Friends Old, New, and Soon to Be,
I live in coastal North Carolina, where the lifestyle attracts more people than the employment opportunities. Granted, it’s hard to be excited about work when the same tide offers tailing reds and a limit of marsh hens, but finding help at the house is a challenge. Once someone proves reliable, they get a spot in my phone and the ease of an unquestioned bill. Repeat visits render some more than purely professional acquaintances. A recent text conversation with one of them while trying to schedule a couple of days of labor was couched in the shared realities of our middle years. It ended simply.
“This time of life is just a lot.”
“Yes, it is.”
Who offered which sentiment is irrelevant, given the universalities of getting older. Parents age. Children grow. Things that didn’t hurt do. I go to more retirement ceremonies and funerals than weddings and baby showers.
Sometimes this time of life is just a lot.
When “a lot” becomes “too much,” when I feel like I can’t even identify all the things I am juggling much less keep them in the air, I go to the woods. Like Everett Ruess, who disappeared in the Utah desert at only nineteen, I prefer “the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities.” Even a couple of hours go a long way towards re-ordering a mindscape that would most resemble a yard sale were it made manifest. So it was I found myself telling my wife late on a Sunday, “I’m taking the dogs to the woods for a few hours.”
Opening the succession of property gates giving me access to the land my cousins let me roam feels like taking off Sunday clothes after church; tearing a metaphorical tie from around my neck and shucking shoes I thankfully don’t wear enough to make comfortable as the afternoon stretches in front of me. But the truth of what I find in the woods is best expressed in the perambulations of our dogs Laurel and Jed, rambles somehow both disordered and purposeful.
Laurel, a ninety-pound Pyrenees/Hound mix who guards us like the former and follows her nose like the latter, rarely experiences life unrestrained by fence or leash. Liberated, she disappears into the mingled curves of a live oak forest to emerge covered in mud from a sporadically occupied alligator wallow. I hold my breath when she heads that way, but true freedom is too rare in her life to call her back. Our black Lab Jed sticks close to me, rearing and nosing my hand to remind me that each of us has a purpose, and mine is throwing bumpers for him.
I had deer sign on my mind, but our recent “1000-year storm” flooded enough long-leaf and live oak to give me fantastic visions of mallards mistaking coastal North Carolina for Arkansas. In the shade of trees under which I normally walk dry-footed, Jed prevailed upon me to fulfill his own vision. I threw a wood duck dummy for him, like a shaman making an offering to the swamp in hopes of birds to come. At the water’s edge, Laurel cut wide ellipses around us, exulting in following a deer path, her chuffing audible even as Jed surged through two feet of tannin-laced floodwater in pursuit of the dummy, every bound raising golden explosions of sun-dappled water.
It was a simple hour, in which dogs and trees and water and sun came together in some kaleidoscopic wonder unplanned by any man. We headed back to real life afterward, on a dirt road through a long-leaf pine savannah. It’s as fine a landscape as I can imagine and I drove slowly. The dogs hung their heads out of the windows, their noses turned into the wind, grinning as truck dogs do. I put on music, Turnpike Troubadors singing about coveys rising and pointing dogs, and thought about the coming week in a more ordered fashion than I could a few hours before.
This time of life is a lot. But sometimes it’s just enough.
I wish you success in finding your simple hours. I would love to hear about them. Email me at EAL@tombeckbe.com.
Yours,
Russell Worth Parker
Editor-in-Chief, Tom Beckbe
