100 Words; Milk and Honey

By the grin on Miguel Loco's face you'd think he was a wide-eyed whelp on Christmas Day. His shoppe was packed with lookie-loos and serious propositions. Outside, the streets were packed; eking, scratching, half-bald monkeys throbbing and pulsing like army ants.

The trail was crowded, but the tundra was striking in the late afternoon sun of high summer. Our last push to the upper lake was worth it, the best part. We got free glasses of wine upon our return. Miguel Loco grinned with whimsiy when we told our tale.

"This is the high season," he said. "Milk and honey."

Trail Macabre

Sabina has a certain knack for memorizing license plates. My daughter wants to climb the fourteeners before her ultimate mountaineering goal of summiting Denali. Due to a string of tragedies, both personal and observed from a distance, over the recent years, my belief and tolerance of the fantastical has become less embracing, instead favoring chaos. All three of us go on walkabouts, and quite often.

All of these little incidentals have a part to play in this story...

The silver sedan was unremarkable, something you would see anywhere. Seeing it at the trail-head did not really register. We noticed it along with a host of other vehicles at the summer lot. It was a good day for a walkabout, which Sabina, my daughter, and I took full advantage of. We went, had our adventure, encountering a few other trekkers along the way, and then headed back. The sedan was still there.

"There are some campsites around here," Sabina remarked to my daughter. "Chances are, if we looked, we'd probably see a tent."

Our dinner conversation drifted toward my daughter's desire to climb the fourteeners. I think her mountaineering interest might ultimate turn her toward Nepal, which she has an affinity for, not unlike mine for Africa. There was a particular peak that she and Sabina wanted to research whilst I was doing dishes. I was outside covering the grill when I heard Sabina all but screaming my name.

"That silver car," she began, and she recited the license plate. "Does that sound right?"

"I'm pretty sure," I said. "Especially the last three letters."

"Fuck!" She exclaimed. "Thanks."

And she quickly marched back into the house, leaving me a little confused. I merely shrugged and went back to covering the grill. The other dishes were done and there was a glass of after-dinner wine waiting for me. I was tired from the eight mile roundtrip walkabout. Whatever Sabina was on about didn't register.

I came into the parlor to the sight of my girls riveted to the 'puter. On the screen was a page set up to find a hiker who had gone missing three days before. Sabina was furiously typing in a message;

We believe we saw his car...

"Tell me you're fucking with me," I said.

"We came across the link at the fourteener's site," Sabina said. "I don't know why, but I clicked on it, and, sonuvabitch, if they didn't have a description of his car and it's the same one we saw up there."

"It's just creepy," my daughter put in. "I don't know if I'm going to be able to sleep."

Within an hour of Sabina's message, she received correspondence from a family member, giving a phone number and imploring her to call. They chatted for just a few minutes, but Sabina explained her quirk of remembering license plates, numbers in general, and it was enough to prompt other family members to drive at high speed into our Sahel to the trail-head she named. An hour and a half later, she received another phone call, confirming it was the missing hiker's vehicle. Sabina was thanked over and over, and called an angel.

"I don't have a good feeling about this," she confessed.

"Living in the hills long enough, hiking like we do, something like this is bound to happen," my daughter mused.

She was right; a few years before, whilst hiking the Bull's Head, we were in proximity to where woman had overdosed herself. The body was recovered a day or two after our walkabout. Her vehicle had been parked by the cantina for a week.

The next morning, a search was organized at the trail-head. Within a few hours, the body was found. Suicide. He had been dead at least three days.

Since then, Sabina has received correspondence from friends and family members of the deceased, thanking her. Stories of prayers and fasting and how this stranger up the mountains with knack for remembering license plates was nothing short of angelic. She's taken this a little hard, because he was still dead, so there's so little to be thanked for. All the same, she wonders if perhaps something didn't guide her to click on that link when she and my daughter were researching the fourteeners.

