Sand in the Tide

From the Desert

2010-09-12T09:19:00.001-07:00

From Oregon

2010-09-12T09:15:00.000-07:00

From Oregon

2010-09-12T08:59:00.001-07:00

From Oregon

2010-09-12T08:49:00.000-07:00

The End

2010-08-28T16:08:00.000-07:00

8/25- I think the reason that I stopped writing towards the end is that I ran out of thoughts. I had raked over all the memories and hopes so many times, but they were like ashes, with no heat left to release. The root of the mental blankness is the body. In 1600 miles I haven't taken a day to rest. I feel 30 years older than I am, like a machine with rusting gears. But the adventure was real and I cannot summarize all the good things. Every moment speaks for itself. And now ith 15 miles until the end I walk through the tunnel of blank light. Every ambition and worry is somewhere South, and all I can do now is feel the wind and smell the flowers and watch the trees sway. If all this is a cycle, perhaps I'll catch up to myself in the bend.

8/27- The end was not as glamorous as I had expected. The monument I had dreamed of waited in a green swath cut through the woods- the lenghty Canadian border. I planned on eating dinner at Castle Pass, 4 miles South of the end. But the urge inside me was too hot, and I didn't stop. The last four miles were tunnels of memory in a deep green forest. A montage of faces and conversations and places flashed over and over on the back of my eyes. Though I had seen few people in the day, I saw someone paused in the clearing. My old friend Smudge came to hug me and say Congratulations, but by then everything was muted and I fell on the monument and cried.

The next day I walked to the trail head on Canadian route 3- the final end of tread. For the first time there was no path on the other side. I walked to the closest outpost, Manning Park Lodge, down the narrow asphalt to my last big breakfast and last shower whose floor I made into a puddle of mud. This morning I tried hitchhiking for hours, but no one knew who I was. In trail towns I was a celebrity. They knew where I was coming from. This morning I had only shrugs and the cold acknowledgment of looking the other way. I can only imagine the quiet thoughts of the two folks in the front of an empty SUV. They look straight ahead or away, unflinching and silent, thinking, I didn't see anyone on the side of the road. But if I had, I would definitely have stopped to give him a ride.

Now I am on the Greyhound Bus, sailing through dark towns and rainy skies to Vancouver. Yesterday I was king of the mountains, and now I am a pauper in the city.

Photos from Washington

2010-08-28T08:55:00.001-07:00

8/18

2010-08-18T17:40:00.000-07:00

I overheard a conversation on a bus in Hawaii once. There was a man spouting ideas like a whale spouts water- pontificating about space, history, pyramids, presidents, conspiracies and all sorts of shadowy stories. He was loud and confident. Finally the man he was assaulting with words spoke back. You know what, man, the quieter one said. The people who tell me that they know everything clearly know nothing. It's the ones that tell me they know nothing, those are the ones I know that have something figured out.

We shall not cease from exploration
and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started from
and know the place for the first time.

8/12

2010-08-18T15:10:00.000-07:00

Boy what a day, I say in a voice ten years older than my own. Washington had given me nothing riveting over which to push my pen, only ghastly grey days and secret patches of snow, until today. In one day I passed between dimensions. The morning found me on the slopes of Mount Adams, by a lava bedded spring, and the ensuing fifteen miles were no more than a race through damp green woodland against hungry mosquitoes. Cheese sticks and dark chocolate were the proud sponsors of today's race. Breaking above the pine trees and into the legendary Goat Rocks Wilderness opened an entirely new perspective, standing in the jewel on the Yakima Valley's crown.

I chatted with curious people hiking for a day or weekend, answering the questiosn about equipment I can almost write a memo to address. Yes my pack is small- nine pounds. I walk thirty-five miles a day, and excuse me so that I can race ahead, after I eat this dark chocolate.

By seven in the evening I reached the lower slopes of Old Snowy, a mountain unsurprisingly covered in snow. By the way, it is mid-august. The fog descended on me but I plunged ahead, and over the ridge, fighting through a wall of white, kicking stpes into a floor, in a dense white room of the matrix. At 7100 feet altituted I suddenly received the radio signals coming from Portland, telescoped directly to my Alpine retreat. Little did the cosmopolitans in bars and clubs and homes with windows know I was privvy to their party. But I stole the dance when Katy Perry's song "California Girls" was played, and I stepped up the snow listening to the sound of gin and juice beneath the palm trees.

On top of the ridge was like walking the tip of a knife suspended from heaven. A three foot wide tightrop of rock held me in the sky. I was racing, racing fast, and though some say it is more rewarding to smell the flowers, I was thrilled to run down the side of that snowy mountain, down through the fog and past the last rays of light, to a lake where I crashed by someone else's fire. The fatigue of these adventures is creeping on me, but they can't kick me out of my own home.

8/8

2010-08-18T15:09:00.000-07:00

At a restaurant this morning a woman inquired where the bathroom was. The closest one was across the street, the cashier replied. Oh, for goodness sake! the disgruntled woman moaned. Then I fantasized of smacking her across the face and letting her know that I walked from Mexico to eat at that restaurant. By the way, welcome to Washington, the final, mystic state.

8/6

2010-08-18T15:05:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we walked 45 miles. Once you condition yourself to that sort of endeavor, all paths but one are a distraction. One path rules your attention; not for a destination or even for immediate scenery, but for the allure of moving, of going as far as the sun can reach. Time is a measurement, not an entity. Anyways, the day hammered both Furntiture and my brains, but he woke up sick as well. I hiked the 20 miles to Timberline Lodge without encountering him, but at the massive and lavish lodge itself I found him, and soon after his brother brought him back to Portland for a few days, which means my partner since Mexico is gone. I will go solo into the mystical horizon called Washington.

8/2

2010-08-03T16:47:00.000-07:00

The calendar welcomes the intrepid month of August, blanketed in snow amongst the marvelous castle Mountains. The Three Sisters Wilderness in Oregon is beautiful in a new way, the regal way a queen still radiates her charm as a princess. The peaks are lower but they are wrapped in lakes as bright as polished glass. Obsidian lines the ground like broken black bottles. Light catches snow and rock and water, sending my shape whirring through a world of mirrors.

7/29

2010-08-03T16:43:00.000-07:00

I began this morning with eight cookies, received with love from across the country, and carried gingerly around Crater Lake. The ensuing burst of energy propelled me through clouds of mosquitoes, and once AC/DC's song TNT came on my radio, I was in full throttle up that ridge. Below Thielson Peak, the lightning rod of the Cascades, I traversed slick fields of snow. At a point in the trees I heard a sound like the fiercest thunder, ripping up the mountain for a minute, and realized there was a rockslide right up the slope. The creek I encountered was the only water I saw today. I had carried water 26 dry miles before then, and packed 17 miles for the dry northbound stretch. The ground is often dry and cracked but mosquitoes arise in swarms, obviously birthed from the pits of hell. Furniture and I drank freeze dried coffee in the afternoon and I had a cheese and dry apricot sandwich to celebrate crossing the highest point in Oregon. And here we are again, ready to repeat the antics tomorrow after 35 miles today. I'm practicing peeing while I walk to thwart mosquitoes.

7/26

2010-08-03T16:37:00.000-07:00

In the shade beneath an Oregon tree
I asked the powers that be
When it was hot and dry and maddeningly
monotonous in a tunnel of pine,
I asked them to remind me of the thrill
within the hill. So the sky spoke
back as we climbed acrross a bare and
broken ridge, a black chain of shale
suspended three thousand feet high.
The clouds opened to speak with hail.
First the long low grumble of thunder,
then the cold winds, then the rain
and then the hail came to remind us
we were tiny guests in a giant home.
The high and black mountain
we were climbing was called Devil's peak.
So we walked right to the front door,
through the darkness and rain,
and told him to fuck off. This is our terrain.

photos from northern California

2010-07-26T18:48:00.000-07:00

7/23

2010-07-24T16:32:00.000-07:00

The chains were broken and we hurdled the high and stony wall into Oregon. After 1750 miles in this tortuous golden state, I have reached the northern yard, every step beside my brothers Furniture and Rally. We have walked on the edge of death and on the edge of society, and now we crossed the edge of America's most prosperous state.

7/16

2010-07-24T16:28:00.001-07:00

Slowly I have slid into a strange canyon in time, a little current of doldrums in this rapid experience. For the last weeks we have been stricken with the Oregon fever, quickly cutting away these fatty Northern miles in California. Since July fourth we have traveled 400 miles, and there are only a paltry 120 separating us from the Golden State exodus. Consistently we hike from dawn to dusk, moving like a tenacious solar operated train. Scenery has blurred together between 30 mile days. I have a slippery footing on where I have been at what time, seeming to slide through a wormhole in the woods. My communication skills and vocabulary are deteriorating. Day hikers greet me enthusiastically and all I can do is look right through them. Hopefully I can take some time to relax in Etna, the next town.

Water, 7/13

2010-07-16T11:07:00.000-07:00

Water is a divine thing, but because it is common in the commercial world, its divinity is not recognized. It is simply there, like the way asphalt is there beneath car tires. But when not harnessed into a state of thereness, it has an agency of its own. Tom Robbins said water invented humans as an expedited means of transportation. A woman I worked with painted hearts on her water bottles because she believed that the clear creature is an embodiment of love. Scientists study the mystery in the language of ice crystals. And now I have had my own engagement with the spectral being. For hundreds of miles I walked across frozen water, morphed into ridges and valleys, and I stepped on settlements of thousands of crystals. I walked through creeks and rivers constantly, hating every minute of wet feet because of the busy flow, one ripple after another. I used to fall asleep in a fortress of fear, because wherever I was, I heard water running, running and never resting, even when I was. And now as I walk on sand and rocks and the dry corners of this Earth that have not been loved for a long time, I think of ice cubes in my water and blue glacial lakes and lovely energetic creeks. What a clever opponent he can be.

2010-07-13T15:46:00.000-07:00

some photos from the few of weeks...

7/7

2010-07-07T13:38:00.003-07:00

After 32 miles, mosquitoes die when they drink my blood, because it is too hardcore. The snow is relenting and the sun is glinting.

7/5

2010-07-07T13:35:00.001-07:00

We celebrated the nation's birthday simply by relaxing around Sierra City- an antique American mountain town, the icing on California's cake. Milkshake and Cliffhanger shared a room with us, and we all shared sickeningly wonderful amounts of food. I finally capitalized on my idea for a stout beer float, which paid wonderful dividends. We almost died as passengers in a speedy hitchhike, but here on the trail again things are calm, easy and serene, and it seems the snow is finally slackening its grip. If you think of the impediments to where you are going, you will always be slower than just simply walking.

7/2

2010-07-07T13:29:00.000-07:00

There is a feeling and struggle I believe that Franz Kafka once articulated. There is a demon against which we struggle who has no throat that we can strangle, a villain that has no heart that we can stab, a computer that has no microchip to step on. Essentially the struggle that infuriates me most is one man against nature- one tiny piece of a system glitching against its maker. That is what snow is to me. There are thousands of acres of thick and ripple ice burying the hiking trails. Getting lost is an ordeal of every hour, and gentle switchbacks have become sloping chutes over canyons. What was once a meditative ramble is a struggle- a contest of every hour. And there is no frosty snowman to decapitate or break. There are limitless expanses of land with no neck to strangle.

In practical news though, the battle is going well. Rally and I rushed 14 miles today to meet his friends Macy, at a remote road, bringing tidings of burritoe, cooking and stout beer. Ed joined us for the lazy feast, and we slowly ambled seven miles farther to an old stone hut, where I split wood to feed the stove, and we spread our sleeping bags on old mattresses. It is funny to think that 22 miles constitute an easy day, and resting before nine is early. Sierra city is 34 miles away, and so is ice cream.

7/1

2010-07-07T13:26:00.000-07:00

Things change quickly. The landscape melts and morphs, creeks flood, snow melts, friendships form and flowers bloom. Yet you could never watch any of these things happen with any sense of satisfaction. You must turn your head around when you have forgotten about the road behind you and then you will remember. Someone found us loitering outside the sporting good shop in South Lake Tahoe and took us into his home. Rally and I both received new packs, and are soaring like sparrows. Today is July 1st and still we are lost in the snow, but found in life.

