Fear and Restlessness

There are loves, and there are great loves, and I do believe Lora and I share a great love.  We are an improbable couple in many ways, but perhaps the core improbability lies in the disparity in our education, and in various and sundry ways, this disparity preys on her mind.  I mention this because Lora and I have had our first real argument since starting our little adventure on the road. I won't attempt to replicate the argument.  It would just sound silly, and in the way of most arguments, once they develop heat, they also develop leaps and non-sequiturs familiar to those arguing but incomprehensible to those observing.  Besides, it's not particularly surprising that we'd eventually come to an argument.  We have been living in close quarters now for some time, and that in itself is bound to create some friction.  Still though, Lora and I always live in close quarters, intimately bound up in each other, so the cause runs deeper.  At the risk of over-analyzing, the proximate cause of our argument was my arrogance, and I can be quite imperious, but behind my arrogance lie more ultimate issues of education and social class that have nagged at our marriage from the beginning, and threaten to pull us apart.

I mention social class for a couple of reasons.  First, of course, the whose notion of social class is suspect.  In the broader sense, in America, we like to think of ourselves as "individual equals" in almost every respect, except perhaps money, and money is the great class differentiator.  We are individuals first and foremost, and each individual has equal "freedoms," equal "opportunities," equality "before the law," and the list could go on, but one gets the idea.  It's that "all men are created equal," with the corresponding idea that, if differences arise, they do so as a result of what "we have made for ourselves" in the pursuit of our individual happiness.  For most that means the pursuit of money, and the stuff money can buy, to include such things as good health insurance, and a sense of security.  Of course, neither Lora nor I have ever really had money, and for reasons that seem at once obvious (bad luck and a few unfortunate choices) and mysterious (why so much back luck and why did we feel compelled to make those choices?) we have always found ourselves living a stone's throw away from poverty.  Though money is one of the typical causes of stress in a marriage, I can't recall ever arguing with Lora about money.  If we argued about money, it wasn't the money itself, more the way in which I made our money.

Of course, one could go about unpacking each of the scare quotes above, and quickly arrive at the conclusion that almost any notion of equality is mostly hokum, which leads me to the second reason I mentioned social class.  In a narrower sense, in America, education ostensibly opens the path to greater social mobility.  Both Lora and I have a working class background, and in that respect aren't much different from one another, with perhaps one exception -- education.  I don't recall ever having a doubt that I would graduate from secondary school and go on to college.  Looking back, however, there may have been huge doubts in my parent's minds.  I didn't qualify for the normal run of scholarships graduating from high school, mostly because I dropped out and didn't even attempt my senior year.  From thence, I didn't have the sophistication to seek out other scholarships, nor did my parents, so I paid for my schooling with a combination of student loans and work study.  When the loans and opportunities ran out, I found myself with an MA from the University of Michigan, and few prospects.  Perhaps because education was always about seeing the world more broadly, more deeply, I never really thought of it as a path to a better, more remunerative job.  I stumbled about, trying to find work in a bad economy, and finally joined the Air Force, at my father's urging, as a way of getting started in life.  It wasn't as horrible as I thought it would be, and they did send me to Europe, and from thence to the Air Force Academy as an instructor of English.  Through a very narrow set of circumstances involving the recommendation of a visiting professor, the Air Force sent me off to Brown for my PhD, and the rest, so to speak, is history.  Nothing comes without payback, and the payback for my PhD was a six year service commitment and a remote tour in Korea, which is where I met Lora.

In many ways, the story of Lora's education is the precise opposite of mine.  On her telling, there was never a thought that she'd go on to college, and neither her mother nor her step-father seemed much concerned that she would even finish secondary school.  There was, perhaps, an expectation that she'd get married and get pregnant, not necessarily in that order, and live out a life not unlike her parents, and initially at least she fell in line with the expectations.  She fell in love with her high school sweetheart, left high school, and got married and got pregnant in that order.  Her young husband had joined the Air Force, received an assignment to Germany, and after a brief separation, she followed him there.  As it turned out, her high school sweetheart had a drug and alcohol problem, which in turn fueled violent abuse.  From there, on her telling, it was all about "survival," and one step she took to survive was to join the Air Force herself.  There is more history, and I will let her tell it, but I doubt, from the time she dropped out of high school, to the time she met me, that education in the conventional sense often entered her mind.   Someday I will attempt to tell the fully story of our courtship, but suffice it to say that I felt a connection to her that was at once passionate and profound. Neither the differences in our education, nor the resulting differences in social class (precisely delineated in the Air Force by rank -- she was enlisted and I was an officer) much entered my mind, and when they did, they were quickly overwhelmed.   I was utterly, recklessly, helplessly in love, and love has a way of obliterating differences.

Well, not quite.  If there has been a point of friction in our marriage, it's been that difference in education.  It's not the friction of "anti-intellectualism," the assumption that "good old common sense" and "education" exist in inverse proportion to one another.  Except in the rare cases of the beautiful mind or the Sheldon Cooper of pop culture, the one has no bearing on the other.  I've known some educated idiots, but I've known even more uneducated idiots and I'm reasonably certain we cannot overcome human stupidity by closing down the schools.  "Good old common sense" is a fiction to maintain a sense of balance, of equality, between the uneducated and the educated, though I will say education has at least one adverse effect -- one quickly discerned and resented by those who lack education -- arrogance.   The educated "know more" than the uneducated, but that is not to say they "know enough," or that they "know correctly," or that we necessarily "know better," and we shouldn't let our education go to our head.  In the end, the educated physician of 1750 who bled his patients was less right than the peasant shaman who rubbed them down with horse manure.  At least the horse manure did the patients no harm.  Just by way of saying that Socrates was right, education is a good thing, leading to a more capacious life, but it must always be tempered with the wisdom of humility.

That said, I suppose, however, that education did provide me with a pathway from the working class into the middle class, if not exactly the bourgeoisie in the classical Marxist sense, then in positions where I had to hob-nob with the bourgeoisie.  I was an officer in the Air Force, and a senior administrator in the community college systems of three states.  I never quite lost sight of the simple fact that I was an at will employee -- a hired gun as one particularly crass board member put it.   Although I was never subversive, I wasn't submissive either, so I was often reminded that I served at the will of the President, and the President's will was directly shaped by the Board of Trustees.  The board varied by state, but the members were often drawn from the business elite, often those with budding political aspirations.  I was successful enough, but ultimately I couldn't quite reach the top of the hill.  In the Air Force, it was clear enough that I wouldn't make colonel, and in the community college world, like a salmon swimming upstream, I bumped up against a final barrier that I couldn't quite leap. I would never be a college president.   I was successful enough, but then again I was never quite successful enough to fulfill a final ambition.  Partly, of course, it might have been that I didn't quite want the presidency badly enough to do what was necessary to achieve it, but then too I have often wondered how much the rushing pressure of social class exhausted me and kept me from leaping that final barrier into the promised spawning ground?   I didn't have, as another particularly crass college president put it, the right pedigree. 

Lora hated my career, and disliked most of my associates at work.  I have never known anyone who is a quicker or better judge of people than Lora, but we share an unfortunate trait.  We both give people too much the benefit of the doubt.  For Lora that benefit often translates into a generosity that "takers" are quick to sense and exploit.  For me that benefit often translates into a naivete, or more precisely, a willingness to take people at face value that the more "politic" are quick to sense and exploit.  In either case, suffice it to say, we are often disappointed in people, and once disappointed, we are not particularly forgiving.  My associates at work had little need of Lora's generosity, nor could they admire what I find most admirable in her, a generosity of spirit that led her to serve the severely disabled at Marklund's Children Home, or the hospice patients assigned to nursing homes.  It paid next to nothing, and most of her co-workers were bumping the bottom of the working class.  They were puzzled by Lora's willingness to do that sort of work when she "didn't need to," and my associates too were puzzled on the rare occasions when it came up.  Although no one quite said it, I  suspect most felt that, if she wanted to volunteer her time, there were more "class-appropriate" ways to do so.  Instead of bathing patients and "wiping butts" at Marklund's, she could, for example, do good by raising money for Marklund.   All told, because of my career, she could never really quite fit with her co-workers, most of whom sensed and tried to exploit her generosity, and she could never quite fit with my associates or their wives.  She felt the arrogance of the "educated" pressing against her as an invidious judgement, and it infuriated her.  I tried to convince myself that she was wrong, that they were not judging her, partly because I had to work with them.  In the end, though, I know she was right.

