Hills and Valleys

OK, I was in a bit of a gloomy mood for a while but I've gotten over it. Up and at 'em! Do it with thy might, all that good stuff. That really is the answer, when you're blue—just get doing something constructive. Plus, it's June. Isn't June (well, for Americans anyway) one of the months that everyone likes? Reasonable weather, no onerous holidays, kids out of school, the crack of the baseball bat, the sizzle of the hot dog? June rocks.

Speaking of valleys, I was in the valley of the Wissahickon Sunday, hiking along its streamside trails. You're in the heart of Philadelphia, but you'd hardly know it. The stream itself meanders poetically, and the deep, lushly vegetated valley is decorated with fantastically varied rock formations made out of what's called Wissahickon schist, which I dare you to say ten times fast. And at one point you look up at this immense structure—a bridge with massive supports that rise to beautiful arches, away up in the sky. This thing emerges out of the green like a monument from some unutterably powerful civilization whose existence you were unaware of until that moment. You've seen such things in movies—I was about to say "films," but that would be wrong—where the explorers are going deeper and deeper into the jungle, pursuing some rumored lost city, and then suddenly they see it, and they say heilige scheiss, just look at that. The bridge is like Kong, you might say—more graceful, maybe, and less grabby, but just as impressive.

So that's what I did Sunday. It wasn't expecially hot, because it was only the first day of June, but I got fairly heated up and tired and when I had my first sip of beer afterward, I was reminded of the line from Slaughterhouse-Five, when the underfed prisoner Billy Pilgrim steals a bit of food. "Every cell in Billy's body shook him with ravenous gratitude and applause," it goes. When I'm hot and tired and I tilt that bottle back for the first time, the cells in my own body know just how Billy's felt.