"All I want now is a fucking egg McMuffin and a prefab cigarette." - Salty, on Sonora Pass

6/27

2010-07-07T13:23:00.000-07:00

When all the pieces are broken, nature usually manages to put them together again. Before dawn I began walking north, navigating snow fields and switchbacks. I waited on a high ridge and watched my lost friends appear on distant switchbacks, meandering like ants. We rambled through volcanic landscape and let the sun shine on our dry and treeless trial. Tonight we are camped by a frog kingdom in a meadow 9,000 feet high, and shared a campfire with the Israeli gears, who are hardy souls. Tomorrow we will raid South Lake Tahoe's collective pantry.

6/26

2010-07-07T13:20:00.000-07:00

I spent the morning horrendously lost in the white oblivion of snow fields. Rally and Furniture were far ahead already. I was ready to cry out that it's almost July. But Simon, the English hiker and extraordinary orientier, wandered into my path in time to rescue me. I was ready to blaze ahead in search of my friends, but chose his company instead, since he wired my interest with stories of mountaineering in glaciers and continental bicycling tours. Somehow, though, I've separated myself from company and am here alone on this dusty ridgeline.

6/24

2010-07-07T12:58:00.000-07:00

It has been so long since I've written, and I have passed so many waypoints on this fated roller coaster that already are fading in my mind. The last week is another chapter in the grueling expedtions through the snow with Furniture and Rally, who have kept me sane and alive through most of this. A human alone in this landscape would simply be swallowed- lost inside a cosmic case of infinitely unfolding dimensions.

A week ago we left the highest of the Sierra for a town called Mmamoth, the only local resupply point inna wide wilderness. A certain Jill at the local outfitter took us into her home where we ingested copious amounts of pizza and good company. We set out with nine days of food, intending to reach South Lake Tahoe, 290 miles north. But sometimes nature kinks even the most well-laid plans.

The snow was only worse, piled high in deeper canyons and deeper forests. It took hours to reach Donohue Pass, a lingering spot on the darkening horizon, as we slipped over miles of sun touched snow. The ground does not thaw evenly and rather than a level sheet of ice, snow at high elevation transforms into suncups- ridges and cavities about a foot deep. Walking on this ground is like strapping on roller skates when you are blind drunk and trying to run. Snow fell on us as we crested the infernal pass and we slid down the north slope quickly on rocks and chutes, trying to escape the dark storm. But of course there is sun behind all clouds.

In the canyon we walked along a meandering creek in meadows of green and shadows of mountains. Birds and butterflies ushered us through, but the most joyous part was simply walking on dirt; soft, wet dirt which was so often buried under snow. After a 28 mile day, we discovered Tom, the traveling trail angel waiting in the Tuolomne Meadows parking lot, the first pavement we had seen in 220 miles. We descended on the nearest mountain town to ravage the unsuspecting local apple strudel population.

But back on the trail and heading North things became tumultuous again. The snow is packed deep stilll, and it is almost July. Route finding is challengning, and looking at maps and pausing to orient habitual. We have gone many miles without seeing dirt. Thus far through the high Sierra, perhaps 70% of the trail is under snow, 20% under water, and the precious 10% is what it should be. Hiking through snow is as absurd as strapping on skiis to walk on the beach. The north face of every mountain is white and packed in ice, and what appears on the map as switchbacks is in reality a steep chute from ridge to canyon. What would be a dry and easy grade is now a slick and slow descent with ice axe in hand. Since Tuolomne meadows every creek has been flooded with snowmelt. What is describeed in the guidebook as "rough" or "tricky" is actually potentially lethal. I have wathced my friends slip and fall in rapids belly high. We cross on fallen trees when we can, even if it means walking a tightrope over black water. This morning I felt stunned from the waist down after fording a creek and then walking on snowpack. I think it qualifies as half hypothermic. The food we inteded to last nine days has only made it six, and tomorrow we will take the 30 mile hitchike to Bridgeport, California. It's easy to forget we are in the golden state. In pleasant news, today is my birthday and we are camped on warm rocks.

Scribbles of the Sierra

2010-06-20T09:10:00.001-07:00

6/12 Recently I've been too cold to write. Motor coordination is one of the simple functions we sophisticated mammals cherish. But like a true primate, I have forsaken feeling in my fingers and toes for the sacrifice of being uncivilized places. Ancient bowls and cirques of blue water lie below sheer treeless cliffs, and wide wide mountain passes stretch for miles like a giant's vertebrate. Deep canyons are dug between domineering shoulders of cliff. And still all is quiet. Even in the landscape of heaven all is quiet, because it is veiled in four feet of snow. How could I have predicted my June in California would be on the fringe of the Arctic circle? Everyday we navigate slopes with steel spikes on our shoes and ice axes in hand. Below the snow chutes, deep below in the canyon is death, and that is really what we are conquering here.

6/13 All this snow can be very defeating. Imagine running a race on a road where a truckful of pushpins was spilled. The sheets of white are deceptively beautiful but are ready to pull down my feet. Suddenly, hiking is very complicated. Sunscreen is necessary to prevent the underside of a nose from being burned. Sunglasses are necessary to keep retinas from being burned. An ice axe is necessary to arrest a body plummeting frictionlessly across a chute of ice. Spikes and chains are necessary for traction on the bottom of shoes. And many extra pair of socks are needed for cold wet feet. But what is most necessary is control of the secret to satisfaction- that the universe is what we make it.

6/14 First we woke in snow. What we saw was fields of ice and bright blue lakes, stilled in time. Then we walked through snow. For nine hours we dug our feet into the still holds in walls of ice and rock, and slid across fields of white. We forded streams of snowmelt, and navigated by compass, because for fourteen miles we saw only 100 feet of dirt trail. Everything else was bright and luminous, cutting into our our eyes like flakes of glass. We climbed Pinchot pass and then Mather pass, for which I should of taped a suicide note to the ice axe in my right hand that explained how glorious it would be to fall 1500 feet down an ice chute into a frozen lake to a death in John Muir's backyard. Needless to say, it scared me shitless. To kick steps into snow soft as vanilla pudding on a cliff face. On and on we walked through the white stuff, until we rounded the western wall of a canyon. The sun was shining proud and gloriously on the high rocky switchbacks, and the water of a million pounds of snow poured down through the shining rocks. We followed the trail inches of water, and I splashed and splashed and almost cried at the bliss of having ground beneath my feet. I drank water- cascading down the ridge- like it was lemonade. And we descended below 10,000 feet and I could hear the chimes of victory in my head.

6/15 A potato bomb is the process in which a hiker pours dehydrated mashed potatoes into a pot of food, often sodium-laced chinese noodles, to thicken the consistency from soup to porridge. Glissading is the process in which a hiker slides feet first down a slope of snow or ice, often forty-five degrees or steeper, grappling the terrain with an ice axe and hoping not to lose the delicate bond to Earth. Both will tear up your ass.

Photos from the goat farm

2010-06-20T08:30:00.000-07:00

6/10

2010-06-19T18:25:00.000-07:00

We are beyond the reach of humans now, and at the doorstep of heaven. Sheer cliffs catch the last light of the sun and leave the deep valleys in shadow. The thundering fall of water beneath sheets of ice echoes from below. Everything around me is white or brown- stacks of snow and rock dominate a landscape of giant proportions, without a sight of plant or animal. 11,600 feet in the glacial cirque below Mt. Whitney is a glimpse of the desert and the arctic, and the waiting room to another world. Tomorrow the six of us- Milkshake, Cliffhanger, Uncle Tom, Furniture, Rally and I- now huddled in rocks, will rise with the dawn to stand on America's highest point.

6/9

2010-06-19T18:23:00.000-07:00

The party shirt appeared from behind the trees. Bojangles unleashed 160 ounces of malt liquor from his pack. That is enough for 40 ounces for the each of the four of us on this desolate glacial lake. At an alpine 11,500 feet above sea level, we are cold, but our friendship is warm.

6/8

2010-06-19T18:22:00.003-07:00

Today I drank snowmelt, dug poopholes in the slope of a 10,000 foot peak with an ice axe, and wiped with a pamphlet sized declaration of independence. Even the best laid plots of mankind return to dust.

6/7

2010-06-19T18:22:00.001-07:00

I don't eat pancakes anymore, but butter sandwiches laced with syrup.

6/6

2010-06-06T07:04:00.000-07:00

Long valleys of sand and sharp brush are behind this point. Ahead are high giants who have reigned since glacial ages, still crowned with snow. It seems like more than lifetimes ago that I was scavenging a horse trough for water in the blue and brown cliffs 40 miles north of the Mexican border. Now the world has gone around its axis, and here I am on top looking down. 700 miles!

6/2

2010-06-06T06:58:00.000-07:00

Imagine walking in the desert for eighteen miles. You are 6,000 feet closer to the sun than your cronies at home. The loose and lifeless sand moves under your feet like a conveyor belt, such that you are never fully moving forwards. No plants grow higher than your knees and are all waving sharp dry fingers. Joshua trees might offer a silhouette of shade as the sun's rays penetrate their thorny crowns, and as the sun shifts the shadow will divorce the ground. The world is white and grey and gleaming all around, like thousands of quartz mirrors smashed on the bottom of this cosmic oven. Everything is bright, caught in invisible fire. The air is hot, hot and dry, and long ago your hands became leather. In the beginning it was only a cosmetic tan and now it is following you, trying to eat your skin. Your shirt is a suit of salt, and everything is still hot and dry and bright and still. Every step sinks into the sand and little ridges form, quickly tickled by wind. Ants scramble up and over the ridges,watching their horizon grow and shrink with awe, as you walk through these lingering mountains.

6/1

2010-06-06T06:56:00.000-07:00

Eventually the universe will have sort of spiraled into chaos. Part of the interesting nature of nature is that it organizes itself. But the great grandfather of life, Energy, has a more devious direction for the universe. Eventually all the seams will come apart.

5/31

2010-06-06T06:54:00.000-07:00

This morning we left the goat farm and trounced back to the transient home we seek in nature. It is difficult leaving certain companionship and right angled rooms behind for wide-open and windy mountains lined with fading footprints. It is difficult to leave behind duck eggs and goat milk. But the less we have is the less we have to worry about. To ween ourselves away from our former home in a rusting camper, Rally and I made our beds tonight under crude lean-to by a stream, which is a lonely triangle of a truck frame and barn siding.

5/24

2010-05-27T19:01:00.000-07:00

A white van sailed through an ocean of desert dust. It slid through the eternal alleyway of Joshua trees. My Hawaiian sarong was flying in the wind from its anchor on cactus fingers. I forget it four days ago.

On the road back, Bill stopped the van quickly. A red snake lay sprawled across four feet of dust. "Those suckers bite like a motherfucker," he said. He opened the door and walked around the red racer in slow circles, the white childish grin in his mouth. The snake was not as pleased and began coiling into symbols of pain. Bill cornered its escape, and instantly broke into a swift jig, laughing as the spearhead lashed at his ankles. He stepped away as it lunged a last time, through the brushes and away. He walked back into the van and drove us home, picking up the conversation where it was dropped.

5/23

2010-05-27T18:55:00.000-07:00

There is still snow waiting on the high slopes of the Sierra. Furniture and I decided we could wait longer, so we are waiting on the desert floor. We are waiting on the dry and dusty basin of the Mojave desert, the intermission between two mighty mountain ranges. We found jobs on a goat farm, and arrived today. The owners fed us goat milk and goat cheese and goat meat and goat kefir and took us through this cradle of life in the bowl of dust. Wide blue skies and snowy peaks frame a beige orchard of apple trees and steel goat cages. The wind runs through like a vandal, stirring the plants and the animals. Snakes called "the Mojave Green" slide along the ground, waiting to put a neurotoxin, donated by evolution, into a man's blood. Goats are the citizens of this little city, and dogs are their police, and a monstrous blind pig is their mayor. Already we have heard stories of space shuttles and abandoned gold mines and drag races and heavy metal deposits and Charles Manson's family and the Mojave Green. The desert is the place to pursue things that have been chased out of cities, and here we are amongst both lifestyles- sheltered in an ancient anchored RV in the ring of rusting apocalyptic stacks of machines, just waiting, just being a desert competitor.

