Blue Highways: Road Trip Notes Archives • Three Saints Road

August 6, 2023September 25, 2023

From Our High Throne, We Command Ichiro

Here we are, the high seats of the haute bourgeois. A pinnacle of wealth. Seventeen rows of proletariat are above us; we look at them not. Let them eat garlic fries. Section 307, Row 8: We are high like the mountains, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Arc de Triomphe, the upper boughs of a cradling Giant Sequoia, the trembling cockpit of a rocket ship on countdown. “Next time,” I tell you, “we’ll get better seats.” You look at me as if I were a benevolent ogre, telling you Santa Claus did not exist, that the moon was made of cheese, that Big Foot was at home, freshly showered, on my couch and eating the blackberries we picked from my backyard. You answer: “There are better seats than this?” Ichiro Suzuki now is below us, jogging out to his position in right field, his glove tucked under his right arm. Both are made of gold. I yell: Eeeeecheeerowwww! He looks up, tips his cap to us.

You are six. Your brother is eight. Your cousin, she is five, I am thirty-four, and from our high throne, we command Ichiro.

May 26, 2020September 26, 2023

Amateur Night at Gethsemani Abbey

(Or: How I Unwittingly Prepared for Social Distancing)

“I am what I live. Don’t tell me who I am yet. It is still being spelled out.”

– Brother Paul Quenon

Fifty-two miles south of Louisville, among rolling hills of switchgrass and swaths of cut corn stalks and stands of uncut red oak and dogwood, near a three-way intersection of shoulderless, asphalt roads, sits a small, red-brick house. There is a grain silo nearby, and a faded turquoise water tower and an idle combine harvester in a fallow field across the way, and occasional, speed-limit minding traffic driving through cool late-February air so thin of humidity the birds fly and chirp in unmuddled joy. It is a scene ubiquitous in this part of America, in this time of year, these rural bucolic settings of west Appalachia so fungible a blindfolded local from six states around could not, with blindfold removed, positively identify his location.

Until: a mile to the north – along Monks Road – after a shallow bend to the east, down a small decline, and through the touchdown goalposts of a cross to the west side of the road and an elevated statue of Joseph and Jesus to the east, rises the sprawling, muted white, neo-Gothic compound of Gethsemani Abbey.

On The Road at Gethsemani Abbey — Gethsemani Abbey, Trappist, Kentucky

Ten years ago I read The Seven Storey Mountain, the monk and author Thomas Merton’s autobiography about his physical path from Europe to the United States and back again, twice, eventually ending up at Columbia University as a 21 year old sophomore, and his spiritual path from vice-loving atheist to Trappist monk to envoy for global humanism. Merton lived devoutly, not just in his Catholicism but in his attempts to find clarity in life and thought; despite living much of his life as a monk, and the latter part as a hermit (though not a very good one), he was a man constantly on the move. He delved philosophically into many things – I presume a monk has plenty of time on his hands – and was a man for his time, his writings and social commentary from the halls of an abbey in central Kentucky about the global issues of war and race and non-violence clarion call for two generations of men looking for clarity as to what America was giving them. Or, perhaps more importantly, what it was asking of them.

Merton’s popularity as a writer, philosopher, and social critic resulted in droves of young men turning to Catholic monasteries in the post-World War II years as well as during and after Vietnam, but Merton’s own brand of religion might be summed up, ironically, in what he described as his naïve beliefs as a young man: that all religions “lead to God, only in different ways, and every man should go according to his own conscience, and settle things according to his own private way of looking at things.” Merton dedicated much of his life to Catholicism as the path to God, but his philosophy and intellectual curiosity, along with his late-in-life exaltation of Buddhism (he died, alas, courtesy of shady Thai insulation, suffering a fatal post-shower electric shock from a ceiling fan in a multi-faith retreat center outside Bangkok) intrigued me as evidence that his early beliefs were maybe the more accurate. As Buddha suggests, sort out your own salvation with diligence.

Seven Storey Mountain didn’t move me enough to return to Catholicism, though to be fair “return” is a bit of a stretch. I often embellish the intellectual path to my contemporary agnosticism by explaining that I was “raised Catholic,” as if my childhood piety were interchangeable with “to do the right thing,” or “by wolves”, but to be honest my Catholic exposure was mostly isolated to the short time periods around my baptism (SUPER young. Like, a baby. And I didn’t get a vote); First Communion, around the age of seven, where I received the blood and body of Jesus Christ (ew. And again, no vote); and CCD on Wednesdays during the seventh and eighth grade (where I first exercised my right to vote by stopping attending). Perhaps the most enduring of Catholic canonical law came courtesy of my grandmother, who assured me that my tongue would turn black if I lied, or, upon a slight injury like a stubbed toe, declared that God was punishing me for some moral infraction I committed at an earlier date. Or would commit later, or was perhaps simply just thinking of committing, even if I didn’t yet know when. That God is ever ready to balance the ledger by slamming my shin into my bed frame has proven far more practical than Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus.

Who would tell that face he’s eating Jesus? And the hair looks exactly the same today.

What did intrigue me was this idea of going to a monastery. Of dropping out of society (or at least intentionally inserting yourself into a very different one) in order to contemplate some higher ideal. To read. To write. To wear a robe and Birkenstocks and take long walks, perhaps with my sleeved hands clasped casually behind my back, a precocious speckled fawn close upon my heel or a cartoon bird on my shoulder. To hum a Gregorian chant or two. Mostly, to just be quiet for a while.

Entering a monastery presents some practical decisions, the figurative shedding of skin and literal shedding of friends, family, worldly possessions, and even your name notwithstanding. Where to find a monastery, for starters, and then which order to choose. You might be familiar with the Jesuits, they of Georgetown and St. Joseph’s and Boston College fame (and twenty-four other major universities), or the perhaps less famous Franciscans (Felician University, anyone?) or even the Benedictines. But how about the Dominicans? Or the Carmelites? The Premonstratensians? Or the Cistercians, Carthusians, Passionists, Visitationists? The Friars Minor Capuchin? Or the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration?¹ Anyone? The names start to delve into the impossible, adorers of blood and regret and sorrow and other emotions, unlimited by the restrictions of time and space, spawning the unavoidable satiricals like Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption² or the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.³ Choosing the correct monastery can’t be a decision one takes lightly. And we are all human, so rivalries and jealousies surely emerge. If I choose the Benedictines, will the Franciscans forever look down upon me? Do I look better in grey or black (no one looks good in brown)? Are there dedication rankings, one order taking their vows more seriously, one more forgiving in their dress (you can wear jeans here brother, he said unironically), another more collegial? I once heard an Army general tell an Air Force officer that his career choice was “a fine alternative to military service” – do the monasteries have an equivalent? Will the Opus Deis and Brothers of Mortification of the Flesh⁴ tighten a figurative cilice or whip a condescending discipline in my direction should I choose a more, eh, cool denomination?⁵

The choice was made for me, my selection of Gethsemani Abbey sealed when I read Seven Storey Mountain, and after a stop at Wal-Mart (bananas and energy bars), Hobby Lobby (pens and butcher paper), and Target (yoga mat and yeah, I know), I drive the 30 or so more miles towards Gethsemani, past an empty log cabin that falsely purports to be President Lincoln’s boyhood home, then into the town of New Haven (population 891), on whose outskirts I spy my first Confederate flag of the day,⁶ then beyond that through the aforementioned three-way intersection and then into the parking lot of the Abbey. It is mostly full, late-model cars and designer trucks and even a Tesla, but it is tranquil, and the few other people standing around the cars are quiet. I carry my luggage instead of wheeling it behind me and follow two hipsters also checking in, they with matching puffy jackets over flannel shirts and matching thick brown belts holding up their crisp Levi’s and sporting matching short hair and beards and glasses and matching weathered (one faux, one not) brown boots, a hipster uniform.⁷ One guy has two drumsticks (wood, not chicken) protruding from his satchel, and I imagine him in his room air-drumming all weekend, a silent one-man one-father one-son one-Holy Ghost drum circle.⁸

The monk behind the counter is old and stooped and hoarse, gravity working its magic on spinal and vocal cords alike; he asks me if I’ve been here before, and where I’m coming from, and did I drive? He mischievously shames me for flying and then driving just from Nashville rather than all the way from Seattle, as if I’ve cheapened my experience already, and then spends what seems to be an inordinate amount of time deciding in which of the several vacant rooms to place me. He hovers over his ultimate selection – room 310 – long enough that I think he has momentarily fallen asleep, but then he pencils my name into the register in neat, uniform block letters, hands me my keys while I listen intently to his directions, and then at 4:35 p.m. on a Friday, after speaking what I hope will be my last words until Monday morning – “thank you” – I turn and ascend the stairs.

Thomas Merton was born in France in 1915 of an American mother and a Kiwi father. They died when he was six and sixteen, respectively, and he grew up in France, England, and the U.S., raised by his father and then an uncle. He was a smart young man, though hypersensitive, it seems, to emotion and unfairness and was afflicted (and concerned) by some extremities in his own personality. He smoked packs of cigarettes a day, drank profusely, spent time in jail, talked into the early morning hours with his university pals at both Cambridge and then later Columbia, loved women – he most likely fathered a child to whom he never spoke or acknowledged – and in general fully partook of life in the 1930s. Had he not died by electrocution, wrote a New Yorker article in 2018, “he might have died by overstimulation.”⁹ Merton arrived in the U.S. for the last time in 1935, enrolled at Columbia, and was eventually thunderstruck by Catholicism. He entered the church in 1939, immediately began exploring the priesthood, and after opening a Bible – in Latin, of course – to a random page, he found his finger falling on a portent: “And behold, you will be silent and unable to speak until the day that these things take place.”¹⁰ A monastery it would be.

Merton visited Gethsemani Abbey in April of 1940 and returned for good in December of 1941. And whatever Merton was looking for, I think I might be looking for it too, but in the obverse, not for a life permanently slowed, or one clarified by the regimented liturgical process of centuries of rigor and tradition and obfuscation, but a simple reset, a restart, a regeneration, a re-anything that might re-mind me of what once was, that time and place where I felt indomitable, and in a flow, as if in every moment lie the potential of something amazing about to happen. To find those things hiding the true meaning of other things, a stripping away of the things we know are unimportant, or those things we think are important but really aren’t but have somehow allowed them to dominate our daily existence. Perhaps just a continuing assessment of whether Maslow was full of shit. That would do too.

