Three Saints Road

It took me too many years to fully embrace the fact it is experiences and not things that make us happy. Or at least a longer-lasting happy. Out were suitcase-hogging souvenirs, sure to languish in dusty display at home, or unasked for at some family member’s house. In were $2 rice paddy rides on rented mopeds; sitting with train station kiosk owners during freezing 3 a.m. mornings, doling out cigarettes and porn; playing pickup basketball with Sudanese refugees on weedy, breathless courts at 7,700 feet. I still make exceptions for art, but mostly because art conjures memories. Or a desire to share, triggered by a fraction of a second too long look from a guest or a narcissistic, alcohol-induced need to show my worldliness. What is that painting by the front door you didn’t ask about? That is Zhong Kui, vanquisher of ghosts and eater of evil spirits. He clocked you before your knuckles even touched the door. I might volunteer that my friend hooked up with the artist after a night of dancing and drinking and translating fleeting love from English to Mandarin and back again (he will tell you she was just the girl selling the art, but he is also a famous ruiner of good stories).

Experience hunting is freeform. It limits, but does not exclude, museums and castles; it tends towards local pubs and art galleries and bookstores and saying “yes”. Agendas are ish, have blurred edges. Think “visit Kraków” on your calendar, not “8 am, castle. Noon, Schindler’s factory”, where you then have to block your schedule for post-tour depression, or two more beers to convince yourself Ralph Fiennes is simply a splendid actor. Walking around without agenda or map exposes neighborhoods and restaurants and parks I might not have otherwise visited, reveals street art and architecture I might not have otherwise seen, lets me walk among locals on their way from work instead of dodging British stag parties, American teenagers, cruise ship passengers on furlough from their sulphuric cells. I’ve recently started seeking out more cultural events. Sports, for example, typically soccer but sometimes ice hockey or basketball or volleyball and, once in a South American country, throwing a metal puck at a box filled with clay and dynamite. And music. Especially symphonies and operas where I always feel underdressed and undereducated, and where the occasional senselessness of tradition is rarely more apparent. One of the great recurring crimes, of elitist culture clashing with common sense, is the tense, awkward, anti-climactic practice of not clapping until the end of a concert.

In Kraków I get one of the last few seats to see Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem, a Catholic funeral mass composed for an author and politician Verdi respected. Requiem’s first movement ends in a crescendo, a conclusion of a piece that is, I am later told, “metal as hell”. Thundering exchanges on the otherwise quiet Big Ass Drums, the percussionists dramatically gearing up for their moment minutes before they strike, as if six or seven whacks of their marshmallow tipped sticks is the single most important thing they will ever do. And tubas (tubas!). And trumpeters, a row of them, they ambushed us those sneaky bastards, quietly occupying the highest seats in the balcony, just rows above us. The conductor turned dramatically from the orchestra to the crowd and I thought we were about to be enlisted until eight trumpets let loose in my ear. And then silence.

I want to clap, to stand, to shout. Not a cliché bravo!, an utterly pedantic word that should never leave any self-respecting American’s lips, but, rather, because though I can be quite fancy I am also at heart a bit vulgar, a roaring “FUCK. YES. FUCKYES FUCKYES FFFUCK. YESSS.” At the top of my lungs. To look, downward and through teary yet clearly condescending eyes, at the cretins to my left and right, them avoiding eye contact, still sitting, smoking jackets and faux-fur overcoats folded nicely on their black cocktail dressed laps. We should stand for beautiful things, should we not? Reverence might be best displayed in silence but awe should be a chorus. A rebellion. A chorus of rebellions. Whitman’s barbaric yawp or William Wallace’s alba gu bràth or Volodymyr Parasyuk’s 2014 impassioned threat at Kyiv’s Maidan. But the world immediately around me is telling me to be cool. So there I sit.[1]

On the walk back to the hotel and nearing Kraków’s bustling Old Town, I hear a voice behind me. A tune familiar; it is something from Requiem. Surely someone leaving the same show I just left, but he knows the words, he is singing in a deep, lovely Latin. I am already lifted and now even more so, and I turn to share my appreciation – clearly this is a person who would have stood with me – to see a manchild, a six foot six boy in a foppish man’s body, walking with purpose, singing, twisting a single rose in his hand. I begin to ask if he was at the show, then realize he was the show. Will Thomas, all of 29, was the bass from Requiem and is a famous-in-the-industry British kid who travels and sings, and who loves this particular version of Verdi’s opera. I agree as if I have heard any other. I tell Will I loved the trumpets; Will tells me “those blokes show up just for that part and then they leave. They’ve been at the pub for forty minutes.” He says Kraków’s music scene is great, and includes a “legit piano bar” in an Old Town basement, where I find local musicians and a packed house. The band does a few songs in Polish, then asks how many in the crowd are English speakers. Few raise their hands, and so the lead singer and guitarist says, “then we continue in Polish.” The crowd sings along and I don’t know the words but blues are blues and rock is rock and even Americana is global (Polskana, Jordana, Hellesana…) and it all feels good. I recognize a Sly and the Family Stone cover and later Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Up Around the Bend and a few others ring familiar, but this is a show in Polish. I love this reprieve from English. Even for a bit, a comfortable uncomfortableness being away from the international language of money, of exported culture, and, explicably, the language of tourism. I miss the times where, without a common basis for oral communication, we had to find other ways. Facial expressions, pointing, gesticulating, international hand and arm signals. Check? Index finger and thumb touching, remaining fingers curled under, signing an imaginary piece of paper in the air. Hamburger? A flattened “c”. Stomachache? Obvi. But also useful for “pregnant”, as when a girlfriend feigned it to get us off the roof of a fast-moving minivan over a bumpy jungle road.

