Mexican Space Rockets

hello, stranger -

it's funny how the mind automatically goes back to the familiar, particularly in times of distress or deep melancholy.  in my case it obviously seems to go straight back to the ocean.  i guess you can take the boy away from the seashore, but not the seashore away from the boy.

but the West has its own special draw, which i think i share with most people who are willing to cross that border.  i remember the first time i saw it, that first cross-country trip, about half my life ago now, fresh out of college and zig-zagging my way across the country in a beat up old Honda Accord, with everything i owned in the back. i was on my way to California, trying to see everything i could possibly see in the United States before i got there, and becoming painfully more aware as i went that all i could cover was one thin strip of asphault along the way.

and then i hit the West, and the horizon stretched out before me like it never had before, taking my breathe away in waves, and keeping me in a perpetual state of wanting to pull the car over and take the right picture or write the best words i could to capture the sense of unreality that was passing before my eyes through the windshield.

i never could , but a few years back i read “Blue Highways” and William Least Heat-Moon put it  something like this:

“The true West differs from the East in one great, pervasive and awesome way: space. The vast openness changes the roads, towns, houses, farms, crops, economics, politics, and - naturally - ways of thinking.  The space here is perceptible, and often palpable, especially when it appears empty, which makes matter look alone, exiled and unconnected.  No one, not even the sojourner, escapes the great expanses. That sense of space diminishes a man, and pushes him toward a greater reliance on himself, while at the same time increasing his awareness of others and what they do, and reducing his blindness to the immensity of the universe.”   

that’s just paraphrasing him, for brevity’s sake, but it’s still as good a way as i’ve ever heard it put.  and to me, especially at that fresh and naive point in my life, it captures the surreal sense that i had, as if i’d been watching everything through a screen my whole life, and suddenly was stepping through and becoming a very real part of that very real world, a feeling both exhilirating and somewhat unnerving at the same time.

warm thoughts of a long ago road trip on this New Year’s Eve afternoon in the desert.  i’m sitting on my porch in the sun, drinking a cold beer and trying to chase the cobwebs away and out of my head from a late night out with friends.  and off in the blue depths of the sky to the south there’s the remnants of a chem trail drifting off into nothingness.  i just watched some kind of airborne vessel shoot slowly through the sky in the distance and into the stratosphere.  at first i thought it might be a jet of some kind, but then i realised its trajectory could only be straight up, so now i’m pretty convinced it had to be some kind of rocket.  but the only thing south of here of note is Mexico, and i’m not sure they have a space program.

i googled it but gave up after about a minute, because i couldn’t find anything, and i figured that if it was something serious and the war heads started dropping soon, then the last place i’d want to be de-atomized is while sitting in front of my goddamned computer.

and that’s just a snippet of life out here in T-town, where anything is possible but nothing ever really seems to happen.  it’s a slower pace of life than in the East.  it takes some getting used to, but you can get the sense out here of what Heat-Moon was saying: “…as the space diminshes man and his constructions in a material fashion, it also - paradoxically - makes them more noticeable. Things show up out here.”  i think that applies to people too, a sort of independence of character that i’ve grown to appreciate over time.

i took a trip to Manhatten a little while back and i felt as soon as i got there that i couldn’t wait to get out.  i was in no great shape when i arrived to begin with, and once i stepped into the whirling energy of the city i immediately felt overwhelmed, and defeated almost.  barely any sky, not enough room to breathe, and an endless stream of people any way you turned, all blurring into one another in my mind.  i generally like cities for the most part, but you have to be prepared for it, both mentally and emotionally.  my host seemed to wear their New York persona like a suit of armor, as i suppose anyone who lives there must. but i felt like i showed up naked - and too worn out from a couple of long, hard weeks to build one of my own - so spent the majority of my time on my heels, just trying not to be flustered by the inescapable energy of it all..

when i finally got back to this dusty little city in the desert i could feel the tension dissolving through the pores of my skin.  it was as if my psyche was a long cramped muscle that was finally able to stretch itself out in long-awaited relief.  i spent a lot my time my first night back thinking about life - my own, and the lives of all those people back on that island, hustling about, day in and day out, trying to do something, trying to be someone, trying to get somewhere.  i was glad to be back. this town isn’t exactly the middle of nowhere, but it’s within driving distance - and i was grateful for that.

the search for significance, though - i don’t think that’s something anyone really escapes, East Coast or West.  we all just have our own brand if it, i guess.  the difference out here though it seems is there are fewer people are so willing to dedicate their actual lives for it.  i guess maybe when you have this much space around you and you begin to get a glimmer of how small your life really is, you begin to realize that the things so many people spend their lives chasing - like money and status and fame and success, and everything else that drives a person to strive so hard to try to be a somebody and make them willing to sacrifice so much for - all end up being just about as real and significant as Mexican space rockets to the rest of the world.

don’t get too wild out there tonight, be good and catch you in the new year.