Rounding The Cape in a Strong Gale Part III

Part III

The sun ascended slowly over the cascading chalk and limestone cliffs north of Marseille, and Clark steadied the wheel with newfound resolve to make landfall meaningful and prophetic; the fulfillment of a month's drifting in the north Atlantic, identities swirled amongst floating rubbish and seaweed. This was not to say he hadn't been to shore yet; quite to the contrary, many times his feet had touched terra firma in the fast 2 weeks since he passed through the steely, gray straight of Gibraltar, the poverty and mistreatment of Africa filling the southern horizon across a scant ten miles of water. His first stop had been in Spain, in the little fishing village of Tarifa, just around the corner from the imposing stone monolith of Gibraltar Rock and the stoic, resolute control of the damn British, content on their eye into affairs of the third world to the south. Clark was not concerned with business or politics, though, mainly he was just bent on experiencing, whether it be temporally or subconsciously, anything worthwhile now days had to be felt,he thought with reeling impact, laying face up on the uneven teak deck boards.

After stocking up on fresh water and produce in Tarifa [the customs agents seemed satisfied with his explanation of personal adventure and cruising in broken, stuttering spanish] he set off along the northern Mediterranean coast, the fabled Cote D'Azure of Hollywood and summer daydreams. It proved even more phantasmagoric and bright than the movies predicted, full of tan, accented young men and women who seemed dubiously employed, spending most of their time on the beach or driving zippy little cars along narrow roads that careened over precipices into the expanse of the Mediterranean. The French were smart and inquisitive, free from the snobbery and pretense he had been led to expect by the xenophobic, zealous American populous. They wanted to know his purpose, his origin, and when he pleaded guilty to neither, they seemed content with him, the tanned creases round his smile and weather-beaten oxford shirts evidence of some noble desire he must have here, so far from home. He loved the food, the wine, the easy camaraderie of the young people, bred of discontent for authority or the government, plans and the future.

On this particular morning, August 20th 1978, his parents and friends had taken him for dead, and the immediate grief, the anguish of loss unseen and unforgiving, had begun to fade as their busy lives clouded the memory of the young man they thought they lost. The selfish recklessness of his actions were of no consequence to him now, and the future loomed so immediate and tangible that the occasional fits of regret he had alone on the boat faded quickly, like a child's tantrum over candy or television. He had been alone before, and he was alone now, pleased with the grandeur and romantic perfection of the coastline, as it never disappointed or expected anything in return. He missed the spontaneity of day to day existence at school, amongst strangers and friends, this was true, because whatever excitement that had generated was always a dead end, safe and predictable, the adoration or lust of a stranger that was never returned. This excitement was terrifying and had consequences of life and loss; emotional attachment had no room here.

He thought of the couple nights he had spent on the beaches of La Coudouliere outside Toulon earlier in the week, dropping anchor suddenly and haphazardly in shallow water in a little sandy cove, the sun beating down relentlessly on the patchwork summer cottage roofs over the water. A young man had appeared out of the corner of Clark's eye in a little wooden dory, of the type the old fisherman used to cast their humble little nets into the maw of the sea, and he had waved enthusiastically and shouted hello in half-coherent French. The young man, Guillaume was his name it turned out, was lean and tan, with a sunburnt shock of fading blonde hair and ratty cutoff shorts speckled in little bits of white paint, endearing and indifferent. With the beautiful forwardness of the French, he asked what a handsome young man like Clark was doing in Coudouliere, and 20 minutes later they were tearing at worn edges of cloth and buttons in Guillaume's little whitewashed cottage on the dunes, breathing mixed with the heavy summer air that pressed down on sweaty flesh.

Guillaume said he had a girlfriend, "Mes Parents habite en Paris", he stated beseechingly into the warm creased of the pillow, as if that explained it all. Clark understood though; summer fun was heady and spontaneous, about feeling hot and restless, not pleasing relatives or establishing a future, even one's own psyche was irrelevant amongst the pale white sand and green vines. Addresses and phone numbers, in a comically sad display of post sexual connectivity, were exchanged on yellowed bits of a phonebook, and he ran down the fading wooden dock to the little skiff to row back out to the sailboat. As he steeled himself for the emotional drain of disconnection, he heard quick, nervous footsteps behind him and felt a steady, heavy hand on his shoulder. "Wait!" said Guillaume, the Parisian with the girlfriend, and his eyes lit with such childish conviction Clark couldn't say no to staying another 2 days.

He left Coudouliere with the distinct apprehension of an opportunity spent and dwindled; the awkward slowness of parting with Guillaume still fresh in his mind. The experience had taken over his sensory functions at this point though, and he shied away from the cruelty of commitment. The sun along the Cote D'Azure was vicious and luxurious in August, and the steep white limestone cliffs cascaded angular fragments of light down into the ragged, hollow sea. He imagined the boat suspended amongst thoughts and the 3-dimensional miasma of the past, the water parting before him like Jesus on the Dead Sea. He thought with pained affection of the quizzical glance Guillaume had given him as they parted on the humble, rotting wooden edge of the dock, a glance that betrayed the hurt of having let a stranger love him.

Everyone was a stranger, in the context of the experience; even if you had been inside someone, you hadn't really known them, wound the tight gears of their soul with your own hands. Lying in the neat little wooden bed with whitewashed sheets in a geometric corner of the house, Guillaume had said he was a writer. This was to say he had family money, and after an education from a good university in Paris, could afford to pursue writing free of the harsh bourgeois struggle for bread and happiness. The daily mundanity of a commutes and deadlines was replaced by living comfortably on the edges of boredom; inspiration coming in childish bouts of creative thrashing. Clark had happened on such a moment, an opening amongst the tedium of being aesthetic and pleasing people. This was precisely the kind of spontaneity he had hoped for, yet somehow he still longed for the scary push and pull of nature, the glimpse into the endless teal abyss of the ocean, or a collision with a rogue shipping container 1,000 miles from land. He wondered what had become of the smiling Arab seamen he had exchanged greetings with across the water 600 miles northwest of the Azores, their crisp white clothing radiant in the sun, their simple trust in Allah and the shipping company, bringing them modest immortality.

Clark felt so vulnerable, to himself and to those who eyed him curiously, wondered if he was the real deal, an energy worth reciprocating. He pulled the anchor up with taunt, lean muscle and heaved the sandy, dripping iron rake onto the foredeck, the boat lurching forward on kind western breezes under sail. The craft heeled hard and bottles of cheap rum and Pinot Grigio rolled around below deck as he trimmed the main and they rounded the arrogant stone precipice of the cape. It was not a terminus of land but rather a reluctant finger into the sea, an abstraction between the next pint of land upcoast. On this sinuous and rounded coastline, it was hard to tell which way was forward and which was back, which led to Morocco and which to the aromatic, ancient ports of Sardinia and Sicily, broken volcano's dripping into the sea.

