From the Grand Canyon to NC in 2 Days

Saw the wild purple hills of Arizona as we shot north up to the Grand Canyon. The light green pitchfork cacti, looking like they are the hands of that cartoon character Gumby, a whole army of hands, reaching upwards always for that cold purple sky. Freezing cold as we get to America’s most famous knife wound. A slit like a gash in your arm, from a downward clefting stroke from a huge angel in the sky. Almost immediatly upon arrival, my feet go completely numb. Converses, tisk tisk, not really shoes. An old man walks by and asks where he parked his car. Maybe I will not grow older than 50 and that will be fine. The Canyon is what you get on postcards. Goes down deeper than your eyes can see. Asians everywhere like they are at every tourist destination. Five hours to drive across. Plenty to love and explore, but it is honestly so cold and windy that I can’t get around to thinking poetically about it. Ravens circling and swan diving in the wild air in between. These are the real old time gods of the West, these Ravens. I’ve seen em in every state out here, picking and poking and barrel rolling. Take a shuttle with Adam so he can walk down into the canyon a bit before sunset. Crazy man driving the bus; wears glasses, scientist haircut. Quick, harsh sounds come from his lips as he bosses the passengers around. Babbling about how the tourist populations wax and wane during the year. Real maniac. Either aspergers or tourettes. We get to the walk but I can’t go far into the canyon. I can’t feel my feet and I’m miserable tired and the path we are walking is hidden by a cliff face from the dwindling sun, so it’s even colder as we go lower. Adam keeps going down about thirty minutes. I turn around and follow the parallelogram of sunlight as it moves upwards along the path. Everybody I pass is happy – Germans, Asians, old crusty hippies. The Grandness of this canyon makes everybody feel small, and it’s actually a relief when that sort of perspective comes along. It’s relaxing to recognize that you are little more than an ant in the reckoning of the looming, colossal mass. Takes some of the pressure off. Makes you easier and sillier and happier for the hours you are there.

Adam comes back smiling. I see his checkered black and white coat dwindling down below, becoming smaller and then later reemerging, first a point, then a figure the size of a Lego, then the size of a dog, then the size of my best friend. He’s moving alone in the dusk, like a monk walking back up to his cot on the top of the mountain. Strolling, thoughtful and thankful and quiet and OK with everything for a while. Unafraid of the dark and the mountains because he was raised in mountains and he knows the mountain cold and he is like this beautiful slender bear from the hills of North Carolina just checking things out in this land. This is where he is tough, like he is when he’s flying around windy trails in mountains at midnights, knowing just how sharply to turn his Jeep to keep from flying off a ridge. I come from the flat Piedmont. This rugged terrain is something else.

I drive back along a long empty state highway, nothing on either side, stars coming out. Back to Flagstaff where we eat a pancake dinner at I Hop. Nothing like eggs, sausage and cakes when you are taking a mad exhausting plunging drive. Body fuel. Adam says he’s charmed by waitresses at diners, like a cute sweetness that comes with a lady in a green shirt bringing you a saucer of pie. Adam takes over after the meal and we chug along in the night. Eventually, we switch out in the sticks of Eastern Arizona. Indian land. A shame we drove this in night, but that was the rhythm of the world when we were there. Navajo land to my left, Apache to my right. Who knows what sort of beautiful mountains are smiling in the shadows in each direction. At one point, we spot in the distance a huge, brilliantly spot-lit form. We must have seen it fifteen miles away. Blinking lights and what looks like a column of smoke coming out of the top of its skull. I ask Adam if this is some enormous fire, but he says no, and he points out the spotlights. Like the way a parking lot in a big city movie theater is like really comically well lit, every square inch of blacktop filled by halogen bulbs, brilliant throughout every moment of the night. It could be a giant mechanized terminator out there in the dark desert, blinking red eyes, feasting on some hopeless small town. As we get closer, we see that it is an enormous power plant, pouring smoke out if its chimney, acres and acres of smoke all the time, all night. Making power but also ridiculously lit up. The walls of the structure look like they were decked out in tacky Christmas lights. They are making power here, but they are also making such a godawful waste of it all night long.

