For a couple of months now I’ve been living on the side of a mountain in Samsun, Turkey at the konukevi (or guesthouse), watching the city below materialize out of the dissolving mist each morning that lifts with such slow-moving and ceremonious restraint it’s like the trailing end of a drawn-out kiss from the steep, tree-covered slopes around me. I think everything should be revealed this way, a new soufflé, a lover’s body, an heirloom brought down from the attic. It’s a daily disappearance and reappearance act that never gets old, and I already know its changing, ever-shifting view will henceforth always be a part of me.

            I’m sorely tempted to call it my mountain, at least my first and foremost one—not, I hope, because I wish to possess any part of it but because of the way it continues to give Turkey to me as a wide, panoramic offering that contains within it something I can only call deliverance. Apparently, the mountain is still up for grabs because no Turk seems to want to claim it or even give it a name, which I find quietly hopeful and astonishing: there’s nothing around to suggest it has any special significance, no flags, no signs, no placards of any kind. When I asked a Turkish friend about its name once, he looked at me with a puzzled expression and said, “It has no name.”

            As far as mountains go, it’s as gentle as they come, rising gradually from the Black Sea less than a mile away in a bosom of generous earth before its rounded top disappears into the clouds, with nary a jagged cliff face of exposed rock to show for itself. This Turkish mountain is not particularly dramatic or awe-inspiring and is in fact downright humble: some people might claim it’s not a mountain at all, or, if it is, one so gradual and hangdog poor it deserves some lesser designation somewhere down in the pecking order. But it’s a mountain to me, and a dear one at that growing dearer every day for the fog-laden views it gives me, and in so many different and subtle ways it defies easy explanation or any explanation at all. Because I’m strangely at home here on the side of this mountain at the konukevi like a part of me has always been here somehow, which continues to surprise me for a number of reasons that do not—like the mountain itself—lend themselves easily to utterance.

            The basic facts are that I came to Samsun to teach and give a series of weekly lectures at Ondokuz Mayis University at the invitation of a Turkish friend, the first American to ever do so—but these hardly get to the heart of the matter: they only point in the broad, sweeping direction of Asia with no other continent in sight. It’s true I wanted to get away during my first sabbatical (who wouldn’t?)—not away from my wife or home in the woods of Northern Michigan but from something else that’s been dogging me for years like a constant, inner ache I can’t get rid of. But here on this nameless Turkish mountain the ache has subsided considerably and sometimes even disappears for days at a time, only to flare up again at unexpected moments.

            So living on the side of this mountain as I watch the city fade and come back with the daily calls of Ezan haunting the thinning air is the best salve for the ache I’ve ever known, as is the long walk each day up to my office which is often at chin level with the clouds, better than drink or movies or another other temporary escape I could resort to in order to try to appease the nagging symptoms of this same ache. I smoke my allotted one daily cigarette on the balcony of my room looking out on the shimmering lights of the city and the sea, and I know I’ll never be this free or happy again, or as lonesome. These facts alone have been sufficient to put me in a more or less permanent meditative mood during my time in Turkey living and writing on the mountain, something that feels a little otherworldly as if I’m caught between lifetimes and states of being, which I very well could be.

            I think I’m beginning to understand now why some writers have to leave America for extended periods of time, why there are ex-patriot hangouts all over the world, why some people feel the excruciating need to get away and stay away from everything they’ve ever known, which is no doubt related in no small way to my own peculiar and nagging ache. As a lifelong Midwesterner, I haven’t known much else—and so I had no way of knowing before coming here that the ache I don’t fully understand is somehow part and parcel of the same lodestone of peculiarly American woe chipped from the enormous monolith of towering stone called the American Dream or its rough hewn equivalent, with hardly ever a chance for perspective-taking until I ended up here in Turkey. All I know for sure is that I’m aware of a slight difference and separation like layers of star-struck gossamer being pulled away, that who I am in Michigan and was in my native Nebraska is not quite who I am here.

            And who is that exactly? 

           Who is the forty-one year-old man living on the side of a mountain in Samsun at the mercy of his hosts and the kindness of Turkish strangers? 

           To tell the truth, I don’t know: I only know that I’m

a stranger in this place, and have come to relish this outsider status for reasons beyond my immediate grasp like some vast exhalation of relief that is still ongoing even as I look down on Samsun’s glittering chandelier of city lights.

            But two days ago I walked down the side of the mountain to go the university’s Olympic center and was followed by a magnificent white dog that looked like an arctic wolf, the white dog trailing about ten yards behind down the winding and overgrown brick path. I stopped a few times to look back at it, for I was warned that dogs run wild on this part of the mountain and in fact all over Turkey. The white dog looked wild all right, lean and hungry-looking with a snout like the stock of a polished Winchester. Each time I stopped the white dog stopped also, like we were in lockstep together in our mutual pause and go that punctuated our descent. I was sure we would part company at the bottom for the busy highway I had to cross, so when I got there I took one last look at the white dog who still maintained its ten yards distance only this time with one of its front paws raised as if to ask me a final question before we left each other for good, and then I crossed the highway.

