Shenandoah: The Other Side

It's strange here, being on the other side of the fence. A quiet calm has replaced the constant buzz of energy. The feeling was here last night, in our sleep, and then in the morning, yet in seconds it has left us. Not gone, but shifted to elsewhere. I can sense it moving through the mountains and roads and earth that rise and fall around our sea of tents. I've heard that energy can neither be destroyed nor created, that it simply moves from one thing to another, which is what it is doing at this very moment. I suppose this movement is all part of the why and how we are here.
She is fiddling with a camp stove and I am staring at the effect of sunrise on limbs of trees. I am also writing in an unlined, black notebook. I never use the journals with lines in them, they're too confining. I like to have free reign. It is nice to hear the sound of metal clinking and paper, of crickets hushing from a night of chatter. I guess this is what it's like from the other side. I can't say I'll do it often, but I'll give it my best all the same. The energy I sensed earlier, it is roaming about out there, suffering. I'd rather be doing the same. Here, the buzz has been replaced with the voices of women conversing, an electric pump re-inflating what a mattress lost during slumber. Now is the sound of the left behind, fiddling and writing, and finding their place. The others are out to hunt. By day's end the energy will have filtered back in, but at that point it will be different. It will be settled, perhaps. Girlfriends and wives will act like they understand, when in reality they don't because they can't. And men will be tired so things will be excused. But that will be then and this is now. Now water boils, waiting to become someone's breakfast tea. Now things are rummaged through, like cars and thoughts and plastic bags. Now we sort out the day, and assume time will stand still as we do so.
I think about each of them out there, each humming world I can enter, because I have been there and I know. I am not a wife tending to children, nor am I a girlfriend pretending to understand. I have been there and I know. I know my experience, at least. There will be a range of emotions. The body will change, the mind will change; certain things will remain the same.
I walk to the port-o-potties wearing sandals and a black sweatshirt, the one a friend gave me from Ecuador. The early morning sun touches my tanned legs and I remember how nice they are. Someone did a good job making them because they work real well. I can ride my bike for hours. I am that same energy, out there and roaming through the mountains. All the stalls are vacant. The green signs on the doors tell me so. Inside the plastic cartons it reeks of anxious stomachs and nerves. Everything around me is quiet and muffled. The tents are an emptied array of colors and shapes. Everyone has hatched and is out flying.
Underneath the black sweatshirt from Ecuador I wear the t-shirt Alex gave me, the one with the giant tree on it. I like it because I love trees and when I wear it I think about the person who gave it to me. I try to do this with most things I wear, especially jewelery. I think about the people I love who have given me the inanimate things I wear, and somehow those people are with me. Perhaps it's because of the whole energy thing and how we can't destroy it. Maybe it's what they call being "sentimental." I'm not saying you have to agree with me, though. I'm saying that sometimes just the way a person feels about something is enough. Sometimes it's all someone has. Other times it's all they need. Either way, I think more times than not it's a good idea to let the simple, more intuitive things be just enough.