I.
There is a range I visit in sleep, a sharp fold in the Earth, that runs from Stockton toward Shasta in the north. It is tall and narrow, but gentler than the Sierra Nevada east of it. Conifers cloak its summits, the soil beneath them thick with decaying needles and redwood sorrel. In life there is no range there but the little Sutter Buttes, but a dozen times the last two years I have drifted off and found myself there, hiking the trail that runs along its crest, looking down on the dry-grass valley between the Dream Range and the Sierra. These mountains catch storms off the Pacific and streams flow down their faces, comfortable and familiar towns along the foothill banks. I have been visiting for a decade or more, in a time in which California has been increasingly gutted, and yet no dream developer has leveled my dream trees to build dream homes.
II.
We waited on Saturday for the mechanic’s shop to open, walking through the leafy Seattle suburbs, and the landscape drank my heart. I remember what this is like, I thought, the bright soft green pressing up against every square inch of sunlight, the moisture in the air, each mild depression in the earth filling up with water. It was the landscape of rural New York, or at least New York with a layer of tall conifers grafted above it. There water flows year round. The summer air does not rob the streams, and creeks narrow enough to step across rarely merit names. That familiar childhood claustrophobia, the sense that the long view was near-unattainable and even then glimpsed only through the woods, made my skin crawl a little even as I relaxed into the green, picked blackberries from parking lot brambles.
III.
When I was in my teens I dreamed a lake. It fit into the Central New York landscape more seamlessly than does the Valley Dream Range, my sleeping mind painting in more cautious strokes in those days, but still it was wholly dreamed, and consistent from year to year. There was a town near the lake, a few white clapboard buildings nestled in the roadside woods, and a narrow strip of pavement running from the town into a lake park. The notion of wild land outside a park was unfamiliar to me then, a child who sat impatient at age six in traffic at the entry gate to Yellowstone, the crazy Absarokas close enough to touch and yet I looked restlessly at the far park hills. In most dreams my lake was almost as remote. I dreamed of being in the town, an errand or two away from getting to the water, needing to make calls from a broken payphone or buy lunch for the hike, and waking just as I crossed the road, ready to enter the park. But there were nights when I reached the lake, a placid, unprepossessing piece of water, and walked around it to the far side and past the rise beyond. There was a cliff, and at its base a cobbled stream flowed braided silver. Beyond the stream was miles of bare badland soil, ravines and buttes and crenellations to the horizon, the long view hard-gained.
IV.
I was born almost upon a glacial lake. Ten minutes’ walk, the way I walk now, would have brought me to the shore. Had the doctor cut the cord and carted me to the hospital roof I would, through blinking fogged and amniotic eyes, have seen it shining down below in the low afternoon sun of winter. I have swum in it but seldom, spent only a few hours of my life able to reach its water. Still it is an ancestral home, like Olduvai. It is the place from which I sprung. I recognize it on sight. I know of no other lake like it. It is distinctive even from a thousand miles up, posing a question to the sky I have tried my whole life, and failed, to answer:
V.
After my first few years of living in a city, the usual pubescent complaints preoccupying me, my parents dragged me out shopping. They stopped at a nursery, an unusual thing for them. I disappeared into the stock out back. There was a row of red maples, stout saplings in 15-gallon cans. I walked between them and stopped, surprised. Someone had hauled them there in rough rows for minimum wage, thinking of lunch and his sore back, and yet I walked into them as a bored child and became a monk pacing a pleached arbor, a startling sudden calm in a time when calm was rare. I was surprised. I walked again through the temporary grove, and felt the calm again, until my evening-impatient parents found me and we went off to buy groceries.
VI.
I think sometimes that the landscape is superfluous to my pursuit of it, that I could love a New Jersey ragweed lot as fully as a roadless sagebrush valley. I have borne places in my heart for years, the verge of Buttermilk Falls the day before I left New York, when I cut off a lock of hair and burned it, and then returned after years and been unable to find them again. Did they exist at all? Mid-Hills aflame, my Buffalo commune refuge from my family now a vacant lot, forests I loved razed and neighborhoods fallen to the dozer blade. The one place in New York the most like home gone now, the heart cut out of it when my grandmother died, the trees and hills still there, the roads still there, my family still there but the spark gone out. And yet I roll through those hills in dreams too, a child again and impatient to see her.
VII.
Not long after I left New York my visits to the dreamed lake decreased in number. By two years on, or three, they had stopped altogether.
VIII.
