6
For the second night in a row, Miles didn’t sleep. It took a few passes, but by sunrise, he had shed enough clutter to stuff his future into a duffle bag. He hauled a load of donations to the shelter, arranged for the single mom next door to craigslist whatever she could, stopped by his job and broke the news, then wrote an email to break his lease. He didn’t want to cross a blazing bridge on his way out of town, which was tough with his overnight deadline, but he did somehow manage to ease out of his prior obligations in a good way, though he was pretty sure that there was no turning back.
With every step of letting go, he felt a wave of relief, a new sense of freedom that came with each release of worldly weight. And by noon, he left his disheveled shelter for the last time, and floated down to the antique roadshow triple parked in a loading zone.
“Game on,” said Cap, as he pulled free of civilization’s grasp on reality. “D’ya manage to get any sleep last night? Yeah, me neither, but over there’s a jug of dangerously strong coffee, and that futon folds into a bed if ya need it.”
Miles took a moment to check out his new digs. From the outside, it looked like what you’d expect a fifty year old traveler to resemble, worn and torn and a touch of rust around the edges, but as you stepped inside the cabin, you were immediately transported to some ultramodern era of bygone nostalgia.
He’d renovated it with the glitz and glamour of a ’50s diner, complete with checkerboard floor and chrome trimmings, but through the retrofitted facade poked an array of LED accoutrement that hinted at some alternative timeline of future sailors. MP3 and GPS, the AM dials of his low frequency transmitter, and his initial inspection even found a built-in TV, though he’d later discover that it was exclusively used to screen reruns of Grateful Dead shows older than he was.
A kitchen of cast iron and cabinets of quinoa, the bathroom had been converted into a five gallon composting toilet, and one of the closets was devoted to being a bongo-laden jamstation full of fireside entertainment. Yep, Cap was a hippie, alright. And Miles had just hopped on a tour bus headed for the hills, to build a house out of dirt, good thing he’d given up on all that sanity mess.
Cap may have seemed a little unorthodox to the squares in the grid, but he was quickly proving to be nothing short of brilliant. Within the first hour, he’d broken down the social constructs of race, religion, gender, and marriage, and drew crazy connections between these manmade concepts and how they’ve been used to contain and compartmentalize the diversity of the human spirit.
“They keep us restrained to neat little boxes of black and white, where it’s easier to keep a lid on any one individual voice at any given time, and it keeps the social caterpillars from ever taking flight to realize that living is meant to happen in the gray area. Nature doesn’t conform to strict guidelines and stiff expectations that dictate who should do what and when and why. Life is a lot more fluid than that, the Earth is a liquid, and we are the drops that make up her being. We’re not meant to be privately bottled for individual resale, we’re destined to flow through eternity with an understanding that the strength of an ocean lies not in the separated components of molecular structure, but in the collective authority of the unified whole, which is indistinguishable from any particular fraction of that same body of water, no matter what kinda misprinted label you slap on it.”
It was deep stuff like that for the first hundred miles of dark foggy mountain pass. They left at night to beat the traffic and the heat, but the heat caught up, as they found themselves stalled on the shoulder with an overworked carburetor.
“Told ya we’d run into something like this, kinda hoped we’d get farther along first, but it’s whatever. It’s this damn aluminum carb, and there’s just no airflow in this style of engine compartment.”
Cap cleared off the center console and lifted the green vintage carpet that concealed the motor, everything was right there between the seats, and it was a big one.
“This here’s the four-thirteen, supposed to be unstoppable, at least that’s what the old timers say. Of course, they told me about the whole carburetor issue too.
We should be alright though. As long as we’re cruising, it’ll get enough air to keep cool, especially if we ride at night. And if it overheats, it’s not really that big a deal, we just gotta let it cool off for a bit, then pop off the air filter and pour some gas into the carb. I mean, it could always explode and catch on fire, but there’s an extinguisher back there somewhere.”
