Mountains, Valleys, Cyclones, Suitcases

It began in a valley that was enclosed by verdant mountains
Oaks and maples that hugged tightly to the precious safe low spaces
As an adoring mother might with her brood of precious babes.
In the vale sat this wooden porch, large, ringed with rockers that blocked you a fast paced entrance
Up into a long ranch house, into fireplaces, grub, tables, rooms, it was inviting from the start.
It felt like East Tennessee set into Wyoming because the sky was so big
But it hugged like it would in those eastern ways
The feeling was Appalachian /West.

I sat awhile, with a camera swinging around my neck as the place
Became filled with so many children in their love of exploring and friends mostly 4th graders
Ten years of time to learn to notice the lay of this land, yet they felt as campers.
Excited and alive.
I felt as if playacting now the role of a camp counselor hired on.
Funny the way dreams are so real pulling pieces of our lives, rearranging.

Rocking away out back on this ranch, there was a different kind of porch, a roofless one,
The numbers of children coming to stay awhile grew so large and my sense of responsibility grew.
Oh, yes, I need to take the pictures for the camp albums.
Thinking suddenly to make pictures of their adventures, as part of my job.
They posed laughing, putting arms around each other, bunny fingers on heads, down the most beautiful vale that a dreamer has ever placed into a mind.
Great camp.
Saw happily my student Eunique there. Her friends.

It has faded from my mind this morning, the why,
But there was a realization that my leaving going on a day trip was important errand,
Was needed to drive urgently over to Preston County, or to the Buckwheat Festival.
Saying it sounds utterly absurd in the mouth.
In a way at this point my dream amused me with that.
I wouldn't have minded waking to a trip like that, eating those cakes.
It was so utterly compelling, to get to that place of my Fall days as a child.

Life surging in the valley cabin, got in my black Honda parked in a lot out front.
Driving out to do this errand my scene was changed as land rose up and flattened.
The car was spotlessly clean, new. Reason to go is gone.
But rested with these children.
I was on a plain, this fallen beautiful one, that is somewhat like my homestate.
Preston County is in West Virginia's hidden away beauty.


I thought in the car, wondering how one got there from here.
Tracing lost memory, fussing with the camera.
Perhaps this was what I needed to do, develop my pictures in that place, or deliver them to some safety, or responsibility of teaching that just was assigned irreverently to me.
Me as gopher.
Or maybe, just going to a newspaper for printing, maybe it's an article about this group in the hills, these moving hills that flatten and go wide.

I drove starting on my way, as the car became realized as a bicycle,
Then the trip became effort, and on this bike my feeling became this was a more responsible way to travel.
More righteous, more wondrous, self talking that through as my adult self needed it.
So it was working hard to reach the turn, down to where I needed to go.
Always thinking I might not really remember the way.
Knowing it might be 50 miles or more to that turn.
Long, long, long going where time would be suspended. But there would be things to see.

The distances were in the miles going on past beautiful green rolling flatlands that still felt up,
Open, with water behind, to the side and ahead rimming this wild fecund place.
Almost as pictures of Ireland might be now. A homeland never seen.
At a crossroad, would turn left and "down," the mind kept repeating this.
I'd fall into forests then and the going would be mostly one of applying brakes, that feeling never left me, the path I was going to need to take.
How it "would be then."
Resting coming after that turn.
So, yes, this part required the effort, but returned it with a beauty.

There was a house sitting as if on a knoll,
It was white, shuttered, painted by Hopper.
It sat, the family it held outside in their vast yard, standing working, playing all apart.
Uncommunicative and closed to my interpretations. Just there.
Stopping (yet going), I asked if this was the way to Preston learning I was going intuitively in the right way. Yes.
But I had looked back to talk, if I could undo anything now it would be that glance.
There gathering at the edge of water you saw in the view were dancing, wicked water spouts,
Further out far far away a mighty cyclone was forming as well,

Then I was in and out mysteriously of their home, spaces
Looking out their windows, trying to get them to see with me, look into the sky.
They had a kind of resistance to comprehending the danger involved for them, the future naught a thought for them.
This sky stretching out was so much larger than we can ever know.
The disproportion of it was startling, the enormity.The blacknesses sucking you down.
It was greater in size than ever contained in thought and filled with angry rolling black clouds in a funnel swallowing the sea.
It was making a water spout near them and then the waters were becoming churned.


So I thought about my biking.
It seemed kind of risky to face that out on a bike.
Could I just go on, beat it?
Started out trying, but I warned them to go in their cellar, they were so childlike now.
Just asking if they should, frustratingly inactive, without self protective instincts.
Setting out for me was cooler now, darker, that rick emerald lighting it gets prior to a dangerous storm.
In front of this house the sky was stretching in front with water there now I realized too, another body.
There is nothing like this near Preston my thought.
I saw the way going be reached over by waters rising from two directions as the pathway was swallowed.
My choice to leave was lost there, gone to the demands now taken on and I had failed to see.

I returned to the house, now as island in seas.
In the house were large picture windows, glassed, where you could watch this turmoil, not safe,
But enclosed. We looked out, there were people in the waters. People.
That was a shocking as any of this.
People that need to be pulled safely in to the shore.
People that had to be saved from drowning in this.

Going down to them at the shore on the green slope,
I realized to go in was to die, yet there was a strange change now of rules of this earth.
That came over my perceptions.
Some, when called by name and encouraged, could come to shore to be taken to the cellar.
The safest spot in an unsafe reality.
This family I wanted to stay there.
Their mom, looking in her thirties helped me with leading them up to it by taking them in.
She made a chart of the names of those out that there floating, treading water,
In the waters that seemed almost a bay holding them in the waves.
(As ever in the distance mind's eye this huge cyclone threatened.)
As I thought to hope it would shift and go another direction,
Nothing of that was sure.

She indicated that we lost a few as I napped for seconds,
I went down this steep incline on green grass, as if it had to be me, to callout their names.
Pulling them by name to safety.
The struggle with winds, earth, cold, to push and pull at forces sucking them under required
Using my will to pull them in. It was only will.
Others in the water echoed that effort.
But their voice was only encouragement from freezing waters.
My responsibility was to do it, but I could not swim out to them, or I'd go under.
Pulled by that.
Just to be to my waist in the waters reaching, reaching, pulling them in and knowing
That we would be bound through this forever.
They had to swim to live and I had to compel that effort of impossibility.
A cyclone was coming anyway.
But my mind would be forever held by those that slipped under, to disappear. My lost.

It was riping me to pieces. Ripping pieces away.
Then she said she no longer spotted a Lisa and that there was no way to see out due to darkness to one that those in the water were frantically calling for.
I pulled in another to the warmth of the cellar and blankets with my heart
Saddening over this fearing for Lisa, a heart being eaten.
Yet going back. Going back down, looking up to wonder
At the coming cyclone, looking out to see my job ahead, to try to find those out there.
Knowing my way to Preston, this day that changed and took me instead here to this
Looking out at the responsibility.
My arm went out and my voice became a shout of the names. Of Amy. Of Lisa.