Lora observed the other day that it's natural at our age to take stock of one's life, but I wonder what happens when one does take stock -- really takes stock -- and finds that most of one's life has been the meaningless pursuit of unattainable ends.  Then too, even if one attains one's ends, the result is the same, debility and death, and then nothing.  It's a frightening thought, perhaps the most frightening thought of all, to think that we are merely bubbles rising through emptiness destined only to burst .  Though it is, perhaps, too much a truism that religion is an anodyne against meaninglessness, but the more I take stock, the more I see it as such.  I would like to believe -- really, I would like to believe -- that our lives are inherently meaningful, that we all play a role in God's plan, and that our rewards will be after in heaven.  It's a comforting thought, and at times my desire to take comfort in it almost overwhelms me -- almost.  There is that nagging, restless, critical part of my mind that just won't allow me to sink back into a comforting faith as if it were an overstuffed recliner.  If God does have a plan, then, in the fulfillment of it, he seems to be as careless with the suffering of his people as Stalin or Mao were with theirs.  One need only read the news.

So, what are we pursing now?  We quit our jobs, sold everything, bought a camper, and set out across the country to find what?  The thought does occur to me that we're not so much "pursing" anything as "escaping," but from what?   I do think the world is too much with us, and we find ourselves living like refugees in a camper partly because we're escaping one world for a different sort of world, where we can, in Lora's words, "just live our lives" without the entanglements associated with education and social class that inevitably emerge for us when we allow others, outside our bubble, to prick at us.  I would like to say we've quit reading or watching the news, but we haven't, and the current clown show of our government seems increasingly pernicious, increasingly indifferent to the suffering of real people.  I'd like to say it doesn't affect us, but it does.  We need our Social Security, and at our age the threat of debility is just a good case of the flu away, and so we also need our health insurance, not that it does much for us anyway.  We are still saddened and depressed by a culture that insists more, and more efficient, gun violence by the right people is the solution to gun violence by the wrong people.  Still, though, we have simplified our life together considerably, pared it down closer to the essentials, and made ourselves as mobile as possible.  We've met some good people -- and I would like to say all people are good people -- but our mobility has allowed us to escape the entanglements and disappointments that inevitably develop when we spend too much time in one place.   The one essential thing in my life is Lora.  Perhaps that's why our arguments, when we have them, seem so apocalyptic, and make us restless.  We all have our reasons for moving, as one poet put it, and we move to keep our world whole, and our argument suggests its time to move on from Hidden Shores and Yuma.    

Music

Every Friday, as I've mentioned before, Hidden Shores has a session called "picking and grinning," where musicians from the park gather to do an open microphone-style jam.  I have participated, mostly at the urging of Buster and a few others, but it's pretty clear that I don't belong in the broader sense of the word.  First, there's the issue of "performance."  I play guitar for any number of reasons, but I am not a performer. 

I remember, way back, when I had first met Lora.  She lived off-base, downtown in Kunsan in a small upstairs apartment.  That apartment is etched vividly in my mind, perhaps because the most significant turning point in my life occurred there.  I was spending more time there than my own room, and I do remember especially sitting in her papa-san chair, waiting for her to come home, playing the guitar.  Even then it must have been clear that I had no interest in replicating the pop-playlist.  There had been a brief foray into classical music, enough that I learned some of the techniques of classical playing, but ultimately classical music required an even more precise replication.  In both cases I lost interest quickly in building a repertoire of the replicated, though I didn't lose interest in the guitar.  My guitars at home didn't fit within my luggage for deployment to Korea, so I had bought one there.  Very cheap, horrible tone, but it did play in tune, and I was playing that guitar when Lora returned to her apartment and caught me playing the guitar.

I am almost always embarrassed when people catch me playing the guitar, almost as though I had been caught doing that thing everyone does in the utmost privacy, but that no one admits.  She must have sensed my embarrassment, or something, because she asked me asked a question to which I responded, "playing is a way of letting the universe pass through me."  OK, first of all, I know how new-age pretentious that sounds, and it wasn't then and isn't now the sort of thing one says to impress Lora.  Still and all, though, it was an honest response.  I knew then vaguely of John Fahey and that other John, John Renbourn, but so-called "fingerstyle" guitar wasn't really a "thing" unto itself, at least not in my limited musical universe.  I listened mostly to singer-songwriter types, and Dylan figured prominently in that bunch, but I wasn't really interested in replicating Dylan, either in the Dylan-ness of Dylan or in becoming a "troubadour" singer songwriter like him.  I really was more interested in my "thing," which for the longest time I thought was relatively unique.

Let me explain.  I am almost always embarrassed when people catch me playing the guitar, in part because almost everyone asks "do you know ..." and then they'd mention a particular song.  My answer was almost always "no," with a hidden "yes."  I didn't know the particular song, but I also knew that, given ten minutes, I could get the chord progression down, and ten minutes more, I could add some nuance.  At the pickin' and grinning, for example,' I can follow most of the playing after the first verse and chorus.  There are a few "modal" songs, those written outside of major scales, that present a challenge, and are more interesting, but even those I can usually follow given the song's chart.  I didn't need to "know" the song, because, in a sense, I "already" knew it.  Then too, there's the matter of singing.  Unless one is in a crowded Irish bar or a church, singing is a way of drawing attention to one's self, a more adult version of the four-year old's "mommy!  daddy! look at me."  The open mic format of the 'picking' and grinnin' reinforces this inceptual narcissism.  With children, we can fawn with complete adoration over the most mundane achievements, but with adults, only in the rarest instances is the "look at me!" merited, particularly in this age of digital reproduction, when the "original" is everywhere and nowhere as a point of comparison.  Then too again, there's the matter of the lyrics, without which the song would not be a song.   Although sometimes catchy, rarely are they really worth memorizing.

Besides, "letting the universe pass through me" is a form of prayer, and prayer should be a "private" matter, along with other things.  I'm not one for quoting the Bible, but as Matthew 6:6 points out, "when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you."   The current infestation of political Bible thumpers have, perhaps, over-looked this verse, but be that as it may, it strikes me that the first requirement of "letting the universe pass through me" is the "letting." Though it's easier in private -- singing in the shower, so to speak -- it's not just a matter of letting go of one's fears and inhibitions -- any half-way decent performer is capable of letting go of stage fright and doing whatever it is they do without inhibition.  It is rather a letting go of the "self" itself, which is, by definition, not an exhibition of the self.  It seems rather lame to say "I lose myself in my playing," but then most authentic religious expression end up being rather lame in comparison to the experience itself.  Suffice it to say, to use another lame expression, "my playing is best when I'm just playing."  Then too, there's the matter of "just playing," which implies that I am not running my mouth, expressing myself, or "feeling" another's expression as my own.  If there's no self to worry over, then there's no self to express first hand or second hand.  Then too again, there's the matter of "the universe."  I could have said "let God pass through me," but I didn't, partly because we have so thoroughly succeeded in trivializing our whole understanding of God into a disco-ball reflection of our own inadequacies and prejudices.  If God is God, then there is nothing I need express to God that God doesn't already know.  The language that most defines us as human gets in the way and throws up border walls that keeps God from passing through me.

I am aware of the ironies of writing a self-reflective (and a bit sanctimonious) blog about letting go of the self.  Lately, I've also been castigating myself for not being a better guitarist in the conventional sense.  I've learned some instrumental versions of recognizable songs and committed them to memory.  Although they're "jam killers," as Bob of brief acquaintance put it, I've played them at the pickin' and grinnin' (nervously) and received some compliments because they provide some relief from the amplified and pitchy boom-chuck versions of country songs.   Yesterday, at the last pickin' and grinnin' I intentionally made a spectacle of myself.  The first couple of go-rounds for the open mic, I passed and didn't play, but reserved a spot "next to last."  I had spent about a week learning "Amazing Grace," a simple version that let the melody ring out clearly.  I had played around with Tommy Emmanuel's version of the song, but his is a virtuoso's show piece, and even when he performs it, the most beautiful aspect of the song is obscured, that reaching, aching melody.  The song is so familiar that one can't help hearing the lyrics, but the song also is so beautiful in its simplicity that it transcends anything resembling dogma and opens a path for the divine.  Still, it was a hymn, and I  didn't want it to be a "jam killer," but I wanted to play it, and I wanted to dedicate it to the victims and families of those killed in our latest mass shooting, our latest school massacre.  So, when it came round to my turn,  I did just that.      

