Knowing Exactly Where I Wasn't

"I couldn't taste the taste that I was tasting,
couldn't hear the waste that I was making,
tired of the life I was facing."
-Ween, "Chocolate Town"

Fall in Northern New Mexico is like no other. Certain autumnal changes are ubiquitous, but the overall impressions, the alterations in neural chemistry the Land of Enchantment evokes, have no equal. Leaves change from verdant greens to tanned, leathery yellows. Crimson and cinnamon turbines fall from oak totems, swirling amidst the chilly breezes speeding through the mountain passes. The cacti remain stolid. The nights spread their arms in both directions, stealing away the afternoon and morning light with gaunt fingers. The air is crisp and open. The snowstorms RSVP, promising their attendance at Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners.

Locals stoke their fires with pinon logs they'’ve either cut themselves or purchased from amicable neighbors with stubble and missing teeth. Ristras hung from jutting vigas and sway under the moonlight, casting feathery shadows against rough adobe walls. The nights smell dark and primal, the aromas of roasted Chimayo chile and pinon, of elk and desert sand, dance playfully with kachina spirits and coyotes skirting nervously over black asphalt.

Look into the deepest of New Mexican skies on a clear night and you'’ll be struck with the sensation of not looking at space, but being sucked up into it.

Living in New Mexico is a combination of several generally uneasy feelings: disconnectedness, isolation, a surreal awareness of living nature, a sense of topographical brooding. Normally, these sentiments would cause one to panic, but in New Mexico they ineffably endear you to the land. New Mexico is partly lost and confused; It has neither fully accepted that it is part of America nor do the locals fully recognize their Mexican heritage, fixating always on their Spanish blood. New Mexico is not white America, nor is itindigenousnous pueblo, nor is it a Mexican villa. In terms of identity, it is a limbo land, a rugged portrait of insurmountability. Different ethnicities and cultures come in contact with one another, however great strides are taken to preserve the traditional ways.

It is almost as though Nuevo Mexico does not exist except for those existing in it, because while it appears on every map of the United States printed after 1912, no one who has not lived in New Mexico has any understanding of it. Some Americans even fail to recognize it as a state. Ironically, the tropical beaches of Hawaii, some 2,500 miles off the coast of California, are never forgotten even though New Mexico is closer than Hawaii to all of the continental state.

Foreign New Mexico Example #1: When I was in Prague several years ago I met a pair of Norwegians who vehemently denied that Western Russia was part of the European continent. I tried to explain the concept of the Caucasus Mountains as Eurasia's fissure, but they would have nothing of it. The Norwegians insisted Russia was strictly an Asiatic land. Is New Mexico invisible to most Americans because of some puritanical strife? Or does sharing its name with a country initiates a state of child-like confusion?

Foreign New Mexico Example #2: On a recent trip to Alaska, a cashier asked me if everyone spoke Spanish if New Mexico. Given that New Mexico was admitted to the United States 47 years prior to Alaska, I wanted to ask if she spoke Russian. However, I refrained, not wanting to give the impression that New Mexicans were uncouthe.














The other day a friend and I went hiking east of Albuquerque at the Fourth of July Campground near Chilili. After driving through what most would assume to be uninhabitable wastelands suitable only for Ted Turner'’s buffalo herds, my friend and I headed confidently into the woods.

My friend and I had hiked and camped together several times before. Both of us were raised in Northern New Mexico and had heard the horror stories of hikers getting lost in the woods, prompting the deployment of search parties and helicopters with spotlights. For that reason, we both understood the importance of water, dressing in layers, and not straying from marked trails.

However, such exposition promises an aberration from the predicates of safe sportage. We didn't stay on the marked trails. Not that we didn'’t try. But what looked liked the trail ended every twenty feet, at which point we would stop and scratch our heads and locate what appeared to be another trail some distance off. And so, like a chain that is imagined to stay together despite its missing links, we followed each trail bit, each piecemeal path, until we were, predictably, lost.

In the fifth largest state, a state with barely 2 million people, it is easy to become lost. There is a lot of uninhabited land in New Mexico. A lot of land waiting to be developed. A lot of land waiting to be scarred. A lot of land where one can search or be searched for. A lot of land to escape to. A lot of land to become a part of.

After some scouting we managed to find the major trail and we headed back toward the main campground. When we reached the car I couldn'’t help but feel the entire time we were without direction, the entire time I didn'’t know where I was, I did not have the impression of feeling lost. I had been feeling out of sorts in regards to my place and purpose anyway, and being stranded in the woods, being faced with the prospect of having to resort to a survivalist mentality, made no impression on me. I was in New Mexico. Maybe that's as lost as one can get. But it is a familiar feeling of being without a location, and a familiar feeling of being disoriented is preferable to an unfamiliar one.

If Only Jim Morrison Were Right

This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end

Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
I'll never look into your eyes...Again

Can you picture what will be
So limitless and free
Desperately in need...of some...stranger's hand
In a...desperate land


Jim Morrison and the Doors would have us believe that life starts, begins, and ends tragically. That there is a return to that which we came from. That when you close your eyes, embrace the darkness, there is only an all-consuming darkness afterward.

Apocryphal lies.

Even after you've closed your eyes, the sun still shines on your decaying form. And you're being dead doesn't mean you are no longer part of the eternal symbiosis of pain and frustration. Flowers used the energy from your matter as an advantage over other flowers. Chickadees weave your hair into their roosts. Your bones turn to soil, or maybe their preserved and later used as clubs. Their is no Nietzschian return to that which you came from or eternal repetitious cycle. Everything is in flux, but with flux comes the unpredictability of continuation, not of finality.

