Rowe

When I was in the firewood business in Galisteo, I’d drive over to Rowe Mesa southeast of Pecos. At one time all of Rowe, and a lot more land, belonged to the Ortiz y Pinos, now the Ortiz y Davis’. It was a land grant for military services given to the family by the King of Spain 500 years ago. Frank, the old man, once had a museum connected to his grocery store on the main road, with artifacts from those centuries. One of them was an altar stone I'd found with a friend on a dig Frank set up. The church was burned down in the pueblo uprising of 1685.

On his land next to a volcanic hogback were the ruins of Galisteo Pueblo that preceded the Spanish by several hundred years. When the soldiers and missionaries got there they built a mission in the center of the pueblo and taught the Indians Latin and the meaning of hard work. They built their own town the other side of the hogback in what is now Galisteo, and it was where I rented an hacienda from Jose, Frank’s son. The hacienda was a few hundred years old, had been Frank’s family’s house, and then a Spanish restaurant that became famous for its cooking by Frank and his wife and daughter-in-law, Mela.

The woodyard was behind the hacienda where Billie Anaya and I’d split the firewood I cut on Rowe, and peel pines hauled in from Santa Clara Peak. I had a 1949 3/4 ton black Ford pickup that was now deep sea blue from 30 years of the New Mexico sun.

I loved driving in that truck up to Rowe and the wilderness. Because of the scarcity of water there weren’t many working ranches anymore other than Frank’s. Also few of the families that ran herds wanted to tough it out on their own, their kids’d moved to town, their wives wanted to be near the kids, there wasn’t much rain after the late Forties, taxes increased and prices for beef and sheep didn’t, the era had passed and these were new times.

I’d been cutting on Rowe for a few years off and on, it was a good source of pinon wood and cedar for fenceposts. Even the pre-Spanish Indians from pueblos along the Pecos River at the base of Rowe cut firewood and building beams there, we’d find the stumps of juniper and cedar with stone axe marks. They’ll likely be there 500 years from now.

I’d driven beyond an old wagon track until I got into volcanic rock and gotten out to scout for a new cutting area. I walked into a pocket of cool air and smelled water.

I came into a copse of tall Douglas fir growing among what looked like desert pinon except that these had trunks as straight and tall as the firs. These two trees do not stand next to one another reaching for the sun. The pinon is a desert pine, gnarled by adaptation to scarce rainfall. I stood there taking this impossibility in. These were pinons that had never known scarcity.

There was a spring somewhere feeding this small stream trickling along among ferns and grass. The grass was untouched. How could it be? The deer on this mesa were small and scruffy, the range cattle not much better. Nothing moved here, there was no sound of locusts or birds. This was a…what’s the word? A place outside time, a place where spirits come, a sanctuary, that’s the word.

I’d been in smaller places like this when I lived in Truchas cutting pinon a few years before in mountains cut over and over and over since the village began 400 years ago, and on some days out hiking and no saw in hand I’d find these glades with huge pinon and cedar growing in abundance. No matter how well I memorized landmarks and trails to find my way back I never did. The men in town I told about these places gave me a look. I might be walking into dreams of what was once, but such places had been found long ago and harvested. Anyone who walks into dreams is not safe to be with.

I tasted the water, touched the trunks of the trees to get a feel for them, took off my boots to soak my feet. There was no trace of man, no beer cans or tossed bottles of Old Mission Tokay, a woodcutter favorite, no paper or plastic, nothing. Any man finding this would have broken the protective field around it and other men would follow and there would only be stumps left within a week of its discovery. Had someone preceded me and made this place visible? Had they walked away as part of me was wanting to now? And if I did, would this save it? If not, would the Pecos and Rowe woodcutters get my trees?

I was working on finding a way to allow me to go get the saw from the truck and cut and haul the trees back to Galisteo with a clear conscience, but it wasn’t possible. There was a lot here. I’d need help. Word would get around, it’d be a fiesta here in a few days, cutters from San Miguel fighting with axes and guns. Maybe if I just backed out and forgot about it. But I’d left tracks. Someone would follow them in. I’d just killed this place.

