The place was a visitors’ center for the sail, and the sail, we learned, was a chapel built by Victor Westphall. He started working on the project five days after his son David, a Marine infantry officer, was killed in Viet Nam in 1968.
After we looked at the pictures, we turned up our collars and faced the wind again. We followed a path down a slope to the chapel, which was small and round. Inside, narrow windows framed views of the mountains, and a photograph of David Westphall hung on one wall.
We weren’t alone. A man was sitting on one of the stone tiers that form benches facing the center of the sanctuary. We sat down next to him. As I turned to look, I saw a tear steal down his cheek. It was matched by a tear on my own, and when I looked at Mark, his eyes were glistening, too. And so we sat in silence, listening to the wind, letting it wail for the fallen, letting it howl for the pain of those who returned.
I can’t tell you what transcendent spirit lives at Angel Fire, and no one could tell us how the place got such a haunting name. I can’t tell you why being there evoked not only sorrow and despair, but also healing and hope. I can’t tell you why, as I write these words, tears again fill my eyes. It’s as though the absolute worst and best of humanity is distilled there, waiting to bestow comfort and light on those who are willing to embrace the shadow.
When we came down from the mountain, we returned to the campground by the frozen lake. When we drove in, we were greeted by a man wearing a hat adorned with an embroidered patch that identified him as a Viet Nam veteran. “I’m Tom,” he said. “I heard about your truck, and I was hoping you’d be back so I could see it.” After answering his questions about the Phoenix, Mark said, “We were just visiting the Angel Fire memorial. It’s quite a place.”
“It is, isn’t it?” said Tom. “I discovered this valley by accident when I was driving across country three years ago. I lived in Pennsylvania, and I wasn’t really thinking about moving, but when I came over the hill, I suddenly had this overwhelming feeling that I was home. It didn’t go away, so I brought my family back to visit. They all decided, even my teen-age daughter, that they wanted to move here. As we settled in, I found out about the memorial, and I discovered that I wasn’t the only veteran who had felt the call of the place. There are lots of us here. I can’t explain it. It’s almost spooky.”
As we walked around the lake that evening, I looked out over the valley, and once again up at the mountains. I was hoping I’d hear the same call Tom had, but the mountains were stern and silent, and the lake lay frozen and still. Even the wind had died to a whisper, and no comforting voice emerged from the cold. It was beautiful and wild. It was easy to see why other people were drawn to settle here, and if I’d heard the slightest sigh of a suggestion that I might do the same, I’d have called a real estate agent.
But all was quiet. I wasn’t home, and I wasn’t wearing ruby slippers. We went to bed, and the next morning, following Tom’s suggestion, we took a narrow dirt road heading northeast out of the valley. It wasn’t on our map, and even Tom wasn’t sure exactly where it led, but we could see it winding up into the mountains, and that was enough. “After all,” Mark said, “We do have four-wheel drive.”
We made slow progress through the stones and ruts that formed the road bed, and, as usual, I couldn’t help fretting about whether we’d make it to civilization in one piece. Somehow, I was back on the cliff side, and I was still chafing against real-life adventure.
After an hour or so, we stopped in a wide spot to assess our progress. The valley lay behind and below us, serene and still. The air was cold, but the wind was no more than a breeze. A light winter sun hung above us, and the sky was pure cloudless blue. We just stood there looking, and suddenly a big bird flew between us and the sun, so close we could feel the beat of his wings. “It’s a hawk,” said Mark.
The hawk was gone as swiftly as it appeared, and we stood standing, gazing out at the huge vacant sky. I expected my familiar yearning to surface again, my longing for home. Is this the place? Should I stop here? I waited for the questions to rise, but, was it the view, the hawk, my recent terror of hurtling off a cliff in the middle of nowhere? I don’t know what happened, but somehow, up there in the Sangre de Cristos, that forbidding agglomeration of ancient stones, my questions blew away on a winter wind.