The internet and translation apps have done the world a service by largely eliminating communication difficulties. But there’s a downside to this distillation as well. We risk losing our individuality, our nationalisms, our idiosyncrasies and dress, our galabiyas and saris and choli tops, Hello Kitty backpacks and giant sun hats, our denim jackets and Air Jordans and cargo shorts and even our Birkenstocks with brown wool socks. The selfie stick is no longer relegated to the Far East, the selfie stick is no longer. The world is now a tripod and cell phone. Heart-shaped hands, duck lips, manufactured cookie cutter over-produced influencer zombies. I go to bed annoyed at the world but also at myself: I am becoming that guy, my international sign a discreet finger point and an eye roll.

The next morning I am rested, and then redeemed. I find a breakfast spot with open tables, staffed by sunny, bright-eyed young people and one older man. My age, probably. Beaten. Demoralized. “What’s good?”, I ask him. “Nothing”, he answers. “I wouldn’t eat any of this.” My man! Give me whatever you’re having. I drink coffee, write, eat a five-cheese omelet. The restaurant fills around me so I give up my table. I take a long walk, counterclockwise around Kraków’s 800-year-old city walls, passing between the barbican and St. Florian’s Gate on the north side of town; in front of the philharmonic on the west; beyond Wawel Cathedral on the southside, burial grounds for poets and priests and kings. I cut north along a stretch of an open pedestrian park. Young couples are here, old men sitting on park benches feeding pigeons, off-leash dogs, runners, walkers, tourists, baby strollers. A scene universal. Comforting. I see a man on the wrong side of the chained-off pavement, taking pictures through a small hole in a brick wall. He turns and sees me, I on the paved path and he on the grass. He freezes, like he’s been caught stealing. We lock eyes, me walking, he still. The man finds himself, and then offers, in heavily accented English, “the weather is beautiful”. This early March day, is, in fact, quite beautiful. “It’s ridiculous”, I counter, and he responds as if I’m Henry and it’s St. Crispin’s Day. “Ridiculous! Yes! That’s what it is! This weather is RIDICULOUS!” Score one for commonality. I continue walking in my direction but can still hear him, echoes of “ridiculous!” still ringing, a row of ambushing trumpets for all the park to hear.

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[1] That we don’t clap whenever we want during a symphony performance is attributed to Germans – Richard Wagner specifically and Schumann and Mendelssohn more broadly. Wagner emphasized the importance of reverence and silence, but Schumann, through the written words of his alter ego, was more directive: “I’ve got you all together again, dear public, and can set you at each other’s throats. For years I have dreamed of organizing concerts for the deaf and dumb, that you might learn from them how to behave yourselves at concerts, especially when they are very beautiful. You should be turned to stone pagodas…”.

In the early morning, when only the cats and street cleaners are out, I run from my hotel in the Psyrri neighborhood of Athens up to the Acropolis. The sun is full above the horizon but still low, casting shadows nearly parallel so that little light touches the ground. I stopped enjoying running on pavement the day I left the army, or maybe that was the day I stopped pretending I enjoyed it. I think what I liked was being good at it, or feeling like I was good at it, and the feeling of being in shape, of being able to cruise along without struggle, or to choose when to exert myself so my heart seemed to beat in time with my footfalls and air became compressed and valuable. Running hard enough to create a burning in my lungs. On cool mornings I could feel the air on my throat even before it singed my insides, and I knew it was going to hurt to breathe well into the morning, long after I exchanged my running shoes for work boots. Now I run mostly so I can experience things when other people aren’t around. I leave my hotel in shorts and a t-shirt, the few locals I pass at this very early hour of 8 am dressed in puffy coats zipped to their chins, pampered by the Med. The neighborhood I stay in looks and smells of Mardi Gras, and the narrow, bricked streets covered in the previous evening’s detritus quickly give way to a gritty main road, storefronts covered in graffiti and locked iron gates. After a few hundred steps I cross into Monastiraki Square. Pigeons pick at cigarette butts and cleaned-out peanut shells. They strut lazily out of my way and I sometimes have an inclination to kick at one, only to see if I’m quick enough to hit the bird, or it too slow to dodge my foot, but I never make the attempt. People hate pigeons, I think, because they always seem to be walking around in their own shit. On one side of Monastiraki Square is the Pantanassa Orthodox Church, just 1,000 years old. On a timeline, I would be closer to this church than this church would be to the Parthenon, whose columns I can now see on the hill high in front of me. The rising sun casts giant halos and penumbras and nimbuses and aureolas around ancient structures, hundred million year old chunks of stone chiseled and shaved and stacked and polished, 2,400 years ago, into the buildings I see now. Twenty-four hundred years barely registers when you’re talking a hundred million. A blip. A fraction of a blip. For a human man in his early 50s, 2,400 years is an amount of time so imperceptible as to be inconceivable. As inconceivable, perhaps, as a single thing simply conjuring all of this up out of nothingness. How the Greeks built the Parthenon, and that this thing is still standing here above me is, I think, about as easy to grasp as is the beginnings of all of Earth. Ok

