Decades became years, years became days, days became hours, and it seemed I had been born only yesterday.
Peering north , the creek appeared to narrow to little more than a trickle before vanishing altogether up where the lush green grass glinted backlit in that dappled patch of glittering morning light—as though God in carving out this valley all those millions of years ago had scattered a handful of diamonds there along the seam where the warm yellow sunshine met the cool blue shadows flowing down from the hills.
I raised my new BB gun with the faux telescopic sight, the one Dad had given me for Christmas a few months back, to check things out more clearly. But the glimmering grass continued to hold its secret.
So I lowered my gun and eased up the edge of the dwindling little rivulet with my mind wandering aimlessly, as the mind of any eight-year-old might be prone to do on such a fine spring morning, and by the time I realized my feet were getting wet, the creek had vanished and the luxuriant grass that engulfed my shoes had become soft and cold and squishy.
They were good shoes, those old canvas sneakers, and it would be the better part of a lifetime before I’d find another pair that fit my feet and my affinities so perfectly.
But on a day trip during my fifty-eighth autumn to fetch Carly home for Thanksgiving during her first semester in college, a brand new pair of ankle-high hunting shoes leapt from the shelf and into my arms in an outdoor shop in Greensboro where I had paused to kill some time, having left home far too early that morning in my eagerness to see the love of my life.
They were the only size fourteens on the rack, and they fit my feet to perfection.
For their maiden outing on Thanksgiving Day they bore me deep into the rhododendron thickets along Beaver Dam Creek on a cool morning hunt for grouse and woodcock.
Two weeks later I wore them west on my annual odyssey for late season elk in northern New Mexico, and come January I put a couple million miles on them down in southwest Georgia on a week long hunt for bobwhite quail.
That was thirteen years ago, and these old shoes have since left their multi-lugged signatures in the sand and soil and mud and snow from northern Alaska to southern Argentina. Their treads are now wearing woefully thin in places. But they’ve always been faithful to me, and I scarcely have the heart to start looking for their inevitable replacements.
These old shoes are lace ’em up on a warm spring morning in East Tennessee, and unlace ’em thirty-seven hours later on a cool autumn evening sitting flight-worn and weary on the edge of the bed in the upper suite of Eva Perón’s old residence on the Avenue Posadas in the Recoleta neighborhood of Buenos Aires. They’re fly up the mountain to Shannon when she radios to tell you she’s just downed a big bull elk with her new 30.06, and for the next year or more they carry the stubborn stains of that old bull’s tapped-out blood atop their toes.
These shoes sculpted your first wild tracks in Alaska as you stepped wide-eyed from the bush plane onto that narrow gravel bar on your quest for trout and salmon and grayling and Dolly Varden—having left those same tracks in the salty sands of Cape Hatteras little more than a week earlier and an entire continent away.
They’ve climbed Sugarloaf in snow and stalked buffalo in rain and were the rock-solid foundation you so urgently needed on that icy evening when you and Pat spotted the big mule deer ghosting through the sunset fir and aspen high in Tackett Canyon and there was no time to find a rest for your rifle, and when the old Ruger single-shot flew to your shoulder, your stance and your crosshairs were as steady as your determination and you took him dead center through the chest.
They’re the spiritual refuge you always find when you slip them on and are off on yet another adventure to some oh-so-remote setting, where for a few precarious days or a few precious weeks Time holds no significance.
But most meaningfully by far, they’re this soft, cold, squishy grass you have just this moment wandered into, and from somewhere deep in your misplaced childhood a vague awareness begins to emerge that this is almost certainly the very same seepage which soaked those old canvas sneakers of yours a whole lifetime ago as you first explored this little valley with your new BB gun.
You haven ’ t set foot on this hallowed ground since the day when, still just a pup, you and your family had loaded up all your hopes, all your fears and all your belongings and moved away south into the great unknown.
You’d risen well before daylight that morning to come walk here alone one last time, and you had promised yourself then that someday you’d return.
But promises made to oneself when a child are often swept away and left unfulfilled. Yet now on this most pivotal day when you’ve finally arrived at your Biblically allotted “Threescore Years and Ten” you are keeping that long held promise, just you and the Lord, as together you walk and together you talk about where you’ve been and where you are now and, more importantly, what remains to be done while you’re still a viable component of the physical universe.
Since you were last here almost six decades ago a big earthen dam has been built across the lower end of this valley, and the resultant lake has risen halfway up its flanks. So you climb to the top of the dam and cross to the eastern shore and bear north along a narrow path that scribes its lower slopes.
What once were grassy hills are now blanketed by a fine new forest that reaches to the sky, and you make your way along the little trail until it veers east up a thickly wooded hollow before swinging you back out toward the lake.
The grass below drops all the way to the water and appears soft and lush . . . well, except for down along that sunlit seam where it looks as though God might once have scattered a handful of diamonds there above the lapping shoreline.
For one single incisive second you hesitate.
Could it BE ???
For a brief, quivering moment you are frozen in time, teetering on the edge of a remembrance that is buried so deeply in your tangled synapses as to be all but irretrievable.
For nearly sixty years it has lain there dormant, any prospect of its ever being resurrected virtually non-existent. So you ease down the slope and into the still-glimmering grass. And as the latent memory of that little spring from childhood fitfully flickers and awakens and slowly begins oozing back into your consciousness, so too does this soggy grass and the waterlogged soil from which it grows begin oozing upward around your feet, and your heart suddenly leaps and stutters in a momentary fit of realization and ecstasy before finding its rhythm once more.
For what seemed a lifetime I stood there peering up and down the valley, then lowered my gaze to these old shoes as they sank ever deeper into the welcome embrace of that sodden soil and the muddy effuse slowly creeping up their sides. Eventually I lifted first one foot, then the other and slogged a few paces back up the slope to where the little spring was still trickling from the base of an ancient, lichen-encrusted pine.
I knelt and sipped from its calming healing waters, then eased a pair of long-cherished rocks from my pocket, one of pumice from Patagonia and one of metamorphic greenstone from Alaska, and gently placed them as far up beneath the roots of that tree as I could reach. Finally I arose and made my way north to the upper end of the valley and circled the entire lake, while these old shoes left their tracks anywhere they could find a receptive patch of sand or soil or mud.
It was as though Time itself were folding inward around me. Decades became years, years became days, days became hours, and it seemed I had been born only yesterday, and all the grouse and woodcock and elk and quail I had ever beheld, all the trout and salmon and Dolly Varden I had ever experienced, all the snow and wind and water I had ever tasted, and all the friends and family I had ever loved were collectively encased in one vestigial memory whose first pallid impressions had been spawned so long ago right here in this little valley.
I felt a warm, rejuvenating sense of belonging and prayed that when the time came for my soul to lay aside these burdensome bodily bonds that have bound it for so long and finally taste the Eternal, someone might think to clothe what once was me in my worn out blue jeans and tattered wool shirt, then lace these old shoes to my feet once more and reduce everything to vapor and ash. And as my spirit returns uplifted to Him who gave it, likewise return the dust that remains to this soft squishy grass and winsome little spring whose taproot source so long ago formed the headwaters of one child’s life.
The author always welcomes and appreciates your comments, questions, critiques, and input. Please keep in touch at Mike@AltizerJournal.com
A most blessed Thanksgiving to you all.