Lightning Bugs and Pickle Juice (Work In Progress)

We were running late, but not by much, and had a few more stops before we would getting home for some rest. The big day -- the RAIN ride, across Indiana, 168 miles in one day -- was the day after tomorrow, and we still had bikes to load, dogs to get to dog-sitters, food to pack, and details to check off. Somehow, magically, it was all happening, in spite of the obstacles stacked against it; the RAIN ride had come together -- people, gear, registrations, time off, family support, transportation, and other things less tangible, like showing up in a best self for something bigger. 

But I'm getting ahead of myself. We were a little late.  

Karl was driving. "You want to see the Golden Dome on the way to Tim's? Desert cats aren't allowed inside, though." 

I was the "desert cat," Karl's nick name for me, having just flown in from the Southwest for the ride. Desert rat might fit better, since I was born in Arizona and had chosen it above all places. Karl knew I wasn't big on things like golden domes. I was more of a straw-bale construction guy, but it was a treat to see some local glam. Karl, along with his wife Kathe, being who they were, were just terrific hosts. They wanted to show me the sights, things I had not seen for a long time, things like rivers with water in them, towering trees, walls of green undergrowth, ponds, lakes, and wildlife, like fireflies. 

Fireflies are mysteries to me. How they light up, where they come from, how they survive have all been sources of wonder. I see them as messengers of light and energy, maybe even divinity, a source of awe. 

The Golden Dome and the Notre Dame campus were lovely, but nothing like the fireflies hovering over Tim's rich green lawn as we pulled in. Any tree in his yard would be a giant among the pygmy juniper and pinon forest of New Mexico. They were dazzling specimens to this desert dweller. 

Tim and his family were supplying a bike rack that had to be mounted on Karl's truck. Jack, the Doodle dog, would stay at Tim and Kim's while we did the ride. He had to meet Tim's dogs while we assembled his kennel. 

Tim and I had done the RAIN ride before. Back then, we did it to remember Will Streeter who had died from melanoma too young, leaving behind two sons, Mark and Eric, and his wife Kathe. Kathe had met and married Karl; together they were the "KJs" and were now helping Eric organize the ride as a kick-off for Eric's new life, post incarceration. Eric had hit a rough patch and had been talking up the ride as a goal and occasion for moving on. 

Tim brought out the rack and with characteristic skill and efficiency popped it right on, tightened and ready. We loaded his bike and made small talk.  

"Nice lightning bugs," I said. 

"Yeah, there seem to be fewer for some reason, but we're glad to see them. Better than fireworks," Tim replied.

I had to agree. The Fourth of July was coming up, and I wasn't in the mood to celebrate with pyrotechnics, especially with fire dangers being what they were in the drought-stricken Southwest. 

There would be eight of us riding. Matt, the best friend of Eric, his brother Martin, flown in from his bird touring work in Guatemala, Joel, a cousin and grass-fed beef rancher, Seth, an organic vegetable gardener, Karsten, a math prodigy an professional poker player, Sean, a nurse, father of four, and general strong man, Tim, a man of many talents, including high-end flooring and remodels, Eric, star pole vaulter, music lover, visionary for the ride and me, the English teacher.  

After installing the rack and dropping off the dog, we headed back to Kathe and Karl's for some much-needed rest. On the way we stopped for some provisions. On a 170 mile ride, nutrition and hydration have to be pretty dialed, but tasty too. Water was good, but Coke had some kick, and, hey, even if I don't normally drink it, if the furnace of effort is hot enough, they say, it will burn anything.  

 

The crew arrived in the morning, and the organized chaos of sorting and packing got mixed up with last-minute repairs -- a stripped seat-post binder bolt, pedal installation, new shoe cleat attachment, and final adjustments. 

 

But, I had to admit, we were a pretty classy group with vintage steel, aluminum, titanium, bikes with an assortment of fenders, racks, baskets, and bar bags. You could say we were pretty old school, retro-riders. Plus we had matching jerseys. Everyone knows that matching jerseys add at least five miles-an-hour to your average speed. 

 

We loaded up and somehow fit everything into three vehicles and found our spots and took off for Terre Haute. The forecast for ride day was rain. It rained pretty hard on the way, but it smelled good to my parched, sun-dried body.  

The RAIN organizers hosted a dinner at a local brew pub. Over lean protein chicken and piles of pasta we talked about the ride. Eric was concerned about the weather and the distance we would have to ride. It also looked like we would not have the tail winds we hoped for. Prospects sounded a little gloomy.

"I doubt I'll make it all the way," Joel said. 

I said "Same. If I have to pack it in, that's okay though. The point is to just be here and ride with Eric."

Nods around the table. 

"Besides, it's already a success. I mean we made it here. Eric got us all together, and that's the real achievement." 

"Still, it would be nice to ride the whole distance," Eric said. "I want to give it a shot. I want to cross that line in Richmond with you all." 

The miles looked very long from where I sat in that noisy pub. It was going to be the real deal of going deep into endurance and pain, in spite of the sweet food and drink. I had my own doubts, coming off of back surgery eight weeks earlier. But we were here to go deep, not to make great time or claim personal glory. This ride had been an homage to a lost father, and now we were riding for a son trying to figure it out after a stint in prison. Father and son, trying to remember, to gather strength, to connect by sharing a journey, to invite challenge and find out how we would meet that challenge. Fear. Anticipation. Excitement. All braided together. This was a collective effort to make a difference, teachers, farmers, guia de aves,  craftsmen, brothers for a long day, maybe a longer time, all fanning an ember of humanity that is doing the right thing, something bigger than the self. Generosity, kindness, consideration, and hard work shared over the day would make the miles fly by. 

After a cold brew with Karl, Kathe, Tim and Kim, we retired to the YMCA to sleep in the gym, another shared novelty of the trip. I dreamed of tornadoes, sleeping under the giant A/C unit blowing down from the ceiling. 

Morning came early. The ornithologist brothers, Matt and Martin, identified nighthawks and herons on the way to the line up. They would point out bald eagles, red-tail hawks, yellow breasted warblers, and other birds throughout the day. They noticed and paid attention better than almost anyone I had met before. 

Through the city and out into the country we rode. The miles lay in front of us, seemingly endless, through flat, straight, farmland, to twisting, rolling, tunnels of green around rivers and lakes, past cornfields, people out mowing on a warm Saturday, past water towers and villages. Some roads were narrow lanes, others wide highways with some speeding traffic.

A truck coal-rolled us; a woman told us to ride a different road because she wanted more highway; most people waved. One person had set out signs for free pickle juice shots. There is nothing like cold pickle juice when one is cramping and spent. The delights of this world are as necessary as the craving of the soul sometimes. We are here to see, hear, feel, touch, and swoon at kindness when it is offered. 

 

 

There has always been a tendency of some people, on the other hand, to see enemies, to divide the world into a competitive us and them, and then to be hostile and aggressive with the "other." It seems that current prevailing leadership has given more permission for acting out aggression, and that jacked-up pickups with buzzy, aggressive-tread tires take some pleasure in passing bikers very close. We had to be careful, street-wise. It's always a choice, that embrace of world views: some people will see in everyone a fellow traveler, a friend, while others see a threat, a "less than," maybe dangerous, other. It depends on the worldview we feed as to which we embrace and embody. 

After about 60 miles, Eric's knee pain shot up into a sharp, overwhelming level that made riding further impossible. He had to abandon.

He had been training hard and perhaps strained something in the knee that might be seriously injured if he continued. Our reason for riding was going to have to take the hard road of wisdom. I would gladly have traded places, but the option wasn't available.

Eric took off his event number and changed out of the bike kit. He took on the role of support person for the rest of us, who still rode for him and for his vision of gathering us together. 

