Ghost in the Mirror

I had a dream about you and ghosts. The ghosts were fierce and dangerous and I needed you to help me fight them. In the dream, time was compressed and day turned into night and back into day over and over.While the sun was up I couldn’t find you, I could only hope that when darkness fell you would return to me again, as you had each night before. I knew that some evening I would search for you, wandering across the shadowed hills and valleys, and you would no longer be there. I did not know if we could defeat the ghosts before you left for good but I knew I would never be able to do it on my own. With daylight you would disappear again and I would miss you terribly, but at night I didn’t think I could live without you. The ghosts would begin to swing through the purple sky, suddenly everywhere and nowhere, too, my fear of them sometimes paling beside my desire to be with you. You were better at banishing these specters than me, more skillful, and I would listen to your instructions at the end of each day as the sun set on the bleak horizon. For some reason I did not understand you would then insist that we split up and hunt the shades alone, but I could not seem to fight properly on my own. I was unable to see what you had to show me, did not recognize what you saw so clearly.

I woke up feeling ill-at-ease and strange, my thoughts of you entirely irrational. I barely even knew you and, anyway, I don’t believe you can expect someone else to fight your demons for you. But still, you know, maybe sometimes the battle is actually won together. I guess that’s just one more thing we’ll never know for sure.



All photos taken at Mare Island, Vallejo, California, USA.

P.S. Let's hear it for AUGUSTA! If you can't take the heat...

The State of the City

I was re-reading some old posts the other day, something I don’t do very often, and was struck by how often over the last 5 years I was leaving someplace, looking for somewhere else to go or just plain trapped. I like that I’ve lived many different places and seen so many things, but I did find something about those posts alarming. So many cities, jobs, people… It can do strange things to a person. Hard travelin’ and ramblin’, the sort of thing Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams sang about, has nothing to do with Caribbean cruises and weekends on the beach at Club Med. When Robert Johnson moaned, “I’ve got to keep movin’, I’ve got to keep movin’” at the start of “Hellhound on My Trail,” he was following the classic blues format. That is, the first line states a problem. The second line reiterates that problem. And the need for constant movement is a problem. Yet I find movement soothing like very little else. I rarely care where I’m going or when I’ll get there. Robert Johnson apparently felt the same way, waking up in the middle of the night to hop passing freights with no regard for direction or destination. He was dead by age 27. Someone once told me that the difference between travel and a vacation is obvious. If it’s really hard, smile, you’re traveling.



All this is a roundabout, long-winded way of saying I’m headed to Albuquerque and hope to stay awhile. It doesn’t take much perusing of this site to see that I have a special fondness for the desert Southwest. Also, one of my big regrets is that I didn’t start City of Dust until after I’d left Augusta, GA. I have received so many comments and wonderful invitations from people in the Central Savannah River Area that I have had no way of accepting. I still get them. Everything from trips to abandoned mills in Horse Creek Valley to guided tours through the neighborhood James Brown grew up in, complete with a stop at the brothel he lived in with his aunt. I really want to do a similar exploration of the dusty corners of New Mexico, Arizona, and elsewhere, but post it in real-time. All-in-all, I’d like to post more and maybe if I sit still for once I can do that. More photos, more obscure history, more abandonment, and, of course, a few creative writing exercises here and there.



In the meantime, it’s Nebraska tomorrow followed by a couple days in New Mexico. Then a trip to LA and a jaunt to the eastern Sierras. After that, a few days in the Bay Area and a drive back down to Albuquerque. I have no idea how many tens of thousands of miles I’ve logged in the last year. I’ve gone from point A to point B by planes, trains, ferries, bamboo rafts, horse-drawn buggies and an elephant. But, as a friend of mine used to say, “I think I’ll take it on up to the house now.” And, as Townes Van Zandt said, “New Mexico ain’t bad, lord, the people there they treat you fine…”

All photos taken in Chaska, Minnesota, USA.

Scene at Grass Lake

We were walking around Grass Lake, a walk we’d done many times before, but never quite like this. We hadn’t seen each other in over a month. It hadn’t really been that long since we’d seen each other every minute of every day for days on end. But then something happened and I was glad for the distance now. I thought she probably was too, but you can never be sure.

