If the years have taught me anything, it is that we end up much more than we arrive. This is not a praise of ambivalence or the acceptance of our lives as a fate accompli but the slightly melancholy retrospective of a half-spent life. In youth we see paths stretching out in front of us, disappearing around a bend, beckoning us with expectations. But what we find is never what we expected and what we want is long gone. This is probably a matter for psychology more so than philosophy but nevertheless it leaves us with a defective sense of ourselves. And so we seek to recover moments that appear so vividly in our memories that we condemn ourselves for ever letting them slip us by. But I do not think this is real. And to live in the past is folly and it is the acceptance of a long slow dissolution into utter uselessness.

I have lived in Kentucky for a decade. 10 springs, 10 summers, 10 falls and 10 winters. And now it is almost over. I have no record for this period of my life. I know I began as a lowly manual laborer at a crane company and am leaving as an artist but the middle is a muddle of fact and fiction that even I can’t decipher. There is, however, one continuity to all the seasons and all the change of the last 10 years. As I stood in the middle of a hilltop field on a warm early spring day in Raven Run nature sanctuary, I was acutely aware that this might be the last time I stood there. I have hiked at Raven Run every year and in every season of the last decade. I know every trail, a good many of the trees and even some of the rocks. But at this moment it was not the natural features that concerned me but the ghostly memories of people long gone. It occurred to me what it would look like if my time at Raven Run could be condensed into one single moment, like a collection of still shots. What faces would I see and what times would I remember? But alas, that is not possible and so I set off on my hike, eager to take in what memories I could.

I did not choose a path or follow any single direction, I just walked. The trees were still barren but there were signs of spring all around me. The invasive honeysuckle was already budding out and wood anemones covered the forest floor with delicate white flowers. I watched a Rufus-Sided Towee chase a butterfly in the underbrush. I could hear warblers singing in the treetops and occasionally glimpsed the fleeting shapes of these small birds as they buzzed about in perceptible excitement. I reached out and delicately touched the point of a Honey Locust thorn and felt the wispy dry bark of a very tall Eastern Red Cedar. This was all rather silly but I wanted to take in all I could from his final hike. After a few hours of happy wandering, I ended back at the black pole barn that serves as the park’s makeshift headquarters. As I signed out on the trail log, it occurred to me that even if I did come back it wouldn’t be the same. They are building a new modern nature center closer to the parking lot and it is due to open this year. If I did come back, it would be a new experience. “Well, that settles it.” I thought and walked to my car.

The worst of the rain had passed by the time I parked in front of my booth space on Florida A1A. Unfortunately it was almost dark and for the sake of the reproductive cycle of sea turtles this strip of beach had no lights. Occasionally I could see the stars and a sliver of a moon through the racing clouds but they were too faint to help. A light mist was falling but the wind was strong so I didn’t bother with my rain jacket. Through the thickets of sea grape I could make out the rollers crashing on the beach. It was pretty. It was very pretty. I stood there for a long time soaking it all in. Well, if I was going to have to set up in the dark it might as well be at the beach, I thought and started to unpack. It was a struggle to put up the tent and after a few near disasters, I maneuvered my car so that the headlights bathed my space in a bright light. Eventually I managed to raise my tent and store the art. Since I appeared to be the only artist around, I decided to take a quick pee behind my booth. I had been drinking Lipton ice teas all night and my bladder was crying out for relief. I stared up at the sky, let out a long sigh and felt as good as I’ve ever felt in my entire life. “Could you please move your car so I can get by?” The voice startled me so that for a brief moment I experienced the vicissitude of peeing into the wind. “Just a second.” I said, “I just have to put something away.” As I moved my car, I couldn’t help but notice the very clear silhouette of the Sea Grapes on the wall of my tent exactly where I had been standing. “I couldn’t find the porta potties.“ I said apologetically. He waved a thanks, smiled and pulled up to an empty booth space a little further down. I hoped he could keep a secret, I thought and started for the hotel.

A one star hotel in travel guide parlance is a nice way of saying, “For God’s sake don’t use the linen and you had better wear flip-flops in the shower.” Of course I knew this when I booked the hotel but I needed to budget and anything was better than sleeping in the car. At the front desk I waited patiently for a rather portly lady with a mouthful of food to finish her conversation with the elderly security guard. I don’t like it when hotels have a security guard. I especially don’t like it when the security guard looks like the reincarnation of Barney Fife from the old Andy Griffith show. Looking at him I felt doubly unsafe. I waited for what seemed to be a polite interval and then said, “Excuse me ma’am, I’d like to check in.” Without looking at me, she raised a finger in my direction, signaling me to wait. “No she didn’t!” I said to myself, more surprised than anything. “I need to check in now.” I said, emphasizing the “now”. She made a grimace towards Don Knotts and wiggled herself off her stool. She took my information without a word, using gestures to communicate, all while chewing loudly on what smelled to be peanut butter crackers. “Which way to my room?” I asked as she handed me a key. She pointed around the corner, intoning something that might have been, “That way.” “You’ve been very helpful.” I said, letting out a sarcastic chuckle. She grunted something and unperturbedly waddled back to her seat. All the rooms faced the parking lot and a good many of the rooms had doors open and small pockets of people lounging with cans of beer in their hands. I didn’t like this at all. As I excused my way through the balcony revelers, trying not to upset their beers with my duffel bag, I noticed my next-door neighbor had left her curtains pulled back and was standing there in bra and panties brushing her teeth. I paused at the door of my room for a long second, contemplating whether I should just get in the car and drive away, when one of the partiers offered me a beer. “No thanks.” I said. “Maybe later when all the shooting starts.” As I lay in bed trying to imagine how I was covered in freshly laundered sheets, I could here bits and pieces of conversation coming through the wall. You could have got the gist of the conversation from the tone of the voices alone and even with the volume of the TV turned up all the way, I could still make out the occasional word. And then the voices stopped. There was a brief moment of silence and then the unmistakable rhythmic creaking of a bed. “Really?” I said to myself. “She’s like 60.”

