For the past four months we have been living in RV parks around Los Angeles – whenever we could, right on the beach, right at the Pacific. However, the pleasures of motorhome living have been less without the daily excitement of travel and new places. The disruption to our lives became more pronounced. Most people who fulltime it – that’s what it’s called – are retired – you know, the gray-hairs everyone thinks of when they hear of motorhome travel. But those older RVers are not all fulltimers. Some are snow birds, heading south for the winter. The gray hairs are what Julia thought of when I first talked to her of motorhome travel well over a decade ago. I had some little experience, and already knew the joy.

Those older travelers are much misunderstood by the people who capture them in a cliché. On one of the countless occasions along the way that I observed some back-bent codger emerge from a forty-footer, and his maybe spryer but plumper spouse head for her own work in parking, setting up, maybe unhitching what’s called a fifth wheel, leveling it, and connecting it to the grid, I turned to Julia and said, You know they’re actually very impressive. Most people their age are rooted like plants in front of a television. These people are out there seeing the world, traveling the roads, engaging life with all they’ve got left. They’re something. And so they are.

One of the rich rewards of travel is the regular encounter with lives, kinds of lives, whole subcultures of which you would otherwise never have known. It’s like discovering new planets, populated planets, right there around the bend, over a mountain, deep in a wood. The fulltimers and the snow birds are two kinds of motorhome traveler, and there are many who are younger, younger than Julia and I, and the family vacationers with their kids. There are the people, too, old and not so old, who are not travelers, who are a different kind of fulltimer. The RV may be a twenty-year old motorhome worse for wear and time, or maybe a fifth wheel, up on its blocks, an apron around its base like a foundation to a house, a makeshift yard of chairs, tables, bird feeders crowding the site. There are many variations, but in each case, not in the resplendent motorhome resorts on lakes and oceans that are condoed and timeshared, but in the small, meager parks stuck back in the rural trees, tucked away on lots off the interstate, they may rent monthly for three or four hundred dollars, and they are not recreational or much of a vehicle, but they are a permanent home, twenty-five feet by ten or even eight, for someone old, or veteran, or attached to reality a little differently, and its better, by far, than a big-city street or some charity hotel, and you’ve got some propane for heat and maybe a pet and your own blue sky, and life is always a road to somewhere you didn’t know you were going.

So finally, for Julia and me, after sixteen months and no longer traveling, fulltiming became too much. She has this business to help guide, I have several book projects in progress and too long in coming, and life is joy if you can make it and let it be that, and if you are lucky, but it is also work, and we just need more space and to be settled again. We needed to land somewhere for awhile.

Among the oddly contradictory feelings of preparing to land, is my reluctance to give up the Allegro Bay, our motorhome, just as we prepare to sell it. (If you’re interested, by the way, the asking price is $125,000 for a 2009, with many extras and a Hydralift, hydraulic motorcycle lift, the best on the market and adaptable for an ATV, welded to the rear, an $8,000 value newly installed.) All my life, whenever talking with friends about the fantasy of wealth, I always said my definition of the kind of rich I’d like to be is the ability to travel wherever I want whenever I want. If you are intrepid and disentangled enough a person, that doesn’t have to be that monetarily rich. For me, though it doesn’t yet cross oceans, the motorhome, has been that freedom, that rich, and while I have longed these past couple of months to be landed, I feel, too, like a cowboy about to give up his horse.

Julia and I both love and embrace change. It comes to you anyway, and we make our own. Our apartment is little more than a mile from the home we own, still rented out, and which I never wanted to live in again when we left it. We expect to stay in the apartment for a couple of years, do some traveling by air and auto to continue our work in Indian country, and then see where the economy and work and circumstance have delivered us. We anticipate another year of motorhome travel in four or five years. This time around with only a very little experience driving RVs, I was reluctant to go above the 37 feet. Now I’ve driven through mountains and over narrow country roads and barreled along interstates amid crowds of trucks and trailers, and loved every second of it. Next time, I’m going 44 feet – the king size bed, the second bathroom, the kitchen island. (Some cowboy.)

We’ll see where we are in four or five years. We are all held out into our existential space, deep into the unfathomed universe. It is cold there, and dark, and in the very dead of night it is frightening. So we seek connection, in love and family and faith, in culture and tradition, in the comfort of habit and routine, as if to believe there is no wonder that anything, a tree or a walk in the park, is the way it is – even though we know our end is to separate from most or all of those connections.

In these final days before we move next week, I walk the dogs along the low bluffs of Playa del Rey, overlooking the Pacific. The ocean and the beach are my heaven, what I hope to see at my end, if not after. I grew up in several communities in New York City, but mostly in Rockaway Beach, a collection of communities, actually, along a peninsula in the Atlantic that many New Yorkers don’t even know is part of the city, or think is in Brooklyn, though it is Queens. My parents moved us there, twice, because they loved the seaside too.

My father, who was born in Ukraine, a cold and unforgiving clime – especially in the first half of the twentieth century, and before, for a Jew – loved three things in the world: his family, everything new and clean (because in his youth everything had been old and of the earth), and the sun. He worshiped the sun, and so he worshiped the beach, and on his restful Sundays, while his indolent children still slept, and when we didn’t live in Rockaway, he would make the drive to Jones Beach, farther out on Long Island, and lie for hours with a reflector, be home before we had risen yet. In the painful days after he died, and now, several years later, every time I sit on a beach, whenever I feel, simply, the heat of the sun on my skin – feel that the universe is not empty space surrounding me, but something touching me – I think of my father. In that inexplicable communion of heart and memory, I am my father.