Room 310 is on the west side of the dormitory and down the length of a hallway covered in blue commercial-grade carpet, the last door before a set of large windows. I get a small shock as I insert my key into the lock, as I do each time I unlock my door over the next three days, surely my grandmother sitting at the foot of God, casting tiny thunderbolts in my direction, reminding me both to be on my best behavior and also who is in charge in the unlikely event I’ve forgotten, God no doubt now wondering the same thing.

The room is austere, but frankly much more accommodating than one might expect of a monastery. There is an open closet, a nightstand, an armchair, and a single bed with a bedspread that might be cut from the same heavy textile as the hallway carpet. There is a crucifix on one wall, with a desk and desk chair under it, and two pictures on another (stations of the cross, I think confidently, grateful there is no schooled Catholic nearby to tell me otherwise or conduits through which my grandmother might shock me), and on the bed are a folded towel and washcloth and a roll of toilet paper. I unpack, and breathe deeply, and close my eyes, and frankly feel just a tiny bit emotional because, for the first time in a very long time, I feel like I am doing something. Not “doing something”, but something. Checking a box, fulfilling a promise, lining out a list, exercising dominion over myself and how I spend my time and how I exert my energy and reminding myself that I once said I was going to do something and right now, right here in this old building in the middle of Kentucky occupied by men who, years ago, decided they were going to do something – I am doing something too.

I sit down at the desk and read through the daily retreat schedule, the words familiar – Vigils and Lauds and Terces – even if their specific meanings are not. In the top drawer I find a red folder stuffed with notes from the occupiers of Room 310 before me (“pilgrims,” some of my predecessors call us), and now the monk’s attentiveness to my room assignment makes sense.¹¹ The dates range from early 2014 to just two weeks ago, from a concise yellow-sticky don’t give up, peace will come to you to a six-page missive describing the writer’s every day at Gethsemani. Some are monotonous and boring, a few tragic, some meandering and uncertain; most are nearly-uniform tales of a search for some sort of internal quiet, notes written on postcards and grade school ruled paper and personal stationery, some in tiny, all-capped letters, others in soaring, beautiful cursive or written in thick fuchsia ink so thick it bleeds through the paper so I can’t read the other side.¹² I read only a few, planning on pacing myself over the next two and a half days, and I resist the urge to immediately organize the notes into chronological order (sub-urge resisted: oldest to newest, or newest to oldest). I find, however, an OCD comrade-in-arms, NP from Parnell, Tennessee, who gives me permission; she rearranged them on September 7, 2016, and there are so many retreatants between her and me who are obviously heathens.

Dinner is served promptly at six p.m. My first meal is what appears to be leftover grilled cheese sandwich halves and broccoli and mushroom soup and a dessert of Jell-O. There are fifteen to twenty other people here in line, mostly men, one of whom asks, out loud, for sugar, and just like that my Totally Ridiculous in Hindsight Plan B: No Human Voices is gone (Plan A was for total silence, which was just a silly expectation on its face. At even the quietest times I could hear the dull thrumming of my heartbeat in my ears, let alone the church bells and road traffic and birds and wind and other humans saying offensive things to me like “hi” or “good morning”). Plan C, then, is reserved for me and is within my control, which is to just be as quiet as possible, both within my head and outside of it. And so I try. I pick my feet up when I walk. I pull my chair out with two hands, lifting it instead of dragging it across the floor. I pick up a fork, then a knife, then a spoon, one at a time so they don’t clink against one another. I sip my tea and chew and swallow and breathe like I’m getting stalked, like I possess the Secret to the Universe to be stolen from me should I make a noise and disclose my location. The phone and computer are already off, of course, and will not be powered up again until Monday morning (if ever!), and I Peaceful Warrior and Downward Dog rather than blaze through push-ups and sit-ups; I turn the pages of my books methodically and slowly; I curse the reading light for its hum. I find myself doing things with deliberation and intention, a slowing down of my motions, walking quieter, breathing quieter, turning pages quieter, pushing down the toaster with precision, feeling the catch rather than bludgeoning it into submission. I have less of a death grip on my pen, the vanity of the cursive of my youth returning over the hours as I write this that you are reading, or scrawl out a list of things to Google at a later date.¹³^,¹⁴

But the world is a noisy place, and the previously overlooked or ignored are magnified by the silence. Silverware, a heater, a microwave, a faucet, spreading butter on toast, sliding out chairs, chewing, drinking, throat-clearing, swallowing, zipping, ice in glasses, automatic paper towel dispensers, an elevator bell, a church bell, an alarm bell, breathing, sneezing, coughing, snot-rocketing, farting, burping…a flushing toilet sounds like a jet engine; rolling luggage industrial machinery; flitting warbler a forest monster of Grimmian proportions. But here’s the thing: it’s good. Like really good. And it’s infectious. I read, I write, I sit and listen to birds. Or the air. Or nothing. I walk in the woods, avoiding eye contact with the occasional other human being, lest my social contract with the world obligate me to say “hello” or “good morning”, instead offering my best attempts at, but clearly fake, Duchennes smiles with a quick, nose in the air ‘sup bro, I acknowledge you but I refuse to do so overtly head nod. And I did all this in silence. Or at least according to Plan C.¹⁵ And for about two days, free of the detritus of life in 2020-America, free of Instagram likes and Facebook followers and fake news-peddlers and fake news-accusers and fake-news consumers and Buzzfeed clickbait¹⁶ and Phantom Vibration Syndrome¹⁷ and free of a TV or Netflix or a lap top or a cell phone or even a watch was, for me – and can be for you, too – a real path, to be trite, to freeing my mind. To quote George Clinton and the Parliament Funkadelic (and definitely not En Vogue) who was quoting Junior from Platoon, who was most likely paraphrasing Emmanuel Kant who was probably riffing on David Hume who surely borrowed from Plato who, we can all agree, probably stole everything from Socrates: free your mind and your ass will follow.¹⁸ So I freed my mind. And my ass followed. And it was good.¹⁹

It is Sunday night, my last night at the Abbey, my last night of Plan C. I can already feel focus drifting away, partially because I have spent a weekend reading and writing and most definitely not clock watching, and now I must get back to the real world, and I have a day to plan and a rental car to return and a plane to catch. I imagine writing a fake Airbnb review from someone who didn’t know what they were getting into (“incessant ringing of bells, guests unfriendly and hotel staff either nowhere to be seen or all together at once, boring church attached to the hotel – not ONE picture of Jesus!”), think about the proper amount of money to pay for my weekend of lodging and food (Abbey-suggested amount: “that is between you and God”), about whether I can continue what I’ve experienced over the last few days but IRL. Can I hide distractions, turn off my computer, un-install my Spotify for stretches at a time, leave my phone in the other room when I sleep? Can I communicate better, both with myself and with those important to me? I think of the language we use when texting, compared to emailing or writing a letter, compared to talking on the phone or talking face to face, compared to those things we agonize over when we want to convey the important-est of messages, and I think about the advance of technology and the absolutely mad rush of twenty-first century America, compared to the deterioration of meaningful introspection and communication, and how it has affected our expectations – and the expectations placed on us – such that we must reply now!, to the point where our smart phones not only suggest responses (“great, thanks!”) but we take them up on the offer. Haste has eliminated the personal, and like slow food that makes for a better meal, consciousness of thought makes for a better person, if I might only give myself the time. If we might only give ourselves the time.

“Tell me. What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

– Mary Oliver

Pass it on: On the Road with Jose

December 3, 2015August 17, 2021

Coming of Age in Pablo’s Kingdom

I spent the most important summers of my youth almost exclusively outdoors, in the days before the internet and cell phones and when video games existed largely as upright, quarter-gobbling monoliths. This, along with the bucolic pace of my rural town, ensured that I counted the days and hours with friends, playing baseball in the streets or endless games of basketball at the elementary school hoops, with their seven-foot tall rims and chain-link nets, the temperature and aridity of the high desert air causing our finger tips to crack and split with every dribble of a dirt-covered basketball; calling out Marco/Polo at the municipal swimming pool; or playing tennis with girlfriends at the weedy, faded-green tennis courts, trading kisses and serves equally errant. Few of us were rich by even the most generous definitions; almost all of us had working mothers and more than a few had absent dads and it seems to me, in hindsight, that we spent a lot of time unknowingly teaching each other how to negotiate life as young men.

Later, in high school and with the responsibilities of a job and a rusted-floor truck, carefree life in small-town Nevada diminished but never really ceased. On summer nights our doors remained not only unlocked but wide open to allow through the cool desert air. I had no curfew to speak of, and my life in rewind, were one to look for those moments where I could have strayed down a road less paved, could be safely boiled down to lying to Mr. Crow about the ownership of a mechanical pencil, playing cards while smoking Swisher Sweets, and one regrettable night with a bottle of Southern Comfort.

I was a freshman in high school in 1985; that year Medellin, Colombia, was well on its way to earning, and deserving, a reputation as the most dangerous city in the world, a title it wouldn´t relinquish until the nineties were well over. By comparison, today’s murder capital is San Pedro Sula, Honduras, with a rate of 171 homicides per 100,000 people – Medellin in 1991 had a murder rate more than double that. And it was essentially the work of one man, Pablo Escobar.

