Conifer Road

a son returns

I ride alone. It’s a fast glance after 9:00 am. Gnats hit my skin. Pine heavy air snakes through my nose busying my brain to the dirt, wetness, all that is blooming and everything that is dying. It’s a hypnotic sweetness filling my lungs. Time passes differently here. It is free of the human corruption of goals and feelings. It doesn’t operate by the ideas of loss, hurt, regret or confusion… much of what has led me here. It knows only the now. There is a great example and beauty to this. Nature is an uncompromising lifeforce. It doesn’t waste a second in contemplation. Survival, beauty, violence and death define its condensed lifespan. I feel the breath of life pushing into a deep pocket of my chest as I pedal a new Mountain bike over a miles long path within a rural landscape of towering Pine trees. Heart beats are my drum, my thoughts… the snare. This is home, not the home I was born into, nor where I have lived for 40 years. I’ve transplanted myself here in the center of Massachusetts to be with my mother. She is a rarity, a member of a club of Americans classified to be living an “ultra long life”. She is a member of the .017%. It sounds glamorous as if some competitive category of an elite alma mater. In many ways it is. I pump harder passing a beautiful meadow of wild orchids, fallen trees, outer space like black ponds with beaver dams and Lilly pads on both sides of the gravel. It’s a blur within the gunshot precision of my awareness.

Manhattan seems very far from me, further emotionally than by miles. It is the city that built me through a self-cultivation of risk, opportunity, excitement and intellectual intrigue. It sadly no longer carries this for me. I’ve fallen out of love. Perhaps as I age, I expect too much from the city. It can’t keep up with my expectations. As a young man I always preferred older friends. They knew more and were unforgiving in their expectation for me to get the facts right if they were taking the time and blessing me with the generosity of their respective intellectual capital. When they spoke, I listened. They were teaching me things my peers didn’t and might never know. I am forever grateful. My greatest fear is being realized. I’m a student who seeks greater teachers where there are scant few. In the current New York, characters keep hidden their quirks, smarter minds are scorned, independent spirits with more interesting ways of seeing the world are silenced. Manhattan became a legion of followers being told what to do, how to think and most deceptively, what to buy. They calculate life and a social scorecard column on race, gender and “fairness” which never turns out to be fair at all. It’s a hopeful yet childish word. It’s hard to believe this has happened. Manhattan is now a giant suburb of easily offended children. It’s inhabitants playing their roles of what Tik Tok and political ideology has told them to be. It was once an exciting very adult place that one felt privileged to be a part of. It once had standards. It was a proud tough.

I want to see rare and elusive creatures: bears, a coyote, bobcat and a rattlesnake. These are soothing offerings nature holds to all that was lost in a Manhattan, an island I have over-romanticized for too long. There, I wanted to find and know smart, interesting, elusively cool people. In this sanctuary, all these creatures exist here, yet they, too, are mysteriously absent in the daylight. My hunt to find them feels familiar. Despite my being alone, an altar boy silence breaks the rotating crunch of tires against the rocky dirt. I feel a steady gaze of forest on me. I am being watched by shy creatures: rabbits, pike, fox and groundhogs. Cool air hits my face. I think it will purify my wounded spirit. I seek animals as companions and trees as my protectors. I move fast under the skyscraper height of old growth pines. They blot out the royal blue sky. I ride over a carpet of orange needles, their softness I imagine myself lying upon in a CinemaScope wonder. Encroaching storm clouds move in.

Change is on my mind, triggered by the cycle of nature both in the forest and of recent loss in my own life. I have lost seven friends within the last three years, each at various ages in a mad blend of illnesses and tragic accidents. Being home with mom feels like an anchor, a force that remains. She is the constant in my life and that power holds me together. I maneuver my emotions over the too soon and stinging goodbyes of close friends. I am here to take care of her, but in a hidden way, her enduring presence is taking care of me.

The trail has abruptly ended, yet the forest continuous. I stop my bike. My eyes scan the area certain that an opening must exist to a new trail, a way forward. Nothing simply ends. A mountain lies in the distance. Trails exist there. I’ve seen maps. How do they connect? I turn back with the renewed will to answer this riddle. If I can find a hidden trail, a new chapter will open for me, through will, luck and the love of life. A faint rain falls, a rumble somewhere in the billowing clouds warns me. I begin to pedal back, not dodging the rain or worried about a strike. This much I have learned on the paths I have traveled. I feel the wetness of a spiritual baptism pelting my skin between the trees. Or perhaps just raindrops for cauterized tears.