top: a strange photo including a corner of the pond,
whose waters, as you can see, are much lovelier than many people think
bottom: the jumping tree and drew belz's high-up hammock
on the night before leaving school for the summer, we go down to jackson pond, like we like to do. we find our way through the woods with flashlights. no, with cell phones, the dim cold light of cell phones, because we have forgotten flashlights. cell phones! i am abashedly aware of the way that my twenty-first centuriness barges into this walden without knocking first. we are tripping over roots and stumps, slipping in sludge. spiderwebs catch on our lips and noses. oh--there is the moon shining softly off the pond! but it's dark dark dark, still. the moon is only bright enough to help distinguish between different degrees of darkness. and there is the bonfire on the other side of the pond, and there is the laughter of friends that tumbles happily over the surface of the water. closer, closer, here are their faces: here are our friends with stories and with guitars and in hammocks and with root beer and all glowing with the light from the fire and from their hearts.
we sit and sit and sit. i put my face in my hands to hide from the smoke that burns my eyes and throat and i smile into my fingers.
suddenly a handful of us are walking back around the pond to the jumping tree. we climb up in the darkness. i tilt my head back and watch the faint silhouettes of four friend-heads as they bob up branches against the blueblack sky. the night hides their mouths and eyes--joy is only patent in the sounds they make, in the yelps and jokes. and then there are four successive splashes that i hear and feel but don't see. i am at the top of the tree now. maybe i am fifteen feet above the water? twenty? i look down but it's the same as looking up, only the water is too churned to reflect the stars.
i leap blindly and hit the water before i expect to. the top layer of the pond is warm and perfect, but beneath that the early-may water bites. so i float on my back with my ears underwater. silence silence silence is in my ears. the sound the pond makes is silence. fish aren't making any noise. the midnight sky is pouring into my eyes. i am not even trying to look and it's just pouring. no clouds at all, just stars and stars. do you know what a star looks like up close? well, the sun is a star and it looks like the most beautiful thing. it looks like this:
and so i suppose the stars above jackson pond look like that too, except i am just a little tiny human cheerio floating very far away in a bowl of jackson-pond-milk, so i can only see them as a numberless collection of bewitching white freckles. and this moment, this moment, this moment. i know it has to end at some point, but for now i'll just float.
