Fallstreak

It's like one of those dreams where you can't wake up.

"Wake up," you said.

I remember the day rolling away from the roof of the world, like a demoralized guest curling toward the wall, and how the darkness made everything shimmery, grainy, and animate.

"Forget it. Go to sleep," you said.

That winter the winds whistled no human tune. Just an oscillating galactic plainsong. Like abandoned sheets on the flinch of a rise, all fluttering and sullied in a dirty howling wind.

"Meet me one day at the crossroads," you said.

Recall how this was once a place of brightness and strangeness? Target and Walmart and Rite Aid. Boulevards. Rust and stardust. Corrugated iron. Cherry blossom. Cascades. Brick facades. Ferries departing the point. Knots of people gathered outside Starbucks, warmed by a patio heater in winter, by mochaccinos always, and by the arbitrary camaraderie of belonging.

That's all memory now. Here is not here anymore. I had no answer for you anyway.

Except this: "You mean all things to me."

But the dreams. They used to call it post-trauma. I don't want to give it its dignity by naming it fully. It encumbers me. The dreams are part of being awake, or as close to being awake that you're unable to tell the difference. And it's whatever your chosen fear, your trigger. They arrive in pairs. Fluctuate. Could be a small fire breaking out and a scream. Or the brittle shock of shattering glass and a moan. Disbelief and the blurry grind and shred of tumbling asphalt. The hot proximity of a biting human reek, then wrenching tears. Or the feel of rubber or hair or oil or watery, seeping hangnails. It's usually specific and crawly and lost.

To gather myself, I remember a night horse named Blondie. A winter horse. Escaping the horror of family, I would cross the frozen ridges of soil beside the dark barn and talk to that horse, rant at him, stand in the crystalline air beside his paddock, leaning on the railing, my nostrils crackling in the cold, the draw backdropped by a bright moon, my entire world ghosted, and make peace with him, watch his large luxuriant eye as it sought some gentle kinship of its own. 

But that was the world that was, and this is the world that is. No return. I only torment myself with thoughts like these.

You are out there somewhere. At the crossroads.

"At the crossroads. You follow me, yes?"

Murmurations. That's the word. Those twisting, flowing skeins against an orange sky. A fluid net of birds. Starlings. Practicing molten turbulence over the stark ruins of a blackened pier. These were things that occurred in the world.

I want to follow you.

America: you are a generous and optimistic place. Where else would carpet the outdoor stairway of a motel? Carve monuments from sheer cliffs? Serve food on such lavish platters in your cheapest diners?

I love you. I loved you. I will love you.

The sun loses its perfect circular rim and bulges into the horizon, while grey clouds become dark lavender and muted pink against a pale coral sky. All is melting and breathless.

Some memory conjures the reassuring call of a train from another era and I feel a tear fall.

Will you burst through a cloud? Emerge. Like a sprite in a fallstreak hole?

I sit by a roadside and watch a creature, some misshapen rodent thing, drag itself across the blacktop. Its rear limbs are shattered and skewed and blood pours from the tiny holes in its snout. One of its eyes is ruined, and it snuffles like something plague-begotten. A trail of blood and sand points back toward the creature's tale, untold and star-crossed. Its suffering is fascinating. But relieving it of the burden of life is a tenderhearted thing, so I stand, find a large rock, and attend to its leave-taking. Pity almost stops my heart, although not my hand.

"Will you be waiting for me, my love?"

There's only the wind across the bare desert and the single cry of a hawk.

My gaze on the heat mirage, I walk toward the crossroads.

Ketch Knot

That morning he saw elk tracks in the snow. If it wasn't for his bones grinding like old bridge girders he'd consider strapping on the cross-country skis and following their trail. Must be around ten or twelve of them.

But he wasn't up to it. Plus his head was stiff with last night's Crown Royal, a habit that had crept up on him like a silent mugger. Especially since Ginny had passed. His beloved, her pretty eyes shining to the end. 

"Not passed. Died," he said aloud, annoyed. "Always called a spade a shovel, so why stop now, 'specially when there ain't no one to hear it?"

On the porch, Wolf cocked an ear in protest.

"Ha, begging your pardon, you old mutt."

He went back inside, poured a coffee, and limped toward the picture window. He liked his big old house and the farm itself—the legacy of a decent pension and a distant yet generous family who wanted to give something back—but it was too big now. He watched the highway down below the curving dirt driveway, quiet at this hour: a mercy.

