Chimes #37

The final insignia bequeathed to me by the camp realm: our bunk went camping, a few hours from the camp, deeper into the Pocono mountains themselves. This meant seeing something visionary— the roads, the highways, the flatlands version of the Pocono mountains. It was about isolation— for every rest-stop, there would be a twenty-minute lull, with nothing on the roadsides at all. The hills and mountains loomed over the roads, setting in place the commanding position which mother nature held in relation to the human race here. The highway spaces had dense woods on either side of them. We were even able to stop at a roadside McDonald’s, but my mind reeled at what it must have been like to settle and live here, to have this McDonald’s as a habitual hang-out place, or place of occupation, as the terse teenagers behind the counter did. When the natural dwarfs encampment areas, like this one McDonald’s, where we all got and consumed the customary stuffs, it creates a dynamic against language, against moving forward by speaking. Nature wins, and that’s that. We could’ve been on the moon, except to say that our human brains were imbibing exactly what the suburbs denied— the existence, around the human race, of the absolute sublime, and of sublimity forcing back our stunted attempts at imposing on the natural. The sublime denies the human, denies language, denies situations the human race creates to demonstrate momentum. We got where we were going, that early evening, by climbing up a seemingly endless hill. We set up our sleeping bags in a secluded campground area. After a few cursory, desultory attempts at lighting a fire (our counselors being no more advanced at this than us), and long after sunset, we went to sleep. In the middle of the night, I was woken with a harsh push. Baptiste, from France, had a pack of Gauloise cigarettes. For us men of daring, it was now or never. Baptiste laughed at our stunted attempts at sophisticated inhalation— yet it didn’t matter. For me, my first cigarette was an extension of acting, playing my guitar or baseball, and all the class-clowning I had down in school. I joined a continuum larger than myself, into a consciousness of bigness, expansiveness, largesse. I was attempting, without knowing or being aware of it, to translate the sublimity of the natural vistas opened around me, and us. I had accepted a token the universe, nature, and Baptiste had offered me, to reiterate what I already knew— somewhere out there was a real life waiting to be had, and the life was mine for the taking, if I dared.