We went for a hike in the mountains the other day. It was transformative. We didn't go far, nor high, nor was the route technical or in any way difficult, but the hike changed us, in the way it always does. We took a previously unexplored trail and wound up in a mostly neglected cirque where there was evidence of an abandoned mining op and the remains of a rodent (skull, scapulae, fur) and hikers on the ridge above with their dogs and the quiet that reigns up there and water and rock and sky. It was me, my special lady, and my three sons.
It's summer vacation here. I've got the eldest two for a month and a half and its awful in the way that it always is. We have to cram in a year's worth of work into that time and it's not easy. The other day I spent an hour and a half with Kiernan wherein we did some serious psychological work to get to the root of why the sight of a blue painted house on the corner that was visible from the breakfast table conspired to make him cry (turns out a shit-talking ex-friend lived in a similarly colored house and that image brought up painful memories). Before that I parsed out all the reasons my oldest didn't want to play soccer here (a sport he loves), then we relayed that info to his mother (not ideal). It's terrible to watch them grow like this but all the while wondrous.
Watching my youngest with his two older brothers is something altogether destroying. Uly shines to his brothers right away, engaging with them in a way he doesn't do with A and me, emulating them more fully, opening up more, observing, learning. He mimics what they do and enjoys their company differently than he does with his mother and me. He's taken to seeking out his brothers in the morning instead of solely needing his mother for the morning's entertainment. They all jive together, incomprehensibly, beautifully. It's more than I can take.
We biked down to the river today. She was up, magnificently, higher than I'd ever seen. We went to the bridge and watched the roiling current eddy and gyre and crest the rocks where we normally could have descended and walked. The water rushed along, carrying with it the various driftwood parcels that swam on its movement. Gavin and Kiernan chucked rocks, larger and larger, into the brown torrent to see how large a splash they could produce. The youngest I watched with an unhealthy dose of paranoia, fearful that he might fall into the tumult below the bridge, thinking all the while that they, all three of them, were like the river, untameable, frightening, capable of being observed only.
In the words of my friend Nick, "I don't know why living exists when you just want to die."