The polished marble of Monastiraki Square is slick from government workers hosing it down. I momentarily lose my footing, and walk for a few steps. I watch a woman, hurriedly passing between me and the church, cross herself in that unique Greek Orthodox way, the thumb, middle, and index fingers of the right hand touching each other, the remaining two fingers touching the palm. The woman first touches her forehead, then her chest, then her right shoulder and lastly her left. The Italians use basically this same configuration, turned upright, to say something along the lines of “what in the fuck are you even talking about”, and I wonder if they took it from the Greeks, along with the alphabet and art and gods and philosophers. My route to the Parthenon, just one building among many in the Acropolis, runs through neighborhoods of tilted cobbled streets and tight passageways, graffiti everywhere. Some images are beautiful but much of it is shit, spray painted by someone in a hurry, under the cover of darkness or influence of alcohol, a messy artistic version of a drive-by shooting. I see one image repeatedly, always in thick black lines but different sizes, unmistakably of a winged and stubbled scrotum and testicles. The shops are labeled in English – the language of money – and Greek. Both, I think, are clumsy and ordinary. The letters lack the beauty of Sanskrit or Arabic or the Georgian Mkhedruli, flowy and connected and ethereal where the Greek seems linear and blocky. I stop in front of an eighteen hundred year old statue of a woman, headless but otherwise in a position apparently immemorial since women posed: Left hand on hip, hip slightly outward, right knee slightly bent and forward, right heel off the ground. I will see this pose a hundred times today. The statue, like all statues in Athens, is extraordinary in detail and accuracy and craftsmanship, and I think this is what their letters should look like.

On the way back to my hotel I join a trickling of people walking west on one of Athen’s main roads, closed today to vehicle traffic. We walk slightly uphill, and when I turn to look behind me I see there are thousands of us. At the top of the slight incline, where I can now see down the road in front of me and into Syntagma Square, I see we are tens of thousands. Two years ago today a train crash killed fifty-seven people, some of them burned to death, many of them college students. The government has held no one responsible, blaming human error, and so here we are in demonstration (English demonstration: From the Old French, demonstracioun; from the Latin demonstratio; from the Greek apodeixis). I wander the square, the main meeting point for the protest, and I realize there far more than thousands. Most people are dressed in black. The atmosphere is pleasant enough but then I see a man with a gas mask dangling from his back pocket, and then another and another, and I know this is no frequency illusion, no Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, but rather an incipient game of Molotov cocktails and teargas. I continue back to my hotel like an anadromous fish: Against a river of people, never ending and flowing, for a solid ten minutes. There are not tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands.

In the afternoon, I sit. I drink coffee and beer and try to write. Or I don’t. I rarely have a plan when I travel now, never a schedule. My age dictates my pace, which is leisurely, a recognition that time, the only truly finite commodity, is always coming towards me, never ending and flowing.

I was twelve years old when the Holy Family Catholic Church left a box of food on our front porch. We were living in our second house since we’d returned to Nevada. This was two years after my mother’s second divorce, two years after I’d watched my second father hand my mom a wad of one-hundred-dollar bills to help us with the move back to her small hometown. From the ever green of the Pacific Northwest, my mom, my three sisters, and I drove sixteen hours south in a rented U Haul where we lived, briefly and for the second time, with my grandparents in their single-wide trailer in Nevada’s high desert. The first place my mom rented was one-half of a duplex, just two bedrooms and a bathroom. We shared a backyard with a neighbor, a huge, quiet man who always seemed to be wearing knee-high rubber boots. My mother squeezed my three sisters and me into one bedroom, she took the other. The house was small, but I don’t remember scrapping for privacy or primacy. We all got along. After the second divorce, surely there was a circle-the-wagons element to our unity.

