Layers of Thanksgiving: Robert Earl Keen's "Gringo Honeymoon" & Memories of Boquillas del Carmen, Mexico

Black Friday.  Snow falls gently down through the last soft gray light of day; a band of wild turkey make their way across the front field, the oak and maple along the canyon slope a smudged gray in front of the softer gray cedar ridge across the canyon.  It's a nice, quiet end to a vibrant Thanksgiving.

Wednesday, I received a call at work from Marci saying Thanksgiving was being moved from Dry Creek to St. George.  I wasn't happy.  Neither was she.  We'd put a lot of work into getting ready to host it here.  On top of that, I simply didn't want to go anywhere, especially somewhere with more than 10,000 people.  I seldom do.  I've achieved my desire in life--to sit in a recliner, look out the window, and watch bands of turkey move slowly across the field, pecking at the slender blades of bent wild rye poking through.

I thought of our past Thanksgivings here.  I like moving around the circumference of the action, going out to old pig shed to get fire wood, or over to the trailer to get food from the extra fridge.  I like placing sparking cider bottles in the snow bank on the north side of the house, as well as the regular chores of feeding the chickens and taking the trash out.

Because of health reasons, it's been a while since I could enjoy such things, but I'm feeling quite a bit better now. I could do some of that again, and no matter how much or how little I could do, the cedar ridge, field and wild turkey would be here.  Everything I'm thankful for is here.  I love this land on the edge of an insignificant town on the edge of a great western valley.

I remembered a couple of our Black Fridays.  Once we went to a bird refuge just west of here (which I'll leave anonymous to protect it's anonymity); another time we went out to some lava cliffs (which again I won't name) and the boys did some repelling off a long, black wall of basalt.

Black Friday in our valley

My brother, Lloyd, on one Black Friday outing

Various family members on the same outing, including Tyler, standing on 1 hand

I love the alkali flats, the small dunes, the lava escarpment, the ancient volcano, the distant horizon, the great expanse of deep blue sky.

Who wants shopping malls, deals, and a hazy brown horizon?

So, I found myself filling up the car on a cold, windy Wednesday to head to someplace I deplore--the city--for Thanksgiving.

The only good thing was that I'd be headed down a vacant, desert highway for two hours before I'd run into anything that resembles modern civilization.

I put George Harrison's All Things Must Past in the CD player, hoping I'd find the brighter side of whatever bad Karma I was justly or unjustly receiving.

Headed down the highway, a straight and narrow rail line on the left, some small rubble mountains on the right, I thought of a southwest Texas Thanksgiving trip long ago.

It was midway down my decent into the death valley of my life, but like with most memories, time has a way of shining its golden light, and so it wasn't at all an unpleasant journey.

I remembered the high golden valley of Marfa in the late afternoon, shadows from the tree yucca long and dramatic.  I remembered pulling into Terlingua after sundown, a slight glow of turquoise over the rubble hills behind it.  I found a cold motel room with no TV that costed way more than I thought it should.

That lonely Thanksgiving I was searching for escape, for better times.  There was a different Terlingua, one where I sat across the table from a beautiful college girl from Germany.   We spent hours in a clean, white-walled cafe, drinking Blue Sky soda as we stared out the window at the rubble ghost town and rubble hills. Patsy Cline played on some CD player or tape deck somewhere back in the kitchen.  I was in heaven.

I had come back in search of traces of that same magic.  Instead I found a cold room with nothing to do.

Thanksgiving Day was damp and overcast.  I headed into Big Bend National Park with the goal of getting to Boquillas, Mexico, in a vein attempt to resurrect another mirage.

The first Boquillas was pure magic.  Karin and I had arrived one hot spring day--which in southwest Texas, can be extremely hot.  It was Spring Break, and the only camping was in the overflow area of Rio Grande Village.  We'd set up camp and gone off into the desert--I don't remember where.  While we were gone, a thunderstorm had moved in and dumped on our tent.  As it was hot and dry when we left, I hadn't put on the rain fly.  When we came back, we found soaked sleeping bags.

I remember sitting that evening on a high, chalky stone ridge watching silver ripples on the Rio Grande as we waited for the sleeping bags to dry in the laundry mat back at the campground.  Sprinkles of rain continued, golden darts of piercing cold in the last light of day.  I was in heaven, rubbing wet splashes into the smooth skin of Karen's bare legs.

