The Forest Rains - Just Mike Just

End of November. I battle the inner and outer seclusion I encounter in this conurbation of nine million Chicagoans. I call no one. No one calls me. Loneliness seems my night shift. I work out at the gym to battle the isolation.

At the health club, I allow the spaceship bank of big screen TV’s to mesmerize me. I permit the svelte blonds on the cyclical machines to lure my mind from its lonely perch. I find myself thinking: Why don’t they hook all the elliptical machines to a giant battery and generate power for this place? My mind wanders. My legs, running in place, need to wander, too. I escape Planet Fitness for Planet Earth.

It’s rained for days. The clouds chalk the sky in a turbid, pastel scrawl, draping my eyes with a dreamy, comforting sadness. In sweats and work out shoes, I trudge out into the wind-driven rains and head for the woods.

Glistening oak leaf carpets the forest floor. I go to my bank, 12 feet above the fast-swelling creek, and stand on a muddy ledge overlooking a tongue of land around which the river carves its gooseneck. The thin headland from where I look out had been a wide peninsula just a week ago. Today, a new leg of the river decides to trespass, crosscutting the tongue in half and taking a cutoff to the other side of the gooseneck. Water knows all the shortcuts.

Guess you can’t escape being a river once you are. If you’re a river, it doesn’t matter how long it takes you to get to the end of yourself, wherever that is. Whether you’re at your own headwaters or at your mouth where you spill into the sea, you’re still part of that same channel. Water is water and all water heads in the same direction. It all rushes headlong or wanders in lassitude toward the same ocean. That inexorable drive of water to meet itself at a final, equalizing level, to mix with its whole self, regardless of the route it takes to get there or its speed or even the form it assumes when it greets itself in the sea. It doesn’t take how it gets where its going, always taking the most efficient route, being no respecter of the rank of a person or the price of property. Those things don’t make a lick of spit to the sea which receives itself. So take a short cut. Get ahead of yourself. It doesn’t matter. If you part from yourself and choose to take the course across the land, you’ll meet yourself again in what seems like serendipity, but in what’s just the natural rejoining of an old knowing. Everything that parts from itself rejoins.

I’m getting pounded by the cold rains. The scrawny crowns of ash trees, denuded by autumn, sway in the wind in an unintentional mimicry of African dance. My inner ear, the victim of North Side alley nights in the winter drinking beer, aches from its frostbitten history.

Go back to Planet Fitness and the hot sculpted bods and the 24-hour newsfeeds and football—

But the forest draws me in like the main channel pulls on its tributaries. I stare up the shoulders of a naked black oak. Its limb, jarred by wind, sweeps a fat tear into my eye. Smaller buckthorn, still green-leaved, wear white jewels of rain like Christmas garland. The thick penny rug of oak leaves I slog across entices me further in. I feel the simultaneous urges to sleep in the leaf litter and to swim in it.

Rains rinse through me as if I, sponge-like, absorb their embrace in my sinews, as the cold, clear water squeezes into and out of my pores, soaks me like the mossy earth. Every organ and thought inside me are permeated with its chilled, cleansing breath, the drenched gusts a virgin storm untouched by any stolid thing. I need this wet forest to breathe. I crave this aloneness, to connect with myself. I’ll just lose little parts of that self back in Planet Fitness every time I cast a glance at a million-dollar mansion on big screen TV. If I accidentally graze the shoulder of a bedroom community beauty, a little bit of soul will cleave off in my desire to possess and be possessed. And soon, there won’t be much of me. I’ll be owned by the world. It’s here I regather those split off drops of myself back into a river.

I wander further onto the floodplain and rub shoulders with a moss oak as I spin aimlessly, my face toward the granite sky, drunk with rain. I unload myself of the burden of serving a God which my mother and Father instructed me in long ago. I do not ask what His will is for me. I just live it instead. And in living, I abrogate my duty to a Santa Claus who rewards and withholds in turns capricious and cruel, wonderful and wild.

Finally, I’m cleansed of urban iniquity. Old oaks on the other side of the wide, drowning stream lean into each other, husband and wife, with a canopy of decayed leaves their common vow. I tumble into a bevy of does and yearlings. Our eyes meet, their black glass wary and watchful as their jaws mulch fresh shoots poking through the duff of leaf and acorn.

I squeeze out of the thicket onto the road, and patter back into the parking lot of Planet Fitness. The soles of my shoes are cleaner now than when I went outside.