FOREVER WILD | chapter one of my unpublished book...

I get looking past today

            right now

and I can’t stop looking

till my eyes red

mind depressed

my spirit quenched.

 

I want to stop looking

            to start living

I want all questions erased

all answers gone

any distractions removed

so that here I am

writing between the lines

with nothing to say

and a soreness in my legs

that says I’ve done enough.

—from one of my journals

The boy looks

His father does not see

The boy will look

Or learn he must not see

       —Lew Welch, Trip Trap

Lose your dreams and you will lose your mind.

—Rolling Stones, Ruby Tuesday

The road is long, narrow, winding, and empty—clinging to a steep, undulating mountainside as it descends into a broad valley.  I have to stay focused on the blind corners, but my eyes are constantly drawn left to the jagged teeth of a dark mountain range.  Dark with forest, and black rock—it's breathtaking—this is my new home?!  It's impossible to believe that I'm moving into a cabin in the woods today, for the winter, in such a remarkable canyon.  I reach the bottom of the valley and begin winding through giant old growth red and white fir, the odd big Jeffrey pine mixed in.  I pass a lake, and see several float-tube fishermen.  I try to imagine it frozen, covered with snow, no cars or people.  Deep forest surrounds the road, going on forever it seems, this impenetrable westside forested river valley.  Although I don't see the river, I notice a dozen side creeks, and there's likely a dozen more I'm sure, all still pouring down the mountainside even in late fall of a drought year.  A few remnant yellow leaves drift from bare aspen branches, and the willows and water birch are simple red and brown stalks with only random wispy leaves.  I drive on, winding and winding, reaching a very sharp, "10 mph" turn (believe the signs), my old truck groaning and leaning as I wrench the wheel around and then around again as the road straightens, but only briefly before another "15 mph" turn, and then another lake drifts past.  But I can't see it much, just trees and a big mountain rising out of it with sweeping runs thinned and cleared by winter avalanches—my ski mountain, I think, eyeing it as much as possible the rest of the drive.

I pass under a towering sign that marks the resort—Big Springs is all it says in giant painted letters of wood, like entering Jurassic Park.  Exhilarated, anxious thoughts fill my head—of Thoreau and childhood dreams.  Of the past winter caretaker of 20 years who's been fired, old Mason Grey—wise, happy, pony-tailed 60 year old man of the mountains all smiles and talk at the local coffee shop, except when we talk about Big Springs and his old job and he gets mystical and lost and glazed, and there's long discourse on lawyers and labor laws, a dispute of some sort.

But I stop thinking about all that because look at these trees, the Jeffrey and Firs are thick and mighty westside giants here at Big Springs, maybe six feet in diameter—this is no Rock Creek Canyon, place of my last secluded mountain home, high on the east slope of the range, where there are Lodgepole pines good and straight and old but you wouldn't know it from their slender widths—the wood grows tight and wise in those high dry canyons of the eastside.  Here it is fat and moist and tender, likening to blow down in strong winds, often snapping 20 feet up, just the top section falling thunderous to the ground and shattering—red fir roulette, Mason calls it.  I roll to a stop in front of the small wooden cabin.  "Ski Touring" the signs says out front, pointing randomly to the south.  Flat shards of basalt mark a path to the front steps where a concrete pad bares an inset gaming horseshoe, along with the signature "Elmer & Floyd 1932", and I remember some vague mention of horseshoe tournaments told me by old Mason some fresh mountain morning with a cup of joe on Main Street.  Glancing around I can almost picture what Elmer and Floyd might've looked like tossin' 'shoes in the pine forest sun dapples of Big Springs 1932.  I push the door open.  My steps make the floorboards creak sharply as I look around from room to room, avoiding cobwebs and jutting nails, leaving marks in the dust, and feeling as if I am trespassing into Mason's life, 20 years of mountains times, good friends and healthy visions!—I see the scrawls on the walls, exploring some of them closely, and finding Mason's bitter resignation "20 years in the hole, no pay...no appreciation, many injuries...many close calls with death.  Made it thru winters 1983-1986-1993-1995, all BIG ones...Thank the gods for my life....Goodbye, June '02" but I leave the rest of these fine scrawls for quiet dark nights with wine and solitude to read what others have lived.  I try imagining myself at home within these walls—what can I bring here, what can I leave behind?  This is where I'll sleep, this is my cook stove, here's my bathroom and here's my shower.  Here's the sunroom where I'll drink tea, eat, and watch the snow fall until the snowpack covers the windows. 

Disbelieving that this wild cabin—in a moist, dark, forest—could really be my new home, I hesitate to unpack, to move even—staring blankly out the windows, or into the grain of the walls—there is wisdom to be found here.  The presence of the next eight months swirls in the air, weighing down on me, making questions I can't answer—I'm excited, blissed even, but I worry about the isolation, the solitude, am I really ready to be a hermit?  After awhile I just grab a broom and start sweeping.

*

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them...He has no time to be any thing but a machine.

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

*

My eighth grade english class read Henry Thoreau's Walden.  Not all of it, just the famous parts.  (The quotes reprinted here originated out of passages soaked in neon blue highlighter.)  Grunge was the current cultural statement, and somehow Thoreau's existential approach towards the meaning of life fit perfectly.  His decrying of the "masses of men" and their "lives of quiet desperation" rang as powerfully as a Kurt Cobain lyric, and seemed to catch and pull at the holes of our ratty jeans and worn out birkenstocks—I was fascinated by Thoreau's life in the woods.  How a natural simple way of living had translated into a philosophy of life itself—and how well I could apply his lectures to modern day realities.  It was my first lesson that nothing ever changes, it just wears new clothes.  Also, he was treating life as a separate entity—not connected to cities and towns, bars and politics, culture and folk—but something that could be found, or at least understood in emptiness.  I was in many ways too young to fully appreciate Thoreau, but he just made sense.  I wanted to know like Thoreau knew.  I was already questioning the parameters of daily life—what might lead to importance and success, and what people seemed to regard as roads to failure—and Thoreau questioned these too—often agreeing with how I already felt, giving some intelligent reasons to my feelings.  It was a good energy in that english class—I remember a particular friend of mine, brilliant beyond almost anyone else I've ever known, Matthew Wrather, who wrote stories about real life, love, friendship, road trips and poetry (how did he know all these things already?  We were all amazed.)—and I wished I could write like he did, and he dug Thoreau like I dug Thoreau, like several of us in that class dug Thoreau, including the teacher, and it was a beautiful thing really, so brief and temporary and yet there it was happening in school of all places, normally an institution of the mainstream, the mundane—but now we knew what mundane meant—Thoreau had torn away our veils.   Matt, some other good friends, and I also shared a Tech Theater class building sets and operating the lights for the plays being put on by the Crossroads School Theatre program, and we had fun reading plays and designing sets, and then working outside with the raw materials and listening to Flashback Lunch on KROQ—I think Matt knew probably before the rest of us how much it all really could mean and yet how little of it really meant anything, or at least it seemed so to me at the time, and it was good to hang around him. 

