Glasnost Lost
A full 61 days after the Floridian dimpled chads were rendered null and void after the year 2000 presidential election in the United States of America, the bad ju ju arrived in Telluride, Colorado, the inevitable do-drop-in of the foul and gassy assassin perched, with a long, long rifle, on the Grassy Knoll of our times. As well as this: Sun spots. Solar storms. War. Winds. Muses, everywhere, muses galore, spinning wild tales as the electromagnetic energy, the very undulation of the earthen core, spun like an out-of-control compass. The first icy thaw of the Dot-Com Bust. Lightning? A load. The Skull & Crossbones War entering the planning stages. Global polarities red-shifting outward, great heaving seas getting colder, deeper; the air, warmer. The warlords, sharpening their knives, sharpening their stones. The Dead rising from their graves. The good spirits returning as the Ghost Dancers had promised. Dogs and cats, living together. Dubya taking his desk as the newly anointed Napoleonic National Executioner. And this: The Savage Pilgrim was fired from his job at the local bakery. This after joking with the owner that he should be sued for selling the locals bad milk. The Pilgrim exercised his free speech, and then paid for what a donut hole really costs. In other words, he was out in the cold in a resort town, in winter, at 8,700 feet above sea level.
Next, he wandered up the street on Colorado Avenue on a sun-drenched spring-like day -- despite it being February at 9,000 feet in the Rockies -- and commiserated with the rest of the high-life wannabe denizens of town, all of who were happy for him and sunning themselves on the smoker's bench in front of the Screaming Bean Cyber Cafe. Still, it hurts. This much we know about the Pilgrim. He's both sensitive and dysfunctional, a canary in the coleslaw mine. That the bad thing can come this far up the hill, isolated as they are in the southern Rockies, only goes to show how deeply entrenched the Machine Mind is on the American landscape.
But, recovery of what's lost is not only possible, it's inevitable. And under the right conditions, the transformation can take place in a blink of an eye.
"I'm getting over it already," the Savage Pilgrim says in movie star sunglasses, wide-open shirt collar and his patented leather pants, shiny as black licorice in the bright sun. "But it's a personal thing. It's the kids. The betrayal. I can understand ... but I cannot ... He gave me a check that said 'zero.' It was just being totally mean."
He hunched down in his seat, back in the glaze of the rejected. Looking at him in a slump of leather pants and mushed hair, it was easy to see how a Pharaoh might react. The Pilgrim, a creative genius with film scripts spinning their way up the food chain in Manhattan, is rendered null and void by the mere failure to fit in as a grunt laborer. He was fired by a man who, by all reports and my own understanding of the story. He was fired by a man who, despite being a devotee of mountain music Americana and a solid citizen in Telluride as entrepreneur and wise political player, is also a cutthroat mine boss of the 33rd degree, the very worst kind of low-paying capitalist exploitation creep. Another former Baked employee, a waster of time and scammer on the streets, now lives in the woods this winter. After being fired for giving free pastries from a throwaway bin to other street people, or "woodsies," one of the many who live in a network of yurts and small cabins nestled in the higher elevations.
A whole sub-culture of people inhabits these places, a Walden Pond ethos. Of course, the Savage Pilgrim is a city slicker, which means he prefers to "couch surf," yet another way to live free or die in Telluride. Sure, it's springy and warm and a guilty pleasure since everything points to still more global catastrophe, but it's colder than hell at night at 10,000 feet in southwestern Colorado.
"Fired from Baked," the Savage Pilgrim groans. "This is what happens when you go to work with leather pants."
OK, OK, it has been well established: They burn their witches everywhere. This is the way of the world, and others have already established that free speech in America is a crock. What's more deeply concerning is the fact that, even in utopia, the very worst are full of passionate efficiency.
Mere donut holes loosed upon the world.
~
The California Zephyr, which crashed the winter of 2001, was a happy enough ride for myself a month before, but then Amtrak is always a little dicey. Even my own safe trip was not without grim possibilities, or, even, consequences. That it then crashed only lent to the deeper mystery of its long traverse across the continent, well, at least from Chicago, through the Rockies, onward to San Francisco. The cause of the crash is still up in the air, but even if ruled as an accident it must mean ... something. Or so I believed.
"Maybe one of the golden spikes for the continental railroad gave out," I mused to my co-horts in Telluride, the paranoia working its way through this mountain haunt.
"Or, something else. One could just as easily imagine a group of barn-storming right wingers, as a kind of vigil and protest for Timothy McVeigh, America's least wanted murderous youth -- one could just as easily imagine something from out of the Turner Diaries."
Such had been in the case in Arizona, where Nazi youth calling themselves the Vipers derailed a train in the boon-dock desert of that state. When I was a kid a friend once told me you could derail a train by putting a quarter on a railroad track.e I never tried, but you could imagine the sparks that might make. Or, at least, a blink of a spark.
The "accident" being in the Midwest, in Iowa, where the train derailed for reasons unknown, with one dead and 90 injured, it's easy enough to see: It can happen here.
But such was the nature of the aura of this train. At least on my life trip. Which had become strange in other quarters. Leaving the Mordor of Boston, the gloomy post-election winter, where the very human face of the city seemed to cry out in a sort of despondency and anguish. Switching trains in Chicago, Ill. "Most likely at great terror," I wrote. But the original notebook is gone and no information is really available on what the true sources of my anxieties were.
"Carrying myself across the long distances always seems to sound a death rattle in me," I would most likely have said.
~
Dec. 13, 2000 will be remembered in history as the day our institutions conspired to fail us. If you haven't already forgotten and moved on to the consoling video stream of the virtual presidency, where President Martin Sheen says all the things we always wished our presidents would say, that drab Wednesday in American history was a very real, certainly material, corrosively visceral version of what we like to call convergence. Or, far better, convergent metamedia, now pouring through the anticipated cataclysm of the future like a bad-- but well publicized, rendered in 3D -- dream.
The whole constipated poop shoot of the dog-eared promise of the New World jammed into the screw-tight orifice of the next century and instilled an overwhelming dreadgeist of collective disappointment. Every human soul within earshot of any report or anguished groan over what the U.S. Supreme Court had failed to do: that is, be Supreme, and all voters, counted and uncounted, felt that gong of doom from the very bowels of hell.
"It Can't Happen Here," apparently, can. That much was obvious. Spreading like a contagion of fire across the networked landscape of the globe via talk shows, television news updates and e-mail flame war preventing even the most modest real estate developer's home page to upload in a slow a sludge ball of bad bandwidth as grief overdosed every pedestrian on Main Street, the deep truth we'd always expected, but never fully understood, pierced the broken heart and fogged the mind's eye of anyone able to read, think, love, hate and - especially -- vote.
If that had been it, from my view, I could of happily moved on, much in the same way that we push forward after the end of the Super Bowl by thinking about baseball or planning a snowboarding trip. But that ceremonial autopsy to the post-democratic ideal, with the suspected murderer, the corporate nation-state, winking like an O.J. Simpson after the verdict, wasn't all there was to it. No, if the end game of the 2000 presidential campaign ended the political playoffs with the bad call by the referees who refused to review the play, every conceivable valued institution of American life -- that is, my life -- joined in a chorus of screaming cats crushed beneath a steam roller called human fallibility.
It all made one think of that line by W.B. Yeats in "The Second Coming" about "mere anarchy loosed upon the world."
The tired fable, taught since grade school along with the story about Santa Claus, that stuff about the basic virtues of home, marriage, commitment, moving on up the ladder toward the protestant work ethic, then to the second floor of American myth of the techno-savvy capitalist as the benevolent shopping site to the world, then the top tier -- that we live in a free country, where speech is free, guaranteed by the First Amendment by the U.S. Constitution -- well, they all crashed like a house of cards.
To my unreliable, shell-shocked psyche, it was a sound much louder than the historic miracle of a mere decade ago, the fall of the Berlin Wall. You remember: When a little meme called "Glasnost," the post-Soviet call for "openness," a tiny word that nonetheless dissolved the antiquated authoritarian regime of a really terrible century in the acid bath of truth, first broadcast, on a daily basis, by Radio Free Europe.
As a result, I did the only thing he had the immediate means to do: I revolted. A private revolution, small yes, but potentially significant. What did I do? Well, it was a three-point strategy intended to disgrace every material bond to the earth within my immediate domain:
First, I refused to ever work in a corporate cube farm again (hah!). I vowed to vacate my cube at Access Internet Magazine, in Needham, Massachusetts, just a bus ride from Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau managed to tune out for an entire year, and the site of the "First Shot Heard Round the World," where a small band of well-networked colonials banded to slay the dragon, another guy named George.
Next, I resolved to disown my car, vying instead to work from home in order to write the God's honest truth, as far as my limited faculties could tell, for the remainder of my life (hah!, again). Or, the immediate future, whichever came first.
Finally, as my birthday loomed, Dec. 28, 2000, I refused to renew my driver's license. A small necessity to be declared officially expired, ironically, by the state of New Hampshire, which has the famous motto to mock this entire charade, "Live Free or Die."
By shedding this holy trinity of personal necessities in the hopes of reducing the impossible suffering of well maybe not mankind, but especially my own Job-like trek through Mythville, as well as to slow down the destruction of the biosphere, if just a little, I decided to become a living experiment in what we will now call the "science of descent." By destroying the very box-like weave of systematized ties to the world, this ongoing performance was cast as likely to end quickly or badly or both (true, so true). If there is ever a time to break free, it would certainly be when the System seems to be rendered ever so apparently obsolete.
"Impossible, you say? " I said, wild eyed, mocking my detractors. "I am going no code. Off the grid." Maybe. But for at least a short time, before the digitized deputy dawgs of Urizen hunted me down like one of the over aged guys in "Logan's Run," it has been at all points so far an instructive mapping of the basic problem of the inter-dependent ties to the autocratic demands of America the Database and the centralized city-zone of urban sprawl and decay.
~
I took a look at his pile of ashes on my desk in the Nugget Building, home of the old theater in Telluride where the soundtracks for the films thunder through the floorboards in the evening (usually a hellish noise, since that's where the popular arts are these days) and thought: "Well then, at least I'm a little farther down the road from my own failed dream of becoming a dysfunctional half-baked employee, a grunt laborer. That is to say, I'd only discovered a few hours before that I was unfit to sell carpets to the public. Overqualified, basically. So I went back up to my office to write some more ..."
And what do I think about (write), having failed to make an honest day's living: "A mere three months ago I was drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes in some grand old Boston hotel, doing research on Dr. Joseph Warren, the Grandmaster of New England, who, as head of the Boston Committee of Safety, sent three horsemen to warn the outlying villages that the Redcoats were coming.
"Well, they are back.
"And what do you know: I find out at the office an hour or so later that I'm too much of a loose cannon to be trusted with the 'vision' anymore. That is to say, my vision was too, um, visionary. It would possibly overwhelm a carefully constructed less-costs-less multi-media paradigm of this, the age of diminished e-expectations.
"There I was, only a few hours away from that point of no return, and I was transcribing the following words about the Jacobin Church in Paris, circa 1790 or so: 'But the chief priest and the speakers of this place, as we said, is Robispierre, the long-winded incorruptible man. What spirit of patriotism dwelt in men of those times, this one fact, it seems to us, will evince: That fifteen hundred human creatures, not bound to it, get quiet under the oratory of Robispierre; nay listened nightly, hour after hour, applausive; and gaped as for the word of life.' "
The effervescent writer, an editor named Tallien, as recorded in "Carlyle's Works of the Revolution, Volume IV, 1884," a scribble found on a great old bookshelf of all kinds of ancient texts at the hotel, described Robispierre as "The Trismegistus and Dalai-Lama of Patriot Men."
A few hours from that momentous post-mortem on democracy, on Dec. 13, 2000, when the U.S. Supreme Court made George W. Bush president by default, I was molesting a 116-year-old book about a still earlier time when a civic leader -- indeed, a revolutionary and visionary -- could be compared to a mythical metaphysical Prometheus and another cat who comes around every century or so like some reincarnated sparrow who arrives, like clockwork, at cosmic San Juan Capistrano.