Eventually we switch and I drive us up into the mountains, see some canyon walls to my left but its too shadowy to be sure. I’m losing it after seven hours at the wheel, and I jump for the first rest stop we come to. The only one for hundreds of miles in either direction. We had discussed camping illegally on this return drive, but it seems like that has silently been discarded. Its honestly too cold out here in the desert, and it seems like a hassle to set it all up and pack it tomorrow morning. Instead, we decide to sleep in rest areas. In the seated posture. On this first night, both adam and I are a bit jittery and nervous about doing this. We haven’t done anything like this before. Rest areas are the places where serial killers lurk to murder the lost and weary. I’m sure both of us are imagining waking up in the middle of the night to an awful tapping on the window, only to see a gaunt and evil man with a long kinfe in his hand, poking, poking, tapping. The thing that comforts me at this rest stop, the thing that makes it all allright, is that we are just so tired it doesn’t matter. Once I park the car and hop into my sleeping bag and hike it up to my rib cage like a cocoon, I’m out in five minutes flat. I can’t even begin to toss and turn in fear. Blessed weariness makes me comfortable anywhere. We could have just as well just slept on the shoulder of I-40. Strange night of sleep. Not bad, just fuzzy. The boundaries between sleeping and dreaming are thin. I dream about sitting in Adam’s jeep in this parking lot, and when I wake up its the same thing, so I can’t really tell the difference. At the coldest point of the night, I wake up shivering. My ears are frozen. The window has secretly assumed a wintery ice spider web while I was unconscious. I pull a blanket over my head like a makeshift veil, and I finish the night. I am overjoyed to find that I have slept in the morning when Adam wakes and shivers and shouts. “I can’t do this anymore,” he says, turning on the ignition and blasting us full of heat. He finally got some of the numb feet too.

We bust on out to New Mexico. Stop for coffee in Gallup and think of that book Ceremony. All these towns in the west seem like sanctuaries. Little communities in the dead middle of giant desert valleys. Outposts in what is otherwise resoundingly wild, in all of its prickly and life threatening thorns.

Now its the next day, and I am full of resolve and energy. I tackle New Mexico in four hours, making it 3/4 of the way across the state. Huge beautiful mesas to the left. Like a bunch of red velvet cakes stacked on top of one another. Unadorned except for patches of emerald green moss that bristle together like green beard hair, stiff and dry. New Mexico says its the state of Enchantment, and these mesas fulfill the statement. Dive down into this beautiful long slope when we cross the Rio Puerte. I love how Western highways will dive down into big rivers. It was the same with the Columbia and the Missouri out in Dakota. The descent is so gradual, over the course of about five hundred yards. Flying seventy, it’s like this long, glorious cavalry charge, down onto whatever settlement borders the bridge and the river. Then it’s the exact same gradual climb on the other side. The slope bears the ghosts of a hundred thousand hoof prints. Something epic dwells in the brain of this descent. I see ten Michael Bay cameras on the backs of ravens, circling and diving and providing stereoscopic coverage of our car as we descend onto the plain of another great river like a torrid Mongol advance. Speed limit. Hell no. You don’t charge down onto the Rio Puerte going 65. We need to turn the volume up, to throwing-hats-out-the-window speed. Cowboys and young children in denim jeans, Carolina boys in search of sweet tea and all of this American landscape filtering past our front windshield like a notebook filled with photographs. Gosh the west is a whole lot more empty and wild than I ever would have expected. Huge sprawling stretches of iguana desert in between cities that seem like outposts for survival, not declarations of immanent conquest and domain. This Southwestern land is still way too hard to be cuckolded by a suburb. Good. We make Albuquerque around lunchtime. Beautiful in a way Phoenix was not. Built into the prevailing organization of the desert. Wreathed by the huge treeless mountains behind it, the tawny toes of the Rockies. Purple and tawny and removed in a completely different sort of air and land. Not a city you could safely walk to or away from. It’s the final bastion of the Southwestern clime. Right after the capital city, you wind through a quick mountain pass and suddenly the land changes. No longer the purples and sun cracked reds of the SW. Instead, huge sprawling empty stretches of the Great American rangeland emerge. Eastern New Mexico and the Panhandle of Texas form one of the most despairing and bleak landscapes in all of America. I remember tiny black bushes and blasted straw colored grass. Every now and then, a huge feedlot of cattle, living out a despairing purgatory in the most cruel of regions. Peed on a rattlesnake. Slept. Took over in Amarillo, a city which is clogged with a sickening strip of fast food chains and clothing outlets. There is no sense of apology to the reeking sprawl of these buildings. Usually, you can feel a sense of embarrassment on the tacky, commercial strips of American cities. This was not the case in Texas. It seemed as though Amarillo had completely given itself over to the conquest of rodent Pizza Hut commercialism. A sort of awful and confused pride in its absurd density of nation wide chains. I take over and drive the rest of the nothing Pan Handle. See the world’s largest cross on the side of a road. Up close, it looks like it was made with same material housing gutters are made out of. Sticking out of a completely barren and unusable acre of panhandle land, Jesus’ breath seems to be the worst of curses, an indication of plague rather than blessing.