The next day we took a canoe across the river to Boquillas, Mexico, and spent the day eating tacos, drinking Coke from nicked-up bottles, kissing each other randomly, frequently, and playing with the village children. Apparently, I'm not the only one to experience such a thing, for Robert Earl Keen captured a day in Boquillas much like mine perfectly.  I was young, in love, and away from the city, in God's country.  What could be better?

I found the second Boquillas under a dark, brooding sky on a winter's day.  The wind howled across the small, stony mesa above the Rio Grande.  The river was choppy and gray below.  Only I and the goats walked the gavel streets.  The kids were inside the small adobe huts with smoke coming out of the small, metal-piped stacks.  I saw one boy in a blue-framed doorway leering out with dark brooding eyes.  And then his mother called him, the door was shut, and I was left outside, pelted by small bits of sleet.  I found my way to the bar and joined a few drunks inside.  A wrinkled old gringo couple who looked like they hadn't bathed in months played guitar and sang "Mind Your Own Business."  By now, I'd moved on from Coca-Cola and spent the day drinking shots of tequila while hating the lonely, miserable person I'd become.

The musicians were good.  Good and drunk.  So was I.  And they were scuzzy, victims of a gringo honeymoon gone wrong.  Two sad old people that couldn't get out of the rut of youth, couldn't leave those glory days behind, stuck here, living that special day over and over again, until everything yellowed, decayed and stank. To grow up here, now that would be grand.  But, to get shipwrecked here--what a sad, sad song. I drank myself sober and headed home, realizing no matter how low I sank I could never sink low enough to try living a honeymoon forever. Whatever reality I had to live, I'd live it.  The past was gone.

But, you know memory is a funny thing.  With time, both versions of Boquillas del Carmen became equally beautiful. As I drove down a similar, gray highway towards another Thanksgiving, the bleeding of past and present mingled to create some sort of strange joy.

By the time I pulled up to the house in St. George, I was feeling fairly good.  I had a strange yearning to go to a bookstore.  Perhaps it was because of all the hours Marci and I had logged at Bookman's in Flagstaff, many during the holiday season.  Perhaps it's because I realized I do have a happily-ever-after story, and unlike that couple in Boquillas, I don't have to remain drunk to keep it alive.

As for Marci and I, our honeymoon ended the day we returned from our trip to Monterrey and Big Sur and had to get back to raising two boys and completing school.  But the beautiful reality continues on, whether here at Dry Creek or in some stinking city.

We went to Barnes & Nobel where I bought a leather-bound collection of five novels by Charles Dickens to replace my copy of Tale of Two Cities, which my son Rio gave away to a girl he'd helped recover from a suicide attempt.  Someday his memories of that gift will mingle with his present and add meaning to whatever drive he is on.

After Barnes and Nobel, Marci and I went to the DI (Deseret Industries) where she picked up 10 books for 10 dollars.  It wasn't quite the same as going to Bookman's in Flagstaff, but close enough to jump-start a great Thanksgiving with the family.

And the road goes on.

Marci walks with fresh cut flowers at Dry Creek in the early fall

  

Incredibly Uncertain at Best: Peace Not Connected to Any Specific Outcome

Over the years my dreams have changed, not just my aspirations, but also my night dreams.  When I was younger, in my teens and twenties, they often expressed humor, fear or anger.  In my thirties and early forties, they most often had to do with my desire to have some impact on the world.  Recently, they are most often about observation.  I am still the main character in my dreams, but I'm not the protagonist in a traditional sense because the focus of the dream is not on me, but instead those around me.  Usually, there is something terrible going on, but because of the outstanding quality of those around me, I have this overwhelming sense of peace not connected to any specific outcome.  In the dream, I'm aware that beauty has nothing to do with what is happening. Instead, it has everything to do with how people handle what is happening.

I woke up early this morning from such a dream.  It started in a classroom, not a traditional classroom, but a rented space in an almost vacant shopping center in a decaying part of town.  The school was in one big classroom, but had two levels.  My side of the room was at street level, where you entered from two glass doors.  There were a couple of those long metal fold-out tables with particle board and wood-print-paper veneer tops. There were half a dozen with fold-out chairs around them.  The floor on my half of the room was worn, yellow linoleum.  Four carpeted steps led up to the other classroom that was raised and had a black iron rail separating it from the main floor.  It was furnished much the same as mine.  It had worn, blue-gray industrial carpet and looked like it once was probably the office area of a food or discount store that must have occupied the rest of the space.