In their place was a simple answer. “You’re home already,” a quiet voice seemed to say. “You’re where you’re supposed to be, at this perfect juncture of time and space. That’s what home is, sweetheart.”
It really was as simple as that. I’ve been home ever since, no matter where my body is taking up space. The less stuff I own, and the less spread out it is, the bigger the area that feels like home. If that sounds like a paradox, well, I guess it is. But since that morning in the mountains above Angel Fire, I haven’t once wondered where my home was hiding. Since that day, it’s been always with me.
Always Home
Do you have any idea how simply splendid it is to be always home? It had taken me a year, but suddenly I could revel in the blissful simplicity of existing in just one spot. All at once I understood how Jesus could enjoy living with only one coat. He wasn’t deprived. He had the luxury of needing no closet.
I had the luxury of needing no purse. Since purses are the security blankets of American women, this may seem more like punishment than privilege, but for me, it was a lovely freedom. For nearly three decades, I’d never been without my personal luggage, my portable repository for all the things I simply couldn’t do without while I was away from home. Of course, this invariably meant I was packing a bunch of trash along with the useful items: old receipts, ticket stubs, worn-out pens, candy wrappers, loose change, odd keys, the detritus of everyday life.
And I could never stop worrying about losing the damn thing. It was like a body part that wasn’t attached well enough, like a foot that you could leave in a bus if you weren’t careful. And losing it was a dreaded thing, especially if you happened to be far away from home. Purse loss was a major topic of conversation when I was a college student on a semester abroad in Italy. The repartee was always the same.
“I lost my boat ticket in Athens.”
“I can top that. I lost my passport in Naples.”
“That’s nothing. All my money and my train ticket back to London got stolen on the Paris Metro.”
“No, wait. I lost my whole purse in Vienna.”
“Oh my God.”
For American women, and the fear starts young, losing a purse is far worse than losing a boyfriend, bone mass, or an ozone layer.
And now I’d lost mine permanently, and I was thrilled. I still don’t own one, don’t carry one, don’t want one. It’s my truest symbol of freedom. Maybe someday I won’t even need pockets. It’s something to strive for, but right now I still need a place for loose change.
But I’m hardly a Buddha. Enlightened souls don’t tote toilets. That’s reserved for people like Queen Elizabeth, who, I’ve been told, brings her own loo wherever she goes. It’s not that she’s hoity toity. It’s just that she’s not amused by the notion of seeing a toilet seat hanging on a wall someday, bearing the label, “Queen Elizabeth sat here.”
It’s comforting to know that I’m protected from similar embarrassment. I, too, carry a loo of my own. For people who don’t know better, my lifestyle may not seem privileged, but consider this. In the last five years, I’ve warmed far fewer strange commodes than your typical suburban BMW owner. I ask you, who’s more aristocratic, a woman with her own private water closet in tow, or a guy in an Armani suit who stops to pee at McDonald’s?
And I’m not selfish about it. I share my facilities with those less fortunate. Come to think of it, my own toilet seat has been graced by derrieres glamorous enough to warrant my hanging it on a wall. But don’t you worry, oh noted ones. You’re lucky that I have better taste in home decor, and no wall space to spare anyway.
Lots o
f people who choose the mobile life tow cars behind their motorhomes, or pull trailers with pick-up trucks. They arrive at preselected destinations, set up housekeeping, and use the smaller vehicles as satellites. “Why don’t you tow a car?” these well-wheeled ones often ask. “It’s so handy for errands.”
Errands. The word alone is enough to make me foreswear cars forever, just like purses. It reeks of endless aisles and dull routine. Errands wear ruts in your life, the same way commutes do. Errands and commutes mean going back as often as you go forward. They rack up miles, but at the end of a thousand, you still haven’t gotten anywhere.
In our first four years, Mark, Marvin, and I covered 115,000 miles. The odometers of most Los Angeles professionals would reflect the same number in the same amount of time. The difference is that the wheels of the commuter run over familiar tracks, back and forth, to and fro.