But a full 61 days after the dimpled chads are rendered void by the Void, more interruptions were on the way.
~
I remember the sunlight fading as the train headed west through the Berkshires, a cigarette along the plank in Springfield, Mass., supposed birthplace of basketball, most certainly of all the attendant regrets of leaving home after two years of dot-com life, as well as a family, in Boston. Across the white-carpeted forests of the East we moved, with the train sounding off a warning and celebration in each small burgh along the line. With each hour, the light seemed friendlier, less closed in as we left the horizon-less maze of New England. That first night we stopped for a couple of hours in Albany, New York. A line was broken on one of the cars. There was a lot of commotion and confusion about hook-ups and connectivity. The conductors told stories and smoked.
I walked the length of the interior to the dining car, which was pitch black but still serving by candlelight. I thought of the last and only voyage of the Titanic. An elderly woman and a little girl sat down to dinner. It was a bit uncomfortable, at first, but I eased into it, telling the story of how the dragon slain by St. Patrick was really a dinosaur, the last of it's kind.
"In hindsight," I said, playing on the part of the worldly storyteller, "the pre-historic lizard, which had only come out for one brief gasp of air after living for so, so long, deep beneath the earth. Perhaps he would have been more appreciated as a relic from some ancient time, a novelty to draw the crowds. But preservation efforts were unheard of then. And so, the only remaining information about the dragon is this: He tasted a lot like chicken."
Even though I was always one to attempt to blow a small child's mind, I hesitated at the telling of the story of Joseph of Arimethea, who he had been reading about on that headlight into the night toward Chicago, about how he had lost the Holy Grail during sea travel on the way to Albion, as in England. Another book, "Rex Deus," a capably written historical tome, revealed the mysteries of the ancient Rosencruz, or at least that's my take on it. The revelations of the book, that Jesus had sired two children, and may have survived his apparent execution, and that the ruling monarchies of France, England and Scotland were connected to the bloodline of Jesus and King David and so on ... the kind of ancient mystery that makes a Steven Spielberg film laughably imprecise, in terms of the larger universe around us.
Then we were off again. The train's horn is a safety and comfort for all traders in the deal. That such peace could lead anyone to disaster, at that point, especially after a couple of bourbons on the rocks in the observation deck, was well beyond all of the hocus pocus I could imagine.
~
Until Toledo. A town for which hocus pocus has little practical use. It was 7:57 a.m. on Jan. 23, 2001, dawn at the Amtrak Station in Toledo, Ohio. Drug interdiction hour. Five Federal Agents, although they didn't show much ID to anyone, since the passengers were asleep, rousting the train awake. They hit mostly the Latin-looking men, many of whom could not speak English. They were asked about drugs, about where they were going. Asked if they had tickets. A conductor's job.
The Latinos only gave scared no-comprende nods. Racial profiling was the technique here, even if the agents also rousted the white punk with the blue hair, it was still an alternative tribe to whatever passes for the social norm in the center of god-forsaken Ohio, the ice floes of the river completely encasing the town in a grimy industrial cesspool of gray, bleak permanence.
But I thought I knew my Fourth Amendment rights, presumed it worked that same way for others, and figured the guys sleeping on the train might have access too.
"Improbable cause," I said out loud, in the direction of the melee. "You can't do that. It's a violation of the Fourth Amendment."
They all looked up. The evil eyes, the scanners. "You a lawyer or something?" said one. "Watching too much TV," said the other. "Yes," I smarted back. "I went to Harvard." A lie. I attended a music piracy seminar once. "You can't do this." I repeated. "You don't have probable cause."
One of the interdicks, wearing a nice suede leather jacket, like the kind a rancher might wear, who said I had been watching too much TV -- when I had in fact been reading too much Alexis de Tocqueville -- started asking me questions. Such as: "How would you like to get off the train and stay in Toledo?" He looked out the window. Morning was frozen and the river was one great ice floe covering the state. "No, I won't be staying here," I said. "But you will," muttering under my breath as I flew out of the car.
Out in the Toledo morning air before my so-called "disruptors of descent" really started to show, hurrying out of the train to smoke, thinking about the Pretenders, "Hey, O, way to go Oh-i-I-I-o." And I thought Boston, the land of Thomas Paine, was bad. Mordor was 1,000 miles away by now. That's what I was trying to get away from.
Back on the train, a West Indian woman started asking me questions, said she wanted to file a report about the raid. It became on ongoing matter of conversation during the day. She was some kind of academic freedom fighter from Berkeley, an attractive Indian or Asian woman with long dark hair, and what had happened had fit a paper she had been writing. The feds had found nothing, and the same group of what turned out to be Mexicans under the supervision of an interpreter, were by this time anxiously waiting for whatever might be in store for them in Chicago.
The remainder of the morning ride consisted of reading the headlines in the smoking car, on the observation deck or in the kitchen. "Bush ends overseas abortion funding," reads the headline for Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2001. "President revives plan on family-planning abroad." Just as I noted this, a guy in the observation car tells his friend, "That dang Bush, he's going to let them drill new oil wells in Alaska."
Another headline: "Four escapees caught, one dead."
Or, from long before, "Four dead in O-h-I-O!"
~
There was that bulgy woman's face, my ex mother-in-law, screaming at me, "Heathen! Heathen! Why don't you read something good for you, like the Bible? Not those stupidheads you call heroes. They are all screwed up, all of them." Her face is a big and red, blood-dimmed authoritarian swimming pool from God's forsaken lake a fire.
A flood of his life's decisions, mainly the bad ones, ping-pong through the head. If I'd only done this, resisted my ego on that, had gotten real on the other. And now this, this fat face in a blond mop of over-the-hill hair, screaming at me about reading Salman Rushdie. Instead of the Bible. Well, let's see, i'd be in an entirely different place, for sure, if i'd been reading the Bible. In fact, from year to year, i'd use it like the I-Ching, let pages open themselves, in hopes they might speak to me. Maybe i'd be married still, in Phoenix, living in the suburbs, like a squirrel counting my nuts for the winter, and still listening to this blather from this charismatic miscreant, in my own home, no less.
However, in less time than it took for the U.S. Marines to find Noriega in Panama, I grabbed my soon-to-be-first-ex-mother in law by the arm and ushered her out the front living room door. Once the lock was secured, as she tried to force her way back in, I went back to reading Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses." Or tried to as his hands shook from the adrenalin rush.
Really, it's a hilarious book.
~
Now I’m back in the desert, with my notes meant for poems written in a green, nine-and-a-half by six-inch notebook. Perhaps if I'd left my thoughts unrecorded in that spring season, I would have never realized the unspeakable loneliness in this marriage. My future X knew it, which is why she eventually burned the notebook in the backyard barbecue. She was, like her charismatic Christian mother, the living microcosm of an authoritarian regime. A real reactionary. A rage-a-holic, most certainly, in disagreement with those words, my poor sad truth.
In my college days at the University of Arizona, I believed I was a poet, but a poet was no longer dangerous to any society. Once, the highest compliment that could be paid to a writer was to be burned at the stake or censored or sent to the Gulag. His ideas would run against the prevailing current, and the government would have no choice but to try to silence him, thus martyring him for future readers, and thus, the world would be moved further along. Yet, it was hard to see how it could be thus in a technological, democratic, pop-culture driven society. I couldn't make the connection. How could I know that the dissatisfaction as revealed in that notebook would, in fact, ignite a revolution in my small Web of life.
What did I have to be dissatisfied about? A wife, three kids, a crazy dog, a professional career in journalism that basically kept us more than just afloat. Barely, yes, but floating all the same. The Baby Boom was over, after all. The prosperity my mother and father had enjoyed and striven for held little promise as we walked a slow march into a new century. On that spring day, it finally broke loose. I looked at the words in his notebook and wondered why they were so dark: the tone seemed to be that of a prisoner who lived in a state of constant contradiction against his very nature; a secret self, working beneath the autocratic empire of the bedroom.
I remember being afraid to go home. The long straight city streets leading through the scatterbrained signage of Phoenix hinted at an ugliness of the suburban southwest. Fast food joints, convenience stores, strips malls and every now and then rows of track-homes cross the eyes. At each stoplight, there was back pain, the endless shifting of the truck's gears, and the anxious pressure of being surrounded by the city, of what kind of moods awaited me at home.
I pulled into the driveway and sighed. There were a few boards piled on the front lawn that my son had fashioned into a jumping ramp for skateboards, and a few new dents in the garage door from the past weekend's tossing the baseball around. I opened the door and there was my son, twittering on the nobs of a video game while he lay on the couch. He barely moved and there was a small beeping sound from his hand-held machine. Not expecting a reaction upon arrival, I moved toward the entertainment center console, checking for any mail. There were a few bills, an ominous looking certified letter from the IRS, assorted junk mail, and a couple of packages, no doubt new compact disks to be to reviewed for the rock magazine. I opened the first package immediately, pulling out something post-punk, or, maybe retro. Immediately aware of its unsuitable nature for my censorious wife's scanning eyes, I threw it in the cabinet, putting it beneath a slew of other CDs that would get attention later that night. I opened the other package, a jazz disc, which would be hard to say anything about since it wouldn't contain any offensive lyrics to hail as the new bad boys of rock. I threw it on top of the pile in the cabinet as well and gave pause to Iggy Pop.
A decision was brewing inside, moving from the back of the mind to the front. All of those things I'd ever wished for had never actually been considered. I sleepwalked into adult years, reacting to the merely formal expectations of finding a girl, making a marriage, the constant question of whether to have children. One would not call it an expectation, it seemed to happen naturally, as if I were an actor in a play in which the lines had been written from a dependable author who had the essence of life down to a biological science. Survival is everything, ya know, perpetuating the DNA, for what reason we cannot specify.
So that day in his mid 30s, the course I'd led found set me drifting. I sat on the couch, twittered on some poetry, then reaching for the headphones for loud music: a rock critic living in a charismatic Christian's home. The music is by the seminal L.A. punk band, X, the sound of late century central city sprawl in flames.
My eyes are closed as I lay on the couch, hoping to find a few moments of disengagement, to marvel at the dichotomy of the male and female voices from both heaven and hell. Then, I am stunned back to the suburbs by future X, who is poking, poking, poking. Her expression has that stormy, bleary eye contact of someone who is ready for a fight. She began one of her usual discourses on his behavior, what she often refers to as Short Attention Span Theater.
"You seem so frantic," she says, her hands on her hips, looking down. "At one time you show up, start reading a book, and then I look up again, and you are on your way out the door, sneaking a joint. Now look at your lazy ass. I've got things to do around the house, you know. I need help."
She has her dishwater blond hair up in a Bam Bam bush on top of her head, wearing a jeans skirt and tennis shoes, very much in her work detachment mode. Soon she would be strutting around the house, slamming cabinet doors and making everyone sure it was busy time in that passive aggressive way. You know: the kind of gal who saw no problem with running the vacuum cleaner into the wee hours of the night.
"You're shifty. You are stuck in sand, sinking in sand, or maybe just trying to avoid sinking in sand," she says. "Look at this place," she thumbs one of the books he's left half opened on couch. "How many books can one person read at once, anyway?
"Sometimes you seem so quiet, and then you are talking so fast it's like you are some drug. Why can't you relax, why can't you stop worrying about where you will be next. You just want to hang out in bars and smoke. I mean, why go all of the way to a public place to spend your time alone, if that's what you are really doing?"
That look in her eye? The bulldog that couldn't let go of those ever-tightening categories of perpetual blame. Angrier words were exchanged, neither side listening, and somehow I managed to leave, though at some cost, her haven taken the notebook and holding it up, scouring, her face with a challenging smile, as if to indicate, "Ah ha, I've got it," as she took it and left the room.
