It is more than 3,000 miles from the western slope of Mount Tamalpais to the table in the Left Bank Café where Dagomar told me over coffee and dessert the story of his vision; but the intervening distance had not dulled its edge, nor had the intervening time.

He ascended from the south, from Pantoll Ranger Station, climbing up from the shade of redwoods and madrones, onto and up the slanting, sun-touched meadows that hang from the hem of the high tableland where the paths diverge. He was in no hurry. His pace was slow, his steps deliberate.

Occasionally, he rested. He looked down, back at the places he had passed through; and he looked up, forward toward the places he thought he would be going. He walked gently, attentive to his surroundings, trying not to become seduced by and then obsessed with the idea of destination.

On the plateau, upon reaching the swale from which all the paths fan, he had planned to continue north through dark fir forests to the golden meadows of Bolinas Ridge. Instead, he turned west. He was not sure why. He could say with certainty only that he felt drawn. Had he heard something? Perhaps a voice calling, or a particle of song.

He walked from knoll to saddle to knoll to saddle to knoll again, each knoll slightly higher than its predecessor and each revealing another beyond the intervening saddle. He proceeded steadily and easily, stopping to look at the patterns thrown against a boulder by a bush or to examine trees he had not seen before or, rather, trees he had seen before but through different eyes – or so it seemed to him.

The sun passed mid-afternoon. The light was changing. He was walking into evening when he came to the crest of the final rise, O’Rourke’s Bench to his left marking the spot where most people stop. Before him, the mountain fell away gradually to a small shelf that held a grove of oak trees under whose shade he had once spent seven days in quest of a vision that refused to reveal itself. Beyond the shelf, he could see nothing but burnished sea and quick wisps of fog. There was really no reason for him to proceed, he thought, except that he had become an explorer of edges.

He walked toward the shelf; and, as he came nearer, he noticed that something, or someone, was moving among the oak trees. His pace quickened. It was not a voluntary action. Certainly the grade had steepened, but it was more than that. He began to hurry. Or to feel hurried. There was a sudden urgency. He thought he could hear murmuring through the wind…or under the wind.

When he reached the grove, it seemed deserted. He saw no one, nothing but the trees; and the only sound to be heard was that of their own, subtle conversation. So he walked away to the brink of the shelf, stood on the lip of North America, and beheld the curving kiss of the Pacific from Stinson Beach to Bolinas Head.

Nothing seemed out of place. He stood on the precipice watching the ocean licking the white, crescent beach; licking the crumbling mesa; swallowing the reef; and listening to its rolling tongues sound like the distant, endless chant of memory. He was listening also to the rhythm in his veins. He stood still. He was barely breathing. He was waiting, it occurred to him, for the moment when the movement of his own blood might match the planet’s pulse. He was awaiting that union through which he might experience – as much as the limit of land – the limit of feeling; awaiting that interpenetration which might separate his selves and speak them back to him like the cadences of a prayer or like a hymn sung from a precipice of joy and pain.

#

“You know me, Baldr,” Dagomar said, interrupting his story. “That’s not my style, that kind of introspection. It gives me the experience; keep the metaphysics. But it was like something had gotten ahold of my brain. I’m looking down at the grass, and I’m thinking, ‘Is there Goddess in each blade of grass‘ I look at the trees: ‘Can a man gather faith like acorns?‘ I hear chirping: ‘And how far can he be extended by the twittering of birds?‘ I mean, what the hell? Who asks questions like that? Not me. You, maybe; but not me. Are there even any answers to those questions? Why bother asking questions that don’t have answers?”

“That right there is a question that doesn’t have an answer,” I cut in.

“Great. Thanks for the help. Anyway, I managed to get a sane thought in edgewise. I thought, ‘Man, I gotta get a grip. Maybe life in the fast lane has finally gotten to me. Maybe I‘m just worn out: too much work; too much play; not enough sleep. I should take a nap.‘”

#

He sat down on the slanted land…then reclined. The sun was low. The air was crisp, but the light still had warmth enough to soothe. He fell through that light into a sleep…or a trance.

A sound awakened him. He heard a man. He heard the man’s humming. It was not the wind, he heard. He heard the man moaning – not the wind, he knew; the man wailing – not the hymn of wind. He stood and turned. The wind was a hushing, a whispered refrain for the howling, then, of the man dancing he saw beneath the trees.

#

“I walked to the grove,” Dagomar said. “It was a grove of willows. It wasn’t oak trees anymore. It was willows, now. What had happened to the oak trees? What was happening to me?”

He was trembling as he told me this. “I walked to the grove, and I could feel myself coming apart. I was leaving myself behind.”

#

He was old, the man dancing, and naked – naked and old like the wrinkled earth. He was nut-brown. He was bearded. He was shaggy and silver-haired. And he spun, spun like a planet spins on a pole of power; and in his spinning, he danced a path, an orbit, again and again circling the grove as though Sol himself burned there.

