The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland -- 4. Working Days 2: Scale and Immensity

At noon in the desert a panting lizard

waited for history, its elbows tense,

watching the curve of a particular road

as if something might happen.

--William Stafford, "At the Bomb Testing Site," 1966

A large drop of sun lingered on the horizon and then dripped over and was gone, and the sky was brilliant over the spot where it had gone, and a torn cloud, like a bloody rag, hung over the spot of its going.  And dusk crept over the sky from the eastern horizon, and darkness crept over the land from the east.

--John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939

Deadpool, acrylic on canvas, 14" x 10 1/2", Steve Brown  2022

YouTube

A stocky male YouTuber wearing a black t-shirt and black athletic shorts walks across a big, cracked, clay bed of evaporated lake, his wide black sneakers landing on little island mesas of earth encircled by rifts and ruptures.  The camera is low, right above the mosaic of mud, the host's head out of the picture frame, dry desert ridges behind him.  He walks out of the scene as he says, "It's 104 degrees out here.  It's not a cool afternoon on Lake Mead."  

The camera briefly tilts down, showing the lakebed shattered by the heat of the sun like a windshield meeting a good sized stone.

Mind Wandering

If the scale were much larger, each rupture in the clay could hold groves of cottonwood at the bottom of moist dark canyons, where animal trails would wind through soft sand arroyos beneath the great shadowed cliffs, and where occasionally a human trail would lead to a series of ladders that, if climbed, would take one on top of hard flat mesas to pueblos and villages and missions and cathedrals that overlook corn fields below--magical places with names like Acoma, the sky city.

In a world like that, the impact of such a large quantity of shoe suddenly dropping from the sky would be astonishing enough for the plot of a B-grade movie.  Or, if real, it would have far-enough reaching consequences to send a Fox-news host with furrowed eyebrows and a dumb, questioning look to ask, "But isn't science supposed to be skeptical?" 

Shocked, the data guy he's interviewing would ask, "Didn't you watch the footage?  It's on every network but yours."

"What is footage anyway?" would ask the Fox News host.  "How do we even know it's real?   Doesn't every news story have a slant to it?  How can you sit there in your cloistered, liberal, elite world and claim to know what's real?"  

"I can claim it's real because my wife, mother in-law, and three children were at mass when that giant shoe came down and ended my world."

YouTube

The head of the YouTuber is seen for the first time against an almost solid blue sky holding a single white cloud.  He wears a cap and has a goatee and appears to be Mexican or Native American.  He says, "I'm going to continue cruising around areas of the lake today, seeing exactly how low the water's gotten.  This was all under water a year ago.  It's rough right now.  It really is.  The cracks in the ground go down about a foot and a half, and there's fish down in the cracks.  It's crazy."

 Grappling

The rate at which Lake Mead is dropping is surreal.  We've had a lot of the bizarrely accurate facts to deal with lately:  the whole COVID experience, the attempted coup in Washington, riots across the nation, Russia's invasion of Ukraine,  and just this week, watching the supreme court casually unravel the constitution.   Normal only remains normal when things are stable enough to establish trend lines. Normal never dictates that things will proceed as usual.  Normal only suggests it, based on past data.

Upheaval does happen.  I have always wondered what it would have been like to have stood at Red Rock Pass 15,000 years ago at the moment ancient Lake Bonneville, which once covered western Utah and parts of Idaho, Nevada and Oregon, emptied most of her 19, 691 square miles of lake, over 900 feet deep in places, in a Biblical-sized torrent that discharged 15 million cubic feet of water per second (compared to Niagara Falls, which discharges 100,000 cubic feet per second).  Oh, how the earth must have shook!   

Facts can be astonishing.  Lake Mead has dropped 140 feet since 2000.  That's the height of a fourteen-story building.  At its lowest level since being filled in the 1930's, the reservoir is nearing dead pool status, when the water level is so low it can no longer flow down stream.  The combined reservoirs of the Colorado River are at 50% capacity.  If it gets to the point where California no-longer receives the river's waters, we will be at that moment when metaphorically a giant shoe drops from the sky and we can't wrap our heads around the new reality.  Statistically speaking, some animals had to have stood at Red Rock Pass 15,000 years ago at such a moment--when the roar in their ears and the chaos before their eyes could not be comprehended based on previous experience.  

We may be approaching such moment.  Humans may soon observe the last drop of water from the Colorado River flow into the last orange grove California to receive it.

If you think that won't be a big deal, you know even less about economics than I do, and nothing about how much California is a part of your life, no matter where you live, especially if it's within the United States.

YouTube

Lake Mead--cool blue rippled water before sandy beach and a gravel ridge blotched by occasional brush.  It could be any western reservoir on any given year unless one notices that the top of the ridge is actually the former shoreline.  Then the houseboat on the beach, tiny in comparison, takes on significance and provides scale to just how much the lake has dropped.

Grappling  

980 feet above the Salt Lake Valley there is a flat line that runs along the Wasatch Mountains called "The Bench".  It is in fact a beach, the former shoreline of ancient Lake Bonneville.  Many homes are built on this flat and have sliding glass doors that open onto back patios that look over the valley below, and in the evening, the gloriously red Great Salt Lake at sunset. Prime real estate with prime views.     

This too may be a moment in time, a moment of brilliance, before the lake, like the setting sun, is gone.  If something is not done very soon, it is quite likely there will soon be a Utah without a Great Salt Lake.  Hard to comprehend.

Worlds change, big and small, without participants realizing they were once at the flute-end of consequences.

When the big shoe of reality drops from the sky and lands on your tiny village, no amount of propaganda techniques from a news network dislodged from reality will alter the scale and immensity of the new normal impacting you. 

YouTube

This fish here, on its side, half decayed, half embedded in cracked clay, it's dead rotted eye staring up at an overzealous sun, warns us of the scale and immensity of the loss we face.

Our YouTuber asks, "Why didn't the fish just swim to deeper water?"

He then pans around.  "This little inlet closed, and the fish's world became a dead pool."  

The waters were deep and cool.  Life was good.  The waters lowered.  Life wasn't as good.  Things became crowded.  Still life was busy.  Other fish to catch.  Things to devour.  Sex to have.  Offspring to be born.  Life went on.  The problem was ignored.

Fish swam in and out through an ever narrowing channel between the pool and lake.  One day the channel's water was too low.  Perhaps there was panic.  Perhaps there wasn't.  

Regardless, the dead pool became the new reality.

Now, there is a fish, half decayed, half embedded in cracked clay.  Its dead, rotted eye stares up that an overzealous sun.

There is a shoreline 980 feet above the Salt Lake Valley called "The Bench".  It is in fact a beach, the former shoreline of ancient Lake Bonneville.  It speaks of a world that once was, now gone.

Unless we act quickly, the Great Salt Lake will be gone, as will Lake Powell and Lake Mead, and whatever forest is nearest to your back door.

The western United States has not witnessed drought like our current one in 1200 years.  It is believed that one ended the Anasazi civilization.   If that isn't a giant shoe dropping from the sky to wake us up to our new reality, what is?

