What You Find On the Mountain

            Light shone on the top of the nearly perfect cone but had not yet reached the patchwork of milpas, or family crop lands below. The dark green of a cloud forest extended down the steep sides of the volcano into shadow, giving the mountain the illusion of ancient, undisturbed wilderness. 

Bernardo, the guide for the volcano who I had seen before but not yet met, was waiting in the lobby of the posada in the half light of dawn and looked a little surprised that I showed up so early. The chill of the morning had not fully penetrated the massive, volcanic stone from which the hotel was crafted. A faint smell of fried fish mingled with ammonia from the kitchen and on the floor.

            “Esperese. Ahorita vengo,” he said quietly and to me, a little mysteriously. “Wait. I’ll be right back.”

            As he walked out, I looked questioningly at no one, but the night watchman seemed to read my mind. “Se fue para alquilar una pistola.”

            He went for a gun? I thought to myself.

            “It’s for protection,” the guard explained.

            I stopped for a minute to wonder about this: a long climb up a large mountain, unpredictable weather, the wrong equipment, and now armed protection. As an aging gringo in mediocre condition I had to think twice; I barely slept for all my doubts the night before. I left a warm bed, my sleeping wife, two children. But other dreams lingered there out of sight, in the background. There was a mountain. Something told me it was this mountain. Coming to Santiago del Atitlan had felt like coming home, like some other places, other mountains had felt like coming home, but this place had something else, promised something else. There was no doubt that I would go to the mountain if I had the chance. I was here to get something that I had given up, or so the instincts said. Like other mountains this one asked me to get outside the inertia and grind of daily life and to step onto something other, something solid, something requiring immense focus and exertion, something that offered a tangible beyond walls of limitation and exhaustion. This mountain felt like a pilgrimage and something more that I could not put my finger on.

            Before I could get anything else out of the watchman, Bernardo returned and signaled me to join him. I introduced myself and offered him my hand. He dropped his eyes and held his hand out twisted backwards and limp. I wondered if he was crippled somehow, but shook it anyway. He turned, pulled open the heavy door and we both stepped out into the dawn. A sharp chill cut through my t-shirt and jacket. Birds I couldn’t identify sang from the flowered branches of the posada garden. It looked like a paradise. One of the gardeners was already up trimming the grass with his machete. He knelt down and swung the blade in a low, fast, arcing swipe through the grass. The result was the same as a power mower. He did not look up as we past, but bent even deeper to his task, intent on the evenness of his cut.

            We descended the cobble road of the posada to the dusty dirt road that ran between the villages on this side of Lake Atitlan. We would hike until a picop, as they called the many tiny pick-up trucks for hire, came by and offered us a lift. Lake smells mingled with those of cow manure and soap from women washing their clothes along the shore. The detritus of snack culture littered the ditch: chip bags, cigarette butts and packages, bottle caps, along with the organic discards such as banana peels, mango pits, corn cobs. The ditch made walking precarious as there was little space between the path of traffic and the loose, sloping soil of the ditch. We made our way in silence, I at least, glad to be walking. Behind us we both heard the low rumble and rattle of a truck coming up the road.

            “Let me talk,” Bernardo said in Spanish as we shouldered our packs and began to walk in single file along the road that circled the bay in front of the volcano. Sunlight had moved about half way down the volcano by the time a pickup with a cargo rack rattled up the road and slowed to see if we wanted a lift. Bernardo talked low and fast, nodded, and pointed to the bed of the truck. I climbed in before him and stood with the other passengers – a woman in full traditional dress of huipil – embroidered with a dazzling display of roses – a wrapped skirt, and braided hair, carrying a basket full of bananas, a hollow cheeked peasant farmer who had to be in his late sixties carrying something like an adze, and a young guy wearing western clothes and a “No Fear” cap. I nodded and tried to shake off the stares as I hung my elbows over the side of the rack. The truck could haul people, animals, firewood, crops, or whatever else would fit in the bed and between the walls of the rack. I had ridden in the bed of pickup trucks before as a farm worker in the Midwest and as a hitchhiker in the Tetons. Happy days of clear light and tired body, they carry a beauty I find painful to remember. I was so sure back then – confident and stupid but alive.

            Bernardo slapped the side of the truck and the driver accelerated in the dust, spinning his wheels and throwing me back toward the tail gate. I tightened my grip as I caught a glimpse of the old man chuckling to the woman who settled down onto the spare tire smiling as they chatted away in Tzutujil, Mom, or one of the other native dialects.

            The morning promised a cool day – good for climbing. Bernardo said we would be ascending most of the morning and asked if I had brought any water or food. I had and he seemed relieved. He looked at my shoes, some stiff sneakers, and asked to see the tread. I thought the lugs were thick for running shoes, but Bernardo winced a little before agreeing that they were probably sufficient.

            We slid passed ranches with elaborate gates, walls topped with broken glass embedded in concrete, and muddy, rock-strewn main streets with tiendas proclaiming the virtues of Crush and Pepsi. A soccer field tilted wildly toward the lake in a way that would give a great advantage to the team trying to score downhill. Pigs and dogs roamed the streets freely, but bothered no one, having learned how to survive traffic and stay out of people’s way. The truck lurched along the rutted road that climbed out past the town toward the mountain. I was alert and on edge as we neared trail head.

