It’s not just the Willie Nelson that’s so right about this situation. Moms laugh uncontrollably from the next yard. Nobody is texting me but that’s cool because half the time it’s because of a catastrophe. More laughter. And those two lovely gargoyles down the street waved at me twice today.
There are so many fires due to the climate change in California now, which is a bummer except that I keep thinking there’s a barbecue. Can’t argue with a barbecue. Sun’s all red. An hour ago an osprey passed by and I thought it was a good sign, then a raven followed behind and I thought that was probably a smart raven. I’m not sure which one is the appropriate teacher, the one who goes for kills or the one who takes after scraps. I identify with both first moves and scraps.
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There was a fire at the neighbor’s house yesterday. This was several days after Mesa County made the New York Times. A rare feat.
So this family that had that trailer that burned have a couple buildings on the property. The kid is the fourth generation on the property. Dad runs the show, and the grandfather is a livestock enthusiast and Vietnam war vet. I think. Thing apparently “blew” according to the matriarch across the street. Grandpa was inside but he’s alright. No doubt a blow for the family Otero.
As covered by the New York Times, this place is supposed to be in a unique position. But the Times reports it as cyclical, like a phoenix, interesting because after the conflagration the thing goes and gets born again.
That’s the story that goes around the mill here anyway. The boom and the bust.
Most Americans seem understandably hooked on the creation story part of the conflagration myth. We refuse to see the phoenix across time. If by we I only mean the New York Times, so be it. I suspect specificity is a safe hill to die on.
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The real estate agent that showed up in the Range Rover today was talking about some houseless fellow handling her property’s gate, telling her that he was allowed to be there. She said she set him right. She described another man nearby, telling himself a story. I said there’s five hundred or a thousand underhoused people between the Grand Bridge and her property. There’s a lot of diversity in that community, I pointed out. We’ve all got to give us all the benefit of the doubt.
There’s a guy with his knees broken (from an accident on North Avenue that he told me about, where he slipped on the ice and it hasn’t been straight since) who was skeptical that all I had was 80 cents but it was basically true because I’d been swimming and didn’t have a thing in my pockets. But I did have more change in my ignored Toyota cupholder than he had asked for. I didn’t even know how much until I counted it days later. I was feeling all bad for him. He said he walked a long way today, was beat. I said that so. He said this lifestyle’s a bitch, but he said he wouldn’t trade it for a thing, and that it’s still a motherfucker anyway. I didn’t know what to feel after that.
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That pitbulls are unfriendly can be easily disputed. For example, there’s a white pitbull that rolls around with Leroy and the black pitbull (that one I know is called Bear). I’m sure he was the one that attacked me on my bike one night. It’s pitch black (few streetlights) and just like that he’s at my pantleg. No idea what I was thinking about and suddenly I’m about to lose my heel. I slam on the pedals and grab for my U-Lock to swing but I don’t have my lock. But the pedals do it. I make it out fast and quick and my heartbeat is over 100 until I’m passed the jail and on Main Street.
Since then, I’ve gotten to know Leroy, and he doesn’t know my name, but that same white pitbull gets it. He’ll come skittering out, all barking, when I’m on my walks. And he’ll smell me up and he’ll fall silent. And when he falls silent it’s like he tells that whole intersection. That pitbull named Jesús Calmate quiets down, that big lab cools out next. One little one that I’ve never caught sight of keeps yipping but the cacophony subsides overall.
Now that is the behavior of a pitbull. It’s a loyal beast and frankly I’m sure if you attacked me with a knife in front of Leroy’s patch of earth, that white pit would come take you right out of commission, dishonorable discharge. You’d look like a mop. Lucky to have a heel. So suddenly he’s my guard dog.
I’ve developed a whole different appreciation for a true guardian dog.
I kept an obsession with guardian dogs up in Montana.
Those magnificent dogs are really sheep. With teeth. And attitude. They keep the livestock well on the plains of the northland, in the grassland expanses of southeast Africa, and under the many suns of Australia. Plus in the Himalayas. All breeds.
Here there’s one living up the road and around the bend, kind of a long-haired hound. You can hear his lineage in his bark. He’s only got two sheep to guard! And that worker holds down the fort like he just saw a bad omen. He’ll flex when the mothers howl from two blocks down. He doesn’t shut up when I walk by. Barks at a rustle in the wind. At a figment in the wind. He always pays me mind. That’s a dog.
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Lil Wayne’s playing in the background and I’m thinking about my mother’s Minnesota. Funny how America works like that, mixing our clay and telling us to split from history whenever convenient. Here I am, scratching dirt by a flooded gravel pit. I’m dragging old pieces of cottonwood over a fence to throw on a fire but I’m not cooking or cold. Just maintaining the contract with fire. But the whole time I’m listening to the rapid high-hat that was born in Atlanta and other places that are like Atlanta for reasons that are harder to say than they are to understand.