There is skeptical.  And then there is stupid.  Climate change is real.  It is that big shoe. 

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland -- 3. Where I Was When I First Encountered John Steinbeck

A huge red transport truck stood in front of the little roadside restaurant.  The vertical exhaust pipe muttered softly, and an almost invisible haze of steel-blue smoke hovered over its end.  It was a new truck, shining and red, and in twelve-inch letters on its sides--OKLAHOMA CITY TRANSPORT COMPANY.  Its double tires were new, and a brass padlock stood straight out from the hasp on the big back doors.  Inside the screened restaurant a radio played, quiet dance music turned low the way it is when no one is listening.  A small outlet fan turned silently in its circular hole over the entrance, and flies buzzed excitedly about the doors and windows, butting the screens.  Inside, one man, the truck driver, sat on a stool and rested his elbows on the counter and looked over his coffee at the lean and lovely waitress.  He talked the smart ladies language of the roadsides to her.  "I seen him about three months ago.  He had an operation.  Cut somepin out. I forget what."  And she--"Doesn't seem no longer ago than a week I seen him myself.  Looked fine then.  He's a nice sort of a guy when he ain't stinko."  Now and then flies roared at the screen door.  The coffee machines squirted steam, and the waitress, without looking, reached behind her and shut it off.

-- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939

 

There's a fly in the window

A dog in the yard

An a year since I saw you

There's a trunk in the corner

I keep all my letters

My bills and demands I keep too

Well I can't help thinking

About the times

You were a wife of mine

You aimed to please me

Cooked black-eyed peas-me

Made elderberry wine

-- Elton John and Bernie Taupin, "Elderberry Wine," 1972

American Wood

I feel like weevil eating the corncob,

an axe to American wood.

All I would is America

As something more than puritanism.

All I would is the farmhouse to be home

where Daddy doesn't slap Mommy around,

where Daddy doesn't plough Bobby into the ground.

I feel like a chainsaw to the church house

bleeding American wood.

All I would is America

where Christianity is Christian,

where Bibles aren't bashing souls to the ground,

where peace isn't silent at night,

violence a common sound.

--Steve Brown, 1989

Pahvant Valley from Cedar Mountain Road, 
acrylic on canvas, 14" x 10 1/2", Steve Brown  2022

Sunday, June 5, 2022, 6:17 a.m.

The sun peaks over a large juniper covered hill, sending light rays fanning out before sodium-colored clouds.  A rare, humid day, the air smells moist, almost coastal.  Birds chirp, cluck and squawk.  In front of me, a two-wire electrical fence separates this gravel pull-out just off Cedar Mountain Road from the rock, rabbit brush, and snakeweed that transition down slope into fields of rye and alfalfa.   A long chalky-white road drops into the scene at a diagonal, sloping down what was once a sandbar of ancient Lake Bonneville to the farms.   Angus blot the pale green fields in clumps of black blobs.  Elms do the same at a larger scale in dark green.  These are my pastures of heaven, my Salinas, my long valley, only this one is some seventy miles across.  

I have known this place so long that I don't know where I stop and it begins.  That is how it should be for a writer, perhaps for everyone.  No matter where we wander, we need a Zion, a holy land, a place that is distinctly us.  It gives us a sense of being, a voice so intrinsic to who we are, it cannot be taken away.  If I were strapped in an electrical chair on the other side of the world waiting for my execution, my last moments would quite likely be here in this valley, and though I might be urinating myself in terror, there would be a calm, steady part of me that says, I can do this; I can do hard things.  That steadiness is rooted here.

It is in the giant shoe-shape of Pahvant Butte, an old cinder cone that rose form the depths of ancient Lake Bonneville 18,000 year ago, forming an island.  It remains an island even though the waters receded long ago.

It is in the pale pink face of sunlit Notch Peak, which boasts the largest limestone cliff in the United States and some of the oldest trees on earth--the gnarled, hunkered-down, waiting for eternity bristlecone, the great preppers of the world, almost as timeless as stone itself, adapting to whatever the climate throws their way.

 And then there is Swasey Peak, a little to the north, gnarled briefly with twisting shadows showcasing canyons and ravines in the morning before fading to pastel blue-gray for the day.

This is where I belong.  It is a big place with few inhabitants, less than two people per square mile.  There aren't many trees either, except on the mountains to the east, and those we're losing quickly.  There isn't much water--and what there is, is vanishing at an astonishing rate.  We've already lost Clear Lake, a spring-fed oasis and bird refuge.  It is now dry but for a short season in the spring.

Yet, this place could remain spiritually much the same if we could just keep our skies.  Distance is the language here, and distance is beholden to clean, eternal skies, which are all but gone.

The poet John Clare went crazy when the Enclosure Acts of the 1800s fenced off his wild places and shut down forever his connection with his own long valley.  I believe I have it within me to be stronger than him, but I get it.  Everything I am, everything I write, is because of here.

I may not be able to do much, but I need to do what I can to protect my tide pool, even if that means trying to change the entire world in the process, even if that means failing miserably.  I'm not a pessimist, but I am a realist.  From this pin-point in time, the data does paint a pretty bleak picture.  Adaption will be inevitable if insanity is to be avoided, but resiliency also comes from putting up a good fight.

Pahvant Valley, here I am, listening to your birdsong, ready to give you my everything.  If I end up in an insane asylum, so be it.  At least you will know someone cared enough about your grand skies to not let them slip silently away unnoted.

But then, again, I don't think I really ever had a choice in writing this book.  It was built for the future long ago when I first encountered John Steinbeck, a voice I knew way back then I needed like birdsong.  Only, unlike with birds, I was drawn to the particulars, the cadence of each and every image, the spark of each and every sound joined simply with and  one "and," and then another, until a whole was achieved most spectacularly through sounds and images connected like strands of DNA--the fabric of America.

I heard and felt the same grasp of Americana, ironically, through the music and lyrics of British songwriters Elton John and Bernie Taupin, something I labeled getting down the grain of American wood.  It was people, landscape, the mythic general through very local particulars that I was after.  I felt like I needed to be a sort of farmer harvesting America through words, an idea captured magnificently in the lyrics of Taupin, although in his very English sounding lyrics to "Lady, What's Tomorrow":

Look up little brother

Can you see the clover

No, not over there

A little bit left and over there

Can you see the lilac tree

the lily pond, the skylark's song

The open air where no one cares

where branches live and die out there

Lady, what's tomorrow?
Will it be the same as now?
Will the farmer push the pen?
Will the writer pull the plough?

Spring Break 1989.  Terlingua, Texas

I sit in an all but empty café in Terlingua, Texas.  Ceiling fans spin gently overhead.  Across from me sits Karen, her brown eyes beaming behind almost round spectacles, a thin smile on her lips.  The light is behind her, flooding in through tinted windows from the stark, stark desert beyond, backlighting and softening her already fine features.  Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail, and I love the shape of her ears, almost perfect half moons.  Small strands of brown hair are picked up by the stirring of the fans, tossed around in the light.

