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“Like a ball at the top of
a fountain, the human head pivots on its animal backbone,
the mind a turning knot of thought and dream on the
end of a liquid spear of living animals.” -Paul Shepard
It landed one year to the day after the completion
of his little cabin.
When Blue first saw it, it was but a shadow— obese
and still, cast down from the peak of the roof he had
only recently sealed, the one he depended upon for collecting
the life-sustaining rain. The shadow seemed somehow
unnatural, unaffected by the solar powered Turkish dance
music vibrating from the speakers inside. It appeared
listless, unmoving, a portent of things to come. Blue
headed out of his door with the deliberately pronounced
steps, unconcealed movement and brash gait of his evolved
kind, fully expecting to spook the sopoforic shadow
into revealing its identity in a flash of disappearing
fur or feather.
But still it remained glued in place, like a decorative
plastic weather vane. Blue looked up to see an unusual
creature, gray and white, and not completely unlike
the animate mourning doves who nightly sang him to sleep,
the ones whose wings literally whistled as they cut
slices from the morning air. A fat rock-dove perhaps,
stilled by the exertion of distant migrations? Or bed-ridden,
foot-ridden, by some hidden wound, a hunters shotgun
pellet doing its leaden work beneath those pewter feathers?
Finally he noticed the cause of its indifference and
sloth, an infliction worse than any bullet: a bright
blue ring of plastic around one leg, a collared foot
from which a great, invisible tether stretched out and
held it fast. A banded pigeon!
But where did it come from? What inconsequential
message did it carry from one sedentary hobbyist to
another? And what magnetic confusion had led it to the
top of Black Mountain and the water troughs of Blue's
cabin? He wondered if, like him, this could be a bird
in the process of escaping pigeon-holes, a tufted rebel
of the air, a vagabond, an outcast. He wanted to believe
it was a messenger who by some vagary of experience
or genetics would no longer take orders. He grimaced
as it dribbled the first of many pigeon puddles onto
the roof he drank from, then went back to work on his
painting.
It was easy to forget the hapless bird amidst the
scents and colors of the oil-paints on his palette.
The canvas seemed to raise its back like a cat at the
approach of his wet paintbrush. He’d always start with
the grays and browns at the base of the mountains, filled
in the darker areas beneath prominent cheekbones, gave
weight to the lifting clouds.
Then came the medium tones, the different greens
and blues that defined forest and sky, the gold that
trims a maiden’s dress or the scales on a dragon’s thigh.
He finished with the brightest of several whites— in
this case, highlighting a pair of knowing eyes. With
that final gesture, a figure seemed to come to life:
a redheaded woman full of love.... and full of fight.
A sudden beating of wings drew him out of his reverie.
Blue turned to see the pigeon laboring to get a grip
on his windowsill— like a a tardy participant at an
overeater's workshop, anxious to find a seat. It leaned
against the dirty screen, anxious to come in. Here was
a bird that, like much of human kind, sought refuge
and solace in the regularity of a cage. It made him
think of the prison he'd been released from some years
earlier, of the ones who would never get out, and those
who kept going back. And this alone was enough to drive
him into a rage.
He rushed at the window, snarling, teeth-grinding,
clapping and hissing— but the pigeon only fluttered
a few feet to the ground, squatted, bobbed, rolled from
one foot to the other.
"Doesn't the stupid thing know I'm here? What
about the foxes and coons?
Haven't you ever heard of squab, fried in grease,
de-boned on a platter?
You’re an affront to nature itself!” He lurched back
outside, leaped at the ground-dwelling entree, shouting
"Fly! Fly, you bastard, fly!," but it only
managed the distance from dirt to gutter again, immediately
dropping another load of pet-food rations into this
channel for scarce drinking water.
He felt the way he did in a bar, when faced by unfeeling
drunks, when his defensive growls went unheeded and
more assertive measures were called for. He wanted to
kill it now, to exact revenge not only for his water
supply, but as retaliation against the creeping domesticity,
the voluntary subjugation, the wretched self-victimization
of his time. In the pigeon Blue saw an obsessive humanity
crowding into lines at welfare aviaries, queuing up
to receive checks for meaningless or destructive work,
pressing into plastic covered easy chairs in front of
the millions of lobotomizing “interactive” sets effortlessly
sucking their brains out. In its unblinking countenance
he saw the unfeeling ones who read the morning paper's
coverage of pollution and war, tearless and still.
