The Last of the Dirt Road Riders…
Eddie woke up the other day and couldn’t find his feet.
The legs were gone as well, determined by earnest poking by those who know.
He could touch them with his hands, but not from his brain, the brain that held the memories of walking his Rockies for Elk, or tracing the places where earlier people had sat and chipped the rocks, and he was slow in his step as he told me to look for something that doesn’t belong on this ground; they carried him to the shale in Douglas Pass, gave him the lift and the leverage for dogging out the leafy fossils.
He carved a yellow Harley down the soft curves of the Unaweep, past the ruins of romance, built for a woman who didn’t want to be the Queen of Nowhere. Easy in the weave and the wind, he knew the miles of the back country, where to see the moose, where to take a horse if the snow stopped the wheels.
He is the last of the dirt road riders, content to follow a scant track just to see why it was there. Sometimes it was food, game for the taking, sometimes it was just that it was far from the pavement and its attendant worries, sometimes it was the sound, the wind, the feathery snow, the cracking sand.
He’d share, if you were quiet. He wouldn’t tell you what he was sharing, but if you shut up for a minute, you’d know it was not that you were along, but that you were along on the way to there, because it was the getting there that was the point.
And because there you see yourself without connection other than your feet on the earth.
It can’t be lost on him now, connected to the tubes and cables and velcro’d straps, and back to mattress and dependent on those who know, and the hope that this time the tumor is really, really gone.
And the wish that before the getting there part of this journey is done, he will again find his feet.
on April 3, 2008 at 6:09 am
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As it often does, your fiction leaves me speechless…
on April 3, 2008 at 6:38 am
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thanks, Frank, but it isn’t fiction.
on April 5, 2008 at 5:56 pm
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I think “those who know” should be capitalized (Those Who Know), but otherwise, bravo.
on April 10, 2008 at 8:28 am
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I considered it, even tried it on for size, but it didn’t make the final cut*. Thanks.
*yeah, I know. It doesn’t seem so, but sometimes I really edit.**
**really. Spastic time traveling notwithstanding.