Our new house on Helen Avenue was the same size as the duplex, but was an upgrade in ways far more important than square footage. We now had three bedrooms and two bathrooms. We had a garage, with a basketball hoop and backboard screwed into the wall, and real grass in a front yard encircled by baseball-gobbling juniper bushes. We had open spaces, ten months of sunshine, and an entire village safe enough for all its children to roam like feral cats who cared only where they were fed and bedded. We shared 1,040 square feet. We thrived.

We also relied heavily on extended family. My grandparents lived on five acres of alkali and alfalfa just outside of town, and had provided my mom a safe landing pad at least twice. An aunt and uncle, along with their three daughters, never lived more than five or six houses away. My older sister Michele and I, at least eight and six years older than every other grandchild, babysat our sisters and cousins when the adults went out on a weekend night. It must have felt to them like furlough. If the adults left us both in charge, our missteps were limited to making the younger kids go to sleep early so we could steal booze from the liquor cabinet. Michele and I and our friends would throw out empty bottles of the Canadian Mist we’d mixed with RC Cola, or refill cheap bottles of vodka with water. If I babysat alone, I’d invite over my best friend. The two of us would create intricate but fair and deeply thought-out tournament brackets, and then make the cousins fight each other. We pitted them against each other first based on age or size, each small child a tiny gladiator, armed with only a pillow and whatever bravery and pre-pubescent bloodlust they could muster. We were just kids too.

My mom always had one steady job and sometimes a second. She took weekend cleaning gigs at a local insurance office when she could. Any stress – and surely it must have come in waves – was rarely visible to us. She once picked up smoking. On a weekend afternoon, Michele and I sat down next to my mom at our Formica kitchen table, white topped with blue and pink overlapping boomerang shapes. My mom had a lit cigarette in her hand. Michele and I each pulled a cigarette of our own from the pack on the table. We lit the cigarettes, cradled them between our index and middle fingers, palms up like a cartoon Cruella De Vil. We blew small streams of smoke from between our pursed lips, then dramatically tapped the ashes onto thin Corelle saucers, fragile white plates edged with mustard yellow flowers and butterflies. We all laughed. Michele and I were proud of our creative and slightly dangerous intervention, but I wonder now what my mom must have felt, seeing her kids through muted, silvery, cumulus clouds of burned tobacco. She never smoked again.

Those same Corelle plates served us squares of Duncan Hines boxed yellow cake thickened with powdered milk, or Wonder Bread bologna and cheese sandwiches. The bread we swiped from the back of my uncle’s Hostess delivery truck. The cheese was free, government issued. Stamped on the side of the block of cheese in sensible, government letters were the words “U.S. Department of Agriculture”; below them was a stern reminder that the cheese was not to be resold, as if there existed a black market for the dense, orange substance, equally adept at stopping a door or a bowel movement.

My mom bought our house on Helen Avenue. Interest rates were high in the early 80s – 15% in 1981 – but a program at the Federal Housing Administration subsidized the mortgage and didn’t require a down payment. Michele and I helped where we could. I had an after-school job through Job Corps, we still benefitted from food stamps and the WIC program, and my mother certainly had no problem waiting in line for government cheese. It didn’t seem like we needed handouts from the church. Mom and Uncle Sam were providing just fine.

I returned home from school one spring afternoon to see an open cardboard box taking up space on our small, concrete front porch. I looked inside. A white-gloved Hamburger Helper looked back. Next to it were cans of creamed corn and boxes of macaroni and cheese and long plastic packages of spaghetti. Manna not from heaven but from an anonymous, possibly well-meaning but surely nosy, congregant. I looked around but saw no one. Moses’s mother hid on the banks of the Nile as she watched him float away in his basket made of reeds, and I wonder if Mrs. Maguire – my mother later learned who left the food – did the same. In my youth I extended her little sympathy, but as I aged and wizened, I considered the possibility that Mrs. Maguire doorbell-ditched our house not to save our embarrassment, but hers.

Donated food on our front porch was a tangible reminder of our poverty. I knew other people knew we were poor – a single mother of four can hardly be otherwise – but I didn’t know people knew. No one rubbed our faces in it. I played sports, had good grades, was popular enough with all the social groups in my high school and most of my teachers. My poverty wasn’t a discriminator.

I attended an expensive, private liberal arts college on an ROTC scholarship, more than happy to swap the next years of my life for some assurance I wouldn’t be in debt. I’d seen what those shackles did to people, and I wanted none of it. I arrived at school alone, with a terrible Flock of Seagulls haircut and just a few bags, one of them containing two suits I’d purchased after working the summer at Chess King, the 80’s beacon of New Wave clothing. Most of my classmates were Colorado kids or from Northeastern prep schools. Khaki pants and navy-blue blazer types. All of them, it seemed to me, were wealthy. In high school, my poverty was academic. At college, it was visceral. I learned words like lacrosse, Saab, Brooks Brothers. One dad paid for his son’s entire tuition with a credit card so he could earn “points”, whatever that was.