            Bernardo’s calm reassured me. I would never have guessed the contents of his pack, and his appearance was startlingly standard. His T-shirt was worn but clean. It had a Nike swoosh that covered most of his broad chest. He was a compact man and looked like he could climb forever. He had the hook nose and the smooth, beardless face of a Mayan warrior. His eyes were clear and looked at things patiently. His hands had thick calluses, like a cowboys. I had seen those hands on men who worked with tools and tractors. I had seem them often crumbling dirt between the fingers and thumb, testing the soil, savoring and revering ingredients of the land.

            One by one the others climbed down when they came to their destinations until Bernardo and I were the only ones left in the back of the truck. I was about to start up some small talk, but we rounded a corner that exposed us fully to the wind off the lake. It struck us hard and cold and carried so much dust that I had to lower my eyes and cinch down my hat. Bernardo just looked at me and said quietly “mucho aire,” lots of wind, and then pointed up to volcano now looming above us.

            The truck pulled off on a shoulder and Bernardo signaled me to climb down and stand to the side while he paid the driver. He kept his body between me and the cab, shielding me from the view of the driver. After the truck sped off on a cloud of dust Bernardo seemed relieved, more at home in the trees than on the road.

            We left the road and the shore of the lake. Lake Atitlan is about a mile high and we had another mile to climb to reach the crater and summit.

Bernardo stopped when the trees closed around us and asked that I wait while he said a prayer asking the mountain for permission to climb. I waited, not knowing exactly what to do, a little intrigued and a little uncomfortable with such a display of reverence. When he looked up, he nodded and said it was a good time to go and that we should start before it got too light.

The path followed a steep, cobbled road through vestiges of cane fields, the cash crop before coffee, and then we entered the cafetales, coffee fields that grew in closer to the road as we climbed. Soon the road petered out and a trail wound through the rows of coffee plants. Rotting avocados lay pecked over in the dust in the shade of the bushes. Bernardo passed easily beneath the branches through a tunnel that was about his height. I either stooped or swung my elbows to clear away the bean-laden branches. Here the earth was brown, dry, friable – easy going. We climbed steadily as the flank of the mountain grew steeper up its perfect arc.

            Coffee plants gave way to groves of avocado then maize. The contours of the mountain were traced by corn rows held in place by stakes and the stalks from previous crops. Some of them formed a solid stairway up the side of slopes so steep that they would never have been farmed in the states. A blessing of sorts. The big corporate farms were not interested in this land but farmed instead the flat stretch of land between the highlands and the coast. Easy to run a  tractor down there. And the gringos had taken the level land around the lake for airstrips, tennis courts, and hotels. One had even exhumed graves to build a luxury resort.

Between fields the trees grew taller and closer. The woods were dense with fruit and nut trees – zapote, oak, semilla de maranon (cashew); thick undergrowth wound its way up the trunks of  trees. The strangler fig had a way of using a host tree for support as it sucked the life out it with a seemingly passionate entwining. Healthy figs grew over gray, dried hulks of larger host trees reminding me of the perils of love turned to obsession, or desire for comfort to greed. Epiphytes and bromeliads punctuated the heights with fantastic displays of flower, leaf, and root high up the upper stories of the canopy.

            The climbing grew steeper as the earth grew darker. Deep, rich, black soil had been cut into steps that became the regular trail now, switchbacking through the forest with unrelenting incline. Breathe, breathe, breathe, step I told myself over and over. Bernardo stopped just ahead and listened, always keeping me in sight two or three switchbacks above.

            The hours passed and still we moved through high cultivated fields. Bernardo said that these fields were owned by the poorer families who could not afford land further down the mountain, so they carried tools, seeds, food, and water up to the fields and haul the harvest out on their backs. I thought about transport, the cost of elote, corn still on the cob, and it just didn’t add up. But then I looked at the view of the village and the lake, imagining what it must be like to work the fields by day and sleep beneath the stars above the lights of the town and I wondered if on another scale the work wasn’t worth it. I saw the vestiges of the crater rim of the most recent caldera that formed Atitlan, this place they call the umbilical connection between the material and the spiritual. These volcanoes are young, only about 80,000 years old. Only Atitlan, across the bay from us, is still active. The volcanoes provided the raw materials while the lichens and algae did the work of making it usable. Volcanic rock has broken down into rich soil that gets darker as we ascend.

            After the last of the milpas the climbing got dirty. Or rather I got dirty. We were moving up slopes held together by moist, loose, black soil that provided little purchase for the lugs on my sneakers but that left a telling smudge on whatever touched it. I touched it with knees, hands, elbows, hips. I touched it by falling, leaning, losing my balance and just scrambling. I grabbed branches of roots whenever I could to help offset my sliding back after hard won gain. I crawled on my belly beneath roots as the cloud forest became thicker. Eighty foot oak trees shot up to the sky and caught some of the wind that was blowing over the summit. Clouds cut off our view of the sky as we moved in a muted rhythm through a narrow world of fog and ghostly tree trunks.

            Bernardo pointed to footprints in the trail. Someone had been here before us today. He said we were above the fields, so he doubted that it was someone who came up the mountain to work. We had entered old growth forest and saw a wild turkey take wing and roost right in front of us. Like a messenger from a lost era, it sat and preened itself, watching, wondering, perhaps what it is we were doing there. Deer, squirrel, spider monkey are all gone, Bernardo explained. The islands of cloud forest are too small and the pressure to farm too high for them to live here. Natural habitat has receded to the unfarmable slopes of the volcanoes and the deep canyons. Shrinking wild lands and native ways I think to myself. I am sure here that the thread has been broken, that people who still have a connection to place are destined for extinction. I remember something vaguely, like a scent I used to know but have not smelled for a long time. I spills over and through me and I relax. I am glad to be here in this strange yet familiar place, so threatened, and yet so enduring. 

