The latest Digital Potlatch offering has arrived! Below you’ll find Chapter Two from BUFFALO LIGHTS, and it’s a doozy. Don’t forget, you can actually buy the book, too!
Reading this over is hard for me on one level, because it brings back the taste of a life that in retrospect was pretty damn good and a lot more secure than everything that’s gone down since. The photo in the main text shows just a small part of the huge back yard I can’t believe we don’t own any more. Who would have thought that I could feel that way, 10 years later? Well, I do. I also have the privilege of reading 10-year-old thoughts and seeing through the rationales with a wiser heart.
However, after all this time, it does appear that we are actually here [pinches forearm] in Taos, New Mexico, and that this is the arena where the full drama of our lives has yet to play out… It’s like it’s taken all this time just to unpack, except that would you believe, we still haven’t? There are boxes in the storage unit that haven’t been opened since 1999…
This chapter is rather long, so you’ll have to click through to read the whole thing, and I hope you do.
Part I: Maryland My Maryland
Chapter 2: Blood Rites
When we returned from our errands that afternoon, and pulled up to the garage out here in our country paradise, with all the birdies singing and fighting and the sun shining down on the fresh green jungle, I knew a certain singular moment had come: Time to Cut the Grass! Yes, the first grass cutting of every year is a kind of religious ceremony. (By July it will be a hot, stinking, deerfly-swatting chore, but for now it has special significance.) I must approach the task in just the right frame of mind and only after going through all the required exercises, the first of which is, of course, Raising the Deere from the Dead!
The seasonal resurrection of the tractor is accomplished through three days of battery-charging, tire-inflating, and prayer, in this case started earlier in the week. When I’m sure it really will start and run reliably, I prepare myself by donning appropriate dedicated clothing and partaking of my choice of intoxicants. 2.57 acres are not to be approached soberly in any case, and opening day is a special occasion, after all. This time as it happened, the old machine fired right up, belching blue smoke with a roar and a rattle, signaling that the moment was exactly right and that I had no time to lose. I ran back into the house to put on my shorts, an expendable long-sleeved shirt, and an old pair of running shoes; tossed back a couple shots of tequila, and backed out of the garage.
Where to make the First Cut? I decided on the “back forty,” actually just the lowest, most distant patch of field, next to the woods. This would truly be an afternoon of blood sacrifice, because of the freshly greened arcing multi-flora branches around the perimeter: if you’re too lazy to trim them first, you get lashed! (I got lashed.) Dripping more blood than an Aztec priest, I churned my way around the once-more familiar plot of ground, reconnecting with the earth and the spirits of the place. It was pretty. It smelled good. The John Deere didn’t skip a beat, the drive belt didn’t slip in the tall grass, and by the time I was finished I was sorry that it was too late in the day to cut any more. I was once again in love with this small corner of the world, a place I would soon be leaving.
Reality check: yes, we were leaving. Moving to where the thick grass and soft dark soil would be a distant memory. Not that there wouldn’t be a chance to end up in another spot like this perhaps, but sagebrush, piñon, and rocks were much more likely. I love all that too, but I had to ask myself: was this my real nature, to be at one with the damp green jungle and the perfumed air? The truth was that it was in my blood (literally). I first realized that when I came back years ago to this slice of earth I had visited many times as a child, and I thought of it again as I mowed.
The fear and urge to undo what we’d set in motion was a shock at first, but I suppressed it and mowed on until the setting sun and gathering chill drove me back inside. Later that evening I reflected on it all, especially the powerful feelings I credited with setting us up to take the blows I knew were coming. There was more going on down deep than I could ever get across to puzzled friends or even to myself. I thought about the stages I’d gone through in all my wavering and raving and lingered on a meditation about my wife.
It was sobering to realize how long I’d heard but never really understood. She’d been right all along, on course as surely as the best of them: seers, visionaries, medicine women, all those things good Methodist girls from Des Moines aren’t raised to be. But she was born some distance west of there, on the rolling black dirt prairie, a little closer to the wildness of the West. There had always been an elemental, independent spirit, and now it was closer to the surface.
For several summers we’d traveled to New Mexico or Colorado, sometimes Texas. We’d camped out in Big Bend and the Davis Mountains, hiked down the Ute Trail near Estes Park, and seen a lot of Colorado and New Mexico. Taos was a favorite spot but not immediately adopted: I saw things that reminded me of the detritus of the bleeding-edge High Weirdo culture I had loved in Austin in another life, and perhaps I felt like I’d seen it all before.
But for several years we’d subscribed to the Taos News, and each issue’s arrival was a real event. Not long ago I sorted through a stack of back issues and realized she’d been circling real estate ads for at least three years! We’d discussed this one or that one, compared features, location, and imagined ourselves living here or there. Of course I’d heard, but had I paid attention?