In its fattened shadow he saw the silhouette of a
priggish general, issuing commands to poor, mostly black
enlisted men. Here was the picture of baited simplicity,
the malady of mindlessness, the symbol of a glad retreat
from freedom and responsibility.
Still, he couldn’t bring himself to kill it. Perhaps
if he fed it, it would find the strength to return to
the buffeting winds, and find its way back to whatever
distant city it came from.
Blue had never learned how to cook only enough for
himself. His batter generally grew until it became pancakes
enough for the children he’d never had. A stew swelled
to sate the hunger of absent lovers. As a result, a
pot of short grain brown rice languished in the north
side pantry. He sat the lid aside, and slid the slightly
molding rice on the roof.
The bird that had showed no interest in the clouds—
no love for the smell of oceans on the breeze— at least
took a liking to a missionary meal. It wobbled over,
and seemed to fall into the rice, quickly refilling
its fat cells with rancid carbohydrates.
Blue had made a cardinal mistake: the jailhouse food
was too darn good.
Like grizzlies spoiled to the garbage dumps of Yellowstone,
the pigeon would return again and again unless shot
by the park ranger. It was now one of the recidivists,
that large percentage of convicts who return to their
houses of incarceration again and again. Like them,
it too easily traded adventure and choice for the certainty
of acceptance and control.
For two weeks the feces thickened on the rain spout,
capped the roof-peak with ammonia snows, whitewashed
the window ledges where the bird spent hours pushing
against the mesh, until finally Blue could take it no
more. Finding a smooth, rounded rock, he fit it into
the leather pocket of a slingshot, and brought the bird
to Earth.
Coyote Blue suffered a flood of mixed feelings. Imagining
its toxic urban diet, he didn’t dare use the meat— violating
his pledge never to kill anything that he wouldn’t eat.
And he could take no pride in hanging up its bland,
servile plumage. While the songbirds continued to sing,
he picked up its inert mass. He watched the slow closing
of its dulled eyes, felt the body heat wicked away by
the winds it abjured.
The band around its ankle was like a constricting
band around Blue's neck. The unintelligible code of
letters and numbers stamped on it were the mark of an
industrial devil, the left-brain monarchy that assigns
digits to membership cards and impressed automobile
plates, to kids’
grades in school and their tax forms thereafter.
Here was the plastic wrist-bracelet cinched tight by
the police at anti-nuke rallies, the polymer ties of
body bags, the toe tags on unnamed AIDS victims after
they die.
He pulled out his knife and, so as not to mark the
leg, carefully cut it away. He longed for an address,
so that he could return the stiffening pigeon to its
"owners," or drive however many hundreds of
miles to rail at them for reducing an embodiment of
liberation to a banded, groveling mutant addicted to
its confinement.
Instead, he simply tossed it from the cliffs— so
hard and far that he could not hear it when it hit,
returning to his cabin under the stifling weight of
its shadow.
***
“Part of the joy comes from the consciousness of
our intimate relation to something bigger than our own
ego, something which has endured for millions of years
. The requisite care flows naturally if the self is
widened and deepened so that protection of free life
is felt and conceived of as protection of our very selves.”
-Arne Naess
Years after her first quest, Kiva still tended the
section of river between the sacred cliffs and the giant
pine, a servant to the needs of a diverse and inspirited
canyon. Whereas the women of the Sweet Medicine People
once spent their summers planting and tending corn along
the Rio Frisco, Kiva gave her warm months over to revegitating
the canyon with missing native species. The red willow
was some of the first to make a come-back, sprouting
waist high as soon as the protective fence went up.
Stalks chewed down to the ground by cows continued
to draw nourishment through an extensive and untouched
root system, propelling new growth skyward the first
full season free of predation. To hasten their comeback,and
to fortify the bare riverbanks against the regular floods,
Kiva carefully cut branches from the established bushes
and stuck them at intervals to grow in the damp soil.
Wildflower seeds from the year before were planted by
poking a hole in the ground with a stick, barely bending
over to drop two kernels in each waiting womb. While
not quite the same pleasure as a garden, these trustees
required no watering, weeding or spraying for insects.
Success in the reintroduction of natives was a result
of the species' built-in relationship with their home
environment, in reciprocal balance with that which it
fed, and that which it fed upon.
Kiva took great pleasure in these labors of love.
The hard part was figuring out what species belonged,
and which were invaders. Some of the exotics came across
the Bering Straits with the first human arrivals to
the Americas. Mullein, with its soft, fuzzy leaves,
seemed like an asset, a benign presence, though certainly
not indigenous. Others, like horehound and the Tamarisk
tree, quickly dominated any ecosystem they sailed to,
colonizing foreign soils, choking the life out of native
populations. Like Columbus and Cortez, these botanical
opportunists were adept at making the transition from
guest to master.