My mother’s love of the sea was more melancholy, as she was. She loved to sit at her window beside the Atlantic on stormy days and watch a dark Caribbean mood travel up to New York’s southern shores. She swam in sorrows that were buoyed by the love of her family.

On the day before we took the apartment, I walked Homer and Penelope amid those kinds of stormy seaside colors. The ocean was steely beneath dark clouds, the wind blowing, the white caps churning, light, though not sun, cracking the clouds for contrast. On this day, thinking of beginnings and ends, and the distance in between, I was not my father but my mother. In contrast to seasides, mountains, and great plains, cities like New York are great works of imagination, architectural installations, stages of human drama, the worlds of the novel a reader enters to live on its streets and know the merchants and neighbors. But on a bluff above the ocean, one returns to the original creation. There is the sea, the sky, the land, where they all meet, and one can feel, originally, how one connects to them, to the sphere they embody, and what lies beyond.

I walked ahead of Penelope, who these days, no longer hunting in woodlands, does not forge maniacally ahead anymore, and followed behind Homer. When he was a puppy, Homer was frightened of the world itself. I had to pull him down the stairs of the three-story Venice loft we lived in then, and out the door, just to get him to do his business. He was not unlike the shy, timid, frightened child I was, who in my infancy, through a long week in the Catskills, would not go potty until my father drove up for the weekend to hold my hand.

Now Homer has seen the country and peed on it all. He was about my age when we left, our gray about the same, but is older than I am now, aging faster, though I’ll get there. On the Playa del Rey bluffs, he lumbered through the gusts ahead of me, each slow step rippling through his body to the hind haunches. He turned to look back at me, his eyes wondering.

“I’m coming,” I said.

AJA (photos from my Moto Q)

Originally settled and contested by the Spanish and Portuguese, Uruguay has a British history too, but like Argentina and the United States is now largely populated by the descendents of a late nineteenth and early twentieth century European immigration, mostly Italian and Spanish. The fiercely resistant indigenous population, the Charrúa, forestalled widespread colonial settlement throughout the sixteenth century, but ultimately were effectively exterminated by a deliberate, documented campaign of genocide. DNA studies reveal, however, that there is an approximately 20% Amerindian genetic component in the present population. As elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere there was a significant African slave population that survives in a small Afro-Uruguayan minority. There is a significant Jewish minority, too, in a Roman Catholic nation that contains the highest percentage of agnostics and atheists in South America. The Africans were the source of Umbandan spiritual traditions and Yemanja, a Yoruban orisha, or spirit, invoked today in seaside rituals.

The Central Uruguayan Railroad opened its first line in 1869. As roadways expanded in the small nation, the importance of the rail lines diminished. The dictatorship of the seventies and early eighties permitted the system to fall into disrepair. The central depot and repair facility, opened in Peñarol in1891, still operates, now with 200 employees instead of a one-time 2000. Work for the railroad is a multi-generational family tradition, as is working, still, with the early twentieth-century British machines and tools that the workers rave still function and never break down The Peñarol station is a working museum of the mid industrial revolution. The collection of locomotives stretches back to the 1880s, and the workers, all passionate about trains, are intent on returning them all to running order.

Uruguay’s Carnival is the longest in the world, at 40 days. Participants prepare for months before, and the various celebrations, theatricals, and revues are central to Uruguayan life. All the floats and costumes are made of recycled materials. The cuerdas consist of dozens of drummers, along with dancers and stock theatrical characters, in dozens of competing teams.

Photograph by Donna Stellini

Photograph by Donna Stellini

It’s been a hard day’s night.

Photography by Julia Dean, except where noted.

AJA

AJA

Fifty-three weeks of travel – unthinkable for some, but for me and for Julia, as our lives have evolved, an almost pressing need. Our travels started uncertainly. They didn’t always go so well. We did not reach all of the destinations on which we had set our sights, but as John Steinbeck said, “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” Our destinations and our destinies are like a ball bobbing on the ocean, and we kicking behind it. Sometimes we do, in fact, direct it exactly to where we were aiming, and so we are apt to forget that the current might just as well have gone against us.

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” – St. Augustine

Among the fascinations about human life shared both by travelers and lovers of literature – so I am doubly blessed in what absorbs me – are the varieties of those human destinies, and the more one travels, the greater number of different kinds of lives one encounters. There are those among us, the larger number, who lead settled lives of varying degree. There are those – players in the great games of power and progress that posts on this blog often address – who are driven in their lives to consequential action. Their purpose is in the work of attempting to direct that water-borne ball over the waves, for themselves and for others, and their lives would feel otherwise aimless.

