I Went Down to the River...

I went to the river, rode down the ruts, curving through the sage and juniper hills remembering where I was and who I am. A purple dust storm spread its churn just below the sun and just behind the walking volcanoes like a ruffling curtain. Aquamarine sky, the peaks quiet and far away, snow spilling from the tops but starting to peel back, retreat, and I standing on a jutting talis rock letting the wind blow through me and realizing that spring had come, and when it had I was not looking. There were snows in March and April, four storms after March 21st, and there may yet be another, but I was whirling out there, traveling, surging, forgetting, leaving my mesa home in the dust. I stopped paying attention and became again the man who walks with Mr. Frodo, searching for a way to Mt. Doom to destroy that fucking ring. My gaze fell in upon my feet and no longer out the window following the moon and the ocean sky, no longer keeping watch for the fiddler in green. I stopped seeing rabbits except in the road darting across or frozen on the side, afraid to move. The dogs were gone, I was gone. My writing room was virtually emptied and abandoned for an office in town. Coffee crept back into the routine, joining the mate, and bars again seemed the natural follow to a power hike driven more now by the need to clear the computer glare out of my eyes and the fear of losing my leanness than to visit the ravens, my brother tree and absorb the magic at the confluence of the worlds. The house got dusty and the cupboard bare, but for mustard, an old yogurt and some rice pasta. I came home to a stopped up bathroom sink and an ashy wood stove flanked by piles of old newspaper and food packaging. It occurred to me that in the mornings the house was now colder, much colder, than it had been when I inhabited it nearly full time in December, January, February into early March. This owed as much to the higher angle of the sun as it did to the draft of my absense and the lack of fires before bed and early in the morning. It became harder to write at home (as you can see by the dwindling entries the past couple of months), the big wood table almost naked, the battered laptop sitting there with its screen hanging by one hinge. It was good enough to check sports scores and my email in the morning, but not inviting to create or even spew. "Where did my muse go?" I'd say to myself on the few nights I was here before dusk or darkness. And now I hear her saying back, "Where did you go, motherfucker?" And, of course, we both know. I went exit stage left to the office and the town draws, like an allergy, like an old itch that you forgot about for a while that you have a cure for at the bottom of some plastic bin under the sink in the bathroom. Six months gone from it and yet the same people were out there, Sam and Marky and AJ, Glenny and Fast Angie and Clyde, Alyson and Candy and Janet. Like family, they'll always be there to take you in. It's like you never left. And there's some solace in it, you know, but a month with that family and it's time to hit the road again, back home. I don't know. Again, I don't know. What I do know is that I was out there in March, sitting in the melting snow, watching it swirl around me, smelling spring in the caliche. I knew it was coming, and I wanted to see and feel the turn, but I missed it. At the river tonight, birdsong filled the gorge and the wind had no bite. It blew hard from the west but it caressed and bathed instead of cutting. Winter was gone and with it the snow that had lasted since November. Even the gullies were going green. I had some hugs out there in town, some moments of knowing the love in all the noise, the sass in the world, the altered, rednosed workshop of smudged saints, but I can't stay there. My workshop is here and my work requires everything I have. "Don't be dramatic" the muse says, "you'll need that family here and there." True, true, I think, but not now even though spring has this ram ready to butt and bang and jump chasms. It is time to create and to create I need abundant life force, and to have abundant life force I need to pay attention and to feel and to show up. Here I am again.