Within a week I'd left her. The notebook had been read then fricasseed, and then an attempt had been made to restore the charred notebook for legal purposes. Then she tried to ram me with her car, chasing me for nearly five miles until I led her right into the police station parking lot. Then, having taken to the streets of Phoenix in the need of disguising locations, I bounced around like a wannabe TV show fugitive, trying to arrange lawyers, new living digs, dealing with a capably diabolical X, and, the possibility that my soon-to-be ex-wife might try to find me and kill me. The paranoia was running unchecked. At work they called me "McGyver" because I was always looking for alternative exits to the surroundings. There were the urgings of my mother in law, who spoke in tongues and filibustered his future X into devious modes of attack. It was a multi-media event: flyers left on car windows, lies sent out through still-novice Christian advocacy sites, phone abuse. There were ugly late-night phone calls and cruel, teasing seductions. Before long, there would be the assault at the office, the crossing restraining orders, the use of the children as hostages in the marriage, but more than anything else, my descent into the maze of adulterated windows and doors in an exploration of my private novelty gene.
~
Nonetheless, as we moved West on this fabled railroad line that would eventually take me to the Rockies, the California Zephyr, all of the way to Grand Junction, Colorado, at the base of Grand Mesa, where the Colorado River winds its own sacred trail southwesterly. The destination: Telluride, Colorado. Which would require a bus jaunt to Montrose, with a driver who turned out to be a real asshole (but who wouldn't be, taking these routes over and over through such climes), as well as a helpful hitch with a local Jack Jehovah Ute, Leroy Morales, in a big green pickup truck up the San Miguel River Canyon to this mountain resort town, isolated as it is in rocky highlands of the San Juans of southwestern Colorado.
A latter-day Zephyr rider from Telluride didn't fare so well. His experience a month later in the coach car, which ended up on its side, after sliding down a 20-foot embankment, was more harrowing.
"I was just lying down to sleep when I heard a rumbling and a screeching sound -- the brakes maybe," said Noah McKittrick, who had also been bound for Grand Junction. "The lights flickered off and the car tumbled over. We were thrown about. It was incredibly disorienting. When we stopped, I was lying on the windows, which was now the floor of the car. People were crying and their kids were screaming for their parents. It was over in five seconds."
The Zephyr was traveling at 53 miles per hour, which is a lot slower than its usual 80 miles per hour, but anyone who has taken an Amtrak line from Boston to New York, or on the Eastern Seaboard at all, knows fully well the fallen nature of its infrastructure. Before the crash, McKittrick said his dinner companions, experienced train travelers, were commenting on how bad the tracks in Iowa were. "For two hours before the crash, the train was shaking like turbulence on a plane."
~
Spencer was a crazy family dog, most definitely also the beholder of the novelty gene. But he got that from Daisy, a purebred beagle.
On the day the he first landed in the suburbs of Phoenix, when I was just a boy, maybe 15, the heat was 120 degrees and the back yard, a one-acre field of white hot dust. The next day, hail stones the size of Hope diamonds pelted puffs of dust onto the phosphorescent ground as Daisy, Spencer's mother, despite the hellfire from the sky, chased around the yard, pouncing on each poof, steam rising on the sand. Next, a freak tornado tore through the neighborhood, and the only thing in its path, mainly, or house, was left intact.
Daisy was a runner, though. This was before she learned things about the neighborhood on midnight sneak outs. Before she'd gone through the rancheria of back yards, golf courses, a river park basin, the very edges of the desert, places Spencer would explore and go beyond. Well before he'd caused a fight with the family across the street. Well before the subdivision was made safe from the last horny toad lizard, well before his father ran over that same neighbor's pet snake, which had escaped, in the driveway: Long before the paradisiacal and counter-intuitive creation dream of Phoenix, city of the great Sonoran Desert.
As a mongrel beagle of Daisy, Spencer couldn't be trained, thus keeping him the place of the long line of pets that drove my father to distraction.
"Here boy, good boy, here Spencer," he'd say. "Sit, roll, dammit, do something!"
I'd sit and watch this comedy, a young teen in the suburbs, up in a willow. I was always up in trees. Despite the call, all Spencer could do was run up and down the fence, occasionally poking his nose through holes in the ground beneath. Spencer was a barker, too, howling at all hours, never seeming to run out of energy. Spencer had the novelty gene. Or perhaps he'd just learned it from his family.
Spencer was a real bastard.
~
This is in Colorado, where I was headed. The Great Plains all too well included in the disasters going on from Coast to Coast, but I thought about adding a few more words, another deck, "and one more at large heading home."
"The California Zephyr begins in Chicago and makes its way toward Denver," I wrote, remembering the last two days of the train trek across the nation. "By nightfall I meet one of two or three of the strangest characters, including the Zen-master man, a drunk cowboy artist named Charlie, who discussed Reiki therapy, meditation and Swedenborgian metaphysics. He disappeared somewhere in the night, in Iowa, I believe. He said: Have you seen the sun behind the sun, the trees behind the trees? Then, the next morning, in Denver, I noticed two men, one with a Masonic emblem on his coat, the other leading a doddering elderly gentleman on the train. Curious about the Freemasons after a lot of study and amazement about it in Boston, I asked who the elderly man was. The large man in the coat said he was the Grandmaster of the Freemasons for the entire United States of America.
"So once we headed up a winding trail into Rockies, I handed him my copy of 'Rex Deus.'
"Did Jesus survive?" I asked him. "Oh, that's what some say," he said, reading the book for a couple of hours with great interest. Not ever saying much. But there seemed to be something on this mystery train that was more than he could perceive, his work on this world pretty much accomplished. At one other point toward the end of the line, the train stopped for some time, in order to avoid an accident. In the canyons near Gunnison, the observation deck announcer pointed passenger's eyes to a cave in the wall, high up on the cliff. Safe enough place for anything, from anyone, anywhere, be it the President of the United States, or, the DEA. Solar storms. All the rest.
"I suppose you could worry about rock slides. No place is really safe, I guess."
~
A full 61 days after the dimpled chads are rendered void by the Void, more interruptions are on the way.
Stephen the Scout, the local half-blood Native American and cinematographer without a camera, whose family comes from big-time money in Oklahoma, has entered the building. His timing, too, is amazing. He's a pony-tailed self-made shaman who is wired as always with the kind of energy and insight that, if I didn't know any better, might be described as superhuman. Whenever Stephen the Scout speaks, which is almost all of the time, the room shakes with the booming voice of a post-hippie pony-tailed preacher on the prairie.
Like the rest of us, without work. Plenty of time on our hands. I wished I had a nickel for everyone he met in Telluride who claimed be a shaman. Ya know: Those who really are keep it to themselves.
"We've got to start pimping Waldorf," he says, putting the little dog on his lap and trying on my new beret for size. "Do you know how much puppies of Yorkshire terriers cost? Five hundred bucks, that's how much. I mean, even the dog is a Knights Templar Freemason dog, look at him."
The little tyke, brown and black with a pink tongue and more brains than most four-year-old kids, is a made-for-TV wunderkind. Waldorf is well beyond mere stupid pet tricks and is, in fact, more human than will ever get credit for, due no doubt to his good breeding and the fact his owner is a four-letter control freak. The dog is also the ultimate chick magnet in such watering stations as The Last Dollar Saloon. Now Stephen the Scout is addressing the dog directly in a "little people" whine that only dogs can understand.
"My mom said my whole life, you need to be an architect. If I'd only listened to my mom, but instead, we are dog trainers," he says in his doggie falsetto. "Your dad don't got no happy hour money, so you can't go to the bars and be with your buddies, beggin' for human food."
Oh yeah, the worm had turned. The witches, geeks and cyber sages were on the run, the lost scouts and the down-and-outs, sifting through the trash for food, sifting through the antique stores, the pawn shops, the big deep sleeper closets, the empty spaces, all for a sign of economic viability that they could recycle from the heady days of the so-called Gold Rush. Meanwhile, the local realtors were chasing their down spiral of foiled deals, fat cats pulling out of their agreements, bailing on their rent, selling their ranches considered to be their priceless, cherished dreams only a week before.
I had come to believe what veryone touched by the dot-com bust privately discovered: We are all not as rich as we only too recently, … um … thought.
"But all the same," I say, in one of those annoying, unrealistic, pseudo-positivist mood swings, "we are all rich beyond our wildest dreams, if we can only see the trees behind the trees, the sun behind the sun.
"Because if the quest is about anything, it's about finding the roots for the new trees now planted in the realm of the invalidated. And believe me, at the end of this foul rainbow, painted by carbon and alien atoms messing with the thyroid glands of everyone who will ever be, living or unborn … there is this deep, broad, humming sound beneath the surface of everything. The sun beams, pelting us, the solar storm causing vibrations … from the collision of atoms … in the very core of the earth. You would have to be numb on a lifetime of ludes, at this point, not to be shaken up by it.
"My problem is I'm not sure if it's the voice of the shaking comes from hell, heaven, or, both.
"If it's the sound of the Machine Mind, well, pay no heed, it's simply the demiurge uncoiling beneath our feet. If it's the sound of the Creator, yes, the thing outside the thing, like a train rolling down a hill, heading for us all, with one last chance offered for redemption, well then, maybe we should listen harder."
Maybe we should go back to the beginning; which is to say, go back to the end, on Dec. 13, 2000, when the dimpled chads were rendered null by the all-too-vulnerable architect of the Void. When the sky turned to fire, repeatedly.
~
Yesterday came suddenly, sang Paul McCartney all those years ago.
I was 12 years old, no doubt watching "Wallace and Ladmo." Little beep, beep, beeps went up on the TV screen (if those weather system warnings on the bulletin bar on the bottom screen actually worked like that, back then).
Hard to remember, he says.
I had just moved from Texas to the Country Estates subdivision at 58th Place and Shea Boulevard six days before. On the seventh day, the rain came.
Well, not so much rain. At least, not at first. The details of that day still linger. The visual impact the storm of 1972 created is still in his expressions better than any DVD could possibly replicate. It was 32 years ago in 2004. Imagine. See it. Feel it. Almost smell it. The ozone in the days of Oz!
Back then a new plat in the Country Estates subdivision was like a cookie-cutter parcel of the moon. Sure, there was mesquite all over, but once the fences sliced-and-diced the place, all of the new back yards were, until the landscaper arrived, squared-off hotbeds of fine whitish, powdery dust. On that day or any other, the dust would get stirred up into swirls of volatile air, called "Dust Devils."
Arizona still gets "Dust Devils" now and then, but with the paradising effect that's gone on since these bad 'ol days, the name is being lost with all of the horny toads, rattlers and coyotes running for cover from civilization. Suddenly, it gets windy. Then, it's not. You'd hardly notice it. But on that day, June 22, 1972, the whole greater Paradise Valley area, basically the Indian Bend Wash basin, from Mummy Mountain to the McDowell Mountains, was a whirling set of such dervishes, a practical ballet performance, as weather patterns go.
Anyway, I tell this story to newcomers to Arizona a lot because it teaches something about the monsoons (which this wasn't) and the history of Scottsdale (a lost great body of knowledge that exists, if it exists at all, in the archives of the old Scottsdale Progress and the Scottsdale Historical Society).
The story doesn't actually begin with my watching "Wallace and Ladmo," the old TV kids show, but with what I was doing when my dad came home as he was watching Wallace, and, of course, Ladmo.
He was mad about something. Dad was mad. Not Ladmo and his Lincoln-esque top hat, where is Waldo shirt. He was upset, you see, because he just got back from talking to some insurance agent. The story begins when dad said, right after coming through the door: "They wanted us to buy flood insurance. Those (bleeps!). Don't they know this is the desert?"
Country Estates is on the northern banks of the Indian Bend Wash. With the exception of a few golf courses, as it flowed to the Salt River, it was still a desert wash with mesquite and sage and rabbits and mice and prairie dogs. In the spring, lots and lots of butterflies. When it rained, even the slightest, downtown Scottsdale would be in need of Noah's Ark.
The next start of the story, after the beeping TV warning, after dad's now famous last words, flows in this direction: Hail stones, the size of golf balls, plopping, puft, puft, puft, into super-heated, white hot dust. Then the wind came. Then came some more. Every dot of dust and debris not tied down flew by sideways by the windows, as if the Creator were converting the new suburban environment into something akin to a black day on Mars.
