essay by Brian Charles Clark
My interest in permeability formed a clot in my imagination the day I first flew solo. I was thirteen, and I was alone. I was sitting on top of the Knoll, for the first time surveying what would be my stomping grounds for the next fifteen years. My fear of moving away from Chula Vista, tucked away in the southwestern-most corner of California, fear of leaving friends behind, all sour was distilled by the calm sage and stoic Joshua trees. The dark chemistry of depression sank deep away into the vats of boulders beneath my feet.
I was leg dangling on an outcropping of rock about nine feet wide. The rock face dropped some ten feet beneath my seat, and then buried itself in the reddish desert dirt. The realtor who sold my parents the acreage, on which they had a house built, had dragged a magnet through the soil and pulled it up coated with iron filings. The eastern face of the Knoll sloped steeply away beneath me for several hundred feet. A cool breeze pushed with mild insistence at my back, and the future was luring me into the arms of the air. In a moment that is indelibly tattooed on my physiological memory—this is a moment that I can ever re-member—I lurched and then I flew. Out, over, in–now I can offer an explanation, but what was really happening, what did flying really feel like? Read the rest of this entry »