Chapter 30

Drifting is a migration from a linear world that is full of neat processes and models to the road where everything happens at once. Any glue for general directions is gone.

The eco-tone is life material for metaphors where two adjacent ecosystems overlap in shadow, transparency, reflection, refraction, dappling, stippling, shimmering, moire, netting, layering and superimposition. A place without a filter to distort knowledge and perception.

A ride, when it’s absolutely necessary. Driving along you engage each other with stories from the past and then you both realize suddenly how common it all is. How your lives are mingling, connected for the briefest time, short and long and quick and deadly evaporating exchanges.

It was one early fall in a cow town 60 miles north of Denver. I stood on the residential street thumbing a ride. Homer, an old crusty ranching farmer stopped his battered blue pickup and I got in. We traveled less than a mile, a few short city blocks. He told me two things.

“If a person speaks the truth they don’t have to remember what they said,” and, “If you ever need a helping hand look at the end of your wrist.”

I thanked him for the ride and words of wisdom at an intersection full of salvation thrift stores and mini-marts got out and started walking to get a paper and check out ads. Found a place in the basement of the King’s house a couple blocks from campus.

This university was the place where younger students called me a “Baby Killer” when they found out I was a veteran. Vietnam, 1969. I had no explanation, no excuse, no answers. I was invisible, I incorporated passive-aggressive silence. I became anonymous, a figment of their imagination.

I learned how to stay away from them, how to practice covert skills of black watch, night patrols, stealth, disguise, cunning, lock and load and put it on fully automatic. Nothing but the blues baby. Write it down, get it out, smile, move on.

My undeclared major was Survival 101. It reminded me of an old unit, Screaming Eagles. It wasn’t in the catalog of classes.

Later I would, under extreme pressure and duress from administration officials in their cubicles screaming “You have to declare something!” select Cultural Anthropology. There are lies and there are statistics. Any system will do whatever is necessary to perpetuate and sustain itself. This is how the world works.

I knew a language died every two weeks on the planet and had plenty of research to do. On the ground. Running, as in ‘hit the ground running.’ I already had a degree in that. Somewhere between earth and sky.

As in keep a low profile and get to the tree line. As in watch out for trip wires. As in the quick and the dead litany from Senior Drill Sergeant Prude at Ft. Leonard Wood Misery up there on his pedestal telling raw recruits, “You’d better listen boys ‘cause what I tell you may save your life.”

The thing that saved his life in that environment where the smell of cows drifted from Wyoming to New Mexico from the feed lots through the slaughtering houses to the plastic wrapped beef parts in supermarkets was the hunkering down, studies, writing, photography and small quick intense encounters with women.

Have mercy. They appreciated an older lover and didn’t ask stupid questions. They were sensitive enough to know better and let him be. He lasted in the cow town two years gathering credits and working through his material.

The places are all together on the spinning globe through all the realms of potential and full of promise. The evidence reduced some of the regret for all the lives he never realized inside the love and passion and the why of our suffering.

To die you should have lived. To live you should have died. It is as simple as that.