We talk.  It comes so easily, which is not normal for me, especially around women.  It seems like a dream.  I'm tired, oh so tired, but in a good way, floating around, released from all the anxieties I know so well as myself.  We have been hiking in heat.  I am drained and happy.  We eat tacos and drink a Blue Sky Soda each from a can.

Karin explains symbiotic relationships, like those between plants and animals in lichen, and talks about M.C. Escher, how he's her favorite artist because he captures so well those connections that keep life bound together in strange and meaningful ways, like us.

There has been the usual classic rock playing softly in the background, and I haven't really been listening.  I know them all anyway.  "Magic Bus" by the Who.  "I'm Just a Singer (in a Rock and Roll Band) by The Moody Blues.  "Elenore" by The Turtles.

Then, all the sudden, something I don't know.  Distant.  Real.  I guess it's country, but not the country I know.  It sounds like this place.  This diner off the beaten path pounded by relentless heat and stark, stark light beating life down to the essentials, to points and needles and harsh, harsh shit.

But it would be just as real in Kansas or Ohio.

"This is amazing.  Who is this?"

It's not unreasonable to think Karen will know.  She seems to know something about everything.  It's clear Germany educates their youth far better than America.  A biology major, she knows all my architectural heroes, like Le Corbusier and Mies ven der Rohe.

"Patsy Cline."

"Wow.  What is it?  It sounds so American."

"'Crazy,' of course," she says in her cute German accent, and then starts singing to point out the obvious reason for the title.

"Now this, this is what I'd like my poems to do."

"Do what?"

"Whatever this is.  The bedrock.  America.  Humanity.  This diner.  This place.  There's got to be a way to get that down."

She smiles that thin-lipped graceful smile.  Her eyes beam through those smart, almost round, but not quite-round spectacles.

September 1989.  Arlington, Texas    

It's late.  The window is cracked open, the A.C. going.  The hope, I guess, is that it will either be cooler inside or outside, and one way or the other, there will be relief.

I don't mind.  I like the sounds.  The sounds outside of occasional talking, especially if it's girls.  There is just something in their voices.  I like the yellow light from my desk lamp too.  And these new almost all-nighters trying to keep up on the readings for Dr. Estes's class.  Slow, inept readers probably should not switch majors from architecture to literature.  But, that's exactly what I've done.  

I mark up my books in hot pink or lime-green highlighter.  No code, no pattern.  Just something to note the important passages, which always ends up being eighty percent of the book.

I've just read about the grey and red country in the first paragraph of Chapter 1 of The Grapes of Wrath, and already my old electric typewriter that my mom gave me is clacking away, the separate key arms flinging up towards the page, getting stuck together now and then. 

We had been to the red country, Utah not Oklahoma, the hot walls with junipers dotted along the top, just under the dry blue sky, acid film etched with cat-claw clouds.

Now we were in the gray country, Utah not Oklahoma.  We crossed into the basin on the new section of I-70, met I-15 and headed north.  Thirty miles past Cove Fort, the town of Meadow was thrown out the back window, the blue-gray flat-topped oak and pine mountain above it.  Ahead, was the long, dry, rye valley, bleached to white.  So, the gray country was white.  I was home in July, as always; July at home was white, as always.

I pause my typing.  This Steinbeck guy.  He's like no other.  But if he is, well, he's like Patsy.  Both have something I want.  No, need.  There's something fundamental here that the world is missing.

A thought rhymes.  A line from Cindy Lauper slips in.  The night doesn't end; there is no end.  Until it does.  I look up and see light coming in through the window. 

"Shit, how am I going to function tomorrow today?"

For nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates; and the length of fiber in the cotton is not the land.  Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor calcium.  He is all these, but he is much more, so much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis.

-- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939

Sunday, June 5, 2022

I knew then if I ever had anything to say in my writing it would not be connected to Dallas, that big, giant spinning cobweb of interstates, subdivisions, glass-box office towers, boggy rivers, malls and cottonfields, I'd so embraced in place of home.

No, it'd be the wide, dry valley I'd been raised in and once couldn't wait to get away from--dirt as deep in my soul as the Elton John songs my brother played in the little house on First West as I watched the corn outside the open kitchen window late summer evenings sway under the blue light of the moon as the crickets chirped and the big, old straggly elm cast shadows across the old white shed.

Get it down before it's gone forever.   What else is there to do?   

Can you see the lilac tree

the lily pond, the skylark's song

The open air where no one cares

where branches live and die out there

Lady, what's tomorrow?
Will it be the same as now?
Will the farmer push the pen?
Will the writer pull the plough?

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland -- Working Days 1

We take a tiny colony of soft corals from a rock in a little water world.  And that isn't terribly important to the tide pool.  Fifty miles away the Japanese shrimp boats are dredging with overlapping scoops, bringing up tons of shrimps, rapidly destroying the species so that it may never come back, and with the species destroying the ecological balance of the whole region.  That isn't very important in the world.  And thousands of miles away the great bombs are falling on London and the stars are not moved thereby.  None of it is important or all of it is.

--John Steinbeck, Sea of Cortez, 1941

One, acrylic on canvas, 14" x 10 1/2", Steve Brown  2022

Friday, May 3, 2022

As the evening sun angles down on Monterey Bay, shafts of warm sunlight filter down through the cold waters to a rocky slope at a depth of a little over thirty feet below the surface.  Clumps of sea urchins forest the rockslide, their animal arms waving around like the fronds of squat palms on some exotic volcanic plug shooting straight out of the ocean in the middle of nowhere.  A rusted can sits, nestled at an angle between two stones, like a hermits cabin, a rust hole forming a door.  Little bubbles float by.  And then the scene is suddenly blotted out by a golden fish-eye, jeweled and ignited.  Specks of gold encircle the large black hole of the yellow-eyed rockfish, a portal to a vision and a mind, which, at least in this life, we will never remotely know--a soul looking out on a world of barnacles and urchins and kelp and old rusted pipes and discarded barrels and cans that have ragged holes and doors and entryways to camps and homes and hangouts, that while accessible to any scuba diver, remain galaxies away as far as perception, intent, and being are concerned.  Yet, the world perceived from the other side of that golden eye and our world are not disconnected.  

As I shower, a hot force of water massages the muscle molecules in my back, which I know no more about than the mind of that fish.  The water feels O so good, and I think about these things:  I wonder why I was lucky enough to wake up with that image of that golden fish-eye.  It may just be the perfect way to precede with my book.  That has been happening a lot lately.  For the first time in my life, I feel fully open to a full range of possibilities.  There is growing evidence that the world we see is only limited by what we are open to perceive.  Whatever lenses we cling to define our reality.  View light as a particle, and it is so.  View light as wave, and it is so--even through the objective lens of science.  Not that all visions are real.  Believing something does not make it so.  Not believing, however, does void it as a possible glimpse into an unknown universe.  You cannot see light you are unwilling to let in.  I'm done narrowing my world to what I see through pinholes.  It's time to float around, almost weightless, and explore this great big complex existence called life fully.