It was nearly dark and very warm. The air was thick with humidity and every now and then we walked through a cloud of bugs. Heat lightning flashed off on the horizon. She looked as beautiful as always, her blonde hair pulled back, a few wisps hanging down her neck. But her eyes rarely met mine and when they did I didn’t like what I saw; this had nothing to do with me. She was in trouble and as we went she told me of her problems. They were many and they were serious.



I recalled how once I sat in her kitchen scowling, wallowing in a black mood. When she asked for an explanation, I said, “You can pull away from the abyss, but some of the abyss will always come back with you.” After she was done laughing, she kissed me and took my hand. “C’mon, I’ll buy you dinner.” It was a great dinner. Hell, it turned into a great night. She always knew which buttons to push to make everything suddenly alright. But I’d never found those buttons in her and I wasn’t about to stumble across them now.

“Life’s a gift,” I told her. I wasn’t smiling. This was no joke.

“Yeah, well, my gift arrived broken.”

We looked at each other and in that instant I felt something so powerful and so sad it made me ache. I wanted her again, suddenly, and more than ever. I wanted it to be like it had been, even if only briefly. As we were now, I couldn’t help her. There was a time when I would’ve argued that it was perfectly natural for ex-lovers to remain friends. The years have proved me entirely wrong. There is a place that two people can get to together, often beautiful, sometimes terrible, and when it becomes impossible to go there any longer all that remains is empty, un-crossable distance. I didn’t want to lose this girl entirely, for this thing to happen again, but I could see its inevitability. I couldn't find a way to touch her without using my hands.



In the twilight we watched a large snapping turtle crawl along the bank of the lake. When I was young I used to see these big snappers all the time. They looked so dignified and serious. Prehistoric. But I don’t see them much anymore. I suppose most have been run over or poisoned out of their lakes. Perhaps many have simply died of old age. Their young are the size of quarters when they crawl out of their eggs, with hardly a chance of living as long as their parents. I felt afraid for that turtle, slow and alone, the last of its kind, like I felt afraid for the girl beside me. Then I began to feel afraid for myself, and that’s a pointless, pathetic place to be, the end of the line. Now I just wanted to go home. Alone.

It wasn’t long before we were back at the cars. The stars were out, the moon rising when we said our good-byes, a slight hesitation before a quick hug. As has happened so often, we went our separate ways into the darkness, no longer of any use to one another, barely of any use to ourselves. Forever apart.



The top photo is from Tonle Sap Lake, Cambodia. The 2nd and 4th shots are from Chiang Mai, Thailand. Photograph #3 was taken at Angkor Wat, Cambodia. I'll try to do a post on Cambodia soon, I think.

Trouble in Mind

I’ve been listening to a lot of Janis Joplin lately because of a dead woman. She died in late middle-age and I never met her. One day she went into her basement, put some towels on the concrete floor under the laundry tub, just beside the washer, and lay down. She opened her veins as close to the main drain as possible to minimize the mess and died there, amidst the old boxes and musty clothes.

The woman was the aunt of a friend of mine and we were driving to her house to get boxes and packing material. Apparently she’d been a pack-rat and who wants to spend money on boxes and foam peanuts if you can get them for free?

“Yeah,” my friend said, “the house was being foreclosed on. She could’ve tried a few other things to deal with the mortgage but I guess she didn’t know it. Or didn't care. The bank doesn’t want the place anyway. I had to go over and clean up the mess after they took her away.”

“Blood’s a bad smell, isn’t it?” I said.

“Yeah, like rusted metal or something. I’ll never forget it.”

We pulled into the driveway of a small house in a neighborhood that looked like it had been built sometime in the 1950’s. Inside debris was strewn here and there, the detritus of a lifetime. A rhinestone rodeo shirt was draped over a chair, a box of old Christmas ornaments sat in the corner. A few things had price tags.

“The people from the bank had a sale and this is what’s left. Take anything you want ‘cause it’ll all be gone soon. The boxes are downstairs.”

I took a look around. I didn’t want a damn thing.