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” – Mark Twain

Another kind of life is that of the other travelers making their way over the earth, most from starting points different from your own, some even choosing to remain where one of their journeys has taken them. In cozy mountain villages in Laos, rambling seaside retreats along the South China Sea, in Roman train stations or filling up the tank, one crosses trajectories with so many random destinies, as one randomly happens to others. There is talk of coming and going, places one should see, a beer in a café at sunset. And if nothing else, there is one thing you all have in common: a place exists in the world called home, in whatever language, and none of you are there. You are each held out into the void of what still remains to unfold in your life, as is everyone, only made more palpable because of the newness, at every step, of the ground beneath your feet and the unfamiliarity of every moment. “There are no foreign lands,” said Robert Louis Stevenson. “It is the traveler only who is foreign.”

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” – Cesare Pavese

Of all the elements of travel, the originating impulse is in the elation of setting off. Traveling over land by motorhome, picking up our home (not simply ourselves, and on to some hotel, but our home) and moving on when it suited us – this became a reinvigorating joy. It reminded us each time, having rutted our wheels in a place we had stayed long enough, of the essential freedom of what we were doing. The panoramic screen of our windshield looming before us, Homer and Penelope setting their chins to the floor, Julia would lock us down and I would shift into gear, counting time into Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again”:

Goin’ places that I’ve never been.
Seein’ things that I may never see again

“There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it,” said Charles Dudley Warner. In a motorhome, that delight can come every time you draw up your levels and pull in the slides. “I just can’t wait to get on the road again.”

Some of what you can understand through travel is as plain as the West Texas expanse or a Tennessee woodland: how could people living in those places, with their histories and their struggles, possibly see the world in the same way as someone from New York City or Los Angeles or Miami or Seattle? Why should they? It is a wonder they all make up a single country. If one travels for the only profound reason a person should – to come to know the world, and oneself, and not simply dip a toe and shrink back from the cold water of the new and strange – one might reject a little less and abide a little more. Tolerance, rightly understood, is not a PC shibboleth, a guilt-ridden principle of holding no principle dear enough except the one of tolerance – it is essential humility before the immensity of experience. The whale is not greater than the eagle.

“The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” – Samuel Johnson

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller

There are the people, the places, and yourself. There is the world that contains them all. In 1981, I traveled to Greece. I had just left my corporate life and almost certain fortune behind (offered, by the company’s owners, the final promotion on Friday – the last rung on the ladder to the top – I resigned on Monday) and was beginning, not for the first or last time, a different life. I flew first to Rome, later took a taxi to the Roma Termini railway station to catch a train to Brindisi, from where I would travel by ferry across the Adriatic Sea, along the coast of still closed and mysterious Albania, to Greece. At the rail station in Rome, I encountered two young men, one still in his twenties, like me, a slight, long-haired and wispy-bearded Canadian, the other an athletic and red-headed eighteen-year-old Brit. With all three of us headed to Greece, we chose to travel together, and for a week were the fast friends that found traveling companions can become.

The young Brit was exploring Europe on a parent-financed escape from grief. His twin brother had died, and he was seeking whatever there was of recovery in the distraction and education of travel. The still hippieish Canadian had been living overseas for ten years. At about the Brit’s age, his girlfriend had left him, and left him devastated. He took off for Europe and had returned to Canada only once: some years of living in North Africa had created havoc with his intestines, and he had returned to Canada for surgery. Now he was living in Greece on tourist visas, which he renewed every ninety days by traveling to Italy and then reentering the country. He had bowel problems that the Brit and I patiently accommodated while we remained a threesome.

“The open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.” – William Least Heat Moon

The Brit, of course, considered the Canadian and me vastly more experienced older fellows, and was duly impressed to learn the Canadian had been at Woodstock. I missed Woodstock because my closest friend and I had flown to California on the first independent travel of my life, while still in high school: we were ticketed for vagrancy on the Sunset Strip, hitchhiked up the Pacific Coast Highway to camp illegally in Big Sur, and made our way to Golden Gate Park and Berkeley, where our acid connection awaited us. The “promised land of my people” I called the golden state of our travels in my senior-year creative writing class.

Well, I was even younger then than the Brit.

The Brit, Canadian and I explored Brindisi together, rode the Adriatic waves to Patras, and traveled from there by bus to Athens. We hunted cheap hotels, cheap food, and toured the ruins. Then our destinations led us apart as I took another ferry from Piraeus, the port of Athens, to Crete. We exchanged addresses, determined to write, and never communicated again.

“When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.” – William Least Heat Moon

On Crete, I walked for miles. I visited the Minoan ruins. I traveled by bus over the central mountains to the southern coast – mountains Julia would traverse twenty-five years later, though without the bus driver who crossed himself at every mountain’s-edge, unrailed switchback. At last, I landed in Matala, a former 60s hippie haven (the fossils still remained from when they shat in the caves) where the residents lived in cliffside shacks, the Greek Orthodox women black-robed from the head down in the still strong, late September sun. I set out to sit with my own long-mending heart. I checked into a pension for two dollars a night, and proceeded to shave, for the first and last time, the beard I’d sprouted on my return home from Berkeley at seventeen. I stared hard in the mirror at the man I had become since I’d grown it.

“All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.” – Paul Fussell

On the beach each day, I lay staring out at the wide Mediterranean sky and the sun-speckled sea beneath it, saw under sail on an imaginary horizon the ship of Odysseus, he tied to the heaving foremast by his men that he might hear and withstand the sirens’ song. In the evenings I sat on the porch of the beach taverna indulging the short-lived taste for Retsina I had acquired in Athens, smoking cigarettes end to end and contemplating my life. The sky was star-shot and beating with an elemental pulse. Once, from the tavern sound system, “Light My Fire” vibrated in the ancient night around me.

