From Finding the Way Back (published in 2001), text by Al Filreis, photographs by Jody Davies Ketcham:I willingly although sadly go my own way now but I'll look for you if I'm ever back this way. Do find your way back, and you will find me. I depart as air, shaking my locks at the runaway sun. The car drifts in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, and if you want me again look for me along the road. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, but I shall be good health to you nevertheless. Missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you.... Memory. The first time you cane (you recall it now as a present tense) your bus turns left over a bridge and weavers through the forest along the water's edge. You're certain that tilting your body with the motion of the bus is the very thing that is keeping you from spilling into the stream. Seven miles later - or was it a hundred? - you come out of the woods an into a clearing. There are horses on the other side of the road. There are cars with roof racks and a long line of buses and kids everywhere and a bunch of people who look like your older brother and sister except they all wear identical t-shirts. There are buildings the same color as the rocks in the river you almost fell into. You have no idea what is happening and you are asked to follow someone wearing one of those t-shirts and she knows your name and she talks to you as if she's your friend, as if she's your first friend, and you hear one word out of every ten because you can't help noticing that your legs are not quite holding you up and you hear bits and pieces of conversations and you soak up the dizzying sun and somehow know you will see this place many more times and that you will depart from it many times too, and you do, you leave and return, depart and come back again and again, and you will learn that "Doubletop" is named that way because there is a peak you can't see on the other side. For now, you accept that on faith, as you do everything else.
The opening is a free adaptation of Walt Whitman.
