Eastern High Sierra Flashbacks
by Jane Elsdon
For over four decades my husband, family, and I have traveled countless times back and forth from our home on the Central Coast to Bishop, California where my husband's parents lived until last year. We haven't been back since his father was lowered into Bishop soil and we tied up loose ends in November. In our minds, however, it will always be home to us almost as much as our beloved Central Coast is home.
How could it be otherwise when so many memories were made there, and the landscape traversed between the two areas is so indelibly imprinted in our souls? We have indeed had the best of both worlds—the glorious beauty of the Central California coast and the majestic glory of the Eastern High Sierras.
Most of our favorite places can be found in one of the two areas—many of our meaningful aha's have happened in one or the other. We often camped in the Sierras during the summertime. My husband would fish and photograph scenes he would later paint. I would claim a cooperative rock, picnic table, or tree trunk to lean against, relax, and fish for inspiration and poems.
Several summers we pitched our tent or parked our camper by Big Pine Creek. There I hooked many a poem . . . or they hooked me. Often we hiked up above the four waterfalls above Glacier Lodge (when it still existed). Ensconced in such natural beauty, the process was organic. Relax. Meditate. Stroll or hike. Drift among sounds, wildlife, changing landscapes, the touch of weather (or anything else) on our skin, drink it all in. Ask ourselves a few cogent questions like what's on your mind? What do you need or want to say right now? Lift pen to paper and let go.
One summer when we hiked up above the four waterfalls to the bridge over the creek I was so transfixed by the power of the glacial melt crashing down the steep mountain that I stretched out on the wooden bridge and gave my full focus to the powerful vibrations of the water and their affects on my body for a time. "Going With the Flow" is the result.
Going With the Flow
Listen!
Do not be misled.
This is no easy thing of which I speak.
I have mouthed simple platitudes
of going with the flow,
living like a leaf borne effortlessly
along a gentle waterway
on an odyssey
or carried on a quiet rivulet of water
gliding over a moss-draped
shoulder of granite, but that is not
the whole of it. No.
I say listen!
I have been there high in the Sierras
in August, drenched in that flood of light
when an ocean of glacial melt
plunges off the edge of the world
exploding downward forever.
Down, down, down
over boulders and fallen giants.
I have knelt there silently
on the redwood bridge
above the four waterfalls
and been ground to wordlessness
by the earthshaking roar of it.
I have hung there
speechless
dissolving in that avalanche of light
glimpsing what it is to be
humbled.
Listen!
I have trembled there
suspended over its thunderous descent
borne along its crashing course
back to the beginnings
of the world
transfixed by my own puniness
and audacity
at playing my eyes
on reverberations of its power,
crescendos of its light,
and I will not mouth
those simple platitudes again. |
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This poem has been published in Prayers To Protest, Poems that Center & Bless Us, Edited by Jennifer Bosveld, 1998, Pudding House Publications, and IN THE RAIN SHADOW by Jane Elsdon, 2005.
Artwork and Photographs by Gene Elsdon
Monarch Butterfly Banner Image by Mike Baird |
