… we’d go tramping off the back road
through salal and ferns and huckleberries
and hike the dry logged-off ridges
crisscrossed with wild strawberries
tiny and tasty and gritty with sand
We’d stomp down tough blackberry vines
raveling over the slash of old bones
piles of branches the loggers left
We’d reach past bramble thorns for berries
still too hard and reddish
that made us all the more thirsty
We’d traipse along the edge of a swamp
full of fat frogs and big snakes
the dull mud beyond the lily pads
cracking under the weight of the sun
…before we’d break through to the beach highway
running broad and swift above the sea
Nowadays those old sandy ridges
hold a fragile growth of spruce and fir
and where we used to tramp
there’s an asphalt road going through
I can park at the store
but it no longer stocks those bottles
of soda that tasted
like a million sweet stars going down
—Eugene Marckx, 24 July 2014
(eugenemarckx@hotmail.com)