the thick rough bark, nose stuck in a resined crack, inhale vanilla strong as any small brown bottle, the tree pungent and sweet as butterscotch. A time when we entered shops that smelled like this. Staffed with high school kids in aprons struggling to scoop the hard ice cream. Seemed cruelly hard back then. Why keep it so cold? Thin girls blowing hair back and approaching each cone like a grudge match. Rum raisin my favorite. Melissa’s pistachio. Or anything with chunks of toffee. But adored a butterscotch sundae. The saliva running in my mouth at the base of the tree. Would kill for it now maybe, not even a figure of speech.
Jasper is patient. He sits, then lies down. In other years he would have ranged ahead and swung out on our flanks, wide, crossing and recrossing the trail, following his nose, picking up game, irrepressible, but now he is happy to rest. Me too. We are in no hurry. There is plenty of stored food at the airport and Bangley can get along without me for a few days, though I hope not too well. Always the fear when we take to the mountains that he will learn to like it like this better. Alone. Though he is smart enough, a good enough tactician to know that long term his odds go down. Plus, he is not a farmer. Jasper has been through this before too many times and is polite enough not to be visibly embarrassed. The hugging a tree, the mutterings. Tonight—it is still night, though barely—I don’t say a word, because tonight I am watching myself a little and I have always despised the sentimental, maybe because it is a familiar weakness. But the tree smells almost sweeter than anything in our world now and it smells like the past.
Apples used to be one of the sweetest things. In North America. Why they were such a treat, why the student currying favor left one on the teacher’s desk. Honey and apples. Molasses. Maple sugar in the north woods. A candy cane at Christmas. Visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads. Sometimes in the fall on the way back from a patrol we land at an orchard north of Longmont. Acres and acres of apples, varieties I don’t know the names of, most of the trees long dead for lack of water, those living along the still flowing old ditches gone scraggly, bristling with new shoots, reverting to some kind of wildness, the apples stunted and pecked, ravaged by caterpillars, but sweet. Sweeter than before. Whatever is left of whatever they distill is more concentrated in their complete and dangerous freedom.
I inhale deeply, arms stretched round, palms to the rough skin which is warmer somehow than the air, fingers holding the flakedcorduroy of the bark with almost the same affinity, the same sense of arrival as they would hold to the swells of a woman.
These small what? Gratifications. And smell is always the smell itself and memory, too, don’t know why.
We climb along the creek as the grainy gray seeps between the tall skeletal trees, the beetle kill ponderosa and lodgepole, the branches without needles, empty handed in death.
I still don’t like it here. The dead forest. Which began to die in great swaths twenty years before. We climb. Step down to the stony bank, the cobbles rounded like eggs. To rest, drink, then climb again. Up into the spruce and fir which are still fragrant and thick with rich darkness yet.
Jasper. C’mon. You’re lagging boy. Not feeling so good?
Run fingers through his thick short fur, up the bumpy ridge of his back, to the loose skin of his neck, and dig. Dig. He loves that. Turns his head away to stretch the skin. Have to bring aspirin next time. We have pounds of aspirin. Bangley says we should take it every day so we don’t get Alzheimer’s.
So we don’t forget why the fuck we’re here! he shouts, as close to glee as he gets.
So you don’t forget. Seems to be more important to you than to me, Hig. To remember shit. Eat some goddamn aspirin.
Bangley perceptive in his own way, a judge of character.
We rest. I sit on a bench rock above
Jasper is patient. He sits, then lies down. In other years he would have ranged ahead and swung out on our flanks, wide, crossing and recrossing the trail, following his nose, picking up game, irrepressible, but now he is happy to rest. Me too. We are in no hurry. There is plenty of stored food at the airport and Bangley can get along without me for a few days, though I hope not too well. Always the fear when we take to the mountains that he will learn to like it like this better. Alone. Though he is smart enough, a good enough tactician to know that long term his odds go down. Plus, he is not a farmer. Jasper has been through this before too many times and is polite enough not to be visibly embarrassed. The hugging a tree, the mutterings. Tonight—it is still night, though barely—I don’t say a word, because tonight I am watching myself a little and I have always despised the sentimental, maybe because it is a familiar weakness. But the tree smells almost sweeter than anything in our world now and it smells like the past.
Apples used to be one of the sweetest things. In North America. Why they were such a treat, why the student currying favor left one on the teacher’s desk. Honey and apples. Molasses. Maple sugar in the north woods. A candy cane at Christmas. Visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads. Sometimes in the fall on the way back from a patrol we land at an orchard north of Longmont. Acres and acres of apples, varieties I don’t know the names of, most of the trees long dead for lack of water, those living along the still flowing old ditches gone scraggly, bristling with new shoots, reverting to some kind of wildness, the apples stunted and pecked, ravaged by caterpillars, but sweet. Sweeter than before. Whatever is left of whatever they distill is more concentrated in their complete and dangerous freedom.
I inhale deeply, arms stretched round, palms to the rough skin which is warmer somehow than the air, fingers holding the flakedcorduroy of the bark with almost the same affinity, the same sense of arrival as they would hold to the swells of a woman.
These small what? Gratifications. And smell is always the smell itself and memory, too, don’t know why.
We climb along the creek as the grainy gray seeps between the tall skeletal trees, the beetle kill ponderosa and lodgepole, the branches without needles, empty handed in death.
I still don’t like it here. The dead forest. Which began to die in great swaths twenty years before. We climb. Step down to the stony bank, the cobbles rounded like eggs. To rest, drink, then climb again. Up into the spruce and fir which are still fragrant and thick with rich darkness yet.
Jasper. C’mon. You’re lagging boy. Not feeling so good?
Run fingers through his thick short fur, up the bumpy ridge of his back, to the loose skin of his neck, and dig. Dig. He loves that. Turns his head away to stretch the skin. Have to bring aspirin next time. We have pounds of aspirin. Bangley says we should take it every day so we don’t get Alzheimer’s.
So we don’t forget why the fuck we’re here! he shouts, as close to glee as he gets.
So you don’t forget. Seems to be more important to you than to me, Hig. To remember shit. Eat some goddamn aspirin.
Bangley perceptive in his own way, a judge of character.
We rest. I sit on a bench rock above
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