Looking for Love in All the Places

Welcome, new subscribers and thank you! This is a monthly installment from Walking the East Coast, a serialized memoir. PREVIOUS CHAPTER. If you wanna, start from THE BEGINNING. If you don’t normally listen to the audio version, this might be the time to try it out. I tried out a fun technique. Would love to know if you think it worked.

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I must have drafted this letter in my log. I must have copied it by hand. Once I’d left the forest Mike D had ferried me to in his magical jade Lincoln, I must have found a printer and a yellow 8 x 12 envelope for the attachment I mentioned. I must not yet have read Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I must have nestled in my tiny turquoise tent with poles inside beneath canary glow of headlamp, longing to be seen. 

Hi, Mountain Man.

I hiked out to Ghost Lake today. It was a bed of lily pads at the far end of a clearing. As I stepped from the treeline, an owl the color of cream lifted from its perch and disappeared into the woods.

On the way there, I kept almost seeing these tiny frogs—about the size of my thumb. I knew they were frogs because of the way they hopped in my periphery. But whenever I’d turn to see them full-on, I’d find they’d disappeared like magic. For a moment, I’d stare at tree and earth and think the tiny creatures a figment of my imagination. Then back to the path and my journey once more. And what had been mere soil and bark sprang to life.

Close to the lake, I lay on a log and watched a hawk circle the sun. If I turned my head to the left, I could see its shadow pass over the grassy meadow. To my right, a trickling spring was the soundtrack. The hawk stayed for a long time. And I felt it knew me, that we had met before. “It’s you,” I whispered and drifted off for an afternoon nap.

Earlier, I’d run into the ranger and mentioned where I was headed. You’ll be passing fairly close to a den with mother and cub, she told me. I did not practice walking silently.1

I met the whole staff when I first arrived at the ranger station. One of the maintenance guys’ wives wrote a book about angels. She’s an angel communicator. He gave me her card. That’s one of the things that’s best about what I do for a living. Everyone has a story, something to say. Everywhere I go, I meet someone who, or someone who knows someone who, has written, is writing, or wants to write—to have their voice and story echo among the massive network that is the collective consciousness.²

Those stories, those voices are so deeply human. They’re what make us realize we’re alive and part of nature and the universe and each other. I guess that’s how the connectedness Brown talks about, his concentric rings, if you will, is defined for me.³

You asked why I’m out here.⁴ I feel like the connectedness is all tied up somehow to what I’m searching for. The details, though, are still vague. It’s like looking into the aluminum “mirror” on the wall of the wash-up station by the ranger’s building. I can hardly make out my face.

Sometimes, I’m impatient for the image to sharpen. But it’s not a distortion of steam that I can simply wipe away.

It was late afternoon, still hot when I got back from Ghost Lake, an easy hike, maybe six miles round. So, I hiked down to the wash-up station. While I was air drying (no towel), I wrapped my hair in a shirt, and the wet ends sprang out the top. I was sun reddened and wild looking. I took a photo. I’ll send one.

I'm sending you this information packet on pinhole cameras. We should make one together when we see each other next.⁵

How’d the dogs do on the overnight? Did you finish the pine bed? What kind of pine did you say you use?

H

This photo was from a few years later. I’m wearing the same red dress I was wearing when I met Mountain Man and the one I took in my bag on my trek along the East Coast. I once asked a friend if I could use this as an author bio photo for a writer’s conference at which I would be the editor on the panel. “Girl,” he said, “you look like you be looking for love in all the wrong places.” This photo was taken in NYC in the wee hours on the way back from hours of jazz taken in at Blue Note, and my friend’s assessment couldn’t have been more spot on.

1. I was, while ensconced in the Jenny Jump forest, reading The Tracker: The True Story of Tom Brown, Jr. It was one of three books that started the journey in my backpack with me and a favorite of the Mountain Man. A tracker himself, the Mountain Man photographed mountain lions and led hunting expeditions. I loved the former, even floated the prospect of going with him to race across snowy terrain and document the big cats. And though it was not my place to do so, I felt uncomfortable with the latter. This discomfort was one of many reasons we weren’t well suited to hold each other through life, that our connection was sweet but brief. But I longed to talk books beneath bedsheets, to find a partner I was willing to compromise with. So, I read the Mountain Man’s favorite book as I lay my head on whatever bundle of clothes from my pack I used as pillow of a night.

I’ll mention the book again later in the letter.

It’s fitting that Brown hails from New Jersey. I was in his native home as I read his words, practiced his methods of searching for signs of who was nearby, and attempted his silent walking (when a mother bear wasn’t known to be nearby).

2. Did I mean consciousness or conscience? I’m not sure. Perhaps both.

3. Brown uses the metaphor of a rock tossed into a glassy pond to talk about awareness. By becoming keenly in tune with the baseline of any place, we can see the disturbances made by, say, a human entering a forest, a scream emitting from an alley. Brown, deeply attuned, can see concentric circles so far removed from the central disturbance they’d be invisible to most of us. It’s how he’s found many a missing person and tracked, in once instance, an escaped tiger across asphalt. 

I think, then, I meant that we all long to make a disturbance felt by those we share this planet with. Maybe we hope the concentric rings of our hearts and voices might reach far distances. We believe, if we put words on paper, they might even be felt beyond our lifetimes.

In Lessons in Awareness - Concentric Rings, you can read or listen to Tom Brown III’s ideas on the matter.

4. I’m not sure he did. But I thought he wondered. I wanted him to wonder. I’m pretty sure he wondered why I wanted to keep in touch like this, when we both knew we’d have ended our fling even if I’d stayed in the town where he lived.

5. We’d once discussed the way the image produced by light through a tiny aperture mimics the way our vision works—our pupils the pinhole letting in light that travels through a dark chamber to project an inverted image on the smooth surface of our retina. We’d been on a hike, strolling during this conversation through a bare field my memory paints in saffron. I wanted to jog his memory of our easy laughter and of the time he, a typically reticent man, had confided in me pieces of his past rarely shared and hopes for his future. I hoped to make concentric rings in his heart.

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