1. Phil
I don't think the entire time I knew him he ever called me up to do something. But, when I called, bored-out-of-my-mind because I was always bored-out-of-my-mind, he'd say, "Yeah, sure, I guess so." And off we'd go.
Well, not always. We did a little bit of going. More so once I had my car. I liked to go downtown Dallas or to White Rock Lake. I liked the Dallas Museum of Art and Swiss Avenue. Phil liked seeing Conan the Barbarian or Mad Max at the dollar theater a couple blocks from his house. I was restless; I wanted to create; I wanted to be somebody. Phil just wanted to be in his room listening to Neil Young on his stereo.
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| Phil and our friend Andrea at the spillway at White Rock Lake in Dallas, probably 1986, perhaps 1987. We each had our music icons: Phil, Neil Young; Marsh, U2; Jim, Bruce Springsteen; Andrea, Peter Gabriel; and I, the Fixx. |
Occasionally I got him to take a road trip. There were several: a couple to the Guadalupe Mountains, one to Big Bend National Park, one to New Mexico, and one to Utah. However, perhaps our first trip was the most meaningful because it was so damn cold and dreary. Hard vacations are memorable. I wrote about it six years later, about halfway through my ten-year undergraduate plan. In fact, I missed the assignment deadline because I went on a walk-about through Juarez, Mexico, a few miles from my apartment in El Paso, instead of facing the daunting task of writing. I came home frantic, got to work, and then rushed it over to my professor's office after-hours on the last day of the term. Luckily, she was still there. Later, she called me into her office and proceeded to yell at me because she thought I deserved a C in the class based on my participation, but "based on this essay, your writing deserves an A". "What should I do?" she wanted to know. I said a C would be fine. She insisted, "No, the work--not you!--deserves an A." She probably overvalued me. Good teachers do that. They value potential. I had plenty of that because whatever I had, it was all in reserve.
But, here's the thing: I honestly don't know if the essay I wrote that day could have existed if I were a better student. Although I eventually found discipline, eventually found peace, and even--for better or worse--eventually found happiness, the essay she admired so much was the product of a different incarnation of me, one who was restless, bored and driven to experience life to its fullest, headphones on, the Fixx cranked up. I was manic, desperately seeking to experience something vital. That incarnation wasn't necessarily always enjoyable to be around, especially for Phil, who at the time was completely satisfied with staying in his room and listening to music.
2. Outside
(Written in 1991)
I grew up camping. From my fifth to sixteenth year, I spent every summer with my dad in Reno, Nevada. Each weekend the family left the city behind and drove northwest into the vast ponderosa forests cradled between the Sierras and the Cascades. My mind's eye sees the sun pouring down through the needles overhead, striping the roads with fantastic patterns. My mind's ear hears the slow lapping of cool water against the shores of Eagle Lake. And though I cherish these images and know they must someday be given space to bubble up full-bodied and ripe, they are not what I choose to write about today. Rather, I recall them because I find it hard to separate scenes in my life. I can't take you on a trip to Oklahoma without first taking you to California. For what I have experienced at one time determines what I will do at another.
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| My dad sitting on a lawn chair outside his trailer, camping. |
I am back in the eleventh grade, living in Dallas with my older brother, Lloyd. Spring Break is approaching and warm winds have been stirring me. For days I have had to make myself do algebra with the sun pouring down through a mental forest canopy. I have had to diagram sentences through the smoky, blue haze that rises from the blue, humpback hills surrounding glorious, white Mount Lassen. My mind has been an eagle chained down. Waves of light have battered my soul, and I have wanted to go outside. I have seen long highways and have imagined the diagrammed world thrown out the rear-view mirror. No grids, no numbered streets, no schools, no numbered thoughts--just free-roaming thoughts that you don't have to justify with thesis statements.
And now Spring Break is here. Phil (my best friend) and I head up I-30 in his old '72 Dodge Dart. His speedometer is broken and the little red needle races back and forth between zero and a hundred, bashing itself against the walls of the gauge case, making a terrible racket. But we have music to drown out the noise. Phil has brought along Buffalo Springfield, CSNY and Neil Young for my conversion. I have brought along the Fixx for his. We'll just see who converts who!
The towns of northeast Texas zip by as we head up towards the Ozarks that spill over into Oklahoma from Arkansas. It isn't northern California, but it's about as close as I can come to that feeling within a day's drive from Dallas. I have been in the Ozarks before, and I know there are some places where the smoky, blue ridges can fool you into thinking you're in northern California. The only difference is that the high, icy dome of Mount Lassen never peaks its head above them.
We head up I-30 towards Texarkana, passing Cumby as Neil Young asks us, "Are You Ready for the Country?" and we yell back, "Hell yeah!" We pass Mount Vernon and Mount Pleasant. The trees along the boggy creeks are Sprite green with purple blossoms mixed in. We get caught up in the repeated pounding of the piano in "Southern Man" and break into singing, "I saw cotton and I saw black / [something] white mansions and little shacks / Southern Man when will you pay them back?" (Young) We sing with all the hatred and zeal our hippie hearts can muster. We get so caught up in mental revolutions and scenes of spitting into Bull Connor's face that we almost miss our exit.
