Dancing is the ideal mix of the athletic and the artistic. You have to be physically fit to be a great dancer; you also have to have something of the artist’s spontaneity and creativity. Physical prowess without an untamed and unlearned originality will get you nowhere. The dancer must surprise himself as he goes along, even more so than whoever is watching. Too much dancing is done specifically for an audience. This cannot be with the athletic and artistic dancer. He must dance for the pure joy of it.
I say unlearned, this is true. You can learn choreographed dancing, Irish dancing, swing dancing. But the kind of dancing I’m talking about is impossible to practice. Iverson’s rant would make complete sense concerning this dancing. Perfect strangers will approach you with money when you dance like this, as well as other propositions. Accepting money is out of the question. You dance the way you do because you cannot do otherwise, you dance for the internal reward, for the harmony you feel with the musicians on stage, with your own true nature, and with theirs. With nature itself, no wall between yours and theirs. Let the others stand, beer in hand, tapping their feet, afraid to let loose, afraid to look like a fool. You are expressing their nature for them. This is your glorious burden.
Often the athletic and artistic dancer will not appear to be a people person. Not true but no matter. In conversation he may appear uninterested and uninteresting, perhaps shy, taciturn. You may even observe a certain arrogance and haughtiness, he may not deign to speak more than a few mumbled words in response to questions about future plans.
Truth is, there is no one who is more of a people person than the athletic/artistic dancer. He is a lover of people, not as they are, but as they could be, as they seem to him when he is away, alone and walking down the road. An inhibited man in company, alone his thoughts are free to roam, footloose as his feet when he dances. And why should he need company? He thinks of past friends and lovers, thoughts blend together. What has he imagined and what has actually happened? Did he ever know them at all? Did they ever know him, fully? No, none know him as he is; he wanders alone. He meets strangers and leaves them behind. The truth comes out when he dances, but then there is no ‘he.’ No ‘I.’
Why should someone who has so often experienced the soaring heights of untrammeled ecstasy have anything to say about future plans? Better to dance than speak. Better to move than stay stuck in a lackluster groove. The athletic/artistic dancer may have no career, he may be a rover, wandering from town to town, concert to concert, following his roots, ahead of the rust. The future? Tonight, dance; tomorrow, walk on, humming some song invented as he goes along, left thumb out, right hand in his pocket, without cares or baggage, full of tender love without object or envy.
I spent the fall before I started at Prescott living with my cousins in Kenny Lake, Alaska, 40 miles south of Glenallen and 220 miles northeast of Anchorage. I spent my time at their place chopping wood to keep warm at 30 below, doing odd jobs for neighbors, snowshoeing through the woods, reading, writing, and watching Lord of the Rings with my three younger cousins. They were three of the best months of my life. When I had worked enough odd jobs that I had money to travel, I did that. One day I decided to drive to Fairbanks.
Driving from Glenallen, I wasn’t sure where I was going to stop for the night. Most campsites were closed for the winter, so I thought I would just pull off the road and sleep in the car somewhere. There was a sign for a campground by a lake, though, that looked like it might be open, at least it was not gated off, as most of the campsites were. I pulled in, drove the loop. There was not a soul in the 50 plus site campground. The lake, Paxson Lake, was run by the BLM, a governmental organization, so technically it was probably closed. This was the time of the government shutdown. But the shutdown seemed so totally irrelevant here, so far removed from this campsite by the lake, surrounded as it was by mountains and trees, that I never expected a ranger might come to kick me out. A ranger did come to kick me out, but not until the next morning, so I still was able to enjoy the stillness of the deserted campsite for the night. I set up my tent and then walked around gathering dead spruce wood for a fire. I laid the wood in a pile, took off my boots and socks, digging my bare feet into the rocky sand, and leaned back against the hard wood.
