A DIRE SITUATION (Chapter 4 of a Novel by Louise Scott)

 

Chapter 4

With Melanie's phone insistently ringing inside the house, I skipped over a stack of mixing bowls, bounded out of the garage, up the steps and across the porch, managing not to trip on Melanie’s Persian cat.  I dashed through the living room and caught the phone on the sixth or seventh ring.

"Mama, it’s Sally."

"Well, Hi, Honeybunch,” I wheezed, slithering onto Melanie’s brand new leather couch--keeping my feet well off the edge of the white upholstery--catching my breath and settling in for an uncomfortable chat.

It was such a tangled skein of love with Sally, my oldest child.  I was always afraid a mundane conversation could veer off into a confrontational path that would make matters worse.  Talking with her usually felt like wading into icy water that was over my head, where each step could bring a downfall. With her schizophrenia it’s been catastrophe after catastrophe through many years, though she had been an exemplary child—always a straight A student, creative, alert, lots of friends.  My feelings for her stack up from the adorable dimpled infant on my breast, to a Brownie Scout selling cookies, a young bride and mother, to her more recent times as a hustler—as a coke whore.

A Bedlamite.  She’s not psychotic, at least I don’t think so.  But it was Looney Toons to deal with her.   I understood schizophrenics may not be able to differentiate between the external world’s circumstances and what their minds perceive in the everyday reality most of us live within--though that reality, too, maybe illusory. Other than consensus for mundane things, like whether it’s night or day, black or white, we each perceive differently.  Consider animals’ perceptions:  A dog smells a cat several blocks away; insects manage to find each other though separated for miles. If we could hear everything making noise in our radius, we’d go deaf.

However.

I took a long deep breath. “I’m so glad you phoned. I've been trying for several days to get in touch.  I want to see you and the boys, today if possible.  Kee-rist!  It’s cold enough to freeze the devil’s gonads, but I’ll be ready to truck on down the road just as soon as the fury of this forecasted storm passes.  I’m packing now, how are you?”

"Not so good," she said in a voice that sounded like the ghost in Hamlet. I heard the note of hysteria behind it.  "They just phoned me from the school.  Justin threw another tantrum and neither of the teachers could control him.”

“What?  What did he do? What happened?” 

“They have the police there.”

"What?  Police? At the school? What the. . .What happened?"

“I don’t know what started it,” she sobbed.  “He raised quite a ruckus, throwing papers all over the place; he spit at one teacher, they said, then bit and kicked the assistant in the shins.”

“Oh shit! That’s awful!  And how did cops get involved?”

“The teachers called the police. The cops put him in handcuffs."

"Cops! Handcuffs! What the fuck! The police put Justin in handcuffs? You mean he’s shackled? Manacled! Holy Mackerel! Is this what happened?"

"Yes. They just phoned me."

"Oh! My God!  That really sucks! Why aren't you at the school right now?  Why haven’t you gone to get him?"

"They told me to wait.  There's nothing I can do right now.”

"Well then, I’ll go get him,” I said as I struggled up from the couch heading for my purse and car keys, trailing the phone’s long cord behind me.  “I can't believe the teachers didn't just twist his arm behind his back.  Really stupid of them to call the cops!  What bloody idiots."

"Well,” Sally said in an abrupt tone, “the teachers aren't allowed to hit the children."

"Crap, Sally.  I'm not talking about hitting our incipient Mike Tyson, only restraining him--just grabbing an arm behind him or grabbing a tight hold of one ear.  How can it be possible that two fully-grown teachers can't control a seven-year-old boy, no matter how obstreperous he might be?  And calling in the police!  Holy cow!  Handcuffing a child!  Justin must be terrified.

“I’ll go calm him down.  But we don’t need to waste time talking.  I'll go get the problem child right now."

"No, Mama, they won't release him to you.  They won't even let you see him; not even me, his mother.  They told me to wait until they phone.  Anyway, if the teachers and police can't control him, there's no way you’d be able to do so."

"Come on, Sally! That’s humbug.  I certainly can.  I’m on my way.  Right now! At least I can be there to give him some sort of moral support.  Holy Moly! Handcuffs!  That’s terrible.”

"NO!”  She screamed so loud it hurt my ear, “You can’t go.”

“I’m on my way. . . ”

“NO!  It's gone past that point.  I think they may take him to Children's Psychiatric Hospital.  Chances are they've even left the school by now."  I was so shocked I couldn’t think of a word to say. After her initial outburst she was quiet, but I kept the phone’s receiver away from my ear just the same.  

When she again spoke her lowered tone betrayed no emotion; it sounded as if she simply stated a fact, such as what day of the week it was.  I suddenly realized that she’d known even before she called me that the child was going to be sent to the psychiatric hospital again.

"Heaven forbid!” I exploded.  “Putting him in that hospital is sure to make things worse! No way! Absolutely not! We've absolutely got to prevent it! What can we do? What can we do?"

Sally was quiet for a minute, then gave a long sigh.  "Well, Mama, no matter what you or I think about it, they will do what they think best.  Laws are laws; rules are rules.”

"And shit is shit! Sally, for Christ's sake!  Laws are rules that sometimes must be broken. They don’t know anything about Justin’s problems, his fears.  Don’t take a defeatist attitude.”

