I have a picture of a brown trout taped into my notebook. The fish has two lampreys attached to the top of its head, rasping through its scales and slurping up its vital juices through the raw bed they scrape. The lampreys are velvety black, snake-like, with no discernable faces. They arc away in two directions, looking like a fool’s motley cap, or like two hoses in science fiction drawing all the fish’s thoughts away. When I think of the picture, I recall the fish appearing distressed, or stunned, but when I look at it again, the fish has no expression at all, or rather, a fish’s only expression—blank-eyed, slack jawed.
My summers are mostly my own, free of teaching duties. My kids are old enough not to need constant tending. But without any structure in the days, the idleness makes me anxious. I wander from room to room, carrying things around for a while and setting them down again, wasting time trying to decide how best to spend my time. By July, it was so bad that I re-activated a long dormant meditation app I’d downloaded in a previous difficult time. The meditations are short mindfulness exercises, focusing on this moment, tending the wayward child of the mind, jogging after it and steering it back with an arm around its shoulder. None of them were really doing the trick.
Anxiety governs democratically, opening the public square to any concern demanding a hearing. The Antarctic ice sheets slumping into the ocean jostle for space alongside: the plants growing in my front gutters, tall enough to flower; a Syrian father keening over his dead son; an email I was supposed to send; the rotten window sills on the north side of the house. I would go running for the short relief it gives– a few hours afterward when I am wrung out. Once, with the rest of the roadside litter, I saw a star-spangled lighter with red and blue lettering like something from a political campaign. As I passed it, I looked down and saw it read, “We’re Screwed 2016.”
When running wasn’t doing it, I headed north to do some hard walking. Two days and a night on the Kilkenny Trail north of the Presidentials in the White Mountains, and then a day spent circling the Pondicherry Wildlife Refuge. The walk in was on a rough trail. I hiked hard, self-flaggelating with raspberry canes. Insects raised welts on my arms, and as I got closer to the ponds, they grew thicker. Ticks crawled up my legs. Something buzzed between the sheets of my Tyvek map. I put on my head net and trapped a hive of mosquitoes inside it with me. Increasingly deranged, I slapped and slapped, hitting myself in the glasses and knocking them sideways. I sat down at the pond edge and gave in. On my knee was a decrepit lightning bug, ragged winged, missing a leg. Butterflies landed on me, seeking my salt. Flower flies tapped me with their tube tongues splaying. A dragonfly with a torn wing rested on my thumb, his abdomen heaving in and out; he’d been in the wars. I ate my lunch and, unwilling to retrace the hard walk back on the trail I’d come in on, I took the longer circuit around the far side of the pond. On a wet dirt rail trail threatened by marsh on both sides, I sloshed through six inches of water and found a crayfish in the middle of the path. The only human I’d seen in a long while came around a bend: an old man with pants tucked into his socks and a wide brimmed hat on. “Awful lot of bugs,” he said. “Plenty,” I answered. In places along the trail, weathered wooden poles that used to hold telephone lines leaned toward the marsh like crosses. “These are the works of man,” I thought.
After a while, the trail met the pavement and I settled into a hard road walking speed past barns and weedy fields. I detoured into a little cemetery and there found a three foot tall silhouette of the Old Man of The Mountain cut in plywood, painted, and stood up among the headstones. The Man himself was long since lying in jumbled pieces at the base of a cliff over in Franconia Notch, but it appeared that his grave was here. Two stones over, a grave, a wife’s name underneath, and “Infant son 1913-1913.” The works of man. I walked as hard as I could and still call it walking. I looked along the shoulder and thought I saw a turtle (a rock), and a mouse (a run over pinecone). I took a little video of what the road looked like as I went, and how little was going on. As I lowered the camera and put it away, a bittern flew out of the streamside ahead of me. In my life, I’ve seen two standing still, pretending to be reeds, and one bursting up out of the weeds, both of us startled, but I’d never seen one flying at its own leisure. It went, wooden-winged, hingeing across the road. I kept on to my car.
I got back from the trip and the walking medicine wore off and the anxiety slipped its fingers between my ribs again and squeezed. I dutifully did my meditations each day, but felt only a little bit better, and only for a short time before the lampreys came rasping at my head again. Then, one afternoon, the meditation asked me to name the thoughts preying on me. To recognize that they aren’t me, that they are not intrinsic. “Call them by their names,” said the lisping Englishman on the recording. “Hello old Mrs. Doubt. Good afternoon, Mr. Self-Criticism.” I rolled my eyes under my closed lids, but listened on. Then, rather than Mrs. Doubt clad in her gray woolens, it was crows I began to see in my mind. Spark eyed and hopping, they closed on me. They carried tools, little short sticks they’d stripped of bark and sharpened. They jumped around and peered in and fished into my head, down my ear canals with their sticks. The Englishman talked on, but I didn’t hear him much anymore. I could see, down in the dark, in the bone cup at the bottom of my skull, a white grub curled up. Down into the dark the ends of the crow sticks rasped and poked but could not quite reach. The grub shifted a little in the dark but that was all. It was imperturbable. The meditation ended, and the Englishman thanked me for joining him, and wished me well. I sat at the table with clear sight, crying. What euphoric relief it was to know the crows were not me, that I was cured.
Later on, out for a run again, the gleam off the revelation, I wondered if my true self really is a fat, dull grub, barely sensate, and what price I would pay for peace. And ego, vain ego, covets those glossy, blue-black feathers.
thestagecoachroad 