49
Now see what you made me go and do? You just had to keep turning those pages, impatiently pushing what could have dragged on at least another chapter or two, and now it’s backfired and our wonderboy as left standing in her dust. Thanks a lot. I guess we’ll just have to riff on the dirthouse for another week or two, oh boy.
It was starting to look pretty cool, and there was a twelve percent chance it would all work according to plan. The lodge itself was done, no stucco yet, but the roof was all in place and locking itself together nicely. Thousands of bags working as one to construct a self-supported infrastructure, each bag alone just a sack of loose particles, but once it takes its place among the composite, strengthening its own resolve through the adversity of external forces, well, if you removed just a single participant of its grand design, the whole thing would come crumbling down. Each bag is critical, each bag serves a purpose, each bag is here for a reason.
There was a double door to the south, with windows on either side to collect some of that big beautiful sunshine, and upcycled blue glass bottles created an alluring skylight into the loft. The whole backside dug into the hill, so once construction was done and a moisture barrier in place, the crevice was backfilled and the structure had achieved thermal mass.
The crust of the Earth stays a steady fifty-five degrees or so, not exactly t-shirt weather, but it provides a constant livable temperature throughout the harshest of seasonal allergies. And the walls have a similar thing going on. As long as they’re at least twelve inches thick, ours are fourteen, then it takes twelve hours for the thermal flywheel effect to allow the outside influences to seep their way into the living quarters. So by the time the sun’s heat has penetrated the outer layer, it’s nighttime and no one really minds, and sunrise arrives just in time to shake off the morning chill. And then when you add a woodstove to the floor plan, you’ve got an entire house made of heat sinks that store that energy instead of burning midnight oil.
And the only oil the kitchen would use, would be for Miles’ coveted frybread recipe, he was gifted the eyeball formula under the veil of a new moon, couldn’t let those pesky infiltrators smuggle our secret weapon into the fossil record. The kitchen layout, however, was public domain, especially the dish station.
The curved backline was cobbed together into one continuous culinary gadget. The central heat of it all was an inset slab of cast iron, a flat top grill not unlike the temperature surface at Doodle’s, and underneath was a salvaged woodstove door and a compartment to build the fire anyway you like. A chimney spread even more warmth into the sleeping loft that was working its way up above, it was wrapped with copper tubing that forced hot water toward the sinks on the right, and the rest of the residual heat transferred to the oven on its left. The leftover BTUs might not bake a piñon pie, but would make a perfect warming chamber for second shift, and they’d preheat the pizza parlor for the real action. The oven had it’s own firebox and should easily hit the five hundred mark of crispy crust, which in turn, heated a bench that ran along the entire back curve of the big room, a buried line of copper ensured the warmest of buns all winter long.
Miles moved on from the imbedded memories of the cannery, the gossip of the walls was muffled by the dry mouths of dehydration, and the original dirt mine had screamed itself into a root cellar full of shelf-preservation.
Of course he was sad sometimes. He never regretted answering the call, it was obvious that this place filled him with life, but how could he not lose himself to the happenstance of his wandering heart? He often found his melancholy expressed through the gray areas of the black and white. He’d taken piano lessons as a kid, but back then it had only felt like another solitary confinement of his free time. He picked it back up as he scraped himself from the rocks, exploring the energetic unions of his emotional content, and slowly started to realize just how universally the relationships of individual vibrations weave together the collage of grandeur.
Each key produces a cyclical spiral of audible energy, each note a unique frequency of motion. Some combine to imply the angst of disorder, but when you find two that fit together in just the right way, it’s like they were always meant to be together as their energy swells into its own sensual sensation. Those same keys hold sacred relationships with others along the spectrum, each composing their own flavor of emotional connection, any one’s not better than the others, they’re simply the pallet of colors with which to paint your story.
You could always play it safe and restrict your listening experience to the happy tunes, pretend the darker keys don’t exist and rely on major chords to express your elementary understanding of string theory, but you’d be selling yourself out if you thought three chord pop was all you had to offer the world.
When your heart’s in the music, it’s the ups and downs that give it depth, that evolve the character of the composition, that unlock a bigger picture one key at a time. From within the bars of dissonance, it can feel like the notation is falling apart as it leads to nowhere, but it’s only through that fog that the melody breathes to life as it blooms into an otherwise unattainable resolve.
Your life is a symphony, each moment is instrumental to the development of your harmonic content, each player that contributes to the story is vital to the growth of the narrative, and only once you step back and take the mosaic in as a whole, are you able to hear the subtleties that were always leading you to your furthest potential.
And just like with everything else, the scales extend far beyond your own set of headphones. Notes of parts of sections of ensembles, and all culminating in the most epic love song the world has ever heard, the power ballad of Unci Maka. Every drop of life a thread of vibration, every sacred species an integral component of symbiotic collaboration, and as the illusion of a solo performance fades away, you find yourself amid the most dynamic orchestra of all time.
And what do you suppose happens if one of those horns slips out of tune? Becomes disharmonious to the rest of the combo as they become lost in their own cacophony? Convinced that there’s nothing wrong with their own ear, because they’re the greatest musician that’s ever existed, in fact, maybe it’s time to break up the rest of the band as they rise to stardom all by themselves.