Tamarisk, or European salt cedar, posed no threat
to its home turf, with natural checks on its population
spread. But once released into North America where no
such checks existed, it became the single dominant species
of the riparian zones. Fast growing, herbicide resistant,
and depositing mineral salts on the ground beneath their
canopy they soon smothered the willows and immature
cottonwoods, filling the ravines and river bottoms with
their billowing pink blossoms.
Beautiful blossoms, Kiva had to admit. There were
none at all on the Frisco when she first moved there,
but now they were beginning to crop up amongst the beeweed.
Gorgeous blossoms, in fact. But she was easily jerked
back to reality, her admiration tempered by the memory
of the Rio Grande River turned into single-species forest,
a vast jungle of nothing but Tamarisk, with too many
of the same kind of flower, too much of the same uniform
color. She recalled the sense of terror elicited by
the view from the Isleta bridge: a veritable holocaust
of beauty.
For months she struggled with what to do, until the
slender trees were well over her head. Wasn't it enough
that there was anything green at all growing, after
so many generations of die-back? And besides, didn't
all plants, like all people, have migrants for ancestors?
When she went down to dig them up, they felt as smooth
and sentient as any creature, as vulnerable in the face
of hominid attack as other plants were in the face of
the cedar's territorial forays. In the end, it was the
river that decided, and the river that pulled them from
their roots, succumbing to a rare Fall flood that left
most of the willows and cottonwoods intact.
She wasn't as fortunate with the horehound. It looked
so lovely at first, in patches of short ground-cover
that smelled sweetly when walked on, growing close to
the yurt of the woman whose woolen socks bore the fuzzy
seeds to the edge of their frontier. Kiva twice made
up a batch of old-fashioned horehound cough drops out
of the aromatic leaves, and blessed their gift of medicine.
It wasn't long however, before they'd formed a solid
mantle of yard-high vegetation too thick to walk through.
Where there had once been desert mariposa and soaptree
yucca, now there were horehound. Prickle-poppy and evening
primrose, nettle and mallow, fish-hook cactus and fleabane
were pushed out of their own neighborhoods, denied access
to soil and sun, garroted by horehound mobsters in a
hostile takeover. Kiva felt she had no choice but to
strike back in defense of diversity, accepting the hands-on
responsibility of pulling them up, one plant at a time,
one vegetal scream after another.
The whole concept of "environmental restoration"
was troublesome for Kiva. As beneficial at it could
be to rebuild salmon streams and replant clearcut hills,
the very notion of restoration implied that humans ultimately
knew best and could play God with the rest of creation.
The other side of the argument was that humans had forever
affected the world around them, and that only by owning
that role could they take responsibility for a more
healthy stewardship. As valid as the "good managers"
approach might have been, the same rationalization for
wilderness restoration was used to explain away "selective
logging" in the Preserves. If she were to believe
humans knew best for the planet, she'd have to accept
the "cultural significance" of urban sprawl,
the "magnificence" of mass starvation, the
"crowning glory" of world wars, and weaponry
with the combined power to destroy all life on Earth
a hundred times over. No, she preferred the humility
of not knowing what's best, and the studied act of destroying
the horehound grew into a glaring contradiction.
Replanting seemed strange enough, but the results
grew all around her, a jungle of Sonoran desert, riparian,
and coniferous species. While she cooled off in the
river bees flew from flower to flower, exploring each
one's varied shape, familiarizing themselves in the
most erotic way with the smells and tastes of a diversified
ecosystem. Walking back to her place she moved through
a field of white flowered bind-weed, stepped around
sacred datura and over woolly loco, stopping to smell
the small purple gems hanging from the heron-bills and
phacelia. The yurt itself was covered with Virginia
creeper, its bitter berries swelling in the midday heat.
Kiva pushed a dangling vine out of the way in order
to open the fabric door wide on its tiny hinges. She
was feeling down, and it showed in the disarray of her
abode, the thick stoneware dishes stacked in the wash
basin, a pile of clothes arcing like a sullied rainbow
of fabric, dirt and leaves thick on the entryway rug.