I expect even worse desolation in Oklahoma, but I am happily rebuffed. The land is used more. Green fields dot like patchwork, like a big tic-tac toe board. About an hour across its extreme length, we experience another regional shift. We move from the long empty range lands into the Eastern watershed of America. I can’t quite explain how I recognize this. A sort of flatness and fullness to the cities. More populated, grass looking a darker sort of green, soil looking a more moist, watered shade of brown. We stop in a Subway at a gas station. The store sells little Indian dolls in shoebox coffins. A nylon hairnet stretched over their face adds a funerary element to the toy. Above Adam, a cabbage patch looking doll is being hung by the neck from the off white tiled ceiling. The doll is unmistakably black. The workers are bald and give off the feeling of educated criminals. Later, we pass a sign designating the attractions of the state. Number 1? The Trail of Tears. Not something you want to be proud of, Oklahoma.

We sleep more comfortably in the rest area. We survived the first night, so we are more confident here. In the morning we blast across Arkansas, which shows all the character of the American south I know from my childhood. Moist swampy greens and browns. The marsh trees that are already skeletons in late November. Buzzards circling the road with their enormous wingspans. We make Memphis by lunch. See a poor city where we change the oil. Adam wheels us to Nashville. Traffic starts to get crazy when I take over. Its the capital city, and rush hour, and its the day before Thanksgiving. This feels like the final test of our car, Bruce. If I can avoid crashing him right now, then we won’t crash at all. I am tense and super awake, lane changing like an obnoxious New Yorker. Holding out on dinner so I won’t lose my place. Drive out of the city and up into the beginnings of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Eat at a waffle house. Now we are really back in the South. Our waitress gets asked if I-40 is still closed. “I don’t’ never leave this town near enough,” she responds. Huge fellow in blue overall. Sweet tea and a cheap biscuit dinner. It all reminds me of home. Light traffic outside of dinner, then Adam pushes us home along an old fox trail in the mountains. We enter our homeland on a back road, sailing down over the French Broad River, and we both shout for joy. Nothing prettier than driving a country road on a North Carolina night when the air is humid and the moon is full.

Nobody Will Sit on The Ground

Strange how people in LA will not sit on the ground. Same thing in Berkley at that crowded student café. Seems that Californian folks are too good to sit on the actual earthly ground. Adam and I drive to a mountain lookout in the middle of the city. Trails wind upwards like rivulets. Palm trees bring to mind Jurassic Park. Who knows, maybe it was filmed here. I look out over the sprawling yawning void. Quieter than I expected. But much dirtier. Smog makes everything sheen oily. Its like looking at a city skyline through a steamy shower door. The sun like a huge orange bruise off to the West. Everybody else in jogging gear, all of LA pretending that this hike means that they are outside and experiencing life and not jeopardizing all of that and wasting time in this city. In spite of the spectacular view, the bare, treeless chin of sand jutting out as a lordly precipice. A seat of wizard’s to stand upon and raise clouds and ominous weather over the city. A seat of kings, a beach above the skyscrapers. In spite of this opportunity to sit and just look, the LA folks turn their backs, running up hills with heads pointed towards their chests in exhaustion. Seeing nothing. Wheezing. Trying to save up enough smog tainted breath to call after their Pomeranians, who all race and jump around the only thing that remains still in this movement. The only thing which sits on the ground and is at their level of curiosity. Me. Every dog looks the same. Small, shaggy poodle dog. Like they’ve been cloned. The size of a football. I’d like to throw one like a football. Eager, terrified. If only I could introduce them to a bear. Sorry, that’s a dark thought. They are the size of tumors, of salad bowls, purses. Basically canine mosquitoes.

