The High Country: Jicarilla

One afternoon at REI, an older gentleman came up to me with the hope that I would order for him a new pair of hiking boots. When I got the email address by which to contact him, I was intrigued by his name. Musai. Somewhere I'd heard it before, this obvious dharma name. Googling it later, I found out that he was the dharma heir to the priest who had performed the ceremony for my first marriage back in 1997. He was now Roshi to a Zen group just outside Santa Fe. Looking over their website, I noted that he did hikes monthly with friends and sangha members.

Last Saturday I joined him for the first time. There were just three of us, waking at dawn for the long drive up the High Road to Taos. We hung a left at Truchas (where Redford filmed " The Milagro Beanfield War"), passed the still operating flume at Trampas, then turned right onto the long dirt road past the village of El Valle, spread proud and isolated along its grassy valley. Where the road ended we moved onto trail, tracing the San Leonardo watershed to its eponymous lake source, up over 11000 ft. It was a lovely hike, crossing the stream a few times, with a long snack break for 'Elevenses.' The conversation was light, mostly about the wildflowers and the ample supply of fleshy mushrooms growing to impossible sizes.

It felt great to get into the hills. I'd too long been putting it off. It seemed that the timing had never been right. The snow season gave way to mud season, a time when even down in town, the dust turns to mud, splashing up to dirty the undercarriages of all those expensive European toys people here drive. I couldn't even imagine what the roads at altitude were like. Then the spring winds came, and in the window between when they clear the stage for the summer monsoon, somehow work told hold of me, taking away triple the weekly hours I had been working over the past decade. Inertia creeps as always, and over this past month a terrible craving for space, both temporal and spatial, has begun to build.

Again, it felt great to get into the hills. While it is admittedly a blessing to have a wife who shares my love for the mountains (and in many ways, is more intrepid than I), it is a treat to be out with the fellows. It also reminds me how much I enjoy walking solo, something I'll need to attend to before the snows come again.

There was a large open meadow at 10,000 ft, the trees all blown down or pushed over by avalanches. From here the trail showed its seriousness, leading us up a 1000 ft climb in less than a mile. It was here that I was truly awestruck by Musai. His pace across the level trails or slight inclines matched my own. It was only on the more steep ascents that his legs revealed their mileage. Lunch was well earned, beside the smaller of the two San Leandro lakes. Small fish swam in water which surely must freeze at this altitude. Across the water was the steep slope that we'd later climb, between the trees and up over the talus, looking for footholds where no trail has ever been. It was tough going, even with the hiking poles I was initiating. I'd always questioned their use, but was now forever sold. Four legs are indeed better than two. Using the poles brought more stability and balance, and occasionally I'd lean onto one, looking down at the floor far below, and across at the adjacent rock wall, where big horn sheep leap and strut, though not today. I'd have envied their sureness of foot. To slip here meant a long and dangerous fall, every step requiring full attention. Awareness built into every step.

It took a couple hours to reach the ridge. I'd sat awhile on a rock just below it, looking over the scenery over which we'd walked, over which we'd driven. All the familiar landmarks were there: Taos and Los Alamos; Black Mesa and the Jemez. Yet, by contrast, the view over the back of the ridge introduced the unfamiliar: the higher Pecos with all that open space, and the ridge that looked like it encircled it all. The Sandia range was visible far to the south, with the Truchas Peaks closer in, all gnarled and misshapen like deformed hands. The beauty ensnared me. I was both in, and of, the landscape. I simultaneously began to expand and disappear.

Then my eyes began to greedily seek more details within the view, and the mind joined in by wanting to capture everything in photos. I wanted to linger, but we still had a short climb ahead. We followed the ridgeline up to Jicarilla Peak, nearly 12500 ft and a good place for tea. I believe I said something like, "Three-sixty is a fine number." All of northern New Mexico was there for us.

There weather was good, but it was nearing three. We didn't dawdle as we moved down the ridgeline, trying to keep equidistant between the two watersheds on either side of us, the truck parked near their confluence. When the descent would grow steeper, dropping us into one of them, we'd veer off at a diagonal for higher ground. It was a long afternoon, feet sore at taking near sideways steps, ankles pitching and rolling. We wound up in a creek bed, thankfully dry, but which required some bobbing and weaving over fallen trees and over rough terrain. Finally, we found the Trampas Lake Trail, wide and well-kept. I'm rarely so grateful to see something constructed by man. The rapidly encroaching dark reminded us that this was the time of the animals, not so subtly demonstrated by the paw print of a very large cat, and in the half-devoured carcass of a porcupine, its quills scattered about like spilled toothpicks.

