Dream d1554-s: The Last Quiet Bench

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the sound reached me before the clearing did, the long even rasp of a hand plane drawing down a board, then the soft fall of a shaving, then the rasp again. I came around the last pine into that rhythm. The Woodworker was at his bench planing one last length of ash, slow and unhurried, as if there were no road waiting and no reason to stop.

Around him the clearing was half undone. Our packs stood open. The Weather Reader was wrapping her instruments in cloth, fitting them into their case by feel. The Builder rolled a coil of spare cable and lashed it to his pack. We were leaving. The bench rasp went on under all of it, the only thing in the clearing that was not being put away.

Lano wove between the open packs, nose down, tail low, unsettled by the disassembly of a place she had learned to call still. "Tranquila," I told her. She sat, but at the clearing's northern edge, facing the pines.

The Dreamer was already there at that edge, camera at his side, strap loose, lens to the ground. He had his back to the packing. He was facing north, where the footpath ran on into the trees, and he did not help and did not speak.

"He has been standing there since first light," the Builder said, quietly, so it would not carry. "I do not think he has decided to come so much as decided not to stay."

The Woodworker lifted the plane clear and ran his thumb along the board's edge. "It is done when it is done," he said, to no one, to the wood. He set the board aside with the others he would never use. He was not coming. That had been settled days ago. He built with what was in front of him, and the road north was not in front of him.

The Eye came from behind the workshop with her kit already closed. She looked at the packs, at the Dreamer's back, at me. "You are not leaving here," she said. "You are carrying here with you. There is a difference, and you will feel it about a day north."

I stood in the middle of the half-packed clearing and understood that the leaving was the dream, not the walk that would follow it. The walk was only distance. This was the part that cost something, the last morning, the plane still going, the Dreamer at the edge already half on the road, all of us stepping out of a home that had held us and would not hold us again.

The plane drew down once more. Then the Woodworker set it on the bench, and the clearing went quiet, and we shouldered our packs.