It’s a good place to take a break I say to Bernardo. He agreed.

            My forearms, wrists, knees, fingernails were all stained deep black. Bernardo had some dirt on his shoes. He was too dignified to note the distinction. I gratefully took a pull on my water bottle and got out a Clif Bar. Bernardo unwrapped a roll soaked through with honey. He asked how much my bar was. It was as much as a nice breakfast out would have been and could have bought almost twenty of his honey soaked rolls I told him. He asked how my legs were. Only then did I notice that they felt tight and hot. I asked how far to the top. He said another hour. I didn’t like the sound of that. The steepest was still to come.

            I noticed the yawning distance between us. We find some common ground in Spanish, a second language for each of us. He asked if I have children. I said two sons, but no more. I have made sure of that I told him, holding my fingers up to make the indicate scissors clipping. I wondered how he would react to this, being a member of a Catholic country opposed to birth control. He said he has three but will have no more and has made sure of that, making a similar gesture. “There’s too many people and too few jobs to have any more kids,” he said to me in Spanish.

            Uh oh, I thought. Here come the questions about the US and about life there and how much money can be made, cable TV, celebrity worship how much people look to “El Norte” and consumer culture as the best way to live. But nothing. Bernardo kept musing silently as he chewed his honey bread and took long draws on his water bottle.

            “I used to work as a guide doing horse tours,” he said out of nowhere. “I worked from six in the morning, getting the horses ready until seven at night leading the tours, cooking, cleaning up. The people who took those tours paid fifty dollars each, sometimes eight, ten twelve people. I made two dollars. In your opinion, don’t you think fifty dollars is too much for a horse tour around the base of the mountain?”

            “That does seem pretty expensive,” I answered. That seemed to satisfy him and close the discussion.

            “Don’t you sometimes want to leave here and travel?” I asked anyway.

            “No. My family is here. My life is here. My life comes from the food grown on these hills, my water from the lake. This place is me and I am this place. Why would I want to go anywhere else?”

            “Do you want to do anything else? Go to school? Have a profession?” I heard myself asking, somewhat incredulously and surprising even myself.

            For a long time he was silent. Then he said that many of his friends had either been killed or had disappeared during the civil war. “It was God’s will that I live,” he said, “and when it’s God’s will for me to do something else I will. Right now I just want to stay here. I have plenty to do between my family and my brotherhood, the men of my village, the elders.”

            I wondered if I could live so humbly, so simply. Working long days with no hope of anything better. But then I began to think about things I wanted: more connection to nature, better ties with community, fewer distractions, meaningful work, care for my family, and realized that Bernardo had all this in a simpler form than I was used to seeing.

            When we continued the climb, Bernardo became more animated and pointed to a plant he said was good for a headache, another whose root was good for a toothache, a bark that when boiled made a tea good for skin infections. I tried to memorize them to listen, but my legs were shot through with fatigue. I feared that I would pull a muscle or worse on the loose soil and rocks as the trail continued to steepen. Breathe in. Breathe out. Rest. Climb. Breathe in. Breathe out.

            Miraculously the trail leveled out and we were on the summit, looking into a knot of trees, vines, bushes, and snags that fill the crater. We worked our way around to a rocky outcrop that afforded us a view of the lake and of the village below. The wind whipped at us carrying fingers of icy cloud and fog that brightened or darkened depending on the thickness of the vapor. Bernardo watched the trail closely and found the footprints that went on past the summit and down the other side. They went only one way. Again he relaxed in this place so familiar yet so contested, so rife magic and envy. Bernardo seemed at home with it all, content that he would survive, adapt, hang on, hunker down.

            Here where we were too high to stay for long, we could see far across the lake. Tiny cities hugged the hospitable places wanting to be more. The wind sung in the branches as I tried to decipher its message. Was it warning or mourning or just moving? I couldn’t tell.

            I put on my Gore Tex jacket. Bernardo threw on an old sweatshirt. We found a place on the rocks and watched the clouds come and go above the lake, above the village, above our families far below. Some of the cloud scuttled by like ships below us and I remembered the stories of Atitlan, mother lake, edge of dreams, belly button of the world, source and destination of the people. Naives believe they are blessed if born into Atitlan, for it is heaven on earth, the highest plane a person can achieve. There is no word in the language for people to leave, for each step away is the first step toward return.

For a fleeting second, in the clarity born of exhaustion, I thought I saw what they meant by the lake being a passage to a world we visitors know only in fragments. The village passing in and out of sight, the lake shining like a living jewel, the unbroken line of indigenous life and its contrast with my own. This could be the center, I thought, and there is no need to go anywhere else. In the color drained mist I could see the village standing its ground of contentment in a swirling sea of urge and distraction and need to be to do something else, my world, a world I stand with both feet. The taste was bittersweet. I could see it, like I saw the beauty of the men and women of the highlands, but could never possess it or become it.  It was not enough, would never be enough, but to want more was nothing better than petulant greed. I did not want to become one of the gringos gone native I saw selling jewelry in Panajachel.  