It may just have been me, but we seemed to coalesce even more at that point. I, for one, had to go beyond the "fun" of riding, and instead surrender to something else that pulled me forward. I put my head down and just went deeper than I thought I could, only to go deeper again when I felt I could go no more. 

We stayed together, though talking less. The final miles were a blur of exhaustion, but the rain came down hard as a police escort took us home.   

 

We rolled together across the finish line and found Eric, who took his place in the center of the band of RAIN brothers. Yes, we had made it, and Eric had made it possible through something of a persistent, steady, focused vision of community and shared purpose. 

I walked to the shower, somewhat beat and delirious, through a field of lightning bugs, weaving their way through the dusk, looking for each other, in the light they shone.  

(This is a work in progress. Feel free to comment or add anything I missed.)  

 

 

Why MAGA Can't Break Up With Trump

Much of MAGA is anesthetized intellectually. The world is changing too fast -- digital economy, cutural diversity, economic inequality, environmental collapse, labyrinthine for-profit health care system, climate catastrophes. and on and on -- for MAGA to process.

To be fair, working MAGA families tend to perceive that they have been "left behind." The "left" has focused on cultural issues rather than working class, labor organizing. When Obama let working class mortgages go into foreclosure while bailing out big banks, the blue collar world was left in a vacuum that Trump swooped in to fill. He became their only hope for opportunity, college, and the life of "rich and white." 

Yes, there is much more going on, but that is some of the context for MAGA hanging its hopes on Trumpism. You can hear it in interviews, where MAGA says Trump "got everything right," or "tells it like it is."  He offers up easy answers that are the old nationalist anti-immigrant, racist, anti LGBTQ, and the old fallacy of trickle-down economics.  

MAGA wants a friendly, white, patriarchal, black and white morality; in short, familiarity. The future can't offer that, so they dig their holes in the sand and put their heads in with the hope that this chaos will all blow over. 

Trump, however, does not create order or restore a nostalgic society. He is gangster capitalism writ large and cruel. He is short term gain at the cost of destroying whatever he touches -- environment, social safety net, infrastructure, widening wealth gap, and on and on. 

 Rather than wake up to this harsh reality, the "desert of the real," to borrow from The Matrix, they voluntarily blind themselves and cling to world that no longer exists, and, in fact, never did. 

It's an abusive relationship that MAGA can't, or won't, break off. The old, white, capitalist patriarchy will likely just have to die off so that a space for change can open up. The changes will include gender equity, racial diversity, new cultural norms about sexuality, community work, not for profit healthcare, labor organizing, and a last ditch stand curb global warming. 

So friends, do not despair, but keep working on the visions of a wider net of opportunity and helpfulness. Time to find allies and to learn to work together to make a better world.  

In short, the future is about work, learning, adapting, and tolerant community. 

MAGA seems unwilling or unable to enter that future.   

 

 

 

When Desire Does a Bait and Switch

He fell hard for the dream he projected onto her. She was a match to his imagination, and the fire caught on dry tinder, years in the making. She was the "if only" of his fantasies, and he could see the far horizons of possibility in her -- a playmate, a travel buddy, a perfect fit for all the good times. We can make our world just right, he said, no problems, not muss, no fuss, all fun and comfort. It came as a surprise when she asserted her difference, stepping outside his narrow slice of what he thought was possible. The real journey, she said, lies within, a place he had locked up tight in the taboo of never-in-this-life; too much pain there, the thing he avoided most, the thing that ran him, the silent advisor behind all of his decisions, that raw nerve of loss. He had braided suffering into the inevitable pain that comes with a life and had identified with that. One might say that this was the end, but one would be mistaken. The departure from the known, the line of sight he thought was all there was, became an answer to a question he didn't know he was asking. There was a more to this life than he imagined and it took a shattering of the self and the surrender to a heart breaking open to loosen the scales from his eyes.

Darkness Is On the Move

Some Americans, roughly a third of us, have chosen the Dark Side: fear, greed,violent domination, regimentation, -- meanness. They/we have chosen not to work through their shadows, the trauma hidden in the psyche. They/we choose instead to locate the "enemy" "out there," in people of color, poverty, and lack of power -- immigrants and other marginalized groups, mainly, but also anyone who disagrees with them. These/we Americans hate and want to destroy these "enemies." They/we will destroy every vestige of democracy to do so. They/we are like a snake eating itself out of anger, spite, and terror of its own, self-created monsters.

The other two thirds of Americans, if they want to live in a freer, more democratic state, have to organize and regain power. It will take courage to stand up to the brutality of a police state. It will require that we overcome differences to work together to reinstate a democracy. 

The times will be hard, because the fearful, our brothers and sisters, have already erected walls, fences, and weapons. Courage, community, and clarity of vision are the tools we need and have to use. 

The work is there, waiting. The consequences of denial or forfeit of action will be dire, for we all will enter a long night of shadow.

Mexico (Draft)

I lived in Mexico for almost two years, off and on, with trips out of the country to renew visas and to make developed world wages so I could better travel and live.

Those first days, I was a sponge and a set of eyeballs. I just stared and absorbed the sounds, smells, colors, and energy of a people hustling to make a living. The sidewalks were packed with people, alive with vendors selling fresh -squeezed orange juice, small stacks of limes or tomatoes or trinkets. A card table was a livelihood.I had to learn to politely decline offers to buy whatever they were selling, but still their eyes sought mine out -- "Here comes a sale, a gringo. Money is nothing to them." 

I trailed streamers of student identity from Madison: baggy jeans, funky baseball cap, worn t-shirt, beat-up sneakers. None of this impressed anyone. Dressing down was not stylish or much appreciated. 

I had studied Spanish most of my high-school and college life, and had a pretty solid grasp on grammar, but not on pronunciation. I must have sounded to them like some Spanish aristocrat dropped out of the sky from the 19th century. My formal address and stilted, whole word elocution made people smile, if not outright laugh. 

While Mexico City, the Distrito Federal, was a humming, cosmopolitan urban monster of a city with much to offer, I wanted something quieter, so went to Cuernavaca to find a language school. They called it the City of Eternal Springtime, and it lived up to that title. There were blooming plants coming up out of cracks in the sidewalk, on the sides of buildings, and sprawled across the countryside. In the distance were the volcanoes, Ixta and Popo. 

I found a guesthouse, a casa de huespedes, and rented a room with the intent to stay for a while. It was not a tourist spot ans catered more to young Mexican workers. There was a teacher, some receptionists, a crazy guy who traveled to pick up eyeglass lenses that needed to be ground to fit prescriptions, sales people, students, and oil workers in Cuernavaca on leave from the derricks out in the Gulf of Mexico. 

We cooked in a communal kitchen so got ro know each other. The kitchen looked over a narrow but busy street frequented by vendors pushing carts and singing their services. Buses and cars were few but took up the whole street, so people had to hug the walls to avoid collisions. It all worked somehow, if not chaotically. 

I enrolled in a language school that catered to Europeans mainly who were on leave from jobs or on holiday and wanted to engage with the locals. Language and culture and field-trips and romance made for energetic community. 

I preferred the working locals to the well-heeled backpacker language school folks, but the latter were a nice break from the overwhelm of trying to acculturate. 

(To be Continued...)

Back In Life

The pain has subsided. The surges and crippling knives have gone calm and quiet. They have retreated back into the mystery from which they came. I am grateful, fresh from the memory of incessant assault on the senses. I again am free to let the mind wander, to see, from a place of peace, what is in front of me, to decide what it is I want to do, how it is I would like to spend this day, not beset by the harassing horde of nervous agitation. It's a gift, and I know that it is easy to forget, once one is here, back in the land of the well, with all the distraction that comes with being here. I will try to remember and to bow in gratitude for the day. I want to use it well. 

