How Can This Compare?

And in the natural order that children will often go off into forests, we decended the back yard, sloping into the trees, like a stair case. The largest in front, the smallest running fast behind. Just as it should be.

Summer does strange things to the minds of free people, especialy little ones who, in certain romantic and philisophical senses, are more free than the most of us could hope to, even remember being. And in states such as these, we all would march to the place we all knew.

It wasn't just some afternoon that these adventures would come to mind. We were all kids under the same household-last-Name. There was alot of drinking under that Name. But afternoons opened the backdoor with a vaccum with the wind and we would sweep away, our hearts in our throats to keep us from breathing too loud, and we would run from His Words, His alcohol Breath. Sometimes He'd hit us with a beer can crushed in His Fist. Line us up like a firing squad in the kitchen for no good reason.

But we always had that airlock backdoor out past the sagebrush and up the mountain and there, somewhere past the pine, was the ledgendary lake.


It was always blue. Even if a storm sprung up over the mountains and we had to hide from lightning, we still stayed long after we should have been home. Some call it escape, i dunno. It was kind of like bliss to me.

I don't remember how we got the idea, but there was this tradition that was founded on some Tuesday afternoon where, when all the kids lined up along the crystal water, the oldest would throw a rock in the air, and the glossy picture of whoever it would pummel with a splash would have to try his hand at walking on the water. I think it might have had something to do with not understanding prayer, you know, trying to talk to god somehow by pretending to be him.

Every day we'd try it out. And it never really worked. Eccept for that one time, that was really weird, it was one of those moments, im sure you've had one, where nobody's sure what exactly has transpired. It was getting dark anyway, and the smallest one of us was just about to do the customary "leg straight out, clench your eyes shut and jump!!" when a big horned sheep and her lamb came running out from the trees, like someone had shot a gun, and everyone but the little one scattered as she careened through the line and in down the edge of the pond. There was alot of splashing, he thought that she had hit him, he thought that he'd been hit himself, but the littlest one of us didn't say anything, just stared at his feet with his mouth open slack, the splashed sheep water gleaming the sunset light like a thousand teany golden lightbulbs, slow motion we one by one caught one anothers glances, and looked his way.

She stopped about twenty yards off in front of her little one and turned a regal stare at us, breathing deep lungfulls of mountain wild out against the sky wearing her gigantic swirling horns.

One of us blinked at the moment some say was the poeticaly perfect equivelant to the wrongest of moments.

Another sneezed. Out of nowhere. Who sneezes in the midst of getting trampled by suprise wild sheep?!
Come on!

The sun was in my eyes.

There was grass in the others'.

It was all very confusing, with the water and the sheep and the sneezing...

But i'm pretty sure, after years of thinking back, even after we walked in silence back to the house and Dad was fast Asleep on the floor again, even after the summer wanned into wyoming winter, even after we all graduated from college and got married, well most of us anyway, but that's another story entirely, I'm pretty fairly sure, even today, that the littlest one, the one who got the most out of His Fists and Kicks, the one who never quite got off his feet unless we all were there, the one who's strange turn it was to take the leap out 'ore the water, the one who deserved it the most, even if it never actualy happened, he, the small and lowly with a suden bubbling splash, dropped into the water a grand total of three fantastic and ledgendary inches.