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The Road to Mythville
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posted by Unknown at 1:51 PM

 
"It's been a wild ride and I can't sleep
You want to step inside for, for just a peek
You say you paid your price
Well I've paid mine
And it's not pretty here, once you've stepped inside"
----Alejandro Escovedo, from the song, "Sometimes," and the album "With These Hands"


My own mammalian fall toward the bog hole of Monument Valley had taken several hours, mostly due to fucking around in Flagstaff. Indeed, my progress is slow. Sure, we all play into entropy's snare, and therefore death and decay, with such detours. Falling in love twice a night, instead of just once, for example. Once after a glance at the girl at the counter of the Flagstaff Chamber of Commerce Visitor Center. Another time after a waitress landed caffeine on my table. A restless search for a human connection: That's a biggie for me when I'm in the transition zone.

I thought I'd never leave Phoenix earlier that afternoon. Too many goodbyes. Too many possible hellos. I'd packed haphazardly but determinedly, like a Saigon diplomat, circa 1972, heading for a rooftop-to-helicopter escape. I drove north, alone, the "Rescue Guy" in his shiny red Nissan truck, so loaded with boxes of my belongings that I couldn't see out my passenger's side window. All of my utilitarian tools and pop cultural fuels were on hand: an immaculately organized collection of Southwestern post-punk rock bands on tape, a Swiss Army compass, a wooden pen with the end carved with a miniature eagle, enough cigarettes to reach Nevada----either Tonopah or Area 51 or Telluride, Colorado, or an emergency bonfire to signal airliners crossing the Great Divide (whichever came first). Also overloaded was the meat and metaspace of my brain, an eclectic rag-and-bone shop of regrets, lies and sacred music. All in all, the balance of my cache was capable of both regenerating me, or, quite the opposite. I had enough angst as energy stored, at least, to keep me pushing the pedal over 75 mph in a general northeasterly direction.

This delicate balance toward the plus side was maintained by a quick oral injection of espresso, a double shot, bought at some gentrified college-crowd grotto in downtown Flagstaff, hub of the formerly romanticized Route 66. To redirect my general emotional decline, due to the two beers I had in Phoenix, I regenerated on ketones and alkaloids and smoke from my cigarettes from "indjiiiiaaaa," Kailas Bidis. The chance discovery on the wall of the Sheridan Hotel, a portrait of the late Edward Abbey, my old teacher at the University of Arizona in Tucson, reconfirmed my faith in The Project: "The Road to Mythville."

My Tactic: To go "East, Young Man," passing through Flagstaff and scooting around the foot of the San Francisco Peaks to the tune of Chuck Berry's version of "Get Your Kicks on Route 66." All very loud technologies were turned up, the motor, the music, to drown out the whine of the perennial train running through that old town and, of course, a tangled torque of psychobabble. My intention: No stopping that night until I got as far as Kayenta.

I would go so much further. Mythville is much harder to get to than anyone can possibly imagine.

~

Before we go any further, just a note in case it gets confusing about all of that Hopi stuff flying by your rearview window. You gotta be saying, jeez, Taiowa, the loving creator, has set up this terrain with a navel headwaters at Tynde, a spot now called Skeleton Mesa. Imagine all the thirsty animals wondering around in need of nourishment, trusting all along, and smelling right there, cold wet noses pointed down the slippery sandstone quarry. At the bottom, a deep well, the hole, offering everything they need. They move a little closer, testing, drawn. Then a little further, then it's over, they slip in and drown.

You gotta say, "Nice. Real nice navel of the world you got there, Taiowa. Could you maybe give us a sign in the Next World that's just a little more obvious?" Maybe then more of us mammals would do a better job playing the game, knowing the rules and all. From Job to Joe Blow, from First World to Second to Third, the game is rigged for failure. Why?

~

At the crossroads leading to Four Corners or Utah, or, where I had just been, worshipping my idol to Abbeyville, Kayenta is a big deal. Especially if you are driving in for groceries from places like Dennehotso or Toe En Loc as an unwired homeowner on the Res.

The Navajo outpost features a sizeable strip mall, school, government homes and utility buildings, a generous and obvious Holiday Inn, all for a master plan that screams Bureau of Indian Affairs. Nonetheless, it's strategically perched for protracted war against anything civilization might have in mind for the holy emptiness of Monument Valley. At night, it has a blinking yellow light to serve as a caution against the bog in the hole where the animals fall, a life guard warning to the perennial stream emerging from a sandstone quarry, reaching toward Laguna Canyon, where flows concede themselves at Chinle Valley, then the San Juan River, which is where the ecstasy of the first convergence is found: If you know how to swim against quite strong currents. Especially when the Creator's world is so bittersweet, that is, in the spring.

Nonetheless, hope for such an exalted experience with any safety at all is a leaky boat. Due to one law of thermodynamics, the heat of heroic inspiration cannot be maintained indefinitely. Out there in the cold desert, the general line of sight running only to the monolithic shadows of buttes, spires and sandstone cliffs off in the distance, all of these intoxications are merely futile attempts to keep bailing out the boat. Entropy is chagrin, too.

