Brambles

I live in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Quarantine has not meant that much to me. I can escape on my dirt bike. But it’s been a great year for less traffic. Traffic is cyclical, too. In a normal year, I can go months without even seeing another human being. In a not too normal year, it’s easy to slide into complete invisibility. I am a photographer, and the Blue Ridge knows its wind songs would take root in who I am. Invisibility rides that razor wind, so does death. Many animals will die in winter. Death has no memory of us. But it will come for everyone. My neighbors live in their cars. Brambles lives in a garage. The garage where he works as a dirt bike mechanic. At first, I had trouble with the idea this kid lived and worked in a garage. Not a new garage. But an old garage with holes in the roof. There isn’t a dirt bike made this kid cannot fix. You ride this bike too hard.” My eyes to the sky. I stand indicted. Shrugs. In Spring, there are wild herbs all over the mountains, and my neighbors pick and sell the herbs which eventually becomes herb tea.  The floods are cyclical, too. Not the floods of rivers, which there are many, but the media floods, the poverty porn, kind of like a tide that goes in and out of more immediate concerns, where people “rediscover” Appalachia. After rediscovery, the cycle dictates that the worse is not over yet. Tourism blesses us with crowds, bars, parking lots, hotels, crime, prostitutes, drugs, pit bulls, and guns. Brambles cannot read. Brambles cannot operate a business because he’s in the sixth grade. Brambles will size you up and spit. It’s predictable, but never formulaic. The robins have arrived. Landing in a place where there is nothing to sustain them. Yesterday I saw a millipede under some old leaves. I have never seen one at this altitude. Birds don’t eat them as they are toxic. Armies of them will take over entire buildings. Climate change is redefining everything from early robins to this time how will we feed ourselves.