Miles knew a bit about cars from a previous life, but this was way above his pay grade, which reminded him that he was newly unemployed, and homeless, and stranded deep between civilizations, but at least there was a futon.
They chilled on the couch while the engine cooled off, a couple cigarette timers and away we go. No fireworks this time, as the drizzle of high octane primed the steaming carb. It pretended like it wasn’t gonna catch until they gave it one last try, the rumble caught them off guard and excitement clouded the fumes hanging in the air, then they remembered that the rig had to get reassembled and moving fast, before it overheated again.
Cap had promised adventure, and delivered, and the gift kept on giving with an encore performance every hundred miles or so. After a night and a half of intermittent momentum, they had gotten pretty good at the open hearted pit stop, and pretty good at chilling with style when the race got delayed, down to the cooler full of ribeyes as they coasted into the rest area for barbecued brunch.
It wasn’t all fun and games though, there were some actual roadside emergencies peppered into the mix, like when Miles checked the mirror to make sure that the truck was riding okay...
“Whoa man, pull over, we lost a tie-down.”
Miles could see the yellow heavy duty ratchet strap dragging behind the load. It must have been rubbing against a metal burr on the trailer as they carved a path through all those foggy mountains. They had just refueled after sputtering into the station, nowhere near top speed, so as Cap pulled past the rumble strips, Miles swung open the door and checked on the cargo.
“Actually, scratch that...” Miles could only afford a split second for dramatic effect, “...we lost the truck.”
“What? Are you serious? Shit man, where is it?”
“Um, it looks like it’s just sitting at that stop sign back there.”
Miles hopped out and tracked back as Cap worked on turning a U with his extended load, but at least it was a few thousand lighter. He arrived at the scene expecting the worst, at least a displaced headlight or something, but the pickup was somehow completely unscathed. There it sat perfectly at a stop sign, as if the invisible man were waiting for a break in traffic, and good thing he’d engaged the emergency brake, or else it would have rolled backwards into the woodline waiting downhill.
Or what if it had broken free of its bonds around one of those blind curves overlooking oblivion? Or on a busy interstate? Miles was shaken by the good luck of their misfortune, but Cap seemed as calm and collected as ever, as he reloaded the dislodged vessel.
“Yeah man, it was a lucky break down, if you wanna call it that. Just like all those perfect spots we keep coasting into. It ain’t luck though, I’ve been doing this way too long to chock it all up to coincidence. It’s because we’re following the map of the universe and letting the flow guide us to the next point of interest. If we got too caught up on getting to where we think we’re supposed to be, we’d miss out on the magic that happens when we give ourselves over to where we’re at right now.
And yeah, we’re still gonna break down and stuff, especially in this old thing, but you’d be amazed at how serendipitously it all works out, when you simply roll with whatever life’s got in store for you. But on the flipside, if you try to fight the momentum of the infinite cosmos, well obviously it’s an uphill battle, and it’s gonna feel like the weight of the world is holding you back from ever getting anywhere.
And when you understand the intricate web of interwoven storylines, it’s easy to assume that the apparent setback was actually a lifesaver, like maybe we stalled out to save us from a detour, or maybe the truck blocked the intersection just long enough to stop that teenage driver over there from pulling out in front of a speeding semi. You never know.”
“Wow man, that’s a pretty remarkable way of dealing with the stress and disappointment of the chaotically unexpected.”
“Yep, plus the best way to eliminate disappointment is to eliminate expectations, then nothing’s unexpected, or everything is, or something like that.”
Cap was full of insights that he almost understood, but he wasn’t full of himself about them, he’d experienced enough of the world to have lost his preconceptions of it. He knew enough to know that he didn’t know it all, and he was open minded enough to consider adjusting his opinions as his thoughts were ever-expanded. He genuinely wanted to hear what Miles had to say, no matter how naive or misinformed it was, and his gentle nudges of redirection felt more like concepts to explore than critical breakdowns of flawed logic.