In the basement was a mountain of packing material, boxes of all shapes and sizes. “Priority Mail.” “Macy’s.” “EBAY.com.” I kicked my way through and caught an address label. Now I knew her name.

It took half an hour to dig through the pile, pulling out what I could use and tossing everything else aside. Every square of linoleum on the floor had come loose and they slid here and there every time I turned around. It was dirty and some of the boxes were covered in a film of mildew. It seemed like a hard way to save a few bucks on bubble wrap. It seemed an even poorer place to die.

“Hey, here’s some records,” my friend called from the other room. “You can have them if you want.”

I went next door and flipped through the stack. Moody Blues Symphony, Gino Vannelli, The Jazz Singer. Useless. On the floor was an oddball. Janis Joplin’s Greatest Hits on cassette. I stuck it in my shirt pocket. I’m driving a car that only has a tape deck and my cassettes are in a storage closet in Oakland. I can only take so much NPR and Janis was going to be a welcome addition.



My friend was over by the washing machine, a clean patch of concrete in front of him. “Check this out,” he said. I walked over and he pointed to the the corroded drain cover. “Some of that isn’t rust. I cleaned as best I could, but it’s impossible to get everything. They had to get a plumber in to clear the drain.” I bent down for a look. I could still smell the acrid tang.

I grabbed my boxes and foam and went back upstairs. Near a stack of discarded ceramic figurines was a John Lee Hooker CD wrapped in a Xeroxed Amazon.com print-out. Probably a freebie tossed in with an order. I put it in one of my boxes while my friend stuffed everything he could into the pick-up. Hell, I figured he’d earned it.

“Let the bank clean everything up,” he said, putting the key back in the box. “Fuck them.”

We drove away from the woman’s home, her life and death. The whole thing felt shabby, undignified.



Later, in the car, I put Janis in the deck. “Down on Me” came cranking out of the speakers and sounded great, better than I remembered, Janis’s voice a force of nature. She groaned and screamed and moaned while Big Brother and the Holding Company played the hell out of the song behind her. It beat another edition of Car Talk.

That night I put on the John Lee Hooker CD. “Tupelo” crept out of the speakers. Primal. John Lee’s voice maybe not of this world. Great music. Life-changing music. Life-SAVING music. And it made me think, “Maybe if this lady had just put aside the Funny Girl soundtrack and her Kenny Loggins records and dug out Janis and John Lee she would’ve been able to tough it out awhile longer. “Footloose” can’t help anyone at 3AM when you’ve been staring at the floor since midnight, but I challenge any person to listen to a Townes Van Zandt song and then turn around and pack it in. I might have razor in hand, gun in mouth or car idling in the garage and if I heard “If I Needed You” I’d lay down arms and at least wait to see what the next day held. I might not like it, but I’d have no choice.

So, you can say what you want about art, minimize the value of a song—sure, hearing Janis couldn’t save Janis, but that’s a whole different thing. When it comes down to it, choose your soundtrack wisely ‘cause bad taste might not kill you, but it sure won’t keep you alive either.

Photos are of the 16th St. Station, Oakland, California, USA.

Welcome to Sarajevo

The train from Zagreb passes through a landscape that seems unlike anyplace else I’ve visited in Western Europe. I don’t recognize the names of towns to come: Velika Gorica, Banja Luka, Maglaj, Visoko. Shortly after leaving the station most signs are in Cyrillic only. The door to the train compartment is thrown open by a man in uniform. We’ve reached the border with Bosnia-Herzegovina. I feel strangely intimidated during an exchange which requires no speaking on my part. After a moment he hands me back my passport. “Hvala.” Thank you.

Beyond the train, old women work dry fields, sowing seed by hand. Thin, leathery men rake and hoe beside them. A goat or two meanders around a yard. A river runs alongside the tracks and the rocks and branches are hung with thousands—perhaps millions—of plastic bags, representing all the colors of the rainbow. However, I notice that most are blue or yellow. Bags way up in the brush along the bank show the high water mark. Sometimes there are signs warning of landmines and buildings pocked with the scars of artillery fire.