Legs in tightly rapped velour cloth pump up and down past me to the right. The flood of joggers continues in both directions. As mindless as the freeway traffic. I watch for almost an hour, waiting for somebody to turn and slow down and sit down and join me in appreciating the enormous and rather gallant view of LA. But none will. The LA resident will only agree to spend time outside in the strict context of self improvement. Objectives in mind. Jogging to get slimmer to get parts to get names in billboards to stop death. The numbers of their weight fly through their heads like stock tips on a billboard ticker, looping over and over, maddening them. None will watch with me. Some even turn their noses away. “Someone loosed a hippie on our jogging path,” they think. “I bet he sleeps here. Oh well, back to jogging. The watching of steps. The hating of stomach flab. The air that is so thin. Like a low fat cracker. Why is this air so thin? Is all air this thin?”

It isn’t. I have to breath twice as much out here to get the baseline requirement. This is like Beijing, where I sneezed and it came out black. I cannot believe art is composed out here. I wouldn’t let my own muse anywhere near this. I want to experience this at cognitive distance, like a lucid dream. Just things blinking and shifting around me.

LA

Stay with one of Adam’s friend in Los Angeles. Lives in a beat down motel near Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. Doorway has a silly white stucco gate. Makes it look like the underside of a sandal.

Kill time in a Barns and Noble. I am shocked first by how late the store stays open. 11 pm! Second, by the number of people who seem to know this well. They populate the floors like a library, curled up in nests, reading books they will not pay for. Many sit cross-legged with books, and some have even brought snacks with them. I cannot understand what drives them here, to a strip mall bookstore, on a Wednesday evening. It is under extraordinary circumstances that Adam and I are here. We have an excuse. Do these people hate their homes? Wouldn’t they rather be in bed? Perhaps there are no libraries in this city. There is a man in suit sitting on a fresh stack of books. A worker very gently asks him to sit in an actual chair and the man bristles. “Well, it’s hard to sell a book if its broken,” she says, maintaining a solid composure given the douche attitude. Christmas music drones even though its like November.

In the self-help section, a young man chides his friend about a girl’s number. He swivels around in a chair that does not swivel, behaving as though this particular bookstore aisle is his office. He squawks like a rooster into his cellular phone. “You can’t trust girls to call you.” He’s also on a blue tooth, ranting and raving about some script he’s tied to. He certainly speaks the words I would have expected from the city, but that is somehow disappointing. If I am able to predict it, why even show up. Many things seem like that here. It’s all sounding like a bad dream, like a magazine feature about what LA aught to inspire in the human condition.

I’m shocked, but people are actually more wound up about movies than I could have predicted. Literally every person in Barnes in Noble is chatting about casts and scripts and deals and flops. Psychoanalyzing movies like a depressed twenty something. What does this movie want to be? What is this movie? Is the plot obvious enough for stupid people to follow? I mean, I would have expected it to hold some serious court, like theater in New York, but this is outrageous. This is all this city is doing.

It is so strange that we decided to finish this trip here. What could be more opposite of an organic farm than the sprawling lava flow city of Los Angeles? No sense of land or community. Long fingers of concrete radiating in every direction. Mindless aesthetics on the road tracing the highway. Where you are forced to drive for even the smallest task. I tried to walk for coffee yesterday morning and all I found in any direction was a freeway and dingy gas station. Vomit. I need to run back up the side of a mountain, to stay with a man who is old and still drinks wine. To a field where I am anonymous and the atmosphere is actually the atmosphere and not an oil painting being shoved sideways down my lungs.

Approaching Los Angeles

Drive down Route 1 through Monterrey and Big Sur. The very edges of the great American form reach their fingers into the surf, slipping slowly into the dark waters of the Pacific. Moving with the viscosity of honey. Wild alfalfa or hay on the sharp slopes to our left. Looks like the cliffs were shot by an army of yellow feathered arrows.