The time to hesitate is through
No time to wallow in the mire

“Try to set the night on fire.”

The next morning, curious for news of the world, I walked the half mile up a dirt road to the kiosk for an International Herald Tribune. On the front page the images spread before me, the headline was bold: Anwar Sadat assassinated in Cairo.

I headed home to New York.

Most obviously, maybe most simply and surprisingly too, travel is about movement. It can be disorienting. A question for the traveler becomes how well he can accommodate, even welcome, that loss of bearings. In a motorhome, you maintain a constant living environment – you are taking your home along with you. So for a year, no matter where we were, at night particularly, the shades drawn, when we ate at the same table and slept in the same bed, wrote and backed up images and interviews – watched TV from our satellite – everything was the same. Outside might be the high Apache desert, suburban Atlanta, a Wal-Mart parking lot in Oxford Mississippi, a Virginia woodland, but inside – more than once, for a moment, I didn’t recall where I was.

To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” – Freya Stark

But for all I love of travel, I think I have come to appreciate nothing more than the actual motion of it. At just the right convergence of movement and what surrounds it, travel achieves a meeting of adventure and architecture. The adventure might be in sitting at the edge of the open cargo door of a small plane, a chute on your back, preparing to push yourself out on your first jump. It might be skimming the Baja coast in an ultra light or getting launched into the whispering sky in a glider, to soar and bank above the Green Mountains of Vermont. Pilots experience this all the time, ship’s captains in a different way, mountain climbers. It isn’t just the thrill of the risky challenge; it’s the motion on or over the earth. Architects do not, of course, just design constructs: they conceive spaces in which to be and move, and part of the success of the design is in the experience of moving in that space, in relation to what contains or abuts the moving body.

“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

To stay confined to the grid of one’s town or at the bottom of high metropolitan canyons is to lose the sense of one’s bodily relation to the sphere one so remarkably lives upon. Climb above it all, withdraw from a part of it, as from a continent, speed over it with little or nothing of the human in your way, as the sphere itself turns, without regard to you, and you perceive your relation to the earth, the universe, in a different way. I recall the night lights of Brindisi fading in the distance, as they would have for Virgil almost two thousand years before, one land receding, a far one waiting, and all our lives, on all the ships, bobbing on the water. I can still recover to my senses the worldly stillness and silence of the upper Mekong River, in Laos, as we motored beneath the high banks, the lone fisherman on a skiff oblivious to us as we passed. The clouds that revolved around the peak of Machu Picchu as we climbed. The mesas that loomed and receded as our home on wheels moved on.

“Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe”……Anatole France

The explorers and builders of civilizations who follow such routes of travel may feel emboldened by the enormity of the nature they reach to conquer; if they are wise beyond the norm they understand that the measure of their achievement is in the smallness of the conqueror.

“A child on a farm sees a plane fly overhead and dreams of a faraway place. A traveler on the plane sees the farmhouse… and thinks of home.” – Carl Burns.

Before we continue our travels here at home next year, we will fly in January to Buenos Aires and Uruguay. Julia will be teaching a photo workshop there. (It is a fun and seasoned group of travelers going, by the way, lovers of photography all, and there are still spaces open, if you are a photographer at any level who would like to learn from the teacher PhotoMedia Magazine named its 2008 “Photo Person of the Year.”)  We were last in Buenos Aires in 2005, and though we had hoped to make it to Montevideo then, we didn’t manage it. This time Carnival Week there is part of the itinerary. The most scenic way to travel from Buenos Aires to Montevideo is by boat, an hour or three, all depending, across the Río de la Plata, as it opens onto the Atlantic. I anticipate it even now, the sense of great waters beneath me, and of an ocean ahead, our boat breaking the waves as the wind tears up my eyes, and I squinting for the first sight of a new destination, standing, for all my life, in the utter joy of moving in its direction.

“The map is not the territory.” – Alfred Korzybski

AJA

Photography by Julia Dean

(by Julia Dean)

Bound for Glory (or Mobile)

(by Julia Dean)

JD

]]> http://sadredearth.com/dog-days/feed/ 1 32.153504 -90.131411 http://sadredearth.com/along-the-interstate/ http://sadredearth.com/along-the-interstate/#comments Tue, 23 Jun 2009 05:27:42 +0000 A. Jay Adler http://sadredearth.com/?p=2040 Blue Beacon Truck Wash: West Memphis, Arkansas

God is Everywhere

JD

Interstate

To swerve is to miss
To miss to long for:
A receding highway light
In the middle of the country
Through the center of the night.

How distance beckons and turns away.

This starry billboard rises
Along the road, through every county
It chances one may go.

To miss is to fail
To reach or contact. The tire
Misses the road. In the general vagueness

In the general night, the rest stops
Blink and sigh over cup and saucer
Above the glum Formica -
The accidental faces.

The windows mirror the way.

A stretch of darkness, like longing’s light
How far I must have traveled
When you rise up quickly, surely
It’s always the center of the road
And I swerve and miss you, miss you.

AJA

originally published in Pebble Lake Review, September 2005

Desert Assault

Gearing Up for the Final Advance

I said, Cut the Wire, Now!