Trail Photos, Southern California

2010-05-23T18:41:00.000-07:00

5/20

2010-05-21T15:20:00.000-07:00

The desert saga really begins yesterday afternoon. We plowed through the first sun oven of sand and arrived at the highway. It was just a long vein of asphalt, and there was a home on the other side, trimmed like a western film set. Old machinery lay in the sandy yard, and the owner welcomed us into his garage. We let the sun sink and the heat escape before setting into the sand again. The trail plunged through the Mojave desert, a long strand of sand dividing the mountains. we approached the narrow open channel of the Los Angeles aqueduct, and peed into it before crossing, only hoping the our salt-infused peanut urine would fill a minor drop of every cosmopolitan water glass. We made it as far into the dark desert as we could before collapsing.

This morning the sun was quick to wake again. Within an hour my skin changed from shivering to sweating. By light our view was unlimited- sweeping copper hills patched with Joshua trees, standing around like sentinels. The wind began to steadily intensify, until we were leaning forward to stay upright. Sand was being caught in greater gusts. Soon I could not hear anything but the whipping in my ears. Bojangles walked in front of me and screamed something into the air. He pointed to a rattlesnake coiled on the trail, shaking, but its sound drowned in the wind. We walked around it but encountered three more, all threatening us silently.

5/18

2010-05-21T15:16:00.001-07:00

After a stint of fortunate roadside karma and the collective pampering of civilizations, of pooping in toilets consecutive evenings and finding coffee in the morning, I have brought myself back into the abyss. Fire closures routed the trail on country roads and past the eyes of strangers. Folks in Acton, Agua Dulce and Green Valley were all eager to spoil me as they saw me emerge from beneath powerlines and railroad tracks. But here I am again and it is the pain and the pleasure that let me know that I'm alive.
A cold mist settled on the desert for the past two days. What used to be limitless panoramas of sand became shrouded by thick cold clouds. We walked high on the ridge today in a still and quiet haze. The desert was like a dreamland. "There better not be a psycho clown with a meat cleaver around the corner," Bojangles said.

5/14

2010-05-21T15:14:00.001-07:00

Fire closure forced us onto the road. There are no trees or water, only a thin vein of asphalt running to a disappearing desert horizon. Gone are the ice-blanketed 8,000 foot passes, and now we walk alone in the floor of the beige-colored quartz oven. But we found a giant willow tree bending over sand on the bank of a desert stream, and here in the shade we will wait until the sun has dropped its guard, and start walking again. The plastic Jesus in the roadside sand will watch us.

5/11

2010-05-12T13:01:00.000-07:00

At 8300 feet elevation the only bed I have is granite and sticks. The sun is sinking over the ridge and the vapor is rising in quick clouds from the two warm bodies on this ridge. Michael the German is here too, and we anticipate an easy trounce through ten miles of snow to town tomorrow. Those below may be proud of their homes, but on this perch I watch them move like ants below, and eat my cheese like a king.

5/10

2010-05-12T13:00:00.000-07:00

This evening we found hot springs in the desert- already crowded by some Californian casual capital earning citizens. The problem with paradise is it needs an observer to become idyllic, but the observing takes away that very gleam itself.

5/7

2010-05-12T12:55:00.000-07:00

The rest of the world accepts a weekly Sabbath, so after 270 miles without a day of rest, I realized I was overdue. I hitched into Big Bear City to join other fragmented bands of hikers. Stepping into town is like descending from heaven to a skyscraper, like peeling open a door to another dimension, where time is so much quicker. The time I have set my clock to by the woods is called deep time- the eons it takes for mountains to rise and crumble, or for trees to stretch their limbs. Town is accelerated time- the compression of space into snack-size pieces. But I certainly can't whine about my luck in hitchhiking up and down the boulevard between cafes. Lakewood and I retired early, by the sun's command, and each brought a rotisserie chicken back to the motel room. We bathed in the great American grease of televisions and meat, falling asleep in a warm dry place. The next day Furniture and Rally found me, perhaps by detecting my emanating good vibes. Now on the trail again, I have wound my clock back to snowbound slow time, and I brought a disposable camera for the documentary.

5/4

2010-05-12T12:52:00.000-07:00

The blissful pleasures come in the midst of the darkest, most calloused valleys. I would find no comfort in a cavernous mansion, or a car I need to to take care of or a hot dinner someone else prepared. But finding a crumbling stone cabin on a n 8100 foot pass, walled in from the whipping wind and out of sight of the mountain ice- that is truly a joy. My friends and I have reclaimed its life with a glowing fire in the long dead hearth. Now with my sleeping bag wrapped tight around me and wool gloves around my wrists, I will warm myself in my family's gifts. I keep the fabric close as a token of love.

5/3

2010-05-12T12:51:00.000-07:00

Routed out the snow but pummeled my feet. Pilgrims carry heavy spiritual burdens, but they are patient in the pace of their quest. I carry almost nothing and I am racing northward at a hurry to usher in the Messiah.

May Day

2010-05-02T18:34:00.001-07:00

I consecrate the first day of May be looking down on the valleys from this high icy buttress, watching the city of Palm Springs far East light up the desert sand like moonlight on water. And 7,200 feet lower in the West the purple cactus flowers are celebrating in the canyon. And here we are, furniture and Sam and I, dangling on a precipice above the world like we were sitting on God's thumb.

We crossed Apache Peak hours ago, untying the knot of nervousness that was twining in my stomach as I'm sure in the stomachs of other hikers. The rumours in the community and amongst locals were images of treacherousness and an icy plunge to the canyon. Alternate routes were encouraged. The North face is not touched by sun, and snow stays packed in sheets, slick and steep. Of course we strutted to it, and rounding the North bend my steps simply stopped. "Well, it was nice knowing you," Furniture chuckled.

Years ago a forest fire at all the trees on the North and East slope, leaving only black bones in the ground. The soil eroded and washed away without roots to hold it, leaving a near vertical chute in its wake. We were looking at a long glowing cape of ice stretched out across a flank that dropped forever. We started walking downslope, trying to cross below the sheet of ice. Even footsteps in the soil sent sleds of rocks sliding down down forever and out out of sight. I could feel the Earth slipping beneath me, tired and ready to let go of the mountain. We made it across, and continued walking through the steep graveyard of black trunks, watching pebbles ten inches from our shoes slide into oblivion. The sibling of majesty is danger. The sublimity of these peaks is that you are standing on something wonderful on the very edge of life.

4/30

2010-05-02T18:28:00.000-07:00

A week ago we knocked beer caps off on the Mexican fencepost. Now we are plunged deep in the desert, but not without intoxicating kindness. Interaction happens like desert rains: life is dry for days until a monsoon of stimulation. Thus far we've been soaked with the kindness of pies beside the road, of beers in stream beds, of hot dog grills in parking lots, hot thermal springs, and most recently, a man called Mike let us into his home.

All fifteen dirty hikers were lounging in a little room glowing with a wood stove. Roasted chicken, tortillas, rice and beans after seventeen miles of tortuous tranced shuffling through sand is the root of Euphoria. Hunger is indeed the best sauce.

We left he desert shack this morning, left the sleeping strange machinery and dumbbells rusting in the yard. Left the beer behind, back into a place that men have not put in bottles and packages.

I think a lot. I let lines of song reverberate over and over, dancing with thoughts of my own. Reason is a scalpel, and there is no amount of fat insulating a riddle through whit it cannot cut. School is a wonderful confluence of ideas, a sort of flea market of questions, but is a distraction as well. To fully enjoy he things you've been given, you must turn them over and over until the ends are smooth.

4/26 From the dusty Trail

2010-05-02T18:22:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I was left in the bottom of a long and cold landscape like a drop of paint mistakenly dripped on an impressionist canvas. Thus far the journey north has been an exposure to natures' great wizened hand. With thin and minimal supplies I have walked through mountain passes cold as hell and hot as furnaces. I have held my possessions in a thin nylon shield against the sun. Though the desert is not what I imagined: not a Looney Toons landscape in high contrast, a pool of golden sand lined with high cacti. There is greenery here but it is sparse and small, growing on the balding heads of ridges as far as the horizon. On top of this land a human feels small- because in no direction are visible the great things we are proud of- no roads, buildings or even other souls. There is only me and the Earth, me drifting across this giant like a dust mite fallen on an endless crumpled ream of paper.

The community is small but strong. About 300 people aspire to complete this trail every year, all beginning in the same window of time after spring snow melt. That means on a given day or night I may be entirely alone on the crumpled rocks, and someone may be stirring on the next mountain over, thinking the exact same thing. Sometimes I see tiny glowing shapes drifting on a far ridgeline, and think them only pollen in my eye, but realize it is another tiny pilgrim like me.

Old Writing

2010-04-20T11:55:00.000-07:00

I Walked beneath the stars every night. I was the only one, little and lonely beneath that massive bright ceiling. I thought I was holding up the whole thing, the infinite chandelier, from old South Point Road. My mother was far away, I imagined, hands clasped in prayer that the stars would not fall on me. Give him the strength to keep them high, she asked. They're the only thing he can't afford to break.

By day I thought of nothing, simply moving to the droning pulse of circuits inside me, like a machine. But by night I let the sleeping senses awake. The road was narrow and lively with high leaning trees and walls of vines. Light of the stars poured down and over the pavement, carving a channel of silver in a black land. Shadows on the roadside danced in the breezes, and shadows of shadows danced in my eyes.

Old Writing

2010-04-17T21:24:00.000-07:00

Kenny returned after a week's regular disappearance, and an irregular trial by centipede venom on the West side of the island. Taft bought orchids from a local farm and in the transaction was given a sleek, full body of a recently dead rooster. Kai returned from Kona with a friend with pink hair. A quiet new worker came from Wyoming, and a couple, with a screaming child, from the Western mainland. Fate seems to have just remembered that lonely little corner of the world, and shine a light in for a moment, only to blind the little creatures inside it. M sometimes thought of California and his family in it. It was the filter that held the sanity within the Western edge of the country, and everyone who reached Hawaii was crazy enough to pass through it.

Old Writing

2010-04-17T12:17:00.000-07:00

There is a certain timelessness that seems to stitch together this southern tip of land. A gray light shines on the little tin roofs every morning, waking the young men beneath them, and turns golden by the time they are greeting each other by the coffeepot, and is hot and yellow by the time they are eating their eggs. Every morning it is the same, and every morning the young men speak the same words to each other.

Morning, says M to Hans.

What's Happening, he says back.

Oh nothing, he replies quietly.

They let silence settle over the first part of the ritual.

Big things today, Hans says, with a hint of suspense.

Are we picking oranges, asks M, and Hans proceeds to articulate the tactics and new obstacles that will transform the orchard into a battlefield, but M only nods occasionally, listening to his eggs hiss in the skillet.

The grey light turns golden, and the birds greet each other with the same words as the men below them, only in more erudite, nasal language. It happens this way every morning, and it always ha, even before there was anyone to write it down.

The men walk up the road, half a mile form the little tin houses to the big wooden one. They walk on a dirt path through a rusting iron gate, cracked for their admittance. They walk past rows of high pine trees, standing like sentinels along the edge of the orchard, and past heaps of strange antiquated machinery, all being painted the same idle brown by the mingling of iron and air.

What do you suppose that big one with the hovel is for, Taft asks, looking for a hook on which to hang a question.

Oh that right there is a terrestrial boar, Hans replies. Yeah, that's what they call it in the mining towns, he says thoughtfully. Everyday that he walked past the machine he added another stitch to his story, weaving a lure large enough or Taft or one of the boys to hook on to. He had hundreds of these tapestries stowed away in his mind for other objects.

How do you suppose Mort came by it? Taft asked.

Won it off a poker hand with a cane planter from up the road. Some folks say the mead he was pouring for him had something to do with it, Hans said without hesitation. Course that's a whole nother story. They let silence eat the rest of the details.

What's mead, Taft asked.

Jesus Christ, don't you know anything about the world? Hans asked. Mike, why don't you explain to him, he said resignedly.

Bubble baths

2010-04-16T12:48:00.000-07:00

Dipping my toes into the puddles of luxury again, looking at the same sun I did in Hawaii but from the cage of smog here in Los Angeles. One week before I begin the Pacific Crest Trail, I can indulge in all the glistening delights of downtown, in a town where people still look in mirrors. Meanwhile my ghost has been buried by the bureaucratic stack of numbers and names back in the castle at school. They are putting idols on my tomb like Stonewall Jackson would pee on the grave of some poor runaway slave. Aloha Hawaii, Aloha huge oranges, Aloha big blue ocean.