Their is only constant merger. Ebb and flow. Current and undertow.

"That door is closed," "I finally got closure," "I burned that bridge," "I'm ambivalent to it now," "I've stymied the flow," "I've blocked that road," "The lights are turned off."

Translation: I'm in denial.

The door can be reopened, no matter how securely it was locked. Closure is illusory. The bridge can be rebuilt. Ambivalence is ignorance. You could give less or more. The flow can burst the dam. The road can be cleared. The lights can be turned on.

Every emotion is recycled. Every reaction to a singularity is manifold complex. This is an injustice to the singularity, but this is reality.

Lust turns to hate turns back to lust again. Maybe you lust for a different person, however sediment from the principal lust makes its way into the secondary lust like a dollar bill that makes its way from New York to LA and back into the hands of the first person who spent it. And so on. Every time you kiss someone, you relive every kiss that preceded it. You're never just kissing the person you're kissing.

Animosity turns to forgiveness turns to animosity. You never forgive without reexperiencing every act of forgiveness that preceded it. And you never despise without despising everything you've ever despised.

Life is long division with a constant remainder. Life is a shoe with sand in it from the trip to the beach you took ten years ago. Nothing is eliminated.

Newly developed branches from a river redirect water away from a main tributary. The main tributary dries up. However, over the eons, it has eroded embankments, dug trenches, drowned hundreds of people, washed their bones downstream, provided life to plants and animals, carved away at the earth until cliffs and waterfalls were created. And in a moment, it can dry up. But evidence of the river remains. It is not gone, it is simply altered. And just as quickly as the main tributary became nothing more than an arid channel, a shift in tectonics, a sudden deluge, a torrential shower, a melting glacier, a faulty levee, and the main tributary will once again become a raging river. It will drown again. The water will reach new heights. The life of the river was assumed over, and now it is alive.

The Power of Walking

It took our ancestors millions of years to erect themselves from quadrupedal primates to bipedal hominids. It took ages for our spines to form the ergonomic posture of the signature S-curve that distribute our weight properly. It took eons for our toes to splay the right way and for our hips to develop so that the femur plugs in at the side to allow for a forward lift of the leg. Along with walking upright came adjustments to the pelvis, the knee, the foot, the arm, and the torso. And maybe the mind.

Why do we walk instead of crawl? What benefit does it have for mankind to be long and linear rather than squat and robust? Some scientists say the switch from knuckle-walking to tippy-toeing was efficacious because it allowed us to raise our vantage so as to see over the tall grasses of the savanna plains. Others say that posting our spines perpendicular to the earth's surface reduced the amount of our body exposed to the sun, offering the benefit of a climate controlled comfort: less exposure to the sun means (especially in the tropics of Africa) easier regulation of basal metabolism. The less skin exposed to direct sunlight (remember these were the days before parasols and sombreros) the fewer calories used to stay a cool 98.6 degrees.

There are plenty of other theories as to why our bodies defied gravity and reached toward the sky: walking upright freed our hands to develop tools and forage; once we descended from the trees, we ceased to brachiate and therefore our legs became the primary mode of transport; it was too difficult to rotate the layers of our Rubix cubes and walk with our hands at the same time.

Last night I went walking. I didn't know where I was going, what I was looking for, or whether I would find it. But I felt that there was some point to walking, some purpose to it, some teleology behind it. I'm sure the first proto-hominid who walked upright didn't have any idea why he was walking, he just did it felt like it had promise. If walking upright proved equally or disadvantageous, the proto-hominid would have abandoned the practice. Obviously he didn't.

I walked by the used car lots on Charlotte Pike. I walked by churches and synagogues. I walked by darkened parks and ponds. I walked by a private school where I heard fireworks and, listening closely, heard a faceless, microphoned voice announce the Homecoming Queen of Montgomery Bell Academy. I walked all the way to the interstate, and then I headed back to the place that is supposed to feel like home, but doesn't anymore.

On the way back I passed some drunken girls. I passed a cop doing double the speed limit, no doubt in pursuit of a late night snack. I walked by a mongrel in the parking lot of a bowling alley who eyed me skeptically, as though to lambaste me with, "What are you doing on two feet? Wanderers should be on all fours, you wonk."

When I came to the cave where I've stashed my atlatl and mammoth hides the balls of my feet were sore. And how. I checked a map. I'd walked over ten miles.

Ten miles is a lot by today's standard though it's nothing if you think back to our ancestors, the ones who walked from central Africa to the northern climes of Sweden or, even farther yet, to Mesoamerica where they learned to dine on capsicum fruits and sinewy chihuahuas.



Walking is a unique type of therapy. Driving doesn't do it. Flying doesn't do it. Riding a bike doesn't do it. Getting abducted by aliens doesn't do it. Walking does it. The walking cure, the pilgrimage, the sojourn. Walking is such an ancient way to get from point A to point B to do so helps us remember a time when there were fewer problems. When the only thing you had to worry about was, "Will I eat today or will I be eaten today?" and "Will I mate today or become meat today?" Walking harkens back to the days before concepts like commitment, promise, justice, propriety, respect, and honesty were unthought of because they didn't exist. Walking takes us to a simpler time. A time before technology, science, futurism, philosophy, space exploration, and nuclear weapons.

Bipedalism gave us the ability to carry greater and greater loads in our arms. I think I'll drop mine for a while. I've carried it long enough.