by Amy Benson
People might find them in a box or a wooden bowl some day when the water has dried from my hair and the freckles retreated from my skin and my veins have collapsed and my hands no longer clench around the things I thought might save me. They might throw out my sweaters, receipts, old notebooks, but they might like the weight of these rocks in their hands, they might want to take them home.
Walking Diary, Summer 2001
Day 1
It’s a mental defect, this nostalgia. I have a week to myself in the cabin while my father is in Russia on a trip. A week to write, to see my thirtieth birthday coming, to think about what matters.
What I notice first when I am here is that I feel immediately and precisely as if I am in love, heartbroken. But in love with, broken by what or whom? Honestly, I think I’m besotted with dirt and the things that spring up out of it and the places where it dissolves into water. Every day while I am here I take a long, embarrassingly vigorous walk down the road for maybe five miles, and everything I look at reminds me of some moment or mood—a violent lurch in the center of my gut that turns memory into a real emotion. Isn’t that the meaning of nostalgia—to feel in the present an emotion that belongs to a different time? I’m not referring merely to emotions attached to other humans. I trip up at the sight of low hills tumbling down to the water and of stark contrasts—sky, islands, water, shore, woods—variations on green and blue with splashes of white, yellow, brown, thrown in with the near purple of the opposite shore. The air is saturated with light constantly shifting under the archipelagoes of clouds. Yes, just being here is like being in love—finding movingly beautiful what someone else might deem unremarkable. I fell for this gesture of land and water a long time ago, but the rest of my life is somewhere else, and a week at a time is not enough. Thus, it’s only partly true that I am in love with the sparkling-eyed boy. Or, rather, if I love him it is a sorely conditional love: I cannot imagine loving him in any other place. To me, he is this undiscovered place. Outside of it, I would have to hold him up against others, and I’m afraid he would look very different.
Sure, I say this like a sage, as if love is a mere psychological tick that can be explained by a time and a place, by something that we want captured and preserved, by some need of ours to have an emotion we can’t get on our own, to find someone whom we can carve ourselves all over. We can, no doubt, demystify our own love, yank its pretty clothes off and watch it freeze or burn. But on my walk today, I thought I saw him. On the side of a house not far from his own, a few men were getting ready to reshingle the roof. A flatbed truck piled with boxes of shingles (I remember those boxes, pulling sheets out and handing them to him, trying not to look as if I was straining). A man pulling himself lightly onto the truck from the ground. Something about the length of him, the straight width of his shoulders, the way the baseball cap sat on his head. I was sure this was the back of the sparkling-eyed boy. If I can demystify these feelings, why did I immediately tremble all over, want to melt into the ditch? Why is this imagined love more compelling than reality? It is not because the love would be more stunning. We would not have a glamorous life: he is not exceptionally beautiful, brilliant, or kind, and neither am I. He doesn’t see the point of traveling; I would suffer and whine every year when our world froze over. But what does that logic have to do with my shaking hands, the constriction in my throat? That light leap of his reminds me of every moment deep in the past of this place.
I plot on my way to my turnaround spot and back to the shingleless house how, if he is still on the ground when I get there, I will call out his name, pretend that sweat isn’t running into my eyes, and tell him I must talk to him. Will you meet me? Don’t worry, I just want to talk. As if talk is the least dangerous thing we might do together instead of the most.
And what will I say to him? That I am nostalgic? Isn’t that a pleasant story I tell myself—we can still love each other in some platonic, edifying way and have the lives that we’ve chosen? Will I tell him that I love this place despite my having forsaken it, him? I need him to tell me that it’s okay, that I belong still, that this land has, he has, never left me. That there is constancy in the world, and despite my wavering I can have it. He has no idea how much ballast he might hold for me and yet how his easy leap makes me tremble like a lunatic. I approach the house (there is no way around it), trying not to examine it too obviously. One guy is ripping gutters from the front, another is setting up a ladder. But I don’t see the man I thought was the sparkling-eyed boy anywhere. Thank god.
…
Day 2
Today on my walk, I really did see him. Late afternoon on a Friday, I had already passed his house on the way up to the turnaround spot (where the two-lane highway begins) and was coming back when, a hundred yards or so in front of me, a green minivan appeared at the end of a driveway and slowly pulled onto the road, rolling away from me. Of course, it was his driveway and he was the driver. There before me was all of the evidence I could ever need of his adult life. A green minivan. Her choice, I’m sure—color, make, model. I could see the outline of her head above the passenger seat.
But I am more interested in hands, and arms, and what their movement might mean. He rolled to the end of the drive and looked in my direction, checking for traffic. How long did it take him to decide it was me, and what made him know? Perhaps something about my height, my build, the mechanics of my stride. I knew his back the day before (it was his back! they were working on that house!) almost immediately. But my eye had been waiting for signs of him, searching the cab of each pickup that passed for something familiar in the shape of the driver. Perhaps it was something less essential. My hair, short and blond, the same cut he had seen last year. Could he see my expression from there, frozen, as if I’d been caught doing something? (Was I not supposed to walk past his house?) Whatever it was that gave me away, he raised an arm out the window in the traditional, efficient, country way—no flourish of a wave at the end, just a hand in the air. But as the minivan pulled onto the road, I saw her hand go up, too, and flutter in the air. He must have said something to her.