"Sometimes I don't know whether to sweep it,
or water it," she thought to herself, grabbing
a broom with one hand and tossing the clothes on the
bed with the other. If disorder was a sign of her distress,
her dis-ease, her lack-of-ease, then cleaning and ordering
her home could also effect its cure. The only approach,
when the time finally came, was to make every stroke
of the broom a spin of the Tibetan Buddhist's prayer
wheel, the washing of clothes a sensuous purification
rite, their folding being the care given altar cloths,
the preparation of sacred vestments. Even doing the
dishes became a ritual of respect. Since she admired
the beauty of the blue and brown bowls she ate from,
since she knew and hugged and bartered with the old
woman who made them by hand, she could honor each individual
piece with hot peppermint baths in her antique sink.
Kiva always cooked the way she sometimes cleaned—
slowly, meticulously, reverently making sensuous contact
with the life form being prepared for her consumption.
Long before it reached her mouth any piece of flesh,
leaf of plant, or ground seed grain had already exchanged
amorous messages with the receptors in her nostrils,
her fingertips, her eyes.
She viewed eating as a form of interspecies love
making. One could say she really got into her food,
relating to its textures and temperatures as well as
to its colors and smells. She massaged her meat like
the neck of a sweetheart, and gave conscious death to
her vegetables, the way a mother cat might end the lives
of a few of her kittens, so that the rest can be filled
and survive. And like Healing Woman, she knew that food
was to be savored.
Every bite Kiva took was a sampling of a communion
wafer made of the finest biscuit, the taking into herself
of the body of God. Every swallow of precious rainwater
signified the blood of God's creation sating the thirst
of Earth's children. She doused the kerosene lanterns
and lit the candles on the table, preferring a moment
of silence to spoken words in the glorification of spirit-within-matter,
the divinity of food. Every meal became a liturgy expressed
in sacramental flavors, a service made up of chunks
of apple and crusty bread, homemade wine and spoonfuls
of white gravy. To maximize the experience, she’d place
the toast in her mouth butter side down, increasing
the amount of taste making direct contact with the tongue.
She swished fresh-squeezed orange juice in a circle
before swallowing it, working each molecule of orangeness
around to every sector of the mouth. She would continue
to honor each bite by paying attention to the sensations
as they eased down her throat, warmed the lining of
her stomach, and finally moved through her bowels and
bladder to fertilize the three square feet beneath the
outdoor toilet The result of such physical prayer was
sacred earth, ready to give birth to more sacred life,
more food for the birds and bugs, deer and people that
still inhabited its surface.
Her mind drifted to the death of Healing Woman, occurring
but a few weeks before. The elder was crushed, "beyond
recognition" they said. A young man, with a bottle
of vodka in one hand, used the other to steer his brand
new pickup into a car driven by Healing Woman's son.
It was reported that her boy, a heavy-set thirty-three
year old purporting to have zero interest in his mother's
spiritual practice, had oddly escaped with only superficial
injuries.
Kiva looked around the room, for some object or purpose
to save her from the sadness, a sadness that threatened
to overtake her. Her eyes came to rest on the black
button nose of an old fur wrap, and the flickering candlelight
reflected in their centers. She felt sorry for the fox,
trapped and clubbed in the Canadian wilds— or more likely
"farmed" for its pelt, euthanized with an
electric rod shoved up its rectum. Either way its skin
was tanned in chemicals and then sewn together with
nylon thread by disinterested workers, all to drape
over the pasty shoulders of some 1950’s socialite. She
imagined the indignity of being paraded in front of
movie and party-goers, and otherwise hung in a stuffy
suburban closet above dozens of high heeled shoes and
packages of perfumed moth balls. Kiva met this fox as
it lay curled up on a rack next to a pair of Mexican
straw hats, below a configuration of dangling plastic
belts at a Santa Fe thrift store. Who knows how long
it lay there under those blinding shop lights, before
being shoplifted by an eco-anarchist and brought here
to the wilderness landscape of its foxen dreams.
The fox had been Healing Woman's totem....
This time it was the waning moon that caught her
attention, the shadows it cast seeming to pool on her
face like rainwater on New Mexico rimrock, forming satisfied
reservoirs of liquid soul. And like water, the shadows
would be lifted skyward by the rising sun. She picked
up the only instrument she played, and dutifully dusted
off its shaft. It was an old silver flute, a Geweinhardt
model peddled to the mother of a girl who hated organized
activities. She never learned the half-time marches
of her high school band. More than music, what she learned
to play were rivers.