Her voice changed to somber--like an old style preacher orating from the pulpit the way Dylan Thomas sounded reading his poetry. “My attitude isn’t defeatist.  I’m very much a realist and it’s me in touch with the school and the cops.” 

The silence was deafening.  Then in a more pleasant voice she spoke. "Look, Mama.  There's a whole lot I haven't told you.  It isn’t just that Justin made a scene at school.  You have absolutely no idea at all about what’s been happening.  But I can’t get into it with you now.  I'll call you back when I hear what they're going to do," she said with finality.

There was a click.

Sally had hung up.  I stood there dumbfounded, holding the dead line, raking my brains trying to think of something to do, some way to make things better.  For years I had kept hoping a day would come when all the dots would be connected and a clean picture would appear so I would know what to do about the dire situation.  What to do about Sally.

And now what is it I don’t know?

***

This was Act II for Justin to be in the psychiatric hospital.  A year earlier my other daughters and I had tried our best to prevent his being sent there. That was after he had attacked Sally, but that’s all we knew.  We didn’t know whether it had been Sally that called the authorities or if the call was made by one of Mrs. Lujan’s nurses-- from the house where Sally both worked and lived.  She had a roomy wing at Mrs. Lujan’s luxurious house where she stayed with Justin and Brandon, his older brother.

We had pleaded that Justin could stay with his aunt Stacey instead of the hospital, but she wouldn’t talk to us at all.  She kept telling us to “Bugger off!”  In desperation Marta got us together in some government office with authorities that dealt with child custody or abuse.  Marta, Stacey and I sat around a conference room table twiddling our thumbs until Sally came in with her long legged loping gait closely followed by two male and two female bureaucrats. She seemed to be part of the chummy group.

It is Sally, not Justin, who is crazy we told the people.  We emphasized how Sally had serious drug addictions, how she had been several times in psychiatric wards, but always denied she had any problems.  I quoted when she had told me: “I’m not crazy.  I only go to the psychiatric wards knowing there I could get drugs.”  As if this represented sanity. 

Stacey pleaded that Justin could live with her instead of being sent to the psychiatric hospital. 

The younger women responded that Sally claimed that although she had allowed Stacey to babysit on occasion, now Stacey wanted to take Justin with her on her up-coming move to Florida.  That she was trying to steal the boy.

‘Yes,” Stacey said. “I would like to take Justin with me when I move. But not steal him.  Right here and now I want to take care of the boy instead of his being hospitalized.  He has often stayed with me when Sally was drunk or otherwise out of commission.  Always he’s been well behaved and seems to feel privileged to be the big kid with my two daughters.  He’s an imaginative leader; the neighborhood children follow him in the games he comes up with.”

The gray-haired woman at the end of the conference table kept pursing her lips in a tight straight line, pushing her eyebrows together and scowling. She commented that Sally didn’t appear to be drugged or drunk.  “Quite the contrary,” she said. In her voice I felt accusation, as if I were a bad mother and now was talking bad about my dear daughter.

Lady, you don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground.

These yahoos were impressed by Sally’s well-mannered presence and proper appearance, the same qualities I’ve always been so proud of with her.  She presented herself as a paragon of virtue with such decorum though her demeanor was subtly coquettish when she flashed her dimples and flounced her abundant black curls.  She’s an excellent actress; we had nicknamed her Tallulah when she was little.

 She kept her beautiful baby blue eyes focused right on the middle-aged pot-bellied man, undoubtedly the head honcho, whose hair combed to one side still didn’t cover his baldness nor his fat hairy ear lobes. He burped and I wondered if he’d had a gastric bypass.

He was so smitten with her that the officious nit-wit simply dismissed our concerns—he and his cronies wouldn’t even listen to us.

Sally was out of the room before any of us could push our chairs out from the table.  Stacey, Marta and I left, exceedingly despondent.  We were stuck with a big sack of excrement.

With Sally adamantly opposed and supported by the law, in the face of her perversity there was nothing we could do then. There was probably nothing we could do now.  She held the poker hand.

She had the say-so with the boys unless we could take her to court to prove her an unfit mother, and what an ugly business that would be, besides requiring plenty of time and money for lawyers. These days family matters are resolved through highly paid surrogates-- the attorneys and establishment bureaucrats we’d tried to deal with.  We were severely hindered by those fuckers.

Sally’s sons were in jeopardy and it wasn't just that Sally couldn't see the solutions; she couldn't see the problems.  She couldn’t tell shit from Shinola.

And now what is it I don’t know?

***

It had been terrible for Justin when the little tyke was locked up at the hospital before.  He came out heavily armored with hard sharp edges, dosed on Ritalin or some other prescription drug.  We couldn't let him spend another two months with screwed up kids in that cold impersonal institution with his only guidance and comfort coming from probably well-meaning, but certainly underpaid, strangers trying to somehow manage to get their rent together on their five-day-per-week shifts. 