            Bernardo was patient. The cold got into my bones and I wanted to leave. He reluctantly stood, stretched, and said the descent would be tricky. A gringo had tripped over a root not long ago and broken a leg. Bernardo had to fashion a kind of travois to get him out far enough for a rescue team to help.

            We retraced our steps, threading through roots and around switchbacks, hanging on to trees when possible. I slipped and skidded on my butt down some of the technical sections. Bernardo seemed to listen for my sliding before resuming, this time just out of sight.

            As the trail evened out into a steep set of switchbacks with a surface of packed dirt, Bernardo started to trot. He took small steps and held his shoulders smooth, his arms loose, elbows tight in. It was the same stride I had seen old men doing if they were in a hurry carrying heavy loads of firewood. I decided I would follow. I imitated his smooth gait, letting my arms swing loosely, cutting my stride to tight staccato steps that ate through the curves and cut stairs on the steeper stretches. It felt good for a while, maybe even an hour, and soon we passed the first of the milpas.

            My legs turned to rubber then to noodles and then wanted to give out completely. I kept going my limping and swinging them like prosthetic dead weight, careful not to repeat the fate of my gringo precursor.

            I asked Bernardo for a rest break. One look at me and he knew. “How are the legs?”

            “Pretty tired,” I confessed.

            “Let’s drink some water. We need it and it will mean less weight.”

            I sat and drank.

            “Why the pistol?”

            Bernardo looked at me with a new expression. “You never know what you will find on the mountain,” he said. “Men with machetes are sometimes angry. They want more than they have. They see the mountain as giving many things in many ways. It’s not always safe.”

            Hi look told me he would say no more.

            I looked down at the lake and realized we still had a long way to go. The thought sent a crippling cramp through my thigh and I groaned.

            Bernardo helped me up and told me to keep walking and to keep drinking.

Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Step. Limp. Step. Watch out for that rock. Don’t snag your foot on your ankle in this narrow rut of a trail.

One hour. Two. The trail leveled out just as I felt I could not take another step. The dusty road was a relief from the terrible downward tug of the trail. Bernardo had me sit on a rock while he flagged a picop.

Once again, he negotiated and we hitched a ride back to the posada. The truck was crowded and this time the other riders paid me very little attention. They seemed aloof, perhaps even jaded, but giggled when I had my back to them. We make our way around the bay leaving a rooster tail of dust in our wake.

I could barely climb out of the little truck when it stopped at the posada. I had overdone it and would feel the topography of the climbs between the torn fibers of muscle for a long time. I was glad though. I wanted to take a little of the mountain with me.

“How are the legs?” Bernardo asked.

“Me duelen mucho,” I replied, they hurt – a lot.

“They will hurt more tomorrow,” he said. I knew he was right.

I got out my wallet to pay him. It felt good to give him the money. “I really wanted to go to the mountain,” I told him. “I don’t quite know why.”

He looked at me squarely. “We all have strong wants. The gifts we get should be appreciated. I hope you get want you want from your trip. Next time, bring boots. There is still more to know.”

With that I offered my hand and this time he took it.

           

Free Will

The sun rose behind mist as we coasted down the big hill at the start of the Ride Across Indiana. Indiana was uncharted territory for me, but I was here to remember someone, a friend who had died three months before of melanoma. 

Will Streeter was a big, humble, thoughtful guy. One time I asked him what kind of mountain bike rides he liked. He replied, deadpan, "Gnarly," followed by his disarming "heh, heh." Serious and funny at the same time.

He liked this long, rolling Indiana ride and had two sons who were scheduled to ride it with him this summer. I flew in from the desert Southwest to join this ride honoring a man I admired. My job was to help them finish the long ride and maybe to learn something along the way.

One hundred sixty miles waited for us ahead of this fun, adrenaline-laced beginning. I wondered how it would go today. Would I embarrass myself? Run out of energy? Get lost? Fail to do what I had come to do?

 

The thoughts ran across my mind as the matching jerseys with “Remembering Will” printed on the side joined a rolling serpent of color and excitement – cyclists on the course. This I could relate to. The freedom of motion, of effort, of surrender to whatever the day had in store. It was time to show up and to let go, let the day be what it would be. This was my life and with gratitude and openness I would remember Will in a way that might do him some justice.

I was riding his bike and it flew. The wheels danced over the cracks in the pavement, the debris in the road, the railroad tracks. I was infused with peace and energy. The fear and anxiety of the day going bad slid into the background. It was time to be here and to feel the breeze. I settled in and rode alongside Steve Parker. His easy smooth cadence spoke long hours on the bike. We talked about the day. He had reminded us that we were here for Will and Will’s family. We were reaching for contact with something Will loved: long days of effort, physical challenge, breaking out of limits, finding the peace that can be found on the other side of pain. We would all be challenged and would be given the opportunity to push past perceived limits.

Will knew pain. He had lost an eye to melanoma a year before. His father had left him early in life. But he had found a way to cope. Richard Rohr, a friend and mentor, had taught Will that pain can be transformed, can be transmuted. It does not have to ruin a life. It is not something to fear, but something to meet and embrace. Will told me that Rohr felt that if one's spiritual teacher did not speak often of death, it was time to fire your spiritual teacher. 

Will did not run away from hard questions. He had met his death head-on. And he loved to ride, and had spoken of this ride often as we rolled over the roads and trails around Tucson. 

