Enough of muddy, rutted, always bum-busting rutted, country back roads, enough of breathless scenic vistas and cows, enough of trees dripping sap, rain, and bugs, strange bugs, not city bugs, that was for sure, but biting frenzy worthy anyway. Enough of all that to last a life-time, thank you. Enough too of Bunsen burners (last seen in some explosive chemical flash-out in high school chemistry class and, maybe, they have rebuilt the damn lab since then, maybe though they have left it “ as is” for an example), Coleman stoves (too small for big pots, stew worthy, simmering pots to feed hungry campers and hard, country hard, to light) wrapped blankets (getting ever mildewed ), second-hand sweated army sleeping bags (in desperate need of washing after a month of night exertions with those ever laughing hands), and minute (small, not speed in throwing up , especially when rains came pouring down and we were caught out without shelter from the storm, a metaphor maybe) pegged pup tents too. And enough too of granolas, oatmeals, desiccated eastern mountain stews, oregano weed, mushroomed delights, and nature in the raw. Cities, please. Large Pacific-splashed roar of ocean cities with life in sheltered caverns and be quick about it.
Quebec City, Montreal, small catholic ile this and sainte that cities, towns really, in between passed in lightning speed, in 1972 lightning speed, deep into westward ho great blue-pink skied American west nights (splashed too). Onward, back to Estados Unidos entrances (studying quick-draw Spanish for the southern Mexican winter and hence use of quick-draw mex words instead of U.S. of A rock landing words). Through fossil-fueled Detroit and radical oasis Ann Arbors of the mind, quickly and then some Neola cornfields and Aunt Betty breakfasts, non-descript or rather same descript, cornfields that is, breakfasts worthy of the corn-fed. A time to ponder though, cornfield, and more cornfield, and aunt betty wisdom, totally foreign although not alien like we were in some other country, and not estatos unidos (better not say that in corn-fed Neola though you might get an argument, an argument in spades, from the normally give me your hand shake people. Yes, strange people, almost Amish except, of course, the gun-racked pick-up trucks and the odd sign or two about no six-shooters allowed). Then through to white out-eked Denver and Boulder rockymountainhighs and from there down dinosaur roads into the high desert thundering night. And to this dream.
*******
Damn, already I missed Joyell, road-worthy, road-travel easy, easy on the eyes and easy getting us roadside and campfire friends Joyell as I traveled across Interstate 10 onto the great high desert southwest American hitchhike road after we parted at the Phoenix bus station. She, heading home East, at least New York east, from the road on some pressing family emergency business, some stockholder stuff, and I to the savage search for the blue-pink great American West night. (We are to meet up in some Pacific splash town, probably L.A., and from there head south, tex-mex south.)
I will tell you true, stockbroker yankee father Mafioso don or not I wished to high heaven she had not gone. See she had started to see thing s my way a little about white picket fence commitment once she knew I could be more companionable without such talk, and committed still in my own way. And glad as hell to reach my laughing hands out for her like the first snow-filled New Hampshire some high purpose anti-war conference night we met. (And she glad too, the road was our cement and our getting Boston city stinks blown off.) True too I did not relish driving alone, picking up vagrant hitchhikers and other kindred in the hot, arid, high desert sputter.
Right then though I sighted my first connection hitchhike ride heading out of Phoenix and as luck would have it this big bruiser, full tattoo armed with snakes, roses, and lost loves names, ex-truck driver who was obviously benny-ed, benny-ed to perdition and was talking a blue streak was heading to some motorcycle jamboree heading to Joshua Tree in California, my next destination (although he did not call it a jamboree and I had better not either unless I want to risk offending the entire Hell’s Angels universe at one stroke. Let’s call it tumble-rumble-stumble and be done with it. They’ll like that.).
All I wanted was company on the ride that day and unfettered thoughts of Joyell but I knew enough of the road, enough of the truck driver come-on part of it anyway, even if ex-trucker, to know that this guy’s blue streak was a small price to pay for such companionship. See, some guys, some trucker guys like Denver Slim, who left me off at some long ago (or it seemed like long ago, really only a couple of years) Steubenville truck stop on my way American south one time wanted to talk man to man. Back and forth like real people, especially as I reminded him of his errant (read: hippie –swaying) son. Other guys are happy for the company so they can, at seventy or seventy-five miles an hour with the engine revved high and where conversation is made almost painful and chock-filled with the “what did you says?”, spout forth on their homespun philosophy and take on this wicked old world. With these guys an occasional “Ya, that’s right,” or a timely “What did you mean by that?” will stand you in good stead and you can nod out into your own thoughts. Forlorn Joyell thoughts.
