The pine trees howl with wind as it whips through the forest and cloud ships sail above the evergreen steeples. That bristlecone sky is ageless. The sticks crack beneath my feet. The forest howls like river rapids. I set the camping pack against a tree, lie down on the forest floor and close my eyes. As the tireless river flows like violent waves crashing into a sandy beach at midnight. The water is restless as if waiting to drown the living. But it is peaceful and enormous. The boundary of reality fades, and the mystery washes me away to a far off place.
Just imagine the reality, I live to be a hundred. My loved ones carry my body into the most desolate of canyons, somewhere off in Canyon Country. Yes, I had lived a good life and loved a beautiful woman. She and I ventured all the wild places. Finally, they dump me in some ravine. Sad they are, because they wanted to give me a proper funeral, but I wouldn’t allow it. After they say their last words and leave, the coyotes come out after dusk, yipping and howling like the wind.
But now, I truly feel the lonesomeness of the remote things in life. All is quiet in this peaceful world. Off into the deep woods I come face to face with my own spirit. It is in the wild that I bathed in strange conversations with the tree man. Like Rip Van Winkle, I fell asleep beneath a blue berried juniper, and there I dreamed.
There is no other place, like a hermit’s roost ten thousand miles in the middle of nowhere.