Back at the Keys

2010-04-01T00:23:00.000-07:00

Several weeks have passed without me penning eloquent thoughts. All the sentiments pile up in stacks somewhere in the dusty corners of my head. Letters I have written are sitting underneath my mattress, waiting for the day I go back to town. I stopped writing personal anecdotes in my journal and started writing bits of stories instead. It's what happens when life is no longer novel.

But that's not a bad thing. The fruit is easy to see and the trees are easy to climb. The stars aren't so bright anymore. I wake without alarm clocks. Soon I will have something adventurous to write about, and not the ferment of my mental complacency.

There are no problems we cannot dissect on our own. The mind is like a scalpel, and even before it is sharpened by the works of Kant or Rousseau or Steinbeck or Shakespeare it has still got the edge to whittle at questions. I enjoy having the seven or eight hours of silence everyday in the orchards, with the oxygen from glossy leaves tickling my brain as it cuts at little questions. Anyways, anyways, hopefully I will write something more intriguing later, that tells about what I've physically been doing.

Photos

2010-03-21T17:16:00.001-07:00

Photos

2010-03-21T16:46:00.000-07:00

Pork Day

2010-03-15T21:18:00.000-07:00

They found a place in the orchard where high grasses were reaching up between trees. There was hardly a breeze. The oranges they smashed on the ground glistened in the soft light, and leaked the sweet smell of ferment, of rich decay. Kai folded his hands together in prayer, and M noticed him and sauntered away, pushing a red shell in to the empty shotgun chamber.

Mort had handed him the gun earlier and told him to be careful. "I like that gun," he said, "Don't do anything like John Wayne." But it was obvious to M he didn't like the gun enough. It was an antique machine, a large piece of metal, stamped with Smith and Wesson, and fringed with rust. The barrel was wallpapered inside with cobwebs.

In the bushes, he held it across his lap, safety lever in place. Kai squatted about fifteen feet away, knife open in his palm. It was sharpened that morning, and ready to plunge into a thick throat. They waited shirtless in the still air not speaking.

But fate has a funny way of yielding its prize only when its not asked for. They thought about the hordes of boars and sows shuffling underfoot when they were high in the trees, crushing fallen fruit in their jaws. Now they waited before the rank juice shrine, but only heard the grass rustling.

It's amazing how loud the forest speaks to one willing to listen. Their ears twitched at the sound of a thousand swishing gowns, the high elephant grass dancing in the wind. But for an hour no hoofbeats came.

Then they saw the children. Tiny pairs of black feet were clearly touching the ground. They approached the fruit lure in a soft chorus of grunts. M's fingers tightened around the stock, and he tilted his head back and forth, looking for a black mass in the bushes. The sow was close behind. Kai stiffened his back and pointed with index finger to a stand of grass in motion. The children munched at the red fruit eagerly. But the sow stayed back with pricked ears. M had the gun pointed at its forehead, but it was not moving closer.

The box of shells seemed like it had been resting on a closet shelf. The cardboard was weak and M was skeptical when handling the faded red plastic. Double O buckshot would not kill a board farther than fifteen feet, and the sow seemed to understand this.

The animals took the bait and scampered away. Kai's back slackened and M laid the gun down. They crouched in waiting for fifteen more minutes in the heavy humid air. The light slowly faded, and rain began teasing the backs of the boys' necks.

M stood up suddenly and walked away, the gun dangling at his side. "I'm losing patience," he said, "I'm just going to stalk one." Kai stared at him in silence and shrugged.

Sometimes good things only come to the inexpectant. Fifty feet away, in another row of trees, he saw the ridged black back moving. It was a large male, grunting carelessly and sniffing the ground for oranges. M tiptoed towards him, but surely he felt as foolish as a child sneaking towards Santa on Christmas. The boar shuffled slowly, but was in no hurry to leave him.

He stood completely still with the gunstock connected to his shoulder. He imagined the boar only saw him as a small tree with on branch. It seemed to agree, and shuffled slowly towards a fallen orange between them. He moved his long black forehead into a line with the shell in waiting.

A peal of thunder licked the orchard. The boar fell instantly. His legs were kicking the air and he flattened the grass beneath him. M slid the chamber open, stepped forwards and pushed anew shell in at once. He pointed it at the squirming boar's head and let a second wave of shot wash him in the eye.

Kai approached him from behind, the knife open in his palm. "Should I do this?" he asked. "No," M said, "He'll be dead in a second." The pig kicked on more time, and was still. Its head lay in a puddle of blood. The boys looked at it in silence.

They never thought of the carry until they were facing the animal. They each grabbed a fistful of hooves and walked uphill, the gun dangling in M's right hand. In less than a minute they set it down, sweat on their foreheads. "Must be eighty pounds," Kai said. "Yeah," said M, and they started justifying the kill, praising fate. It took another half hour to drag the carcass to the top of the field. They dropped it at the dirt road, and Kai ran to call the boys, asking them to bring the truck. The boar was wearing a coat of dry grass on top of his blood.

A poem

2010-03-11T23:52:00.000-08:00

There will always be
something in a Southern Winter
that makes me lonely.
Certain smells
light old tunnels in my brain,
and certain sounds forever
echo in old caverns,
and this Southern feeling has
its own empty room.
There is a body barely breathing
Inside the room,
with a face with no features.
There is no silver lining
when I stand in the
high hallways of bare brown trees.
The wind walks through like a
cloaked stranger, eyes turned to the ground,
and does not carry news but
brushes by me in silence.
And no one cares.
And that is the lever that pries my cap off, and
turns off all the lights.

Walking

2010-03-11T23:48:00.000-08:00

The road between the palace and the big house was a narrow tunnel of greedy trees, bending towards one another in an arc above the road in a desperate attempt to touch. It was the only road in and out, and really the only pavement at all in a large swath of trees. The boys walked on it to work in the morning, and they walked on it to bed in the evening. They always walked on the left side of the road, so as to be clearly visible to any traffic, and to wait for the face of a pretty woman behind a windshield.

The walk was quiet, and the boys kept the ritual of silence. It was half a mile of meditation, ten minutes of four brains saying prayers so close to one another, yet completely oblivious in its own way. Sometimes M would pick up Macadamia nuts fallen from a certain tree they passed. He would hold the three brown shells in a palm, and roll around one another with a soft tapping. They were soft and spherical, like three planets of his own.

3/6/10

2010-03-11T23:43:00.000-08:00

We are not free from the laws of nature, and we live like earthquakes and forests. The world is not in fact a delicate system, ticking like a rhythmic watch. The second is our regular measurement, a vibrating quartz crystal, a costume of neatness for a world in disarray. Big things don't happen often, so we've always forgotten the first surprise by the time of the second. The party quest waits until we're asleep to walk through the door again.

Kenny returned after a week's regular disappearance, and an irregular trial by centipede poison on the West coast. Taft bought orchids from a local farm and in the transaction was given a sleek, full body of a recently dead rooster. Kai returned from Kona with a friend with pink hair. A quiet new worker came from Wyoming, and a couple, with a screaming child, from the Western mainland. Fate seems to have just remembered this lonely little corner of the world and shined a light in for a moment, only to blind me again. I sometimes think that California is the filter that holds the sanity within the Western edge of the country, and everyone who has reached Hawaii was crazy enough to pass through it.

3/3/10

2010-03-11T23:36:00.000-08:00

I had forgotten about orange faces and quiet campfires, I had forgotten about the land without mirrors, without grades, and I had forgotten about having dirty feet. I had forgotten about all this at college. I was measuring my life with a system other people had given to me. No one in particular was responsible for calibrating my mind, just a nebulous majority called 'good life.' It had no mention of exile, poverty and thoughtful silence.

It was a giant tumbling machine, and even the people who proclaimed to resist it helped push it out of ditches when it was stuck. To resist the machine is to give traction to its treads. My parents and teachers are apart of it too, gearing onward to an invisible horizon over a sea of money.

But friends have shown me a new system, a new measurement set. Taft, the twenty two year old butcher, fourteen year old GED recipient, veteran traveler, is neither wealthy nor glamorous. But he found a detour to the place called happiness, which the giant machine passed long ago, tumbling instead on a blind convoluted route across deserts, towards the same goal. There are many questions we only feel comfortable feeding the machine before thinking over ourselves, but I realized that with patience, there is no knot we ourselves cannot untie.

3/1/10

2010-03-11T23:31:00.000-08:00

The arrival of the third month has ushered the arrival of new questions. The first one is Zen. Occasionally a word will knock at my mind from more than one entry, spoken from the lips of more than one person, and that is my message from fate to begin thinking. I'm reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance right now, which is a scope of form and function, artists and engineers. Yesterday my mystic friend Jimbo told me that Zen was a study originated by a monk who traveled to see the Buddha lecture, but instead, saw him in a transfixed state, holding a flower in silence, for many hours. Today in the Tangelo trees Christopher asked me if I studied zen. I told him that I call my beliefs by no name, I just think a lot.

Taft and Christopher brought home roadside skeletons this evening. We fashioned a candle holder out of a boar's jaw, which radiates a quaint pagan touch. Now with our living space glowing with the white bones and teeth of ancient critters, and glinting with the skins of large lizards and insects, I'm sure guests will wonder what sort of heathens haunt this place.

2/29/10

2010-03-11T23:24:00.000-08:00

I always turned my eyes from racism. I had a clean, white ticket of passage through the South, and I figured race issues were something other people could solve when I was sound asleep or far away. I was almost bored with the whole tedious talk- talks in artwork, in school, on streets and stores. I was one of those apathetic civilians on the fringe of an old battlefield. People loved to make panic for themselves, but I knew the war would never come.

And now in Hawaii I see the flipside of the coin. I am on the battlefield now, and whether I want to care or not, others watch me with heedful eyes. I am the same color as the colonists who shackled this land and domesticated its people like pets, the same color as the sugar can chieftans of so many families away, and I am the color that others now love to hate. 'Haole' is the Hawaiian word for white person, no different from 'nigger.'

Today I rode to the ancient coastline at Honau'pu, where picnic areas and fire pits littered with beer cans overlook crumbling stone piers and white coral sands. A crowd of Hawaiians watched me pass, behind folded arms and smug grins. i did not look them in the eyes and I did not say anything, and I felt what the black people I had casually ignored must have felt. I felt the generations of hate being unearthed and loaded on my back.

2/18/10: High Ground

2010-03-04T18:22:00.000-08:00

Sirens sounded through the Hawaiian hills this morning, screaming the note that warms fear beneath a person's navel. We ate breakfast in silence, moving slowly, listening to the words on our only radio station, somewhere between static. The regular sound of ukuleles and silly falsetto had been commandeered by officials speaking about the tsunami. Then the emergency broadcast signal began, droning about something deep and fast many miles away.

Well, I had all intentions of hitting the beach that morning, well before the tsunami forecast hit. But from the scattered panic on the radio waves, it was clear all low roads had been seized and shut down. Only the sky was still bright and quiet, and nothing had changed with the air. Only the forecast of something two hours away lingered. I thought I would cleverly escape to a glorious overlook. I piloted through roads and through town on my bicycle, climbing the high road that winds through green cattle fields. I climbed past the cemetery and past the last buildings, up the slope and past the trees, until I was alone on a thinning road, high above the shore.

The road was built by the old sugar can corporation that ruled this land long ago. It was the intended overland route, skirting city and coast. From the top one can see a panoramic coastline, three quarters of a full horizon, and white surf on the deep blue water like icing. I brought a book, and read until the forecasted apocalypse.

Soon cars began pulling to the side of the road, above and below me. Passengers poured out, and with crossed arms and sunglasses on turned to the same coastline, leaning against their cars and casually waiting for the ocean to spill. Some had video cameras that they swung across the line of sight. The time of arrival- 11:04AM- came, and we squinted harder at the ebbing shore. Minutes passed in eager silence. Sometimes a person though he or she saw dark water, then said nevermind. After half an hour, some folks climbed back into cars, closing hungry video cameras. I knew the wave would not hit, and got back on my bike, riding past people with crestfallen faces, to another day in paradise.

2/27/10: Shifting Ground

2010-03-02T19:36:00.000-08:00

Today I went to Kailua, the teeming tropical resort city. I went pursuing illusions of grandeur and shapeless visions of happiness and beautiful faces. But I found streets of pale and ungainly white people, shielding themselves from the sun. There were not rows of shadowy bungalows, but rather strips of shopping malls. It is nearsighted though, to look at the trip as a failure, since I did not find what I wanted. From every experience we can extract wisdom, and even if I have to wince through hours, I carry the antidote through the future forever. I wanted something so badly simply because it was what I was not, it was the glistening grass on the other side of the fence, it was the illusion of happiness we all pursue. Truly, I am learning that what makes us happy is what we cannot have. Here I am in paradise looking for something greater.