The ride was a vehicle, a metaphor for living. In itself it would not give an answer to questions that seekers ask. This was not about winning or just about speed, or results, though all of those figure into the experience. The ride was providing grist to mull over. What do I want? Where am I going? 

Terre Haute unrolled as we cruised through downtown. People cheered us on. We were on a path, pursuing a goal. Will’s sons Mark and Eric, his wife Kathe, along with friends Kathy, Toby, Tim, Miriam, Brian, Karen, and many others. SAG drivers would leapfrog us through the day, providing material and moral support. 

Rural Indiana lined highway 40 as miles began to accumulate. Rolling hills and a breeze passed by as we formed groups and chatted quietly as we settled in. Sun and heat rose together and I began to sweat. Eat. Drink. Draft. I reminded myself. It was going to be a long day.

About twenty miles in, Kathe, Will's wife, hit some sand and went down. In spite of a nasty bruise, she hopped back up to examine her bike. "Is my bike OK?" she asked before examining her injury. Bike first, then body. What a statement of how important this ride was to her. Strong woman I thought. Like Will. 

The ride progressed as all rides do and priorities took the shape of speed and distance.

Toby, Tim, and I formed a pace-line on the flats and opened up a gap on the group. I started to calculate time and speed and results. This was a habit and had become a trap for me in past rides. Average speed became a kind of god, and my state of mind depended on whether or not I met a goal. Those old habits, Will had shown me, were not the real gold of doing a ride like this. 

I had deified many things and become a prisoner to them, thinking they might redeem me, ease my pain. I thought that things might do it – a new bike, a better car – or that being faster, skinnier, wealthier. The list is long. The only way out was into and through the pain, but I am a slow learner. Will helped me to remember. He had come to Tucson to ride El Tour and we had talked – a lot. He became part of my family, part of the brotherhood of rolling through the desert on epic mountain bike rides. 

He thought hard and liked dark beer. What’s not to like about such a combination of traits?

So we rode across Indiana. The first forty miles was gravy. At the rest stop we grouped. The day was getting warmer and some of the honeymoon glow of novelty was wearing off. Our little group got organized and we began to share the effort again, but somehow lost Mark.. I decided to wait and meet the group at the lunch stop. I had time to think as I waited. Why was I here? What was I doing? I remembered that it was not just about the bike.

When Mark did not show up after half an hour, I rode again, but this time alone. It was fine, but I realized I did not want to ride alone and would find out what had happened at the lunch stop. I would ride with Mark or Kathe or Eric for the rest of the ride. This was about Will and about what he was learning. It was about heart and sharing and doing something together. 

The heat was adding to the likelihood of cramps and dehydration. They had hit Mark and he needed to refuel at the lunch stop. It happens. He was fit, but something was a bit off and he would have to respond if he wanted to complete the ride. He rose to the challenge and ate, drank, and drafted. 

We hit the road and made good time for the next sixty miles or so. It was time to go deep, to push through, to eat up the distance. Mark settled in and took breaks when he needed to. 

Shadows lengthened as we closed the gap on Richmond. Tom, Tim Stoner, Kathy Parker-Streeter, Karen, Seth, and others charged us up with cold Cokes and encouragement with twenty miles to go. Mark and I then began the detour onto quiet, narrow roads through cropland. Between rows of corn, we pedaled easily and I told Mark what I thought of Will, why he had been important to me. This was the reward, the soul of the ride, the real dirt, the taste of freedom and heart. I hid my tears as I spoke of Mark’s father. 

Of course, good and true stories don’t end at the easy moments. We had the longest hill of the day still to climb and the pain of the effort returned. We both leaned into the hill like horses straining against their traces and pushed again through the limits. Richmond rose on the horizon and then closed in as the miles surrendered to our efforts.

The group was there, cheering. Mark and I crossed the finish with more than an hour to spare. Kathe, Eric, and the family circled around us, hugs and tears and smiles all around. Then they took the bike, Will’s bike. It had crossed the line. It had made it to the finish, the real and imagined. 

The effort had paid off, but by itself was not the point. We got a good result, a tangible reward for a good day of straining against limitation.  But the result was not the end, would not ease the pain of missing Will. 

Will would know. Will was free of such easy answers. He would understand why my heart was so full.

  

The Promise of Rain (fiction excerpt)

They drive in silence up the mountain. They rise out of the valley and onto the slopes, through saguaro forests, where ocotillo branches etch the sky like upside down spiders, spindly legs reaching for something solid in the air. The road etches a rising angle onto the naked fingers that spread out at the base of the range. It cleaves the contours of the front slope before turning into the watershed of Molino Canyon.

As the lights of city fade behind the shadow of the ridge, the road tilts up, now between sheer granite walls. Cacti surrender to dwellers of higher country. Scrub oaks replace the saguaro along the murmuring stream down in the defile. They pass a sign saying they have climbed a thousand feet. Water plunges over a ledge of banded gneiss into a pool where tiny frogs have gathered to mate and feed on the abundant bloom of fireflies.

Still the road climbs. It is the fruit of  blood, the labor of prisoners who wielded hand tools to carve this arterial lifeline between the heat of the valley and the heights of the mountains; it is the gateway to alpine forests, islands of shade and cool air surrounded by the ocean of desert below.

