My life is a series of bad days to endure until good days to enjoy. All the small things are what make it worth the wait.
Just after 7 am, I walked out of a blue metal door, into the frigid mountain air, through plumes of white breath, and past a razor wire-topped fence to the outside recreation yard. It is a blue upside-down U-shaped pull-up bar, a blue dip station, and a single basketball goal all growing out of a concrete surface.
I was nervous because an officer, known for provoking prisoners, is working in the control booth in my pod. I was thinking about all the challenges I watched him present to other prisoners in the solitary confinement pod I just left.
The recreation yard is situated so that it is three wire-topped fences away from the dog cages used by prisoners still in solitary confinement.
The morning was cold enough for two shirts, a pair of long underwear, two pairs of socks, pants, and my orange skullcap. The laundry workers hadn’t shown up for work for the holiday week, so I didn’t have a coat either.
Attack dogs barked at the prisoners too far away to bite on the command of their handlers. The solitary prisoners yelled back and forth in English and Spanish. The wheelchairs squeaked in rhythm where officers pushed the shackled prisoners, handcuffed behind their backs, from the buildings to the outside recreation cages.
Winter mornings can be tough. Just getting out of bed. I was only moved from the solitary confinement pod to a transition pod that isn’t quite general population a week ago. Everything is new all over again, same as last time it was new all over again.
The other two guys that were outside with me were moved from where I was with me the same day. They went to the fence to talk to their associates. I walked the length of the small yard. My thoughts were already spinning— the pod I’d come from where those caged prisoners were still, the one that I had only just left, the one I was so scared to end up back in, the attention-seeking officer working my pod’s booth who could send me back there on his word alone, and the prison that hadn’t given me a winter coat for freezing cold weather. I searched every word, thought, every possible scenario for traps to avoid and plots to foil.
I walked to the end of the yard and turned to walk back the same way.
The rising sun had turned the wispy, close-together clouds into a blanket of orange dragon scales that covered the sky from building top to building top and over the hill that was a wall above those. If I had ever been so surprised just by looking up, I can’t remember. The light from one piece of cloud to the next was so bright it tinted the blue between them. It made me think of the fantasy novels I read. Only a second moon could have taken the scene any further past what I could have expected.
Adding to the shock of discovery were two planes crossing long white jet streams so far away that they looked like tiny white crosses on the orange cloth. One had only just passed as the other made an X as it crossed the leftover smoke left by the former. I watched, head tilted back soaking up my own wonder.
My mood shifted. I thought about the wonders still available in the world. I did pull-ups, dips, push-ups, and whatnot. Between sets, I blew into my cold fists and walked to the end of the small yard. On the way back, I studied the different burgundy and red leaves on the balding tree that covered the tall slope of the sheer hill. For some reason, I thought I had touched a tree recently. It had been almost 25 years. I realized then that I could remember the feeling of touch rough tree bark because I could not forget the feeling of a tree and leaves and seeing a sunrise and orange clouds and jet streams and white plumes of breath from forever ago.
I finished my exercise, and when I went back inside the warm building with all those small things safe inside my memory, along with the thought that if I ever put my hand on tree bark again, I will remember that morning.