Beyond that dreaming range lies a narrow dry valley, and east of it the big Sierra Nevada, not too different from its waking self. East of the Sierra starts the desert, though not the same one as in life. At altitude the rocks’ color changes, the trees thin quickly, and a thousand inviting trails emerge from the forest to thread through sinuous red rock. I start out on those trails and awake. Farther east, around the location of Fallon in the waking world, a desert valley holds a familiar town, a mix of Tucson and Moab with perhaps a little Santa Cruz. I have visited that small city many times. Some nights I move to that dream city, and am making copies of my new house keys when I awake.
IX.
There is a lake there, sometimes. I have camped along its shore, paved with round granite cobbles the size of cars. Sometimes I am alone. Once I camped there with two much-beloved friends, one dead, the other living in a life now forever separated from mine, and we lit the backpacking stove and found sandy places to lay our sleeping bags. A ranger showed up and told us we needed a permit, and I went to get one, and I had sat through almost the entire required orientation before I woke up.
Beautiful!
“Some nights I move to that dream city, and am making copies of my new house keys when I awake.”
I have a dream house in the hills above Mexico City. It’s probably now over-run with cars and businesses, but not in my dreams; a lonely hill-side with a tiny creek meandering down the slope. I move in, re-arrange my books, put a bowl of fruit on the table, and ... wake up. Always with a sense of loss, and of leaving unfinished business.
I’m usually making camp in the Adirondacks. Long-lost friends and dead relations come to talk. Once a former grad school teacher sat by my fire, coffee cupped in his hands, offering avuncular advice. Sometimes I walk out of the woods with my gear and gratefully drop it on the porch of my dream cabin, somewhere up a Kentucky holler. I’ve canned jam, cooked meals, watched birds out the window. It’s my bonus life.
Beautiful dream geography, and writing - I’d love to see that ridge.
Mine is a house and the land on which it sits. Both change constantly, and the barriers between inside and outside are permeable, but there are consistent central features of both building and land, if sometimes in different places.
It stands in spite of everything, that dreamt environment, and grows as I do.
delurking just to say thanks and this made my day.
Not much to say but thanks for this; I’m glad the wet greenness prompted it.
Beautiful, Chris.
Sometimes when I read these things you write lately, I imagine you’re undergoing some sort of metamorphosis. That what to me already looks like a beautiful rare butterfly is instead only a caterpillar, and that one day we’ll see something stunning emerge, something never before seen, too bright and wonderful for mortal eyes to look at.
...
Either way, I’m good.
I thought I did that already.
All very nice, but when are you gong to get back to the political writing? What’s so important about all this that you choose to do it instead?
Actually, Aaron, it’s not the writing in this genre that’s keeping me from the political writing.
It’s the set of all eight seasons of Who’s The Boss on DVD I got in June. I really want to find out whether Tony and Angela ever get together, and it’s been sucking up all my free time.
That Alyssa Milano is a cute kid, I gotta say. Did she get any more work after the show ended?
I know exactly what you are talking about, since I have hiked that very same place, just a few years ago. When I first got home from California, the greenery just hit me so powerfully, even though I was only gone a few years.
It’s all coming together. The dreams, the episodes of Who’s the Boss . . .
http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/comments/1114/
No wonder I couldn’t sleep well last night.
I’ve never met anyone else who had a static dreamworld. Whenever I try to explain it, people just look at me funny.
Yours sounds much more beautiful (and wild) than mine. Mine is almost all cities… mostly here where I live, though there’s a dream School and several other places that don’t have analogues. Very few people though… and even fewer benign.
Every couple years I have a vivid dream about finding another mountain hollow right over the ridge from this one in which I live - essentially the same place, but wilder, with the old orchard still intact (in reality it was bulldozed out in the 50s, long befoer I was born). As the previous commenter says, it’s nice to hear someone else has a dream world like this.
I have a recurring urban dreamscape (a frustrating road system), and a recurring natural dreamscape (a high mesa with a river running across it). In my waking hours, I’m a city person, yet stress expresses itself in my sleep via the urban motif. Gee, I wonder if that’s significant.
I was born almost upon a glacial lake. Ten minutes’ walk, the way I walk now, would have brought me to the shore.
I’m surprised you didn’t turn out to be a sailor. Or at least a soldier.
I was an Upstate arriviste rather than a native, but gad, I miss the Finger Lakes and their surroundings. And the shores of Lake Ontario. And… Look, this piece already had me a little teary, so I’ll just cry quietly for a little while, okay?
Enough with the inside jokes, there Buckwheat.