It is hard to tell the story of Medellin without mentioning Escobar, but Hernán Echevarria, who also grew up in the 1980’s, refuses to say his name, and calls him only “the famous criminal.” As a child, Hernán lived in Campo Valdez, a poor-but-not-the-poorest barrio of Medellin where his father moved as a young man, uneducated but dedicated, working twelve hours a day, seven days a week at a juice cart, showing Hernán by deed and word that hard work and education was the only true way out of Campo Valdez and into better worlds. “It was safe when I was a kid,” said Hernán, but the neighborhood grew worse as he grew older. Hernán had a bomb go off near him one day when walking to high school, and the driver of the motorcycle responsible for assassinating Luis Carlos Galán, a presidential candidate in 1989, was a childhood friend. “It was a poor area, and there were few opportunities to work, so being part of the narco culture was attractive.” It was ostensibly easy money, though mysteriously gained, and some started calling these kids “los magicos” because they could make money appear. For Hernán, a man who clearly loves his city, the change in ethic was palpable, and he fears that it still exists, albeit manifested in a slightly different way. “Have you seen the mannequins?”, Hernán asks me (I have; there is no way to not see the mannequins, they are cartoonishly and anti-gravitationally well endowed and lined up outside storefronts beckoning you in). “You can sit in the café and watch the street and play the game of ‘real or not’ as the women walk by.” Hernán is adamant that this is not a show of wealth and prosperity, but something more insidious. “It is the descendant of the narco culture, about a perception of what it means to be beautiful and glamorous, and it’s not just for the women. It used to be okay that men could be ugly,” he continued. “We have a saying that means ‘men are like bears, the uglier the tastier,’ but I don’t think this is true anymore.”

Regardless of whether it is narco culture or just newly found materialism, being Colombian, and in particular a Paisa – someone from Medellin and the surrounding area – means interminably and frustratingly answering for the Escobar years, something they see as akin to asking a German to explain Hitler or a Russian to explain Stalin, as if it is their fault for producing such a monster and their duty to explain why and how it happened. For Diego (last name withheld), the questions are a bit more difficult to answer. The second youngest of thirteen children, he was close to his younger sister but a small child when his older brothers were in their late teens and early twenties; when Diego was playing a version of freeze tag in the streets, his brothers – at least one and as many as four – were forming the gang that would become Pablo Escobar’s most feared and prolific assassins. Diego’s last name is Italian and unusual in Colombia, and when the police started referring to the gang simply by his last name, life became, to say the least, difficult.

“My last year of high school was awful,” Diego says. “When a teacher would call out my last name, the entire room would go quiet. When grades were posted, my name would always be circled or underlined with some comment written next to it.” Diego was regularly followed (he believes it was usually the police), and one day, tired of seeing the same car tailing him for weeks, he dropped his books in the street and, crying uncontrollably, faced the car with his arms spread wide. “Kill me now!” he shouted. “If you’re going to kill me, do it now! I am just a student so leave me alone!”

The tailings stopped, but not the violence. Diego heard explosions around the city seemingly daily, and came home from school one day to see the windows of nearly every house on his block shattered, the effects of the bombing of a business near the family home. He saw a young man murdered literally in front of his eyes, and believes he lost at least ten friends to the violence, some of them personally involved and some of them not. “The police were powerless,” Diego says, “either from corruption or out of fear. Escobar put a price on every police officer’s head. At stop signs, other cars would stop a hundred feet away from the cops in case a bomb went off or if the gangs started shooting at them.”

The misery, of course, was particularly personal to Diego. One brother was murdered in Bogota in the late 80’s; another died in 1991, along with sixteen other people, in the bombing of the Macarena bullfighting stadium in Medellin. A third brother committed suicide, and two others were killed, probably by police, in targeted raids on the same day in different parts of the city. “My father died of a heart attack,” he says, “but I am convinced my mother died of a broken heart.” After the death of a husband and five sons, Diego says his mother essentially shut-down. “My best memories of my mother are of her singing and cooking. Her voice was my alarm clock, and she never let any of us, no matter how early, leave the house without making breakfast.” But she quit cooking, then quit singing, then seeing – Diego says she closed her eyes one day and refused to open them – and then, finally, quit talking. The last words Diego heard his mother say was in response to his asking why she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, open her eyes: I don’t want to see the world.

I asked Diego if he, or his parents, knew what his brothers were doing. “I knew when I was older, and was able to read and understand more, and I think my parents knew. We just never talked about it.” Sometimes we don’t ask the questions to which we don’t want to hear the answers.

But for as much as Diego and Medellin would like to leave all that nonsense behind, those who came of age in Pablo’s kingdom are generationally intertwined with cartels, cocaine, political terrorism, murderers, and, perhaps most importantly, helping the rest of the world to see Medellin’s citizenry for who they are – generous, optimistic, and kind, with an acknowledged but well-intentioned self-importance and sense of pride in belonging to something bigger than themselves. Which are all things not Pablo.

Perhaps. To a small extent, I can sympathize with Hernán’s plight. Being a Nevadan means having to regularly explain that the state is more than just Las Vegas, more than just gambling and legal prostitution (we have more mountain ranges than any other state save Alaska, damn it). Humans are naturally inclined to embrace the good while deflecting the bad when pride is at stake, but this seems a bit disingenuous. Maybe we do have to account for where we’re from. Because for all the demurring of narco culture and Pablo Escobar, Hernán also shares a telling Colombian proverb, one he says everyone knows and labels the “eleventh and twelfth commandments”: The first (or eleventh) is that “when someone offers papaya, take it.” Easy to mistake this sentiment as something similar to “never look a gift horse in the mouth” or the more pedestrian “don’t pass up an opportunity,” until you hear the twelfth amendment: Never offer papaya. Essentially, don’t present me with an opportunity – even one at your expense – because if you do, I’m going to pounce on it. This might be the culture of industriousness and optimism, but it also contributes to a culture of conflict and a history of violence that has played out, ironically, almost entirely within Colombia’s own borders.

Hernán tells another story, his recollection of an uninformed childhood discussion over the reasoning behind Escobar’s declared war against the government. Escobar was angry at Colombia’s extradition policy with the United States, which aimed to prosecute the drug cartel’s leadership in the U.S. judicial system. Escobar said “a grave in Colombia is better than prison in the U.S.,” and one of Hernán’s friends said that his father supported Pablo, likening the extradition policy to a bad kid getting disciplined not by his own father, but by his neighbor’s. “I can understand this,” says Hernán. “But I don’t think we were very good fathers.” And here is an element both Hernán and Diego raise, the importance of not forgetting. Both say the current generation, who embrace narco culture but do not fully understand the havoc Escobar and his cronies wreaked upon lives in this city, run the risk of living through the same hell through which Diego and Hernán lived.

So how do you do this? How do you simultaneously ask the rest of the world to stop picking at the scab that is cocaine and Pablo Escobar and see instead the beauty that is Colombia and Medellin? How do you convince people to move on, but to not forget? This is the same message the city is trying to share through social urbanism or, as Hernán calls it, “democratic architecture.” Medellin installed a grand public library, a beautiful cubist building, on the top of the hill in a dangerous neighborhood, and outdoor escalators grace the steep hillside in the depressingly named “District 13” where, before the escalators, residents had to walk up and down more than 300 steps to get to the city center and home again. The idea is not only to make life easier for the city’s most destitute, but to let them know that the government cares about them and that they should care about themselves as well. Whether the projects have improved the quality of life of the residents isn’t clear – we saw the escalators used only by a jubilant dog and a smiling little girl taking out the trash – but that the residents take pride in their community is: both neighborhoods are clean and active and colorful, District 13 particularly so. Locally-painted murals grace the walls of the homes that press in around the stairs, and house plants are in abundance.

Medellin is also mall-crazy, and has a smoothly running metro system that is the pride of the city. There is not a piece of garbage or stain of graffiti to be found in any station or on any train. The city turned the dirtiest, druggiest, prostitutiest area of downtown into a public library with a neighboring bamboo garden and monumental park of towering lights; there is free Wi-Fi in every public space; and favorite son Fernando Botero donated a new sculpture of his peace dove to sit next to – but not replace (move on but don’t forget) – the original Pajaro de Paz that was blown up in 1995. This is not reinvention necessarily, but reinforcing pride and focusing the positive. And maybe it works. Medellin, once the murder capital of the world, was named 2015’s “City of Innovation.”

Diego today is single and lives with two of his sisters in Laureles, an upscale area of Medellin. For a living he teaches Spanish and English to businesses around the city, and a few days a week he volunteers in the Ocho de Marzo barrio, where he gives free Portuguese lessons to children who live in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Medellin, one where you can be killed for wandering across the “invisible frontier” and into the territory of the la Sierra barrio. People ask Diego why Portuguese, why not English, but for him it doesn’t matter what he teaches. “It’s the message that is important,” he says. “I’m telling them they don’t have to be what other people expect them to be. They can be something different and better. They can be someone.”

September 25, 2015November 14, 2015

Ride Along with KCFD

Fire Station, Kern County, 1:39 am. The fluorescent light above my single bed flashes on, accompanied by an audible alarm that has obviously been finely-calibrated to wake the sleeping without producing a minor heart attack; a Goldilocks of sirens. The headboard speaker streams the dispatcher’s voice, relaying the relevant station number. I quickly sit up in bed. Tom[*], my shift captain, has assured me that I will hear people running if the call is for a fire, shuffling if it is for something else. I hear nothing. I slip on pants, shoes and a shirt, grab my notebook, and unwisely make a stop in the bathroom on the way to the apparatus bay (the garage). I climb into my designated spot in the cab of the engine to find everyone – fireman, engineer, and captain – waiting for me. There is no shame like letting down a team, doubly so when you are the new guy and trebly when you are allowed to even be there in the first place purely out of their generosity. As I place my headset over my ears, Tom hangs his back up and, smiling, runs his hand across his throat to signal the universal sign for “canceled.” I have dodged my punishment of buying ice cream – penance for missing a call – but the message is received. On just the second call of my shift, my goal of staying out of the way has crystallized: Do not be a liability.

I am on a two-day ride-along with the Kern County Fire Department in the Bakersfield metro area, California’s ninth biggest city and perhaps its most maligned: the city has been labeled the most polluted, one of the worst places to live, and the least literate city in America (which means no one is going to read this blog). It is hot, dusty, far-flung and suffers from both high rates of poverty and crime, so Kern County is as good a place as any to spend thirty-six hours with one of America’s most respected and, in retrospect, inaccurately named professionals: firefighters.