The roof began to wail. Fences picked up and were lifted off as wind sails in a scene from the black-and-white segment of "The Wizard of Oz."
Then, I looked out the window, and saw a tower, a dirt vortex, well up into the sky, up and out of the frame, cascading off nearby Mummy Mountain.
Now, even before this, tornadoes have freaked me out. Sure, Dorothy's little house-spin into the air, up and back and down into Oz, always left a strong impression. But also this: Members of my grandfather's immediate family, including his mother and father, had been killed by a tornado in West Texas (and he had to raise his younger siblings by himself as a teen). So, fear of tornadoes is pretty much in the McDaniel DNA.
So, what did I do? Run? Scream? Duck and cover? No. I decided to go outside and get a better view. Went through the front door. Looked up. It was a big, brown, swirling behemoth. Or, that's what the eyes, as dust bits pelted hid face and sandblasted hid hair and his mother screamed "Get back in here!" - that's what my eyes still feel, see and remember.
There was no time to do the classic, heartland-style, get-into-the-cellar maneuver. No time to even get into the hallway, away from the windows. But by God's grace (as well as the seeming lack of it) the tornado hit the house across the street, destroyed a roof, killed their dog, hopped then over the entire Country Estates neighborhood, and then landed again, turning Shea Boulevard and points northward into a Vietnam era-, Robert McNamara-style playground pathway of near total destruction. Hundreds of homes had varying degrees of damage. Uncounted numbers were rendered, national-TV-news style, into images of flattened rubble.
Then, the winds passed. A half-mile away, looking toward Shea, a boulevard named after a Union General at Gettysburg, you could see nothing but the wrecked frames of bombed-out homes and flashing red emergency lights.
Then, it began to rain. In fact, it rained for a day. In fact, it rained four inches in four hours. The Indian Bend Wash became the Indian Bend River. It must have been a mile-wide muddy river, too. But our family never knew. We couldn't even step out of the door for three days as the wash, our street, now a river, flowed on by with every bit of debris and clutter it could pick up. A wash. Indeed! A major Maytag this so-called "Paradise Valley" will always be, say, every hundred years or so.
Now, we could go on and on about not having electricity or water for a week. Or, about how some official landed in a helicopter behind their house, looked around, and then left. How the governor came to bless us with his utter and useless amazement. I could thank the Lord for sparing us but punishing the neighborhood (it was their turn, after all) with a kind of creative whimsy, and yes, a cosmic sense of timing and selectivity.
It was, after all, right after the first official day of the summer. You could talk about solstices and the equinox and all ...You could ask, why them, but not us? It would be futile, of course, unless you have lived it, to try to fully explain the impact of this storm on the family, and yes, this burgeoning city called Scottsdale. The number of times I have told this story to people.
The day I faced the tornado.
~
So Spencer and had the novelty gene, and on the day the tornado came, I saw it in the window. Dust was blowing all around, but he saw it there, bigger than the black and white version in the Wizard of Oz. I ran outside. Pinpricks of dust hitting my face and my mother screaming to get into the house. I leaned into the wind. It ran hot and cold.
The tornado high in view, I saw it tear a roof off a house down the street, and went back inside, satisfied that my scouting report through the window was correct. We barricaded in the hallway, or tried to, but there wasn't enough time. God knows what was running through my father's mind because his father's family had been killed by a tornado in West Texas. God knows what's in a dog's mind when the sky had been turned upside down. All that is known is after the winds died down, after the new saplings were pulled out of the ground, after it seemed liked the wind picked up their back yard and deposited it somewhere west of their neighborhood, Spencer was gone.
~
It is the mid-1980s and Ty Hardin's agent in Beverly Hills keeps leaving messages, but lately, Hardin is not returning his calls. Hardin was the voice and leader of the so-called Arizona Patriots, the radical right-wing fringe group that had dropped out of public view. Except when they met out in the woods to shoot guns and maybe spout off about regional democracy, starting a new country and so on. Not coincidentally, Hardin, too, dropped out of sight.fe as a living, breathing Cowboy picture movie star.
Those who saw him in his last days in town said he had one thing on his mind: Getting back into the movies. A realtor involved with the sale of his home said when he last saw Hardin, a few days before he left for Northern California, all the former television star from the "Bronco Layne" Western series in the 1950s was to talk about the good old days of Hollywood.
The former star was extremely disappointed that the realtor didn't remember an old war movie he had played in. He talked less about his conspiracy theories on Jewish bankers and the one-world government to come. Nothing about the Posse Commitatus, which the Patriots had linked up to as a co-conspiracy unto itself. Nothing about the revolution to come. Nothing about the U.S. Constitution, about the right to bear arms, indeed, the demand to do so.
~
We looked for him for a week. First we walked past the demolished homes in the area, marveling at their bombed-out look. As a 10-year-old boy, the inconvenience this caused to our neighbors was hardly a factor. It seemed fun out there, fun to be a searcher in bombed-out Phoenix, the subdivision seriously in decline due to the storm. Worst hit were the people down the street, who we had a running feud with because they were always the ones who called to get Spencer picked up by the animal control officer. Once, when we'd returned from a sailing trip to San Diego, Spencer was missing from the back yard. I knew immediately what had happened. I rushed across the street, being a hot-headed 15-year-old, and started yelling at the neighbor, Rosey something something, who was dead drunk when she answered the door. "You give my dog back," I shouted. "You have no right." They, of course, did have a right.
Leash laws mandated by the homeowners' committee being fairly clear. When Spencer was recovered from the animal shelter, he continued to pursue his novelty exploits, eventually getting to the point that he could leap the height of our wood fence in the backyard. Had to be six feet. It was only a matter of time, at least he had the potential, to jump the fence. Then the storm came and we had to resolve ourselves to the image of Spencer spinning away into the clouds. These were happy days for father.
~
A few days later I had my first psychic experience. It was during a baseball game. Bats and balls and the hopes of being a professional baseball player being my only real concern. That and the skinny blonde girl who was watching the game in the bleachers. They were behind, maybe by a few runs. The Firebirds were up to bat. I sat on the bench, and he had this feeling come over me, that heaviness from within. He thought that perhaps he was feeling ill. It was then thought I saw the whole thing before, one, two, three batters ahead -- I knew that each one would reach base and visualized the bat hitting a line drive to right field and their team winning the game. That's exactly what happened. When it was his turn to bat, I half-consciously lined the ball to right, just as I pictured it, willed it, in my brain. I was buried by my teammates, and after the game that skinny blonde girl gave me my first kiss. His braces, unfortunately, cutting her lip pretty good.
When they came home, Spencer was at the doorstep. Historians can only wonder about the tales he could have told of flying over Phoenix and out into the desert.
~
There McDaniel was, meandering in an automobile's deep sea dive into the cesspool of Boston traffic, on his way to work in Needham, Massachusetts, wondering if he would make it before his kidney burst from drinking too much coffee, and deciding a little research on his book at the old hotel in Boston would be better than actually completing the 40-mile commute to his office cube.
Which he could barely look at anymore ... O, the stories he needed to tell.
~
So where was he? Oh yeah, that's right, near Walden Pond, closer to White Pond, in Concord, where havoc gets played on cell phones when military surveillance craft fly overhead, since this little getaway is directly in the flight path to Hanscom AFB.
But now he is at the train depot in West Concord and some kind of supply or fuel engine is speeding by, blowing through everything so fast along that commuter rail line that it blew the Sampoerna cigarette right out of his hands and sent leaves and trash following its wake down the track.
A portentous hue, indeed.
As he waited, he realized: no train fare. One dollar in his pocket, and the check for the recently sold 1990 Honda Civic wouldn't clear for another hour or more. So into the West Concord coffee shop at the depot he went, writing out a check for $44 for a 12-ticket pass, for the upcoming days to get his silly ass and belongings to Mythville.
The commuter rail arrived on time. On their way, McDaniel watched the increasingly bare trees go by as the sunlight lit his face brightly down to Boston through Lincoln, Brandeis, Waltham, Cambridge, Porter Square, all of the way to North Station, which is directly below the Fleet Center, which of late had been amply amplified with a stadium-sized wall mural of an American flag, in 2001 one of the most memorable icons of the Hub.
What happened next is left for the historians to ponder in a series of blogs posted at his Web site, Mythville.blogspot.com/.
"Now I have a new problem," he states to imagined readers (at the time there were none). "While the depot in West Concord would take a check for still more 12-ticket rides to get my silly ass to Mythville, the guy behind the glass at the ticket counter in North Station wouldn't take a check. So there I am, 12 minutes away from my next commuter rail out of town to Mythville, and I have no money. So I figure: I'm in the Fleet Center, right? I have a Fleet account, right? Should be easy enough to just go outside the door and get money at a Fleet machine since by this time the check for the car has cleared.
"O shit, that reminds me. I forgot a key ingredient for this tale: What I packed for the trip. That would be one backpack (black) full of books (heavy), one computer carrying case device that I stuffed fully loaded with my poetry and writings (heavier still since I'm rarely able to lighten up), one black suitcase with wheels, also full of books, which I actually happened to purchase at my as then of yet unrealized Mythville exactly a year ago. Or almost exactly a year ago. Sometimes the mind does get hazy, but not very often when I'm communicatin' in this Mythappropriatin' Nation.
"The first day after I sold my car, which I had purchased two months ago with my last unemployment check from the State of Massachusetts, I carried the license plates with me as I took the commuter rail from town to town. Let's see. That day I did Boston and Beverly and Somerville and Cambridge. Actually, Somerville and Cambridge twice. Total cost: $6.
"Today I opened my mail, sent to me from the civil servants for the town of Concord, Mass., site of the so-called `Shot heard Round the World.' Actually, I got two pieces of mail in Concord over the weekend. The first was a traffic complaint from the town of Hamilton. It said they were suspending my Arizona driver's license, which that state had given me with the agreement that it would last until 12/28/2024. Gets quite a rise out of the pretty girls at the banks when I'm trying to cash my freelance writing checks. The State of Arizona wants people to keep on driving for a long time. So they fail to build much in the way of public transportation, and then people get to drive for a long time. But that's not for me. I guess I didn't tow their line. Or, at least, I didn't in Massachusetts. I mean, I really was on the way to get my car approved, finally, with its inspection sticker. It was going to be the second time I went to the inspection place. Spent a total of $60 on fees, another $60 to get new tires, which they had said weren't safe enough for New England roads (which really are truly unsafe), and now they wanted another $50 because some police officer happened to notice that my sticker was of the wrong color. Platial profiling, I think they call it ...
"Since I gave up my car as an act, OK, OK, an experiment in civil disobedience (and not because I'm a drunk, because I'm not), but also as a statement of global citizenship, I figured this letter in the mail (well, both of them), I figured the letter from the Hamilton District Court signified the beginning of a kind of understated (Hmmm, unstated) social contract. I wouldn't pay their $50 fee, even if I was in compliance (or on the way to buying tires, in order to comply), and they would agree to take care of me by making sure I stayed off the road with anything other than my own two feet. I opened the letter. Laughed. I thought: OK, it's a deal. We will mutually cancel our official ties. I won't need a driver's license, and they won't need to watch for me while I fail to drive.
"Am I missing something here?
"The other letter, from Concord's civil authorities, came in some kind of red paper duplicate format. They asked me to pay some kind of an excise tax, something, since I am relatively new to these parts, that I don't completely understand. Do I pay a tax for the right to breathe, drive, what?
"Since Concord is a hotbed of accomplished liberalism and humanitarian letters, and since Massachusetts is a liberal state, which means there are way too many rules, deeds, covenants, restrictions, laws, organizations of security and plain old control and so on, I took this note to be another kind of serendipitous receipt for a mysterious agreement that had already well been determined when I sold my car as an act of civil disobedience. So, I unsigned on the dotted line, figured that eventually there might be some money in unsigning on the dotted line, if I can just find (by walking) the local office that wages excise taxes to someone who not only had no vote or gave no permission, but doesn't even know what the hell they are charging me for.
