THE COMET
march 2021
21
comet tales: reader submitted writings Lost River Road
By Faith Merz
I am not the best at writing beginnings. This I know prominently as a symptom of my being - I guess endings have always just made more sense. Maybe it’s the potentiality, maybe it’s the blank page that stares at me in a silent taunting, “what will she do this time?” That makes endings feel more solid and stable. It’s with this trepidation that I clumsily wish to recant a lesson that keeps playing in my mind’s eye. One so profound and real that if I closed my eyes I could, in vivid detail, be able to map out its intricate profile. I’m not sure if lessons have homes or embody physical spaces, but in this particular case it came in the form of a cabin. Big and beautiful with chipping red paint and a green roof that matched the surrounding moss covered oak trees. It was this beauty that I pondered just 3 weeks prior- a Craigslist ad advertising a room for rent, off grid, in the rolling mountains of the Sierra Nevada’s. What, in my mind, made me think I was capable enough to go live on top of a mountain with virtually no experience, I’ll never know. But I do acknowledge the feeling of when my gut began screaming at me. “GO,” it demanded, lest I regret it for the rest of my life. It was with this conviction that I packed up everything I owned in my little bean of a Ford Fiesta and set out to a little town known by the locals as Malakoff Diggins. Population, 178. I recall seeing my new home for the first time, illuminated on its perched hill by a crack of lightning from the ensuing thunderstorm coming in. The pines whistled and whipped, great rolling claps of thunder gave way to the sporadic sounds of hooves from the resident horses nearby. My heart sank - 759 miles I had driven to star in my own personal horror film, the silent cabin loomed at me in the dark - yep, this is where I would surely die. It was there laying wide eyed late into that first evening where reality firmly had begun to set in and my frivolous ideals of frolicking like a woodland nymph soon came to an end. I was for intents and purposes scared shitless. What have I gotten myself into? In retrospect, there are things no one tells you about living away from the rest of the world. Likewise I’ve come to find there are things no one tells you about living life. The ensuing months came on like waves, the rhythms and patterns quietly making themselves known. I quickly became adept at building a fire, more so out of necessity than novelty. Leaves of three let them be became almost a daily mantra as I began to understand that this was the land of poison oak. And I soon became accustomed to the night time scratchings of my possum friend (who I lovingly named Bernard) beneath my floorboards. Mainly, however, I learned how to be quiet. It was in these months that I didn’t speak as much, as if the encompassing stillness held title over my tongue. The lack of which being so foreign to my usual extroverted demeanor that I became increasingly aware of my lack of practice in shutting the fuck up. I had learned the nearest town was a joyous 45 minute drive. A treacherous 1 lane winding road down the side of a canyon, an old mining highway designated for people who had decided to be in the boonies and now me. Trips to town were events and had to be planned, god forbidding you left your wallet at home. Days would pass one after the other and there came a time when I realized I hadn’t spoken to anything other than a tree or a horse in over a week. It was the complete antithesis of what I had known for most of my life. My childhood consisted of billboards and parking meters, concrete sidewalks and rush hour traffic - the lack of noise and companionship was jarring at first.
I began to feel a palpable homesickness that felt like some strange shedding of skin. I was faced with the sheer understanding that I had just spent all of my money to upend my life for this experience and I was firmly alone. I had no idea what to do with myself, no idea what to do with all of that time. Internet and streaming were out of the question given the nature of my new habitat - if I wanted entertainment (I soon discovered) I had to be creative. It was this sense of forced immobility that drew me away from the confines of my cabin and onto the land of which it sat. 1500 acres of preserved oak forests, criss crossed with horse trails that disappeared behind great sprawls of manzanita trees. There was life here, not like the constant noisy deluge that I was used to, but a different more subtle teeming symbiosis that made its presence ever more known. I started to feel more comfortable with the idea of climbing a tree just for the sheer pleasure of feeling moss beneath my skin. I started noticing the mugwort that grew all around the trails on the north end of the property, and the mushrooms that peeped their way out in the golden fall afternoons. I had never known a piece of land as home before, never been able to see natural markers as anything other than a shrub or a bush. In that familiarity I began to feel a form of simplicity that I felt I had long been denied. I sat on a bench lovingly placed between two great oaks one afternoon, a place from which the white caps of Donner could be seen peeking through the forest horizon. The light was golden and warm, one of the last full days of sun before the impending late fall gloom. I recall sitting there and realizing that this place in fact was not silent, rather filled with choruses and symphonies that took a slight fine-tuning to be able to hear. It presented itself in a vernacular that couldn’t be written or spoken, a language that came through the act of listening. It demanded respect, not without its tribulations of course. There were many times I fell asleep in front of my wood stove due to lack of heat, my car when the snow came couldn’t make it up the service road and hiking into the property became necessary. I painstakingly chopped and stacked wood, and realized that rotted oak only served to fill my entire room with smoke when burned. There were times that I wept in the sheer loneliness that I felt, to the alienness that I could no longer relate to my peers who were living such different lives so far away. There were times I felt like praying, there were times that I felt like screaming, there were times that all I could muster was a small whimper at the thought of having to deal with myself. An exchange was made I suppose, something made of blood and sweat and older parts of myself, which the land took and has held ever since. And as I sit here writing this and reflecting on such an experience I realize that maybe I’m not as bad at writing beginnings as I thought. Maybe endings and beginnings are the same thing. Just one continual cycle that constantly refreshes itself like the slow growth of a forest or the changing presence of the moon. And maybe, just maybe that the reflection of those things observed hold more weight than we give credit to. That we constantly change and learn and try and those moments can have profound meaning like ripples in a pond. I am no expert, I am a twenty something year old who had the wise idea to experience something I was completely unprepared for. And maybe there’s beauty in that, maybe that’s enough. I now live in an apartment with central heating and neighbors who say hello when I get home. A new chapter built on a foundation of another, my new service road is a maintained gravel driveway. It still feels strange from time to time, to look out and see everyone so close yet so disconnected, as if this wasn’t all land that was sprawling and wide at some point. Still though if you were to give me the opportunity I would do it all over again, without hesitation. And maybe I’d buy a truck. The beginning. The end.
