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I remember well, vividly enough to even now feel hard packed granite dust beneath my back, how impatiently I broke sound sleep in Half Dome’s inky shadow. With one fast motion kicking both legs up to shed my down-filled sleeping skin, I rocked to my feet ready for an early start with hope of beating the line of groggy climbers about to scamper up Yosemite’s walls.
Twenty years on, the rock-ringed camaraderie of Camp 4 bivouacs left behind with youth, I favored a bed firm and snug moving gently with tides and swell. ln no particular hurry to rise, I would tune my ears to laughing seagulls combing seaweed stranded on the shore, halyards gently slapping on the mast, and wavelets whispering against a half inch plywood hull keeping me afloat and dry.
Swallowed the anchor; moved ashore onto six wheels, and into a bed like a submarine’s – a narrow bunk stacked in the back of my modest travelling home. Not so modest as the black bear’s single shaggy coat for all seasons, nonetheless my Sprinter wrapped slumber in safe comfort. I could wake amidst flooded paddies paved with geese talking loudly of rice breakfast in the coming dawn; or overlooking mountain lakes whose midnight mirrors echoed stars and loons with equal crystal clarity; or in the lee of wind-carved dunes dusted with sugar sand and sweet salt fresh off the nearby breaking sea.
Those many mornings, waking each to new adventure, are now filed in my history, no longer in my dreams or anticipation. Memories are there, readily available and fully fleshed out in all dimensions, so real they could be real, except they’re not.
I cannot make new memories of that sort; I cannot do much more than sleep. Sleep is my refuge and resolution.
Sleep is simple comfort, till the pain of living wakes me. Sleep is warmth, till the chill of age wakes me. Sleep is easing numbed legs, till stiffening cramps wake me.
Sleep is a place to be that makes no demands and offers no taunts of things which will be neither done nor seen again. Sleep eagerly claims my brain mid-thought and mid-sentence and returns it cleansed and calmed.
So let me sleep.