I walked the periphery of the sanctuary. Looking out over the mesa it was clear this place would be easy to see from out there. Here it was dense and green and tall where out there it was spare and dun colored. And yet it had been invisible until I walked into it.

I found a cedar with a massive trunk and pointy top not but a few feet higher than me shaped like a cone or dunce hat with branches. It seemed to be just outside the sanctuary, a border guard. It would be a test tree. I oiled up the blade with STP because desert cedar soaks up the oil and makes the bar expand and stops the cutting chain. It took an hour to get through it. Then it wouldn’t fall. The notch hadn’t been deep enough, so the saw was trapped by a thousand pounds of wood sitting on it. I went to get the sledge and wedge.

Once it was down I decided to cut it up the next day. There was a huge dead Douglas fir I’d found well beyond the sanctuary and being a softwood would only take a few hours to cut into rounds and load. It was worm eaten but would do okay as firewood. I cut the notch and took a rest before cutting in from the other side. No, it was more than needing a rest, there was something odd about this tree, about its branch arrangement. The branches looked tormented. If a tree can have slow motion epilepsy this one did.

There was a huge burl halfway up that would make its fall tricky to direct. The burl was thicker around than where I stood at its base. On most trees I’d take into account the wind, the lean, the pattern of branches that told which side was heavier, the depth of the notch and the angle of the cut. This all computed automatically and helped me plot my escape route should the wind shift or a big branch break off from the vibration of the cutting blade. I thought of getting my hard hat from the Ford but decided to risk it. I’d never been hit by a falling branch in seven years of cutting.

I went back to the cedar and stood there feeling like the fir behind me looked. This tree had been here before the Conquistadores, maybe even before the local Indians. I’d stopped counting at 800 rings. I said out loud, What have I done? This cedar was the doorway into a holy forest that I’d opened for others to see what was apparently invisible normally. I’d been given sight to see it, feel it, walk among trees and spirits from long ago.

I couldn’t live with this on my soul. I went back to the fir to get lost in work and a funny thing happened. Something hit me on the head as I was cutting through the base. It shocked me but didn’t hurt. I touched the top of my head and there was a stick no bigger around than a pencil and maybe twice as long arrowed into my head at where the cranial plates join. I pulled it out and looked at the end that’d been in me. No blood, just wetness.

I decided I better sit down although I felt okay. Still, there was something a little off I needed to track down. I leaned back against a tree and slid down to the ground, switched off the Husqavarna and checked myself over mentally. There was an itch on my face and something moving across my cheek. I swatted at it without thinking and big violet and pus yellow centipede only a little shorter than the stick went flying to the ground and chased itself away. How had it gotten there? Its leg hooks left tracks across my face that were already swelling.

The light was different, the sun way over there where it’d been noon when the stick hit me. And I was cold. I’d been drenched in sweat a few seconds before. I touched the chainsaw and it too was cold.

I got up and didn’t have a clue as to where I was. And with the Where comes a Who? I didn’t know that one either. When I happened upon the truck I didn’t know what it was. This was a prelude to what would continue at the Strathallen Hotel while having dinner with my grandmother in Rochester, New York ten years later.

Between the time I sat on the ground and felt the itch of the centipede on my cheek was an impression of three old men in rough woolen robes angry at me. I can see them now. Twenty years in the future Marilyn would buy the print of a painting of three southwestern Indian women in profile with pots on their heads that captures the memory of those old men. I was coming up out of somewhere deep and these old guys were right there beside me giving me hell. This is the only memory I have from those five hours I was unconscious. I’d been somewhere else yet not missed a beat in regular time, sitting against that tree. I’d sat there, felt the itch and gotten back up.

I put some pieces of the puzzle together when I put the saw in the truck. This was habit, I didn’t know what I was doing, but my body did. I opened the cab door and studied the things in there like a young boy for the first time.

Savvy nerve patterns got the Ford started, worked out how the clutch and accelerator worked, and the stick shift. I started moving, the low sun highlighting the grasses either side of the grass flattened by the tires coming in. I was doing this intuitively. I still didn’t know who it was doing this and it didn’t matter. I was at peace, I had no questions yet, there just wasn’t enough self-awareness for it.

