The Broken Guardrail

Vanquished! I am rolling over bridge now now through a tunnel I have to warn my mom the cars going underground before the signal fades Ive just explained it all to her and shes taking it easy after all shes heard this week she knows the whirls of wind can change can push a hurricane back across the continent Shes gone Im in the tunnel Over head lights the suns behind me now too Im out again into the light but its shadows rolling ahead of me until the river turns and the road turns and I can see on the curves slope a stripe of buttery light reflected bright earth and cedar back at the sunset and the deep pacific green shimmers across the river golden skipping the sun back into my eyes like flat stones.

I recognize this part of the river where I had rafted once as a boy. The raft was a big yellow raft, really big like for an expedition, and sturdy. Led by my dad’s sister or half brother maybe, but both my parents were there, and their mountaineering friends; they were like parachute adventurers then just dropping into the world for an afternoon or a week and pack up and back to the city; once had literally jumped with skis out of hovering helicopter onto unmarked downhill peaks, down and up. And my two brothers of course also rafted with us. We boys did some paddling but mostly played with plastic animal warriors. When the raft flipped over, capsizing suddenly with a burst or a jerk like a rage upsetting a dinner table, some of my favorite of those little toys were lost under the river. A military style cargosized rescue copter’s twirling teetering blades pulled at the air which fearing the swinging beams grasped tight to raft which came loose from the water startling the wind and we dropped just as the shock had lifted us but bottom up into the waves. Somebody told me a driver had leapt his vehicle off the highway over the cliff at river’s edge and the giant helicopter was there to carry that driver and his passengers to a hospital. I looked into the river which was muddy like a tea, searching for my little beasts and a fallen snorkel. When I did look up I saw a great dented boat, apparently crushed by the careening vehicle, its windscreen split and shattered. But it appeared the car itself had drowned and I saw the helicopterists hop from a long rope ladder into a nickel colored raft, while state police gathered above near the broken guardrail. I recall the water felt warm like soup but reeds or grass and fish bothered my legs. And why didn’t we just right our raft and go on? And sometime I realized the broken boat was a truck, a Chevrolet maybe, so mangled and angular, its canopy so collapsed, its hood squeezed to a prow; I mistook it for a water craft.

Crossing a wide break in the trees where the river comes right along the highway, along bends around the mountains, I look for that spot where the truck crashed years ago, to see if I can identify it from up here above the road. I’m also trying to imagine riding through these valleys back the other way. I know I passed like that just a few days ago, but it was night and I sleeping. I hadn’t seen it in any color. I pretend to go off on monologues about the places I pass and know. It is glorious feeling these places, being by the Yakima river, being on the edge of the continent with a full continent to go again. But that of course is also the sadness.

So as I drive now I’m looking in my imagination for the forward ride to the West as I make its way in reverse East along Route 90. I know these slopes these bends these signs these trees, even better than I will know the flat hills and farms and orchards that follow, and I want to tell someone, tell them what little there is that this has to do with me. This remains the place I am from. If it is an outer reach of it, it is still where I spent hikes and carwindow views when I was much younger, and where I will always envision the birthplace of man to have been like. My companion is gone. Christine Lagorio flew to San Francisco this morning. I drove her to the airport in my dad’s van. I drove back to my dad’s house thinking about Seattle rolling through its southern industrial end, separated only by the freeway from residential South Seattle — our own South Bronx South Side South Central North Dallas East St Louis West Savannah West Phila District of Columbia — its shipping yards its train yards and old airfields and new ballfields. I had a vision of myself with a radical freedom, the kind of emancipation broken loose by a disaster that severs you from all your dependents, addresses, addressers, appointments; the freedom to stay where you are or go wherever you want. So several exchanges of phone calls I’m driving this Saturn something, I’ve lifted my dad from work in his van with my packed bags in it and explained all on the way way out past the airport so I could drive this car for free to Hampton, Virginia, birthplace of Allen Iverson, and I’ve seized this perhaps because it must be right now to succeed this is a moment of action — literally includes a rush-hour race through downtown Seattle and far to the south before the Driveaway Service closes — the seizure’s victim this sudden end to the Seattle moment. My hours of boundless freedom closed, I am bound in the foster Saturn with my dad and Seattle behind me going exactly where I’ve already been. Taking Christine’s place beside me now is myself. And there being no one else, I tell myself stories.

