He was a big guy but quiet, and when things didn't work out for him he liked to be alone, so he was alone a lot. That didn't bother him much, because he didn't feel like he had much to say to other people anyhow, at least, not about the things they cared about. He was a former football player and looked it, and so people were surprised at how introspective he was. They didn't know what to make of him.
He was given to thinking about big things, about life and death and what was possible or not. He loved things that were irrational or that baffled him, and he sought them out. He believed that the human mind was very small compared to what was out there, and that you had to leave yourself open to things you didn't understand, because when the truth came, it wouldn't come as a result of logic or the things he knew, but from somewhere else, totally unexpected, wearing a face he'd never seen before and possibly wouldn't even recognize.
He was pretty sure that thinking about the kinds of things he thought about was the most important thing you could do with your life, but he was aware that all this thinking didn't make him very popular. That did bother him, because while he didn't mind being alone, he didn't like being lonely. He wasn't sure whether the kinds of things he thought about prevented him from having friends, or whether the fact that he had no friends made him think about the kinds of things he did. He had a good job that paid him very well for very little work, and one in which people left him alone. He wondered whether that was good or not too.
There was a golf course not far from his new apartment, and since he liked to walk, he often went there at night, walking on the grassy verge because there were no sidewalks where he lived: everyone drove cars. The golf course was protected by a chain link fence, but in places the fence was old and sagging or just fallen down, especially by the little creek that ran as a little water hazard through the manicured fairways. There was a big patch down by the fence near the ninth tee that was too inaccessible to mow or spray or make out in, and over the years had been allowed to revert to whatever nature would have it be. Willows hung over the little creek that here was wild and swampy, and poplars stood guard behind, screening it from the golf course proper. There were maples and dogwood, hackberry and fir and bushes whose name he didn't know, sloping down to an open spot before the stream where weeds and wildflowers grew in the spring.
He never went there, because that would require wading in the creek, but he liked to stand on the little concrete bridge nearby and just look at the patch and let his mind go blank. Sometimes he would play games, like squinting his eyes to make everything blur, or making a tiny little hole by putting his thumb against the crook of the top joint of his index finger and looking at things through that, or other foolishness, but in the end he found that just looking at the patch was very pleasing to him and restful. The human eye seems to take pleasure in things that are green and shadowy and overwritten with nature's hieroglyphics, and that was the patch. He hadn't been to church since he was a child, but standing on the bridge was like standing in front of something sacred. There was some sort of infinity in there, a wild place where no human hand could reach.
He began coming down here with nature books, and learned the names of the trees and weeds, and even some of the bushes, plants he usually wouldn't even notice. In the summer there was the green scrim of tall grasses and the soothing shadows of rustling leaves, the sounds of insects and maybe frogs by the edge of the water. In winter, black and sepia bleakness and stark steel-pen angularity of the dead weeds and naked trees, black twigs making a mosaic of the gray and lowering sky.
No matter what time of year it was, though, what he saw and felt there pleased him and drew him back, and he became very attached to the patch. The trees were like people—the melodramatic willows, the staid and conservative poplars, the quiet but good-natured firs that seemed to keep up the other's spirits in the winter. He believed in nature like he believed in God, both of which seemed to have fallen out of favor these days so that the closest he came to either was on TV, and so it was a great thrill for him to realize that the patch was nature too, unruled, unwatched, uncared for, his own bit of the unknown. Barely an acre, but what went on in there was no man's business and hadn't been for years.
That was important to him, because he believed it was necessary to live near a frontier or gateway, either a river or ocean or a bit of wilderness—or even, as a last resort, a highway or railroad if nothing else was available—some way for the unknown to reach into your life and make its presence known. He believed you had to make yourself available to the miraculous, which he was sure was out there. The patch wasn't much, but it was all he had.
He lived where the change of seasons was fairly dramatic, and he savored each one. Spring was especially good, and this year he rushed into it impatiently, barely waiting for the first night warm enough to go out walking, where he could hear the melt water running beneath the dirty snow, and the air was as cold and raw as the earth it blew over. He went out to the bridge where the weather could find him and stared at the bare trees and dead grass of the patch and let the raw wind scour his face till his eyes watered. The wind was full of life, and he could feel stirring in the soil as well, and even in the urgent icy water of the little creek, wild and full of itself with the spring runoff like a drunken adolescent.
He knew that the early spring flowers—the daffodils, the crocuses, the narcissus and snow drops—would all bloom on the same day, each after its own kind. It didn't matter if it was down here at the patch, or in a city back yard thirty miles away. On a certain night, each species would bloom all at once, as if they were all wired together to one grand switch. No one knew how it happened and no one could explain it, but it proved to him that there were ways of communicating that people didn't know about and couldn't even imagine. That thought pleased him. He liked to think that there were things going on that no one understood, and things being said that no human ever heard—many, many things, he suspected, more than most people dreamed.
And on that raw and windy March night he could feel one of them, even if he couldn't understand it. He could feel spring pushing against him with soft and insistent force—cold still, but the warmth would come. The image he had was of a huge, dark, breast, full of life and promise, and the image made him smile. He could almost hear the scrabble of millions of little feet in the soil and feel the restless coiling of leaves in the bud on the tossing trees, and he could sense some big mystery rubbing up against him like a cat that wanted to follow him home and come inside. He'd felt that cat before. He'd felt it before and had always looked for the handle that would open the door to let it in, but he'd never found it.
He wouldn't find it now, either, but he realized that the Patch was giving him a taste of it, a peek, letting him in on a secret, and right then and there, in the raw, misty night, he slapped his hand down on the bridge and laughed for joy—laughed like a loon and didn't care who heard him. There was mystery in the world, and he loved it.
After that it was his place, his sacred grove. No one used the bridge, because no one walked anywhere anymore, and he had it all to himself. He came there and stared at the Patch and let himself go, let it flow through his senses and speak to his body directly, telling him things he couldn't hear and washing himself clean on the inside, looking at the weeds and trees and that shy little brook. He saw the spring come, the browns give way to green, the fresh soft greens hardening and becoming dark and serious.