I'd gone to visit when he was there before and I saw what a Bedlam it was.  Just to tell you, I was smack dab in front of the nurses' station waiting for Justin, standing right there in the waiting area where there were nurses all about wearing their sweet little white starched uniforms, a couple of them within three feet of me, gossiping about some doctor, when a boy, eleven or twelve years old, walked up to me and with no further to-do aggressively thrust his fist right in my face—almost hit my nose--with his middle finger pointing skyward.  The little dork flipped me the finger, spat out "Fuck you, Lady," and nobody but me seemed to notice or care.

Meanwhile, huddled by himself in a corner by the barred windows, trembling like a little animal with fear of the vet, a small boy was staring at the parking lot outside.  He was perhaps eight or nine years old, scrawny and pale as a seedling thrust early from its seed in darkness.  The lad was still quivering there, staring out at nothing, alone and ignored, when I left several hours later.

"A lot of the kids here are strange," Justin had volunteered.

***

Feeling overwhelmed, I made another cup of coffee, my third or fourth of the morning, and carried it upstairs to Melanie’s guestroom that she euphemistically called the Old Broad’s Home. I sat on the sunny southeastern facing balcony warming my hands on the cup as I sipped and vacantly watched the early morning sun erase shadows as it bounced color off the corrugated wisps of shape-shifting clouds looming in the distance.  

It looked improbable that I would be on my way there in the next few days, now that this horror was back in my face again.

Lately I hadn’t often been thinking of Sally and her sons, but ignoring the problem rather like ignoring it as if there were a hurtful pebble in my shoe. I had been thinking more of how best to recreate order in my own discombobulated life.

What about Justin?  What is it I don’t know?

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THE WHY AND THE WHEREFORE (Chapter 3 of a novel by Louise Scott)

 Chapter 3

I had started on this enjoyable trip with the hope that moving to Mexico would recreate order in my helter-skeltered life.  Poorer than the biblical Job’s turkey, I was virtually homeless since cashing in my chips after ten years of homesteading and coming out with zilch.  All the equipment was sold: the expensive solar submerged pump from the well, a dozen solar panels, a good generator, a large Servel propane refrigerator and big cast iron stove—the list goes on and on, yet had raised only a pittance for the move.

Should I have postponed going to Mexico?  Should I have rented a house somewhere near Boulder and gotten some kind of a job until things could have straightened out?  I was baffled.  At my age I probably couldn’t have gotten a job that would pay even enough to cover my ass.  I was stymied.

All my household furniture, do-dads and appliances, everything except what was now strewed in Melanie’s garage waiting for me to pack, had been given away or sold.  Rents in town were exorbitant and the place was inundated with technocrats jogging along the roadsides with their earphones on, wearing fluorescent-colored Lycra outfits, getting their daily high by hyperventilating carbon dioxide from the mainly foreign-manufactured cars whizzing by.  Not my style.  It was time for me to leave Colorado.   Things were getting Orwellian.

Well fuck a duck!  I had no debt, but neither did I have any dinero except for minimum Social Security--and you can’t get much more minimal than that.

I tried to look on the bright side. I had tried--I’d kept trying—to do the best I could, knowing that’s all life ever seemed to require of me and it had been wondrous so far even with the ups and downs.  I started out in life naked with nothing; I still had my original birthday suit of skin, though it had become quite wrinkled and worn during the years.  As the song goes: ‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.’  I knew this to be true though sometimes difficult to remember.

The day was as cloudy as my turmoil.  I felt like a turtle pulled out of its shell.

“I can’t wait to get out of fucking Boulder, fucking Colorado, the United fucking States of America. . .”  I was fired up to kvetch more, but Melanie put her cheek against mine and enclosed me in her arms while I cried. Sometimes a good cry is the best solution to life’s problems.

“Well, gee-whiz, Polly dear,” Melanie--always the practical one—drawled, “here’s a tissue.  Blow your nose and let’s get going on what we can accomplish instead of crying about what we can’t.”

So after this tearful time of commiseration, she left for work and I went out to the garage to work on what I could do.  I could get my pickup loaded and get myself on the road to Mexico.

***

Only the day before Melanie had helped me finish vacating my homestead a few miles outside Boulder.  We’d dumped all the household items I planned to haul to Mexico in her icy-cold garage—now it was all scattered on the concrete floor waiting for me to pack my Toyota pickup.  Some items I’d managed to sort into preliminary piles.  At least some of the dishes were stacked up, with the smallest items inside larger bowls, trying to conserve space as much as possible, but most of the junk was totally disorganized. The hodgepodge looked like leftover trash from a rummage sale in Shantytown.

             Melanie was a small dynamic green-eyed redhead who was capable dealing with the material providence—much more so than I.  Her home in Boulder was a delight of comfort and beauty that she worked diligently to create and maintain by sales at her trendy boutique.

              I was a dilettante who had lived for years on the edge of my economic incompetency.  I never was any good at coloring within the lines; I’d always lost playing Monopoly.  Still I’d managed through the years to always provide my daughters with eggs on the breakfast table and I made loaves of whole wheat bread and healthy cookies with oatmeal, nuts and raisins, delicious goat milk cheeses and yogurt. Amazing how much children eat: milk and meat, vegetables, fruit, bread, p-nut butter of course, and candy when they can get hold of it.

I had hated to go back out to Melanie’s frigid garage --it was as cold as a witch’s teat there --but as soon as I could load my pickup with my few remaining household possessions I’d be on my way south to a more tropical, warmer Mexico.

