It wasn't very cold, just blustery and raining steadily. I put on my pauncho right away. The cemetery was dull and shining at the same time, in parts, with russets and burnished yellows and damp greens, the comfortable brooding dark blue green of spruces in a line. Looking into the spruces, between their wide boughs, at the wet brown trunks where their limbs met their bodies, I thought of all the thousands of things I can look at during the days of my life, and how looking at those things makes up my mind, and how I look at so many, many things, when I could just look at a few, a few things like this wet tree trunk, a little damp cavern in the boughs, safe for being real, not for being comfortable. I could look only a things that grow from the ground, things that stand in the weather, and make my mind this way.
I pedaled up to the hospital and then down Glasgow as the cars rushed past me in the spray. South on Belmont, west on Gage, past a garden of wildflowers interspersed with stones outside a monolithic warehouse. Goldenroad, purple asters, little white flowers. It was raining harder and I was becoming damp in my pauncho. When I saw these wildflowers in the rain, I thought to myself, this is something meaningful I won't forget - but I forget now why. Yet the rain does now seem very important, - not the rain, exactly, but the way the light shone through it, dull and subtle and wild.
The wind was coming out of the west down Gage and it became tiring. I felt set on my goal for the day, the height of Victoria St just past Fischer Hallman. Rain, wind, tiredness and growing dampness were my environment, my skin, my surroundings, not something to fight against.
On Westmount I turned south again and jogged up to Chopin Dr. I began to wonder what the best way to get up to Fischer Hallman was - through the woods (possibly quite muddy) or up Victoria (possibly quite a tiring uphill struggle in the rain). I felt uncharacteristically uninclined to go into the woods - it was as though my ability to withstand the wind and rain was somehow reliant on my having a specific goal (top of the hill) rather than enjoyment of surroundings (through the woods). I felt somehow that only pavement could sustain me. And yet I dreaded an uphill battle. I began to feel uncertain of my goal and then I began to feel irritated and uncomfortable with the weather. I rolled around the mall and into the entry to the woods, feeling more and more uncomfortable.
I made the quick decision to stick with my goal and turned left down the path that leads to Victoria St. My calm returned, and then my joy. It felt to me in that moment that my calm was related to my commitment to a goal - that as soon as I'd focused specifically on enjoying myself, I began to enjoy myself much less.
It felt good and right to be on the path heading south. It followed a steam that had been paved many years ago to form a downward sloping aquaduct, and, in the rain, the muddy water was rushing and swishing along uniformly, like the water in a splash park ride, taking the slight bends and twists of the duct in a body, up the sides and then back down again, in a race to the south. I flew along the path at what felt like the exact speed of the water, feeling myself move with it, slide with it, rush with it, curve along with it, race with it in the rain and the wind, with the colourful hedgerow whipping along the side of my vision, and the big park sky opening up ahead, high and grey.
Turning west on Victoria, I discovered the hill was not so big as I'd imagined, and began to climb. I needed to put in a steady effort and a firm mental concentration, as the wind was strong, I was becoming cold and more wet, and was about to leave my zone. Crossing Fischer Hallman, the ground leveled out, the wind dropped, and everything became still, as if I had arrived where I wanted to be, and could now quietly, carefully, slowly inspect every part of it.
I followed Victoria until the road curved and dipped down to Eastforest Park. At this point I stopped, having come nearly to my goal. If it had been sunny and cool, I would have tried to go further, but I had no more motivation in the rain. I enjoyed the view, the swoop of the road into the hilly distance.
Once I turned around, I began to look around carefully at the trees, signs and my own mind. I turned north down Fischer Hallman and into Monach Woods. I stood on the bridge, watching the stream flow beneath, bubbling rising and floating on the dusky surface, water dripping from the high trees all around, wet pale green everywhere. I was feeling colder. I walked for a while in the woods, watching the water, until I realized I was waiting to feel uncomfortably cold before I could leave. I decided to leave before that happened, and pedaled comfortably down the trail back to the mall. At the mall, I readjusted my pauncho until I felt as cozy as possible, given how wet I had become, and then made my way back to Gzowski Park, on Chopin Dr.
In the park, I got off my bike and walked slowly. The rain seemed to fall more softly, and the pale morning light settled onto the branches of young trees. I smelled fresh air and damp ground. Birds were calling out in the trees, and far away across the park, a massive turkey vulture was swooping against the clouds. As I watched, he came closer and closer, tilting left and right on the air currents, until he soared directly above me, and I tilted my head back to see his dark profile against the grey and white sky. A blue jay, a flit of blue and white in the trees, screamed. The green lawns fell away down the hill to the south, under a wide open sky of thick clouds. My face and my mittens were damp.
I started pedaling again back at Gage. In Timm Park, a very tall popular was shaking yellow in the grey light, tossing up high in the wind. Dark boughs danced next to it on great, tall pines, and the park was a quiet, empty place of green and shimmer. I took Gage all the way around the church, on the little swooping corner road, which, if I kept going straight at the curve, would take me to Tom's house (I remembered that warm, golden, late summer day, and my heart made itself known to me). Looking right off the curve, I saw the lovely lost corner by the stream where I starting reading Remembrance of Things Past on the early days of my holiday, when Autumn still felt like a dreamy summer.
I went home through Cherry Park, growing more enamored of being cold and damp, feeling more alive by the moment, speculating that I was made for such climates as this, imagining Scottish moors, comparing this moment to July, feeling like a foreigner in a land where those who love the cold thrive, but popular opinion suggests that loving the heat is more sane. Ah well! It is something to feel a spark of damp, wild, joy on these blustery days when other people tell each other, "The weather is terrible! I guess fall is finally here! Oh well ..."
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