Home in Texas

Hello, it's me, I haven't been here for a long, long time (credit to Todd Rundgren). A barnstorming couple of weeks that took me from the snowy 13,000' peaks and upscale but hollow carb infested town of Breckenridge to the sea level debacle of repeating chain(store) DNA that is Houston, TX. And now I'm back in a place so different from the rest of the USA that I am reawakened (again). I'm still staggering from the 16 hour drive from Houston to Taos that spanned Sunday into Monday, but something happened out there in south Texas. There is hill country that rises like green sea swells after the lushness and big muddy rivers of places like Flatonia, Iraan, San Angelo and San Antonio. Into a long, glowlit dusk after San Antone, I drove Montez into a rollercoaster of sandstone ridges and valleys where the air cooled and dried from the swampy oil slick of Houston, and frenzied birdsong echoed in the thick, lowset oaks, magnolias and mulberries. A talkshow station crackled in from Dallas, a woman writer of a Christian book called "Angry Conversations with God" bantered with two hip male Christian hosts about the book and her prideful, reckless foibles on the empty road until she wound her way back to God. It all made sense, what she said, and they had such a self deprecating, knowing hipness that me and my friend who was traveling with me, both of us pagan buddhist animists, were riveted and called them the Hiptians. But, as all good things do, the reception faded into the static scales of the engine's fluctuations and we went quiet as the dusk held on, orange and low flame blue with hints of cranberry and blueberry. And the road rose through cuts in the white sandstone where you could see the bone of the land, the layers of lifetimes piled up in wavy rows. I looked out to the north and the south and breathed into the trees knowing this place, it knowing me. South Texas, somewhere between San Antonio and El Paso, Mexico just a little farther south, a place I'd never been before, but I knew it, and it gave me peace, a crack in my heart to release the scent of home. My breathing went downward into my belly and I felt locked in, like I could drive forever. It reminded me of the Bonzai Forest, this place of hills and knobs and chilly, dry air. Darkness finally came springing loose the stars and, low on gas, I pulled off at the historic town of Sonora where I had to drive four miles to find the gas station downtown. It was a sleepy place with the leaves just popping on the locust trees and a pickup in every driveway. There were a few historical markers but I was too tired to read them. Strangely, the clerk in the gasmart had no discernible Texas accent, but then again, this place was nowhere and I knew it, so it wasn't necessarily Texas or the dot showing on the map. Like those mad singing birds filling the giant magnolia in Flatonia hours earlier, I, too, heard the hum of a place in my dreams and it just happened to be called Texas.

Showing Up

Easter morning, April 12th. It is snowing heavily on Taos desert, the mountains shrouded, everything brought in close. I look up into a fall of feathers, it doesn't seem possible that snowflakes can drop thousands of feet, not when a small wind can blow them sideways in a crisscross pattern. It is 7am and the bridge looms over the gorge filled with bouncing snow, its road surface covered with a slick whiteness. It's at once improbable and expected, and as high desert dwellers are ready for anything, and love all weather, there are 70 people huddled under the open air wooden shelter facing the yawning gorge. People are layered up, hats pulled down tight, the dark haired heads of toddlers and infants swimming in giant parka hoods of blue and magenta. Older men greet me with crescent pouches under their eyes, smiling, not old as much as broken in. Some of the women are wearing colorful scarves wrapped around their hair; it reminds me of my childhood in the 70s when more women seemed to wear them, and project mystery and bright eyed destiny in the face of boredom. The reverend Steve Wiard, a Kansan with a broken voiced optimism, a cornfield skipping boy of 60 who loves the red sox and amber beer, paces before the huddled group in his red tartan blanket coat with charcoal crosses in subtle relief on front and back. He is smiling, his salt-and-pepper ponytail spilling and curling out of his blue baseball cap, and telling us that he does not know exactly what happened that day of Christ's resurrection, that it's a mystery. But he knows something happened that turned those people around that day. And he knows that showing up is the key. 70 people in driving snow, 27 degrees, singing songs of peace, and listening to a preacher with a sun faded blue red sox cap whose voice cracks with excitement and wonder and who injects the still unmarred buoyancy of a ten year old who knows anything is possible. You can't see the mountain today but you know it's there. And I don't know what it means, but it feels good to be around people at 7am listening to a guy with whom you'd trade baseball cards and drink beers while watching a ballgame. As he spoke, I looked out to the west to a lone cottonwood standing firm in the snowfall; a single, sturdy tree on a desert at the edge of a massive gorge allowing the snow to collect on it, at the edge of my visibility, nothing behind it but a field of gray while people sing and recite and hug in many colors also on the edge of that wide opening. Something? It reminds me that I read an article last night on David Foster Wallace, a great writer who killed himself months ago at 46. In his last novel, an unfinished work, he wrote of an IRS agent who found himself in the grip of such immense boredom that he thought he'd never recover without hurting himself, or hurling himself away. But he finds a way to stick it out, to be right in it, to use it as practice, and the boredom fades into another state where there is nothing but openness, and he is joyful. He doesn't know what this is, and it doesn't seem like anything but he is spacious. I took that with me as I fell to sleep last night, and I had it with me at the sunrise service in the snow. I don't know what it is, but it exists. Practice, showing up, even if it's mechanical, will lead to joy and peace. Believe me, I know how simple and even trite that sounds. And it doesn't happen right away, and maybe not for a while, but it happens. And I'm not preaching Jesus or any religion, but there's something about showing up. And there's something about being there. I don't know what it is, but it's something.

