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David Yandell Todd

Up in Leelanau County, from a hill above Lake Michigan, Tom Gerald, this man I know, follows the trail he followed every June when he was a boy, back of the summer cottage, into the woods.
     Down to his home town now, he has been rented a room and he has been given a job. People he knew are startled, meeting him. He dusts shelves, sweeps floors at an art supply shop. Grand achievements had been expected. Back when we were in school, he had won scholarships.
     Father dead, Mother in an invalids' home, his brother strikes gold in a distant city. Only long-ago lovers would come near him tenderly now, in dreams. I know he would like to see how to get along better, how to stop just living it down, finding out what he has to let go.
     The folks sold their stake in the cottage to an aunt, years back, when all still were getting along, the aunt promising that of course she wouldn't sell it away from the family, but she did.
     So he has taken a Friday from work, taken an all-day bus to this town by the shore, found a beaten motel a mile inland and walked from there out to the beach, then along it to the old place, now unoccupied and locked for off-season--and has crossed through the yard quickly to descend into them, these woods he has returned to in his dreams.
     Leaves and broken sticks are stamped flat in the sand by a summer of walkers. The trees have spread, darkening the path. He comes out from beneath them to an open dune that never grows over, crosses it toward the bigger woods at the far edge, a field's length away. Sunlight on the green and the dead needles of pines, on cedar, birch, beech and oak.
     It's a coming down, down to where one has to pay attention. Put one foot in front of the other. The evening is cool. Squirrels run up the trees, bark cracking. The trail splits at a huge, twisting beech, right spur heading north back to the lake, left going on. He takes that way, hiking, comes to a bend where another old tree has fallen and is rotting, orange, soft flesh of the open trunk spilling over piled needles and leaves on the gray sand. He can tell there will be no one else out here now. He saw hardly anyone in town. It's September, chilly out. No one will come. In this silence, a faint glimmering sound of big lake waves hitting shore.
     Breeze at his hair. He can smell pine and the sandy water. He can stop walking, can stop to look at this place, slowly, turn in a circle to see the new little trees leaning each way like marks of a hieroglyph, each sapling slanted as if to cast off an attitude, or desire, each fallen branch delicate, a spent prayer from earth.
     Once, he remembers it, he came here afraid, as he is now, but unknown, unknowing. He was ten. They let him, his folks, stay out one night in an abandoned old shack somewhere near here. Grown deep, in a high wind the woods seemed to swarm to conceal, to close off even his loneliness.
     He sits down crosslegged on the needly earth. Then he rises to his knees, gazing up at branches netting sky.
     He has told me that often he's longed for this place, where he worships scarlet light pouring off outstretched fingers of cloud. But I fear for him to linger here. He makes love to the dream of leaving everyone he could yet come to care for. Also he may insist that I, or any of us, go rebuild the shack, live in the garden, and never again even try to give account of what's happened with him or might.

Copyright © 2010 by San Diego State University.

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