Reading Thoreau got me excited about this fantasy of going away to the woods, to live a valid life, a fully awake life—whatever that meant I didn't really know—I'd done a little backpacking before, I'd been skiing before—but a cabin in the woods?  Thoreau described it in a way that sounded so easy, simple, natural, blissful—a place where you could laugh at the rest of the mundane world going about their wasteful successful ways, plant a bean patch and be happy.  Of course I knew it was much more than this but I wondered.

~

The air smelled of salt and fish and bird crap.  The boats were always coated dusty grey by soot from the coal plants or some such thing near Long Beach.  But there was Retriever.  The 30 foot Tartan designed sailboat that my dad had a partnership in owning with two other sailors for awhile.  It was a good sailboat, almost utilitarian in its simplicity and grace.  There were water tanks (you pumped water with a foot pedal), a good diesel motor, a simple wooden tiller to steer, and spacious fore and aft bunks as well as benches around a dinner table.  Our family of four would spend a few weeks each year living out of the boat while circumnavigating Catalina Island, as well as numerous weekend trips.  I don't remember how many years we did this, but it was a lot. 

I grew up a child of the sea, "The blond haired boy," as my dad would fondly and sarcastically call me on sailing trips.  My dad is a fine sailor, and a passionate lover of wind.  He hated running the motor any longer than it took to back out of the slip and get the main sail up.  If there was no wind the whole way to Catalina, you could feel his disgust.  He always hoped for a fine passage; to get the rush of a true seaman out in the wilds of the Pacific, and motoring across a glassy sea has nothing to do with being a seaman for him.  The sharp slice of silence when the motor was turned off and the sails filled with air always described the beauty of sailing to me—the boat would heel over, creaking with the load of wind, gracefully gliding forward into a soundless sea.  We became a family of sailors.  My mom had crewed with my dad in Hobie Cat races at various lakes around California where good folks would gather to race their prized little 16 to 18 foot catamaran sailboats.  Ultra-light and ultra-fast.  And now my brother and I were growing up aboard my dad's very own boat.  I remember his pride in showing us how to take care of things on the boat, and I began to take great care in coiling the excess dock-ropes perfectly and keeping all things "ship shape."  We learned with our first rough crossing what "ship shape" really meant.  Food, clothes and things inevitably all went flying during some of those crossings, but usually the worst of it resulted from carelessness.  The best crossings—25 knot winds howling across rough seas the whole way to the Island—made us feel like explorers as waves exploded over the bow and water flew back to the cockpit, soaking us.  Sometimes we'd even have to reef the main sail down to a smaller size, or furl the jib.  My dad loved those crossing, and if I at all wimpered with any fear or nervousness about the wind, he'd simply say:  "Oh come on Carl, this is sailing!"  All in all we were a good crew of sailors for him.  We knew how to follow his orders and had fond fantasies of racing in The America's Cup or The Whitbread Round The World Race, or designing sleek racing yaghts.

As you sail across the channel, Catalina Island slowly appears out of nothingness.  First there is a silhouette, then varying degrees of distinction as it imperceptibly slips closer until suddenly you are upon it and passing Ship Rock and Bird (shit) Rock and you're at the Isthmus radioing for a Harbor Master to give you a mooring in one of the coves.  We preferred Cherry Cove to any of the others around the Isthmus.  The water was so clear you could watch the bottom fish in over 30 feet of water.  I was still paranoid and destroyed by the JAWS movies, but I went swimming, nervously, in the relatively warm water—sometimes climbing up the mooring lines and diving off the bow like a good tropical blond boy of the Sun.  I think back on it now and realize what absolute bliss it was.  Truly my first experience with what it meant to be wild and free.  To sail at the hands of the wind, to swim among the fish of the sea, to feel the sun burn and tan, and to eat pancakes in the morning with good cold orange juice. 

During some of the trips across the channel we would fish the whole way, trolling with two good salt water rods and plenty of tackle.  My dad's friends Mark and Ira were the source of this gear, and they enjoyed showing my brother and I how to use it, even though we'd usually get it all tangled.  How patient all these adults were with us little snots really.  We caught mostly Bonita on the trips across if anything at all.  Once at the island we'd usually catch Perch.  All of it was very tasty.

Our favorite harbor in Catalina is appropriately named "Cat Harbor" or Catalina Harbor, and it's on the backside of the Island.  We'd sometimes go from Cherry Cove to Emerald Bay then around the fantastic spur of rock that marks the West End of the Island and down the backside to Cat Harbor which truly opens up before you like gates because the entrance is so narrow.  Anchorage was good in Cat Harbor thanks to the soft, silty ocean floor.  The water was always cloudy here.  I once dropped a stringer full of baited hooks into the water and caught the whole stringer full of mackrel in seconds so there was definitely a lot of life down in that brown-green swirling seawater.  We always stayed at Cat Harbor the longest.  Enjoying the short walk across to the Isthmus for a fine dinner or an afternoon of beach time or hiking.  Often though we'd just swim or walk up a nearby mountain.  We hiked the peak rising just southwest of the entrance to Cat Harbor several times.  It's face drops hundreds of feet nearly straight into the roaring Pacific.  All wild Ocean out here—unending and vast, bending at the corners of vision. You're most aware of the curve of the Earth when you're out at sea. 