Too much fuel for both of us women, sparkling-eyed boy. Better for you to have ignored me. My mind degenerated into a sludge of useless questions: Did he wave instinctively, merely acknowledging someone he knew? Did he weigh his options for a moment: can I just ignore her, will my wife mind if I wave? Did he wish he could have been alone in his pickup instead, turning toward me instead of away? He probably said, “I think that’s Amy Benson down the road.” Perhaps she had asked, “Who’s that?” when he waved, and he answered, carefully uninterested, reluctant to share the private knowledge of my presence up there. Or, a private dread, he said, genuinely nonchalant: “That looks like Rich Benson’s girl.”
And what do I do in response to the wave? I lift my arm tentatively, as if they were coming toward me in the dark with their brightest lights on, though they’d turned the other way and it was broad daylight. And then, fool that I am, I start running. I start running because, up here, no one takes a walk on the road for exercise or pleasure; it just isn’t done. Most people work for a living. They lift; and stamp and pound and carry and get home with a weariness they can taste in their mouths. So I figure I’d look more purposeful, less ridiculous running instead of swiftly walking. I didn’t realize until after I noticed how slowly the minivan was going once it hit the road that it must have looked as if I’d started running after them.
You know, I have a good life. Friends, perhaps a hint of love with a new fellow in New York, family, a job, good students, a house, books, a brand of pen I love to use. What is this picture doing in it? A green minivan rolling down the road, nuclear family inside, and me, running after it.
…
Day 3
He is cruel. He has not come to see me. When I know he knows I’m here, I begin the fruitless waiting.
Today on my walk, I barely even glanced toward his house. When I got near, I resumed the charade of running and dropped it again as
I reached the woods on the other side and was out of sight. I’ve always wanted to be a runner. Runners seem so noble, disciplined, utilitarian in form, the nonessentials burned away. But, walker that I am, my body does not admire it. My lungs immediately burn and my hips ache. I do hope he appreciates the things I have pretended for him and the very real sweat that is splashing to the pavement. Maybe someday my fierce independence, my discipline, will be real, as real as my lack of interest will be when I don’t look toward his house.
Though we have seen each other about four times now in as many years, he has not sought me out since our adolescence, so I don’t know why I expect it now. I know he knows the way. He knows all of the roads up here. They have names but rarely signs: Gogomain, Prentiss Bay, Traynor, Four Lake, and Lime Island. I’m thinking of putting up big orange arrows that point the way right up to the cabin door. But that would be too obvious, I think, like the flaming butts of monkeys. I don’t want to give the wrong impression.
Perhaps I should just trust in his sense memory. Every summer day, at first, before we accepted the requirements of encroaching adulthood, every day we met at the dock practically in front of our cabin. We were good beasts back then! Without ever touching, we made our bodies feel so good, dunked in cool water, divorced from the exactitudes of land.
The ice has long since cracked and gone under, daylight lingers, the forest is choked with new leaves, and there is a scent in the air rich with living things before they turn the sharp corner toward winter. Don’t you remember what this means? Am I not part of the breaths to be drawn before the air once again freezes your lungs? My dear boy, come speak with me. Let us be good beasts together again.
…
Day 4
Forever, poets have known what a strange thing it is to know we are dying long before we actually do. I keep walking, feeling parts of me quiver when my heels strike the pavement. I will never be firm all over, of a piece. How can we smile and feel satisfied when we know our cells get a day older every day, our minds less and less able to think a new thing or to hold a thought for long?
When I am honest, I must admit to believing sometimes that I am a sickness and he could hand me back well again. All I need to hear is a few words from him; that’s all, words. There is the world whole and portentous; and then there is the world in shards, spent, discovered. How can we help ourselves from preferring the fantasy—the unbroken, benevolent world, high sun on the same perfectly shaped leaf multiplied, hanging everywhere. The earth really was blue and green, and we loved it as if it could love us back.
He is wise to stay away from me. We shouldn’t say to one another everything that we could.