Three Thirty In the Morning

I walk in the company of cats. They are the ones who know this time, the time when all things are possible because space and possibility walk with us in the dark. For this moment, I rise above the pulsing pain after strapping on the ice packs on my thigh and back. Once settled I can travel to where the mind takes me until I again return to the subject at hand, the little daggers that hold my attention hostage. I remember bio luminescence behind a sailboat that I worked on off the coast of Central America. It was my watch and the seas were calm as I held the course for Punta Arenas in Costa Rica. I remember my hundred-dollar pickup truck heading west to Colorado with skis on the roof, tips gently dancing in the wind. I remember the shock of diving into Lake Superior on a solo backpacking trip to Isle Royale. I taste the time left to me and lean into it. A train plays a mournful song to the waning moon. Who will you see today, pilgrim? What will you carry with you from this moment outside your habits and routines? How will you trace the story waiting for you to tell? Will you be able and willing to part the screen of distraction to see and embrace this moment and whatever it holds?

Pain Talk

Still in pain and slowly getting worse. My task is not to resist or to panic, but to go with it, disidentify with it, let it be a "taste of purification" that is distinct from suffering. Observe precisely the ebbs and flows without making it a thing or wishing it was something else, wishing I could get out on my bike or or sleep the sleep of a honeymoon beloved. No, the pain is there, and it's calling. It says work. Do the work of letting me be without resisting. I hear you. I turn my attention to sorting the sensations from the prayers for them to end. 

Abnormality

Donna Frazzee, the girl who sat behind me in fifth grade, used the whisper "abnorm" to me when she wanted to bug me. She thought this was very funny and would double up in an all but silent exhale of a giggle at her own joke. (My first name in Norman, and I was named after my father, so called Erec to keep us distinct in the family.) Donna's secret joke forecasted a trajectory of my time here on earth. I have been out-of-step, or a half-bubble-off-plumb, my whole life. I just can't seem to fit into the boxes people want to put me in. Anyway, it comes as no surprise that my body has taken up the moniker as well. My MRI for the hot, stabbing pain in my lower back, hip, and thigh has revealed "abnormalities," growths, in other words. You could say tumors, but there is still some further tests to run. None of this is anything to worry about, though; it's just the path life takes and another turn in the circuitous road I travel. I am relieved, actually, to have the beginnings of a diagnosis. Now I can see it down there, in the complicated tunnels of the spine, all those nerves, discs, and Gaudi-inspired bone structures -- a little something that reminds me this ain't no paved, easy, predictable, normal garden path. Carry on, y'all. And remember that your time is likely shorter than you think. Rejoice in this day, and try to breathe through the pain. XO.

Wisconsin (Draft chapter of a larger work)

After retiring from the Army, my father got a job with AAA in Wisconsin. Wisconsin, to me, seemed almost the Wild West compared to the tangle of traffic that is DC and Alexandria. 

We uprooted and looked for house in a small town that might serve as home base for my Dad's field work. I liked the town of Sun Prairie, if for reason beyond the sound of the name, but we chose Stoughton. It was close enough to Madison for my dad and small enough for my mother to feel comfortable driving and house-holding. 

While we waited or a house to become available, we lived in a cottage on the shore of a lake, Lake Kegonsa, "the lake of many fishes". I thought we out in the wilderness and would shoot my .22 standing on the back porch into the woods behind the cottage. That was not something our neighbors appreciated, and I heard about it. 

It was strange living on a lake after the urban life of northern Virginia. All of us were a little naive bordering on reckless with the new surroundings. 

One time we rented a row boat from Sunnyside, the resort near the cottage, and rowed out into the lake. A windstorm came up and we had to fight waves to get back to Sunnyside. The waves came up fast, and we had to row into the wind. We made little, if any progress, and our little craft was taking on water. 

A glittery ski boat came to out rescue, piloted by a handsome guy Maggie's age. His interest in rescuing us took on a real mission when he saw that the new blonde from school was in trouble. He pulled up alongside to get the painter from the row boat so he could tow us to the dock. His attention was more behind his destination than it was forward. The air was charged with attraction.

I just sat in the back of the beleaguered dinghy and stared across the whitecaps at the shore. 

Maggie was assimilating to the new place in her way and I would have to figure out mine. 

I sleep-walked through high school, numb mostly. Two insights stood out, though. One was that I found a part of myself in words, keeping a journal. Two, I loved art. I drew for the pure joy of it in out basement. I did participate  for personal reasons and could not care less about accomplishing what others felt was worth doing. I wrestled because I liked working out, but had no competitive fire. I did well in math and humanities, well enough to be elected to give a speech at graduation. But my assimilation was more cultural. This was a land of lakes, woods, and farms. People fished, hunted, and worked long days. I would learn these ways, more or less, and play the role of redneck for a while. 

My best days were spent alone in a canoe on the Yahara River, which ran in front of our house. I could carry the Grumman 17 foot aluminum canoe across the street, through the Park, and down the bank to a rocky ledge near the water and launch. From there I could paddle upstream, through town, under the Highway 51 bridge, the railroad bridge, and out into the marsh. The river opened up into cattails, oak woods, and farm land. Redwing blackbirds perched on the cattails and carp swirled the muddy water in the shallows. 

Out here, I found something of myself. It was part of me that I didn't know but wanted to to become. it was restless, loved rivers, woods, and mountains. This part of me would carry me through long, rough patches of shadow and loneliness that waited for me after my life in the small town. 

Fast forward a few years, and I am out of high school, doing yard and farm harvesting work in the the summer and working in a truck body factory during the winter, driving an old International pick-up truck, carrying rifles on a rack over the rear window of the cab, and drinking to blackout after frustrating nights in bars trying to meet women.  

I revel in being a bit of an outcast and call myself a "DG," or degenerate. I can see a path forward that includes a muscle car, a small house, maybe a wife, and a life lived in a small town. 

But there is something gnawing at me. I can't quite put it into words, but it involves college, learning to think, and taking a sharp turn into the unknown. 

A chance meeting at the urinals with the president of the truck body company helps me to imagine a new path. The president and I are standing beside each other at the urinals and he asks, "What are you doing here?" 

I am silent, but he goes on. "This is no place for you. I can put you in charge building doors because John, the head, is about to retire, if you want. But you can do something else. I heard your speech at the last graduation. You aren't factory material. Think about it." 

So there it was. A fork in the road. I knew but didn't know at the same time. 

A few days later, all of us workers on the line are called to a general meeting. The president stands on a riveting table and gives us the news. At that historical moment, a recession has hit, and he offers a deal to anyone willing to quit rather than be fired. 

I jump on it and resign. I apply to the University of Wisconsin -- Steven's Point, and state my major as forestry, and pay for my first semester with money I made building semi trailer doors.

Maslow's Ladder, Father's Day (Intro to a Larger Work)

I was never very good at taking advice, especially from older people, like my father. The curriculum of the young is not that of the old. The young are warriors, on the move, achieving; the old are moving inward and taking stock of the life they have lived, coming to peace. 

As a father now myself, I have to remember that when I think of writing something for my sons. The oh- so- patronizing-and- axiomatic tones of elders talking to young people makes me cringe a bit. I don't know if aging, by itself, constitutes wisdom. Experience can, if we learn something from it, knock off some of the erroneous ego-based assumptions we all carry about what is the best way to travel through the time given to us. 

That is what I hope to achieve with these scribbles to you both, my beloved sons. 

