Windshield Soup

There are places I remember
All my life, though some have changed
Some forever, not for better
Some have gone and some remain

I learned of music sampling from a cousin. It is use of an uncredited riff or two of another's inspiration in an artist's creation. And so it goes. During the Artists and Repertoire era, Alan was an international promotions coordinator at Atlantic Records. In those days, A&R curators funded change in tastes - taking music in new directions. Digital distribution ended that. That ain't the way to have fun.

Recently, I sampled roads I had already travelled. This past August I looped back in time connecting with places across parts of the Southwest that I had not visited enough the first time through. Memory would flood back as I encountered a renown vista. I call that photographic memory. For example, Highway 163 near Mexican Hat with Rock Door Mesa looming in the background is featured in “Forrest Gump.” A bearded Tom Hanks says “I’m pretty tired. I think I’ll go home now.” When I paid tribute about fifty other cars and buses were also stopped along that section of highway recreating that movie image.

More profoundly to me, I might round a bend and the climb of the curve along with colors, shapes, and shade would align just as I first sampled years back. It felt nourishing to be in that moment of being back. Covering two thousand miles in seven days there was hardly a chance to dawdle. So, those moments passed. At no point did I listen to the radio. This windshield soup sufficed.

I'll be the roundabout
The words will make you out 'n' out
I spend the day your way
Call it morning driving through the sound of

In and out the valley
In and around the lake
Mountains come out of the sky and they stand there

I distill that journey into three rains.

First rain. Alone on the hill. Taos is uphill from Santa Fe which is uphill from Albuquerque. The Rio Grande River connects the three. On route to Taos on State Highway 68, near an historical marker for María Rosa Villapando, a sky-sweeping rainbow appears and welcomes me into town.

Once I reach its historical center, I am surprised as Google Maps leads me away from my destination at the Worldmark Taos and instead to Taos Plaza and then along Civic Plaza. Somehow Google knows that Dwight Yoakam and the Mavericks are setting up to play outdoors at Kit Carson Park, right next to my resort, and steers me around the arriving throng. One of Yoakam's tunes is "A Thousand Miles From Nowhere."

I'm a thousand miles from nowhere
Time don't matter to me
'Cause I'm a thousand miles from nowhere
And there's no place I want to be

Once unpacked, I grab a straw fedora. Outside I discover that the rainbow has birthed a hard high-mountain rain. Soon I am drenched head to toe. Soaked concertgoers leave the Park smiling and made innocent by baptism of the downpour. They help strangers, dance in puddles, and are utterly unaware of self. Walking toward me, in succession, three women my age, each with droplets of rain streaming down their face, stop me to celebrate our folly. I fall in love again with Taos.

People stop and stare, they don't bother me
For there's nowhere else on earth that I would rather be
Let the time go by, I won't care if I
Can be here on the street where you live

I take shelter inside at the Sabor Real Restaurant and order the enchilada plate with a limed Negra cerveza. The food is delicious. Lively patrons celebrate out front on the deck under an umbrella. In a corner a couple sit glumly. They do not speak. Alone on the hill. The storm subsides. I wade back to my hotel.

Second Rain. Remembrance of things passed. On a cloud obscuring rainy day, I head up Colorado 145 from Cortez after visiting Mesa Verde. I pass slow motor home after travel trailer. Everyone wants the view, no one wants the climb. I am determined to finally visit Telluride.

Decades back I had been to Ouray and Silverton slicing through the San Juan Mountains on jagged U.S. Route 550 and marveled at the remains of the La Garita Caldera extinct super volcano. But Telluride is on the western side and full of lore. I now arrive during monsoon season with orographic rainfall as Gulf of Mexico air masses, forced to rise over the San Juans, carry water vapor cooled into rain.

Long as I remember
The rain been coming down
Clouds of mystery falling
Confusion on the ground
Good men through the ages
Trying to find a sun
And I wonder, still I wonder
Who'll stop the rain

I do not see the old mining operations dotting the hillsides or remnants of the Rio Grande Southern Railroad. Nor do I turn out at the Sunshine Mountain Scenic Overview, or the Lizard Head Peak Vista Overlook, or stop to look for a Galloping Goose railcar. In fact, by the time I reach the 145 Spur, about two miles from Telluride, I realize I would not see its box canyon nor enjoy any view of Bridal Veil Falls. Instead, I drive west, away from the San Juans, circle the San Miguels, and drive out of the monsoon to unexpected joy.