Anyway, I had four or five students I was working with in this big, almost empty space, and another teacher, a Navajo woman, had four or five students she was working with in the raised classroom.

I knew one of my students, an oriental girl about fourteen or fifteen years old, was not doing her best work. She kept giving me excuses, and I was telling her that those excuses were nothing but crap.  This made her angry and I was aware her raised voice had drawn the attention of the teacher with the other class.  I considered the other teacher my mentor and didn't mind that she was watching somewhat critically.  But, I also knew I was handling the student appropriately, that she needed to be pushed so that she could experience the taste of real success--not success from the outside, not empty praise, but success from the inside, that inner voice that says, "That needed to be said, and damn, I said it well."  But she was putting up a wall.

Finally, I asked the other teacher if she'd watch my students, and I told the girl I wanted her to take me to see her parents.  At first she argued and told me I was crazy, but I said, "if you're so sure what I'm doing is wrong, why not get your parents involved?"  I know that would never work in real life--kids may run to parents to intervene in school, but not without controlling the narrative first--but in the dream, it worked.  It had to in order to move the narrative to the next scene.

I followed the girl along a ravaged boulevard, the sidewalk littered with broken liquor and beer bottle glass to an old motel that had been converted into apartments.  She took me up some outside stairs to the "apartment."  Below, I could see the swimming pool had been filled with dirt where a rusted swing set and half-broken teeter-totter now served as the playground.

Inside, the kitchenette room was steamy.  There was a couch and a double bed in the main room.  An old 1970s TV was mounted on the wall.  Off to the side there was a small kitchen where her mother was cooking. An eleven or twelve year old boy sat at the bar between the two rooms, swiveling on a beat up bar stool. On the bar was a gold Buddha.  There was also a bedroom that I assume had been another room altogether, for a door had been blasted through, a frame put up, the wall filled in, but they'd failed to paint the remodeled part.

I don't think there was a full conversation in my dream, and if there was, I don't remember it.  I do remember her brother, the scrawny twelve-year-old, was excited that his sister was in trouble and kept coming to my defense, which I didn't particularly like.   But what I remember most is the love I felt from the mother for her daughter and the appreciation she had towards me for pushing her daughter to excel.

I remember thinking, she is one of the lucky ones about the girl.  She has nothing and yet everything. This is what she needs to write.  She probably hates it--this small cramped space in a smoldering city-- and that's alright.  As she writes it out, she will deal honestly with the bad, but in the process, she will see the good also.

I didn't say that.  It would have been an insult to her family.  But I now knew how to reach her.

I left the family.  Because it was a dream, I never returned to the school.  Instead, I went to my house, which was a couple doors down.  There was a blast behind me and the sound of air-raid sirens.  An old Jewish man, who I knew, was holding a sobbing Cambodian boy.

"His mother works in that direction," he said, pointing towards the smoke, as I came up and stood beside him.  Then to the boy he said, "There's lots of buildings down there, you can't just assume it was your mother's office, but I'll tell you what, after the sirens stop, I'll walk down and make sure everything is alright."

The scene cut to the Jewish man's apartment at a later time.  It was a small, dark-paneled room with a single bed, a worn-out recliner and this beautiful big old roll-top oak desk, which you could tell was polished on a daily basis, the papers on it immaculately organized.

He sat at the desk, his old 1940s swivel chair turned to face me, the desk behind him.  I sat on the edge of the bed.

"If you don't believe in God," I asked, why do you do it?"  I was referring to all he did to help relieve the suffering of others in the neighborhood.  You see, although Jewish by heritage, he was atheist by belief.

He smiled, looked over his round, clear glasses that had slid down to the end of his nose, and said "Love."

At first I wanted to push him for more, but then I decided not to.  I wanted to go back to my own place and write down my thoughts:

I believe in Christianity--Buddhist Christianity, Jewish Christianity, Islam Christianity and Atheist Christianity.

So, I told him so.  "I hate to go, but you've inspired me and I've got to get it down on paper."

He smiled--"Glad to be of service"--and swiveled around back to his big, oak desk and returned to writing a letter.