The attendant from passport control has been looking closely at the identification of the man on the other side of the compartment. The attendant turns and asks me something but I don’t understand. He sees this and laughs. “You are okay,” he says, pleasantly. The man across the compartment smiles and winks at me as he is handed back his ID card. “Do viđenja.” Good-bye.

Bosnia-Herzegovina is a land marked by war and Sarajevo, its capital city, reflects this history. Near the city center is the bridge where Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophia, were assassinated. Shortly afterwards Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, starting WWI. Not far away is a second bridge where two young women, Suada Dilberović and
Olga Sučić, became the first Bosnian civilian casualties in Sarajevo of a much more recent war.



It is hard to imagine that less than a decade after hosting the 1984 Winter Olympics Sarajevo had become a bloody warzone, the cities dead nearly reaching 10,000 by the start of 1996. Today the Olympic buildings remain, though some have had to be rebuilt. The Olympic Village can be seen under the snow-capped peaks of the Dinaric Alps beyond and the Olympic flame is now re-lit each year to commemorate the games. Yet across the street is a cemetery with row after row of graves, each bearing a similar date: 1992, 1993, 1994... Above the markers, now made of stone to replace the flimsy old plywood memorials, sits a lion; it, too, partially repaired in the last few years.



Yet the city of Sarajevo is vibrant, feeling to me as much like Western Europe as my first glimpse of the surrounding landscape did not. Tourists have returned to Baščaršija, the Old Town, where ancient mosques and minarets flank cafes and souvenir stores. Cobbled streets lead to dessert shops and internet clubs. The baroque Cathedral Church of the Nativity of the Theotokos, one of the largest Orthodox churches in the Balkans, stands majestically, waiting for the faithful, as it has for nearly 150 years.



On the other end of town are the headwaters of Vrelo Bosne, several gushing mountain springs that provide drinking water for all of Sarajevo. I fill my water bottle and drink the impossibly clear water all day. A ridge rises above the spring, where once ran the “Road to Salvation,” so-named because, if one could just cross the hills alive, on the other side was free Bosnia. Now a horse-drawn carriage transports us back and forth along a tree-lined avenue and vendors line the small streams that join to become the mighty river that gave Bosnia its name.

The “yellow Holiday Inn” still stands, formerly the last refuge of foreign journalists reporting on the unfolding carnage in Sarajevo. Alongside is the infamous “Sniper Alley,” an open street that made easy targets out of anyone trying to travel it, even at a dead run. But the thoroughfares now bustle with cars and people, cell phones in hands, attend to the day’s business.



High above the city sits the Vraca WWII Partisan Memorial, formerly an ideal vantage point for soldiers firing into the city, and utterly destroyed by the war’s end. No effort has yet been made to repair this place, the building stripped of anything of worth and strewn with garbage. But one can’t help feeling that this is the Sarajevo of yesterday, when the future was at best uncertain, at worst something to be feared.

On the train back to Zagreb a young Muslim boy hears me speak and enters my compartment. He says he speaks some English and tells me he would like my address and phone number so that when he visits America he can look me up. He enters the information in his mobile while telling me that wants to travel and “live a life like Indiana Jones.” There are many other things he tells me; his English is actually quite good. He loves animals, especially dolphins. His father’s best friend from the war drinks too much and lives in Texas. There is a hotel by his home where I could stay if I don’t have reservations elsewhere. (I do.) He has already visited Switzerland, Canada and South America. Much of what he says is surprising to me, though, in the way of kids, it must seem perfectly natural to him. As the train pulls into the station and we say good-bye I can only hope that his life will not be marked by the kind of war his father has known, that he will get the chance to live the life he desires. And, if by chance he arrives at my door several years hence, it will be a life that I will be very anxious to hear about it.

So Much for Travel Updates

Alright, so I'm doing an utterly terrible job of writing about my travels. It's just too hard to sit down in front of a computer and write about stuff when there's more stuff to actually *DO*. So far, I've been through Fiji, New Zealand and a chunk of Australia. Thailand, Italy, Croatia, Bosnia and Spain are yet to come. For now, if you want to see some photos, head over to FLICKR.