As I exit the bathroom, Marci is listening to a piece on NPR about the giant black hole they have just verified exists at the center of our galaxy--another fisheye wormhole to an existence, which, at least in this life, we will never fully understand.  Yet, I have absolutely no doubt that existence does continue to exist even amid gravity and pressure so strong and dense even light itself collapses and goes who knows where.  And if that full, dense void was not at the center of our galaxy, would we remain here in our orbit around our little sun on our little tip of just one arm of this gigantic sea creature we call the Milky Way, or would we go spinning off into a bleak, black distance too vast to comprehend?

It is a bright day, after a good overnight rain, and a frosting of slushy white snow in the morning.  The air is crisp and clean.  The morning sunlight is golden on the fresh budding trees.

This big valley, which has been part of my life for so long, is beautiful today.  The Cricket Mountains are sharp and defined, as is the House Range.  I can even see that Haystack Peak, about 100 miles away, has received fresh snow.  This is the valley of my mind, the one I remember from my childhood.  It seldom exists anymore.  Distance is not what it once was--clear and untarnished.

It is only May, and already we've had five or six dust storms, including yesterday.  That is new, but the smoky summer skies have been intensifying since at least 2005.  My little tidepool here is changing.  I'm not sure whether this is a book about trying to stop that change, or adapt to it, or both.

Steinbeck learned early-on that you need to be able to sum-up the main idea of your book in one sentence.  If you can do that, and then let it go, and just write, it will hang together.  If you can't, it won't.

Here's what I think:   I believe we are headed into very difficult times.  We have known about climate change for a very long time, and we have not made the necessary course corrections.  I don't blame anyone.  If I did, I would have to blame myself.  My desk at work is littered with empty plastic water bottles, as is my car.  I do take a refillable cup to work, and usually use that, but if I forget a day, as I frequently do, I run to the fridge and grab a water bottle.  Same goes when I'm in the car.  I try to remember to take water with me on my drive, but if I don't, I don't hesitate to stop and pay an unrighteous price for water in a container that comes with a price tag so high it cannot be measured in dollars and cents, although it is definitely impacting that as well.  Dollars only represent the ability to obtain food, and food only represents the capacity of earth to sustain us--inflation and scarcity are not unrelated.  

So, up until at least last week, I was only willing to make incremental changes in my lifestyle, that although they make me feel good, will not solve the problems we face.   Societies around the world are doing the same.  This most likely is going to be one hell of a summer--literally.  When Marci and I were in California in April, the snowpack on the southern Sierras looked like it usually does in August.  The drought the west is experiencing currently is the worse drought in 12,000 years.  What needed to be done, needed to be done decades ago.  I will not be able to write this book quickly enough to document all that is going to come.  I will get most things wrong.  Events will be different and probably more intense than I imagined.  But the causes will remain the same.  Those are worth talking about even if I get some of the effects wrong.

So, what I think this book is really about is a way to not only survive through it all, but to thrive through it all--spiritually, mentally, socially, and physically.  It's about a paradigm shift that John Steinbeck and Ed Rickets, despite their many human flaws, understood needed to happen long ago.  The time has come to revisit their message to the world.  We are not only on the brink of another dust bowl--only this one, I believe, will be greater--but we are also possibly on the brink of another world war.  Now is the time to put away our bad habits and our little-bitty feel-good changes that have no real impact on our world and face the fact we are on the brink of climatic and social collapse around the world.  Yet, as I have recently come to realize facing kidney disease, accepting reality can and should be a time of healing, humility and joy, not doom and gloom.  

If gratitude and joy are not apparent in every sentence I write here, I will have failed.  These are working days.  It's time to put my shoulder to the wheel and push along.

Here's my sentence:   We are all connected, and what we choose to do now will impact our individual and shared realities through the eternities.

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland -- 1. In a Time of Confusion

It has occurred to me that we may be so confused about the present that we avoid it because it is not clear to us.  But why should that be a deterrent?  If this is a time of confusion, then it should be the subject of a good writer if he is to set down his time.

--John Steinbeck to Elizabeth Otis, 1954

In a Time of Confusion, acrylic on canvas, 14" x 10 1/2", Steve Brown  2022

Wednesday, April 6, 2022

YouTube

Somewhere in Ukraine:  An older woman, perhaps in her late sixties, wearing a baby blue flannel jacket, walks down a street strewn with metal fragments and bits of concrete.  She is hunched over, carrying a plastic bottle of water.  She could be almost any woman of her age, many places, including the United States.  She could be in a forest or national park campground headed back to camp after filling up the water jug.  In fact, she looks a lot like my stepmother looked later in life.  She could be my mom, but she's not.  What makes this apparent are the massive heaps of metal, which appear to have once been tanks, although that's not absolutely clear, as well as the unidentifiable bits of debris on what once was a lane lined with electrical poles on the left and fine straight winter trees along a park's edge on the right.  

Grappling

The scene is a fauvist nightmare, a vibrant vision gone wrong.  Spills and splashes of color are torn from the tendrils of reality--brick and biology, flower and foam packaging, steel panel and fine scarf--all genetic fabric stretched beyond capacity to repair--fragments of bright color everywhere, but no semblance to substance, to light, to what once was, or is, or should be.

Just a woman alone with a jug of water in a world unraveled.  If God shut off the switch to gravity, the rest of us would come unhinged as we floated away into a void too vast to comprehend while still mortal.  But she would hardly even notice.  The human mind can only handle so much disruption at once.  

A fauvist vision works based on light and beauty.  What is left when the black seed of Satan has stitched himself into the fabric of humanity and dislodged our spiritual tendencies--those beautiful flecks of light and color that unite and bind us to the beauty of us together as a whole?

Narrative

Salem, Utah:  It's a bright morning with a bitter wind. Marci and I walk across a parking lot to a new stone and glass building that looks more like a ski resort hotel than the hospital that it is, Revere Health.  A former architecture student, I admire the alternating horizontal runs of light and dark stone in the façade contrasting with the vertical runs of stainless steel in the huge plate glass window that showcases a strong diagonal in the two tier staircase on the other side of the glass cascading down from the third floor.  Also not to be missed is the prominent horizontal entrance canopy that seems to float above the ski-lodge-like wood posts that support it, all of which is topped by giant stainless-steel letters spelling out "Entrance".

The inside also resembles a fine hotel rather than a hospital, which, I guess is as it should be, as almost no resort can equal the cost of one night's stay in an American hospital.  Even a day visit is likely to set you back thousands of dollars.  I think all the rooms should come with hot tubs and there should be a 24-hour buffet and a cocktail lounge in the lobby.  Then, perhaps, we wouldn't always come out feeling as if we were asked to bend over in our open-backed gowns as something foreign and plastic is inserted very uncomfortably inside us.

We check in at a central station.  A receptionist sits behind a wrap-around counter behind wood divisions that form five or six semi-cubicles, each with a large touch-screen tablet mounted at a forty-five degree angle where patients enter their check-in information.  We pick one and follow the digital prompts, which includes scanning my drivers license and insurance card.  I like the process.  It's so much easier than filling out a bunch of forms with a pencil.  However, I'm also aware that it probably allowed personnel to eliminate one or two receptionist positions, and while that doesn't really impact anyone during this post-COVID boom, sooner or later, it will.  As a society, we are quickly automating our way out of livelihood and purpose.