"I can't tell: Am I two or three days ahead of, or, two or three days behind the hyenas barking at my heels? Is it time to cash in, or, cash out? I guess I'll just use my old Massachusetts license plates for snow shoes someday and go down to this place, which I have no idea where it is, and see what they say. Hopefully, it's downhill.
"In the meantime, I'll just walk the walk, and, talk the talk ...
--Sullivan Square, Boston, or thereabouts, heading very fast toward Reading, Mass., and further north ... Nov. 19, 2001."
Next, he wandered up the street on Colorado Avenue on a sun-drenched spring-like day -- despite it being February at 9,000 feet in the Rockies -- and commiserated with the rest of the high-life wannabe denizens of town, all of who were happy for him and sunning themselves on the smoker's bench in front of the Screaming Bean Cyber Cafe. Still, it hurts. This much we know about the Pilgrim. He's both sensitive and dysfunctional, a canary in the coleslaw mine. That the bad thing can come this far up the hill, isolated as they are in the southern Rockies, only goes to show how deeply entrenched the Machine Mind is on the American landscape.
But, recovery of what's lost is not only possible, it's inevitable. And under the right conditions, the transformation can take place in a blink of an eye.
"I'm getting over it already," the Savage Pilgrim says in movie star sunglasses, wide-open shirt collar and his patented leather pants, shiny as black licorice in the bright sun. "But it's a personal thing. It's the kids. The betrayal. I can understand ... but I cannot ... He gave me a check that said 'zero.' It was just being totally mean."
He hunched down in his seat, back in the glaze of the rejected. Looking at him in a slump of leather pants and mushed hair, it was easy to see how a Pharaoh might react. The Pilgrim, a creative genius with film scripts spinning their way up the food chain in Manhattan, is rendered null and void by the mere failure to fit in as a grunt laborer. He was fired by a man who, by all reports and my own understanding of the story. He was fired by a man who, despite being a devotee of mountain music Americana and a solid citizen in Telluride as entrepreneur and wise political player, is also a cutthroat mine boss of the 33rd degree, the very worst kind of low-paying capitalist exploitation creep. Another former Baked employee, a waster of time and scammer on the streets, now lives in the woods this winter. After being fired for giving free pastries from a throwaway bin to other street people, or "woodsies," one of the many who live in a network of yurts and small cabins nestled in the higher elevations.
A whole sub-culture of people inhabits these places, a Walden Pond ethos. Of course, the Savage Pilgrim is a city slicker, which means he prefers to "couch surf," yet another way to live free or die in Telluride. Sure, it's springy and warm and a guilty pleasure since everything points to still more global catastrophe, but it's colder than hell at night at 10,000 feet in southwestern Colorado.
"Fired from Baked," the Savage Pilgrim groans. "This is what happens when you go to work with leather pants."
OK, OK, it has been well established: They burn their witches everywhere. This is the way of the world, and others have already established that free speech in America is a crock. What's more deeply concerning is the fact that, even in utopia, the very worst are full of passionate efficiency.
Mere donut holes loosed upon the world.
~
The California Zephyr, which crashed the winter of 2001, was a happy enough ride for myself a month before, but then Amtrak is always a little dicey. Even my own safe trip was not without grim possibilities, or, even, consequences. That it then crashed only lent to the deeper mystery of its long traverse across the continent, well, at least from Chicago, through the Rockies, onward to San Francisco. The cause of the crash is still up in the air, but even if ruled as an accident it must mean ... something. Or so I believed.
"Maybe one of the golden spikes for the continental railroad gave out," I mused to my co-horts in Telluride, the paranoia working its way through this mountain haunt.
"Or, something else. One could just as easily imagine a group of barn-storming right wingers, as a kind of vigil and protest for Timothy McVeigh, America's least wanted murderous youth -- one could just as easily imagine something from out of the Turner Diaries."
Such had been in the case in Arizona, where Nazi youth calling themselves the Vipers derailed a train in the boon-dock desert of that state. When I was a kid a friend once told me you could derail a train by putting a quarter on a railroad track.e I never tried, but you could imagine the sparks that might make. Or, at least, a blink of a spark.
The "accident" being in the Midwest, in Iowa, where the train derailed for reasons unknown, with one dead and 90 injured, it's easy enough to see: It can happen here.
But such was the nature of the aura of this train. At least on my life trip. Which had become strange in other quarters. Leaving the Mordor of Boston, the gloomy post-election winter, where the very human face of the city seemed to cry out in a sort of despondency and anguish. Switching trains in Chicago, Ill. "Most likely at great terror," I wrote. But the original notebook is gone and no information is really available on what the true sources of my anxieties were.
"Carrying myself across the long distances always seems to sound a death rattle in me," I would most likely have said.
~
Dec. 13, 2000 will be remembered in history as the day our institutions conspired to fail us. If you haven't already forgotten and moved on to the consoling video stream of the virtual presidency, where President Martin Sheen says all the things we always wished our presidents would say, that drab Wednesday in American history was a very real, certainly material, corrosively visceral version of what we like to call convergence. Or, far better, convergent metamedia, now pouring through the anticipated cataclysm of the future like a bad-- but well publicized, rendered in 3D -- dream.
The whole constipated poop shoot of the dog-eared promise of the New World jammed into the screw-tight orifice of the next century and instilled an overwhelming dreadgeist of collective disappointment. Every human soul within earshot of any report or anguished groan over what the U.S. Supreme Court had failed to do: that is, be Supreme, and all voters, counted and uncounted, felt that gong of doom from the very bowels of hell.
"It Can't Happen Here," apparently, can. That much was obvious. Spreading like a contagion of fire across the networked landscape of the globe via talk shows, television news updates and e-mail flame war preventing even the most modest real estate developer's home page to upload in a slow a sludge ball of bad bandwidth as grief overdosed every pedestrian on Main Street, the deep truth we'd always expected, but never fully understood, pierced the broken heart and fogged the mind's eye of anyone able to read, think, love, hate and - especially -- vote.
If that had been it, from my view, I could of happily moved on, much in the same way that we push forward after the end of the Super Bowl by thinking about baseball or planning a snowboarding trip. But that ceremonial autopsy to the post-democratic ideal, with the suspected murderer, the corporate nation-state, winking like an O.J. Simpson after the verdict, wasn't all there was to it. No, if the end game of the 2000 presidential campaign ended the political playoffs with the bad call by the referees who refused to review the play, every conceivable valued institution of American life -- that is, my life -- joined in a chorus of screaming cats crushed beneath a steam roller called human fallibility.
It all made one think of that line by W.B. Yeats in "The Second Coming" about "mere anarchy loosed upon the world."
The tired fable, taught since grade school along with the story about Santa Claus, that stuff about the basic virtues of home, marriage, commitment, moving on up the ladder toward the protestant work ethic, then to the second floor of American myth of the techno-savvy capitalist as the benevolent shopping site to the world, then the top tier -- that we live in a free country, where speech is free, guaranteed by the First Amendment by the U.S. Constitution -- well, they all crashed like a house of cards.
To my unreliable, shell-shocked psyche, it was a sound much louder than the historic miracle of a mere decade ago, the fall of the Berlin Wall. You remember: When a little meme called "Glasnost," the post-Soviet call for "openness," a tiny word that nonetheless dissolved the antiquated authoritarian regime of a really terrible century in the acid bath of truth, first broadcast, on a daily basis, by Radio Free Europe.
As a result, I did the only thing he had the immediate means to do: I revolted. A private revolution, small yes, but potentially significant. What did I do? Well, it was a three-point strategy intended to disgrace every material bond to the earth within my immediate domain:
First, I refused to ever work in a corporate cube farm again (hah!). I vowed to vacate my cube at Access Internet Magazine, in Needham, Massachusetts, just a bus ride from Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau managed to tune out for an entire year, and the site of the "First Shot Heard Round the World," where a small band of well-networked colonials banded to slay the dragon, another guy named George.
Next, I resolved to disown my car, vying instead to work from home in order to write the God's honest truth, as far as my limited faculties could tell, for the remainder of my life (hah!, again). Or, the immediate future, whichever came first.
Finally, as my birthday loomed, Dec. 28, 2000, I refused to renew my driver's license. A small necessity to be declared officially expired, ironically, by the state of New Hampshire, which has the famous motto to mock this entire charade, "Live Free or Die."
By shedding this holy trinity of personal necessities in the hopes of reducing the impossible suffering of well maybe not mankind, but especially my own Job-like trek through Mythville, as well as to slow down the destruction of the biosphere, if just a little, I decided to become a living experiment in what we will now call the "science of descent." By destroying the very box-like weave of systematized ties to the world, this ongoing performance was cast as likely to end quickly or badly or both (true, so true). If there is ever a time to break free, it would certainly be when the System seems to be rendered ever so apparently obsolete.
"Impossible, you say? " I said, wild eyed, mocking my detractors. "I am going no code. Off the grid." Maybe. But for at least a short time, before the digitized deputy dawgs of Urizen hunted me down like one of the over aged guys in "Logan's Run," it has been at all points so far an instructive mapping of the basic problem of the inter-dependent ties to the autocratic demands of America the Database and the centralized city-zone of urban sprawl and decay.
~
I took a look at his pile of ashes on my desk in the Nugget Building, home of the old theater in Telluride where the soundtracks for the films thunder through the floorboards in the evening (usually a hellish noise, since that's where the popular arts are these days) and thought: "Well then, at least I'm a little farther down the road from my own failed dream of becoming a dysfunctional half-baked employee, a grunt laborer. That is to say, I'd only discovered a few hours before that I was unfit to sell carpets to the public. Overqualified, basically. So I went back up to my office to write some more ..."
And what do I think about (write), having failed to make an honest day's living: "A mere three months ago I was drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes in some grand old Boston hotel, doing research on Dr. Joseph Warren, the Grandmaster of New England, who, as head of the Boston Committee of Safety, sent three horsemen to warn the outlying villages that the Redcoats were coming.
"Well, they are back.
"And what do you know: I find out at the office an hour or so later that I'm too much of a loose cannon to be trusted with the 'vision' anymore. That is to say, my vision was too, um, visionary. It would possibly overwhelm a carefully constructed less-costs-less multi-media paradigm of this, the age of diminished e-expectations.
"There I was, only a few hours away from that point of no return, and I was transcribing the following words about the Jacobin Church in Paris, circa 1790 or so: 'But the chief priest and the speakers of this place, as we said, is Robispierre, the long-winded incorruptible man. What spirit of patriotism dwelt in men of those times, this one fact, it seems to us, will evince: That fifteen hundred human creatures, not bound to it, get quiet under the oratory of Robispierre; nay listened nightly, hour after hour, applausive; and gaped as for the word of life.' "
The effervescent writer, an editor named Tallien, as recorded in "Carlyle's Works of the Revolution, Volume IV, 1884," a scribble found on a great old bookshelf of all kinds of ancient texts at the hotel, described Robispierre as "The Trismegistus and Dalai-Lama of Patriot Men."
A few hours from that momentous post-mortem on democracy, on Dec. 13, 2000, when the U.S. Supreme Court made George W. Bush president by default, I was molesting a 116-year-old book about a still earlier time when a civic leader -- indeed, a revolutionary and visionary -- could be compared to a mythical metaphysical Prometheus and another cat who comes around every century or so like some reincarnated sparrow who arrives, like clockwork, at cosmic San Juan Capistrano.
But a full 61 days after the dimpled chads are rendered void by the Void, more interruptions were on the way.
~
I remember the sunlight fading as the train headed west through the Berkshires, a cigarette along the plank in Springfield, Mass., supposed birthplace of basketball, most certainly of all the attendant regrets of leaving home after two years of dot-com life, as well as a family, in Boston. Across the white-carpeted forests of the East we moved, with the train sounding off a warning and celebration in each small burgh along the line. With each hour, the light seemed friendlier, less closed in as we left the horizon-less maze of New England. That first night we stopped for a couple of hours in Albany, New York. A line was broken on one of the cars. There was a lot of commotion and confusion about hook-ups and connectivity. The conductors told stories and smoked.