From the vantage point of a good sailboat, Clark thought contently, the world presented itself just as it ought to, mountains announcing their presence far off on the horizon, cities glowing in hazy amber fog over the calm black water at night. He set the wheel and trimmed the sail's to his liking, a long, confident tack southeast away from the raucous green coast and out into the warm, shallow gulf, the gulls and shorebirds silent and curious. Rummaging about in a little wooden compartment behind the helm [at this point, all things had a rightful place, and the workings of the yacht were of hi own sinew] he found a bottle of old gin. He bit off the bitter end of a lime and poured a little tonic water, preferring to take alternating shots of each rather than mix the three. It tasted acrid and delicious, the bitter summer remembrance, and suddenly he was so thirsty he could only drink more and more and more, crying over Guillaume and the future between squeezes of lime and gin. The tears were salty and old, running into pale stubble and the faded end's of a Brook's Brother's collar, which drooped downward dejectedly from the assault of all this unpredictable running about.

MusiccisuM

Bang Gang Records, a small Australian Label, is on the forefront of electronic/house labels to watch for 2010. With artist's like 18 year-old Perth wonderkid Shazam, Bag Raiders, Toecutter, Cassian, ZZZ, The Golden Bug, and Headman, they are a group to watch this year. Technically, they are a wax distributor for much bigger and better known label Modular Records, who has made a small fortune off act's like The Yeah Yeah Yeah's, Cut Copy, and the Preset's. Bang Gang specializes in delicious 12" releases of singles by it's formidable list of DJ's and Producer's, and seems to engineer their own remixes as well, much like New York's 'A Touch of Class'.

Speaking of A Touch of Class Records, they deserve some love too. Though they haven't been as prolific lately as their fellow NY nu-disco brethren DFA Records, they have been busy pleasing their wonderful lineup of artists, including The Ones, Scissor Sisters, Waldorf, and Services. If Waldorf, who up until now have been sort of a one-album wonder, release anything on par with "Your my Disco", they will blow Turbo or Modular out of the water. Just my 2 cents.

In the realm of modern trip-hop and ambient electronica, for lack of a better description, there seem to be a lot of imitators and very few genuine success's. The U.K's Matt Cutler, better known as Lone, is one of these success stories, and his recent release on Werkdisk Records, "Ecstasy and Friends", is a solid creative effort and a new direction for the genre. His marriage of old school funk and breakbeat samples, un-syncopated drums and stuttering, heavy bass breathe a new kind of deep house/funk that defies fair description. Best to just give it a listen.

French house producer and DJ Surkin recently released a new EP, "Silver Island", just out on Paris's Institubes Records. While not really comparable to his his first album, it is still a solid collection of tracks, with his signature tight vocal samples and sharp hi-hats, in the modern Parisian house style of fellow Institubes DJ's Para One or Bobmo. The standouts are probably the title track and "Easy Action", which are more akin to his earlier efforts. The single, "Fan Out", has some choice moments, but on the whole suffers from a bit too much compression and over-production. It really is amazing how much better a lot of electronic music sounds live, when the EQ is actually somewhere near correct, and not compressed into chopped off notes and stuttering bass. "Next of Kin" and "White Knight Two" are probably his best tracks to date, and when I saw him in Denver, he played a killer live set, based largely off these two singles. To those who doubt the artistic merits of knob-twiddling and record spinning, I would advise you to get plastered and see any of these fine DJ's at a venue near you. Surkin, who looks about 14 and hails from Southern France, is a force to be reckoned with behinds the tables.

Jonsi, of Sigur Rosa fame, recently released a solo album, "go", which, despite inconsistencies, is definitely worth a listen, as it run's the entire spectrum from warbling, surrealistic art-rock to more anthemic rock ballad's, all tied together by his unique vocal ability to sound both sincere and innocent. On XL Records, he will be touring the U.S this spring, and is actually slated to make a stop in Denver coming up on April 21st!!

Another band in the genre of ethereal, spacey nu-disco art-rock is Gothenburg, Sweden's 'Little Dragon', a four piece collective with a Japanese front woman, whose distinctive and beautiful vocals bring together an otherwise largely mediocre album.

Several newer artist's on European house labels Institubes and Boys Noize have caught me ear lately, the best being young Parisian producer Tacteel, who is on Institubes with his friend Benoit, better known as Surkin. Another DJ to watch is Boys Noize Records artist Strip Steve, whose new EP 'Delta Disco' is a superb foray into old-school sample based, clean house and tech. He has collaborated with German artist's including Siriusmo, David Rubato, and Boys Noize, and produced some really top notch material, great for live mixes or DJ set's.

Show Reviews:

Spoon and Deerhunter, Ogden, Denver Colorado, April 7th 2010: Let me start with saying I was pretty excited about this show. I mean, seriously, when do 2 great, widely acclaimed indie bands like this come to Denver, let alone tour together!? Judging from the buzz around the Ogden before this show, I could tell people were pretty stoked as well.

8 Days across the Southwest with Lin

I feel some details of the past 8 days spent road tripping and rock climbing across the southwestern U.S are worth noting, if for no one else but myself. Maybe Lin too. Here goes:

The trip began with the impending weight of a spring blizzard, which descended on Colorado with typical ferocity and suddenness. Friday morning dawned, and what had on Thursday been an awakening landscape of green grass and radiant sun had morphed back into snowy sleep, covered in blowing drifts and gray clouds. We waited out our initial start date at Lin's house in north Boulder that evening, packing and making excited plans for the upcoming week in Arizona. Lin made pesto pasta and I brought wine and a salad, that was the deal. I suppose we seem so comically mismatched at first, her, a retired geologist, librarian, and attorney, 66 and with a climbing resume few of her generation and gender can boast, in one corner. In the other corner, see me, Philip Persson, 23 year old perpetual undergraduate, restless wanderer of the vast Western landscape, climber, skier, dreamer. We shared so many things though; the drive to climb, the inability to control our mouths or our political correctness, a non-traditional orientation on life and relationships, and a deep love of the outdoors. We drank too much cheap wine, argued politics and denounced religious nuts and conservatives till the dawn came up again, and constantly made excuses about why we weren't climbing as hard as this or that. We bickered, laughed, smiled, and made fun of everything and everyone under the sun. It was thus I suppose that this road trip materialized.

Saturday morning came sooner than I'd hoped, and we loaded Lin's little Jetta TDI wagon with the weeks provisions and gear. The drive was daunting and immediate, something I dreaded and anticipated, because I knew it led to a magic landscape of warm granite and towering domes in the Sonoran Desert to the south. Conditions got exponentially better as we made our way south, and save the hairy initial descent from the driveway and some snowpacked spots between Denver and Colorado Springs, the roads were fine and the sun did shine. Santa Fe came around and we stopped at a Trader Joe's to stock up on some last minute supplies for the backcountry. Needless to say, while I am not a man of religious inclinations, I may have found god in Trader Joes. 3 overflowing bags and sixty dollars later I was a solid convert. The drive from Boulder to Tucson is largely forgettable, the monotonous New Mexico desert fading into a greenish-brown blur at 80 miles an hour, with occasional bony, stubborn mountains poking through the vast alluvial plains. The landscape does change though, in way subtle at first ands then glaring and beautiful. Slowly, the arid high plains are replaced by the lower, more lush Sonoran desert, it's Century Plants and Saguaro's decorating green hills and sweeping valley's between the endless basin and range ridges that fill the burning horizon line, the highway always about to crest some hill.