After checking in, we walk up the long, two-tier cascading staircase that I so admired through the glass curtain wall and stop at the second level landing.  It's a long, airy hallway.  On the left are the offices, and on the right is a series of lobbies set against a ribbon window overlooking the Utah Valley and the snow-capped Wasatch Mountains, which even in this year of extreme drought, are impressively rugged and white.  The hall reception area is divided into four sections, each decorated and labeled for a season:  Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter.   Each section has an automated self check-in area like the one in the main lobby and a place to sit down.  However, the entire floor is void of a receptionist--a small glimpse of the future.  We sit down in comfortable silence in the Winter section and wait to find out if I have kidney disease as my lab tests have suggested.

After a few moments, a nurse comes out.  Angela, a friendly Hispanic woman.  She has me get on the scales.  It seems to me that I'm feather-light.  This may be partly from my new diet, but mostly it is just my perception.   I haven't adjusted to my weight in kilograms.  Every I time I go to the doctor, it seems I'm dwindling into a void, slowly vaporizing.  As I know this is not the case, my weight means nothing to me.  The scales could give me the mass of the moon, and it wouldn't be any more or less accurate than this new kilogram weight of mine.  It's the same with the blood results and urine analysis I received last week.  They mean nothing.  I don't even know what a healthy blood pressure score or pulse reading is.  They are just numbers I have always ignored because I never felt I needed them.  I have always been interested in the weight of a pigment or the bluntness of a word, the impact of a slight musical rest, or the singe of a a sharp orange marigold amongst a bed of deep blue baby's breath.  Art has been my interest.  My body, though I have not badly abused for most of my life, has never mattered much to me.  I took it for granted that it would always work.  I felt there was no need to understand it.  And I don't.  I don't even know how to read the meters and spinning dials, so to speak, that tell me whether or not I'm about to blow my engine.  It's a very, sudden and uneasy feeling.  I barely know how to change the oil in my car, but I have cared enough to watch the dials.  Not so with my own body.

However, one thing I've always believed in is specialization.  As a writer, I know working well with words doesn't fall into place over night.  People often get reasonably good at what they dedicate their lives too.  I don't know why in the hell a career politician is considered a liability in America.  Who wants a senate and congress comprised of members who know nothing about the law or the constitution?  I certainly hope the doctor I'm about to see is absolutely obsessed with dedicating her career to one thing, and one thing only--kidney disease.  I have no qualms about placing qualified people in high positions.  We should want smart, capable people running our country--people as well-trained and dedicated to preserving democracy as I hope this doctor is well-trained and dedicated to preserving me.  The problem is, instead we have people smart in propaganda running the country, and what they do best is flip the world upside down, and call good evil, and evil good.  Inquiry, thought, education, observation, humility, compassion and reason--these become vices.  Mindless rebuttal, close-mindedness, ignorance, disdain, arrogance and stupidity--these become virtues.  Democracy cannot sustain itself against such an attack on its foundational principles indefinitely.  I am aware my body isn't functioning normally.  I am aware my country isn't functioning normally.  I hold steady.  Usually.  What else is there to do?  I am not afraid of tears.  I am not even afraid of dying.  Release is release--but it should be for something.  Or should it?  I don't know.  Maybe freedom ultimately is just an acceptance of reality, whatever that may or may not be.  Enlightenment may have more to do with understanding than action.  No, that cannot be.  We do not exist simply to understand something that is beyond us, an observer only.  We are an intricate, if small part, of creation.  Doing has got to account for something.

Marci and I wait alone in a small room together in silence.  I'm not sure what she's thinking.  I'm not sure what I'm thinking.  This morning has been wonderful.  We went shopping at WinCo for our camping trip to California, which is to be an early celebration of our 25th anniversary, revisiting the places we inhabited fully for brief, glorious moments during our honeymoon all those years ago.  I see a golden light shimmering off the crest of waves as I hold my baby with the sea in front of us and a rock between us and the shore, knowing at any moment we could get soaked by an extra bold wave, and then it happens, and it is cold and sharp, and fun and glorious, and we laugh and head in to higher ground, a bit wet but not too drenched.

WinCo is a big store with lots of fruits and vegetables and things like cereal and grain and spices sold in bulk from bins.  It is why we have come here.  We are looking for foods that I can safely eat on our vacation.  I have spent weeks building the itinerary, making reservations, and planning a menu that will keep me here on earth as long as possible.  Now is the moment.  This is the day to select the biggest, greenest bell peppers I can find.  We have already stopped at the Red Barn, an orchard store in Santaquin, for apples--usually the best in the state.  Now it is time to pick through bins of green and identify all that is good and delicious to and for me.  When faced with immediate fear of dying, either every moment takes on significance or nothing has meaning at all.  It seems quite natural for a human under duress to fluctuate quite naturally between the two extremes, although I've been fortunate so far to spend most my moments bathed in golden light.  I'm not sure why.  I think it is probably the gospel because I haven't always been like that.  Much earlier in my life, I spent most moments under a lid of darkness even amongst the best of friends.

And then, now, there are moments of silence, of stillness, of openness to not knowing, like here in this office with my loved one waiting for a diagnosis--a moment that could confirm or deny that our lives have been changed forever.

The doctor walks in--Dr. Lyles.  She is sharp looking--thin, athletic, piercing blue eyes.  She radiates a casual confidence--nothing to boast about because there is no insecurity, and nothing to hide because she knows what she's doing.  She sits on a stool and tucks her feet casually in, resting them on that circular foot bar.  

I do not carry that confidence, and I never have.  I don't expect it in myself, and I don't expect it in others.  In fact, some of the people I love most in this world, including myself, wear insecurity like a badge of honor even though nobody enjoys doing that.   Yet, I admire people whose very body language asserts that they belong in any given social situation.  It must be amazing to always be comfortable with who you are and know your value regardless of the setting.  I dislike boasters--people so afraid or unaware of who they are that they have to hide below layers, although I do understand a pain deep enough to create that need.  But natural confidence is an amazingly attractive quality, even just visually. Still, I'm more comfortable around others like me, who aren't.   I love how gloriously Paul Simon captures being inhabited by uncertainty in many of his lyrics:

Fat Charlie the Archangel
Sloped into the room
He said I have no opinion about this
And I have no opinion about that
Sad as a lonely little wrinkled balloon
He said well I don't claim to be happy about this, boys

And I don't seem to be happy about that...