“Plus, if we’d have gotten along our way when we first tried to, we’d have missed out on the world’s best grilled cheese.”
Cap motioned to the diner attached on the side of the gas station. It’s oversimplified signage bore no corporate logo, it simply stated the facts in the least amount of letters, EAT. As Miles admired the cleverly crafted non-branding, his eyes drifted to the smaller red words that crowned the doorway, Home of the World’s Best Grilled Cheese.
Perhaps the universe was insisting that the team slow down and find out for themselves, and Cap was definitely insisting, and treating, so Miles could find no reason not to ride the wind on this one.
They emerged from the promise of global domination with two baskets of runny egg cheesequakes and found a seat at a nearby picnic table. Before Miles could dig his way to the molten core, he noticed an eager onlooker patiently awaiting the forecasted eruption, her eyes twinkled with a glimmer of hope that debris would fill the air and she’d be called into action to assist with damage control.
“Timps, get over here, let those folks finish eating without the scrutiny of your closed circuit surveillance.”
The tender voice floated through the air over Miles’ shoulder, he risked a peek and got caught by the inviting smiles of neighborly charm, as they drew him in to coax an involuntary response of cheesy goodness. The pair were something out of a cartoon, Miles thought, in the best kind of way, like some kid’s imaginary friends come to life and out for their own spinoff of animated whimsy.
“She’s a sweetheart, this one, but she can smell a pushover from a mile away. Her name’s Timpsileh, or Timps, and I’m Annie, and this over here is Spaz.”
Miles connected with Spaz, both forewent any kind of vocal nicety, as simultaneous nods expressed mutual feelings of instant friendship, while also conveying mirrored mouthfuls of gooey deliciousness.
He was tall and thin, his shaggy brown hair seemed to be at the growing pain that most would consider an awkward phase, but it meshed with his entire persona seamlessly, as if he’d just awoken as a real boy, fresh off the fun factory showroom. His thoroughly broken in flannel and purple corduroys were covered with at least thirty-seven pieces of flair, buttons and patches and dangling strips of red cloth, much evidence of self-mended road scars, but not in a way that suggested hard times, rather a lifestyle of hard work and even harder play, as if anything you could throw at him would simply roll off the fringes of his rag doll motif.
Aha, that was it. Raggedy Ann and Andy, or Annie as it were, and she fit the role just as perfectly as her companion. An old band tee and a paisley skirt crept out from under an army jacket that was just one size too big, and so were the unlaced black boots that tied it all together. Her chin length waves were pulled back under an indigo bandana kinda thing, they were a deep dirty blond, almost golden, and there was a glimmer of strawberry somewhere in there, at least until the light passed by and it transformed into strawberry blond filled with sparkles of golden dirt. Her eyes were on the hypnotic cusp of blue and green, and a few light freckles hinted at a girl next door, but she had obviously been much farther from home than he could ever imagine.
Cap was finished chewing first and introduced the ranks, by the time he got done with his version of a short story, they were fascinated with the whole thing. They talked of a few off-grid communities they’d stayed with, and had even helped for a week building an Earthship, a different style of Earth building that utilizes old tires packed with dirt. Now they were hitching their way back home, or to one of them anyway, but not in any particular hurry, and the dirthouse was about halfway in the right direction, so it only took a basket of pimento cheese fries to forge an alliance, luckily they traveled light.
They each carried a bag that exuded just much character. Hers with a two foot bundle of sage wrapped in a strip of yellow cloth, and his was strapped down with a bunch of skinned sticks and, was that a boomerang?
“That thing really come back to you?” asked Cap, as Miles wondered the same thing.
“Nah man, it’s a hunting boomerang, what they call a kylie, it flies long and straight, just what you want for a turkey, or a squirrel, or the occasional kangaroo.”
“You any good with it?”
