place memory

memory is a curious thing. the twists and turns of free-association taken by the active mind are at once entirely illogical and perfectly rational. thinking of, of all things, Mahayana Buddhism leads me to a certain stretch of highway in western Oregon, on the way to Newport. fog leads me to a stretch of Kansas road at three in the morning, my lights barely cutting through the crowding mist. and the poem This Is Just To Say by William Carlos Williams sends me to the dirt road through the desert that runs to Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty.
an eerie place, the great salt lake. we walked in the heat under cloudless rain-coloured skies to the place where white crusted black rock curves out into rusting water. the silence was heavy as the heat and our footsteps were gunshots; a lonesome raven cried out and overhead flocks of pelicans, antediluvian and massive, shuddered noisily on their way from nowhere and to it.
in and above and through all of these things, he is present. the smell of his sweat and the feel of his skin. he is only the second person whose scent i can recall without some external prompt. he escapes the loop of associations, he is his own entity.