We rolled into our destination around midnight, Cochise Stronghold, a vast a magnificent landscape of sweeping granite domes and canyons filled with verdant trees and wildlife, which empty out onto a African-like Savanna, which is spotted with oak trees, giving in a slightly surreal, coastal quality. Dead tired, I somehow rigged the tent as Lin attended to the important task of ridding the back of the car of enough of our shit so she could sleep in it, and in the process, opening a bottle of wine. The almost full moon radiated cool white haze across the valley as we sipped cheap Pinot Grigio and speculated on what a beautiful morning tomorrow would hold, and how it was still 30 degrees warmer at midnight in southern Arizona than it had been in Boulder yesterday. The next day was indeed beautiful, and we set out across the savanna to the base of the Sheepshead, a towering 700 foot granite dome, to climb Peacemaker, a 7 pitch bolted 5.10 outing I had traveled up once before. The first pitch was a bit stiffer than I remembered, and as Lin made fun of my poor footwork, I cursed the delicate slab climbing. As we made our way up the wall though, grumbles of "motherfucker!' were slowly replaced my smiles and even the occasional hoot and holler. At the summit, we sat and drank lukewarm water and ate old granola bars, and admired the singularly otherworldly, monolithic granite landscape that lay below us, deep rounded chasms where Coatimundi's and Ring Tailed Cat's nibbled on berries and hawks nested high in cliff nooks.

The next day, we ventured back up towards the Sheepshead, but today our agenda was a bit different, as the fond memories I has of the beautiful upper half of "Mystery of the Desert" on the nearby Muttonhead Dome had precluded any memory of the awful first pitch. Well, it wasn't that awful I suppose, save chossy cracks and 3 pieces of gear in 100 feet of climbing. I wretched up a nasty, shallow corner from the ground, fumbled in a little orange TCU, and decided it was better to traverse left out onto the face. 30 feet higher up, Lin politely reminded me I was facing a definite grounder, and thoughts of decking on hard gravel in the Southern Arizona backcountry clouded things a bit as I fumbled with an awkward nut placement overhead. After finally getting a decent piece in, I continued upward and was relieved to find a nice bolted belay on a comfortable stance on a dike. The rest of the climb was beautiful and fluid, save a little scary bolted face climbing up a leaning arete I did to avoid to infamous "wedge', a blood loss-inducing offwidth on pitch 2. The experience climbing on this perfect backcountry Arizona granite in March is hard to describe, and we milked a good 3 or 4 more pitches into the rest of the afternoon, returning to camp weary and worn, but not warn enough to fill the rest of the camping area with talk of "dumb, ignorant conservatives" and "intolerant Christian neo-con's", Lin's recent topics of choice. I of course followed along enthusiastically, and our opinions are now well known to the oak trees and cows that inhabit the meadow below Sheepshead rock.

Desert Varnish

They call it caliche, a type of calcite, or Aragonite rather, but not like the alabaster-white Roman columns and monolithic blocks of Aragon, Spain. This is a stoic, black varnish which coats the rough, hard edges of the desert and focuses the sun's angry rays down another lonely highway. In this case, the highway led to Bisbee, a former copper mecca at the very southern tip of America's sprawling manifest destiny, 8 miles from Mexico and a world away from the gray, suburban productivity of the Rust Belt or the northeast. Here, time moved slowly with the overhead passing of the sun, a brilliant white fireball that withered anything not shaded from its wrath. The green El Camino shot down the highway as if launched from the gates of hell, blazing along shimmering black asphalt riddled with potholes and crooked fissures where the desert had worked it's way into man's geometry. Inside, bathed in cool air conditioning and sharp, staccato rhythm's from the vintage speakers, sat a young man. His expression was fixed and rigid, forward but anticipatory, as if always cresting a hill.

They say drivers approaching Mach one out on the playa in Utah's Bonneville flats always note the sensation of being about to crest a rise, as the flatness is so uniform that eventually the curvature of the earth takes over, fading onward into the mountains. The young man in the driver's seat breathed evenly in deep, confident inhalations, and the edges of his mouth curled upward ever so slightly in smug satisfaction. He reached for a cigarette and thought better of it, shoving them under a worn pack, festooned in bright Navajo colors, a gift from the Rez people after his stay with them last spring. It wasn't right to call him a drifter, because he had time and money, luxuries not afforded to those confined to the paranoid realm of vagrancy. He had an education too; a BS in geography from Dartmouth, though his parents wouldn't say he was exactly using it. 'I'm taking a field sabbatical", he told them in straight-faced sincerity, though they knew this was bullshit; such things were for tenured professors and reserved academics, not idealistic young men whose future was infinitely possible. He had a name, but preferred not to use it when possible; names were too preconceived, too confining. If there was one thing he disliked, it was confinement. The lush green forests and neat Victorians of New England had slowly driven him insane until he did what all dreamers and half-believers did: went west.

This latest trip was both for business and pleasure. He was to procure and purchase minerals, no, not rocks or dusty, classroom-bound mineralogy samples, but radiant crystal groups of the highest quality and pedigree, the art of the natural world, he liked to say. Mineral collecting had always been an interest, a passion really, and the material desire to hold and possess clouded out monetary or practical concern. In his eyes, the world was filled with so much filth, the cheap, mass-produced miasma of 21st century life dulling people's aesthetics until everything was synthetic, artificially enhanced to replace experience. The experience had to be immediate, yet still long and strange, circuitous, and surreal. The collector was both an accumulator and an adventurer, scouring the ragged edges of the earth in search of the most beautiful and profane objects, that which we were meant to admire from a distance, wretched out of the earth and framed behind glass.

The mileposts now read in the single digits, and on the right, a broad, high cliff of grayish-white Escabarosa Limestone followed the highway, remains of a warm, ancient sea now juxtaposed in the desert. Between these humble layers of petrified ocean lay some of the richest copper veins in the world, huge, dense bunches of cuprite and azurite, chalcopyrite and malachite, their colors bold and obvious. To the weary, hungry men who first crossed this lonely bit of land a hundred years ago, their salvation must have been these bold outcrops of wealth, a hill of Malachite-laced limestone and porphyry a hundred meters long waiting to be converted to drain pipes and electrical wire, the dull functionality of modern society triumphed over nature's mystery. He also came down here, to the far corner of the Southwest, to escape people, the discontent and morbid pop culture bred by the cities of the East. People were too unpredictable, flimsy and temperamental, and he vowed only to sell them what they wanted, and in the process perhaps see into the heart of a gem, for as Keats said, "A thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever, Its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness."

