Envy me.

Out on the road witnessing the dying summer. Two-laned, banked-cornered bliss. Freedom relieving all stress from a new job, a rigorous class, and loss over my life in Korea. I was all energy and that car could not hold it all so I made it go fast and there seemed to be no end to its ability to meet my demands. There seemed to be no limit to my capacity for sheer happiness. I sang most of the way, smiled at such persistent beauty, and shouted out how great it is to be living, living with the option to get into a car and head for the deserted wilderness.

There was blue sky for a change, sharing itself with slate-grey rain clouds. I thought it was symbolic to the ritual I was about to experience. I thought the spirits knew about my journey today and they allowed me to feel the heat, one final time, of a summer sun together with the saturating dark rain of the next half year. Um and Yang.

A long drive to the destination. Mostly sunny, mostly traffic. I passed many, hugging their back bumpers until they pulled aside for relief. Eventually it was just me and the tall narrow V of light up ahead. Trees whizzing by, sometimes small stores, always little houses, some shacks.

Rain fell in sheets just before the V closed and I was safe under the canopy of long elegant branches crisscrossing the road. Emerald moss reclaiming the margins of pavement. Ooo, the rain was just pelting me and I yelled, Come on! Drench me! And it did. It was perfection. It was exactly what I had dreamt for this day. Oh, the rain! It was here participating in this ritual cleansing: my saying goodbye to summer, the radical life change, the deep blues of the water, the warm breeze pushing against me as I pedal. All that is gone now, packed away in the back of the closet with the shorts and tank tops.

Shrieking. Singing. I wanted to be naked in a stream and felt certain I would do it. I thought I should've gone to those hot springs, but I was already here, under the wing of a magnificent mountain. She will help me close the book and start a new one.

Higher and higher into Paradise. Snow now. Snow! Swirling cotton puffs caught in the beams, some flattening against the glass. I'm safe because the heater works. I'm safe because the lights on the dash are comforting. I'm safe because the music is so divine and by some miracle the speakers have stopped crackling. And I yelled, throwing my arms into the air: Snow! Woohoo!

Sat for an hour on her nape writing about this, writing about that, spilling about love, about hazardous desires. Then I read about me in the summertime; I reread the everything from this most pivotal of times in my life. Meanwhile, the storm continued. I was getting socked in, unable to see beyond the glass. Occasional figures, hunched into their Gore-Tex, walked by. I kept reading and when I turned the last page and closed the cover, I looked out onto a sparkling world in white. Packed the books, packed the camera, got myself out into it all. Knee deep, rummaging around looking at crystallized water, at colored plants defying the whitewash. Slippery walking in my worn out hiking shoes. No gaiters, no gloves. Jeans and my Gore-Tex coat.

I went up toward the big camp. Hiking was steep and in only moments I was warm; I could feel the generated heat exiting through the neck of the coat. My hands started to swell from the increased vascular activity causing the scabbed area on my hand from the crash last week to open up and bleed. Snow-chilled air cooled my nose and mouth; it tasted clean. At a flatter section of the path, I stopped to admire the vista: southward a volatile sky of deep-blue grey and billowy white clouds. The stout alpine firs stabbed at them from the earth, their green so dark it looked black. Black trees, white snow, silver rocks and trunks, blue-grey sky. Photographed in color.

I was soaked from wandering on and off the trail in nothing more than hiking shoes and jeans. Dusk approached and chill set in. Returning downhill did little to warm me so that by the time I got to the car, my fingers hurt.

On again. Down past part-time snow fields on which I have glissaded in years past. One of those slopes over on the right I have dug into and made shelter when it was covered in 10 feet of snow . Now it is rusted with thick, course scrub. Delicate maples mixed in saturated yellows, reds, and oranges are allegorical of the fires that sometimes burn through, charring it all. On and on down. I thought I would stop again and write. I did for awhile across from one of the meadows burning. I was certain I would stop one more time but the chill from the top lingered and I couldn't pull myself from the heated car, so I drove on. Fast down the long winding grade. Not a car in sight for miles and miles - a dream realized. Trees becoming thicker at lower elevations, taller too: I cannot see the top of the great pillars that seem to support the sky itself. They call them The Patriarchs. I have missed them, lain in bed in Korea trying to imagine that they still exist, these skyscrapers. Now they stand over me, extending soft and great feathery arms down to the air just above my speeding car. Clustered at their feet, still brilliant in the waning color of dusk, plumes of thin paper maples. On still, till Sunrise.