One of the most powerful, best sails we ever had was coming back from Catalina in a fog.  My dad was all high on this new "reaching spinaker" that they had just gotten for Retriever, and we decided to set it even though he admitted it was a bit much for the small boat.  We screamed across the channel with perfect wind, my dad alone holding the tiller while my brother and I ran the decks and ropes and my mom huddled in her jacket.  It was a cold crossing.  It was rough enough that waves occasionally sprayed over the bow, but not so rough as to slow down the boat.  My dad sent me up to the bow at one point to untangle something or other, and up I went holding onto the side railings and had just decided to make my move for the bow when the boat lurched , sending me flying forward.  I caught the anvil head of a tie-down and stopped myself from sliding right through the bars and over the side.  I had almost gotten hurled into the sea.  This scared me but I remember feeling proud that I'd risked it boy—for the ship, the crew!—so we can keep hammering across this channel!

And after about two hours we were still flying along, and it was still grey and totally socked in clouds and fog, and suddenly I thought I heard something.  For the next several minutes it was a debatable mystery but then it finally got loud enough for everyone to hear, and we all agreed that it was the light house at the breakwater for the harbor.  "But it's only been two hours we can't possibly be near enough to hear it," my dad said, "I don't believe it."  And there he'd been the whole time just holding the tiller with nothing but a compass bearing to go on and still we charged on in the fog and he kept us on the lookout for the breakwater and after another good half hour or so we mystically glided right through the opening in the breakwater.  My dad had guided us across over 20 miles of stormy sea in powerful winds, (addicted I could tell to the speed, power and efficiency of such good sailing) and he'd just kept hanging on and somehow brought us right through in the perfect spot.

~

The memories I have of playing piano are so old that I hardly have them—I must have been three when I started—or maybe five—yes, five it was, because I played for two years, won a trophy at this competition where parents dragged their kids to display their talent in boring drab rooms where boring drab judges either awarded or dismissed them (so young an age to be judged like that!) and I won this trophy and promptly quit playing piano.  And I know I was seven by then.  My dad was all too happy to think of some new instrument that might entertain my fancy, and he picked the cello.  I remember being skeptical.   Why do I have to pick anything?  But I went with it—and went with it for the next ten years it turned out—and it may have been this musical childhood that cultivated a sense of the big picture—an early understanding of life beyond childhood—but then again, I don't really know because damn I was just a kid and I couldn't formulate such advanced thoughts as these—but cello was a beautiful instrument, and I did love the sound, and I was "talented", so I kept playing.

While many kids were consumed by school, friends, homework, and current fashion/culture trends, I had my cello—the weekly lessons, the daily practicing, yearly competitions and recitals.  At performances I would dress in a suit and tie, my very own, greeting the older crowd as respectfully as I could.  If I had just played I would accept their compliments with a terribly shy thank you.  I would listen in on their conversations, as my parents mingled with friends and, if I was really bold, try adding a thought or two of my own—afterall, I read the paper, I knew what was going on.  I watched as my brother performed with full symphony orchestras, won competitions, gave recitals, and became a highly regarded young pianist.  People seriously garnering autographs from him because they thought someday he would surely be famous.  A "child prodigy," they called him, and he was an awesome pianist.  I remember vividly a performance of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue when he was "older", still a young teenager and he just seemed to rock, sway, flow, cry, and scream accompanied by a fine orchestra, his foot flying up off the floor, dancing off the pedals, the conductor watching intently, carefully, matching his emotions and Eric watching the conductor too even as he was fully overwhelmed and letting himself run across the keyboard.  Do I just feel this because we are brothers, I wondered, but then the crowd literally erupted into a standing ovation—and there's my brother, in his young teens, bowing endlessly to hundreds of people thundering their applause and calls for an encore—amazing.

  Then I seemingly watched as I followed him, guided by my parents.  I began performing just as he had, winning competitions and playing with orchestras, even twice appearing on the Disney Channel.  Really a lot of little kids go through this system guided by their parents.  You're forced to be serious and practice and care about what your'e doing.  If you happen to display special talent, then you are pushed even more to take your playing seriously.   So music—the people, the performances, the upcoming competitions, goals for the future, all of it—became my reality.  I had the sense that I knew what the "real world" would be beyond school and homework, and in fact, it was already beginning to happen.  I officially became a professional musician at 15 when I was accepted into the Debut Orchestra as its youngest member—everyone else was in college, or graduate school.  For many years I accepted that I would be a career musician.  I grew up thinking, music, now that's real, that's life, but school, that's just education, that's just where I have to go, and there was a clear distinction between the two.  Music was my outlet—and even now remains an outlet—as I pick up my guitar and pen and paper.  It is the plight of a musician, an artist—you must play—there is no choice, there is no decision—performing is the expression of the players soul.  Gary Snyder, in his incredible collection of essays Practice of the Wild, writes of what can occur "beyond training" for an artist: "If there is a next step, it is to "go beyond training" for the final flower, which is not guaranteed by effort alone.  There is a point beyond which training and practice cannot take you.  Zeami, the superlative fourteenth-century Noh drama playwright and director who was also a Zen priest, spoke of this moment as 'surprise.'  This is the surprise of discovering oneself needing no self, one with the work, moving in disciplined ease and grace...At this point one can be free, with the work and from the work."  That spontaneous thing that just flows untamed, uncontrolled from your spirit—surprising even yourself—sparkling out of the ripples of the unconscious.

It was clear to me that Thoreau firmly believed everyone should follow their dreams—that anything else was obedience to a worthless system, a worthless culture of machines.  And when we got to the conclusion of Walden, we came to one of his finest passages which would rest subtly within my conciousness, giving me strength when I needed it during the big changes to come in my life:

I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.  He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.  In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.  If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be.  Now put the foundations under them.

At one time playing the cello formed those castles, but increasingly it didn't.  Obviously, I'd never come around to it on my own, and so I'd never actually dreamed about playing it, or dreamed about being a musician—I just ended up one.  I was beginning to realize that I just didn't like the idea of somehow remaining a slave to a way of life I'd never actually chosen.  Usually my dreams wandered to skiing in the mountains, or sailing the world, maybe being an artist—painting with oil paints—and I will admit to sometimes dreaming about being the next Yo-Yo Ma.  For awhile I took a Saturday morning paint class with a wild powerful woman named Janet who could scold you to the bone, sending you to the back chalk board to draw elipses and "get your damn elipses right" and then the next Saturday look over your shoulder and say something that might make you feel like a new Van Gogh or something—she had wit that woman, sharp as a tack, and a good painter to boot.  My art classes lasted three years or so, and I completed about three paintings and then, for some reason I forget now, I decided I was done.