Hot Diggity Dog!  Mexico!

  There I planned to live cheaply on refried beans and tortillas. This would far surpass other unpleasant options I could think of:  having to be dependent on my friend, Melanie, or Stacey and Marta, or being a homeless bag lady pushing a market cart while going through trash bin.  No way!!! Anyway, my daughters both had moved from Boulder leaving me there with only Sally and two of my grandsons.

It didn't seem as if I would be able to fit even a small portion of the useful junk in the back of my little Toyota.  That paltry truck now seemed to shrink more every time I looked at it.  How much could be squeezed in?  First the most essential things like a few dishes, pots and pans, but then?

The past five years had been burdened by dealing with son-of-a-bitch bankers and lawyers and accountants while I attempted to hold on to my homestead-- I was plumb tuckered out from it.  Basta!  Enough of living in Gringoville with its Disney fascism and King George Bush in the White House, of watching land developers and oil barons screwing Mother Nature up the gazoo.  The bureaucrats swimming in their polluted sea; the politicians floating in their own bubble.

In Mexico I figured I could make some sort of a home for myself-- create an unknown new life, a life not yet visualized, blank as a newly-gessoed canvas.

It was time to move forward--onward through the fog-- to search for and trust in some beneficent future as an ex-patriot in Patzcuaro, a charming historical Mexican town I’d visited during my hippie days.  There I’d seen huge Ponderosa pines with orange orchids perched on their branches.  Muy bonito.  

Patzcuaro was high up, a lot higher than Boulder, high up in the volcanic mountains of Michoacan.  The small town was perched by a large lake that had a little island, Janitzio, the center of Los Dias Del Muerto (The Days of the Dead).  The lake was surrounded by native Purepacha Indians living in small adobe pueblos, using boats that went back and forth from Patzcuaro’s harbor.

 As I kicked open the door of the garage, a gaggle of geese flying overhead made a V in the sky as they flew south.  South to Mexico!  I became full of optimistic enthusiasm as I began to pack my Toyota.

Then I heard Melanie’s phone ringing. 

(Written by Louise Pickering Scott)

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GETTING AS GOOD AS IT GOT (Chapter 2 of a Novel by Louise Scott)

 

Chapter 2

GETTING AS GOOD AS IT GOT

 Espanola epitomized the worse of everything in so many poverty stricken places in the USA.  After choking down that morning’s cup of the watery motel coffee,  I mounted my trusty Toyota and drove over one last hill and there was Santa Fe spread out below in a broad valley with a stream flowing from the hills and running through the town, surrounded by flowering cottonwoods.  I had visited during my Hippie days when it was a small town, but now it had become the private property of the rich and famous. I could see how much it showed its recent years as the developers' delight, a Disneyesque city of Indian-style adobes with Mercedes Benzes or Jaguars on the driveways.  I noticed two Hummers. Now the place had grown in a sprawl of expensive cardboard-appearing- adobe houses, each dispersed on greedy plots of extensive acreage over the surrounding Juniper covered hillsides.

 When Woody Guthrie was busking around New Mexico in 1936 or so-- shortly after the wooden houses in the Texas Panhandle where he lived had been destroyed by a devastating freezing dust storm they still call Black Sunday--he had an epiphany concerning the New Mexican adobe homes.  Comfortably warm in the winter, cool in the summer, and inexpensive, using free materials found right at the building site.  The technique was simple; anyone could do it--but it did take a lot of labor.

 Mud and straw were mixed and poured into wooden forms--rather like putting a cake in a pan to bake.  Then the bricks were stacked up to dry completely before building up walls on rock foundations.  Windows could be framed; rooms could be circular or whatever, though most buildings used straight lines; beehive fireplaces could be made even by a child.  Using the same beehive shape, outside they made hornos to bake--great to make bread and especially useful during hot weather when they traditionally put up ramadas (outside kitchens) under a shade tree.

 Adobe was one of the first building materials ever.

 Guthrie even believed Jesus’ manger must have been such as these.  He was inspired to write a best-seller, House of Earth, as a way to teach the building techniques.  Now the Santa Fe ‘adobe’ houses were sheets of plywood nailed to two-by-fours bought from Home Depot, daubed with an adobe-appearing coating.

 I understood a bumper sticker that said DON’T CALIFORNICATE NEW MEXICO.

 The plaza area both surprised and charmed me—it had changed into rich men’s delight with all upscale shops displaying not only local artists but global work.  Indian artists were prominently displayed and a there were a lot of canvases where Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings were copied.

 I gorged on  breakfast at the rooftop dining room of the La Fonda Hotel, an elegant two-story adobe that sits on one corner of the square plaza as it has for four or five hundred years. This is right at the end of the fabled Santa Fe Trail.  La Fonda means ‘the end.’  Breakfast was delicious: eggs smothered with green chili served with fresh blue corn tortillas.  I admired the lobby’s hand-carved beamed ceiling done by the Spanish architects long ago, and the furnishings of beautiful antique pieces I assumed were mahogany.  Spanish architects were the best ever; they sure beat anything I see being built today out of concrete, steel, and plastic using noisy, polluting, power tools.