Good. Wood gathered, tent set up, fire burning. What else? Food? Why not. I cut up my quarter pound of sausage, put the pieces on a stick, and stuck the stick in the fire. Cut open a bagel and stuck it in the fire. Got my steel cup, filled it up with water, and stuck it in the fire. Waited. Leaned back against the wood, looked at the sky, darkening now. Took the sausage and bagel out. Put the roasted sausage on the toasted bagel, added some cheese which instantly melted from the heat of the bagel. Took the cup out and added a teabag. Dinner. Good. Anything else? A book? But that would require standing up, and the fire was so warm. Something of an issue, but one that could be overcome. Simply required an exertion of will. I could do that, I could stand up. I stood up, and ambled gingerly in my bare feet to the car, found a book, went back and leaned my back against the wood again. Edward Abbey would be my companion for the night. And a good companion he would be, better than many, than most, his voice truthful, passionate, alternately loud enough and silent enough to be heard. Often though the fire would distract me from his righteous and pure polemics, and I would put the book down and stare at the flames, thinking nothing, not at all oppressed by the beauty of the night, not at all lonely, but feeling liberated in the aloneness, which was not mine as loneliness would have been. Not my aloneness, but the aloneness. It had been here before I came, and it would be here after I left; I joined it, the aloneness, become a part of it, more a part of it than I would have been if I were not alone.
Unhappiness here did not make sense. The trees were happy where they were, the rocks on the shore were content that the water in the lake flow gently over them, the animals pleased to roam and find food. It made sense only to conform to the contentment of these natural living beings and life-giving forms, and it was the only type of conformity that made any sense. Part of me dreamed that life could always be this simple, this easy, and maybe it could. But perhaps, another part of me thought, it is the difficulty and monotony of everyday life that make the rare times of easy happy simplicity when there is no conflict between the inner and outer life, when there is no distinction made between the two, when you are a part of the outer and the outer is part of you, so meaningful. A pool of water in the desert wouldn’t be an oasis if the desert were filled with water.
It snowed during the night, 2 or 3 inches. I had fallen asleep by the fire and moved to my tent after the fire burned down and the cold woke me up. In the tent I slept soundly and warmly and didn’t realize it had snowed until the morning. I was in no rush to leave so I stayed in the tent and read in my sleeping bag. After an hour or so of this, I heard strange motorized sounds coming down towards the lake. I heard the strange motorized sounds stop by my tent, heard someone get out of the car and shut the door, heard someone ask if anyone was in the tent. I feigned sleep. She asked again, I answered. She was pretty nice about it.
“This campsite is closed, I’m going to have to ask you to leave. The governmental shutdown and all. You can get dressed and everything first.”
Although this ruined my plans, which consisted of staying in my sleeping bag doing nothing, it was alright. I would press forward. The Denali Highway was a few miles ahead, and perhaps not yet closed for the winter. My Uncle Peter and Aunt Patty had recommended driving on this road, which led to Denali National Park, but it was mostly unpaved and always unplowed. If it had snowed heavily during the night the road would be impassable.
At the entrance to the road, there was a sign which read “Travel Beyond This Point Not Recommended,” and a second sign which warned that wind, snow, and other perilous weather conditions were almost always present. In other words, only a fool will keep driving. More to the point, you, driving the 2003 Subaru Forester, are a fool. Do not continue, turn around, you have never driven in the snow, have you? No, of course you haven’t, which is why you consider continuing. Stop considering it. There are winds on this road which have flipped cars twice the weight of your little utility vehicle, conditions which have put the fear in drivers infinitely more experienced in the snow than you are. I listened for a minute or so to the signs, physical and otherwise, and then went beyond. There was a campsite about 20 miles away, Tangle Lakes, surely closed, that I would drive to. I’d turn around there, if I had to. On the way, I saw a caribou in the middle of the road. It paused for a few seconds and looked at the car, then turned and ran, stumbling a little. Perhaps it was hurt, hungry. I cursed myself and the noise of the car for frightening it and making it use energy to scamper up a hill, energy it might have needed to find food. I could have watched it from afar and waited until it was out of sight before continuing. As it was, I made it act other than it would have had I not been there. I changed the natural flow of things, and not for the better. When does human interference ever change things for the better?
It started snowing when I was about halfway to Tangle Lake. Not too hard, but definitely snow, not rain. Cold enough outside for it to stick. For Alaska, a minor storm. Fairly windy, snow accumulation if the pace kept up of maybe half a foot by the morning. Nothing to get worried about. In Washington, everything would be shut down. Then again, in Washington everything was already shut down, snow or shine. The governmental shutdown and all. At Tangle Lakes, I stayed in my car for about half an hour, thinking through the options, which were two. Press on or go back. West or east. Right or left. The first had the ring of adventure to it. Press on, in a general westerly direction, through snow and wind, through some of the wildest country that man has yet profaned with a road, seeking adventure. Go back? Retreat? That definitely was not adventurous. Not an attractive option. No romance to it at all. So I turned right, towards adventure, the west, towards a fair chance of fatality. The snow, as if in answer to my foolishness, immediately started to come down harder, the wind picked up. The weather report that Patty and I had looked at the day before had said that winds would be gusting at over 70 miles an hour. Travelers were forewarned. After 3 or so miles of driving under 10 miles an hour, I turned around. A couple more miles more and I might have had trouble doing even that. Later, when I returned to Kenny Lake, Peter told me that the Denali Highway had been closed for the winter that very day. I was probably the last one on the road.