Starting a Howl

Piles of tires
below a bridge
in New Jersey

A song on the radio
"What the world needs now
is love sweet love."

Nobody talking
the tires fading
from my perch
in the back
of the station wagon

On the way to Rockaway
the cousins,
mud in the backyard
from endless sprinkling

Dad switches the radio
to WNEW
a deep voice
recites the news

127 VC dead
only 4 Americans
there is movement
in the jungles
it is 88 degrees
in Hanoi

Brian, my counselor, is there
Colgate toothpaste and
Winstons taste good
like a cigarette should

Mom lights up
Dad rolls down
the window
my brother and I
choke in the back

The air smells of eggs
and leather
still no one talks
and the trees of Jersey thicken

Neighborhoods on the sides
dirty white and green houses
lean away
in the woods

I remember the tires
and see that commercial
of an Indian on the roadside
with a tear on his cheek.

Happy Hiker

April 6, 2009 at 7pm: Back on Devisadero in Taos, snow melted, sunny and mild, no need for helmets, 5 layers, or blocky gloves. I'm watching ravens fly over the cliff 20 yards in front of me. The 3/4 moon, misshapen but bright, had already risen high behind me but I couldn't quite get my arm out enough to include it.

Postcards from Breckenridge

We had mid winter conditions at Breckenridge April 3-5. It snowed about 10" on Saturday, after several feet during mid-late March. The temperature at 13,000+' when I took this picture was approximately 8 degrees with a northwest wind at 20 mph. Invigorating. It was, as they say, "hero snow" - powdery yet formed enough to keep you on top of the snow. I had not skied all season, but my ankle held up, and I was able to drop off the summit ridge and make turns on the steep bowls. It was so inspiring that I am getting a full pass to Taos Ski Valley for next season. I have to be up there, an ancient home for me. There is something at once immense and intimate above treeline. The world congeals into an atom up there. Although you can see for hundreds of miles, distance fades to a room made up of hushed strokes, sheer mountain walls flatten, and you live in the hollow smell of cold and the rotation of your knees.

Caveman of the Bonzai Forest II

This day I was hurting. Something had sapped my energy. I wasn't sure if it was the food I ate, a bug, or having overtaxed my body over the past few weeks. No gas. Sore muscles. A sagging spirit. Also, I had no socks and it was chilly. I'd left them at home, on the bed lined up perfectly to be noticed by me before I took off for town, but I didn't. I wanted to wear sandals. It was sunny and my feet wanted to feel the breeze and the sun. Oh, well, I did have my climbing shoes and they're so old that the fibers have softened and formed to my feet. They know me well, these shoes, we've hiked thousands of miles over rocks, snowdrifts, downed trees, and scree. The wind got under my jeans, just a little, but not enough to bother me.

