The cobbles of the roadway wind from the heights down to the Saint Lawrence, through the old Centre Ville, where the money of past generations found their comforts, and the history of a nation come and gone remains on the tongue, in the food, in the grey and red blocks of granite in the walls.

The ephemeral lives in the walls as well, but more slowly. The ephemeral lives in the flower-box geraniums, and the leaves gone brown. Out of the sky, that grey-matte day, huge flakes like goosedown floated in front of the shopwindows, making them stand out dark against the speckled daylight. It was cool and wet, the humidity like a finger of ice running along the cheek, up the spine. The dark-haired waitresses and the vendors from their counters looked back out on the scene, and the falling winter, and on the people in the street who shared their eyes.

Invisible, the wind came off the high mountain peaks, cold and crisp as water from the glacier, and poured down the divide and over the foothills in torrents, mingling as it went with the desert air east of the range, stirring up dust devils and clouds, raising the earth from the earth and carrying it a few miles east, only to set it down again.

Wet over the prairies, drying; dry over the fields, moistening. The wheat fields of North Dakota stretch forever, from one horizon to another, but still the sea of air is larger, and its waves impress themselves upon the green stalks, green currents through the evening grain which you can follow with your eye, trace with your finger, and draw to your lips like a drop of scented water, to slake your thirst for beauty. Then the wind passes on – it leaves you behind. There you stand, your heart racing with youth, creating a memory, a record of the moment here and now in your early years, a record of the invisible that moves a over the face of the earth. The wind sighs away to the east, and in the sense of being filled and being emptied, nascent understanding that every moment and every scent and every touch reels out the lineage of your own story, prose and poetic as it is, true and retouched as it is.

There is nothing in midnight but a fleck of ink on the otherwise empty face of the clock, or an electrical pulse which dis-integrates into a soft dash of light in an otherwise seamless river of life. We make the marks against which we measure our lives and call them time: they do not exist without our pen striking the hours and the days and the years.

Gravity explains the sands of our lives by dividing moments into falling grains of silica, whose gently wrinkled whorl descends a crystal flue, gravity which draws it through in only one direction, toward the center and to rest, toward the sea. As smooth as grains can be, still they click in quantum resonance like a smaller tick of the clock, a smaller and less useful error of the time we make, one which can never be pointed out, so never be discussed.

A moment arrives and a moment passes, water through your fingers. Beautiful water: touch a drop to your lips, your thirst is lessened; touch a drop to your eyes, they are cleared; touch a drop to your forehead, you are baptized; touch a drop to the soil, the flower grows.

From the electric arc of that instant, a trail of Past streams out, like smoke from a sparkler spun through the air, or heat from a flame that burns and consumes itself as it gives light… like words on a page, a trail of markings left behind the hand, a narrative guide, a history, each word a nod to a line that began and continues to be written.

Three nights later, and I still have not returned to an east coastal sleep pattern. While it is “only” five time zones away, the body and the mind take in so much information in such travel that the consequences are deeper and broader than the meager mind would care to admit.

Some years ago I spent six months on the island of Java, in Indonesia. The island rests on the equator. My home town away from home was Yogyakarta, in the central Java, a city of some 600,000 at the time, snuggled at the feet of Mount Merapi, an active volcano. Every once in a while the ground shook, and my Midwestern mind reeled as it tried to assimilate moving earth vs twisting skies. On the equator, the sun rose and fell with complete regularity, weighed heavily at noon, was broken by a thundershower at 2pm, and set peacefully accompanied by an soft offshore breeze. Everyone was a foot shorter than I was.

Like a curtain being pulled back, revealing landscape which has not been previously witnessed, stepping from a boat into the waters above a reef and turning your eyes toward the ocean’s bottom opens a window on a world which could not have been imagined had it not been seen.

Had it not been seen, the language of the sea would continue to be the language of wind and waves, and weather that sweeps in on predictable currents, and the traffic of human hulls from one dry landing to another. Here, however, the life which moved undetected beneath our domain… one glimpse adds new words and new harmonies to the music of the planet, making one both smaller and larger at the same time.

Above the slopes of the eastern mountain, the moon rises; it is nearing its seven-day size, waxing to half light, half darkness. The light of the sun as it sets strikes the dusty surface and, without atmosphere to impede, reflects back to our earth, in a delicate choreography which changes each minute and each day.

Today we drive to the height of Haleakala, as it rises 20,000 feet from the ocean floor, then 10,000 feet above the level of the sea into the tropical sky. Measured from its roots to its peak,it is the highest mountain mass on the planet. We climbed from tropical warmth into subtropical slopes, where cattle and plantations sprawled; through eucalyptus groves whose leaves perfumed the air and shaded the car; into sparse grasslands dotted with gorse and scrub; into the clouds…

I took some time to gear myself up a bit, and swam out to the lava point at White Rock Beach. I had been practicing snorkeling in the shallows – never having been a water person, further and deeper can bring me closer to the edge of comfort, and unfamiliarity with the techniques and the gear kept me diving, rising, being pushed in by the waves, and drawn back out by the wave-return.

Some two thousand five hundred miles from the coast of California, a “hot spot” in the floor of the Pacific ocean has jetted matter from the heart of earth toward the sky. It passes through cooling waters, and becomes a cone that, over the millennia, breaks the waves and rises thousands of feet above the surface. Unstable, it erupts, explodes, sloughs new earth down the slopes to consolidate, hissing in the sea.

“I’ve never considered myself a spiritual person, but the first time I stopped the boat above a singing male, and dropped the hydrophone in the water…”

Then there is a pause for words, which are not available. This is the well from which the poets draw water, the place beyond words, where words alone are required but will never be adequate. The guest at my cousin’s party spoke of arriving here a few years ago, and beginning a water tour company with her husband. Maui, as it happens, is something of a sacred site for the whales – what else but a sacred site when such large populations congregate here, as compared to other Hawaiian islands?