I have lived a life of searching. I did not (much) chase fame or wealth and had little ambition for those things. What I did listen and look for was something very elusive, a kind of quality of experience, of being more engaged with what was happening. My worst fear was that I would pass though this life numb, void of convictions or empathy, untouched by the troubles and delights of this earthly journey. 

That meant that I had some work to do, because before I knew better, I had been hammered by a trauma that I had no idea how to process or digest. As an adolescent whose father was at war in a time of great turmoil, I was already wounded and had crafted for myself a shell in which I hid away from the world as a form of self-protection. 

People called me "shy" and I stood only on the periphery of things, sitting out because I did not know how to handle pain. 

My path lay in turning that wordless tangle of trauma into some kind of art. My greatest desire was to get what was inside, out, literally to express, like mothers express milk from their breasts, that boiling mess I had churning in my heart. 

I had to go alone, an a path that almost always was the back way, through the woods, around the places where people gather. Most people interfered with my search; they distracted me from what I was looking for. No, it was solitary, mostly, this path I had to follow.

I got lucky. Life did not lead me into a despair so great that it would destroy me. I had helpers along the way -- friends, teachers, familiars, and just blind circumstance -- that diverted me back onto the path right when I needed it most. 

I was poor. I was a student. I was lost. But I escaped being prey. And for that I am very grateful, because this life led me to where I am, a place where I can look back and tell a bit of the story. 

I have learned not to avoid pain, and, as a bonus, have learned to feel joy. The two are braided together. What a surprise to find hidden inside greatest fear, the windfall of my greatest desire. I have won by surrendering.  

Sciatica

I am currently incapacitated and hobbled by pain. That pain erases my hopes and plans for the day, and instead, the proximity and reminder of the ephemeral vulnerablity of this body sit down next to me again. Mortality sits close and takes up the entire frame of my awareness. 

I feel the scarcity of time left to me and load the awareness into every step I take. The onslaught of fact and memory whispers at the edges of my struggles to attach ice packs and heating pads. I meet my desires that are braided into the failures of talent and circumstance and hold my hands up to the hot fires of grief. I approach but don't immerse myself in the emotions. 

I track the timeline of my life in a random collage of images. The memories rise out the mysteries of shadow. I wander the streets of Merida, Yucatan, wake up under a bridge on a hitch-hiking journey through Texas, see the beloved ghosts of women I have loved, now dead. I too am approaching the end, but it not a big deal. In fact it is routine, a passing of another unrealized human. 

Here, in the dark, on the edges of pain, I try to reconcile with the unrequited business of my life. It's a secret and solitary business, one that no one will read or know.

I didn't think it would go this way. My spring was supposed to be pain-free, a trip to New Mexico, where I would fill the fountain, feed the birds, explore the forests on my bicycle, nail down some licks on the guitar, and maybe paint some of my dreams. 

Instead I sit here crippled with a cocktail of meds -- Meloxicam, steroids, Gabafentin, Banofen, Tramadol -- that are not up to holding the line on pain. I am forced to sit and ruminate on the random wanderings of my mind. Memories assail me. I am thrown into the gauntlet on my end-of-life urgency to come to terms with the path my life has taken.

The unborn curriculum glows with a heat I cannot survive, but I warm myself in the proximity I can handle. It won't let me rest.

The pain rises and falls. I walk when I can, to the kitchen, to the bathroom, to the porch. I sit when I cannot walk. No position is comfortable. For short periods, when the meds meet the pain, I sleep. My dreams are a fever of mystery and shadow -- climbing mountains, driving through rivers, chasing ships on the ocean, lusting after the relief, the melting that is sexual union. 

It is not what I thought my days would be. It is what it is, and I am learning to lean into the pain. 

I wait for relief. I surrender into the pain, and this moment is the sum of my reality. I watch the screen of mu mind but live the hot and glowing wire of pain. All that matters is that I curl into a chasm of what comfort I can find. There is no escape.  

Awakening Stardust

 

I have no choice but to compose this chapter called Aging. The plot, tone, scene, and arc are up to me, but the outcome is obligatory, the conclusion foregone. I am leaning into introversion, exploring the canyons of psyche, the geology of conditioning, the bones, ligaments, and anatomy of narrative and history of conditioning. I travel through the topography as a witness, the terrain a snapshot of territory in flux, as temporary as a flower, about to be washed away by rushing force of time and mortality.

If I build anything here, it is the practice of seeing, listening, and surrendering all that I have held up as "me." The space I inhabit is not a space at all, but a wave on its way to somewhere else, a wave out of a particle. "I" am disintegrating as I loosen my grip on what I thought was solid and permanent, but "I" am also connecting to something larger, something ongoing, something moving, a force traveling as light between the space of matter, but infusing matter. 

I begin to understand what the phrase "made of stardust" really means. The egoic Erec is a transient manifestation of form; the soul abiding and animating the flesh goes on into iterations and evolving transformations. I never left cosmic origins, but I may have forgotten them.

The upshot of this is that I have no choice but to choose love, to love this life, even as the form of it fades, declines, and eventually disolves. Release is the hardest part of love, as the hands only know grasping. I have to learn another way. 

My transition may come sooner than I think since I am losing contact with this material plane, but while I am here I need to live unfettered life of surrender and heartbreak, as in the heart breaking open.  

Turning 68

 

It's calm now, moon past full, still high among the lingering storm clouds.

I walk a narrow path in the wolf hour as song dogs sing.

It's time to go deep, down into the hole in my heart to meet the demons and angels dwelling there, to connect with the flow of energy surging through me and all things.

The years of trying to please and get it right have ended.  I let those stories go and travel light, my senses tuned to the urge calling me forward, up and out of my habits, my confining skin.

The work now is about descending, settling, parting the veil between this world and the mystery of spirit.

It's not the sun I long for, but the velvet skies of midnight

Stars are my company, my guides.

I am coming, my lost and exiled soul.

I gather up my staff, shed all that is unnecessary, and travel north to find you, trusting that my feet will find this strange, invisible path.

Faith is braided into the weary bones, tired eyes, and slow steps.

My heart knows the way.

I'll see you when the new day dawns. 

Fraying At the Edges

When an organ like the brain starts to go, it's not so dramatic or accessible to others as a cancer or a heart condition. It's more subtle, nuanced, more subjective. You feel like you are walking precariously near a precipice in the dark and are about to slip and plunge into a void of blank static, but no one knows. No one else can see the edge that you sense. Novelty becomes something to dread because it shoves you right up to that edge of not knowing, of just emptiness, confusion, and anxiety about not knowing what to do, how to proceed, especially when everyone else seems to be clear and confident and excited. Watching others soar at the prospect of learning makes you frustrated and angry. All you want to do is be left alone to contemplate your demise, to surrender to oblivion's cool embrace.

Crazy Old Man

My big green kayak has slipped from its perch. It lies there on its side, looking every bit the forlorn, neglected dream that it is. I was going to travel to Baja and paddle off into the sunset, never to return. That was a few years ago, and plans have changed. 

I have to get realistic about where I am in life, and where I am is old, weak, and ugly. Just a fact. No judgment, remorse, or self pity.

So the kayak is going to stay here, most likely, for the rest of its natural life, the rest of my natural life. 

If that is the case, what is it that I am going to do with the days I have left? The answer to that is more about inside work than outside, visible, material doing. 

I want to become the crazy old man who lives the life impractical. I want to lean into getting old, feeble, senile, and free of inhibitions, to live the life that I feel will be my best life:  more art, more music, more honesty, more generosity, more emotion. I'll probably cry a lot more. 

So, there you have it -- my plan in a nutshell. 

Time to go prop that kayak up, give it some dignity in its old age.

