The cougar was more than a cougar, it was a metaphor. A fear of the unknown or being tracked by something immutable, time itself. If it were a Castaneda novel the cougar would be a witch, supernatural. I’d have to access that power in myself to survive. It would be a test. You could visit that other-world with psychedelics or the occult but I wanted to believe it was accessible in the here and now just by awakening to my senses. Like if I focused hard enough I could summon it.

In the woods in the morning when the landscape was lit you could see pretty far, with the occasional object breaking the pattern. Every last bit was perfect, almost staged. The angles of leaning or fallen trees, the pattern of colored leaves on the trail, the wild grass bleached by the sun. The way the moss looked ribbed running up and down the trees.

Most times I was thinking ahead to a different time, thinking work thoughts. But sometimes I snapped into the present like I’d just been dropped there. I tried to hold onto it as you might in meditation. Giving over to my senses, listening. It got so quiet.

Earlier in the week I heard an owl cry I’d never heard before, like a dog yipping, and when I recorded it with my bird app it was a Great Horned Owl, a picture of it right there on my screen.

The right kind of job afforded me this, the time to roam about the woods every day before I started work. It was possible I’d never go back to an office again and would finish my work days remotely, from home. Even imagined staying in our house until it was hard to climb the stairs. Then what of my days coming here with my walking stick and coffee? Would Dawn come too? Would I remember these times blogging on my phone?

The woodpecker was like a jack hammer, the sound deep and dry. A low drumming like an automatic rifle. The way the morning sun light coming through the trees resembles the colors in a fire with the red, orange and yellow.

Even with the cougar warnings a lot of people still come here in the mornings to run or bike, some with dogs, most with Teslas. It’s a playground for the rich. I feel rich in spirit and quality of life, and this is my daily practice.

I had Covid, which explained the mysterious low energy and chills. Then came the brown stuff I spit up in the sink, the sense I was a walking infection (I was).

The weird Covid dreams inspired by NyQuil: driving with my grandmother looking young again, driving around Seattle’s SODO district lost, nothing looked the same. How all the roads splinter off at odd angles. Driving with David Foster Wallace glaring at me in the rear view mirror, me in the back wearing the same bandanna he wore, imitating him. Asking him to pull over so I could drive, changing places.

When you are sick like that and need to isolate it’s all about time and waiting it out, lying in bed listening to the birds outside, the muffled dialogue of others coming and going. The strange pace of days as experienced mostly from bed.

The radio program played Iron and Wine, their 2004 record Our endless, numbered days. We would have listened to it lots in that first house, in West Seattle. Newly married that year with a new, old house and a baby on the way. The tattoo artist and drug dealer who lived up the road had a cat named Endless for reasons he explained and I immediately forgot; it made no sense. Everyone in our friend group in our early 30s with decent jobs, first-time homeowners, about to start a family. Still kids ourselves though by the way we behaved. Me throwing empty wine bottles in the lawn: if I did that a hundred times never, not once, did a bottle break. We just collected them for the recycling the next morning.

Most times I was thinking ahead to a different time, now I was thinking back. To why they called it SODO (south of the dome, a large sports arena) and that day they blew it up (the dome was deemed unsafe in the event of an earthquake) and Dawn’s employer had a decent office view of it so they hosted an implosion party, because that’s how they destroyed the thing: they imploded it. And how people made a party of it that Sunday morning and probably got drunk at nearby bars but were then surprised by how much ash and dust got expelled onto everything within a mile’s radius. We were so much younger then, death-defying. Then 9/11 came and we weren’t.

The sound of that record, even the texture of the cover art like a woodcut reminds me of the grain in the hardwoods of that old West Seattle house, a deep, earthy vibe. The odd Zen of being sick like this and just forced to tend to your body for as long as it took, almost comforting.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir

Tags: aging, Creative Nonfiction, journal writing, prose