Back on the main road to Fairbanks, I stopped in and got a cup of coffee at a cafe. Just to see the reaction, I asked the old man there if he thought the Denali Highway was passable. He looked at me for a second, looked outside at the snow coming down hard, and looked back at me.
“No. Not a chance. Stay on the main highway there, my friend.”
I did so, heading up to Fairbanks, 3 or so hours away, which for some reason I wanted to see. To see the difference, maybe. See how I would fare in a city for the first time in a month. I thought, mistakenly, that after a few weeks of living with my cousins away from the land hungry evil twin brothers of progress and industry, living in the shadow of some of the most majestic mountains in the world (Wrangell-St Elias Range), I might better be able to handle the brutal meaningless sounds of the town and city. And if I could not, then there was the library. I could always retreat there. There was a university with stacks and stacks of books. And there was always the car. And the road. The car on the road, departing. I could leave if I couldn’t stay. I arrived at night on Tuesday, after picking up a couple of not so reputable or respectable but nice enough hitch-hikers (one of them started singing when I put on James Brown, “Man, I haven’t listened to this since I was a kid. Do you got It’s A Man’s World?” so we sang it together.) I dropped them off so they could look for drugs and then parked my car and slept surprisingly well in the parking lot of the 24 hour Wal-Mart. Before I fell asleep I wrote a poem, just one of probably thousands of Wal-Mart parking lot poets all over the USA, down on our luck.
I stayed in Fairbanks the whole of Wednesday, mostly in the university library reading the poet Robinson Jeffers, leaving the library once to go buy some books at a used book store. Libraries and used book stores, the shining beacons of civilized life, which have saved many a wanderer, salvation for those who don’t know why they are there at all, why they aren’t climbing a mountain, riding waves in some sea, wandering in some desert. Jeffers, from the poem “De Rerum Virtue”:
“One light is left us: the beauty of things, not men;
The immense beauty of the world, not the human world.
Look—and without imagination, desire nor dream—directly
At the mountains and sea. Are they not beautiful?”
Or as the Grateful Dead put it:
“Let it be known there is a fountain
That was not made by the hands of man.”
I left early Thursday morning, left the land of men, returned to the mountains; left the dangerously hopeless dream (or nightmare), returned to the starkly beautiful reality. In the words of one young unpublished poet, I left the land of rules and returned to the land of reigning silences, left the land of fools (myself included, no less than the rest), back to the land where there are no disguises. Driving from Fairbanks, I started to feel excited, more alive. I had felt dull and lifeless in the library, though the most refined thoughts of the greatest writers this world has known sat in books all around me. Driving now, Zevon on the stereo, I switched on the cruise control and watched the sun rise in the rearview mirror over some hills (mountains in any eastern state, hills in Alaska). The sky was almost completely clear, a rarity in perhaps any part of Alaska at this time of year, though I can’t say that for certain, having not traveled over the one-thousandth part of the state. Alaska is so massive, and with such wildness, such beauty. I wanted to climb every mountain I passed. But the Alaska Range, close to Denali National Park, was about 100 miles ahead of me. I decided to park my car somewhere ahead, in the range, and, while the sun was still shining, climb until I had cleansed myself of civilization by a process of detoxification. I parked the car shortly after a sign reading Wind Area. The sign had it right; the wind was powerful, though not quite as strong as it had been on the Denali Highway. Besides, the mountains were irresistible to me. Wind or no wind, I would climb.
At the Deli in Prescott I sit at a table,
Next to the fence which separates me from the outside world.
Attached to the fence are two dogs, one smaller than the other and black and white.
The larger one looks like a golden lab, though I’m not sure.
They are just far enough away from each other that they can’t touch,
Though they are close,
About a foot away.
Almost together, but alone.
Almost touching, but not quite.