I will get back to posting here someday. Really. In the meantime, here's a groggy koala to keep you company. They get pretty sleepy eating nothing but eucalyptus leaves, which have little nutritional value. This is pretty much the state of City of Dust right now.

See the World!

I know I've done a terrible job of posting lately and I haven't even gotten around to Part III of this desert saga I've been working on, but things have been a little out of hand. How out of hand? Well, tonight I'm off to Fiji and from there...well, let's just say that if you live in New Zealand, Australia, Bangkok, Italy, Croatia, Bosnia, and, perhaps, large portions of Spain and want to meet up to take photographs or eat food or have advice to offer, please get in touch! I don't know that I'll make it to ALL those places, nor do I know exactly how long I'll be gone, but I'll go until I can't go no more. I'm going to TRY to turn this into a travelblog if I can, so stay tuned. In the meantime, here's an abandoned pool and church at Fort Ord near Moneterey, California. Oh, and I'm serious, if you have a mind to, drop me a line at jmhouse at cityofdust dot com! More soon...

The Last Morning Pt. II

I turned away from the risen sun now hanging blood red before me and thought of a time--it now hardly seemed to have been my life--when I was waiting at a train station. A different desert. A different country. She arrived late that night and we nearly ran from the platform to the hotel, her bag banging against my thigh as I clutched it tight. I didn’t feel it then, but my leg stayed black and blue for a week. When we stepped out of the hotel and into a blue-grey dawn three days later it was only to get bread and another bottle of wine. Six months later we were married. I loved her so much that sometimes, watching her come toward me down a crowded city sidewalk, I felt like I’d been stabbed in the stomach. Almost unendurably painful and beautiful beyond words.



Five years later things were different. I’d say that I somehow loved her even more but something had risen up between us. Secrets will do that. Lies. Deception. Anger and tears. Finally, silence, worst of all weapons. We had been apart for three months and I was waiting for her in another city, another country. The train pulled away from the platform and she had not been on it. I tried to reach her by phone but there was no answer. Another train arrived and departed. And another. I doubted her and in all this that is the one thing for which I cannot forgive myself. I found a rundown hotel and stayed drunk in my room for three days, in honor of a time long ago. When I emerged, wrecked, into a bright summer afternoon I could hardly catch my breath. Everything was gone. I believed she had betrayed me, finally, but what I did not know was that I'd betrayed her. If only I’d been able to trust in her love for me, a love that I know now could never have been extinguished, no matter to what wretched depths I succumbed. If only I’d believed that she still loved me I would not be here in this endless desert waiting to die. I would be with her.



Photos are of the 16th St. Station, West Oakland, CA.

The Last Morning

As night gave way to the first light of dawn, Tony pointed his .45 at the horizon and emptied the cartridge. But the sun kept rising, day crawling ever closer, unstoppable.

“Fuck you,” he muttered, ejecting the clip. None of us wanted this day to arrive. Not Tony, not Ruiz, not Jimmy, and not me. About 30 feet from us lay Michael in the spot where he’d bled to death sometime in the night, the only one that wasn’t going to see this day and the only one of us that might’ve wanted to.



They say that everything happens for a reason but that seems like nothing more than a mundane truism to me. Of course everything happens for a reason. Someone drinks 13 cans of Budweiser then drives their car into oncoming traffic. Or someone gets mad and shoots somebody else’s son or daughter. Action and reaction. Cause and effect. But that’s not what they’re talking about, I suppose. They’re talking about a “higher purpose.” Some kind of grand design. Sure, whatever. I don’t know about any of that. I don’t know about anything anymore and I’ve spent most of the night doing nothing but proving that to myself again and again.

I look over at Tony now, sitting in the sand, his legs pulled up to his chest, his forehead on his knees. There are hours yet to go. I watch that sun climb ever higher into the cloudless sky and think, “Yeah, he’s right. Fuck this day. And fuck all the days to come after it.”

The Salton Sea

It’s like going to sleep not caring if you wake up. Here’s to one more endless night in a motel at the end of the world with nothing but a pile of ashes for a bed. The salt stings your eyes; the listless sun will handle the rest of you. A bloated bird, one-hundred thousand dead Tilapia, the endless stench. It’s in your sweat. There were dreams, once, at least for a little while. But you better be careful what you invest in. Keep your assets liquid so you can get out if—make that when—you have to. Don’t get too deep into anything or anyone out here.



