Just what is this, you know? What makes this lumbering bag of bones and blood get out of bed in the morning?
There we were in southeastern Colorado with the weather turning grim, and my wife wanted to keep on heading east. I was fixated on getting to McCook, Nebraska and urged us north into the wind instead. The duststorm that hit us next was blowing at 60 mph, like nothing I had ever seen, bringing us at least three times to a dead stop on the backroad two-lane because we absolutely couldn’t see a thing. The punishment the car was taking made me wince. When the blizzard followed right after the dust, it was almost like a relief, but then I started to get scared. I thought my wife wasn’t going fast enough, that we wouldn’t get to McCook before it got dark. With the snow blowing so hard, once we lost the light, the road would be invisible.
We got there just fine, though, and had dinner at a barbecue joint down the road from the Holiday Inn Express. I’d made the reservation on my cell phone while we were still an hour away, shouting over the roar of the storm and straining to hear the service rep on the other side of the world.
For the next few days, Iowa. Relatives and eating out. Stores, curbs, traffic lights. Humidity. A rural industrial landscape, for the most part, its charm now more a memory and a brand. Dubuque was a long dance of shopping and eating. Serious eaters along the Mississippi, too! Shop, eat, shop, eat. Where does it all end?
Heh.
On the way back home through eastern Colorado, the new car took two serious hits to the windshield from flying rocks in the middle of nowhere. One of them made a 10-inch crack. I was emotional collateral damage for at least 50 miles.
A couple of hours later, we were flying across a vista impossible to photograph, so huge and so dramatic it was: sun and clouds and snow-covered mountains, a highway that stretched forever, and nobody on it. As we approached northern Taos County, I felt we were being lifted up into an exalted realm. Coming into Taos itself, disappointment: too many mud houses and too few trees, all the unanswered questions I’d left behind for a week.
But I still don’t get it. Okay, it’s back to chaos, but what would I do if everything was fine? If I had all the money and comfort in the world but still heard my minutes ticking away, what then? Hell, why do we do anything? I did have the thought, though, that I was an expression of unnamable, inexhaustible energy, and that most of my upbringing and subsequent socialization was based on turning it off… One’s duty is therefore absolutely clear!
I wish anything more were, but that much we got knocked.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
But our minutes ARE ticking away, dear Farr. If we don’t hear them ticking, we’re living an illusion. Camus had the noblest and most moving description of this, in “The Myth of Sysiphus”. If we are sentient creatures, we know we must die, and that thought must be the basis for all our human actions. We must live bravely, facing the music of death, and carve out for ourselves some little niche of beauty before the Big Sleep.
Well of COURSE they are. But most people who have “security” in their lives don’t admit that. My point is exactly yours, that regardless of material circumstances, there’s something else going on here to pay attention to.
I know you believe that there’s a big difference between those with security and those without. I don’t see it myself. Life is life. We make our bed, we lie in it. Nobody gets out of this life alive. Some folks face up to that fact, some don’t. I think you face up to it, and you have woven a personal mythology on the general theme of being, as you say, “off the reservation”. That’s your trope for being honest. Palefaces have their own mythologies, however. You gotta walk in the mocassins of the other guy to know just what his challenges are. In the end there’s just one challenge – making something of the short life each of us is given.
I have absolutely nothing against what passes for “security” and enjoy as much of it as I am blessed to experience. It is, however, an illusion, which is all I’ve ever been driving at.
The question is whether “security” (which I put in quotes because it’s a pretty slippery term) is antipathetic to an honest life – or at least a life without illusions. That’s something we both value highly, so we are agreed on the outcome. Where the disagreement may exist is on how you get there. I don’t think it’s a matter of externalities – living on the edge, say, as opposed to living more conventionally. Having money or not having it, having status or not having it. Some of the profoundest of our species wore good threads, ate good dinners and sat behind a nice set of wheels (even before the Vibe arrived!). Some were assholes, of course.