The yellowed newspapers with the circled ads made the point belatedly but loudly: my God, how long had she been coming home from work and declaring, “I just can’t do this anymore”? I’d heard, all right, but besides perceiving that my comfy setup was under siege, had I really understood? Once in a while, seemingly out of the blue, she would say something like, “We should go spend a week there at Christmas,” a statement I was never sure whether to take as a call to act or not. But now, as I sat in front of a pile of old New Mexico newspapers and trip souvenirs, I suddenly saw that there had been a veritable procession of signs, omens, inspirations, and sincere declarations of the soul stretching back for years. All this time I’d wanted the adventure too, though I must not have believed deep down in my soul that she would really come or that I’d finally have the nerve to go.
After all, we already had a place to live. There were trees here that I had planted from tiny seedlings given away on long-past Arbor Days, and gardens all around. We’d gone through most of the bad stuff, from termites under the front porch to leaking water tanks and heaters in the basement. One by one we had either fixed everything that was broken or gotten used to it. When I sat at my computer I could look out through the spacious second-floor windows across the fields to a wooded horizon. In the spring and fall, when the sun shone bright and clear and everything was beautiful, I would ask myself: who in his right mind would ever want to leave this place? There was even a large gravestone with my name on it, back in town: “FARR” was all it said, but that was plenty.
We also had our friends, of course. Neither of us had ever lived so many years in one place, so most of the people we knew were very old friends indeed. Who could even begin to imagine what it would be like to leave them here? In my case the isolation of my Internet writing job and our house in the country seemed to insulate me from potential trauma. I loved my friends but rarely saw them, except at the odd supermarket parking lot encounter or several parties every year. Under these conditions moving to the Southwest was just a matter of moving “a little farther out of town,” I told myself. There’d been more interaction in the past when everyone was young, before babies and liver transplants, but life was more encapsulated now. My own world had narrowed rapidly to focus on my thoughts about New Mexico, the Internet, and how I would support myself. Aside from my many e-mail correspondents, there didn’t seem to be anyone else sharing this space except for Kathy and the cat.
I’ve been joking that doing what we’re contemplating is like having a baby: no matter how many books you read about what to expect and how to prepare, there’s no substitute for the real thing. Every birth is different, every person is different. And so it is with pulling up stakes and leaving town: at least there won’t be any predetermined standard to measure up against. We’ll be new at everything we do and get no practice, having little or no ability to undo any particular step. That we will go is no longer in doubt, though all the rest is, so here we are now, planning the hairiest disruption and the biggest drama of our lives.
This is an affair of the heart, after all, and logic will only take us so far.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
as one of the “many email correspondents” from back then i remember when all this was going down, and looking back (10 years? a DECADE?? when the fuck did THAT happen??!? ^_^ ) is a trip.
3 things:
1- i wouldn’t miss that lawn. dealing with maintaining a property is a chore i really could do without, but that’s just me.
2- i see vague but deep symbology in that “FARR” gravestone, something about how staying there too long to the point where that’s where you end up dying, but your soul would’ve been smothered long before the actual physical end, as well as an aspect of “dead end” and “past” and an “old way of doing things”, stagnation in a status quo that would be unsustainable if you wanted to continue to grow and evolve and unfold with the rest of the Universe. it’s like when you’re having a dream, and you can either go back the way you came or keep moving forward, and you just KNOW going back is NOT the choice to make, as familiarly comforting as it may seem.
3- “friends” who drift into just being vague occasional acquaintances – just like the suburbia i’m stuck in these days where you occasionally wave at neighbors or exchange a few words, but really everyone is alienated from each other and there’s no REAL connection or true friendship. there’s a concept in astrophysics called Hubble Flow, which is basically the tendency for all objects in the universe to keep drifting farther away from each other due to the expansion of the Universe, and i always see that reflected on a microcosmic human level (as above, so below, and all that). besides, i’d much rather have only a couple Real Friends, people i’ve known for decades and really trust and connect with, than a whole bunch of casual acquaintances who don’t really mean anything to me.
it’s after midnight and i’m tired and babbling so i’m going to shut the fuck up now. Be Seeing You! ^_^
No, I’m not going back.
That’s not part of the deal. Right now, though, there are still some emotions to process, amazingly.
there are always emotions to still process, even decades after the fact (i find myself still processing things from when i was 10 years old!).
in your specific case part of it may have to do with the fact that even after 10 years you’re still not *really* settled there; still renting and perched on that extreme edge of potentially having the rug pulled out from under you any moment… which is the thrill of course, and catalyst for all the deep good work you’ve done to date, but i bet it would be nice to finally be able to let the psychic roots burrow down and anchor in.