I mention the roll of the bones chaos. It was a matter of odds that we were there on that day, and noticed what we did. Sabina once compiled coroner notes of flood victims, we both danced with the dead for money once upon a time, and she's got an interest in cemeteries, thus, showing a certain sense of morbidity. Between Miguel Loco and myself, she's heard a fair amount of stupid hiker stories, which leads to schadenfreude. Add this to the alchemy of the fourteener research and being instilled with something humans made up to maintain pack order, commonly called morality, upon the realization this was happening in our here and now, and there it is; a set of random factors all coalescing at the same time. Chaos, nothing more, although perhaps fantastic in its own rite.

Despite the macabre, I still suggest that trail to hikers because it is an amazing trek. I will do that walkabout again. An acquaintance of ours, slightly flaky new-agey in her countenance, told me we shouldn't let that person's unhappiness taint our enjoyment of the bush, and she's right. We still go to the Bull's Head, even though it's milk run of a walkabout compared to what we usually do.

I have mentioned the Confirmation Bias before. Simply put, as a species that seeks patterns to cope with the chaos that permeates the cosmos, we find facts to fit our particular world view. One example I came across was that political pundits are not listened to because they might be right, but because they validate a certain set of opinions. What happened to us in the outback shows this theory in all its glory; a family and set of friends who believe someone was guided by the hand of a god, and someone who thinks it was all pure roll of the bones chaos made manifest. It probably doesn't matter which is right, just choose your superstition.

Monsoon

Rain has come to the mountains. Dark clouds and a dragon's roar of thunder and the sky opens up. It rains like Africa, like Borneo, like Brazil, and London and all those other places where slate-skies are the norm. The air has become heavy with the taste of moisture. After heat and dry and fire, there is wet and cool and flash floods and mudslides. The sliding scale of paradoxical balance. Were one to anthropomorphize, it would be irrefutable truth of a maniacal humor inherent in the universe.

The ground, once dessicated, no longer seems to scream-whether in pain or joy is conjecture-when the rain comes. Now, it greedily slurps at the water falling from the sky, drunkenly allowing excesses to puddle up. Once more, there is mud and rainbows and the peaks become mist-shrouded. The rides in the rain intimately acquaint me with the Gore-Tex of my hardshell and the rain-fly on my pack. Two innovations I am grateful for.

"Does it always rain like this?" We were asked.

"Sometimes, it rains harder," I replied with a shrug that was meant to answer everything. "And, these days, we are grateful for every drop."

"Did you see the locos out there dancing in glee?" The matron put in.

"We were getting ready to sacrifice a chicken for this," I added. When I off-handedly remarked about hoping not to get caught in a deluge on my way back up-valley, the matron smirked in my direction.

"You're the one who chose to ride your bike all summer," she said.

And all I could do was acknowledge the obviousness of the truth. I am either that hardcore or that stupid. Take your pick, though it's probably a little of both. This is part of the price; and all things for a price is the very nature of the deal. Only the cheap things get purchased with folding paper and jingling coins. Sometimes the penance is blood and karma, sometimes it's bicycling up the hill in a monsoon downpour.

Despite these gully-washing deluges, I am not naive enough to believe this will alleviate the fire danger. If we're lucky, the fire ban will drop to stage one, instead the stage two it's been at since half the state caught fire. It's queerly comforting to hear of floods and mudslides and heavy rains instead of thousands of acres being devoured by rampant flames.

Meteorological prophecy foretells of another few days before the jetstream slips to a drier and warmer pattern, thus perhaps making the monsoon fleeting. A lesson in impermanence. But before that, I watch it rain like Africa, like Borneo, like Brazil and London and all those other places where slate-skies are the norm, allowing the presence of moisture to seep in past the skin and marrow. Water is the most precious of substances, after all. Aman iman as it is said in Tamashek, which means; water is life. I might be a heretical bastard who doesn't believe in much, but, here and now, you better believe I'm thanking the Divine for every drop that falls from the sky.    

Outback

The first epic walkabout of the summer was up Grizzly, in the shadow of two of the nearby fourteeners. Here, beyond the mine ruins and four by four tracks we wandered out into the outback, the Backcountry, the wilderness. A realm of profound silences and unspoiled expanse.

I told my daughter that philosophically I am still very much a Buddhist, despite the heresies. Yet, as the years in mountains and the distance of the walkabouts increase, I find my theology, if it can even be called that, more in line with that of John Muir and Edward Abbey. Their writings becoming more gospels than the sutras. And I quoted from the book of Desert Solitare;

"I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with the nonhuman world and somehow survives...Paradox and bedrock."