As I walked out the door, the shadow of a bomber moved swiftly down the street and up the side of the motel where my student lived, and then a few blocks beyond there was a flash, the distant wailing of mothers, followed by sirens.

And yet somehow I knew with people like my student's mother and my atheist Jewish neighbor all was well regardless of the outcome, which was incredibly uncertain at best.

November Snow Brings Fresh Connection to Dry Creek

Patio lights through water droplets on the sliding glass door

It's been a long time since I've connected with this place.  Summer was long, hot & plagued with insects.  Between the heat, voracious grasshoppers and my poor health, my gardens suffered greatly.  Fall was dry and drab compared to the norm--trees choosing to go into a dry coma instead of fighting the heat that continued into late September.  October brought little relief.

For the first time, it was hard to write about this land.  I buried anger and disgust by blogging about  different times and places, not wanting to face a dream deferred. 

Tonight, walking back from the wood shed carrying logs though nine inches of fresh snow, the air damp and cold, the smell of smoke drifting down from the chimney, silence big and booming under dark expanse, I felt this place deep in my tissue again.

View of the house while walking back with firewood.

To be fair, I had a taste of winter a couple weekends ago.  It started off mighty but fizzled out before an inch had collected.  Still, it was a wonder standing at the window watching the patio lights bleed through water droplets on the glass.

Outdoor grill pad as seen through the back window

 

The house was cold and damp, a good reason for a hot drink, a good book and fire.

 

 

 

Everest slumbered while I watched Mountain Men, Camilla, his pug, taking advantage of him lounging around all day.

 

Everest and Camilla enjoying a snow day.

 

But tonight!--this is it, the real thing: WINTER.  With it, Dry Creek is vibrant, living, and in the spring will be green again--the churning, chalky white waters bringing life to both the forest, and via our irrigation system, the fields.

Nine inches of fresh snow
 

Let it snow, let it snow!

Of the Barking Strings: One Account of Growing Up in the 80s, Part I: Start with Nancy Sinatra Reclining on Stage in her Pink, Pseudo-Native American Dress and Pink Boots

The other day a friend asked me how I would start film about the old gang.  It was a reciprocal question; I'd asked all of them the same thing.  They gave me history--how it all started at Bill's Ice Cream in a large and sprawling city on a great, humid plain.  Now, what am I suppose to do with that?

I do feel the stickiness of dried ice cream up to my elbow from reaching way down into the square carton, making sure I "square dipped" appropriately so that we wouldn't have shrinkage.

I remember working the line on those hot August nights when it snaked around the metal bars and people stood with the glass front doors open waiting outside to get out of the heat and have some cool ice cream.  I remember picturing them as flies and wishing I had a great can of bug spray to knock them down, so we could sweep their buzzing, bumbling bodies out the door with a push broom and and shut down.  But the fools just continued to come in.

But what am I to do with that?

I remember Jim belching out the Boss while stocking the milk room--how it was low and muffled until Andrea opened the glass door to Windex it, and it then blasted through the store--

I ain't nothing but tired
Man I'm just tired and bored with myself
Hey there baby, I could use just a little help

Or I remember some chubby, blond punk-ass kid, saying "squeeze-me" for "excuse me" each time he passed a girl behind ice cream counter on his way to get a broom or rag from the back.

But what am I to do with that?

I remember one time Phil asked Andrea if she could invite anyone over for Thanksgiving, who would it be? and she replied, "Sid Vicious."

Okay, maybe I could use that.

But I think I'd start instead with Nancy Sinatra reclining on stage in her pink, pseudo-Native American dress and pink boots singing, "Bang, Bang--My Baby Shot Me Dead."  It's stark--that black background against that shocking pink; it's glamorous--oh that thick, deep 60s long, blond hair; and it has nothing what-so-ever to do with the story-line, which would have been my take on things at the time.