Here, for a hundred miles, a salt anticline adjacent to the Uncompahgre Uplift creates a remarkable valley. The anticline is ancient Mesozoic sedimentary rocks arched over a thick core of buoyant salt. Deposited over it is Morrison Formation, a distinctive sequence of sturdy Upper Jurassic sedimentary rock composed of mudstone, sandstone, siltstone, and limestone. It is a valley of unparalleled beauty with colors of light grays, greenish grays, and rusted pink reds. I stop several times to take photos. None will match the images now burnished within me. There is satisfaction in understanding that algorithms will never recreate this experience.

The route takes me through the town of Bedrock and then just past Paradox, a short ten miles from Utah, the asphalt turns sharply south and then sweeps up and along a towering ridge of the La Sal Mountains and on into Moab. I will never regret not entering Telluride.

I love driving. My thoughts process road rules; strategy such as route choice, tactics of anticipating road conditions or adapting to other drivers, and finally executing the continual choices of driving. It leaves me free to think about nothing. I just drive and enjoy the views. A self-driving car would deprive me of that low level involvement leaving me to worry and wonder. My little runaway brain.

Third Rain. Marketplace of ideas. Unknown to me, there is much lore to southwest New Mexico. Geronimo. Billy the Kid. The Aldo Leopold Wilderness. I’m there for my need to drive State Road 9, which abuts the border with Mexico from Columbus to El Paso, to see the conditions there that now capture our politics. My version of fact checking.

I circle the west side of the Gila National Forest on Highway 180, where the continental divide passes through, to support bike packers on the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route riding from Banff to Antelope Wells. Every so often I stop and offer bottled water and listen to their stories. I hope to see the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument the next day. The charming owner of the Palace Hotel in Silver City lets me know it would be two rugged hours up to the Cliff Dwellings and then a few hours to walk to see everything. Six hours I do not have.

A late afternoon rain hits as I walk to the Jalisco Cafe for some fine Mexican food. Mountain towns have raised sidewalks and crowned streets but no gutters. Rainwater washes down both sides of streets. It is not as easy for me to leap across the gully as it once was.

 
I rise early and walk over to Tranquilbuzz for coffee. It self boasts, “Yes, it’s unique. Yes, there are tree branches inside when you look up, and a painted sky too.... It’s got that ole mercantile feeling.... Our Buzz community emits a whole lot of vibrancy.... Our horizon goes beyond a coffee house into growing a model of community kinship....The conscious building blocks of The Buzz .... seed dreams of possibility." 

A marketplace of ideas.

I seen so many things I ain't never seen before
Don't know what it is, I don't wanna see no more

State Road 9 crosses the Chihuahuan Desert. I spot cacti, yucca, creosote bushes and mesquite trees. They are there but I don’t see mule deer, coyotes or jackrabbits. I also don’t see any humans crossing the border. There is a wide dirt road adjacent to the state road for border patrol vehicles. Next to that a wire fence. Occasional plastic water bottles are hook on the fence. I stop and hook my remaining bottles to the wire. Off in the near distance is the border wall. It is tall and constructed with steel-bollard barriers. You can see through it.

As I near the Santa Teresa Border Patrol Station there is an unexpected stadium with an oval dirt track. Then I reach the Pete V. Domenici International Highway with the Puerto Fronterizo Jeronimo Santa Teresa border crossing to the right and a large Union Pacific Railway Facility to the left. Soon I am in El Paso. I am no closer to any truth about the border.

Late last night the rain was knocking on my window
I moved across the darkened room and in the lampglow
I thought I saw down in the street the spirit of the century
Telling us that we're all standing on the border

















.

Three Sisters

Tall and wiry Naadą́ heeds Moab traffic on Highway 191 as she crosses the four-lane bridge over the Colorado on route tohip surgery  Poison Spider Trail. She rides a unworldly buggy, a Polaris RZR Pro XP 4 Sport with a Specialized Stumpjumper bike racked on the back. Indeed, she slows further so the goosenecker 'shicheii' in the adjacent lane cannot snap her pic on his phone. Naadą́ stays solemn but thinks that 'grandpa' sees her only as a Mad Max Furiosa heading out on an epic journey through a forsaken canyon world. For Naadą́ its just Monday.

Back in Moab, her sister, Pumpkin, is serving up a delicious pork green chili poutine at the Trailhead Public House and Eatery. Pumpkin gets around with a slight limp. Should you ask, Pumpkin would happily supply that she is a breech baby. Hip dysplasia. Sometimes she might chip in that her Navajo culture had her tightly swaddled as a new born. Lovingly acquired dysplasia.

