Thursday, June 20, 2013

One Paragraph Memoir

Wrote 4,000 words recently on the memoir, and I think this is the only part worth keeping -- it's about the Salt Flats in Oklahoma: 

"This is an amazing place – a landscape of absence and solitude, filled with subtle fluctuations of life at its most raw and determined. I can only imagine what it looks like in March when the migrations come through, millions of birds in every size and color, pushing their lean bodies north through the desert-less desert of the central Plains. I remember those moments as a child when I was sent out to clean the driveway of snow, and in the falling echo of colliding snowflakes heard nothing else at all, saw nothing else at all – it was like being inside a prayer. There is this same sensation being out in a wheat field as the wind swaddles the heads and only two senses fill the void – a soft underpinning rush of sound that seems to scream go, go, go, and a reassuring and grounding calm of visual monotony that says stay, stay, stay. To be torn in these two directions is the call of the Plains, the tug of being human in a space we can only understand by not moving until the place calls us out (translates us in) to become a part of its rhythms."

3 comments:

Abby Palmer said...

Benjamin -

"...like being inside a prayer." Beautiful line.

Diana Studer said...

you transport/translate me there. Our wheatfields seem functional and factory. But then I see an old abandoned family graveyard, and remember there would be stories to tell here too.

Benjamin Vogt said...

Thanks Abby and Diana. All the fields in the Plains are factory rows, but at the right angle you can imagine the ghosts of family stories....