The station fronts a wide street in the Bakersfield suburbs and is one of the county’s newest, a modest and comfortable building that sleeps ten firefighters and a battalion chief. There is a workout room, a large dining room table, and a kitchen big enough to cook meals for everyone. The station operates in three shifts – A, B, and C – with each shift working three rotations of forty-eight hours on and forty-eight hours off, followed by eight days of recovery. Each shift has two crews of three men: a fireman, an engineer, and a shift captain, with corresponding rank and responsibilities indicated, as one firefighter tells me, by the fact that “the captain is always furthest from the poop”. One crew operates the “engine,” a Pierce Quantum pumper, and the other operates the “truck,” a Pierce Dash 100’ aerial platform, the actualization of your first-grade what do you want to be when you grow up homework assignment. Except this one costs a million dollars.

The truck crew responds to fires and car crashes, the engine crew to those and everything else as well. Each bedroom has a toggle switch on the wall that alerts the relevant crew when an emergency call comes in, and there is an alarm and a loud speaker in the main area of the station as well. When the crews aren’t in bed asleep, studying, or doing maintenance, they are together watching television or cooking, playing games for dish-duty, or generally acting how I imagine brothers act if they have to be around each other for forty-eight hours. I quickly gather that the single most important quality required to be a successful firefighter is an ability to get along well with others.

8:20 p.m., possible structure fire. Both shifts – the engine and the truck crews – are fully engrossed in the Dodger game, but at the sound of the alarm everyone is up and moving. Tom goes first to a fax machine and then to a map on the wall where the station’s section of metro-Bakersfield is divided by number and quadrant, with street names visible and a little red dot for every fire hydrant in the area. Tom and his engineer (the driver), a man with an infectious smile, a mop of curly, flaming red hair, and ironically surnamed “Hernandez,” match the address on the report to the closest cross streets on the map, and they head for the trucks. Though Tom suspects this call is just an air conditioning unit on the blink, potential fires require all hands, and both truck and engine are out the giant bay doors, lights flashing and sirens blaring, in less than two minutes. We reach the house minutes later to find a pajamaed family gathered on the driveway. Tom gets information from the matriarch, and one crew checks the outside of the house while the other checks the inside, but it’s all anti-climactic. Nelson, a hulk of a man but also the fireman – thusly closest to the poop – is selected to squeeze himself into a tiny crawl space about the size of a pizza box and up into the attic where he sees no evidence of fire. The A/C unit motor is indeed burned out (which is surely a legitimate emergency in Bakersfield), so they cut the power to the unit and return to the station, the entire process, from alarm back to the Dodger game, lasting less than fifteen minutes.

It is easy to glorify firefighters. Their mission and very existence is to end the danger in your life. They rescue stranded cats from trees, smile placidly while your elementary school-aged children wipe their snot-covered hands all over their spotless equipment, help old ladies cross the street. Occasionally, to the shame of prematurely big-bellied men and the delight of their wives, they might pose shirtless for calendars, probably while petting a sickeningly cute puppy. No one calls the firefighters on their neighbors, you never see secret video of them beating up minorities, and their first words to you are never “can I see some identification?” In the battle for the citizenry’s hearts and minds between cops and firefighters, it is not a fair fight.

They have much in common with the military. Aside from the clear responsibility to get along well with others, a firefighter needs to be personally responsible while being subservient to the team. He[†] must both appreciate the importance of a command structure and understand his place within the organization (there is irony in the fact that our democracy’s most respected institutions are decidedly non-democratic). He must maintain his composure under adversity and discomfort. He must always be ready – no long showers or a leisurely perusal of The Atlantic while sitting on the can. There is similarity in the friendly ribbing of one another, commonly used to address deficiencies without creating those awkward confrontational moments of publicly embarrassing a guy by telling him he is completely jacked up (for example, “Vino, are you dressed for a barbeque?,” or “Loudon, nice of you to join us this morning. Did you sleep OK?”). And there are long stretches of the mundane, followed by bursts of activity and trauma, the stress dealt with later in the familiar manner of minimizing reality or making light of the grotesque. As an outsider, it is uncomfortable to hear a soldier talk nonchalantly about shooting someone, or to hear a firefighter talk about seeing a kid injured in a traffic accident (at least one firefighter casually spoke of being called to a scene to find his pregnant wife and three-year old child as the victims). The truth is that a firefighter on duty can have a lot of idle time, but he is always there when you need him. And a lot of people seem to need him.

6:30 a.m., medical assist, elderly woman confused. REM cycles should not be interrupted, and after the 2 a.m. false alarm and subsequent difficulty returning to sleep, this alarm has me confused as well. I almost get clipped by an oncoming school bus as I step out of the engine. Calls at this time of the morning are often dead bodies, found when a spouse wakes up to discover the other spouse has died during the night. Instead, two generations of women are there to meet the crew as they walk through the door of the house. Though it is 6:35 a.m., everyone looks as if they’ve been up and ready for hours. Or all night. An elderly woman, the grandmother and the third generation, is reclined on an armchair, purse on her lap and with an oxygen bottle next to her piping air into her nose. Her daughter, granddaughter and one other woman hover nearby. Every few minutes, the granddaughter cracks open the garage door to ask indecipherable questions into the dark. The fireman, Vino, a big man but steady and soft spoken, takes a knee in front of the grandmother and attaches a pulse oximeter to her finger tip. He asks his standard battery of questions: what year is it, who is the president, how old are you. The elderly woman answers “forty-five.” Her daughter, face funereal and clenched arms folded high on her chest, whispers, “sixty-five.”

This is a common theme throughout the sixteen or so emergency calls over the thirty-six hour period. Multiple generations in a modest home, usually clean and well-kept, though some are nicer than others and a few are downright slovenly. An elderly parent is confused, or silent, or simply displaying abnormal behavior. The adult child scolds the parent for not answering the fireman’s questions, or answers the questions for the fireman before the adult gets a chance to, or simply waits patiently in the background until a fireman asks “what hospital do you want to go to?” An ambulance shows up, an EMT straps the patient down, gives a silent head-nod to the captain assenting to patient transfer, and the firemen leave. But I want answers. I want to know why the family is up and ready to go at 6:30 am; why grandma, fully dressed, has her purse in her lap, clutched with both hands. I want to know what wizard and keeper of family secrets lurks in a pitch-black garage and refuses to show his face, or why martini glasses are scattered on the counter. I want to ask about the nimbussed picture of Jesus Christ on the wall that looks more than passingly like skinny Matthew McConaughey. But the firemen don’t care. Not only is it not their job, it is not their place to care, or to judge. Their job is to administer aid, wait for the ambulance, transfer the patient, go home. Repeat.

9:12 a.m., medical assist, woman complaining of stomach pain. The engine arrives at the home four minutes after the alarm sounded at the station, and as we approach Tom says “we’ve been here before.” Repeat customers tend to be either old or drug users, and this woman appears to be both. She lives in her garage on a filthy pull-out couch, with old food on makeshift counters and dirty dishes piled up in a sink. Her son is indifferent, and answers most of the questions for his mom, who is in the fetal position on the bed and groaning softly. She is able to tell Tom her birth year, and he glances over at me with raised eyebrows, acknowledgement of the effects of drugs. The woman is 45, the same age as both Tom and me. She looks like she could be 70. There are scars and pockmarks on her arms and back near her armpits, but Tom hesitates when I ask if she is a drug user. She could be suffering from some sort of withdrawal, and the 911 call might be for legitimate pain. But it might also be for a free trip to the hospital, or an attempt to get more drugs.

“There’s no consequence to overdosing or to calling 911,” Tom says. “So why change your behavior?” Easy to judge Tom as callous. He joined to fight fires and to save people, though those types of calls seem to be in the minority. Of sixteen calls, just two are for fires and both are essentially false alarms. Of the remaining fourteen, there are elderly who are confused and disoriented with signs of stroke, but more often than not it appeared that a 911 call was unnecessary – or at least the presence of firefighters was gratuitous. The firefighters are on the scene within seconds and typically leave as soon as the ambulance and paramedics show up and take over. They never stayed longer than fifteen minutes at any site. A trip to the emergency room in an ambulance won’t get the patient in to see a doctor any quicker than driving there themselves, and EMTs who responded were uniformly quick to point out that there was a two-hour wait at the hospitals of choice. The fact is that of 40,000 calls in Kern County in 2012, just 3300 were for fires – that’s less than 8%.

Is this a bad thing? Worthy of discussion? Or simply the normal cost of doing business in a well-functioning and caring public-welfare system, a sign of progress rather than decline. Technology has made life easier in vastly more ways than it has made it more difficult. It is reflexive – and perhaps correct – to say that it has also made us less resourceful and less capable of taking care of ourselves. Why remember directions when my GPS gets me home? Why know calculus when my computer calculates for me? Why read about the Kennedy assassination when I can just watch a movie? Why, for that matter, drive to the hospital when my insurance company tells me to call 911? But there is always an adverse, and that doesn’t change. In one of the last scenes in No Country for Old Men, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell visits Ellis, an elderly friend of his father and a wheelchair-bound sage. Ed Tom is looking for sympathy, someone to tell him that he’s right to be disappointed in his inability to stem the downward spiral of America, but Ellis is having none of it: “What you got ain’t nothin’ new.”

12:14 p.m., medical assist, elderly man fell in the shower. The address is nearby, and we arrive two minutes after the alarm. An on-site nurse meets us at the door with a curt “Bill fell in the shower again.” Bill is seventy-one and has dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, and we find him sitting awkwardly on his tiled bathroom floor, naked and disoriented, one leg folded under him. His face is bloody, with a bump the size of a half-grapefruit on one side of his head and a blood-red week old bruise on the opposite side of his face. Maria, his caregiver, says this is the third time he’s fallen in recent weeks, and points to a hole in the wall near the toilet as evidence. Louden calmly suggests that perhaps the tile is a bit slippery, and a non-slip mat might be a good investment. Nelson – again, closest to the poop, though this time it is for real – asks Maria if she has some towels to clean the blood and feces from Bill’s face and legs. But all the towels are in the wash, and Maria doesn’t appear to be in any hurry to retrieve them, so Louden calmly asks if he might pull them from the washing machine himself. Nelson asks Bill his age (“I AM FORTY-TWO!”), if he might be able to stand on his own (“WHAT?”), and if he wants to go to the hospital (“HELL NO!”). Maria shakes her head and says, “Bill does what Bill wants to do.”