Elders

The Elders wanted me to tell you this: Anything you think of thinks of you.
It feels you, is a part of you. Look at the sunset and say it is very pretty and the sun
feels this, feels happy. When you’re hot, a breeze cools you and you say, Oh that
feels good. This makes the breeze feel good. Maybe the breeze is only a baby, just
some air crawling before it touches your skin, and you saying, Oh that feels good,
makes the moving air understand who it is.

It feels your joy as a part of itself. As it moves down across the mesas it carries
the part of you that felt it. When it blows over the skin of the next person the
breeze joins the two of you and reminds you of how close you are. That breeze
touches many people. It marries them, shares that good feeling it gets with what
you and the others get from it.

By the time the sun is down and the air is still, the part of the air that
touched those people sleeps and dreams of them. That part that is them, and the
part of them that is itself. Maybe the next day it wakes up and it is a wind, and the
people that it touches bend against it, put their arms up over their faces to keep
from being bit by the sand it blows against them.

That night when it gets a chance to sleep again, it dreams of people it
roughed up, the sand people, the calm air people, the coyote people, the sheep and
rabbit people, the water people. Maybe the wind had a little rain that day. It was a
dance. You could see it like a dark curtain blowing against the big sky and it fell in
love with the rain. It dreams of this. It has this good feeling that blows back to all
the people it touched. It laughs, too, in its sleep as it remembers and weaves a
blanket of all it feels and remembers that’s got lots of people in the design.

The rock you throw at the rabbit is you. When you just think of picking it
up and trying to get the rabbit, it is already a part of you, and if you know this it
will fly true and knock that rabbit down. And the rock will remember what it felt
like for you, and that feeling of flying from your hand. The rock never flies before.
It never is picked up, it never hits a rabbit and knows that rabbit. So now it knows
some more about what it is and what you are. It will see you in its own way when
you pass by after that. It will call you warrior brother. It has different dreams now.
It sees more and feels more. It is part of you too from when you touched it and
asked it to help you. It was with you only a little while but it’s going to be with you
forever. In you is the rock and everything it knows and feels.

This is the way it is. When you see something or think of it, which is the
same thing, you marry it. That is what the marriage vow is, knowing that this is
the way you understand things, and saying it. When you killed that rabbit that
rabbit was your bride, it married you and your need for it. It gave up being a rabbit
person to become part of you through its flesh and through your prayer to it
carried by that rock. If you married well it jumped into the hole of you and felt
safe. You had the rabbit, the rabbit had you.

Muddy Night & New Seals

We are north of Santa Rosalia on the Baja west coast heading back to the United States from San Pedrito Beach. Night’s caught us before we find a place to park. At a roadblock manned by Indian soldiers with guns I ask if there is a road ahead we can pull off on for the night. The Indian youth who’s come into the RV has begun his search for hidden drugs in our fridge and taken out a bottle of beer he asks if we have enough of that he could use to quench his thirst. He says there is a dirt road a few kilometers on the left that goes to Catavina. After about 2O kilometers we come to the only turnoff either side of Highway 1 since Rosalia. There is no sign. The road is not graded or graveled.

We take it and stop along the side to reconnoiter. Turns out it has rained here and the slick of mud along the side is like grease on hard pack. A pickup headed to the highway stops and the two men say they have a good tow rope they will tie to the rig and pull us up to the middle of the road where it’s dry. The rope the driver takes from the truck bed is one of those plastic yellow ones fishermen use in their nets, about three eighths inch diameter and ten feet long. He gets down on the road and ties it to our frame, his friend ties the other end to their bumper, they get in, gun it, pop the clutch and the rope snaps like a shoelace. They get out and look at the broken ends, hmmm, what the hell?, held the fish that time.

They say this is their only rope, but they’ll push us out. I have my doubts. The RV weighs 23,000 pounds loaded, them about 250 loaded, and the ground we’ll be pushing from is slick. But we don’t want to be ungrateful so while Marilyn drives we push and get a lot of road on our clothes. They are useless so I give them a ten for beer and they drive off on a more holy mission.

We dig up some dry dirt from off the road and cut some brush for traction and use this to inch forward, push, fall, push, fall, Marilyn there at the wheel shouting out orders, me shouting back orders, the Winnebago whining.

