The grass turns golden and
I can't finish. I can't force myself to.
I want to see you and tell you so badly.
What is the thing that once chosen becomes the thing itself?
Once it was, it was appropriate. The choices the flip you over the edge and change everything.
The things that make you change, and suddenly opening the way, make you deliberate.
Back I am to running and ducking.
But it's not so bad. I'm really good at it.
--
(midicronica - pillow jam)
You can count the time I've been awake by the shifty formula of the mileposts, or the overestimating on my trip meter. You can measure the miles across the marbled relief of the monsoon clouds forming their wall across the western dusk.
But to that, you'd have to follow me back to where I lost it. 634.6 or some-odd miles, depending on who you talk to, from Monahans back to wherever it was I stayed in L______, I can't even remember. The words turn to liquid, because they were never crystallized to begin with. I just pull from the color tone machine moving the flow through my brain and begin to
speak.
For a minute it almost looks like San Diego, and then the feeling passes. But the air dries out and the temperature is gentle. The speed limit goes up by five miles per hour, and there are all kinds of roadway signs. Texas cares about its roads, and it shows. Somehow, it's very beautiful. I'd thought Texas would be the wasteland it's made out to be, but this is something else.
Ride through the freshening sunlight along the trees, and watch the clouds. Huge, expansive, drifting things. Thank you, Texas. Look at them arrayed. They're moving in, but there's a crack that lets the light through. I know that smell. Rich, wet, alive...
The smell of monsoons in the desert. And the rain comes down. I swipe the rain from my visor with the side of my left thumb and keep going. It comes down harder abruptly, stinging my biceps because I'm adding 70, 74mph to its speed. And soon I'm fogged up by the spray from the rear tires of trucks ahead. I head down after 20 or so miles of it and navigate myself by the white line on the outside of the road.
Wait it out at the truck stop, in a little diner, for an hour or so. Change out your wet earplugs for a dry pair, because the wet ones won't compress.
Beat your brains out thinking about it.
And then don't think about it anymore.
"Put on your rain gear this time. And you listen, that's a mom talking."
-Waitress, TA truck stop.
Add the waterproof winter liners to your gear an hour later, throw on your army poncho over the lot, and mess up the soul shake with the brother outside who wants to wish you good luck, you crazy fuck. Ride out, crack your visor one click so it lets more air out and tear off, a camouflaged, formless windy thing atop a crouched engine and frame.
A sign says nothing but "Huge Trees". Without even solicitation.
The clouds crack open in a huge sunburst that carries a corona of chastened for at least 20 miles in either direction across the sky. Crest a hill and look down on a valley that is the perfect picture of description. One of those sights that they use to illustrate everything all at once. Hilly pastures, forests with a straight swath cut through them for the long distance AC power lines, a river with a bridge, and tiny cars doing things in the little roads and the buildings nearby.
Go up the next hill and see the rock and dirt turn redder and get squarer in the cut away pieces. Get closer to the desert.
The trees that got taller and leaner from the state line on shrink and spread now, as the hills lose their contour. As the land opens out to a scrubby, green plain, a silver Mustang pulls up by me and the punk kids wave. They smile and eyeball my bike, and the driver speeds up a little. I downshift two gears and take it up to 120 real quick just to fuck with them. I drop back to the speed limit and wait for them. The driver pulls up and makes the masturbation gesture like I'm the one jerking -him- around. I flip him off as he pulls away. He slows down and flips me off. I return the gesture. They speed up to a steady 20 over and pull away.
More monsoons, traffic jams, and wrecks. Abandoned vehicles. At a gas station I never thought I'd be so happy to hear Mexican Spanish again. Sick of white people.
The sky clears up and the land flattens out. The monsoons are gone as quickly as they came, like always. There are mountain silhouettes in the distance, the first time I've seen such a sight in a long time. The shrubs get scrubbier and scrubbier until suddenly I realize I'm in the desert again.
Around the time the clouds get their top edges lit, and the contrails suddenly attract your vision even though you hadn't seen them, because they're suddenly incandescent, I slip imperceptibly into West Texas. For some reason the riding is easy. I shift from half-tuck to sitting up straight, shift my feet from toe to arch and back, stretch my legs out periodically, clench and unclench my shoulders, and arch my back on the curve of the tank. In this way I keep the things that need to move in and out of my joints from locking up and swelling solid.
Everything in West Texas smells like petroleum. I pass by the Fina refinery, and recognize it immediately. Somehow, they have a certain look to them. A complex of stations, cylinders, tanks, and tubes, valve wheels, ladders, and catwalks all over them.
Midlands proclaims on its welcome sign that it is the hometown of George W. and Laura Bush. A flat, oil-filled and farmy flatland, the only thing keeping it from rolling up under the tension the shady place is under--the massive Texas sky. Everyone here has a slightly furtive look on their faces.
A guy on a rocket tears by at at least 130mph. I watch him go and contemplate catching him. And contemplate getting another ticket. And decide to let him go. I spot two other rockets on an overpass. Guess that's the only thing alive and screaming in Midlands.
Like this, 630-odd miles pass. Lenny was wrong, the 80mph speed limit doesn't show up until all the way into West Texas, and it's still 65 at night. At night things seem to get faster but the ride seems to take longer. I'm waiting for desert, waiting for the country I spent so long in again, giving color to all my memories.
But it's not coming any faster.
Everything that comes this way, comes only fast enough to arrive, no more, no less. Which is just slow enough for the anticipation to settle in my mind. I know that when I get to T_____ it'll just be the gentlest kind of letdown, a settling. I'll eyeball R____ and J_____ (my roomates) and mutter about crashing, then fall over into the bed.
I'll wake up and hop right back on this road.
I realize I can't capture the long feeling of miles. I can't explain to you why the stories get built up enough and start to flow, whether I'm all together or not, I can't explain to you why my stare gets longer and longer but the sight drains back out at night. But that's the way the day slips into me, and I don't know where it goes once I fall asleep. The dreams are too tightly wrapped up in themselves and other things to hold it all. The stories change too much as the details arrive at different speeds.
I'm putting this down because I know I'll forget and then there'll be nothing for me to tell you, broken or otherwise. I could reconstruct the facts but not the feeling. When I next come back to this I know it'll be from the outside. Like I said once before, a rider on a rocket is in a tunnel and flow all his own, and the only way to see it is through it, one way.
I look over my shoulder at you, even though you're not there yet. But by the time this mental, figurative look gets to you, you will be there.
And I'll be gone again. Maybe.
My gloves are perfect models of my hands. My pants feel like normal clothing now. My jacket feels like a shirt.
But what I'm saying is something totally different from what I'm thinking. Which is it, the feeling of the dream or what happened in it? Only somehow are the events and strange things conversant with that path of feeling you took through it. Your own synchronicity, inside your own brain.
The hiker skirting the edges of a great, vast mountainous thing that isn't even apprehended by his methodical travel.
I'm trying not to get so close.
No comments:
Post a Comment