Pilgrimage

On April 10 I woke with a strange feeling, an urgent tug followed by three consecutive question marks, like I imagine some introspective Crusader felt the eve of his journey to the Holy Land; a definite mission, but not much of an idea of what to expect once there.  The cab driver, an older Pakistani gentleman, asked if he could turn on the news.  Poland’s president’s plane crashed while we slept.  So, because of that, I learned how in 1988 the president of Pakistan suffered a similar fate, apparently from a gifted crate of rigged mangoes.  The news and the facts passed through me, interesting but meaningless.  At the airport I was successfully processed (I had left all of my weapons at home), the wait, the boarding, the wait, the flight…they happened.  I went along.

I traveled light.  I carried one pack with less than two changes of clothes, several books, and a case of CDs bearing a season and a half (plus a few selected episodes) of This American Life.  I could want for nothing more. 

The purpose of the trip was to pick up my parents’ car.  The last time I drove my car in Chicago was in second gear to and from work.  The transmission was shot.  The problem was plain, the situation was clear.  I needed a car to get to work.  It was another sting to receive, the latest in a long series, and I was haphazardly swatting [reacting] at each reflexively, being led to live by pain.  My world has become my workplace and my home with what seems like a wormhole in between.  But to be fair, I accepted this, I allowed this, I chose this; I went along with it.  I haven’t seen with my eyes in some time.  Maybe I should be grateful nothing lasts forever, one way or another.

My parents were gracious enough to offer their car to help my family get through some of the challenges we have been experiencing of late.  I flew to Arizona to pick up the car and drive it back to Chicago.  It was necessary that I do it alone.  That was my only trepidation, but really it was a gift.
This remarkable pattern interrupt started with my parents.  For me, my relationship with my parents is a pure and perfect demonstration of the depth and quality of change someone can experience without realizing it.  I never really thought that my values were that different from my parents’, but something in me changed at some point, something small that after a few dozen more rotations on my axis had exaggerated my tilt.  Now we don’t speak the same language.  It is a strange verbal pantomime we use to bridge the gap.  So it wasn’t exactly a break from comfort or expectation (I knew what to expect), but this wasn’t a vacation so I didn’t see the challenge for anything more than it was.  Despite our differences, my parents still support me in ways they can understand; something I will probably relate to when my daughters are older and consider me a Pict, yet I will still cherish them.

I got on the road early the next morning.  Driving out of Phoenix, I was listening to “Not What I Signed Up For” (“double whammy” OMG).  I was giddy.  Driving through the boulder fields I was listening to “Break-up” (loved what Phil Collins brought to it); through the high desert on the way to Kingman “Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time” was on (hilarious and totally relatable).  At Laughlin I was listening to “Pen Pals” (an excellent suggestion Joel) and driving through Las Vegas I was laughing my ass off listening to “Fiasco”.  All the rest are a furious blur of spotlights on strobing humanity.  It was wonderful!

But this isn’t meant to be some postprandial recounting the menu of my journey in monotonous detail.  The route I chose was not the most efficient, but it was what I wanted.  It was defined by my expectations for it to take me through new and stimulating environments, places to excite my imagination.  I got that, but it wasn’t the place that reawakened me, it was the endeavor.

About the time I got off the interstate in Nevada and entered Area 51 territory, my mind began to wander and play.  I had the route from southern to northern Nevada determined, a short hop between I-15 and I-80, the backroads through the barren and blasted lands.  My planning revealed two routes between Alamo and Ely, U.S. Route 93, which is listed as scenic, and Nevada State Route 318, upon which twice a year there is a high-speed open road race that is prominent enough to be featured in a popular video game.  My curiosity piqued, I figured I was looking for the fast road nobody was really interested in seeing.

To be fair, I don’t know what I missed on 93, but 318 got me what I wanted just fine.  The track skirted hill crests overlooking bleak rocky terrain and wended through red stone cliffs and gullies, Alex Blumberg’s voice traversing the ridiculous intricacies of naked shortselling playing through the ups and downs and under the blue sky; hanging on the spine-tingling tale of a man using a shadowed past to locate fugitives in Mexico, deeper knowledge that simultaneously rescues children and undercuts the nobility of a selfless act by the inherent understanding of how gray the situations become under the hot, circumstantial, desert sun…the same one over Baja, the same one over all of Gaia’s muck and blood children.  I achieved a trance-like state of absorption, my eyes soaking up the landscape, my ears sponging up the stories, insights and revelations and my mind churning, focusing and packing it all into little volatile sticks of holistically conceptual TNT asking me, begging me to detonate.  I checked into the hotel that night afire.

Throughout the whole trip, the sights, the places, so mystical, entrancing.  The deserts of Nevada, near the Extraterrestrial Highway, hot, craggy, Martian, bleak and threatening, I wanted to walk in the shadows of the cliffs, stop and sit and become one of the great boulders hunkered precipitously upon some edge for 10,000 years.  No mother to hold me but the warm, shaping wind.  To even be bleached bones, chalk strata, a well earned failure, if only I could have stayed; glory be to the God who made the desert here and in me.  I have to move on.

And the salt flats of Utah; I knew such places existed, but to see them makes the world a little more special.  The wind lifting curtains of salt and dust, a veil dancing and swaying, aching to just walk it, to scale its rising pleats and experience the ghost land fully as crystal and silt.  Climbing crags to catch this creation of otherworldly wildness in my camera’s eye, shooting blind, buffeted by the breath of the alkali crypt and its stinging whispers warning me of the things that crawl in my skull, skittering down the vertebrae, squeezing between the ribs and clutching at the pumping bloodvine fruit, draining it slowly, sadly; daily.  Sadly it slows daily; whither it withers.  Toward dust; maybe to fly back to mother’s tomb.  I have to move on.