After an hour the Mexican guys are back and even more happy, they stop and get out bright eyed and eager to push some more. First thing, they don’t want a woman at the wheel, it’s not our way they say, this is a job for drunk men, so I’m ordered in to drive and Marilyn’s ordered out to stand beside the road and look helpless, hopeful and not speak. They have no idea who they’re talking to. She won’t take that from me or anyone less than Jesus, and sometimes not even him.

After a bit the pickup driver decides I don’t know how to drive and orders me out of the seat and takes over. His idea is that we need more acceleration, that once we redline the rpm's the spinning wheels will dry out the mud and the traction will begin. I tell him to turn it off. He says Mande!? and glowers at me.

Marilyn takes over and says Get out, put the firewood I laid out there under the back tires and some dry dirt. We get out and shovel more dry sand in front of the back wheels and lay the firewood down for a track, then the three of us push while she drives and this time the rig skids sideways, finds some dry roadbed and scoots out. Marilyn disappears over the hill, not wanting to stop till she is on a downgrade.

There’s no way to turn around. I ask if the road is okay the rest of the way in. I’m not thinking straight. He nods. He offers to lead us, says to keep right behind his pickup and he’ll guide us around the wettest patches. I hoof it over to the rig and get in, tell her to follow them. Had I known.

No way we can keep up with them, and there is still no place to turn around. We pass some sort of point of no return and it is a wing and a prayer from then on. In fact already was when we came over a low hill and plunged down a 15% grade that then slung us up an even steeper one along a switchback only a four wheel drive could follow. The Mexican’s backlights are nowhere in sight. We‘re in a black black where light gets heavy after leaving the headlight bulbs and falls to the road ten feet away and dies.

Marilyn steps on it halfway down and we come up out of the bottom wash at about 6O and reach the top fishtailing in mud, make it over and down another longer slope that curves in the middle where I feel us slipping toward the edge and know there is no way we will not skid over the side at this speed and plunge to our deaths. The RV will be stripped in two days and the frame will be cutting-torched and all that will be left is oil stains and our bones, but she makes it and again and we freefall to another running arroyo and splash into the upgrade so fast we bottom out on rocks with huge mashing jolts that rock us, things spanging, cabinet doors exploding contents, everything not locked down set free.

By now I don’t recognize my voice, like trying to reach the high notes of the national anthem. Marilyn snaps Shut up! at me, something I’ve never heard her say.

Now the rig is at a downward angle to the edge, we can see others tracks where they slid to the edge, got stuck and were pulled out so it’s plain to me we won’t make it to the top. But that’s only physics and Marilyn doesn’t operate by physics in a crunch. Fiddlesticks. Hey, sure this is the worst yet but I’ve ridden beside her in San Diego traffic on home health care calls in neighborhoods where cops don’t drive and been through as plainly suicidal maneuverings as this and seen her pull it off. I may as well sit back and enjoy the terror.

We get to the top of a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean. We can’t see it but know it’s there because of distant lights reflecting on patches of surf. We see the tail lights of the Mexicans’ truck flare as they pull in to where those lights are.

The road is wide at the top of the final hill before beginning the final descent to the coast so we park, lock the door, pull the shades, pick up stuff and go to bed. We hear trucks pass and hours later our boys come by yelling happily. What’d they say? Marilyn mumbles. They said Thanks for the ten-dollar bill, I tell her. Oh, they’re so sweet, she says, and goes back to sleep.


Seal Nursery

When I get up the next morning Marilyn and Pebbles are gone. I see a craggy basalt black coast with surf geysering up blowholes scattered around, no beach, and out on a point is what looks like a lighthouse where our friends had parked. They didn’t seem lighthouse types so it must be a bar. I’ll bet Marilyn walked down there to explore. I start down with the hope of finding coffee and Marilyn. I find her first at the second switchback in the road returning with Pebbles. Oh John, you must come see this it’s a seal nursery! What? A seal nursery, I can’t describe it, I’ve never seen anything like it, come on, I came to get you, you have to see this. Do you have the camera?