Thoughts fail to find words as they pass through Molino Basin. The road and the towering slopes speak instead. A fire scoured this valley and left scars of ash, bony skeletons of Manzanita. The moon lights a bleak and haunted landscape, harsh reminders of the decade-long drought. She clutches his arm as the little car surges up the slope, straining against the grade. They cross a saddle and enter Bear Canyon, the first taste of the high mountain. The road levels briefly as they pass through a portal of towering granite spires and enter the sheer walls of the narrow canyon. The stream whispers as it cascades over boulders and down spillways. Water runs onto the roads off the walls of the canyon and showers the pavement. A curtain of mist chills them, rinsing the heat of the low desert off their foreheads. They enter the tall Ponderosa pines. They drive now through a tunnel of them, deep in the defile.

He is tempted to stop, but proceeds upward. His pulse rises as he takes the tight hairpin that leads up again, out of the canyon onto the contour up to Windy Point. Hoodoos stand like sentinels against the sky. They block the light of moon and stars and silhouette profiles of stone standing on either side of the highway.

His head surges with his pulse and he is flush with a desire that is almost more than he can stand. Best to warm his hands at the fire than to quell the stirring urge. She sits quietly beside him, following his lead, expectant, silent, full herself with a hunger to receive him.

They round the curve at Windy Point and pull up to a parking spot. They grab a small pack that contains sleeping pads, some water, and a blanket. They head away from the road under the moon down a path he knows to an overlook. Her eyes widen in wonder at the sight below; the city shines a million tiny lights beneath them like a bed of diamonds. There is a stream beneath them and a pool. It catches the moonlight and is completely still, a perfect mirror. He lays down the pads while she admires the light. She joins him. He touches her arm and she lies down. He reaches for her as distant lightning illuminates a thunderhead a hundred miles away, in Mexico.

Anybody Seen My Glasses?

Clawing My Way to the Bottom of Maslow's Hierarchy* or Life After the Wallet

I’ve been down lately, not depressed, but down in the ground, as in building a pit toilet. My lovely bride wanted one for the “casita,” our tiny hideaway next to a sandstone bluff near El Morro, New Mexico.

I had the hole – a six-foot-deep beauty – so had only to build the platform** above it as well as the throne that would afford a view of the rocks and stars. 

The platform came out fine. It has 2x8 joists with hangers and braces and plywood that make it strong enough for a herd (if herd is the right word) of square dancing hippos to have a hoe down.

The plywood chute was tight, very tight, tighter than a duck’s butt, as they say, and had to be hammered in.

So all was good, even if the all was simply dealing with basic, foundational needs. 

I like that. I can handle that, more or less. After years teaching college I am ready for a break from all the quibbling over abstraction and self-actualization. All that stuff can be a bit over-rated.

I thought I had it all down, chapter on basics closed. My bride was going to ride our outhouse into the sunset, coasting on the satisfaction that comes with successfully dealing with square one.

 ***

Then we went to Gallup this morning for supplies, big stuff like food, a toilet seat, and gas as well as little stuff like finger nail clippers and aspirin . My mountain bike computer battery had gone bad after only five years or so of faithful service, so I was browsing the battery rack of a real store (not many of those where we are in El Morro) and I saw the battery – a flat disk with the designation 2032, the right one. I reached for my back pocket to grab my wallet and it was not there. Hmmm.

Mr. Wallet was last seen paying for gas about five minutes before. It was not like him to go off on his own like this. I began to worry.

I’ll save you the frantic search that followed. The upshot was that my wallet, ID, money, receipts, and all that implies vanished, dissolved, disintegrated, went MIA into the New Mexico ethers between the gas pumps at Giant and the aisles of Safeway.

When entering this level of crisis, the world has a way of jumping into sharp focus. Even the melting tar in the parking lot takes on a karmic importance. The distance and padding between me and “out there” is ripped open and away to reveal  contact and vulnerability. I became one with the panhandlers, day laborers, and derelicts who haunt this particular crossroads.  

I sit here writing this without even two copper pennies to rub together. 

Of course, what this kind of situation brings into focus is what is really valuable. I did have a phone, a laptop, and the keys to my truck,  but that is not what I am talking about.

 I also needed ID to fly to the Midwest in three days. That’s not what I am talking about either.

What I am talking about is my friend Tom. I called him from the bottom of the heap of needs that had to be met before I could continue this crazy adventure called civilized living and summer travel plans.

“Hello Mr. Toso,” he said with his amused formality into the receiver. “How are things?”

“Well, I am here clawing my way to the bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy. I lost my wallet. I am frantic.  No money, no driver’s license, no credit cards. Just a laptop, phone, truck, and a full tank of gas.”

“So, what do you need?” he asked. I knew he was busy with a life of his own: work, family, things to do. I said it anyway.

“My passport.”

 Tom went to my home in Tucson and found my passport. He then Fed Exed it to Albuquerque, where I will catch my flight to Madison, Wisconsin. 

That is what I am talking about. I am near the bottom in terms of needs and am seeing things from the pit beneath my wonderful new outhouse, from the clear perspective of no cash, and what I see is Tom: radiant, light evanescence of Tom. He is my hero. I will never again utter the words pit toilet, abject poverty in a strip mall in Gallup, or online cellular rescue without thinking of Tom, Maslow, and the fragile web that holds us all above a scramble to survive.