I walked the length of the interior to the dining car, which was pitch black but still serving by candlelight. I thought of the last and only voyage of the Titanic. An elderly woman and a little girl sat down to dinner. It was a bit uncomfortable, at first, but I eased into it, telling the story of how the dragon slain by St. Patrick was really a dinosaur, the last of it's kind.
"In hindsight," I said, playing on the part of the worldly storyteller, "the pre-historic lizard, which had only come out for one brief gasp of air after living for so, so long, deep beneath the earth. Perhaps he would have been more appreciated as a relic from some ancient time, a novelty to draw the crowds. But preservation efforts were unheard of then. And so, the only remaining information about the dragon is this: He tasted a lot like chicken."
Even though I was always one to attempt to blow a small child's mind, I hesitated at the telling of the story of Joseph of Arimethea, who he had been reading about on that headlight into the night toward Chicago, about how he had lost the Holy Grail during sea travel on the way to Albion, as in England. Another book, "Rex Deus," a capably written historical tome, revealed the mysteries of the ancient Rosencruz, or at least that's my take on it. The revelations of the book, that Jesus had sired two children, and may have survived his apparent execution, and that the ruling monarchies of France, England and Scotland were connected to the bloodline of Jesus and King David and so on ... the kind of ancient mystery that makes a Steven Spielberg film laughably imprecise, in terms of the larger universe around us.
Then we were off again. The train's horn is a safety and comfort for all traders in the deal. That such peace could lead anyone to disaster, at that point, especially after a couple of bourbons on the rocks in the observation deck, was well beyond all of the hocus pocus I could imagine.
~
Until Toledo. A town for which hocus pocus has little practical use. It was 7:57 a.m. on Jan. 23, 2001, dawn at the Amtrak Station in Toledo, Ohio. Drug interdiction hour. Five Federal Agents, although they didn't show much ID to anyone, since the passengers were asleep, rousting the train awake. They hit mostly the Latin-looking men, many of whom could not speak English. They were asked about drugs, about where they were going. Asked if they had tickets. A conductor's job.
The Latinos only gave scared no-comprende nods. Racial profiling was the technique here, even if the agents also rousted the white punk with the blue hair, it was still an alternative tribe to whatever passes for the social norm in the center of god-forsaken Ohio, the ice floes of the river completely encasing the town in a grimy industrial cesspool of gray, bleak permanence.
But I thought I knew my Fourth Amendment rights, presumed it worked that same way for others, and figured the guys sleeping on the train might have access too.
"Improbable cause," I said out loud, in the direction of the melee. "You can't do that. It's a violation of the Fourth Amendment."
They all looked up. The evil eyes, the scanners. "You a lawyer or something?" said one. "Watching too much TV," said the other. "Yes," I smarted back. "I went to Harvard." A lie. I attended a music piracy seminar once. "You can't do this." I repeated. "You don't have probable cause."
One of the interdicks, wearing a nice suede leather jacket, like the kind a rancher might wear, who said I had been watching too much TV -- when I had in fact been reading too much Alexis de Tocqueville -- started asking me questions. Such as: "How would you like to get off the train and stay in Toledo?" He looked out the window. Morning was frozen and the river was one great ice floe covering the state. "No, I won't be staying here," I said. "But you will," muttering under my breath as I flew out of the car.
Out in the Toledo morning air before my so-called "disruptors of descent" really started to show, hurrying out of the train to smoke, thinking about the Pretenders, "Hey, O, way to go Oh-i-I-I-o." And I thought Boston, the land of Thomas Paine, was bad. Mordor was 1,000 miles away by now. That's what I was trying to get away from.
Back on the train, a West Indian woman started asking me questions, said she wanted to file a report about the raid. It became on ongoing matter of conversation during the day. She was some kind of academic freedom fighter from Berkeley, an attractive Indian or Asian woman with long dark hair, and what had happened had fit a paper she had been writing. The feds had found nothing, and the same group of what turned out to be Mexicans under the supervision of an interpreter, were by this time anxiously waiting for whatever might be in store for them in Chicago.
The remainder of the morning ride consisted of reading the headlines in the smoking car, on the observation deck or in the kitchen. "Bush ends overseas abortion funding," reads the headline for Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2001. "President revives plan on family-planning abroad." Just as I noted this, a guy in the observation car tells his friend, "That dang Bush, he's going to let them drill new oil wells in Alaska."
Another headline: "Four escapees caught, one dead."
Or, from long before, "Four dead in O-h-I-O!"
~
There was that bulgy woman's face, my ex mother-in-law, screaming at me, "Heathen! Heathen! Why don't you read something good for you, like the Bible? Not those stupidheads you call heroes. They are all screwed up, all of them." Her face is a big and red, blood-dimmed authoritarian swimming pool from God's forsaken lake a fire.
A flood of his life's decisions, mainly the bad ones, ping-pong through the head. If I'd only done this, resisted my ego on that, had gotten real on the other. And now this, this fat face in a blond mop of over-the-hill hair, screaming at me about reading Salman Rushdie. Instead of the Bible. Well, let's see, i'd be in an entirely different place, for sure, if i'd been reading the Bible. In fact, from year to year, i'd use it like the I-Ching, let pages open themselves, in hopes they might speak to me. Maybe i'd be married still, in Phoenix, living in the suburbs, like a squirrel counting my nuts for the winter, and still listening to this blather from this charismatic miscreant, in my own home, no less.
However, in less time than it took for the U.S. Marines to find Noriega in Panama, I grabbed my soon-to-be-first-ex-mother in law by the arm and ushered her out the front living room door. Once the lock was secured, as she tried to force her way back in, I went back to reading Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses." Or tried to as his hands shook from the adrenalin rush.
Really, it's a hilarious book.
~
Now I’m back in the desert, with my notes meant for poems written in a green, nine-and-a-half by six-inch notebook. Perhaps if I'd left my thoughts unrecorded in that spring season, I would have never realized the unspeakable loneliness in this marriage. My future X knew it, which is why she eventually burned the notebook in the backyard barbecue. She was, like her charismatic Christian mother, the living microcosm of an authoritarian regime. A real reactionary. A rage-a-holic, most certainly, in disagreement with those words, my poor sad truth.
In my college days at the University of Arizona, I believed I was a poet, but a poet was no longer dangerous to any society. Once, the highest compliment that could be paid to a writer was to be burned at the stake or censored or sent to the Gulag. His ideas would run against the prevailing current, and the government would have no choice but to try to silence him, thus martyring him for future readers, and thus, the world would be moved further along. Yet, it was hard to see how it could be thus in a technological, democratic, pop-culture driven society. I couldn't make the connection. How could I know that the dissatisfaction as revealed in that notebook would, in fact, ignite a revolution in my small Web of life.
What did I have to be dissatisfied about? A wife, three kids, a crazy dog, a professional career in journalism that basically kept us more than just afloat. Barely, yes, but floating all the same. The Baby Boom was over, after all. The prosperity my mother and father had enjoyed and striven for held little promise as we walked a slow march into a new century. On that spring day, it finally broke loose. I looked at the words in his notebook and wondered why they were so dark: the tone seemed to be that of a prisoner who lived in a state of constant contradiction against his very nature; a secret self, working beneath the autocratic empire of the bedroom.
I remember being afraid to go home. The long straight city streets leading through the scatterbrained signage of Phoenix hinted at an ugliness of the suburban southwest. Fast food joints, convenience stores, strips malls and every now and then rows of track-homes cross the eyes. At each stoplight, there was back pain, the endless shifting of the truck's gears, and the anxious pressure of being surrounded by the city, of what kind of moods awaited me at home.
I pulled into the driveway and sighed. There were a few boards piled on the front lawn that my son had fashioned into a jumping ramp for skateboards, and a few new dents in the garage door from the past weekend's tossing the baseball around. I opened the door and there was my son, twittering on the nobs of a video game while he lay on the couch. He barely moved and there was a small beeping sound from his hand-held machine. Not expecting a reaction upon arrival, I moved toward the entertainment center console, checking for any mail. There were a few bills, an ominous looking certified letter from the IRS, assorted junk mail, and a couple of packages, no doubt new compact disks to be to reviewed for the rock magazine. I opened the first package immediately, pulling out something post-punk, or, maybe retro. Immediately aware of its unsuitable nature for my censorious wife's scanning eyes, I threw it in the cabinet, putting it beneath a slew of other CDs that would get attention later that night. I opened the other package, a jazz disc, which would be hard to say anything about since it wouldn't contain any offensive lyrics to hail as the new bad boys of rock. I threw it on top of the pile in the cabinet as well and gave pause to Iggy Pop.
A decision was brewing inside, moving from the back of the mind to the front. All of those things I'd ever wished for had never actually been considered. I sleepwalked into adult years, reacting to the merely formal expectations of finding a girl, making a marriage, the constant question of whether to have children. One would not call it an expectation, it seemed to happen naturally, as if I were an actor in a play in which the lines had been written from a dependable author who had the essence of life down to a biological science. Survival is everything, ya know, perpetuating the DNA, for what reason we cannot specify.
So that day in his mid 30s, the course I'd led found set me drifting. I sat on the couch, twittered on some poetry, then reaching for the headphones for loud music: a rock critic living in a charismatic Christian's home. The music is by the seminal L.A. punk band, X, the sound of late century central city sprawl in flames.
My eyes are closed as I lay on the couch, hoping to find a few moments of disengagement, to marvel at the dichotomy of the male and female voices from both heaven and hell. Then, I am stunned back to the suburbs by future X, who is poking, poking, poking. Her expression has that stormy, bleary eye contact of someone who is ready for a fight. She began one of her usual discourses on his behavior, what she often refers to as Short Attention Span Theater.
"You seem so frantic," she says, her hands on her hips, looking down. "At one time you show up, start reading a book, and then I look up again, and you are on your way out the door, sneaking a joint. Now look at your lazy ass. I've got things to do around the house, you know. I need help."
She has her dishwater blond hair up in a Bam Bam bush on top of her head, wearing a jeans skirt and tennis shoes, very much in her work detachment mode. Soon she would be strutting around the house, slamming cabinet doors and making everyone sure it was busy time in that passive aggressive way. You know: the kind of gal who saw no problem with running the vacuum cleaner into the wee hours of the night.
"You're shifty. You are stuck in sand, sinking in sand, or maybe just trying to avoid sinking in sand," she says. "Look at this place," she thumbs one of the books he's left half opened on couch. "How many books can one person read at once, anyway?
"Sometimes you seem so quiet, and then you are talking so fast it's like you are some drug. Why can't you relax, why can't you stop worrying about where you will be next. You just want to hang out in bars and smoke. I mean, why go all of the way to a public place to spend your time alone, if that's what you are really doing?"
That look in her eye? The bulldog that couldn't let go of those ever-tightening categories of perpetual blame. Angrier words were exchanged, neither side listening, and somehow I managed to leave, though at some cost, her haven taken the notebook and holding it up, scouring, her face with a challenging smile, as if to indicate, "Ah ha, I've got it," as she took it and left the room.
Within a week I'd left her. The notebook had been read then fricasseed, and then an attempt had been made to restore the charred notebook for legal purposes. Then she tried to ram me with her car, chasing me for nearly five miles until I led her right into the police station parking lot. Then, having taken to the streets of Phoenix in the need of disguising locations, I bounced around like a wannabe TV show fugitive, trying to arrange lawyers, new living digs, dealing with a capably diabolical X, and, the possibility that my soon-to-be ex-wife might try to find me and kill me. The paranoia was running unchecked. At work they called me "McGyver" because I was always looking for alternative exits to the surroundings. There were the urgings of my mother in law, who spoke in tongues and filibustered his future X into devious modes of attack. It was a multi-media event: flyers left on car windows, lies sent out through still-novice Christian advocacy sites, phone abuse. There were ugly late-night phone calls and cruel, teasing seductions. Before long, there would be the assault at the office, the crossing restraining orders, the use of the children as hostages in the marriage, but more than anything else, my descent into the maze of adulterated windows and doors in an exploration of my private novelty gene.
