I went back up the Himmelsleiter but took a different route. It was my first time here in January. After a moody walk in the Jack the Ripper fog the night before I was ready for a walk in the sun. If poets dwell on death, January provides unlimited source material. But you can still find evidence of life because nature never goes on break. Death and life, one and the same. And the colors are best for landscape paintings with the drama of the distant hills draped in deep blue, how the clouds like curtains cast the rain, the sound of someone warming a tractor, an old wind chime, a distant church bell, the clank of machinery, the click of a crow. All these gnarled grapevines and bare fruit trees with their arms thrown up or out towards a neighbor, all of us trying to keep ourselves aloft. The ground pulling us down or pushing us up.

How the wire’s stretched taut to keep the vine branches erect and the dew drops look beaded in the pale morning sun. The branches extend forever, down past the bottom of the road, the road just wide enough for tractors or little German cars and old men with cigarettes taking to them too fast.

I’ve been coming here for ages but never in January and now that I’ve seen all the months I’m like a school boy who’s memorized the whole set. I’ve always had a hard time with the past, it’s taken me out of the present. My last therapist said it’s maybe your relationship with pain we should explore. (We never did.)

A string of apples on one of the trees like Christmas ornaments perfectly red, almost fake looking. Some of the lodge poles holding the chicken wire bent down like crude fingers or broken teeth. The farmer’s work is never done, play-acting nature. And now here he is: the vintner examining each vine one by one with a tool that makes a hydraulic dry sound, a kind of music against the purr of his tractor, always the same green and red, the occasional pop of the engine punctuating time, the constant hum of the motor almost soothing. It’s a pressurized set of pruners he’s using with a long cord leading back to the tractor, he’s pruning. Clipping back the dead? He balances a long set of pruners on one shoulder and uses a handheld one to clip the smaller ones. Is it time already?

It is a perfect January day. Don’t waste any month, or any part of the fruit. The time isn’t for taking, it’s for spending.

Here’s what Annie Dillard wrote,

“Ezekiel excoriates false prophets as those who have ‘not gone up into the gaps.’ The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the cliffs in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fjords splitting the cliffs of mystery.

Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the solid, turn, and unlock—more than a maple—a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.”

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, Travelogues

Tags: Annie Dillard, Creative Nonfiction, inspiration, prose, travel