More likely, as she hails from Shiprock, the uranium industry wore her down. Until serendipity happened, her parents worked in the Shiprock electronics assembly plant. Also, they did not know construction materials with uranium milling waste was used in their home. Top it off, the Trinity Test site was downwind. Still hip dysplasia one way or another. Right? So, where's the harm? Millions of tons of uranium ore were extracted from the Navajo Nation, leaving gray streaks across the desert landscape.

The third sister, Naaʼołí, is at Singha Thai in Moab hopeful that Barry will pick up the check for the entire party of eight, again. All suffer an overwhelming cheerfulness from addictive endorphins from their nonstop outdoor activity. In his teens, Barry's Portland father started him on long distance enduro mountain biking. Not that anyone listens, except to say 'wow,' at every get together of the eight, as Barry always recounts his love of enduros, "They are held in timed stages. That means you compete against yourself. Not others." All eight love this notion. Each loves themselves as each shares, unconditionally. It's the saying that matters.

Sam, the owner of Singha Thai, wanders over. That gives Naaʼołí the opportunity to offer up that her Pad Thai today was just a good as when she was in Thailand for three weeks a few years back. Sam asks where. Naaʼołí utters syllables that Sam cannot understand. Naaʼołí finally spits out, "South." Sam cheerfully retorts, "Koh Samui, Hat Yai, Phuket?" Memory returns to Naaʼołí, "Krabi, it's small. It was so nice to be in Krabi away from it all." Sam is unsure of Krabi.

Barry, meanwhile, is so happy with himself that he offers to pick up the check. Someone in the group asks Barry what he does for a living. "I'm in music." They all nod 'wow!' "I'm the one dressed up as an animal at all the shows. I'm the bear. 'Jamm'n Bear.' I do play. Will play. But this is my in!" All at the table feel wonderful for Barry.

Sam is unsure. He is silently grateful for all the trust fund kids in Moab. Sam knows there are also retired Army and Marines here, still young as twenty years in that career puts you at forty and able to afford high-end toys in the desert. If you ever met Barry's sixty year old father, in Portland, you would notice a slight hobble. He no longer has cartilage in his right knee. All those enduros. So, where's the harm? Right?

The three sisters come from the Navajo Trust Land. The Navajo were hunters and gatherers but adopted farming from the Pueblo, growing the Three Sisters: corn, beans, and squash.

Corn 'naadą́ą́' is planted first to grow tall and provide support for the beans to climb and shade for squash. 

Beans 'naaʼołí' absorb nitrogen in and convert it to fertilizer to benefit corn and squash. 

Squash provides ground cover to suppress weeds and inhibit soil evaporation. Squash's wide leaves shade corn's roots. 

Serendipity. When the three sisters were yet in their first decade, the Tribal community voted their mother onto a district board of NAPI, the Navajo Agricultural Products Industry. Over time NAPI adapted from subsistence farming to large scale agriculture operations. Instead of just raw materials for feed, NAPI increased bean and potato acreages and sumac and chiles as well. NAPI now produces Navajo Pride brand flour and bread and operates an 110,000-acre farm stretching 30 miles east to west just south of Farmington producing 658,000 bushels of winter wheat. NAPI hopes to get winter wheat to one million bushels for its flour mill. It tends 15,000 acres of alfalfa for southwest dairy farmers. NAPI plans to grow 57 varieties of organic potatoes.

This serendipity inspired the three sisters, approaching their third decade, to venture out, together, to Moab to learn and adapt to the world.

Home Rule - Part 1

I have lived chiefly in Indiana. But my first-year college dorm in Colorado held a majestic view of Pikes Peak. Opera singer Kate Smith saw that summit and belted out, “From the mountains to the prairies To the oceans white with foam.” Head west young man. Now, back home again, a gravel quarry is across the street from me. Rocks. Infrequently there, at dawn, blasting caps ignite to split up alluvial. In the near distant past, our Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra set up chairs in the quarry bottom so tuxedoed men and ball-gowned women could sit and listen to Beethoven’s Fifth. The four opening notes of that composition are known as ‘fate knocking at the door.’ Da-da-da-dum.

In the distant past, before me or the gravel pit, Indians lived in Indiana.

