Opening

Another way to talk about what was happening on the road trip would be to say "my intuition was becoming the decision-maker along the way, and the cogs, gears, hamster wheels and Euclidean lines of my strategizing mind had begun to quiet and erode as far back as Little Rock-- and, by now, on my way to see a woman I hadn't seen in 30 years but with whom I was once in love, filled with new and unexpected thoughts of a woman I had just fallen in love with (who I hadn't seen in 16 years) but didn't really "know" it-- let's just say the whole apparatus was down for maintenance. I had begun going entirely on the pull, tumble, poem and breath of a more and more expansive opening. 

Sunrise, July 13, Ship Bottom, Long Beach Island

Also, I had forgotten-- I had a brief lunch in Surf City with the bass player from the thrash funk alt acid sort of metal band I had been in 25 years earlier. I had posted something on FB about being on Long Beach Island and, of course, the guy was 6 miles away in Harvey Cedars. I always admired this man's bass playing and it was great to see him again-- we made tentative plans to collaborate at a distance using home recording equipment, something that's actually feasible and relatively high quality these days. 

The only picture of the band I was in from 1989 to 1992, Percy shirtless on the drums, trying to bash his way free of demons, most of whom thought that was pretty cute

On the road to Maryland, I recalled a lot of my East Coast travels from the '80s, when I was a student at a small, insane liberal arts school in Annapolis. (more about that sometime, probably). From Jersey to Rockville one way to go is to head directly across Jersey to Camden, go south through Baltimore, south to the top of the DC beltway and west. So there's a little bit of Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington in the drive-- typical of the East Coast where you go through more cities in a day than some entire states have out West. 

I have memories in all of these cities, of course. Lived in Philly. Spent years visiting friends in Baltimore. Went to DC a lot when I worked on a vegetable farm in Fairfax County VA after graduating. When places are closer together, memories tumble together more closely also, when you're traveling. 

Regarding K, the woman I was visiting-- we connected the summer after my junior year in Santa Fe. This junior year started with me spiritually feeling like a Christian mystic monk, in my dorm room high up in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo's, staring down the most challenging academic year at my school, trying to hold on to a long distance relationship with a woman in Annapolis that was not making it. The dissolution of that broke my heart and I spent much of that winter hiking in the mountains and wading through snowdrifts. It's probably when I decided "When You Are Old" by Yeats was my favorite poem and memorized it. In subsequent years, I would wheel out my recitation of it from memory as part of my woo kit. Now, the poem just seems like adolescent hubris. It's still quite well done. It's just that, well, no WB, you don't necessarily get to be that one man who loved the pilgrim soul in her. That ain't up to you, bub. 

But by the time spring arrived, I had tried cocaine for the first time and loved it (who doesn't, the first time?), dropped acid the first time, a late traveler (on a warm, windy spring day at Holy Ghost in the Pecos Wilderness-- a truly life changing experience about which, maybe more later also), taken mushrooms for the first time, etc. Out of my utter despair and some kind of really ill-advised self flagellation (arising, I'm sure, out of self hatred, my old friend), I went to the opposite extreme of wanting as much Dionysian and unbounded, heart-centered experience as possible. Whatever Christian mysticism was still in there had become wildly Gnostic and absolutely untamed, bleeding over to plain old raw paganism, spurred on by the vast wildernesses and presences of Northern New Mexico-- sky, pine, red dirt, wind, piñon, canyons, sunsets, snowstorms, thunderstorms, a beautiful woman I was in a fling with for whom I had no deep feelings so it was perfect, all at 7000 feet in the air. My cathedral, sanctuary and hermitage (all) became the wild world outside. It wasn't that the spiritual mysteries of the Western world were not present also (omnipresent in that Catholic town)-- but all of the dogma had been immolated in an insatiable etheric flame of just being here, now. Man. 

A rarefied time.  

So it was at the tail end of that, that I met K. She had her own brand of paganism combined with vague Hinduism (her nickname in her religious community was Radha, and we shared a weird and conflicted background of explorations in Christian experience as well). She was stunningly beautiful, kind, sweet, scattered, eccentric to the nth degree and at this time in her life, as wide open and weird as I was. I was in my home town and she was in Bethesda for a while that summer and she sent me a 14 page letter written on both sides of the lined paper with the envelope soaked in perfume and covered with bird stickers. For example. 

However, as soon as the new school year started, she dumped me to get back together with her ex, and then left him a few weeks later and got together with the man who would end up being her husband, a tall, lanky, excellent blues musician with all the Bad Boy cred a good Hindu girl could want. Her departure busted up my heart some more and threw it down ye olde stairway of doom-- I only realized after she broke up with me that I had been harboring fantasies of partnering with her in marriage and living on a farm and taking mushrooms all the time while we parented 2 or 3 wild children who would grow up to save the world. When I have unconscious plans for the future, they tend to be pretty grand. 

Anyway, the last time I saw her she was a few years into her relationship with the blues singer but not yet married. We all piled into the blues singer's completely reconditioned old cream colored with red leather interior Cadillac, blasting BB King on the stereo, and drove down to Ocean City MD. I spent the weekend doing coke, crashing, blacking out from drinking too much, sobbing on the beach at 3 am, eating ridiculous amounts of grilled fish and pretty much loathing myself and everyone else there. It was a dark, dark time. K herself had decided to put off most spiritual pretense and was very successfully being the partner of a tall handsome white blues musician with a cream colored red leather interior. It seemed like all the wild pantheon and magic illumination had gone completely out of everything-- I didn't realize at the time that it was because I was advancing into a new stage of alcoholism and addiction. I just thought I had somehow been cursed. 

I also didn't know, of course, that a couple days later I would meet a woman in Bryn Mawr with whom I would spend the next 5 years and almost marry, but--of course-- that's a different story.

K and I had sporadically stayed in touch over the years, much more so after Facebook, that great, weird, sometimes healing and sometimes poisonous nexus of lives. Her house now is in a beautiful, wooded suburb in Montgomery County. It was a rainy, humid and hot day. It was good to see her. It was odd in that way where you know it is the same person, but of course it is also a different person, and you are the same, yet different. As the night went on, things got progressively more strange. I'll leave out the details, but I spent a lot of time hanging with her 10 year old son, a great kid, and slept in a room in the basement. The next morning, she and I had a good, recovery oriented talk on her back porch overlooking her beautiful grassy yard, birds in the trees, sun broken by so much green. 

I look back and realize the whole encounter had been set within a context of my having fallen in love the day before but not knowing it yet. Along the way to Maryland, "oh, she would get a kick out of this. Oh, this would make her laugh." While visiting, "I'll have to tell her this and this."

How will I tell this story of wanting suddenly to share my life, in particular wanting to tell stories, with someone I had basically just re-encountered after 16 years? No idea. Still. It might be untellable and ineffable, in the strict sense. Sometimes of course merely in the act of writing, at least something manageable arises. I used to think Aristotle was hilarious when he wrote "Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end." As I've gotten older, I've seen more clearly why he felt it necessary to make that explicit. 

It was with relief, grief, and the brahmaviharas spinning out into the rain-washed sun of I-95 that I departed, without knowing how far I would go. But I was uncommitted to any more wrestling matches with my past for the entire rest of the trip (not that Santa Fe, one of the places I was headed, wasn't jammed full of ghosts, but I wasn't committed to any of the ghosts yet), heading west at last-- sure, south through Virginia for a long time, but that magic turn wasn't far off, at nowhere Bristol, TN, a point I have always reverently celebrated going either way, where I-40 noses finally away from or toward the distant Pacific.