JD & AJA

]]> http://sadredearth.com/the-taking-of-enchanted-trails-rv-park/feed/ 0 35.080371 -106.627085 http://sadredearth.com/poem-of-the-day/ http://sadredearth.com/poem-of-the-day/#comments Tue, 24 Mar 2009 18:21:01 +0000 A. Jay Adler http://sadredearth.com/?p=1283 Julia and I are often asked what this experience is like – traveling around the country in our motorhome with our two dogs, doing the work we love, writing and photographing.  I first caught the bug of motorhome travel nearly twenty years ago, when I toured the Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming, including Yellowstone, in a twenty-eight footer. If you have the moving gene but are not entirely vagabond, it is a joyful union of two kinds of life. You wander wherever you wish, always stirred and invigorated by the natural and the new, yet you’re always home. You sleep in the same bed every night, retain all the conveniences of home, and you can have your “stuff” around you. It is a limited amount of stuff, but you can take everything essential, including the most sophisticated communications and office equipment, and you learn, as a consequence, how little stuff you really need. We left 98% behind. I miss none of it.

You can also pick up and move on whenever you like. In a few hours you pack up, unhook, and disconnect. The disconnection would be the challenge for those who need to feel always rooted in place, in community, in relationships. Instead you float over the earth. Through the panoramic window of, say, a thirty-seven footer now, the world spreads out before you, changing by the moment, offering the constant vista of the new.

And you drive. You test your skills. In ‘91 it was winding up through South Dakota’s Black Hills to Mount Rushmore. It was ascending the 10,300 feet of Montana’s Red Lodge Mountain switchbacks at sunset, and white-knuckling them down in the dark. Two days ago it was driving from Albuquerque to Gallup in 30 mile an hour winds with 50 MPH gusts and passing outside of Gallup another motorhome gone over the edge and on its side. Cranked the music up real loud and held on tight.

Travel – extended travel – changes your relation to the world and your life. The flow that fixed walls and property lines and routine seek to shut out washes over you and you feel a part of it. You feel it in you and around you, and you know you will wash away in it, to some kind of mouth, through some kind of delta, into a new geography where everything is altered. The world, you sense, in every moment, is vast, and the multitudes you pass among great, and so maybe, as Julia did in India back in 1993 – and so unlike those Wall Street “masters of the universe” who looked down from what they thought great heights on so reduced a prospect – you begin to feel like that “speck on the surface of the sad red earth.”

There is a tension in all we do between the large and the small. Traveling, you may begin to see the line, and the tautness in it, that tugs between them. Here is Ted Kooser, Julia’s fellow Nebraskan, one-time U.S. Poet Laureate, and, by the way, in his pre-retired, salaried life, an insurance man, about a different kind of travel:

FLYING AT NIGHT

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.

Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies

like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,

some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,

snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn

back into the little system of his care.

All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,

tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.

AJA

JD

AJA

AJA

JD

I conjure. It is easy enough to see Doc Holiday or the Clantons, ghost-like, riding their horses through the brush, over the shallow gullies. Like a slow superimposition in a film, I can draw out of the atmosphere Wyatt

Wyatt Earp at 21

Earp and Josie Marcus – the Jewish prostitute who was his third and final wife, of over forty years – talking by a bush as he woos her away from Sheriff Johnny Behan. What I imagine probably more miraculously than anything else is the notion that these people and the moments of their lives – because they have become so legendary – continue to occupy some alternate dimension of the coordinates that surround me. As if every period of time – every instant – continues to occur in some fractional off-frame, a parallel universe just a little invisibly, dimensionally beyond sensory apprehension. Until I conjure. And then I envisage that Earp and Marcus, in clandestine conversation in the desert in 1881, are an event somehow more concrete than my own occupation of that space, standing there in all my mundaneness in 2008, an experience the ephemeralness of which I exhale with every breath.

The famous line from John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” But though there are disputes about many of the “facts” of Earp’s life, there is little, really, about the genuinely legendary nature of the life. Testimonies to his fearlessness and strength of character, by men nearly his equal in legend, like Bat Masterson, are many. That of the seven men who stood their ground during the gunfight at the OK Corral (really two lots down the street, but legends are created of words, and “two lots down from” doesn’t work) three died, three were wounded, and only Earp emerged unscathed is firmly established. And we must acknowledge the force and will of the man who led what is known as the three week “Earp Vendetta Ride” in pursuit of the men who murdered his brother Morgan five months later, leaving anywhere from five to fifteen men dead.

The town lives up to its legend too. It was named by the silver miner Ed Schieffelin, who was told by soldiers at the nearby fort that the only stone he’d find in Apache country was his tombstone. It had – still has – the most compellingly named newspaper in journalism: The Tombstone Epitaph. (Every tombstone needs one, said its founder, John Clum.) Of those buried on Boot Hill, by far the largest number were shot, or murdered in some other way. Many are of unknown identity. More than a few were killed by Apaches, as Tombstone is in Apache country, in what is now known as Cochise County. Some were hanged or lynched. Of one, it says on his grave marker, “Here Lies/ George Johnson/ Hanged By/ Mistake/ 1882/ He Was Right/ We Was Wrong/ But We Strung/ Him Up/ And Now He’s/ Gone.” By my rough count in just the years 1881-1882 (the gunfight at the OK Corral took place on October 26, 1881; Morgan Earp was murdered March 18, 1882) about 40 people were killed in a town of roughly 5000, nearly one every two weeks. It was a helluva town to try to live and not unlikely die. (And by the way, down a slope from Boot Hill, erected in 1984 is the Jewish Pioneers Memorial, dedicated by both groups to “the Jewish Pioneers and their Indian Friends.”)

