Imminence—A Rhapsody
Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part.
Nay, I have done, you get no more of me;
And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart,
That thus so cleanly I myself can free.
(Michael Drayton, Idea 61)
In the scrub brush, changeling leaves flutter—dried leaves of sycamore and willow trapped mid-flight by thorny, bare twigs. The breeze brings them alive like the warblers moving between them, never still, always about to lift off. Everything wants to fly today, under a sky that stretches wide in all directions. Or maybe that’s just me.
The campground is full of the noise of departure. A pickup sounds different when it’s fixing to haul a fifth wheel than when it’s heading out for the day. A car door shuts more definitively when the driver is leaving for good than doing a grocery run. (I’d like to say it’s a matter of earnestness, anticipation, or finality, but really, it’s volume or duration.)
Tomorrow it will be me shutting the door. I can feel the breeze tugging. And why not? Why not cast my fate to it and find out what happens?
I have loved it here: The sandhill cranes in the evening and the morning speaking of home and away, or riding the thermals at noon and showing the shape of the wind. The bright enthusiasm of weedy new mustard leaves, and the tired rattle of cottonwoods. The huge, arching sky, and the gentle slope of the ground toward what we might as well call a river. The language of upheaval in the craggy mountains’ strata. It has been a good place to regroup after a season’s encounters with snow, floods, wildfires, and bears, of emergency rooms and medical care and celebrations, after a milestone birthday.
The now is beautiful—more beautiful than the future will be. I’m not taking to the open road; I’m returning after more than half a year to my winter base camp where I will look at gravel and dust for months. Still, the pull of change is strong, as is the promise of discovery, even in the familiar or the unpleasant. A new season awaits: new thoughts, new skills, new ways of responding to the world. (In theory every morning could evoke this. But it doesn’t. An imminent change in geography helps.)
I’m not much for holding on to the old; I can only keep so many timelines straight at once, and the past has decades of them. I’ve expressed my gratitude to this place—to the whole summer—by my enjoyment while I was in it. Now I’m moving on. I “kiss and part,” ready for the next experience. For today I am Camus’s Don Juan, campground version. (Just don’t get me started on Camus’s self-serving, willfully inaccurate, textually unsupported reading of the Don Juan source material, whether Molina, Molière, Da Ponte, or Byron.)
Change is imminent. It will not be bliss: tomorrow will be a nuisance of grocery stores, parking lots, semis, and sewer lines. My winter digs? Not all that exciting. Still, I have a growing, sunny sense of promise. The road is less important than the fact that you’re about to step onto it.
Lift-off is one deep in-breath away, and all is potential energy—like buds fattening in spring, an unopened gift, the morning of a childhood birthday, a treat in store. Imminence: when the present is still the present but swells to hold something more. It’s the fresh notebook; King’s Cross Station; the deck of the Enterprise; the thousand-and-second night—the beautiful architecture of the threshold.