California Dreamin'

Every day when I go to work, it is with this strange smile on my face and in my heart. Not because I love my job. I'm a temp worker at a large document storage warehouse. Row after row, shelf after shelf, floor after floor full of boxes of files, reciepts, and other such information that banks, businesses, lawyers and the like must save but have no space to store themselves. The sheer number of boxes boggles the mind.

One begins to see the use of computers, and to wonder why, this far into the computer age, we still have to have a whole forest dead and boxed in this building. Still, when the destruction date for a file box comes around, at least it's going to the recycling plant rather than the incinerator. That's something. Speaking of which, walking down the aisles, one thought strikes the onlooker: how terrible, yet at the same time fascinating in the way all catastrophes are, a fire would be on the loose in such a place. It would burn for days, or else hot enough to melt the metal shelving.

But the job isn't great. The days go by quickly enough, reboxing files from their old crushed boxes into new ones, or out among the aisles, finding needed files to ship back to the owners, or unloading pallets of boxes to the shelves... in the end, nothing short of boring. Actualy about as exciting as the legal documents we store.

Yet there between the metal grating of the floors and the thin fluorescent lights over my head, breathing the claustrophobic dust and slicing my hands open on the paper and cardboard I handle all day, back bent in labor and curses under my breath when the box I need is in the back, on the bottom, and wedged in tight; I find myself smiling. I smile because I am dreaming of California deserts, the rocky bones of dry mountain ranges, skies so blue as to almost stop the heart in wonder. I smile because there are pine forests in my future (as Aldo Leopold said, I love all trees, but I am in love with pines). I smile because there are high snowy passes, mountain springs gurgling even now, at this very moment, singing the song of the mountains as they dream their own dreams, of the sea far below. I smile because the Milky Way will soon be showing her lacy self to me again, because my days will be back to bare essentials (wake, eat, walk north, sleep), because though I'll be cold, or hot, or thirsty or hungry or tired, I'll be happy all the same. I smile because I will again be among people who understand.

Two and a half weeks....