Earp was one of the few of his stature to die of old age, at 80 in Los Angeles in 1929. Doc Holiday died of

Earp the Legend

tuberculosis at 36. Big Nosed Kate, Doc Holiday’s lover, lived to 90. Hungarian by birth, she was the daughter of the physician to the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, who was deposed three years after her family’s arrival. A long, sordid journey and tale took her from that life to Tombstone. When she died in 1940, it was in the Arizona Pioneers Home, which was founded to offer a refuge to the aging pioneers of the Arizona Territory. What the legends and the movies don’t tell us is that the “pioneers” were not simply agents of their personal destinies, for good or not so. The Clantons and the Earps represented interests who were vying for control of the land and its mineral wealth: the Clantons post Reconstruction Southern Democratic forces, the Earps Eastern Republican businessmen.

It was Josie Earp who lived the longest, dying in 1944, just two years before John Ford’s My Darling Clementine was released and only 11 years before the television show – about what seemed such a remote past – that I watched as a child.

But even these words, fairly plain, tend to build a monument. A monument, too, is The Birdcage Theater, the only wholly intact original structure of Tombstone from those early days. For nine years, the theater, bar, gambling house, and bordello was open 24 hours a day. All of the famous were regulars, and Russian Bill, supposedly of royalty, who attended every night for two years until he tried to earn his unwarranted reputation as a bad guy by stealing a horse, for which he was hanged. And “Curly” Bill Brosius, who got shaves in a corner room with windows on the show, and was later killed by Wyatt Earp during the Vendetta Ride. Greats performed there: Eddie Foy of later Vaudeville fame, Lilly Langtry, Bernhardt. (How worlds collide.) A poker game ran non-stop downstairs from opening day to closing, right outside the prostitute’s “crib” where Josie would receive Wyatt.

“Those aren’t theater boxes” she told me. “They’re bordello rooms.”

Now a museum of its past and of its former patrons, I arrive by serendipity just before twilight – the final and only patron during my visit. I have the building to myself. To stand in the middle. To perform my magic. When new owners took possession in 1934 and opened the theater for the first time since its closing in 1889, they found much of it and its contents undisturbed. Photos, guns, knives, paraphernalia and old newspaper clips encircle me. The faro table where Doc Holiday played and sometimes dealt. The grand piano just feet away, and the space between in which Holiday and Johnny Ringo held opposing ends of a bandana and drunkenly shot at each other, missing. The craps table. The stage. The twenty-six people killed there.

at 80

Just before she left me to myself, the guide who escorted me in drew my attention to the “birdcages” that ring the main room along the ceiling.

“Those aren’t theater boxes” she told me. “They’re bordello rooms. Even the wall paper, what’s left of it, is the original.”

For twenty dollars for the night, a man got a bottle and a woman. Maybe ten feet above the action of the gambling tables and the stage, he could drink and watch the activities, then without diffidence draw the curtain. An act that intimate in a place that public, separated by only a curtain. So near in space, so far in nature. Like two events, two people, in the same space one hundred and twenty six years apart.

So I have all the elements. It isn’t hard. To see the crowded room. The cards. The dice. The theatrics on stage; the drama on the floor. Shots being poured. The shot ringing out. A shout. The general honky-tonk and the orgasmic grunts of hungry men from the cribs above. I can think it’s all there in the space around me, an atomic-vibration off from the world I inhabit, events made material and permanent by the words that continually inscribe them. And then I think, no, it is all long gone, the players forever emptied from that space. One man strikes it rich, another is murdered, a woman does what she must to survive. Some of it is remembered and talked about, some of it is not. But human time is not a compiling of moments, layer upon layer, like old newspapers there to be drawn from down in the pile. It is a fuse, burning up our moments as we live them, leaving behind its historical ash, but moving only forward, from opening to closing night, to another actor and another dusty wind, to me standing one day in the shadows, and beyond.

AJA

Tombstone, Arizona; December 2008

JD

Willcox, Arizona; December 2008

December, 2008

Willcox, Arizona

AJA

The image is also the cover photo of the Julia Dean Photo Workshops spring season catalog. Check it out. There’s a sale going on.

AJA

Tucson, Arizona; December 2008

AJA

Banning, California; November 2008

Now there was a day when the sons of Ill Fortune came to present themselves before the SOB, and Murphy came also among them.

And the SOB said unto Murphy, Whence comest thou? Then Murphy answered the SOB, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it, and composing my law.

And the SOB said, All laws are mine. What law thinkest thou is thine?

And Murphy did say, I’m having trouble composing it. Maybe you can help. First I tried, “”If there’s more than one possible outcome of a job or task, and one of those outcomes will result in disaster or an undesirable consequence, then somebody will do it that way.” Very exact in conception, but cumbersome in the expression. Then I thought, “If anything can go wrong, it will.” To the point, but it lacks punch. I tried to smooth out the first try with “Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time, in the worst possible way,” but then that sounded long-winded. Now I’m thinking I should go statistical: “Anything that has a probability of happening greater than 0 can and will happen. No exceptions.” Whadda ya think?

