Been thinkin’ about…Bleak sun

A winter sun set fire to the west and I stopped. For a moment, time stilled.  The living room windows were dirty. The windows have needed cleaning for a season or two. Little time for that in the treadmill of surviving, responding, reacting.

There are journalism notes to be thrown into my bag, dogs to be tucked into respective kennels. I’m already late for my meeting, another creative meeting, another testing of my abilities, old and new. The sun moves imperceptibly. The dogs wait for their treats. Some portion of my mind says, “Don’t forget this, don’t forget that.” But I cannot move. There is magic in the sun, especially at late of day.

The sun is dying, again. Only perhaps another hour left and I drive. Drive past the big rock bluffs, across the lake that’s really a river, a river steaming in the winter chill. The last of the season’s tourists are feeding the geese. A train is pulling again into the old station. Cold light reflects off the mirror glass of the high-rise hotel. Another covey of tourists stands at the traffic light, shivering, waiting for the signal to walk, waiting to return to the safe and the warm, a glittering lobby that soars upward, a world far removed from the cold Ozarks dark.

The sun is dying. There is something hopeful and bleak in the turn of a winter day. Just another Tuesday. Just another Wednesday. Old fiddle music echoes somewhere in my mind. The road curves northward, spreading out into four big modern lanes. The isolation of the winter hills is long gone. It’s easy to drive here now. Easier, at least. Tuesday, for Thor. Wednesday, for Woden. The old Missouri hills were settled by the Scots-Irish, the English, the Germans. We’re a long way from the roots of Norse mythology, a long way from Scandinavia. Why then, does the dying light traced by bare tree limbs in ice make me think of old myths?

Myth is closer than we might want. The elemental, the hot blood rushing need for survival. The warrior’s lust beneath the superficial of the modern, politeness only an inch deep, if that. Something not far buried calls, and calls deep. The plaintive drone of the fiddle whispers things to our hearts, a resonating of last light and black, icy stone, of fertile but thin earth, and spirits of the woods, woods that are now blush red, now graying, now black.

The sun is dying, bathed in sky blood. The world a crimson thing through silver maple boughs, but only briefly. There will be another day, of course, another sunrise, another sunset, on and on into eternity. But not for all of us. For some, this red sky at night is Armageddon, the last day of the last of days. “We get all ‘het up about the end of time,” I used to say, back when I was a deacon and there was a church, “but for somebody today, this is the only end of time that will make any difference.” And the earth-rending magic of death happens all around us while we only keep our schedules and don’t see the tears of the ones who haven’t gone, the ones now waiting on the recent dead. Easy living makes us heartless.

Grand, lighted civilization has stayed the specter. Magic is relegated to stage tricks. The infrastructure of modernity numbs us, tells us lies. The biggest lie? That we will live forever. The porch light keeps the black haint dogs from our front doors. There is some comfort in that but also hubris. Callousness. Those trapped in the dark are cursed to remain forever the other, “those” people, the ones “over there,” agreeably where we don’t have to think about them. Out on the cold road, I passed the broken windows of a half-dozen trailer houses in the past half-dozen minutes, their abandoned rooms cold and cracked and moldering in the night chill, mildewed curtains still.

The sun sets on the just and the unjust alike. I turn up my collar, and turn off the truck ignition. Headlights wink out. The snow is deep here on the ridge. Last light of day gone. Nature is magic indeed, but not all magic is easy. Here on the ridges there is darkness and death too. Worlds far removed from our comfort and warmth. The Ozarks have always been a harsh and unforgiving land. The lies we tell ourselves won’t ever change that.