I know. For ten years, I was the quintessence of the Southern California job holder. I drove thirty miles each way to work, crawling in the same direction as thousands of other coffee- drinking minions each morning. Every evening I’d crawl back with the same horde, and on Saturdays we all went on the same errands, filling giant suburban parking lots with row after glistening row of our four-wheeled exoskeletons.
I never minded “to”, but I got sick unto death of “fro.” “Forth” would have been fine, but “back” became anathema. Life in the Phoenix was all tos and forths. Our paths drew triangles and squares and circles on maps, but we never created the heavy over-and-over lines of our former lives. Why, when it had been so blissful to give it up, would I want to set up a place to which I had to wear a path? And why, in the name of all I held good, would I want to require myself to own a purse?
You need a purse only if you have a here and a there. I want only a here, with no such word as errand necessary. If, as the road unrolls beneath me, I need food or raiment, I know I’ll find it along the way. There is no dearth of shops and grocers on the road to the horizon.
So no car follows the Phoenix as we ply the road. As Mark says, “With a car back there, we might as well not have four- wheel-drive. We’d have to leave it somewhere if we wanted to go off-road. And then we’d have to go back and get it.”
Neither of us wanted back or there or then. We wanted forth and here and now. One truck was enough, and there are times when even it seems excessive. There are times I’d like to travel even lighter, with one coat, one pair of shoes. There are times when, having found the pleasure of owning no purse, I’d like to plumb the possibilities inherent in needing no closet.
But you know, I really have nothing against commutes and errands and daily routine. It’s never the action that wears the rut in your soul. It’s whether the action is getting you where you want to go. The deed is only dull when it isn’t cutting its way to your heart’s desire.
Our life had its full complement of routine. If you travel with a toilet, you can’t ignore the inexorably expanding contents of your holding tank. If you want to make tracks, you can’t ignore the inexorably shrinking contents of your gas tank. If your heart’s desire is to send e-mail from the hinterlands, you try and try and try again.
I was, as ever, filing a story every week with the newspaper in California, and digital communion was still an elaborate ritual. If we were in the mountains, we’d drive from ridge to ridge, watching the cellular phone all the while. When the signal strength reached the minimum necessary for a successful connection, we’d screech to a halt. There was no such thing as logging on while rolling.
And success wasn’t dictated merely by signal. Back in 1994, cellular telephone companies were still figuring out how to offer nationwide service, which, since it required cooperation among a score of local companies, took as much negotiation and diplomacy as it took to create Yugoslavia. Customers paid for the whole enterprise in the form of ‘roam’ charges. If you wanted the luxury of using a cellular telephone outside of your access provider’s bailiwick, you had to pay through the nose. A human operator was often employed to make connections, and payment by credit card was required.
Making a single telephone call could take as much as twenty minutes of negotiation, which would have been inconvenience enough, but for our purposes, it spelled disaster. It had taken all my powers to pummel my software into working with the cellular phone under optimal conditions. I hadn’t the faintest idea how to figure the interruption of a human voice into the equation, and, lest you think I’m above asking for help from superior beings, no computer whiz I could find knew what to do either.
All of this meant that in New Mexico, our cellular telephone was a useless hunk of black plastic. It wouldn’t work at all, and no ancient magic could help. To file my story in the land of enchantment, I had to hire the services of an antediluvian fax machine. The deed accomplished, we went to Texas.
Chapter 12
Life Among the Peccaries
Arizona Detour
You just never know what Americans will be thinking when you say “Texas” to them. Some think “big,” and some think “bigoted.” Some think “oil,” and some think “cattle.” Lots think “Dallas,” the television show, and some think “Dallas,” the city that killed Kennedy.
I used to think “forever” when I heard the word, because that’s how long it seemed to take to drive across it. But that was before I learned that boredom doesn’t grow in surroundings. It flourishes in the agar of your own soul. Which means I have to take you on a detour to Arizona before I return to Lone Star territory.
