View current page
...more recent posts
Doak Walker's Backup
Standing next to the tracks in San Antonio I watched my rail riding advisor disappear as the boxcar we shared traveled east. He said he had been backup to Doak Walker at SMU but when later I checked the roster his name was not there. Also I could not find any evidence that black men were attending Southern Methodist back in the late forties. Strangely, this did not make me doubt any of his stories, even the ones that could not be backed up with hard facts because most of what he had told me had served me well, like how to jump off a train without hurting yourself. Unfortunately he had told me this last bit after I had jumped once, and hurt myself.
I had to catch Interstate 10 to Interstate 35, the right side of my face was a black and red scab from temple to jawbone, and I was overall a dirty boy with rail riding grime coating most of my surface.
An amorous Native American picked me up and I told him I would be appreciating the lift but no nooky would be exchanged between us. The offers of man love had shocked me at first but I was coming to understand the game better and this guy was drunk, at eight in the morning, and I had a weapon, and I was tired, and that was that. He dropped me at a place that left me a short walk to I-35, which would take me into Austin.
I was a few days late for the start of the spring semester at the University of Texas. I wasn't a dropout yet, but in retrospect, I was very close. This train trip, it was already starting to wear the weight of a seminal moment in a boy's life.
I don't even think I was hitchhiking, I was just walking to the right spot, when a VW Beetle pulled onto the shoulder. It was Dave, this guy who had roomed next door to me at Kinsolving (a girls dorm) during summer school. He was a few days late for the start of the spring semester too. He asked me what happened to my face and I said I fell off a train and that became the refrain for the casual acquaintance regarding what happened to me. Most people thought I had just gotten my ass kicked and the train thing was me and my dry wit.
He took me to the apartment on West Lynn and Ninth that I was sharing with three other guys. Off campus, bigtime, grown up stuff. I got to see myself in a mirror for the first time in a week (we stayed in an El Paso mission that first night after the train accident and I saw myself there but it was one of those shiny metal mirrors and the detail was lacking.)
My roommates were all gone--presumably attending college--so I had a little time to collect my thoughts, wash up, shave around the scab, get dressed and...go to college?
It was too late for classes but I walked up West Lynn to Enfield, caught the Enfield shuttle bus, and walked the UT campus. I was tweaked, circuits sizzling. I wasn't who I was so who was I?
I entered the undergraduate library and took a seat by myself at a table for four. As soon as I sat down I knew I was done with the college thing.
I had taken another trip right after summer school, in August, with a friend named Billy, and we had hitchhiked together up into Telluride, for the Jazz Festival. That was a life-changing, life-affirming trip too, but more for Billy than for me and it was me telling him to hang in there, don't drop out, when he discussed his doubts about school to me in December, right before I hitchhiked to USC and came back on a train.
I went through the motions for awhile, attended a few classes, tried dropping acid before some of them to see if that would help, but it didn't.
At the end of January my father wrote to say he had opened for me what looked like official mail. As he was handling most of my "business" affairs I did not take issue with his felonious behaviour. He was sure this was a mistake but their was a ticket for me from Los Angeles, or Anaheim maybe, for hitchhiking. Oops, those damn CHiPs, I had forgotten all about that.
Home Away From Home
I went hiking yesterday up in the Shenandoah National Park. It felt like I was the only human up in there. I had to walk along Skyline drive for about half a mile to get back to my truck after the hike and not a single car passed by. I of course was travelling with an entourage of women--Missy Elliot, Gillian Welch, Francoiz Breut, (Miss) Catpower, (Miss) Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Neko Case, (Miss) Belle or Sebastian, and (Miss) Mick Jagger.
I wondered at first who's footprints I was following, a heavy person for sure, their prints had broken all the way through the hard packed snow to the dirt and rock of the path. They were old prints, that you could tell because they had no definite shape, the edges of the snowprints were melted, leaving a design that did not compute inside my humancentric frame of reference. But of course we are not alone and the prints belonged to a bear, this I realized when I saw a print with full definition, so I became super self aware for a few minutes, which did not hurt me.
But was this one last romp and feed before hibernation and am I edible? I can't see serving me up at a dinner party of people, or bears, you were trying to impress.
I just poked myself in the eye so I'm crying a little.
The path turned into a stream once or twice, water flowing out of rock, maybe not THE source, but a source, so I had to sit on a flat boulder at one point and consider it all. Actually there were two streams, both of them just began out of the side of the hill and flowed down the slope into the canyon into which I was descending. One stream was to my left and the other was to my right. The left stream had white water, the right stream, the stream that was actually the path, was more of a flowing trickle.
Just saw a shooting star out the window.
I think it was the Hughes River I kept having to cross, and the water was up a little and some of the large boulders which would normally rise above the clear cold water and act as stepping stones, were submerged. Others were coated with ice. I belabored over the idea of crossing each time, once crabwalking awkwardly over an icy log. Missy Elliot said I look like a bitch doin that, which hurt my feelings, and I told her I would not bring her back out here if she was going to talk like that. Neko Case smirked, she's a hard one to read. Miss Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, she kept wailing that she loved me like no one else did but she would not hold my hand, so I had to question just what was the good of that love.
There was a locked up cabin at the bottom of the canyon, the Corbin cabin it is called, and before and after it remain the faintest signs of a life long ago. A piece of a wall here, a diverted spring there. The park ranger at the Thorton Gap entrance had sold me a map after I asked her to suggest a nice five mile circuit hike and I kept referring to it but as simple as the map was I could not lock into it. It did not seem to relate to anything I cared about but at the same time I did not want to take a wrong fork and end up halfway to Old Rag. Francoiz Breut would look over my shoulder but she doesn't speak much english and when she pointed at the soft, rip proof, water proof map, and said, "we here," I had to wonder if she meant, "yes, here."