The Valley

Clouds and fog and rain come to play with you and you can't be afraid at all, you don't run from them just like you wouldn't run from 7 friendly people waving to you on a beach as you swim to shore. That's how you have to think about the snow clouds as the green lightening hits the field besides the Willamette River. Cold water is warm water. Freezing rain is warm sun. Fog is a clear sky looking across the ocean.

There was an orange and blue and green sky in the dark and in the moonlight and as the snow did not move in the air there was water, there were specs of water that froze to my face and gloves and jacket. I wore the balaclava on my neck and the longer polypropylene hat and I could see the large foothill that rose from the Willamette River and the lights of the houses and the river rushing in the cold and there was the crunch of the snow as the rain coated three inches of snow on the field and I ran swiftly and I thought that many think badly of clouds and rain and fog and these guys are always used as metaphors, someone is always pointing their finger at God’s creatures—“I was in a fog; my life has been frozen in a dark cloud; rain has washed the last chances of hope"—yet these forces have been alone for so long because they have been shunned, they rush in good faith to humans and no one can return the embrace of cold rain, snow, fog, clouds all embracing a man together in a dark night. There is an escape from what they did there. That damn bridge, for example. What they did to the foothills with the road, is also what I’m getting at. All those homes perched on the foothill with the lights that look beautiful in the night—that ruins the foothill: if you just sit down in the field and feel the cold crunch of the snow in the field and feel the rain and see that moonlight and the clouds. Do you know it’s far more impressive than anything you bought that day? Do you know the whole system that makes you smile is just a mind game? That money, that ‘savings,’ those ‘mutual funds?’ Better to smile at rivers, better to smile at the sound of water, better to smile when you collapse asleep in your tent. What was it like for the man who walked through that same valley before there was anything there with the houses and the road and concrete bike path? What do you imagine as he looks up to the foothill as the moonlight fought the clouds and the rain with the green and the yellow and the orange and the blue and purple and bracing for one moment of lightening? Huh? What do you think he might have felt just then? God damn wonder. He’d stop thinking about his wet feet. He’d be in a place closer to those clouds and that sky and those colors and that feel of chill in the night holds everything over that river and that field and that snow and that valley before they all tried to go and kill it.