With a turn of the spin, the man leapt, burst into the air – back arching, arms flung out, legs stretched taut, toes pointing, palms opened upward. With a turn of the spin, the man crouched, collapsed to the ground – spine bending, knees touching forehead, toes curled into the dirt, elbows clasping ribs, fists clenched against chest. And so he turned and turned, spinning through his orbit, bursting and collapsing.

#

Dagomar leaned forward, cupping his chin in the palm of his hand, elbow resting on the table. He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. He lifted his head a little, curled his hand to a fist held against his mouth, looked down and off to the side as though there were something of interest on the floor. Then he sat back in his chair and looked at me again. He said, “I could hear a voice, Baldr; but whose voice was it? Was it the old man’s voice? It was so familiar. Was it my own voice? It was both voices. It was his voice and it was my voice – not as an echo, but all at once, the words filling me from outside and from inside. I felt literally like I was inside out.”

He was being told he was a witness; told in words that his thinking could not trap, words from everywhere and nowhere. He was the witness. There could be no others. He stood by the grove knowing this but not understanding; and, he admitted, even now he understood only a little.

#

“You remember where I was born?” Dagomar asked me.

“Of course. Why wouldn’t I? New York City, but I don’t see the connection.”

“You will,” he said, pulling his wallet from a back pocket and removing a photo from one of the glassine sleeves. He placed the photo on the table.

“My father gave me this when I got back from the coast. I carry it with me everywhere, now.”

From the small rectangle of paper, a child in rather formal attire squinted into an invisible sun. Was that a willow tree at the edge of the image? It was hard to tell.

“Is that you?”

“Yup. In front of the Church of Notre Dame, Morningside Drive and 114^th Street. That boy in this picture? I had completely forgotten him.”

#

Dagomar watched for a long time, the old man dancing. He did not know exactly how long he watched, how many rotations the old man completed upon his axis, how many revolutions the old man made about the pivot of the grove; but he became aware again that the light had changed, and it was now the hour of darkness coupling light – the shadowless time, neither day nor night.

He turned to look away toward the edge of the shelf where he felt he had left himself upon approaching the grove of willows, and he saw a boy – lost, maybe, and maybe four years old. The boy was dressed as though he had wandered out of a Sunday Mass in Manhattan on a long-ago morning in June. He wore navy blue and unblemished white. He wore a navy blue cap with a tiny, charmingly useless visor and four seams that met at a button at the top. He wore navy blue shorts with navy blue suspenders and a crisp, white shirt with snappy French cuffs and a navy blue bow tie. He wore navy blue shoes and fine, white socks.

The blue was the blue of the new moon midnight sky. The white was the white of the noontime sun. And the red was the red of child’s blood – blood that ran from the wounds in his leg…the leg to which clung a small, implacable beast. A bitter demon, tugging: ancient, skeletal, hopeless. Its skin was the color of dredgings. Its eyes were the color of fear. Its feet clasped the boy’s ankle. Its belly hung like an empty scrotum. Its obscene, emaciated hands clutched the boy’s thigh. Its lock-jawed fangs were buried in the soft flesh behind the boy’s knee. It had been there, that way, just so, ages before the boy had been born; and it had waited for the boy to grow into its embrace.

Dagomar had been a witness, even then. He looked away, looked to the old man – silent and not dancing – at the center of the grove of willows. He was in the middle of something he could not identify. An exorcism? A baptism? He felt like a fulcrum. There was no extricating himself.

Dagomar turned, looked at the boy. In the boy’s terrified, tear-streaked face was his own face. He turned, looked at the old man. In the old man’s ecstatic, tear-streaked face was the boy’s face. He turned, looked at the boy. He saw the old man. He turned, looked at the old man. He saw himself. He turned to look at the boy. He saw only the precipice of joy and pain. He turned to look at the old man. He saw only a grove of willows, out of place, it seemed, on a dry mountain’s shoulder.

The stars were just becoming visible. In the last lavender light of almost-vanished day, he walked to the heart of the grove. There the earth was damp, then moist, then sodden. He stopped, there, a tiny spring; knelt, there, a mere puddle; looked, there, a clouded mirror in which he saw his reflection fading.

He leaned forward, put his hand down to touch. The earth was dry, hard as glass; the grass brittle, parched. He looked up and around. He stood and walked the circle of the dance and caressed each tree with question: “Willow?” And each tree answered with leathery leaves, with lichen-etched bark, with ripening acorns.

Somewhere among the limbs a bird was chirping.

There was barely enough light for finding his way as he returned to the place where the paths diverge; and, retracing his steps, he started to understand a few, basic things. He understood that he would have to spend the night on that high tableland where he had perhaps heard something – a voice calling, or a particle of song – and turned west. And he began to understand that, at dawn, he would have to face the south and descend: back through the light of slanting meadows, descend; down through the shade of redwoods and madrones, descend; until he stood once more at the bottom, that he might begin the climb again.