* Phrase courtesy of Phyllis Siken

** Design work by Tom "The Man" Brightman

The Joy of Being Hobbled, Stuck, Stranded, and Between Things

The smell of coolant came as no surprise. I had just climbed out of the Salt River Canyon and my little pick-up truck was straining to ascend the steep inclines of Arizona’s Central Highlands. The fan had been groaning and shaking whenever the motor wailed in high RPMs. Likely the water pump was going out, but I did not want to think about it. In fact I refused to think about it. Never, as they say, underestimate the power of self-distracting denial.  

I had been singing to myself – my usual sad and soulful travel fare: "Sixteen Tons" by Tennessee Ernie Ford, "Ring of Fire" as sung by Johnnie Cash, some Doc Watson standards, and, just to mess with the old boys, Melissa Etheridge –  when on about the third refrain of "Come to my Window" when the smell hit me. 

Now, the mountains between Globe and Show Low are not tall by mountain standards, but are steep, each ending only to begin climbing the next. They have a way of killing cars. Not once, but twice, cars have died at the crest of a pass, south of Globe. I know the risks of driving old cars in the summer in these parts.  

This time, I was on my way home from New Mexico, north of Globe when the steam began rising from the hood. I was hoping to make it home to Tucson before the water pump gave up the ghost, but no such luck.

I had to cut Melissa, check the mirror, and pull over on the shoulder. I didn’t know if the singing had caused the failure or the mountains. I guessed it didn’t matter. What did matter was that I was hobbled in the middle of Arizona on some crest of the rolling mountains on the San Carlos Apache Indian reservation. 

It was windy and hot as I peered under the grill and saw my coolant generously dripping on the gravel. When I lifted the hood I got a dose of toxic fumes. Yup, coolant. Not good.

Being at a high point of one the many mountains, I hoped for cell phone service. No luck there either. I have broken down on this trip between low and high desert before, so I knew it was going to be a long day. 

These trips have been a "between time," time when I fall out of my routine and consider my life's trajectory. I suspend habits and head out somewhere -- a canyon like Cibique, where waterfalls carve deep pools in the dark between canyon walls, or the open meadows of the White Mountains. On the way, I reflect on questions like Where am I going? What am I doing with my life? How far is it to the espresso bar?  

This time was no different and just because I had stopped did not end the questions. But reality is more immediate when the show-as-planned comes to a halt. A strange and terrifying thing happens as I slip back to the here and now that has become the betwixt and between, as in the middle of nowhere, between edges of somewhere.

My stomach was raw with the coffee I had been drinking. I did not have any food, but did find a nice juniper to hide myself when I followed the radiator's example. 

I also took stock: water? check (one liter); food? negatory; air? great; sky? superb; brain? re-engaging.

There was a cement mixer parked down a ways across the highway at one of the big pullouts. The motor was running, though I could see no one in the cab. I waited for a break in the nonexistent the traffic (why hurry things?) and made my way to the truck, monitoring my phone to see if I could pick up a signal. It's hard to give up cell phone hope, after all.  I noticed a mile marker tried to figure out exactly where I was. My phone was useless; as help it offered up only “emergency calls only” again and again. Yes, just the way I like it, but I can't give up that easily. Habits die hard.

It looked like the driver of the cement mixer was taking a nap, so I did not knock or try to get his attention. 

I kept trying to pick up a signal, but the bars went away as soon as I tried to call. Just as I headed back to the truck the driver opened the door and climbed down from the cab. He looked worried, sympathetic, like something dangerous was stalking us. Being outside on a remote stretch of Arizona highway is fraught with equal parts peril and potential. Most of us want to keep the time as short as possible. He wanted to get me out of there quick.

He did have a phone and a couple of bars of service. He dialed the number of a Globe tow truck and then passed the phone over to me. I gave the dispatcher the particulars, mile marker 282, south of the Salt River Canyon, north of Globe about twenty miles. 

She said she would send a driver soon. 

The driver of the cement mixer took back his phone, climbed in the truck and said he was headed up toward Kayenta, a long drive in a big truck, a rolling capsule of protection, safety. Or a cage, depending on how you look at it.

I offered him ten dollars, but he declined and put the big truck into gear. "Like money is going to do any of us any good out here," he said.

I went back to the juniper to recycle some more minerals, to liberate the Show Low coffee, to do my part to keep the high pigmy desert scrub happy and healthy all while enjoying my role in the big scheme, one of the great benefits of being far from somewhere. Then back to the truck to think and wait.

When all else fails, I say write. I pulled out my journal and began scratching some philosophical attempts at making sense of the situation. "Here I am, free to make something of this open, surprising, and unscheduled moment. What a thing. I don't quite know what to do with it and notice that I am anxious to get out of it. Why is that?"

A pick-up traveling the other direction noticed me scrunching up my face at these conundrums, and took pity on me, slowed, did a U-turn and pulled up beside me, in four wheel drive, jauntily tipped by the slope of the ditch between us. 

"You alright?" asked a man with a cowboy hat, an intent to do good, and some kind of badge. His look said I needed company, to be brought back into the fold of humanity, that I should not be out here alone between all the safe and busy zones of productivity and directed behavior. But he knew something too. He was between places too, had some secret taste of the between places way of being.

"I’m good. Got some water. Waiting for a tow truck."

I saw his face relax a bit. Good, I could hear him saying to himself, this guy is not yet gone too far into the between. He is still social, is shaved, has not gone too far into the wild world of nothing and nowhere. He had been there too I could see, but did not stay long. 