And so I went feeling a lament, needing someone to talk to but at the same time not wanting to. Sometimes I feel like a rack of bones and I can imagine someone or some force scooping me up and laying me down on the edge of a creek under tall trees cushioned by the sponge of moss and matted straw. And in that imagining, I submit because that is what I am, a rack of tired bones with no sinew left who wants to be left to rest in the softness, listening to the creek for a long, long time. But I kept walking as I always do, knowing that there are things up there that will wake me up, teach me who I am, and who I am not. The wind kicked hard from the west and two women passed me, one whom I knew, but she did not recognize me with my new sunglasses and black hat pulled down tight. I said hi to both, but did not betray myself as I didn't have the strength to chitter.

Once I wound up through and over the boulder-strewn gully that is a steep shortcut to the trail higher up, I was feeling better, not good, but good enough to keep moving. Still, I was in a state where I couldn't pay attention to much, I just kept moving, head bowed forward, eyes soft focused about 20 feet in front of me. I had my camelbak on, but the water, like everything else that day, did not taste good, it had a metallic tinge and I sipped some and spat most of it.

A long, wavy purple cloud, like a prayer flag being whipped west to east, reached toward Tinkantananda, and cut the wobbly setting sun in two. I stopped and took a picture with my cell camera, but it cannot deal with the sunlight and the picture looked like a nuclear blast or a supernova over the desert. I erased it and kept moving, twisting up into the heart of the bonzai forest where it flattens out and rides the ridges above the Pueblo.

Sooner than I expected, I was at my lower sacred spot, the one I stop at when I'm feeling lethargic. It looks out over the velvety juniper and pinon covered meadow of the Pueblo rising toward the base of Tinkantananda and its brothers. Also, to the west through the jiggling branches of the rounded pinons you can see the Pedernal, the flattopped butte sitting south of Ghost Ranch that Georgia O'Keefe made famous in her paintings. 70 miles away on the horizon, it looked like a chunk of dark chocolate covered with a thin layer of raspberry sauce. My hunger sparked for the first time in several hours.

For some reason, when I was approaching the prayer spot, I had a feeling that I would find the sunglasses I had lost two weeks before and given up on. I knew I'd left them there, on a rock, while doing my prayers, but when I came for them the next several days, they were nowhere to be found, not hanging on a tree, sitting on a rock, or tumbled down the slope in the pine fluff. I was dejected for a few days by the image of somebody picking them up and pocketing them. That's not the etiquette or spirit of the trail. But, this time, as I came around the bend near the spot I started scanning the ground, the rocks, the branches. When I stopped on the rock where I do my motionless gratitude prayer, I felt my heart beat for several minutes and then turned left toward a tangle of dark dead branches that I'd looked at 5 or 6 times before with no luck. This time they were there, my sleek black Sunclouds, exactly where I originally thought they'd be. It was as sweet as seeing an old friend, and the fact that I'd just bought new ones that day (Sunclouds, too, but not as comfy on my nose), did not dampen it. A small miracle. Where had they been? Had I not been seeing?

I did my prayers and felt a bottom lip-protruding tenderness toward everything, a sense that things are "given back" or that they "never leave." I mean, I know these are sunglasses, but I really liked them, and they returned to me. It's hard to explain, but it was like forgiveness. It was quiet up there in the bonzai except for the wind. No animals stirred, the ravens were elsewhere. I was left with my heartbeat in my ears and the sun slipping under the purple cloud. I wanted to share this with someone, but it seemed ridiculous thing to tell. Then I thought of Harris, the guy living in the cave another 15 minutes up the trail. I had not seen him since that first time when he told me about the ravens. It had been weeks and I figured he'd moved on, maybe up the hills toward Angel Fire, maybe further east over the Pueblo. I wanted to talk to him. I had a feeling he'd put the sunglasses there for me to find.

The Sunclouds slid on like butter, giving me a synced feeling at bridge of my nose. It was getting dark, but I kept them on as I hit the trail down, and I found myself yelling up into the forest, "Thanks, Harris!"

When I got down, dusk was still hanging on and my legs were shaky. I went to the wooden bridge over the creek that leads to the South Boundary Trail and looked west along the water, listening, smelling the vapor, and noticing the tree shadows dancing on the young moss rising off the banks.