Place 4: Ruin

Friday October 2, 2009 2:47 pm

My first thought upon arriving here today: the clearing is a mess. The dirt is ravaged by tire treads, the landscape torn as if clawed up by huge nails. Track marks from car tires circle and crisscross and sickly orange puddles have filled in the deeper tracks. The clearing looks ruined.

The birds are deafening. It sounds like a jungle or a rainforest or the inside of an aviary. Continuous chatter punctuated by squawks and shrieks; everybody talking at once.

It’s raining pretty hard today, so I drove my car into the cemetery and down curving roads to get here. I parked right in front of the gate. Even if they gate weren’t there I would never drive into the clearing. It felt sacrilegious enough driving this far, and the knowledge of my tires on the pavement churned in my stomach. Not quite sure why. Maybe it’s because I’ve only driven into cemeteries for funerals, or to visit a grave. Otherwise I walk in. The walk to the clearing is part of why I picked this spot and it felt bad to miss that too, like I was cheating. And it was strange seeing the familiar sights along the way from my car. Everything seemed smaller and more distant, separate from me.

Standing in the ruined clearing now, my drive in and the tire-torn ground seem connected, like voodoo. Like somehow my tires on the pavement carved up this land.

I wonder where my meditation rock is – I don’t see it anywhere. With the landscape so ruptured I wonder if it’s been plowed up or overturned or tumbled down the hillside. It was in the middle of the clearing but I can’t find it today. Oh, there it is, barely distinguishable. It blends in with the torn up ground. The little foxtail grass that tapped me on the shoulder is down in the mud, crushed. The birds have quieted.

Where the ground is unbroken it looks like the bottom of a lake exposed and the pebbles are even more beautiful and multicolored than last week.

I just stood in one place for too long and when I moved my feet the ground clung to my soles like quicksand, a creepy feeling. I begin to pace the clearing; if I stand still my feet will start to sink again. Because of the rain, I’m talking into my voice recorder instead of writing, holding it and my camera by turns beneath my umbrella. Both are getting wet anyway. It’s strange to talk to myself in this place. I feel like a secret spy or a schizophrenic or both. I talk to myself when I’m alone sometimes, but not in paragraphs.

Pacing around I am drawn again to the vines overtaking everything. Some are more like lianas than vines, with thick, woody, interminably long stems. Much of the greenery here seems to come from the vines and lianas. On the gated side of the clearing, two huge trees are totally overcome. They look like gigantic topiaries. The one on the left looks like a creature walking upright, pack on his back like a turtle’s shell, muscular, maybe a traveler, tattered tunic, skull for a face.

I approach the skull traveler, a large oak, much too big to put my arms around. A woody tendril encircles it. The sight is almost gory, obscene somehow. I want to look away.

I step outside the gate to examine the other side of its trunk. An ivy creeps up it from the ground – but on first impulse it looks so much like a snake that I recoil. It cuts a cruel channel into the bark of the oak and sprouts little heart-shaped leaves, almost mockingly. I feel the creepingness of it in my body.

In the even bigger trunk of a nearby maple, another type of liana has had its way with the tree. Tens of squirmy stems pulse their way up the trunk. And on the other side I see lianas growing from the earth up and over the branches, anchoring them to the ground like ropes. The upward pull of the branches is palpable, uncomfortably tight.