Palm Fronds and Ice

“Do you have family or friends here?’ says a woman I just met, just exchanged enough information with that she asks the obvious question. I want to create art for her, perform in her presence, so she feels my state of mind and relates to it in her own way. I want her to smile back at me with insight, thanking me for clarifying a feeling she already had. That’s the point of creativity and art, I think,—to express emotions in unusual ways so listeners or viewers find a part of themselves in me.

I have found it strange and gratifying how far from a listeners' experience some of my stories diverge, even from their desired experience, and still find a familiar tune in their repertoire. But the question this woman asks does not draw that response. I have answered it a dozen times and seldom has the glint of art appreciation returned to me from the questioner’s eyes.

“Over Christmas?” comes next, and I sense a spiral of irrecoverable honesty descending from my lips, and pity mixed with perceived stupidity returning from their eyes.

Such dialogs leave me feeling that I am inherently a wild thing, having no sense of friendship, family and home. Yes, my genome comes from wild, natural places. Sometimes I want to take it all the way, and say, “Should it be surprising, then, that when I go to places like here, I feel less stressed and more sane in the elemental world from which we all came?” But of course they are not ready for that and will read into it things like, “She is running away. I wonder what she wants to escape from.” But they are not willing to ask.

I have devised no answer that diverts their adverse reactions and still maintains some degree of truth. I figure they will either take in stride the fact that I simply want to be here, to experience winter, and learn why people stay here, as Katrina has, an Jerry wants to but can’t quite, or they will reject me as odd.

Perhaps if I did not have this question to answer with each new potential friend, I would not escape so often to the sweet elixir of wilderness. Possibly, by their asking why I came, I am driven farther into the truthful answer than if they had not asked. Maybe I love the accepting attitude of trees and the falling snow, and yes—cold, and move away from them more and more because they fail to accept my motive, and assume it is cover for something else. But trees really do bring to me the fresh body odor of nature, its matter of endurance, and animals accept or reject me based on my perceived threat to them, or my flavor—ideas I can usually deal with easier than the opinions of humans.

Yet, it is only because people have invaded and changed the wild by building roads and airports, that I am able to come here, and ride a bicycle through places like this, and experience it from the electric comfort of a motel. So I say to the woman that I want to experience winter, and yes, those dates include Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years.

After receiving her expected chagrin, I took a long walk in the woods. The air is almost twenty degrees, much warmer, and heavy clouds descend onto the treetops. Light snowflakes zigzag down. Wind is nil for a change, and all is quiet except for the raven’s squawk and distant sounds of humanity. On the way into town, I pass the skaters in Kerry Park, but do not stop. My first twenty years were chiseled into bungalows and tree-scattered streets of Pasadena. Skinny palm-ladies with frazzled braids so high we rode their locks like broomsticks, when they fell, rode them even higher, to heaven, as our bean stakes were guns and our red ants, friendly subjects. Childhood slips back through its private door as I see these skaters, even though we had no outdoor ice rink. The art of these hockey kids, their turns and yells, are my turns and yells, certain as if I’d been born right here ten years ago. In some shaded place these happenings are still there, unseen, but felt, still trying to say the unsaid things.

A snowmobile flies by on the Blue Ox Trail, carrying two young adventurers out of town. I come back to my rented room. Twenty-five days are left to finish whatever I will do here.