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Be There Now
Scantily clad like a Southerner in a snowstorm and with only my recently acquired Yankee/Canadian merit badge to justify me being in a truck, in the snow, going nowhere, on highway 211, I started fishtailing about forty degrees worth on a straightaway.
I'm cooler than cool though, that's right, ice cold, so I just relaxed and let the truck find its direction, which luckily was straight ahead on down the road. My heart though was palpitating at not so much an alarming rate but enough to make me dizzy with cautious glee. The words to the beat were--I'm not in a ditch, I'm not in a ditch, I'm not in a ditch.
I hated the idea of being stuck up here; I don't get stuck is a thing I lie to myself about all the time.
So I jumped in the truck and headed down the snowy hill which is the easy part. I drove the five or six miles to Sperryville but forget about it, I wasn't having any of that delicious coffee at Rae's this morning, everybody stayed in bed, the parking lot is not even plowed. I headed back to Litttle Washington thinking I'll eat at the diner across from the famous Inn. But dammit those people rest on the Lord's day. That's when I started fishtailing on a straightaway, and I didn't really need coffee after that.
My friend and master of the manor had come out the day before while I was high as a kite and freezing cold up on the new 28 foot aluminum extension ladder I had just bought for the farm. I was cleaning out the gutters, fingertips throbbing and numb, fingernails packed tight with frozen black sludge. I was chipping it out of the gutter with a putty knife, four or five inch sections at a time, trying not to shred my bare knuckles against the metal edges of the gutter, or the metal edges of the roof. It was like a cross between that Milton Bradley game, Operation, and that game we played in the elementary school yard, bloody knuckles.
"I came to take you to lunch," he told me, giving me the once over.
I settled on having him bring me something back, which he did, enough for a couple of days in case I got snowed in. I don't have to tell you he's a nice guy, he just is.
But the next day, yesterday, back from my unsuccessful feeding mission, I could not make it up the driveway again. Fresh snow I thought would not present a challenge, and I had put the weighted buckets in the back of my truck bed the night before. So I walked back up the hill for the cat litter. I fell down once, like Lee Marvin in the final scene of (Ernest Hemingway's) The Killers (which by the way did not have a single word of Hemingway in it, not that it suffered from that.)
Unlike Lee Marvin, I got up again, got in the truck and tried backing down and up the hill a few times to spare using the last of Herman's cat litter. I was successful at this.
In the end, truck back at the top of the hill, I had some kind of green vegetarian roll up for breakfast, instead of the lasagna.
This is my last week here, until Spring, or until after the opening of New Orleans crawfish season at least, and I have a fair amount of work to do, and I'm getting a cold, I think. I don't remember when I last had a cold and I'm unsure about what to do, although sleeping is good so I did some extra sleeping yesterday, in between reading, and watching the excellent, Red, from Kieslowski, and the less challenging but enjoyable, Lilo and Stitch.
Now, tomorrow is supposed to be beautiful, and, with or without a cold, I can't see how I'm going to resist going back up into the Shenandoah one more time, so, I had better get to work, now.
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.