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.
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