Any external embarrassment was fleeting. I kept most of my insecurities buried deep inside of me, where they belonged. Being decently athletic and knowing how to hold my liquor – drinking in the desert was pastime in my small, Northern Nevada mining town – went a long way towards making friends, and I made them. Good ones. I lived with the same seven other boys all four years of college, played sports with them, skipped class with them, leaned on them for help with math, leaned on them when I was a sophomore and a senior broke my heart.

I graduated from college and went into the army. There, my peers and I made the same amount of money, worked the same hours, socialized both on and off duty. There were significant events over the years, moments to which only I assigned value, but were indicative of me moving slowly up an economic ladder. I bought a new car, made my own rent payments, slept in a room big enough that I could push my bed up against just one of the walls. Nothing says you’ve arrived like being able to get out of either side of the bed in the morning.

Later, I could afford good beer, then good whiskey, then a good meal at a nice restaurant. I bought all three, each time with diminishing stings of remorse. When I retired from the army I bought a nice suit, had it tailored, then bought obscenely expensive shoes to wear with it. And then I bought more of both. Donated food on the porch was a distant memory, one I could conjure up voluntarily as a reminder of where I’d come from. Or involuntarily: A ghost, a seeping miasma of guilt and shame that I’d left.

I’d been living in Seattle for eighteen months when Covid turned the world inside out. I was a graduate student and did some work consulting, and both of those turned inside out too: My work-related travel stopped, as did my in-class instruction. Zoom sessions from the confines of my small West Seattle apartment became my Lauds, my Sext, my Vespers; the smokiest Scotch I could find was my nightly prayer. I needed to get out. I bought a rooftop tent for my 2003 truck. In the back I built thick, plywood storage boxes to hold cast iron skillets, a propane tank and camp stove, beer and fly rods. And then, opposite to the only consistent directional pull I’ve had in my nomadic life, I headed east.

There are eleven states between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains. I hit them all. Short stays with friends broke up longer stretches of solitude. In October, I spent a week in northern New Mexico at the home of a college roommate’s surly father. I slept in his studio, borrowing his Wi-Fi and drinking coffee with him in the mornings, reveling in his tales of Taos in the 70’s. He’d started a commune, dabbled in the illicit drug trade, built houses, spent summers as a sawyer with the forest service. All his stories ended with some version of “so I told him to go fuck himself.” I loved it.

In the middle of a gentle, arcadian fall, I strung my hammock between two aspen trees in my friend’s father’s front yard. The sun’s rays softened through my closed eyelids. A slight breeze across the nylon folds of my elevated bed created a vibration that matched the sound of the beating wings of a passing red-shafted flicker. A half-day’s drive north of Taos, three of my best friends and roommates from college were recovering from my visit a few days before; two-and-a-half hours south, a fourth was expecting me. Though I spoke with my college friends regularly during my twenty years in the army, I was rarely around them for more than a few days each year. I had never really seen them in the capacity of husband or dad, never seen them interact with their children in intimate ways. Now I had, and I felt a pang of envy. It surprised me that it was for both father and child. Nostalgia was there, too. Not just for college, but for being around these boys I’d watched become men, humans I loved, friends with a shared history. Our connections never seemed in need of reconnection. Instead, we just fell back into an easy swagger of togetherness.

Many American boys, before culture allows them to be comfortable with affection or words of love, often in engage in high-risk behavior. In comparing feats of skill or strength or daring. Young men doing dangerous things together is a love language, a surrogate. For us, age and confidence softened whatever those societal pressures were that had prevented us from loving overtly. Trauma, too: One of our best friends killed himself two years prior. So maybe we just stopped giving a shit about societal pressures. Or societal pressures revealed other things we gave more shits about. Either way, I decided to stay.

I bought an acre and a half of rocky, red clayed soil at the end of a short dirt road. One college roommate, a house builder, walked the ground with me. I wanted to put my future home at the highest point on my land. He showed me that tucking the house into the low ground would give more complex views and take advantage of the setting sun, where New Mexico’s singularly brilliant light would reveal Georgia O’Keefe paintings out my kitchen windows. He extended his hands out in front of him like a movie director, palms out, thumbs touching together with fingers raised. I stood next to him and did the same, feeling the corners of my mouth curl upward at the discovery of the artwork I held between my hands. Another roommate drove up from Albuquerque with his surveyor’s tripod, helping me stake out the lot’s corners and high points. An unassuming but ridiculous athlete, in college he’d done things I’d never seen before. Juggling a soccer ball hundreds of times in a row, jumping so high he’d bounce his chest on the top of a door jamb, diving to touch a squirrel. He once leaped a parked car. Now, he handed me the end of a tape measure, and I walked sixty feet south, raising my arm high above the sagebrush to keep tension on the tape. I turned back to see him, his hat on backwards, eye pressed against the transit, body seemingly always at the ready to do something outrageously athletic. We played baseball together in college, he a pitcher and me a catcher, and I felt the urge to squat, to have him hurl a ball at me at nearly ninety miles an hour. We were eighteen again.