            I had no way of knowing that the ache was coming back for me, as my brief encounter with the dog that was really no encounter at all served to somehow make me wonder where and who I was and what I was doing at the northern end of Turkey in a brief but delirious bout of disorientation. In the starkest and simplest terms you get on a plane and leave: that’s what it always comes down to. The destination doesn’t even matter all that much, as long as it’s somewhere else far away. Maybe I even believed I could leave the ache behind, drop it like a bad habit and become someone entirely new and fresh unto the world, which has even happened here at least for a little while.

            But slowly I’ve come to realize that not even this beloved mountain can get rid of the ache for good, that it’s somehow managed to track me down because I carried it inside all along with its peek-a-boo shutters and symptoms popping up again no matter where I go, as the ache is lodged so deeply inside of me I’m convinced only death could finally rid me of it. Because an hour or so later coming back from the gym I saw the white dog stretched out and freshly killed on the same highway where we had last looked each in the eyes. I could see it about a quarter of a mile away about thirty feet from the littered shoulder, the filaments of its fur lifting in the wind and shining like white fire. I went up to the white dog and discovered that she was female and saw how only her face was smashed while the rest of her lean body looked perfectly intact, perfect in every part and lineament of rib and tendon so that I couldn’t help crying—crying for the white dog and crying for myself and a thousand other things, crying because I had unwittingly led her to her death and because she was a white, wild and beautiful dog that never had a chance.

            I grabbed her by all four paws and dragged her off the highway, the pads of her feet still warm though it could have been from the heat of the concrete in the sun. You touch a dead white dog like this and somehow it’s like touching the map and meaning of the world no one understands of which you are still an indisputable if infinitesimal part, a map that goes on and on between the dead and the living and the sky above the Black Sea beside a crumbling, falling down sidewalk in Samsun, Turkey. The death of the dog was something I couldn’t share with anyone as our happenstance and fatal meeting took place under the auspices of chance and isolation far beyond the province of understanding. Besides, whom would I tell it to anyway in my nearly nonexistent and nascent Turkish? The truth was I had been afraid of the dog when I first saw her, but I also couldn’t help but admire her beauty and the way she followed me down the mountain like a four-legged animate candle of white flames, an angel perhaps taking the form of a dog or even a dervish who had come to show me something I had never seen before.

            Later I realized that the dog was connected to the ache that continues to swim in the bloodstream of my veins, the ache that must in the final analysis be God-charged and insatiable, connected to every living thing and the life force itself caught up in the infinite sorrow that somehow attends to each of us. I had thought, for instance (and this is where time and chronology collapse and the cards of a life are radically re-shuffled), that I had left the overwhelming Nebraska sky of my childhood long behind, the kind of sky no sane person would ever want to face, a sky that simply obliterates every comfort and consolation there is in service of an impossible truth, that we are all somehow free falling through it every moment of our lives even as we walk down a street, that an eternity of space surrounds us on every side we can do nothing about except recognize once in a while in order to try to get it out of our minds. I thought I had left such void episodes back in Omaha, only to find that the void was back in the sky above the Black Sea while I knelt down before the white dog that had been killed trying to follow me. 

           Could or should I tell anyone about the white dog and my time on the mountain?

           Could I dare to mention the ache and do justice to its glowing debris trail of symptoms and signs?

           The answer is yes and no, never and always: the answer isn’t even for me to say. But I think now that the ache must be like a spark in the lining of my heart or a worm unable to find lasting sustenance in anything it burrows into, that it’s is a slow burn running through my innards toward the conflagration of my life—though even these foolhardy stabs at metaphor in no way really describe it. But the white dog was looking walleyed at the road and the sky, at me, at the astonishment of its last moments before the truck or car hit it and went on its way—was looking past the sea into the ink of the stars and beyond them into the vastness of nothing and all that nothing contains. I didn’t close her eyes. I didn’t touch her again. But I knew I would never forget her, that her wild and roaming nature was somehow congruent with something inside of me, that we were, at least for a moment, curious about each other and almost friendly.

            I made sure she was well off to the side of the highway and that she lay there comfortably, though of course she was beyond comfort in a place that rattles like a Styrofoam cup caught in a chain link fence. I walked across the highway not wanting to look at any driver’s face for fear of self-betrayal back to the foot of the mountain that continues to show me things I know I’ll always cherish until the day I myself lay dying when I will see it again in its shifting white meringue of fog in the intimacy of an overwhelming truth that cannot be articulated, only embodied.