The Ride Back

I live far away from home now. It's been decades since I've seen Jenny. I have a big corporate job now. Time to think is a rarity, something I cherish amidst the chaos of my life. The work often feels like too much, like it’s stacking up against my chest and threatening to strangle me. My days are often filled with people yelling, misunderstandings and missed opportunities. Sometimes I wonder if the corporate life, with its gray interiors and fluorescent lights, is meant me for me at all. When the work gets to be too much and I feel myself unraveling, I think of Jenny and the waterfall, and in these stretching gaps of dissociation that seem so common now, the waterfall beckons me like an old friend, opening up something inside of me like a deep wound breathing life into my heart.

The waterfall was hidden down deep in a valley. The drive there was monotonous, and you usually needed to be peering down at a map to find your away around the twisting roads. But when the hill dropped down into the valley, you could feel your stomach drop out as the car brought you down into the cavernous stretch of blacktop through the shining trees.

in the summers the valley was brilliantly green, and big, healthy trees lifted their arms up towards the warm sky. Fall brought burning reds and yellows, fire in the oaks that burned towards the dark, windy sky. And in the winter the leaves twirled and fell in the harsh, biting wind and revealed the black, skeletal fingers of naked limbs.

This was the place where Jenny and I loved to go.

It was a place that embodied love and loss, memories that had fluttered away like butterflies but remained locked in here, a world I could revisit at any moment and be back.

More and more I found myself thinking about Jenny. On my long train rides back from work, through the biting winds of darkness and the white flurries past the windows, I think of her and that waterfall. Sometimes it makes me happy to think of that place, other times it makes me so sad that my heart feels like it’s dropping down into my stomach. The main thing is that it makes me feel anything at all.

On these train rides back it’s so clear . . . I close my eyes and the vision comes me, half-asleep and smoothed over with the magic of dreamscape, and I smell the air . . . sweet with the scent of damp cedarwood, and I come over that last rocky outcrop overlooking a beautiful waterfall tumbling over the brown cliff to find her waiting for me, her blue eyes gleaming up at me through the sun.

Sometimes I see both of us there, like I’m watching from afar, peering into a pocket of the distant past. Down beneath the waterfall I can see that huge pine that had toppled over in front of the falls. I can see us sitting there, straddling the mossy wood, teasing each other with the sound of the falling water in our ears.

We were never the perfect couple, both of us often on different wavelengths, dealing with our own problems and trying to project them through each other. We were two people trying to find ourselves in each other, usually failing while doing so, but sometimes succeeding spectacularly. 

Amidst the colors of these dreams, the train shutters and my head clangs against the cold window and I jolt awake. The cold air wraps around me again and I close my eyes once more, hoping to return to that place one more time, to that wonderful waterfall, hoping the train will never stop and I can dream about this place forever.

It doesn’t take long to fall back into that dream state. All I have to do is imagine the sounds; the heavy thudding of water on rocks, the soft chirping of a whippoorwill, or Jenny’s laughter like music in the falls.

I look forward to the train rides home now, almost from the time I wake up. It’s something to get me through the day. Sometimes the waterfall creeps into my daily life. I’ll be sitting in a meeting and hear the gentle falling water in my ears.

I look around, but there’s nothing but dark suits and hollow eyes.

A couple weeks ago, I was in the middle of a conversation with my boss and I heard the distant chirping of a bird. I was completely transfixed by this that I interrupted my boss midsentence to comment on it. He seemed to be ignoring the noise completely.

There’s a bird in our vents, I think, I told him, peering up at the vents along the ceiling. I think it’s stuck up there, trying to get out.

My boss returned my concern with cold eyes.

I don’t hear anything, he said. And that was that.

But I continued to hear the bird, ever so distant. It seemed to stalk the ceiling above my desk.  I couldn’t get the image of the poor little thing scampering around up there through the narrow vents, skipping around corners and using its wings to try to fly, all the while slamming into the tight confines of this awful place. Trapped, unable to escape. I felt my chest tightening every time I thought about it.

I asked others about the noise and got no response. No one heard it but me.

I figured the others were just too busy in their work to notice it. I could hear it because I was listening for it, I could relate to the helpless scampering in the walls of this place, the desperate attempts to fly away. Those warm dreams on the train ride back became my only solace.

Once not long ago I was in the midst of yet another dream and someone came down the aisle and knocked my elbow off the seat, thrusting me rudely out of my trance. A burst of red-hot anger shot through me and I jumped to my feet, tackling a stranger as he tried to apologize for the mishap.

He’d taken the dream from me. I couldn’t forgive him for that.

I was kicked off that train. I was able to find another one, a longer journey with more stops, much dirtier, but it stopped close enough to my house that the walk home was feasible. I didn’t mind the longer train ride, anyways. It gave me more time with Jenny. This train was filled with more homeless than those returning from work, and they eyed me suspiciously, often seeking money. I gave them all I had. I didn’t mind. I was tired of sitting with the same old gray suits, avoiding each other’s eyes. Sometimes I would tell my new friends about the waterfall, about the way the trees shined in the summer and the way Jenny’s eyes looked in the sun.

And after I gave them money, they let me alone to dream.

A week ago, I lost my job. I don’t blame them for firing me. I hadn’t been able to focus with that damn bird chirping, and for the past month I’d been letting my work pile up on me. It came as a relief when I was called into my boss’s office to receive the news. It was freeing walking out of that gray, dark place, feeling the eyes on my back. I felt reborn, like I was chasing some kind of new splice in the universe I’d never explored before.

The moment I walked out I knew what I had to do. I had to go back to the waterfall. I had to find Jenny. I thought about it the whole train ride back.       

And that’s exactly what I did. That night I found a flight. The next day I was 70,00 feet in the sky, watching the clouds below wisp by. It was just as I imagined – a series of twists and turns through the forest until the road gave way to a towering hill that led you down right into the heart of the valley. I was afraid I might lose it on the hike there, that maybe it was gone, and the trees wiped clear for a new shopping center. But it wasn’t long before I came over that last outcrop. The sun came through the trees, dappled by the emerald leaves. The air was warm, a slight breeze . . . everything smelled like earth and flowers. The sound of the water was beating in my ears, and as I came over the hill, I saw the water cascading off the cliff, down underneath that huge overturned pine.

And there she was, waiting for me, after all these years. Her blue eyes scanned the falls up to mine, and we met each other’s gaze.

But an odd feeling came over me then, as if my skin was growing cold, like a pocket of air around me was turning bitter and dark and the sun going down behind the trees, and everything began to shutter in fragility.

I woke up on the train. The jacket I’d thrown over my shoulders was gone. Someone must have taken it.

Of course I’d never gone to the falls. I have no money, you see. How could I get there?

           But that’s okay. I’ll wait here on this train, and all I have to do to go back is close my eyes. Maybe one day the train will take me back there for good.

I close my eyes, and I see it . . .

The stream that sources the waterfall slinks away through trees that pale emerald in the sun’s rays, dappling the muddy ground. If you follow the stream far enough back you pass a large, gnarled elm with branches thick enough to lay on. Farther on the woods opens up into a grove of flowers, purple and red and blue . . . maybe that’s where I’ll go tonight, with Jenny.