When Kiva touched the shiny metal to her lips it
seemed to liquefy, with whole rivers pouring forth through
its ancient course. She played the slow, laconic melodies
of the Smith, the racing staccato of the upper Colorado,
and the deep swells of the Columbia. When she played
the Rio Frisco, she played it with an accent. Not Spanish
exactly, but a blend— with the abbreviated consonants
of the Apaches, and the guttural sounds of the Pueblo.
They could make everything that wasn't a threat sound
like laughing. At the death of a loved one, they could
make every noise sound like crying.
In pain as in bliss, Kiva only knew how to play the
flute one way. It was the way of the shaman creating
the world. The Siberian's world of color against the
backdrop of unmarked snow, notes balanced against Arctic
silence. The sounds of unrehabilitated Bushmen of the
Kalahari dancing antelope through small ivory flutes,
tiny sonic hooves marking the cadence of nomadic spirit.
Hers were the melodies of love-sick tribal women piercing
the sky with mysterious, haunting sounds. The melodies
of any shameless shaman anywhere, heralding forth from
the cliffsides, coaxing mighty echoes from the precarious
limits of sanity, of night. The music of the muse, the
music of the moon.
Kiva moved out into the open air, faced the direction
of the Kachina Cliffs and began to blow— first an airy,
windy sound, and then a bright note carrying all the
way to the mountain and back. She released her body,
her control, her direction and form, through the core
of the tube and out its many holes. With the wiggle
of a finger, the tones shimmied and collapsed upon themselves,
then rose like the notes of the Phoenix reborn in a
celebration of hope. Once more she blew, stretching
the final sound all the way from present to past, and
past to future, until the final echoes faded away into
the night.
Kiva turned towards the yurt, her flute at her side,
then pulled to a sudden stop. She tried to steady her
breathing, strained to make out the sounds echoing down
the canyon in answer. Once, twice, three times they
rang out, a note higher each time, then trailing off
at the end. Kiva smiled and wiped the tear from her
eye. She had been heard— and sometimes being heard was
enough.
That night, Kiva again dreamed the dreams that left
her unsettled. She dreamed of making love, of fighting
and dying. She dreamed of a blackness that gave birth,
and it held her tight to its chest until late in the
morning. The first thing she did was to throw on a skirt
and head in the direction of the sounds from the night
before. They seemed to originate just around the bend
from the sweat lodge, at the far side of the cliffs.
She knew that there was nothing to see, no flute player
with a pointed woven cap to meet her by the river. Still,
she was compelled to stand where the flute-player would
have stood, and seek to feel his presence.
Kiva needed a challenge to feel alive, needed mystery
to feel her place in the "all." Like the waters
of the Frisco, she was only sated by cycles. Both craved
the deepest crevasse, the constant touch of canyon,
the excitement of the next turn, the eventual taste
of ocean, and the heated lift sunwards. She valued every
mad dash down the rapids, ending in the dissolution
of mist, disappearing in a wide arched path into the
colors of rainbows. And like the river, she knew that
each ending is but a beginning. She crossed through
the shallows, and up onto a sandbank in the middle,
her eyes fixed on the details of the cliffs.
It was then that it hurt her.
Kiva stumbled and fell to her knees, her foot flashing
fire from a cut in the underside of the arch. "How
stupid," she thought, before looking around for
the source of her pain, the evidence of her lapse in
awareness. Then she spotted it, a jagged piece of wood
sticking out of the sand at an angle, probably a branch
deposited by the last high water. She watched it without
getting up, the way she watched rattlesnakes in her
path, giving the danger time and room to move away.
But there was something strange about the stick,
beckoning her to hobble closer and try to make some
sense out of the geometric patterns of its bark. Pulling
it from the ground, she examined its cracked and split
stem, the primitive yucca fiber wrapping around the
middle, and the evenly spaced holes along its length.
Kiva rose to her full height, with the ancient flute
held lightly in her hand. She looked to the hole it
left in the ground, steadily filling with river water,
its sides gently caving in. She looked to the Kachina
Cliffs high above her, then to her home in the distance.
And then, to herself.
***
“ I wanted to tell him that I like his mind, a mind
that passes through raw, unconventional territory and
reposes itself on unresting surfaces.
It is nowhere any of us wants to live, but it is
there -- all the places we do not venture that themselves
venture forth without us, living and dying, mysteriously
part of this human race that we are a part of but would
like to believe ourselves immune to.” -Marcia
Clay (on the '60's poet Richard Brautigan, the
night of his death)
People forever loved to talk about what they didn't
understand, and so they would talk volumes about Coyote
Blue. Over the years they'd alternately pegged him as
a crazed casualty of some bitter war, a dope grower,
a misanthrope or Chiapas libertista. The nervous chuckles
that followed each new assessment were the mark of listeners
comforted by their unchallenged similarities, basking
in the false security of the herd and the safety inherent
in sameness. In the 21st Century it might be okay to
look different, to wear unique costumes over a persona.
