The heavens turn overhead, the soft blush of dawn nuzzling the eastern sky. I sit cross-legged in the flimsy hand-me-down plastic chair in the backyard, writing. My heartbeat reverberates thickly against my skull, the remnants of a leftover headache ebbing under the anesthetizing sunlight that pools beneath my still bed-warm skin.
The familiar anthem of daybreak swells – the cheery melodies of the house finches; the wistful tintinnabulation of church bells; the hoarse baying of an old hound several yards over; the distant cachinnation of crows and a nearer bleating response; the chattering of quarreling squirrels; various overlapping tittering and warbling by yet-unseen birds. This essay isn’t about sound, but sound lilts through the prose nonetheless.
My phone teeters precariously on my knee, recording the din of avian conversations bubbling around me. I want to put a name to the sounds and faces belonging to the transitory tenants of the yard. So far, I’ve cataloged dark-eyed juncos, magpies, black-capped chickadees, and northern flickers. This essay isn’t about birds, but birds flit through the prose nonetheless.
I send the recording to a friend, an avid birder with an encyclopedic knowledge of the various avian species found across North America. I ask her about the identity of the speakers– if she can hear anything over the unrelenting tuneless shrieks of the blue jays, that is.
“Fun fact,” she says. “Blue jays mimic the calls of red-shouldered hawks and steller’s jays mimic those of red-tailed hawks.”
Yes, I think. I know this. Or rather, I knew this, once. It had been tucked away in a forgotten cerebral time capsule buried under layers of years and distance.
This niche knowledge of the natural world was nestled amongst other artifacts of my own mythology that my subconscious had culled while my back was turned – the names of loved-to-pieces stuffed animals; the geography of my grandma’s hands; the stories of the first characters to tumble from my head and onto the page; and the oft-recited hymns of a long-discarded religion.
My friend’s innocuous off-hand comment had triggered spontaneous epistemic time travel, and I find myself willingly caught in the riptide of nostalgia, floating back to the halcyon days of yesteryear.
I’m sitting on the back deck of the house I grew up in, gazing up at an altogether different sky cradled by rolling calico foothills. I watch the carrion birds – agile red-tailed hawks and ghoulish turkey vultures – wheel through the dizzying blue yonder, floating on the thermals like corks in the eddies of a stream.
My childhood home — a place I spent my first nineteen summers — is perched on the high edge of a valley twenty minutes from the Pacific coast as the crow flies. Ours was the second-to-last house at the dead end of a serpentine street that slithered deep into the foothills.
The neighborhood was so quiet that on some mornings, you could hear the percussive clattering of mule deer hooves against the asphalt through the thick fog that cascaded across the hills and sank heavily to the valley floor.
Diagonal to our front yard was a sprawling empty lot that offered access to two hundred and twenty-five acres of chaparral and oak woodland, and just enough creative grist to sate my voracious imagination.
From the empty lot, you could choose to climb to the sun-baked hilltop, or descend to the shadowy valley floor, which meant that you were only ever an hour’s scrabble at most from a completely different world. It was a gateway, an interdimensional portal, a tear in the space-time-continuum – though it only ever seemed to work properly when I traveled alone.
New worlds poured out of my eyes and flowed across the landscape, conjured with a thought. That valley was an edge of the universe; a projector screen; an escape hatch; an open-air theater with a living set, and I was given carte blanche to make it whatever I wished it to be.
Each barefoot adventure through worlds of my creation accumulated on my body; calloused hands, scraped knees, and an ever-multiplying spray of freckles across my sun-pinked cheeks.
While most of those souvenirs of my travels were transient, it sometimes feels as though that valley never really left me. Its dusty sun-baked deer paths are mapped in the whorls and lines of the soles of my feet. The stubborn marine layer is reflected in the blue-gray of my irises. Its raw materials still comprise much of my internal wilderness.
Other times, however, it feels like I never really left the valley. Like that fantastical, carefree version of me slipped out the side door while I wasn’t looking. It happened around the time I was indoctrinated into the capitalist obedience program before I’d completed my tenth lap around the sun, closing the back cover on childhood several chapters too soon.
When the day was domesticated into something perversely boring and subsequently butchered into twenty-four efficient, equal units by which grown-ups quantitatively measured and scored our worth.
When I relinquished my afternoon interdimensional roaming for standardized testing, “gifted” programs, pedigree-bolstering extracurriculars, and countless hours of tutoring in a sisyphean effort to improve my woeful mathematical abilities.
When I began to focus on what I was told ought to be instead of what I was, imprudently ripping the threads of wild whimsy that weaved the center seam of my personality until I was unraveling and unrecognizable, the “unproductive” parts of me – my favorite parts – left on the cutting room floor.
When various intimidating authority figures told me that the things I wanted to do, the things that made time disappear in that magical way – acting, writing, storytelling – were unrealistic and unworthy pursuits, and I believed them.