 I watched Indians unloading pickup trucks on one side of the plaza.  Under the portal of a one- story adobe building Indians spread displays of silver and turquoise jewelry and different styles of pottery on colorfully patterned Indian blankets. Without much ado, they settled themselves comfortably by using the building to rest against.  This was the governor’s palace, where once spread throughout the building there had been a festoon of Indian ears on strings that had been turned in from hunters to collect bounty money--during the days of Kit Carson, a bounty hunter himself.

 Muy triste.

 I window shopped at a few of the high end galleries.  It amazes me that there are enough rich people to support these shops.  Enough of Santa Fe.  I headed to Albuquerque.

The hour’s drive went through scenic escarpments of red rock, an elevated hill of tortured red clay outcrops with fantastic spiral forms chiseled by the winds and weather—something like Disneyworld advertises where a castle is shown on high.

 There were no houses.  Nothing marred the spectacle until off-ramps began and kept increasing, each with a Mobile or Exxon gas station and a McDonalds or Howard Johnsons offering the usual trans-fat high calorie unhealthy slop that would be good to fatten pigs for slaughter.  After the nightmare of the I-40 and I-25 interchanges I was through the city and past its blue scarf of smoke.

 Fields of green alfalfa began to appear off to the left where I could tell by the abundance of cottonwoods in the distance that the Rio Grande flowed on.  I spied Texas Blue Bonnet, lupine and poppies, brilliant patches of mustard and little pink wild flowers showing themselves at the side of the road, where huge crows loitered waiting for the morning’s road kills. The big birds looked like hooded highway men or like the Zapatistas who wear black ski masks, the enmascarados (masked rebels from Chiapas). The black birds made such a straight line arrayed roadside they looked as formal as the Royal Guard standing at attention waiting for the Queen’s royal coach to pass, or masked participants in a medieval ball.  

 

It was past noon when, famished, I stopped in Socorro for a late lunch and devoured two tacos again using blue corn and  smothered with green chili. A Primrose path led to the tree-shaded plaza where I stretched out to rest on thick green grass under tall leafy elms.  I was traveling forward in time, going from earliest spring in the Colorado mountains to what now felt like mid-summer.  There were roses and pansies blooming in nuptial bliss, being impregnated by the pollen-coated proboscis of the buzzing bees.  A sprinkler was turned on in one corner of the plaza with children running through it, laughing and tumbling about.

 Water, blessed water.  God’s beverage.   I thought of water here in Socorro where once upon a time the stagecoaches arrived from El Paso, coming safely north through the Jornada del Muerto, the Journey of the Dead, where there was not one drop of water. Not a drop, not even a mouthful to dampen parched lips.  Well named, Jornada del Muerto.  This is where White Sands is, where the fuckers exploded the first atomic bombs.

 Resting in the shade of the lofty elm trees, it was easy to see why they named this delightful little town, this oasis, Socorro--which means succor, which means relief when in difficulty or distress.  That’s how it must have been perceived by the people arriving by stagecoach or wagon train not so many years ago.  The gratitude, the relief that must have been felt for having survived the deadly desert without dying of thirst or heat prostration, without being overcome on the parched sands under the pitiless sun,  without a raid of outlaws or the dreaded Apaches.  Beautiful was the name of the town Socorro.  I thought of other pleasant Mexican names: smiling brown-eyed girls called Innocencia, Esperanza, Remedios, Salud.

 Well rested, I drove on down the dry tough cowhide of a plain that was split with cracks and dry arroyos and riverbeds whose banks were carved by their distant memory of water.  So much land, so good for nothing, so it was astonishing to see water by the roadside where the sign said it was the Bosque del Apache refuge. Lots of ducks were flying about.

 It wasn’t far until a huge lake appeared.  I mean huge!  There were piers and a harbor; there were  boats sailing around; there were  people fishing.  What appeared to be a big island in the middle I suppose was the remains of a volcano.

 I don’t recall whether this was before or after I stopped at a small town called Truth or Consequences by the chatty waitress.  She said it used to be called Radium Springs until Truth or Consequences, a radio program of the 40’s, paid the inhabitants to change the name. 

 I stopped early at a cheap hotel outside El Paso and paid what was asked by a surly attendant who had a bronchial wheeze and a belly pregnant with age and dissipation.  At its convenient restaurant I ate part of a wilted salad and didn't drink a glass of wine that was aged with something other than time.  In my dingy room, lit by a dangling flickering lightbulb, I studied the vocabulary sections in my Mexican tourist books and meditated on the roadmap of watermarked streaks from yesteryears’ rains that had dribbled down the motel walls.   In one corner I again watched a spider create its arbitrary world with a complicated web.  Echos of turbulent past days were trapped in those corners.

 I was wound up as tight as my travel clock that pounded on the silence; my mind continuously chewing its cud of worries about my grandsons.

 I tossed and turned wondering why the fuck I was on this trip.  Why Sally was so nuts; why my other daughters, Stacey and Marta, had moved away—left me and Sally living like strangers in Boulder. Why was my family scattered?--Stacey on the Florida coast; Marta on the Pacific West; me heading clear out of the friggin’ USA.

