from the pen of icarus blake

My heart lives in the shadow of the Rockies, where I was born, where I spent my childhood catching crayfish in freezing streams and scrambling over boulders that overlooked the great flat plains to the east.  There is no place I am more at home than beneath the canopies of lodgepole and ponderosa forests, picking out insects and spotting deer between the trees like the bars of a zoo.  Every so often, a bear even steals a car (true story, happened to my friend, I don’t know if insurance covered it).  The air is dry, it scours your lungs while you hike, head light as you approach the great dome of the sky.

But every three years, my family returns to the place of my mother’s birth: South Carolina.  We gather with friends and selected family in a house on the beach, everyone pitches in, people lay over every soft surface.  For one to two weeks, we spend our days without care, stinking of sunscreen and sweat, a bunch of mountain-living fools basking in the warm wet air of the ocean.  I can breathe, my hair frizzes, the wind blows, and I spend hours upon hours wading through the warm waters along the beach until the crowds melt away.  By the time I wander back in the evening, or someone finds me and summons me for dinner and drinks, my back is aching and my pockets are filled with shells.  

The beach is a rare treat for a rocky mountain dweller, but even while I’m looking out over that vast plain of water I can’t help but sense the second mountain range miles and miles at my back.  Even standing at the coast, I hear the call of the mountains behind me.  The Appalachians call me up the coast, ask me to explore something even older than the dragon’s maw I live within.  Something older than bones, older than the very air we breathe, that saw the stretch and break of pangea and the loss of it’s sisters in the Scottish highlands.  

The ocean is vast, it’s depths a void you can barely touch standing on the sands of a manufactured beach, but the mountains are a mouth.  Full of teeth, beckoning with a promise secret places to hide your bones.  From the sunny conifer forests and dragon teeth of the Rockies, to the ancient caverns beneath the Appalachians, I cannot deny that pull of the maw.