The Landscape Is Changing

A lot can happen in ten years. An innocent, intelligent, wide-eyed young woman of seventeen might, in the course of ten years, graduate from college, go on to earn her master's, and make a good bit of progress toward her doctorate. She might travel abroad, get to be fluent in a couple of foreign languages. She might see her first book published, and even her second. She might get to be worldly and wise, accustomed to engaging in elegant, witty conversation with people of culture and refinement. She might take charge of her first class of undergraduate students, standing at the front of the lecture hall with confidence and poise, thoroughly in command of herself and her subject. She might even find the love of her life and get married.

None of those things happened to me.

"It's not exactly the same, you know," my mother pointed out when she told me we would be spending three days in August in Idyllwild, my favorite place on earth. "There was all kinds of construction, and a lot of the trees were chopped down." Yes, she assured me, we would be staying once again in Cabin #12 at the Idyllwild Inn, where we stayed during each of my four previous visits; yes, she was pretty sure that my favorite little gift boutique was still there; the lovely little sweet-shop with its two dozen flavors of shaved ice was still running a brisk business. The bookstore with its rows and rows of half-priced used books wasn't where it used to be; it had taken up residence in one of the gift shops last she'd heard, and it was still there for all she knew, though she couldn't say for certain.

It had been ten years, after all, since I'd last breathed the cool, piney air of the San Jacinto Mountains, since I'd last strolled up North Circle Drive under the majestic thumb of Tahquitz Rock. The rest of my family had been there, many times, without me, but I hadn't been to Idyllwild since the free and magnificent summer after I graduated high school, ten years ago, when I was seventeen.

Idyllwild was never just a vacation for me, never just a tourist destination. From the very first time I stayed there, when I was fourteen, I always felt this small town to be the natural home of my soul. The rustling of the leaves in the summer breeze seemed to speak just to me; the stones of the mountain, keeping their own dignified counsel, recognized me as kin; and the forest was full of sweet and plaintive secrets I alone might unravel, if I only had the time to devote myself to its mystery. Maybe it's just the thinness of the air a mile above sea level, but when I'm in Idyllwild I feel as though the greater part of the burden of living had been lifted right off my shoulders.

At least, that's the way it was when I was seventeen.

Could there have been enough construction, enough deforestation, in the last ten years to render my beloved place unrecognizable to my spirit?  Would I know Idyllwild after all this time? . . .

Would Idyllwild know me?

"Don't overthink it," a dear friend advised me, but it wasn't that simple.  Is it ever that simple?  The last ten years had not been kind to me, not at all.  I had endured humiliations I could not have imagined, loved in ways I had never believed possible, and survived losses that have left permanent scars on my soul.  The worldview, the self-definitions that sustained me when I was seventeen had been battered by sudden shocks, eroded away by subtle cruelties, until they were no longer applicable.  I was not who I had been.  Through it all, my longing to return to a place of peace and beauty had been one of the few constants.  Idyllwild was the symbol and the focus of my craving.  If the brutality of the past ten years had taken away my soul's joyous response to that beloved place, would I ever feel at home and at peace again?

It was evening when we left, the last traces of the overbearing summer sun fading from the sky.  My family chattered happily and listened to comedy on satellite radio as we passed out of our most familiar environs and into the more sparsely populated lands to the east.  They were on vacation.  I joined in the laughter, but part of me was detached, remote.  I was on a pilgrimage.  I was going home.  I was off on a journey of salvage.  All three.

We pulled off the freeway into Banning, the little town at the foot of the San Jacinto range, and a few minutes later we began the ascent toward Idyllwild.  There isn't much in the way of foothills above the desert plain of Banning; the mountains begin suddenly and ascend sharply, like a moment that changes your life.  The road winds itself gently up the mountainside and into the heart of the forested heights, hugging the walls of stone.  By the time we got that far, the radio was off and I had the window down.  The cold night air rushed over my ears as the car wound its way along the road.  To one side of us was the mountain, solid and imposing and covered with scrubby little plants, and on the other side, the lights of Banning in their neat grid of city blocks lay spread out on the ground far below.

Higher up, the desert scrub gave way to towering pines that rose high above the road and dotted the distant cliffsides like dense stubble.  I had never traveled this road at night before, and it seemed there were more buildings and Forest Service signs than I remembered from before, but other than that, it was the same familiar journey.  My eyes, parched for this wild beauty, drank in the scenery with thirsty greed.  Above the level of smog and light pollution, the air was crisp and clear under a generous sprinkling of stars.

I was the only one in the car who saw the meteor: a bright streak of light trailing for a second through the night sky, vividly there and then forever gone.  A tiny piece of the solar system had ended its lonely aeons in the void, drawn to the earth's gravitational field and burning up in the atmosphere as it hurtled toward its new center.  Had I been superstitious, I might have made a wish.