Before I set out on a never-ending journey that had no stated purpose, no itinerary, and no destination, touring the United States had always been a connect-the-dots operation. The dots were points of interest, and the lines connecting them were long, tedious are-we-there-yet highways with faceless, boring towns scattered along their edges. Since, with foreknowledge derived from travel guides, the auto club, and previous junkets, I already knew which places were interesting, what was the point in exploring the others unless I needed a drink, a burger, or a toilet?
One such place was Gila Bend, Arizona, a town I’d passed through many a time on many a dot-connecting journey. It’s out in the desert somewhere between Phoenix and the California border, and it usually appears through your windshield when you’re getting thirsty, hungry, or need to pee.
Since I had already relegated the place to my boring list, my heart fluttered not when Gila Bend rose on the sand in front of the Phoenix. We would have left it in the dust without another thought, but it was eight o’clock and about to get dark when we reached the town limits. “I guess we’ll be spending the night in Dullsville,” I said.
I pulled out the fat, dog-eared directory of campgrounds we kept handy for such exigencies, and one establishment was listed. “It doesn’t sound lovely,” I said, “But all we’re going to do is sleep and leave, so who cares?”
The campground was wedged between an abandoned Mexican restaurant and a junkyard. A dusty trailer had a shingle nailed on the door that said “office.” Inside, a woman with so many children she didn’t know what to do assigned us a campsite. “Have fun!” she called as she rushed off in pursuit of a grubby two-year-old whose diaper had fallen off. “You betcha!” I did not call after her.
The sun had just set by the time we’d parked, and Mark took Marvin outside to survey the landscape and look for bushes. They were back in five minutes.
“There’s a Christmas tree here,” he said, “A tall one, covered with lights and ornaments.” It was July, and the temperature was just drifting down from the three-digit range. A Christmas tree did seem a little out of place.
“I’m going to go take a closer look,” said Mark. “Want to come?”
As a matter of fact, I did not want to come. I wanted to ignore the whole dingy place, Christmas trees, dirty babies and all. I wanted to go to sleep, wake up, and hit the road.
“Sure,” I said anyway. “Let me put
on my shoes.”
The growing darkness improved our surroundings. Warm lights glowed from ramshackle trailers, and the Christmas tree actually looked quite lovely, it was a tall fir tree, and someone had persevered in attaching lights and ornaments all the way up to its topmost branches.
A leathery, bearded man clad in nothing but shorts was sitting in a folding chair between the tree and a silver bullet-shaped trailer. He was drinking beer out of a long-necked bottle, and he smiled as we approached. “Hey,” he said amiably. “I’m Tim.”
“I’m Mark,” said Mark, “And this is Megan. We saw your tree when we arrived, and we came over to take a closer look.”
“Hey, I’ve been working on this thing ever since I moved here four years ago. People give me stuff to hang on it.” All kinds of stuff, I noted. In one glance I saw a naked Barbie doll, a teddy bear made out of old panty hose, a pair of peace symbol earrings, some sequined sunglasses and a paper airplane.
“Your first time in Gila Bend?” Tim asked. “I’m from Michigan, but I just can’t leave a place where I can dress like this every day of the year. He stretched lazily and scratched his tanned belly. “It’s paradise.”
“And it has loads of history,” Tim added suddenly. He jumped up and disappeared inside his trailer. In a few minutes, he returned carrying a yellowed newspaper.
“Look at this,” he said, unfolding it. “Burt Reynolds committed a murder here.” We peered down at the aging tabloid in front of us. Sure enough, Gila Bend had hit the big time when Burt stayed in one of the local motels while he was making a movie back in the seventies. In his spare time, the yellowed rag reported, he’d created a large ruckus with his co-star, a local motel owner, and a dead body.
Tim looked at our faces expectantly. “I can show you the motel if you like. I know the owner.”
Noticing that we weren’t responding with alacrity, he quickly changed tack. “John Wayne owned a ranch near here,” he said.
Roads From the Ashes Page 14