Moonlight Moment

She is my wife of forty years, breathing softly, lying behind me, spooned close, on a night draped in moonlight. My arm reaches for her, drawn to her heat, and inserts itself into narrow space between us. My hand and fingers rest there at the portal to her, touching so tenderly that there is more electricity than contact. She is as new as birth to me, and I wait for movement, a shift of weight that opens her, a squeeze that says "I know you are there. Yes." before I advance. Moments pass like hours. I wait. The moon rises higher, shining on us. I walk a razor's edge of attention, all focused at that tiny point of contact, my blood pounding in my temples so loud I wonder if she can hear it. She is flesh made of light, and I feel I could pass a hand right through her as the faintest of squeezes, a slight pump of tissue offers an invitation to share her secret. I am slow, gentle, moving at glacier speed, but on fire. My touch sees the architecture of her, sacred folds and mounds and silken planes. She is weightless and made of sparkling photons. I touch the mystery driving fusion, super novae, life force. She rises and crests and writhes again and again as waves of energy pass through us both. She is more soul than flesh, and something like eternity wraps us in its blanket. She is not one for irony and says that she now understands the Big Bang and how it is baked into the design of desire and living things. Silence informs my touch moving over her as moonlight rains down in a moment of grace, of earthy pleasure, a delight that passes into memory as the moon winks and nods and slides toward the horizon. Too soon only a memory, 

Hopelessly Analog

 

The truck is humming along at two thousand RPM, and the wind comes in gusts against the windshield as I head north out of Tucson for the summer. I don't have ear buds, Bluetooth, or Spotify. In fact, I don't even have a radio that works. The CD player died years ago. I sit and listen to the sound of the motor, the tires on the pavement, the creaks and rattles of the twenty-two year old truck. I smell the faint trace of gas after the last fill-up. I swivel into the seat to find a comfortable position and start watching the wildflowers along the highway. In another hour or two, I may even sing to myself or jot down a phrase in my notebook. The stimuli are abundant in this here-and-now of moving away from the city and into the wide vistas of the desert highlands. 

You may think this is a primitive way to take a road trip. I mean -- no music, no audio book, no Surround Sound. But, the truth for me is that I like it. I prefer the emptiness to the digital, streaming distraction from this moment that otherwise fills my awareness. I like to hear what the quiet has to tell me, what the tedium of the long hours offers up as a nugget of truth as my mind spins out along with the wheels and the machinery at work all around me. I find I make something out of space rather than merely consume what the producers want me to see and hear.

I find it soothing, like sinking my feet down through mud to the bottom of a stream bed. I find joy here in these moments emptied of digital stimulation. I rarely get to hear what I think beneath all the noise of input, the battle for eyeballs, and competition for attention. I like to give my all to right here, right now, sore butt included. 

What Happens In Baja, Or, It's Not (Just) About the Boat (Draft)

 

 Departure

"You need to take a trip," she said. "A trip would interrupt your routine, break you out of the mental loops you're stuck in. You might find something out about yourself that will give you some insight into what comes next and how best to live it." 

I agreed that I needed a fresh outlook, that I had been wandering through my days in a fog of ennui, looking for the thread that might lead me to the answers of what I should do with this chapter of my life, the pre-dead endgame of retirement. More specifically, I was in rough patch of writer's block. I was angry about it too. I felt like I was in a straight jacket.

This came to a head when I was asked to accompany my friend Tom on a rescue mission to Baja. Some sailing friends were taking shelter from winds and waves. They were in danger to the point of having to abandon their goal of a Hawaii voyage. More on that later.

I felt skewered by contraries. I wanted to stay home, live simply, play music, cut down on my carbon footprint. I also wanted big horizons -- wind, sun, excitement. I was bound up in ambivalence. 

I wanted to stay safe. I wanted to protect my stuff. But that felt narrow, small, and constipated. 

Another part of me said don't be such a chicken shit; think of them for a second. Do what needs to be done. Your soul needs to decide this one. Make a difference. Tip the scale of karma a bit in your favor, even if it means discomfort, danger, possible loss or damage to your possessions. 

Yes, you have a new toy, the camper you have dreamed of since childhood. It is your one shot at a vehicle like this. You want to keep it safe, functional, looking good. You don't want to put it harm's way. 

The parts of me were locked in contention. I had to do something.

I had no idea where I would go and did not have a vision of a destination until Tom came striding up to me in the alley behind his home with an invitation to join him on rescue mission to Baja.

It seemed that some friends of his were stranded in their boat near the little town of San Quintin, a couple hundred miles down the Pacific coast of the peninsula. They needed help to get them and their boat back to Arizona. 

"I'd like company," he said. "You could help with the driving. And we could use extra hands to take apart the boat, get it on the trailer, and haul it back to Cascabel," he said. I knew Cascabel, a little burg in southern Arizona. It was my kind of place -- populated by seekers, sustainability people, wood workers, welders, artists, independent thinkers, misfits like myself. I liked the connection.

So, the trip called me. I was busy I told him, but let me think about it. Later, while driving into the Tucson Mountains in my loping pick-up truck, it occurred to me that we would have to take a bigger vehicle than Tom's little four-cylinder Toyota. My V-8 would be able to haul a 23 foot catamaran up the steep grades in Baja and southern California. The idea took shape, seemed like a journey that fit my assignment to take a trip, get out my habit, leave the known, well worn horizons of my routine.

"Let's do it," I said.

 

Crossing the Line

"I'll need your papers for the trailer," the Mexican border agent said.

I rummaged through the file folder that held my passport, registration, boat title, trailer registration, insurance proof, and other documents. But I couldn't locate the title and registration for the trailer. She got a little irritated and asked what we were doing with the big trailer, where we were going. 

"It's a rescue mission, " I said. "Some friends are stuck in their sailboat, off the Pacific coast, near Molino Viejo, pinned down in an estuary by high winds, big seas, cold, and fog. The currents are dangerous. They just take shelter in the boat that keeps getting hammered by the waves and howling wind."

She seemed to take that as legit, handed me back my folder, and told me to bring better, original documents next time.

Driving in Mexico is not like driving in the US. There, it is an act of faith. You just surrender to ongoing hazard after hazard. If you are not threading the needle between oncoming semis and the edge of the pavement, you are dodging gaping cavities in the asphalt. Forget about steady speed. Turn off you cruise control. Don't even think about picking up your phone. You are on manual now. Focus and respond or accept the consequences.

The rules are different. It's expected that you straddle the shoulder fog line to let people pass; yellow no passing lines mean nothing; weaving through dense traffic, if you can, is expected; speed limits are more like suggestions; you should not be surprised if you round a blind corner and meet a steam roller smoothing new asphalt (no warning, no "road work ahead" caution signs). 

The roads are a patchwork ranging from state-of-the-art to barely driveable. Narrow highways, pot holes, decrepit vehicles, obscure traffic directions, non-existent stop signs where, yes, drivers are required to stop, lanes that just end without warning, stretches where the shoulder disappears completely at a drop-off of a couple feet. 

Yes, I had left the familiar and was now on the journey that would rattle my habits and shake loose the calcified questions I needed to ask myself.  

Road Hell

The drive felt harsh and wouldn't end. We drove through small towns, stop-and-go traffic, dust, dead dogs, and sprawling humanity for twelve hours. By the time we turned off at San Quintin, the sun was a memory, the road ahead a mystery of rugged hazard. My little brain was fried. 