We passed the sign at the town limits, and then the ranger station, and suddenly there we were in the heart of Idyllwild's commercial district.  The stores were closed, the streets were dark; it was too late to do anything but go to our cabin and quietly unpack.  Cabin 12 was mostly as I remembered it; some of the furniture had been replaced, and there was some new artwork on the walls, but the little touches were all still there: the yellow-and-salmon-colored window frames, the "Flaming Fire" notice on the living room wall charmingly detailing the proper use of the fireplace, the nail in the wall between the two beds in the room that has always been mine when I am there.  I was the first one in, and immediately claimed what I have for years thought of as my "honeymoon bed."  I was never the sort of misty-eyed romantic who plans out her whole wedding before she's even met her prospective groom, but I've known for years that if I ever marry, I want to spend my first days of connubial bliss in Idyllwild.

As our mothers set up the kitchen with the food we had brought from home, my sister and I lay prone on my bed and read a comic book she had brought.  Since I hadn't had any dinner, I helped myself to a peach and some Cheez-Its.  My mother and her partner admonished my sister and me not to stay up too late; they know we're night owls and could both stay up long and happily into the night with a good book.  With my circadian rhythm disorder, staying up at night isn't just a matter of preference for me, and normally my family respects my need to keep my own hours, but since I was sharing a room with my sister, I would have to cope with having the lights out at a more conventional time.  Although I wasn't tired at all, I brushed my teeth and changed into the shirt and shorts I had brought to sleep in.  I wrote in my journal a bit, and then we turned out the light and let the deep dark of genuine night, far away from any city, settle over us.

It was only a little past my hours of peak awareness, and I was in Idyllwild for the first time in ten years.  Of course I couldn't sleep.  I didn't really mind, though.  I was in Idyllwild, tossing and turning in my honeymoon bed.  There was nowhere else on earth I would rather be, even if all I could do there was lie awake in the wide black dark.  I lay wide awake for a long time, unable to settle even into the unrestful, forced half-sleep that one can usually attain by lying awake long enough in the dark.

There was something I needed to do.  I felt it pushing itself into my brain.  It was important, it needed to be done tonight, and it would have to be done before I could have any peace.

I needed to go in search of where I belonged.

It seemed as though the whole cabin creaked as I left the bedroom and crossed the living room to the front door.  I walked as quietly as I could, opened the door as gently as possible, but the hinges still whined loudly as I slipped out into the night.  Only a few scattered, distant lights made it possible to see where my feet were landing as I stepped down off the porch.  The world was blurry as well as dark, and I realized right away that I had left my glasses on the nightstand.  Well, I'd made enough noise already in a house full of sleeping people; I wasn't about to go back and get them.  Carefully, one hesitant step at a time, I made my way around the side of the cabin and into the field between the row of cabins and a small dirt service road starting up at the rental office.

I made my way blindly, as if I were floating in a fog.  I knew what I was looking for, and at first I didn't see it.  I felt the soil beneath my feet, and the occasional scratching of some dry reedy plant against my shins.  The trunks of tall pines solidified before me as I picked my way across the field, a deeper darkness congealing against the lesser darkness that was the air through which I moved.  To my left I could barely make out the small playground; to my right stretched a volleyball net.  Geography was coming back to me, my feet remembering the way even as my eyes widened to take in more of the night.

Then I saw it, still there, exactly where I had remembered: my rock.  Long, and reasonably flat, perfect for sitting on; situated by the end of a fence at the edge of the service road.  I remembered sitting on this rock when I was seventeen, writing in my little notebook, looking up at the trees and the mountain and the vastness of open space.  This was where I had come when I needed to be alone with nature and my thoughts.  This was where I needed to be tonight.  Ten years later.

I settled down on the stone, shifting around to get comfortable, letting my eyes wander across the dim, yet familiar, landscape.  I looked up, where I knew Tahquitz Peak stood, hidden behind treetops and darkness; I looked behind me, at the faint lights that marked the deserted main road.  I looked back across the field, toward the cabin.  Everything I saw, blurry as it was to my eye, stood out in clear focus to the more delicate instrument of the mind.

This rock, my rock, hadn't moved an inch in ten years.  It hadn't changed at all.  It had probably been right in that very spot for decades.  Centuries, perhaps.  It had maintained the integrity of its structure and shape through untold millennia, born of the earth in heat and pressure, becoming a thing that had not perceptibly changed since long before any of us were here, and would, left to its own devices, remain the same long after all of us were gone.

The last ten years were nothing to my rock.

The pine trees all around me had been here too, ten years ago.  Birds had looked down from these same lofty branches to spy on my yearning, hopeful adolescent self.  Living five times longer than the human lifespan, the trees too were all but untouched by the passing of another decade.