Marilyn takes me down to a round open dome with a weathered picket fence around it, most of it fallen down. The parts still hanging in there have signs in Spanish saying not to go beyond the fence, which is good because there is nothing beyond the fence except air. It is like a round window in a cathedral dome where once you get into position you are able to look down on the congregation and drop tickets to heaven.

Marilyn shows me where she laid before and we crawl on our bellies till we can look over. This had started as a blowhole and in time widened inside so that it became a circular room with a crescent of sand and waves sloshing in. On the sand, maybe 1OO feet below, are seals lying side by side. One lies diagonally to the others. She is lighter, maybe because she has been out of the water longer and dried off. She looks up at us. She is the midwife, Marilyn says. Those are the expectant and nursing mothers. You see how that one is moving, the baby is in the birth canal. I’ve never seen seals like them before, have you? I say I haven’t. Can you see the newborns riding on the backs of the mothers in the water? I look through the camera viewfinder to focus an eye, hardly able even to see the swimming mothers, and press zoom. Now I can. Some of the newborns have the umbilicus connected, some are held to the mother’s side by a flipper. Marilyn says they’re teaching them to swim. Once the mother begins to breech she slides into the water and delivers there and then bites the umbilicus and teaches the babies to swim.

Pebbles is bellying out to us sensing we are looking at something more important than her. She feels Marilyn’s love and wants it all. The mothers nuzzle their babies in the water and on the beach though most of the nursing mothers are in slumber. One in the water picks her pup up with her teeth and comes ashore and whomps along till she finds a patch of warm sand and tucks the baby in with a flipper to nurse.

The calls the seals make is haunting and amplified by the shape of the cavern, lifted by the swells of air washed in from the sea. There’s some banter going on between a mother and a baby paddling too near the rocks where the waves are washing in. It is trailing a long leash of birth cord.

This is a power spot, Marilyn says, you feel it? I say I do. Something has gotten into me besides fear of this thin rock roof caving in beneath our combined weight. Maybe if I never move again it’ll hold firm. Marilyn is happy, face radiant, she’s in her element. There’s a birthing mood here, she says, you feel it? It’s just like with human mothers. It’s so familiar.

I notice when we talk too loud the midwife seal looks up at us and there is no doubt about what she is saying, it’s in her eyes, her eyebrows or what passes for them. Shut up!

I need coffee. I risk death by inching backward on my stomach and Pebbles takes my warm spot next to Marilyn. After a few feet I get up and head to the tower. There is a man looking out the top window. In and up the circular steps into a café and bar and this shining bright dark mestizo man with gleaming teeth greets me, introducing himself as Hernan Cortez. THE Hernan Cortez I ask in Spanish, and he lights up, says he is a direct descendant to the Spanish conqueror of Mexico. And what is my pleasure? I ask for coffee and some sacrificial virgins and he says they haven’t brought him supplies in weeks. There is plenty to drink at the bar but coffee is what is calling for me. He gets some instant and fixes up a pot, sets down two cups, two spoons and a bowl of brown sugar. We yak about all the drinkers here last night, and the two vaqueros who helped us get here, and about spending the night right up there, he ducks to see through the wraparound window where I’m pointing. His teeth are massively white in his mahogany skin and he shows all of them, he is a happy Hernan.

Marilyn comes up telling Pebbles No, stay! But Hernan says to bring her in, dogs belong, dogs are welcome...

Gen's Dog Died (From the book Marilyn & Me)

‘Gen’s dog just died.’ Marilyn’s just rolled in from her sister’s house. ‘The funeral’s today at one. Kathy will dig the hole in Gen’s backyard. I thought you’d maybe do a couple of shovels full.’ I say I will and ask if we’ll sing a hymn. She said to choose one. I’d been joking, now I was the soloist. I scanned my archives—Old Shep? I’ll sing it like Elvis, wrench the tears from the congregation. Or take my guitar and sing Bach’s B Minor Mass, hum the words I may have forgotten.

Pebbles slept all night and during the morning when we went for a walk she slept some more. It was noon when we got back and she was getting up. I asked her if she wanted to do the oratorio and she wagged her tail. I wish I could do that when someone needed an answer right away. They’d know I was working on it. Pebbles is deaf but can read lips. Not just selectively deaf like Marilyn when I’m saying something about consciousness, ethos or samadhi, or me when she’s planning a revamp of the bedroom that is completely filled by our bed and a dresser.