"Shit, that's it!" I yell as I see the U.S. 259 exit sign.
Phil spins the steering wheel, and we slide onto the access road just after missing the signpost. The car rocks, looking for balance and the road.
"Jesus, Phil!" I say. And we break into laughter, more as a means to release terror than joy.
Clouds have been racing over the horizon and breaking up the blue dome. The cold surge continues and whole plates of blue shatter into white. Soon the blue is gone and the white thickens to black.
We cross the Red River under a cloud burst. The river is swollen, the color of chocolate milk. The windows steam up and then feel cold to touch.
Few know this, but green is brighter on cloudy days. The lowlands below Idabel are covered in lime-sherbet grass and wildflowers. And the dark weather doesn't dull the scene.
However, as we move north past Idabel, the trees appear to die. It is still winter here. The world looks haunting and cold, which I love, but Phil gripes, "The trees look dead". I try to make him see that bare trees are beautiful and that the cold that seeps into the bone and settles like larvae is something to be cherished. Mood is mood, and it is to be permitted, even savored.
Now we are deep in wood--thick, wet, rotting wood. Steaming black pine choked with undergrowth. The hills rise up out of the wetlands and lose their heads in clouds of mist. We pass Octavia and Oklahoma 63. Winding Stair and Rich Mountain are before us. We go between them and turn up Talimena Skyline Drive. The road winds and rises and then follows the ridge top. Even Phil is a little impressed.
We rise and drop, rise and drop, in and out of the clouds that are breaking up. It is sunset and the fire ball below the cloud line washes the miles of wet, dark green expanse with gold, making the world a color I can't describe.
The road is pink, even hot orange in places, quartz chips in the pavement on fire. My heart is on fire.
This is life! Diagramming sentences has nothing to do with living. Diagramming sentences doesn't even have anything to do with language. Words are, or at least should be, lines written across the sky. Education should evoke freedom and make one want to soar. But school, for me, is sitting in a corner by the window, peeking out the blinds when the teacher isn't looking. I want to tell Phil this. But he won't understand. He'll think I'm trying to justify my lack of interest. He prefers the more direct, "School's a crock, work's a crock, life's a crock" approach. But, I can't see things that way. For at times like this, I feel throbbing, wrenching beauty. It's not life, but the diagrammed world that is a crock. It is the paradigms we lay across what is natural to extrapolate artificial meaning. We diagram the forest looking for places to lay down pipes and cables, missing the beauty of the trees. We chop up literature looking for structure and miss the beauty of the words. We cage and control legend, myth and fear with strict religious doctrine. Man can't see anything without a grid, a paradigm, a frame, a box.
The rest of the trip was cold and dreary. We spent whole days feeding single flames of fire. The wood was wet and steamed up ashes that filled our cold creamed corn with gray mud. It rained and the fire steamed some more. We lived huddled around a small volcano, our bodies reeking from the steam and gasses. But I loved that trip, even the cold sogginess of it. There is beauty in mud and slime. Let the cold creep in on my bones and settle like larvae. I might bitch and complain, but I will stir inside. Only in a walled room does my mind die. I need to get outside to get inside. I haven't been inside lately because I've been cooped up doing homework.
The homework has improved since the eleventh grade. I finished up college algebra and calculus a couple years ago and will never have to justify my math with theorems again. I still have to chop up literature and explicate symbols that are meant to be read with the natural, unconscious mind, but at least college teachers can comprehend an interpretation not already written two decades ago. And I have my writing classes, where occasionally I'm allowed to write lines across the sky.
Yet, inside is not outside. I just need to travel, even if it's only by memory. It's not the same as it is live. It's a little less cold, but also a little less intense. Still, it's a form of going outside. All I want to do is go outside. So long, bye-bye!
3. Postscript
It is late Sunday afternoon. A lot has changed since 1992. With the world. With Phil. With me. I went to church this morning, for one thing, as I do almost every Sunday morning--something I definitely would not have done in 1992. Phil also has taken up religion and is a lot less cynical than he used to be. I became an English teacher, and I love teaching sentence diagramming. However, although definitely essential to my life now, none of these things seem pertinent here.
No, the only thing that seems to matter at this moment is that outside my window a hard summer light glistens off slightly stirring leaves on an oak tree. Behind the tree is a sandstone gravel ridge with dark globs of green juniper splotched all over it. Each tree-blob glistens on one side and casts a great shadow on the other. The entire ridge glows warmly polka-dotted against a blatant blue sky.
I need to water the garden. More importantly, I simply need to be outside. It is the only practical thing to do on so many levels. As much as things have changed, I am still much the same, and the lyrics of Cy Curnin and the music of the Fixx move me as much as they ever did, maybe more so, for they are now layered over with my own stories of outside.
Outside, I stretch the mind that hides within
New pride, I lose four walls that keep me tied
Outside, I breathe new air that reaches me
Fresh tide, does all the cleansing life can give
Tongue-tied, no words will match this point of view. (Fixx)
References
Fixx, The. "Outside." Reach the Beach.
By Cy Curnin. Prod. Rupert Hine. MCA, 1983. vinyl.
Young, Neil. "Southern Man." After the
Gold Rush. By Neil Young. Prod. David Briggs. Reprise, 1970. vinyl.
