It began with the cornfield, I think. It began in Myerstown in the early ‘50’s, among trees and the cornfield to the north where we played hide ‘n seek.
That sky over the cornfield. That sky to a little boy. Blue and clouds and wind and light.
Running the long alley back and forth. Outside in all weathers. And the long lane that led south directly across from our house. Walking down the lane past the clay pit where one snowy day I discovered dead Cardinals and Blue Jays, shot with a BB gun, strung upside down on wire and floating in the wind. I was maybe 5. That sight was so physically repellent to me that right then I think my conscience may have become something real inside me.
Walking down the lane, fields to the east and west, to the Tulpehocken Creek to the blue pools of arsenic. We threw stones into them to hear them plop and to see the slow geyser. We knew nothing except that color and the sound.
Arcadias always have their dark spaces where humans have done terrible things.
But still, I walked. I ran.
When we moved to West Lawn, I rode my bike deep into the country which still rose around that old suburb. I swam in the Tulpehocken and the Schuylkill. I discovered basketball. I began shoveling snow for neighbors for a few dollars when I was 12. I had to be outside, in motion, working, playing.
In college, I rode up into the hills around Kutztown and walked the fields and abandoned farms. I worked as a custodian.
Sky and motion, the body at work.
I worked summers in open air factories and meat packing houses and for the Highway Department.
In the summer of 1976, my friend Tony and I spent close to 3 months in Ireland, the UK and Scotland, most of it out of doors, camping and hitchhiking.
From 1977 to 1981, I spent each summer out West taking specialized graduate courses built around wilderness – the Beartooth, Wind River, Yellowstone, the San Juan’s.
Always that sky and light and climbing and those stars.
By my late 20’s my DNA had changed. I could not be sedentary except that it would emotionally cripple me.
At almost 72, I cannot rest except that I have earned it with work. At almost 72, I need wind and sky and trees and animals more than ever, especially at almost 72.
At almost 72, I repeat to myself several times a day, “More light.”