~
Nonetheless, as we moved West on this fabled railroad line that would eventually take me to the Rockies, the California Zephyr, all of the way to Grand Junction, Colorado, at the base of Grand Mesa, where the Colorado River winds its own sacred trail southwesterly. The destination: Telluride, Colorado. Which would require a bus jaunt to Montrose, with a driver who turned out to be a real asshole (but who wouldn't be, taking these routes over and over through such climes), as well as a helpful hitch with a local Jack Jehovah Ute, Leroy Morales, in a big green pickup truck up the San Miguel River Canyon to this mountain resort town, isolated as it is in rocky highlands of the San Juans of southwestern Colorado.
A latter-day Zephyr rider from Telluride didn't fare so well. His experience a month later in the coach car, which ended up on its side, after sliding down a 20-foot embankment, was more harrowing.
"I was just lying down to sleep when I heard a rumbling and a screeching sound -- the brakes maybe," said Noah McKittrick, who had also been bound for Grand Junction. "The lights flickered off and the car tumbled over. We were thrown about. It was incredibly disorienting. When we stopped, I was lying on the windows, which was now the floor of the car. People were crying and their kids were screaming for their parents. It was over in five seconds."
The Zephyr was traveling at 53 miles per hour, which is a lot slower than its usual 80 miles per hour, but anyone who has taken an Amtrak line from Boston to New York, or on the Eastern Seaboard at all, knows fully well the fallen nature of its infrastructure. Before the crash, McKittrick said his dinner companions, experienced train travelers, were commenting on how bad the tracks in Iowa were. "For two hours before the crash, the train was shaking like turbulence on a plane."
~
Spencer was a crazy family dog, most definitely also the beholder of the novelty gene. But he got that from Daisy, a purebred beagle.
On the day the he first landed in the suburbs of Phoenix, when I was just a boy, maybe 15, the heat was 120 degrees and the back yard, a one-acre field of white hot dust. The next day, hail stones the size of Hope diamonds pelted puffs of dust onto the phosphorescent ground as Daisy, Spencer's mother, despite the hellfire from the sky, chased around the yard, pouncing on each poof, steam rising on the sand. Next, a freak tornado tore through the neighborhood, and the only thing in its path, mainly, or house, was left intact.
Daisy was a runner, though. This was before she learned things about the neighborhood on midnight sneak outs. Before she'd gone through the rancheria of back yards, golf courses, a river park basin, the very edges of the desert, places Spencer would explore and go beyond. Well before he'd caused a fight with the family across the street. Well before the subdivision was made safe from the last horny toad lizard, well before his father ran over that same neighbor's pet snake, which had escaped, in the driveway: Long before the paradisiacal and counter-intuitive creation dream of Phoenix, city of the great Sonoran Desert.
As a mongrel beagle of Daisy, Spencer couldn't be trained, thus keeping him the place of the long line of pets that drove my father to distraction.
"Here boy, good boy, here Spencer," he'd say. "Sit, roll, dammit, do something!"
I'd sit and watch this comedy, a young teen in the suburbs, up in a willow. I was always up in trees. Despite the call, all Spencer could do was run up and down the fence, occasionally poking his nose through holes in the ground beneath. Spencer was a barker, too, howling at all hours, never seeming to run out of energy. Spencer had the novelty gene. Or perhaps he'd just learned it from his family.
Spencer was a real bastard.
~
This is in Colorado, where I was headed. The Great Plains all too well included in the disasters going on from Coast to Coast, but I thought about adding a few more words, another deck, "and one more at large heading home."
"The California Zephyr begins in Chicago and makes its way toward Denver," I wrote, remembering the last two days of the train trek across the nation. "By nightfall I meet one of two or three of the strangest characters, including the Zen-master man, a drunk cowboy artist named Charlie, who discussed Reiki therapy, meditation and Swedenborgian metaphysics. He disappeared somewhere in the night, in Iowa, I believe. He said: Have you seen the sun behind the sun, the trees behind the trees? Then, the next morning, in Denver, I noticed two men, one with a Masonic emblem on his coat, the other leading a doddering elderly gentleman on the train. Curious about the Freemasons after a lot of study and amazement about it in Boston, I asked who the elderly man was. The large man in the coat said he was the Grandmaster of the Freemasons for the entire United States of America.
"So once we headed up a winding trail into Rockies, I handed him my copy of 'Rex Deus.'
"Did Jesus survive?" I asked him. "Oh, that's what some say," he said, reading the book for a couple of hours with great interest. Not ever saying much. But there seemed to be something on this mystery train that was more than he could perceive, his work on this world pretty much accomplished. At one other point toward the end of the line, the train stopped for some time, in order to avoid an accident. In the canyons near Gunnison, the observation deck announcer pointed passenger's eyes to a cave in the wall, high up on the cliff. Safe enough place for anything, from anyone, anywhere, be it the President of the United States, or, the DEA. Solar storms. All the rest.
"I suppose you could worry about rock slides. No place is really safe, I guess."
~
A full 61 days after the dimpled chads are rendered void by the Void, more interruptions are on the way.
Stephen the Scout, the local half-blood Native American and cinematographer without a camera, whose family comes from big-time money in Oklahoma, has entered the building. His timing, too, is amazing. He's a pony-tailed self-made shaman who is wired as always with the kind of energy and insight that, if I didn't know any better, might be described as superhuman. Whenever Stephen the Scout speaks, which is almost all of the time, the room shakes with the booming voice of a post-hippie pony-tailed preacher on the prairie.
Like the rest of us, without work. Plenty of time on our hands. I wished I had a nickel for everyone he met in Telluride who claimed be a shaman. Ya know: Those who really are keep it to themselves.
"We've got to start pimping Waldorf," he says, putting the little dog on his lap and trying on my new beret for size. "Do you know how much puppies of Yorkshire terriers cost? Five hundred bucks, that's how much. I mean, even the dog is a Knights Templar Freemason dog, look at him."
The little tyke, brown and black with a pink tongue and more brains than most four-year-old kids, is a made-for-TV wunderkind. Waldorf is well beyond mere stupid pet tricks and is, in fact, more human than will ever get credit for, due no doubt to his good breeding and the fact his owner is a four-letter control freak. The dog is also the ultimate chick magnet in such watering stations as The Last Dollar Saloon. Now Stephen the Scout is addressing the dog directly in a "little people" whine that only dogs can understand.
"My mom said my whole life, you need to be an architect. If I'd only listened to my mom, but instead, we are dog trainers," he says in his doggie falsetto. "Your dad don't got no happy hour money, so you can't go to the bars and be with your buddies, beggin' for human food."
Oh yeah, the worm had turned. The witches, geeks and cyber sages were on the run, the lost scouts and the down-and-outs, sifting through the trash for food, sifting through the antique stores, the pawn shops, the big deep sleeper closets, the empty spaces, all for a sign of economic viability that they could recycle from the heady days of the so-called Gold Rush. Meanwhile, the local realtors were chasing their down spiral of foiled deals, fat cats pulling out of their agreements, bailing on their rent, selling their ranches considered to be their priceless, cherished dreams only a week before.
I had come to believe what veryone touched by the dot-com bust privately discovered: We are all not as rich as we only too recently, … um … thought.
"But all the same," I say, in one of those annoying, unrealistic, pseudo-positivist mood swings, "we are all rich beyond our wildest dreams, if we can only see the trees behind the trees, the sun behind the sun.
"Because if the quest is about anything, it's about finding the roots for the new trees now planted in the realm of the invalidated. And believe me, at the end of this foul rainbow, painted by carbon and alien atoms messing with the thyroid glands of everyone who will ever be, living or unborn … there is this deep, broad, humming sound beneath the surface of everything. The sun beams, pelting us, the solar storm causing vibrations … from the collision of atoms … in the very core of the earth. You would have to be numb on a lifetime of ludes, at this point, not to be shaken up by it.
"My problem is I'm not sure if it's the voice of the shaking comes from hell, heaven, or, both.
"If it's the sound of the Machine Mind, well, pay no heed, it's simply the demiurge uncoiling beneath our feet. If it's the sound of the Creator, yes, the thing outside the thing, like a train rolling down a hill, heading for us all, with one last chance offered for redemption, well then, maybe we should listen harder."
Maybe we should go back to the beginning; which is to say, go back to the end, on Dec. 13, 2000, when the dimpled chads were rendered null by the all-too-vulnerable architect of the Void. When the sky turned to fire, repeatedly.
~
Yesterday came suddenly, sang Paul McCartney all those years ago.
I was 12 years old, no doubt watching "Wallace and Ladmo." Little beep, beep, beeps went up on the TV screen (if those weather system warnings on the bulletin bar on the bottom screen actually worked like that, back then).
Hard to remember, he says.
I had just moved from Texas to the Country Estates subdivision at 58th Place and Shea Boulevard six days before. On the seventh day, the rain came.
Well, not so much rain. At least, not at first. The details of that day still linger. The visual impact the storm of 1972 created is still in his expressions better than any DVD could possibly replicate. It was 32 years ago in 2004. Imagine. See it. Feel it. Almost smell it. The ozone in the days of Oz!
Back then a new plat in the Country Estates subdivision was like a cookie-cutter parcel of the moon. Sure, there was mesquite all over, but once the fences sliced-and-diced the place, all of the new back yards were, until the landscaper arrived, squared-off hotbeds of fine whitish, powdery dust. On that day or any other, the dust would get stirred up into swirls of volatile air, called "Dust Devils."
Arizona still gets "Dust Devils" now and then, but with the paradising effect that's gone on since these bad 'ol days, the name is being lost with all of the horny toads, rattlers and coyotes running for cover from civilization. Suddenly, it gets windy. Then, it's not. You'd hardly notice it. But on that day, June 22, 1972, the whole greater Paradise Valley area, basically the Indian Bend Wash basin, from Mummy Mountain to the McDowell Mountains, was a whirling set of such dervishes, a practical ballet performance, as weather patterns go.
Anyway, I tell this story to newcomers to Arizona a lot because it teaches something about the monsoons (which this wasn't) and the history of Scottsdale (a lost great body of knowledge that exists, if it exists at all, in the archives of the old Scottsdale Progress and the Scottsdale Historical Society).
The story doesn't actually begin with my watching "Wallace and Ladmo," the old TV kids show, but with what I was doing when my dad came home as he was watching Wallace, and, of course, Ladmo.
He was mad about something. Dad was mad. Not Ladmo and his Lincoln-esque top hat, where is Waldo shirt. He was upset, you see, because he just got back from talking to some insurance agent. The story begins when dad said, right after coming through the door: "They wanted us to buy flood insurance. Those (bleeps!). Don't they know this is the desert?"
Country Estates is on the northern banks of the Indian Bend Wash. With the exception of a few golf courses, as it flowed to the Salt River, it was still a desert wash with mesquite and sage and rabbits and mice and prairie dogs. In the spring, lots and lots of butterflies. When it rained, even the slightest, downtown Scottsdale would be in need of Noah's Ark.
The next start of the story, after the beeping TV warning, after dad's now famous last words, flows in this direction: Hail stones, the size of golf balls, plopping, puft, puft, puft, into super-heated, white hot dust. Then the wind came. Then came some more. Every dot of dust and debris not tied down flew by sideways by the windows, as if the Creator were converting the new suburban environment into something akin to a black day on Mars.
The roof began to wail. Fences picked up and were lifted off as wind sails in a scene from the black-and-white segment of "The Wizard of Oz."
Then, I looked out the window, and saw a tower, a dirt vortex, well up into the sky, up and out of the frame, cascading off nearby Mummy Mountain.
Now, even before this, tornadoes have freaked me out. Sure, Dorothy's little house-spin into the air, up and back and down into Oz, always left a strong impression. But also this: Members of my grandfather's immediate family, including his mother and father, had been killed by a tornado in West Texas (and he had to raise his younger siblings by himself as a teen). So, fear of tornadoes is pretty much in the McDaniel DNA.