And that is exactly where I wanted be, as old Buck (where do they get these names) droned on and on about how the government was doing, or not doing this or that for, or to, the little guy who helped build up, not tear down, the country like him. Me, I was thinking about what Aunt Betty, sweet Neola cornfields grandmotherly Aunt Betty (everybody called her Aunt Betty, even guys who were older than she was, after the name of her sweet Neola diner), said a month or so back when we pitched our tent for a few days in her backyard, we did some chores in kind, and she fed us, royal Midwest fed us, still rung in my ears. I was good for Joyell. Hell, I know I was. Hell, if I had any sense I would admit what I knew inside. Joyell was good for me too.
But see the times were funny is a way. No way in 1962, or ‘64, or ’66, let’s say, that I would have run into a Joyell. I was strung out, strung out hard, on neurotic, long black-haired (although that was optional), kind of skinny (not thin, not slender, skinny, wistfully skinny, I say), bookish, Harvard Square, maybe a poet, kind of girls. If I said beatnik girls, and not free-form, ethereal, butterfly breeze “hippie” girls you’d know what I meant. As a kid I was cranked on pale, hell wan was more like it, dark-haired, hard Irish Catholic girls, and I mean hard Irish Catholic girls with twelve novena books in their hands, and chaste lust in their hearts. So, I swear, when Joyell’s yankee goodheart number turned up, I was clueless how to take just a plain-spoken, says what she means, means what she says young woman who had dreams (unformed, mainly, but dreams nevertheless) that also were plain-spoken. Ah, I can’t explain it now, and I doubt I ever will. Just say I was stunted, stunned, and smitten, okay and let me listen to old Buck’s drone.
****
I have now put many a mile between me and Phoenix and here I am well clear of that prairie fire dream now into sweet winter high desert night California (still hot during the day, jesus, one hundred at Needles, although not humid, thank Christ) not far from some old now run down, crumbling Native American dwellings on Joshua Tree reservation that keep drawing my attention and I still want to utter that oath, that Joyell fealty oath. Buck has gone, and thanks, over to Twenty-nine Palms. (Marines watch out when Buck and his tribe come through.)
Sitting by this Joshua night camp fire casting weird ghost night-like shadows just makes my Joyell hunger worst. And old now well-traveled soldiers turned “hippies,” Jack (something out of a Pancho Villa recruitment poster and, in another age, the look of a good man to have beside you in a street fight) and Mattie (some Captain America easy rider poster boy brimming with all that old long gone Buck found ugly in his America although Mattie did two hard tours in ‘Nam), playing their new-found (at least to me) flute and penny whistle music mantra to set the tone.
Hey, I just remembered, sitting here wrapped up in Joyell and ancient primal tribal memories out of the whistling black star-filled night that I haven’t filled you in on where I have been, who I have seen (like John and Mattie), and how I got here after depositing Buck at his stop on this star –crossed night. Jesus, and here we are only a few hundred miles from the ocean. I can almost smell, smell that algae sea churned smell, and almost see the foam-flecked waves turn against the jagged-edged La Jolla rocks and mad, aging surfer boys from another time looking for that perfect wave. Ya, another more innocent time before all hell broke loose on us in America and crushed our innocent youthful dreams in the rice paddies of Asia, our Joyell plain-spoken dreams, but not our capacity to dream. That only makes the Joyell hurt worst as I remember that she had never seen the Pacific Ocean, the jagged edged, foam-flecked ocean that I went on and on about and I was to be her Neptune on that voyage west to the rim of the world. Well, let me get to it, the filling you in part.