I guess you could say I’m in love with the world as it appears to me right now. Walking on the street, the sun had warmed my back; now, my back against an Arizona Walnut tree, a hundred yards west of Montezuma Street, the sun warms my left shoulder.
My pants are rolled up, socks and shoes off. I hear birds singing in the red willow by the creek, I see a seven-layered power line that I do not understand. I don’t understand why there are so many layers to the power line; I think I understand why we have so many layers, but I don’t think I fully understand any one layer at any one time.
Never the whole of it.
I can’t see the whole tree all at once, all of the leaves that shake in the wind, so I shift my view from time to time. What I can see at any one time shakes me, leaves me breathless, almost brings me to tears. I fight it a little, the emotion. Don’t get so affected, I tell myself, it’s just the leaves shaking in the wind. Stay cool, calm, collected. You’re a stoic, you’re a man. I can’t do it. The tears come, the way they do. I feel more like a child of eight than a man of twenty-two.
Now the wind dies down a little bit.
I become a little bit calmer. Not necessarily stronger because calmer, though I definitely would appear so to others. But how we appear to others is not always how we are. Usually it isn’t. It takes more strength to show your weakness, how you truly are, than to look strong when you feel weak. The automatic response is to look strong, but the truth is in weakness.
I remove the shirt from where I’d had it, against the tree and my back. Now I feel the bark more fully.
My back is strong from pull-ups and pull downs. Hard against hard, which one is harder? No use fighting fate here, the bark of the tree is harder and will always be harder. Don’t compete with it, don’t try and dominate it. Sit with it, against it. Feel it, as you feel your back. Feel your back against the tree, as you listen to the cars go by. This is a sort of meditation for you, though you don’t necessarily have to use that word.
There is a thin line between being in a good place and being in a bad one. Especially for you. You’ll always live on that edge, that line, or at least you’ll try to. At least you’ll live close. The creek separates the woods from the road, but you can’t live in the creek; you’ve got to pick a side. You can go to the other side later. Where you are now is not where you’ll always be.
You start to go further inward but stop yourself. Another automatic response, this going inward. Good and bad things come from that. It’ll probably never be any different, and maybe that’s the way it should be. But stay present, present to and in the place you are now, the marvelous beauty of what is here. Do not repress the ugliness you sometimes feel in yourself, do not dwell in it either. You dwell and then you drown, though long ago you learned how to swim.
The coffee cup is almost empty. Soon I’ll be sitting alone with nothing to drink. Not my strength.
Apparently the house almost burned down last night; I wasn’t in it at the time. If the house is going to burn down, would I go down with it? Or would I be up at the School of Rocks, the City of Rocks, observing the world like Jeffers from a lonely boulder, watching the innocent settled people take the punishment of the guilty who flee. But though I admit my guilt to myself I can’t stand being told I am guilty. I already know that.
“Everybody’s restless and they’ve got no place to go
Someone’s always trying to tell them
Something they already know.
So their anger and resentment flow.”
—From Mohammed’s Radio, by Warren Zevon
A raven soars in a descending circle around the walnut trees, then flies off over the power line, beyond, down. I feel myself shutting down, I’ve gone beyond the point of empowerment and into powerlessness. You can’t go back from that but you can keep going down. You go down and lose touch with the surface, with the simple beauty of sitting with rolled up pants, your back against a tree.
Sitting like Whitman did, observing a single blade of grass, seeing how the wind touches it, shakes it gently. Another blade of grass that is close is not touched by the wind. Thinking about how we touch some people in the same gentle way that the wind touches the blade of grass, how we leave others unmoved. How we do not always appreciate the times when others touch us. How we are moved by others when they don’t try to move us, how we are unmoved when they do.
I look over at the bridge to the south and see that two people are watching me. I had been singing and possibly talking to myself. I find that I have no more thoughts at the present, nothing more to write. I put back on my shoes and socks, my shirt and jacket.
I walk back towards the place I live, back towards the place that does not feel as much like home.
Here’s the difference between me and you:
You don’t care tonight,
And you won’t care tomorrow.
I care tonight,
And you know I’ll care tomorrow.
Outside I see a cop pulling over some unlucky soul;
I feel for whoever that is; I feel more than I know.
This is the bullshit that will never make any sense;
This is our world: Can it ever have any true defense?
I need to keep going, I can’t ever stop;
I’ll be by what is flowing, the river of course.
The river is on course, but I’m off;
The river is going somewhere,
I’m standing at the gates of hell.