       





                                    

The Craft Room

The craft room was one of the reasons for moving off the raw desert into Hidden Shores.  Normally, the craft room is a female preserve, filled with women who mostly do quilting.  I know little of quilting, per se, but it seems to be three things at once --aesthetic, exacting, and social.  There are women who have an eye for it, and one can see their quilts come together with a blend of color and pattern that is quite lovely, while others are just patch works.   Lora would excel at the aesthetics of quilting, but I'm not sure she would excel at the exacting aspect, the sort of tedious patience it takes to cut all those little pieces of cloth and then to get all their "points" or corners to align.  She has trouble, self-confessedly, doing the same thing over and over again, which quilting would not only require, but would also demand precision in the repetition.  Then too, I'm not sure how she would do with the social aspect.   We discussed "friendships" on the way into town yesterday.  Neither one of us is gregarious, and we find that "friends" often demand more than they give in return.  This may be just a matter of perspective, and others may likewise feel we demand more than we give in return, but we do feel the imbalance.  At any rate, the craft room is filled with female voices travelling back and forth, and when they are not discussing the finer points of quilting, they are gossiping, usually about the one who for whatever reason isn't present.  Though this would seem an opportunity for malicious commentary, I have to admit I haven't heard it, and the gossip revolves mostly about kids, grandkids, plans for the summer, and health -- how quickly the maladies of aging can up-end plans and become the sole focus of living.  

We had gone into town for quick stop at Walmart, but mostly to check mail.  I was expecting a book of guitar exercises.  I have been trying to learn the alternating bass method, pioneered by the likes of Merle Travis and Chet Atkins, but extended with great virtuosity by the likes of Tommy Emanuel.  There's something counter intuitive about it, at least for me, and I'm hoping that the exercises would help me develop some muscle memory around the alternating bass line.  When we returned, I played around with some of the exercises, while Lora walked down to the craft room, leaving me with one instruction.  She has been preparing things for a craft sale coming up this Saturday, and she wanted to price some of her jewelry and needle-felting.   The last two days have been rainy, and she left me with two instructions, one (close the blinds on the camper) I forgot, but the other I remembered.  The last few days have been overcast and rainy, and it was misting when she left.  She wanted me to drive down to the craft room and retrieve her if it actually started raining.  Not long after she left, it actually started raining, so I did drive down to the craft room so she wouldn't have to walk back in the rain.  I remembered, no doubt, because I had an ulterior motive. 

A corner alcove of the craft room has been relegated to us males. The other occupant does painting.  He won't set the gallery world of NY aflame, mostly because he attempts to replicate photographs of picturesque landscapes in a painting.  His current painting is of a river near his home in Colorado.  The aspen are just beginning to show the gold of fall, and it appeals to me because I can imagine myself standing there with a fly rod, the air crisp and cool, scoping out the pocket water.  Fishing for me is fly fishing, and fly fishing is a small cold river winding through the mountains, and he was capturing the look of a small mountain river. 

I had been out fishing the day before.  While the fishing here isn't what it is in the Rockies, it nevertheless has its own beauties, and the shores of Hidden Shores are the reservoir waters of the Colorado River where it collects behind Imperial Dam.  It isn't quite what one would normally associate with a reservoir -- no big wide open lake -- but a series of back waters and channels winding through tall reeds and the occasional palm.  It's a warm water fishery, and the predominant fish are blue gill, small mouth bass, and stripers.  Lora caught a striper the other day, and she's still marveling at it -- the solidity of its muscle mass and its sleek, silvery, almost machine like beauty.  I haven't caught one.   When I was out last, I did catch several small bass.  I was using a particular fly trailing behind a dark olive wooley bugger.  I made a mistake on the last fish I had on my line --a good one, probably a striper -- and tried to horse it in too quickly.  It broke the tippet between the bugger and fly, which, as it turned out -- crap! crap! crap! -- was my last one.  I did catch one more fish, on an articulated streamer, but the fishing slowed down considerably after I lost that particular fly.  

After admiring my neighbor's progress on his painting, I began breaking out my tying gear.  I'm sure the fly has a name, and I'm not the first to tie it, but I might as well be because I tied it up without a pattern.  For the aficionado, however, I tie it with red thread like an all purpose nymph on a size 10 to 14 1XL hook with a fluorescent pink bead head.  It's tail is gold flashabou, its body is composed of touching wraps of dark olive polar chenille, and its thorax is pearl ice dub.  It was a "what the hell" fly, tied, as one outdoor writer put it, to resemble a Vegas showgirl -- flashy with a lot of movement.  I'm not sure what it resembles in the bass food chain, probably nothing, but it certainly touches off a response.  

Fly tying is a repetitive business.  After the first couple, I'm going through the motions, concentrating enough to maintain consistency while half  listening to the ladies gossip.  It's background noise, like a television on low volume, and I really wasn't paying attention.  I was just tying my fly, grateful that I did not have the assistance of our camper kitty, Jade.  One piece of gossip did, however, catch my attention.  I hadn't watched the news, or read the papers that morning, so when one of them brought up the latest school shooting, I had heard or read nothing about it.  They didn't discuss it much, and even so I only caught half their conversation, but I do remember one woman expressing sympathy for the parents of the kids killed, along with the siblings and grandparents, all of whom would have their lives changed forever in a muzzle flash.  Another woman began an odd digression about having eaten not only venison and elk, but also bear and bobcat -- with an extended story about how they had once served bear without telling the kids on the assumption that they wouldn't eat if they had known it was bear.  She did come back to the point that she knew a lot of people who do a lot of hunting, and they would be upset if they "took away the guns." Lora did not contribute to the conversation, and that was it, or at least all I had heard, and for those two ladies at least, the news cycle had ended.

I finished up my flies, and Lora finished up a bracelet.  She showed it to me, and I commented (yes, with honesty) that I thought it was "very nice" or something of the sort.  It's the same sort of response she gives me when I show her one of my flies, the most typical being "oh, that's pretty."  The response was appropriate for the particular fly I was tying -- it had no natural materials in it, no bobcat or bear fur, no chicken or partridge feathers, nothing but manufactured synthetics, so it was rather sparkly and pretty, not the normal "buggy."  I suppose its one of the perineal disconnects between genders, but I'm never quite sure what she wants as a response.  If I were to say, "oh! that's beautiful! a stunning achievement!" she would know it was over-the-top sarcasm, so "very nice" will have to suffice, and I'll take the "is that all you have to say?" with a grain of salt.

On the ride back, Lora expressed interest in watching the news, but there was nothing unusual in that.  She likes the evening news with that "sweetie" David Muir.  For me, the evening news is about like reading the headlines on USA Today, the topics without discussion or depth, but for Lora it's enough.  I'll grant her that.  Trolling the news for more discussion and depth usually drives me half mad, in both senses of the word, and my usual comment on hearing the evening news, or at least the political news -- my god, what a clown show -- is about all that's possible at the moment.  We'd no more returned to the trailer, however, when the phone rang.  It was our son calling to reassure us that the shooting had not taken place at Bella's school, but a neighboring school and so we weren't to worry.  The phone call had its intended effect.  When we watched the news, she knew immediately that the "Florida school" wasn't our grand daughter's school, and that she was "safe."  It had another effect, however, on Lora.  She would quibble with my metaphor (she always does) but I believe she felt the way one feels when a horrible crash is averted, swerving panic, then nothing.  It could have happened, it almost happened, but didn't.   Jay's phone call made the possibility more real, along with the anguish of those for whom it did happen.  The effect lingered through the remainder of the evening and through the next day.