LA extends over the coastal plain like a lava flow. We begin to see the damage one and a half hours out, North of Santa Barbara. Sunset like a smudged oil painting. Best Buys and Wal-Marts sprout off the concrete’s lengthy arm like neon pimples. As we draw closer, pimples cluster together, spawning off the rooftops of each other, seething with some kind of thoughtless malice. It is a generosity to our senses that we make this approach into Southern Cal when it is dark outside. In the dim light I can make out palm trees, bristling tall like overlarge broccoli.

More San Fran

Suddenly, in the midst of this hoe hum day, we stumble into a place I had wanted to go to all along. The City Lights Bookstore, den of the Beats in the fifties. Kerouac, Ginsberg, Cassidy. A setting immortalized in some of my favorite books. Dharma Bums. On The Road. Now it is just a bookstore. Kind of vaguely reminiscent of the smaller New England houses. I suppose it has a more subversive collection. One wall holds “class warfare” books, and that is exciting. Yet I can imagine none of my heroes here anymore. Perhaps not in San Francisco at all. I am sure Kerouac would sniff it out for being over played and overexposed. The hey day of trendiness has been passed to Portland, Seattle, Brooklyn. In the 60s and 70s, California was too much too soon, and its cities these days bear the history of decades of decades of broken and compromised dreams. A sad breath in the streets. Hippies with way too much money, legitimizing their promotion in class by spending boodles of it at Whole Foods Market.

I am not sleeping well here. The change from farms to city is sort of nauseating. Here, I have all the amenities I craved at times. Insulation, the ability to sleep in a t shirt instead of a winter coat, a swift internet connection, coffee on hand, people watching galore. A table to sit at. Couch to lie. TV with no strings attached. And yet I find myself yearning for last week. For a pad on the outside; undiluted. Walks in the woods. It is far too warm in this stuffy studio for a November midnight. I feel like I’m cheating. I want something much colder and firmer underneath my back.

I am actually happy to find discomfort. It means that I gave myself over to the trip more than I would have thought. Steered my days with a different cadence. There is a colossal inertia as I re-step into old pathways

Sit with Adam in a mock fifties diner after the movie. Still killing time. Ask to share a milkshake, but the waiter looks at me cross-eyed and brings us two svelte glasses instead. I guess two boys can’t drink from the same cup. Honestly, in San Francisco. I did not expect this.

Behind Adam a wild street bum philosophizes to a friend. White, middle fifties, gaunt face, science teacher’s haircut. With enormous enthusiasm, he tells this other guy about “getting to a place where you have the potential to have this experience of a sort of experiential reality.” I perk up. What experience?

“Allright,” he says. “So I told you those exercises, so they are to create a void where this sort of experiential, thing, can happen.”

I am still unclear what this thing he is aiming at, is. I listen for ten more minutes while Adam is glass eyed at his milkshake, and I cannot uncover the diamond at the center of this fool’s yarn ball. He continues to say the same sort of ambiguous sentence, in a variety of syntax. Pursuing the experience of an experience of an exceptional experiential moment. Aiming at the target over and over without firing the shot. Finally, I realize that it is just word soup he’s preaching. Talking just to talk. Proselytizing beliefs because that’s all he has to do, and because the silence is more terrifying to him than a lie.

We leave and walk by several hours later. He still has this poor sap cornered, yapping away. Perhaps repeating on end the exact same sentence. Hours upon hours, articulating over and over again a phrase which contains nothing of any material substance. A dense thicket of qualifiers and subjunctive conclusions. Madness it is. This evening is an existentialist’s cruel joke: absurdity and winding rhetoric only to wink and sneer at the forward linear movement of space and time.

If You’re Going To San Fransisco, Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair

Drove into San Francisco yesterday. The fog greeted us at the farm in the morning but was gone by the afternoon drive. We take the road more often travelled, leaving the coast for Wednesday. Big Sur and Monterrey. Plus, I don’t really trust route 1. Not since the taciturn ocean in Oregon on that other Sunday. No sir.