He figured he'd go out to the barn. After he retired, the place had been a working farm for a good two decades, a dream of his since childhood. He still kept a few sheep around, a handful of chickens, and Engine, the old chestnut mare he would never ride again. He'd take Wolf with him, but even Wolf was showing his age, around the muzzle and in the stiffening gait of his hindquarters.

He felt alone, but he wasn't alone: the things he'd seen in thirty years as a firefighter never really left him. Probably never would. Sleep was some fabled oasis amid the dunes of trauma.

It was no one's fault, truly. This was mountain country, the BC interior—past Hope and beyond all Merritt as he used to joke, back when he had an audience—and the farm sat on the south side of the one straight stretch of highway for miles, and frustrated vacationers took risks; the province had been meaning to fix it, make it two lanes, but good intentions were forever getting themselves tangled in red tape. While for him the irony was complete: half a lifetime of seeing dreadful things replay on the screen inside his head and now, most every summer and midwinter, he'd hear that sound, the plosive, fracturing shriek that was always followed by the worst silence imaginable, and as a human being—as a man—he'd have to go see if he could help. No two ways about it. Only a coward would phone it in and go cringe someplace away from the window. Oh, he'd been tempted, but he was compelled by habit and by nature, although this last one, only a few days ago, was one of the worst: three young girls shivering quietly beside a ticking minivan, mesmerized by their father's ruined head, the broken body itself in a ditch. Mom inside, not moving, a piteous wound in her own head that precluded any likelihood of her ever doing so again. He'd done what he could, checked the folk in the other vehicle (an elderly couple in a pickup, miraculously unhurt, but wide-eyed and refusing to leave their truck), called 911, given the girls blankets, led them to the warmth of his house, away from the nightmare they'd relive for however many cruel decades remained for them, but it was awful. Wretched. Appalling.

One thing firemen and farmers know is knots. Over a beam in the barn dangled the rope he'd tied yesterday, before he'd gotten cold feet. The Ketch knot, although most folks knew it by another name. Thirteen coils. He'd meant to take the rifle to Wolf, but he simply couldn't do it. He hated himself for that. He knew the animals would be taken care of: his family were arriving tomorrow for the holidays. He hated himself for that too.

But he'd lived a good life overall, had done his part, and it was time. He didn't cotton to all that afterlife horseshit, but as he climbed onto the stool and reached for the rope, he'd be lying if he didn't admit his thoughts turned to Ginny, and remained there, the gleaming vision of her dancing eyes his very last.

Where It All Begins

So back in 2001, I was having a rough time of things and decided that the only way I was going to shake my head back on straight was if I drove the 10,000 kilometres from my home near Vancouver, British Columbia to New York City and back. For the life of me, I don't remember why this seemed so imperative, other than it was a solo road trip over a hell of a long distance and I had a friend in Brooklyn as well as friends along the route.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I picked a date pretty much out of a hat, a random date that will now be remembered for a long time... and not because one small person began a trip that day. It was, of course, Tuesday, September 11, 2001.

Well, I witnessed many things both during the journey and at its destination, eerie post-apocalyptic scenes, jarring contradictions and touching moments. It was both cathartic and humbling, putting into perspective my tiny trauma against such shattering global events. All of it went into a short book I wrote soon afterward and eventually published as an ebook. The cover is a photo I took on the trip itself, and I chose it because to use a shot of Ground Zero itself would have seemed crass or at least insensitive so soon after nearly 3,000 people had perished in such an appalling way.

My book wasn't political. It largely avoided judgment. I wanted it to be about the sometimes strong too often tenuous connections between people and not a diatribe against America or the Middle East.

Well, ten long years went by and I couldn't avoid the impression that what had been an opportunity to forge something positive from that terrible wreckage had been passed by in favour of ideological ambition, fearmongering and a servile media.

But if I were to be fair, I would have to retrace my steps of ten years earlier and be in New York City on September 11, 2011 when the anniversary was in full swing, if only to feel the changes up close and personal for the first time since those surreal days a decade before.

So, once again I set out on a late summer/early fall day and drove that vast distance and had a new, different adventure, possibly even a darker adventure, certainly a more extreme one in its implications. Which is all going to be laid out in the sequel, as yet untitled, currently being written.

So this is the blog that begins to chart that journey; not the journey itself, but the writing journey that emerged from the physical one. It is and will continue to be a story of movement, of restlessness, and of migration. Restless spirits, the movement of words, the migratory impulse in the physical realm and in the artistic/creative.

If anyone joins me for all or—more likely—part of the ride, all the better. Solo road trips are great, albeit incredible tests of one's capacity for loneliness, but shared journeys are more colourful and redolent of possibilities, potential... and yes, even hope.

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David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.