I guess none of this matters now. You watch the day rise out of the scalding water and fall down the mountains, keeping company with the dead and the mad, pretending you’re different, not like them. Sure, you’re just a spectator, not a participant. Then why don’t you leave? Nope, this is it, the end of the line. You'd almost forgotten about Chinatown, Jake, but it caught up to you out here in the desert. It had to. So, welcome to where everything finally stops. Greetings from the Salton Sea.

The Last Night

This is the last night you’ll ever drive these dirt roads. The sun sets behind you and the mountains are cooling, darkening to a deeper blue. The blinding heat of the day fades to a whisper as clouds of dust rise up behind you, where you’ve been now lost in the distance. A shallow mountain river thick with boulders runs beside the road and you wonder how many times you have been in that water. Sometimes you swam alone, the river and the birds the only sound beyond your breath. Other times you slept on the warm rocks, your bodies touching, less alone than you ever imagined possible. But as with this last day of this last summer, you know there is nothing you can truly hold onto and the more you have tried the more quickly you have lost what you’ve had.

You loved this place, the mountains stacked one on another and rising to the east, clear streams and cold rains, sleeping under moonlit skies, the long pines blowing overhead. But you hated that through it all you still felt lost. So close to perfect and so utterly wrong.



You pull the car off the road and step onto the grass. Beside the river you see a cloud of midges hovering above a still pool. You can smell the sweat that has dried to your skin and you reach your arms into the cool river to cleanse yourself, ancient hemlocks darkening the valley. There are no words for what you feel, at least none you can recall, so you look at the sky and the water and the hills and wait for it all to pass. You know you’ll never be back, but that is not your thought. Instead you ask the forest to tell you what it is that you fear you have missed, that you are always missing, that will never come again. The trees are quiet as darkness falls.

The gravel crackles under the wheels as an owl crosses the road ahead, noiselessly, lit only by the headlights. Of so many nights, this one is the last.

From Oakland, CA.

Answering Machine II

ANSWERING MACHINE, Pt. II - I call your answering machine just to hear your voice. Sometimes I call nine or ten times a day. Most of the time I can’t force myself to hang up before the beep so I know you see the number of calls. 10, 11, 12. You’ll come home and push play and there won’t be anything. There are times when I leave you a message after I’ve hung up. I go on and on. Maybe I should feel embarrassed at myself or humiliated, but I’m so far beyond that now. Have you ever loved someone so much you…what? Cried? Stayed in bed all day? Told yourself you’d never be with anyone else again? Have you ever loved someone so much that all you longed for became nothing? Nothing might feel right, but you can’t make it happen, no matter how hard you will it.

I find that I hate myself just as much as I love you, so I call your answering machine. If you pick up I wait a moment and then hang up. You know it’s me, but you don’t ever call me and tell me to stop. You just erase the messages and it makes me love you more. I want you to do something to make me hate you. I want to hate you and I want you to do something to make me hate you. I want to hate you. I want you to hurt me the way I hurt myself each time I hear the beep and hang up. All day, every day, all of the time.

DEAD SEASONS
In the autumn, it was as if
I’d learned a new language.
One spoken not with words
Or gestures
Or a look.
But with nothing
Except desire and delusion.

In the winter, at last
I had perfected a new language.
But I found that not a person
I knew
Or met
Or me
Could understand what I said.

In the spring, alas
I tried to re-learn their language.
But found that every single word
Was wrong
Or misunderstood
Or just something that could not help anyone anymore.



What the hell? More first-person narrative drama and then a fucking prose poem? I feel like I'm getting close to some kind of saturation point here, so hopefully I'll have a nice short story or something to post soon. But I kinda wanted to do the "Answering Machine" thing to death and then I threw in a bit more about communication (or the lack thereof) to beat the horse more completely. Yeah, a theme. Anyway, thanks to everyone that has sent in nice comments lately. It means a lot, really. Really. I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas. I'll be back soon. And this is nice: My Heart is an Idiot.