We have already shifted back to drifter mode. It makes an enormous difference whether you are being fed or not. For three months, we grew accustomed to large breakfasts of granola. Heaping turkey and mayonnaise sandwiches. Dinners of red snapper brushed with parsley, lemon and basil. Never once reaching for the wallet. Allowing cobwebs there, what a nice treat. Now it is back to the drug store, buying Quaker Oats instant packs for a microwave, spending every cent with an eye on the old account balance. Back to eating mushy bagels from the cooler. Back to the regular world of spending, spending, spending. Money leaving pockets and you’re fearing the numbers always. It has only been 36 hours and I already miss it. Hell, I missed it yesterday afternoon, the very first meal we had outside of WWOOF. Carl’s Jr. Industrial patties of sad cow meat, raised on acres of Monsanto grade one clone feed. Took us about three hours, and we already started slipping. Forgetting the grasping of kale. Forgetting those lessons. Turning an eye again towards the bottom line. The fast food chain plays slow jams from like Jamie Foxx as we feast. We finish ravenously in under five minutes. It is about 180 degrees opposite of Collette’s slow, meditative dinners up in Mount Shasta.

Got into the city yesterday, but had nowhere in particular to go. First time this has happened. A good friend from China is putting us up, but she’s out in Sacramento for the day. We need to kill time until 11, yet we know nothing of the city and are both weary from the drive and just everything in the world. We decide to drive to Mel’s place and wander around there. Forced to drive up a nauseating hill, where I grimace and curse each stop sign. Gunning the accelerator like I’m fighting an ice storm. Gripping the wheel. Letting go of the brake pedal and feeling for the shortest of moments an infinite weightlessness, tons and tons of intelligent steel falling backwards like a theme park ride.

Wind through the streets. I park the Liberty on a big ugly street. Commercial, maybe the central part of downtown. None of the glitz and glam. Second rate shops. A tacky commercial street for people who cannot afford the main tacky commercial street. Around this main drag avenues pour down hills into sketchy and dark areas. We walk past two homeless men shouting at each other from across the street. Car almost on empty. Not the right place to stall out. Homeless people everywhere. This city has the most ruined people I have ever seen. One of them looks like a zombie and offers Adam and I a wet nickel bag. We decline. Another is wearing a plastic trash bag around his head like a visor. A young torn white guy with mothball mad scientist hair chats wild to his friend on a corner, but then suddenly something shifts and spooks him and he goes racing away down the block. Strange in the city to see anyone running literally as swiftly as possible. Young brown haired boy, completely naked in the bathroom of an upscale market on the pier next to the clock tower. Its hard to communicate the numbers. At least one of out every four people on the sidewalk. Destroyed in their eyeballs most of all. Frizzy smelly noodles of hair. A deep pool of red sadness in their irises. Misery of every addiction. Filling sidewalks in every direction. The most densely packed population of vagrants I have ever seen. New York has nothing on this, not even the crazies who perform their sort of gaudy crazy routines for the tourists in the Times Square subway station. This is an entirely different order.

Saw the worst one tonight. A daddy, cornrows but white skin. Lesions on his neck. Unleashed five of his children into a convenience store at 11 on a Sunday night. Tiny children, all with frizzed out nappy haircuts just like their daddy, bob up and down amidst rows of Corn Chips and Fritos. “Don’t eat those nerds, Donkey.” he says. “They’ll break your teeth.”

It appears cornrow homeless man has named one of these kids after a mule. Livestock. A human child. I am horrified. This cannot be overstressed. Pakistani clerk murmurs disapproval. I stare around but there is nothing to be done to help these children. Rock bottom has been glimpsed.

You dreamed of San Francisco, I think. Back when you were young and blonde and fit. Back when the girls would smile at the park near the water. You chased this. It seems like the city chewed you all right up.

Game Over

Our final hour of work ends underneath a chestnut tree on a steep California ridge. The sun is beaming down on our shoulders. The dusky clouds of morning wetness gone somewhere else. Adam and I toss our buckets in the air in joy. Pump fists. “It’s been a pleasure my friend,” he says.” Yes, I respond. We did this. Game over.

We drove across America. Farmed in Montana, Washington, Oregon, and this big endless summer state. Near on eighty days of manual labor. Day in, day out. Strapping boots on do easy tasks; same footwear for the grueling days. Feeling a certain fundamental joy in every meal. Meeting the bubbling faces of my own generation and those before. Recognizing with joy that there is still a swelling goodness everywhere in America. Seeing in those same people the ghosts of people I used to know.