The next morning I awoke tired and more than a little cranky. I had barely slept a wink. Even after my next-door neighbor had decided to call it quits, I was kept awake by an odd aroma emanating from the sheets. The best I could figure it was a cocktail of sour milk, cheap laundry detergent and cigarettes. It wasn’t until I ingeniously opened my deodorant and left it laying next to me that I was able to go to sleep. As I opened my door an empty beer can fell from the handle. A fellow artist had installed empty beer cans on every door handle on the second floor. I smiled. It was kind of funny in a sophomoric sort of way. My mood further brightened when I stepped out into a perfect spring morning. I let out an audible, “Damn!” Things were definitely looking up. I drove the short distance to the festival and found a convenient parking spot for my four door sedan hidden among the big vans and campers of more successful artists. I opened my booth for business and then found a nice sunny spot in the back to sit and watch the ocean. There was hardly a wave and a slight breeze barely rustled the leaves of the sea grapes. I watched the distant silhouettes of ships slide across the horizon where the blue of the sky met the blue of the ocean. An occasional seagull called overhead but the beach was empty. Sitting there I could understand why the ancient mariner left the security of terra firma for the uncertainty of the open ocean. On a morning like this I would have joined him. I would have sat there all day enjoying the peace and calm but for a lady sporting Dolce and Gabbana sunglasses and sipping white wine from a Dixie cup. “Why are you hiding back here?” she asked in a smoky voice. “So people like you don’t find me.” was what I wanted to answer but instead I smiled and followed her out to the front of my booth. I spent a half-hour answering inane questions, all the while aware that she was not going to purchase any art. Maybe she was lonely. Maybe she was drunk. Maybe both but I’m not a bartender and the ocean was behind my booth. She eventually tired of my halfhearted conversation and tottered away on ridiculously high platform shoes, leaving me more than a little annoyed. Just as I was about to disappear into the back, an elderly man attired in a bright yellow windbreaker and baby blue slacks entered my booth. I paused for a moment, waiting to see if he had any questions and then watched with some bemusement as he began inspecting each and every piece of art with the thoroughness of a detective with a magnifying glass. His small hooked nose and large sunglasses combined with his brightly colored clothes gave me the impression of a very old parakeet. And when he cocked his head to one side and lifted his sunglasses to look at me, I smiled slightly at the impression. “Very good.” He said in a soft chirp. “My wife and I have been coming to this show for years and this is the first time I’ve seen your work.” “Oh?” I said, looking around for his wife. “She passed a few years back.” He explained in a quiet voice. “But I still come every year.” he added after a long thoughtful pause. I didn’t think he was talking to me anymore. He was remembering his wife and the times they had spent together looking at art. “Good luck.” He said. I groped for the right response but there wasn’t any. I watched as he stopped at the next booth, inspecting each piece of art, remembering his wife and wishing she was there. Maybe this was mostly in my head but I didn’t think so then. And as I returned to my sunny spot looking out at the ocean, I was a little glad this pretty place didn’t remind me of someone I loved now gone.

When it is too cold and my fingers are chapped from all the washing and my back is sore from bending over the art, I turn out the lights in the studio, except for the one fluorescent light over the workbench. I go to my room and sit on an old office chair pulled close to the space heater and think. I think about how it is good for an artist to be an egoist and how my aesthetic is the best aesthetic and how I shouldn’t be afraid to follow it to its logical conclusion. I think about circumstances beyond my control and how they make for a lucky opportunity not to live it in the heads of other people. It must be my aesthetic, I think and my willpower and then someone else’s imagination. I think about how innumerable circumstances combine to make a great tide that pushes mankind along at a rate beyond any one lifetime. It is the great dialectic that sees every man as only a man. I wonder what is goodness or greatness to this blind force? Superlatives are stretched thin in time so that philosophers and theologians, forgetting their own cause, grope endlessly for a cause uncaused. So I think about the great comedy of history and the reverence we pay the dead. Wishing, by association, that we matter to more than ourselves and if we do, that we matter like we do to ourselves. I think about all of this and cannot deny any of it.

The warmth from the space heater gradually lulls me towards sleep and my thoughts drift and all I can hear is the sound of the fan. Before I go to bed, I peek into the studio and look at the art in the faint glow of the one fluorescent light over the workbench. I smile like a parent smiles as they watch their child sleeping, knowing that life goes on without me but with something added by me. And what a pleasing thought that is and what a pleasing occupation this is.