The chief clown offered, as is usual, prayers and condolences, and went on to emphasize the insanity of the shooter.  Of course, normal people don't shoot up high schools, and so the shooter is, by definition, abnormal, insane.  The tautology explains nothing, certainly not the shooter's felt need to wreck havoc on a school, and to offer only prayers and condolences, as one victim's frantic parent made abundantly clear, is to offer next to nothing.  There is one thing we can do, and it seems fairly obvious, and reasonably easy -- limit access to the guns that do so much to facilitate high body counts.  Beyond that, I'm not sure what to feel.  It seems the shooter went about the business as a craftsman might go about planning his next project, studying past shootings, planning his own shooting with the intent of "improving" on the body count, purchasing the right tools, and choosing the day, Valentine's Day, so it would, be forever known as the Valentine's Day Massacre.  He was characterized as isolated, a loner, a young man who had trouble connecting with others, particularly girls, a characterization which makes every introvert "suspect."   Still, though, it seems clear that he hoped the shooing would bring him notoriety, and affirmation, and one can altogether too easily imagine other potential shooters enviously studying his stunning achievements as they plan their own path to fame. The shooter might be abnormal, insane, but he is not terribly unusual.   Mass shootings are happening with numbing frequency, and the shooters are choosing venues where, as the saying goes, it's like shooting fish in a barrel.



     

                          

Mexico I -- Dentist

Lora and I have been to Mexico a number of times now, so we are rather seasoned border crossers now.  As with most things in my life, my feelings toward Mexico are ambivalent.  I am neither a Mexiphile  nor Mexiphobe.  Ambivalence could be a positive good for one who sets out to be an observer, just an observer with an objective eye, but the attitude seems suspicious in a culture where, more and more, one is expected to cultivate the commitments of a partisan for or against -- where neither/nor is just conceals, whether with conscious cynicism or with subconscious naïvete, a more real either/or.

At any rate, one notices first off that the border between our two countries is permeable, but it is much more permeable in one direction than another.  Getting into Mexico is easy.  Although one travels through a maze of chain link fencing, at least at the border crossing at Los Algedones, the only marker that one has crossed over is a turnstile gate that rotates only in one direction.  The maze continues a bit past a public restroom, then deposits one in the center of town.  I had expected someone to check an ID, or something, but only the turnstile gate, and it's relatively clear that the official policy of our two nations is asymmetrical.  There are a few signs posted clearly warning that the transport of firearms into Mexico is illegal (for those who want to indulge a Pancho and Lefty fantasy) but no one checks.  Getting back into the US, however, is not so easy.  One must have a US passport, or a visa, and one must pass through a bureaucratic choke point where documents are checked and one must declare one's imports.  It's very official, and the officials are the epitome of aloof.  They never smile, and do not return pleasantries, and go through their motions with mechanical menace. Although Lora and I would pass a strip and cavity search, and we have little interest in the sorts of things that might interest the border patrol (particularly narcotics) there's still a sense of palpable relief when one has passed through.  I have the same sense passing a state patrolman on the highway.  I slow down and check my rearview mirror, and I can't help but feel relieved when he doesn't pull out, lights flashing.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  The first time Lora and I crossed the border, we walked past an elderly lady struggling with a recalcitrant walker.  Perhaps it's my oblivious focus on other things or Lora's attentive kindness.  I didn't really notice her, but Lora did and offered to help.  As it turned out, she was crossing to finish some of the dental work she had begun earlier.  In the natural course of conversation, we discovered several things about her, to include her desire to immigrate to Mexico where she could live more cheaply, that she was an author of books, that she had an estranged daughter, that she had had some dental work done previously and it had not gone well, and that she was very satisfied with her current dentist.  Items of descending importance to her, but ascending importance to us.  We had hoped that the gossip about Mexican dentist was true.  It was said that many were ex-pat Americans practicing in Mexico because of the high cost of malpractice insurance and regulatory obfuscations.  Without those obstacles, they were, ostensibly, cheaper.    The purpose of our trip to Mexico that day, beyond simple curiosity, had been to "check things out" so far as dentists were concerned.  It seemed fortuitous that we had happened upon someone with experience who was giving her current dentist high marks.  For their returning customers, the dental offices provide a cab service to their offices.  She offered, and we accepted a ride to her dentist.

The first thing one notices about the dental offices of Los Algedones (or at least her dental office) is the contrast to the surrounding shabbiness.  One is beginning to see some of the same shabbiness in the US, particularly in the more impoverished rural areas, a sort of "make-do" shabbiness.  Everything seems faded, worn, claptrap, and genuinely so, not in the freshly painted shabby chic imitation of the faded and worn.  People who cannot afford the new are "making do" piecing together what they have at hand.  Though there could be a certain sort of dignity and pride associated with "making do" (the imagination and skills to make a life out of less) one quickly gets a whiff of resentment, like background scents of cooking grease and sewage.  One senses it particularly in the barkers stationed at the doorway to every pharmacia promising the "best prices" and the street merchants lining almost every sidewalk selling most cheap junk for "almost free."  Their resentment of the gringos is just barely concealed beneath an almost menacing obsequiousness.   The driver pulled up in front of the dental office, just outside a gate separating a small quiet courtyard from the obstreperous activity of street.  There was barely room only for the one car.  One thing I have noticed outside the US, at least below the longitude of our southern border, is the lack of parking.  The narrow streets are clogged with cars, and as we weaved our way along I remember thinking it would have been a quicker walk, but there are no expansive parking lots, at least not the delineated asphalt expanse that you'd see surrounding every shabby strip mall in the US.  Although one could easily imagine the desert surrounding Los Algedones being broad and empty, they had not spread out over it.  If everything in Los Algedones seemed faded, worn, claptrap, it also seemed crowded, with every nook and cranny occupied by someone, usually someone selling something "cheap."
 
To step inside the dental office, however, was to enter another world.  It was clean, well lit, comfortably furnished and fresh.  The receptionist was pretty, efficient, and friendly in the aloof way of receptionists everywhere, somewhere between a studied avoidance of undue familiarity and a more genuine boredom.  The old woman who had given us a lift was quickly processed ushered into a back room.  After some dithering back and forth, we decided to go ahead and get our teeth cleaned, along with an exam.   Lora was led back first, and so I spent some time in the reception area, flipping through magazines (oddly, mostly American women's magazines) and trying to follow the language on the television mounted on the wall.  A ubiquitous feature of Mexican TV seems to be the "game show."  Fox News must have taken some cue from them, because there is inevitably a clownish male host with bevy of buxom babes whose role, it seems, is to make the host appear at once enviable and ridiculous.  Lora suggested once that they exploit their women -- true enough, the buxom babes are just barely this side of being strippers -- and given the current climate in the US, with the #metoo movement exposing the ubiquity of sexual harassment, we might have some occasion to preen our moral superiority.  I wonder though. Although the men who exploit positions of power are contemptible, and I'm making no excuses, watching some I can't help thinking they protest just a wee bit too much.  As Lora points asks, "why didn't they protest at the time?"  Too much of it seems exploitation with benefits, and too many it seems have their celebrity topped off with the moral indignation of a victim.

I start thinking too much when I get bored.  When it was finally my turn, and I was led back to the exam room, I was struck by how clean it was in the way that high tech always seems clean. The tools of the dental trade were clearly "top of the line," with a glossy metallic sheen.  I was already a data file in the computer, and the hygienist pulled up my name, tapped away for a second or two, then went about taking my x-rays, which, when done, had enlarged my file.  She proceeded then to clean my teeth, stopping now and again to tap away at the computer.  Not unlike the receptionist, she was pretty, efficient, and she spoke in clipped sentences to the other receptionists.   To me she said only, "open wider" with an inimitable accent, and I spent most of the cleaning customarily uncomfortable as her gloved fingers poked and scraped around my teeth.  Were it not for the occasional burst of Spanish, and the accent, I could have been in a dental office anywhere.  I'm not sure what I was expecting -- something more primitive perhaps -- and perhaps I would have found it further south of the border, in a dentist that catered principally to Mexican teeth.  This office, not unlike the score of other dental offices in Los Algedones, catered principally to American teeth.  

Here's the thing, I know my teeth are not in the greatest of shape.  They're not in the worst of shape either.  One can tell from the number of crowns that I've spent thousands on them, and every dentist I have seen since my adolescence has suggested I spend thousands more.  When this hygienist had finished her work, and the dentist had confirmed her preliminary exam, adding a few additional data points for the receptionist to tap into the computer, I wasn't surprised at the result of the exam.  The dentist, not unlike the receptionist or the hygienist, was pretty, efficient, and she explained the work that needed to be done with the rushed seriousness endemic to professionals. Her diagnosis was similar to the one I had received a few years ago in Salt Lake.  She wanted to replace my full set of teeth, not with false teeth.  No, she wanted, to replace all my existing crowns and to crown the few teeth left over.  In Salt Lake, I had insurance that would have covered part of the expense, here I had none, but the total "out of pocket" was about the same $10,000.  She must have sensed that I wasn't biting (ha!) because her explanations of the work grew more perfunctory and finally petered out entirely.  She advised me to talk it over with my wife, and seemed impatient, not unlike a waitress who hands over the check and says "take your time," when they really mean "pay up and move on."