The magic dissolved, the portal closed, and the empty lot was nothing more than an ordinary bit of vacant space. And I was too busy dislocating my remaining “unprofitable” traits, contorting myself to fit into the vanishingly small box of achievement potential – which would be neatly packaged with a bow and shipped off to [insert impressive-sounding university here] for processing before arriving at its final destination: [insert impressive-sounding Silicon-valley corporation here] – to notice. (Upon arrival at the aforementioned corporation, you were to receive disgustingly large amounts of capital to compensate for shipping and handling, as well as the down payment of your soul. So that was alright then.)
Ninety-one full moons have bloomed and withered since my parents sold the house at the edge of the valley and I said an unwilling goodbye to the only place that has ever felt like home to me. It’s been even longer still since that capricious, headstrong version of me went missing, still wandering around the valley on a different plane. And when she did, she took the magic with her. Or so I thought.
I’ve recently recommitted myself to creative endeavors – as I’d resolved to do – and I’ve realized that my imagination wasn’t dead or lost, but dormant. Every time I pick up my pen or walk through the doors of drama school, I feel it flexing, arching its spine like a cat, stretching the stiffness from its joints.
Until recently, I hadn’t seriously considered the negative implications of the scarceness of play in my life, nor the appalling state of emotional malnutrition that long-term creative famine had caused. Now that I have it, I don’t want to live without it.
I feel as though I’ve snapped out of a numb trance, the omnipresent liminal static fading to reveal the full spectrum of a life that’s worth more than simply observing from behind glass. Basically, I’m feeling pretty optimistic, which makes me feel giddy and terrified in equal measure – which is good. It means I feel alive. I also feel more like myself than I have in recent memory.
This dribbling of linguistic pigment hardly captures the images in my head, but that’s exactly why I keep trying. I love to play, even if I’m not very good at it yet. I’m wading back through the knee-high yellow grass, following the paw prints a much smaller, more self-assured me left behind. There are two sets of tracks: one leading up, and one leading down.
I amble down the precarious ravine through thick, tangled branches of scrub oak blistered with lichen, finding myself in a woodland world of perennial shadow. Dappled shadows patter over my onyx fur as I plod over a thick carpet of prickly leaves along a narrow creek.
My slitted citrine eyes dart about as I search for salamanders. I sniff the air, filling my lungs with earthy sweetness. Crouching low, I stalk a rabbit hiding in the underbrush. A wolfish grin creeps across my face, revealing gleaming stalactite teeth.
Sunlight tangles in the twisted oak canopy overhead as I prowl along the muddy path, following four-toed tracks in pursuit of my coven. It’s my fault I lost them — I wandered much further than I should.
A rustling sound, the cry of my friend the hawk, here to help guide me home. No, an imposter – the shriek of a steller’s jay, a spy for the baddies, swooping aggressively just overhead. She’s letting them know I’m alone.
Panting, I clamber up, up, up into the sunlight, through the waist-deep yellow grass to the shrubland. At the top, I’m met with uninterrupted views of the kingdom that stretch to the shimmering bay.
I pick my way through thickets of deer weed; soft, aromatic sagebrush; and cream-yellow chamise blooms that have tanned auburn under the July sun. My fur turns to skin, my paws to elven feet, but my abalone-shell wings remain. I fold them tight against my back as I crawl beneath the coyote brush, iridescent feathers shimmering under the strands of midday sun.
Turkey vultures hang silently above, malevolent mages that puppet the shadows, black beady eyes peering out from grotesque ruddy faces. I pay them no mind – today is the elvish midsummer festival. The sun magic is strong.
Mule deer join the festivities, conversing pleasantly while I festoon my shelter with red toyon berries, the dark serrated leaves stinging my fingers. Shadows lengthen under the slanting light like the hand of a clock passing underfoot, and I curse the vultures for violating the treaty. My stomach growls. This matter will be dealt with tomorrow.
The world falls away, reality rushes back in, and I am human again. The sky catches fire overhead as I scamper home with sunburned shoulders, several new scrapes, and an alligator lizard in my hands. The last of the light trickles away from the western sky.
The velvety air hums with the drowsy melody of the regular twilight ensemble – raspy, warbling robins; thrumming crickets; the misty susurration of pacific winds through the trees. I watch from the back deck as the coyotes gather at the top of the hill, yipping and yowling at the full Buck Moon. I lean over the handrail and yip and yowl right back as if to say, I’m here. I’m here. I’m still right here.
Music, for me, provides powerful reminiscence bumps. Are there any songs or verses that transport you back to childhood?
As always, thank you for reading. This post is both free and public, so feel free to share x
Have to say that “tintinnabulation”, “tittering“, “teeters“ are tasty words! Also just love the sensory language a lot.