The twelve-hour drive had been a salad consisting of the best of highways, long, sweeping, 21st century smooth tarmac, and outdated, crumbling, axel-snapping ruts and potholes. Gaudy semis, decked out in chrome and flashing lights shared the road with school buses converted to public transport. Corrugated shanties crowded the shoulder of the highway between groomed vineyards and modern architecture of the super-rich. The best of the best rubbed shoulders with the destitute. Abject poverty sandwiched between opulence that bordered on the obscene. Sleek luxury sedans with windows tinted so dark, no silhouette was visible snaked through the traffic flow on their way to fine dinners and meetings about money. 

Rows of grape vines combed the rolling hills, corduroy stretching to the horizon.

But my eyes were on the road, always on the road, trying anticipate the next surprise, the next problem to assess an solve, urgency my constant concern. 

I guess if you sign up for not being a chicken shit, you will pass through some hard, tired moments that demand of you more than you imagined you could give. I had not imagined this would be so hard. The trip was lifting me up and out of the container of possibility I had been living in for so long. I felt the shell I was hiding in begin to crack. 

Tom and I watched for gas stations that could accommodate the truck and trailer. They had to meet certain criteria: long space that would allow us to pull through after filling up and re-enter the highway. Young gas attendants were eager to talk, to ask where we were headed, why we had such a rig. 

In the hell of driving, the young people were a tonic, angels that helped ease my fear of what was coming, both in the immediate and long term. Their eyes were bright with intelligence and hope. They had everything to look forward to, even if that future was crowded with more applicants than slots available. What would they lose by hoping so much I wondered.

We saw the sun sink into the Pacific as we made the turn that would lead us to the estuary where David and Pearl were waiting for us, waiting to be conveyed up and out of the ocean, back onto land, another country, yes, but land. And then the trip across the land, across the border, across the deserts, back to home. Home. They were leaning into that prospect as only souls in adversity can lean into a better possibility.

They were waiting for us at the corner, wearing their dry-bag packs, sailors weary of the sea. 

Here's a link to their blog if you'd like more in-depth information about their voyage(s).

https://voyageofminimusii.wordpress.com/ 

The Boat

From the road, with all its menacing obstacles, we arrived to a banquet. David and Pearl rolled out the carpet. They had been subsisting on the minimum while hunkering down in the wind. They had spent weeks pinned down in an estuary while twelve foot seas battered the coast line. The wind had howled even in the harbor and waves slapped at the hulls of their catamaran. They took sleeping pills wore ear plugs to escape the din. Their only company on the water was a derelict sloop, abandoned and left to swing at its mooring on the changes of the tide. It was more skeleton than living flesh, pirated, abused, picked clean of anything worth taking. At night it returned to appearing a working boat, a ghost of itself in some previous incarnation.

But now, here on shore, with the arrival of friends, they celebrated. The rescuers had arrived to take them out of the water, away from the punishing gale-force winds, the fouurteen-foot swells. It was time to indulge. to play the card of extravagance. There would be work in the morning, but tonight we would toast and eat, fill our glasses with beer, mescal, and tequila, listen to the stories, comfort each other  in the shared enterprise of stepping out of the easy way of simply gathering and caring for commodities. There is no meal like the meal of relief as danger passes by, as the dark angel glides by overhead, even if only a brief respite.

Pearl and David slept on their boat, but they paid for Tom and me to have a suite on a second floor overlooking the estuary. The Molino Viejo is luxury by my standards, and being delivered from highway hell to a bed in a room with a porch view of the water was pure heaven. 

But my worries kept me from sleep. I knew the road home would be a hard one to navigate with a twenty-three foot catamaran that weighed three thousand pounds. We had mountains to get over and descend. The problems demanded attention, kept my adrenaline pumping to point where there was no more to pump, and kept sleep at a distance. Physical comfort cannot overcome mental anguish. I kept thinking there had to be a better way back than the way we had come. I would not find the solution to that problem because the only option was the one I wanted to avoid. The only way out is through, as they say.

In the morning we met David and Pearl at the dock. They had already removed the masts and rigging. The boat was a white deck.

 

David had built the Minimus II with two criteria in mind: the boat had to be unsinkable, ocean worthy, and it had to be easy to assemble and disassemble for trailering. He had succeeded in both. The hulls were living space and storage. Masts were low and junk design. She would be stable and fast with a wide berth and shallow draw. It was an experimental design. 

To me it was a big "wow!", the work of innovation bordering on genius. I could not believe it was hand built and that they had already been through so much ocean sailing. 

But that was the assembled form of the craft. Now it would have to be taken apart for the road.

That was our work for the day.

Of course, the trailer and truck needed tweaking to work with the boat. That interface would require a hitch extension, added safety chain, a wiring splice, and careful placement on the trailer so the hulls didn't puncture the camper or break a window. 

My underlying imperatives to "protect my stuff" began to fret. I didn't want this mission to break my tools. 

We pulled the boat out of the water and began the work of taking it apart.

 

Weather, for once, was good. We worked under a gentle sun on a breezy cool day. I followed David's lead and did the low skill job of unlashing the cross beams and other structural members. I marveled at the design beneath the unfastening. We took apart, by hand, an ocean-going sailboat. We used some tools but not many. Davids craftsmanship was evident in the tight tolerances and user-friendly access to important components of the boat. And the man knew his knots. 

Pearl kept track of the ropes and the fasteners, a myriad of detail necessary for simplicity. For it all to work, one needed to be patient, focused, methodical, and conscientious. Our work was as much a meditation as a job. 

I made a point of planning to ask Dave how he had become such a designer, such an engineer and adventurer. So many questions. So much energy. So much curiosity. 

With the deck removed, the cross beams unlashed, rudders detached, motor stowed, it was time to move the hulls onto the trailer. First we lifted the ends to set blocks underneath to support the hulls when we removed the 14 foot wide beams necessary to load the assembled boat onto the trailer. Then, gradually, once we had shifted the weight of the hulls to the blocks and removed the long beams, we lifted the ends of the hulls in order to removed the blocks, lowering the hull onto the trailer itself. The entire process could be done with a couple of people; no hydraulics necessary. 

The work took until mid afternoon, when, boat loaded, rigging stashed in the camper, and luggage squeezed into spaces leftover, we broke for lunch.

"I'm beat," said Dave. "Me too," Tom agreed. "It's been a long day," Pearl addded. 

They all turned to me. "I think we should hit the road. Get a chunk of the drive done today. Before sunset. I don't want to drive in the dark on roads I don't know, but we could maybe make it to Ensenada," I suprised myself by saying. 

They nodded. It was settled. We would leave after lunch.

We took our time eating, not talking much, each of us quietly preparing mentally for the beginning of the return home. We still had a long way to go.

Ensenada and Ruta del Vino

The drive was bone jarring and white knuckle. We made our way slowly through the gauntlet of dogs, diesel fumes, roaring dump trucks, and late afternoon school releases, avoiding pedestrians, trying to stay on the pavement when the shoulders had a gaping drop-off.

I found something below being tired; maybe it was adrenaline pumping to meet the ongoing threats to progress and injury. I felt good. The act of faith overrode my logical conclusion that driving here was madness. Sometimes you need not to be reasonable I told myself. Take a chance. Go for it. Don't live like a chicken shit.

And so Ensenada somehow came to us, opening its doors to swallow our little caravan. The glitz of tourist luxury sang to us from the high rise hotels and the five star lodgings. There was no way our long train and wide turning radius would survive leaving to road for a a hotel or even gas. We were prisoners of the road, our sentence to be served, the other side of the city. 

Chile Verde, the big truck, loped along like it was made for the crazy conditions. It barely broke a sweat on the hills and held the descents in check in a vise-like grip. But we passengers were running out of gas as exhaustion took over.

By the time we reached the far side of Ensenada, it was dark, and we were a ship without a port in a storm of container trucks and industrial indifference. We needed a place to stop. Soon.

