|
|
I have had to suppress many things. In the hospital beds when I was young with my guts rotting inside of me, I would suppress the woods and the waters, because I thought I might never see them again, or because remembering them made me go mad.
For those many years I lived abroad I had to suppress who I had been before and who I was, or I would’ve gone mad. That was the other side of the world, like when you were a child in the sand pit under the two great white oaks in the flat grass field and you all decided to dig straight down in the sand until you got to China. But that this hole would close after you and you would have to suppress all memory of the grass and oak and the lake and the creek, or you would go mad because you longed so hard to return.
The Mekong River was muddy, wide and slow, and warm as urine, and looking into it there was nothing to see, but you concentrated on not thinking of Wilson Creek or Clemens Creek or the Flute Reed because you couldn’t allow yourself to be sad and you needed to move forward, forward, always upstream.
The canals in Singapore were old and deep, and the plane trees were high overhead, and you had best not think that you were a fly-fisherman because you were a world away and it was a different life and maybe you were not a fly-fisherman anymore.
In Malaysia there were the dark green, orange groves that stretched many miles, and in Thailand the uniform rubber tree plantations and in Vietnam the canes yellow and green, thick and tall, so you did not know how far they stretched. But I had to suppress the drive to come back to the sweet balsams and spruce and poplars and the mucky bottoms of the cedar stands and alder defiles.
Sometimes, though, even when I was here in the out-of-doors, I had to suppress other things that otherwise were driving me mad. That November in the Mississippi River bottoms high up in the Polack stand I sat alone in the frosted snow with my first broken heart. That was when I was a teenager. I had to suppress the broken heart until I shot that doe and her fawn and then I forgot the broken heart for a little while.
Then a few years later, November again, up in the climbing stand up the lonely red pine, alone and suppressing things painfully, that second broken heart that made me wince and swear at myself, until I shot that buck; but this time I couldn’t suppress things, and nothing made me forget or feel better.
“Two roads diverged in a wood,” said Frost, and we sacrifice one for the other, and up the other sometimes we suppress some things that had come before them both, or go mad at failing.
Leave a Reply