“It was a beautiful, level country unbroken by mountains but traversed by rivers which occasionally found a channel through slightly rolling country to the plains beyond. Much of it was covered with thick forests of walnut, poplar, maple, linden, cherry, and sycamore. There were broad meadows with only stubble undergrowth of bushes. The natural plains had been fertilized through the centuries by decomposed vegetation. The topsoil of the woods lay deep with rotted leaves. On these plains, as in the dark, damp recesses of the woodlands, nature from the beginning had been enriching the earth. Its transformation into productive fields needed only the axe and the plow.” ‘Sons of the Wilderness: John and William Conner’ by Charles N. Thomson, Indianapolis, Indiana Historical Society, 1937.

In that era of the Sons of the Wilderness, near where I now sit typing this missive on the west side of the White River, lived a French half-breed doctor named Brouett, whose wife was captured and brought up by Indians. He practiced medicine after the Indian fashion and had considerable patronage. He likely used plums growing wild in thickets along the banks of the White River as medicine. The Plains Indians and Cheyenne ate wild plums. The Navajo used the plum roots to make a red dye for wool garments. But I get ahead of myself.

Just before the Sons of the Wilderness era, along the Atlantic seaboard, a confederacy of tribes including Delaware, Shawnee, and other woodland Indian forces lost the Battle of Fallen Timbers, surrendered to the United States, signed the Treaty of Greenville, and were forced to pledge never again to take up arms against ‘Americans.’ The Delaware tribe resettled along the White River.

And before that era, the Six Nations refused English subjection and the empty promise of limited white settlements beyond the Alleghenies. In turn, French traders and settlers chafed under the loss of the fur trade resulting in Pontiac's War in which Fort Detroit was besieged for three months by ‘savage hordes.’ The Six Nations lost.

Delicious plums. Memories are scent, like perfume, a desire of something perfect. Always making promises it can’t keep. A lifelong friend understands time as a loop. He asserts history is a constant. It repeats. We have not spoken in eight years. So far, no loop. I conject times get better. It must, right? I'm not sure on what evidence I rely.

Indigenous Americans were localized hunter-gatherers. Teepee rule. Clan chiefs were ceremonial leaders. Post Columbian and Christian contact brought on centralized leadership - the confederacy - the Six Nations. Along the White River the traditional Big House Ceremony was revitalized. It featured the ascendancy of a principal chief among the clan chiefs as the Delaware elevated Chief Anderson’s position from a first among equals to the position of head chief. This renewed sense of Delaware identity was in opposition to Christianity. In 1805, along the White River, a Monsi Delaware woman appeared as a prophet preaching a ‘new religion’ to the Delaware. In the aftermath, the Delaware executed several of her followers on the charge of witchcraft. Turns out the executed had colluded with missionaries and U.S. government officials. Fate knocked at the door.

Again and again, Native Americans were herded west. In about a week, I am going back to the stone age in New Mexico and Southeast Utah. Oh, it’s here, but in Indiana nature from the beginning has been enriching the earth. Evidence is covered by the topsoil of the woods. Here, archaeologists find a ring of stones cracked open by heat and deduce it as a tribal campfire. Out West Indigenous Americans built enduring cliff dwellings and later pueblos. Petroglyphs remain. I hope to gain permission to visit a Navajo reservation. I most certainly will drive Indian Routes to reach Canyon De Chelly, the Chaco Cultural Center, and the Tsé Bitʼaʼí monadnock.

We think of Indigenous Americans as living in nature according to natural rights reveling in experiences that circumvented conscious thought. This romantic notion sees a meditative spirit one may always find in Nature. Something in Nature responsive to one’s mood. Reverie. Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that individuals surrender natural rights to the state to protect their rights. Rousseau recommended a government guided by the general will, which would be the true good of every person in society. This government would pass laws to reduce income inequality, promote civic education, and cultivate civic virtue. Coming from natural rights, the goodness of government would flow from our innate tendencies toward the virtues of benevolence, righteousness, wisdom, and propriety. In essence, government today depends on a notion that Indigenous Americans were noble.

Evolution, as seen by Charles Darwin and others, on the other hand, is founded in evidence that ancestors of modern humans were not like humans today. Evolution is also much easier to see in New Mexico and Southeast Utah due to the exposed stratigraphy: Precambrian, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic rock. I look forward to that journey.

Another friend bought the Indianapolis house I grew up in made of enduring red brick high up on a hill. Years back I painted a mural in the garage. An immature petroglyph. It depicted evolution from ape to man. She kept it. When my mom died several years back, I drove back to that ancestral house. It evolved, considerably, with an addition, painted brick, and a pool in the back yard. I do not have a need to go back. My memory does not linger there. It does in my three sisters. We joke that I grew up in a different family then they did. My outlook is different. I evolved differently. But in our group chat they remember my memories of silly idiosyncrasies of growing up together. And I remember their memories. Our clan. Our teepee.
Our rock.