"You're just crazy-scary mountain man, Dad," my daughter said. "But you've been everything at one point or another."


"Crazy?!? Me?!? My dear, I'm amongst the sanest cats I know," I said. My daughter just smirked and patted my shoulder.

"Of course you are."

Both the mountains and deserts fascinate me; both environments being portraits of extremes. It is within the high bosom of a great mountain chain I have found home and myriads of adventure. Although, I ache for the lifespan of a star, so I may explore both landscapes throughly, and then perhaps the rest of the cosmos. I told Sabina's mother once I was going to live to at least one-hundred twenty, and then seeing about going beyond that.

So far, so good...

I promised Sabina an exploration of ruins we spied along our trek if we could spend some time in gulch at the foot of the great peaks. Despite my archaeological intrigues, I find when I go on walkabout, I prefer to Hansel and Gretel amongst the wildflowers and rocks and aspens. She likes the ruins and has several books on the subject. The mining history of our Sahel fascinates her, which is almost comical, given my position on the board of our local historical society.

"You two monkeys just wanted to go climbing," Sabina teased when she caught my daughter and I scrabbling up a rock face, Whistler whining plaintively after us because he could not follow.

"And?" I called back to her, as though that answered everything. Perhaps it did.

I perched in the sun on top of the great rock, spying thousands of potential campsites and places to explore in that stretch of borderlands between the tundra and montane. The scope of the sky was humbling and the landscape seductive. These days, the outback of the Backcountry are my badlands, which are quite different from the ones I cut my teeth upon down below, and somewhere I have no desperate desire to escape from. Here, the Divine speaks in incorporeal voices with the tongues of the wind and rain, raven and rock, pika and river, tree and snow. If you listen, you can hear these whispered riddles that can take lifetimes to solve, but are never fully answered.

True to my word, we explored ruins that appeared to be from a more recent era than the antiquity of the mining days. Perhaps a half-century or a little more. Still, Sabina and my daughter clambered about every abandon structure the could reach, Sabina telling my daughter what various pieces of equipment were for. There was talk of looking up the mine's history in a borrowed book for further details. In the meantime, Whistler and I followed the course of a river, finding flat places to relax.

Epic walkabouts mean epic meals; grilled leg of lamb and potatoes. Wine and recounting the day. Loose talk of the next great adventure. That good kind of sore and exhaustion that comes with epic miles of wandering and exploration. It reminds you that you are, indeed, alive, which is always a wonderful sensation to have.

Regrets

"I think about my loves
I've had a few,
I'm sorry that I hurt them
did I hurt you too?"- Social Distortion

Sometimes, when working on our community garden plot, or doing yard work, I catch myself vaguely wishing I still maintained an acquaintance with the jewel-eyed girl. She was at one point, a horticulturist by trade, and her botanical advice could be invaluable. Quickly, though, I realize the peril of such a thought; the penance price would be she would know where I live, and the fact she knows I'm somewhere up in the mountains is quite enough. More than, actually, but that's another story.

There are those who say it's queer or even wrong to think about x-lovers in any context. I call bullshit on that, and up the ante with some who shot john. We all do it from time to time. Sometimes, when I catch myself musing a girl from my past, I can even remember the tender times, rather than those moments that drove us apart, when the very atmosphere between us was Hell and cobwebs and gravedust and serpents and tigers and razorblades and maggots.

Once, I had a conversation with someone who proclaimed they had no regrets whatsoever. I called them a filthy fucking liar. If there is someone in this world with no regrets, I've yet to make their acquaintance. Although, I suspect if such a person exists, they live-and I use that term rather loosely-in a sensory deprivation tank. Regret is one of those things that makes the monster, which stares back at you when you look in a mirror.

Whenever I meditate upon my regrets, any of them, I catch myself slip-sliding upon the light fantastic of quantum possibilities. Those parallel worlds and lives of what if and if only. An interesting mental exercise, which, at best, can sometimes become a solipsistic circle-jerk, or, at worst, lead to outright psychotic madness.

