Simple Twist of...

John Steinbeck's most famous line has the ring of Shakespeare, but was in fact penned by that Great Scot, Robert Burns. And it rings too in my world, in particular when I spend time with my friend Taylor. Most of our hiking plans tend to change while afoot, but it is in a car where things really "gang aft agley."

I'd long awaited the Matachines dances at Jemez Pueblo, but the weather forecast predicted snow. The day was in fact somewhat warm, so what did precipitate was a rain that aspired to a softer beauty. We drove south, through the more scenic La Cienega backroads, meeting the freeway briefly before leaving it again at Algodones. Not far off was the ruins of Kuaua, whose crumbling bricks lined the western banks of the Rio Grande, paralleling the high, winter-bare cottonwoods on the other side. We walked the ruins in the light drizzle, sadly denied the pleasure of entering the kiva whose walls were decorated with the colorful restorations of murals centuries old. I remembered them well from a visit 20 years before, on a day of similar weather. But we otherwise occupied ourselves with a few thrown snowballs and a stroll down to the river bank, dreaming of future picnics.

A short drive north brought us to the shadow of White Mesa, the name resonating by the minute due to the falling snow. We had our aforeplanned picnic in the car, the wiper blades occasionally returning the view to us. On the way to Jemez, we made a brief errand stop at the post office at San Ysidro, whose postmistress surprised us in being East Indian. She was a friendly and chatty woman, oft so caught up in the talk that she made three mistakes processing our post, quadrupling the time it would normally take. Ironically this delay conspired to cause us to miss the Jemez dances altogether, which were brought to an early conclusion due to the weather. Miki and I were astonished, as the identical thing had happened a month before at Tesuque Pueblo. We had heard the drums on our approach, but by the time we entered the plaza itself, the dancers were moving away. Bizarrely, these were the two times that we had actually planned to attend a dance. The dances that we'd seen at Zuni and Hopi, had merely been random visits to the villages, but we'd been treated to a wonderful surprise.

Back in the car, Taylor and I talked of fate and those sequences of events that oft go awry. It occurred too in Jemez Springs, where a hot drink was nowhere to be found in a town closed early. A coffee may have brought some subconscious comfort on a day now gone to snow. We were traveling along Route 4, to examine the damage of the previous summer's fires. But snow blanketed all, clouds kept the adjacent hilltops just out of view. (I am pleased to see that LasConchas, one of my favorite places in New Mexico, seems to have survived, with the real damage on the other side of the road.)

Fate then decided to show a kinder face. A group of wild turkeys scurried through the drifts. And just above Los Alamos, we spied a herd of elk at least a hundred in number. Had we followed our planned itinerary, I doubt we'd have come across them. We stopped to watch a long while, the elk moving slowly and calmly through the snow, grazing, grazing. I stepped out of the car to pee, moving quietly into the trees. A bull with a massive rack of horns turned his great head, a few dozen meters away. Then a trumpet called from deeper in the forest, and the whole herd moved as one, a mass of gray shapes making for the hilltops. And I stood there paralyzed, as these animals, the smallest of which is at least twice my weight, hadn't made a sound. The whole scene had a magically quality to it, a serenity that I'm likely to revisit in future meditations.

Then as if in punishment for altering the fate of the elk, ours too took yet another turn. We hit Los Alamos proper at a hair past five o'clock, to join a long line of cars moving steadily toward a steep hill made perilous in the freezing rain. What would normally be a 45 minute drive was tripled. And as we inched along at 4 mph, we had ample time to weigh in on the fickleness of fate.


On the turntable: John Lennon, "Double Fantasy"
On the nighttable: Frank Waters, "The Man who Killed the Deer"

(Untitled)

Shrikes flit amongst
snow-covered lavender branches.
Delicacy for bees
in warmer times.

On the turntable: Yes, "Drama"

Nine months after...

I wrote this not long after the quake and tsunami of March 11. It appears in a less vehement form in the Quakebook collection. Buy yours here. Every cent of the proceeds go to charity.