I paid a man to scratch out a flat place where I could build a house. I bought lumber from the Amish community in southern Colorado, then hired two Mexican men to turn the stacked lumber into the bones of a home. I wanted to help, to learn how to frame a house, but instead stood back and watched. I marveled at their choreography, their movements and ability to say so few words yet produce so much so quickly, their easy familiarity with one another. This, I thought, is what extraordinary looked like. I hired more men to install electricity and plumbing, then insulation, then hang drywall, doors, windows. I assembled and installed the cabinets myself, laying down cardboard over my polished concrete floors to help prevent scuff marks, stopping occasionally to imagine where artwork might go, or a dining table, or shelves full of unread books, then imagining where I might sit to read them. Friends would stop by to inspect what I’d accomplished since they’d been there last. My favorite moments were watching my discerning house-builder friend cast a critical eye: Silence was approval. A slow, measured walk with hand on chin was admiration.

This morning, two years later, I wake for the first time inside this quiet cocoon. A deep arroyo moats my home to the east; on the far side of it, a low but steep undulating ridgeline blocks the afternoon winds. To the north, through a twenty-by-nine-foot wall of sliding glass doors, I watch a magpie, black and white with iridescent purple wings, land on a small juniper and flick its long tail at the morning sun. Stretching out beyond are gently rolling hills covered with big sagebrush and blue grama grass and piñon pine, all backdropped by the snow-covered Sangre de Cristo Mountains. On the south side of those glass sliders: Me. I sit on a leather couch I bought from a bougie Santa Fe furniture store. A cup of fair-trade coffee in hand, I stare up at foot-deep beams of Douglas fir and a spruce tongue-and-groove ceiling. Or, rather, my ceiling. My windows, my couch, my coffee, my beams. My view. My house. My home.

And then?

That ghost. On me like an ambush, squeezing my rib cage, the insides of my arms, my throat. The difference between a hug and a chokehold, I think, is just a matter of pressure and a few vertical inches.

I remember a time, when I was a young man, where I treated everything I perceived as wealth not as the bastion of the talented or hardworking, but of the greedy, of the nepotist, of the callous and opportunistic. I might have walked into a nice house – no food left on this front porch unless it was going to the trash – and thought what entitled asshole used their parent’s money to get this place? And now, I look at my possessions around me, at my house, at my ridiculous roller shades that I can move up and down with a touch of my smart phone while I stand within arm’s reach, and I think: OH. NO. That’s me.

“It’s turtle poop,” said the fishing guide, in accented but clear English. Confident. Behind and in front of you, a short swim away, is choppy salt water. Silty. Milky. To your left and right are small islands, explosive with red and black mangrove and spikerush and Mexican silver palms and Chechen and kitinché. Lush. Idyllic. You see birds whose feathers and calls are moderately familiar. The islands seem to you as perfection, though for what you are unsure. This moment, maybe.

In between the silty milky water and the lush idyllic islands is crystal blue ocean. Still. Unbroken. In this calmness you float, your face to the muted blue sky above. You could see to the bottom as you dove in from the boat’s edge, after you shed your clothes and before you closed your eyes, and you think it might be six feet below, or maybe sixty. You open your eyes to look up at the fishing guide. The tops of his feet and the backs of his hands are an enviable chocolate brown. He has spent most of his indeterminate number of years standing in the sun on the deck tower of a Mexican panga.

Now you hold two hands up to the guide, gently kicking your legs below the water to keep your hands above. You hold your two hands up to the guide and spread them apart to indicate something the approximate size and shape of the candy bar you ate just minutes ago, and you say, “it was about this big.”

Turtle poop, said the guide once again. He smiles, his raccoon-mask eyes, less tan than the rest of his face, wrinkling at the corners. “Good,” you say. “I thought for sure it was human.”

You lay back and close your eyes and float again, quietly elated that this thing – things – that nearly brushed up against you in the bay yesterday afternoon was not human poop. You lay back and float and are quietly elated that it came from a green sea turtle, an animal with a face moderately familiar, like that of an old man; quietly elated that this turtle that poops like you and has a face like you one day might, has, inside its flippers, a humerus and a radius and an ulna too, and four bony fingers and a fifth that looks moderately familiar to an opposable thumb.

You lay back and float, looking up at the sky at the origins of everything.

