Dropped entry?

(I probably sent this, back on the Erie canal, but it's still on the desktop.  Just in case it didn't go through     . . . )

<Looked up from the screen and found myself hidden in a canal, steep walls on both sides of the boat!> <Olfactory clue, the slight smell of diesel exhaust.>

September 21st, hovering around my combat anniversary.  On September 14th, 1968, I was wounded in Vietnam.  Standing guard on a captured ammunition pile, part of it blew up and ended my career as a soldier.  (And started my much longer career as an ex-soldier!)

That I remember that moment with crystalline clarity is probably an artifact of repetition.  Revisiting it constantly . . . refining it?  Editing the memory or letting time erode it?  The actual moment of impact is just white noise.  I barely remember staggering, rotating half around, hitting the ground and then tearing at my clothes to ascertain the severity of the wounds.  Couldn't open my belt because the clasp was too slippery with blood.  Men crawled up to me at first, thinking we were under fire.  I think a medic started to apply a tourniquet, and then just wrapped the major wounds up tight.  Someone cut away my pants leg.  There was a long wait in the bright sun.  After a minute four guys held up a blanket or a tarp to shade me.  When the morphine came on I felt muffled all over.  Time was strange, not compressed or stretched, but somehow elliptical, waiting for the next thing to happen.  Or for life to peter out.  I was only slightly anxious, if I remember correctly; I was obviously out of the decision chain, the atropine and/or morphine in control of my time sense.

Cruising along the Snake River in the shank of summer, it looks more like Arabia then America.  Sere cliffs rising up into shimmering pale sky.  The Suez Canal might feel like this.  Last night we pulled through a wide spot, a body of water perhaps a quarter-mile to the left and right, and it felt strange that the water didn't smell of salt.  But in fact it didn't smell  like fresh water, either; no noticeable vegetation.  It's very plain, but unearthly.

Trees now, dusty in the still morning heat.

(Days later)

Boring is not the opposite of exciting.  This environment is interesting, but it hasn't changed in days.  Sparse suburbia sprawled along the steep hillside as the sun comes up over the slowly moving water.

In 1819 john Keats, at 23, was despairing of the loss of his poetical gifts.  He wrote to his brother,

"Nothing could have in all its circumstances fallen out worse for me than the last year has done, or could be more damping to my poetical talent."

But these days, Keats scholars call 1819 the "Living Year," the "Great Year," or the "Fertile Year." Keats had written almost all his great poetry during that year, including a series of odes during that spring and summer, among them "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and "Ode to Psyche." "To Autumn" was the last of these odes. Keats died from tuberculosis less than two years later, at age 25.

. . . so who ever knows, who ever knows?  I should give myself a little kick and get back to work.