“Getting there. I scared this off a turkey a while back.” He jiggled a brown and white feather that hung from one of the wooden dowels. “And those are arrows I’m working on, trying to anyway, just messing around really. And I carry a slingshot.”
“And I’ve got a pretty legit crossbow,” added Cap. “I’ve seen some deer out that way, and definitely some smaller game, and maybe a mountain lion.”
Miles was beginning to feel under armed. He only had a pocketknife he’d grabbed during his last minute checkout, not that he knew how to use it for anything more than opening plastic packages that contain pocketknives.
“You boys and your toys, I’d be just as happy with a big fat cabbage steak and some homemade tempeh.”
“Ah, vegetarian, are ya?”
“Hardly, though I do try to eat vegan when I’m on visitation to the inhumane world of the human farm, couldn’t resist the world’s best grilled cheese though. I don’t like to eat animals kept in captivity, it’s just not natural to have a lifetime’s menu condensed to a field of barbed wire. It’s not healthy for them, or us. And especially not once the hormones, and antibiotics, and all the other poisons of the industrial cornfed feedlot completely wreck the biome, of what should be an honored participant in the most sacred act of the entire circle of life, not prisoners of war to the great colonial food chain.”
Spaz added that, “Plus, even if those entitled enough to own animate objects treated them as living beings, the fundamental practice of animal husbandry reeks havoc on the natural world that it has yet to swallow. The concentrated methane clusters are bad enough, but when you factor in manufacturing and distribution, along with mass deforestation, and you gotta grow all that corn, it all adds up that the living stock of your grocer’s inventory is responsible for more greenhouse gas than every commuter on the planet, put together.
Now pesticides and fertilizer wash into the river, and even organic animal waste releases enough nitrogen to destroy a healthy marine habitat. And on top of that, it requires thousands of gallons of water to raise a single ribeye, a lot of which has been pumped from underground aquifers that aren’t designed to replenish themselves nearly as fast as we insist on emptying them.”
“And now our bellies have swollen to the point that even those supposedly free of the cage have nowhere to go. Billions of miles of fencing have divided and conquered what was once a flourishing migratory ecology, and it even had a place for humans among its waves, but that kinda life was only for the natives, who weren’t real people anyway, so we simply boxed them into borders and slaughtered the free roaming food supply, which left them little choice but to become as utterly dependent on this so-called civility as the rest of us.
And don’t get me started on the colonial indoctrination that we lay on thick from birth. The glorification of farm life and how incredibly happy all those docile prisoners seem to be. Of course, Nazi propaganda films touted the same thing. But then you see sweet little Bambi, and some mean old hunter out there doing the evil deed of feeding his family, so now an entire generation is morally apprehensive about eating from the wild, and scared of some kinda poison apple or something out there, so they just get in line to settle on some plastic package with a barcode that promises they did the right thing with today’s meal plan.
And that’s not everybody, obviously. Plenty of people from all walks of life hunt, you even hear about hunters being commended for thinning out the overpopulation of the herd. It turns out they weren’t actually overpopulated though, just overly condensed into whatever tiny slivers of planet haven’t been consumed by human consumption, but it’s just enough evidence to prove that the deer are doing fine out there on their own.
How about we change the narrative we let wash over the young minds of tomorrow, like where’s the Disney flick about the big evil farmer who sweeps in and destroys the planet, incarcerates the main characters and sentences them to death, maybe even some natives too, but we all saw that one and she lived happily ever after, right?
So anyway, yeah, I eat meat if it lived and died in a sacred way, and it’s not like most of the vegetables out there aren’t also destructive to cultivate in the massive scales required by our monoculture monopolies. I much prefer to eat a diet of wild foraged foods, I guess I’m what you’d call a wildatarian.”
“Well then, miss wildatarian,” Cap offered. “You happen to be in luck. The land we’re building this dirthouse on is covered with piñon trees.”
“Ooh, I tried a few of those back at camp, they’re fantastic. Supposed to be a good protein source, I think.”
