Nose to the ground, panting with excitement, the coon hound bounds from the front porch and down 16th Street, on a hot summer night just after July's full moon.
To the Cree and Ojibway, July is the Moon When Birds Cast Their Feathers. This July, at the vineyard where I spend my days, I am startled to observe a nest of blue eggs become squawking nestlings then mottled fledglings that are suddenly, tentatively airborne in the space of a few sultry July weeks. It is the month when life is at its most abundant.
Cottontail rabbits munch on clover, content at twilight, unperturbed by the hound's leashed enthusiasm. Bent at the knees and hunched on her sent trail, the hound soon forgets about the rabbits and is on to something up in the trees. Mammal population is at or near its peak, soon it will diminish as predators kill to feed their young.
Leaving the concrete sidewalks and clipped devil strips, we enter the woods and the craggy sandstone ledges of the Gorge of the Cuyahoga. The hound is unhinged: those ledges are alive with the scents of varmints and critters. A hundred yards away I catch the briefest glimpse of a red fox's distinctive trot. As we approach that spot, the hound bounds under the largest ledge and scrapes excitedly at the tiniest of crevices, perhaps the entry to a vulpine lair. We are but yards from the old mills and shuttered auto dealerships and sagging wood frame houses of Front Street, but this section of the river, teeming with critters, feels primeval.
Ascending from the river, up the steep streets past old corner stores where the proprietress scowled at you over the counter as you slid her a quarter for an ice cream treat on a hot summer's day.
We find ourselves on the route I used to walk daily to Harvey Bolich Jr High School, alto sax in hand, in a heavy black case. The sidewalks must have gotten smaller: how did a pack of three or four friends jostle down these same sidewalks sharing tales and treats from Open Pantry and King Quick and whatever Lawson's eventually became?
We find ourselves at the old school, a never lovely orange brick pile, for years fronting water-stained aqua window shades to the city's busiest street.
In July's warm late afternoon light, however, this night you almost forget about the olive drab lockers and endless gray halls and fickering florescent lights that did no one's Clearasil-soaked complection any favor. I notice, not for the first time, that squat orange pile of bricks crowns a rather lovely hill. Gazing toward State Road and the setting sun, round buildings are oddly prevalent: a water tower, a medical office, a brick apartment building, The Cathedral of Tomorrow, and of course, an infamous tower to nowhere.
This is the hill to watch storms blow in on sultry summer nights, and inevitably one does. The hound is startled, but not frightened by the large plunking drops. She runs a zig zag to avoid them, so it takes us perhaps longer than it should to seek shelter under the covered back entrance the Shop Wing.
Images from adolescence's cusp flood my mind. Mrs. Londa and her sewing machines. Shop class, making a sanding block, varnished with Deft. An industrial vacuum with ducts snaking the room, to collect the sawdust. The metal case where you put the safety glasses, to get sanitized by radiant beams. The foot pump on the industrial hand sink. Mr. Burns throws an eraser, to get the wayward trombone section's attention.
The storm quickly passes, as summer cloud bursts do. We trot along the ridge of the hill, where the hound discovers and rolls excitedly in a patch of clover. We seek shade under the only three trees in a vast expanse of grass, while below us the aluminum bats clink slow-pitched softballs, on all three fields. From Newberry Woods, a chorus of cicadas and crickets, and a million other things. Summer's full ripening, her endless fleeting song.
We make our way home, the hound panting and tracking and trotting, pure bliss. She is not ready to call it a night. One more circle around the block? She pleads with soulful hound eyes. Dog walks man.
The days get ever so slowly shorter now. Soon it is dark. The murmur of adult voices from front porches. The red tipped glow of a cigarette. Flickering TVs on living room walls.
These old streets. I could swear, again, the sidewalks used to be wider.
Something about those adult voices on distant front porches, the flicker of fireflies, the deafening chorus from a canopy of old oaks: I am taken back to other years, other nights, on these same streets above the craggy cliffs where the river bends.
I remember a hot summer night, on the cusp of high school, before we could drive, but were allowed to stay out just past dark. A night just like this. We walked, boldly down the middle of gravel and tar streets with big grassy gutters and steel driveway culverts: the sidewalks could no longer contain us. That same murmur from porches, distant cigarette glow, TV flicker.
Every day is a new beginning, even if you find yourself, at forty, on the old streets of your old home town.
The unbridled excitement of a coon hound on a night in the month when life is at its most abundant. There are too many scents, too many trails to follow. Every summer someone is on the cusp of fourteen. There are too many choices. Every summer the chorus in the canopy swells until you think, how can it possibly be this loud? How can this possibly end? The haunting, continuous--though fleeting--night song of the Moon When Birds Cast Their Feathers.