I mentioned this feeling of jettisent free agency. I was like an ant whose hill is demolished by a step on the bluff. Like a crab lifted off the beach. I found myself in Seattle with no timetable, no contracts and few possessions. The architecture of my journey has been pulled off the river and dumped upside down. My meager toys scattered at the basin. This morning I rushed through those hilly streets, green even as the high summer sun gleams off skyscrapers, roared up Aurora, high above the canal— there are moments like these when the spirit seems to calcify and I feel not, like so often, in the world, but I feel myself moving on the world, a body moving at the surface of reality, apart from its trappings, illusions and debts. You must remember to remember because at times I will be prone, I know, and it is a shame, to forget to express that this journey is one of body and its vehicles, that its proportions will always be mansized, not godlike except when gods are humans, not universal except in the constellational sense, that is that every point or vertice connects to every other. But this spiritual carriage of body through time and place is always contained within the vessel of myself. This is a study of the body, as Henry Miller says the Greeks studied the body, eternalizing the spirit with human proportion, but a spirit that nevertheless swallows the whole world. At the moment of absolute emancipation, at which my arms and legs extend throughout this country, the world, as it tries to close itself to me, I can with the movement of my foot on a gas pedal convert all that energy into action, into transformation. This bright blue morning I might concede to stay in Seattle, to live with my dad perhaps rent free, survive on the propulsion of my writing. Or return to Missoula by bus, but strand myself there like the settlers who founded the place in that cauldron on the edge of the Rocky Mountains, and successive generations who found themselves similarly on the world. Might abandon the bar at Park Avenue, that safely expendable job. I might board a plane back to New York, where my Jersey City lease is up in little more than a month. Wasn’t the rent cheap on Capitol Hill? Might pay for the car, might save —this awareness swells as you chase the sun to the West. Something about the shadows change, the angle of the sun, but it has risen with the rising dusk all along my way toward the coast, this feeling that I might do anything, that every element of my carriage into the future is unstable. I read a comment a while ago by a critic whose name I never noticed, about minimalism. It said movements in art by nature head toward the edge of a cliff and inevitably must turn back and walk down from the edge. But I exclaim why not jump over the brim? Why is it not even in the conversation? Not a suicidal plummet but a leap into the air —a leap! The same muscle spring as pressing the accelerator. My heart is in the future nearly all the time and this trip is designed to spread tales and tie roots for later vision, but it has only until now led me through past places. Enough of the gravestones and dreams. My experience is a pillow and I am inside the fluff, tearing at its seams. Now I drive under the greening dark of twilight first to Missoula to extinguish the deceased.

Yesterday my mom was in Seattle. She’s still there I guess. She’s been up in Skagit country where I was born, and had a ticket from SeaTac to Detroit. It’s a coincidence she came to the city just as my path spiraled through. Otherwise she and my dad wouldn’t have crossed at all. It’s my dad’s town now, but he was happy to let me drive her downtown in his van. A museum visit and a walk on the waterfront with Christine. We two slept in my dad’s bed when my mom called, left her purse in the van. He and the van were at his girlfriend’s place; that’s why we’re in his bed. No answer there; adults sleep. Her flight was in the morning too, earlier than Christine’s. My dad got a late start. Thus the day began.

Beyond the Cascades I am without tales to tell myself. I don’t really know these fields. A peculiar smoke rises from somewhere its smell invades the air they highways flat and I cant see ahead into the night. I am bound, bound to bring this car to its destination, bound now to live in some loft in Brooklyn: have just this afternoon, while riding the fast dash to this car with time to take me everywhere, committed over the phone to a Bushwick apartment. I am thwarted, my agency now as much imagined as the opposite journey into the Pacific mountains, the roadside cedars, the red boulders, the river still golden with the drowning sun, its ghost now forever unavenged, its tale undetailed. I am defeated. Once believed invincible, I find myself down, oddly dominated, denied — but not destroyed. I am not destroyed — it is invigorating; I have new wheels, new legs for a new jaunt. This is how I am vanquished. I have thrown my arc at the Pacific and it rebounded me, sent me bouncing the other way. Night is fallen and I reach the end of flat East Washington. I am now on the deadly dark curves, reaching after 90, which may have done in my last chariot but Missoula awaits and I push the curves, dodge oncoming headlights. Into the freeing mountain darkness. Every command in my mind at sunrise at sea level is now distant as the wet Sound, where the road might turn suddenly and blindly as the day.