That Friday, I awoke before dawn, in order to get to my early morning yoga class. As always, I swallowed a splash of coffee to fully rouse myself, then quickly checked my email before setting off. I noticed a message from my sister wondering if my wife's family was okay. I didn't have time then to check the news, and it was difficult to concentrate on my teaching that morning. It was only later that I saw the videos of the water rushing in. I watched one video after another, as if not quite convinced that this was real. NHK was streaming in another browser window, and in a third, I followed Facebook updates from friends. This last was the most surreal. From the nature of the messages, it was obvious that cell phone reception in Kanto was down, Facebook being the only reliable means of communication. But it was unsettling to this vicarious experience of the post-quake confusion in real-time. One post: "Where are you? Did you get the kids?" Another: "Trains stopped. Walking home. Google Maps says I should be home in seven hours." For the rest of the day I imagined my friends walking through the cold night. That night I couldn't sleep, my head filled with images of all that moving water.

The next morning, I checked in to see that a great many people I cared about were having a pretty rough time. It was also apparent that we had better access to news, when the media was still giving facts and hadn't begun squealing like nervous nellies. I went off to work, but couldn't keep my concentration. Even though my wife and I were safe in Santa Fe, loads of people checked in on us. My co-workers could see that I was disturbed. I'd already begun to hear about the sense of calm amongst the Japanese, about the absence of looting or advantage-taking. Yet minutes into my work shift, I watched a woman try on sweaters, then toss them in a heap on the shelf, all before the eyes of her two young children. In the big picture, retail came across as pathetic. My manager let me go home early . Once there, my wife told me how she'd seen a car rear-end another, then quickly U-turn in order to flee. What the hell is wrong with my countrymen? After a year back in the States, we are quite depressed about the state of things here, at the behavior we witness daily. A day before the quake we began to reassess things, and I began to look at grad schools back in Kyoto. The moral strength and cooperation we witness in Japan becomes almost the justification for a return, the sort of society in which we want to raise the child now deep in my wife's belly. I'm not such a pollyanna that I don't recognize the problems there, the things that once rankled. Over 15 years in country they'd slowly worn me down, in what one wit called "death by 1000 cuts." But America's flaws glare by comparison. (Though that's a rant for another day.)

By Sunday, we needed to turn off the laptops and go for a walk. The news was no longer fact-based and entered the realm of speculation. As the week went on, I relied more on Facebook and Twitter than any media source. The foreign press sickened me. On the first day, as I desperately tried to find out if people I loved were still alive, these websites forced me to wait for 30 seconds as they tried to sell me stuff. Their later sensationalized coverage will always be remembered as they created a panic of fleeing foreign Tokyoites and drew attention away from the true suffering going on further north. Again, the priorities and morals of my birth country astounds me.

As the week went on, our lives began to revolve around what was happening with the reactors. Online, silly humor interspersed with drop-dead seriousness gave me the impression that Tokyoites were slowly losing their minds under the worry about the radioactivity, as they were jolted yet again by another aftershock. By the following weekend, they began to write of other, more normal things, and in the international media, Japan dropped out of the top headlines.

And as we continue to live here safely in America, my sleep is still disturbed, I still finds myself occasionally shedding tears. It's incredible how emotionally attached I am to Japan. It appears the quake caused some profound seismic shift within me, as I begin to seriously consider where to live the rest of my life.


On the turntable: Asleep at the Wheel, "Live at Billy Bob's Texas"

Sunday Papers: Quanah Parker

"The white man goes into his church and talks about Jesus, but the Indian goes into his tipi and talks to Jesus."


On the turntable: Visage, "Fade to Gray"

Sunday Papers (Weekday edition)

"My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go."

--Oscar Wilde's last words


On the turntable: Velvet Underground, "1969"

Gary and Me

(This post is an addendum to what I wrote here.)


I'm sitting in an uncomfortable folding chair, waiting for Gary Snyder to appear. And he does, moving through the door right beside me. He looks older than I'd imagined, small and somewhat stooped. He's finally come into the look of the wizard, an image cultivated more for, than by, him.

And on stage, he's suddenly much taller, his movements more dextrous and grand. The 81-year old that I just saw walk through the door is gone. His energy is astounding, outlasting my own as the reading nears the ten o'clock hour. I'm tired, the baby's asleep. We need to get her to bed, as much as I'd like to stay after for the book signing and tell him a few things.

...I'd tell him, remind him, of the first time I met him, here at Naropa in the summer of 1994. I'd mentioned that I was bound for Japan in a month, and had asked if he could recommend any temples or hikes that he found particularly interesting. And he cut me dead with a curt, "I'm not a guide book." I backpedalled, and said, no no, just a hint at something that had inspired him during his long years there. And he again fired off a "I don't even know you." I was so disappointed that I didn't even ask him to sign the copy of "No Nature" that I held in my left hand.