“For sure. It’s not the right season to harvest them yet, but I’ve got a few Earthbags full that I collected last fall. It was really easy, just picked them up off the ground. They say that an experienced harvester can get over thirty thousand calories in a day. You could also just lay out a blanket and shake the tree, but the Navajo say that’ll bring an early winter, and they seem to know a thing or two about living with the wild.”
“Yeah they do,” seconded Spaz. “But you know, they don’t actually call themselves Navajo. That’s just another misinformed entitlement of the colonial invaders. Most I know, prefer to be called Diné.
And it’s the same with the Sioux. Sioux is a word from the Ojibwe language that means snake, or foreigner, which is kind of an ironic exonym considering the immigrants who dubbed over their entire way of life. They’d have rather been referred to as Lakota, meaning friend, which is how they introduced themselves, but apparently the feeling wasn’t mutual.”
“You spend a good bit of time on the reservation, I take it?” asked Cap.
“A good bit,” she confirmed. “ Mainly up in the Dakotas, it’s so beautiful there. Had thoughts of heading that way soonish, maybe after we eat all the piñons.” She giggled out a smile of calculated innocence that warmed the driving room. “But for real tho, I’m pretty excited about them.”
Miles had to know more, “How long have you been going out there?”
“Just a few years now, but we’ve been so warmly welcomed by so many communities that it totally feels like home.”
“How’d you find yourself out there in the first place? I’ve always been fascinated with their traditional way of life, but it’s not exactly like I can just walk up and introduce myself. Hi, I’m just another white guy trying to rip off everything you’ve ever known.”
“You probably could with a lot of folks out there,” insisted Spaz. “Sure, they may be wary of strangers, though what small community isn’t. But once they see that you’re there in a genuine way, people have open hearts, arms, and doors. Most don’t live anything like that traditional way of life that you romanticize about though, it’s a lot of poverty and depression and addiction, but also a close sense of family and a spiritually grounded community.”
She added, “And you-know-who’s stealing even more land to ram a big nasty pipe right through the middle of whatever existence they’ve managed in a country founded on their genocide.”
“Ah, you guys are Water Protectors,” Cap surmised.
“Yup, you caught us, not that anyone else can.” He shot the same smile she had, almost identical, were these two maybe brother and sister, instead of the romantic ramblers Miles had assumed? Here’s hoping.
“And you were out at Standing Rock?”
“Yeah man, all winter long.”
“Long and cold,” she inserted. “But we managed to keep warm out there.”
“That’s where we met, but it wasn’t until later that we got to be as close as we are now.”
Not brother and sister.
“What was it like out there?” asked Cap.
“Jeez man, that question’s more loaded than the riot guns were. It was intense, and in tents, and snowy and exciting and inspiring, and a little scary, but it was so transformative to overcome it all as a family. And there were guns and teargas and stuff too, but that was whatever.”
“It really stripped you down to what was truly important, what you needed to survive and who you needed to survive it with. Plus, there was magic in the air, like actual magic, you could feel it. It was like a microcosm of cosmic connections. You’d just think of something you needed, and someone would walk right up and hand you one, over and over. There was some pretty heady spiritual stuff going on, and a concentration of energy focused on the same communal objective.”
“Not to be a downer or anything, and not knocking the work ya’ll did, but they ended up pumping oil through it, didn’t they?”
“Unfortunately so,” she solemnly responded. “We could feel the drill digging on the day we were finally evicted, but anyone who was touched by their experience out there, knows that it was no failure. And now we’re all weaving ourselves into the fabric of society as we spread the spark that was ignited in that Sacred Fire. And here we’ve met you fine folks, and together we’re gonna sow some more good into the world, definitely doesn’t sound like losing to me.”
She finished it all off with a wink, maybe directed at Miles, maybe just out into the ether, but Miles could swear that she kept shooting him the cutie eyes, though maybe that was just her signature look.