There is a mysterious canyon reservoir I’ve passed on the back roads of Heidi-ho (Idaho) many times but never explored. I learned its name this year and I’m trying to forget it. Names destroy mystiques. This mystery especially needs preserving in the misty, forbidding chill of the views it offers me. It is huge and the waves are slate gray or green. No one is ever on it – no boats, no fishing from its edges. It looks deep, opaque, cold. It is my Loch Ness complete with Monster. It dredges up from the depths of my memory an ocean voyage I was on as a small child. This was wartime, and we were sailing to Argentina, and the ship (merchant marine) had been conscripted to some quasi-military use. I remember standing with my family wearing large cork lifejackets on an upper deck during drills because enemy submarines occasionally sank vessels like ours. And the ocean then was very similar to my impenetrable canyon reservoir of recent journeys. Incalculable depths lay beneath its heaving surface – room for the unimaginable (or the all-too imaginable in my child’s imagination). I love that canyon reservoir at the same time that it terrifies me. Horrible seduction. Someday I’m going to swim out there to the middle, no matter how cold, or how much every instinct inside me rebels. Whatever is beneath its surface can have me, and no one will ever know. Except you, of course…shhhh.

Are you ever drawn to something that terrifies but excites you at the same time? Life is like that. I mean, really living is like that. Not the secure, smothering insulation of childhood or the staid suffocation of a sedentary adult life. I’m talking about the years when you searched and grew and there was magic around every corner. Your days were alive with lessons and warnings and rewards as you discovered what living meant. Some people never stop living that kind of magic. And they get good at it, if they never embalm themselves in the shrink-wrap of facades. I think façades are okay in order to fit in, but not if they become the whole of your existence.

Makes you wonder why it ever stops. The journey, I mean. Ah, yes – career, marriage, children. I did that. But part of me stayed out in the woods, the ocean, the reservoir. Sanctuary, sanctuary! So now inner sanctums and enchanted bowers dot my life like rest stops on a highway. I suppose that sharing it to the max is the ideal, but the further you travel, the less likely it is to happen, I believe. Still, I was wrong about that before, and there are approximations, end runs and workarounds. Life is sweet. Thanks for being part of mine and letting me be part of yours.

My arm wasn’t fully recovered from a ski accident, but I decided to ski (very cautiously) in Heidi-ho’s mountains last month. Here’s a short video edited down from several superb hours at a place called Galena: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc2_gl66O9g  And here are May’s photos below: #1-2 Elm Creek; #3 for those of you who remember Linda Tyldesley, caring for animals as she does, she makes sure her luggage stays alive and well – not sure how cooperative the ‘gator is when he goes through TSA screening; #4-8 stuff I caught last month in the mountains of Idaho; #9 Riki at Crow-Hassan, one of a couple of riders who help me rescue a dragonfly; #10-12 you get left-over photos of me when I run short of new shots. 

Gonna give you a couple of new StorytellersUnplugged column links this month as I’ve moved the posting date and am trying to catch up the archives. KY JELLY & THE HEADLESS SQUIRREL is at http://www.storytellersunplugged.com/2016/04/15/thomas-sullivan-ky-jelly-the-headless-squirrel/#respond and ELECTRIC PURPLE & HALF OF EVERYTHING is here http://www.storytellersunplugged.com/2016/05/01/thomas-sullivan-electric-purple-half-of-everything/#respond . 

Let’s close with something I shared on FB that a lot of people responded to: 

Went to Walmart today and pulled in nose to nose with a banged up jalopy next to a traffic island. But before I got out I spotted a couple of scruffy looking men coming toward the jalopy with a supermarket cart full of groceries. They looked so hard and disheveled that I hesitated, not wanting them to see me getting out and abandoning my luxury car for a trip inside the store. You can hate the cynicism inside yourself and still act on it. Moreover this spot was where I had interfered with someone who had been living in their car and who had targeted the love of my life one night nearly a decade earlier.

Now, as the two men drew closer I saw that the younger one, who wore a goatee, had Down syndrome and stumbled a bit. And the older one – too old to be his brother – had gray in his unruly hair. The latter was hard looking, steely, but his face softened and he was infinitely patient with the other one as he popped the trunk and drew the cart up close. He could have transferred groceries quickly, yet he waited for his younger companion to slowly complete the task. Clearly he wanted him to have meaning, purpose – pride – in doing something. This was compassion. This was two human beings being beautiful.

The young man with Down syndrome was meticulous and energetic in pushing the empty basket to the cart corral. And then as they were getting into their car the older one saw me through my windshield and his face turned to steel again. He didn’t like me watching. Didn’t want to be seen being tender. Didn’t want to flinch before the tigers of life whether they were scornful or pitying. I tried to pretend I wasn’t witnessing, but he knew.

So I made a show of leaving my car, though he probably saw through that too. Life is full of very good people and small heroic acts; and it has cowardly fears and shameful moments. I suppose I’m writing this because I chose wrong, and because of a late night conversation over the phone that pulled this out of me in a way that I would never have let become words. Such a small thing to write about. But life’s important moments are so fleeting, and when you miss one, the only thing left is to turn it into an object lesson. Not quite redemption maybe. But sometimes redemption is just another form of vanity. I need to learn to share more…