"Well, you know, my dad used to drive all us kids up this road, and one time we broke down at night – six of us in one of those old Pintos. I can't quite explain it, but I remember that time. We all felt, so.... close, I guess." At this point he looks at me like he has gone too far, into a topic best left private. He quickly jumps to the happy ending.  "A couple of drunk guys in a panel van gave us all a ride to Show Low. Since then I always stop if I see a car in trouble. Wouldn't want anybody stranded out here too long, in the middle of nowhere. Who knows what might happen?"

Yeah, I think to myself. Who knows what might happen? Exactly. Obviously. Too-close-for-comfortly.

We talked some more about being between places and how that can color one's view of the world. For him, the road and the moments of possibility created by being stuck and stranded had been generous. I can't say it's that way for everyone, and that may be why it is so frightening to be cast out of routine and into a moment that must be made up, on the spot, no script. Scary.  

As he pulled off, made his turn and continued on his way, I sat with this mildly terrifying gift of time I had been given, and kept writing.

"My life seems to slipping from my control,” I wrote, "but that is not necessarily a bad thing. I don't know what is going to happen next. I feel curious, a bit excited and alert. I am off my course wondering how this detour will affect my memory of this day, this place, this gap filled to the brim with potential."

"Who knows what will happen in these next moments waiting by the road for a tow truck that may have gone the wrong direction for all I know? Strange, to feel so free, here not quite at home, but a welcome guest, between places. 

Hallelujah! I am in the gap, the interstice, the living, fully-charged nowhere between things. What potential!"

Gulp!

A Nail in the Tire

A concrete forming nail had found its way into the sidewall of one of my truck tires. New Mexico law prohibits repair of such a puncture, so I either had to replace the tire or risk a blowout carrying heavy loads of drywall and lumber. I opted for the fix.

The only place close by was Ramah, a small Mormon town in the middle of the Ramah Navajo Reservation. So I took the truck and sat down in the waiting room to contemplate my fate while surfing the only wifi within twenty five miles.

As is the case in many more urban waiting rooms, the ubiquitous big screen TV was playing a loud, action-packed Hollywood blockbuster. This one was set in the land of mesas and cacti and big skies, not unlike the view out the window.  This particular film was Cowboys and Aliens, a Harrison Ford/Daniel Craig/beautiful- mysterious-woman-taking-on-the-evil-aliens flick. Think Sigourney Weaver.  Using aliens as villains is pretty standard fare in these politically correct times. And, by my standards,  C and A was an entertaining romp with all the nutrition or significance of cotton candy.

But the film’s main characters at this point had just been captured by a band of "wild Indians." The Indians were hooting and dancing in full war paint around the fire as they dragged the heroes – trussed up like turkeys – through the dust toward the fire. The whooping melee played loudly to the waiting room audience,  tugging all eyes to the screen.

Action-packed stories are a kind of heroin for attention in boring moments. All of us were glued. Not in a good way.

I looked around the room. I was the only white person in a room full of Navajo and Zuni customers. The men wore jeans, cowboy hats, and entered the room politely, with a gentle deference to the place and other waiting patrons. Some of the women wore traditional long, cloth skirts, scarves tied over their long hair; they wore silver and turquoise rings, bracelets, and belts.  Some of them recognized each other and passed knowing looks or quiet remarks.

Another white guy, a plump, clean-shaven, spectacled, freshly- pressed as an accountant, sat behind the sliding billing window, and worked on his computer. He only responded when taking our money. He could have been in Kansas for his bland middle American comfort and neutrality.

Then awareness of what was playing out on the screen spread through the waiting room like a noxious smell. I saw a veil of anger, sullen hardness come over the patrons' faces. These were friendly men and women being mocked, subtly.

The scene became suddenly uncomfortable, for me at least, as the others in the room spoke in languages I did not understand about the film. I was embarrassed at how the images portrayed these people’s tribes and historical roles. I was ashamed, embarrassed, self-conscious. I also felt the way I did driving seventy miles an hour on that nail punctured tire: borrowed time, I gotta fix this.

We viewers understood more than enough of the plight of the whites as they struggled to find the alien-kidnapped loved-ones, but nothing of the majority of people in the film – the Native Americans. The white characters had been doted upon, fleshed out, made real. We viewers liked them. The captors were carboard cutouts, stock pieces of movie furniture set up as just another obstacle to the heroes.
 

I wondered what it was like to bring your car to a shop where your people are being reduced, flattened, and stereotyped in the name of fun and entertainment.  Ugh!

I cringed and wanted to disappear into displays of shock absorbers and tool calendars.

Soon enough, the man behind the window called me to the front of the line to pay my bill. It was steep for a tire, but was way out here 150 miles from the nearest tire store. The reach of The Man is long and I stretch to touch his extended finger.

Glad to again be mobile and less in danger of catastrophic tire failure, I left the waiting room, the saturation of images, the ongoing re-make of old and tired type-casting, the furnace of mind-warping, and climbed into my quiet, simple  truck. This is beautiful land with beautiful, diverse, complicated people. Many of them I don't understand, but find them polite and generous and funny.

Three of my tires are still long in the tooth and short on tread, but one is new, tall in the tread, full of travel possibility. The representations we buy and and buy into, subtle though they might be in this age of “awareness,” were part of a prejudice grown way too long in the tooth and due for replacing.

I wondered how many nails I carried in the other tires, how long I was going to ride along on tired, out-dated, dry-rotted circles of unconscious chatter.