TYLER STATE PARK, CAMP SITE 126 | TYLER, TEXAS | Friday, April 9, 2010 - All trees, forested, here on a low hill shot through with light and shadow, above a lake full of bass. Birds all wound up, calling, singing. Spondees of talk, voices of people unseen, on next knoll over. 43 degrees. Toes frozen, comfy as comfy. Already cooked delicious breakfast. Scrambled eggs with spinach, bodine, grapefruit juice and fresh coffee.
You do have to keep keepin on. Just the way driving, the roads are always linear. They’re necessarily anchored to the ground. No buoys. No float. But the mind continually disengages, unhinges, rises above the road and the car, through the windshield, to configure things, to wrangle a convergence.
Each day you configure again, reconfigure. On the road it is more so. It is naked, stripped down to the tangible, even if almost every sense of meaning, whether momentary – a shape approaching, what is it, a mirage of sky cutting into the road – or more fully realized, approaching meta, approaching narrative closure, comes from the symbolic. Everything is so literal on the road, so corporeal. Remaking home each day in a different place. Filling the tank and emptying the tank. Each car passing begins to take on more significance, amount almost to a transient neighbor. And still, like everything else, gone in a flash. The road is theoretical timeless stasis in unending relentless linear movement. So you have all the grains on the conveyer belt, and nothing else. And you are just driving, looking. And from this we make up this story of a voyage, of transubstantiation.
Leaving New Orleans, two days ago now, we ran aground on the brutal. One thing after the other. Not until afternoon. The morning was beautiful, easy, walking the streets, sazeracs and pate at napoleon house, the spring breeze blowing through. Café au lait and beignets at Café Du Monde. Easy. Good. Happy. Then rush hour compounded by bridge under construction. Then crap strip mall roads compounded by an accident. Then a campground on the map, not being here on earth. Out of the way, along the flawed path, leading to nothing. The heartache part.
Related thematic: There was a cyclist, back in the mid-1990s in San Francisco, who was struck by a bus in the early afternoon and killed. I was on the F-Market, a street car, headed home from my first office job, the former lobsterman stuffing envelopes, etc. Word of the fatal accident spread through the street car. I overheard a husky business type, easily, he probably hoped to be heard. He said, “Raw deal. Guy works all morning. Gets hit by a bus. Doesn’t get paid. What a waste.”
I knew the statement had some beauty to it, even if it was flat wrong. And it was this, at least for me: actually better to die in the afternoon, even if you don’t get paid. Because every morning, most workday mornings anyway, we get up full of sturm and drang, everything seems mountainous and unusurpable. To die in a morning would be to die with an unnecessarily elevated heart rate. But by afternoon, most often, things have settled in. We’ve reconfigured the mountain into a low knoll. The lake is in sight. It is only this succession of steps down to water and a swim, in. If you can, die in the afternoon. When the light is softer, when the day has warmed you into taking off all the grandeur we’ve been taught.
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After escaping the traffic of the outer rings of New Orleans, we made it to a Motel 6 outside Lafayette. We were exhausted, not even hungry, but we ordered a pizza anyway, carnal, full with convenient bourgeouis shame.
Adrienne called her friend Amanda, and I listened to the story of New Orleans. It was all about the traffic. About the heartache. The peace of the late morning, the sazeracs and café au lait, the streets and the early street musicians - this time, the morning was usurped by the travails of the afternoon. The ease had not been enough. I asked why she hadn’t mentioned the good things. The good along with the bad. “Because I’m negative.” Which of course she isn’t. And I didn’t mean to press either. But I wanted to say it out loud, for the record.
She was talking about wanting to go home, to finally again be home. Of course that was then. You try not to make big decisions in low moments. And this morning, we awoke in the tent in the cold in this place so good, in Texas of all places. When we crossed into Texas, on Rt. 79, we expected the earth to go scorched and brown. But just the opposite. It has gone more wildflower, green hills and curving two lane roads, black cows against fields of yellow mustard grass.
We’d had a fire last night. I’d forgotten how good it is to live, however briefly, out of a cooler in the woods. With our strange foodstuffs, what we could find. With our lanterns. Our makeshift assortment of bowls and silverware, keeping track of the flashlight, the sound, so deep in my gut, of a tent zipper, zipping open the tent entry. Then, after the meal, sitting down in the fold-out canvas chairs. The one-match fire I’d already constructed, with paper from a Texas real estate mag. The wood, a hardwood from a bundle outside a package store. A flick of the lighter, the one match. Going, flickering up. Licking from paper to twig to branch to split log. All ventilated, each with its own space, to pull in the night air. There is nothing like the architecture of a camp fire.
sldkfs;ldfj;asdlf*end*
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