Then, perhaps, there'd be a shot of the gang at the zoo feeding flamingos.  Marsh, here after known as Swamp, would be looking into the camera with strait, dark brown shoulder length hair, Lennon-specs and a cheesy smile.  He'd be wearing a white U2 Joshua Tree t-shirt.  Andrea would be bending over the metal bar, wearing a bright blue t-shirt and blue and black checkered Capris talking to a flamingo directly below her. Here, her hair would be auburn and straight, but it could be any color from neon orange to purple.  Each scene it will be different.  The movie will end with Andrea as Nancy Sinatra, only she will be dressed like Sinead O'Connor and will have a shaved head.  She won't like that.  She won't like any of it.  Jim, I'm not sure what Jim does.  He wears a concert shirt of the Police.  It has the arms ripped off.  He's showing off his muscle.  Oh, I got it, he stands next to Andrea, but faces towards the camera while she faces away.  He looks down at the concrete wearing dark sun-glasses, the type Buddy Holly would wear if Buddy Holly wore sunglasses.  He's counting ants on the ground.  He's up to twenty-four.  I'm not sure why.

The Barking Strings are never sure why.

Phil is pelting the flamingos with bread.  Or, rather Phil, here after known as Glasses, is trying to pelt the flamingos with bread.  Bread doesn't make very good stones.  He looks like Neil Young.  He will hate that.

He doesn't hate Neil Young.  That will soon become very apparent.  But, he will hate that he looks like Neil Young.

Lucy, she now prefers to be called Lucia, will be telling Phil, I mean Glasses, to stop it, that he's mean.  She is the 1960s counter-culture type--two braided pony tails, leather headband, tie-died t-shirt, flowing skirt and all.

Me.  Well, I'm skinny with a white dress shirt that is big and sloppy.  I wear blue-gray dress slacks and canvas vans.  I have a bit of mullet, and if I looked cool, I'd look a bit like Cy Curnin of the Fixx (see video below), but I'm not cool.  I'm a geek with a great unused mind instead.

I hold up a copy of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, open the cover, and show the author's note to the audience.  The camera zooms in on the following:

I am not I; thou art not he or she;

they are not they.

--E.W.

There is a black and white shot of U2 by the Mississippi River.  "Heartland" plays.  Scene fades. 

    

The Soundtrack of One Life out of 108 Billion, Entry 8: "All By Myself" by Eric Carmen and "Over & Over" by Fleetwood Mac

Something happened in eighth grade.  I'm not sure what or why.  It wasn't all good.  It wasn't all bad.  But I was somehow sucked from a primarily external world into a primarily internal world--from doing to observing.  I noticed deeply the world around--the lights, the shadows, the stark winter light on blue boned trees.  Everything gained a richness, a complexity, a texture I'd never noticed, never knew.  It was quite startling.  I didn't know how to react.  I didn't know if anyone else experienced this new world.  I felt awkward, a bit like an alien.

Although in many ways I was less mature than other kids my age, definitely more socially awkward, in some ways I all of the sudden was an old soul.   I understood the adult world more than my own.  In music, I was drawn to songs with adult themes, like Eric Carmen's "All By Myself".

Outwardly, I still tried to be the kid I knew how to be, but it didn't work.  I felt fake, and I think I seemed fake to others.  All of the sudden, everything was hard.  And yet, there was a clarity, a complexity I saw in life that thrilled me.

I was interested in layers.  In the natural world, I loved the layers of leaves along the canyon bottom at Dry Creek--how on the top layer they'd be crisp and crunchy; and in the layer below, the leaves would be soft and partially eaten with little squares nibbled out between the fibers; and finally, the later below them would be leaf-skeletons among potato bugs.  Below that would be rich, black dirt.

In music, I liked layers also.  Fleetwood Mac's Tusk album had that.  "Over and Over" had the complexity in sound and lyrics I was looking for.

A richness, a Rembrandt brown in tones, an uncertain hope in the lyrics--hoping something might be, but knowing it just as likely might not be.  Hoping, yearning, over and over.

I don't know what caused it.  I loved a girl, but I'd loved her since fifth grade.

No dramatic event happened in my life.

My family was good, stable.

It's almost as if I was invaded by a knowledge unwarranted.

That person who moved in during 8th Grade has been who I've remained the rest of my life.  I haven't necessarily done much with him other than that I've become a little more comfortable letting the world know it's alright to see shadows in the rain.

But I live in a complex world, a world hope and broken dreams, of love and heartache.  Not because that is my reality necessarily.  But because I see the shadow lives around me--those pretending because not pretending is too damn scary.  Because of this, I don't have a lot of tolerance for those who have no empathy.

But, I'm not sure they can help it.  I too once lived in a world without shadows.  I'm glad that for whatever reason, complexity was thrust upon me.  It's not necessarily an ingredient for success, but it is an ingredient for humanity.