Phones gave us little help. We were no longer in the tourist zone, the money pot of high volume clients. We were in a limbo between internet interest and advertising. Google was no good. GPS was a POS. We were on our own. I couldn't see well through the salt film on the windshield. We hit potholes, rattling the trailer, threatening to blow out a tire, smash a rim. The semis came us like the tide, in an unrelenting, constant stream. They laid onto the horns warning us to speed up or get off the road. 

We climbed up a steep, winding grade out of Ensenada, away from the coast, and into the mountains. Each of us struggled to stay calm, focused, on the task of threading the highway needle again and again. 

After what seemed an impossible stretch of forced alertness, the lights of a hotel appeared on our side of the road. There was a long ramp to enter and a big parking area. The place looked good, so we took our chances. The Plaza de Fatima Hotel was a welcome blessing, a safe port.

We climbed down from the truck, relieved to be off the road. 

Night Visitor

Pearl, bless her, got Tom and myself a room. She and David would sleep in the boat. David wanted to park the truck behind the hotel. That meant taking it down a narrow drive alongside the hotel, between a curb and a grove of eucalyptus trees. Tom offered to watch the hulls while David made his way through the curves leading to the driveway that went out back.

He stood on the hitch. David opened the window to better hear Tom's report. Good thing too. The mild radius pushed the metal tie down at the tip of the hull right toward the rear window of the camper. Tom's yell prevented the puncture of the window by fractions of an inch. The hulls had slid forward because of all the rattling and vibrations of the trip. We would have to slide them back somehow.

It was clear the boat would have to stay in front, visible from the road. 

After a brief powwow about how to  reset the hull on the trailer, we grabbed our toothbrushes and pillows out of the camper. The work of loosening the straps could wait until morning. We all knoew that somehow we'd have to move the 1500 pound hulls back about six inches in order to continue, to be able to turn if we stopped for gas or any other reason.

Once settled, we all trundled off to bed as the container trucks continued to roar up and down the highway, engine brakes growling as the hit the steep grade back to Ensenada. 

My room was airy and clean. I brushed my teeth, set the deadbolt in the door, and fluffed my pillow.  I hoped to fall into a sweet sleep, but could only spin in anxious mental circles about the truck, my truck and camper, suspended in harm's way. I thought about how I should have taken off the camper, how I should have gotten a smaller one at the very least. I thought we could detach the steel plates at the point of hull, plates that held the anchor chain or painter lines, or towing ropes. Not likely

I went into a vortex of obsessive anxiety and regret that I had even considered taking this trip with all its risks. What was I thinking?

I also realized that this was a reaction to an identity-defining story, personal and social conditioning about how to relate to possessions, material goods, a learned narrative about "stuff." Take care of your stuff I could hear my dad saying. He berated me one time when I was about twelve for loaning a friend a bicycle. "You're a real nice guy," he said, his voice dripping with uncharacteristic sarcasm. 

I stepped back enough to see that this was what my friend had foreseen when told me to take a trip. She knew that a trip like this would be epic enough to bring me to my limits, physically, emotionally, and intellectually. Spiritually too. Situations like these bring to the surface in stark relief what is usually submerged, taken as truth. I was "in it," and had the opportunity to face and examine some demons.

I also saw that my fear and anxiety was exactly what I wanted to leave behind me in my past. I wanted that hyper-protective, security of guarding "stuff" to dissolve into a life that was lived by a larger ethic, that subordinated "stuff" to richness of experience, to enhancement of my soul, for lack of a better word. 

I wanted to be less of a chicken-shit and more of a servant to a greater purpose, vague as that was. 

So I lay there at two in the morning, thinking about this when a hand outside the door violently and aggressively grabbed to door knob to test it. The shock of the sound was palpable, and I bolted upright in the bed, my entire attention a point of laser on that knob. It held. The dead bolt was a good one; the frame quality wood. I realized that this was the parry of the pickpocket, the knife-slice through fabric of the back-pack pirate. It was the surprise strike, the blind-side punch, the overt threat to hand it over or else.

Seconds ticked off. I stared in the dark, wondering if I had imagined such a thrust of frontal assault. The light from the hotel office shown onto my window, and a shadow of a man silhouetted on the blind, looking into the room. He then turned away and headed toward the main office.

I got out of bed and peered through the blind. There he was. A young guy, trim, fit, wearing a surgical mask, testing the door of the office, looking in the window. I wondered if he was just security making the rounds, but then remembered the sound of a car pulling into the lot a few minutes earlier. The dogs had been barking excitedly before stopping suddenly. Had someone given them food? Seemed odd.

This man was from that car. He was no security guard. He saw the boat and truck and wanted to see if he could gain access to a room with a wealthy tourist sleeping the deep sleep of the wolf hour. 

I waited there as he made his way back toward the driveway and parking. No other cars or guests were moving. I cautiously cracked my door. I heard the slam of a car door. Another. There were two. Plus the get-away driver. The engine cranked and took, a low growl. It then slid back into the night.

I had to wonder if I had remembered to lock the truck. My passport was there. The truck registration. My check book. The paperwork for the camper, trailer, and boat.

I tried to go back to sleep, but only felt the churning nausea of turista in my gut. 

They next day promised to be a long one. 

Tecate

I went out before dawn to check the truck. Doors were all locked. Documents still intact.

David popped his head out the hatch of the hull. "How'd you sleep?"

"Not so good." 

"Pearl didn't either. I'll let her tell you."

"Yeah, I think we have some visitors last night."

"Yup. Pearl knows all about it."

I got my coffee kit and set about making some brew, knowing that it might come back to haunt me later. Tom was standing in his door, still clearing the fog of sleep from his eyes. "Everybody sleep OK?"

"I've had better nights," I said.

The inventory showed nothing damaged or missing. We got lucky.

After some breakfast and coffee the morning burned off as we loosened the grip of straps on the hull. We rocked it back and forth until we got it to move back far enough to make a fair turn. Then David secured the hull with strap that would keep it from sliding forward. 

"We should be good," he said.

"I'll drive," I said.

And so we rolled through the vineyards of the Ruta Del Vino, a lovely bunch of valleys and tony estates and villas. Think Napa, Mexican style. The Mexican elites seem to have spread the gap between themselves and the poor of Mexico. Luxury next to squatters and tar paper shacks. Somewhat like the US, the rich have fashioned the system for their own interests, it seems. Baja is no exception.

The truck, however, didn't care a whit and bent into the traces, loping along up grades and down winding descents. It purred. Our pack horse of truck was a great comfort, padding between us and harsh circumstance.

Kilometer markers painted on the pavement counted down the distance to Tecate. Tick, 45. Tick, 24. Tick, we are there.

No signs directed us to the frontier, so we just followed the road into the center of town. The road we had traveled on the way down, through the Mexican customs. I thought the US border should be near, or at least accessible. Nope.

In the center of town, a federal police officer pulled us over to inform us we were far from the road to the US border and that he would lead us to the correct route. He and another motorcycle officer bookended us across town and up a steep side-street before signaling us to stop. 

"Este camino llega a la frontera. Tiene que seguir hacia la interseccion, donde puede bajar a la linea." (This will get you to the border. Just turn at the intersection.)

I couldn't believe our luck. This cop had escorted us to within a few blocks from the border back into the US.

Then his expression changed. His face went hard and sharp, his dark eyes hidden behind expensive mirrored aviators. 

