Mt. Doom

An excerpt from the journal from this week while in Maryland. Skip it if you're bored. Pictures keep claiming to be en route but I refuse to believe them. Those sneaky pictures...*sigh*.

Monday Outdoors

Maryland is another world. Seriously. Another world. And when I say another world, I mean another world like the world in that Bradbury story where it doesn’t stop raining... ever. Maryland is a crazier place than you’d think.

We got out on break from lecture a little after one. Fat on the glorious lunch spread and tired by the previous night’s glorious beer spread (glory here loosely defined and more closely associated with quantity rather than quality), I emerged into the sun, socks pulled high, Umbros pulled high, and hopes, you guessed it, high. And, I must add, alone. Therein lay the clincher. The WISP hotel offered a slew of outdoor activities to entertain the idle mind and idler body, ranging from paintballing to “mountain-boarding” and most dangerous activities in between. Not only did I feel like Violet in the Chocolate Factory, but every activity I wanted to do kinda sorta would actually be fun only with someone else. Yes, I could conceivably battle myself in paintball... actually, no. But I could go mountain-boarding solo. Mountain-boarding involves climbing aboard a board akin to a oversize skateboard with large rubber wheels and then either descending a ski slope or a mountain bike trail. So, yes, I could have done that alone. And I could have also died alone after pulling a Sonny Bono or trying to play a one-man version of Michael Kennedy football.

Regardless, the many and various activities each held their disadvantages until by default, the afternoon’s plan simply became follow the next person out the front door of the hotel and do whatever they were planning on doing. Jon and Marie were the next to exit and were going hiking. Decision made.

Monday was a wet day. The earth was sweating, the sky was sweating, and within eighteen seconds, I was sweating. The spongy ground bounced underfoot and the sodden air had to be pushed aside like a wet towel. Winding trails led off the open stretches of grass that six months from now will be white with snow and crossed with ski tracks. Our hour-long walk took us to the top of the hill looming behind the hotel, through clouds of lazy gnats and accompanied by fiery red dragonflies. As time passed, the haze overhead thickened and the blue paled and the sky grew more confusedly gray. Arriving back at the hotel, the light was starting to wane and the wind pick up. After showering off, I headed down to the next series of lectures... the air outside had cooled and quickened. Something was afoot and it looked like rain. Not forbiddingly so, but in a strangely refreshing way. Even though the world was soaked as it was, the only thing that could cool the steaming air was going to be more rain. But just then I had to go inside.

~

A rotund economist from George Mason University with an entertaining penchant for basketball metaphors enveloped the podium, trotting out his version of libertarian economic reasoning. Outside, the clouds closed in and the light dwindled. The middle of the afternoon felt like the middle of the night and the lecturer's banter only elevated the surreal intellectual standup sensation. In the middle of a diatribe on the vices of various ostensible cures for poverty, the rain began in earnest. To limited degrees, water had been sprinkling the large windows I was sitting next to. But suddenly, the floodgates opened and outpoured pregnant droplets, morbidly obese grapes of rain, collecting into a pool in a matter of moments. Each fell with a pleasantly distracting thwop, the collected water just deep enough to create a vital atonal symphony of raindrops that vied for our attention. Every furtive glance was rewarded by a series of furious concentric circles on a concrete slab and a distant sun illuminating the salvos of precipitation. The green outside was muted by the rain, but not drowned into gray. Color, life, and a sense of refreshing pleasantness penetrated the thick glass and rendered the rest of the afternoon (and evening) delightful, even under the fluorescent lights.

~

Emerging after dinner, there was one completely pure moment of the whole night. I stepped out the door, into the crisper, wet waning light, and looked up. For just a second, all I saw was the ivory shine of a dwindling, but not yet setting sun, illuminating the whisper thin clouds directly above. An angelic white from overhead cast a cool sheen on the world around and begged you to chuckle at the pleasant peacefulness. This moment, though, was just a moment.

~

I was desperate to communicate this idyll to a captive audience. So, I made like E.T. and phoned home. Just as my younger brother Joe grabbed the phone, a fantastic shift in my perspective occurred. The linen clouds above, so invitingly pacific, were not alone in the darkening sky. They weren’t even the dominant feature. As my eyes wandered toward the horizon, my ignorance became more spectacularly apparent. The peace above represented the failing elements of a less threatening sky, quickly being overtaken by a front of the most sinister clouds I’ve ever seen. Not content with being gray and forbidding, some of the sodden cotton had darkened into black and individual clouds were unleashing veils of black rain on ridges not to distant. Behind this fast-approaching line, the thin haze stretched to the horizon, demonstrably thinner by virtue of the sun’s weak ability to colorize the clouds. A band of orange wrapped around the western perspective, bounded on top by the imposing and rapidly moving black clouds. Above me, the pure white faded rapidly to the east, a wholescale rout in the face of the violent cover coming from the west. And violent it was, to be sure.

Massive columns of sudden fire snaked there way to the ground, the actual strike barely obscured by the closest ridges. With incredible ferocity, one hundred and eighty degrees of my perspective were filled with intricate columns of neon flame. Time and again, the role of thunder swept over my head, as rods of lightning struck in faster succession than I could distinguish. The Halloween colors of the clouds lent the storm’s approach no festive air: the cracks of electricity begged for a target and it was all to easy to envision each strike as sating that thirst.

Absent modern knowledge, I would have supposed the entire world was burning and my vision of the towering flames was only obscured by the smoke and the apocalyptic storm that had arisen simultaneously. I felt as a man of Gondor might have felt as the dark cloud overtook the river Anduin, the ruins of Osgiliath and the whole of Ithilien. Above me was the near-white reminiscent of the baleful wizard recently returned to Minas Tirith and sequestered in consult with Denethor. Before me spreads the disease of Cirith Ungol, infecting the sky and poisoning my every breath. Hope is lost as the approach of such a darkness can only herald the imminent arrival of the Dark Lord’s legions and deathless minions, the Black Riders.

~

Torn from my fantasy by a final lecture and discussion, I raced outside to see what remained of Middle-Earth and Maryland. On the steps of the hotel, I paused staring upward. The inky blackness betrayed the clouds continued presence and for a sneaking moment, my imagination permitted me to inhabit Pippin’s shoes as he wondered at the approach of the dark while lying in the camp of the Riders of Rohan, hastening as they were to the aid of the stewards of Gondor.

With incredible sharpness, the natural world jolted me from my childish reverie. With eerie silence, the eastern sky flashed brilliantly neon, every stark silhouette of a tree or mountain rise cutting a black scar into the suddenly bright sky. The storm had passed overhead, taking its violent splashes of light with it. The insects had already resumed their circuit around the lights in the parking lot, and the squish of the ground underfoot was remarkably unremarkable and as pedestrian as it had been earlier in the day. But the storm refused to be ignored, incessantly finding another part of the eastern sky to tear fiercely into light. I watched in silent amusement for some ten minutes. As a soft, warm rain began to lightly snake down from the heavens, I shook my head... and headed inside.