do this you know. Once on a glass beach on the greatest of shores I paced from crescents' end to end the littered sands and attended my mind to casting waves so in tune that in the end, my only thought was it...the Sound, the Great Songless Call of the Sea. No thoughts went through my head. No words complicated mood, balance, meditated quiet being...

Here, farther than I had ever traveled from the sea, I could nighttime reckon the unseen kildeer calling circles round me in sleeping fields; their longing cries family enough that I would, at every small call, pause and scan for the gulls. By the sea my mothers' mother told me that gulls in the fields warned of a storm out at sea; storms that in their swelling greys and crashing whites heaved with titanic strength and broke upon the shore to be known to the inlanders as only rain.
Kildeer, when away from the ocean, cry out in mourning. When in sight of the sea, they call out of joy. Feeling their cries and no more able to heedless be of them than not breathe in, not breathe out, I chose the trails through their fields. The trails led to and by the river where I would travel daily, mindful of the missing ocean as I followed the waters, cold threads that even out of sight, I knew with the trust of gravity, somewhere they touched The Sea.

So it was I came to a constant path each day the rain did not come in torrents. After bringing the foods the lost kids were so hard to come by elsewhere, I would leave them to their music, conversations and cigarettes; I would follow down the road to the forest park where the tiny nighttime owls would sometimes fly. A simple trail grew out of the edge of this places' grass and twisted under great and many trees to burrow through the now almost leafless forest towards the waters.

On the way it passed the straightened edge of a small rectangular pond, too overgrown to let tell if it was natural or not. A bench aged there under which no grass grew for the passage of countless feet. If I was quiet enough at the edge of night I could creep up and, peering over the bench, see the great black red-tailed fish that slept in just four inches of water there without a movement for the world, dreaming its breathless dreams.

Onward the quiet trail pathed to a set of steel rails, twins to the set across the River by its side where the grey concrete blocks of the bakery could be seen if there was no fog. I usually left the trail to walk on the rail ties and think of my grandfather who had taught me how to balance on tracks. A mile or two and the trail wrapped away from tracks and river and curved into a set of trees curtaining a small grass field with little lamps growing from the curved blades of green grass. A wildflower, it seemed, had bloomed the summer before. It's lantern shaped, closed flowers had skeletonized to the look of leaves left late on the forest floor and in the center of each cagelike remnant a little yellow sphere hung motionless from the arching stem. For all the world it looked as if tiny lamplights lit the grassy meadow in wait for faery dancers, in wait for magic.

I was so close, so very close. I could have kept on forever. There was a master baker there who was content to teach me the step by step of baking sourdough bread and all the secrets of hard work and building a career. There were friends to trade stories with, to drink beer with and visit with over Christmas. There was a girl who was trying to get close enough to me to let me know, let me know she loved me.

But breaking away, breaking away forever from the calling rough green waves would not happen, could not happen. No matter the distance I traveled or the time I would lay in, it would come with the rush of an autumn wind; it would fall from the shrill of a seagulls' cry and pull me back with its unseen tether, with its unemcompassable and unfading image, The Call of The Sea.

I left the paths, the bakery, the girl and the friends abandoned there, by me, as some futures cost just too dear a price. That which centers us, for so many, is the place where we are from. And the moment that these words swell to, the thought to which they spiral up, is the one where I realized that there is no place in heart to dwell but home.