The ridge that is not there

It is twenty past six. The light is on the fence line at the top of the ridge and the grass hasn’t dried.

Bo is a long way off, up the shoulder. Let me tell you about a fence post.

There is a post on this ridge I’ve been describing to people for years. It is the old grey one, and it leans. The wire used to run along the top of the shoulder to it.

That post is worth the walk. From up there the whole cove opens out and the far ridges stack up and go blue. I have pointed at it from the bottom road more than once.

So this morning I went up to stand on it. I wanted the view again.

That isn’t a big want. A want like coffee. I had the whole morning in mind and there was a post in it.

And there is no post.

There is new wire on new posts. All of them straight. The grey leaning one isn’t anywhere on that ridge.

I want to be clear about this, because it sounds better than it is. It is not a mystery. Nothing is hiding out there.

It is where I said it was. It is always where I said it was.

That isn’t a lost post. That is just how I walk.

What is there instead is grass. A wide open shoulder of it, gone silver with the wet, and one sycamore at the far edge where the ground drops away. And the valley.

So I stood in the wet grass for about ten minutes, looking at a view I could have had from anywhere on that ridge.

I didn’t feel cheated. That is the part I can’t get at yet.

I had twenty minutes set aside for that post. It isn’t a big plan. It is a man and a wire fence.

The plan didn’t survive contact with the new wire. I spent the twenty minutes looking for a post that had been gone for years, and it bought me a view I could have had for free.

That is the honest report. Twenty minutes gone, and the only thing I got was the thing that was there anyway.

On the way back down I called Bo twice.

He didn’t come. He was standing at the edge of the open grass with his nose on the wind, looking out at the whole valley, and he stayed exactly there.

I had to walk up there and get him. He got to the end of it first.

I’m not counting that as agreement. I am counting it as a dog who beat me to the end of a thing.

So here’s the question for today.

Why is the place you remember always better than the place you are standing in?

I have one honest answer. I have one thing I still can’t get rid of. I’m going to take both of them to a book.

Let me say where this comes from, because it is not mine. I’m standing well outside the man I’m about to name, and I’m taking one thing out of what he wrote. That is the polite way of saying I am borrowing.

The name is Alan Watts. He wrote in English. Nineteen fifteen to nineteen seventy three. He spent his life as a reader, helping people walk back into the middle of things that were already going on.

The world he was arguing with is worth a minute, because it’s not so far from this one.

He was writing in a century that had started selling people pictures of their own lives. The office in frames. The weekend in frames. A whole life, as something you could stand back from and look at.

And the more a life gets looked at from the outside, the less of it anybody is actually inside of.

His one idea is small. We make a picture of a thing, and then we get comfortable inside the picture, and we stop going to the thing.

I’m not going to say his words. Here are mine.

A picture never gets tired. A real place is always slightly wrong with the one in your head, and that’s the only part of it doing any work.

Now the price of carrying that, because every good idea has a bill in it.

If the picture is the trouble, then the second time you walk somewhere ought to be worse than the first. The first time you see. The second time you’re only checking.

That isn’t true and I’m not going to pretend it is. The second time is where the walking is. Every bend in this cove that I know is a bend I have walked in the rain.

It also costs me the sycamore. There was one tree in that grass that’s not in the picture anywhere. I’d never have gone over to it if I had been looking for a fence post.

And I do not know that he was right. I know I lost twenty minutes on a post that was not there. I know the valley is worth more than the post. I know I’m going to tell people about that post for the rest of my life.

All three of those are true, standing in the same wet grass.

Now I’m going to disagree with the part of him I just borrowed, because you cannot borrow a thing honestly unless you say where you are not taking it.

The second name is Gilbert White. Seventeen twenty to seventeen ninety three. He lived nearly all his life in one village in southern England, and he wrote letters about it to other people who wanted to know about it too.

His idea is smaller and drier than the last one. He thought the ordinary hour of an ordinary day was the one worth writing down.

Not the great view. The week the first bumblebee came out. A beetle that was a different beetle that year. How high the water came up the wall of a barn.

Here is where I do not agree with what I just borrowed. There is no moment out on this ridge that is not also a record.

The ordinary hour isn’t a consolation prize for missing the view. It is the only thing that was ever going to be here in the first place, and the view was the part I had already decided to like.

So now I have one man telling me to get inside the moment, and another one telling me the moment was ordinary and therefore worth the ink.

Both of them are right. That is annoying, and it’s also the answer.

The whole difference between them is what I do with my hands. One of them wants a notebook. The other one wants my eyes.

I have a pocket for the first one and a head for the second.

I found the old wire, in the end. It is in a tangle in the brush at the fence corner, grey and soft, and there’s no post in it anywhere. Somebody pulled the old line out and piled it up and left it.

The new wire is taut. Whoever set that knew what they were doing, and I’m not leaning on a fence anybody has just fixed.

So the post is gone, and the wire is on the ground, and the valley is still out there, and the light has come down off the grass and onto the trail.

Somewhere in your week you are going to do this exact thing. You are going to go to a place because of what you remember about the place.

It is a driveway. It is a kitchen. It is the stretch of road between two places you have already been to.

You get there, and it’s a place. That is all it is. It is smaller than what you were carrying, and the one holding the wrong size is you.

Nothing out there was wrong. The picture I brought with me was bigger than the place, and it always is going to be.

That is not a reason to stop going back. It is a reason to keep going back and to actually look.

So here’s the thing to try. It costs you one step off your route.

On the next walk, pick one spot on it that you have walked past more than once. Stop. Stand there. Look for what’s actually there. The stump. The rock. The wet patch. The place where the rail has a gap in it.

Then say one thing out loud that you had not noticed. Not a feeling. A thing. Something with a color or a smell or a number in it.

If nothing comes, say that nothing came. That counts too. The looking is the whole of it.

There is nothing to download and nowhere to write it down. It works on the way to the mailbox. It has nothing to do with ridges.

If you skip it, you got ten minutes of a man who lost a fence post, which is its own kind of lesson.

Bo says the ridge is fine. He is no surveyor. He is a dog.