But to be truly internally different, and then to honestly
to act out those differences, was considered dangerous,
crazy, insane. One could act any way they wanted, so
long as it was obvious to the gossiping observers that
one's end goal was the same as theirs: money, security,
and the insulation of psychic consensus.
Many of the things about Blue's life seemed to threaten
theirs. His actions, no matter how seemingly ordinary,
served the methods and goals of magic. His every move
and gesture rejected conformity, assailed Cartesian
rationality, and threatened the plastic underpinnings
of artificial constructs. Blue was piquant antimatter
to their pernicious gray-matter.
He was fully twenty hard dirt miles from their gathering
places, yet always the hot topic of breakfast discourse.
Only one sheriff's threat to enforce the 1870 law against
cohabitation and the game warden running away with the
county assessor's wife got more docket time at Aunt
Ellie's Village Cafe. The proudly simple traded barbs
in Sear's mail order overalls around the feed store's
pot-belly stove. The Village godfathers told the same
lies in Spanish, the language of the second wave of
Mogollon Country conquest. Their Indian halves related
to this latest coyote myth, the living renegade, the
Joker, the wild-man on the top of Black Mountain.
The Señoras clustering at the Post Office-cum-laundromat
hid their daughters when he came, giggling about his
"stamina" as he loaded his heavy supplies
to leave. Husbands watched him the way a clipped parakeet
watches the free-flying birds outside. If he was some
people's wettest dream, he was others’ most vivid nightmare.
They were, like most, a people too often inside. Even
in Frisco or Villa Nueva abutting the protected Mogollon
Wilderness, most folks lived their lives in cafes and
cars, bungalows and bars.
The owner of the local bar loved Blue, but didn’t
dare let on in front of her customers. For years she'd
swung her smile around like a Spanish machete, rubbed
her mammoth bosom on the fidgeting boys from Stone's
Sawmill. Now the customers were spending credits from
their International Debit Card, existing on the legislated
handouts of the modern consumerist society. So to appease
her constituents she let them hang a sign above the
counter that read, "Spotted Owls, Fried In Exxon
Oil." This ubiquitous little owl had historically
been the target of a great deal of animosity. Pissed
off about the logging cutbacks legislated to preserve
the endangered bird, loggers sawed down their nesting
trees and stomped the newborn chicks under their cleated
boots.
The owl's downfall, and the logger's downfall as
well, had been the increasingly automated suburbanization
of every inch of scenic land.
Bird and Cowboy, done in by the asphalt that World-dollars
buy, living on in Virtual Reality Westerns and Nature
shows. The species was long gone by this time, but it
still survived as a potent symbol of what the locals
saw as the intrusive policies of federal and global
bureaucracies. For Blue, it was another symbol of the
vanishing natural world, and a murdered guardian of
the crack between the worlds.
You could tell the Earthies from the Straights by
their hat styles and brands of beer. The ex-loggers
and men of the rancheros wore either baseball caps or
cowboy hats with the brims curled up on the sides, and
dosed themselves on what the Earthies called "Curse
Lite." In turn, the tree-huggers distinguished
themselves by wearing their caps with the bills facing
backwards, and bent the rims of their Stetsons down
more like old mule skinners than John Wayne, drinking
the best imported Mexican brews when they could afford
anything at all. A blind man might have more trouble
telling them apart, groping in the fog of his affliction
for some definitive difference between them, with Earthie
and Straight alike lambasting the centralists and World
Systems. They all pined away for a wilder West, and
promised to die for what was left of their disappearing
values.
The good ol’ boys exchanged theories about Blue's
moods and motives over a billiard break, and anteed
up bets on what he was up to next. But for that matter,
so did his compatriots in the struggle for the Earth,
some stowed far away in various mountain states (but
drinking, instead, Sierra Suds or Goat Michael's infamous
home brew). Friend and foe alike tried to second guess
the Joker. Why did he insist on living so far away from
everything? Why the transportive paintings, the musical
suffrage and rabid primitivism? What wound the tensile
springs of such a biological time-bomb, the vanquished
wolves' revenge, the pacing Canid man?
