Walk

"Friday, Nov. 6th. Having completed the necessary preparations, I left Potosi at three o'clock, P.M., accompanied by Mr. Levi Pettibone, being both armed with guns, and clothed and equipped in the manner of the hunter, and leading a pack-horse, who carried our baggage, consisting of skins to cover us at night, some provisions, an axe, a few cooking utensils, etc. On walking out of the village of Potosi, on the south-west, we immediately commenced ascending a series of hills, which are the seat of the principal mines, winding along among pits, heaps of gravel, and spars, and other rubbish constantly accumulating at the mines, where scarcely ground enough has been left undisturbed for the safe passage of the traveller, who is constantly kept in peril by unseen excavations, and falling-in pits."

-- Henry Schoolcraft, "Journal of a Tour into the Interior of Missouri and Arkansaw, from Potosi, or Mine a Burton, in Missouri Territory, in a South-West Direction, toward the Rocky Mountains, Performed in the Years 1818 and 1819"

--

After breakfast, I drove to the publishing company. I always park across the street, in some vacant spaces around the corner from a dilapidated apartment complex. There are sometimes tricycles and Little Tike jungle-jims caked with small-town yuck in the little patches of grass near the parking lot. The sky is usually white.

I sat in the car, cold, tired, five minutes early. I took the time to breathe and think about tricycles. Then I watched an old man walk.

He was wearing all brown: pants, shoes, socks, jacket, Irish tweed cap. He had his hands in his pockets, not jammed against the air but slipped in like if they went too far down his wrists would crack. He moved his head but did not see me. He paced slowly, his form swaying like a tire swing, those hands in those pockets. It took him a minute to move ten feet. When he reached the corner of the building, he turned from the shoulders, smacked his lips to the world, and started swaying down the block, where he paused by a glass door, blinking. His beloved came downstairs, spry old lass, waved, and they walked down the block together.

--

I listened for half an hour as my boss's wife told me about her life. She told me about how every room in her parents' house was filled with light, except for two rooms, the dining room in the center of the house, and the kitchen on the south side, where the shadows were heavy. She told me about her mother and how her father won't get out of bed any more. She told me about her trip to England and the anniversary they spent in a castle and the smoked flayed salmon their hostess prepared that night. She told me about how curry burned her lips to numbness and how coconut milk and pineapple nursed them back. She told me how castles feel like barns at night.

--

Schoolcraft's "Journal" begins this way:

"I begin my tour where other travellers have ended theirs..."