Outside the town of Pescadero, California is St. Anthony's Cemetery. Though by the sound of it Catholic, and with plenty of Spanish names carved into granite, there appears no current affiliation besides the one great one: living may visit, dead may stay.
I enjoy old cemeteries for the reason that I may wander without having to inquire of the inhabitants. This particular plot - rising on a hill with open fields to all sides - was very nice at sunset, when the air would almost visibly change temperature and the roar of the ocean would come in from miles away. Or when the wind blew off the Pacific and stirred the grass like the steps of a young girl. And off to one slope, where the view is not as spacious, an old blue gum eucalyptus sheds bark and broken branches over a strangle of myrtle.
Something about old trees. Something reverent for having survived thru the quiet of centuries on light and leaves. Even when the diet of ages changed, and the years did not eat with the seasons but fed on fossils and built of themselves a century muscled of iron, the eucalyptus lay down each summer a layer of wood. This is a patience I will never learn.
A buzzing comes from the tree. From a crack where a fire scored the side that faces east, honeybees have settled into a hive. It is twilight now, and tho it will soon be too dark for any strays to return, many come into and leave and trace little arcs over the spreading dew. Cross-legged, back to the tree, I settle myself and face east with the bees.
A current of wings and little golden bodies catch the light. Some curious scouts descend, landing on my shirt, my glasses, my face. I have no allergy and - not being a flower - need not fear being overmuch attended. The few inspecting workers fly off, toting home the packs of nectar and pollen - I'm no threat - and the stream of bees goes on.
Who was it who sat beneath a tree? Siddhartha? St. Francis? They knew what they were doing even when they did not know why they chose the seat. Then the earth was parchment whereupon the divine scrawled messages in a hand more legible. Sometimes missives writ large across skies with punctuations of comets and footnotes lightning. But far greater by signs small and significant. It may still be so. The rain still falls. The wind still blows. The grass stalk still bends.
The nebula of bees pulsates around hill, tree, stones, and me. So busy and so necessary, tiles in a shifting mosaic, shaped and shaping the earth as it grinds out life at the mill wheel of the sun. Not looking at hills and bees and tree - not looking only - I marvel. I behold what I have set myself before. Here I seek the communiques that others saw plainly in centuries previous, seated on a raw nerve of earth.
However things must have been different then, the print larger perhaps. I do not see what they saw, but I can see as they saw. Even without sense enough to know what I sought, I knew to come to this place to think it, and the answer - which I had already suspected - became plain. I would take my own adventure - on foot - across the continent. No motors. Just my feet.
Many admirable people had done the same, and for many great causes. And sometimes, they have changed history, rejecting the stories written for them with chapters they have authored, for themselves and nations. For myself, I had no such desire. There was nothing I could preach, much less I could even profess. I would speak but moreso listen. I would step over every beetle in my path and sweep away the ashes of every fire lit. I would raise no awareness other than my own, as I wandered from hillside to mountain to lake to shore, connecting those wells of buzzing, electric nature. Mine was Diogenes' errand, roaming the hills with my lantern. I make no honey. I have no sting.
Two weeks later, I had breakfast with friends in town, shouldered my pack, and started out down Stage Road, past St. Anthony's Cemetery. North to the Olympic Peninsula, then east to the Atlantic. Goodbye bees.
Then I could draw a path, but could not walk it. Now, a year on, I have reversed, and can walk but no longer tell. Still, eastward I go.
~Missoula, Montana
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