All were poised to expose the "wolf in grandma's
bed," to debunk the furry tooth-fairy, show the
arrogant loner for the indulgent asshole "he really
is." They stayed up late Christmas Eve to catch
him masquerading as Santa. They peeked through the Venetian
blinds of his mind to try to bust him breaking sexual
taboos. They patted him down for signs of a tail. When
they couldn't translate Blue's howls, they made it all
up.
They had him doing it all to get laid. For excitement.
For whatever hidden agenda that might motivate them.
They looked to Blue, as to the ice cap on Black Mountain
in January, seeking a wilder reflection of themselves.
***
“Spirit animals. Anasazi. Mayan. Viking. Celtic.
African. Cro-Magnon.
Zen. Witch. We can all claim genetic authority for
the return to our roots. From many different, dispersed
places we all arrive now at one place: between birth
and death, what is truly worth living for. The answer’s
in place. That place is Earth.”-Barbara Mor
It had often been said that “there’s no going home”—
but a belief in miracles could make all the difference.
Such belief was the oxygen that kept Llyn alive.
As an unsure child, as the gawky adolescent at the far
edges of the prom, what kept her going was a belief
in angels and fairies, in a Prince Charming that would
one day see through her shyness and sweep her off her
feet, and in the absolute certainty of miracles! Llyn
believed, against all evidence, that even if the birds
ate every crumb left to mark her trail— that she could
still find her way back home.
Not literally, of course. She’d been moved from one
army base to another depending on her father’s latest
promotion, and knew the names of theaters in a dozen
different towns. Nor could she return to the place of
her earliest memories, where pink baby bottles were
supplanted by plastic tea sets and pretend microwaves.
If her idea of home was the tract house with the stucco
walls and the yellowed grass, she was in for a surprise.
It was never how one remembered it. Even if she knew
the town, she’d never recognize the metropolis.
It wasn’t enough to locate a familiar spot on the
map and hunt down the appropriate off-ramp, ignoring
the malls ever under construction. Lots full of new
look-alike transports obscured the old familiar landmarks
(no land anymore, only marks). Even if some reference
point survived, a hill too tough to be completely leveled,
a church preserved by the Historical Society (exactly
two and a half blocks east of the house, and you passed
it twice a day while being driven to school and back),
the land would remain a stranger, remade, “renovated.”
Even if you could find a high spot from which to judge
the altered terrain, even if you could pull off a digital
survey of this alien movie set, hold the surveyor’s
mast up on the giving tops of the parked cars, shoot
a radio-line through the discount store and the waiting
room of the MinitLube, and determine the exact spot
where you’d slept beneath cowboy and castle print covers,
where you remembered the wild things living in forests
beneath the bed, it was still true. You can’t go home
again.
That is to say, it wouldn’t look the way you remembered
home feeling.
There’s likely to be fuel station trade magazines
and non-dairy creamers where your comic books were once
stacked. The familiar walk down to the hall to the bathroom
may cross the floor of a hair salon, or point through
the walls of several subsidized housing units, deep
in the bowels of a giant forty-story complex. Reach
for the light switch in the dark, and put your hand
on smelly men in old uniforms. Every direction would
involve moving through the unfamiliar, and arousing
the suspicions of strangers.
And it was never really her home anyway. It was just
one of a long string of rentals, in suburbs one step
ahead of urbanization: part of the twentieth century
history of forests cleared for farms, farms split up
into ranchettes, ranchettes turned into subdivisions
which then gave way to high-rise factories or condominiums.
Llyn’s real home remained hidden in the unlit sections
of her yard outside. With leprechauns and sprites, roots
and bears. With things free and wild.
Llyn never forgot the time the “Wild Womyn’s Drum
Circle” was disrupted by a group of Native Americans
concerned with what they saw as the theft of their rituals,
a form of cultural genocide. While drums were a universal
heritage, and only one of those they used duplicated
any AmerIndian design, the Bloods were unimpressed with
the claims for their Celtic and African roots. She remembered
turning away in tears, knowing that there was truth
to what they said, knowing that she should always bow
to the wisdom of the original peoples of this Turtle
Island. She still felt shamed, when she recalled the
epithet “Wannabe,” tossed out in the middle of an attempt
at appeasement and search for common ground.
Her attempts to contact the spirits of this continent
were sincere, even desperate, as she struggled for signs
of instruction, a glint of some purpose beyond mere
physical and intellectual survival.
It hurt to be told to “go home,” when home was still
an idea, a generalized New Mexican ambiance sans a specific
address, a garden somewhere waiting in dormancy for
her special care. It would have fruit trees on it, and
horses, and access to the public forest. A porch swing.