To pass into nothingness was his greatest fear, and he poured a shot of whisky into his lemonade as the El Camino crested the last undulating, scrub oak clad hill before Bisbee. Lemonade tasted sweet and satisfying, like childhood, only giving and never taking. Bisbee sat at the upper end of a narrow canyon, and like most mining towns of the West, crammed improbable urban density into a former gully or wash, now serpentined by narrow, steep streets and bright pastel manor houses, the former trophies of the mine captains and Copper Kings. His first stop was a contact made though an old geology professor at Dartmouth, and from what he could gather, consisted of an ancient Mexican miner and his wife, former denizens of Bisbee's underground empire. They had some good minerals, professor Fawkes had mentioned, and were worth visiting if he was in the area. He had telephoned them last week from his parent's house on the Maine Coast, and had made his intentions and associations clear. "Mr. Hernandez, it is a pleasure to speak with you today. Let me first say I am much enamored with you're lovely little town of Bisbee. No, I'm not in real estate or politics. I am a mineral dealer. Ah, you have heard of such characters? Let me say they are not all flakes and con-artists. I am a recent college graduate, with an intense interest in the beautiful minerals of your town, and wish to purchase some of the specimens you have in your collection, at your discretion and convenience. Next Tuesday? Yes, that would work fine. Why don't we say noon then. Righty-o. You take care as well." He really did speak with such pompous, confident syntax and verbose forwardness, but it was a function of his eccentricity rather than his ego, and besides, the arrogance was lost on someone like Mr. Hernandez, who just took him to be a peculiar gringo.

He hastily punched the address into the little rectangular GPS; 325 Brewery Avenue, in the heart of the old business district. The car lurched up the steep, well-kept street, and he hastily threw the clutch into park on a narrow bit of dirt outside the little lime-green cottage. He knocked on the door, and an elderly, kind-faced man opened it, his smile a map of dark brown creases and eyes which has seen death and hardship, good times and the dregs of industry. Mr. Hernandez introduced his wife, a short, round woman wearing a festive Sinaloan dress and holding a tray of freshly cooked empanadas, which the young man devoured gratefully. Mr. Hernandez ushered him to a narrow, rickety staircase in the back of the single, open living room, and soon he stood in a dusty, poorly lit concrete room, surrounded by box after box of rocks. At first, his expectations dived, as he presumed Hernandez's "mineral collection" was nothing more than a typical jumble of crude ore samples, the usual miner's assortment of oddities picked up over the years. A closer inspection of a nearby box revealed some small blue crystals poking out from under thick dust and cobwebs. He picked up a large mass of brilliant green malachite, and, blowing off some dust, noticed a pocket on the backside covered in lustrous, dark blue 3-inch Azurite crystals. 'Jesus! he thought with elated surprise as he studied the specimen... it needed some serious cleaning and trimming, but once back home, this piece alone would easily sell for five thousand dollars or more to a wealthy east coast collector. His thoughts turned more practical as he speculated on what Mr. Hernandez knew about minerals... others had probably been here before; perhaps he wanted an absurd price for these minerals, or maybe he wasn't even willing to sell... He wanted to be fair, but he also realized that an honest price for him could still be a windfall for him, if he handled it right.

In the rusting teal truck of the El Camino, he had $6,000 in cash in a little gray leather suitcase. This was supposed to be for the whole trip; purchases, emergencies, food and booze, the works. He knew this was the best stuff he was going to see all day. In the modern mineral market, this was a windfall of unseen proportions, and he was absolutely ready to pool all his eggs in one basket to have a go at this. He made a cursory overview of the rest of the collection, which, as he expected, contained a relative variability in quality, but enough keepers to make the deal a no-brainer. The time has come and he approached Mr. Hernandez as calmly and indifferently as he could. "You have some superb minerals in your collection sir. This is obviously the work of someone with an eye for aesthetics. I will not hide the fact though that as I am sure you know, nothing is labeled or sorted, cleaning will be laborious, and there are a fair amount of lower-grade pieces. I am prepared to offer you six thousand dollars in cash for everything." Mr. Hernandez's eyes, which up until now had been wide and kind, narrowed with concentration, and he steeled himself for the inevitable no, looking absent-minded out the little stained glass window in the corner. Suddenly, he felt a hand meet his and start to shake, and they both smiled silently as he went out to the car to get the cash.

"Great, I just spent six thousand dollars on a bunch of rocks, which, in addition to being marketable to a very small, questionably-sane segment of the population, are going to barely fit in my little sports car." The rest of the afternoon was filled with huffing and puffing up and down stairs, moving, sorting, and cleaning with hoses and brushes in the little yard, and organization into neat new boxes of his own, stacked in little rows in the trunk. The couple mostly sat on the faded old floral-patterned couch in the living room, conversing quietly but excitedly in brisk Chihuahuan spanish, hands running over the pile of crisp, neat hundred dollar bills. He finished the packing and, after downing a few more empanadas, heartily shook hands with Mr. Hernandez, and gave his wife a kiss on the cheek before starting the engine and coasting down the steep incline of Brewery Gulch to downtown. He smiled and shouted a few non-sensical hoots and hollers, like a kid who had won the game single-handed AND gotten ice cream after. The deal was fair, honest and straightforward, but dammit if he hadn't made out well. He was also now dead broke, and he hurried up the street to the little antique's and novelties shop that sold 5 dollar rocks to the hordes of winter tourists. The aging woman behind the counter was getting ready to close up shop, and didn't seem overly pleased as he swaggered in the door, young bravado and style. He carried a rectangular white box, and inside were a couple dozen little blue Azurite roses, pretty but not especially rare. Still, they were hard to come by these days, and he knew she'd give him cash. 'Hundred bucks" he said flatly as he opened the fox on the counter, and she smiled as she withdrew 2 fifties from the antique register.

He skipped unevenly down the crooked street, red cowboy boots click-click-clack on the pavement, until the local saloon appeared to the left, tall glass windows lit with boisterous laughter and the din of conversation. He sat down at the old wooden bar and asked for a double shot of Jack, which, he thought, must have been a ticket of some sort with the locals, since his story soon flowed like the dried up edges of the Colorado, new friends and strangers crowded around as he made some sort of future for himself, here on the desert varnish.

'A Thousand Lifetimes in the Midwest//Grass is so Green'.

The chilly morning air caught me by surprise in the damp silver dew on the side of the interstate, and all of a sudden I regretted nothing. The circumstances of why I was lying face up on a blanket, naked except for some tattered corduroy shorts, on the side of I-80 were insignificant, yet somehow perfect. Ohio in late August was more serene and pastoral than I had imagined, and the purpose of this trip had begun to fade like the pale summer asphalt, sizzling in the rear view mirror through tortoiseshell Ray-Bans.

I was 24 and the bright blue horizon seemed infinite; life diverging into a myriad of worn dirt roads which tied together the uneven edges of the Midwest. I had always possessed a keen apprehension of the Midwest, no, an outright phobia really. I imagined nothing more than a 2-dimensional ocean of stale American dreams and cornfields, curving easterward over the green horizon until Appalachia finally brought relief. To ameliorate this uncertainty, I suppose I left Los Angeles with a bare minimum of plans or preparation. I didn't have to leave, I didn't have to do anything really; that was the apathetic beauty of upper-class, post-college existence in LA. The choice to simply exist and and be defined by the rhythms of time, which occluded greater consequence.