The July Effect

Late in June, several decades ago, I stood atop the Yerevan Cascade in Armenia to gaze across Turkey's Iğdır Plain to fathom Mount Ararat where legend places Noah's Ark.

I had just been in majestic Kiev and would shortly be in imposing Moscow. This was back when Russia was the USSR and wasn't lucky at all. What I remember, aside from a glorious Kremlin, were shortages. Long lines of weary proletariat at dreary shops that sold only one kind of lampshade. 

What I recall of Yerevan was my disconnect of being in Asia Minor, north and west of Eden. The history I learned readily connected parts east of Europe from classes about stalled advances by Napoleon or Hitler to face Cossacks or the Red Army in tactical retreat through thawing steppes. It was Eurocentric. That stiffled my curiosity of elsewhere. I knew nothing of the Black Sea or Arabia. A shortcoming of knowledge. Maybe. Maybe not. Eden's apple. Careful what comes with knowledge. What occurs when a fallen world pays a visit, when it strays to the comforts of your garden? Do you lament?

Our oldest written story is a lament and a good one, "The Epic of Gilgamesh." It is a five thousand year old assemblage of myth from a preliterate age when gods were being replaced by mortals on the thrones of the city states. It is a legend of survival and brotherhood in the furtile crescent of Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, eventually written down in cuneiform at various times on sundry tablets. Those tablets were separated, broken, lost in the 7th Century, rediscovered two hundred years ago, and finally translated just one hundred and fifty years back. "The Epic of Gilgamesh" is a quick but delightful read, maybe sixty pages. It is a lament on the trials faced by a seemingly invincible man and his trusted friend. Some say Will Smith and Charlize Theron retell the story in the movie "Hancock." 

The Epic includes a massive deluge, perhaps Noah's flood. Most certainly, the premise is a journey toward Mount Ararat to fell giant Cedar timbers for use as impenetrable doors for King Gilgamesh's fortress at Uruk. Due to its wealth, Uruk was a tempting prize to semitic tribes of Arabia and nomads off to the east in Persian.

So now I want to travel there. There is now Iraq. Sometimes a great notion takes shape - just a visa on arrival at Erbil International Airport, a car rental at Budget in downtown Baghdad, and a myriad of security checkpoints to visit world wonders: Babylon, the Tower of Babel, Sammara, the Great Ziggurat of Ur, and the port of Basra from which Sinbad the Sailor set sail.

Who is in? Don't want to drive? Drivers for hire can be secured in Baghdad as well as the breakfast indulgence Geymar, a clotted cream, served with Kahi, a fluffy flakey pastry, along with a cup of hot tea. Mesopotamia has witnessed five millenia of conquest and reconquest. We are the most recent. What occurs when a fallen world wants to pay a visit, when you want to stray from the comforts of your garden to see beyond the lore. I would lament not going. The western world may be infinitely larger but part of it ended in this abyss.

Rental cars are also available in safer Turkey and Jordan for those adverse to Iraq in the aftermath of a 2005 war and surge ending in withdrawal in 2011. Jordan has Bedouins and tales told by Scheherazade in "One Thousand and One Arabian Nights," including many of Sinbad. Though you may remember Petra mainly from "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade."

Turkey has Göbekli Tepe, the world's first settlement. Neolithic, it is pre-pottery and predates Stone Hedge by six thousand years. Like much later indigenous north Americans, Göbekli villagers did not experience a Bronze or Iron Age. Turkey also has Mount Nemrut where a Greek king reinvigorated his ancestral dynasty by constructing a tomb-sanctuary flanked by huge statues of himself, lions, eagles, and various Greek and Iranian gods.

In Turkish, kismet means fate or destiny. In Islam, the will of Allah. Popularly, it is something meant to be. Time can be the sort of thing that makes your conscious heavy. Wherever you hurt the most is where your spirit lay.

One reason I travel is to observe first hand rather than rely on colorful lore. The 'July Effect' is the sense of risk from medical errors and complications once medical school graduates begin residencies each July. Over one hundred and ten studies have shown no evidence of a 'July Effect' on mortality, morbidity, or re-admission. No causation. No correlation. But why set off fireworks this Fourth and risk a resident botch reattaching your thumb? Kismet.

A final thought. Doctors are a scarcity. In every generation there is a limited pool of talent and inclination willing to invest themselves with the years of training for this calling. The rigors needed don't seem to translate to technicians who learn a sequence of treatment steps.