Basilio Nicolas Hage was an aspiring merchant, but he feared for his future. Signs of trouble were all around him. The Ottoman Empire was shrinking so fast, it seemed its death rattle shook the plaster from Syria’s once magnificent buildings right before Nicolas’s eyes. His hometown of Tripoli was the western terminus of the famous Silk Road and a port to Europe’s markets, but cheaper Chinese silk was making the local versions obsolete. French and British merchants brought money, but American evangelicals brought schools and tantalizing tales of land and liberty. If America’s political power was not yet dominant, her economy and reputation was. Industrial United States produced twice as much as did Great Britain, and she built things bigger, faster, stronger. More whimsical. Having the world’s tallest building wasn’t enough; an American invented a machine you could ride to the top of it. Stairs were yesterday’s news. America’s citizens invented refrigerators, lightbulbs, drinking straws, screen doors, slot machines, roller coasters, Ferris wheels, zippers, mousetraps, and cotton candy. They invented the phonograph, the telephone, the telegraph. One American laid cable across the Atlantic, a reversed umbilical cord attaching two continents, forcing the queen of a dying empire to tap tap tap her congratulations to the democratically elected president of a rising one. Days of staid, Victorian handwringing surely prefaced composing such a laudatory note to her plebian cousin, but no matter – her compliments were carried across the ocean fifteen times faster than had it been ferried by boat. The message itself was a white flag, a surrender, even if the queen didn’t yet know it:

The Queen desires to congratulate the President upon the successful completion of this great international work.

Americans didn’t desire to do anything, thought Nicolas. They just did it. America was the land of opportunity, of jobs, of liberty. Her streets, heard Nicolas, were paved with gold.

So Nicolas, like thousands of Syrians before and after him, chose myth over fear. He made his way first from Tripoli to Beirut, then to Le Havre, France, where he purchased a steerage ticket on the S.S. le Champagne to New York City. The ship’s doctor examined Nicolas prior to boarding, determining him to be neither an idiot nor insane (good my brother is not here to disagree, thought Nicolas), nor a pauper likely to become a public charge. The Second Officer agreed with Doctor Lucien, and added that Nicolas was not suffering from a loathsome, dangerous, or contagious disease; had not been convicted of a felony or other infamous crime involving moral turpitude; and did not have more than one wife. The inspection took just minutes. Other than his confusion when asked his color (“white”, wrote Second Officer Gaston), for each question Nicolas simply answered “no.”

The SS le Champagne left France on May 24th, 1899. Ten days later, after a trip that a reporter would observe as “vile and disgraceful treatment” by the steamship companies of the immigrants below decks, Nicolas tread his weary feet upon the terra firma of Ellis Island. He watched as a man checked his name against the ship’s manifest – one of almost two thousand times the customs agent would do so that day – then, satisfied, put Nicolas on a ferry to the mainland. America.

New York confounded Nicolas. Tripoli had been a water wheel for international powers since the Phoenicians in 300 BC, but New York City on the cusp of a new century was a different kind of melting pot. It was a volcano. Unbroken strings of tall buildings blocked the sun, policewomen patrolled the streets in skirts, people prowled the sidewalks in numbers greater than Nicolas could count in a lifetime. And cars! The first would not be seen in Beirut for seven more years, but New York’s streets were clogged with automobiles, sharing the road with trolleys and horse-drawn carriages. Enough of the latter were still around that Nicolas thought America’s roads were paved not with gold, but with horseshit.

Nicolas had never seen anything like it. New York in 1899 was the second largest city in the world, but it was surely the densest. Tenements housed 418,000 people per square mile, the equivalent of six human beings standing inside a box the length and width of one of Nicolas’s strides. Many were as new to America as was Nicolas himself – more than one-third of the city’s 3.4 million people were born outside of America’s borders. His journey should have better prepared him. The le Champagne manifest included Armenians, Austrians, English, Finnish, French, Germans, Greeks, Hungarians, Irish, Italians, Montenegrins, Polish, Russians, Scots, Swiss, Syrians, and Turks, but even the suffocating steerage air paled in comparison to New York’s streets. Nicolas missed space and clean air. He missed trees.

He wasted little time in New York. Nicolas skipped Lower Manhattan’s vibrant Little Syria, skipped trying his hand in the growing Arabic import-export business, skipped the street fights with the uncivilized Irish, skipped his opportunity to find a good Syrian Christian wife. Instead, Nicolas headed west, eventually finding himself not in America but in el Triunfo, Baja California Sur, a silver mining boomtown 3,500 miles from New York and 9,000 from his home.

What drives a man to go to such trouble, such great lengths, passing by so much opportunity and wonder and novelty existing between there and here? What continued to push Nicolas west? Was it flight from, rather than to? Ghosts of repeated failures or lost loves in dogged pursuit? Was it a condemnation? A serial reminder of stabbing epithets, slights, miscommunications? Perhaps it was simply a thirst for adventure.

It was, I think, a collective. Not just one driver but multiple, all of them exposing the potential in the new. Something untamed. Something only people like Nicolas could see in that precious-metal nimbus he watched drop daily behind mountains that seemed to only get bigger as he headed further west. An invisible finger drawing in a man who chose only to follow the sun.