"Tener un remolque come este en el centro de la municipalidad es una infraccion de la reglas de trafico. Lleva una multa de dos mil pesos. Usted tiene que ir a la oficina de la municiplalidad para pagar la multa, hablar con el juez para averiguar si usted seria detenido. Vamos a quedar con el troque y el remolque y velero." (You have taken a trailer into the city center. That's a violation of city code carrying a 2000 peso fine or jail. You need to go to city hall and pay the fine in cash, in pesos. You'll have to change money if necessary. You will leave the truck, trailer and boat here. Your passengers will have to wait outside.)

I explained that I understood and was guilty but that I didn't know I had broken the law.

He seemed to be waiting for something.

"Le puedo pagar aqui la multa en efectivo en dolares?" I asked. (Can I pay you cash here?)

He considered this for a moment and then nodded. "Si."

I extracted a hundred dollar bill from my wallet and asked it it would suffice. He nodded, but indicated that I should lower the bill so his colleague couldn't see it and then pass it to him below the open window of the truck door.

He took it between his fingers like a magician.

"Feliz Viaje," he smiled.

They both turned and left in a cloud of motorcycle exhaust.

"Let's get to the border," I said, very aware of the potentially dire situation we were leaving behind. I had lived to two years in Mexico and knew of gringo travelers who had been framed with planted contraband only to lose their vehicles and end up in Mexican prison. One does not want to engage a federale in an argument over just cause for arrest or impoundment. 

The crossing went off without so much as an open door.

"Passports?" She glanced at them and ran a computer scan over the bar codes.

"Proceed."

And we were home.

Integration

Crossing the border felt like deliverance from unrelenting hazard, and the weight lifted from my psyche was as palpable as dumping a heavy back pack. I turned the driving over to David before retiring, exhausted to the back seat. I didn't mind at all being scrunched into the little king cab cubbie. In fact, I needed to take a step back, to reflect on these days, to take in the sights, to just listen. 

Pearl took shotgun even though she didn't want to navigate.

"You don't need to," I said. "It's a straight shot back up to Interstate 8. There's a burrito truck in Campo that I want to stop at though."

High fives all around. From here it was all American-engineered highway, even if narrow in places, until we hit the interstate. 

The wider road helped relax the travelers. They sat back in the seats, took in some of the scenery. I asked David about sailing, how he got started. "Long story," he said.

"That's okay. We've got time," I said.

He was eighteen or nineteen when he decided he would sail from Seattle to Alaska. He had no experience as a sailor and set out along the coast of British Columbia in a craft not up to the trip. He about died.

Undaunted, he returned to Seattle and worked at some sewing jobs with crews of Chinese women, the only white male. It worth noting here that David is a tall guy, over six feet. Long boned. Strong. He stood out.

He did other jobs -- a stint in a sleeping bag factory that gave him a taste of what it would be like to design and sew up sails. He haunted the piers, made connections with boat people, went out as crew on sailing yachts, began to learn the ropes. 

After a year or two of saving money, he found a small sailboat with a cabin. It was sea-worthy enough to make the voyage to Alaska. He bought it, left his jobs, and set sail.

I had to notice that here was a man who both took meticulous care of his stuff and still put it to use on adventure. He was a wild one, for sure, but one with his head screwed on. He possessed by both the thing itself, the design and function of boats, and the wide horizon of uncontrolled adventure. 

He was not domesticated, but very much capable of functioning in society.

The luscious scrub of alpine flora of southern California slid by the windows. It was clean, beautiful, and eccentric. Collections of ancient trucks, craftsman homes, sweet meadows all put us at ease in a way that we had not felt for a while. We had the day to roll, just roll, all the way home.

After David's story, Pearl volunteered to give her take on adventure. She was raised Mennonite, conservative Mennonite. As in cover your face Mennonite. That wasn't who she was, though. Inside she wanted to move through the wider world without all the attention of being so different, so she got a spot on a mission group and boarded a train to join the group. She had jeans and a t-shirt in her suitcase. She entered the bathroom a covered Mennonite and emerged a young woman in jeans and t-shirt. Transformed. Her life took a new direction. 

She too, had the wild streak woven into taking care of her things. She had the attention to detail necessary to survive on a small sailboat in the Pacific Ocean. Appropriately, she called the hull she slept in a cocoon, one from which emerged renewed again and again.

Tom told a story in which he and his future wife had ventured out, in spite of small craft warnings, in a catamaran not up to the conditions. Patti had been knocked off the boat by a swinging sail and had injured her legs. She couldn't swim. Tom took half a mile to turn around and found her, a needle in a haystack sea. Another adventure taken to the edge.

We dropped down off the Coast Range and were carried across the Mojave Desert by a stiff tailwind. Our little caravan fairly whistled across the barren flats below sea level, through El Centro. By the time we crossed into Arizona we had decided to try to make it all the way to Cascablel, home of David and Pearl, fifty some miles past Tucson.

The lessons of this journey were still taking shape. I felt that I was the one being given a favor. I was on the receiving end of insights that shone a way around the either/or of my "chicken shit vs. adventure" dilemma. I saw, as the shadows lengthened over the hills east of Tucson, that it was possible to integrate caring for one's tools and putting them to use for a greater good, a life affirming set of risks. 

I had run away from the rigid safety from losing things to a wildness of the open road long ago. I left home to hitch hike to the West, Glacier National Park, the Grand Tetons. I was reading Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in the back of a pick-up truck going through Yellowstone when I decided I would never be able to go home to all-out safety again. 

But then I had a family and felt the need to provide, a good thing. I saw the wild life as indulgent and contrary to my need for responsibility. I shut the door on wandering.

In a way, that denial had helped me grow up, but had planted a resentment of having to give up the exploring wild side. In response, I withheld what I most wanted to do out of spite. I wouldn't write as way to get back at a life that required schedules and accountability to my "stuff." 

Problem was, the only person I was hurting was myself. 

David asked me about writing, how I had come to it, why I was so stuck about it. 

"Long story," I said.

"That's okay. We've got time, miles still to go," he said.  

By the time we made the turn up Melpomene Road toward Cascabel, where the road turns to washboard gravel, it was dark. Animals ran into the headlight beams and then back out into shadows. I think one of them was a ringtail cat. The others were jack rabbits, coyotes, and kangaroo rats. The desert was coming to life.

 

 

What Lies There Sleeping

He had reached that stage of life when the windows and doors of time opened and let in the delicious freedom from work. For forty-five years he spent his days doing the bidding of others, of the demands of schools, of extrinsic motivation to get up and out the door and into the great gears and wheels that kept a society operating.

But today, this cold January morning, he sat with a cat on his lap and a cup of coffee in his hand and ruminated on the dreams that had been disturbing him nightly, waking him in the wolf hours. He got up in the dark on those nights and went out into the cold air to look at the waning moon and wonder about the voices that called him out of sleep. 

We are, each of us, a repository of stories, one of the voices said. It's your work to create that story out the chaotic mess of your experience, to live becoming, even if it means leaving the comfort of your rest years.

Damn, he thought. What does that portend? 

His entire life had been lived under the whispers of that voice. In the beginning, he had lived on nothing, had hitchhiked across the country, slept under bridges, wandered along wilderness streams -- all in search of the source of that voice. 

But then he left the rocky path of searching for more security when he got married and raised two sons. That, of course, exacted its own kind of payment. 

Sleeping while dragons wander can come back to haunt a man on his death bed.  

So a choice now lay in front of him, as he sat there in his chair, looking down the barrel of a day wide open to possibility. He could follow the sirens and take the path of comfort or he could take the path that led into dangerous shadows, work undone, and go in search of what treasures he might never find. 

Dust lay on everything he needed. He would have to clean up his traveling boots, shoulder the worn pack, face down the voices that said no, and set out to wake the sleeping desires, uncover the hungry heart. 

You cannot serve two brides, dear bride groom, a voice somewhere cautioned him.