The Haunting Transformation of Destruction

This is the stream on the other side of Parvin's dam in Autumn 2009

This picture wasn't taken too long ago, maybe a few years, but this area looks completely different now.

Today as I rode my bike up to the location where the National Guard and the Sheriff's Officers had blocked off the road, I washed the water gushing out, over and under the bridge/dam, after Hurricane Irene, after just last week, there had been at least 3 fallen trees and loads more flooding.

I just wanted to drift away and explore. That's why I went on the bike ride in the first place. I went over to Parvins because I knew it would be different, and I was right.

The pine loop trail, where I usually run with friends, was almost half under water, I rode my bike pedaling through the cedar water, watching for holes, snakes, and debris, with my toes dipping into the 10 inches of clear, brown water, the way only water in NJ can be.

I listened to the wind around me, the water rushing, the only sounds I could hear. I watched the trees for birds, there were none. Neither were there any squirrels jumping through the flooded forest floor.

Even the usually busy, noisy insects lay silent in the forest.

It was beautiful. I wanted a puma to come crashing down a fallen tree or something ferocious and beautiful to happen... like Irene. Furious, powerful, beautiful.

The thing about nature is that no matter how many "disasters" it seems to face, it weathers it and maintains it's beauty. Forests regrow, fallen trees across the stream make homes for fish and birds and turtles, hurricanes destroy what humans have made and tried to maintain of nature, but nature, in her resilience, just transforms into something different, but still hauntingly beautiful.

Sometimes I wish humans had the same capability, but it seems like we are damaged and the pain cripples us to transform, we haunt ourselves and become more dilapidated and morose.

I've been talking to some friends about breaking up... movies rarely show breakups, or the life after them. Movies show the beautiful transformation of a relationship, but not the maintenance, and it's always the maintenance that wears us out and down until we give in and collapse.

Breaking up seems to haunt us, and we have the baggage of the past that we carry around with us, in the memories and smells of the men and women we can't seem to forget.

Even if the ghosts fade into wraiths, and the memories aren't painful, but just a sad sigh, they still walk with us... K loved Ben and Jerry's, M sang when he cooked, J bought me a stuffed zebra, G wrote me love letters, B wrote a poem with fire metaphors before we burned out, M made the best chocolate chip pancakes... the memories that are sad, but not sad, and float beside us as we walk familiar places.

I went to the beach and stared out at the placid sea, not a ripple, not a crest dared to whiten the coast, and I knew Irene was out there coming, and all I wanted to do, was sail away to meet her.

Sometimes I wonder what I am transforming into as life batters me... I've often heard the cliche or mantra that the sun both hardens clay and melts butter, so which am I? I hope that whatever I am, I can capture some of the haunting beauty of nature as it transforms me...