LIFT ME UP AND SLAY ME

I’LL NEVER MAKE IT TO THE TOP NOW, though one can. I had my chance once and the spirits showed me how. All you have to do to reach the 12,115 foot summit of Lobo Peak is hike up from the Manzanita Canyon trailhead on the road to Taos Ski Valley and follow the ridge line. A total altitude gain of almost 4,000 feet, about 10 miles round trip. I made it to the ridge in total ignorance 20 years ago after hiking to the spring that feeds the creek running down the canyon. There was a wooden sign directing me to Lobo but I was wrecked and turned around. The funny thing is, not long afterwards I hiked up the Williams Lake trail from just above the ski valley lodge and kept going, slipping on the scree above the tree line to almost reach another ridge that led to the highest mountain in New Mexico—Wheeler Peak at 13,161 feet—without a clue how close it was. Not that I could have continued any farther. By that time it was 10 steps, rest, 10 steps, rest, and try like hell not to tumble end over end over jagged stones until I hit a boulder or the trees. It was beautiful, though, and I was up there.

Recently I had a follow-up appointment with the man who put the pacemaker in my chest. His name is Dr. Remo. The first thing I said when we shook hands was, “Thank you for saving my life.” He listened to my heart and said the beat was strong and steady. I made sure to ask him where the leads were, how he’d placed them, and whether there was any kind of exercise to avoid. Repetitive lifting of heavy weights above my head, perhaps—which I would never do regardless. But I could chop wood (“Oh, yeah!”), work out with dumbbells, anything else I wanted. He asked me how I felt now. Better, I replied. Nothing like having my blood pumping as it should.

Live your life, he said.

The water in that creek is clear and cold, the elevation around 8,400 feet. It’s flowing fast, there might be trout. You get to this location after driving 90 minutes until the pavement ends and then you’re on the rocks and dust for half an hour more. You’d never find the place without some research and there isn’t any cell phone service. Better have good tires too, and plenty of gas. That’s what I appreciate about el Norte—the isolation and the danger, really. Empty roads and wilderness. I used to say there was something alien and ancient here that doesn’t need us. Chthonic spirits older than God, terrible beauty to kill you dead, alien because we forked off with our minds. But you can feel it here without the static in our DNA. Bigger than anything human. Ineffable, forever. Might as well relax then, John-boy. That’s the kicker. Nothing to do but whatever I want, just like Dr. Remo said. Like my angel baby whispered in my ear (“share the beauty and the joy”), like anyone with half a heart would do instead of blaming others, killing hope, and selling the country for parts.

Speaking of which, it’s been so hard to write. Too anxious to hear the little voice inside. I realized last night the only other time I felt as tense was in my college years of ‘63 to ‘68 and after. The draft was a tsunami of injustice on so many levels. Every time I did what I was told and passed the test(s), they changed the rules. Until the second semester of 11th grade, I’d lived my whole life as an Air Force brat. We changed residences 45 times. Always the new kid in class, I never had a friend for more than six months. But I was proud to say I’d been to Maryland, Virginia, Germany, Texas, even summer camp in Switzerland. No problem being the son of an Air Force pilot, no sir. We often lived “on base” in Air Force housing. I grew up on military bases. Learned the culture, did my time. Eventually I ended up in Austin at the University of Texas where the whole damn universe opened up. Yet all the while, the draft board tried to pull me back. Too late! I went to foreign movies every week, reveled in literature, history, and languages, jammed with jazz freaks in empty churches, wrote off to New York and San Francisco for crazy books and music. I also went to every protest march there was and almost moved to Canada. Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, my God—the chaos of today is worse but I remember with a shudder. At least back then I was immortal in the flesh.

I think we draw dilemmas to us for a purpose. As if somewhere there’s a thread of pure desire we can’t help but follow. Here I am in this ancient adobe with no overhead lights or central heat, surrounded by grandeur and decay, absolutely nothing certain, yet my day-to-day experience is as vivid as it ever was. Should I stay or should I go? Grief still finds me. Some days I’m burning with appreciation and want to sing or cry for joy. In the end it doesn’t matter. That’s what the gravedigger in eastern Iowa told me when I lowered the burial urn with the ashes of my wife of 40 years into the muddy hole and it fell right over. I tried to stand it up straight but couldn’t reach that far. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, and before I had a chance to argue, covered it with dirt! I would have done that slowly, just a little at a time, even in the rain. But he was right: it wasn’t her. Perhaps this isn’t me. What a relief.

Now that’s all settled and I can carry on. Empty the storage units, find a home for Kathy’s old piano, wet my bare feet in both oceans once again. Get out of the house to play an actual gig. Make a new will, buy a fast car, road-trip like a sumbitch. Walk every day, keep losing weight, outlive the fascists. Write books, learn Spanish, build a cabin. See more of New Mexico. Take pictures, make art, never criticize another soul. Maybe in the end I’ll be a poet. Short stuff, you know. Funny, true, obscene. When I first came to Taos, they would shuffle down the alleys in their Birkenstocks raising little clouds of dust. You could always find a few downtown, sipping espresso with barefoot mini-skirted groupies or chatting up bookstore clerks until they got thrown out. Yes, we had those. Little places where they just sold books.

I kid, but you shoulda been here.