There is despair, either real or perceived, in every 911 call. People might not always call for genuine emergencies, but neither do they call to make conversation. Emergency calls are made because people panic, because they don’t know what else to do, because there is nothing else they can do. Maybe they call because it is easy. Sometimes this appears to be the most obvious answer, but the firefighters are uniformly kind and respectful. Both crews interact with the elderly and the infirm; with likely drug users; with insensitive parents and children. They never raise their voices, never show frustration or impatience, are never condescending. The most common sentence is we’re going to get you fixed up. Vino politely asks a twenty-eight year old why she took a bottle of pills; Tom asks after an old man who was the catalyst for an earlier 911 call; Nelson literally picks up an old man covered in shit and deposits him in his wheel chair so he can be safely moved into the shower and washed off. Perhaps it was to ensure he showed up at the hospital relatively clean. Perhaps it was to give him some dignity.

5:50 p.m., medical assist, elderly male not responding. As we return from a false alarm at Lowe’s home improvement store, the dispatcher reports a potential stroke victim. The man is eighty-four years old, and though he seems aware of his surroundings, he is completely non-responsive and refuses to answer any questions. He sits in his boxers, tall in a chair, as his daughter speaks to him sternly; clearly there’s a history of him not doing what she wants him to do. The scolding is out of love and frustration. Joe, the old man, has an air of defiance, a man who knows his days are numbered but would prefer to do his best to not give one shit about it. His daughter says he built all the cars in the garage, and there are trophies testifying to his proficiency. The EMTs arrive and take over, asking Joe to smile – a simple test to screen for a cerebrovascular accident – but Joe is stone-faced. The EMT, a black kid and by far the youngest of the techs over the last two days, shows the first impatience I’ve seen from any of the first responders, and he elevates slightly his aggressiveness with each “smile for me Joe. CAN YOU SMILE BIG FOR ME?” Though his youth might explain his impatience, it might also have something to do with the confederate flag draped over a table at the entrance to the house.

Is there a “too old”? There is no denying that medical advances have helped the human condition, both in quantity and quality. In 1900, the life expectancy of an American was forty-seven years; in 2000 it was seventy-seven. Though the increase has as much to do with shrinking infant mortality rates (a decrease from 100 deaths per 1,000 live births to 6.9) as it does with quality care of the elderly, using a length-of-life metric to measure the luminosity of our society’s enlightenment avoids the philosophical question of what life is worth preserving. One-hundred-year-old Don Pellman can run one hundred meters in twenty-seven seconds, long jump six feet and pole vault three, but Socrates (or perhaps a generous Plato) will have you believe that only the examined life is worth living.

Perhaps age should have nothing to do with it. Maybe Joe had a legitimate stroke. Or maybe his rheumatic hands could no longer turn a wrench, and his loving daughter and stacks of trophies are testament enough to his presence here on our earth.

A neighbor shuffles up the driveway and peers into the living room; she is an older woman with thick glasses and a German accent. She wears slippers and a house robe with some sort of medical device in her pocket, and asks Tom if everything is OK. He tells her that she should talk to one of the family members, but that he thinks Joe will be all right.

She slowly looks at Tom, then at Joe, then back at Tom again. “It’s tough,” she says, “being old.”

[*] All names have been changed.

[†] Of 465 firefighters in the Kern County Fire Department, two are female.

August 2, 2015October 26, 2015

Lost and Found

August 17, 2015May 11, 2018

Third Beach to Hoh River

We sit on giant driftwood bleachers in the morning sun, peanut butter and rice cakes in hand and the protruding cliff face of Taylor Point rising in the distance a mile in front of us, up from the Pacific Ocean at the south end of Third Beach, space and fog lazily obscuring the sea stacks of Giants Graveyard. I am on the Pacific Northwest Trail at the western edge of the Olympic National Park at my older sister’s urging, and though she intends a three-day hike from Third Beach to the Hoh River to be bonding for her and her oldest son, it is quiet therapy for me, an opportunity to perhaps accomplish something visceral and palpable after fifteen months of spinning my cubicled professional wheels.

We drove up from Reno the day prior, my sister, oldest niece, and oldest nephew, leaving hours too late but not feeling particularly pressed, as I have embraced my pending retirement. Or am trying to. Shifting, on a dime, from twenty years of Army service and a largely feigned laissez faire commitment to schedule to actually living The Attitude of Meh is no simple task. I’ve started the transition by not shaving, committing (or not. Whatever!) to developing a personal beard style I call “Spanish Moss,” which looks exactly like you think it might. So we leave a few hours late? Not to worry. We turn a ten-hour drive into a twelve-hour one and, still well shy of our start point, are consoled with an extended trip to a Portland-area Wal-Mart to pick up last minute supplies. We overnight at the Lewis and Clark State Park near Winlock, Washington, hours short of our target but exposed to a view of the indomitable Mount St. Helens to the north. The volcano looms large both in front of us and in my older sister’s and my memory. Though it is recently active, it most spectacularly erupted in May of 1980, exactly a month before my sister’s eleventh birthday and a year before our mother’s third divorce and our repatriation to Nevada. We lived in northwest Washington when the mountain blew, winds carrying volcanic ash the 250 miles north to our small town of Sedro Woolley and depositing it on our family’s cream-colored Ford Galaxy 500. The car had a big back seat and a wide, gently sloping rear window with an apartment-sized shelf above the seat that served naturally as a bed, fort, or escape pod for any road trip of longer than an hour.

We sit around the campfire, old-growth Douglas Firs towering over us, my sister and my niece and nephew, the latter two now far more adult than child so they can share in the jokes as we talk about our lives as kids. Wistful and meandering is the conversation chain that flows around family and a campfire; a late morning start and a long drive turning from a discussion on volcanoes and ash to a Galaxy 500 and rear windows and road trips to remember that time a storm blew your bedroom windows out in the middle of the night and there was glass all over your bed and mom and dad couldn’t find you? Though nature can be powerful, the supernatural is inexplicable and whether through the banality of chance or the magic of fortune, a storm neither sucked me out of second-floor windows nor peppered me with glass shards, as I was snug asleep at the foot of my sister’s bed in the next room, a place I frequently went as a child, driven there by nightmares.

We get up early the next morning and pack like professionals, driving three more hours through the Scrabbler’s-delight towns of Hoquiam and Quinault and Queets; stopping for coffee at one of the Northwest’s ubiquitous drive-thru coffee bars; then north along the 101 and certainly one of the prettiest stretches of road in America. We just make our pre-arranged pick-up time at the Oil City Road trailhead. Though most people hike from the Hoh River north, we’re doing it in the reverse, and Seth from Forks has agreed to pick us up here and drop us off an hour north at the Third Beach trailhead. Seth is a college student in Boise, but lives here in Forks, and though he appears to be about twenty, the interior of his truck, with its coffee mugs and backpacks and work gloves and climbing gear, gives the impression that he’s already living a full life. He shares his local knowledge, elating my sister with the good news that the coastal black bears are timid (“the inland bears are another story”); titillating her with the insider information that the town of Forks, though the literary locus for Twilight, was simply copied and reproduced en masse in British Columbia for the film because it “was cheaper and Kristen Stewart would have been bored out of her mind if she had to live here for three months” (she would have been); and entertaining all of us by calling Aberdeen, home of Kurt Cobain, may he rest in peace, “Methlaberdeen.”

Seth drops us at the start of a canopied trail leading a mile and a half from a parking lot down through the Hoh River Rainforest, and after passively-aggressively-unsuccessfully suggesting that my sister, niece, and nephew remove their rain gear (“it’s not raining, and you’ll get hypothermia”), we head for the beach. Google reviews of this hike promise ankle-deep mud; knee-deep and fast-water river crossings; boulder-scrambling that requires properly timing the tide; and a trail that is “more obstacle course than hike.” So, after a peanut butter and rice cake fueling, and a second passive-aggressive-unsuccessful rain gear removal suggestion, we begin. I have nominally prepped for the hike, my only concern with negotiating boulders around a blind corner, so I naturally assume that the first stop – Taylor Point – is where we must cross boulders only during the outgoing tide. It is not. It is, rather, the impetus for the first of our two “group discussions.”

Not having children is both boon and bane. I am free to come and go as I please, and am not burdened with the demands of responsibility for a living, breathing, DNA-sharing thing. I need not exert the inefficiencies of, to be blunt, caring. This, of course, is theory; in practice I would be perpetually panic-stricken if I were a parent. A scraped-knee would likely induce in me barely concealable tears and a minor case of hyperventilation. My niece and nephew are now 17 and 19, but it is hard to look at them in any manner other than as objects to be hurled wide-eyed and giggling into the air or as face-painted children ready for an “Uncle Jay Day”, something I surely looked forward to more than they did. So as I venture fifty yards or so onto the boulders around Taylor Point, and realize that I cannot see anything but cliffs and more rocks and an incoming tide and that this might cause some problems for my traveling companions, I, as my older sister might say, lose my shit. I look back at my sister gingerly negotiating the boulders and my niece absorbed in her vain search for tide pool creatures, and say “turn around.” My sister freezes, pauses, looks at me, then asks, “turn around?”

I do not like feeling anything but fully in control, and though I am confident that no wave foreseeable could possibly shake me from my perch, even the potential danger of some harm coming to those I see – even erroneously – as ones in need of protection is uncomfortable. So when my sister asks, “turn around?”, it triggers in me something instinctual.

“TURN THE FUCK AROUND.” This is a gross, and, in hindsight, hilarious overreaction, but the self-imposed burdens of leadership are significant and spontaneous, and turnthefuckaround seemed like a pretty good thing to say. My sister moves, quickly. My niece is cooly unconcerned, and my nephew chooses this moment to remove his raingear. But we scramble back across the boulders, our final few steps retracing the original, which were then on dry sand and are now in shin-deep water. The debrief is fairly quick. We agree that in return for moving quickly when there is a hint of urgency in my voice, I won’t swear anymore, which is a fairly reasonable concession on their part. The raingear, however, stays on.

