Ammi Midstokke: Rivers and roads

I read once that our souls cannot keep up with airplane travel, that we must land in flesh and spirit in one place before we can effectively travel to another without risking leaving some essential part of us behind like some spiritually disjointed tourist.

I think whoever wrote that was onto something. As I blaze down the interstate in a river of cars that whooshes past the barges trudging against the current of the great Columbia River, I feel parts of me wanting to pause to listen to the grass. It can’t be heard anymore over the freeway traffic: Amazon Prime trucks with all their blue smile promise, terrified cattle leaving their waft of dung, motor homes, the migration of sedans pulling various sizes of U-Haul trailers.

Are we leaving a dust trail of ourselves like a comet passing by? Small particles of seeming insignificance, burned and brushed off by the abrasion of invisible gasses until we are inert lumps of rock?

I pull over at a viewpoint to look at the view, the blaring wind of semi trucks at my back.

This is not the view, I think, because I’ve been driving for hours and seen better views though my windshield. If we gained just a few feet of elevation and stepped away from the ribbon of concrete and railroads and power lines, we could get a glimpse of what this majesty looked like before we bludgeoned it with progress.

There are Lewis and Clark signs dotted along the way. The curious mystery behind Meriwether Lewis’ presumed suicide has me wondering if he had a premonition of what might follow his epic journey west. What did these shorelines look like before the dammed river drowned them?

By the time I stop to let my soul catch up, I’m on a ridge above the Deschutes River in central Oregon. The air is tinged bitter with the edge of smoke, making me and the fauna anxious. Their noises, I’m certain, are the hushed exchanges of anticipation and consideration. How close is it?

By all accounts, it is here: the unstoppable incineration of our home.

I run down a trail toward the silky waters, green and blues reflecting mirror images of the trees like a magic trick of light. Great ponderosas grow up and down simultaneously. The clouds watch themselves, primping, in their own reflection. I descend into a thick grassy field that spreads like a green puddle at the river’s bend. I stop to listen to the water.

It trickles, gurgles, babbles by as if bothered by nothing. I want to think its supply is infinite, but I know that a few miles upstream is a reservoir filled with the ghosts of trees lobbed off and a man-made lake that controls the flow of water. That we try to overcome the lack of snow load with this deceptive form of storage. The toilets we flush may be fooled. The fish are not.

A million tiny bugs chew my legs into a furious mess of red bumps within seconds, as if they are intent on letting me know just how unwelcome I am. This Eden I stand in is already ruined by my footprints and the smell of my sweat. They chase me back up the canyon wall, into the tall pines and the low brush. I’m not sure I belong there either.

I’ve been a guest all summer in one way or another, trying to navigate the generosity of other’s spaces with conscientious consideration. Which recycling does this go in? Should I wash the sheets? Where is the compost? I pick up my dishes, tidy my spaces, and am forever trying to limit my unconscious spread – of stuff, noise, presence.

We’re just guests on this planet. A temporary visitor welcomed with far too much priority and too little skepticism. Will she hang a no-vacancy sign up when we’re gone?

Once permanently expelled from nature’s club, will the remaining members create a resolution that bans all future evolutions of us?

For their sake, I hope so. I hope the globe is deloused of us before the calamity we cause turns the place into an inert rock itself.

When I drive home, through several states and tanks of gas, fire warnings and camps, and at least three Starbucks drive-thrus, I am struck that maybe my soul is the only thing that belongs here at all. No wonder it prefers the rivers to the roads.

Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com