I have always known I'm smart.  I have always had strong opinions.  But there is a deep shyness in me that refuses to let go--a strong feeling that I just really don't count for much.  I get ignored easily.  Part of me hates that.  Part of me prefers it.  People listen most prominently to the sloping boy, as he is the most dominate part of me.  I once spent a few years trying to drink myself into someone more confident and outgoing.  Instead, I drank myself into someone mean and willing to compromise my principles in the moment with self-loathing and disgust.  Luckily, Marci pulled me out of that phase of life quite quickly when I realized she loved me for exactly who I was.  That has been the single most important event in my life--her full acceptance of me for who I am.  I hope I have usually given her that same grace.  Slowly, I have befriended the Fat Charlie in me.  In fact, I have come to love him.  He is the one most open to empathy.  

I receive the news I already knew I would.  Doctor Lyles confirms that I do have kidney disease.  Marci, I know, has been holding on to the hope it would be something else.  I wonder how she is doing.  My father died of Amyloidosis, which causes kidney disease, as well as the failure of other internal organs, and I am hoping that at least that can be ruled out.  Doctor Lyles lets us know that Amyloidosis is a rare disease, and rarer still in patients as young as me (in my mid-fifties).  Still, she notes, it can be genetic, and although unusual, her father died in his mid-fifties from it.  She definitely doesn't rule it out.  I know Lloyd, my brother, has been doing that.  His mind has been working out all of the reasons I cannot have Amyloidosis.  He's rational, so he's using numbers, and facts, and statistics, but his frequent return to the subject is to either reassure himself or me, or both.

Dr. Lyle's blunt dealing with the fact that Yes, it looks like you could possibly have Amyloidosis, actually provides release.  One of the hardest things to deal with is unnamed fears--things that scare you so much you aren't willing to name.  I have wanted to name this thing, to acknowledge that I had a higher than statistical average of dying soon, and to come to know exactly what that means to befriend death if I have to, to learn from it, for myself and others.  The comfort of others, though well-intended, stops that light from coming through.   Faced with imminent death, you want to choose how you spend every minute of your remaining days very carefully.  You have to be strategic: allocating enough time for others; enough time to help plan for the future of others without you (finances, etc.); but also enough time to relax, rest, and complete the things that are important to you.

Here is a doctor who seems to get the need to honestly name the possibilities without slanting things towards the most favorable outcomes.  When facing death, what one likes least of all is dishonesty.  What left is there to deal with other than an end to this life itself?  We all live and we all die.  Time, though relative, becomes everything.  There simply isn't time left for bullshit.

 

   

 

 

 

     

 

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 77: An End and...

1.

Some memories are hard to write about because you want to get them right.  You don't want to misrepresent someone else, and you don't want to be misunderstood.  It can be a painful memory, but it doesn't have to be.  I've had very few traumatic experiences in my life, and the few that I have had, I haven't set out to write about.  Often, they had been all but forgotten.  Instead of intentionally recording them, they have crept up on me in the course of writing about something else, and once I noticed the pain breaking through the crusty soil, I was willing to follow it down until I discovered the root.  That is where the best writing often is--in discovering a buried hurt which longs for release.  Tears are shed, but it's wonderful to unexpectedly face your own fragility.  It's like standing at Glacier Point in Yosemite, being so small among great granite monoliths:  I am here, but very small among immensity, and isn't that amazing--to be aware of how frail I am, yet still thriving.

That seldom happens with me, although I don't shy away from the experience.  Rather, it's because I've had a fortunate life.  A few weeks ago in a writing workshop we were asked to write about metaphorical snakes, in other words, human vipers in each of our lives.  I wrote something.  I always do when given the opportunity, but I didn't write about human snakes.  I couldn't; I haven't had any real contact with that type of people.  So, instead, I said something like, I 've been hurt, sometimes deeply, but never by anyone who set out to harm me.  That's true.  No metaphorical snakes in my life.  The very few people who have hurt me were my friends and still are.  The only pain they ever caused me was by not loving me in the way I wanted them to love me at that time.  Yet, I never doubted their friendship, and still don't, so I only have good memories.

Yet, I'm reluctant to write about past loves.  I don't want to be misunderstood.  I don't want Marci to think I have some void I'm trying to fill now.  I also don't want the person I'm writing about to somehow think there are unresolved emotions that I need to work through.  Writing about my friend Andrea was like that.  I half-felt like I was betraying Marci in taking a couple of days to mentally once again drive down long, straight, gravel roads outside Denton, Texas with someone with whom I once desperately wanted as more than a friend.  Yet, I'm glad I did it.  This ultimately is a book of gratitude, and I would be disingenuous to skip over experiences which touched me deeply. 

I think I have a fairly undistorted view of life.  I lived in some pretty real neighborhoods in my twenties, heard the domestic violence through the walls, passed the homeless and prostitutes daily, spent some of my own nights trying to drink away deep loneliness, and dealt with my own addiction to pornography. I've always been aware that most of human history has been a story of war, bondage, death and disease, which continues into our times.  I'm also keenly aware of the environmental peril we are putting ourselves through even as I write this.  If I were to step outside my front door and look to the northeast right now, I would see a hillside covered in dead juniper, trees just recently killed by bark beetle.  The beetle are always there.  Long extended droughts, however, are new, and human-caused.  The trees can't handle both the beetles and us.  I worry about fire.  It seems almost inevitable.  Our forests are sick.  They can't handle the massive change we've imposed upon the climate through our addiction to fossil fuel.  The west is a vast funeral pyre to nations of dying trees. 

Even so, ultimately, I view life as beautiful.  I believe it's a designed event: a temporary experience to school ourselves in subject of ourselves so that we can be better throughout the eternities.  Although this wasn't always the case, I think now that even if I thought I were just a chance occurrence, a happenstance of billions of years of lucky chaotic connections and evolutionary adaptation, I would still be stunned to find out I'm here now to hear my dog snoring and the fish tank gurgling while I prepare to relive a memorable afternoon with my old friend Michi almost thirty years ago.  Isn't it amazing that most of us see, smell, hear, touch and taste, and most of all, that we are not only cognitively aware of it, but that we can replay experiences in our head years after they occurred? Or that we can imagine experiences which never occurred so vividly they not only become part of our history but the history of whole civilizations?  Take Pride and Prejudice, Their Eyes Were Watching God, or even Seinfeld.  That is so amazing--people who never actually existed become so real that they live on in the mind of not of just one person but entire civilizations.

In this light, to not go back an smile over a long conversation and good coffee with one once loved deeply seems like a crime.  We are here to give gratitude to those who have touched our lives.  Because I'm an insecure, jealous person, I don't like the idea of Marci thinking back on past loves.  I want to be the one and only to occupy her mind.  But it is important that we take in and are aware of this beautiful thing called life, that we enjoy our own personal, profound, little intricate niches that God has carved out for us in the grand cathedral of creation.

2.  Here, now, the oak outside my window spreads tight branches of clumpy, little spring leaves silhouetted against a silver-blue morning sky hosting streaks of pink-tinged clouds.  Equally vivid in my mind is the lightening sky east of El Paso, the lemony-tinge at the edge of  the blue-gray hulk of the Franklin Mountains slanting hard down into the valley like a whale returning to her watery depths.  I can see the edge of the great lit star on the mountain right above where the Rocky Mountains officially end.  I can see the city lights spread across the valley beyond.  I can see the plumes of smoke from the Chevron refinery lavender-blue before a silvery sky.  