Similarly due to the scarcity of tin needed to alloy with copper, Bronze Age commerce was controlled by a limited pool of talent who insinuated themselves into power and connected their legitimacy to religion.  Merchant colonies and distant trading posts were set up but caravan communication was often broken and raw materials fetched by force from reluctant tribes in Persia and Arabia. 

The Iron Age arrived once it was known how ores could be smelted. There was no scarcity of ore. It democracized power. Everyone could have iron weapons. Nothing happened to the tin man that we didn't already know. For this different reason the Middle East remains a powderkeg. Better to slip in now, quietly, through a seldom slice of peace. Allah give me quickness of tongue to put your heart at ease before the foot of my table has set itself in your stomach. It is meant to be.

Abstract

Many moons ago, I learned to cook at an Italian restaurant in what once was Times Square in Ft Myers Beach, Florida. Hurricane Ian removed it, and all other non-concrete shops and bungalows, on Wednesday, September 28, 2022 shortly after 3:00 pm. A Category 4 obliteration. Fluid water, tossed like a shaker of salt into a spiraling vapor, rended solid destruction. It all wasted away.

What remains are stories. Like this. In 1968, a forty-something Czechoslovakian woman basked in the glow of The Prague Spring - a period of political liberalization and mass protest ushered in by reformist Alexander Dubček. She then faced the Soviet invasion of her nation that August. She escaped, tucked in the back of a Volkswagen van, eventually to Florida to open an Italian restaurant in Ft Myers Beach.

I joined her in the Nadia Comăneci Olympic summer of 1976 fresh from the Breezy Freeze, a beach hangout where I worked as a fry cook. Think Krusty Krab. On the interweb I identify the Breezy Freeze as my only work experience. Nadia lists Romania as her nationality. At the '76 Olympics she received six perfect tens in various gymnastic competitions to win three gold medals.

Resolved and fierce, she commanded our attention as we gathered in bars, dined on conch fritters, and drank beer. Jimmy Buffet's "Margaritaville" hit the charts the next year. Hungarian Béla Károlyi coached her. His famed centralized program trained young girls chosen for their athletic potential. One of his first students was a then six-year-old Nadia. He defected here in 1981. Nothing remains quite the same.

Anyway, I deserted the Breezy Freeze to join the ranks of this Czechoslovakian owned Italian restaurant where Blaniece from Jamaica schooled me in kitchen techniques. I was an attentive pupil. Cooking, especially learning foreign cuisines, remains a passion. The three waitresses there often shared lessons of their escapes to their present circumstance. Clyde, a wiley islander, took my place when I was off. Otherwise harmless, Clyde had a tattoo of a knife on his arm.

On each of the three full moons I worked there, hired hands fresh off boats from the Gulf of Mexico would wander the town. The Gulf is abundant in shrimp. Taverns abound in Times Square. Alcohol on the collective breath of these mates could not mask the stench on their clothes of brine, urine and brown, white, and pink shrimp with a just a hint of grass and pistol shrimp. 

I was in the kitchen galley on the night of my final full moon there, before traveling the United States for a year in a Toyota I named Clyde, when a waitress shriek cued me in that a shrimper brandishing a knife had entered. Commotion and confusion ensued as he flicked at patrons seated at red checkered fourtops. Eventually, I shouted at the drunkard. Waddling, he slowly pursued me into the kitchen. I enticed him toward me and then back-stepped down the galley, and exited out the rear door. He stumbled out too. I darted back inside and locked the door. Story over. 

In his novel "Ultimate Excursions," Alan Gottlieb, a much better story teller than I, has me, himself, and two other college friends encounter the protagonist of his novel as we play Frisbee waterside in front of his parents' bungalow in Ft Myers Beach. It happened. It was an epic summer. We gigged. That cottage was walloped from this earth in September 2022. What remains are stories. Should you google Alan to order his novel, please know that the interweb has confounded him with a different Alan creature. The Alan I know also wrote a book about the Colorado Rockies and was an outstanding beer softball first baseman in college.

A short decade later I had changed attitudes and lattitudes. While studying for the bar I swam daily at an adjacent natatorium. Hydrotherapy.  I discovered that pool water to have several natures: mysterious, friendly, buoyant, encapsulating, resistant, and well, fluid. Some days it felt almost granular as I worked on strokes to grasp particles of water ahead of me and force them behind me and kicks that thrust me into the next reach.