 Why?  Families weren’t meant to be scattered. This is a new phenomena of the 20^th century in industrialized countries.^. Now with cars that whiz 80 mph, new vistas have appeared. It’s conceivable that my grandsons could someday live on Mars.

‘See the USA in a Chevrolet, America’s favorite car.’

‘You can’t keep them down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree.’

No shit! 

 Finally I slept well in spite of the images that were snarled in my head; finally lulled by rich memories of the day. But the next morning, knowing there would be no gourmet French Roasted coffee at that motel, wishing there was something better than McDonald's excuse for coffee, I continued south; excited to cross the border. 

(From a novel by Louise Pickering Scott)

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WHERE’S THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS? (Chapter 1 of a Novel by Louise Scott)

Chapter 1

WHERE’S THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS?

At the earliest crack of dawn I slipped quietly down the stairs and out of Melanie’s elegant home in Boulder.  I skidded a bit on the ice while crossing her frozen porch but made it Okay to the frigid garage where my trusty old Toyota waited, already loaded without an inch to spare—only enough room to tuck myself in while wrestling with a thermos of coffee and stashing a bottle of water by my side.  Conveniently on the passenger’s floor was a basket with necessities: my wallet, two packs of Camel non- filters, several lighters, a roll of toilet paper… a brush… a lipstick…

 

 It was absurdly cold, like it often is after a winter storm this far north and elevation.   After a couple of discouraging weak sputters of coughs the truck made a deep gasp-- such as a dying man might give trying to draw his last breath-- with a grating groan it kicked in.  

 Don’t you know I was relieved.

My hands shook as I opened the thermos, poured a cup to sip and hold to warm my hands while the truck had a chance to heat.  I pondered the advisability of my plans:  my age, my gender, my resources, or rather, my lack of resources.  Always I’ve had the support of family and friends and friends of friends; now I would know nobody at all. The trip would be long: four days at least? Five?  Will I make it far enough to sleep in Santa Fe tonight?

 I put the truck in gear and rapidly slid down the sloping driveway.

So far, so good.   

I took the old turnpike road that was kept snow-plowed and sanded.

 Miserable.  Cold.

Shaking for what seemed an hour peering through the half circles the windshield wiper cleared on the wet glass.  Just then the sun began to pour like golden honey over the ice-packed mountains.  The light glowed gloriously atop of Flatiron Peak and briefly bounced around on everything-- the road-- the trees--the air itself.  I don’t know if there’s a word for this phenomenon; a Hopi Elder once told me it’s a time when souls can pass from one plane of existence to another.

By the time I approached the arm pit of Denver warm air was swarming the cab from the heater I blasted on high.  The moisture on the windshield cleared, the clouds lifted, she sky was blued.

Whoopee!  I shouted with glee.

I’m on my way. The decision had been made. The die was cast.  

I was plumb tuckered out from the emotional trauma during the past worrisome weeks.  Now I was leaving the whole kit and caboodle behind.  I felt energized, on my way to a new adventure.  “Hallelujah!” I sang over and over again,

I headed south from Denver.  A long way south.

South all the way to Mexico.   I’ll follow the unrolling black ribbon of road, keeping to the right of the center white line.  South to where the sun would shine bright all day; where there would be long hours of sunsets; where in the lingering dusk I would sit warm outside at twilight watching birds fly home to their nests.

I was full of optimistic enthusiasm.  Ya me voy!!!  I had been so anxious to be on the road that I hadn’t thought about breakfast.  Now that was all I could think of: enchiladas, tacos, chili rellenos smothered in salsa. Hot-Cha-Cha!!!  Que Bueno!!!  

Approaching Colorado Springs I stopped to eat, stretch, pee, and refill my thermos with coffee. At the restaurant entrance of the parking lot I spied crocuses unfurling where they grew in profusion in a remaining patch of snow.    As I got back in the truck I noticed the first delicate blossoms on the cherry trees showing a little pink or white as they considered opening; forsythia bushes had begun showing a bright shocking yellow with spring bloom.  There were tender tippy- tops of some types of bulbs-- Tulips? Hyacinths? Daffodils?-- tentatively raising above the patches of snow to test the damp winter air. Wildflowers were ready to burst open their petals.   It was the cusp between winter and spring.    Trees still showed stark and intricate lines on their bare bones, which soon would be obscured by lush plumage of green that was certain to follow.

 I’ve been told that the English word for the color of ‘green’ got changed to ‘gringo’   now meaning people like me--Americans.  In Spanish-- pronounced green-go.  This came from the song sung by Yankee soldiers long ago during one of the many invasions of the United States into Mexico. “Green Grow the Lilacs” the Yankee boys sang, marching along, all in uniforms, stepping in time while carrying their lethal weapons.

  I felt myself a part of the countryside I was driving through—as an essential part of the whole.  I remembered the lines from the Desiderata: ‘You are no less than the trees and the stars.  You have a right to be here’.

