More free literature, dig it: the FarrFeed Digital Potlatch presents Chapter Three from BUFFALO LIGHTS, the book I wrote about the process of relocating to New Mexico.
To read the preceding chapters and the introduction, just visit the Buffalo Lights category page. Want to read an official synopsis? Go here. This chapter, entitled “Missing Links,” is rather transparent to me now, of course. I wonder if it feels that way to you?
Part I: Maryland My Maryland
Chapter 3: Missing Links
They’re everywhere, I thought. A road not taken, a treasure missed.
The realization was maddening, too, as I walked to the beach a mile and half away. A wide concrete jetty extended fifty yards or so out into the bay, and I walked all the way down to the guano-dappled end to behold a grand view: the upper Chesapeake Bay stretched out before me, and in the crisp clean air I could clearly see the forested bluffs on the distant shore. A steady west wind aroused my dormant sailing instincts, and I noted that there were no ships in sight — if I’d been on the water, I would have had the whole scene completely to myself!
I didn’t go sailing then, of course, not that particular December afternoon. Or hardly any other, I thought, as I walked back up the hill. What kind of man would I be now if I’d gone sailing every day all for these years Physically stronger, for sure, and probably more handsome. Wind-burned and tanned, with a glint in me eye instead of two chins and a frown. Dead, perhaps — you never know, out there on the water. I could have had a transcendental time or two, experienced the ole cosmic download, written a novel about it all, and been driving a Maserati. It was all a muddle and a dangerous one at that.
Had anyone ever been completely fulfilled, I wondered, completely manifested? Had there ever been a person who made all the right choices at every turn? Realizing the awful slope I was heading down, I winced as images of missed opportunities from the past came floating by.
Once when I was a student spending the summer in Germany, I took a train to the Bodensee (Lake Constance) and rode the ferry across to the historic Swiss city of St. Gallen. I wandered around for most of the afternoon, and then sat in the park for another hour or two, reading a magazine until the boat came back. A few years later I was sitting in a graduate seminar in Germanic literature at the University of Texas at Austin, listening in rapt attention as my professor described a certain monastery where monks kept watch over the most extraordinary ancient manuscripts. The scholarly brothers were known for welcoming visiting students and sharing their secrets: if they liked you, you might get to see the good stuff, including a revered parchment with the first words ever written down in German. The monastery, it turns out, was in Switzerland, not far from the Bodensee, somewhere near the town of St. Gallen! What monstrous irony: instead of reading priceless parchments and illustrated manuscripts, I had spent my afternoon in St. Gallen eating a candy bar and reading the international edition of Newsweek.
A few years later I was divorced and preparing to leave the small Texas town where I had been a college instructor. Virtually everything I had was for sale, and I had posted flyers at the junior college where I worked. One of my last visitors was a colleague I had hardly spoken to over the preceding three years, a slightly older and bolder lady who coached women’s sports. She draped a long leg over an arm of the couch I was selling and more or less called me a fool to my face for not noticing her all that time, hinting strongly that the two of us could have had a very good time together. Poor me: I had spent all my weekends in Austin chasing neurotic hippie chicks instead of getting an education at home.
All those missed Maseratis, manuscripts, and sex. It was all but too much to bear. Time was closing in as demons laid siege to my cozy fortress on all sides. A cusp was approaching, a time of decision and movement that would open a whole new road, but what about the others that I’d missed? Just what were these links to other realms, in fact? Would things have turned out better? Were the untried gateways openings to places I should have gone, or had I merely chosen different paths from the ones I remembered passing up?
It was frustrating beyond belief to admit that there were always more possibilities than any one person could explore. That was the arrangement, and I had always chafed under its bounds. If there were any sort of cosmic justice after all, some guarantee of second chances, then reincarnation made a certain kind of sense. Maybe opportunity did knock more than once, maybe ten times, a thousand, who knew? Contemplating these dynamics, I felt myself relax just a tiny bit. I also remembered that that the last thing I’d ever wanted to be was a professor of Germanic literature, after all.
Exploring the ancient archives would have been great fun, no doubt. But who knows how many equally valuable things were imprinted while I sat on a bench in the sun in a foreign country, reading a magazine, all those years ago? As for my junior college days, the truth was that I had never spoken to the lady in question because I was never interested, and there were lots more to do in Austin than just chase promises. Without the associations and connections I made over those long weekends out of town, the rest of my life might have been horribly drab.
As far as sailing and boating was concerned, well, that was a problem. The bay was almost always taunting: “Sail me, you fool! My proximity to the water was something most people only dreamed about. When I made it out to the Rockies, there would be no marshy creeks to cruise in my kayak. Roaring rapids in the canyons, yes, and a mountain lake or two, but they would be much farther distant. I felt more than a little troubled as I took off my running shoes, sat down at the kitchen table, and gave my long-suffering wife the latest psychological damage report. Turning to face me squarely and looking me right in the eye, she said: “You have now— you have the present moment! It’s beautiful here, and you can get in your boat and go out whenever you want.”
I knew I was in the presence of truth. I sat, wavering, finding it more and more difficult to brood. Where did she get these things, anyway? I sat a while longer, and by the time I finished my coffee, the magic had worked: “You have absolutely nothing to be upset about,” spoke the quiet voice inside my head, and it was true: I had no real immediate problems. Nothing had been missed, lost, or taken away. I still had every opportunity, in fact, to make my way to glory.
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