Highlands

The elderly woman brushed us aside with a harsh hand gesture. “Go, go,” she was saying. “Get out of my sight.” I’d been late to see her and her white-haired partner crossing the intersection and so had stopped short. I’d gestured them on, apologetically. Her brusque response commanded us to drive on through. I laughed. It was as if I were a servant who had made a predictable mistake. We were trying to find a place to park. It was a Saturday, midsummer, and this touristy mountain town was in full bloom. Our car, a dusty Subaru Forester, and the two kayaks strapped on top, had told the woman all she needed to know. We were interlopers. A friend, now dead, who lived up in these mountains, once told me, “You know they’re really rich when their driveway is marked by a single river stone.” The super rich don’t want you to see them, but they can’t help marking their territory. Hungry, we ended up at a burrito joint on the edge of the downtown grid. It was empty when we got there, but soon after the noontime bell, it began to fill with people. All of a sudden, in a town seemingly made up entirely of rich white people, we were surrounded by Latinos, blacks, working class whites. “We’ve come to the right place,” I say to Ali, who smiled in agreement. After a half hour of window-shopping, we’d tired of the scene. We got back on the road, happy to drift down the mountain, leaning into the curves, letting the air rush through the windows.

Flag

It’s been over two weeks since the Confederate flag came down off the South Carolina capitol building. Since then, I keep seeing confederate flags in the back of pickup trucks. Flag bumper stickers, flag t-shirts, flag murals, flag hats. Always been here but especially conspicuous now. Hard not to read the recent uptick as a big “fuck you” to liberals and blacks and gays and anybody who gets in the way. Like the “fuck you” I got from the young man after he backed his truck, fast, on a blind turn, ignoring my honks. He pulled right up to me before pulling slowly into a makeshift parking space. He didn’t back in or make any signal. When I pulled up alongside him, he looked over and sneered his defiance: “Fuck you.” He could have cared less. Or what about the quiet “fuck you” from the man sitting in the dog park listening to me talk to the gay couple who live down the street? How he walked away in disgust. Or the “fuck you” from the woman who laughed in my face as she steered into my lane, texting, and had to swerve to keep from hitting me. Or or or…. I refuse to agree that we’re back in a civil war again. The flag needed to come down, plain and simple. It’s time to move on. You can have your “fuck you” flag and you can swear with it all you want. Just leave me out of it.

Listening to Something Else

At the end of “One for Daddy-O,” a eight-minute cut off Cannonball Adderly’s now classic album, Miles Davis croaks out into the voluminous silence, “That what you want, Alfred?” At least, I think it’s Miles. It sure sounds like his trademark rasp. And the wicked smile built into those five words sounds like Miles, too. It’s straight-out braggadocio. He knows that’s what Alfred wants. “That’s a take,” the producer was probably leaning into the intercom to impart, but Miles beats him to the punch. Even when it’s not his gig, Miles makes sure you know who the boss is.

Camp

I join my boy in the lice check line. Whenever one of the soon-to-be campers passes the test, he or she lets out a little whoop. Avery shakes his head and whispers, “Not having lice is not a good reason to cheer.” When he passes his exam I refrain from clapping. Thing is, our water heater has been out for two days. I went down into the crawlspace to check but the metal cylinder looked like an unexploded bomb. Maybe one of the workers turned it off while attempting to fix the A/C. Maybe the pilot light went out. I have boiled half a dozen pots of water since Saturday morning, the last of which we used to sponge our pits. We’d been invited to a brunch and didn’t want to stink the place up. At the table, a woman whose husband is a poet, asked me over a steaming plate of food, “Can you even change a light bulb?’ She was joking, kind of. I’d played the straight man in my wife’s story about the heater so had asked for it. However, being a poet, I was light on my verbal feet: “No, but I can change it into something else.” Now Avery and I are in line to check-in his luggage. He wonders aloud why it took three bags to achieve the desired task. We are standing in the parking lot surrounded by families wearing camp T-shirts and flip-flops. Ali is stuck in the orientation meeting. It’s heating up. I contemplate suggesting he repack everything himself. Then Avery asks, obviously worried, almost shaking with nervousness: “You’re not going to stay for lunch, are you?” “No, of course not,” I say. “We’ve already eaten.”

After Death, What?

