He galloped toward the forest’s bound
and rode in on a path he found,
where there were hoofprints, freshly made
by horses passing through the glade.
“This is the way the people took,
the ones for whom I came to look.”
He galloped through the forest fast,
not stopping while the trail would last.
—Perceval by Chrétican de Troyes
There’s nothing for it but to strip down naked and make an assessment.
It would have to be fast. Who knows how much time I have before some couple or unsuspecting family happen across me in my birthday suit, writhing around in the sand like some frantic chinchilla. I start laughing as I slap my shirt and turn it inside out.
Sitting atop a bed of ticks was absolutely not on today’s bingo card, but games change quickly out here. The plan was just to Go Out again. Venture out past the strip malls to meet back up with Percival and the Fisher King, like I’ve been doing lately. That may have been my company out here, but I’m nowhere near Brocéliande. No, this is Thunderbird country, my friend, Turtle Island is Coyote’s place. He’ll pull the rug out from you every time.
I’m glad I’m laughing at this. It’s not something I would have found easy to do just a year ago. Ambling along Wonder Mountain amid all manner of wild and icky weirdness has made me more understanding of nature’s surprises. Black widow babies crawling around your site will do that.
Truth be told, I’d still rather be out here, ticks or no ticks. I’ve been having a hard time with the idea of Return as of late. I mean, for goodness’ sake, why? What is there to return to? Watching my third career implode across the globe? Environmental degradation at the hands of linear thinking? A culture so obsessed with maximizing its outcomes that existence itself has become a utility equation? Horchata Frappuccinos?
That’s all rather one-sided, of course. People are meeting in person more. Self-checkout lines are withering, vinyl and flip phone sales are up. Humanity seems to be making in-roads. It’s just that I seem to be able to tolerate only so much participation in my own time and place. Percival spent his adulthood searching for the old wisdom necessary to heal the Angler. It wasn’t nostalgic romanticism for him, either.
…He also did a ton of dumb crap, too, but I think sitting along a tick-infested shoreline is a blunder unique to me.
Clothes back on and just a few steps back up the trail, I pass two women on their way to the shore. See? Look at that, I knew I didn’t have much time. Risking indecent exposure was still the better option over Lyme disease or alpha-gal. Some retired forester who now turns wooden bowls for a living told me we live in the largest alpha-gal hotspot on the coast, perhaps the continent. He told me it wasn’t always like this. I told him that I remember when it wasn’t. We’re both older than Galahad in that way. For him, the land was always blighted. However, he knew it was the Angler’s wound that so scarred the world. To heal the man was to heal the land. That’s something I wish we still understood.
Mind retraining. That’s a big part of it. It’s why John Moriarty left his university teaching track. He felt that he could no longer prepare students to thrive in an environment he no longer believed in. He had to retrain his brain, he said, retrain it away from his compartmentalized, productivity-first, outcome-obsessed European education. It starts with the mind, perhaps, but it’s got to reach body, spirit and soul, too. That’s what Moriarty said he wanted, to walk back into the woods and find his bush soul. I find myself trailing just behind him on occasion, following paths away from town and toward everything that was there before it.
I can’t stay out here, though, as much as I think I’d want to. Percival never stayed in the forest, nor did he kick up his feet for too long in Camelot. Tarry not idly by the chapel perilous, good sir, the work of the road lies before you. After all, the names of Percival, Vasilisa the Beautiful and Fionn mac Cumhaill come out strange in our mouths today. We’ve forgotten the very sound of the Primum Mobile, the gears that keep the spheres aloft. If all it took to true our cosmic wheels was to share their names a little, wouldn’t you do it? Wouldn’t you do what you could to share them?
Stories. That’s what’ll heal our culture’s dolorous stroke, I think. Stories heal the man, stories heal the land.
I walk up the hill and head back to the car.
