It’s not just the brightness of feathers that alters the scene. The air moves as a solid. It shimmers, vibrates, shakes, as if the wings of the geese produce shock waves you can see. You can look through the team, the flock, because beating wings need space. And that? That is like looking through solid air.

The stones of my memory, and in my life, cannot be avoided any more than rain can avoid rivers. They take up space. They force action. No, they demand reaction. They do not interact, they impose. They do not relate, they occupy. If they breathed, I’d have no oxygen left.

But I realize that time isn’t a refuge any more than the wilderness is an escape from people. You cannot go into it or out of it. You cannot choose to participate in or avoid time. Time beats on in a constant, connected continuum. Standing in Cliff Creek, the collapsing of divisions tells me this is so. I’ve escaped nothing, because I’m participating fully in the wild times that swirl here, now, then and always.

All places contain ghost landscapes when you see them as a historian does, which is to say, how I do. Buried beneath today’s scenic vista lies all of the yesterdays, layered one upon another, accreting with passing memories and moments. I obsess over this interplay of place and time. It is where I live, where I think; it is how I chart the world. And I wonder how anyone could plot their universe otherwise. Even if it does mean being constantly confronted by loss.