At the Reservoir
Anna Oberg
Dust hovers as it settles back to the washboard road. A truck passes. I am here again, at the reservoir. I sit, looking out over the water frilled by the same dry wind that tangles my hair. As I study the landscape, I wonder why my anxiety has arrived here, in this peace. Is it the wind, the inevitable change in season that prickles my spine?
I watch from the white cliff as the last kayakers brave the wind. The sage is silver and brittle now, and my own energy wanes with the day as they paddle to shore. This is my favorite place, a solace during the change of seasons. Something in me goes still when the breeze dies off. Cloud shadows slide over the dry hills. The distance remains blue with haze.
I love this place, because of the way the sun hits the water. The wind tosses through the sage, and clouds build to the west. I am comforted by the predictability of this familiar spot. Yet, I am not calm. I’m nervous, always, this time of year. It’s as though I pick up on the earth’s stray energy, it’s last output before it starts to fold up and fall away toward winter.
***
It is dry. Fires burn to the west. The air holds the smoke, softening the view. Even through the haze, there is an edge to the wind, a reminder fall is coming, barreling in, arriving on a fringe of aspen leaves, gold glimmer on a few sprigs here and there. The language of fire follows me—it is zero percent contained. I wonder if it is my own wildness that makes me nervous, my inability to contain myself this time of year.
Perhaps it is betweenness that ruffles me. There is a sense of something leaving, as something else arrives. I feel this invisible transition I am no good at making. I cannot embrace change. The feeling, that I am not embodied in either season, lives in my belly. I survive on potato chips and black coffee, and try not to make important life decisions during August. It is a no man’s land.
***
It is hazy like this the August day I hike Long’s Peak, too. I can see far, but not far enough. The air thins at 14,000 feet. It can’t hold the smoke that settles below. Still, I am anxious. I wonder if I will make it to the top. Once on the summit, I wonder if I will make it back.
Up there, betweeness is magnified by size—distance intervenes. Landmarks, rock formations are swallowed by an immense nothing. The space between mountains is the same as it has always been, but standing inside it, the chasm seems wider. It is as though my center has moved, as though I have stepped away from myself and cannot recognize my own form through the smoke.
Maybe I’m not describing it the right way, or maybe I’m remembering it wrong. My form in such boundless place would have disappeared anyway, with or without the smoke. But that day I wanted a guarantee I would rematerialize, become myself again as I made my way down the mountain.
I feel the same now, staring down at the reservoir, this desire for a guarantee I will return, become myself again. That this smoke will clear. That it will rain again. I want to know everything will be okay.
***
Cinders choke the sky with residue of something previous. Whatever was before is now after. Flakes of ash drift around me like muted confetti kicked up from the road long after the parade has ended.
I wonder how to make peace—how to live in the space between before and after—before autumn and after it, before the fires and after them. I don’t know how to live between what is living and dead, what is leaving and what is arriving. This season is always hard, but especially now. This liminality will never resolve itself.
How do I live with mistakes I’ve made, with the future looming? My anxiety lives here, in the thought I will follow old footsteps. That I will make the same mistakes again. That the smoke will never lift. I go out walking, rambling, to quell the restlessness, the crawling feeling on my skin, the sense that I am nowhere—never leaving or arriving, but always between.
It happens like this every year. I can’t get my bearings again until the light changes. Until the aspens free themselves from their leaves—when that first strong wind undresses them—and they become silhouettes against the coming winter sky, a huge moon hanging near the horizon. This thing, whatever it is, will settle in me, then.
***
For now, I am watching it unfold. Afraid of closing my eyes, even for a moment, I wait to see the whole performance play out over the next month. The trees will flame up before their color drains, and they become bare lines, bones, reaching into the bluest sky.
Maybe that’s where my fear lives—this fear that I will disappear in the betweenness. That my passion for this world will flare up and fall away, and I will live in the dark chasm; I will become a bony silhouette between the earth and the moon. My fear is I too will burn out with the season.
***
As I walk to the other side of the reservoir, smoke adjusts the light. The haze brightens, begins to glow, somehow backlit, orange—like storm light, like something is coming. Only, it is not rain—its more burning, like the sky is falling, closing in. Through the sun’s muffled rays, falling ash casts a spell, a premonition. I wonder if this is what I feel coming, or if something else will arrive. My stomach buckles. The anxiety takes over. I turn around on the path and head back from where I’ve come.
***
With the smoke comes the feeling that not only am I between seasons, there is also something between me and the world, between me and this landscape I try to memorize. The smoke lurks—between me and the air, between me and my breath, between me and my ability to breathe. It changes the scene entirely.
I find I grind my teeth at night. I awaken with sore jaws. This change gives me a headache some days, a stomach cramp on others. The world, I am told, is dangerous. It is burning down. All of it, it seems, everywhere. I wonder if we will be told to leave, to flee our homes.
The fire is near, and nearer. Nothing is contained. Anything can happen.
The cloud is thick enough, low enough to make the sky darker, like dusk is coming on in the middle of the afternoon. My chest is tight. A friend calls to ask if the world is coming to an end. Yes, of course. But likely not today. It’s a sickly yellow glow that buries the peaks, chokes the view.
***
I’ve sat here many times hoping the reservoir will teach me how to be in the world, that I can take something of this place back with me. But when I leave, I hold only the hunger to return. I ache for the quiet here. This feeling is equal parts wanting to be settled and yearning to be free, wild on the edge of the cliff, the world, in the sun, letting the wind tear my hair free from its ponytail.
An osprey circles over the water, held aloft on the strong wind. The sign in front of me, by the cliff edge, says “Caution Steep Dropoff” I take it as a metaphorical warning as well as a literal one. My year will wind down steeply. The last of this season will go quickly with the leaves. It is a blessing, this sign. It tells me to let my toes curl over, but not to lean out too far this time of year, or I too will fall.