SSS

Enough of this philosophizing.  Here and now.  I turned my radio to a local Chicano station playing a rousing ranchero with Vincente Fernandez singing at the top of his lungs.  I couldn't understand the words, but I understood the feeling behind the many gritos he threw in.  Aie, aie, aie, aieeeeeee.  Trying some gritos myself, I only succeeded in squeaking like a stuck pig.  I must admit to a schoolgirl crush on Señor Fernandez--the Mexican equivalent of the Marlboro man, a charro wearing a sombrero rather than a gringo cowboy sporting his Stetson.  I recently had seen Vincente in a film, so I should say 'an aging Marlboro man,' as he's about my age with great lines in his face, a full moustache that frames his big smile and shows his dazzling white teeth—which are probably still his own.  He must like his cerveza, as he has developed a bit of a paunch.  Never mind.  His buns are still tight and he still looks good strutting around or perched astride his prancing white stallion.  Muy macho.

In spite of Vicente’s rancheros, I hadn't driven many more miles before my emotions took a head-first plunge--like dropping down on a bungee cord and smashing into the concrete pad.   I could no more keep my thoughts from returning to my grandsons than the sea can prevent itself from returning to slosh on the shore. 

Several times within the first hour I pulled off on the side of the road, ready to turn around and go back to Melanie’s,  even knowing there was nothing I could do about anything, no matter where. Obviously it was useless for me to try to step up to the plate--to try to rectify the dire situation.   I didn’t have a blanket to smother the flames; no oil to pour on the troubled waters.

So fuck it.

 I dried my tears and drove on.

This felt like one of life's four-way intersections, an anxious junction where no turn could possibly be the right one--or at what Steven Hawkins calls a 'singularity,' where all solutions, all mathematics fail, never to be solved--like in the minute fraction of an infinite instant following the Big Bang; or at the point of no return where light turns in upon itself when it’s sucked into a black hole.  Or, I suppose, like the singularities of birth and death.  Crystalization is one of those events, where all the atoms wiggle around until finally they are aligned--like diamonds do, salt does too--then they instantly connect and in an instant, Whamo! Everything locks forever, rigid in place for eternity.  

Again I cried so hard the tears obscured my vision, so I pulled off the road to a look-out point.  I cried like a fallen woman who, at the point of her death, repents her sinful life, as I now repented my many sins.  My guilt was overwhelming: my life had been a three-ring circus, with my children only in a side show as I was center ring subduing my emotional tigers.  I tried to see how this turmoil had affected my family; the greater the sins, the greater our pleas for mercy.

 I cried for the grandsons I was leaving in Boulder.  I cried for the state of the world, a world so sick with pollution.  Then I cried for the homeless, for all the people dying of AIDS, the women and children bombed in Afghanistan and Iraq, the people in pain, dying in Syria, killing one another all over the globe.  I wept an ocean of tears, but like the ocean, my pain could never be dissipated.  My pain was something like space, all the space there is.  When one imagines reaching the end, it can only be imagined as a boundary or a wall, which means there is always more on the other side.  It terrifies me to think of infinite space.

Blinking away my tears and blowing my runny nose, I drove on south toward the New Mexico border.  The sun was playing peek-a-boo with billowing cumulus clouds that were like egg whites whipped into a meringue.  The pine trees were increasingly replaced by cottonwoods, lacy and shimmering with new growth; there were patches of the beautiful but cowardly Aspen trees with white-speckled trunks and tender lime green buds waiting for guaranteed warmth before they’d take a chance to burst open their leaves.  I drove past deep brown furrows in fields that were just now being plowed for spring planting. The air was so pure I could see where the moon was suspended in a translucent sky.

When I rolled down my window I could smell the healing aroma of the musty blue-green sage, a color not even Georgia O'Keefe managed to capture.

Driving on, slowly now, enthralled, I progressed south toward the town of Taos where far off to my left the majestic blue-black silhouette of the snow-capped San Cristobal Mountains were being swallowed up by the immense crystal sky.  During the 60’s Rom Dass and other spiritual leaders taught at a mountain commune there.

Then Great God Almighty!!! Another hill and the awesome windswept Taos plain appeared in the distance. There was this gigantic crack in the earth—a whopping deep chasm that veered to the south for miles.  It jagged back and forth, bisecting the enormous sky-filled empty plain. This huge cosmic zigzagged crack was a deep planetary gorge where even before the Jurassic era, even before there were such animals as dinosaurs, the Rio Grande River was eating the land dramatically away, eating its way down towards the central heart of creation, down to the very bowels of the earth itself.  It was like nothing describable; it was like nowhere else.   No Siree! I sat a long time looking at that gorge. Hypnotized. Mesmerized. 

I became aware of time ticking on, so I didn’t side trip to the famous Taos Indian pueblo and only cruised once around the square block of plaza at the charming small adobe town.  I didn’t dawdle there, but followed on south through the usual highway necessities: a gas station or two, a junkyard, two Mexican restaurants, the detritus of civilization that obscured any possibility to see where the deep gorge had veered off.  It had to be somewhere to my right where I could no longer glimpse it, try as I might.  After a few more miles there appeared big patches of sagebrush and scrubby juniper growing on seemingly arid red clay soil; another ten miles or so the road made a radical horseshoe turn, climbed abruptly up, way up, up a steep hill; it then plummeted suddenly down, way down, down into the gorge, into the awesome abyss, the deep cosmic crack itself.  Down, down, deep down I went into the very core of the belly of the earth itself.

Goodness Gracious!!!

