We didn't have that when I was a kid

Note hiking shoes and jacket.
It's all over from here. 

This year I've become infected with CHD:  Compulsive Hiking Disorder.  It's sort of strange that it took me four years to contract a highly contagious disease for which the majority of NW Arkansans seem to be carriers, and is endemic to the environment. But this spring I got it.

It started with a few innocent half-hour walks on the trail near a local spring.  Then I graduated to longer hikes in the nearby wildlife management area, then to trail hikes in a state park half an hour away.

Then I bought a pair of hiking shoes and a Gor-Tex jacket, and everything went all to hell.

Now I find myself poring over trail maps and guide books, looking for the next fix. My car is covered in mud and gravel from the unpaved roads, the back floorboard littered with empty water bottles, and my Flickr account is full of photos of moss-covered rocks and waterfalls.

I've never been particularly "outdoorsy."  The outdoors, as lovely as it is, is also full of bugs. It gets too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter, and I'm allergic to red cedar (rampant in Oklahoma) and most grass pollens. But I also spent a good part of my childhood at my godparents' 140-acre "farm" in St. Louis, Oklahoma (population 158 at the last census).My godfather was a weekend rancher: he lived an hour away from the farm, so he raised cattle and grew alfalfa and otherwise just let the land run wild; and my parents pretty much let me run wild over it.

For me, an introspective and imaginative only child, that 140 acres was my personal fairytale world. Each stream, pond, forest path, and red sandstone outcropping had its own special magic to me.
I explored every nook and cranny:  collecting fireflies in the meadow, catching tiny frogs on the sandstone falls, following cattle trails through the woods and crawling about through the fort made of hay bales my Godfather built me each fall as he loaded the barn with winter fodder for the cattle.  It was a maze of tunnels, room,s and windows that grew gradually smaller all winter as he used up the hay.

Hawksbill Crag, probably the most
photographed spot in all of Arkansas.

But we didn't have anything like this back in Oklahoma!

Everywhere you turn in the Natural State you're looking at clear, running streams, springs pouring out from under rocky ledges, towering trees and even more towering bluffs, caves, hollows, and waterfalls. The kid in me is entranced all over again. It's good to be reminded of the magic in the world!

The Cruellest

April is the cruellest month,
breeding Lilacs out of the dead land,
mixing Memory and desire,
stirring Dull roots with spring rain.

                                              --T.S. Eliot, "The Wasteland"


I have argued that T.S. Eliot was wrong:  that March is the cruellest month, with its false starts and bitter remissions. I almost always jump the gun: plant my garden too early and have to run out as the sleet falls, covering the beds with sheets or plopping plastic bottle-halves over tender pepper plants. I want to believe in spring... that this time spring won't let me down.  This time, spring will be true, right from the beginning. There will be no misunderstanding, no heart-clutching doubt, no failure.

Sometimes it turns out that way. Other times my gentle basil plant is blackened by frost, or the spring rain pounds all my just-bloomed tulips into muddy mush, or the cut-worms nip my pepper plants off at the ground, leaving them  fallen like tiny forest trees, limp and lifeless. Why?

Lately I ask myself the same thing about love, and I realize now, more than I ever could have as a young graduate student, what Eliot was talking about: that dreadful return of a need to love that we experience after losing it or failing at it or being horrifically scarred by it. You want to turn your back for good: just climb into your treehouse and close the door, watch it all pass below you as if it didn't involve you. But it does. Your heart sends out grasping tendrils, craving connection, and it beats a little Morse code message into your brain:  maybe ... maybe ... maybe ... maybe...

So Memory and desire get mixed:  Memory telling you you have no luck, you're not good at this, you're unlovable, you're set in your ways now, you don't want to give up your freedom or share your space or pick up anyone else's socks off the bedroom floor. But desire is there with its big, sad eyes, staring forlornly at happy couples in the grocery store, thinking "why not me?"

When I was a kid, I loved stuffed animals. They were one of my favorite toys. And when I was allowed to pick out a new stuffed animal, I would go through the entire pile or shelf or bin, looking for the one that was imperfect. I looked for eyes that were out of level, ears that were wonky, fur that went the wrong way...for missing bits and broken bits and stains... I sought out the unlovable. I knew that only I could love them as they should be loved. (Maybe that's why this book, and this one, wrench my heart)

It took me years--decades--to figure out that my choice of imperfect stuffed animals was like a prayer that I, too, could be loved. That someone could and would see past my weaknesses and quirks and fears and manage--somehow--to love me anyway.

Today I still take in the unlovable. I bring home problematic pets who have been rejected or abandoned or who are just too much trouble for most people to take on. I know only I can love them as they should be loved. And I do my best. I give up a lot:  money, time, the freedom to run off on a moment's notice, a clean house and the ability to wear anything that doesn't have a sprinkling of dog hair. But I trade it easily for the sense of security I gain. Here, at least, among these misfits, I am loved without question, and I love without regret. I gather them to me. They are my furry equivalent of the bedclothes that protected me from fear in the night as a child.  With them pulled up around me, I am safe. Nothing can get me.

That's how I have felt when I've been in love: like love is that magic blanket and nothing can get me. It's a strange way to feel, I guess.  In reality, nothing is out to get me. The world is not out to cause me pain or sorrow. But lying in the arms of a beloved, I have heard myself say "nothing can get me now."

But it did.  It does get me. Love is lost, or broken, or illusory. Love is impossible, or hopeless, or mean, or toxic, and it either fades away, turns its back on me, or I realize that my love is ill-adapted to the environment and can't survive there, even if it wants to.

So that's the "dead land" Eliot speaks of.  And while the quest for love may be a positive thing, at the same time, it requires that I open myself up yet again to doubt and discomfort at best: with the real possibility of failure and pain, or worse, the illusion of success and crushing loss.

So yeah. I get it now.  Me and my dull roots...