My regrets are legion. Things I wish I would've said or did say. That I could've done or did. The would've, could've, should'ves that make up part of my psyche.

The kicker is, my actions and reactions to the roll of the bones chaos inherent in the universe have gotten me where I am here and now. Just because I do not believe in fate does not mean I think I would've gotten here by any other set of actions and reactions to the roll of the bones chaos inherent in the universe. It renders the if onlys and would've, could've, should'ves irrelevant when placed in that context.

Do I regret? Almost daily. Would I change any of it? Given what I have, what I've yet to achieve, I cannot say it would be worth it. Would I do it all the same way again? It would seem, if I want to be where I am, I'd kind of have to.

I do what I do and go my own way; a Tao of bohemian scholarship and gutter-punk academia. Moments of technicolor identity crisis and periods of self-assured understanding of the riddle of the individual. There are regrets, and sometimes I think about them quite deeply. Still, I am contented with where I am in the here and now. Perhaps that renders my regrets irrelevant, and, if that's the case, then, quite hypocritically, I don't regret a thing.

An Afternoon of Walking Ghosts

Bruja,

It was a cruel trick of the light that she looked so much like you. My heart leap and sank all within a beat. The brutality I wanted to inflict at her unintentional deception bordered upon sociopathic. The type of stuff that would make witch-hunters, Spanish inquisitors, Jack the Ripper, and Nazi death-doctors cross their legs and blush.

But it wasn't her fault. There are only so many ways a bipedal body can be put together. Similarities are bound to exist. Some hapless half-bald monkey cannot be blamed for bearing a passing resemblance to a dead woman. It would be wrong action to make her the focus of my ire over the fact you're gone.

For half a heartbeat, I was elated. A year and half can feel like forever in context of the dead, and, in may ways, it is. There would've been so much to tell you in playing ketchup. And, of course, the one question I've wanted so dearly for you to answer;

Why didn't you wear your fucking seatbelt?

***

Fucking indian,

I haven't seen or spoken to you in almost twenty-two years, not since back in North Carolina. But there was who-you-would-be-here-and-now from those phantasms of memory; the long black hair, the obligatory Kiss t-shirt, and that swagger, which some girls would throw themselves at you for and some boys wanted kill you for. I could even see the anger in the eyes; equal parts that abusive childhood of yours and growing up as one of what you called a conquered people.

I don't think about you as much as I used to. The stories I tell don't feature you as often as they once did. Perhaps that is unfortunate. Maybe that's what nearly twenty-two years without a glance or word will eventually do. I'm not sure I care enough to find out the difference.

I always swore if I saw you again I'd punch you, though I struggle to remember exactly why anymore. The motivation for malice at seventeen seems trivial at the precipice of forty. The effigy I saw swaggering across my field of vision would not have appreciated my fist in his throat.

Besides, punching anything hurts! I could never understand how you did it without the slightest wince, but you were always cooler than I. Or at least that's what I believed all those years ago.

What I saw took me back to those last days in North Carolina. Me and you were born in the same state, and, after three and half years of misery, my father saw fit to move us back. Part of me wonders if you resented me for my escape from that stifling wasteland of white supremacists and kudzu. There are a lot of things I wonder about you when you arrive within the mathematics of my thoughts. But after nearly twenty-two years, neither those questions, or the answers you'd perhaps give, really matter.

Downpour

We had just reached the eastern ledge of the cemetery when the sky went dark. I unshouldered my pack to retrieve my t-shirt and Whistler's leash for the last leg of our trek home through town. The cloud cover gave us a pleasant respite from the building heat of the day as we had been out on walkabout.

Something wet touched my arm, but I dismissed it was sweat. The dark clouds sure looked ominous, but I was cynical. It had been so hot and dry that even when the dark clouds appeared, any moisture carried therein evaporated long before it touched the ground. Even this high up.

Then there was the roar. Wardrums echoed through the valley, causing Whistler to start. Another peal of thunder and more sensations of wet. The sky opened up.

We walked home in a downpour, the rain soaking clothing, fur, and packs. The thirsty earth, all but drying even as it got wet, opened wide to drink heartily. A sound like that of bacon frying upon a skillet.

