Seagulls in Montana, I see five and a pelican dip minutes under water gulping for small mouth lodes of fish. They eat three course meals, and lay excrement upon my burnt neck. Here the air is thick, warm, Hebgen lake is an overcast of one giant season—and a million skipping stones, from Indian to Pioneer, Rancher to Homesteader, to tourist. We throw rocks at uneven surfaces making them walk, run, slap distances of up to 20 miles. Hidden around us, lies, as always the bigger picture, nature quaking earth, skipped its own stones a million at a time, drowning deer, human, house-fly anything that needs oxygen to survive. 1959. A winter that didn’t exist.
This land is an instigator, the river, the dam, the flood, the faults, the fortune lives through, and beside it all. And I am a part of Montana, and once upon a time. A fool to those who walk, jog, bike, boat and drive by. I beg wonders into life, borrow my green eyes from the devil himself. These roots are a flimsy life of two-hundred years. My outstretched body rests sideways, sticking lonely out of the stable slabs of fallen soil. Sand, a mail box, a barb wire fence; a field tractor lay beneath me. Muck slopped, and algae, it is rusted metal-work, solid, harboring insects of small, to large trout scaring carp, each twisted within intricate gears, luxuries of a spacious gas tank.
Two for one, or one for two, everything strikes a deal for the bed they lay. The bed we make or the bed that makes us. These days are centimeter to centimeter to millimeter further down that slope. The planets fixated, the stars completely still, the sun straight up and blocked by clouds as summer relaxes my worked shoulders. A bird peels the sappy bark off my back to build a happy nest and I flinch at the feeling. Bend my elbow, loosen my grip onto the hillside for a couple seconds of relief, just a few before I clutch back to the anchor.
I see two children paddling a blue half-sunken boat along side the rough undertone shore. They move slowly, with cracks, and creaks, and up the horizon till they arrive within my close perimeter. I shake off my dead leaves, blow my hair back, and open my mouth real wide, smiling like I have just found something I recently lost.
“Poor tree” one of them says.
“Why do you say that?” The other replies
My smile fades into a deep sighful expression, watching children as did my distant father, and my lonely imaginative past. My two week twinkie arms flapping at the ground as wind howled and hissed through the canyon. My close relatives all more then two miles away (I have no legs), I faced the isolation early, or more, it faced me. And for a while my mother stretched high and big enough to see from anywhere on the lake, but now she has faded to stump, filled in as new turquoise pocket.
“I think he is a lucky tree.”
“Lucky to be alive?”
“No, lucky to have those big eyes.”