The most dangerous stretches of the Third Beach to Hoh River trail are conspicuously marked by large, black and red circular discs affixed prominently on trees and next to an entry/exit point diverting you away from the beach, and danger, and into the rain forests of the Olympic National Park. They should not be ignored, at any cost, and heeding their warning, after climbing up or down wooden rung-missing ladders and rope assisted inclines, rewards you with silent marches on trails peppered with Pacific banana slugs, looking unmistakably like giant turds; through permanently damp, waist-high skunk cabbage, deer fern, and pick-your-berry (Salmon? Huckle? Black twin?); under soaring Sitka spruce and Western Hemlock. There are obstacles to be negotiated at every turn, cooperation required, and like a corporate sponsored team-building event, we are positively lifted by the time we make it to Toleak Point. Everything seems to converge here. Sea otters, permanently content on their backs, float with the current; Bald eagles projectile-shit from tree branches like expectorant, a county fair participant readying to launch a watermelon seed in reverse; sea lions cruise the channels between rock outcroppings, hunting fish and barking commands to each other like bloodhounds on a chase. It is easy to imagine life here hundreds of years ago, single plumes of campfire smoke rising from the tree line, soft-lit Thomas Kinkade landscapes unobstructed by the noise and tools and trappings of electricity and progress. We find a camping spot, luxuriant, just above the beach and the driftwood piles marking high tide. We hang rope to dry our gear and quickly make the camp ours, pitching our tents and taking forty-five minutes of collective effort and patience to start a fire. My niece and nephew are, literally, without complaint, and I am a bit ashamed that I find it moving. If we can’t start a fire, no biggie, but we did, and that’s pretty cool too.

We’re set up early enough to scour the beach, walking over a thick blanket of dried, shredded paper-like seaweed and finding, among other things, Styrofoam coolers, rope, nets, buoys, bags, and all things plastic. The ocean is an artist, a driftwood sculptor and a gem polisher, but she occasionally does her best Andres Serrano impression, vomiting on her shores the effluence of man far and near. My nephew finds a bleached skull, sans the jawbone but a radiator-like screen in the nasal cavity intact, and we spend twenty minutes debating what this belonged to. Is it a coyote or a wolf? An adolescent saber-toothed cat? A dog? Sea Lion seems badass – it’s a lion of the sea, after all – but I realize that Google will settle this debate and then, as quickly as we gained it, the knowledge will be gone. No need to retain it, the answer is always just a search engine away. I wonder what Google, for all its power, has done to the imagination of a boy.

We spend the night at Toleak Point and head out early the next morning, traversing beach, then rain forest, then beach again. We startle a raccoon and trace the solo steps of a deer, joined briefly by a larger, second set, then solo again as one set of tracks disappears in the woods to the left and another in the ocean to the right. Other than a slight mist the night prior, the weather holds out for three days. Freshwater creeks are shallow but adequate, and with our water filter we could have safely left all water bottles and Camelbacks at home and survived just fine. The warnings of mud and a fast river crossing are false, as the drought has reached the coast as well.

At Jackson Beach we climb down the vertical face using fifty feet of rope ladder, eat the remainder of our dehydrated food (Jamaican Jerk Chicken and Pad Thai) and have our second group discussion. This one concerns whether we stay our last night here, risking setting up camp at what may or may not be the high-water mark, or wait for the tide to go out and skirt the point, crossing what turns out to be the much-anticipated boulder field. The latter wins, and my sister and I kill time talking about life after the Army. I watch my niece and nephew walking in the sun and think about how one experiences life and risk and adversity and beauty relevant to our age. This trip as a twenty-year-old, in possession of a healthy ego and an unearned sense of optimism, would have been a significantly different experience than that of a forty-four-year-old in transition. Articulating the risk of hypothermia from wearing raingear when it’s not raining, for example, is such a pedantic thing to say, but life is easier when someone is there to protect you, no?

The tide starts to go out, so we pack up and start our trip around the last corner, hesitant, not knowing what is on the other side or how far we have to go. But it opens up after a few hundred yards, the beach covered in giant driftwood logs like dropped matchsticks and the flats reflecting the setting sun and the most extraordinary view.

October 26, 2013November 17, 2015

Life on the Lincoln Highway/The Fourth Street Project

Carl Graham Fisher, the astigmatic speed-freak credited with envisioning the first trans-continental road – the Lincoln Highway – may not have ever stepped foot in Nevada, but his life mirrors the boom-or-bust history of the Silver State. Born in Indiana, Fisher’s father left him when he was young, causing Fisher to quit school early to help support his family. He proved adept at the task, and revealed himself to be a remarkable inventor, investor, and showman. By the age of 50 he was worth over $100 million and famous for his promotional stunts, which involved, among other things, dropping a car from a hot air balloon and then racing it back to town (the dropped car was engine-less; he drove a prepositioned, perfectly good car back); riding a bicycle off the roof of a building; and enlisting a baby elephant, frocked in a Fisher-project sandwich board, to caddy for a vacationing President-elect Warren G. Harding. Like the history of Nevada, Fisher’s fortunes rose and fell, and he was destitute near the end of his life, surely the result of the Great Depression, but probably the result of his whims as well. His then ex-wife, whom he met and married when he was engaged to another, said he was all speed and that his millions were simply incidental – “he just liked to see the dirt fly.”

In 1913 the thirty-nine year old Fisher conceived of the Lincoln Highway, eventually labeled Highway 40 and now known as Interstate 80, and though through much of the country her asphalt is laid within a few miles of Fisher’s original trace, for 8.6 miles in Reno the Lincoln Highway still resides, incognito, as Fourth Street. All of American History moves east to west, and so it does here as well: the oldest stretch of the original Lincoln Highway begins somewhere around the very modern Rail City Carwash; her terminus a parking lot in Verdi on the other side of railroad tracks with an elevated view of an abandoned, vandalized trailer and a short walk through a sandy field to the Truckee River. Here I find two fly fishermen, retired, going home to Santa Cruz with nothing more than a nibble or two. The older man tells me that he remembers driving Highway 40 as a kid, staring out the window from the backseat of his father’s car at the desert, then the motels and bars, then more desert. I tell him the buildings probably haven’t changed much but keep to myself my suspicions that the road seems to be about as lucky as he is. Fourth Street, I think, could use a nibble. Or two.

Three hours earlier I am the first breakfast customer of the day at Los Compadres; on the way out I watch as an industrial sized garbage dumpster births an old woman. We lock eyes and she, sheepishly and after a pause, says “I was talking to the bird.” I ask if it answered; she smiles and continues her day. I momentarily consider following her rather than Carl Fisher’s aspirations, but instead walk across the street to inspect the artwork on the Desert Sunset bar. The owner, huge and tank-topped and holding back a pit bull with a giant metal chain the size used to tow cars, emerges from the motel next door. He’s gregarious and proud of his business, and we talk about the other hotels on Highway 40.

A sign on the door at Shorty’s tells me that ROADHOUSE TOM’S COATRUN Has Moved to the Wonder Bar; I contemplate their frivolous use of capital letters but quickly resolve it in Shorty’s favor, as I have a weakness for the semi-colon and who am I to judge. An Indian – the sub-continent type, not the native – at the desk of the Hi Way 40 Motel lets me park for free while I take pictures; the woman at the In-Town Motel does as well, reluctantly and only after scolding me for texting while I was turning into her parking lot (guilty). I am sized up by a prostitute near the bus station; I discuss the tragic beauty of the mosaic entryway of the N.C.O. Railroad Depot, soiled by urine and spray paint, with a man sporting a neck tattoo and who I think is going to ask me for money but instead just stands and stares with me; I pause from picture taking at Abby’s Hwy 40 to let a man, severely overweight, pass by in his wheelchair. He moves not by pushing the wheels with his hands, but by shuffling his feet slowly forward, one never fully extending beyond the other. For three blocks I am enchanted by a middle-aged Hispanic man’s custom bicycle. It has thick wheels and extended handle bars and a beautiful silver eagle mounted on the head stem. The bike is painted the colors of the Mexican flag, and I tell the rider – booted, cuffed denim jeans, snapped-to-the-top black satin jacket with matching slicked back hair and dark sunglasses – that his bike is badass. He says thank you.

The west end of Fourth Street is no more optimistic, but the fornlorn seems to have dispersed a bit. There is an artist’s motel, seemingly in business but without a car or person in the parking lot; a brief stretch of industrial, the kind built big and cheap and windowless and populated with gymnastic centers and beer distributors; then a huge, abandoned wooden riverfront resort complex, fence locked and without any indication of what it once was. Then, nothing. A stretch of road with high desert and retaining wall on the right and a rolling river with trees in foliage the colors of fading sunshine and leaking chlorophyll on the left. This, I think, is what must have driven Carl Fisher’s dream, and the dream of Highway 40 and is maybe even what drives someone’s dream on the other end of Fourth Street. Maybe the dreams of a woman who talks to birds.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

December 4, 2011October 26, 2015

Air America

The Delta Embraer E75 from Reagan National begins its descent, and from my window seat I watch us settle into the thin layer of altostratus clouds covering central Florida like batting, diffracted and billowy, perfect mirror-imaged moguls repeating themselves as far as I can see. Soft rays from the five p.m. sun contrast the clouds and the blue sky, but we pass through quickly and everything below is muted aquarium blue, and blurry, like looking up from the bottom of a swimming pool. This is Orlando, the Orlando Airport specifically, and my three nights at the Hyatt Regency Orlando International Airport Hotel (prime location within the airport!) are appropriate, given this is the last leg of my two-month trip and here too is where it started. The Orlando airport is Biosphere east, its giant windows and Macaroni Grill and hotel bar sporting too few barflies and too many Wrangler and polo shirt clad Grainger Industrial Supply salesmen small consolation for the sixty-something hours I spend within it. A flight should end in an adventure, not a cage, and the delicious snack mix upon which I gorge at the bar does not fulfill my need for adventure, or the potential for danger, not just the threat of broken bones and bruised egos and humiliation but also the kind emotive, that sensorial overload we earn from placing ourselves in positions unfamiliar. Adventurous my work trips are not.