Throughout childhood I had an overwhelming desire to fast forward to adulthood, so I could finally decide things for myself, on my own.  Really I just wanted to be big and tall like my parents were, so I could reach things on the upper shelf.  One day, when I was still really young, I was wishing to be an adult so bad that while I stood in the bathroom to take a leak, I remembered the saying: Life's gonna pass in a blink of an eye, and so I closed my eyes and held them closed extra long, telling myself that if that's true I should surely be able to open my eyes and be an adult.  Of course I was disappointed to see just the toilet waiting when my eyes opened, but then I'd sort of known that would happen anyway, and I reminded myself to enjoy being a kid since adults always talked about youth so whimsically and nostalgically, and had strange kitchen hot pads that said: "39 Forever!" 

For the next few years, I just kept along the same old path, wondering where I would end up.  I did get an incredible rush out of performing with my cello—I was laying my soul out there, crying with the composer and laughing with him, and frustrated with good teen-angst to top it off.  I fought with my parents about practicing quite often, sort of like laying seige to a medieval castle—you dig-in and commit to it for the long haul and hope that at some point they'll just run out of the energy to fire back and give up.  I threatened to quit at least a few times—one time even feeling fairly sure of myself for a day or so, but then my dad showed me a tape of one of my great performances with orchestra and I felt ashamed and returned to practicing. 

During my eleventh-grade year my brother and I headed into a Lake Tahoe book store, on Christmas vacation, to buy each other a gift.  We perused the shelves idly—I always felt a little embarrassed in book stores because I didn't know the names of very many authors, unlike my brother who always seemed to know who was good, or who was just bestseller list crap, his friend Steven and him were some sort of literary experts it seemed, and I wished I could be.  But both of us were struggling to find something, and interestingly we ended up walking out of there with very similar books.  I finally saw an author I'd heard of, and knew that I'd heard reference to this exact book as a classic of American literature, a classic of philosophical musings about life, but I didn't really know much about it—it was On the Road, by Jack Kerouac.  Eric, maybe a little inspired by my choice, picked up The Beat Reader, a compilation of Beat generation writings that included a lot of Kerouac and others.

That night, back at my family's new vacation home in Kirkwood—built and designed by our neighbor's kid, Kevin, who used to baby sit my brother and I, and who became an architect and ski bum in Salt Lake City, and (I'm going to digress here a bit because it's important) really my mom and dad went over the barrel to finish the Kirkwood house, and I was there with my brother, pushing up walls, and complaining about moving sheets of plywood, but showing up every morning at eight at the site, and then having a several day stretch where my mom and dad and brother all left, my dad handing me some cash to get by on, (he'd return soon) and it was just me and the workers, and I got to understand them and relate to their simple lives in the mountains, and I walked out in the frosty meadow of Kirkwood alpenglow dusk on the Red Cliffs, and I stared into the creek and knew then and there that I really loved the mountains—we had an afternoon of launching potatoes out of some employee housing complex called the ghetto in the meadow, and we had late nights in the local bar, the Inn, where Kevin would swing from the rafters all laughing on beer—I thought it was great and good fun.  All I could drink was Coca-Cola, by the pitcher, but they were drinking beer by the pitcher, and I ran around with them, and fished in the creeks and looked at meteor showers, and for a short time, I felt something of what real adult life might be in these wild valleys in the mountains where it seemed all people did was have fun—and now I see how that was really my beginning, running around with those mountain carpenters who just skied all winter, pounding nails all summer and doing it again and again, year after year. 

But back to that night, Christmas vacation, in the jaw-dropping valley of Kirkwood Meadows, California, a place that would become my spiritual home—the place where I first opened Kerouac's book. 

*

Lumbermen in their winter camp, daybreak in the woods,

            stripes of snow on the limbs of trees, the occasional snapping,

The glad clear sound of one's own voice, the merry song,

            the natural life of the woods, the strong day's work,

The blazing fire at night, the sweet taste of supper, the talk,

            the bed of hemlock-boughs and the bear-skin...

                                                                        —Walt Whitman, Song of the Broad-Axe

*

Watching the snow fall, I stretch my lower back—twisting and arching, moaning and groaning.  Only half way through the first day of wood splitting and I’m feeling worked from leaning over the noisy splitter and heaving the large rounds into place.  I wish I could split it all silently by hand, the crack of the ax thudding like falling pine cones in the forest, but I can’t.  I have seven quards or more to split if I want to survive the winter, so I am slave to noisy crunching machinary.  It reminds me of long afternoons spent by the splitter in Rock Creek Canyon, striking marks on the side of it for each horsefly we killed, sweating in the hot sun, checking our watches for the time when we'd be off and could go walking into the wild.  For the moment, thankfully, the roar of this Big Springs splitter is gone from my ears, and I can enjoy the quiet snowflakes as they place themselves on pine needles and tree limbs, spraying patterns in the duff of the forest floor.  The first snow of the season is always so beautiful, so wonderfully unexpected.  The bite of winter in the air, the frost of breath, the cold burning my lungs.  Numbness enters fingertips and toes, and pretty soon snot begins its drip cycle from my nose.  I love this time of anticipation—the waiting—the soft, brief blankets of Fall storms.

Surveying the mountainous pile of rounds to be split, I see how much snow there will be—to burn all of this wood—and I think ahead to the next eight months skiing to and from this cabin, living alone in the woods.  Plenty of people will visit, and I'll go out to town often enough, but still, only the silence and emptiness of the cabin will greet me when I get home, only the grains of wood will listen if I chance to speak.

Stepping back up to the splitter, we bend and heave, split and ho, pieces of lodgepole, jeffrey, red and white fir, and I notice how familiar it feels—being involved in the process of what will heat my cabin and cook my food all winter.  This is what we did at Little Lakes Lodge in the fall, just on a much larger scale—stacking wood at all of the 15 cabins as well as the lodge building and the kitchen.  We didn't cook with it there though, just heat.  It's a familiarity with being out here in the light fall snow of October getting hands roughed up and sticky with sap.  Like I'm continuing a common history of humanity.  Like a contemporary mule-packer tying a load and sinching knots in the same way as old mule-skinners over a hundred years before.  It's just one of those things that hasn't changed.  In the mountains the seasons of each passing year exist in profound detail, and you're forced to live by them.  In my circumstance, here in the Sierra, it means I must get this wood split and as much food stockpiled as my broke pocketbook can afford before the first big snow—because it snows over 300 inches a winter right here, and it can sometimes start with eight feet all at once.  The coming of the snow means the coming of isolation.  No more driving in and out.  Thinking about all this I realize how used to it I've become, this feeling of being sort of pushed around by the seasons.  Only now, it's heightened by the newness of my situation—nervousness about a winter of solitude adding energy to each passing moment.