…
Day 5
I didn’t go on a walk today. I am relaxing into the deep nothingness of no expectations. I have been telling myself: There is nothing else that I want besides this moment on a wooden bench in front of the cabin, looking out onto the water, a velvety breeze blowing through the trees, across me. I am trying to feel merely like an object with planes and curves the air must negotiate. It doesn’t count, though, if I have to tell myself this. I realize with consternation that I have almost no idea how to be without design or a wish formed for the next moment. Among a thousand other things, I have been tuned to hear the phone ring (which it does not do) or the crunch of tires on the gravel (which does not come). I like to think that, as an adult, I have barely walked across the street for a man, let alone waited for the phone to ring. But this is an old anticipation made new. We had no phone here when I was a kid, so the crunch of tires meant a possible visitor. As a teenager, my life was marred by waiting for someone to drive down the road and become an actor in my drama. I can’t decide if it’s crueler to have or not have these anticipations. I used to think satisfaction equaled stagnation, then a slow sinking into the muck. Either way, I am trying to release my desires as if they were a buildup of toxic fumes. Ah, but how sad! He might come when I no longer care if he comes. Rather, if he comes, I might necessarily no longer care. Are we all built for living only in our minds?
I don’t know what the sparkling-eyed boy tells himself he’d really like to do if only he could. I don’t know his heart anymore. Why shouldn’t it change every day, like mine? Why shouldn’t we fall into the distance between us and lose each other wholly? This is not the stuff of tragedies. But what fascinates me is that there are so many things we can know and so many things we can feel and how rarely those two lists intersect. If I have worked hard to solve the mystery of why I have dreams about him, to consciously understand my subconscious, then why do I still dream about him? Explanation can’t quell a more powerful urge at work here: to be dissatisfied, to feel only loss is worthy of courtship. To hell with our better judgment—there is no such thing when we don’t really want to listen to it.
God help the perpetually bereft—and who among us is not one of those? Don’t come to me, sparkling-eyed boy. I couldn’t take the satisfaction.
…
Day 6
After two days of rain, I am walking again. There is a chill in the air at eleven in the morning, and I am walking only for myself, knowing that I will not see him and he will not come.
I am stumped. I have decided my life can’t be about absence, what I don’t have, what does not abide, and the rich grief it brings. “Life Is Elsewhere” was the easy slogan of young, French students. In me, its bittersweet grows more bitter.
But if I am not an absence, I’m terrified to ask, what is my substance? The trees are defined by the texture of their bark, the cluster of their leaves or needles, how they make their genes known to the world, whether or not they fall to pieces come October. The animals are divided by the temperature of their blood, how they hide their entrails, the solidity of their bones, and the splay of those bones inside their skins. But each of us? How are we to differentiate the blank complexity of our consciousness? I cannot say what I am from moment to moment. One moment I am a perception, the next an idea, the next a limbic fear.
I have had one overwhelming thought about the sparkling-eyed boy: that he would be able to tell me something I have desperately needed to know. I thought he might have kept something essential about who I was safe and unaltered. And I could add that essential something to who I am now and know myself better. Frankly, I have been wanting a mirror, and have wanted to be a mirror for him. But I think we must answer these unanswerable questions for ourselves. Here, though, I reach the kernel of my cowardice. I fear my own volition. I am afraid to be alone with myself. And I am not, I imagine, alone in this. We call it loneliness because loneliness is an acceptable emotion. But this fear is much stranger and inviolate—it is the fear of being in charge of a whole person and having no idea how to govern it or what it even is. What we are and the soundness of our choices are nearly wholly unverifiable.
I wish I felt more like an animal: working blood and air through my body, moving along the edge of trees and water, a collection of jerking, purposeful limbs. But I still look into the darkness of the forest where trees have uninvited light, and I am afraid. I need to stay on the road, a path not of my own making. I need to know other humans have walked here and have found it good. I need, apparently, not to know what I am and how I will fill my days.
…
Day 7
There it is, like an icy vein flowing out of the ground—or the fingers of a dead thing refusing to concede—or, rather, something so pure it doesn’t know it should stay covered. Five almost-translucent pearly stems pushing out of the black dirt in the shadiest part of the woods, long necks curved over tightly like swans, a shy head the same color tucked below it. These are not flowers or absurdly headed moss; they are Indian ghost pipes, a fungus, and they bend their heads away from one another in a small circle as if they are guarding something necessary inside. Maybe I love things best that no one metaphor can describe, no single chapter can explain.
I could have easily missed this. Today I took a woods hike instead of a walk. It’s been a long tim
e since I’ve been in the woods alone, so I missed the trail marker early on and plunged, instead, into uncharted land. I was fine for a while, but then, when I didn’t find the trail I told myself I wasn’t looking for, a kind of low-grade panic set in. A purely instinctual panic, wholly divorced from my intellect, which told me I couldn’t really get lost. All I would need to do is head downhill and eventually I’d hit the shore. I started to stumble—the trees were closer and closer together, a few sharp branches beading up blood on my arms. But then I saw the Indian pipes like a bit of lightning from the ground, and, moments after I left them, I re-connected with the path.
My destination was an abandoned homestead about two miles in. A long time ago a man named Jimmy Moore used to live there without a single other person, without a road even. Just Jimmy and the trees. He had cleared a large meadow (smaller now every year), and you can still see his stone well and the foundation of his house. Apparently he hiked out once in a while to get supplies, but he stopped coming one year. People say he just disappeared, since his body was never found.
