Summer Of Fear

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On a bad night here in the canyon, the wind can hit so hard feels like my house is coming down.

The place is built on stilts, perched high on the steep east slope of Laguna Canyon. From the road below, the stilts look frail as mosquito legs, wholly insufficient for holding up a home. When the wind is strong, it can change course a hundred time a minute, trapped as it is by the canyon walls. With too much gale in too little space, the air doubles back, howls in fierce frustration, then whips around for another bellowing pass. Order breaks down. My home sways, leaning with each crazy reversal. Windowpanes ripple and timbers groan. Within the fury of these moments, I await a nudge from the master's hand. Infinility yawns back.

Some nights, when the wind is at its worst, I sit outside on the deck, feel the deep sway of the structure in which I live, look down through thirty feet of darkness to the sandstone below, and admire the way that nature can go so quickly from order to chaos. The popular notion is that nature's world is ultimately ordered and systematic, that only man's woeful intrusions can ruin that balance and harmony. This is not true. When I sit on my deck in the blackness of a high-wind night- the higher the better-I realize that the natural world isn't neatly ordered, isn't flawless, isn't perfect. Sometimes it is just like our human one: angry and yearning for mayhem. People want to "get back to nature." But she wants to get back to man sometimes, too, to regress to the liberating, transcendent state of violence. On a dark night with a high wind in the canyon, it's obvious.

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