this weekend i managed to find my way back to the Cinque Terre. getting stung by jelly fish with hearty smiles, jumping off thirty foot cliffs, hiking in the dark to a naturalists (nudist) beach to lay our sleeping bags and listen to the tide push and pull the heavy rocks carelessly bellow us.

just after sunset, before we had reached our destination, we watch from atop a large bluff the ocean like a giant metallic dish, the colors split apart and bend into tiny little pixels, barely visible currents in repetition, looking far off over the horizon the continents held together by the imagination of some belief in certainty, some buried memory. seagulls cry into the air, maybe laugh at our hiking outfits. no one says anything back. i have butterfly's on my shirt flying about an old wicker basket.

at night the beach we sleep on is the color of gray. or a mix of black and orange and white. maybe full of dust or like an old daguerreotype photograph....something rummaged out from a relatives attic. we sleep on rocks. my air mattress is mended with a tire tube patch. has proven unable to function correctly. the wind pushes the tall grass behind our heads. the grapes smell ripe and smashed to the earth. every thirty minutes i wake up thinking the clouds will open rain onto our dry slumbering faces.

in the morning my friends wake up well rested. my back hurts. i do some stretches and notice a fully tanned bald man naked on the rocks forty feet bellow us washing himself with a towel.
soon after we pack up our bags to continue the trail onward towards the remaining two villages. instead of going back up the mountain we thought there must be a short cut. we then stumble upon a tunnel with two Italian man eating breakfast near the entrance both wearing the most amazing mustaches that I've ever seen. they stop us and explain the fee for shaving an hour off our hiking time to Corniglia. they also explain to us that the naturalist beach is what the fee is mostly for....the bald man makes more sense...... we talk him down from fifteen euro to five. his flannel was the most beautiful in all of Italy. we told him he was lucky to have found such flannel.

the tunnel was of an old railroad a mile long. the air was dank and sharp. the sound of water trickling down the interior walls. each brick twenty five feet above us perfectly set by hand. Jeff mentions how insane it would be to actually have to build something like this.....where would you begin to start?

i think about how each moment, no matter how far in the past or how distant
only becomes real...or takes shape once we are there to interpret it....once there is a witness.... like the creation and purpose of this particular tunnel, the many times its been used, the experiences others have gained.....at this moment for some reason these all seemed inconsequential...as if the tunnel was created solely for our presence.....only this specific moment. the function now for the thousands of bricks, metal rods and concrete all shaped, smoothed and rounded together....in this moment with it hanging far above bracing the earth from caving in over our heads...its sole function was not to come crashing down on us while guiding our way to our next destination.

once we arrive to the end there is a little white button that needs to be pressed to open a red metallic gate. at this exact moment a train was passing overhead from the modern segment of railway nearby....while the door continued to open, more and more white light began to spill into the dimly lit space from the sunny afternoon sky. an amazing rush of air then came tumbling in threatening to knock each of us to the muddy earth or maybe back to where we had come....soon the wind diminished and the sounds began to fade of riveted train tracks bracing a giant body of steel carrying its many passengers and moving quickly through the distance...we thought that maybe it was just a lucky coincidence.