I wish I could have taken a picture of that evening – could have taken a picture of everything on that trip, but it wouldn’t have done any good. The picture would have been a snapshot; it wouldn’t have felt the same, and it wouldn’t have looked the same. Sometimes, when one looks at a picture, he remembers how he felt right then, what he was thinking, what happened before, what happened after, all those ‘soft things’ that come with being in a time or place that an image can’t quite capture. But even this, the subconscious writing of a thousand words, is still a replica. The viewer never feels – surrounded, but only confronted from the front of his face or the back of his brain. Something, perhaps, what Eustace Scrubb was lucky enough to experience and the rest of us are not, is always missing.
On that evening, the heel of my foot hurt in my new Birkenstocks. No matter how artistic my photograph, how descriptive my words, how hard I tried to remember, ‘it’ will never be the same, because I would never have walked the same distance, in the same shoes, my toenails will never be the same too long length, and my heel will never hurt in quite the exact same way. The details define the particularity of a moment. To ‘take it all in’ is admirable, but indigestible. To describe an entire view in one word is to lose all meaning - ‘amazing’ becomes absolutely ordinary. To use descriptors is to fail at describing – ‘cloudy’ is too subjective, too inarticulate.
That evening, it was cool enough to be in a quarter zip, shorts that soaked up the wet plank picnic bench, and unfastened Birkenstocks. Dinner was chocolate and tap water tasting too strongly of chlorine and dirty plastic. The sun, the color of sailor’s delight, concentrated through the clouds and colored the fells – turning the endless green to orange and yellow. Every sunset is different, but every one is the same – the detail is what makes this sunset different than the one before. This sunset, it was the heel.
A few years ago I watched another sunset, an ocean away from the naturey feels and fells of the Lake District. This sun silhouetted a midway, dusty sparkles spattering circuses on the end of an era. This time, my feet were secured in thick, black socks and faux leather shoes that looked as though they were found in an old folk’s home. Folks, old and young, would see them tonight, watch their toes pulled high towards the sky, stretching all of me from the bottom up through the inside out to some unattainable standard. In ten minutes and thirty seven seconds, when their soundtrack had faded then fled, for the last time, they would still keep pounding eight to fives until finally, heels exhausted, they couldn’t take it anymore and stopped, silent and aching, that evening in the Lake District.
Perhaps, it is when our feet have stopped, that we understand a moment for all it is.