What I had come looking for, I had found.  I shifted again and lay back across the full length of the rock, my head nestled into a little indentation and my arms and legs hanging off the ends, like a human sacrifice.  Idyllwild was still here, still the same.  Nothing that had happened to me since I was seventeen could take that away from me.  Nothing ever could.

How presumptuous of me even to have questioned it!  A small, trifling thing such as I, supposing anything in my life could change my relation to the vast, the timeless, the immutable!

Life would come and keep on coming.  I had changed, and would change again, continually reborn, renewed.  But my existense, immense as it was in my own eyes, was but the tiniest drop in the great river of space and time.  I was a piece of something greater, something that would prevail with or without me.  No matter how much my circumstances changed, no matter how badly I was hurt, even if I was utterly destroyed, that which nurtures and sustains me would carry on strong.  What matters most to me - what matters to me even more than my own happiness, safety, and well-being - is invulnerable.  Whatever losses I might sustain along the way, I have the consolation of knowing that everything I stand for will long outlive me.

The sky over the mountains was alight with stars drowned out in more populous regions by the hazy light that hangs over urban areas.  Away from the dusty noise of the city, the stars twinkled their identities free and proud across the light-years.  Ten years ago, the illumination that was now reaching my eyes was a stream of energy pulsing through a great emptiness.  So immense is the cosmos that light must travel for years, centuries even, from the stars before it arrives in our solar system.  Lying on that rock, looking up into the sky, I was gazing into the past, gazing into a thousand scattered histories of fire and ice and immensity beyond my understanding.

And because I am a part of that universe, of those stars and those trees and mountains, I dared to speak to them, to whisper into the night the story of the past ten years.

"I went to college, all the way across the country," I whispered.  "But I was hospitalized for depression.  I was in the hospital for nine weeks.  And after that my family brought me home to recover."

While I was in the hospital in Massachusetts, the trees here in Idyllwild had stood tall and silent in the night just as they stood now.  Their branches would have hung heavy with snow, but the snow would have melted as I adjusted to my new life, struggled to reconcile my academic ambitions with my new identity as a diagnosis.

"I took some classes at the local community college that summer," I told the trees, "but I got rebellious and stopped taking my medication.  It was hard to accept that I would need it for the rest of my life.  I had a relapse and ended up back in the hospital again.  This time, my father wouldn't let me come home."

I told the trees how I had attempted suicide for the first time not two weeks later, in December again, when this rock on which I was now lying must have been glazed with ice.  I lived in a group home for a few months, in and out of the hospital every few weeks, and then, in June, I was hospitalized again, mostly on the basis of a false report, and this time they wouldn't let me go back.

"For over a year," I whispered into the sky, "I was in a long-term hospital.  I was so lonely there - I had visitors only once or twice a month, and I was aching to matter to someone.  My skin was starving to be touched.  And I had a roommate who took advantage of that.  I tried to give her what she told me she needed, at first because I cared about her, and later, because I was afraid of her.  It was degrading and horrible, but I could never bring myself to say no until she had already gone too far."

After the long-term hospital, I had spent nearly six years in another group home.  "I made a friend there, a special friend," I breathed into the night air.  "And one day she told me she was in love with me.  I didn't feel that way about her, but I couldn't bear to break her heart, so I shoved all my romantic notions aside to devote myself to her.  But I wasn't really what she wanted.  She changed so completely.  I never could have seen it coming.  I don't think it was really me that she loved, but some vision she had of how I could be.  And I couldn't be what it was that she wanted, though heaven and earth, I tried.  And finally she gave up trying and threw me out."

Lying on a rock under the stars, it all seemed like a dream, the past ten years.  If I closed my eyes I could imagine that I was seventeen again, on a night very much like this, and in a few weeks I would be packing my things to fly across the country to college and begin a new life.  Time and trouble to nothingness did sink, and nothing seemed to matter very much except this vastness all around and inside me: not my damaged mind, not my violated body, not my broken heart.  Still, I continued on whispering my secrets into the night: names I had never heard ten years ago, belonging to those who would to varying degrees shape my fate.  Friends new, old, and forever lost; unrequited loves; passersby who left their footprints in the clay of my soul.  Everything that had made the girl I once was into the woman I had become, I gave back to the universe, to the stones and the trees and the stars.  And I whispered of my new hopes, the fruit of the windbent core in me that refuses to die.

I saw another meteor streak across the sky.  A pebble that had travelled an untold, nameless eternity in space, and might have travelled a million years longer, had slipped into our gravity and burned, dying in a glorious blaze of light.

It was the sign I did not know I had been waiting for.  I slipped off the rock feeling calm, cleansed.  I made my way back to the cabin, crept back into my honeymoon bed, and slept surrounded by Idyllwild.