We did, leaving with an over stout, over sized blue plastic bag of dental trinkets -- a cheap toothbrush, a yard of floss, and a tiny tube of toothpaste -- the same things my dentist in Salt Lake provided.    As we left the dental office, Lora and I did discuss it, for about two minutes.  At 64, I'm not putting $10K into my mouth, partly because I don't have the money, but partly because it seems, well, foolish.  In the absence of an abscess and real pain, my current choppers will serve until they don't. I thought briefly of the woman who had recommended the dentist in the first place, because she had taken the bait once, been disappointed, and then had to have it done all over again.  I wondered briefly what motivated her, and came to nothing conclusive. 

We wandered among the street merchants for awhile -- I bought a belt that I didn't need -- until we began discussing where we wanted to eat.  A tall skinny, and appropriately toothless man overheard us, and offered to (insisted on?) escorting us to a restaurant -- "the best."   We wound around for a couple of blocks, until he deposited us in a café, then waited expectantly with his arms down and his hands clasped together.  It took a second to realize that he was waiting for a tip.  There must be some rule, written or unwritten, that prohibits a more aggressive tip seeking, because he just stood there, trying to look as pathetic as possible.  I tipped him.   He seemed to know the people working in the restaurant, but the relationship didn't seem overly cordial, suggesting what?  family?   I wondered briefly, but again came to nothing conclusive.

The restaurant was a stretch from "the best."  There was a roof, but it was mostly open air, and open to the flies that gathered as well.  The food was authentic, by definition.  We were eating Mexican food in Mexico after all, but it wasn't great, and teetered on the border of being "not even good."   As we ate, street vendors.  We Americans tend to think of Mexico as homogenously Mexican, but if one is attentive, one can see the different ethnicities, and the class structure associated with it.  The dentist and her crew were clearly mestizos, of predominantly white, European blood.  I remember my son's first wife was Hispanic, and I remember her parents insisting that they were not "Mexican," but "Spanish," and I remember wondering "what the hell difference does it make?"  It didn't so much in the US -- though clearly they thought it should -- perhaps because it apparently makes a difference in Mexico.  The "shops" were also clearly owned by mestizos, while the "stalls" that lined sidewalks on the street side seemed mixed, partly mestizos, partly Amerindian, but those that approached us in the restaurant, with their trays of trinkets supported by a strap over the shoulder, were clearly indian.  Most could be waved away, but one in particular, a short dark skinned little man with a stare straight out of a b-list horror movie sequel squatted about 10 feet away from our table, and just kept staring, fixated on us.  Most likely he had nothing better to do.  We were there early in the season, and there were few other Americans for him to fixate on.  So far as the one or two other patrons of the restaurant and its staff were concerned, he was invisible.  For us, however, he was definitely creepy, and between the bad food, and the atmosphere provided by the street vendor, we didn't linger, and made our way quickly back to the border.                  

Snow Birds

As I write this, Lora and I are in Yuma, Arizona, one of the principle snow bird sites.  There are reasons for this, some related to climate, some to the economy.  Today, the temperature is projected to rise into the high seventies.  The climate in Yuma does have some drawbacks, most notably the wind, and the dust carried by the wind, but for the most part it is sunny and pleasant during the winter months.  And it is not San Diego.  Mind you, I have nothing against San Diego.  I grew into adolescence in the surrounding suburbs.  My earliest memories are concentrated there, and so I still consider it my point of origin, if not my actual place of birth.  Having said that, however, for those of us who live on the fringes of the tourist trade, the RV parks in San Diego are enormously expensive compared to Yuma, and there is nothing like the expanse of BLM land where camping is virtually free. It's the difference between a thousand dollars a month vs. 180 dollars for the six month stretch between October and April.  Although it doesn't have the beaches, it does have the Colorado River, and for those whose amusements involve motors, one can cruise the Colorado in an oversized boat, and there are thousands of miles of ATV trails where one can zip along in a Razor.  Consequently, the San Diegans descend on Yuma to play on weekends, where it is cheaper, and less constricted, and the snow birds follow suit to escape the arthritic cold of points north.

Lora and I did not set out on this adventure to become part of a community, much less an unrelated extended family.  If anything, we set out expressly to escape community.  I should say that our attitudes toward this idea of community are rather contradictory.  We both, I think, would like very much to belong, but this belonging seems always to elude us.  It's puzzling, and I have given it much thought, but have come to no definite conclusions.  Neither Lora nor I are individualists, at least not the sort who feel it necessary to cultivate their eccentricities as a form of public display.  To all appearances, there is nothing much unusual about us, in dress or behavior.  Lora chides me for my conservatism on occasion, though she seems aghast when I dress or act in ways that would draw attention.  We both spent too much of our early life alone. My father's itinerant military career meant that I was always the new kid on the block, or in the class, and while there was a surge of popularity surrounding my novelty, it quickly wore off and I found myself once again alone.  Lora's father, her step father, was an abusive drunk in the grand Irish Catholic way, which helped insure she spent most of her adolescence alone hiding away to avoid his wrath.  No doubt our combined sense of unwanted isolation can be chalked up to adolescent angst, but even after, I spent most of my young adult life in the Air Force, not because I had a military temperament, or because it provided me a coterie of companions, but rather because the uniform itself gave an official stamp of belonging and it concealed those unconscious eccentricities and insecurities that isolated me.  I suspect the same was true of Lora.  The uniform covered the scars of her abusive childhood, with the added benefit that military life, at least in peace time, demanded a certain arbitrary tidiness. 

I mention all this because those RV parks that cater to the snow birds go well out of their way to foster an illusion of community.  For the San Diegans, it's irrelevant, of course, because they come here simply to play and go home.  If there is community there, it's the rather tenuous community of those who enjoy the same sorts of over-powered toys.  For those, like us, the more permanent residents, however, it's a powerful illusion.  When we first arrived at Imperial Dam, we parked unwittingly on "music row."  We really had to idea.  We selected our site because it was flat, easily accessed, close enough to the waste water dump, and yet afforded a modicum of privacy.  We had no idea that the sites along that row were ostensibly "reserved" for a coterie of amateur musicians who returned year after year.   As we were informed later, we had parked on "Roland's site," though we were forgiven and welcomed when it was discovered that I played the guitar.   I put all this in scare quotes, because none of it is official BLM policy, more simply an understanding among those who return to Imperial Dam year after year to winter. 

Buster was the unofficial initial ambassador of music row.  One learned quite a lot about Buster, quite quickly.   He sketches his own back story in the way that a novelist or playwright might describe an important secondary character.  As it turns out, he was the only professional musician of the lot on music row, and he has tales of the time he was invited to tour with the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis.  He turned it down because he already recognized that he was an alcoholic.  Life on the road with Jerry Lee Lewis, and perhaps others of the early rock and roll pantheon, would not contribute to his sobriety, and so he chose his marriage over alcohol and fame.  As it turned out, he was married over fifty years, and his sobriety and the longevity of his marriage are his core points of pride.  He had given up music along with the alcohol, at least initially, but had rediscovered it when he and his wife had come to Yuma to winter and he fell in with mythical Slim and others of the picking and grinning crowd.  The three chord 1/4/5 songs of rock and roll gave way to the three chord 1/4/5 songs of what might be called classic country.  He has been coming to Yuma now for 30 years.        

Buster had a sardonic sense of humor with the men, and a flirtatiousness with women that many might consider inappropriate in our overly sanctimonious times.  He was fond of saying that all women were beautiful, though too he was fond of quoting the mythical Slim who would point out in response that some just barely made it.  Still, one suspected that Buster did indeed believe that all women were beautiful, and it was clear he enjoyed the company of women, particularly those who were willing to play along with his bravado.  He was fond of Lora, and was quite open in his admiration of her behind, and Lora for her part would tell him to quit being a dirty old man and keep his eyes where they belonged.  He delighted in the idea that, if he had to be an old man, at least he could be a dirty old man. 

