All the Lost Voices

And then driving on with a welcome sense of defeat through the verdure of Northern California I contemplated that sensation.  How it was that defeat could be such freedom, how the substance of this particular beauty was the grating pain of tedium heightened to the extreme.  How the limits of beauty touched me, burned in my limbs, excruciating in itself, yet bearable in the broken feeling of continuity, of failure--it kept telling me to move forward and remember I was breathing.  How I thought of New Orleans then and how it didn’t matter when I finally saw the snowcap of the majestic Shasta...the mountain erupting in the sunset.  So beautiful against a backdrop of the mighty trees.  Maybe they were redwoods, certainly oaks, but nothing new all the same, so on I drove unsurprised through the landscape glancing at Shasta in the distance and melting into the sequence of places that I put behind me.  And through it all I smelled November creeping under the boughs and touching the dusty valleys as darkness soaked the lightened ways of California, and dissolved into starlight at Wolf Creek Pass.  Oregon.

They offered free coffee to weary drivers.  Wolf Creek Pass.  It was twilight of the coming evening when I got my cup and turned down the musty sheets.  High elevation and crispy cool, the wind in the pine boughs and coyotes in the distance pretending to be the wolves that had long since snuffed-it.  But the boughs quieted the coyotes’ howl, the shushing boughs like rain when the wind blew and the trucks gasped quick soft sighs in short bursts from their iron stacks.  I sleep.  And I’m awake with the dawn, being extra quiet so as not to disobey the shushing branches, van cranked up and driving north through the mist and dew of the Northwest morning.  Kids on the roadside hold a sign, begging a ride and I drive on and watch the cows asleep on their hooves.  Uphill often and green and misty, Oregon is a peat-moss landscape of ancient horticulture, hitchhikers and livestock in the dead-gray-almost-light that precedes the certainty of morning.

Oregon is there, alive and damp.  Green and shaded and thick.  One can’t explain it briefly.  I’m Davey Crocket.  I’m Lewis, or Clark.  Long ride through the heavy trees, I’m Gulliver in Brobdingnag.  Tiny Tiny Tiny.  I drive and watch the roadpaint and count the miles.  A phone call to sick dad at a rest area alongside a river that hosts salmon runs (so says a wooden sign) and dad says a lot of maybes about cancer and diabetes and getting thinner still, ever thinner.  Brevity now...I pull into Portland, find the Willamette and eat ravioli on a park bench just digging the town.  It’s a town I see, not a real city after all.  And everybody moves slow in the misty rain.

I wander the Hawthorne section among other wanderers in ragged clothes--the street is damp and the storefronts fogged and streaming.  Dogs cuddle into the corners, kids cuddled beside them smoking damp cigarettes, sacks of clothes and maybe a guitar, pile of books for a pillow.  So many of them.  Such a strong scent of must and cloaked sweat, burnt weed and coffee.  Coffee everywhere, as if the town fueled itself on the stuff, kept from nodding, from just grinding to a deathly still under of the overcast by the potent smell of the prolific brew-shops.  My shoes hit the concrete and it feels natural somehow.  For the first time in a month I feel at home.  A punk flips his board and offers a joint for two dollars, whispered over the rattle of ball-bearings in his spinning wheels.  Thanks, I’m good. Book shops and junk shops.  I pick up a copy of Kerouac’s, Big Sur...I’ll read by the streetlamp tonight, the way it should be read after all.  I grab a book of Chinese character translations from the freebee bin on a whim and get an idea for a tattoo.  A tattoo seems right here.  Like it would fit in with the mute spirit of things.

It’s all guitars and paintings and half-bad art here in Portland.  It’s drum-circles and drug culture...tired weakened women and beat-up kids, old men too soon and the old too drained to be ambitious.  But everybody’s polite, sweet-polite and talkative in subdued banter...I’m happy in this insular pocket of not-quite-anywhere-in-particular.  I’m gonna move here, live here, I tell myself.  It’s where I’ll fit.

Sleep it off in the van, route five.  A meal of burrito in the morning I drive five hours to Seattle where I find a leather love-shop with a paper flyer says tattoos available.  Tattoos by Tony.  That’ll do in a fine, karmic sort of way.  I make the appointment...make up a sentence “live it all for your dreams...never lose faith.”  I cruise old Chinatown and find a shop where the old man translates, outlining the characters in order.  I tip him a fin and he’s happy since I lie and tell him I’m an artist and will look in on him again for calligraphy.  I’m a liar, after all.