Valley of the Dry Bones.

Fraught with illusion and properly outfitted, he walked into the desolate Ozark wilds on a pale November afternoon.

His plan was to escape the others, their chatterings and their judgments. Psychic winds from so many private deserts had impelled him to the edge of this mountain wilderness. Within its isolation and wisdom he would seek again to grasp the elusive something of his dreamy aspirations and come to terms with his age.

To become forty in America is surely a moment of dark passage. In the first hours of Ebenezer's descent into Dug Hollow, he brooded upon it under the cooling sun of life's noon.

One's fortieth birthday is no longer a celebration of maturity and the precious visions it portends. In exaulting the primacy of youth, the generation of the forever young has transformed a rite that should honor the sureity of coming of age into a displaced wake for youth's passing.

In private celebrations and public displays, his peers would mock one another with their black party balloons, with gifts of walking sticks and rocking chairs, with rude messages on billboards beside the fast lanes of dangerous highways and in newspaper ads at the bottom of pages filled with rage and yellow howling. Sure, certainly, the weary revelers would counter the sombre import of their symbols with hearty best wishes. They would sing the refrain of "and many more." Perhaps they would climb into a black limosine for a proper tour the city. But somewhere from the deep drifted the awful melody of the dirge, the fearful grind and clatter of the heart attack machine.

Coldly, Imbued With Storm

To Ebenezer's generation of post war babies suddenly growing old, the culture of youth was turning upon them at forty as the north wind turns upon a warm zephyr, coldly and imbued with storm.

Ebenezer's point of passage would arrive before the end of the cycling lunar month — "If I survive," he thought while pitching his dome on a narrow ledge deep in the bowels of Dug Hollow. Shadows lengthened, darkened, then passed away. Cool air gathered quickly.

The moon, rising, confounded him. Ebenezer had chosen to mark the very last phase of his thirties by the time measure of the moon, a body whose maneuvers and influences he had never fully understood. He wondered — have I arrived here in the wilds at the night of beginning, or at the night of end? Does the lunar month begin behind the dark veil of the new moon, or does it end in the clarity of the fully glowing disk? He had neglected to check his almanacs, consult the astronomers.

Having been driven since birth along the sharp path of Western Man's cruel arrow, he drifted into uncertainty when he considered the nuance and pace of cycles. Fluency returned only when he looked away from the feminine orb and strapped his identity to the swift arrow and the blazing sun. The irreversable trajectory of a disposable calendar and an atomic clock — those are concrete blocks of knowledge he could stand on. His perceptions were anchored in a linear mind space of progress and irreversable change where things begin and end without repetition. Why else would he wrestle so furiously with the import of a measurable number — the Big Four O — upon his incremental journey toward death?

The intertwined, changeless nature of so many simultaneous circular paths would bind him to a psychic gristmill of primitive repetition where definitions are fixed and experience lacks episode, where the prospect of life without a series of beginnings and endings is unsynchronous with his New Testament pursuit of the straight and narrow way.

So, the absolute solitude of the wilderness would be graced on the first night of his solitary trek by the luminiscense of a full moon. He hadn't planned it that way, but it seemed appropriate enough. It was the second Sunday in November. From the north he heard the howling of a beast. Its primal cry came from behind the open face of his domed tent, which he had erected on a small ledge overlooking a creek without a name. Was it a bird, a cat, a canine? How solitary, this cry of the longing beast in a rocky domain. How amazing after all these phases that he had come to be with God in the wizened Ozark hills.

Personal survival over the interminable long haul — that was a prospect he chose to ignore, prefering to embrace the distinct sureity of the present as the all, the end all.

The full moon passed in a lazy arc o'er the dome, left to right, bathing the night in a soft blue haze. His dreams were without portent.

He avoided the fast-fallingness of night by stopping beside the deadly reckoned trail well before the light would begin to dim.