This is one of the reasons I love America but it seems to be the same thing that has everyone else upset. Kind of like the rotting beaver carcass at the edge of the canal over there and the imported wool in my felt hat that was shaped by Jerry Derby, last best hat-shaper in the West. As he steamed my hat he said he was not familiar with the Ivy League. I told him I was not familiar with bull-riding but had love for rain on my nose or sun in my irises. In fact, I didn’t much like the look of my own irises. The only iris I ever liked was the patch my mom kept in the west part of the yard, between the ash tree and the mountain range.
I also have a soft spot for the fleur de lys, though I have never supported Saints football and we have not been French for several centuries. I’m not sure why I studied French, except some sort of mystical attachment. I’m sure Mr. Derby feels the same way about hats and stock animals. The musicians of Atlanta likely feel a similar way about their beat packages and the rollicking evolution of diction. I think we despise only one thing and that’s losing our foothold on whatever it is we’re holding. This is, obviously, unnecessary. Every time I’ve fallen off so far, I’ve landed on something relatively nearby that looks substantially different. I don’t know if it’s because I’m wearing shoes but when I close my eyes it’s hard to tell the difference between what I was standing on before and what I’m standing on now. It really must be about the shoes.
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Some farm equipment so old its age is its beauty.
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There’s a great jazz band on record that plays a tune called “stakes is high.” I’m sure they don’t mean to refer to the big corner posts that make the fence around the big house stand up. They may have. At night you can hear something boiling that will play with your serotonin. A pair of GMCs will come in and take a left off the side-road, then a left, then another left, finally a right and disappear behind what I used to think was just the back of the gravel processing place. Only after I consulted a Google aerial did it become clear how many square feet were back there, tucked. On the next occasion it snowed I realized that there must be a lot more traffic after bed. You have to wonder how they know where it is. But you figure there is some sort of magnetism once you get engaged with a situation.
The other day I drove a couple of hours up the river to one of the more expensive ski resorts. I took a right off the highway and then I just kept driving straight. The ski hill got closer and more mountainlike. I told a woman in a hut with a gate arm that I was a guest and she gave me a neon green parking pass to hang on my rearview mirror. I hung it on my rearview mirror and kept driving straight. I figured it was soon but the google maps voice didn’t say anything through the speaker and I wasn’t in a mood to check it by hand so I just drove straight. Soon I was at the ski lift. The voice said it was 500 more feet. I pulled off at what’s called a condo but with a 45 foot ceiling in the great room. I never counted the bedrooms or bathrooms because I was having a great time with my friend from college whose family owned the place. We genuinely had a ball. A couple hours of billiards, a couple in the hot tub, a couple on the slopes. I forget how his family made their money but I want to say it was pharmaceuticals.
On other weekends I can get on 5th street with just one turn (or none if I start at McKenzie’s place) and then I can drive for two hours through three towns to arrive at a hot-springs, all without turning until the last pull-off. People in the town will tell you that the waters are medicinal, and many of them can unsurprisingly be found there, in the waters. A crowd of folks was there from the small town of Paonia the other day. It happened that one guy I had mowed lawns with years before was there. He apparently now caretakes for a vineyard in Paonia. He knew some locals I had met before. There was a big group of them, as I say, and they were singing Lakota sweat lodge songs in the sauna when I came in. Several of them go to Hawaii pretty often.
I had an image in my head getting sunburnt and covered in saltwater but this was interrupted by the sleek picture of an airplane or more accurately an aeroplane. I hadn’t flown in a while. There are so many ways to get anywhere but I prefer to realize that I’ve progressively been various places the whole time of getting there. Flying is different. Once you arrive you ask yourself which part was the medicine you were after. When I drive to Ozarks in the coming months I will also be going to gather up pieces of places in between.
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Some nights, I don’t walk the neighborhood at all. I just sit back and reflect on the big shots. Because this is not a geography of a neighborhood without being a locus of the world. All things beget this experience. There is a state named for a man named Emilio Guerrero. There is a seat near the stars for every young person daring enough to dream. And so I sit and dream.
But you want to know about the abandoned corners and the “formerly” subjugated territories so I should tell you a story about a rifle or an overgrown cannabis. Some shtick about yucca. But you want to know the truth about the area so I’ll tell you it isn’t as pretty unless when your eyes are open.
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One of my buddies has been jobless for a few months. He used to be an electrician but he doesn’t really seem like one, so it’s not surprising he left and didn’t go back. He’s been doing a lot of crafts. I reckon he should be an elementary teacher. One good thing about people in recovery is that they tend not to judge others. So I think he’d make a great teacher. He would have summers off to see birds and drive in the desert. I’m sure he would find a partner once he had the right lifestyle going. The other day he knotted me a bracelet. I think about Handsome Lake when I look at it so I tend not to wear it when I’m drinking beer.
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We live in atlases disguised as boxes.
Our tendency to see them as boxes comes from their general boxiness as much as from our own craving for boxes. Receptacles R Us. Therefore, receptacles for us. Receptacles for our things. And so we arrange complex and thorough boxes of various magnitude’s stacked amongst each other like a warped Russian doll. George Carlin has a good one on the subject.
