We’re really doing this? Yeah, she said and she sank into the glacial volcanic silt water in the Hood river, in fact in the confluence of the north and east tributaries. I followed her even though it seemed way too cold. It felt necessary to go all the way in. I stopped questioning it. My skin tingled. We walked around and found heart-shaped rocks and then rested in the sun and talked and looked around.
Later in this same trip another friend went right into other cold waters, no problem. These people were cold plungers and I felt very wimpy but also inspired, though possibly not a cold plunger as much myself. Maybe I can get better at it.
I remember this past week like the touching down of small dirt devils, whirling dervish memories of people, conversations, pieces of nature and water and sky and rocks and eating and drinking. Spinning a little bit in reference to each other and the energy of engaging, doing old things and new things with old and new friends.
The campground sent a text: no water. No toilets. No showers. They said there was a leak somewhere in ten miles of plumbing but they did not know where. It was too bad but who was really to blame? Not them. No refunds. It eventually got fixed.
She cooked dinner in the rain.
After it got dark I got into my tent and listened to the ocean. I laid down on the damp pillow listening to the waves and the occasional drop of water on the tent.
I read a Tom Robbins novel.
One night I got up and out of the tent around 2:00 a.m. and saw the Milky Way just overhead. It looked like a reflection of the sand and rocks projected upward. It glittered like lit up sand in the sky. It hung there with a weighty weightlessness.
One night I had dreams of being in a sci-fi situation where I kept trying to escape the more advanced bad guys. I usually have weird and vivid dreams when I travel.
We pulled animal cards and one card referenced an unstruck sound, which gave me ideas but no clarity on what it meant. Then later I made up what it was to me. It is a sensory thing that finds me before I find it and so I have to catch up with senses that are more immediate and don’t need to be explained. They are only felt. They are struck like an inner chord.
I walked in the forest of big old trees and I tried to take photos of them but they are not photogenic in that they don’t fit the frame. Figuratively and literally they are too ancient, large, and beyond the small confines of a moment in time and a small window to hold it. I gave up and just stopped and put my hands on their trunks for a few moments.
“Honk if you let your soft animal body love what it loves” said the bumper sticker on the car in front of me today, and I really wanted to honk so badly but we were at an intersection and I was afraid I would irritate the driver. So I just had a good feeling about it. You know, it’s of course from Mary Oliver’s poem.
One morning we made oatmeal with figs.
Memories wash in
That time walking next to waves
Memories wash out
Rivers and flowers and beaches