Walking Through Brambles: A Narrative of Circumspection

By G. W. Latimer

Walking Through Brambles covers a year-in-the-life of a self-proclaimed middle-aged, mainstream exile as he re-discovers himself and builds a new life in a  small coastal town in southern Oregon.

Adam Moore reveals an environment that is bucolic and an ethos that is perplexing but warm as he learns his way around his new town, meets h

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zimbell House Publishing, LLC
• Release date: Feb 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9781643900018

G. W. Latimer

G. W. is a semi-retired tech-writer and web developer, and one of those rare English majors who didn't go to law school. Instead, he focused on developing his writing style and reading just about anything he could get his hands on. Originally from Corpus Christi, Texas, he's lived in Indiana, Utah, and Seattle, Washington. A heart-and-soul Seattlite currently living in Oakland, California, he spends his spare time with his two Schnoodles running around every dog park in the city. For the last twenty years, he's been writing user manuals, developing websites, and writing books of poetry, short stories, and a novella on its way to becoming a 'real novel.' He has an amazing daughter, an artist, and writer herself, who lives in Texas. You can follow his work on: http://thefogandwave.com or on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gwlatimer

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Walking Through Brambles

A Narrative of Circumspection

G. W. Latimer

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. All characters appearing in this work are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the written permission of the publisher.

For permission requests, write to the publisher

Attention: Permissions Coordinator

Zimbell House Publishing

PO Box 1172

Union Lake, Michigan 48387

mailto:[e-mail]

© 2019 G. W. Latimer

Published in the United States by Zimbell House Publishing

All Rights Reserved

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-947210-98-1

Trade Paper ISBN: 978-1-947210-99-8

.mobi ISBN: 978-1-64390-000-1

ePub ISBN: 978-1-64390-001-8

Large Print ISBN: 978-1-64390-002-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018911737

First Edition: February 2019

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Zimbell House Publishing

Union Lake

Dedication

For Cara, an amazing daughter and a beautiful soul.

IN SUCH A NIGHT LET me abroad remain,

Till morning breaks, and all’s confused again;

Our cares, our toils, our clamors are renewed,

Or pleasures, seldom reached, again pursued.

-Anne Finch, 1713

Delusions

A Room in Valencia

I

Valencia is the kind of place you’d see in old movies but full of color. Sometimes it seems as though I took a wrong turn on my way to the office and ended up here, someplace unreal, somewhere tucked away in the Azores or the southern Antilles. Standing atop Mare’s Point, you can see beyond Vero Bay and out to sea for miles. As you follow the upstream course of Dakota Creek, you will see Valencia’s ivy-lined houses stone bridges and vineyards of young kiwi. Furrows of carnations, purple avens, and orchids, hedges of wild heather mixed with clumps of bamboo and licorice color the horizon. If you continue beyond the statue of Saint Jerome, you will come to the church playground, brimming with uniformed children. The old Mission of Saint J, as we call it, and where I work within its library above the rectory.

A street map of Valencia looks more like the schematics of a computer chip but curvier. I’m still getting lost after living here for two and a half years. The population since then has grown to nearly nine hundred. Or has it dropped to eight hundred? No matter—the mission isn’t even a mission anymore. It’s a parochial school upstairs with a church and seminary downstairs. The property forms a U around a courtyard of statues, benches and flower beds that for some reason, fail to retain visitors for more than a few minutes. I even avoid sitting there at times when I really want to, afraid of annoying people by violating a secret trust or something.

Now and then I can hear the chamber chorus in the chapel; hollow songs linger in the catacombs, stone walls tingle with voices. Even the bay breathes in iambic pentameter. Gales blow in from the sea; their landfalls soften by a coastline of pines rooted between giant rocks and domes of sand and clay.

Sometimes at night, the smell of the sea creeps into my room, blending with the scent of paper and seasoned wood. Pine, elm, or oak perhaps but with less definition, as they are now in retirement within their current compositions as chair, desk, and floor.

My house is only a short walk from the church. A small stream runs behind it and passes through my neighbor’s hay field on its way to the town square. I’ve never followed it northward beyond the cemetery since it ducks below ground for nearly a mile or so, and where it wanders, I do not know. Every morning, except for weekends, I accompany the tiny creek through the mission gardens and to the chapel where it again disappears beneath the earth and rambles southward before resurfacing past the school play-ground. It winds its way to Valencia’s central square where it burbles through the halo of a porcelain cherub and into the fountain’s pool cupped like a sea-shell.

