Wild

You talk about wanting to get higher then higher, climbing up out of the tourist realm, “ahead of the wave,” up early to find the elusive summit. Machu Picchu. The first world’s collective wet dream of spiritual sanctuary. You were there, you tell me, as you walk the ghost streets of Lubbock and I trek down into a familiar forested gulley, dogs out ahead on the trail. Two friends back in cell phone communication after months of relative silence. I am happy for you (only mildly jealous) and can remember—relive almost—that feeling you describe of elation and joy at being so far out, so deeply inside the body of the moment. “We were travelling like we did as kids,” you say. And I can picture you both in your shorts and t-shirts, tipped forward by top-heavy packs, sweaty and sore, dropping the load in the windowless hostel then falling into sleep like water dropped into a glass. Jack Turner, in the Abstract Wild, writes of coming upon cliff drawings in the desert, seeing them flicker to life inside fire light. How for a split second he thought they were alive—that he was in danger—before settling into the awareness of time and distance. He describes that moment of first contact as the true wild. You were climbing up into it the best you could, moving upstream inside tourism’s turbulence. But I can’t help thinking that you are also out in the wilds as you talk to me, ghosting those Texas streets; and I a little wild, too, breaking the slender spider webs along the trail, assured I am the first biped to pass down this trail since nightfall.