And the SOB said, Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.

Huh? said Murphy.

You heard me, said the SOB. It’s my law. But I’ll name it after you.

And so Newbie Mr. was doomed. Newbie Ms. too, but she was tending to her business, while Newbie Mr. was tending to the RV, which is clearly not his business.

Before the Deluge

And so it came to pass that the RV came with a faulty 12-Volt-switch solenoid. Which meant that for the first three days of inhabiting the motor home, planned in all the glory of fantasy for an RV park on the Pacific Ocean, there was no electricity, and thus no lights, no refrigeration, no hot water heater, no leveling of the coach and no extension of the slide outs. Which left the Mr. and Ms. living in the aisle of a bus, though granted one with a sofa, kitchen, and dining table, and with a bathroom and bed at the back. Also in greater physical intimacy with the pooches Homer and Penelope than, no doubt, some Southern and Mormon state laws permit.

Two visits from the road mechanic dispatched by Newbie’s Good Sam Club membership and several hours of phone consultation with service technicians in three states later, and the problem was diagnosed and the replacement solenoid, shipped over night from Alabama, installed. All to the musical accompaniment of $545. Which will be reimbursed. And Newbie Mr. will utter no further word of actual monetary value. But it doesn’t end there, and this is to establish the idea.

A concurrent spark of genius on the Mr.’s part was to switch his wireless telephone service from Verizon to AT&T, as well as acquire a laptop card from the Bell in order to provide internet service on the road. The Ms. retaining Verizon, the two would find increased coverage and minimize the periods and locations of none. How very practical and prudent. This, then, is the time, gentle and not-so-gentle reader alike, to acknowledge the several among friends and family who have since informed the Newb that upon hearing his plan to switch to AT&T, they almost said something. This would be the time, too, you can understand, to thank them reservedly for ALMOST saying something.

On two separate occasions, nearly hour-long and ultimately fruitless phone calls to the AT&T tech nerve center in a Bangalore basement end with the calls being dropped, the first with Mr. Mukherjee hurriedly noting, “Wait, I think the call is fading; give me your phone – .”

That the connection quality of AT&T wireless is a degree better than the plastic cups with string one hooked up in the tree house back in aught ten is, perhaps, to be accepted as the general static of the universe. But for the two weeks of ocean adjacency Newbie Mr. could not pick up a call without dropping it. And the laptop card – the Bell’s latest, known, one discovers, to be faulty and inoperative with roughly half of Windows Vista computers, but nonetheless marketed to their owners – would not work. During the aforementioned solenoid situation, the Mr. was simultaneously passing through levels of AT&T customer service and technical support like the circles of hell. On two separate occasions, nearly hour-long and ultimately fruitless phone calls to the AT&T tech nerve center in a Bangalore basement end with the calls being dropped, the first with Mr. Mukherjee hurriedly noting, “Wait, I think the call is fading; give me your phone – .”

But what of Direct TV, you ask; surely, with the satellite people, one was like a pious traveler among the congregated faithful. (Yes, Direct TV. What did you think the Newb was going to do for entertainment – fly fish?) Perhaps Newbie Mr. should have known when his order was treated by the highly trained customer assistance, account representative, service fulfillment specialist no differently than were he ordering service for his home, despite how clear he was about the nature of the installation in a motor home. Nonetheless, he confesses to being taken aback when the installation technician headed up the walkway to the house the Mr. and Ms. were at that very moment moving out of rather than into the motor home parked right in front of said house that they were at that very moment moving into. Informed of his misdirection, the technician replied – it is forever burned into Newbie Mr.’s transistor bank – “You can install a satellite receiver in a motor home?”

How shall Newbie Mr. count the levels of his trepidation as his latest affliction went about his own first installation in an RV? How shall Newbie Mr. tell his reader, while retaining any element of surprise, that even after those first days of occupation, when there was no electricity and no internet and little telephone, there was also no TV? It was observed by one very helpful friend, who shall remain nameless as Derc, that during those first days, the Mr. was bouncing from one problem to another without solving any. Alas, t’was true.

Still, through it all, Newbie Mr. bore it all with the patience of – . Well. Even when he called Direct TV and requested that they send someone out to the RV park to review his installation, and he was told that it would be the same technician. Even when he had to state to the fulfillment specialist, with utter and blessed endurance, “I think I’m explaining the matter in a clear and commonsensical way. How could it possibly be acceptable to me for you to send the same technician who mis-installed the receiver in the first place because he had never installed one in a motor home before and didn’t even know it could be done? Are you trying to tell me that in the whole city of Los Angeles, a major corporation such as Direct TV has only one installation technician, and none who has ever done the work in a motor home?” Even when he had to close by saying, “I don’t want to be angry with you anymore” – oh, Newb, the strides one has made – “I repeat, one more time, pass me to your supervisor.”

Desperate phone calls to the Newbie Ms. ensue, generally beginning, “Hello Darling. I’m going to kill someone.”