Every excursion from my home to the mission library becomes an homage to peace and quiet, a benediction. In April, dogwood petals cover the trail along the creek. Deer weed climbs an olive tree, and the fragrance takes me back to a place I’d been as a child—somewhere unclear, ambiguous to even imagine, nagging like pieces of a song, vague recollections of a first date, the tease of something more than just a dream.

On nights that are clear, I can walk beside the creek without a flashlight. The moon, stars, planets, orbs of fire and ice brighten the pathway and cast a bluish hue to the entire valley, and illuminate the mountains nearly a mile away. One night while sitting against a dogwood, I watched an airplane drift by above me and remembered the day I arrived in Valencia on a twin-engine Beechcraft and swearing that the distant ground could be touched by merely extending a finger. At fifteen-thousand feet, parceled acres of barley and rice appeared as nothing more than patches of grass and clover; a soft and inviting bed. The distance between me and the earth seemed incomprehensible, and I believed for an instant that stepping out of the plane at that moment was no less absurd than stepping off a curb and into a puddle.

When I first came to Valencia, the mission’s library was nothing more than a book rack in the corner of a room at the top of a spiral staircase. No other entrances to the library existed except for a sliding-glass door on the stone balcony. The balcony meets a sloping walkway that leads to the courtyard downstairs. The second floor is divided among the library, classrooms, a few school offices, and a storage room; which after a little dusting could qualify as a museum were it not for the fire codes prohibiting public assembly rooms without direct exits. It would cost too much I suppose to put in an outside door.

I spent my first day here surveying the landscape and scouting for a place to live. Housing didn’t come with the job, but I was allowed to live in my office at the library until I had the cash and references to lease a house a few blocks west of the mission. Eventually, I found a place in Valencia ‘s oldest neighborhood, split in half by the small creek and dotted here and there with cafes, shops, and parks.

There’s not a single car dealership, shopping center or parking lot bigger than a tennis court within a hundred miles. We are a community of settlers, not commuters. No one mistakenly passes through. Only a few stray tourists come in the summer for gas and a few seaside souvenirs. More than likely, if you wake up one morning in Valencia, you’ll end up settling in before the next bus leaves the gazebo or the grass is mowed at Memorial Park and the airstrip just east of Saint J.’s cemetery.

MY WEEKDAY ROUTINES are no more or less eventful, I suppose, than are my weekends at home with the cat. My house is not far from the creek I follow almost every day to the mission just a few blocks away. It is a small house with many windows that remain uncovered throughout the year and opened for all but the coldest months. The exterior at one time was a brilliant crimson, like that of ruby or garnet, but has faded since it was built nearly eighty years ago. The design of the house is simple, almost a perfect square if not for a couple of bay windows on the south and west walls. The north and east walls are cool most of the year, shaded by a few pines with tendrils of ivy and wisteria crawling along the bricks. One day, I will build a proper deck there, but for now, a comfortable lawn chair and pillow rest alone with the pines and ivy in the cool, shadowy grass.

The previous owner was an artist who added a small upstairs studio with a window that swings open into the yard above my chair. From the window, I can almost see the creek itself behind patches of cattails and bamboo growing along the creekside. The artist had studied in Provence, so much of her work exhibits a style inherent to the French masters. According to the agent who sold me the property, the French woman died in the upstairs studio the summer before I moved here. But sometimes, while sitting in my chair beneath the window, I imagine her still here watching me, studying me, sketching my profile over a thick, hardbound book whenever the air is warm, and the wind is brisk. But I have yet to see my portrait in any medium anywhere in the house. Much of her actual work still hangs on the walls; her studio still cluttered with art stuff abandoned just as she had arranged it, ready to begin the last landscape of her final summer in Valencia’s countryside.

ANTIQUITY is a sensory word like coffee and Christmas; a perfect metaphor for Valencia. That is what I notice here. The antiquity of an old book with a handwritten note inside the cover, coffee on your lips after days without a sip, holiday lights blinking only in December. Maybe I am more attracted to Valencia’s charm than its history and to the artist’s tastes more than her mysteriousness. But perhaps it’s just the artist’s death—or death in general—that mysteriously engages me. I don’t want her to go without her bed and desk, her curtains and paintings, her soaps and dishes, and the mail that comes still bearing her name.