Marilyn says Pebbles can come, and there will be the four of us for the service and internment. It won’t take long. I am on a No fast so I say Yes to everything. I’m getting so mellow these days I hardly recognize me. I smiled at myself in the mirror this morning. I like saying Yes, or Let me think about it, will you please? Last night when we discussed changing some travel plans, instead of me falling to pieces I simply said my brain wasn’t working and could we try again another day? Marilyn was touched by my honesty and didn’t pursue it.

We drove over the few blocks to the house where Gen and Earl had raised eight kids. The house was tiny, not much bigger than the garage, but had a huge backyard. The tractor tire the kids had swung on in the tree 50 years ago was still hanging there.

There were three pines all planted at the same time, the one in the middle was full and tall, the second was closest to the woods and was middling to okay, but the third one closest to the house was as raggedy as QT. The sandy soil here was perfect for digging the grave and Marilyn and I got to it with two spades Kathy brought. No one said anything but I think we were all rooting for the little tree making a comeback as it was nourished by QT’s closeness to its roots.

Kathy brought the bag with the small corpse and unwrapped it, peeled back the blue wrap and we laid him to rest about two feet down. QT’s eyes were open and still shiny. Something wet dribbled onto my hands. We swept the sandy dirt in with our hands until he was covered then used the spades to finish up, Kathy arranging the burial site by replacing the turf and laying on a rectangular stone that would be the base for the marble slab one of Jen’s kids had left over from a job. Gen was going to paint a scene with a live QT running about on it.

Kathy had helped bury a much earlier family dog named Duffy next to the thriving pine. She took us over and pulled the rotting post out to better show us the commemorative words she’d burned into the wood. Marilyn had assumed Duffy was Gen’s husband. She was horrified to be hearing they’d buried Earl in the backyard and appalled by the nonchalance with which her sister was uprooting Earl’s cross to show us her handiwork.

Back at QT’s grave Gen was crying quietly, upset by her emotion. She told Marilyn her mom always told her when she was little not to cry when the dogs or the lambs the kids hand-fed at their farm died, and here she was doing it anyway. Marilyn hugged her saying It’s okay to die, I mean cry. Kathy hugged her too. I wanted to but felt three hugs might be too much all at once. I was inclining toward the car carrying one of the spades back to Kathy’s station wagon. I got halfway there before I had to go back to Gen.

Was Jesus a Woman?

Marilyn and Jesus

Marilyn is feminine, non aggressive, demure, even. She notices everything except stop signs and one way streets. She may have taught Mother Theresa a thing or two but also Gail Sheehy, Gloria Steinhem and Betty Friedan. She looks like Betty Crocker but in terms of determination is more like Man Mountain Dean.

She is scared of police and misdemeanor laws and is meek until the police or the law raises a voice or hand against one of her kids or anyone in the family or someone who cannot defend himself, then she’s a bear mother with cubs. I have a theory about Jesus I like to share with her even though she makes the sign of the cross and stuffs marshmallows in her ears. That temple episode where he gets into a physical rage over the money-lenders and curio sellers using God’s purported house as a marketplace was no single tantrum. He was a gentle man with a five star temper. His gentleness was tempered by his sense of justice. A carpenter uses the tools he has to shape what he’s crafting. Jesus was a fighter. You don’t out-wrestle evil with logic, compassion, instruction, acceptance. You heave it across the nave onto the altar and beat it senseless with a collection plate. Then it warms to you and checks its moves when you’re around out of the side of its eye. It respects you now. It’s still evil but it smiles in your direction plenty when you’re around and offers to share its burrito, it’s sizing you up looking for the chink of dark in the light it plans to weasel itself into. When you’ve gone it gets back to cooking up bitter misery and selling it as medicine.

These were the sort of people selling their wares and lending shekels or issuing credit cards to buy them with in the synagogue. Jesus whupping ass was not a one-time thing, it was part of his life to the very end. He bowed to no man, especially those with dead souls. Passivity and acceptance and hope were not things he taught or lived by. The Pharisees taught these things to better shear the sheep. Our own priests teach the same things for the same reasons. He said Sheep are sheep, not men.

