History Lessons

This is one of the most beautiful places on Earth. Of course, every place is one of the most beautiful places on Earth. But this particular place, at noon on a hot Sunday in August, getting lost with Eric looking for a place called Sugarloaf, this stands apart in a history of beautiful places. Place and time are inextricable, you can never go back to this place, it's never the same light or smells or clouds or person.



I might have said this earlier, when I first moved here. I remember thinking it at least - that one very obvious thing different about this landscape was how detailed it was. All these little shards of color and shadow, broken up in contrast as if someone had applied one of those HDR filters to the entire world, and then used their flash because everything is So Bright. I never thought about it, but Ohio is much more watercolored and smudged.

There's just so many leaves everything, thin leaves. It's all thin here, instead of broad and flat.



In the state parks, the sand lies hard packed into hilly wooded dunes, covered with pine needles and decomposing plants. It's a weird texture to walk on - like you can't really go barefoot cause it's rough, but also you can't wear sneakers because it's all sand and there's nothing worse than getting sand in your socks and having to still walk 2 miles back, in more sand. I have learned to hike in flip flops which seems really really unhealthy, though for reasons I just can't pinpoint. I was always so self conscious about my feet, I like how quickly that fell away, like, last January. Anyway, you have to wear flip flops, or straight up boots, or one of those expensive hybrid shoes they sell in camping magazines.



There are little pockets of the smallest cypress groves ever. Like, as if we are wandering in a diorama of the Pleistocene era at the Natural History Museum - trudging through the ground up shells of mollusks and the worn away bones of mammoths. There are giant sloths watching us from the trees, and everywhere the acid of evolving life is bubbling and churning away, sending it's DNA stink into the clouds and into our lungs.



I don't know how I'm expected to *not* fall in love with everyone here. I'm living in the same primordial soup as the people who first created language.