We start early the next morning, moving around in three inches of snow.  The splitter must be returned by mid-day or the resort will be charged for another days rental, so we move fast, only quartering the last couple quards, literally throwing rounds onto the splitter, cracking them and throwing them away while a fresh round gets tossed on and split—sweating in the cold, as many as three of us huffing and puffing—and then suddenly it's time—we catch our breath within these new mountains of split wood, dust ourselves off and feel glad for a job well done.

~

"You'll carry the jam, so be careful Carl, because it's a glass jar."  My dad said as he gave me this all important task.  It was going to be our first real backpack trip, heading to Glen Aulin outside of Tuolumne Meadows.  It would interesting now to take the walk again and see how much I remember.  I do know that I was careful not to slip and fall or sit on the glass jar of jam.  I felt important as a "tough little tike" for taking on this responsibility.  We hiked through woods and among granite, and through the haze of childhood memory we crossed a creek on a bridge and camped out on our own along a river.  We were camped on a sort of island next to the rushing water.  My dad wasn't one for camping where everyone else did so he'd found this special spot.  He noticed a metal bear pole across the river and would hop scotch from rock to rock across the rushing water to hang our food bag from it every night.  It was out here that I learned the wonderful taste of a hearty thick cracker (like Rye Krisp or Wasa or something) spread with jam.  Everything tasted so good out in the woods.  And sleeping so close to the rushing water, with no one around that I remember seeing—it all remains a wonderful mystical memory of my first true mountain experience.  I'm sure my dad would remember some crying or some tantrum—kids are so prone to such wasteful things—like our extreme brilliance of uninhibited Raw Mind must be balanced somehow.

Memory is an interesting thing.  What it chooses becomes the overall sensations of our lives.  We re-live them over and over, tell them to people, get excited about them around campfires—exaggerating them in better and better detail as they age.  A random situation, or phrase in a book might catch us suddenly realizing something we did as a young child that was so indicative of where and how we lived our lives now.  I've just remembered how I used to hide down in the forward bunk of Retriever whenever we'd pull up to a mooring because I hated the briefly stressful moments of my dad and older brother pulling that difficult mooring line out of the water while trying not to let it go accidentally or drift into a neighboring boat—and I laugh about it now realizing how I still avoid stress, and conflict—prefering everything to just be easy and calm and placid, like the moment immediately following the yanking up of a mooring line, when you've just finished tying into it, and suddenly it's time to go swimming. 

~

On the Road had me by the heart from the first page to the last, and all I could wish for was that it would just keep going.  I didn't want to return to the life I was living.  I felt I could disappear into Kerouac's fantastic vibrating world of life and spirit and soul—and I realized then that I desperately wanted to live, not follow any guidelines, or set rules of society, not pursue "success", not conform to such dreariness—I wanted freedom!  I started to question my musical career—I was supposed to recognize my talent and desire to further it, but I still struggled with having to do it versus wanting.

Now there was this new voice of Kerouac running off spontaneously about life, confirming that there was in fact life out there in America, I just had to find it, create it, live it.  On the Road was really an incredible awakening—it had breath like a jazz solo, and spoke and sung like fabulous poetry.  I looked around me hopeful to find my piece of America, to find my inspiration—the searching in my soul just exploded. 

My best friend at the time was a kid named Jordan.  We'd found each other through a great little class that was part of Crossroad's curriculum, called Mysteries.  It was a sit-in-a-circle-and-talk class, so we shared who we were, what we loved, etc.  The teachers were more like friends—they didn't really care if you didn't show up to class, and they didn't care at all what you talked about if you were there, as long as it was real and true and honest, and it was such a free class that I'm amazed I didn't somehow learn how to open up more and be myself and talk damnit—instead I just listened.

 But through this class Jordan and I discovered that we both were absolutely obsessed with skiing.  And the partnership of our interest grew into total fanaticism.  I thought it was amazing, truly a miracle, that I could've possibly found anyone who liked skiing as much as I did.  Someone who cared about Powder Magazine.  My obsession with skiing, with the ski bum cultural ideal, with the wildness of big mountains grew tremendously now that I had someone to share it with.

During my eleventh grade year we began frequenting the Santa Monica Pier and a particular pool table located in the back of Rusty's Surf Ranch.  We got to know the people there so well they eventually started slipping us the key so we could unlock the table and play for free.  We'd order our requisite baskets of fries and rack up game after game for hours.  A TV hung from a corner of the room, and it was always on the sports channel, so we'd get distracted by excerpts of ski videos, or recent ski races.  Basically those long afternoons around worn green tables, in the atmosphere of the bar, was all just a stage on which to contemplate our feelings and thoughts about life and skiing.  We felt older there.  I was establishing another reality outside of school, and now outside of music as well.  We got pretty good at shooting pool, and occasionally played at the weekly Monday night tournament.  I remember one afternoon I played for hours with an older drunk who was an excellent pool player, and also a philosophical rambler.  He told me about games he'd won by sinking the eight ball on the break using a special technique, or games where he'd run the table from the first shot, and interspersed this stuff with life philosophy, and we played game after game during all this—I even left my car (really my mom's old Toyota Camery) parked at an expired parking meter, and got a ticket because I couldn't leave (drunk ramblers have a way of never letting you go), and though it's hard for me to remember exactly what advice I came away with that evening, I do remember feeling fate tapping on my shoulder, another voice in the wind saying, go Carl, go—

*

Above the mesa the sun hangs behind streaks and streamers of wind-shipped clouds.  More storms coming. But for the time being, around my place at least, the air is untroubled, and I become aware for the first time today of the immense silence in which I am lost.  Not a silence so much as a great stillness—for there are a few sounds: the creak of some bird in a juniper tree, an eddy of wind which passes and fades like a sigh, the ticking of the watch on my wrist—slight noises which break the sensation of absolute silence but at the same time exaggerate my sense of the surrounding, overwhelming peace.  A suspension of time, a continuous present.  If I look at the small device strapped to my wrist the numbers, even the sweeping second hand, seem meaningless, almost ridiculous.  No travelers, no campers, no wanderers have come to this part of the desert today and for a few moments I feel and realize that I am very much alone.

