Holland Creek

There’s a rock the size of an armchair high up on Holland Creek. It rests, touching the water, beside a slow bend, down from a granite ledge. It’s a proper hike, usually I take my e-bike. I sit on that rock (the armchair), it’s smooth and I can sit for a long time and look at things, and that’s what I do. (I listen too, and revel as the burble overtakes my tinnitus.) I look at all the things around me. I’m not known as methodical, but here I’m methodical. Stridently so. My eyes pierce, no, touch — touch every crook and beck, gill and cranny, in those stones strewn over layers of gravel. My eyes are like that bird, the American dipper, or water ouzel, searching and finding aquatic larvae everywhere. My eyes bob and dip, God is everywhere. The game, at this point, is searching for a place where God isn’t. I start over, from the top. My eyes search upward through the boughs, past the crowns of cedar and fir right into the blue imaginings of stars; then sweep slowly down the trunks to the understory, the salal, the salmonberry, the fiddle ferns, the moss, lichens, the micro forests, right to the edge of the creek, that speaks in tongues, but like nothing you’ve heard coming out of some Pentecostal church. I give up. God is everywhere. Everywhere the exterior solacing majesty is laid upon me like a feather comforter. But here’s the problem: after 20 minutes or so, I involuntarily begin to look inward, and I think of Wallace Stevens, searching the mystical frontiers for, “the God who must be found in me, or not at all.” But my inner eyes are only half grown, old as I am, and what I see inside are dim outlines, and it’s dark and cloudy like before a heavy rain and my eyes are troubled in that murk. I sit on the rock until I’m tired and I pray: Lord, help me see, make of me, something more. I look, listen — inside, silence, and I see nothing but the flashing of tiny white feathers on the eyelids of a dipper. I cast a glance over the creek, hear its thousand mourning doves, and see a fall leaf, rising in the breeze of the brook. I take it as a yes. Why not? Then I get up, stretch the cramps out of my legs, and leave.