Regress by Allison Fischbach
The taste of spring is in the air, yet it’s still too early and too chill for the green buds to safely come out. Before us, running the length of a football field is a straight shot of two iron rails stretching out towards the perspective point resting somewhere in the distance where it always stays but never is.
We had just eaten dinner and the sweet promise of a new warm evening drove us out of the hovel of library and desk to seek a walking path, to find escape in movement, in the promise of warmth. We had discovered the train tracks a few weeks earlier, when snow still spotted the sopping ground, now squelching with its release from freeze. They had laid under tangles of brush and saplings and ice slung carelessly into the ravine, while on the bridge overhead we stared straight down into the tussle of undergrowth to discern the two orange slats. Surprise. Tracks.
We entered the path at its mouth, opening into Morgnec road, and were amazed to find the tangle of vegetations cleared, as if simply for us, the sun already having banished snow. Barefooted and balanced on rail we tiptoed into the straightaway ravine, dipping below the sunline and sightline of the world above. Scattered along either side were hidden treasures, a plethora of forgotten emblems of collegiate life; bottles and shoes and key chains, a rusted keg. Tennis balls, mostly, hundreds of them aged and dirtied, blending into the foliage, absorbed into the earth.
To think, all of this as being covered again, wedging back into the elemental fray. Perhaps they were not enveloped completely, but as we walked parallel, each balanced on a beam of oxidized timelessness, we opened our eyes to our path. Regressing from the whistling streak of Chestertown’s cars into the tree-bending whistles of an invisible train charging over us, bent back, time standing still. To the left there, the willow tree, half-fallen, half-alive in which we used to burrow between roots and tell stories about pirate ships. Children from houses ten blocks away scattered and descended onto the giant like a beacon for our games of hunt and harvest.
Up the ravine a bit is a maple, sturdy, which has grown sideways in the dirt, and a group of three children, two girls and a young boy, have nailed plywood boards to the trunk at odd angles. Piles of stones and branches and cloth bits lay on the cleared ground. The trio scrambles to climb like wolves, their voices carrying on the air, squawking like crows from the trees. We are still standing on the tracks, watching as we climb the plywood tree, higher each minute now into the canopy of a white pine whose sap stains our shirts and arms and tangles itself into our hair. We cannot imagine why adults do not climb trees, and we swear we will never stop.
A plum tree farther down the line, under which a girl with a book and bare feet steps over the tussle of poison ivy and takes refuge in the dying specimen, bark split open, oozing sap where ants congregate. Sickly deep purple leaves flutter and shield her from view for a moment, and then she is there. For hours she will sit inclined, until her legs have fallen asleep hanging down to brush the tops of thorn bushes. She will stay until it is too dark to read and the lightening bugs coax her down.
Funny child ahead in the short patch of evergreen trees, kneeling over an anthill, a cut stump. Or the girl, almost adult now, standing on a promontory rock, her head bent through the trees. She is looking down at us as we walk, but she sees instead the rushing fullness of a stream and our faces are blocked by rhododendrons. Somewhere a deer threads silently through the underbrush and she stares, turns her cameras to it, but we cannot see from our time.
Yet what waits still is her path down hill and downstream, and through fields where foxes run, screeching threats and darting like demons. Through wildflowers and swamps of skunk cabbage and fallen barbed wire to where broken bottles and lost china have been beaten by the constant rush of time. To the places where evidence of existence is continuously lost, paths slowly covered and forgotten, synapses of memory abandoned and found years later, half-buried in the muck of lessons learned. Here we bend down and examine them, like a shining treasure, half-broken bottle, riverstone or skull, shoe abandoned for the coolness of forest floor, and wonder why we ever stopped climbing white pines, because we were afraid of sap on our feet.