There is nothing to do but return to the trailer, open a can of beer, eat my supper.

      ` —Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

*

I wake at six a.m., groggy in the dark cabin and warm bed.  Pulling the curtain aside, I look out, and immediately see why it is so dark: there's a couple of inches of snow on the ground, and it's snowing heavily.  Quickly out of bed, I hurry into the sunroom to get a better look.  Seeing the pile of snow stacking up on my car immediately gets me in gear and I make a short to-do list.  While the coffee brews I head across the yard to the shed, get a small roll of fiberglass insulation, and bring it back to the cabin.  Starting behind the cabin I put insulation into all the new wood boxes guarding access to various valves of the water system.  I don't think it'll really matter since the rest of the pipes aren't buried very deep, but I do it anyway, hoping the storm drops a good amount of snow to insulate the rest of the shallow plumbing.  Finishing that, I warm up back inside around my cup of coffee before stacking the last of the wood I need to stack under the porch.  The cabin looks like some fortress of stacked wood, all tarped in blue—so much wood you can hardly see the cabin itself anymore.

Now I'm ready to go.  This is it, that moment I’ve been waiting for, when the snow finally flies and everyone is forced to leave, and I am left surrounded by endless solitude, surrounded by powder snow.  This sensation fills me with energy as I slip and grip my way out of the valley in four wheel drive.  This is the last time I'll drive my car for months.  I watch the flakes pound earthward, cloaking the forest, the road, my windshield, and start to think that I should be done dropping off my car already and just be kicking back, enjoying the storm.  On top of the pass, I realize that not only would this be nice, it may be mandatory.  Two-inches-an-hour snowfall is layering onto six inches of fresh, and I slide head-on into a new berm built across the road by a plow.  After rocking out of it in four-low, I roll my window down and talk to the plow driver, who's been watching the whole thing from the parking lot a hundred feet away.  "Suprise, huh?"  He says smiling and laughing a bit.  "Yeah," I respond, "uh I'm the caretaker down there, and I'm going to drop off my car in town and get a ride back down before it gets too nasty," realizing as I say it, that it already is nasty.  He laughs, but I tell him that really the road isn’t bad, and that if he could just hold off berming the road any further I can get back in.  "Well, I was told to berm the road, but I can talk to 'em."  "Thanks, I should be back by eleven or twelve or so, mid-day."  "Ok." 

Driving into town I realize I'm an idiot for thinking there's any way I’m driving my car 45 miles away to the desert where I plan to leave it for the winter—I’ll never make it back in time.  I swing by a good friend's house and give them the scoop: "It’s not good."  My friend Dave and I figure we can take my car back down, and he can drive it out—his wife's pickup is too light for the wet snow—and in a few days they'll shuttle it down to the owners property in the desert.  We call John, another friend will be good in case we get stuck.  We go back up the road and a different John—a summer ranger for the Park Service down in the valley whom I'd just met briefly the other night (he'd said "Come on by, we bar-b-q, and have a good time")—is parked in front of the snow berm with a big Dodge four wheel drive with chains on all four tires.  He tells us he still needs to pick up a worker down in the valley, and not seeing the plow, we all start digging, almost clearing a spot through the berm by the time the plow comes ripping through the parking lot (same driver as before, smiling) and clears the berm for us.  I ride down with Park Service John and my landcruiser goes back to town with my friends.  The snow is still dumping out of the sky when John drops me off at my cabin—we had a good easy talk during the drive—"Hope you have a good winter, I'll stop by and say hi if I snowshoe down."

Three or four more inches of snow have fallen since I left, and I look around bursting with energy, yet nervous with solitude, and stumped by the aching silence.  I stoke a fire in the cabin to boil water for tea, and warm things up further with sounds from the stereo.  A little Grateful Dead, live at the Fillmore East, in April of 1971 oughta do nicely.  Sitting down in the sunroom, I pack a bowl into my pipe, and watch a new existence settle in flake by flake.

*

I suppose if I look back (or down, as the case may be), my being here isn't all that accidental.  I can see now that the way I was raised and what I was raised to believe probably prepared me for where I am now, high in a tree, with few possessions and plenty of convictions.  I couldn't be here without some deep faith that we all are called to do something with our lives—a belief I know comes directly from my parents...even if that path leads us in a different direction from others.

—Julia "Butterfly" Hill, The Legacy of Luna

*

I walked into my parents room one evening and simply announced to my mother, who was lying there reading in bed, "I quit."  And I went back to my room to figure out what that meant, leaving my mother there to think wow, and maybe it's just my imagination to think she might've smiled had she not been married to my father and linked to all his efforts at my musical career—she being a writer, an english literature teacher (once teaching in Compton, and being threatened by a student),  an Administator involved in progressing the teaching techniques of the Whittier Union High School District—maybe she had secretly always hoped I'd dump that damn cello and take up painting or writing or something beyond the stuffy world of auditoriums and handshakes, suits and ties—something she could really relate to and enjoy.  And through the ensuing fights that I had with my parents about quitting cello, my mother was always the kindest and most understanding.  She really believes in what the renown thinker and writer Joseph Campbell describes as "following your bliss" and so she supported me when at all possible (usually when my dad was out of the room). 

What gives my mother so much serenity and wisdom, I think, is what also causes her so much pain.  In 1986 she was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis.  Just like her own mother.  She recalls having her first attack as young as 18.  But the doctors dismissed it then.  I can imagine how hard it would hit me to be diagnosed with MS after watching my mother go through it, but I only imagine.  She has had to live it.  The emotional fortitude, and strength she has displayed in handling the disease is nothing short of awesome.  As a child I don't remember ever seeing her depressed, or sad.  It was the opposite.  She lifted her chin high to respond to you with a smile on her face, and she still does.  She loves conversation, books and a hearty laugh and has an hilarious wit.  Her favorite word is "Thicket", because of how it sounds, how it rolls off your tongue, and the fine image of it.  It makes me smile to think: I live in a Thicket.  A deep thicket of old growth forest.  I feel that somehow her strength of character (and certainly her love of books, writing, and laughing) was born into me, then taught by example, and ultimately formed into the backbone of my resolve to pursue my dreams, my bliss. 