I want my great-grandfather to have found whatever he was looking for. I want to picture Nicolas in el Triunfo with silver in his pockets, a Mexican woman on his arm so achingly beautiful it made his heart clench, the grainy dirt under his leather boots now familiar enough to assuage whatever homesickness he had for the tall cedars of his Mount Lebanon. A nirvanic look upon his face when he learned enough Spanish to translate the name of his new hometown, his closed eyes turned upward to the warming sun as the word slipped quietly from his lips: “Triumph. Goddam right.”

This creek, I think, is perhaps a metaphor, a stand-in, a liquid ekkyklema on my hero’s journey to know thyself, to bathe myself in healing waters or the love of God or a god or all of them or none of them, to get to the heart of the matter, to be consumed by the joy of everlasting love, to find redemption or enlightenment or nirvana or self-actualization, to cease the chase for rainbows, for ghosts, for King Charles’s head or the Holy Grail or myonetruelove or white whales and arks of covenants. Rumi said what you seek is seeking you, and it is here I realize why this goddamned fish is called a cutthroat.

published with permission from The Tahoma Literary Review

If you are standing in the kielbasa line at Nationals Stadium, do not dramatically leave the queue. Do not hip check people out of your way as you attempt to burst through a stanchion belt like it’s the finish line ribbon at your local 5K. Nylon stanchion belts do not break. Do not immediately look to your girlfriend for help. Though she supports you like a nylon stanchion belt, right now she’s as freaked out as you are. Do not spill your beer. You’ll need this later.

If you are walking through the condiments aisle of the gleaming new Harris Teeter at the corner of Madison and St. Asaph, perhaps perplexed by the apparent difference between cornichons and gherkins, do not consider putting a name on what you are suddenly feeling. You are wasting time thinking about anxious v. anxiety v. anxiety disorder, no matter what the National Institute for Health suggests you do. Do not let your eyes fly from object to object, searching for an exit like a caged feral cat or a teenager at a house party when the cops come. Instead, find something to focus on. A familiar face is good. Your friend’s, for example, especially if, after you make eye contact, his face clearly signifies “calm down, it’s going to be OK.” Sometimes a familiar face is not so good.  Your friend’s, for example, especially if, after you make eye contact, his face clearly signifies “are you having a panic attack? In the new Harris Teeter?”

If you are at a Mexican restaurant celebrating a birthday – not yours – with extended family and friends, do not get up from the table without saying anything. Do not pretend you are going to the bathroom, but then exit out the front door. Do not walk home 6.3 miles in your flip-flops, unintentionally walking through the “bad” part of town, hoping the homeless and high and half-crazy won’t talk to you. They won’t. You’ll be the one who looks crazy.

If you are riding your new (used) 1999 Triumph Thunderbird, do not worry, as a panic attack will never happen. Your family and friends may be concerned that you have possibly purchased this death machine in a passive attempt to kill yourself, especially your girlfriend, who is the only one aware that just a few weeks ago you wrecked your truck simply pulling out of the driveway. But they do not know. They do not know that a motorcycle is something to hold on to. They do not know that this motorcycle is responsive to you and you alone. And though your friends will tell you there are two types of motorcycle riders – those who have been in a wreck and those who will be – what they do not know is that you, while wearing your full-faced white helmet with black offset racing stripes and black leather boots and black leather gloves and a new unmistakably badass black leather jacket with more zippers than any one human needs, you feel completely in control. They do not know how much you feel in charge, how fully wide awake you are, how fully conscious you are of your body and your surroundings, how you interact with air, with bone-vibrating cold, with vibrant leaves falling from the canopy of trees roofing the George Washington Parkway as you head south on a late September afternoon.

A horseshoe, the color and texture of an ancient railroad spike, taken from my grandfather’s tack shed.

A CD jewel case, the contents of which do not match the label.

A ratchet.

A universal socket, hexagonal with fifty-four cylinders fitted snugly inside. A miniature Giant’s Causeway.

A partially eaten bag of sunflower seeds, purchased in 2020. Edible.

A baseball, abandoned, found in an abandoned Havana suburb in an abandoned field, saplings sprouting from stadium walls like an infant Angkor Wat.

A small, opaque, reusable plastic container with purple lid, contents invisible but to science: It once held Hatch green chile, then a portion of what was left of my friend. Seven of us spread his ashes on the eighteenth tee box of a golf course, a church where he was the best version of himself. I later thought of using the makeshift urn to hold flies, Copper Johns and Bead Head Hare’s Ears and #6 Poundmeister Craneflies, but that’s a different church.

What sacrament precedes discarding a thing that held discards?

This, inside my truck’s center console, topped by a string of brown Kukui nuts, a circle I drape ceremoniously over my neck when I need to feel invincible.