This was the same way the Colorado River trickled its way to lie gently on the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

It was pristine!!!  The Rio Grande now flowed peacefully at the roadside with pinpoints of light, like fireflies dancing on the creased surface of the water. There was a gentle mantle of light green grass and blood-red reeds sticking up in patches along the shoreline where they caught the light and seemed to burn with fire.  I thought of Moses seeing the burning bush—that bush is always afire; we seldom perceive it but I once saw its radiant flame emanate on bushes everywhere when I took LSD.

Gone was the austerity of winter.

The road, the river, and me, too, were all totally dazzled, overwhelmed by the towering height of jagged cliffs pressing in, tightly enclosing on each side of the narrow road that ran next to the edge of the river, where for eons the bulge of eternity had pushed ancient sea beds vertical and seared them with copper and zinc veins with dark strips of iron contrasting yellow patches of sulfur and red sculpted outcrops of clay.  The crags of rock were riddled with sculptured crevices likely blown by winds through so many years.

 It was as if God had chalked a secret formula on the earth's blackboard, had engraved the blueprint for interpreting eternity, but the cracks and lines were illegible.  It was like trying to understand the language of the bubbling stream I could hear when I would sit quietly by my creek.  We've forgotten God's alphabet and it's everywhere: on the shell of an egg, the wings of a butterfly, the unique pattern of lines on our hands.

I saw a dilapidated one-ton Dodge painted with bright psychedelic motifs.  A long-haired Hippy had parked on a narrow pullout roadside.  The truck had a bumper sticker that reminded me to SEEK THE GOOD AND PRAISE IT.  Right on.

I pulled off the road at the next available narrow strip of dirt and stood by the side of the Rio Grande looking up and up and up.  Up to where the jagged cliffs pierced the dome of the sky; way, way up to where cactus or stunted pine were clinging precariously anywhere they could get a foothold on the scraggly spires of rock.  At the very edge of the precipice some tenacious roots had penetrated rock and stone to insinuate themselves; they endured, stunted though they were.

And the birds!!!

Oh, my God!  The birds!  There were dozens of red-tailed hawks soaring high way up above, effortlessly gliding around and around, circling way high overhead in the blue, blue sky--with the sun glistening on their outstretched silver wings.  There was no need for them to flap their wings; they were gliding about, having a free ride in the uprising thermal.  We were here together, part of an immense silence.  This beat any of the mood enhancement drugs I’ve tried. 

The license plates on the occasional cars passing by advertised the state as the LAND OF ENCHANTMENT.  It is so called with good reason.  I felt completely enchanted.   As I was getting back in my truck to drive on another old clunker chugged by; again a long-haired Hippie driving a rattletrap with a rusty tailpipe sputtering exhaust and a bumper sticker that told me to THANK GOD IT’S ALL AN ILLUSION.

It was difficult to get back in the Toyota and move on.  This place was balm for my soul.

Just a few miles more following the Rio Grande when suddenly the high cliffs separated.  They simply opened up and the road emerged from the earth’s entrails, out from the abyss of the gorge--out from the very innards of the earth. The immense clear blue sky spread over miles of a vacant sweeping plain.  The river had moved off somewhere to my right.  And I was on an uninhabited semi-arid plain in a totally different world that again supported more sage and scraggly juniper.

 Holy cow!

In a only a few miles there came such a sweet smell from orchards in full bloom with some trees I couldn’t place-- Apples? Apricot? Cherries?  There were magnificent cumulous thunderheads crowning the white snow-topped mountains silhouetted on both sides in the far distance.  From the majestic clouds on the Jemez Mountains to the west, pink lightening froze in an acute moment of splendor. Soon the sun slowly sank behind these mountains with a rainbow of color like mercurochrome.  With this awe-inspiring sunset on the west side of the plain, the eastern mountain range, the magnificent Sangre de Cristo, then turned into the blood-red of their name: Blood of Christ.  Glorious.  Absolutely glorious.  I sang in praise.

A banged-up road sign, with what perhaps were several bullet holes, said ESPANOLA.  Espana means Spain, so Espanola would mean Spanish, right?

On a car full of Mexican kids a bumper sticker advised NO VENDE LA TIERRA (don’t sell the land).

For a mile or two there were businesses on both sides of the road: a video rental, a dinky liquor store, people lined up outside a Lotta Burger stand, a used car lot with eviscerated vehicles that also advertised stacked up second-hand tires, and there I saw what looked like, but wasn’t, a cheap motel.

Everything was bright with garish neon, but there were several restaurants nearby.  By the time I had eaten, the dark had settled and I was exhausted.   Although the motel advertised free cable, the television only showed static.  I was too tired to complain. For a long time I laid on the bed, just watching a Granddaddy Long Legs in the corner by the bathroom explain itself in an intricate web it spun at precise angles that only another spider would know.  A calendar on the wall said April, which sure enough it was, but the year was wrong.  A sign outside blinked off and on all night with no discernible pattern to its changing colors that I could find.  The clock moved with a hiccup once a minute and I do declare it chimed thirteen times.

It was a night of insomnia with intense worry.   Still, after a morning cup of left-over watered down coffee, I again headed south.

(Written by Louise Pickering Scott)

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