April 23, 2020 and Today is Shakespeare’s Birthday,

was silent, and I knew which kind of silence this was, and I didn’t like it because the bear was too close and he did not know I was there. Then, I clapped my hands once so loudly the darkness echoed sharply, and I knew from the silence what expression that bear had on his face as he leaned away from me and then barreled down the hill, so close to us that my girlfriend clenched my arm until the nails dug into my skin. The cataclysm-crashing charge of black bears moving in the opposite direction because black bears are the biggest cowards in the East and I love them to death.

For twenty years I walked the forest for hours every day, for twenty years I got closer to the forest, for twenty years it shaped me. Eventually, the forest accepted me, and when it accepted me, it told me its secrets. The forest is my mood when I am with it; the forest is alive, and I live with it; so when the bugs break out in a hoedown in the height of the simmering summer, I join them. Sitting on a stump beneath shafts of sunlight that fall like Jacob’s Ladder in a clearing in the forest, among the fiddlesticks and blueberry bushes, I listen to the rhythms of the scratching in the trunks and tap my foot and hang my head in the haze to doze and groove with the arthropods. This derecho has gotten me closer than I have ever been to the forest, closer than I have ever been to my family, closer than I have ever been to myself.

AFTER SIX DAYS (or more), I cannot sleep. The forest cannot sleep. Nearly 90 degrees at 10 PM when I get out of bed to go for a walk, I know the forest is tired from so many all-nighters, and the walk is surreal. Moonlit contours, a charcoal painting in bad light, stars floating in the smog, when a gunshot goes o in the distance. Then another gunshot, in a part of the forest where no one lives. Standing on a hill in front of an unoccupied building, I listen to gunshots multiply. Sporadic reports of gunfire echo up and down the ravines, and I strain to hear, heat-thickened blood pounding in my ears. I know the sounds of the forest, but sounds that people make here confuse me, because these mountains do strange things to noise, as if to mix up intruders so that they became disoriented and turned around and walked right back out. Echoes and their source overlap in the deep hollows here, and sometimes I can’t tell which has come first, so I do not know where the gun is. When the gunshots stop, the forest is silent, though I do not recognize this silence. The forest is as confused as I am. I shrug at the forest and walk home.

In bed, I lie on my back, naked, staring at the stars, when the gunshots start again at exactly midnight. Multiplying, spreading, filling the forest, I wonder if an impromptu Civil War reenactment is taking place among mountain men whose boredom has finally gotten to them (and I wonder if they need a standard bearer), but then sirens sound in the distance and I know something unusual is afoot. Throwing on a pair of pants, I walk through the woods in the only direction that makes sense. Up and down ravines, through spider webs, past sleeping owls, mashing molehills, sliding down stumps dusted with bug-made sawdust, I walk past ten-foot high barbed wire along the

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border with the neighbor’s (that one who nearly got my sister shot—hence the barbed wire) until I see it. There on the horizon an orange inferno glows, bizarre. Through black silhouettes of trees, light pulses, skies glow in the wilderness of one of the darkest regions of the East.

I sit down in the leaves, astounded, and thoughts that have drifted apart over the last ten (or so) days sluggishly reconnect. I watch, wondering, as the orange glow fades behind the hill, and then I hear laughter. Laughter? Who would be laughing about the biggest shootout the mountains have ever seen? Suddenly, rediscovered facts come together of their own accord, as if God is letting me in on a private joke. June recently ended. It is now early July. My neighbor, who lives a mile up the valley and has always enjoyed extravagance, a man who is a relativist when it comes to law, a man who owns racehorses and once jokingly accused my brother of “stealing” his tadpoles when he found my brother wading barefoot in his creek with a tiny terrarium, has been the victim of a cosmic coincidence. This neighbor has a large barn down the valley, closer to our house than his, and the conflagration has taken place in that approximate location. Like an epiphany firing spark plugs, my mind revives and I know what has happened: my neighbor stored a colossal stockpile of fireworks in that barn and the stockpile ignited in the extreme heat and went o , one-by-one, until a flame hit the motherlode at midnight, exactly when July 4 began. Independence Day, the dawn of the American nation, the spark of a newfound identity, the light of liberty. I suppose it came a little earlier than anticipated for my neighbor friend. All mysteries solved, I walk home, laughing the entire way, thinking clearly for the first time in days and inordinately proud of my country.

When the power comes back on the next day, I stand in front of the air conditioner with my shirt pulled above my shoulders, feeling the cold wind engulf me until my chest is numb. I think about my neighbor, and how Appalachia has managed to get the last word. This wilderness always reclaims its rightful place, when history is forgotten in the forests of Appalachia, as history always is, because Appalachia will never change, because any alteration feels as if it has always been here, as if the past is just a trick of the mind. Life is a circular dream in the mountains, and you forget about everyone else hidden in the nooks and ravines all around you as you wander this temporal milieu, but for that one heat spell in June and July, when the clocks all stopped and everyone forgot their quibbles and quodlibets, we all came together as one in the grocery stores.

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