I sat awhile on Boulder mall, justifying it for awhile; that he'd had a busy week, that I'd overheard many requests to him, that I had been like everyone else in wanting something from the man. But then suddenly I really got it. It was time to kill the Buddha; time to step out from behind my heroes. Gary, among others, and pointed the path out to me, but only I could walk it. And walk I did, down the darkened Boulder mall, and into my own life...

... I'd tell him of my friendship with Pachi and Yoko. The latter was my tea teacher in the 'Nog, a woman who had studied at Daitokuji while Gary had been there as a student of zen. At my first tea lesson with her, the other students had all sat quietly as Yoko Sensei and I had a long chat in English about him and their shared history...

...I'd tell him of my friendship with Uchida Bob, who I'd hosted when he played a gig in the 'Nog while US bombs were just beginning to fall on Afghanistan. The next morning, my now late son had sat in his lap. (Later, Ken never failed to recognize Bob's voice on the stereo.) Over coffee and pancakes, we talked of Gary, and of Nanao, and of the three communities they'd once created back when US bombs fell on other parts of Asia...

...I'd tell him of my friendships at Kyoto Journal, and of our mutual friends there. I'd tell him of how Iwakura Ken had commented on the blog post where I documented carrying my rusksack from Kyoto to the Sea of Japan, of a temporal crossing of paths...

...most of all, I'd introduce him to my daughter. Had he not served as a major catalyst for my moving to Japan, I'd have never met her mother, and this wonderful little girl would never have been born. Despite his claim of not knowing me, we both shared a responsibility in her creation...


On the turntable: DJ Food, "Kaleidoscope"
On the nighttable: "The Gary Snyder Reader"

Anatomy of a Roadtrip

Late morning, and we pass through the same intersection we passed a few days before, along Highway 64, that gorgeous stretch of highway through some of New Mexico's most beautiful features. Heading north this time, toward the half buried marble dome of Mt. San Antonio, glazed this season in blue and white. A single structure is dwarfed against its massive face. What is it like to have this mountain as your backyard? (This scene will be repeated north of Crestone, with a lone ranch set against an impressive stretch of range, the earth rolling like the tideline to rise in a syncline toward peaks snow covered above 10,000 feet.)

Over the Colorado border, and it's usual dramatic change of scenery. The land looks livelier than in New Mexico, but how could it not, considering the amount of water than moves through this, the San Luis Valley. We pass the train cars of the Cumbres and Toltec railway, resting until next spring. Into Alamosa finally, eponymous Keens on my feet, worn for the irony. Stop at San Luis Valley Brewing Company for a fat burger and a sampling of nine of their brews. Sora plays with her mom on the leather sofa, thick and aged and of the kind more often seen in some wood-panelled room in 1890's London.

Miki takes the wheel as my head swims with beer. After a pair of U-turns, (I had left my phone plugged into the brewery's wall), we take a long thin straight road that doglegs left just before ramming into the Sangres, passing in front of the Great Dunes that look ready to break across our road, repeating the water metaphor once again. Shadows are thrown by the wrinkles carved out by the wind across their faces. These dark spots contrast dramatically with the snow sitting a thousand feet higher atop their granite progenitors. Against the perfect blue sky, the range looks like it is a paper cutout done by a child, albeit one who has poor scissoring skills. I myself was a child when I first saw this scenery in a book on National Parks, read in my New Jersey home where what I saw out the window looked nothing like this. Now to finally arrive many decades later, fighting a strong wind that keeps us down on the flat of a dried riverbed. The baby cries due to the wind, so our visit will have to remain brief. From inside the car, I console myself with the sight of a lone figure standing atop the highest dune, a mere flea against its mass.

North again along the Cosmic Highway (man). The Sangres finally rise to meet us after shadowing us all day. Wriggling through a narrow canyon to land in Salida along the Arkansas River. Miki and the baby stay at our rented cabin, but I make a five minute drive into town to investigate more beers at Amica's. There's an IPA there that is one of the best brews I've ever had, a seasonal that the staff knows nothing about. But I appreciate the mystery. It's like the smile of a passing beauty, a smile that launches the fantasy of an entire love affair, a lifetime lived out in mere seconds. This beer piggy-backs those I drank at lunch a few hours earlier, maybe the cumulative total of what I normally drink in a month. I'm far too drunk to drive. So I walk the town awhile, and finding a Chinese place, I grab some take-out for Miki. While I await its preparation, I stand in the doorway, catching up with an old Denver friend on my phone. I must appear suspicious to the waiter at the restaurant, who, when handing me my food, says a curt," Thank You. Goodbye." The cold and clear mountain air has helped clear the alcohol from my brain, and I make my way back to my car, driving slowly and cautiously back to the cabin...