He called me over early on, with the imperative to bring that guitar of yours along.  I enjoyed playing with him, partly because he did play all of those songs that originated in the fifties and early sixties.  In their basics, they weren't difficult to figure out.  If it was in they key of C, one knew that it would be composed of the C, F and G chords, with an occasional "minor fall" (as Leonard Cohen might put it) of A minor or E minor (hallelujah).  He complained that I couldn't hear the chord changes.  It wasn't that I couldn't hear them.  I heard them fine, but we skipped around from song to song to song so quickly that I couldn't quite anticipate which variation on a theme we were stumbling through.  Then too, while on rare occasions I have played with other people, my guitar playing has been mostly  a solitary affair, and because it was a solitary affair, I could take great liberties with a song, if I even bothered to play a recognizable song.  What I enjoyed most was a sort of improvisational finger style, taking a melodic or progressive theme and playing around with it.  One of Lora's earliest memories of me -- one she alludes to often enough for me to believe it is iconic -- was of me doing just that in Kunsan not long after we'd met.  She was returning from somewhere and was laboriously climbing the stairs to the apartment.  She had badly sprained an ankle.  The awkwardness of the pain and the crutches made the climb difficult, but she didn't call out and I didn't hear her because I was lost in playing the cheap guitar that I had bought at an open market.  I remember telling her that playing was a way to let the universe flow through me, which immediately embarrassed me because it sounded so pretentiously new age and because it was true. When a theme took me, and I could just play -- just play -- disappearing into the playing the way smoke disappears into a breeze.

Our private jam sessions were one thing, but he quickly involved me in the Sunday afternoon jams at the gravel pit, a pavilion about a half mile from our campsite.  Buster was more or less in charge of the affair, and on Sunday afternoons, at about 1 p.m. he would drag his supply trailer down to the gravel pit and set up the speakers, amps, and mics that helped facilitate the weekly event.  They weren't really "jams," at least not in the way that I think of a jam, but more an "open mic."  Each person was expected to stand up to the microphone and sing, while those in the background played along.  There was supposed to be back porch feel to the gathering, but it wasn't really a group of friends gathering together to play and sing familiar songs.  It was more like karaoke, an opportunity to put oneself on public display.  There has been much talk surrounding the notion of narcissism of late -- the current white house has more or less assured a national reckoning with our national narcissism -- still, though, the whole exercise struck me as an exercise in narcissism.  At one level, of course, it's the five year old's "daddy! daddy! look at me!" -- a child diverting attention to itself in search of affirmation.  Buster's playing is accomplished enough to escape this sort of trivialization, but for most of us, if we expected actual judgment, if we expected anything other than affirmation, it would be an exercise in public humiliation.  Ostensibly, it's all in good fun.  If someone said, "well that truly sucked!" and meant it, a taboo would have been broken.  It would be as though daddy had watched his five year old and said, "sugar, what you're doing isn't that special.  Anyone your age can do it, and to be honest, most do it better."      

The taboo is never broken.  We applaud enthusiastically enough, and occasionally offer up a "good job" when a performance seems to transcend the individual performer's skill set.  Peace in the gravel pit is preserved.  Buster once or twice has said to me, "I'm proud of you," and his paternal tone struck me as both odd and amusing.  Although at 64, I am young enough to be his son, and it mattered.  For a moment, I was part of the community, though I knew it would be short lived.  I'm not sure whether it is something in me that repels, or something in me that rebels -- Lora and I go back and forth on that topic -- but I'm the sort of person who expects actual judgment and usually gets it. Growing up, I was usually the kid singled out by the bullies for exclusion, the reviled other, and so I tend to rebel preemptively before I can be excommunicated.  Having said that, however, I run the danger of putting self-pity in the place of self-infatuation, which is really just more of the same.  No one who is rapt with self-pity thinks they deserve their fate, and so the spite of others becomes just another way of affirming that one is somehow special, truly special, perhaps in ways that only god can see.

Round we go round we go round.  At the core of it all, I think, is an emptiness.  The couple that Lora and I have taken to calling the twins are a case in point.  They live in Yuma, now, though they wintered at Imperial Dam sometime in the past, and so feel entitled to crash the jam at the gravel pit.  They are among the not quite elderly (that is to say, not yet infirm) and they show up at the gravel pit dressed alike in outfits no doubt specifically selected for the occasion because they always feature musical notes.  They both play identical baby blue electric guitars, which they play robotically, she especially with a repetitive spasm of a strum.  I'm trying not to sound too judgmental, but their whole being seems to cry out for exactly that -- judgment.  At one point, just before Christmas, they must have had an anniversary, and they sang a song that went something like "if you want to know what love looks like, look at us."  There was no sense of irony, not even the least hint of self-mockery, and the audience clapped appreciatively and a few voices added congratulations.  They seemed deeply gratified, but it struck me that they must gaze lovingly into the other's eyes to see what?  a reflection of themselves.  Someone remarked to Lora that she knew we were a couple because we looked alike, which puzzled and mortified her.  I suppose it's difficult for two people to live together for thirty years without mirroring each others pet phrases and gestures, even facial expressions, and I suppose too that it helps to have a common understanding of the world and shared values, a common micro culture, but the matching baby blue guitars points at something different, something utterly superficial and devoid of substance, each a reflection of the other, each affirmed in the rapt admiration they see gazing back from their reflection.

Lora has told me to avoid politics, and religion, but I'm not quite sure how to do that.  All things ultimately are political, or religious, or both.  The twins are about as white bread as one can get, and on one occasion they sang Merle Haggard's "I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee," and I remember thinking at the time that "good golly miss molly, they're still fighting the culture wars of the late 60s/early 70s."  I absolutely loath that song.  At the time, it was associated with Buck Owens and Hee Haw, the heartland's answer to the more urbane Laugh In and the Smother's Brothers.  Looking back on it today, it was the first anthem for the disaffected rural voters who have helped create our current and contemptible political climate.  Even in its day it was a revanchist vision of America that never existed except as a nostalgic fantasy, and I've thought of rewriting the lyrics to reflect current realities.  They may not "smoke marijuana in Muskogee," but plenty of rural folk seem fond of huffing meth, and they may not "take their trips on LSD," but opioids seem to be the Greyhound bus to disability and the lassitude of the welfare state.  The twins, however, are far from being "Okies," at least not in the originating, depression era sense of the epithet, and seem to be the pure product of small city suburbia, the sort who giggle over the naughtiness of a glass of Chablis, not the dust bowl refugees described by Steinbeck, the original hardscrabble disposables.

Lora worries that I'm becoming cynical in my advancing age, and perhaps I am.  To give Merle Haggard his due, there was perhaps more than a bit of irony in the song, at least when he wrote it. The song has been covered by the likes of Arlo Guthrie and Phil Ochs, and with Arlo in particular, it would be hard not to hear a note of sarcasm.  Still, we live in a country that suffers from chronic irony deficiency and it's become a sort of literal version of what America was like, before the hippies spoiled it, not to mention the democrats and people of color, and so a vision of what America should be like again.  It's difficult to picture the male half of the twins singing "Irma Jackson," Merle's song about interracial love, and given the current imbroglio over immigration and black lives matter, I'm pretty sure that all this love of country is about a far from being "color blind" as ever.  Among the snow birds, there aren't any blacks, at least none that I've seen.  The twins are overtly religious in a sort of white bread protestant way, and they insist that the last song be "I saw the light."  I'm guessing (unfairly perhaps) that their illumination is blinding and bright white, and they would view interracial love as "a sin," not only against their image of god, then against the unspoken, "I'm OK, you're OK" covenant of narcissism.  It's difficult for us white folk to see our own affirming reflections in a black face, and no doubt vice versa, and so this snow birding is, for all that I can see, a segregated activity.