The clouds broke as we turned the last corner of the last stretch to home. Sunlight once more bathed the mountainsides. The rain moved on, thunder echoing further down the valley. Once more, the ground and roadways dried out as though the downpour was nothing more than a phantasm. The drink the world had been given equating to about a sip.

I let Whistler off the leash as we approached the House of Owls and Bats. A rainbow arched overhead in an almost cathedral-like fashion and warmth returned, but the rainsoak made it feel quite pleasant. I couldn't help but smile, reaching down to scritch behind Whistler's ears.

"Remember," I said, "These are the best of times."

Heat; A Meditation

Eighty-five quaint 'merican degrees on the fahrenheit scale at ninety-one sixty. I heard this apocryphally happened once, long ago during the dark ages between the halcyon antiquity of the mining days and the here and now. A climatic fluke. Being eighty or a little bit above has seemed to happen with a bit more frequency. I find it easier to accept the idea of the epoch of the anthropocene and its repercussions than when I first heard the term. Something about naming a geological epoch after a species of half-bald primates seemed rather arrogant, but then I remembered human and arrogant are kissing cousins. Be that as it may, I also try to be mindful when I'm observing the climatological omens I don't get suckered by what is called the Confirmation Bias. 

It has been a comedy of errors, savage amusement, and near homicide when trying to explain the fact there's a fire ban in effect. It's been in effect since shortly after the vernal equinox. Still, some travelers cannot comprehend it. Once, I got a little indignant.

"Tell you what; I'm not going to burn down your house," I said.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Return the courtesy," I growled. Sempi and I might have had a discussion about that had I not reminded him about his reaction to a WWII vet asking him if he'd ever done military penance on the day Don't Ask/Don't Tell was repealed. I've never claimed to be a nice man.

Fireworks are canceled within the borders of our Sahel this year. Something that has not happened in recent memory, perhaps ever, though I've yet to find the old-timer to confirm or deny that. The heat and the dry and the way it feels like half of the state, not to mention the southwestern quadrant of the 'merican Maghreb, is on fire act as the reason and rational.

It doesn't bother me much. The idea of celebrating white man's independence from tyranny with the detonation of low-grade explosives has often struck me as being a bit stupid. An excuse to be drunk and belligerent chanting Usa! in a show of fair-weather fandom. That probably makes me a horrible patriot, and, were I given to self-indulgence, I might say there's a file about me somewhere because of that perception.

Well, that and the fact I have three copies of the Qur'an in my possession...

The dry is disturbing. Every time the haze from another fire cloaks our sky, a breath of collective fear is drawn. When seeing someone smoking, it is homicidally hoped they put out their butt throughly and in the proper receptacle. Fire ban are the first words mentioned when someone wants the location of a campground, and it's repeated like a mantra, depending on who's asking.

Yet, despite this Lovecraftian macabre, there is serenity and optimism. It is summer, after all. Flatlanders come to our elevation in locust-like swarms to escape temperatures that make our eighty and above heatwave seem trivial. Once the sun sets, as in the deserts and the badlands of eastern Colorado, it becomes cool. Sometimes, pleasantly so, whilst others, rather chilly.

The heat can make my bicycle rides home interesting studies in feeling the burn. I keep waiting for one day, hotter than the others, when I can make my spicy shrimp recipe with a bottle-or two...three?-of cheap white wine and sit out back in the fading daylight. I play musics with that hot summertime resonance. There are walkabouts up tundra and wildflowers in bloom. The trill of hummingbirds and the lazy amble of a far below average river.

Things of beauty and terror, or optimism and worry; those sides of a cosmic coin. Here is this anthropocene summer in the mountains; the heat and the dry, the hummingbirds and cocktails taken out back in the warm sunlight. Take it as it comes, riding the snake's tale for all its worth. It is perhaps the only sane course of action. 

100 Words; Twilight Tigers

I pulled someone outside to behold the spectacle of the twilight tiger clouds in the fading sunlight. And they spoke of triviality. Stupid things. That, which could be repaired.

And I hissed in the tongues of feral cobras and meditative demons;

"What does it matter? Look at this most beautiful portrait. Enjoy the moment, because it will never come again, no matter how you try."

