The Old Blog in the Desert

Somewhere along the line, I became an adult, and no one had the courtesy to inform me of it. I didn’t arrive at this conclusion by reflection or wisdom, but the hard way, by gravity.

It started with a walk up a narrow, twisting path that looked harmless enough, the sort of trail that invites a man upward with false kindness. Thirty feet later, it ended in a dead end, which ought to have been my first warning that the whole enterprise was a poorly conceived adventure.

Coming down proved educational.

I turned sideways and dug the edges of my boots into the soft earth, employing a technique I am certain works well for younger men and mountain goats. About halfway down, the arrangement failed, and matters turned into a foot race between my stomach and my ass.

My ass won.

Realizing I was about to launch myself into open air above a patch of brush, I attempted to fall backward with some dignity, a skill I had not practiced since my days on movie sets and cowboying, both of which now seem like stories about a different man entirely. The landing was decisive and final.

After a spell spent contemplating the ground at close range, I rose like a reluctant phoenix from the wreckage, only to discover I had torn the calf muscle in my left leg. Since then, I have been hobbling about, my foot turning outward as if it has developed independent political opinions.

Thus concluded the first lesson: youth is not only wasted on the young, but youth gets repossessed without notice.

The second lesson came upon the hoestead, where a man ought to be safe from such revelations.

I sat down on the old wooden bench at the picnic table on the deck, a bench I would have climbed on, jumped off, and otherwise abused as a child growing up among the redwoods and the damp. In those days, wet wood was a fact of life, and so was ignoring it.

A few seconds passed. Then I stood up and said, with great feeling, “Damn it, now my pants are wet, and it soaked clean through to my skin.”

That was the moment it became official.

No boy in the history of boyhood has ever uttered such a sentence with sincerity. That complaint belongs exclusively to men who have crossed a certain invisible line and find themselves on the far side of it, damp, injured, and annoyed.

So here I remain. hobbled, seated carefully, and forced to admit that I have wandered out of the alleyway of youth and into the broad, uncomfortable street of age. It is not a place I recommend, though I suspect most of us arrive whether we mean to or not.