What the Midwest lacked in grandness or austerity it made up for in glorious sincerity, a sort of niceness almost alarming to someone so hardened by the cold pretension of LA. The shallow, vapid smog of the city faded over the vast western deserts, and as the highway crested each successive mountain range, it was like a new dawn, a buckle in the tinfoil of the earth. I guess I was afraid to trust people who didn't immediately judge you in cold logic, to open up to people who lived through the simple yearly cycles of the earth. The farmers I met were hard-faced, unafraid people with broad, flat foreheads and faded flannel shirts; their smiles fresh and warm. The anthropology of America was absurd and tangible, something to be grasped at with outsider wisdom, and I wished I felt a stronger connection to by birth country of Norway, where I had lived until I was ten. I must have looked like some strange Eurotrash tourist, I thought ironically, wild blonde tangles almost bleached white in the sun, a redneck tan working it's way down my bare back, almost Diasy Duke-like Corduroy cutoff's perched over stern-toed brown cowboy boots. I was a cocky bastard, caught in the infinite possibility of youth when adulthood has been realized, intellect developed, yet childish indecision and spontaneity are still actor in life.

Somewhere to the north, the narrow, trim roads and sunlit cornfields have way to a rougher, sinuous landscape of hills and lakes, clad in festive green, a million pine trees bright. Up here in the northern tip of middle America, people smiles with disarming brightness, and even the young people had deep creases round their lips it seemed, nervous hands can't lie. This wasn't the drive-by country of the vast western deserts, the sagebrush oceans, bur rather something to be studied and understood in fine detail, if one had the time, of course. To me, it was a passing thought, beautiful, yet still a highway pitstop on the road from where I'd been to where I was going. The weather was changing, the clouds swirled into grayish pudding cake tangles, and instead of dispersing on the red horizon, as they did in the West, they stayed, and coalesced into rain that lasted for days. The rain washed away all the stale, dusty dreams I'd gathered over the desert, and turned them into something stoic and resolute; no longer was I merely a wandered in an old truck, I had a purpose, a plan to head east and find my youth, my family, and my future. I had been sent to the great cultural identity blender of Los Angeles, swirled into the gigantic melee of ideas and personalities for 5 years, and, emerging battered and wise, I would return that that whence had come.

In the West, a sense of place was paramount, and seemed to mold the various identities I saw across sagebrush and cholla, pinon pines and junipers, small and featureless on the vast elevated plane of the continent. The weather was rugged and temperamental, prone to spontaneous spring blizzard's and August cloudburst's that reminded us of our minor place in the scheme of things. The old cities of thew northeast were universally gray and dreary, thick smog and methodical, repetitive ambition clogging the sun. This was not to say they weren't full of smart, forward people, much the contrary, I thought. The energy, the creative force of New York was not equalled elsewhere on this continent, and I missed the tenacious pragmatism of Manhattanites, the sharp resolve to produce meaning for the world. I was never satisfied though, and this restlessness is what drove me westward, stale donut crumbs and coffee stains littering the inside of my mind like a million Monday mornings.

I wanted to be a 21st-Century Huck Finn, but instead of muddy overall's snaring on thickets in some far off hollow, I spilled coffee and hand-rolled tobacco on slick, rounded pieces of denim and polyester. I was an urban refugee; assimilating to an aesthetic my people tried so comically hard to appropriate. I suppose the narcissist in me expected even out here in square, geometric rural America, I'd grt the same sort of stares and recognition I got in the city; the self-loathing puncuated by smug awareness of being watched. I guess I was handsome in a way both conventional and absurd; different from the legions of all-American farm boys who streamed into LA looking for their "big break" and ended up an extra on Elimidate, yet I was also distinct from the androgenously beautiful A-list hipsters and models. Style to me was something I wasted too much time, and what should have been fluid and easy became overly analytical in my head. This trip was a chance to live and dress spontaneously and without pretense, and I laughed at my current outfit; cowboy boots and cutoff cord's, a ragged western shirt and brown Ray-Bans.

Past the barren eastern flanks of the Rockies, hot and dry and ready to combust into a tinderbox of mountain trophy homes and Ponderosa's, the landscape changed. Slowly and imperceptibly, the old fire-engine red F150 descended down the sloping ramp of the High Plains, and the unkempt sagebrush and prairie dog holes of Colorado turned into neat, geometric rows of Kansas corn. The ethics changed as well, and the yuppie liberalism, the progressive island of Denver faded with the crest of the continental divide; morphing into a no-nonsense, stoic resolve to live by the rules of the sun and the rain. The mountains were beautiful, but too familiar and safe a landscape for me, and the brooding peaks that inspired awe and terror in the flatlanders were a second home for me; a playground I knew and understood. Personally, it was the habitat of these derided "flatlander's" which was alien, bizarre and fascinating, I vowed to move east without stereotypes or preconceptions.

Everything now was obscenely and rakishly green; fraught with the impenetrable American resolve to produce and procreate. The smells changed too, as the air picked up sweet summer humidity, cow manure and diesel fuel; it all felt very swampy and moist. Sometime when I stopped for gas, the muggy, oppressive air hung like a veil over the neat hedgerows and chrome fuel pumps, and I had the distinct urge to crawl out of my skin and back to the hot, dry, judgmental air of Los Angeles. There was something pure amongst the palm tree and neon obscenity of LA, I thought, yet life at the moment precluded any sincere understanding of these subtleties. I thought with an uneven tide of smug contempt and bitter embarrassment of the colorful resume I had amassed over the past 5 years, and imagined life as a recluse, unaware of the teeming mediocrity that undermined existence.

That was the wonderful thing about road trips, they clarified the uncomfortable things, the awkward details of life into something forward and tangible. I had no complaints though; since I was confident I had lived a thousand lives and had an untold number left; the faith in something succinct happening and making everything better. Life, or perhaps just the present, was full of an immediacy that wasn't always comfortable, or even necessary, I thought. The abstractions that passed me by along the highway mostly took the form of greenish-brown blur's, pieces of domesticated nature that were strangely tolerable, given their context. Even in LA, a number plugged into the vast urban gridlock, the feeling that the wild, ragged edges of nature was watching was omnipresent. The steady stream of earthquakes, landslides, and wildfires ensnared the city, and on some mesquite-and-sagebrush ridge overlooking suburbia, a mountain lion watched silently.

As one progressed east though, the lean gritty Westerner in cowboy boots and faded denim gradually faded into plump, content Midwesterner's, their John Deere machines and Sunday clothes bright in the muggy sun. I wanted quite badly to cultivate an air of uselessness, or rather, aloofness from responsibility, such that I might hold a captive audience amongst these straightforward people. The landscape colored by thoughts increasingly on the journey east, and nostalgia for my childhood on the coast of Maine filtered into my subconscious hazy like the Mississippi fog. I was in Iowa now; in what I had always seen as the figurative heart of the between-coast's fabric of America, here sat all the dull contentment of the lower classes, my foul judgement on those I didn't understand.

In fact, Iowa was even more green an mysterious than I had imagined, and the little rural towns in particular retained the surreal ambience of a bygone era. This was a strong, simple land where little blonde children skipped down Maple-lines main streets to buy an old-fashioned Coke bottle for fifty cents, then meet up with Jimmy or Bobby for a gave of pick-up, who had conveniently been at the pop store as well. I couldn't take it anymore, the foul miasma of urban life; sorting out the winners amongst the bigger mess had become too much work. Everyone preened and pranced for attention, without the slightest idea they had already lived a thousand lifetimes in the Midwest.