The distance between our minds and our stomachs, shortened. Knees, dirty with soil. Jeans, shredded to shorts. Heart, challenged of its romanticism. I look down at my hands and find the scabbed remnants of countless stabs, prods and pricks. I look at my gloves and they are in even worse shape. Dirty and wet with chestnut mulch. Sinful with the fatty insides of meat birds. Streaks of brilliant white from the fence painting in Oregon. Polka dot holes from the relentless defenses of the blackberry bush. The caked residue of soil from seven different farms. My father gave them to me at the beginning of the trip and said they had served him in his day. I can smile now when I give them back.

The work is finished. Now begins a joyous trip home.

We walk outside to the top of the hill to watch the stars. They are plenty and numerous and active. We talk about the scientists and how much they know about the planets. Why don’t we send a poet into space? Down below the house blinks blue. Tom is watching the TV, and it’s the only light in the big old house. It illuminates the room with rhythmic pulses of blue and shocks of red. In the serious blanket of darkness, it looks like the lantern of one of those ugly horror fish that dwell in the deepest part of the sea, where there aren’t even whales or sharks. Just a quiet lonely light, waving in the distance behind many curtains of dusky water. The house an the organism and the TV its awful beating heart.

sun day, scale and reckless

Powerfully rowdy day in the field today. After three or four glum fall days, the sun finally showed and it sends me into a fervor of energy. I take off layer after layer. I feel stronger today than I have at any other day of the trip, including the first two weeks when I still had my virgin farm energy. I am jumping around, swinging the shovel and wrecking stick around my head and neck. Adam and I do some amateur landscaping. Carving terraced plots into a hillside of hard packed clay. The first part of the task is pure catharsis. Slamming anything metal as hard as possible into the ground, over and over to remove the clay. I try to make a little dance out of it, but I end up almost whacking Adam in the head a few times. We engineer little passages in the stone walls of the terracing for drainage, so the pots do not become lakes. Once we’re finished, it seems like a science fair representation of a Utah desert. Burnt red clay valleys, with little canyons poking and winding around sheer cliffs of granite. I imagine all the fun the ants will have in this new terrain. Tiny troops and intrigues played out on a smaller scale. Scale is such a crucial phenomenon in the experience of the world. We have these great looming land figures on earth – the pyramids, the grand canyon, the Nile river, the Amazon. But the entire Pacific must look like a puddle to the angels above. And our human progress and immigration, our wars and leavings and romantic returns, seen instead as lines of frenzied but quite literate beetles, milling back and forth between dense hives. Our population growth has more akin with the gnats and mosquitoes than it does with angels, that’s for sure.

The sun makes all the work tolerable, even enjoyable. Just a powerfully rowdy day, slinging dirt around. Making a mixture of dirt, saw dust, fertilizer and this white powder Tom calls lime. I am wary of any white powdered substance, except salt, but it does not burn. (yet). We mix the ingredients in a wheelbarrow like a big earth cake. Tossing buckets around our heads and down hills. Rolling and working always but still injecting some chaos and energy into the mixture. We young must seem like antelopes to the man in the window watching us, sprinting crazy with energy out the front door, jumping down steps and off rocks to the valley below. Lifting and tossing and bending with no grimaces. Tom the farmer lumbers behind us, moving with the progress of the old, which is less like the motion of an animal and more like the motion of a tree, or a block of earth, sighing slowly once, over the patient course of decades . We must seem like hummingbirds, like cheap shafts of light in a cup. Expending our precious and diminishing energy in profligate fashion, spending and spending on the most menial things. Going to bars. Running for the sake of looks. Lifting and pulling and squeezing. Cracking your back and calling it exercise. Using and rushing and lifting and yearning with all of the spastic dendrites in your body, roaring and winding their arms in unison like a crowd of drunken soccer fans. Anybody who has been in the center of a college campus will recognize this energy. It is like an airborne intoxicant. Not the motion exactly, but all that pent up juice, roaring at the various dams of young adult bodies, searching for some release. A cloud of youth infects us all with energy and, of course, with mischief.