She must have waited for the train for 45 minutes, maybe an hour.
It was getting dark and the forest gave way to a shape that she did not recognize. Trees were moved by an unseen breeze. A streetlight plastered yellow onto green grass. The circumstance had pushed her far enough away from the city that the markets had closed and the lonely lights that would normally illuminate the paths for the late walkers were nowhere to be found. Up ahead she can see in the sunset a figure bustling about near the train stop; an elderly woman clutching a bag hovers around the last dying light. Perhaps she understands too well the unknown that crept out from the west. The tree line, the edge of the pink sky when mothers call their children home. Here is one, I meant to say: you missed one. This child is very lost and is a very long way away from home. She approaches with a degree of warmness that is not returned right away. From the bit of streetlight the woman’s glasses are reflected and her long wrinkled face stares at the impending doom figure with apprehension. Aside from the language barrier there is also a clear cultural barrier evident as well. We are not so very open in these parts.
Like two ships bumping in the night, we cannot clearly see one another and are surprised by the interaction. A lonely call from the mast out to land hits the waves and bounces back to empty.
“Hello?”(crashing waves and wind, the approaching night storm)
It’s not that they don’t see each other, it's really only that they choose not to. Eyes are kept down and we try not so much to become so very dependent on these concourses. The one way couldesacs of human exchange. It’s as if the STREET NOT THRU sign that we are so accustomed to in the states had been lifted completely or perhaps placed as a blanket statement over all things humane. Turn around. Don’t bother. Unless you are really lost and hungry, cold and tired. Nobody is going to help you this far out from town. A lone wolf howls in the forest and there is a sweeping cold as she outstretches her hand from the oversized coat in some sort of waving motion. This is seen as a friendly gesture, she does not mean any harm but still the woman is fearful and cannot bring herself to look up.
“Is there a Carrefour near here?”
The woman stumbled with light English and finally responded, flustered.
“At this hour?!”
Granted it was late. Sunday, twelve A.M. Amsterdam time. She hadn’t eaten anything all day and no one here was any help whatsoever. It was only her and the wild. There was the moon, the dark and the unconscious dutch forest. For years before men had hunted these woods. Foxes, hounds, duck and quail, all ages gone now. Their bones lie scattered, discarded a foot below the surface. Below a thin layer of pine, like sawdust; waiting to be uncovered by feral dogs and cats. There was a time when a welcome fire may have been waiting for her and perhaps a hunter willing to share catches from the day with a weary traveler. For certainly he had been there before, we all have felt the incredible feeling of loss and being lost. The lonely journey of dusk into night. The only people out now are the ones who have nobody to come home to. To sit alone at dimly lit wooden tables with old silver pots of coffee resting on a stove. The coldness of evening is welcome as a warm fire.
The simple fluorescent lights of the market illuminate some key points of interest to the night hunter; a chocolate bar, a coke, a vegan meat patty. A collection of dusty tinned things with a smiling face and a salty snack in a bag. Is this what we have resorted to? Picking up dead things from shelves in a strange light? How unnatural, the cashier asks if there will be
anything else? What a strange question; since if there were, surely we would have grabbed it by now. Before we got in line. Before we committed to saying we are finished and that is enough. Is there something we missed? Something we didn’t find in the pathetic plastic shelves under the harsh neon lights? Is this it? Will that be all? I don’t know, I guess you should tell me.
The night she called him. This was the first night in the forest, the first night in the camper. The darkness was pure and nothing could come from it. She and a man sat alone at the train stop and she worked on the chocolate bar. The man seemed strange and distant as he shuffled on the bench. Suddenly he was up and shouting at the tracks. Nothing, he was up and shouting at nothing. His dutch expletives broke the silence and it was as foreign as the sound of lovers’ laughter on a loners walk home. The chaos of his screams ripped into the black and settled as the static hum on the channels you don’t get. She is reminded of how she would sit as a child and stare at the screen until the shapes came out. The dark spaces between the white specs of snow. She does speak the language but can tell he is clearly upset, his voice is broken by crying and screaming. Something or someone was lost and cannot be brought back. Above the stop she can see the line is “twelve-blue”.
“Twelve-blue” and she is met with the sudden realization that this is not the right stop. She will have to abandon the insane static screamer and walk perhaps another mile to the next stop. The woman is gone. The man is getting silent behind her and stands in the middle of the tracks staring. Watching her go. Into the night.
“We shared this moment together. By force or pure happenstance, we shared this moment together”
The sun has set and another wolf has made its presence known in the wilderness. For now all she can tell is that there are two of them. They are still a great deal away, she had learned as a child not to be afraid of the night hunters. They will leave you alone as long as you leave them. She counts the moments between the howls.