My next cello lesson I showed up without my cello and went through the painful process of telling my teacher of several years, Jenny Goss, that I would not be taking lessons anymore.  Jenny was surprised and disturbed, and reminded me of my talent, but she was also supportive.  She knew I'd always really just wanted to be a "normal" kid with the normal amount of freedom kids have who don't have to practice an instrument every day.  She was kind, caring, and a great teacher—she worried that somehow she'd bored me out of music by not being stimulating enough.  But I told her that was not true at all, that she didn't have anything to do with it.  Quitting cello was simply my response to an unquenchable desire to pursue my dream of skiing and living in the mountains, and that was all. 

I continued playing in the Crossroads orchestra but word spread quickly that I was no longer taking lessons—something nearly incomprehensible.  Friends asked me why, and were confused when I tried to explain my quest to be a ski bum.  They laughed.  We'd all sort of bonded with the common direction of being young musicians, so they just didn't understand it.  The conductor of the orchestra thought it might have to do with financial reasons, and questioned me strongly about anything that could be done to get me to continue playing.  There was nothing, I told him.  I even ran away when they tried to get a respected cellist from the L.A. Philarmonic to talk to me, a man who had coached a chamber music group I'd been in—he even offered to be my teacher if that's what I needed.  But I told them that I needed nothing except to be free of my musical burden. 

There was an assistant conductor of the orchestra that was the only surprisingly supportive voice—he told me I'd make a great bass guitarist, and that I should try it—he knew I just wanted to rock, to share, to laugh around a fire and sing songs, somehow, goddamn it he knew that!—and he happened to be an openly gay, black, great wonderful man named James who lived, at least when I knew him, in a fine house that'd been in his family that was right in the gut of Los Angeles. It was like you could feel the beast beyond the walls, but within, there was harmony and music and life and we'd rehearsed chamber music there a few times, a brief quartet group of ours and we'd all become friends, playing serious damn music, some wild stuff, contemporary and vivid, elastic and spontaneous, off beat chaos that found ways to synchronize beautifully—we thought it was classical music's answer to rock music, and flipped the lights off in the auditorium when we finally performed, all dressed in black and blew everyone out of their seats with a precise, total blackness start to an insane piece of music.  James had spent time in the mountains, he had skied and cross-country skied in Colorado, and knew Kerouac and Thoreau, and smiled at me when I told him all I knew in terrible words that were so basic and rough—he knew I was finding something, and he'd say yeah, yeah, god I miss the mountains, and convey that he knew there was wisdom there.  He'd had to leave it, his soul had needed to try to fix things, help out with society—to teach.  It was good to have a positive friend there in the orchestra amongst all the negativity, amongst all the others who were drifting away on their roads to musical careers.  A friend who appreciated the strength I had to even try this crazy new idea of being a ski bum, a Thoreau woods bum, a Kerouac bum of mountains—to quit cello after 10 serious years of awards, and notoriety—it was no small frie.  "I'm telling you Carl, try the bass guitar, you might thank me someday."  Words I remember fondly because he was mostly right—though I am not a professional musician, and I don't play bass guitar (yet), I've found a rich, strong love in the mix of harmonica, acoustic guitar, and song writing.

I remember a particularly bad argument in my parents room—I say "particularly bad" because there were many that year—they told me I would not be able to finish high school at Crossroads because it wasn't worth the cost if I was quitting cello—it cost several thousand a year to send me there even with scholarship.  I tried to explain why I was quitting, but the terminology was so simple, the ideas so new, basically all I could say was that I wanted to be a ski bum because I was a really good skier and I just had to know what would happen if I dedicated myself to it and skied everyday all winter.  I didn't know how to express that this was my "castle in the air", and that I desperately needed to start working on the foundation.  The ideas weren't wrapped in such philosophical statements or quotations from Thoreau, all of that was bottled up in my mind, they were just simple seventeen year old dreams of freedom.  I wanted to go live in the mountains and ski and I thought I knew what that all could mean, but my dad told me very bluntly: "A ski bum?! What is that?!  You'll be nothing, Carl, nothing, you're throwing everything you have away—do you realize the talent you have, do you realize what people would give to have the talent you have, and you're just going to throw it away!"  It should be noted that he was not alone in saying this.  I was surrounded by a chorus of voices saying the same thing, each in their own way. 

The fight happened to occur the night before going up to Kirkwood for Spring Break, and Jordan was sitting across the hall in my room flipping through Powder Magazine, he was coming along with us to go skiing.  I walked back to my room with tears in my eyes, a tremble in my voice, and grabbed my skis, looking at them as if for an answer.  Jordan could hear all that went on and gave me a hug, I told him I would be alright, "This is what it's all about, right?" I said as I snapped my skis together to carry them out to the car—and in those days, just skiing was like an answer, a light, a candle in the window of my struggle—someday I will prove to them that I am right, I told myself.

I was very fortunate to know a few different outdoorsy folks working in the Outdoor Education department at Crossroads and I began asking them about finding a job in the mountains of the Sierra.  The most progressive program at Crossroads, in my opinion, was their Outdoor Education requirements.  For most of the time I was there, students were required to choose two trips from an incredible list of trips—including rock climbing in Joshua Tree, to backpacking in Baja, to rafting a particular section of the Colorado river, to a May ascent of Mt. Whitney—during our four years of highschool.  Without doing two E.O.E. (Environmental Outdoor Education) trips, you could not graduate.  And it was on those E.O.E. trips that I learned to rock climb, in Joshua Tree and in The Needles, from a mountain guide named Todd Vogel whom I would years later find myself working for as a porter in the Sierra.  It wasn't so much the trips themselves that confirmed my dream of the mountain life, but more what I saw of the guides and people who led the trips.  Their spirit was contagious, and they were a lively bunch.  It was that feeling of "hilarious life" told around a mountain fire with the dry humor of a mountain guide, that gave me a picture in my mind of what my life could be. 

