July 19, 2018

Hiram Inn, Hiram. I have a balcony looking out on beautiful black gums and a transported church and a dumpy yellow statue of James Garfield. Arrived after flights without incident at about noon, when Hiram lay pressed under brilliant summer as under some glorious, fragrant body. It was difficult to move in the thick light. I remembered the magic of the place. Red headed birds twittered in leaf cover inches above my head. I moved from place to place, read at book I’d gotten from the college bookstore (which has practically no books), looked at Bonney Castle and others of my old haunts, left the horrible book on a bench. Though in touch with the rich beauty of the place, as I was then, I felt surprisingly little nostalgia. No heart strings were tugged. I looked on the buildings and remembered the wild, violent, usually one-sided love affairs conducted within and around.  But I realized that my contact, my sympathies lay mostly with the land around. My mind was always on the paths of the little wilderness stretching in every direction. I have in some measure never left the valley of Silver Creek. Whatever emotion I got from campus pales beside the memory of this crooked tree or that path disappearing in undergrowth. Nobody appreciated how wild I was then. . . perhaps am now, though most of my tramping must be done in imagination. The Spirits of Place have always been palpable to me. My society has always been imminent but invisible. This gave my life its peculiar flair. I’ve always entered the room just as the one I needed to meet was exiting. He has appeared just as I, in weariness, finally wandered away. But, whatever the company, the setting was right. I have always moved in the forest I could see from my windows as I drove here, the green shelter, the emerald cover. It might have been much, much worse. It might have been much better.

Thwarted in my attempt to go the bar I enjoyed last time I was here. Nothing prospers in this hamlet but the mind.

Bought gin. The kind landlady gave me ice.