A few moments of stillness standout to me. For much of my life blurs, hyper active, over indulgence, angry bursts, blurs have blotted out logic and retentiveness. I longed for a placement. As a kid, there was a sailboat. At times the rest of the family rocked by too much Chesapeake action waved the flag. I had a stomach born of inequity, slender, unbalanced, ready to wobble. The boat changed from one make to another, but it offered that stillness. Later that translated to a book store coffee house where I’d peer at Plachy’s unguided tour, and remember flash frozen images of my brother and I, naked but for our life vests jumping into the Magothy, or the Bay. They were as monumental as Memorial stadium.
But Maryland wasn’t me. Yes I loved the soft shells. And I liked the horses and the debutantes, but both came off as alien beings you walked up to gently and then pretended you were something else, something they could better understand. I landed in Texas for a summer working horseback and that spelled the animal’s myth. Then there was New Orleans and that’s where the other mysteries evaporated, not for explanation’s sake, but because care was a set adrift in the river.
Now, California sends a rainless summer, a tour with more guides than passengers. Just behind that scavenger mentality, plasticized in perpetuity, there are western remnants and charm so mysterious it trails back to a proud native origin boundaries and borders make a mockery of.
by Hank Cherry
