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By Jenny Walicek
t’s a gusty autumn evening in the woods near
my home. Loose leaves flap and flutter across
the narrow path, darting and swooping before
settling into silent drifts. Some sail down the
current of the creek; one hangs upon the brittle
web of a wiry shrub, trembling like a spider’s
prey. I’m ankle-deep in death. I scuffle and crunch
along, careful to avoid the burgundy legs of berry
vines that sprawl and clamp across the trail. Overhead,
dangling twigs tangle up my hair, and bare branches
crackle the ochre sky. The air is ripe with damp earth
and the roar of wind.
In all this grief of landscape, I succumb to brooding
on the transience of life: my father’s unjust death,
my newly empty nest, my so-called friend’s betrayal
… my youth, ideals and imagination. Time rolls along
relentlessly and undoes what we do, the pleasures and
people we love. Why labor to forge trails few will follow,
that soon will be grown over? The Preacher understood:
“That which hath been is that which shall be; and that
which hath been done is that which shall be done: and
there is no new thing under the sun.” Everything is the
same as it ever was and ever will be. We are forever
cycling toward demise.
Pa g e 14
A ropey brown hand, mottled
as the leaves, pushes aside the
chaparral and a walnut face
emerges, framed within a messy
corona of long white hair.
I’m startled from my dreary thoughts by a muttering
that spews from just around the bend. A ropey brown
hand, mottled as the leaves, pushes aside the chaparral
and a walnut face emerges, framed within a messy
corona of long white hair.
I stop and step aside. I know her well, though only
from afar. She is the Walking Woman, the gypsy lady of
lackluster Almaden, who strides our suburban sidewalks
from dawn to dusk in tangerine and turquoise skirts that
Ma r c h • Ap r i l 2011
swish above her bobby
socks and Keds. I first
saw her in my childhood
town, a mountain range
thirty years away. Even
then, something about
her resonated within me.
Since spotting her in Almaden
in 1985 I’ve asked
around, but no one else
seems to have noticed
her. How can that be,
I’ve puzzled, when she’s
so distinctive? I’ve sometimes
wondered if I’ve made her up – if she is really
there – but here she is.
“Hi,” I say, heart rushing, though I don’t yet know
why.
She doesn’t respond, or even pause. As she plunges
toward me I see as much as I can in this moment –
that her lips are chapped, that her skin is taut, that her
cheekbones are prominent, that she was once pretty,
that one arm is criss-crossed with dotted red lines. She
snaps her chin down, following my glance and places
a gnarled hand over her scratches.
“Hello!” I try again, a little louder.
She peers at me, eyes silver-blue and glinting
through her narrowed lids. The skin around them
crinkles and quivers, the way a horse twitches when
flies are near. She mutters again as she passes by me.
I look too much like everyone else in my t-shirt and
sweats, too homogenized. She can’t tell I’m a misfit,
too. Most can’t, or so I hope; I work quite earnestly at
fitting in.
And suddenly I know why the sight of her always
stirs my heart. With her purposeful, flamboyant steps
she treads the Wasteland holding high the torch of simply
being. She walks as her given and accepted form of
expression, to be who she is, to live her own truth – her
inherent meaning, impervious to the ravages of age or
weather or public opinion. Mad? Maybe. A misfit? Yes,
and a beacon. Her transcendence, whatever its cause,
nudges my soul. Never mind that forms will molder by
and by; there is in truth a beauty that will linger.
t h e Jo u r n e y