I'm up early, standing on a fifth-floor balcony above Mesa Street.  I do this fairly often, although probably not often enough.  These moments of watching the city awaken amaze me.  I stand, holding my cup of coffee.  I'm chilled by the morning breeze, anxious to get this Saturday going.  I have a day planned with Michi, a day, which in my mind is to be our first date.  I have tried for this Saturday frequently, but she is always working.  Now it is here.

The morning breeze is crisp.  No, it's down right cold.  Too cold to continue standing here without a jacket.  I may be in the desert southwest, but it's only April.  I take one last look at the glow along the horizon, at the streaks of orange-edged clouds, knowing that in a moment, molten light will erupt over the low, jagged Hueco Mountains, knowing that within a few more minutes light will flood the entire valley, backlighting each and every silhouetted structure to the east with a golden glow along the edge.  Sparks of light will ignite and vanish instantly, only to reappear and disappear again and again, as traffic moves in and out behind the shadows of buildings.  The palm fronds in front of the cathedral will sway, glazed by the intense desert light.  

Yet, I go in.  It's cold, and we human beings seek escape from anything unpleasant, regardless of the reward that would be gained by staying put and experiencing the sting of existence.  It's just how we are made: to seek comfort over understanding.

3.  Last night I found out my brother-in-law Jeff filed for a divorce from Marci's sister Charlsia.  It bothered me more than I would have thought.  They live miles and miles away in Kansas, and we hardly ever see them, though we did visit on this trip we took in 2018 that I'm still writing about here.  Why it bothers me so, I'm not sure.  Perhaps somewhere deep down I know I was more damaged by my own parents' divorce than I realized.  

I think what really bothers me is that we humans get so many things wrong in this life.  By nature, we're always in fight or flight mode.  That biological response, though saving us from temporary pain, removes us from what matters most--deep involvement in life.  We're wired biologically only to preserve the self.  That human instinct left unidentified and unchallenged robs us from not only from fully experiencing life, but also from our own potential.  As I age, I become more and more aware we're not here simply to experience a biological response to life.  We're here also to experience a spiritual response to life.  That transcendence comes only through forgetting the self.  The lesson we're to learn here is I am therefore I am not.  Not that we don't exist.  Not that we don't matter as individuals.  No, not that all.  But that we are part of something so much greater than the sum of our individual parts.  My existence has meaning, but our existence together is what it is all about.  Happiness is found not through protecting the self, but rather by letting the self go.  The ego isolates us from creation; left to our own devices, we're consumed by it.  

I'm four.  Shadows move across the bottom of the tub.  No that’s not right.  Light moves across the bottom of the tub—shadows remain, weaving in and out of the light.  There is a window, I think, high and horizontal on a cracked plaster wall.  The window is frosted, light unfocused, yet focused enough to still allow this play of light and shadow across the tub.  I hear voices, metallic, yet warm, distant, perhaps from the apartment on the other side of the wall of the duplex ringing through the faucet.  I can’t hear what they have to say.  I’m probably too young to care.  To me, they sound like congregations of angels, remembrances of a time before I was.

In my twenties, I felt incredibly disconnected from life.  I felt this great void gnawing at me from inside. I'd lost contact with something that I'd felt so strongly as that four-year-old watching light and shadow move across the bottom of the tub.  I don't know if I heard voices from the house next door while in that tub and they reminded me of angels, or if I actually heard the angels themselves.  What I do know is that I was connecting with something transcendent--that I felt a connection to a love greater than anything I've experienced on earth.  I've since wondered if perhaps I slipped under the water and was drowning and the voices I heard were not from the pipe at all.  I have no idea if that's true or not.  I get glimpses of that moment, but nothing concrete enough to say, This is what happened.

As I was saying, in my twenties I felt this great void gnawing at me.  I interpreted the feeling that life felt fake as there is no afterlife and that life has no meaning.  It paralyzed me.  I couldn't finish college.  I sought escape through addictions.  I related to Hemingway deeply:  "Our Nada who art in Nada, nada be thy name".  

Biology is definitely part of our essence.  We are animals, products of evolution.  Fight or flight is part of who we are.  But the reason life once felt so false to me is that biology is only part of who we are.  I'm certain of this.  We are also spiritual beings.  That feeling we get of being acutely removed from life is a deep awareness that this is not our true home.  Spiritually speaking, we are off to college; we get homesick;  we want to return home.  Our day to day reality--the one we're supposed to be so entrenched in--doesn't seem real because a part of us remembers there being more.

This is just school.  Ego is what separates us not only from others but from creation.  People yearn for childhood not because of some lost innocence.  That is just the label we've given what we yearn to feel again.  I can't remember a time when I wasn't selfish and didn't make bad choices.  I've actually become a lot less selfish and make fewer bad choices with time, as do most.  Innocence is the wrong label for what we yearn to return to in childhood.  No, what I do remember from childhood is long periods of losing awareness of myself and just existing in a state of awe at everything around me,  that feeling of being the transparent eyeball that Emerson describes so eloquently in his essay Nature.  What people label as yearning for the innocence of childhood is really yearning for a time when they weren't so disconnected from the wonder of existence.  If we're not careful, life numbs us to the reality of I Am.  Ego is that great separator from the divine.  And yet the panic of the ego is so strong that only a few, like Gandhi, slip away from its great, grimy grip and touch a deeper is.

Divorce, I believe, is usually nothing more than a fight or flight response.  It's fleeing emotions too painful to handle--insecurity, numbness, boredom, whatever.  But it's a response to fear.  Escape. 

Escape is not what we are here for.  Living is.  Divorce is a deep betrayal of our purpose on earth--to lose ourselves in the service of others.  Family is that divine unit where we are forced into very close quarters with other egos, other wishes, other desires, so that we can truly learn to love and let go.  When that gets hard, we seek escape, and through that escape, miss out on the ultimate purpose of life.

That doesn't mean divorce never needs to happen.  We can only learn what we're ready to learn, but divorce is ugly for a reason.  It's a betrayal not only of the family who gets left behind; it's also self-betrayal of the one doing the leaving.  It's dropping out of college without obtaining that masters degree you were born to obtain.  Life goes on, but it isn't the same.  Deep wounds and permanent scars cannot be avoided when we flee from the obligations of our existence.  We are here to push through hard stuff.  That's where all the growth occurs.  The rest is just distractions.  Divorce is betrayal not only of loved ones, but ultimately, betrayal of love itself.  It cannot have anything other than deep consequences for everyone involved.  

Like so many, I am a child of divorce, a divorce which turned out well for all parties: two marriages that were ultimately better than the ones they grew out of and children (including step and half-siblings) who get along and care for each other.  Yet, buried beneath all that is the pain of a failed union.  

A Train following a great, gentle bend in a wide valley of golden grain suddenly goes off the tracks.  Or so it seems, Suddenly.  Perhaps it was headed towards that conclusion of crunch and carnage before it left the station, driven by egos that would not bend with the path.  We scramble out of the wreckage and wander off to find new lives, even the little ones, not knowing which way to go, which parent to follow.  One so small not knowing what in the hell just went wrong, baffled by an event beyond his capacity to measure the significance.  