The truck was there, outlined in the nearly full dark. It had taken us about four hours to get down. Musai mentioned that his goal with these hikes is to be completely emptied out. I felt the opposite, full and re-energized after all those summer days seen from indoors. Not that I wasn't suffering. My stomach was crying for food, but luckily we arrived at Rancho de Chimayo a few minutes before its 9 o'clock close. The ride home seemed long, myself crammed sideways in the jumpseats of the truck cab, my neck stiff from altitude and dehydration. What didn't help matters was arriving at a police DWI checkpoint back in town, me rankling at such a deliberate display of control after a full day of freedom in the wild. Finally, my fatigue found a cure in sleep, crawling into bed nearly 18 hours after I'd left it.

(Musai has posted his own take on things, with pics. Scroll down to Aug 21 post.)


On the turntable: Gentle Giant, "Gentle Giant"
On the nighttable: David Hatcher Childress, "Lost Cities and Ancient Mysteries of the Southwest"

Sunday Papers: Willie the Shake

"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin."


On the turntable: Yes, "Drama'

Dharma, Talks

Another unexpected side effect to my repatriation is an oft-awkward re-immersion in my mother language. This has happened before. After fifteen months in Japan, I took my first trip abroad to New Zealand, and for some reason it took me a day to get used to hearing my native tongue again. (Some would argue that understanding Kiwis is difficult already, as theirs is a nation that has found it possible to get by with a mere three vowels.)

One place that this showed up repeatedly was during dharma talks at Upaya. Granted, mostly it was during a talk given by a non-native speaker. Once I mistook the words 'Go Ye Unto the World" for "Go Ye Undo the World." Another time Beatte-sensei was talking about having a "calm, abiding mind," and I was sat there thinking, what the hell is a karma-biting mind?

During dharma talks I always bring a pen and my moleskine, not to take notes, but to jot down all the weird ideas that pop into my mind. That mind was most busy during a talk by
Yamada Roshi, head of Sandai Kyodan. He kept mentioning that his lecture dias was illusion, an illusion from his glasses repeatedly fell when he'd set them there. If such matter is empty, is it not faith then that creates the illusion of material things? Is this similar to a Christian faith in God, form in emptiness and all that? As if to emphasize this, dust began to swirl in the air, in a still room seemingly devoid of any wind. Where then, did the dust in this sunbeam come from? More form in emptiness?

The most powerful talks are usually, no surprise, given by Roshi Joan Halifax. During the talk, "On Grief and Buddhism," she quoted us a poem by Issa:

露の世は露の世ながらさりながら
Tsuyu no yo wa tsuyu no yo nagara sari nagara

The world of dew --
A world of dew it is indeed,
And yet, and yet . . .

And the bottom fell out of my world. A month earlier, during the film retreat, we saw "The Secret Life of Words," a film that floored quite a few people. After the viewing we had a brief discussion, then wrote poems. One woman, a friend, devout Buddhist, and radical feminist, read hers, angrily asking how men can keep talking (in the discussion) after being exposed to such violent acts against women? And I felt personally attacked at her words, questioning both her Buddhism (her blinding attachment to her own emotions) and her feminism (which was so exclusionary to men).

Yet here I was, in the midst of my own despair. And, as Roshi kept going on with her lecture, I too was thinking, "How can you keep talking!?" when my grief has stopped the world yet again? And as it passed, I thought about the mysterious nature of grief, and the many ways it reveals itself. As the years go on, the grief and sadness I sometimes feel seem detached from the actual loss of Ken,and are seemingly now connected mostly to my own feelings and memory .


On the turntable: Dire Straits, "Sultans of Swing"

Yogi's Bear

I came home late one evening to find my landlady standing in front of her home, talking on her cell phone. It turned out she was in the midst of calling me, hanging up as my car crunched up the gravel. She wanted to tell me that she'd seen a bear go across the property, silhouetted against the darkening sky as it moved along the ridge just above my house. It dropped down to the road and into the yard of the weird old guy who'd once been under police surveillance because he allegedly got his kicks opening his robe to passing school buses.

Not long afterward, a young couple moved into the casita just down the hill from ours. Fresh from Manhattan, they weren't too clued in about animal control. In less than a week, the husband, after stepping out onto the balcony for a middle-of-the-night smoke, was startled by the sound of the bin being tipped over by a bear that was looking for the heart of some attractive olfactory delight. The poor guy spent the better part of the morning picking the trash--mostly liquid-encrusted, styrofoam take out boxes-- from the hillside. A week later it happened again, probably not long after I joked to my neighbor that I hoped that the bears weren't on their way for a meal out, this being date night.

The odd bear incidentally making its way across the land doesn't bother me. One conditioned to a free lunch does. Where the neighbors wanted to triple bag everything, I suggested we simply take the trash out in the morning, before the trucks roll by around eight. Crisis averted.

