East of the Rockies

We rounded the serpant bends. I could seldom tune in a station up there in the hills but occasional crackles of something like "Moon River" got through. 'Where are we?' I'd think as the billowy, melodramatic lyrics panged out the speakers of the car as the soft dirt road guided us along, in and out of turns and one minute the sun is eclipsed by hill and summit and the next we break out into a bend with a green and blue horizon and a jagged drop. I'd seen many roads in my travels. Icy, dusty, lonely, pure, red, deadly, tourist trap etc...there are many types of road. But Big Sur has the best. They are at the edge of the country and could be the edge of time and space for that matter. I write about them too much and never describe them properly. No one can. The coast is weed and thistle and rock and lichen splotches and salty sage with golden grasses with land that runs hot to cold at a moment's notice. It's dead-cow-bluffs and campers and surfers that look like ninja assassin bobbing in seaweed foam. It's foot-thrashing coastal walks and thorny brush cutting your forearms up on hikes off the beaten path with fog-catcher cliffs, grey puffs rolling over you at the top of that day's peak. In and out of those bends, boy. You see it all and yet you haven't yet seen anything. But it all makes sense out there when you're nothing at the edge of the planet. Scary to think that being nothing, mattering not to the rock and sea, is a good feeling. Yet this lush end to all roads with a big godly dunk tank edge doesn't need me. It never needed the countless others who came looking for answers or escape. In fact it spends our whole time there taunting me so I'll leave. Says, "No place for you here man - go on back to the car, steer it back into those towns and cities you and yours made, go through the drive-thru, eat your precious wants and take all you desire like always. No place for you at the edge unless you want to get rid of that car, toss those clothes swim to the bottom of my pool and never return. No place for you out here. G'on back and join the rest of the dying flower children who make up their own peace. And it's in these moments I see how fake it all is - the whole trip is just me and so many others trying to live by some rebel standard set a long time ago that others tried to live by after someone made it cool but never knew it was. It's cool to be on the road - cool to drift - cool to roam - cool to think your are alone and like you'll just be a bum meanwhile your roundtrip ticket is in your pack along with your maps and touristy trinkets - "Did you really come here to leave it all behind, hippie?" Are you a real rebel? Are you all that much of a drifter bum poet? You never intended to leave it all - you came here to think you did for a while but you know full well it couldn't happen. Not when your job awaits and the bills and the guise of life settles firmly on you - the brick and morter of each expected plan settles secure. You can't live like these hills or drift with the bobcats. No cable tv out here in the hills either kid. Just dead-cow-bluffs.

Listening to the fractured voices on the line I could tell she was near a doorway, probably some local bar where everyone else was going to forget a little while and ride credit cards into oblivion. She was there to forget her day and the testing ways of her teenager, who just a day earlier deemed her the bitch. At a cross-roads she called her little brother and we did our usual talk until the cell ran out or the tears were too much. And the cat curled whining for attention as the phone crackled static sorrows into my ear and innocense slipped further. All those easy days gone -- now it was time to be big boys and girls and swim once more in the turgid puddle of life. Mother's grip was loosening - not by choice but because it is the natural order. The daughter cub becomes the bear sooner than you think and claws do sharpen on the rocks of the adolescent cave. Soon enough, the November frost will outline the angry brows and groaning cars idling before a departure. Let us hope the chill is kinder.