G.K. Chesterton wrote that the danger of the modern person is his constant effort to escape from the street in which he lives, and that were he to be snowed in, with his neighbors and immediate surroundings his only stimulant, he “should step suddenly into a much larger and much wilder world than we have ever known.” G.K. overreaches, and his early 1900’s didn’t have the luxury of today’s air travel, but his sentiments remain true: we delve not into our neighbor’s business, ostensibly out of respect but really because once we learn of that wilder world, we still have to face our neighbors in the morning, and wouldn’t that get awkward. But when your flights end in taxis, and domed airports, and city sidewalks, you take your adventure as it comes.

Nashville at night, to paraphrase Shawn Mullins, is far more Los Angeles than Grand Ole Opry, despite it being the home of modern country music, the proof in the glut of decorative, Crayola-box spectrum piebald cowboy boots and bought, not won, belt-buckles; embroidered, rhinestoned cowboy shirts more Affliction and Ed Hardy than Pendleton and Sheplers. And boobs. Boobs everywhere, huge, fake ones, spilling from spaghetti strap shirts and protruding out the front side of back-less dresses, on all ages, 16 to 60, inappropriately large when they should be average, or smooth and taut where they should be leathery, Tennessee such an unhealthy (third in obesity!)[1], unathletic state to have so many giant breasts on Time for Timer[2] bodies. Nashville also has, I suspect, more people per capita who talk to themselves. Loudly. No timid under the breath commentary here, and your presence is more likely nuisance than potential audience, particularly for those crazies lingering west of the railroad tracks running under Broadway; a stark juxtaposition to the itinerants on the east side, some brilliantly playing guitars and fiddles, or white five-gallon plastic buckets and accordions, mandolins and melodicas for whatever money you’re willing to throw down, metal or paper non-discriminatory.

Across the street from the Sheraton I pause to hear a young man give his testimony to a mix of itinerants and groupies, black and white, backpack-laden and homeless, some crammed at his feet like a mosh pit and an equal amount strewn across the plaza like morning-after red Solo party cups. A city bus roars by, denying me the opportunity to hear the preacher give his take on the role of wife, but at the same time a disheveled, scholarly looking man approaches me from the sidewalk, cigarettes and keys in one hand, newspaper in the other. We listen to the preacher for a few minutes, then talk ourselves, about Jesus, and wives, and bluegrass music, loudly enough that we get shushed by a half-asleep vagrant, until the man tells me he’s locked his keys in his car, and could he just borrow a few dollars for the bus and I realize it’s all a ruse and as epical a beggar’s pitch I have ever heard.

In Reagan National I pass Laura Bush and one of her twin daughters, the two of them focused, a string of dark suited men both in front and in back, a silent, woolen pinstriped elephant walk; on a flight to Phoenix I witness two robust twenty-something black women, obviously on their first flight, vociferously and adamantly refusing to part with their bags which the flight attendants want to check; as clear, I think, a manifestation of black mistrust of any sort of government bureaucracy as one could ask for. The black women’s resolve outlasts the flight attendants devotion, and they keep their luggage.

On a flight to Kansas a couple behind me talk to their young child, non-stop, explaining every detail, the finer points of acceleration and lift, depriving him of any element of surprise, or the exhilaration of flight, likely creating apprehension where there may have been only joy. Explaining how 80,000 pounds of alloyed aluminum defies gravity sounds sketchy to even my ears, and it must be gobbledygook if you’re two, so why not just let the kid enjoy the ride? I find hope for them when they discuss, at length and after smacking their son’s hand for smacking his own mother’s hand, their suspicion that “perhaps we’re sending the wrong message.” Realization late is better than realization never.

Leaving Detroit a middle-Eastern man – Yemeni, in fact, which turns out to not be a state-sponsor of terrorism – moves up several rows in order to sit across from me, in a row of empty seats, him wearing a thick winter jacket despite the stiflingly hot preflight airplane air; he looks from front to back multiple times, nervously, apprehensively, each one of his looks making me, in turn, more nervous and apprehensive. He spends too much time in the bathroom, and upon return begins to pray, semi-prostrate on the seat-back tray in front of him. This causes me such consternation that I lift the arm rest, unbuckle my seat belt and turn slightly towards him; I will not let him leave his row if it appears he’s making a break for the cockpit. And though I like the idea of hero, I’m more lover than fighter, so I instead engage him in conversation. He is neither bomber nor one-way pilot, but rather a Detroit gas station attendant on his way to Yemen to visit his three children, last seen more than two years ago, and he produces pictures of his two daughters and son. The eldest daughter, surprisingly, is the object of his most affection, and he pauses at her photo the longest, a Disneylandish five by seven picture of the girl standing, arms crossed, with her own airbrushed headshot in the upper right corner. Shame, I think, on me, and I wonder if any of the 9/11 terrorists had saccharine pictures of lovely daughters in their wallets.

From Orlando to Philly a precocious girl next to me asks me to smell the feet of her stuffed Minnie Mouse (I do), then peppers me and everyone else around us, for the rest of the flight, with all forms of the word “irritate.” She uses it correctly, if not gratuitously. She’s irritated, her father is irritating her, she doesn’t mean to irritate me, the air is irritatingly cold.

From Hawaii to DC I sit next to another daughter, this one a laconic college senior returning from a trip with her inversely verbose mother, them discussing the daughter’s future but the latter dominating the conversation. She solicits my opinion routinely; she wants her daughter to be in “policy,” but the daughter, wearing too-tight jeans, a long sleeve mock turtle with a peach colored button up sweater and a strand of pearls, just wants to write. She is uninspiring, and I wonder at what age the prematurely mature turn from precocious to simply boring.

In a Philadelphia airport hotel bar I witness a female bartender taking absolutely no shit from the Korean couple who own the bar, first exasperating the husband, then pleasantly taking my order for a beer (“another Sierra Nevada honey?”), then exasperating his wife. It becomes apparent the bartender has only worked here a few weeks, and I do not know how it can last too many more.

From Denver to San Francisco I read that the world still thinks America is the coolest country on the planet; boarding a plane in Seattle I overhear an older woman, fumbling with her dated cell phone over the tops of her glasses, ask her traveling companion “how do I put this thing on vibrator;” on the way to Kansas City a meticulously manicured male flight attendant hits on me, casually dropping my name during his rounds: “can I get you something to drink Joe?” Beat. “That is your name. Isn’t it?”

My cab driver from Incheon International Airport to my Seoul hotel is an American citizen; Mr. Kim – all Kims and Lees in Korea, no Hatfields versus McCoys here lest the country eat itself in genocide or mutually assured destruction – is 41, but has spent the last twenty years of his life on America’s west coast after spending the first twenty here. He left his fifteen year old daughter with friends so he and his wife could come home to take care of his ailing father, and he tells me, salaciously, that though his wife was born in America, her “body is all Korean.”

The flight to Korea chases the sun for the duration, mirroring the revolution and defying darkness; the return flight counters it, defying time (I leave Seoul at six pm on Friday, and arrive in Seattle at 1230 the same day).

Gone: the resetting of watches upon touchdown. Cell phones are tethered to satellites, and watches will be gone from the civilized world soon enough, at least for practical purposes, serving instead as they do in the Third World, nothing more than a bauble, a Swatch Watch for the 21^st Century.

In Seattle, a friend’s beautiful downtown wedding is juxtaposed with listening to a convicted triple-murderer, being prepped to testify for the government in a trial against a co-conspirator, complain about his haircut. I crack a joke about the difference between a bad haircut and a good one (two days), and am later horrified at my detachment in the presence of bona fide evil.

I find that flying more often makes it harder, not easier, a subconscious recognition, perhaps, that my odds are decreasing; particularly on takeoff, where I start to imagine the plane nose-diving into a field, or houses, or a river, and I wonder if I will close my eyes during the fall or keep them open.

While waiting for my ride in the Incheon International Airport, I meet 32 year-old Keshab Raj Sapkota, an American Soldier as of one year ago and a Nepalese citizen the 31 years prior. He taught social studies in his hometown of Butwal until he won a proverbial Golden Ticket, a free path to American citizenship, just one of about fifty thousand annually out of nearly fifteen million applicants in the Diversity Program. Keshab had a point-six percent chance to win this Green Card Lottery, and after spending about six months at Ft. Benning, Georgia, here he is on his way to the 2^nd Infantry Division at Camp Casey, Republic of Korea, to be an air conditioner repairman in order to provide for a better life for his wife and daughter. Such are the things that make us American, and I think, perhaps, America is the coolest country on the planet, in spite of it all.

[1] Gold to Mississippi, Silver to Louisiana

[2] When I’m slow on the draw, and I need something to chaw, I hanker for a hunka cheese. When my ten gallon hats-a-feeling five gallons flat, I got something planned, which is little cheese sandwiches. When my get up and go has got up and went, I hanker for a hunka cheese. When I’m dancin’ a hoe down, and my boots kinda slow down, or any time I’m weak in the knees, I hanker for a hunka, a slabber slice a chunk of, a snack a day’s a winner, and it won’t spoil my dinner, I hanker for a hunka cheese.

March 31, 2009November 16, 2015

The Ninth Life

My grandfather spent the first months of his life as a widower sleeping above the covers of his decades-old queen size bed. Changing the sheets required the initiative of his daughters; my grandfather felt that if he washed anything he would lose, forever, the pillow-case smell of his wife. He and my grandmother had been married some fifty years when she died over twelve years ago, and in some sense, I think, he has simply been waiting around to die.

Over the last few days, it seemed increasingly likely that day had come. My grandfather isn’t supposed to have aspirin, but had unknowingly been swallowing 325 mg of the stuff each time he followed up his vanilla ice cream with an Alka Seltzer tablet. The aspirin ate a hole in something, he started leaking blood internally, then throwing it up.

We have been down this road before. Several times in the last few years, and a few isolated events over his lifetime, have prompted his five children to make the one- to seven-hour trek from the nether regions of Nevada to his hospital bedside, muscling past the hovering priest and fawning nurses (even in the throes of death, he’s a bit of a charming fellow).

But again my grandfather has defied the cumulative effects of age, odds, loneliness and preservatives; again his children have packed up and went back home, heads shaking in equal parts admiration and disbelief. To be fair, for a man who subsists almost entirely on bear claws and Hot Pockets, every day he gets up is a spit in the face of the devil himself.