...a quick stop in town in the morning for a coffee. The owner is a ramblin' man ready to ramble again. After a few years in town, he sold his cafe a few days before. Our own road takes us along the Arkansas heading east, in and out of canyons and through dozens of small towns. I've recently been reading about this river and its history, it having once served as the boundary between the US and Mexico until 1847. Now the river is a popular place for rafting, operators strung along the banks for many miles. The roads eventually lifts high above the waters, and we weave through the lessor Rockies toward Denver. We drive up to the Royal Gorge Bridge, but balk at paying 30 bucks to cross. The road north takes us through broad valleys many with ranches at their navel. As we drop into the trough of one hill, we scare up a murder of raven and magpie, startled temporarily off some carrion. Amidst them is a wolf, that eyes us warily as we speed past. Miki and I are of course thrilled, having never seen one in the wild.

We make a stop now at Florrisant National Monument. There isn't much here, but it is a pleasant walk out on the valley floor, slaloming between fossilized tree stumps. This had been a major tourist stop a hundred years ago, but today it belongs only to the three of us.

Heading northeast, the home stretch. A ranger had told us of a beautiful drive along some backroads into the Denver suburbs. We follow her directions, the road narrowing more and more the deeper into the canyons we go. We're only a few feet above the Platte River, which roars past at a speed far greater than our own. The ranger had told us that the road was paved, but the asphalt ends eventually. It stays well groomed, but would be a brutal trip in the snow. We pass the odd house, the occasional settlement. Most welcome are the signs saying that this is indeed the direction of Denver, up ahead somewhere. We need to get to the Japanese Consulate by four, and have plenty of time, but it seems we're somewhat conspired against, especially when we're forced to drive behind a road grader at 5 mph for awhile. Where the road widens slightly, I pull the car around it, and before long we reach the highway again, with the glass towers of Denver glittering on the plains below us...

...we pass a few days in Boulder at my brother's place. My niece is sick, so we rarely leave the house, our time consumed with books and food. On the last day, my brother flies off to NYC for a wedding, and we watch his daughter. Better now, she takes us out into the open space below the foothills, where prairie dogs have built a massive colony. The residents are active in the warmth of the final hour before the sun drops below the hills and the shadows bring the chill. The call of the prairie dog is wonderful to hear, as they stand on their hind legs and raise a banzai to one another. Our presence is what causes this, of course, as they signal across the grass about the approach of the two legs, who laugh at their earnestness. For me, this will be the highlight of the trip, along with the Gary Snyder reading later that night. (I wrote something on that here.)


...southbound, and a quick stop at the consulate again. Despite their promise, they've forgotten to make Sora's visa. Apologetic, they do it in 20 minutes. We are happy of course, but puzzled. Their policy is that this process takes 10 days, and usually requires two trips. Yet they've just proven that it can be done on the spot. Very Japanese, this. Rules over reality.

We move along through wealthy Denver suburbs and out into the prairie, a drive uneventful but for the tall cottonwoods that occasionally rise above the road. We make La Junta by lunch, eaten out before the massive Bent's Fort, standing proudly beside the Arkansas. We spend the next hour wandering in and out of the fort's many rooms, the thick adobe walls holding the chill. I imagine that this would be a fantastic posting for a ranger, living on the spot that was the center of so much western history, and hosted some of its biggest names. It is peaceful here, standing by the fire and looking through at the trees bare for winter. This whole region intrigues. I hope to come back and explore more.

Hills roll us toward Trinidad. It is near dark when we arrive, so we skip the looked-forward-to stroll. We compromise on a meal at an old hotel, but it is a pricey, meat-heavy menu, so I reward myself with a single pint and peanuts and get back on the road quickly. Over Raton Pass into New Mexico again, moving toward home, under the crisp and star-filled sky...

On the turntable: Tedeschi Trucks Band, "Revelator"
On the nighttable: S.C. Gwynn, "Empire of the Summer Moon"