Answering Machine

Well, I guess you can't accuse me of overdoing it with posts these days. But it's quality not quantity, right? Or something like that. Here are two odes to the days before cell phones, when people had to use these things called answering machines. They kinda sucked, didn't they? One of these bits I wrote, one I only wish I did. The photos are from Erwin, Tennessee, where they once hung an elephant for murder. Only they botched the first attempt and had to try a second time. Hey, it ain't easy to build a gallows for a pachyderm.



ANSWERING MACHINE - I hadn’t spoken to her in two years; hadn’t seen her in more than that. But I found an old answering machine tape in a box of junk and put it in the player. I knew it was a bad idea, that I should just toss it in the trash with the outdated magazines and credit card receipts, but instead I pushed “PLAY” and sat on the floor to listen. It was toward the end of things and there were dozens of calls. Her dad. My mother. Calls where the concern was palpable underneath the usual greetings. Those who didn’t know left invitations for us both to come by. The others were already splitting into her friends and mine, some addressing her, some me. Some seemed unsure who to address. Toward the very end were calls from the landlord asking about moving dates and forwarding addresses. The last call was from me. I said only her name and then the tape ran out. I got up off the floor, took the tape out of the player and weighed it in my hand for a few moments. Then I broke it in half against the corner of the dining room table. A spool rolled across the floor, a tiny streamer of tape unfurling on the carpeting. It won’t matter. Some messages can never be erased.



ANSWERING MACHINE-The Replacements

Try and breathe some life into a letter; I’m losing hope, we’ll never be together; My courage is at its peak, do you know what I mean?; How do say you're O.K. to an answering machine?; How do you say good night to an answering machine?

Big town’s got its losers, small town’s got its vices; I’ve got a handful of friends, one needs a match and one needs some ice; Call away on the phone, another time zone; How do you say I miss you to an answering machine?; How do say good night to an answering machine?

”If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and dial again. If you need help, please dial your operator.”

I get enough of that.

Try to free a slave of ignorance; Try and teach a whore about romance.

How do you say I miss you to an answering machine?; How do you say good night to an answering machine?; How do you say I'm lonely to an answering machine?; The message is very plain; Oh, I hate your answering machine; I hate your answering machine;
I hate your answering machine.

Knox County, Summer 2007

Yeah, posts are few and far between. Not much I can do about that except stop making promises and further alienate the three people that used to pay attention. Sorry. Anyway, rather than a tale from the Cumberland Plateau here's a true story from Cumberland Avenue, the city, Knoxville, Tennessee, not too long ago.

ANOTHER NIGHT IN A BAR

I won her love in a pool game. It was the only way I was going to get it, although I wasn't really sure what I’d do with it once I had it. I was still happy to make the bet though, against $5 and a couple bottles of beer.

“I guess your love isn’t worth much,” I laughed, setting up the nine.

“That’s a terrible thing to say to a girl,” she replied, frowning as the ball rolled into the side pocket.

I kissed her and it was good, charged like it could sometimes be. The bar was cool and dark, a smoky cave away from the Tennessee heat. The jukebox played an old Johnny Thunders tune, “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory.” I liked this place. I liked her. I was more than in the mood for trouble, but maybe not quite like the kind we’d both just found.

I lined up the eleven for the corner pocket as she lit a cigarette and leaned against me. She bit my ear, trying to distract me, to make me miss. I felt her breath against my cheek and the ball hit the pocket dead-on.

“There’s just no way I’m going to lose this game,” I grinned. I picked up her beer and had a long drink. I don’t even like beer. I missed the fifteen.



She took her cue and knelt down beside the table, looking to bank the three into a side pocket. I never understood why she did this—kneeling to put the table at eye level, sometimes using her stick to gauge an angle—but it seemed to work a lot of the time. Only this time it didn’t and the three bounced harmlessly to the center of the table.

I walked over and held her to me. It felt right, my arm around her waist and her hand pressed against my chest. I let her go and sunk the fifteen. I had two balls left on the table; she had four.

“I don’t really want to play for my love anymore,” she said, looking over the balls that remained.