At the same time, of course, one has THINGS TO DO – bills to pay online, very, very important emails to ignore, the goddamned ship of state to run – and one needs to be online. So in the midst of all, one must be running off to a Starbucks in El Segundo (oh, indignity heaped upon indignity), but not before solving the difficulty that the 17-inch desktop replacement laptop the Newb bought for the road will not fit anywhere on the motor scooter, and he is now without the departed Mini he sold to purchase the two scooters. Desperate phone calls to the Newbie Ms. ensue, generally beginning, “Hello Darling. I’m going to kill someone.”

There is more that could be related – there were the oxen and the asses, the sheep and the servants, the sons and the daughters, all lost because Murphy had the SOB’s ear – but one tires of others’ woes no matter how woefully retailed, and you, dear reader, are no doubt even now considering what was the general insight of Newbie Mr.’s father when in the receipt of such news about the misfortune of others: “Listen, It could have been worse. It could have been me.”

The two weeks on the beach came to a close, and the Newbies, Mr. and Ms., sallied forth to the land of Irvine, at last to have the hydraulic lift installed on the rear of the motor home to carry the motor scooters. Like all else, it took longer than predicted and cost more than double, but perhaps worst of all was to discover the precise GPS coordinates of Purgatory – the La Quinta Inn in Old Town Irvine for three days and three nights without transportation. Of some comfort was the eventuality fulfilled of Barak Obama’s being elected the next President of the United States during this soul-sapping interregnum. One is glad to have made one’s contribution.

Back at the beach for one more night – and to place the treasured scooters on the lift, and lift them – and

They Called It Paradise

then it was  time at last for the Newbies to travel out from the land of woe and into that of America. The RVites bade them adieu, and of the RVites it must be told that they are not all the oldsters that the uninitiated reader presupposes. They are varied in stripe, and of extraordinary friendliness and helpful, good neighborly disposition. They are the Midwest on wheels. So much so that as the Mr. and Ms. putter down the exit road from the RV park, over the speed bumps, and happily chatting about the adventures to come, one gracious soul actually runs Lassie-like behind waving them goodbye through the side view mirror. How charming. Wait. He is not waving goodbye. He is waving stop.

Stop.

Because one of the scooters, its rear wheel neglectfully left untied-down, has bounced off the lift and is being dragged behind the motor home…

Among the adages bandied from mouth to mouth, carelessly slipped over too pliant lips in the direction of too ready ears, is the one that states that it will all work out in the end. Newbie Ms., a child of the small town Midwest and its long stock of wilderness conquering fortitude, believes this to be so. And if “it” won’t work out in the end, something will. Since Newbie Mr., on the other hand, is a Jew, he believes this to be a lie, and a lie intended only to increase the sting and force of the other shoe when it drops with its crushing blow. Hope cometh before the fall. Still, in search of the endlessly flexible “something,” the Ms. compliments the Mr., sincerely, by pointing out that amid all his trials and provocations, and despite his several threats, Newbie Mr. did not actually take another human life.

Newbie Mr. is even led to consider, after all, the nature of the “something” in contrast to the “it,” in the matter of their working out in the end. Accordingly he has requested his scribe, here scribing, to pass along the following favorite example of the humor of the Jewish Diaspora, with which, if you are unfamiliar, you will now be representatively introduced. Newbie Mr. does not recall where he originally read the story and so begs leave for its uncredited use and any alteration or embellishment.

In a little shtetl somewhere within the Pale of Settlement, late in the nineteenth century, it was the habit of some of the Jews to gather in the local tavern after the day’s work was done and talk of their hopes for the future. On one particular night, a shirtless stranger was observed sitting in the back. He spoke to no one.

Jewish Tavern Scene, in the Pale; Lithograph, ca. 1840.

A favorite game ensued. Yonkel, the barrel maker, asked of those assembled, “If you could have one wish fulfilled, what would it be?”

Zalman, the cabinet maker, wished for a new set of tools, to make his work easier. Mendel, the liveryman, wished for a second horse, to pull his cart faster. Rivka, mother of five daughters, wished that her oldest would make a good marriage. From one to the other they went, drawing from each a simple wish to improve a life. At last, all had offered up a wish for the future but the stranger in the back.

It was Rifka who spoke. “Of all the things in the world, this is what you wish for?”

“Stranger,” said Yonkel, “join with us. Tell us what you would ask for if you could be granted one wish.”

Said the stranger, “If I could be granted a wish, I would wish to be king of a great land, a land in which all my subjects prospered and were free, a land in which Jews were treated just like any other and could live their lives unmolested and in peace. And one day, invaders would storm over the borders, sacking the towns and villages as they went, slaughtering the livestock and setting fire to the fields. Nothing would stop them, until at last they advanced on my castle in the middle of the night, and I would be forced to flee from my bed with nothing but the nightshirt on my back. I would wander hungry and cold, penniless, from land to land, for days, for weeks, when in the end, I would come to this tavern, on this night, and sit with you all here, good people, in hopefulness and friendship.”

They all glanced at each other. They looked at the stranger as if he were meshuggah [crazy].

It was Rivka who spoke. “Of all the things in the world, this is what you wish for?”

One must imagine the stranger turning his palms upward and shrugging, the pitch of his voice rising at the end.

“At least I’d have a shirt.”

by AJA

Banning, California; November 2008