easter 2016

"Something hidden, Go and find it. Go and look behind the ranges, Something lost behind the ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go."  --- R. Kipling 

 

April first. 5am. Everything is set.
I roll out of bed put on my boots grab some water.. my pack, my wallet, my jacket.
5:05, ignition. Break.. sunglasses.
The drive will be long, but first the sunrise. When the sun hits, I tell myself, you can forget everything, you are gone.

'You're going to have to feed those chickens before they let you'
'No the fence right'
'Well sure, but those chickens sure gonna miss you'
'I'm gonna miss that fence'
'..5am, huh?'
'Ja mon'
'All the way to Madison.. You need a little to-go breakfast? Let me get Jen... Yeah that's too early for me, else I'd be up.. You know.'
'Sure. Well trucks only five feet. I can manage that much easy'
'Night then, bruv. Keep in touch'

The high desert is a blue lagoon and the hispanic station is polishing off comedy hour. The highway so empty in the emptied dunes it's like a painting. Emptied like a laugh, and me sinking deep down into it with my right foot. I slap myself alive every few minutes for emphasis. Say please, baby. Now call me coffee.. Coffee.. Soon..
Dawn approaches green and thin just on the rise and I descend the last climb into the familiar patchwork valley, phantom rays of daylight straying over the hills before I reach the bottom of the grade. The I-90 snakes away from out the cobalt distance in the north, west to eastward. I take the onramp and throw in the first cd of the day for the drive ahead and for the coming journey, blaring through the gorge and then Spokane and further, through the jingle jangle morning for new york ..and for the tangerine dream submarine mr tambourine man lying long and loud in those colossal cotton eves.

Two hours of steep windy north Idaho interstate, and then a sharp exit off again out of the mountains and into flathead country... empty. Like a laugh. From there a couple of hours north by the lake through Kalispel and over the woods to grandmothers house look at those fucking mountains to grandmothers house to the river just look at those mountains I am so anxious to get there I stop only for gas every couple hundred miles, eager to start work. I managed to glance some of the drive, but for the most of it I only wonder.

Montana, Montana. Almost there. New pace new scenery, Montana. Alaska Alabama New Mexico New England, Montana. It's a new love it's a new life for me, Montana.

Pulling into a new farm always gives me nerves. Like catching out on the fly, you don't know just how it's going to play until you grab on with everything you've got and let it take you or throw you. It isn't just a new employer it's a new family, and not just work but a project and lesson all it's own. A new farm means new faces and foreign contexts, where kind gentle people will feed you and house you.. and challenge you. But I've since decided that it need not matter which way it goes. You are going to stay exactly as long as you feel like staying no matter what and that is the beauty of living belly-first. Follow the nose, trust the nose.

All quiet when I arrive. Nothing callow, nothing sketchy about the establishment but a modesty in it's demeanor. We are embedded in the tall pine forest against low hills, and I am reminded of the reality of the agreement. A family.. one with it's own struggles and handicaps.. has invited me to come and eat and live and work from their own table.

I lope up to the main house further up the lot, big and yellow, thinking maybe I'm not cut out for long drives maybe I'd better go easier on that gas because my right hip and knee are cramped as hell. Big and yellow, like the victorian down the road I used to visit in younger days with flowers at my chest and butterflies. Smoke fluming out under a little silver sheeted top-hat atop neat grey shingles... Knock knock, moneybags. First its dogs, and when the door opens a weathered, stout, grey woman greets me. Decidedly in her early sixties. A long denim skirt and purple sweater.

"Why Hello, you made it!"
"Only because I got tired of the drive?"
"Shoes off and first the rules!....Have a seat young man."

I forget her name. Good lady despite minor annoyances. Jewish. Very strong-headed. Hearty, young at heart for her age, which is a very good sign in a woman passed her prime. Certainly plenty of trouble too when push came to shove. Dinner was to be set shortly and I settled into one of the loveseats to make conversation with the daughter and son-in-law, visiting for the night, best I could. They're alright people from what I could tell, if a little too modest for my tastes as long as I'm a houseguest. But then, I was always just a house guest.

When conversation dies off -- oh, inevitability! -- my host notices that her 3 year old grand-daughter is excited to see someone new. Trying to inoculate me with her little world. Without missing a beat she asks if I would kindly read a book to her for the remaining interval before the evening meal. I'm no good with kids, but when I'm up for it or put up to it, I do try the very best I can to make them happy. I have found reading to be an easy way to clear your throat now and again against the inhumanity of long, long silences out there on the rails, and by this time am no stranger to a bit of delivery.

did the wind make her send 
wishes the far distant land

or a bed full of prayers 

To the ghost of a friend

and the train track will take 
all the wounded ones home 

please wait for the parade

fare thee well mara jane

I jump back into my truck two weeks later with a couple hundred bucks extra cash, ready to continue east. Cutting through the quick of the earliest morning, fumbling groggy and stiff out into the black slow malaise with all of my gear as quickly and quietly as possible.. It's the first time in about a year that I it is preferable to sneak off like this. When your patience is gone and it's a race on just to catch up and lick it before you lose it. I felt like they might've been on to me after confiding to brother-o-dan boy about my plans to skip off in the near future. So I went full stealth mode: No possibility of a guilt trip when you don't give them the chance. Of course they'll assume you've stolen something at first, and I never stole anything from anybody but their trust, but all the more reason then to tip toe your way out.

Again the emptied miles of road and that sense of freedom and wonder, broadening, stretching far beyond it. Again setting out into the frosty northern night with all of your belongings, money and well-lighted for a brave new world. Coasting back over those long country roads straight into the waning gibous night-dawn, into and through and beyond the plaster-paris, high-line town of Whitefish. Thinking.. now. Now, now, now begins the real trip. Now I am gone.. gone everlasting. Gone like a mountain cat, gone like howlin' wolf, like smokestack lightning. Gone like a thief in the night with a million errant jewels all my own welcoming me home to an immaculate solitude clean, clear and pure beneath their ageless articulation.

I take the 93 south to Missoula and back on the I-90 next, this time for Bozeman then Billings. No detours. The drive is gorgeous, until the Crow Reservation. Then everything opens up into a flat expanse of plain and plateau, but not without flavor, not without a cool flaxen ambiance. I hit the radio and hear that Merle Haggard has died, and they are playing all of his best and I content myself with nothing but classic country, from Wyoming to the sotas and clear to Wisconsin.

A few thousand miles of solitude will do more for a guy than any shrink, casket or capsule ever did anybody. Your senses are starved for challenge for contrast and novelty. Even in adversity, your mind absorbed your tendons and extremities devoured and blistered by the hours and all is whittled down into nothing, whittled right down into your chest where only the heart can remain unscathed. There is no better cause for this sort of silent cataclysm than the slow motion shrapnel of your own putrefaction within the "normalcy" of the age. Drugs need not have anything to do with it... let me be evidence of that. Only of the magnetic effect, the inspiration which wilderness and wind, field and stream, has always created in the heart and soul of generation on generations of young people.