Act One. The shock from the electric fence knocked me sideways. I’d bumped my shoulder into it unwittingly opening the driveway gate. Horses were grazing in the backfield the first time I’d visited, but I’d forgotten, and so didn’t notice the thin wire running atop the fences on both sides of the long drive. In such close quarters, keeping hold of the leashed dogs, awkward with the latch, I swayed a bit to my left. Zap. The shock ran across my chest and shot out the fingers of my extended right arm. I shouted out in surprise at the heavy jolt. What the fuck! When I told the woman who owned the land what happened, doing my best to control the rising anger, she laughed a little and said, “Well, it’s a kinder, gentler shock. It used to be much worse.” For some reason, this did not reassure me. Act Two. The pamphlet sat on the toilet in the bathroom of the highway exit gas station. It’s title: After Death, What? This made me laugh, causing my piss stream to flick outside the urinal. I pointed it back at the painted fly. Who had placed this bi-monthly bromide alongside the toilet paper and condoms? Did they really expect this to become some traveler’s spiritual task? Or had I entered a different kind of weigh station? Needless-to-say, I didn’t pick the pamphlet up. The title was enough to fuel me for at least twenty miles. Act Three. On my drive down from Northern Vermont, just outside Boston, about to merge onto 95, my driving energy flagged, the post-accident PTSD rose up, and all of a sudden I was shaking like a ragdoll behind the wheel, surrounded on both sides by lolling big rigs. Without thinking, I pulled off on an exit and soon was driving along a tree-lined road, following signs to “Historic Downtown Lincoln.” I stopped at the old town hall to see where I might grab a bite. The woman pointed me on to a bistro—it was that kind of town—just up the road a mile. But before I got back in my car, I walked into the field beside the hall, letting the thin footpath take me back and around a small swale. The grass was tall enough to brush against my calves and knees. I was about to turn back when I spotted a lone tree atop the next little hill; someone had built a three-sided bench around the tree. When I arrived at the spot, I saw an old metal sign on the back support. It read “Think of Us and Be a Force for Good.” The donating couple’s last name--Avery--was the same as my son’s. I walked back to car now calm, quite hungry, ready to find the bistro then get back on that highway.

LSD

I experimented with LSD, and with mushrooms, during and after college. A few decades since I last tripped. And, I must admit, I look back on those experiences with fondness and appreciation. I came out of them a better, more fully engaged person. Likewise, I see LSD as having truly transformed my brother, allowing him to shed an overly aggressive, defensive nature into a loving, open and mindful man, someone who has fathered four amazing kids and been a dedicated partner. I can't see him pulling that off without the help of LSD and mushrooms. That said, I'd left behind much of this and for some time hadn't thought much about the drug, or any of the large amount of reading I'd done on it—its history or even the whole mystical-experience thing. Not that I'd grown out of it, but that my connection to it had waned. I have been looking for peak experience in my art, in my side travels, in my regular day-to-day life with Ali and Avery. Also, the car accident switched up a lot for me. It closed down parts of my life, while opening up whole new areas. Woke me up and, at the same time, oppressed me—in particular, it seemed to at first alleviate my depression and anxiety (conditions I have suffered with and through for decades) then amplify them. I can thank PTSD for that. But four years later, arguably more mature and focused than I have ever been (it's all relative) I find myself ready for something new. Which is where the article on LSD comes in. And, oddly enough, it's not that reading the piece makes me want to dose again. I don't. I can barely smoke pot anymore. Instead, a certain hard-to-describe feeling has taken over me. A lightness? Hope? Some sort of light going off in the closet of my head, for sure. Oh yeah. There's that. I remember that! But what exactly? In the article, nonfiction writer Michael Pollan does an expert job at showing how recent medical and psychological testing and research demonstrates that LSD can often alleviate anxiety and fear and stress for cancer patients facing imminent death. It has helped PTSD sufferers; helped with tobacco and alcohol addiction; worked to alleviate depression and anxiety in relatively "normal" patients. How? The dumbed-down version: it chills out a part of the brain that likes to control everything. The Orchestrator gets his baton taken away. Then the other "lower" centers and emotional impulses are given sway. Love saunters up and gives you a big smooch. (I swear, Thoreau was eating some seriously triply berries!) All this to say...I had faith in LSD once. And I see again that it offers a non-materialistic stance in the face of despair. And that understanding brings me relief. One doesn’t have to turn to God. Solace can be found in Nature or in a tab of LSD or during Zen meditation. Or through Tantric sex. Or just a really good martini and a NBA game on TV. Hey, the dogs say, take us for a walk, you moronic biped. I say: Sure thing, goons, as long as I don't have to think.