Anyways, when the crew and I returned from Kailua, all four of us, we found the two new workers waiting at the hostel. As delighted as I was to make two more friends, all night I could not suppress my feelings of insecurity. What if they eat all the food? What if they use my shower stall? What trivial things to worry about, I know. The abrupt shock of two new bodies in this space shook the ground beneath me, I realized, because it is a fifty percent growth in our population. After crawling so deep inside myself, the call of only two others draws me back to the surface.

2010-03-01T16:23:00.000-08:00

2/24/10: Older Instincts

2010-02-25T17:26:00.000-08:00

I had a science teacher once who told my class that the moon is no bigger on the horizon than it is in the sky. But it always seemed mammoth, like a planetary floodlight. He insisted that it was an illusion our ancestors had passed down to us- the lingering eyes of hunters who had watched the horizon. I've never tried to prove him wrong by measuring the moon, but now I feel the old eyesight regaining control. There is no way to know my progenitors, but I feel their sight now swiveling in my head.

In an urban matrix our eyes function in planar space. Menus, books, computer screens, billboards and tables all tribute the rectangle. The commercial world is stacked like playing cards, easily read and shuffled. But I have left that, and play in twisted space now, in a jungle of bending shapes. My job depends on me reading the collage just as my ancestors did. Standing in a bed of elephant grass bending over my head, I crane my neck slowly left then right then up then down, watching all angles of serpentine branches in green leafy clothes, waiting for a piece of red to touch the sunlight. I once walked in forests and saw only trees of faceless portraits. Now I shift my glance to the horizon and many patches of color pierce my eyes, kindling the old instincts. I even found a Jackson chameleon today, a slow little commuter hoping not to be spotted.

2/20/10: This is It

2010-02-23T18:57:00.000-08:00

Went to Hilo today to indulge in the Earthly pleasures of energy. One is the simple buzz of social interaction- of walking on crowded streets and seeing and hearing other people operate on Saturday, witnessing the way so many objectives in a city mesh like cogs. The other energy I speak of is food- the simple fuel of life. Nothing is more pleasant than satisfaction bordering gluttony, and nothing tastes better than dark chocolate, Kona coffee, and hot dogs after another week in the fields.

On the street front there was a grand sign proclaiming "This is it: Thrift Store and more." I walked into a cavernous room leading to other colorful rooms, and asked a woman behind the desk if this was it. "We have the thrift shop over in the back, the kids toys in that room, restaurant right here, and adult entertainment section behind those doors," she said. "Would you like a free donut? It's our one year anniversary." What a store, I realized, a typical Hawaiian conglomerate of leisure before aesthetics. In the same place on could buy vintage clothing, cap guns, leather thongs, and finish it all with a dollar hot dog.

2/17/10

2010-02-19T14:43:00.000-08:00

There are no longer walls or doors in the passage of time. I am not walking down a hallway, but rather, swimming through a stream. My life simply seems to flow together now, with nothing to really lay anchor upon.

We were discussing the time phenomenon this morning. I told Jennifer and Hans that when I lay my head on my pillow at night, it seems that no time has passed since the night before, when I was in identical position. I am not going to bed after any day in particular, but after any day at all. Every event of going to bed blends with every other one, and every waking up leaks into every other waking up, like spilled milk on a level surface. Hans called it the closest to a groundhog day phenomenon we would ever experience, and it seems only minutes ago that he said it. And I remarked on the phenomenon with Jen today, and I mentioned that the walk home was one anonymous in a stack of many. But this evening Hans arrived with the lower half of a boar body hanging from his hand, its legs dripping blood on the sidewalk. He was holding a machete with the other hand and said, "pork chops tonight," and that is what I will grapple, to anchor today in time.

2/15/10

2010-02-19T14:40:00.000-08:00

I don't hear music often. I don't hear it secondhand, drifting from cars or hallways and I am not injected with it by high sterile speakers. But in the evenings I sometimes listen to a song or two through headphones when I walk beneath the stars. And all of that energy, that grooviness and that swaying strong beats sleeping inside of me, wake up and remind me what I love. And they remind me not to love in excess.

The most memorable moment of today's picking was reaping an orange that was big enough to only sit clumsily in my two palms together. It was wide and wrinkled like a granddaddy orange let grow forever, and it must have been four pounds.

2/14/10: Happy New Year

2010-02-16T19:14:00.000-08:00

Interesting things happened today. And when interesting things happen, they become the new subject and scope of my time. I am demoted to state of passivity, of a dangling indirect object in my own life's sentence, watching the interesting things assume the nominative position. I no longer count minutes, but simply allow time to pass me as I stand still in the road. My neighbor, Richard, some time ago mentioned a ceremony at the Wood Valley Tibetan temple, several towns away. I went with him this morning to slip into this strange hole in paradise.

Southern churches in America are full of sideways glances, aggressive proclamations, and saccharine smiles every Sunday. No one slips through the system without being showered and slathered by the love of Jesus, but more so, the stares of other church goers. I expected something of this community, but I was very wrong at the Tibetan temple.

A group of thirty perhaps had gathered in the open-air shrine. Brown and red wood twisted amongst one another in strong arches. I placed my fruit at the base of a mountain of offerings to the glinting gold Buddha, smugly watching over the crowd from the rear corner. WE sat crosslegged on carpet in rows facing one another, rather than the idols. I was completely oblivious to custom, letting my hands shift amongst positions, and scrutinizing myself mentally- was I dressed correctly? Was my hair too unclean? I was waiting to feel the seething heat of judgment, but I experienced nothing but quiet warmth, and a nonchalant sense of community.

We were served tea and rice to symbolize auspicious tidings for the new year. I likened it in my mind to plastic wafers and tart communion juice, without the blood spilt. What ensued was no sermon or hymn or lesson, but a chant- a chant in the room of smoke unfurling. The English phonetics were typed under the Tibetan scripture, spelling guttural sounds like "zhay war se nim ghom oord." This was no lilting four-beat eight-tone christian hymn. It was no velvet harmony and chain of resolutions. These sounds were deep and forged with breath in the belly, and slow and wandering, without looking for a place to end. We turned through twenty five pages of texts, singing several loops, echoing several syllables hundreds of times. It was all soft and restful, and humming with invisible smiles.

At the end was a climactic ushering of the new year. We gathered in a circle and each grabbed a handful of flour from the bucket being passed. On the same count we all threw it into a white mist together, like quiet fireworks.

2/12/10

2010-02-16T19:11:00.001-08:00

By now the absurd has become normal, the struggle has become routine, and mustering inspiration to write is not an act of touristic awe. Time is in full swing, rounding a gentle curve like the pendulum falling through the bottom of its arc.

Friday is a half a day of work for me. I went out to pull weeds today as I have on other Fridays, but today was exceptional because Hans brought the tractor. Orange trees are docile and wide, like well fed kings. The weeds that surround them and gnaw and pry and twist their tendrils around the bark of orange trees are densely clustered, growing at tight angles shrouded in darkness, choking one another for a view of sunlight. They cling to trees, they cling to each other, and they cling to the hands that pull them, like relentless famished beggars. But they will never learn not to cling to tractor tires or the machete blade. Tonight I met Jimbo the quietly spiritual neighborhood icon. He is polite and earthly, and I hope to see him again.

1/11/10: Split Time

2010-02-12T16:08:00.000-08:00

I haven't been intent on writing my feelings recently. In my mind I mulled over the merits of keeping consistent record of thoughts, and the uselessness of recording the same things each day as well. So I decided to write about it. I'm constantly pulled between the vital present and the commanding force of now, and the faint, scrupulous call of the future- the duty of retrospect.

So I am lingering between two habitats of being- one of the lush and lively now, and one of the future tourist in me, eager to see the slideshows of Hawaii. There is so much space to infiltrate in the narrow crevices of life's surface- so much to explore between the grains of sand, and most of us only walk on top. I would be cheating no one if I exited this moment, but would simply be destroying my own desires.

1/7/10: Natty Self

2010-02-12T15:54:00.001-08:00

It seemed like an hour passed before a car finally stopped for me. I must of watched dozens of light-skinned, elderly couples pass in sleek rental cars, all wearing sunglasses and frowns for me. But a van slowed down, and in a quick seize of ecstasy I folded my sign that I had scrawled that morning, and ran to the windows. "I can take you most of the way," he said. "Watch out for broken glass under the seat." Only seconds of silence elapsed, and we were in motion again.

"I only picked you up cause I thought you was a bitch," he said in a heavy accent from somewhere East of the Atlantic. "Not that I'm some creep looking for a bitch," he said, "And I mean bitch in a liberal, non offensive way."

No introductions were needed, and he asked only one question: "You working on a farm down there?" When I told him yes, he tore a wide portal of thought open. "The problem with the fucking system is it's like modern slavery. They've got you imprisoned in a hole in paradise, without mobility or friends, groveling your way out, so that ultimately idiots like you are begging for rides from assholes like me. And I mean these words without offense? You know what I mean?"

I was sitting directly behind him, in the only other seat in the van, and watching the ardent movement of his head and hands as he spoke. The car swerved over lines as he developed the more passionate points. He had a black ponytail streaked with silver, and deep lines around his mouth. He was missing half of his left pinky finger. He would turn around for brief glimpses of eye contact, like a wild cab driver in Manhattan.

"And the worst part of the whole fucking system is that you're always on the clock," he said, "You know what I mean? You can break your back for those assholes all day but you can't clock out, cause you're imprisoned right there on their land. And then they expect you to be grateful, to kiss their ass for even giving you such an opportunity." And the ironic thing was, he really had my situation pegged. He really outlined the capitalist hunger that gnawed at my boss, and the vicious snare of the work exchange system that has trapped so many on the island. Once he was finished with socialism, he turned to philosophies of metaphysics, religion and friendship. I sat behind him, quiet as a sponge.

"Believing in God is like playing the Superbowl," he said. "It's not enough just to be excited, but you actually have to pick the right team. There is only one Reality with a capital R," he said, "But infinite little r's amongst us. You could believe that we're driving West, or in a convertible, or that it is raining right now, but it simply isn't so. What does it matter what we believe outside this world? We are simply chained to this life, so we might as well make the most of it."

And near the outskirts of Hilo he became so overwhelmed by thought that he pulled the car to the side of the highway, procured pencil and a scrap of paper, and outlines his diagram of life. In an arc he drew the letters S-C-R-I-P, narrating after each one the evolution of Sex, Consciousness, Respect, Integrity, and Peace. "A friend of mine asked why I don't include T for Time," he said, "But I told him an evolution already includes time- each one leads to the next." He drew a rectangular outline around the R. "In an arch, this is the keystone," he said. "It is what holds the structure together."

I found Hilo and the Bob Marley birthday concert finally, lounging in the sweet glory of a sunny day. I remember the singer on the bandstage pointed to a small girl in the front of the crowed before a certain song. "This one I devote to you, sweetheart," he said. "You are da future, and many men will tell they have love for you, but you must remember be true to yourself first. Be Natty- that is- Natural."

2/6/10

2010-02-12T15:49:00.000-08:00

I spent a day in solitude and on the wings of my bicycle. Every piece of time seemed to rapidly slip together. One of my bosses, a woman, came to clean the hostel. She scoured every surface with aggressive fingers, envisioning the clean benches beneath guests she will never have. Then she sat down in front of me and said, "Tell me about your ambitions."

Her children moved away a decade ago, leaving this quiet farm for West coast colleges. She let me talk endlessly on dreams, visions and philosophies that perhaps no one else will ever hear, listening in stillness to my childish lullaby. "You cannot build a hundred story building without a solid foundation," she said. We talked a long time about raising children, and then she invited me over for dinner.

Her husband offered me mead, which I had seen him bottle and scrutinize for so long, but had never tasted. He poured me a glass made from limes, bright like soda, then a glass made from oranges, strong like vodka, then a glass made from lillikoi, gentle as ginger. He stayed drunk all night. I ate many plates, and she told me how her son used to eat, and how much she would feed him when he came home. It was the first time in a month that I ate with a family, and the first time in a month that I filled my role as a son.

