Terrain

The shape of the space around me makes a difference. From the base of a ravine, the earth appears to contract, the trees lean inward from the ridge, threatening to shut out the sky, and the feeling is a strange composite of vulnerability and strength.

A short time later, perched on the crest of a hill, the land falls away from me in the distance, the vulnerability is gone, and my thoughts move quickly toward the horizon, seeking the very limits of vision.

My childhood was spent in a broad river valley, where the slopes and hillsides were overlaid with asphalt and the view was framed by windows and obscured by rooftops and powerlines, and the principle feeling was of insecurity and apprehension. The meat of my adult life, the muscular middle, was embedded in repurposed wetland prairie, where the land was annually scoured clean of all life, and then forced into surrogacy, an unwilling receptacle of the relentless mechanical impulses of corporate industrial agriculture, where the only distinction among directions was the shape of your shadow, and the feeling was of boundless and accelerating emptiness.

Where I sit right now is an amalgam of each of these. I am surrounded by wetland repurposed to accommodate highways and apartments and condominiums, sitting toward the top of a hillside, with my view framed by a balcony rail and obscured by chimneys. Although the bulk of my horizon is the roof of the building across the pond—like the looming edge of a ravine—through a small gap between the eves I can look down on the back of a crow hopping along the crest of the rooftop of the next building beyond.

My thoughts become black and feathery and start to move with her, seeking the limits of vision, using her eyes as proxies.