So, what did I do? Run? Scream? Duck and cover? No. I decided to go outside and get a better view. Went through the front door. Looked up. It was a big, brown, swirling behemoth. Or, that's what the eyes, as dust bits pelted hid face and sandblasted hid hair and his mother screamed "Get back in here!" - that's what my eyes still feel, see and remember.
There was no time to do the classic, heartland-style, get-into-the-cellar maneuver. No time to even get into the hallway, away from the windows. But by God's grace (as well as the seeming lack of it) the tornado hit the house across the street, destroyed a roof, killed their dog, hopped then over the entire Country Estates neighborhood, and then landed again, turning Shea Boulevard and points northward into a Vietnam era-, Robert McNamara-style playground pathway of near total destruction. Hundreds of homes had varying degrees of damage. Uncounted numbers were rendered, national-TV-news style, into images of flattened rubble.
Then, the winds passed. A half-mile away, looking toward Shea, a boulevard named after a Union General at Gettysburg, you could see nothing but the wrecked frames of bombed-out homes and flashing red emergency lights.
Then, it began to rain. In fact, it rained for a day. In fact, it rained four inches in four hours. The Indian Bend Wash became the Indian Bend River. It must have been a mile-wide muddy river, too. But our family never knew. We couldn't even step out of the door for three days as the wash, our street, now a river, flowed on by with every bit of debris and clutter it could pick up. A wash. Indeed! A major Maytag this so-called "Paradise Valley" will always be, say, every hundred years or so.
Now, we could go on and on about not having electricity or water for a week. Or, about how some official landed in a helicopter behind their house, looked around, and then left. How the governor came to bless us with his utter and useless amazement. I could thank the Lord for sparing us but punishing the neighborhood (it was their turn, after all) with a kind of creative whimsy, and yes, a cosmic sense of timing and selectivity.
It was, after all, right after the first official day of the summer. You could talk about solstices and the equinox and all ...You could ask, why them, but not us? It would be futile, of course, unless you have lived it, to try to fully explain the impact of this storm on the family, and yes, this burgeoning city called Scottsdale. The number of times I have told this story to people.
The day I faced the tornado.
~
So Spencer and had the novelty gene, and on the day the tornado came, I saw it in the window. Dust was blowing all around, but he saw it there, bigger than the black and white version in the Wizard of Oz. I ran outside. Pinpricks of dust hitting my face and my mother screaming to get into the house. I leaned into the wind. It ran hot and cold.
The tornado high in view, I saw it tear a roof off a house down the street, and went back inside, satisfied that my scouting report through the window was correct. We barricaded in the hallway, or tried to, but there wasn't enough time. God knows what was running through my father's mind because his father's family had been killed by a tornado in West Texas. God knows what's in a dog's mind when the sky had been turned upside down. All that is known is after the winds died down, after the new saplings were pulled out of the ground, after it seemed liked the wind picked up their back yard and deposited it somewhere west of their neighborhood, Spencer was gone.
~
It is the mid-1980s and Ty Hardin's agent in Beverly Hills keeps leaving messages, but lately, Hardin is not returning his calls. Hardin was the voice and leader of the so-called Arizona Patriots, the radical right-wing fringe group that had dropped out of public view. Except when they met out in the woods to shoot guns and maybe spout off about regional democracy, starting a new country and so on. Not coincidentally, Hardin, too, dropped out of sight.fe as a living, breathing Cowboy picture movie star.
Those who saw him in his last days in town said he had one thing on his mind: Getting back into the movies. A realtor involved with the sale of his home said when he last saw Hardin, a few days before he left for Northern California, all the former television star from the "Bronco Layne" Western series in the 1950s was to talk about the good old days of Hollywood.
The former star was extremely disappointed that the realtor didn't remember an old war movie he had played in. He talked less about his conspiracy theories on Jewish bankers and the one-world government to come. Nothing about the Posse Commitatus, which the Patriots had linked up to as a co-conspiracy unto itself. Nothing about the revolution to come. Nothing about the U.S. Constitution, about the right to bear arms, indeed, the demand to do so.
~
We looked for him for a week. First we walked past the demolished homes in the area, marveling at their bombed-out look. As a 10-year-old boy, the inconvenience this caused to our neighbors was hardly a factor. It seemed fun out there, fun to be a searcher in bombed-out Phoenix, the subdivision seriously in decline due to the storm. Worst hit were the people down the street, who we had a running feud with because they were always the ones who called to get Spencer picked up by the animal control officer. Once, when we'd returned from a sailing trip to San Diego, Spencer was missing from the back yard. I knew immediately what had happened. I rushed across the street, being a hot-headed 15-year-old, and started yelling at the neighbor, Rosey something something, who was dead drunk when she answered the door. "You give my dog back," I shouted. "You have no right." They, of course, did have a right.
Leash laws mandated by the homeowners' committee being fairly clear. When Spencer was recovered from the animal shelter, he continued to pursue his novelty exploits, eventually getting to the point that he could leap the height of our wood fence in the backyard. Had to be six feet. It was only a matter of time, at least he had the potential, to jump the fence. Then the storm came and we had to resolve ourselves to the image of Spencer spinning away into the clouds. These were happy days for father.
~
A few days later I had my first psychic experience. It was during a baseball game. Bats and balls and the hopes of being a professional baseball player being my only real concern. That and the skinny blonde girl who was watching the game in the bleachers. They were behind, maybe by a few runs. The Firebirds were up to bat. I sat on the bench, and he had this feeling come over me, that heaviness from within. He thought that perhaps he was feeling ill. It was then thought I saw the whole thing before, one, two, three batters ahead -- I knew that each one would reach base and visualized the bat hitting a line drive to right field and their team winning the game. That's exactly what happened. When it was his turn to bat, I half-consciously lined the ball to right, just as I pictured it, willed it, in my brain. I was buried by my teammates, and after the game that skinny blonde girl gave me my first kiss. His braces, unfortunately, cutting her lip pretty good.
When they came home, Spencer was at the doorstep. Historians can only wonder about the tales he could have told of flying over Phoenix and out into the desert.
~
There McDaniel was, meandering in an automobile's deep sea dive into the cesspool of Boston traffic, on his way to work in Needham, Massachusetts, wondering if he would make it before his kidney burst from drinking too much coffee, and deciding a little research on his book at the old hotel in Boston would be better than actually completing the 40-mile commute to his office cube.
Which he could barely look at anymore ... O, the stories he needed to tell.
~
So where was he? Oh yeah, that's right, near Walden Pond, closer to White Pond, in Concord, where havoc gets played on cell phones when military surveillance craft fly overhead, since this little getaway is directly in the flight path to Hanscom AFB.
But now he is at the train depot in West Concord and some kind of supply or fuel engine is speeding by, blowing through everything so fast along that commuter rail line that it blew the Sampoerna cigarette right out of his hands and sent leaves and trash following its wake down the track.
A portentous hue, indeed.
As he waited, he realized: no train fare. One dollar in his pocket, and the check for the recently sold 1990 Honda Civic wouldn't clear for another hour or more. So into the West Concord coffee shop at the depot he went, writing out a check for $44 for a 12-ticket pass, for the upcoming days to get his silly ass and belongings to Mythville.
The commuter rail arrived on time. On their way, McDaniel watched the increasingly bare trees go by as the sunlight lit his face brightly down to Boston through Lincoln, Brandeis, Waltham, Cambridge, Porter Square, all of the way to North Station, which is directly below the Fleet Center, which of late had been amply amplified with a stadium-sized wall mural of an American flag, in 2001 one of the most memorable icons of the Hub.
What happened next is left for the historians to ponder in a series of blogs posted at his Web site, Mythville.blogspot.com/.
"Now I have a new problem," he states to imagined readers (at the time there were none). "While the depot in West Concord would take a check for still more 12-ticket rides to get my silly ass to Mythville, the guy behind the glass at the ticket counter in North Station wouldn't take a check. So there I am, 12 minutes away from my next commuter rail out of town to Mythville, and I have no money. So I figure: I'm in the Fleet Center, right? I have a Fleet account, right? Should be easy enough to just go outside the door and get money at a Fleet machine since by this time the check for the car has cleared.
"O shit, that reminds me. I forgot a key ingredient for this tale: What I packed for the trip. That would be one backpack (black) full of books (heavy), one computer carrying case device that I stuffed fully loaded with my poetry and writings (heavier still since I'm rarely able to lighten up), one black suitcase with wheels, also full of books, which I actually happened to purchase at my as then of yet unrealized Mythville exactly a year ago. Or almost exactly a year ago. Sometimes the mind does get hazy, but not very often when I'm communicatin' in this Mythappropriatin' Nation.
"The first day after I sold my car, which I had purchased two months ago with my last unemployment check from the State of Massachusetts, I carried the license plates with me as I took the commuter rail from town to town. Let's see. That day I did Boston and Beverly and Somerville and Cambridge. Actually, Somerville and Cambridge twice. Total cost: $6.
"Today I opened my mail, sent to me from the civil servants for the town of Concord, Mass., site of the so-called `Shot heard Round the World.' Actually, I got two pieces of mail in Concord over the weekend. The first was a traffic complaint from the town of Hamilton. It said they were suspending my Arizona driver's license, which that state had given me with the agreement that it would last until 12/28/2024. Gets quite a rise out of the pretty girls at the banks when I'm trying to cash my freelance writing checks. The State of Arizona wants people to keep on driving for a long time. So they fail to build much in the way of public transportation, and then people get to drive for a long time. But that's not for me. I guess I didn't tow their line. Or, at least, I didn't in Massachusetts. I mean, I really was on the way to get my car approved, finally, with its inspection sticker. It was going to be the second time I went to the inspection place. Spent a total of $60 on fees, another $60 to get new tires, which they had said weren't safe enough for New England roads (which really are truly unsafe), and now they wanted another $50 because some police officer happened to notice that my sticker was of the wrong color. Platial profiling, I think they call it ...
"Since I gave up my car as an act, OK, OK, an experiment in civil disobedience (and not because I'm a drunk, because I'm not), but also as a statement of global citizenship, I figured this letter in the mail (well, both of them), I figured the letter from the Hamilton District Court signified the beginning of a kind of understated (Hmmm, unstated) social contract. I wouldn't pay their $50 fee, even if I was in compliance (or on the way to buying tires, in order to comply), and they would agree to take care of me by making sure I stayed off the road with anything other than my own two feet. I opened the letter. Laughed. I thought: OK, it's a deal. We will mutually cancel our official ties. I won't need a driver's license, and they won't need to watch for me while I fail to drive.
"Am I missing something here?
"The other letter, from Concord's civil authorities, came in some kind of red paper duplicate format. They asked me to pay some kind of an excise tax, something, since I am relatively new to these parts, that I don't completely understand. Do I pay a tax for the right to breathe, drive, what?
"Since Concord is a hotbed of accomplished liberalism and humanitarian letters, and since Massachusetts is a liberal state, which means there are way too many rules, deeds, covenants, restrictions, laws, organizations of security and plain old control and so on, I took this note to be another kind of serendipitous receipt for a mysterious agreement that had already well been determined when I sold my car as an act of civil disobedience. So, I unsigned on the dotted line, figured that eventually there might be some money in unsigning on the dotted line, if I can just find (by walking) the local office that wages excise taxes to someone who not only had no vote or gave no permission, but doesn't even know what the hell they are charging me for.
"I can't tell: Am I two or three days ahead of, or, two or three days behind the hyenas barking at my heels? Is it time to cash in, or, cash out? I guess I'll just use my old Massachusetts license plates for snow shoes someday and go down to this place, which I have no idea where it is, and see what they say. Hopefully, it's downhill.
"In the meantime, I'll just walk the walk, and, talk the talk ...
--Sullivan Square, Boston, or thereabouts, heading very fast toward Reading, Mass., and further north ... Nov. 19, 2001."
posted by Unknown at 8:13 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home