For example, I moaned over how I'd squandered my last few moments in metropolis, now cursing this sanctimonious idea of mine about avoiding the strip bars in Phoenix. As potential road kill on the desert with no foreseeable destination or future love affair, any deadly siren on the shore would've been welcome company.

Oh, the lonely Void.

But it was too late. I sang to the Air-Guitar Age version of William Blake's line: "A voice of one crying out in the wilderness." It was all epic, romantic, at least in my Abbey-inspired view, all of that chaos and conflict brewing inside. Stuff for a major motion picture: A soundtrack of Tragically Hip riffs kicking in at the response to the Byron-esque call, "It couldn't have come at a worse time," the miles passing beneath my truck as walls of Yoruban rhythms wrestled to the ground the handgun-toting demon assassins of my interior life. It was terrifying. More than I had expected. To throw away everything that had once seemed to matter, to toss all material worth of any use into the flatbed of my stead, to leave the entire landscape of both my youth and adulthood behind: What had I done?

I never thought I wouldn't survive, that I would slip into the bog in the hole where ordinary animals will always fall. Nor did I imagine points along the road where the question of my lifespan might become an issue. Courage as stupidity: I moved along the road that October of 1996 with a sense of shame and ecstatic euphoria. My marriage of 15 years was over, a family wide apocalypse that sent me hurling down the bog shaft and into the transitional zone with enough wounds to tell tall but true tales for a decade to lovers, readers, counselors, strangers, to whoever would listen. Now I was driving across the great plain of the high desert of Northern Arizona, moving toward Four Corners, what the late monkeywrenching writer, my old dead mentor friend, Mr. Ed, called "The Holy land." A 25,000-square mile of sand and wind-sculptured stone on a vast and arid plateau touching Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, the Navajo Reservation trapped, a bejeweled interior mythmedia center that was even more quixotic: the Hopi Reservation high up on three rocky mesas.

I'd become obsessed with a woman in another town. Probably a mistake, right from the start. We'd met at his art gallery in Telluride, where she was part owner for an art gallery at the trendy resort town in the mountains of Colorado. I was introduced by her business partner, an odd and soft spoken but gregarious scoundrel. "She's very lonely right now," he had whispered as we walked to the Main Street Post Office, a trip that really just been part of a ruse. "If you ask her out for dinner, she'll cream in her jeans." When we returned to the gallery on Colorado Avenue, I looked her over and made up some pseudo intellectual thing to say about the spirituality of prisms in art glass. We went out to dinner and spent the night together. She said I was polite and was quite moved when I'd offered my sunglasses to her to shed her eyes from the brilliant alpine glow sunset during an outdoors concert for Alejandro Escovedo at Bear Creek Park. I followed up, kept touch over the phone, and yet as each month it'd been more difficult to keep track of her. Of recent, conversations on the phone had been tugs of war, and she often sounded distracted and angry for the intrusion. Early on, we'd said promising things over the line, of what it would be like if we share our lives. I was beginning to fear, though, that she wasn't looking toward me for the answers to her daily dilemmas, which were considerable.

Her dealings with her partner were a constant irritation. He was forcing her to sign papers that would turn control their art business to him, though she would retain full authority to claim aspects of the collection, as it appeared their partnership were surely on the outs. "I hate him, that bastard," she'd screamed over the phone. "You're in Phoenix and he's here, and I'm wasting time talking to you. Unless you know a good lawyer." She hung up the phone and I spent the rest of the day trying to avoid thinking about her, but failing to do so, noting the curious appearance of what can only be described as a hole in the heart. Into that shuddering vacuum, everything I was, and ever shall be, got sucked in.
All that being well understood, my contrary daemon had two votes to my metaphysical side, which had only one. So it wasn't really a fair fight.

~

"Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread," wrote Abbey in one of those rollicking essays about life alone with the wild. And certainly, the game of solitaire was the only one I understood. I couldn't shake the fairy tale from my childhood:

…and in and out of weeks
and almost over a year
to where the wild things are.

My blank canvas turning into a pastiche of everything I'd suppressed: Native American shamanism, romanticism fueled by lost love, the music of the Tragically Hip and every Charles M. Russell painting----a Western Art format I'd often loathed for the way the corporate world of oil and television had appropriated it. Key examples of mythology and politics from Ronald Reagan on down the pike. When Russell painted his portraits of the American West, it was more than an attempt to record a fading era; it was an act of both outrage and sentimentality. But as a conjurer of the Wild West myth that implies its own demise, Russell knew he was as guilty as anyone for staging its disappearance.

"I have been called a pioneer," he said. "In my book a pioneer is a man who comes to virgin country, traps off all the fur, kills off all the wild meat, cuts down all the trees, grazes off all the grass, plows the roots up and strings ten million miles of wire. A pioneer destroys things and calls it civilization."

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posted by Unknown at 1:23 PM