Jesus didn't teach Trust in the Lord and you will be delivered. He taught You are the Lord, act like it. He taught Women are not possessions. He learned that from his mother and Mary Magdalene. He said There is no Heaven you can count on except what you make with your lives. He said Hell is when you let others make your life for you and watch it on TV reruns.

Marilyn is like Jesus with more patience and less beard, loving at whatever the cost. I know it’s heresy, but what if Jesus was a, gulp, woman?

Two Lawmen & A Bear

I am in First Bank on Ski Road in Breckenridge with Zack who is opening a savings account. The bank officer is Zaa, a fiftyish slender woman with peroxide white teeth and mussed up short blonde hair sprayed to hold that way. She has a photo on her desk of a girl Zack tells me later looks exactly like his sister, Cristina. She has just told us that the bank serves bagels, donuts and coffee Saturday from 9 to12, and to come by. She will tell us then if Zack gets his ATM card. Because he is 14 there is a question as to whether they will issue one, but Zaa says she will do her best to see that he gets it. She has gotten to the part of the application where she has to put in a dollar amount of the deposit, and Zack hands over $200 in cash.

The idea of a cup of coffee has me hankering now so I ask Zaa where the nearest coffee bar is. She says Starbucks has opened on Main Street in a yellow house up around the 200’s. She adds that she can’t understand why people are willing to pay that kind of money for a cup of coffee, but the high school kids won’t drink anything less. For Zaa a 7/11 cup is perfect. Her own daughter pays $3.50 for a Mocha Java Slushy, and thinks nothing of handing over almost two bucks for a small cup of coffee called a Grande. It’s a status thing.

Zaa needs Zack’s social security number and I have to call Marilyn at the cabin to get it. We tease him that he hasn’t memorized it yet. Zaa says how he will need to give it to everyone in sight having to do with schooling, education, work and banking for the rest of his life.

As Zack is signing his name to multiple 14” long legal documents pouring out of the computer printer now, and initializing clauses releasing the bank from multiple responsibilities and acts of God having to do with his money being deposited in their bank, I tell Zaa about finding bear tracks on my hike out east on the Colorado Trail the day before, and how our dog Pebbles took one sniff and lit out back the way we came at a full out run, hackles up so high it looked like she had on a back pack.

Zaa says that not too far from the Colorado Trail where I was, a couple of miles up Tiger Run Road near the mining barge, two lawmen were killed by a black bear, one two nights before, the other just last night. My first response is visceral, that it could be the same bear, and she agrees. I should have been right there beside Pebbles with my own hackles up. She says that the rancher that found the lawmen was really upset, and I can understand this. I am also thinking why would the lawmen be out there two nights running in the first place, and what a coincidence to be killed by the same bear.

I say to Zaa, “Two lawmen were killed?” just to make sure and she tells me yes, the first one was bad enough but the rancher was really stricken when it happened again. Well, of course he would be, but what about the police force and the lawmen’s families, and what was this special connection with the rancher? And how come this didn’t get into the paper? There had been a story about a drunk on the front page who was suspected of stealing a computer from a parked police car, and when apprehended said he didn’t do it, while the arresting officer asked him then how come the computer was in his hands? And the drunk said he didn’t know, someone must have put it there.

Zack finishes up signing his name and initialing the sheaf of documents that are almost as thick as a mortgage loan package. He asks Zaa if he can deposit his paychecks from his summer job in Hawaii through the ATM, assuming he gets the card, and she says No, because the bank is only in Colorado, with a single, lonesome branch in Palm Desert, California. We all stand up and shake hands, Zaa must be well over six feet tall because she is looking down on my six foot two-ness. Zack gathers up his papers and we leave, get into the car and drive up the street to Starbucks in a little yellow clapboard house. Zack orders what Zaa’s daughter usually does, and I order the small coffee, called the Grande. I notice the medium sized coffee is called the Macho Grande, and the big coffee is called The Maximo Grande Grandissimo. Three teenagers are seated at a round table with their drinks and I wonder if the girl with the Mocha Java is Zaa’s daughter.