This is the story of the modern world, the story of us collectively.  We live it, we repeat it, and we wonder Why are our children so damaged?  

I can imagine a culture where the second child is served up and eaten on his/her fifth birthday.  In such a culture, somehow everyone (except the second child in each family) would adapt and carry on.  They'd have to.  It would be the only realistic outcome.  We are evolutionarily built to adapt to whatever horrific situation we are poured into.  Prevalence of a phenomenon doesn't make it benign.  Even in a war zone, the human spirit carries on.  That doesn't mean humanity flourishes best under the bombardment of tanks and torpedoes.

Some marriages must end.  Most should not.  Our ego-driven cultures are eating us alive.  Divorce is only one small symptom of a perverse system driven by the glorification and preservation of the ego, a system which we don't recognize as devastating to the human spirit because like the characters born into a world where every family eats their second child, we assume that because its prevalent, it's natural and right.   

4.  

I have this memory of my friend Michi sitting in golden light in a booth at Village Inn in El Paso, Texas:  

She is squinting, looking out on a world that dazzles her, her hand raised, as if saluting, to shield her blue eyes from a reality outside too intense to take on directly.  Normally, her eyes are piercingly sharp and drill into you with deep, unspoken questions.  But right now, watery and squinted, they feel frail, paper-thin, translucent and unguarded.  Although we've been sitting here all afternoon talking, I can tell at this moment, I am gone.  I shouldn't even be sitting here.  It's time to get up and leave.  I don't know if she'll get up also to follow.  I don't know if she'll pull out a notebook and start to write.  I don't know if she'll just sit here and continue to gaze.  I'm not sure she's even aware she has slipped away from me after a day of deep conversation.  But I get it.  I know that time.  I know that light.  My life has been dedicated to follow it, wherever it leads me.  It's why I'm here in El Paso in the first place.  I get up and say my goodbyes.

That day was perfect.  It lives on alongside a few other perfect days.  What made it perfect was the ease I felt sitting across from another person who I liked very much--just talking, dreaming and scheming about our futures.  I don't remember everything that we said.  I remember Michi said something about how she wished our generation had some cause to rally around like the Vietnam War.  I have since thought how she got that wish.  There are definitely causes to crusade. There is so much going wrong in the world currently, it's hard to even focus on where we need to help, let alone how we need to help.  What's more important?--to save our crumbling democracy, our dying planet, or just any notion of objective truth?  How does a writer even help in a country where half the population doesn't believe in facts, and the other half is dead to any whisperings from the divine?  How does a writer make his or her mark in a world where everyone has access to the media--both as readers and writers--but How to put on your makeup or The perfect keto shopping spree attracts more attention than something as big as the Great Salt Lake or the Louisiana coastline vanishing right before our eyes.  And then there is the realization for my generation that we are old and that all we really want to do is retire.  Our time to make our mark on the world is for all practical purposes over.  The world that is literally burning before our eyes is the world we either helped create or didn't put enough energy into changing for the better.  If there is a way out, it will not be through us, but through our children and grandchildren.  Hopefully we have given them the tools to tackle a reality too strong for us to handle.

Anyway, that day with Michi stands out almost in singularity, a rare moment of ease around another person.  A moment of just being, not unlike what we mistakenly label as the innocence of childhood, not unlike what I felt watching light and shadow and water while hearing the voice of angels through the veil.

Perhaps, that is what this book is ultimately about.

Perhaps, writing this book was an attempt to do the impossible:  recover time.  It's not an attempt to capture the time spent living though--  No, not those magic moments, like that afternoon with Michi; or similar moments with my friends in Dallas and my brother; or the countless, quiet unspoken moments with Marci and our boys since then.  No, those moments stand strong.  They are solid, eternal, real.  No need to recover them.

No, it's the lost time that I now realize I sought here to recover.  All that I lost because of a divorce I was too young to remember--the life I never got to live because I was always protecting myself from hurt from the loss of a father who never gave up on me, just his marriage.  But, as a toddler, one can't sort the two out.  One can't figure out why a dad once there is there no longer.  There is a rip in the soul as gravity pulls an enormous part of you away out into space to follow your father.

For years some unknown part of me floated out there beyond my reach, cut off and crisp in eternal light, yet unconnected, a rock suspended above the earth it belongs to.

There’s a little black spot on the sun today
(That’s my soul up there)
It’s the same old thing as yesterday
(That’s my soul up there)
There’s a black hat caught in a high tree top
(That’s my soul up there)

I didn't know what the Texas trip would mean to me when we set out for Green River, Utah in September of 2018.  I didn't know where writing this book would take me when I sat down to write that first blog post upon our return from our thirteen-day trip to and through a state that is so much a part of who I ultimately am.

But now I do.  Naming has power.  I needed to name a hurt I didn't know I had so that I could move on.  Although the road goes on forever, this particular journey is through.  The energy that pushed my pen forward has run its course.  There is much I never covered.  I had planned on writing more about my friend Lucia, about one lovely night across the border and a magical journey along the edges of Lake Superior way, way up in Minnesota.  I had planned on writing about lonely days in all but empty topless bars and driving a 1981 Datsun Maxima wildly through the desert while listening to U2's Zooropa.   I'd planned on writing about getting drunk Halloween night at a party with Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top and refusing to believe it was him because it was Halloween and people show up to parties in costume.  (In the version I tell, I repeatedly pull his beard, saying, "That ain't real; this is a costume!") I planned on writing about bailing out of a cab in Juarez, Mexico because I had spent my last dime catching a bus back from Casa Grande.  All of those would make great stories, but that is not what a book is.  A book is about discovery, about finding out what you needed but didn't know you were looking for.  Books fill a need in others only by filling a need in the author.  Good books are not planned, they are created.

I needed to name that I regret of not being more connected to life.  I had my friends in Texas--very good friends.  I had my places in Texas--sacred places, at least to me.  But I always felt so damn disconnected.  I hated God and I hated myself because of an isolation I didn't understand.  I probably still don't.  Perhaps I never will.  But, at least it's named.  

Dad, when you left me, you left me un-whole.  That is not unique.  It's profoundly common.  Fathers do it all of the time.  But, for me it meant living for years with a shyness I didn't understand.  

Texas is where the void grew wide enough I had to construct ladders and set them across the gulf.  Those ladders--the art, the music, the poems, the long drives, the yearning to be complete--ultimately became who I am.

All I am is because of you: poet, writer, dreamer, husband, father. All I am not is because of you:  socially at ease, driven, successful.  For the first time, I'm thankful for all of it.

I'm also grateful Texas gave me the space and distance to find not only myself, but also my way home again.  

It was a good long journey.  Both the thirteen day road trip and the eleven years I lived there.  Many fine sights, many fine people.  Mostly though--just heat and sky and a highway home--the world the way I like it.

References

Police, The. "King of Pain." Synchronicity. By Sting. 1983.