Caprice

Goat-eyed now breathing in and out the whole verge of woods and desert, I see with predictable clarity and wonder the grey-green of ponderosas against vermillion cliffs and distant peaks. The blue bruise, the tawny dark-ringed cap, the nest of drying manure, all looked right. And my mood of maybe-fatal heedlessness suggested I should eat it. So I look back a half hour at my sad sad self in the just-grazed meadow, stooping under my pack and plucking the manure-flecked caps, and running my nail across the stems and watching them bruise blue, and taking a handful and half-chewing them and washing them down with my last Heineken, and now I am here at the verge of woods and desert in the riptide of profundity. The whole vista bleeds its color into me but loses no color. I name the scene turkeyhead because it is flushed with color that reveals a kind of sexual pulse not usually seen in trees and rock. I have my notebook, my walking food, my pistol, and I know circumstances back home brought me here with these things with the idea of writing a long note to the girls and stepping off some edge but I am scarcely able to maintain this thought. This fungus does not feed the planning mind. This fungus reminds me what I knew all along, but continually forget in the city: that conclusions drawn from specific circumstances cannot logically lead to final solutions. That desperation in suffering in ruined plans and regret and wasted time and impotent rage do not lead to some final edge from which there is no return, but that the edge can be skirted, on the faintest trails that run perpendicular to purpose, to places unsuspected and new. My head may be free of plans for now and enraptured in just-revealed beauty and meaning, but a fact is gnawing. It’s in that shred of superego that wears polycarbonate riot gear and wields the baton of anxiety and demands that I behave, that even this, right now, this breathtaking place with me in it worrying the last granules of cattle-manure from my teeth, is a job interview, a place where I need to maintain my guard, to behave, to do what I should. This personal cop reminds me, and reminds me again and again, that I am wrong and I feel shame and loathing and self-loathing and real terror that I will be found, even here. And also the worry that I am now seriously tripping and alone and the light is fading. The westfacing red wall across the valley will get redder and redder for a few more hours, but already I’m in shade, and here in the mountains the temperature falls quick and bracing the moment the sun sets. I will spend the night alone and tripping in the cold and I will have terrible clear visions of the wreck of my life.


Now I walk downhill, and remember that a new athletic ability comes with mushrooms. I jump like a goat from black basalt ball to ball over the top of the grass and fireweed, very quickly, but sure. My pack is a massive muscle on my back. I am a goat and a bison. The land drops away like a Hitchcock stairwell and I smell water icy and green. The blond heart-shapes of elk rumps bob into the woods below me and I drop through layers of scent: gunpowder rock, lime lichen, birdshit, bearfunk, elkpellets, troutstream, and this last brings me up short and a whip of the oldest primate caution bends my spine and tightens my thighs and I slide into the trees along the stream aware that there is an animal and aware that it is unaware of me in my silence. So I drift like breeze-blown catkin fluff into a thicket of serviceberry and the buck is below me bent to the water like a streambank, drinking, crowned with arrows like St. Sebastian, connected at the mouth to his inverted self seen by me against a horn of jumping lights on the still beside the riffle. I am close, but I have slipped here unperceived. Insinuated myself into this. And my mind and the mushrooms conspire to send me a message, for my notebook, for my gun: Man was not –I was not-- born for impotent rage, to be emasculated by a dull Mormon wife and the courts that see men as perpetrators and deadbeats. I am here goat-eyed watching this as-yet-not-martyred buck slope to the water like a streambank, exactly like a buck drinking while the world and its inverse pivot around his velvet nose and his crown rhymes with the trees. I am here to think clearly about what I can barely engage, and to make a big decision.

As bucks do, this one raises his head often to spy lions, but I stand in the bushes and smell him but he doesn’t notice. Next he slopes to drink again and I raise my hands like ears above my head and when he looks up he sees me against the sky looming there and exits vertically from the streambed as though through some sipapu into a fifth world. The earth drums and he is gone and so is the reflected red light from the facing cliffside. Across the stream is a flat area under the big pines. I manage halfassedly to get a fire going and am totally involved in the flames which seem right then important as heat that can sterilize and cauterize because I have carried here a secret illness from the city I’ve escaped and it hangs here in the dark green expecting an exorcism. And so I spend the night till the east blues sweating disease which feeds the fire and when I wake much later it is afternoon and I am predictably sick, but now I know that beyond enraged submission to my ex-wife and the court, and beyond writing a long note to my girls and stepping off some final edge, is a third way, perpendicular to any purpose I had when I was young and looking ahead, that runs along the cliffside and takes me alone into the deepest canyons and wilderness where everything is always new and unsuspected.