Where We Wait
An Exploration of an Antipode
37° 59’ 14.3” N, 122° 35’ 16.7” W
As I write I imagine my hands in the dirt the way they were yesterday. I look up and at the garden. I love this garden my dad made. There is corn, irises, tomatoes, basil, nicotonia, poppies, ginger. There is also a meadow-in-minature of blue wildflowers that neither of us can find the name of. They weren’t anywhere in my wildflower books. Couldn’t find them online either. Maybe out of a collective boredom we’ve made up this meadow.
I hear the cars in the distance, through the sound of the leaves of the live oak. I look up and there is nothing in the bright blue sky. I can’t see the wind. The blue sky reminding me of the ocean. Not in the blueness of the ocean, but how it seems so endless, the way it revolves around the earth. Lately I’ve come to see that boredom is taking ahold of me, and that there is little to say or do, almost because there is so much to say and do.
37° 59’ 14.3” S, 57° 24’ 43.3” E
Across the world rests my antipode in the middle of the ocean, just east of South Africa, almost south of Madagascar. Hundreds of miles out to sea, between the Indian and the Southern Oceans. It’s fall there, turning to winter. Just as it is spring here, turning into summer. I’m not sure what lives there, what animals or currents define the topography of this pelagic space. I’m not even sure what the weather is like there, except for the fact that Madagascar is not too far away, and I’ve always thought of it as a warm island. So I don’t have much to go on. It could be getting stormy. Or it could be like it is here today, clear, warm, with a small breeze.
37° 59’ 14.3” N, 122° 35’ 16.7” W
I can feel the heat of the setting sun on my back. There are chickadees and titmice. In the distance I hear American Goldfinches and kinglets. Up at the top of a Douglas fir, every morning, on the same branch, is a western grey squirrel. It usually hops up to the end of that branch and doesn’t leave for a while. They take their time. Doing what? The squirrel probably has known that I sit here for months. I bet the squirrell wonders what I’m doing, staring at things I hold in my hand.
37° 59’ 14.3” S, 57° 24’ 43.3” E
I picture something floating in that open ocean, swaying with the light ripples of the water being moved by the wind, being moved by the current below. A leatherback seaturtle. It’s tired. Heading east after breeding on the oddly empty beaches in Florida. I wonder if it hears a ship coming through the water. I wonder if it tries to avoid ships. Probably. Has it noticed if the sounds of freighters have dwindled? Turtles have nothing but a brain stem. Hard to say if they notice things that way. They live by instinct. They probably don’t wonder the way I do, the way we do. But the sounds of the boats have decreased. The water has become quieter. The sounds of whales travels clearly. The ships still pass. They are not all gone. Pelagic sharks, hammerheads, slowly float through endlessness somewhere miles away from my antipode, slowly floating like the leatherback, waiting for something to break the quiet, bring them to food, or who knows what. The leatherback hears the sounds of things they’ve perhaps never heard before, the places where other lives becoming clearer. Sounds coming from below. And things smell different. Less oil, easier to follow so many trails to land, to food. This silence, floating, reawakened.
37° 59’ 14.3” N, 122° 35’ 16.7” W
The wind cools the sweat on my back. This dry heat I love. I look out to the gate that defines this house from the rest. I want to go out, get a drink with some friends. But I can’t do that. We can’t do that. But that’s more than obvious at this point. So I look up. The trees are lightly swaying. I hear some crows. They pass overhead and rest in the nearby live oak. The sound of a brown towhee tweating and tweating. A little kid somewhere crying. There really isn’t much to say. I am waiting for something to break. A crack somewhere that I can enter, become made into wholeness through a communion with difference. Maybe tonight I’ll look at the stars. For now I’ll imagine an antipode, traveling through every layer of earth.
37° 59’ 14.3” S, 57° 24’ 43.3” E
There are some seabirds flying overhead but not many. Maybe some young albatross trying at long flights before things get colder, more desperate as they consume plastic while drinking seawater. The virus isn’t out there in that ocean. It’s here, in my county, in almost every county in the United States. It rests, runs, thrives, on land. This antipode has no virus. But they’ve always known dangerous things that spread, things that change, unknown things, like an albatross wondering why it hasn’t felt hungry in so long. And they hear how quiet things have become. They take advantage. Who knows if it will come again.