A walk in Lake City, 17 April 02, with Zack and Marina (with flashbacks to a walk on Waldron Island, late October 01, with Arianna & Carrie).

Like Nirvana only bad, 70 decibels plus Bass Boost, and burnt cheese in the air. Right along 35th, and uphill. On the dark side of the street is a spray of white flowers — no, a leafy branch singled in a beam out of a hole in the face of the streetlamp.

(A mile from home, an owl coasts just over us. We stand silent and still for too long to measure in the middle of the ridged dirt road watching the bird sitting just above us. The owls call to each other over miles of forest like mad sad dogs.)

Coming down the hill in the middle of the road, I feel I’m getting sick. A plane flies through the clouds over us, a gray lambda flashing along, ripping out or roaring through its predicted groove. It’s banking toward Seatac, and as it turns it dips in and out of visibility. Zack points it out.

(At the tip of Sandy Point, after passing through numinous warm breezes and past big rocks, we stop. The moon is full or near-full but often hidden. There is an abandoned driftwood fort flying a skull and crossbones against the orange-gray sky, and two acres of tule and seagrass make subliminal scratchings. Clouds with faces like old men roll over islands with bodies like old women. The ocean is black and imperceptibly glittering with phosphorescent plankton, parallel to the aurora borealis somewhere behind the clouds.)

I’m worried that this will all be lost. City steets will one day have white lights, not orange. The tongues of warm air we felt rolling off the forest will be irrelevant. The entropy will dissimilate us all. Wideband radiation will be everywhere. We must look for another green world.