Along I-80, 80 mph, passing a convoy of flatbeds, long smooth gracefully turned arms lashed down, an alabaster giant dismembered, Lilliputians getting serious.  And then I realized, not an end, a beginning.  These were the parts of a fetal behemoth traveling the asphalt birth canal of progress, scheduled to rise and reach its arms to the sky, unknowingly machined by desperation.  I sped up the spine of the continent, rolling horizon, tumbling track.  What is Wyoming?  Could be Chinese…  And then I saw them, strung along the ridges in severe rows, the massive fully realized wind turbines like enormous anemones twisting in the breeze, Earth barnacles attached to our great ship’s hull touching the currents that swirl and stream.  I was struck with the same feeling of awe as when I first saw the AT-ATs stomping across Hoth in Empire Strikes Back; the enormity of the progress, another footstep in a direction of magnificent potential.  I knew they existed, but to see them was wondrous.  Words danced carried by the rhythm of change and motion…we are doing it…it is happening.  These giants, infants to a new generation of thought, earthly anchors of the paradigm shift attached to the floating vessel of our imagination.  We must keep moving on.

(I am moving, the muscles atrophied, they burn and fatigue easy)

And in Cheyenne, a barbarian stockade, they wore their hate on their skin.  I considered the form and expression and it disheartened me to accept that philosophers typically do not bear skull tattoos and 1% patches.  It seems so unfair.  I suppose definition usually is.  Stopping at the Motel 6 with the weekly rates, bands of Goths keeping time by the chuckling of their two wheel steeds, Vandals at the gates, glassy stares and shuffling feet, chefs cooking the house special in 208.  And a plague (from my own rats or theirs, I could not tell) to accompany me on my journey in the morning.

Upon the morning I was a cadaver leaking effluvia from my stitches. 
Reality and nausea conjoined to become the dream of Nebraska.
Hunched.  Wretching at the wheel.  Storm tossed stomach; roiling sea of bile; exhaustion
Melting to the seat.  Stuck to the wheel.  Time stopping at speed.  And still racing while stopped.
Every 50 miles stumbling to some filthy shrine
offering my guts to Hell and praying for Moloch’s satisfaction.

The wind.  The wind.  The wind.
My mind wandered to Venus and brought her wind to Earth
surely punishment for ten years of wicked mantras
whispers collected and condensed, punching any who stand to make excuses,
Shepherding vast flocks of tumbleweeds across the road;
another alien place

Still, stories unwound from the dash,
my thoughts hungrily clutching at them,
and following,
as though threads leading from the maze.
Following to Des Moines. 
Desperate ablutions.  Collapse.
Dreams of the thread, stitching my mouth shut, stitching my eyes open,
stitching me together, parts to a whole
Beautiful sinner

My guardian angel is really pissed off by now.  It commands me move, or it shall take me.

Rise.
Gather.
Start.
Travel.
Traverse.

“I stopped you because you were going five miles over the speed limit.”
I suppose that was true…but still not fast enough.  Not fast enough.  Not raging.  Not yet.

Nevertheless, I crawled the remainder of the trip back to where my body lives, watching the sun rise and fall. 

As I understand it, church officials would send people on pilgrimages as penance for some crime or wicked behavior.  They would do a circuit of Europe to all of the churches and holy sites and miraculous venues across the continent.  At a time when travel was slow, cumbersome and potentially dangerous, such a quest was certain to trash a person’s year handily.  Forget your plans; your time is now devoted to God.

Considering that the average person’s experience of the world was within a 20 mile radius of their birthplace, suddenly breaking that pattern, removing expectations, had to be jarring to say the least.  I believe this is what the church had in mind when setting people adrift on extended journeys to see the world.  A person can get comfortable within their 40 mile circle, complacent, expectant, entitled.  It’s easy to forget that the world is an enormous place when you’ve never seen it.  It’s easy to imagine that the entirety of existence is within you, as thoughts that squirrel around in your head, no longer attentive to the people and places around because you see the same damn thing over and over that you don’t have to, don’t even want to, pay attention anymore, and the soliloquy you profess to the dark becomes the only truth that bears acknowledgement.  Only Hamlet’s pain matters, it is inconsequential how many have to die to imagine yet another solipsistic solution.  And then you do something stupid and God tells you to go take a walk to cool down; get away from all of the things that you feel you know.  And with new experiences comes fresh thought and the solemn realization that there is still so much of life that can shape you; that what you know is small and ridiculous compared to the enormity of what can only be guessed at and all of the baubles, procedures and fantasies we pretend bring comfort have limited value outside the cage.

It’s an easy circumstance to succumb to; you hear the coins jangling in your pocket but you don’t realize they are only pennies until you are asked to contribute.  And you don’t even know where it all went, bit by bit, minute by minute; the passion went to small expenses over time until something strikes the skin of your soul and the hollow resonance forthcoming is terrifying.

I put off my passion until the day when time would be plentiful; I didn’t realize the cost.  I didn’t know that the pressure caused the threads to pop, the sutures to burst, and that there was a leak, draining all of my love, my hunger, my capacity to feel, and my strength; the things that make me were going away.  A lot of damage has been done.  Being honest with myself, I have to admit fifteen years of failure, not because I am poor, not because I am consistently angry and desperate, but for the root of it all – because I have denied every passion my heart calls me to engage.

I realize now that the things that drive me aren’t just suggestions.  They are imperative.  They must be addressed.  Traveling 36 hours in the company of so many human tales of tragedy and triumph through lands that inspire the imagination awakened something in me and made me realize what I was missing, what I had passed off. 

Now I am going to get it all back.