But hell is where I am already,
Though some people think of it as out of this earth.
I’m in the depths already,
I guess I’m trying to figure out what that is worth.
It’s the people who need to be saved that get pressed down most often;
It’s the people who just won’t behave that get put in that coffin:
Before their time,
Before it’s time.
It’s more than time that gets me thinking;
It’s more than the mine that gets miners drinking.
Press me and I won’t respond;
Listen and maybe I will.
Maybe I’m doomed;
Maybe you are too.
But let’s not get you involved,
Unless you are one of the many unloved.
Loved by others; never by ourselves.
You can relate?
Well, maybe we’ll make it.
Make it where?
Maybe you know because you have no idea;
That’s the way to live, that’s the way to be.
I used to be a great athlete,
Fans cheered when they heard my name.
I used to be the one the girls wanted to meet,
I guess I’ll hop that next freight train.
I’m just one of the many who stay up late,
Are we lonely or are we alone?
Just one, just another sentry, trying to send this letter;
Just another, dialing numbers on this ridiculous phone;
I’m just a man: I don’t know how to live life any better;
I‘m a man, trying to access that different time zone.
They say, “No one wants to feel they are different.
“Everyone wants to feel they are not alone.”
They tell me, “We rely onyou to treat us as you would a Higher Power.
“When we call, we suggest you answer the phone.”
They say, “No one can breathe when they’re under water.
“Everyone wants the practical means to succeed.”
They tell me, “We advise you to become a law-abiding marauder.
“It’d be best if you learned what you do and don’t need.”
I say, “I’m better off nurturing quietness,
Living in solitude and dancing alone.”
I say, “Maybe I’m just a little bit different.
“What gives me joy leads most to moan.”
I tell them, “What feels like prison to one is freedom to another.
“When the leaders grow confident, I begin to have doubts.”
I say, “Maybe I take what matters a little too intensely,
But when most are deaf, those who hear must shout.”
They say, “Trust us, we know you better than you know yourself;
“We’ve seen your type many times before.”
They tell me, “Some specimens are more difficult to mold and shape,
But you’re just a type, that’s what you ought to remember;
You’re just a type, and nothing more.”
They say, “We’ve figured out the way to do it.
“We know now what has to be done.”
They tell me, “The goal is to get adjusted to upright society.
We stimulate the economy to debilitate autonomy:
At the end of the day, we hope you have fun!”
I say, “Still the earth remains in all her unserviceable and savage beauty,
“Still many know your surface victory is hopelessly hollow.”
I tell them, “As long as a few men and women observe astutely,
Not all will be hypnotized, not all will follow.”
I say, “Some will always search for something higher than regulation.”
“The more you try and control, the shorter will be your reign.”
I tell them, “What you do is a more subtle and cowardly form of degradation,
“But as long as there exists wildness, some will never be tamed.”
She said, “I always hurt everyone I want to help.
When it’s all said and done, I’ll be by myself.
I tried to be the peacemaker and started the whole war;
I decided to face my maker, he said I got what I deserved.
You say you feel trapped, don’t know how to get out.
Well throw out your map, that’s not what it’s about.
But I can’t help you, all I’ve ever done is escape.
I run when I get boxed in; I run so I don’t break.
I’m pulled into the cold without time to shiver,
Like a willow ripped from the banks of the river.
I sleep on the rocks, my prison yard bed;
No too soft pillow for this too hard head.
You said, “I love to see you here, that light comes back in your eyes.”
Well, the snow falls down, the cold wakes me up, and I feel alive.
In the woods there is peace; I know the trees can help me climb any slope.
Inner and outer, observer and observed, it all intermingles like sorrow and hope.
I wish I could feel the same way outside, but I never do.
So I return to the empty places to be restored and reborn.
I need these places as much as I need to live and to move.
For no one has died or is dying, yet I grieve and I mourn.
She said, “I always hurt everyone I want to help.
I can’t get past the first step, and I’m s’posed to do twelve?”
She said, “I’m limited by a world whose ambitions I do not share.”
I said, “No, you’re freed by that perception: free to yearn, to burn, to care.”
She said, “I guess I’m still a little bit fearful.
I confess I might not have what it takes.
I was told that what I lack is experience.
What I want back is life for life’s sake.”
She said, “You run so you don’t break,
But when I find you, you look shattered.”