2/5/10

2010-02-12T15:47:00.000-08:00

Well if you want to sing out, sing out
and if you want to be free, be free.
Cause there's a million ways to be,
you know that there are.

2/3/10

2010-02-05T17:33:00.004-08:00

Another day passed rife of thoughts over doings. The boss allowed us a generous break from hard labor today, assigning us an ornery task in building fruit parasite containers instead. If he is indeed on the frontier of science, then I hope for a footnote in the annals of discovery, perhaps as a fleeting technician, or an appearance in the movie of this place, credited as second white guy.

Farm labor is one of the most liberating practices. The city of vines lets me be its destroyer, and the fruit that falls joins me briefly for the energetic conquest. I look in the mirror once in the evening. Sometimes I feel I left my reflection in Providence, because I only live on one side of the glass, the side reality is on. I ate seven pieces of fruit today, a variety of oranges, tangelos, bananas and papayas, ready to fall to me from the vine.

2/2/10

2010-02-05T17:33:00.001-08:00

Just picking today. Just Hans and I tonight. Just the stars to fill the place of art on the walls.

2/1/10

2010-02-05T17:30:00.000-08:00

Four weeks ago, during my last days in North Carolina, I mailed myself a package of a bundle of materials I knew would be essential to my life in Hawaii. The first week that it did not arrive I was anxious and vigilant in monitoring the mail. The second week I was worried. The third week I had pushed my worries into the corner of my head for resignations. This week I had forgotten about it entirely, until it arrived today, and I remembered that some of the best things in life are not things.

Finding constellations is surprisingly difficult, because the sky is studded with so many stars. It is not the few gems shining in the darkness that I am used to from home. The night sky is like a wide beach, with countless crystals winking down at me.

1/31/10: Porpoise Purpose

2010-02-02T19:29:00.000-08:00

I went snorkeling with a friendly neighbor today. We were beneath the water of the Place of Refuge- an ancient Hawaiian sanctuary. The water was clear, and I watched blue and yellow fish swim over canyons of coral shaped like strange broccoli. I saw dark shapes shifting far below me, like specimens beneath thick liquid glass. They rose and grew larger, until they were squirming right below my belly, and it was clear they were dolphins, large and blue. A pod of dozens swam below and around us, moving with us for minutes, and their squeaking cries were loud like radio waves.

1/30: Lost and Found

2010-02-02T19:04:00.000-08:00

Three are many things I would do simply to heighten my stack of experiences. Neither good nor bad, they simply wait to be had, like cold bullets resting in a chamber. Today Kenny drove me through Hawaiian seascape to the end of the world. We began in a truck high on the mountain's slope, with two hitchhikers perched in the cab for purposes of weight and stability, Kenny declared. They each wore thick blond dreadlocks clinging stiff to their sides, and dark brown teeth rounded on the edges, and long cracked nails. They cheered us on from the back, asking to go faster as the truck careened down dusty paths.

Kenny promised he had driven the path at least several times. The pavement ended early in our descent, tapering to coarse broken black rock. The path began a steeper descent, and we left the rock behind for red sand. The earth seemed gutted by brigades of heavy four wheeling vehicles before us, stripped of solid pathways. Our truck plunged and bounced over sharp, three-foot tears in the land, spinning over rifts that snared one wheel at a time.

He insisted on speeding through the steep pits of sand, because otherwise, he said, we would simply be stuck. The white truck was turned red by the time we came to the coastline, and the springs beneath it groaned badly. Gutted steel frames of trucks were rusting in several places along the way, and I realized, if you get stuck on those paths, your car is there forever. WE reached the sharp lava rocks, leaving the sand. On one horizon the blue sea was limitless and bright, and on the other, stacks of broken, black lava towered high, without interruption by a single plant. It seemed like the inside of a molecule.

And finally we were there- the Rainbow Gathering. Kenny said it would be lovely time. "Dancing by the fire light," he said. We approached the edge of a wide grove of trees, crouched on the shoreline .The first human we saw was an old man, completely naked. He stared at us silently, only his dirty dreadlocks quivering in the wind. We found the colorful banner draped across trees behind him: "Welcome Home," it read. Another man crouched in front of it in the sand, his eyes fastened on the ground. He pulled minute blue pieces of plastic out of the sand. Later, I learned he was on an LSD-induced litter crusade. And inside the hollow stirred the most bizarre world.

It seemed almost post-apocalyptic, a teeming cluster of motley families, wearing only rags and cracking coconuts around pit fires. Naked children ran in and around crowds, people were sleeping beneath trees and sprawled on the sand, and guitars and flutes were humming in different directions. A man drew breath from a plastic bong, his back to the wind, then scooped up his young bumbling daughter, and waded into the tide with her. So I sat in the sand and read and let the wind talk to me, because, honestly, I hate that hippie shit.

They are a band of voluntary outlaws, wearing masks of compassion over hearts of bitterness. They have chosen isolation rather than integration, savoring the secrecy of being high every waking hour, and talking smack about the rest of the world behind its back. They group government, commerce, and every family that is foreign to them into an entity that is hostile, one that has driven them there. I hear comments spliced in every conversation about how much better this life is, about constant reassurance for the struggle I hear a diatribe about how the government is poising Americans with sugar-laden Skittles.

So I chose the high and challenging road home, deciding not to break Kenny's bliss by asking for a ride. "Kenny- if you can't find me, then I've found the path home," was the note I left propped inside his truck. Three hours before sunset I started walking back the jagged lava path, the sun dawdling before me and the moon staring at my back. I made it way from the beach, away from the black rock, and into the sand pits, and suddenly, I was lost.

The jeep trail simply faded away into nothing but brush and tall grasses. Every horizon faded into infinite rows of the same plant I was standing in. Brown grass, black brushes and windswept trees were the only pieces of the landscape. Nothing stood out. I began sweating and my heart was ticking louder and louder and then I started running. I ran uphill, fast and hurdling bushes. I ran until I reached the crest of a hill and looked in all directions. Still no change in the horizon, just the infinite fractal bushes. I could smell the fear leaking out of me. But then I saw something moving- a shifting black mass.

I looked at the pies of poop blanketing the ground and realized that I was in a cattle pasture, and the specks roaming the slopes far away were enormous cattle. I found tractor tread marks in the dirt and followed them up and up the hill, turning my red shoes brown with coats of dust. In my head echoed over and over: Where there are tracks there are roads. Where there are tracks there are roads. I climbed and climbed the hill, slipping in dust like I was walking through flour, and then I heard a cow's cry, ringing like a scream rather than a gentle moo. I kept walking with my head down, and began hearing more moos, breaking into chorus and after every cry rang another one. Then the ground began to tremble and the dust shivered around me, and I watched dozens of cattle running across the plain, slowing to a halt in a semicircle on the path before me. I was surrounded by a massive mingling cry, by massive animals, alone on a desert plain without trees. My heart began racing and I walked back down the hill, quickly, quietly, and low to the ground.

I watched them move step by step towards me, still screaming, and I began to run. I ran down dusty slopes, sliding through thorny bushes and over rocks. I ran until I saw a fence far-off, and and then ran harder towards it. I rolled under the barbed wire, and looked back at the cattle I had left on the other side. Then my mind rang with joy again: fences lead to roads.

I looked down tot realize I was red with dust and blood, after running hard. But I kept a quick pace along the fence, moving tirelessly uphill. After miles of walking I saw bright and tiny arms waving on the horizon and I knew they were the white arms of windmills, the windmills I knew from South Point Road. I yelled victoriously and showed the finger to any cattle watching, and walked two hours along fences until I climbed over at last, at the road near the windmills.

I came out of the ranch around sunset. The road is narrow and poorly paved and only connects two points. At the bottom is the Southernmost beach on the island, and a the top is where I live. Cars passed seldom, and it wasn't until the eighth one that I got a ride. The man asked me where I'd been, and I told him I was late walking back form the beach. I asked him if he lived nearby, and he said yes, that he owned the 4,000 acre cattle ranch behind us.

1/29/10

2010-02-01T16:09:00.000-08:00

Kenny says Hawaii is the farthest island from any continent on the Earth. It certainly feels that way. I am on top of a floating fortress in the ocean.

No time to write the next entry now, but it will be worth waiting to read.

1/28/10

2010-02-01T16:08:00.000-08:00

Tensions are mounting and straining on the labor frontier. Some workers asked to negotiate with Morton this morning, and were asked to leave. I coyly walked around fields with a picking pole, staying far from the heated rift.
After work I ate two pieces of fruit, one pound each and ruby red. I will miss that color on grocery store shelves.

1/27/10

2010-02-01T16:04:00.000-08:00

I can feel the growing momentum of time, gaining speed quickly in the first quarter of its fall. Three weeks ago almost I was nervous, restless and walking with heavy feet. Now I feel the rhythm gradually merging with my own, so that I draw my strong beats in time with those around me.
Nothing would distinguish another day of picking except the rising tension between workers and the bosses. Before Emily arrived, we quietly shoved our cumbersome discomfort into the backs of our minds. But now she has lit into our bosses with the blade of aggression. Currently our contract requires twenty five hours a week of hard labor. We are supervised continuously and urged to pick more efficiently and with less rest. And pulling down each fruit is like putting cash in the bosses' pockets, who are not working in the sun with us, but watching the money pile up from afar. So what drives the commitment to efficiency and "personal excellence" my bosses encourage? If I exceed their expectations twofold, I don't see another dime. In fact, the faster we pick fruit, the less hours we earn, and the more we have to work. We are hoping to forge a less slave-oriented system.
I love riding my bike after a long day. My legs are sore, but the sloping lava streets call.

1/26/10: Gutes Essen

2010-02-01T16:01:00.000-08:00

We were blessed with German guests. Two women arrived in the darkness last night, turning the screw in a fateful construction. I convinced them to stall their trip to the South Point until this afternoon, once we returned from work. All day in the fields I let visions of cliffs dance in my mind. We were all there, finally, soaking in the last strands of sunlight. It is so powerful to see the sun slip off the horizon, as though it were holding on by fingertips, and then the colors fall behind it. The German women were insistent on cooking us dinner tonight, which no one protested. Immediately eggs and spinach, olives and cucumbers, and surprisingly passion fruit and vinegar all joined fingers and danced through the kitchen. I was giggling all through the meal, just sheerly ecstatic at what our barren lifestyle had suddenly become.

1/24/10

2010-02-01T15:57:00.000-08:00

Every other night there are new crazy people in this home. Drifters become characters, and characters become fixtures, all ushered into our tiny paradise by the gatekeeper Hans. The evenings are colorful and high-spirited, and then the mornings are tense and quiet and down turned eyes. The people who entertained us the night before meander in from the backyard, hungrily and silently eyeing our breakfasts. We workers mutter about Hans like he is a dumb child, dim enough to lead stray dogs home. I am not being paid in cash, I am being paid with food. When I see derelict and homeless humans, the kind that seem to magnetize to Hans, shuffling around barefoot and hungover and with their faces in my only income, I can only feel cheated. I have been pulling weeds all day, and luckily I experienced dinner, the greatest satisfaction before the dirt clods drifted in.

1/23: Krazy Kevin

2010-01-29T17:02:00.000-08:00

Last night I eased my sore fingers into a game of Scrabble with the new couple working on the farm. Evening and nightfall at the Southernmost tip of the country bring only plaintive solitude. The sun falls and only a slow breeze comes alive- all else submits. There was nothing to ask for in the kitchen- dinner and company were already there.

And then footsteps sound in the darkness, shapes approach the screen doors, and instantly a party of men materialize. They drift in from the front and sides, which is why they're called drifters after all. Kenny is suddenly on the bench inside smiling at us, his new friend Max has collapsed into sleep in the corner, Hans is waving hands broadly through quiet air and embarking on strange stories, and most bizarre of all is the new character, Kevin.

He was obviously young and limber, wearing typical tight and brown Hawaiian skin. But his hair was white; white as polished silver and glowing with grease, and his eyes were burning blue like small flames. He seemed to fling away the night, now lighting up the room with his artificial luminescence, and cryptic, ageless energy. He was side by side with Hans, and yelling just as loud into the same story.

We were so bewildered we had not even dropped the plastic letters from our palms. Kevin was already far into his story. He and Hans were both laughing and gasping severely.