In the abstract. I never was a Masters swimmer. Those swimmers not need breathe in the fifty meter breaststroke. All the oxygen need to power muscles for that short a period is already in their blood. I learned I prefer friction not aerodynamics. For one, it's cheaper. Less flashy too. I thrive in sports such as cutting the grass.

 

Which brings me to this story. Friday, June 14th at 8:00 AM MST is the Grand Depart. Aerobic knuckleheads from all over the world will compete in 2,745 miles of ultra-endurance bikepacking from Banff to New Mexico. 200,000 feet of elevation gain and loss. The winner may finish in fourteen days. That's two hundred miles a day. Top riders hardly sleep. Here is a link should you want to follow the race.

https://trackleaders.com/tourdivide24f.php

And majestic: Flathead Valley in Alberta, Grand Teton National Park, the Great Divide Basin in Wyoming, South Park, Boreas Pass in Colorado, Polvadera Mesa, and the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico. Colorado’s Indiana Pass, at just less than 12,000 feet, is the highest point on the route.

Most of the trail is well graded gravel. Nonetheless, managing water in all three forms solid, vapor, and liquid is essential. Snow melt at upper elevations in the northern Rockies is still underway leaving mud. New Mexico is arid. Exerting riders will be parched.

I cannot imagine a soundtrack. It makes me feel my sense of adventure has left me that I cannot aspire to this madness. Maybe it's time for a sidecar and a dog. No story, no song.

Founders Round

Some time back, I worked on an image campaign for my home city, Naptown. My sleepy town, through my eyes, awoke. Our top tactics were to bring sport sanctioning groups here with the moniker ‘The Amatuer Sports Capitol of the World’ and to steer trade shows here from NYC and elsewhere with a catchy slogan, ‘Move Over New York Apple Is Our Middle Name.’ (IndianAPPLEis for those not yet caffinated.)

A guy, a few years ahead of me during high school, had a plum job. As an emissary of Lilly Endowment, Chuck would welcome the director of every visiting trade association to set the stage to lure companies and jobs here. Oh, how I envied him. Chuck made it effortless.

Our newly inflated Hoosier Dome was connected to the Indiana Convention Center. After dinner, at the first convention I attended, I strolled to the Hoosier Dome to discover a three-ring circus set up for us: high wire acts, cotton candy, taming of tigers, shimmery gals standing on the backs of horses going round and round, and Our Mayor as ring master.

Our Mayor always enthusiastically dressed up in all sorts of outfits to promote the city. His Hudnut Hook taught us to Keep Indianapolis Beautiful by tossing trash into bins. Or that same very tall man in St. Patrick's Day parades dressed as a leprechaun. The whole shebang. 

The demonym ‘hoosier’ is self-mocking - we rough yokels shouting “ain't I a husher” to a census taker's “whose here?” or, we pioneers calling out “who's ‘ere” when fear’in a rustle in yonder prairie grass. Even Our Poet, James Whitcomb Riley, fancied that a trapper entered a southern Indiana tavern just after a brawl, spotted flesh on the dirt floor, and remarked “whose ear?” Being flatlanders leaves a chip on Our shoulders.

An alphabet soup of sports groups arrived; NCAA, USA Football, USA Diving, USA Track and Field, USA Gymnastics, Horizon League, and the National Federation of High School Athletics. Having the Indy 500 did not hurt either.

The seats installed in the Hooser Dome were blue, but no sports team played there. It was built on an idea. It worked. The Colts arrived - in blue uniforms. Alas, Johnny Unitas did not. 

Art Angotti launched a stalwart effort for a team to be known as the Indianapolis Arrows to use the Hoosier Dome for Major League Baseball. The Arrows did not land.

Some ideas take time. I was not the first Hoosier to help promote change. All the railways here were at street level into the 1860’s, with thirteen routes in and out, and Our Town thus anointed ‘The Crossroads of America.’ Pedestrians and horse and buggy, and then automobiles and trucks, though, had to dodge these trains. Tunnels near Our Union Station solved the problem for a couple of decades. In 1884, boosters, including Colonel Eli Lilly, began to promote elevating the tracks. Railway investors refused due to cost. Street overpasses were built in 1908. Finally construction of elevated tracks started in 1915 with the railroads and Our Town splitting the costs 75% to 25%.

These public improvements were funded by the sale of bonds. The bond holders took a haircut from the bond brokers. Not actual hair, but less in proceeds from par value to reflect the perceived risk of the asset falling in value from forced sale or liquidation. Fear'in a rustle in them bushes.