After grabbing up and letting off that strange from blue streak talkin’ hard rider old Buck I did tell you about, I got here in good order. If I didn’t tell you before, and now that I think about it I didn’t, I (we, before Joyell high-tailed it back east), was to hook up with my now traveling companions, Jack and Mattie, here at Joshua for the final trip west to the ocean and serious blue-pink visions. Jack and Mattie are two guys that I picked up on the Massachusetts highways heading south in the days when I had a borrowed car (from sweet pea Joyell) in the early spring. We had some adventures going south, that I will tell you about another time, before I left them off in Washington, D.C. so they could head west from there. We agreed then to meet up in Denver, where they expected to stay for a while, later in the year.
My last contact with them in late summer had them still there but when we arrived in late October at the communal farm on the outskirts of Denver where they had been staying I was informed that they had gotten nervous about being stuck in the snow-bound Rockies and wanted to head south as fast as they could. They had left a Joshua Tree (the town) address for us to meet them at. We stayed at the commune for a few days to rest up, doing a little of this and that, mostly that, and then we headed out on what turned to be an uneventful and mercifully short hitchhike road trip to Phoenix on the way to connect with them. And then my Joyell world fell apart, as you know.
And so here we were making that last push to the coast but not before we investigate these Native American lands that, as it turns out, we, Jack Mattie and I (not Joyell though when I asked her about it one hell-bent night much later), all had been interested in ever since our kid days watching cowboys and Indians on the old black and white 1950s small screen television. You know Lone Ranger, Hop-Along Cassidy, Roy Rogers and their sidekicks’ fake, distorted, prettified Old West stuff. Stuff where the rich Native American traditions got short shrift.
Earlier today we had been over to Black Rock for an Intertribal celebration, a gathering of what was left of the great, ancient warrior nations that roamed freely across the west not all that long ago but who are now mere “cigar store” Indian characters to the public eye. The sounds, the whispering shrill canyon sounds and all the others, the sights, the colors radiant as they pulled out all the stops to bring back the old days when they ruled this West, the spirit, ah, the spirit of our own warrior shaman trances are still in our heads this now blazing camp fire night. I am still in some shamanic-induced trance from the healing dances, from warrior tom-tom dances, and from the primal scream-like sounds as they drove away the evil spirits that gathered around them (not hard enough to drive the marauding “white devil” who had broken their hearts, if not their spirits though). Not only that but we had scored some peyote buttons (strictly for religious purposes, as you will see) and the buttons had started to kick in along with the occasional hit from the old bong hash pipe (strictly for medicinal purposes).
So right now in this dark, abyss dark, darker than I have ever seen the night sky in the citified East even though it is star-filled, million star-filled, in this spitting flame-roared campfire throwing shadow night along with tormented pipe-filled dreams of Joyell I am embedded with the ghosts of ten thousand past warrior- kings and their people. And if my ears don’t deceive me, and they don’t, beside Jack’s flute and Mattie’s penny whistle I hear, and hear plainly, the muted gathering war cries of ancient drums summoning paint-faced proud, bedecked warriors to avenge their not so ancient loses, and their sorrows as well.
And after more pipe-fillings that sound got louder, louder so that even Jack and Mattie seem transfixed and begin to play their own instruments louder and stronger to keep pace with the drums. Then, magically, magically it seemed anyway, I swear, I swear on anything holy or unholy, on some sodden forebear grave, on some unborn descendent that off the campfire- reflected red, red sandstone, grey, grey sandstone, beige (beige for lack of better color description), beige sandstone canyon echo walls I saw the vague outlines of old proud, feather-bedecked, slash mark-painted Apache warriors beginning, slowly at first, to go into their ghost dance trance that I had heard got them revved up for a fight. Suddenly, we three, we three television-sotted Indian warriors got up and started, slowly at first so we are actually out of synch with the wall action, to move to the rhythms of the ghosts. Ay ya, ay ya, ay ya, ay ya...until we speed up to catch the real pace. After what seems an eternity we were ready, ready as hell, to go seek revenge for those white injustices.
But then just as quickly the now flickering camp fire flame went out, or went to ember, the shadow ghost dance warriors were gone and we crumble in exhaustion to the ground. So much for vengeance and revenge. We, after regaining some strength, all decided that we had better push on, push on hard, to the ocean. These ancient desert nights, sweet winter desert nights or not, will do us in otherwise. But just for a moment, just for a weak modern moment we, or at least I knew, what it was like for those ancient warriors to seek their own blue-pink great American West night.
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