[Newspoetry] A Katydid Journey

[Donald L Emerick]

A Katydid Journey

Even a journey of a thousand miles would begin with a single step, a leap away from the sameness of the same.  It’s an old saying, old in my memory, old to the human race, old before its time.  A seed unplanted makes no roots.

Oh, yes, the measure of distance was not always “miles” – but there was always already the standard unit of measurement, something that lies beyond the shadow of man.  A mile is such a unit, already a distance that takes time to hike across.  It’s the hiking that makes the journey, and thinking of that, the journey begins, all over again.  Gardens are home-tamed fields of prairie grasses.

Where I was born and early on lived, I could hike across prairie – and did.  The ground was not so flat as what the travelogues say it is.  But, they have already been elsewhere than on the prairie.  Maybe, they came across the prairie on their journeys.  Maybe, they even hiked to get there, to the indefinable edge of the prairie – for the edge of anything, of a landscape, even of a mountain, can never be found.  There is no foot of any mountain on which you could set your foot – a foot trampling on a foot.  Weeds were once weeds, until biology taught us to see pristine beauty in the wild flower and its primal naiveté.

Every step is a journey; you could not step onto the same prairie twice, Heraclites might have said, had he been more observing of his own feet, less arrogant against the foolishness of (other) people.  He trampled over people in his journeys, carped at them daily; "carpe diem!" indeed.  The flowers he walked past had more becoming than he did.

And, yes, the value of a thousand speaks of a magnitude difficult to mind.  A thousand is never easy to manage, but it is not yet so big as to be impossibly large.  Even here, a thousand appears on top of a distance already almost out of sight, the measured mile.  This sense of measuring would not differ much were we speaking in ancient terms, of stadia, the length of the lap around a stadium’s inner footing – even if 7 or 8 stadia might make a mile.  The sense of measuring on top of measuring would be more obvious were to be speaking metrically, on a journey of a thousand kilometers a thousand petals fall.

The hiking is much the same, however the journey is measured.  Your feet know that and tell you that, if you walk on them long enough, tramp far enough in a single day.  Your toes wriggle, your arch rises, your heels ache to tell you, ”You’ve gone too far, today.  Stop and smell roses you hiked by all day.”

It’s not the first step of any journey that is ever hard to take.  It’s the next one, the one that keeps on eluding you, the one that has yet to be made.  It’s easier to overcome, this next step, if you make it the first step again – fresh as a daisy.

Hike in the hills, hike in the woods, hike where you will, even over the widest desert, water will soon or someday cut cross your path.  You can not walk on water, to hike over it, unless the stream or puddle is shallow.  You have to cross over by bridges or boats, or go around, or stay on the hither shore, never reaching any nethermost world, where all flowers fail.

Hiking will not take you where you want to go; your feet will fail to overcome all of the surfaces – even if you inflate them greater than your ego, to try to skate across the waters of the ways.  Terrains are not all plains, the grounds also rise and fall, in mountains soaring tall, and gaping abysses of the eternal fall.  And in the crevices, between the rocks, flowers grow.

Why walk when you could fly?  Arms stretch and flap, and feet dangle down – but man can not fly alone, unaided.  Man flies, armored against the fall failure would bring.  A flower does not fly in the wind, it tosses itself against its roots, ever anchored, ever moored against journeys.  Its life is brief enough, though its seeds travel.

Flying has its limits, too, as a journey method.  Icarus dickers us down to dock our flights from soil and water.  Else, we reach the fires of the flaming heavens, where our bindings of feathers and wax must fail.  We fall from the fire that restores us to earth, that hurtles us back to earth, that forbids a longer escape.  Tulips shiver to pierce the passing thaws of frozen sod, to shatter shining ice packs lying like burial mounds out across flower beds.

A journey escapes no maze, but travels in it, for its pleasures.  A journey is journaled, or else it is forgotten, digested, wasted.  A journal is about the journey, step by step, in time, a record taken daily.  A journal stretches out time, as if its coil of slinky wires could be laid flat, flatter than a prairie, to hike upon.  The springy entwining connectedness of the entangling wires has an elasticity only out to a limit, and then it stretches too far.  It snap back no more, but becomes a jumble of tangles.  Who would staple, tape or glue petals back on fallen flowers?

A journal is a book of a journey – every day makes its mark, its imprint.  Its footsteps are preserved like fossils in the muds.  They form sheets of rock, sandstones and shales.  They pave over the prairie, the hills, through the woods, and over the waters that pool and stream.  Concrete and asphalt roads level time’s travels, smooth and soothe comings and goings.  Even the chilling layers of once molten rock, basaltic up-thrusts of devil’s towers, become mere surfaces, dully reflecting the technology of the long the hike up-country, cross-country, home.  And strewn along the way are flowers, left to mark the way back – a trail of crumbs such as Hansel and Gretel might leave behind.

Every day is a long hike toward an ever self-refreshing, self-renewing horizon.  An horizon is like a fountain of youth, perpetually bubbling over, never dying.  They say flowers planted there never let their blossoms fade, their petals fall.  I’m headed there, I know, if my feet don’t fail me now, if my hiking boots don’t fail me, if water doesn’t block me, if sky doesn’t daunt me, if fire ever draws me home.