From "A Lost Man"

This piece is from my new novella, working title above:

One day in my past, the sun rose slowly into the sky, like a sheepdog ambling up a hill to watch over its flock. Hour after hour, it rose higher, still higher, until it acquired a bird’s eye view of America, the land of the free. Clear-cut forests agonized in pain as they gasped last breaths of life. Loggers had swooped in like military paratroopers, killing with the precise skill of modern-day surgeons. Nothing was left to chance. City-dwellers breathed toxic fumes with nonchalance. After all, anyone could get killed in an automobile accident just as easily.

Later that day, someone saw black ravens swirling around in that same sky where the sun had been.?It was just north of one of America’s cities, near where a range of mountains rose into the heavens. With dusk coming one, the ravens had left the fields for the air where they could fly outside the range of the humans. Black widow spiders remained in the fields, although some of them had made their homes in the concrete basements of the rural folk who had settled there. They were hard to see down here.

It was a curious medley - - - the sun dipping, the faint moon rising, and the fine admixture of mankind and nature, refuse and beauty. To be sure, the cultured types had painted and chiseled their way an “art,” in order to understand their world. But the after-waste they had left to get there was finally taking its toll. One only had to take a walk through any downtown alley to see. There was so much garbage that it spilled its way onto some of the more popular trails in those mountains.?

Hardly anybody here had ever seen an unblemished snowfield. But anyone who had could never look the same way again at the filth and the disease of the city. What was so special about them, these pure-white patches of deep, rich tongues of snow that blanketed their way between groves of pine and fir, where scarcely a wild track registered itself, where God himself could have gained repose?

Imagine yourself walking in the north country just before dusk, in the dead of winter, dressed warmly, and with a full belly.?Walking alone, you make your way across fields brown with weeds, past dense foliage weighted with snow, and up a saddle near a mountain ridge. Walking out of a particularly thick patch of forest you welcome the open air. But your relief is quickly surpassed when you realize you have come upon an unblemished snowfield.

It is pure white and glistening as the hot, brilliant rays of the sun dance their way around the hardened crystals and onto your corneas. All else is temporarily forgotten as the pristine field fills up your senses. It is of one color, white. It smells of innocence and beginning, clarity and peace. You can only hear it if you remain motionless. Sometimes you even have to hold your breath because it is so quiet, a subtle pirouette that performs with gossamer slippers. It tastes of life and feels of cold reality, melting in your fingers as the sun moves you and it forward in time.

You know you are experiencing something profound. Profound in its beauty and profound in the wisdom it imparts to you. You feel like you could never leave this place. And you don’t right away, perhaps never, really. You can’t stand the thought of going back to the city where you live. And you know why. Sometimes, when this happens to you, you try to ignore it. Pretend that you are going to the snow precisely to escape the muck of the world in which you live. But in moments of greater perspicacity, you realize this is just a lie, that you bring the dirt with you, that you cannot escape it by avoiding it, by fleeing it. Then you tremble. After that you become sad because you don’t know if you have enough courage to really be in a snowfield.

Too much time in the snowfield can either lead to intense bliss or to waves of dread because you know you are guilty of an oblique sensitivity to yourself, to others, and to the world. For most this means that time in this white light is limited in duration. Soon then like most others, you find yourself trudging back through the dense foliage, down the saddle, and back out through the weeds. And that last look at the pure white is enough to last a lifetime, especially enough to remind you of your sins of conscience.

Back to the ravens circling at dusk, and the black widows you know are sleeping in the farmers’ barns. Back to your life in the city, where you have a name, and you are regarded in a particular way. And darkness falls by the time you are home.

~ Kevin Boileau