I countered with some nonsense about how
To be healed you must first be torn and in tatters,
And how I’d rather be poor and miserable
Than one of the contented mob.
She said, “If you’re trying to find what’s integral,
You’re doing a demented job.”
The pianist strikes a melancholy chord,
As I wait in vain for the knock on the door,
To bring me the love I can never deserve,
And something to fix me that won’t hurt me more.
But there’s no quick fix, no magic contentment pill,
Nothing that satisfies, no easy way to feel fulfilled.
So I’ll wander and roam, like I always do.
Maybe I’ll find a home, maybe you will too.
How have you been? Still in school? I’m a student of the road no longer, a student in the classroom once again. Not sure if I’ve settled in yet, it takes me a little longer than most. I’ve been living odd hours: sleeping in the evening, waking up when most other people are heading to bed, writing and working for those six hours, midnight to 6 in the morning. I spend this time trying to understand the alienation I’ve been feeling since starting back at school. Nothing doing. I’ll keep writing.
There is much that I like about this school I’ve started at, Prescott College. I like that it is focused on the environment, social justice, liberal arts, the outdoors, wilderness. But it may be that no school environment can give me the independence and leisure time that is necessary for me to live a creative life. Of course not. A creative life cannot be given, and neither can the intangibles that lead to such a life. I must find those things out on my own, find how to live creatively in all types of environments: in school, at work, while traveling.
But I’ve missed being outside, sleeping under the stars. Maybe the alienation comes from feeling disconnected from the land itself. I’ve forgotten what a fire of mesquite and juniper smells like, I can’t quite remember the joys of waking up before sunrise, silently packing up the sleeping bag, putting it in the rucksack, getting back on the trail. Not being woken up by an alarm or some chemical stimulant; rather, waking yourself up by your own physical movement, awakening to your strengths, becoming aware of your weaknesses, sharing yourself with yourself fully so you can share yourself with others in the same way. Hiking or walking or biking all day, or however long you want to, then having some time in the evening to sit in the stillness, listen to the owls and coyotes, cook your simple dinner on the fire. Turn to the west and watch the sun set, turn around and wait for the moon to come up. Sit for a while, between the two, the sun and moon, feel the wind come, feel the white butterfly land on your shoulder and then fly off again, smell the fragrance of the burning mesquite. Watch the fire die down, fall asleep.
I’m listening to melancholy piano music as I write this at three in the morning. It’s hard to find these times of solitude when taking classes, but I need them in order to write with any sort of clarity or purpose. When I haven’t been alone for awhile, and when I haven’t been out in the wilderness and on the trails either, I become less confident, less happy, more confused, more prone to isolating and reverting back to the old habits that never worked and never will work.
I’ve been thinking that there’s a good chance I’m drawn to you because the distance between us is so great. It’s the space between that integrates. You’ve probably figured it out. In simple words, I want what I can’t have, what is just out of my reach, a little too far away. I’ve thought some about why this is, but I can’t remember what conclusions I came to, if any. Let me try again. When you can be with someone, your longing for that person decreases, is reduced to reasonable proportions. When you can’t be with someone, and you are like me and have difficulty accepting the things you can’t change, then that longing remains and grows the longer you are apart from whomever you want to be near. That’s the way I feel.
In a way what I tend to do in idealizing relationships is as dangerous as codependency. Idealizing from afar allows you to keep your independence, but at the cost sometimes of preventing you from having actual relationships.
But that idealizing, that inability to accept what is, that’s why I write, I wouldn’t write if that wasn’t an integral part of me. I’ll always plummet down into the depths of discontent and sort through the debris like a dumpster diving drifter until I find something that’ll keep me going until the hunger returns again. That’s why I wake up when everyone else is going to sleep, why I sit here scribbling words down for a letter I’ll probably never send, why I’ll always be drawn to people like you who are on paths that parallel mine. And they say that even parallel lines intersect at some point, but it might be a long time before they do. We are on separate paths, but that doesn’t mean we are separate. I sit here alone and wonder what you are doing right now. I guess it’s almost tomorrow there, it’s barely today here. Morning has not yet broken, I’ve not yet broken my fast, the darkness outside is intact. The moon was full two nights ago, and I took a midnight hike by its light. I thought of you on it.