They’ve got computers to quantize their missteps and autotune to cover their tracks, but no digital recreation of creation is ever going to compare to the aural complexities of real music. Trapped in an echo chamber of their own reverberations, they’d soon come to believe that their limited genre was all that ever mattered, and without the outside influence of the vast catalogues that speak to a greater mystery, how could they ever realize that their flattened waveforms had crashed the entire music industry?
But it’s actually quite simple to realign yourself to the harmonies of life, one must only step away from the bubble of self-importance as they allow the rhythms of nature to saturate their soul. It may seem a peculiar approach to those following the misprinted chord charts, but as more members become aware of their surroundings and retune to the root note, it becomes that much easier for those lost in the chaos to recognize the melody, as the dissonance resolves into the reprise of the greatest show on Earth.
The winter played on as heartache melted into the fondest of recollection, clouds of fire ribboned across the cobalt skies, the first starlight glistened the snow covered mountains, it was all rather patriotic. Heated games of snowquet kept icicles on their toes, the closeness of the lodge evaporated any lingering numbness from the outside world, and either the food had gotten better with age, or a lower temperature of expectation made room for off-menu surprise.
Miles and Timpsileh went for a daily census of winter’s citizenship. She’d quickly capitalized on his sudden free time and didn’t shy away from heavy petting, it was nice to have a close companion who didn’t mind listening to the same old sob story. Annie and Spaz were never far, their card sharking took over the frostbite of February’s indoor voices, and the boys even managed to outsmart the mountain lion a time or two, as their brotherhood grew to whatever the next thing is called.
Annie and Miles were close, cooking together most days and planning their future renovations, still sneaking off to their moonage daydream, but there wasn’t enough space in the universe for him to unhang his preconceived desire. She got it, and she tenderly navigated the blurred lines of their friendship, standing by with a shoulder as he worked through his growing pains. Even if she was eager to move on, she had no real interest until she had his full intention.
They were planning a vacation together, all four of them, back to Timpsileh’s home for a long awaited reunion with the rest of her family. They’d never meant to be away for this long, they were just going to be on the road for a couple months of adventure and eventually cross paths with her people, but that’s how it goes when you open yourself up to the great beyond. They’d been here nearly a year, jeez, and Timps loved it, and they’d checked in with her folks through a pigeon blowing smoke signals, but she had a lot of kids back home who dearly needed to rub her belly.
Miles was stoked, excited to be back on the road with his homies, and this place they were going sounded mythical, the LG, and apparently it had been a big inspiration toward Annie’s vision of the hillside. They’d leave tomorrow, Cap was gonna drop them off on the town run, they had a rideshare lined up for the first leg and the rest they’d figure out on the fly, hitchhike or whatever.
The night never ended as the celebration ordered another round, Cap would be the only founding member on the hill, Annie wasn’t sure who would be in charge. Toasts and jams were delivered, gifts exchanged, Miles handed out echinacea root and opened an Earthbag of piñons, over a thousand bucks worth, but they were way more valuable than that.
“Thanks Brother, you know we’re hitchhiking though, right?”
“Eh, you’ll be fine, you’ve been pulling half my weight for months. I’m gonna miss you kids, you know? Miles, my boy, you’ve been with me since before the beginning, you may have ventured out on your own for a while, but you never really left the hilltop. And Spaz, I don’t know how in the hell I’m gonna do much of anything without you. And Annie, oh my dear sweet Annie, you have brought so much passion to this place, and to my heart, you’ve properly inspired me to get up everyday and be the best version of myself I can be.”
“Oh jeez,” muttered Spaz. “That was the best version?”
“Hell, I’m going to be sleeping til noon from now on. But for real you guys, nobody’s ever gonna tell me that if we didn’t make people get jobs, then they’d just sit around all day being lazy, you’re the hardest working people I’ve ever met.”
“It’s cuz we’re doing what we love,” bubbled Annie.
“And without that dollar looming over us, we’ve been able to give ourselves to something we care about,” offered Spaz. “And we’ve been able to help the Earth in the process.”
“Without having to worry about putting food on the table or a roof over our heads,” she added. “We’ve done both for a bunch more people than ourselves, and had plenty of time for horseplay on the side.”
“When the fundamentals of life are included with life, it opens you up to live in a way that’s fundamental for life.”
“Or even if they kept the whole dollar sign,” negotiated Cap. “But simply gave every citizen a minimum living wage, or vouchers for the essentials, regardless of employment. The financial world would scream of a handout to the homeless, but we live in the richest country with the richest people and the most excess and the most inequality, where our brothers and sisters die from starvation and hypothermia. I think it’s our duty as halfway decent humans to hand out the minimum requirements for life, otherwise we might as well pull the trigger ourselves.”
“And people could still work their shit job if they wanted,” allowed Spaz. “Which is really why they want to drag everyone else down with them, if I have to work then so do you, but expendable income could still be a thing. You get your basic wage for your basics, and if you wanna devote your life to chasing capital, then you’ll be able to get a bigger TV and a smaller cell phone. But if you’re a person of inspiration who just wants to spread good into the world, it’ll be a lot harder for your penny pinching parents to talk you out of a moneyless career of passion as they enroll you in business school, and just imagine how beautiful the world would become with color and song sprouting up between all the boulders.”
