january deam

Recent rains kept the dust down on the gravel road. Driving gently over crunching stones through a forest of bright gray poles each pothole was half filled with milky tan rainwater that splashed up and lacquered the rear fenders of my car. The easy upland landscape rolled in large, broad waves and the road swung and curved around them splitting the carpet of warm brown leaves arbitrarily in two.

The tower tapers toward the top and is capped with a gray box full of empty window frames. It sways back and forth like the road but we climb to the top for a view anyway.

The trail stays to the ridge barely elevated, barely delineated from the rest of the landscape. We pass fields of dark green lycopods and verdant walls of plush moss that stand out distinctly from the rest of the world.

Slipping into the woods, becoming a true foot path the trail winds its way towards the lake through a gauntlet of persistent dry brown leaves. It follows the right arm of the ridge where it splits and the land begins to fall away to each side and the ridge narrows and some sensation of elevation is finally apparent.

Yaniv is standing at the end of the trail in the middle of the cold, leafy fire pit on a broad knob where the land falls steeply away two hundred seventy degrees around him. The lake shimmers dark bluely in the distance through the trees several hundred feet below. He holds my wallet open in his hand and removes two twenties and a ten and crumples them up and stuffs them in his pocket. “I stole your money well. You never verb something good. You verb it well.”

I let him keep the money. That kind of tip is well worth fifty bucks.




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