A lone utility pole stands abandoned on the other side of the stream that borders our property to the west. Its cross arms are studded with glass insulators and cover all four points of the compass, leaving me to wonder which way the lines originally ran when it was in use. You don’t see it when the trees are fully leaved, but it’s there in all its solitary uselessness nonetheless. I caught sight of it while walking on the road this morning.

Oddly, I glimpsed it as I walked north and had taken a half dozen steps before I realized what I had seen. Curious, I retraced my steps but I couldn’t find it again. It had either disappeared or I had imagined it in the first place. It was disconcerting to think I was seeing things in bright sunshine that weren’t there. I took a few more steps to the south and stopped to carefully scan the bare trees on the rocky hillside above the stream where I thought I had seen it. Finally, its form emerged. It had been camouflaged by time and weather to blend into the ashen grey tree trunks along the stream bank.

The longer I looked at it, the more sure I became that I’ve seen it before. Today, though, it leapt out at me anew, as if it had sprung full grown from the earth last night. Perhaps I had seen it once and then dismissed it as unworthy of the trouble to store it in my mind’s cache of jumbled memories. I’ve lived a hundred yards from it and walked by it at least a thousand times in the last twenty-some years, though, so the memory of it must just get erased over and over again. Why else would I think I had discovered it for the first time today?

The mind is a strange country. It sees but doesn’t always perceive. It creates our personal reality, but doesn’t verify it. Thinkers deeper than I opine that reality only actually exists in the mind, that our very existence is fully imaginary. We dream ourselves into being just as I, for a moment, thought I had conjured up the utility pole in the woods. If that were so, I must have imagined the woods, too, and the stream, and the sunshine, and the road on which I stood, and myself as well, confused and peering into a reality that only I could see because my mind had created it.

The pole stands at the entrance to a crevice in the bedrock at the bottom of the hill. I seem to recall finding another pole that had fallen over not far away but closer to the stream. If that were true, and not just another image flashing up from my befuddled imagination, the pair of them must have been part of a procession of poles that marched up the hillside and there is quite possibly another one or two to be found if I climbed the hill myself.

I won’t be doing that any time soon. I am not sure what profit would be gained by further challenging my grasp of objective reality.

from The Journal of My Seventieth Year, Tuesday, January 5, 2021