“Could you imagine if we were a hive of bees?” proposed Annie. “Or even if we were just observing the hive. How inhumane would we think them, if they only fed the workers with enough grains of sand in their pockets, not sand they needed for anything, just a mechanism to weigh them down from ever taking off? Or if a bumblebee stood guard and only let the sand dollars into the castle for the cold night of frozen wings, too bad for everyone else, survival of the fattest is all that matters.”
“But they don’t, of course,” said Spaz. “Everyone is family, and there’s plenty of honey and toilet paper to go around, and it’s because of that mindset that it’s true. If each bee hoarded their share away, the abundance would dwindle, the hive would begin to fear the scarcity, and the entire community would crumble into pieces.”
“That’s how it happened here,” shared Miles. “The natives lived that way before we taught them just how sparse we could make their lives. It was a cornucopia blooming from the Earth, the earliest settler accounts make it sound like Willy Wonka designed the place, and they didn’t think twice about scooping us out of the snow and welcoming us into their way of life.
But that’s not how we operate, because that way’s no good for the king, and even with exponentially more than they had a week ago, it just wasn’t a comfortable enough cushion to share the Earth with the Earthlings, so we didn’t.
Then once we got them locked up, we imprisoned the next race of the circuit, who eventually earned the freedom to slave their life away for a dollar, which enraged the working-class whites, who were now at risk of losing their most sacred American job to some outsider accustomed to working for table scraps. We didn’t hate them because of their color, that’s ridiculous. We were taught to hate because if we didn’t, then they would take what was rightfully ours, and everyone knows that there’s not near enough to go around, so grab what you can and hide it away, we’ll just hang the rest out to dry.
And that’s all happening again now, if it ever even stopped. The American dream is so limited, that we’re willing to use walls and cages to preserve our inherited right to work in factories and mines, and the ones who sign the checks let us know which enemies to hate, and they’re the boss, so what they say goes.”
“You know,” said Cap. “I’ve been thinking about the word colonization a lot differently ever since you brought your new perspective back from the trail. And I think about our newest missions of planetary takeover on the final frontier, and say we do encounter sentient life out there, you’d like to think the entire universe would be big enough to share, but we’ve all seen enough hollywood propaganda to know how that’s all gonna work out.
Or say they come to visit us, in peace of course, but here we are oblivious to the double standard of just wanting the foreigners to go back to where they came from.”
“Or what if another sentient species of Earthling emerges through the coming change,” Miles supposed. “What would it take for us to not reflexively eradicate that which we don’t understand?”
“You’re right,” thought Spaz. “Our indoctrinated instinct is a fierce competition for survival, and anything another has, is less for your own, so it’s your duty to vanquish the liberated leeches, else they’ll suck the wells dry before we have the chance.”
“I’ll tell you what it will take,” dropped Annie. “Obviously we’d have to shed the illusion of scarcity, relearn that a symbiotic existence breeds abundance, and with plenty to go around, you’d think we’d be capable of sharing. I understand that’s a tall order with little modern precedent, so it would also take an evolution of equality.
The first plan of action within the dominant culture, assuming they’ve really moved past genocide and slavery like they all claim, the first thing I imagine is the establishment of superiority. We were here first, we did all this work, this world is ours and you’re lucky to get whatever we give you. And that only creates an actual plague of scarcity for those actually struggling to survive, even if they are technically free to exist on the outskirts of excess.
It would take us welcoming them as equals, as relatives, with no preconception of prior possession, we’d have to forget the fallacy that we’re competing to survive, and remember that we’re all collaborators of creating abundant life. We’d have to understand that allowing another to exist, doesn’t take away from our own privilege, it enriches it, and that goes for another species, for immigrants, for natives, for nomads, and even for aliens. Our merging energies swirl as they empower us all with culture, and wisdom, and new perspectives on an old way of life. And could you imagine the campstyle fusions we’d be cooking up together?”
“And this place has been a perfect example of that, for me anyway. If I had moved out here with a trailer full of food, and locked my doors because of some privately issued entitlement, sure, I’d have been the king of the hill, but it would be a grim existence of working too hard and eating too little, while I withered away from loneliness.
But instead, I welcomed anyone willing to join our community, I didn’t even require that they helped with construction, and through this extraordinary blending of human spirits, we’ve truly created a vast abundance out of nothing. It’s changed my life, how I view the world, I came out here to escape society, now I want nothing more but to foster it.
You’ve woken up my own passion for living, and I’ve felt a switch flip inside from defending the scarce, to sharing the wealth. I’ve come to learn that abundance is something that lives inside all of us, and it’s yours to hoard or to give away, and sharing abundance creates abundance, so the only one you’re limiting by restricting that flow of energy, is yourself, and through that epiphany I’ve discovered the most fulfilling way of life I’ve ever known. And for that, I can never thank you kids enough.”
“You already have.”