Contouring. That’s what they call it. All my talk of fingers on a hand, walking around the fingers. That day there were too many fingers. Too many.
Now the story of Bonnie & Clyde by Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot, sung in French, comes on my computer here on the boat as I work outside in the cockpit to repair the hatchway frame, not even at my computer but suddenly drawn down into the cabin and to it, keyboard in hand and writing as the song takes me straight back into that strange sunny forest more than a month ago, that day of seemingly endless fingers, endless contouring around and along one mountainside and another, over this ridge, down that road, a long section of road walk, the sun exposure perhaps to blame for the altered state my mind drifted into later in the day.
Did I listen to this song repeatedly? Or was it just with this song that the real weirdness hit? Bonnie and Clyde.
I do not understand the French, but we all know the story. My brain knows the story, can follow the growing tension, however subtle. Knows what’s coming. And somehow that mixes with my own anxiety of being lost and alone in the endless forest. I look at the map again. It seems I have been on the same mile or so forever now. But these sections are deceiving, like loopdiloops, like counting petals. Loves me. Loves me not. Loves me. Loves.. where was I? Which one was I on?
On the map, they look like a sprung Slinky, a child’s Crayon drawing of an endless lower case m. The same clutch of contours, a bridal bouquet cast backward over the bride’s shoulder, flying blind, airborne, captured thus by the photographer’s camera, forever frozen in time now traced by finger’s nostalgic, each flower a thickly-forested ridge of some mountain range I married when I woke up this morning. "We now pronounce you man and mount…" I was half asleep! Surely I can’t be held accountable. I didn’t know what I was saying.
The same can be said of this whole ill-begotten adventure, come to think of it. I was under the influence of a strange and beautiful witch. She inhabited my right hip, put a poison and a pain in there. By day said she didn’t want a boyfriend, didn’t want the responsibility of me, but by night whispered "Take me away with you to the country, save me, love me, save me from myself."
Abnormally exhausted for mid-afternoon, a kind of vertigo in the forest, rounding the next in an endless chain of zig-zag contours each one the exact copy of the last, I, like Alice, shook my head with the strangeness of it all. And finally unable to take it anymore, sometime during the demise of Bonnie and Clyde, I staggered like a drunk off the trail and into the first available grassy spot, dropped my pack and fell hard into the grass and fast asleep in a way to mimic fainting.
Perhaps, I thought, I think back now, that is what fainting feels like. I fainted there in late-afternoon in the forest dizzy and overwhelmed and hot and perhaps a bit dehydrated and most certainly anxious over the unmistakable sense that I was not walking some straight south to north trail but wandering lost in a labyrinth, quite alone, soon to be gunned down.
And where oh where was my Bonnie then?
- Rick McKinney
