Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Paradise



Ed Abbey always managed to say it well:

"When I write paradise, I mean not apple trees and only golden women, but also scorpions and tarantulas and flies, rattlesnakes and gila monsters, sandstone, volcanos, and earthquakes, bacteria, bear, cactus, yucca, bladderweed, ocotillo and mesquite, flash floods and quicksand, and yes, disease and death and the rotting of flesh. Paradise is the here and now, the actual, the tangible dogmatically real Earth on which we stand. Yes, God bless America, the Earth upon which we stand."

His frame of reference was the desert southwest. Mine is Iowa, Wyoming, Saigon, New York City, Baltimore, Boulder, Washington, D.C., New Orleans, more --- remembered and here and now.

I have no vision of paradise in another dimension --- unless it is parallel to this: sitting on the bench in front of the house on a May evening, a glance up from the geranium-filled planters through the trees down the hill and toward the river.

And other specifics --- west of Cody along the road to Yellowstone many years ago now, lunch at a picnic table, declining to smile at the photographer I see clearly still behind the lens that took this, hands-in-pockets along the creek. And walking out into a late summer sunrise from my uncle's ranch house to the far side of the pond he had built and stocked, then turning west, Big Horns reflected.

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