On to present day. Now I witness what surely is a Founders Round. It is like a haircut. Say an entrepreneur has a controlling interest in a venture, say the Indy Eleven soccer team now playing in the USL. That Founder works endlessly to grow local interest in the sport with hopes of joining the ranks of Major League Soccer. Governmental blessings are given and work started on a promising site. The Founder understands ownership will be diluted. Classically some of the round of new seed capital, say, in addition to the MLS entrance fee, goes as an early return to the founder to increase the stake of the co-venturers. 

But it turns out Major League Soccer has a gate keeper. Sweat equity is of no importance. Our Mayor, cloaked in mystery, cuts a deal banishing the Founder. Expansion is awarded on other factors. In this case through a favorite son of MLS. I suspect partisanship is at play. A big stream of construction jobs and cash flow lie ahead.

Last weekend I drove down to look at both sites. Our Mayor's site is next to Our Transit Center - a plus. Conventions like the walkability in Our compact downtown. Another plus. One of the first industries in Our Town was meatpacking, in and along Our White River. Its stench was horrible. I can turn my nose to this present effluvium. We may be ‘No Mean City’ but we hicks are not quite of broad shoulders. 

Coda. I still delight in Our onetime appellation ‘Wander Indiana,’ which I would shout whenever I went out.

Incurable

Act II. Sitting here in limbo. I am in that gateway between the rich experiences of recent travel and the long return home, as made manifest in the Barcelona airport. Mainly my limbo is the queuing, about a dozen so far, from center city to departure gate. Europeans love to queue and Americans to cheat it.

In line for coffee in the departure area, a Hemingway short story plays out. Separately arriving, a band of American twenty-somethings one by one cut in line ahead of me and rehash their escapades of the previous night.

It is like 'Hey Dude, Where's My Car?" Each unable to recall what they did the night before -- except get very wasted and trash their girlfriends' house. To remember, Dude and Sweet decide to proceed with a sense-memory-simulated perception-altered-consciousness memory retrieval process. The twenty-somethings banter. In the queue, the Romeo among them talks of sitting on a bench until sunset to break up with his Catalonia girlfriend.

Hemingway's 'Hills Like White Elephants' is set in a train station just south of the Barcelona airport, in Tarragona. It is about a break up between an American man and a young Spanish woman. They indirectly discuss abortion. The girl compares the nearby hills to white elephants. It's metaphor. Maybe it is about the valley between aimless hedonism and pursuing life in a full natural sense. It's a short story. Read it and you decide. I retreat with my Cafe Americano.

My first visual arriving in Barcelona, ascending a glassed elevator from the Metro to The Rambla, is a Marilyn Monroe costumed girl, dancing on a second floor balcony, beckoning tourists to an Erotic Museum. That metaphor interests others.

My quest is quixotic, but without a Sancho Panza, donkey, or a happy ending. What makes Barlcelona world class? Specificly, what did I fathom years earlier as a twenty-something? More specifically, did I then see Barcelona for what it was or did I then imagine living out an imagined story meant for the annals? It can't all be a pastry filled with crema catalana? Can it?

In some ways George Orwell did the same. In 1936, he volunteered to fight fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Fighting ravaged the streets along The Rambla. But, Orwell faced intense boredom saying “if this was history, it does not feel like it,” while keeping watch on a rooftop for three days armed with wine, cheese, and a stack of Penguin classic books. 

Two and a half days of walking along The Rambla and I am no closer to my truth. But, I am in better shape for it. Often I sit along the way to contemplate the many Antoni Gaudí architectural wonders. Gaudí did not classify his works as fantasy. Instead he said, "We own the image. Fantasy comes from the ghosts. Fantasy is what people in the North own. We are concrete. The image comes from the Mediterranean."At La Sagrada Familia I find rest on a stone cube directly in front of its northeast facade. There I begin to study every odd detail of the concrete image looming before me. It could take hours. Instead, a young northern European couple order me off. Startled, I refuse. They implore. The He shows me Their past by thumbing down to pictures already on his phone. Once, They had been exactly here. They desire to recreate time. Loop back. I relent, but also spit out a 'fuk you.' Hearing me, the He flexes His upper arm of at me. Then, the He moves on to His next moment as the She ascends the cube. The He orients His camera phone to vertical as the She preens like a fantastical peacock. The She extends her wings upward to invite the mysticism of these Gaudí towers. The He captures Her ghost. It is how We remember. Now.

I shrug and head over to yet another tapa restaurant. What one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. It is craft. One never knows what engenders what one experiences. Tapas are surely what I will remember of this journey. Time is a loop. Incurable.