Goats for cheese. Extra vegetables grown for the
deer and those bugs not eradicated by the BioPlanners,
the hedgerows left to grow as habitat for the last of
the migrating songbirds. Llyn felt pressed to find her
place, and provide them with a home-- bird numbers were
down by seventy percent since the turn of the century.
She’d give her new place a name, like Shady Acres or
Heron Gulch, and suspend it above the driveway on a
wood sign, squeaking on rusty hinges every time the
wind blew. There were less and less such places, with
all the private land developed into appendages of the
global city, and privatization of federal lands widely
viewed as the only chance for someone to buy rural land
anymore.
That would make her no better than the Pilgrims,
extending human impact at the expense of the non-human
world, Kiva often harped. Llyn felt trapped in the never-never
land of the terminally landless, moving back and forth
between the megalopolis and the undeveloped wildlands
with the three day camping limit. She found the closest
thing to sanity in Copper City, “Gateway to the Mogollon
Parkways,” and the Edgewater Cafe perched on the hundred
foot ditch. But that too was rightfully Apache land,
and the Mogollon people before them. There was a time
when it belonged to only the jaguar and trout, grizzly
and pine, before a net or arrow was ever cast across
those volcano-made lands. If home was defined as the
place one can hardly stand to leave, than she was closer
to home in the land of the scorpions than anywhere she’d
ever been in her entire life.
Somehow it was more real, even abrasively authentic,
bringing out in her a rougher and quicker presence.
In contrast, Europe seemed a setting many lives removed
from her own, with no contemporary significance. It
brought up pictures of cold oversized mansions suited
in fog, where all the furniture is done up in velvet,
and she knew that wasn’t true. Besides, how could she
possibly go “home” to any one place, when so many migrants
from so many different countries crossed sweat and semen
to create the one named Llyn? Would she return to her
Pict roots, search through its sprawling cities for
the vibrations of her English past? Or to find the birthplaces
of her ancestors in Greater Russia, a country still
skirmishing with China and the Baltic Republics, where
the oldest surviving tradition was patriarchal Orthodoxy?
Or did Llyn belong in France, now a single industrial
center, the place of origin for at least one branch
of the spreading family tree? Or what about modern Africa?
Because whether anyone admitted it or not, she knew
there had to be a genetic determinant for her slightly
flared nostrils, and the light brown skin under those
blondish strands. Did they want her to carve up her
thin body, send a foot to walk two separate shores,
an arm to be raised to the Gods of the Pyreenes, her
guts to the Caucasus, her head staked to the destiny
of the British Isles, forever looking west?
If so, her heart must remain in the Mogollon.
One by one the hundreds of Pacific and Atlantic salmon
went extinct rather than surrender the watersheds where
they were born. Such irrational behavior marked most
of Llyn’s friends, insisting on living and dying in
one place, like natives. John in Wyoming wasn’t happy
out of sight of the grass covered Big Horn mountains,
and couldn’t live without winters of ice in his beard.
The Swamp Poets seemed to need the sticky hot, and refused
concert tours that took them away from their Anza Borega.
An Ancient Ways circle in the southeast endlessly spoke
about the power of the continent’s oldest mountains,
worn and rounded over millions of years. Amigos in the
undeveloped portions of Texas made a religion out of
the desert. Stinging cholla cactus, palm sized dung
beetles, and a wealth of birds that seemed to show up
out of nowhere at dawn, or when it rained. Their loyalties
were to a place defined by its flatness and lack of
perpendicular features.
The Mogollon lay to the side of that desert, standing
tall in its assigned position of prominence. While there
were still cactus in the higher elevations, one knew
they were no longer in the desert when they hit the
first ragged line of upright trees and lifting sandstone
spires.
Rising shapes enticed by the touch of the sun or
the thrill of heights, stretched back to the Earth,
the source, the tether. The raw clay of all vertical
forms was extruded by the force science called gravity.
The horizontal lines were the product of unidirectional
winds, a kind of gravity in its own right, impelling
the sideways flexing of the molecular chains comprising
rock and wood. And the winds were themselves the offspring
between the yin and yang of lunar passion and gravitational
insistence. All things responded to this irreconcilable
force, supposedly imparted by the physics of a spinning
planet, the way the mud clings to the whirling potter’s
wheel. But it is better understood as the Gaian hand
that steadies the clay, while the other hand excites
its orbital motion. Together, they sculpted the vessels
of form containing, delineating, actualizing tree and
mountain, wild deer and the re-wilded human being.
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