Ok, so I am growing cynical in my advancing age.  When we pulled the camper out of Mountain Home, we were leaving behind a settled community and what Lora would call the "bullshit."   It's a word that carries a lot of freight with us, but boxed up with the other freight is the unremitting pressure to "fit," to conform within the covenant of narcissism.  As I said at the outset of this post, Lora and I have never quite "fit," and we have both spent a considerable amount of time thinking about and discussing our lack of "fit."  Lora can't help but feel that there's something wrong with us, something hidden from us, but obvious enough to others, like being nose blind to our own stink.  We spend a lot of time affirming one another within our own covenant, assuring each other that we've showered sufficiently, but ironically enough, by pulling out of Mountain Home, we were saying in effect, "oh to hell with it" and running away from everything except each other -- running away as a more or less permanent lifestyle.  We hadn't counted on the winter, however, and the need to hunker down in place, and there seems to be no place to go for the winter where one isn't immediately surrounded by flocks of snow birds, who bring with them the expectation that we will be birds of a feather.        



        

Getting Started

It's  been about eight months since we decided to sell everything, put some in savings and invest the rest in our camper home.  We were both quite enthusiastic, almost euphoric, about our little adventure at the beginning, in part because it felt transformative. We had cast off the material chains of our previous life to experience a rebirth in freedom of the sort that Kris Kristofferson sang about in Bobby McGee -- "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."  We still have some stuff to lose --the camper, the Ram truck, and some of the accoutrements of camping like the generator -- but for the most part we have condensed our potential losses down to what will fit comfortably into our camper, what can be loaded up and moved to the next spot, and it did feel a whole lot like freedom.  We spent most of the summer in the state of Washington -- first at Pacific Beach, where our grand daughter came to stay with us, and then at River Bend near Twisp and the Methow river.  I won't say it was the best summer of my life, but in truth I can't remember a better -- the image of our adolescent grand daughter bounding about the beach in childish joy scavenging drift wood for the 4th of July bonfire, while frigid gale force winds blew in off the north pacific and Lora sat huddled like an Inuit against the cold --  waking early to just sit and watch the sunrise behind the Cascade mountains, at times blood red, obscured by the smoke pouring down from the Canadian wildfires.  I  actually learned the Methow River, its pulse and what worked to catch its fish. 

The summer officially ended at Henry's Lake, near Yellowstone, when eight inches of snow piled on the roof of the camper, and we abandoned what seemed to us like paradise (minus the tourists) for the long trek south to Yuma, where we had decided to winter. As I write, just now, we are at the Hidden Shores Resort, just outside of Yuma near the Imperial Dam.   Yuma brought us back to the reality that we had not transformed ourselves, only our circumstances.  We may have cast off the material chains, but the transformation was incomplete. We should be glad that we've escaped the frigid cold that has clamped down on the rest of the country, and we're not really doing what we'd be doing had we stayed in Mountain Home -- what Townes Van Zandt (that most cheerful of songwriters) expressed as "waiting round to die." It comes close though.  Yuma is a town designed to capitalize on the snowbird, most of whom it seems are over 80.  They all seem hale and hearty enough (the infirm stay home  in Missouri or Canada and wait out the remainder of their time in nursing homes and hospitals) but there is a generation's difference between us and the majority of the snowbirds.  Buster epitomizes the differences.  He's in his mid-eighties, a good musician who plays the rock and roll of his generation with an enviable ease, but the musical timeline ended for him at about the time the Beatles burst upon the scene.  Of course, I'm aware of the irony that my references to Kristofferson and van Zandt date me no less than Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis date Buster, still, we're talking about my generation (pronounced guh-guh-gen-eration).  It's a bit dispiriting to be perpetually reminded by those much closer to the happy trail's end that we will not be, as promised, forever young.

Then there's the desert.  In the attempt to plan, we had booked an initial month in a resort on the outskirts of Yuma.  We did so because the October temps outside were reaching upward toward 110 degrees and we wanted the hook up for electric so we could run our a/c.  Our generator is sufficient to charge the batteries, run small appliances, including the TV, but insufficient to the a/c.   The resort, however, was a dump.  There's no other word for it.  It was mostly filled with trailers that had seen their better days 20 years ago, most of which were empty and awaiting occupants most of whom wouldn't arrive until January.  One of the few residents who was actually present subsisted on disability and supplemented his income by buying abandoned storage units, arranging the accumulated junk around his trailer, and holding a perpetual yard sale.  He lived with his son, who had downs syndrome, and had not been treated well either by his ex-wife or the RV park where they had resided previously.  They had also prohibited his "business," or so he told us, while this park allowed it, at least on the off season.  At the first opportunity we moved to a park outside of Yuma, near the Colorado River.  It was certainly more vibrant, too vibrant.  The resort provided a convenience store, along with a bar and grill, and was occupied by party people, those for whom big boats and alcohol are the primary forms of entertainment.  We weren't there more than week when the couple in the trailer next to (and I mean "next to," within inches) of our own erupted into a fight.  There were two hours of drunken verbal insults, crashing and slamming that actually rattled our windows. 

We stuck it out there for a couple of weeks, mostly because it was still pushing the high 90s and we needed the electric hook up, and we did some scouting in the area. We didn't exactly chance upon the BLM land near the proving grounds -- Lora had done her research -- but on first encounter it seemed almost like paradise after the two previous resorts.  There were essentially two campgrounds, one set up for short term, the other for long term residency.  The short term was near Squaw Lake, which resembled every bible illustrators idea of a desert oasis.  From the bluff, we looked down on water that was a crystal cerulean blue, surrounded by reed lined banks and dotted with two small islands each with a stand of desert palms. There one found the showers, which had hot water and were clean.  The longer term camping was on the so-called Florida Flats, the top of a bluff overlooking the second lake, Senator Wash.  Although not quite so picturesque as Squaw Lake, it was water, and the campground provided the other necessary amenity if one were to boondock -- potable water and a dump station.  On our scouting trips, we selected a site, and when our reservation at the resort ran out, we moved on over.

I am not adverse to the desert, per se, at least not quite so much as Lora.  It has an austere beauty that appeals to me on a visceral level.  When we first arrived, there were few other campers, and the landscape seemed uncorrupted by too much humanity.  With the exception of a few desiccated cacti and the scrub brush that lined the wash that bordering our campsite, one could have been on Mars, as the rovers must have discovered it, a landscape of rock, and more rock, with rusty hills fading into a line purple mountains in the near distance, and in the greater distance a line of ethereal blue mountains.  The desert has always been a place where one could live a life of bare necessity.  It is a place returned to origins, scoured free of all the merely human illusions by an abrasive wind.  It's a place where, if one listened closely to the surround outside one's self, with concentration, one could hear the voice of god itself, not unlike the distant howling of the coyotes or the alarming quick buzz of a hummingbird.  It's perhaps not surprising that three of the great world religions found their origins in deserts, and I wouldn't want to denigrate or dismiss their prophets, who no doubt did find illumination in the sun baked clarity of the desert, though I have always felt that I am the impediment to a true religious experience -- literally the "I am."  I have never been so enamored with myself to believe that I am created in god's image, which, conveniently, means that god is reflected in my image, god reflected in me, me reflected in god, back and forth in a tunnel of mirrors where god worship becomes a form of self worship extended into eternal life.  I have always felt that, if we really want to know god, we must reduce the self, the "I am," to its vanishing point and then let it vanish.  To do so takes a different sort of privation, a different sort of austerity that has always been beyond me, and no matter how hard I try to release myself, there I am, braying like a burro to myself.

So it goes.  When we first moved over, the weather was still unendurably hot, with temperatures climbing into the 100s during the day.  Although it cooled down some at night, the heat rose along with the sun.  Outside, with no shade except that created by the camper itself, you could actually feel the heat sear your flesh.  Inside the camper, with no breeze, the heat quickly became suffocating, and so we found ourselves hoping for a good breeze, though there seemed to be no median between suffocating stillness and gale force winds.  We have a generator, but it wasn't sufficiently hefty to run the a/c, and even if it would have run the a/c, we wouldn't want to run it for 16 hours a day.  Our best bet was shade, and we tried a couple of things to create shade for ourselves.  The first, and least successful, was our portable canopy.  We put it up and secured it to the ground, and it was fine for a day or two, until the wind lifted and twisted it almost into a ball, ruining it.  The failure was disappointing on a number of levels, not least that Lora had hoped to create something that resembled an oasis for us.  Throughout our marriage, Lora has had the unique ability to imagine almost any place as home, with all the comforting associations of home, and she set about making even the desert our own, putting out our square of green felt carpet, hanging a couple of decorative solar lights and surrounding it with tiki torches.  It was, briefly, homey, and the loss of our little oasis simply reinforced just how hellish the desert could be. 