The artist’s effects remain throughout the house. Bits and pieces of her still linger as well. That’s why I like it here, why I bought the house in the first place. Of course, I’m alone here. But the artist has given the house a comfortability that certain homes get only after years of decorating, years of its owner marking her territory with bits and pieces of creativity and individuality. Her clutter was here when I took possession of the place. Her bed, her coffee table, her desk placed strategically in the dining room with a few rugs and runners in the living room, bathroom, and hallway.

Her room is a curious place still accessorized with easels, brushes, jars of pencils, frames empty and others stretched with muslin canvases, and heavy blankets draped upon mysterious figures. Chairs lay toppled over or stacked in strange postures, and a small corner sink still dripping after all this time like a clock never unwinding.

Outside her window grows a large mimosa. Sometimes the branches knock it open and shake their fragrant fringes on the floor. Yellow Cat brings them downstairs sticking to her paws and tail. Perhaps she’s trying to tell me something, trying to lead me upstairs to the studio to show me something that I’m always failing to see?

I have never been successful at seeing. Concepts do not trouble me, but details always lose themselves within the big picture, the essence of the notion—my paradox. Machiavelli said that the ends justify the means. He believed the desired result was more important than the process by which that result is realized.

Georges Seurat believed otherwise. In 1884, he created his most famous painting, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte. Dot by dot and point by point, Seurat’s art evolved entirely upon the means by which it was conceptualized. His vision of detail is manifest within the message of his bigger picture. His technical style creates an art that is justified by his message. Seurat brings harmony to Machiavelli’s dissonance—nature’s paradox.

I regret I’m too impulsive and impatient to be an artist. I tend to buy the frame and pick out the wall space before wetting a single brush. The journey is lost to me. My desire to communicate, to give thanks, to apologize, to acknowledge is lost in its own form. I paint a thousand dots of color and smear out the sentiment with a single, wet stroke.

IT IS THE LAST SUNDAY morning in May, and Yellow Cat is balled up in the center of her pillow like the calyx of a sunflower. The morning sun eventually reaches her. Stretching into the den like daybreak seen through time-lapse photography, the sunlight spreads closer and touches her tail. She twitches. Another band of light elongates across the floor, past a pile of books, over a boot, and then toward her still asleep on her pillow. A hot, bright beam touches an ear; she twitches again but to no avail. The sunlight envelops her. She’s been swallowed. She wakes and stretches belligerently on her toes, arches her back and stiffens her tail. For a moment, in the middle of a great yawn, she appears to be stuffed, embalmed by her master to serve as a doorstop. But then a foot twitches, shaken as though to dry it. She moves from her pillow and finds darker lodging beneath the telephone stand where the sunlight never comes. She balls up again like a wintered flower and sleeps in a time-lapse unnoticed by even the most perceptive camera.

The cat and I are banished here in a pretended heaven—a twisted paradox forever twisting, spiraling deeper into paradise, deeper into delusion. I feel my life in Valencia is an ellipsis, reconciled to nothing but its own passing.

THE LIBRARY SLASH ELEMENTARY school storage room is the oldest structure in the valley. Missionaries came some time ago searching for a truth that was satisfying, inoffensive, forever pleasing, touchable. They found ideals here, but their criteria for truth was never identified. The truth that occurred in nature was too raw, too ugly so they recreated landscapes—censored imaginations of only the sweetest things; gardens, creeks, streams, and meadows.

As a blueprint, photographs would have been too multi-dimensional, contemporary, confrontational for the founders, so they created Valencia as a painting, a representation of truth, a metaphor of ‘Paradise.’ All things existed at the top of the food chain where survival of the fittest became nothing more than a pecking order of corpses. Even in Paradise, there must be opposition. Balance and proportion demand it. But then again, Valencia is not a real paradise; it is a painting, nothing more than a playground of reality. Truth, according to history in Valencia, has become equally unidentifiable. History has become a record of conveniences like a crossword puzzle of letters finely arranged but spelling nothing.

A painting, however, is a perception of a more evident truth, more dependable than superstition, more indulgent than even fantasy. This is what Valencia has become. People do not come here to live but to die, to belay immortality, to forget the resurrection, to avoid truth and history and