What has changed for me is my relationship with bears. In Japan, I dreaded an encounter with one. Here, I'm not so much scared as cautious. Whereas I used to walk up the hill to my home in the dark, marveling at the incredible number of stars up there, I now turn on the lights lighting the path every time.

At my job at REI, I find others who have their own relationship with bears. Whenever anyone comes in to buy bear spray, I always ask their story. One guy told me that he often rigs his trash bin with a small water balloon filled with ammonia, since bears have such an acute sensitivity to smell. Another guy told me that it isn't bears that he uses it on but the cougars (which really scare the crap out of me). He's used it before, on a mountain lion that is lured onto his property by his two dogs. He essentially called in an airstrike on the whole area, dogs and cat alike, since it was a quicker and more effective way to get his pets into the house.

A few weeks ago, a small newspaper serving the mountain communities of the east face of the Sandia Mountains ran an article on bears. Apparently, there have been 120 encounters in the 3 months since spring, with 40 of the animals being shot by landowners. In the week after the article was run, we completely sold out of spray. Not a day has gone by without at least three customers looking for a can.

My favorite bear spray story happened months before this, during my first week at REI. A woman walks up to the counter, asking for some. She was wearing those big Jackie-O sunglasses, with a poodle under one arm. I asked her what was up, and she told me that a bear kept coming over her fence into the yard, located in one of the posher areas of Santa Fe. I asked her, quite seriously, if she thought taking on a bear was a good idea. Wouldn't it be easier to call Fish and Game? She said that she already had. What did they suggest? Bear spray. When I returned from our back room where we stock it (since it has reportedly been used by robbers on mountain shop employees), she asked me how to use it. I read her the directions off the can, saying that she had a range of about 30 feet, which was from the counter to the front door. Oh! But the entire can would empty itself completely in 7 seconds. Without a beat she said, "Better get me three." I still have an image of her, standing beside her palatial home, poodle under one arm, quick-drawing the cans from a Gucci holster on her waist.

(I'm sure that there'll be a sequel to this story.)


On the turntable: Frank Zappa, "Bongo Fury"
On the nighttable: Stanley Crawford, "The River in Winter"

New Bottles

This return to the US has me staring down the barrel of the gun of aging. In Japan, no one could peg just how old I was, often guessing a decade younger. Here, I am expected to act my age. In Japan, I could constantly reinvent myself, the judgments and perceptions of the locals going no further than my identity as gaijin. Beyond that I had all the room in the world to be who I wanted to be. Now I'm back in my own cultural context, and can't escape the framework.

Yet how AM I defined here? I find myself as Neither/Nor. I'm a native New Mexican who no longer recognizes his state. I'm as much a gaijin here as I was in Japan.

I'm most puzzled how do I fit into all of this as an American. Since the national nervous breakdown year of 2001, I no longer know what that means. The America I see in the 21st Century is not the place I learned about in school (however fictitious that was). I don't remember such a high degree of fear and anger, of distrust and ingratitude. While most of the Japanese I knew tried to harmonize and blend with what was happening around them (manifested at its worst as the dreaded 'shoganai'), Americans try to dominate the space. I see it in the conversations, in the body language, in the government policy. I don't really want to be part of it.

While in Japan, I'd made a conscious attempt to be a big fish, as a yoga teacher , a writer, a musician, a martial artist. It was exhausting. Here I want a quiet and simple life. To do my job and go home. But those around me (God bless 'em) are pushing me to both succeed and exceed. Such an American thing, to fill up and overflow the container that is your life.


On the turntable: Yes, "Tales from Topographic Oceans"
On the nighttable: Stanley Crawford, "The River in Winter"

Sunday Papers: Lew Wallace

"Every calculation based on experience elsewhere fails in New Mexico."

On the turntable: Yes, "Yessongs"

Over the Line

A decade in Japan created in me the habit of wearing shoes without laces, preferring the whole Mr. Miyagi, slip on-slip off thing. The shame about this is that I lost a creative outlet of artistic self-expression: tying a pair of worn-out shoes together by the laces and throwing them over a power line.

I was reminded of this in spying a pair from the train I was riding, as it pulled into the station in Los Lunas. The link between these shoes and my own is further paralleled and linked with trains, as I most often threw my own shoes over a wire shaded by the upper eaves of that massive tree beside the rail station in Santa Barbara. Just as these shoes welcomed me back to my native Valencia County, no doubt hundreds of passengers were waved at by my shoes as they blew back and forth in the Santa Ana winds of the Central Coast.

On the turntable: Ricardo Lemvo, "Ay Valeria!"