The second, slightly more successful strategy, involved a roll of puffy silver reflective cut to fit the windows of the camper.  It did help some.  The sun still beat down on the south side of the camper, baking from the outside in, but it kept the sun from slating into the trailer and baking us also from the inside out.  With most of the windows covered, inside, it was perpetually dusk and still with no breeze, even when the wind outside was strong enough the sway the camper on its springs.  The third, slightly more successful strategy yet, involved shade cloth slated down from the roof of the camper and staked to the ground, which shaded the south side of the camper.  It allowed us to open the windows again, getting some breeze.

For the most part though, we just endured the heat.  Lora would run the sink full of cool water and bathe the dogs.  They didn't much like it, but it did cool them down some, and our own showers became one of the highlights of the day for much the same reason.  We would drive down to the showers in the Squaw Lake Campground, and luxuriate in the tepid water.  On the worst of days, in the late afternoon, we went for long pointless rides, adding mileage and burning gas so we could sit in air conditioned comfort for a couple of hours.  We did run the generator for a few hours in the evening, mostly to recharge the batteries, but we would watch a couple of hours of television from the list of channels available to our antenna.  The local weather people kept assuring us that the heat was "unseasonable," though they also saw no particular end in sight, because a high pressure zone had stationed itself off the coast of California, keeping the cooler winds from the Canadian north from reaching us.  We endured the heat in part because we kept expecting it to break.  How long could the "unseasonable" persist?  How many "record setting highs" could follow day after day?

There is a sort of madness associated with the heat, though it has nothing to do with divine sense.    For my own part, I don't complain, at least not aloud.  Lora does complain.  She holds no secrets, at least not for long.  There aren't many thoughts passing through her mind that don't find expression, and so I have never once had to wonder what she thinks or how she feels about something, and I absolutely love that about her.  I am all secrets, not in the sense that I have malignancies of the soul that I must keep hidden, more in the sense that I live mostly within my own head, within Chrissy land as Lora sometimes puts it, and I really could go days without speaking to another soul unless drawn into it, happily preoccupied with whatever might be preoccupying me at the time.  Normally that just means I'm introverted, and I rely (too much?) on Lora to draw me out, connect me with other humans, tether me to the Earth, though on those occasions when I am unhappy -- and the stultifying heat did drive me mad -- I can grow sullen, surly, selfish, and the last thing I want to hear is another's litany of complaint.  I still don't complain, at least not aloud, but it isn't hard to imagine myself with a defiant glare that may as well shout, "shut up and suck it the fuck up."  For her part, finding too little sympathy, Lora stood in our tiny bathroom and hacked half her hair off.  The heat was driving us both mad.

It did, however, eventually break, and we settled into a routine or a succession of chores that facilitated daily living.  Though Lora chided me about my single chore, which involved the hauling of water, fresh, grey and black.  Near the entrance of the campground, the BLM provides both potable water and a dump site for waste. It is perhaps not surprising that the primordial task of hauling water to and fro takes on an outsized significance in the desert.  Those that winter here every year have developed some rather elaborate methods involving trailers with two plastic 100 gallon tanks and pumps, along with the accoutrement of hoses and gloves.  They store their water rigs for the summer at the Christian Center, who offer reasonably priced storage as a way of generating income in support of their evangelical activities.  It's very unlikely that we will return her next year, and so our general rule applies -- if we acquire it, we must find a permanent space for it within the trailer, which, as it stands, would mean creating space by disposing of something else.  My methods did not involve a rig, though we did have one accoutrement, what is called a blue boy, or more profanely a turd taxi.  It holds about 25 gallons, and fortuitously Lora and I together give way to about 25 gallons of human waste a week.  To be honest, I would not have thought it quite so much, but each Wednesday morning, there would be enough black water to fill the blue boy to the brim.  I would haul it to the waste station behind the pick up, driving along at five miles per hour, and there I would dump and rinse out the blue boy.  I would dump whatever other trash we had, and would fill the two blue plastic jugs set aside for fresh water.  Each held six gallons of water each, which I would haul back and pour into the fresh water tank, completing the circle.

Likewise, once or twice a week, I would make a grey water run when those tanks filled.  As it turned out, we created grey water at about twice the pace of black water, so one can do the math easily enough.  When you are lifting and pouring water, you learn rather quickly to conserve it, though it's impossible to imagine a modern life that doesn't involve the consumption of about 15 gallons of water per person per week, and that excludes showers.  Everyday, we would haul ourselves down to the Squaw Lake campground, where the BLM provided showers at the modest cost of a one dollar token for seven minutes of hot water.  At first we showered separately, then economy won out over modesty and we began to shower together.  There was a time when showering together might have occasioned an erotic adventure, and I can close my eyes and still see Lora as I saw her the first time, our intimacy has changed over the years.  I wouldn't say for the better (there are times when we both miss the raw intimacy of physical desire) but I wouldn't say for the worse either.  The subject comes up now and again -- the "what would you do if something happened to me" conversation -- and I am really at a loss at what to say.  Losing her would create such a void in my life that I'm not sure how it could be filled, though I am relatively certain that I couldn't go on living really with it unfilled.  I solve the dilemma by simply refusing to think about it, except when it is pressed upon me by a panicked imagination, when we are separated and she is late returning.  In her more cynical moods, she says it's because she takes care of me, and of course she does in more ways than I can count, but it's more because she cares for me, and it's impossible to imagine anyone caring for me with the depth and breadth that she cares for me.

Lora's chores have remained pretty much the same.  The rough division concerns outside and inside, which means I take care of things outside the camper, she takes care of things inside the camper.  Many things cross the border of outside and inside -- like cooking on the grill or in the smoker -- but the one inside task from which I am excluded is house -- or rather camper -- cleaning.  My job in that regard is to minimize my mess, particularly right after she has finished cleaning, the undoing of what she has done.   I am not sure what occasions a thorough camper cleaning.  It erupts spontaneously and doesn't seem to happen on anything resembling a schedule.  From my benighted perspective the camper never comes close to the condition of filth, and only rarely is it really untidy, but there seems to be some internal valve in Lora that, when the camper reaches a certain level of dirtiness or slovenliness, it must be cleaned.  I don't share in this task because, frankly, I would never do it well enough to suit her.  She is the Maxwell's demon of our little universe, engaged in the perpetual struggle against the evil forces of dirt and disorder.  When she goes into her demonic mode, I make an ineffectual offer to help, here and there, but mostly I just try to stay out of the way.  In almost every way she is more spontaneous than me -- we wouldn't be on our little adventure were it not for her --  but there is a paradox deep at the heart of her spontaneity that seems anything but spontaneous.  She abhors clutter, the accumulated disorder, which normally follows in the wake of those who would consider themselves spontaneous.  Again, though, from my benighted perspective, her tidiness is a good trait to have when living in a small space.

All this by way of saying, we have a good marriage.  It would be enormously foolish of anyone to expect that living on the road in close quarters would fix an ailing marriage.  There is a line in a song I'm trying to write -- "trees don't move, but gypsies do, and so I've put my roots in you" -- that more or less sums it up.  If one's connection to another is mediated through stuff, or through a place, then better to keep the stuff in place.  There is another aspect to this "gypsy" reference, which distinguishes us from the snowbirds proper, those who have their homes in Missouri, or Idaho, or Quebec, and have come to the desert to escape the frigid temperatures of "home" through the worst of the winter.  When we sold the house in Mountain Home, along with everything in it, we gave up on that idea of "home," and we more or less knew, when we did it, that there was no turning back, no starting over somewhere else.  We're gypsies, on permanent diaspora.  Lora commented the other day that we never quite fit, and in all our career motived moves in the past, from Alabama to New Mexico, to Michigan, to Illinois, to Utah, we have always made the attempt, but have never managed to quite fit, as though each place has sensed something in us and kept us on the periphery, just outside the boundary.  We have rationalized it in any number of ways, but no matter where we go, there we are, always on the periphery, just outside of what might be called acceptance. As it must have been for the Roma, so it is for us, a perpetual mystery, and so we fantasize about finding a place to park at some point in the future, and eventually, no doubt, we'll need to just stop, but I doubt that we'll ever find a place where we really fit, a place to call home.