Index
At quarter til noon the day had yet to begin in Index, a hamlet hidden in the folds of the Cascade mountains. Tribes of mist in varying shades of gray rose from the mountains' rich green shoulders like the biproducts of an exorcism that began the night before andwould labor on for many days. The mist rose like a steamy passion that might have been channelled into the activities of the town's inhabitants -- gardening, playing badminton at the sportsman's club, painting art to hang in the Avenue A Gallery, fishing, eating the sweet plums dropped by neglected trees, drinking at the tavern -- if the town wasn't nearly unpopulated, its social infrastructure closed. The boards that shut windows to protect historic buildings from unwanted transients, a name that I would later be called by a suspicious local patrolman, have been painted as a measure of their permanence.
There is an art gallery, a general store, a sportsman's club, an historic museum -- I'm just going by memory down the road -- a post office, a town hall, a hotel, a cluster of houses, and a school with a big a yard and a swingset that you can use to fix your sights even higher up on the mountains, and that you can use to swing down from them, easily and with joy and screams of delight that betray the giddiness this little hamlet will overwhelm you with. Screams of delight that temper the Great Cascades. Index is like a playtown. It is the place you build out of brio blocks on a Sunday afternoon with your brother.
I sat beneath the road bridge with my back to a clear green river, the perfect color of which I learned is caused by light's refraction off glacial flour. Can you imagine something so refined? As I succored gewy, overripe plums gathered from the gallery's lawn, I treasured my view of its pitched roof -- a perfect red triangle poking up from the hill -- and the great mountain rising up beyond that, pulled high into the sky by the clouds that had come down for it, clouds that suspend Index somewhere between land and sky and make it imaginary.
At quarter til noon the day had yet to begin in Index, a hamlet hidden in the folds of the Cascade mountains. Tribes of mist in varying shades of gray rose from the mountains' rich green shoulders like the biproducts of an exorcism that began the night before andwould labor on for many days. The mist rose like a steamy passion that might have been channelled into the activities of the town's inhabitants -- gardening, playing badminton at the sportsman's club, painting art to hang in the Avenue A Gallery, fishing, eating the sweet plums dropped by neglected trees, drinking at the tavern -- if the town wasn't nearly unpopulated, its social infrastructure closed. The boards that shut windows to protect historic buildings from unwanted transients, a name that I would later be called by a suspicious local patrolman, have been painted as a measure of their permanence.
There is an art gallery, a general store, a sportsman's club, an historic museum -- I'm just going by memory down the road -- a post office, a town hall, a hotel, a cluster of houses, and a school with a big a yard and a swingset that you can use to fix your sights even higher up on the mountains, and that you can use to swing down from them, easily and with joy and screams of delight that betray the giddiness this little hamlet will overwhelm you with. Screams of delight that temper the Great Cascades. Index is like a playtown. It is the place you build out of brio blocks on a Sunday afternoon with your brother.
I sat beneath the road bridge with my back to a clear green river, the perfect color of which I learned is caused by light's refraction off glacial flour. Can you imagine something so refined? As I succored gewy, overripe plums gathered from the gallery's lawn, I treasured my view of its pitched roof -- a perfect red triangle poking up from the hill -- and the great mountain rising up beyond that, pulled high into the sky by the clouds that had come down for it, clouds that suspend Index somewhere between land and sky and make it imaginary.
2 comments:
i love you miss jenny
Index, WA is where one of the largest gatherings of Satan-worshippers takes place. No really. I have heard stories of this. If you ever camp out in Index, don't be surprised if you hear chanting and see a bunch of strange-looking hooded characters.
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