My lesson was learned or lost. Black or white. Profound truth or a waste of oxygen. It doesn't matter. I watched the twilight tigers fade to shades of Grey, ever so grateful for the moment.

Extraordinary Mundanity

The other day, whilst doing yard work, I happened to look up into the clear turquoise sky. There, along the southwest flank of Mount Pendelton,  just above the valley's rim, sat a half-lidded eye of the moon, showing phantasmal. I drew a deep breath, finding this spectacle tragically interesting; in the imagery and tongues of science fiction, where everything is rocket-fueled and laser-powered, the sight of another heavenly body, another world, is awe-inspiring. Exotic. Yet, here, on this pale blue dot, such a thing is lucky if noted with a passing glance. It's only the moon. Here, it is a mundanity.

As of late, my culinary tastes have been turned in the directions of  Mesoamerica and the Caribbean. I find this to be a bit of a natural progression; I've mastered pan-Asian cuisine and I've got a bit of reputation amongst some who know me for my grasp of food from the Indian sub-continent. Some have waxed poetic about my taste and heat in their mouths.

And apparently my curries don't suck neither...

A few years back was when I started traveling to Africa on a gastronomic level. North African-Morocco, specifically-and Ethiopia host some of my favorite dishes, though I do like piri-piri out of Mozambique. That savory heat factor. It has been suggested that my taste for spicy is one of those things that helps me in rarely taking ill.

Then, it was up along the Mediterranean regions and the middle east. I especially dig Spanish. Probably because it's in spitting distance of Morocco, but also because the recipes, along with the wines, are nothing short of fantastic.

Sabina was not surprised in the least when she caught me rooting through my cookbooks. I usually have our meals schemed out a week in advance, which makes going to the souk a quick and painless process. When I told her about my jones for Mesoamerica and Caribbean food, she merely smiled.

"Of course you do," she said. "It's exotic! You're drawn to things you find exotic. You have to be different. Contrary." Then she got a wicked gleam in her eye. "Go ahead, deny it! Argue about being different and contrary."

"Nobody likes you," I said with a glare, and she threw her arms around my neck.

"You don't like me!" She chuckled. "You love me!"

Fucking woman. And the other day, somebody had the audacity to ask me why I drink. Imagine.

I know a pair of distinguished gentlemen who proudly proclaim they're Francophiles. That's fine, I suppose, though I wonder how Frank feels about it. Of course, it seems when phile comes into context, you're on some sort of registry and people look at you with disdain. Personally, I'd rather not be marked, filed, briefed, or debriefed at all. My life is my own.

Sabina, Jezebel, and my daughter would all say I'm an exotophile. As long as it's not American, too far north of the equator, or from the present age, I'm all kinds of Holmes-like interested. Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps I find those above listed things to be a mundanity, and there might be tragedy in that.

After all, someone in Tibet might find those ancient Buddhist monasteries as everyday as the Presbyterian church down the way, but think Coldplay or Nickelback just might be edgy. The exotic is merely a point of view. So it goes.

Once, a girl, quoting an indie-film told me anything less than extraordinary was a waste of time. She said this unto me when some of acquaintances of mine were fading into the slow death of suburbia and television lobotomies. Celluloid though the line was, I hearkened, and, was made glad, by receiving what I would take as gospel.

I've never done well with boredom, though I've sometimes described myself as a boring little man. Certainly, those who have, or still do, lead the rock and/or roll lifestyle might find what I find entertaining downright dull. Of course, I did my penance around the rock and/or roll lifestyle, and it can get trite after awhile, believe it or don't.

I search for the extraordinary in the little things, taking pleasure in it. There are adventures to be had in the magical moments between heartbeats if one knows how to look. Perhaps it's just a stubborn refusal to grow up and settle down, but I've mentioned before, I fucking hate grown-ups.

The moon was extraordinary that warm mountain late morning. As was the chorizo and potato tinga I made for supper. The rhythms and rhymes of the cosmos is the most fantastic of backbeats. I try not to allow myself to be suckered by mundanities, but, then again, these days, I try not to let anything be mundane.