“What business have I in the woods,” Thoreau asks himself, “if I am thinking of something out of the woods?” But I do not separate the woods from you, nor you from the woods. I walk through the woods on a trail here, in the desert sun on a cloudless day, the town below, a soaring red-tailed hawk above; you walk through the woods on a trail there, knee-deep in snow on a cloudy day, surrounded by mountains and lakes, the waves crashing on the beach somewhere far below you, an eagle soaring somewhere far above.
For a moment as I walk, I think I’ve come to some sort of satisfying answer to the complex questions of isolation, aloneness, solitude, alienation, and the differences between them. I am not isolated, not alienated. There are the woods and we both walk in them. The names are not important. I am walking on a trail in the Prescott National Forest, you are walking on a trail wherever you are.
I am here, you are there, and for a moment I do not want what is there. What is here is what is there.
But before I can go into that thought a bit further, a bit deeper, I find that the trail has looped around and I am standing next to my car. I get into the car and drive alone in silence back to town, stealing a glance in the rearview mirror at the woods I’m leaving behind.
In Chamonix. Planning to hike the Tour of Mont Blanc, a 200-kilometer loop. Passed a hotel called Le Gite Vagabond. Tempting, but too expensive, so I slept on a bench outside the train station in the shadow of Mont Blanc instead.
I am writing you from a train filled with Aussies. Paris to Lisbon, Portugal; a long ride. I was in Paris for a day. I didn’t know what to do so I went into a movie theatre and watched Spiderman.
Dublin is as dirty a town as they claim, and as beautiful. I drank Guinness today and sang dirty old town with an old drunk. I watched cricket and noticed that cricket players are faster than baseball players.
I got to Madrid hours before my flight back to Ireland. I lay down shirtless outside the airport, as I had done in Phoenix a few months before, and did nothing. Much hotter here than it is on the coast. The temperature rises, the people get colder.
London is packed for the Olympics. My brother and I came over from Ireland to watch the Marathon. I retreated to a bookstore and read The Perks of a Wallflower and then napped in a park. Rolled up my jeans, took off my shoes and socks, watched Londoners get drunk.
Somehow I made it to Berlin to meet my uncle, though I had no money. Strangers can be kind, when you aren’t in France. Here, I biked in the downpour, looked at portraits of smooching dictators and gorged on continental breakfasts. I took some food for the road.
Got robbed in Nice. Took the train to Marseilles, hid in the bathroom. Spent the week trying to get a new passport. I sat in the US consulate reading the dictionary and copying down words I liked.
Wish you were here in Portugal. Lonely and melancholy tonight. For the past week, I have bodysurfed in the day, slept on the beach at night. I don’t feel lonely while surfing, riding the waves; the loneliness comes when the sun sets, and the couples walk off hand in hand
In France, most everything is forbidden, private, or impossible, usually all three. “Can I sit here?” “It is forbidden.” “Pourquoi?” “Dis table izze private.” “Can I climb this tree?” “No, it is impossible.”
Hung out in Lyon with a gorgeous German woman studying abroad there. Saw a guy with a Redskins hat, he told me the Heat had won the NBA Finals. This news did not make me happy, but the messenger of the news did.
Mark Twain wrote, “There is a friendly something about the German character which is very winning.” I agree. The difference from the French was noticeable the moment I crossed the border in Strasbourg.
Met a group from Jersey (not the state) on a train. They were going to a heavy metal concert. I don’t like heavy metal music. They had a friend called Jim Beam. After meeting him I decided to go with them. I left the concert when Lynyrd Skynyrd was playing “Free Bird.”
I feel invisible when travelling in the city. Not ideal for a life, good for a few days. Not a part of the city, not apart from it. In it, as an observer rather than a participant. An outsider by choice. I’m in some city, I forget the name, thinking of you.
Got to Hamburg a little after 2 p.m. on July 3. Watched a horse race. Met a group of 12 or so. They welcomed me with sandwiches, sausages, and lager. The next day I told them I had to get to Berlin, had no money. They paid for my fare. Gratitude.
Talked to a French bum today. Seems that all French bums have dogs, earrings, long hair. Renegades. Interacting with French people from the towns and cities drains me. But the bums are like mountain spring water from the Alps, refreshingly energizing, quenching that thirst for meaningful connection.
A trekker named Bruno saw me trying to hitchhike. He came over to me, laughing at the pitiful sign I had made. I told him my story, he told me to come with him. I hiked for three days with him. I slept in a cave, he slept in his tent. We wondered where the french flies go at night.
Brian Leibold 