One Two Three Four...
They are five seconds apart before the night is broken by another lonesome call. She can tell by this they are still very far and for the moment want nothing to do with her. Reaching deep into the pocket of the oversized coat she fumbles with the headphone. Calling him, she only hopes that he will answer.
The noise of the bar is so great he barely notices the phone ring. There are pinball machines firing and people yelling at ridiculous decibel levels and the laughter of drunk happy couples together. The warm lamp light of a local bar illuminates the faces just enough to make out features. Man, woman, child, mother and father. Here we forget the color of each other's eyes or the nuances or facial features. Was he wearing a hat last time? Something feels different. Still he picks up the phone and will try to talk. The hardest thing of all of this has been the wedge of distance between. The time gap and the impossible reality of the fact that this relationship could not possibly survive. At some point the rope will break and someone will be lost at sea. The beacon blast of the light house house across the water makes another pass. A distant fog horn of a lost ship calls out to the abyss. The dialogue is awkward and ancient. Like the caress of a digger's brush uncovering trapped Jurassic amber. To hold it close and say;
“You lived and You existed. Now I have to uncover you. Now I have to figure you out. Put you back together. Why did you do this to me? Why now? What happened to you, to leave you this way. Twisted in some final death sprawl, now I have to figure you out.”
What is left when the things cannot touch and we can no longer see the rocks from the water? This is the siren call that will bring the primordial soup up from the bottom of the ocean. He had been told that is where it all started. The origins of life. In some volcanic eruption a million years ago somewhere in the warm mist of the pacific. Along the coast of California. He dreams of it falling back into the water. The great return to the mother source. Jutting out from the mist that would become a beacon of hope to wayfaring travelers for centuries.
They set out from Amsterdam, from Florence, from Leeds and Liverpool with the best intentions. Fleeing persecution and famine; pioneer to the falls. Standing in the mist, bathed in the kaleidoscopic vision of water and sunlight. Now they just sit and wait. Lost at the bottom waiting for something. Someone to stumble upon them again and feel human touch. To suppose and project over their lives and purposes. How can life begin here? In such a cold desolate place. In the
dark, the land of strange alien shapes. Creatures that have evolved with no eyesight and the forsaken LampFish, lighting its path for no-one going no-where. There is a certain static and these trans continental phone calls feel more like nautical signals, inaudible to the ear. Like the shadow of a passing humpback whale or the chirping back and forth of dolphins in the warm pacific. The sonar buzzing of a creature that does not know any other language than to send out a signal. I am out here. I am alone and I am scared.
“I’m scared. I can’t hear anything. I just want to hear a sound. Something,
Anything.”
“I don’t understand why you’re doing this, my god.”
For someone who had surrounded themselves with nothing he thought for the resounding fact that she had found it here should come as no surprise. Once they had gone out shopping at night near her apartment back home. Once he had dreamt of what home might look like. A small house in the city, white fence around it, maybe a dog, a kid. Driving to the store they passed one such house and he commented on it. She was always so certain that it was not something she wanted. Crusher of dreams, dweller of Spanish cave village at the edge of the earth. She would send him pictures to prove that they were real. To live off nearly nothing, no god and no country to tell you what to do. Perhaps this is what she wanted all along. Then these must be the crazed desires of wanderlust, like some romantic prince setting out to see the world. For certainly there has to be more than just his dreams of family and a dog and fence to keep the dog. A single car garage and tenure. Here at the Whole Foods; twelve P.M. central time, the dreams of the future seemed to dance on his fingertips. He wanted to stop and sign in the aisle, alive with bombastic energy. The magic of togetherness like two workhorses hitched together. We are in this for the greater good, old friend. Yes, it will be hard work but in the end we will get a treat and it will not be so very cold. We will be given a roof over our head and lights from the house in the distance will reflect in our eyes and inspire our dreams until we die side by side, me after you or you after me.
Together, we will see through this task together. Like the bridle horse and the wagon pulling oxen; though our backs are broken, there was a sense of knowing and a feeling of togetherness. Like the overstocked underfed pack mule teetering on the edge of some precipice, inches away from death but still looking straight ahead, fearless or just blind to it. Half asleep from exhaustion but guided by the infernal rope of its master. Tied together by something. You see, you cannot fall now. If you fall, I fall.
If you die.
I die.
The rocks do not discriminate man from the unwashed heathen beast. We go down together.
They ran through the store grabbing candy and cookies and a frozen pizza. Like crazed animals let loose from cages and running wild in some sort of urban sprawl. Grabbing whatever they could and giggling the entire time, two night hunters moving together as one.