Zack and I sit and I start talking about the bear and the lawmen and how weird it all seems, only the rancher feeling so bad, and the coincidence of their being at his place two nights in a row, and the bear killing them and there being no news and... Zack interrupts, “Dad, they were llamas, not lawmen!” He looks at me as if I am considerably unhinged. I can’t help smiling with relief. Oh, is all I manage to say. Zack sucks his mocha through a straw and tries to figure out how to appear to not know me although we are at the same table. The other kids might recognize him when he goes to 9th grade in September and spread the word.

Humanninny

Humanity has acquired a database over a million or so years if you believe the scientists, or around 10,000 years on a Monday morning if you are more romantic. Let’s assume some upright animal with rudimentary language and social skills that we occasionally find the remains of evolved into at least a proto-human with enough intelligence to shop craigslist for jobs and toys. Whether evolved from photo nutrients, or hatched wholly human, we have together assembled a democratic database of what works and what doesn’t.

Many of us educate ourselves from this nest egg of wisdom, we learn the systems that have worked for humanity for between ten thousand and a million or so years, the socio/politico/religious equations linking us to how well we can do in life along with the clearly seen or invisible cautions and moral codes we generally abide by. In short, all the ways we’ve discovered and created variations on of doing, thinking and expressing ourselves.

These are universally perfected themes we reference in the shared libraries of human experience so we don’t have to entirely recreate the wheel or wig.

I wanted to create the wheel, and language and airplanes and conception and parties and footwear. Somehow I never learned how to use the library card. Once I started to feel I was doing what generations of humankind had done I‘d veer away to explore for original ways which even if I’d stumbled over I wouldn’t’ve recognized because I had only a couple of the same contexts and reference point for recognizing things others do. I believed everything and learned nothing. I was a lad with one foot spiked to the oak floor hearing the starter gun go off every ten seconds. Maybe I had neo natal Nazi Alzheimer’s. I followed whatever I was ordered to, even when these orders conflicted.

It was really bad. My relationships suffered, word got around and I walked in an empty landscape, even downtown. Here he comes, hide!! I couldn’t connect words spoken or on the page with the make-sense place in mind others seemed to be able to file things in memory or respond to normally. The database of human experience is sometimes out of bounds for some people, and I was one.

Still I felt I was a genius but didn’t know what to genie or how. People who are still having trouble tying their shoes at age 30 or remembering their name need to believe they are special in order to survive. If we ever got it how dumb we are we still wouldn’t get it how dumb we are.

What got me through it all is that I was merry and big and strong. No one ever beat me up. Those who could make mincemeat of me with a few sarcastic words didn’t. One time I walked in on a Don Rickles show on the Strip and he waded into me with rage because I was walking while he was talking, but all that came out of him was stutter.

People I hurt forgave me, or at least didn’t keep after me. I was off limits to those of the broken hearts, to predators, bullies, murderers, zealots, con men. Whores loved me because I brought out their wounded best . They made sure I was treated with respect. The mentally challenged and deformed drew close to protect me. Schizophrenics called me brother, or sister, and made perfect sense to me.

After awhile I didn’t want people around protecting me so I learned to become invisible by scanning without any felt focus other than curiosity. My image’d wander off leaving behind only stripped down awareness. On the streets if I stare at a woman shifting along fluidly she feels it and looks over her shoulder with annoyance. In scan mode there is no focused energy contact for her to refer to so she just feels a general pleasure of giving pleasure in her walk.

After awhile I knew the rules for getting into regular society but no longer wanted to. I made peace with being an outsider, it was my nature. I preferred anonymity and only paired up with others to see up close how life worked for them. What came automatically for others I had to study as lessons over and over. It took thirty years to get out of elementary school. I learned to appear normal when I shimmed into visibility, except when I spoke. When I spoke people drifted away wondering what language I was speaking. So I learned to shut up. And eventually, with nothing better to do, to listen. Little by little I got what people were saying. By then I was in my forties and working as a woodcutter and sawyer in Santa Fe. I spent ten years in and out of the woods of the high mountains in my truck. I was happier than any time in my life. I had a woodyard, sawmill, a Maine woman who rarely spoke, and all the physical labor I could handle, which was plenty. I was free to be who I wanted to be with no apologies...