“Too bad,” I replied. “You should have thought of that earlier.”

“I did. And it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“It usually does.” I sunk the eleven. We just looked at each other.

The twelve was easy and the eight was lined up nicely along the rail for the corner pocket. She looked genuinely concerned and I felt suddenly uneasy. For a moment I considered missing, scratching, blowing the game, but I caught her brown eyes for an instant then followed the curve of her neck to her shoulder and on down to her hips. Nope, I decided, I wanted it. Then I sunk the eight. She shook her head and grabbed her pack of cigarettes off the table. I had another pull of the beer I didn’t like.

“So, I’ve got your love,” I said, finally.

She lit her cigarette. “Not yet you don’t." She blew a cloud of smoke over her head. "And I want a chance to get it back. I’ll put up another round and dinner against it for the next game.”

But I wouldn’t put it up. We made a lot of bets after that, but somehow there was always one thing I wouldn’t wager, just in case I needed it one day. After all, you can never be sure about something like that and I’d won it fair and square. Love rarely comes so easily.

"This place is hell to me, With the Devil in my bed, And the Devil in this bottle, And the Devil in my head, I'll meet you in Heaven again, If you wear that dress again, (I'll have one more drink, my friend), Where my heart is kept on ice, And prayers burst into flames, PRAYERS ON FIRE," Nick Cave 1981

Sequatchie County, May 2007

We step out of the dusty S-10 at the end of an old logging road in Sequatchie County, Tennessee. The surrounding landscape is blasted, just piles of dirt and debris, shorn of trees or shelter from the relentless sun, but we’re used to this. A vulture wheels overhead as we check the GPS. “This is as good as we can do,” Jason says. “But we’re about 2 kilometers northeast of where we really want to be.” I take out my compass and look across the clearcut to a patch of trees, trees that quickly disappear below the horizon. A steep descent. Cliffs. Bluffs. Rocks. We’re used to this, too. Yet just because you’re used to something doesn’t mean you like it. We start off northwestward.

While walking through the coves and gulfs of the Cumberland Plateau you want to stay alert. There’s loose boulders and dead trees that can fall over in a stout gust. Copperheads and timber rattlesnakes might coil near every handhold. Stick your foot between the wrong two rocks and you’ve just snapped your ankle with no easy way back up the slope. But it can be hard to concentrate on the terrain when the hours and the heat stretch out before you and all your body does is walk while all your mind does is consider things as they should be. Or as they could be. Or mostly as they never are. Ghosts. Ghosts are dead things, of the past. Often terrible. But there are other ghosts. Worse ones. Ghosts of the present. The living dead. The shape of things to come falling apart. Then there are ghosts of the future, the worst kind. Dreams that will never come true. Just keep walking.



Jason and I get beyond the clearcut to the treeline and look across the valley. Typical. The valley is so steep and covered in laurel and bramble we can’t even see what’s below us. The opposite slope actually rises above where we’re standing. Typical. We pick a route that appears reasonable, yet might end abruptly in a bluff and a sheer drop to the rocky creek below us. It wouldn’t be the first time we’d be forced to crawl back up a hill and look for an alternative way down. But eventually the bramble and laurel yields to a landscape of 50-100 pound boulders that appear to have been literally thrown across every slope. A rockslide waiting to happen. Jason and I keep a good distance apart so that we don’t inadvertently bury each other. The going is not easy, but we reach our first transects and begin walking south to nowhere in particular.



Alright, so that's a pretty melodramatic way to return, eh? Before everyone starts sending me bottles of Xanax, let me just say that I was TRYING to be melodramatic. Something about walking around out in the woods this summer didn't feel quite right and it was hard to convey the sense of burn-out. On the other hand, no one pulled a gun on us, no one almost died, not much of interest happened at all, for better or worse. With that in mind, I'll try to pick up the remaining threads of last year's harrowing mess in subsequent posts that hopefully won't take 6 months to put up.

Interestingly, I can end this post the same way I ended my last one, over 180 days ago: "By the way, anyone wanna give me a job?"

P.S. These photos are from the flat land of far-western Tennessee, not anywhere near the Plateau, geographically or spiritually.