Spring

February 8, 2009

(Twin Peaks)

I stood on the higher peak and looked down on the city, where wind drove mist over the deep-cut streets. I felt again what I had felt on the bluffs of Marin staring back across the bay: a rising and then subsiding, as of breath in the chest. First exaltation. Then sadness. For the city looked so small and pale, almost subsumed by fog. The buildings of downtown were like masts and protrusions on the deck of some ship lost at sea.

It looked like a thing that could rust. Memory could close over it, and one would look down through those cold waters and see a scene wavering and indistinct. It could crumble slowly and be claimed by the ocean floor of time, grown over by weeds, with creatures nesting in its vacant rooms.

So I thought, standing on a wet, green, high hill. The brilliant vegetation – young grass and starbursts of yellow flowers – so impressed and elated me that I felt I could write pages and pages on it, but the only thing that came out was “green, green, green.” Such vitality of nature, it seemed, could overrun the gray architecture beneath and wilderness reclaim this whole peninsula. I have such notions often in this city, with all its dense, forested parks that overlook the surrounding buildings, rising from among them on hills like volcanic islands made of the true stuff of the earth, lapped by a mutable, inconstant civilization.