I'd enjoyed the trips so much, that I'd developed some friendship with the other employees in the program.  So I had these folks to turn to in my quest for a job in the mountains.  I could tell they all sort of felt guilty about aiding in my "going astray", and weren't sure if they should help this great cellist give it all up to be a bum.  But eventually I ended up in the office of Steve Tomasini—a man who smiled like an old sage, with a grand white beard and friendly sparkling eyes; even the crackle of his voice was like a campfire—and he made a phone call—just one phone call—which changed my life forever.  He called an old friend of his, "I'll call up Caroline at Little Lakes, see if she needs anyone."  Caroline managed Little Lakes Lodge high in the Sierra backcountry.  Once he got her on the phone, and had finished briefly catching up, he told her "I've got a good kid here in my office right now who needs a job for the summer."  And he handed me the phone and I talked to her.  She described the work: "We've got eight lawns that we mow and rake, and there are a couple summer flush toilets that are cleaned everyday, and we make beds and clean the cabins, and we serve breakfast and dinner in the restaurant so you'll wait tables, and there's also a store where you'll answer the phone and handle reservations."  She said they paid $800.00 a month including room and board, and I almost choked and told her it sounded great.  I asked what elevation the lodge was at and she told me they were at 9,373' and I almost choked again.  I think I even asked if the lodge just sat right up in the mountains, surrounded by peaks, trying for a mental image, and she said yes, and that there were lots of trails to hike on days off.  I was overjoyed.

Steve had once been a part owner in the Lodge's winter operation in the late '70s, and he would later joke that my parents were probably out to get him for turning me on to Little Lakes Lodge.  I wonder how he must've felt that day, connecting me with Caroline, a part of his past, a dazzling memory (I've heard rumor of an old photo of him partying there with two joints hanging out of his nose)—to connect a young bursting soul to those wooded paths he'd once'd tread.  What a powerful thing to do for a kid.  I sent a hand written letter with my school picture pleading further for the job, telling Caroline that I was a desperate ski bum locked in Los Angeles needing badly to escape, and she agreed to hire me.  All of a sudden my dreams had a foothold on the future: my first summer in the Sierra Nevada.

*

There is nothing like stepping away from the road and heading into a new part of the watershed.  Not for the sake of newness, but for the sense of coming home to our whole terrain.  "Off the trail" is another name for the Way, and sauntering off the trail is the practice of the wild.  That is also where—paradoxically—we do our best work.  But we need paths and trails and will always be maintaining them.  You first must be on the path, before you can turn and walk into the wild.

—Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild

*

About a foot of snow has piled up when I head over to the hot spring.  I stand naked in a shower of silver dollar snowflakes before sinking into the steaming pool.  My mind talks as if trying to fill the silence which surrounds me.  The tub is over six feet wide, so I can just float on my back, toes gripping the edge.  Submerging my ears and most of my body brings me into a throbbing silent space—is that the earth beating or just the pulse of blood through my head?  I close my eyes.  I feel as if Time has finally let go of me—nothing matters, nothing exists.  I open my eyes and snow exists falling on my face, trees exist forming a halo through which I see grey cloud existing.  I exist.  But somehow I feel like I don't.

After several years living in the mountains, I can hardly keep track of how I got here, how I ended up floating in this hot spring?  I feel an overwhelming sense of a single dream exploding into so much more, and slowly living through that explosion, while I feel less and less like I'm following any dreams at all, and more and more like I'm creating dreams to follow.  Like this cabin for instance.  I dreamed about Thoreau, but I never really dreamed I'd actually have the chance to isolate myself alone in the woods like this—I just never thought this far ahead to the possibilities.  Then the opportunity presented itself, and I took it, and am now in the process of trying to decide whether the reality of such isolation was really ever a dream of mine needing to be fulfilled.  By trying to add this heavy new weight of reality onto my original dream to move to the mountains, I am testing whether that original dream will support it.  I feel like this new path of isolation is forcing me to renew my questioning of my life—I'm worried about what the point of it all has been if it has led me here—alone in a cabin in the woods.  But this is Paradise, Carl, look around, YOU'RE FLOATING IN YOUR OWN HOT SPRING FOR CHRISTSAKES!  But I'm frightened already, even in this bliss, about how different paradise feels when you are experiencing it all by yourself.  Friends matter a lot I realize now, but I try to push beyond that, saying that it will be good for me.  I will write, I will read, and mostly, I'll ski my little ass off.  Over the last several years as I've experienced more and read more, I've added strength to that original dream that tossed me out into the river of these mountains—I've felt confirmed.  But this new solitude is the hardest thing it's faced yet—the heaviest load it's had to bear.  What is a dream, and how does it become a "calling" in life?  How do I actually build foundations for castles in the air?  These thoughts swirl in the throbbing silence of my submerged ears.

It feels so natural, so normal to be surrounded by a mountain wilderness.  I certainly thrive on the calming power of the natural environment—it keeps me straight in this bent new millenium.  As I float and sink to the rhythm of my breath, I imagine an artist who acknowledges the meaningless of their work and yet continues with it anyway—the defiant magnificence of their need to express.  That's how I feel about my life.  The wilderness shows you how small, how truly meaningless you are because it lifts the barrier of separation between human and animal.  And yet I still feel this need of importance, of expression, of purpose.  I still feel a strong need to validate my original dream of the mountains with something profound.  I tell myself that moving with the seasons, living simply, and going on wild adventures is purpose enough.  I tell myself that living alone down here this winter is purposeful just for it's opposition to the very unisolated, globalized world going on around me.  I tell myself a lot of these things to try to make them feel true.  But then they hit the silence of solitude, the vast sea of the future, and collapse back into worry and doubt.  I hope this winter will bring me clarity.  So much empty time will have to cultivate some new understanding.  I just keep asking myself, why have I chosen this isolation?  But even as I question it, it somehow feels like I've demanded it.  But what am I here for? My thoughts hit the throbbing silence of my submerged ears again.  You're just a new winter caretaker for a summer pack station, my mind responds, relax.  But I'm moving away like Thoreau, like a hermit—is this really what I dreamed about, what about my friends?  My mind just tells me: relax, take it easy, absorb into the moment, set adrift your thoughts of the future and the past and just enjoy the present—set yourself adrift Carl. 

I sit up in the pool, I need a more active silence to quiet my head—the creek rushing, a chickadee singing, wind in the forest.  I still feel like there is something I'm trying to put my finger on so I can be through with it. You're only 23, you can't answer this yet.  But such silence seems to demand answers.

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