This latest reincarnation was the best yet; in that awareness of self was secondary to experience. The experience right now was so overwhelmingly sensory that I had to laugh, having dismissed the Midwest as devoid of the hidden agenda's I picked out of West Coast life. During the days, driving mostly, I made minimal conversation with anyone, save the vacuous pleasantries over things like gas and food. The exception to this was what I had begun to refer to as the "blind moments", when, driven by some internal misalignment [or perhaps precision?] of gears, I went careening off the highway down some off-ramp towards god knows where. God-knows-where was usually bleak and left a bitter, stale taste in my mouth, but sometimes, I left with a strangers foreign smile etched into my memory, or the smell or flowers in some marshy river valley.

The latest hitchhiker; I didn't know his name, I don't like names, they are too definitive. Well anyways, I'd let him drive for a while. I leaned back on the hard gray fake leather seatback, my feet up on the dash, freckled legs and coffee stained cutoff shorts bright in the sun. Suddenly, I lit the sunset in the rear view mirror with a smile that reflected all the light right back at it. The horizon blinded me with that last pulse before tomorrow and then, all was dark.

Falling off the edge of the world

What happens when you fall off the edge of the world? Somewhere, all the neat geometric lines of longitude that divide the globe into inhabitable realms converge to a point, and when you stop falling south you are in Antarctica. Antarctica is different from the northern Latitudes, both in physical character and myth; with no history of habitation or significant exploration, it is the last truly wild place left in the world. It is true that we have fouled the extremities of the continent with our egotistical desire to claim and understand, but the vast frozen interior remains empty and pristine. As the wheels of the massive army cargo jet screeched and sent up clouds of fine white snow, I felt the familiar, green expanse of New Zealand we had left this morning was a world away. Why had I chosen to blow the last of my expansive savings on a frivolous trip to the last reaches of the world, when, having just passed 7 decades of existence, I might enjoy a leisurely retirement in my New York apartment?

The past 4 years had been a whirlwind of unpredictable change, and I found myself in a state of similar disarray I was in 50 years ago, fresh out of college and uncertain of anything except the momentum of the present. I had been divorced, though it felt odd to repeat the word in my mind, as the papers had just been finalized 3 weeks before I left to Antarctica from New York. We had been married nearly 4 decades, but I can say truthfully that I never loved her; rather it was a classic blue blood marriage of convenience, and as dark and self-aggrandizing as it sounds, I thought now that the hum of the city had been removed, perhaps I never loved anyone.

The penguins were of course a principal attraction, and even around the garbage and machinery-strewn edges of McMurdo, the main research station and U.S outpost here, they gathered in curious groups. I marveled at their sleekly engineered bodies and easy familiarity with this alien landscape. Our group leader, a burly and rough-hewn giant of a Norwegian Expat named Lars, had told us earlier on the plane that penguins, once they find a suitable mate, remain loyal until the end. I suppose I envied this too, but not really, it was just an affirmation of my suspicion that even the wild fringes of nature longed for some sort of routine. Despite this though, there were occasionally deranged penguins who would purposefully ignore the rest of the flock and waddle in a distressingly uneven gait towards the interior, driven my some internal idiosyncrasy, or perhaps just the desire not to be number any more. I sympathized with these crazy penguins, since their yearning to be more than another black dot among the millions resonated in eerie clarity with the New Yorker in me. Apparently their were also same-sex penguins couples, which I thought was particularly endearing, that the foul intolerance of American politics and religion need not apply to the natural world, here in this singular landscape of rock and ice.

It was late spring here, almost the southern summer, and on this unusually clear evening of December 15th, I wished my vision was good enough to fully comprehend all the strange, oblique shadows of sun on snow, rock and ocean, the only 3 things that defined this cold desert. The aesthetics of Antarctica were not as 2-dimensional as I had expected; rather, the light constantly morphed around intermittent clouds, throwing it's weightless energy around the edges of the horizon. The weather was fickle and cantankerous , and reminded me of my boyhood summer home on the Coast of Maine, the perennial comfort of warm summer rain and early morning fog sailing in the Atlantic.

I took an immediate dislike to the steel and concrete abominations that were the McMurdo Station, as they seemed so lewd and out of place in this landscape man was never meant to conquer. I stared at the piles of construction supplies and rubbish that lay strewn about the outskirts of the station, and it reminded me quite vividly of the trash I had seen at base camp on Everest nearly 20 years earlier. The audacity of man to excuse such actions in the spirit of "adventure" or remoteness was unacceptable in my opinion, and while our team had not summited that August afternoon in 1983, I was proud of the fact that we had packed out 100% of our trash, and also embarrassed at how easy it was to practice 'leave no trace' ethics on one of the most difficult peaks in the world.

Our group was a motley and thoroughly incohesive assortment of the types of characters you would expect to have fallen off the edge of the world and settled down here; glaciologists, climatologists, machine operators with PhD's in philosophy, kitchen workers who fought for 2 decades on Wall Street. Everyone seemed to share a collective weirdness though, and the details of social etiquette that, in my opinion, mired interaction in the rest of the world, were refreshingly excused here. I loved the refusal to settle for mediocrity which I saw so much of in New York; even amongst the most humble immigrant hot dog vendor or cabbie, their was a shared responsibility to be fresh and influential in the world, to refuse to roll out of bed in sweatpants and drag your feet down the street.

I was retired; technically, having climbed the vicious power ladder of New York corporate bulshit for more years than I cared to recall, yet I had begun a new lifestyle as of late, a sort of cleansing of past sins, I mused ironically. My days now were filled with 2 unyielding themes; science and humanitarian philanthropy. Having served as a CFO and senior board member of one the world's most influential gold companies had afforded me the luxury to help others, and I looked at the petty material excess of my past with shame and forgetfulness. Antarctica was a place where death and renewal were intertwined dangerously close, and the concentration us humans were capable of seemed insignificant compared to the daily plight of the seals and penguins.

The physical geography of this place was similarly complex and appealing. Maps had always obsessed me; I recall even as a small child being gifted a simple globe by my father one Christmas and spending endless hours in my room studying the un-named corners and wrinkled creases where the greasy wax paper of the map obscured a distant paradise. Everywhere was novel and new and worth exploring; the political bias of the U.S had not yet colored my thoughts, and even now, the nostalgia of this time in my life remained strong. I had reasoned for a long time, all the way until the money started really coming in, that the way to overcome travel limitations in life was to stay ruthlessly fit, mentally and physically. Even now at 72, the young men who frequented our neighborhood gym on the Upper East Side, the square-jawed power brokers; they all knew my name. I relished the feeling that aging, while inevitable, was so much more mental than any of us could understand. The psychological part, well, that was more complex, a balancing act between the calculated reservation and tact I had to exercise in the board room, and singing tribal songs with Nigerian refugees at a benefit dinner in Queens, unafraid of judgement from anyone but myself.

I could say it was this boyish obsession with maps and the financial means to do most anything that catapulted me from a pre-war townhouse on 81st street to the cold, bright wasteland of the South Pole, but really it was a lot more spontaneous than that. I was going to die soon, well, not soon, but inevitably it was coming, and I did not romanticize the harsh facts of old age; the decline of spirit and fortitude. Antarctica was a place that had always haunted my imagination; a place free of the greedy resource terrorism my company had subjected nearly every other continent to, and its purity and singularity remained a global anomaly. The scientists and government people filled the McMurdo dining hall with curious chatter, much of it directed at what a lone 72 year old man had been doing on a New Zealand Armed Forces cargo plane, headed to an island in the Ross Sea. I knew people, and I suppose that was all it took really to secure myself a place on a private research-oriented trip south.