"Dude, it was a state of excellence," Hans cried.
"Dude, it was a state of excellence," Kevin repeated.
"Dude, what was it?"
"I've been around the world. Around the world seven times. Seven times! I've never seen anything like it."
"I swear I wouldn't believe it if someone told me. If someone told me I swear I wouldn't believe it."

The blabber continued for many minutes, far away from the point. They used more absurd words than were on the scrabble board. We chattered with the jesters for a while and let them rattle their jaws and roll their eyes. IN the end Kevin left us with one parting doctrine of Tigger:
"Sometimes you've got to stumble and bumble before you can trounce and bounce around."

1/21: Kenny

2010-01-28T19:41:00.000-08:00

There is a man named Kenny who roams the island. The island is not so big actually, so Kenny's dark wrinkled face and coconut white beard are well known. He is small but strong and bronzed from a life on beaches and in the back of trucks. He began appearing at my farm and hostel last week, after Hans met him on the bus.

I thought he was aggravatingly strange at first. I thought he was just a cryptic bum with a polished ivory smile, waiting to steal our dishes when we slept. He expresses careless happiness I mistook for drunkenness, and he laughs like has a fish swimming in the bottom of his belly. But the more he has stayed here the more I realize he is the truest form of the island Mana.

He has become something of a rustic teacher and father figure. I came home form work today to see him prodding a fire beneath a smoking rack of meat, next to an old truck with mattresses piled in its back, where he had slept the night before. I whined to him about my oppressive boss, who directed me moving boxes with caustic comments. I told him of how I fell through the rotted floor of a farm building on the job, and my boss walked past without a word of concern.

Kenny beamed at me with his smile that dissolved the malice behind my eyes. He wears a look that is both tragic and ecstatic. "Brother, don't be upset by that man," he said. "He doesn't know where he is."

1/20/10

2010-01-25T17:48:00.000-08:00

All the other birds sing to me
slightly and politely, murmuring
over and over about their
view from a precious perch.
But your cries are shrill and
Shameless, young Hawk.
You scream as though nature's
hand has throttled you by the neck, and
you do not sing for others, and
you do not know who I am.
Your sharpened soprano wail
sends out sorrows darker than
A grey Tuesday Manhattan alleyway, and
pride more handsome than
the tattered Confederate battle flag.
But you do not know what these things
are from your singular perch,
and the most resounding triumph you can
summon is sinking your
claws into a soft field mouse, which
the world never even slowed down to watch.
Your song is the steam of ferment placed
inside of you, and you sing without dynamics and
You cry without feelings.

1/19/10

2010-01-25T17:47:00.000-08:00

Too tired. All the wires in my body have stopped buzzing.

1/18/10

2010-01-25T17:40:00.000-08:00

There are days between sunrise and sunset that are smooth and shapeless forms. NO conflicts or triumphs stand above the plane of events. There are no peaks or valleys.

The sunrise was soft and yellow. I stayed inside reading and writing all morning. I ate bananas from our backyards. My bike carried me to and through Naalehu like a swift and angular steed. The graveyard was an interesting sight. Citrus fruit and beer cans adorned the graves of many.

In town I reaped the waves of cell phone reception. I chose the harder of the two paths to home, the relentless steep ascent of six miles on the mountain road. In the afternoon I was ready to rest again.

The fields behind the cabins were still vast and unexplored this afternoon. I fought the still and soldierly elephant grass to reach the high side of the field., the one lined with trees and a stone wall. Countless thorny legumes were clinging to my clothes on the way back.

Kenny the bum was here again today. He is deep brown like tree bark, and just as wrinkled. He amazes me with his calm shuffling pace to life and blissful attitude. He is genuinely satisfied with sleeping in the back of his truck, just for the opportunity to see us. He is an honest man.

The new couple arrived tonight, ready for work early in the morning. They come from Wisconsin, and seem to bring a traditional continental perspective. And that is near the end, and we all retired early after hearing my outlandish boss drone our ears with childish lectures. Hans said the boss had him working on Christmas Day. "He's so fucking out of it that he had me picking fruit that day," he said, "He doesn't understand- the last thirty five years, the heaviest thing I've lifted on Christmas Day is my nuts."

1/16/10: Uncle G

2010-01-21T19:08:00.000-08:00

There are many rice cookers in stacks beneath the stoves. They are sitting in high piles, rust flecked, bent and cold. Dishes are gleaning with grease, piled in the sink. Discordant ukuleles are pattering together, and thick tobacco smoke is sauntering through the air. Fragments of strange conversations are all I can hear, phrases like, "what is right is wrong." The man called G is leaving, and I do not even move to say goodbye.

This morning a hostel guest, Nathan, spread the possessions of the trunk of his car across our lawn. HE sought to give everything away, or barter it for camping gear. Inside I was cooking eggs. The man who cooked us marlin the night before stumbled in the back door. His colorful van was still parked in our backyard, and the fire ring was littered with plastic bottles and cans.

He was moderately short and fat. His face was pointed like turtle's beak, and wrinkled through and through. His skin was dark on the shoulders and neck, and his voice had a sharp rasp, like his lungs were lined with iron. He called himself 'G,' and sometimes 'Uncle G.'

It was hard to ignore his stories.

"You ever heard of the Madra?" he asked.

"You ever heard of the Men in Black?" he asked.

"You ever heard of Ardsley, Washington?" he asked.

And each questions was proceed by a story, so fantastic and pompous and filled with epic dimensions and mythic men that I was close to laughing at first. But then I realized that he was in earnest. He was lying in complete earnest. He was sincerely living in a twisted golden dream.

He told stories of Mafias and families and clans and powerhouses and weapons of mass destruction and government conspiracies. He told stories about Jews and Indians and Russians and secret agents, all tangled up in clandestine, black-robed combat and dealings with slim briefcases. And in everyone he was the hero. He was the leader of a primal war tribe storming a nuclear power plant, he was the one on the ship of uranium in the Swiss canal, stealing a Russian tanker. And the reason why we ignorant, basic, near-sighted University students had not hear of any of it was of course because it was completely classified and shielded from our eyes and ears. And here was the man, 'G,' wearing a ragged tank top tight over his gut, living in a van on the big island of Hawaii.

But he was very proud of his acquaintance with the island. He offered us a ride to the South Point cliffs, to pursue another day on the edge of the world. We piled into a van coated with stickers, spray paint, insignias, and scratches. The star of David was on one side, and the cross on the other. "Aloha," "Mana," and "Pele," all plastered in various places. "4/20," spray painted on the bumper. The back window was broken, and fishing tackle dangled out the end, over shards of glass clinging to the frame. Inside were stacks of cookware, clothes, lumber and all varieties of blades and hand weapons. I got a seat on top of a rough piece of driftwood.

But clouds overwhelmed the sky as we moved closer to South Point, and rain started falling. Our driver and navigator offered to take us instead to the Kona side of the island, where it was always sunny. There he promised us many grand adventures under his leadership. He knew the island well, and the island knew his van just as well, he claimed. At our first stop for gas it was clear how well the island actually knew him. He began talking to locals at their car, describing the "hoalies" that he was carting around the island. "Hoaly" is a slang label for white people on the island, used by natives. The men at their car chuckled and skirted their eyes from the bumbling and shirtless white man talking to them.

On the way to Kona he began narrating fabulous stories of Hawaiian folklore. Each sentence swas sprinkled with Hawaiian words, which he slowly stopped to translate for us. "Malka," he rasped, "that means mountain. Makai, that means sea." He returned once and again to his favorite Hawaiian word, "Kapu," each time sliding fingers across his throat like a knife. "No lawyers or trials," he rasped,"Just Kapu."

The first one we picked up was a grey and yellow man. He was waiting at a gas station, swigging a little plastic flask. "This is Uncle Rock," G rasped. "He's a local legend." He seemed only a legend of piss poor decrepitude to me. His face was pitted with wrinkles and his hair and beard were tangled into one dirty slick mass. He climbed in and silently glanced at the people around him. And he stayed silent for most of the ride except for spontaneous outbursts like, "I want to jump off a cliff!" Uncle G would chuckle and cackle, "I hear you bruda." The second one we picked up was a glamorous Hawaiian woman standing by the road. G swerved the van and waved excitedly to the hesitant woman, who asked to be dropped off, politely, as soon as we entered Kona. We left her and moved on.

The first stop was an ancient burial ground. A field of black rocks abutted the ocean. There were high piles and walls still standing, and trenches still lining the ground. Mounds of rock were arranged at the head of the field, now ancient tombstones. "This place has powerful Mana," he said, "That means spirit. Don't walk off the path or its Kapu."

G swaggered in front of us, shirtless, but with a scythe tied in to his belt. He rasped about the historic significance of this hallowed ground. I thought he would make a good park service guide, if he wasn't so disgustingly unpleasant. He gave snide greetings to a pair of tourists carrying beach chairs, who just laughed quietly.

The array of mind-blowing and mysterious sites he promised us unfolded in smaller dimensions than expected. Most of our destinations were simple, sand bays, beautiful, yes, but already busy with tourists. I watched Tyler and Stephanie's silhouettes move in the forefront of the falling orange sun, on the rocks of an ancient pier. Lee bumbled around beside me, picking up and examining pieces of coral. He walked in a clumsy way that seemed his wrists and ankles held his centers of gravity, dragging his body around in a jerking path.

On the way home G asked me for twenty dollars, to cover gas expenses. I had already given five, and I looked at Tyler and stephanie, who only returned sheepish stares, because they had no money. Lee and I agreed to each give ten. He put only enough gas in to push the needle above the empty line, and pocketed the cash.

We were still in Kona when he made the stop to buy weeed. "Wait here," he rasped, and left us inside the van in the parking lot of a yellow apartment. I watched him carry the cash I'd just given into the seedy palce. He began smoking in the parking lot and continued for the next half hour, holding the wheel with his knees. "Twenty five years without a DUI," he rasped. I was just glad the van was moving South, the direction of home.

His iron-lined voice scratched my ears most of the return trip. Tyler took over driving shortly , which only gave G greater freedom to assail us with gruesome Hawaiian stories. He insisted we stop at a McDonald's, then gas station after gas station, riding on a near empty tank and handing out the rest of the money on soda then licroice then burgers then candy. "You're a little skinny bruda," he turned to me, "learn how to eat like me and maybe you'll have some of these," he said, flexing his wrinkled and soft arms.

Then a song came on the radio that I liked. I watched the glowing red Hawaiian sun sink out the window, and felt the warm wind on my face. I hadn't heard music in a long while, and I let it wipe away all of G's rusty words.

We were finally home, and I rushed out of the stinking van. G followed us inside, but by now no one was acknowleding him. We let him stumble around, groping for milk and cereal, spilling carelessly on the floor. "What you cooking up, bruda," he asked, trying to peer around my efforts to guard the food from him. "You got a big chicken in the fridge man," he rasped, "maybe you should cook it up. It's goin to go bad by tomorrow."

Once he learned I was at Brown opened a scathing commentary. "They wanted me up there man, up at Phillips Andover," he rasped, " They wanted me up in the Skull and Bones, but I didn't want none of that," he rasped. I sat in silence, letting him dig into deeper and deeper tunnels of fury. "You'll never know how the real world works in school my friend. Let me tell you, I've moved so mouch money that it would make your head spin," said the man living in his van.

And he continued to excite himeself more and more, and I looked on in silence. "Do you know who invented the internet?" he asked. "Bill Gates, my friend. Ever heard of him? And he was a fucking dropout too. When he invtented MSDOS, the command system for IBM with Paal Allen, he signed a secret agreement with the FEDs. He would forever have backdoor keys to the internet, and in return for helping the government build weapons of mass destruction, they would make him the richest man in the world until he died. That's right my friend, I know these things." I kept trying not to laugh.

"So are you published yet?" I asked him. "Brother the shit I do never gets published. They had me working on Black Projects. They're like black holes- because nothing ever escapes. I'll give you something right now that will blow your mind," and he furiously began searching for pen and paper. On the back of a bus schedule in highlighter he scrawled:

[p squared x infinity = infinity x p squared]

"Know what that means?" he asked. "Poop?" I replied.
"Of course you don't. That's where Einstein had it wrong. This is thefinfinte perspective and possibility theory, which has helped me solve many unthinkeable problems," said the man living in a dirty van.

I went back to cooking in silence, laughing in my mind. "I would of held off on the cereal if I'd known you were cooking something up bruda," he said.

"Sorry," I said, "there's nothing left, brother," and fed the rest of my food to the cat.