A funeral is an ablution for the life of man. Tragic and cheerless for those who die young; a maudlin celebration for those whose lives have been full and satisfying, but an ablution regardless. It is also, unfortunately, a chit you can use just once. But why? Why are there no eulogies for the living?

My grandfather has always been, with the exception of his brief hospital stays, in full control of his faculties. He continues to hunt and ride horses even in his 87th year, walks daily, and possesses a wit that seems to only get more lascivious as he ages (he recently told his nurses he didn’t want an X-Ray because he was worried it would make him sterile). He takes my grandmother with him just about everywhere he goes, she the permanent resident of the left side of a small oak box, he the would-be tenant of the right. He buys her flowers regularly. When he comes into town on cold-day errands he leaves grandma at his youngest child’s house so she won’t get cold, and if he wants to stay only briefly grandma provides a ready-made excuse: can’t stay long, I’ve got your grandmother in the car.

My grandfather is simple. My gut tells me that definition means something different to you than it does to me, but I don’t know a better single word to convey my admiration for the man. Dictionary-dot-com lists twenty-nine different uses, and of those I think the one coming closest is free of deceit or guile; sincere; unconditional.

A high-school graduate, in his lifetime he has been a first-generation American, a hair-tonic hocker, a newspaper boy, a retriever of moonshine for the drunks under Bayonne’s bridges, a sailor, a World War II veteran, a pipe-fitter, a miner, construction worker, heavy-machine operator and a member of the Greatest Generation. He is a pioneer, part of the post-World War II westward migration; a cowboy, a hunter, an amateur rancher, artist, and leather-worker; a husband, father of five, grandfather to eighteen and great grandfather to sixteen (with number seventeen on the way).

He is also, for me, an unfalteringly good example of what it means to be a man. He wishes ill-will to no one, and is the least judgmental person I know. I have never heard him raise his voice and never heard him swear in anger. He deflects praise, takes responsibility for his actions and expects others to do the same. His most prized possession – he told me once – is his family. No contest. I know every man sins, but I wager we could use both hands, less thumbs, to accurately account for the times in his life he has lied, cheated, or stolen (and make fists if you want to count the times he failed to correct it). He used to drink, daily, but when he realized he was an alcoholic he just quit. No twelve-step program, no intervention, no relapse – he just quit. Simple.

He uses words sparingly. I once read Ernest Hemingway won a bet by writing a story with just six words (For sale: baby shoes. Never worn); I think grandpa could give him a run for his money. If something doesn’t sit well with him, he might say “that’s not right.” Only later, after I began to develop my own moral compass, did I realize he didn’t mean “that’s incorrect,” but something much, much closer to

life is but a series of decisions, of interwoven threads not only keeping you tethered to the ground but keeping your friends and families close, close where they can pull you back down, if need be, or even give you yards of slack to make your own way. If you are lucky, you can pull them right along with you, or let them lead you back on course. But if you make that choice, or tolerate those who choose to make such decisions, even in passing, you might take those first steps down a path that ends someplace you just don’t want to be.

He grew up in Bayonne, New Jersey, one of the most densely populated cities in America, but home is, and has been, a double-wide trailer at the end of a quarter-mile long dusty road in the high deserts of Nevada. And though his blood is Irish, and his heart belongs to a dead German, his soul is unmistakably and firmly set in the salty dirt of the sagebrushed American West. Here was – is – his dream: to own a horse, to be a cowboy, to raise a family and work the dirt and hunt and fish and never take more than you need and respect others and have your own space. And he did it, he has it all – maybe not much to you and I, but it is everything he ever wanted. Simple.

Josey Wales is one of my favorite fictional characters, and I have only recently put a fine point on the reasons why: but for the six-shooters and the inclination towards serial killing, he is a man who reminds me of my grandfather. I think he and Josey would get along right well. Neither say much, but say what they’re going to do and do what they say. Both kind to animals and lovers of the earth, they have understated senses of humor, respect other people and above all else love their families.

Appropriate, then, to borrow Josey’s simple words for a fallen companion and put them to my living grandfather: I rode with him, and I got no complaints.

July 2, 2008October 14, 2021

Curtains for the Zen Dog

I killed my dog on Monday. To be more precise, I suppose, I told a vet to kill him. I wasn’t the trigger puller, or in this case the plunger-pusher, but it felt like it.

Late Sunday night Mojo pissed himself, on his bed, and then couldn’t stand up to move out of the mess. For almost 18 hours his pulse rate was at a drug-influenced 170-200 beats per minute, but uninhibited it raced to 300. It should have been a steady 110. On the way back to the clinic Monday evening, the cardiologist told me he had collapsed once again, and though when his heart was pulsating in the lower range of that 170-300 frame he was literally pulling the vet techs around the hospital floor, they had to give him drugs more and more frequently and his lows were causing him more and more distress. Three of the four valves of his heart were paper thin. “It is not a bad thing,” she said, “to put down an 11 ½ year old Great Dane.”

I know this, I told her. Most Great Danes live 8-10 years, frequently have hip and heart problems, and lug around significantly less than 180 pounds. But this was my friend, a dog who has been, with the exception of his several brief stays with the Jenks’ and two long ones with my mom, my roommate and companion for the last eleven years. That’s almost 30% of my life. It’s 73% of the time I have been in the army. It would be 15% of my entire time on earth should I live to my 74th birthday, the average age of an American male. Euthanizing an 11 1/2 year old Great Dane might not be a bad thing, but it is certainly not a good one.

In his younger years Mojo was, in the most emphatic sense of the word, a beast. He would pull me on my mountain bike, on a dead-on sprint, for almost two miles. More than once he pulled me off of it. He inadvertently broke my mother’s forearm in a game of tag. He could play touch rugby for hours, was a decent hiker but a terrible swimmer (distances were limited to however far he had to go to drape himself over me floating on my pool chair). He was in a few fist-fights and liked being around fringe characters. He possessed a pair of the biggest testicles you ever saw, and didn’t mind me showing them off. He was a great roommate. Though he didn’t bark much, and would never bite anyone, if he was home I never needed to close (let alone lock) a back door when I was at work for the day. He was house-trained so quickly and so well that I once mistakenly blamed one of my friends for drunkenly wetting my bed when I was out of town for a weekend. And if he did make a mistake, he always told me so, usually as soon as I walked in the door. He could be rough around the edges, I will grant you. His breath was atrocious. He sometimes picked on smaller dogs, leaving me feeling like the guy who shows up at parties with the belligerent frat boy no one really likes but pretends to. He was never accused of being brilliant; his sheer dumbness, in fact, may have been his most endearing quality. But his drawbacks became nothing but background noise when he leaned against you or dropped his enormous head into your lap and stared at you with his slightly crossed eyes.

Mojo had taken well to our Capital Hill neighborhood, and no one had perfected pretentiousness better than he. I would leave him in the front yard while I sat on the porch, reading and smoking a cigar, my view of Mojo obstructed by a hedge row but knowing exactly how he was sitting: front legs stretched out, head up and nose elevated slightly above parallel, hind quarters off to his left. Sphinx-like, were the Sphinx dressed in business casual. One could not walk by without noticing Mojo, sitting in the sun, a Zen dog in an ambitious city. People would, more often than not, talk to him.

“You are huge.”

“You are a horse.”

“Oh. My. God. You are beautiful.”

Not once in two years did Mojo rise from his position to meet a dog-less person (and those with dogs usually moved along quickly). He rarely bothered to even make eye contact, and would frequently shift his gaze further away from whomever was standing in front of him, his answer to all compliments uniform: “I know this. Now please move along so I can ignore someone else.”

But now here we sit, facing one another, him on a lowered stainless steel cart, me on the floor with my legs under him, one arm around his neck and the other scratching his belly. He looks sad, but I don’t know if it’s because he is, in fact, sad, or if it’s a product of me bawling childishly. I know we can’t sit here all night long, but I’m not sure what else to do. I impulsively take a picture of him with my cell phone and immediately regret it. The picture is stygian, his face long and skinny and cartoonish like a Pat Oliphant sculpture. A few friends are here with me, and I ask them to step outside so I can I tell my dog, in private, how much I love him and how thankful I am to have had him as a friend for so long. I hug him once for my mom and once for me. He barely raises his head. And then death knocks on the door.

Death, oddly, looks an awful lot like a thirty-something Connie Chung. She carries in her hand three syringes: one large filled with a milky fluid, one large filled with something appearing to be watered-down Pepto Bismol, and one small. The first shot, death/Connie Chung tells me, is anesthesia, which will put Mojo to sleep so he feels no pain or discomfort. The second, and I think the third – I’m not really listening at this point and so I don’t know what she said – induce cardiac arrest. What I do know is that there is asleep and there is dead. Asleep feels like Mojo asleep. I can see his chest heaving, still feel his heart racing. My own heart races; I want to stop this.

“Hey! Ha Ha! Just kidding! Sometimes Mojo and I like to play jokes on each other! He licks my face when I’m asleep, I pretend I’m going to euthanize him!”

But Connie Chung is quick, and the second syringe is emptied and then the third. And though I am familiar with my dog asleep, dead is another matter. I feel the full weight of his anvil-sized head, see and hear his last breath, feel the cart move as his 180 pound body, for the first and only time muscleless, fully relents to gravity. A forearm slips off the table.

I am, probably, Godless. But I love life, and karma, and symmetry, and existentialism is a pretty cool concept and maybe just maybe Elysium is a real place. I like to think so. And sometimes life gives us those little reminders that we all come and go, and good often replaces bad, and trees grow in dirt, and being with is usually a better thing than being without. If you’re lucky, the timing of these reminders is such that it’s harder to write it off as mere happenstance when it is so obviously and joyously karma or symmetry or, if you prefer, God. Such is my Mojo-less ride home, when I call my good friend Patrick, waking him because he’s been up all night with his wife Andrea helping her to deliver their new daughter. I had previously suggested they name her Patandrea, but they’ve gone instead with Fiona. I jokingly tell Pat that Fiona’s and Mojo’s spirits have passed one another in the other-world, and we should hope Mojo’s spirit hasn’t inserted itself into Fiona’s body.

Pat says she could do a lot worse.