My friend Jacques Seviuex , an influential French climatologist and architect of the global climate change movement, had spearheaded this trip, and invited me along after hearing secondhand of my interest in visiting the last continent. I, or rather my company, had given his research group a fair chunk of change in the 1980's, which I admit was mostly a P.R move [big companies never do anything completely altruistically] it did, however, help a lasting friendship develop. Dr. Seviuex [he was an MD, I loathe referring to some PhD academic as a "doctor"] met with me in Auckland 3 days ago, and as we packed and prepared for the trip, I could tell he was excited not just for his own exploration, but for me as well, and this kept resonating with me on the trip south. Anyways, I managed to placate the herd of scientists and fellow weirdos at dinner regarding my provenance, and they seemed satisfied with my explanation as a "retired environmentalist and adventurer", though this was only partly true.

I had recently crossed that wonderful idealogical divide of not giving a fuck what anybody thought of me, and the newfound freedom of this classic old man characteristic was still fresh. This was not to say, however, that I didn't want to earn the trust and respect of good people. Au contraire: I now focused all the negative energy pent up from being nice to assholes on learning the traits and habits of the best people; people like my companions in Antarctica, fallen off the edge of the world and settled down here. I could sense the collective excitement in the air, as our planeload of travelers disbanded into their various factions and specialities, eager to begin work and not just be a spectator to this vast landscape. I was not so eager to work, as I had done work my whole life and now was just beginning to truly enjoy the fruits of that labor, but I was eager to understand, and I slept impatiently that night in my cot on the floor of the dorm-like research station. The next morning, the sun and sky looked just like last night, and I realized this discontinuity between time and nature was going to take some getting used to.

I fit the Antarctic 'street style', I mused, in my oversize, neon green and red Henri Lloyd foul weather gear, the same sort of gore-tex and neoprene armor the World Cup sailors wore. In the balmy 40-degree southern summer, I felt bit silly clad in layer upon layer of precisely engineering shielding from the environment; yet I knew the harshness of this place did not belie any laziness. Just like the young men I saw on my block in New York braced themselves against the constant current of social judgement and fashion whims, I had to guard my old self against the elements here, the sudden blinding snow squalls and strange shadows of the perpetually setting sun.

After a hasty 7 AM breakfast [it could have been 7 PM for all I knew..], we loaded into 2 A-Star field helicopters for the trip to the mainland, and my mind felt almost numb with anticipation and anxiety to actually step foot on the Antarctic Continent. As the choppers filled the air the the rhythmic din of their ascent, I watched the ugly pastel green and yellow pre-fab structures of McMurdo shrink behind the sun. Suddenly the horizon was huge and immediate, endlessly stretching over the ice cap until some mountain or rock bent the edges into a more forgiving corner. We buzzed low over a rare ice-free inlet to the Ross Sea, and what appeared to be a dirty collection of black boulders coalesced into a colony of thousands of Emperor and King penguins, an abundance of wildlife so foreign to modern man, I thought. The excitement I felt building in my toes and up through my stomach and finally crystallizing into a headache of joy was akin to the nervous anticipation I felt on the summit ridge of Denali, or on our first family heli skiing trip in the Bugaboo's in the late 60's, when nothing seemed impossible. I thought of my family now with an almost detached postscript of consideration, and though I loved them more than air, my journey now had become singular and removed from others, an internal quest to close the loose ends of my life down here amongst the Penguins.

The helicopter circled low over a small cluster of bright red and green Quonset hut like structures, the inland research station, and I marveled at how obscene and obvious the smallest intrusion of man was in this monochromatic world.

We landed with a less than gracious thud on the hard ice, and Lars, Jacques, and myself disembarked from the little glass and titanium bubble of the A-star, tiny specks on the ice 200 km. south of Mcmurdo Base. The jagged teeth of the Transantarctic Range pieced the 2-dimensional veil of the horizon, granite spires with thousand meter walls of blank, frozen granite sticking out of the ice caps. They were a terrestrial cousin of the massive Volcano's of Oceania, the first 9,000 feet of their bulk encased in solid water as opposed to liquid. It was surreal and almost frightening to think of the almost 10,000 feet of permanent ice than separated us from true terra firma, and yet I relished this ethereal separation from the familiar, suspended on nothing more consequential than frozen water.

People were so flighty and unpredictable compared to the stoic resolve of this place, that not even the climactic wounds we had inflicted on the earth had softened the frozen grimace of the interior, though I knew this was not the case.

The earth was changing, and as convenient as it was to believe it was the invention of scientists and politicians, the indisputable truth was that even thousands of miles from the nearest permanent settlement, cosmic rays burned through a Texas-size hole in the ozone layer. It made me seethe with anger, yet also regret after having spend most of my career inflicting such wounds on the earth in search of something as unnecessary as gold, the comically desirable metal that had spurned so much evil in the world. I suppose in this place, so harsh and beautiful, it was impossible to be average or complacent, and the catalyst to understand and explore was omnipresent. That was what scared me the most, the overwhelming mediocrity of the American public, the ability; desire even, to settle without any justification on whatever was easiest.

Perhaps this goes back to the earlier point of having reached the irreversible divide of old age where public opinion no longer swayed me; in any case, I found Antarctica a welcome respite from the gritty streets of New York.

The city was marvelous in so many ways though, and I thought of the young men and women there, immigrants from some rural speck where people dreamt small and were afraid of change. These young people; they were so used to being an anomaly, a curiosity to the plain faced, hard working people of their hometown's, and the anonymity of the city must have been both refreshing and terrifying. I pondered the possibility I might have a heart attack or fall into a crevasse or be eaten by a Sea Lion down here in the frozen southern wastes, and the idea was disturbingly benign to me. My time on earth had passed without the slightest regard for the rest of the universe, the re-incarnation as plankton in the South Atlantic, or perhaps one of the 3rd world workers my company had "provided" for.

The sky was so blue it almost deafened the senses, and in the absence of the vicous katabatic winds that roared down from the mountains, it almost felt like a giant movie studio, insulated from sound or outside stimulus. I stood outside the little red hut where we were to sleep and eat for the next week, and felt so much more inconsquential than on a New York street corner, another office clone en route to some high-rise. When I got home, I was going to call Julia first thing, and tell her I was sorry. Sorry for 40 years of postponed dislike, sorry for the bland connection that held our souls together after Margeret and James had gone off to college and families of their own; sorry I couldn't really share my true self with anyone. She would understand, she already did, in a sad, accpeting way that tore at the ragged edges of my conscience, yet I was numb enough to find companionship amongst the somber green sea and bright snow, as if that would make it all better. As a small child, I read stories of adventure with an insatiable appetite. In those days, political and social implications were easily excused in the name of conquest and understanding, and I marveled at how littlw had changed. I used to think if I bid my time and played my cards right, everything would fall into the right spaces, and doors did open for me in the following years, as I never imagined they would. Life is defined by a lot of things; luck principally, and just like the lines on the globe that converged to this point, everything now was transparent and obvious.

