spleen

personal drek

I listened to the Indigo Girls for three straight months, mostly because it was the only tape I had that didn't break. I was on buses, countless buses going to Steele, North Dakota, Missoula, Coeur d'Alene, Eugene, Portland, San Francisco, anywhere west. I listened to white noise on a walkman in order to drown out the noise and press of other travelers. This was how I slept, swept up in static, my memory full of songs about travel and longing. I saw the basalt columns of the Columbia River gorge with that music in my head, and the Pacific Ocean, and the San Joaquin Valley, and the lonely hills of Utah, and on and on.

This is far ahead of the story I want to tell you. A year before that trip, I lived in New Mexico for a couple of months. I spent most of my time in Ranchos de Taos, a poor shepherding town just south of the wealthy tourist trap of Taos. I was there to help a friend build an adobe house, and together we lived in the high desert and erected walls and laid a floor made of river stone. The area was so poor that there was very little proper plumbing; instead water and waste and everything else was handled by an elaborate system of garden hoses that dumped the whole mess into a nearby arroyo. What a strange time. I walked deep and narrow arroyos, following trails of footprints and horse dung. I walked a portion of the old Santa Fe trail, and went into the mountains to gather stone for our floor.

It was the mountains that changed me. You walk fifty yards from the trail, and you find yourself in mountains where no human has left a trace, and where the only sound is the strange ticking of insects in the trees. It's dry and clear, and you can think. There was a short time where I seriously considered surrendering books and computers and everything else for a life of mountains and sheep. How strange that would have been. But I thought of the Red-Crosse Knight and his Hierusalem, and I felt called to the world. The place of the poet is here in the world, sick with the world, constantly teaching. That was when I knew I was done with Romanticism.

Once, I was stuck in Vegas for five hours. There was a very drunk young Blackfoot Indian there who was furious at being robbed. He had no money, and someone had stolen his bus ticket. For some reason he wanted to be my friend, though I am generally the last person people want to be friends with. He wanted to tell me everything. "You're a writer," he said, and then he told me stories and finished them with, "Put that in your book." This man was the size of a small mountain. I could tell he had been crying. "All I wanted was to get home," he said, "and maybe some music for the journey." And then he told me a story, a great story, and he said, "Put that in your book." I will tell you that story someday, and I will tell you about my time wandering west, and what I saw, and how beautiful and ruined the world is. But not today.