Locally, the feral cats are in heat. They are out wailing in the field. They give birth amidst the long sage and the invasive grasses. For their offspring, that will be the first receptacle. What a reception.
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The other day I took a walk down the County Road. It’s funny that it’s the County Road because I live in the city or close to it. Plus I work for the city, planning for further receptables. Anyway, I’m walking down my County Road which has no sidewalk and up around the bend past the beautiful house all grown over and teal. Then I have to worry about the pitbull that comes rushing around the corner. But he doesn’t come rushing today. I’m just walking past the flock of starlings on the fence.
I’m walking the same route on a different day and have my headphones in on podcasts trying to keep an education but I see the ancient German neighbor, Horst, and la bonita señora, Esme, and pause the music to salute them. And the next thing I know all the neighbors are out for the sunshine of spring. And the pitbull just wants a stick. Hardly barks just wags. The cats are done wailing but the moths are picking up. Getting unbearable. Maybe the job is just the gig, maybe the real stuff is here along the dike. There’s the padding from one bikini top lying by the mountain-bike jump. Several people have put mattresses on the top of the dike or big sofa chairs on the top of the dike. At one point I saw a housewife, gone to seed, sunning herself on a chair she brought. She took the chair when she left.
I thought how many vagrant people had walked up the mighty Colorado River in the last month and wondered if I’d seen any of the ones who had put those nice places to sleep at the top of the dike. I would have seen them on the road that leads out to Pepsi Cola bottling and beyond to the grocery, haircut, gasoline area. I would have been driving to work or walking to the corner bar. Maybe the antique place holding out, its asphalt cracked and its shipping containers dwarfed by the corporate complex along the way.
I hear that the antique man has the place paid off and he’s going to sell it as soon as this town turns that real estate into something he can retire on. I’m walking by the place but I learned this plan of sale across the bridge in City Hall. Still, this isn’t an elegy for beloved small town America nor a diluted land-rights treatise. You’ve got the prison visible over the bridge and the finer homes up on on the hill. We are not, like our ancestors were not, kidding ourselves.
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Years later, moving away, I left my mattress on the top of the dike.
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There’s a fire in the neighborhood again. July 4. The boy runs out with his pants around his knees to stomp it out. I think this cousin of someone’s is hitting on me. I’m not listening to the history of Rome anymore. I don’t miss the barbecue.
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Sometimes I come out at night and someone’s walking a dog or just walking. If there’s a dog then the person is usually a familiar walking neighbor. When there isn’t a dog it’s usually someone without a house who lives in the neighborhood.
There’s a tiny guy with a Rip Van Winkle beard who said one night he lived at the Connected Lakes sometimes. I said he might not believe me but I’d bring him some cigarettes. He didn’t believe me because when I came back he was gone. But I saw him out again when I was driving home late the next day. When I saw him I was already thinking about him. Got home and biked back quick to find him, then handed him the pack I’d bought. I was already thinking about him because I couldn’t stop figuring he was thinking about me. Silly assumption. I bet he thought at least twice since he thought it first that I was really going to get the cops that first time. I’d wouldn’t have waited for me either.
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The people I met in college from Mexico would usually suggest that I say Mexico in their accent, like the x was an h. When I got over the Anglophony, I got into it. Recently, I found out that the Nahuatl pronunciation that began the word was pronounced Mexica with more of an sh for the x. There are apparently about 2 million Nahuatl speakers still.
The other day, I finally said hello to my neighbor in Spanish instead and she said bien y tú and I agreed. I hope the best for this.
I went to get my haircut a few days later and when I asked if the barber was from town he said nah Mex bro. Meks, like that. So increasingly I distrust languages. Increasingly, I trust people.
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The longer I spend walking around these six or seven big irregular blocks of homes and the long road to town that make up this neighborhood I get a little more lost. Then I get on a plane and I’m in a field of cattle and I’m in a bustling townhouse area with corner stores. And it’s there that I realize where I am is right back where I usually am. Each animal is that one bleating pair of sheep. Every car just got rebuilt by that family with the peacetime flag and the quonset hut. Every pine is a cottonwood. All of the rivers are the canal letting out into the mighty Colorado. The oil tankers are bathroom cockroaches, the war jets are the administration’s roaring dragonflies. I can see them defunct on the windowsill in their futures. The smell of people’s weed and cigarettes and methamphetamine carry differently through wetter air elsewhere but I’m sure the people feel the same, missing something.
Feeling this way put a pitbull in my stomach for a long time. That’s when I figured most people weren’t different or wrong. It’s just one big home on this continent, and probably everywhere else. I’ve made more mistakes in life than I can count. This patch of earth, a low dry slice by the water, has not been one.
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You know a place is actually a place. You get taken in on the joke. It’s a neighborhood when you laugh and it winks back.
Skookum Atlas 