Dark Winter, Snow's Bright Part II

Part II of: http://philippersson.blogspot.com/2010/02/dark-winter-snows-bright.html

"He was alone. Not in the way of the Arctic terns and golden eagles that circled low over the island, but in a way that transcended mere geography and dwelled more in the esoteric regions of the mind. The escape from Los Angeles has been necessary and impulsive, spurned by nothing more consequential than the metallic sheen of a toilet stall door, which, in his drunken brilliance, had reflected all the self-loathing and material filth of the city into something sharp and tangible. That something sharp and absurd had pierced the veil of feigned happiness was only one piece of the puzzle. That alone was not the reason he was here. Ralph was here simply because this place was home, home of the conscious moment; yet also of something real and inherited, a cabin from his grandfather on an island in the Puget Sound.

On clear evenings, the hazy lights of Seattle filtered in over the jagged pine tree horizon, onto the gray pebble beach where the cabin was perched; an eye over the placid sound. Life now had attained a new clarity, not only of simple routine, but also of understanding that everything henceforth could only go forward, caught in the pull of the impossible. At night, under the dark green blanket of the sea, the shifting forest and steady sky, he hugged himself like there was no one else left in the world, squirming under the covers with indecision. It was not physical discomfort, or even mental angst to be honest, but something like the excited, half-irritable unrest of a child, forever kicking and fussing under the blankets.

Even when he had company in bed, which seemed increasingly rare in his last year in L.A, he was forever distracted and restless, to the discontent of friends and lovers. It was a neurotic impatience coupled with the need to be constantly experiencing something novel and surreal; a piece of seaweed in the tide. This was such a blessing and a curse; the high standards for nature and even higher standards for people. Every awkward part of his soul seemed to stand naked for the world to see.

Tomorrow he was contemplating a temporary respite from the wild amongst the concrete jungle of Seattle, a 30 minute boat ride through the fog and drizzle to Pike Place piers. There, he could oogle and judge the cool kids and the commoners alike; a number in the urban grid of the city. He almost wanted something spontaneous and beautiful to happen, another handsome and distracted soul to happen on him wandering around downtown, and he pictured them making love in the cabin after after the chilly, anxious boat ride home.

Life was best viewed as a progression of still frames through all the perfect moments; maybe not perfect but real and crystalline, with all the mud and sand of everyday routine sieved out. He might be picky with people, but the kelp and starfish that filled tidepools and the hilly green flanks of the island pleased him immensely, and their entertainment was novel and sincere. He did not romanticize the old, damp facts of rural life in the Pacific Northwest, however, and enjoyed the stoic resolve of everyday chores. Work was so necessary and beautiful, a welcome reprieve from the weary motions of school. Education was happening all the time he thought, without reason or consent, while chopping wood and catching fish, mending clothes and tinkering with diesel engines. Experience bred knowledge in the shadowy edges of life here, it seemed.

It was late October, and though the perpetually damp and green maritime climate encouraged year round fleece and flannel, the layers of warmth around his body has become more substantial lately as the cold nip of winter moved south from Canada. He thought with detached posterity of the well-paying job at the museum he'd passed up, or the chance to buy into the family business and slowly climb the New York blueblood power ladder. The most intense and joyous moments of his life were always alone though, and as lost yet prophetic adventurer Everett Ruess had said once, "I have always been unsatisfied with life as most people live it. Always I want to live more intensely and richly. why muck and conceal one's true longings and loves, when by speaking of them one might find someone to understand them, and by acting on them one might discover oneself?" The Starry black sky and warm firelight triumphed over the discontent bred by cities, he thought. Here he would learn to love himself amongst the sea otters and watchful gulls; an alien in a place that one day might be called home.

It was easy in this relatively cozy outpost on the fringes of luxuriant American wealth to become an idle romantic, yet somehow he resisted this urge. All the types of people he saw on an everyday basis in Los Angeles, the bums, the movie stars, the small army's of 5'4" blonde sorority clones, they all coalesced into the outgoing tide and left his conscious when he first took the little whitewashed motorboat out to the island, a refugee from excess. Everything in LA was excessive, yet somehow life there required this sensory over-stimulation he had removed himself from. Ralph was always craving recognition, a self-obsessed impulse that haunted the clarity he saw his life in now.

The purity he wished to attained, plugged in perhaps by the occasional trip to Seattle to sip Americano's and check his email at some trendy corner spot, yet also live removed from the clusters of people who tormented him. His standards for people never wavered, and though he was the first to admit his own flaws, somehow these things were less excusable in others, and he knew this was wrong. In a world of Fox News and MTV, he wanted to find another NPR; another reason to trust someone beyond immediate physical satisfaction. It was mid-morning now and the sun had peeked out over the distant, brooding shadow of Mt. Rainier, dissipating the last wispy bits of fog over the still water. The fog was a familiar comfort, a concession of his youth in coastal Maine, he liked to think. It lacked form and predictability, and he remembered the damp, cool August mornings sailing on Merrymeeting Bay, the silver shards of low angle sun filtering in over the stained wood deck of the little catboat.

Light was oblique and full of strange shadows here in the Northwest, shades of gray and green that played with rock and water differently every day. Here in the inner reaches of the Puget Sound, sheltered from the full brunt of the North Pacific, it was easy to fall into the illusion of security, but the distant clouds always boiling over Mount Rainier served as a reminder that this was not quaint, pedestrian New England. He walked barefoot on the smooth, algae covered pebbles of the beach, and deftly slid the old motorboat into the water, as the tide sighed and started back in to land. The crab traps he has set out last week should yield a nice dinner, he hoped, and he idled the motor as the boat slid past a gaudy neon green buoy. The viens on his sinewy arms bulged as he hauled in the 20-some odd meters of line attached to the trap, and in a cloud of mud and seaweed, he pulled the heavy wire trap over the deck. A half dozen ugly, reddish-white Dungeness crabs writhed and angrily snapped their claws in the trap, and he dumped them into an old 5-gallon pail, smiling and singing the last few lines of some song whose where and why escaped him. The rest of the traps didn't yield much, but he loved the purposeful simplicity of the exercise, re-baiting the traps with smelly old fish heads, watching the birds hover and otters swim nearby, curious and watchful. He revved the little 40 Hp Honda outboard, and the boat planed up with a low whoooosh, the wind whipping his tangled blonde hair back, and the cold nip of the morning air breathing fresh life into his lungs.

People were kind of like those crabs in the bucket, he thought; willing to crawl into a trap for a bit of food and shared space, unwilling to look beyond their immediate confines for a greater reality. One on one interaction was so predictable and polite, he wanted a human network that worked on spontaneous gestures with strangers, misunderstood signals sent across a harbor, a bar, maybe even a bedroom.

It was better to be seen out of context, with complete objective reason and blind faith, that to be studied and deduced with cold logic, he thought in absent-minded passing. The pebbled of the beach squeaked under his weight, walking to the cabin. 'Where we're going, we don't need roads', he mused, and thought of the steel and concrete edges of the American Dream closing in on the island until all the power brokers and schemers and clones crumpled like tinfoil, and a handful of fellow crazies held out here in the inner reaches of the Pacific.