1/12/10: Tropical Facts

2010-01-19T19:38:00.000-08:00

In all of these adventures I have carried myself high and proud, stomping through obstacles even when the rain was in my eyes. But this is a different challenge that I am experiencing now. There is no bridge to build, no orders from bosses, no Katahdin. There is only me and vast and uncaring land. There are numberless pieces of fruit dandling on thousands of branches across hundreds of acres and countless hours to pass.

Romantic poets referred to Nature with a capital N, because they believed in its mystic, living correspondence. What i have discovered here, near the Southernmost point of the country, and on young and broken volcanic land is something inhuman a nature without the capital spirit. There are wonders here which have no equal in anything I have ever experienced. Bright birds, bright flowers, bright skies, black Earth and glowing fruit decorate this near imaginary landscape. The weather is called idyllic anywhere else: consistent temperatures of 75 degrees, low humidity and almost no rain. Here is is just commonplace.

My job here basically entails picking fruit. In supermarkets my eyes used to glean over oranges carelessly, but no w have been honed to fasten on every pore. Color is crucial in this industry, so the difference between light and dark orange, the fickle threshold of ripeness, is the hinge of the job. Wasting a single piece is expensive collateral. These little orbs command a picky customer following along the East coast and throughout the islands. They are grey, speckled with dark spots of red, and misshapen, but all organic and whereas the golden spheres with the Dole sticker have a sugar content of three percent, these are about fourteen. They really are like liquid gold.

Picking is not too hard a task, but it can be very tedious. It requires a wiry neck and strong shoulders, since its all done with a retractable 15 foot pole, and a constant amount of looking up. I think of my mothers nervous face, and hear her tell my brother to get down from a tree, every time I am dangling 20 feet above the ground on a limb with a pole reaching far for a piece of fruit.

After work I come home to the worker housing. There is a complex of eight tiny cabins and one communal kitchen and bathroom. They are rectangular shacks of thin wood and tin, with insect screens for windows. It is very much a camp environment, but without the carefree spirit.

The comfort is not in the buildings, but in the people. In a few days I feel that we have already become family. There is a couple from Washington, a student from New York, a mystical Puerto Rican woman, and an eclectic, comical, dirty rogue and former marine, who serves as our overseer. The bosses and owners of the farm are polite and industrious, after seeing the color orange become the color green for thirty years, but they are uncaring humans.

There is no cell phone reception here, no televisions, radios or computers, and hardly a whisper of the world outside this island. But who else in the nation can see the source of their bananas and oranges?

1/15/10: Thick Air

2010-01-19T19:29:00.000-08:00

Tyler swung us recklessly in the back of a truck. He and Hans piloted from the front as we were captive in the bed. He skidded us into the entrance of Volcanoes National Park, tires screeching in the gravel right before the ranger station. We crawled out in the haze of a scenic crater overlook. The sulphurous fog was heavy and crawling into my lungs. Tyler kept asking where we were and where we were going. He swung us around further, careening through the visitor center and towards the lava tubes. We plunged deep into the crater breathing fog. We wandered through a massive, empty, cosmic, black thumbprint. Steam was rising between the rifts in the cracked floor. We came back to the truck and ate sweet Tangelo fruit in the parking lot, pulling ourselves back into awakeness.

Some of us went back to South Point. Earlier in the day Tyler told me that once he took the jump, he dreamed of the jump. He was afraid of nothing else. I watched each of them fall off the cliff, diving through silence before the resounding splash. I steeled myself for the plunge and fell off the slab, and feel so long and through many stretched seconds, before sliding into the water. There was a rusty ladder hanging from the top of the cliff.

Back at the hostel we met a guest who was grilling us freshly caught marlin. I ate what I needed but spent most of dinner thinking about Tyler, who touched no food but rolled one cigarette after another in his dirty fingers.

1/14/10: Cliffs

2010-01-19T19:22:00.000-08:00

At the southern cliffs I forgot all the troubles of the fields. I forgot that only hours ago I was cutting vines in tangled orchards. I forgot of the bizarre and tainted Hawaiian culture. I forgot the past and looked at the brim of this planet spinning slowly into the future.

After a tortuous day of pulling weeds from their strangling grip on orange trees, I walked home slowly and shirtless. Hans said that we were going to watch the sunset at South Point. Within a crew of six there are hardly and exclusive invitations. We rolled won the barren road in a borrowed pickup truck. There were high and white wind turbines waving on the west side of the road. As we went further and further South the amount of vegetation around us quickly dwindled. I felt hair tickling my eyes in the wind.

And then we were there, at the edge of the country and the Earth. There was no gentle ramp into the sea. High and sharp cliffs of black rock loomed over blue water. I remembered my awe at the rocky cliffs and thunderous waves along the Southern coast of Maine, and realized how dwarfed they were by these monstrous black walls. The curve of the Earth was clear, slowly moving from the light of the sun, and to the North was the misty mass of the giant volcano. Watching the sun set was like looking at the future, at a spectrum of colors glowing in the sky like something I can only imagine.

1/13/10: A planetarium is an aquarium of dreams

2010-01-19T19:19:00.000-08:00

Spent a simple day pulling tangeloes from their clever perches, and slapping them with stickers afterwards. I quickly inflated my tires after work with the tedious labor of a hand pump, then raced down serpentine volcanic hills to Naalehu, rewarded by sweet blessings of the bakery. There was a high fire burning tonight, and I got to see my crew in a different light. Life is wondrous and becoming wonderful. The bum Kenny joined us for the fire tonight.

1/11/10: First Day of Farm Life

2010-01-19T19:16:00.000-08:00

There is nothing compassionate about farm labor. There is no sympathy or cooperation from the Earth, and no correspondence with the mystic Nature with a capital N, the one romanticized for centuries. Reaping the bounty of the Earth is a job handed to the ground dwellers by the apartment and carpet dwellers, it is the necessary fuel to keep the Energy moving.

Without mirrors and without many faces around me and without much property I can quickly forget who I am. I am a reflection of a motley cast of faces. Many extravagant pieces of this landscape will soon be unfolded- the paths, plants, people, and wild, wild animals.

The Vestibule

2010-01-04T06:58:00.000-08:00

Greetings from the wide digital frontier. One week still stands before I am off of this old continental soil. Until the adventures start, this is just a landfill for the riddles dancing in my mind. One new year's eve someone kindly reminded me that this is the decade I, and many of you as well, turn 30. We better start squeezing every minute.

It's unusually cold in North Carolina. Winter in the south is perhaps nature's most dismal show of colors. There is none of the snowy evergreen enchantment of New England; rather, many brown and lonely trees. When the leaves fall in these forests the spaces seem so much wider, and old stands of trees look like wide and empty hallways. Everything is brown, brown, brown and cold. I feel like part of a geriatric pageant.

Which is why I'm excited about the seven months of summer ahead. It will be a welcome change to swim in the warm primal soup, where the velocity of the earth spills the waters higher on the bowl. By the way, in the coming months I will be one of the most southern people in the United States. All of you proud tarheels who drawl your vowels and drink sweet tea intentionally should check your latitude twice if you don't think I'm the real southerner here.

Working in Hawaii is essentially a portal to the plans that follow. The guiding intention of taking time off was completing the PCT, and Hawaii is the preparation for that trial, rather than the trial itself. Conventionally, people begin walking North on the Pacific Crest Trail around late April, with the objective of finishing before October. The intermediary obstacle is snowfall in the high Sierras. Thus, one starting too early meets unmelted snow in the Sierras, and one starting too late meets the obstacle of snow in the Cascades.

In this final week I have a few meager goals: Playing Ukelele, mailing my gear across the country, and saying long goodbyes. Maybe I will write some things too. Including these words. Here are some of the questions that I commonly encounter:

How long is the trail?

Somewhat over 2,660 miles.

How long will it take you?

Until school begins on September 1st.

What will you eat?

Many breads and spreads.

My friend Dangerous Magnolia illustrated an angle of the riddle over which I have puzzled a long time. I had always assumed that time is a path down which we can walk in only one direction. There is a terminus far in the horizon, where our travels will ultimately finish. Looking back over shoulders is possible, but the path is too narrow too turn around, or pick up things we dropped. Now Mr. Magnolia expanded the path to another dimension. Imagine that the path is straight only within our limited perspective, but from a wider glimpse it is clear that we are in fact walking around a sphere, as if walking around the circumference of the earth, only to end right where we began.

Here is also a good opportunity to give thanks:

To my uncle Bill for helping me with some west coast logistics.

To A Neon Leg Mall for loaning me a camera.

To Risk Per Lazer and Jock in Bagel for schooling me in freestyle verse, and who would also be proud to hear how much I've honed my rhymes.

To my Mom who taught me how to live kindly.

To my Dad who taught me how to live easily.

The Stem

2009-12-28T19:59:00.000-08:00

Seriously, if you read the first post, you are still wondering what I am doing. You may still be wondering if I write coherently. I brandished the cosmic chalkboard, and now allow me to tap my pointer on the little dots which I am.

So I am not in college right now. The bureaucracy still has a distant tether on my ankle, but basically I am a free man. With new shoes and shirts but mostly empty pockets, I am going to the Western longitudes of the United States, to see what really goes on out there. I am leaving the books on the Eastern coast, but the memories are coming along, and are weightless anyways.

The adventures begin on January 9th. I fly to Hilo, Hawaii, and meander down to the Southern tip of the Big Island, to a farm I have never seen. I know it is an organic Orange farm, and I know I have a place to stay. I guess part of the suspense of reading this journal is discovering what happens next.

But the larger culmination of my coming days is in the Spring. Beginning April 23rd, I set out on the Pacific Crest Trail, a 2,660 mile path from Mexico to Canada. What I see is yet to be seen.

On the Appalachian Trail, my name was Ishmael. He is the wanderer in Melville's Moby Dick, set out on a strange ship with strange characters. He is an articulate orphan amongst heathens, savages and capitalists. He sees dark shapes below the seawater that he never catches. His journey carries him to the far corner of the world, in pursuit of Nature with a capital N, in efforts to put his fingers around the throat of something he can neither see or feel. He is a quester of the absurd.

The Seed

2009-12-28T18:47:00.000-08:00

I do not believe that anything is random. The word itself is an imaginary definition. It describes something that has no affiliation to anything else, something entirely removed from cause, something like an island in the stream of time, but floating on top of the current. The closest approximation to a definition of randomness is an intergalactic alien interrupting my breakfast to hand me a trinket on a holiday it celebrates in another dimension. But even this is not random- it is pulled from a pool of possibilities that I have imagined and articulated.

In 1824 Nicolas Carnot expounded on an engineering conundrum. In developing an engine, he was faced with the common challenge of exchanging as much energy for work as possible. An engine which is fueled with copious amounts of gasoline but coughs out fumes and only moves a car slowly is therefore very inefficient. However, he realized the concept of perfect efficiency is impossible. No amount of energy can be exchanged for work without losses to heat, and this principle tore a rift in the previously perfectly symmetrical universe. Time only moves in one direction, since we engines can never return to past states of being.

Every thing builds on another. In a sense, it is impossible to erase an experience- even forgetting things do not eradicate them. There is no one alive today who can remember Mozart, but many remember what his music sounds like or portraits of his face look like, and in a sense it is irrelevant whether Mozart the man really ever existed. He is a giant and infinite stack of experiences added to time, just like everyone else before and after him.

There is a quite a detailed game plan to this universe, with many imaginary X's and O's drawn out on a cosmic chalkboard. None of us really have minds large enough to see the entire thing at once, but we can see the edges of our own chalkdust, and with good faith, we can imagine the larger letters we form. I'm not talking about a master plan devised by God, or really any single thing. I mean that there is an enormous equation, and it is unfolding in one direction, always adding the past.

Anyways, my intentions are not a culmination not only of weeks and years, but an entire lifetime, and abstractly, the lives before me. When people ask me why I want to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, I don't say any of these sentences. I usually have something wry to say. But if you really want to know, I really could not even tell you. I would have to hand you my lifetime, and let you sort through it.

But seriously, there's a reason. Sometimes I recite Thoreau's words:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

We are fleeting particles on this world, that only get to kick it briefly with other particles. If we don't understand our present particle-ness, then we may quickly be fused into a larger and different compound that does not even resemble what we once were. I want to understand this universe firsthand before I have it handed to me by someone else.