Chapter 9
August 30th, Day 6.
I awoke in the early-morning fog and found Lucas sleeping in the front seat of the car. It was eight thirty a.m., and we were right outside of Price. Lucas stirred, sat up, and rolled down the passenger-side window to yell out to Declan who still slept about thirty feet away on the cold hard shoulder of the highway. Like a dumped body from some kidnapping gone wrong, Declan’s flannel shirt and crazy pink shorts were partly visible under the poorly but tightly wrapped cocoon cotton blanket cover. His snoring body lay beyond the noise of the passing cars and the chill of the outside world. Declan, at first, didn’t move at Lucas’s beckoning.
“Hey, Declan, want us to leave you here?” Lucas shouted out again to him.
In the morning light, there were medium cool mountains of stratified rock around us. I noticed that the layers of rock ran at angles; they were bands of petrified rivers shaded with reds, grays, and browns. I marveled at the fossilized matter, strangely visible in the roadside cliffs as we began our drive again. These layers of rock had once been sea-level mud, I imagined, pushed up and hardened over the eons from a combination of earthquakes and continental drift. We slowly moved southward and eastward, pushing toward the distant border of this mysterious state, inch by inch. On the expanses of road along the valleys, I witnessed rows of butte-topped mountains in the distance that had been scraped by the march of retreating glaciers millions of years before us. Their distant blue stillness gave the appearance of being just painted out there, but I fathomed the slow but sure movements they had made over time. It was a glacial graveyard of beautiful giant ranges that continued to grow around us. These buttes were part of the pathway that would eventually lead us to the majestic peaks of Colorado.
It was hot. Tugging on my size thirty waist jeans, I looked down at my flat belly and my fading California tan. A freight train pulled boxcars west just about 300 yards off of the interstate. Humming the tune to The Allman Brothers “Melissa,” I watched those empty boxcars going back to where we had come from just days before. I questioned myself as I watched them if I would be living a gypsy life forever. These trains crisscrossed the plains of our great West. I wondered if the train I now looked at was ultimately heading back to the port of San Francisco in order to load up again on containers from Asia, only to head back east all over again. Supply and demand; the cars had to always be full, for they had to always feed our growing American appetite with stuff. We all ran like they did on predetermined tracks over and over again. I fathomed myself as a timeless gypsy and continued to hum aloud alongside the beautiful Allman Brothers’ love song.
I had weighed myself at 138 pounds on a Utah drugstore scale with my soaking shoes on. Sadly, I realized that I had lost another five pounds since San Francisco. I had still lost my appetite over Colette. Would I ever be fat again? We were homeless; Luke, Decky, and I, without a key to our names other than the one that started the engine of that sweet beige beast that now carried the three of us home. We had left Huntington Beach behind and were riding the beautiful line of mystery and riddle searching for something that we all called paradise.
Veering on to Interstate 50 and ultimately Grand Junction bound, we listened to something obscure; Declan’s McGuffey Lane tape. They were a band out of Columbus that had toured with The Allman Brothers and the Charlie Daniels Band, Declan told us proudly. I wasn’t particularly fond of it, though. Off the road, the train’s container cars continued to slip westward silently beside us, eventually getting smaller and smaller as the mountainous landscape slowly engulfed them.
High red rock plateaus now rose on the horizon above us. It took me back to all of those Roadrunner cartoons I used to watch as a kid. The rock was all pinkish and gray, just like in the cartoons. I observed those omnipotent monoliths around me; they were huge sleeping giants, nature’s Stonehenge casting midmorning shadows back toward Nevada in this big beautiful American West.
The colors of the landscape kept on changing as the hours began to roll by. Turquoise hard-faced rock buttes surrounded us now; they were sculpted, chiseled by centuries of ancient wind. I noticed that their red brick bases were laden with crumbled rock debris. The smooth rock of their upper plateaus drew stark contrast to their broadened rough rock pile bases. It was a kingdom of interstellar castles on their individual pillars, as if the castles had been built up there in my imagination amidst my own islands of fictitious clouds. These were the fairy-tale fiefdoms of the badlands of Utah. It reminded me of the artwork on a distant album cover. I saw on the Rand McNally road map that these were the forlorn lands where our great Native American brothers once roamed so comfortably—their descendants now confined to a great reservation on the left-hand side of the highway. This was the land of the Uintah and Ouray.
We took a detour on Route 191 after seeing a sign for Canyonlands National Park. There were several miles of a bumpy, hard-packed dirt road at first. A lone hawk flew all the while overhead, tracking us like wounded prey, its large wingspan marking a cloudless blue sky as it followed us into the Utah wilderness. When we stepped outside of the car at the park’s entrance, the silence of the earth was all at once deafening and relieving. We all marveled at the smooth-faced cliffs around us as soft winds breathed faint whisperings of ancient voices into our ears. I could hear the voices talking amongst themselves.
“Do you hear that?” I said. “It sounds like someone is talking.”
A huge rock topped a tower of smooth rising stone almost as if God had placed it there himself. Although still and balanced for centuries, the large boulder looked as if it might teeter-totter at any time and come crashing down to the valley below it, crushing us and forever rendering anything lying in its rolling path extinct.
There were outcroppings of subflora of blue green and yellow bushes throughout the rocky landscape as we walked about the scenic trails. On a sideways rolling plain, the desert plants intermixed with some larger green bushes; there were lazy-eyed Susans and brown green grasses everywhere. This complete picture reminded me of a western landscape of pastel colors that would have been so pleasing to the painter Ingrid’s eye. But there were no industrial complexes like the Newport Beach Cannery or oceans of water in this desert wilderness for Ingrid to paint.
I dreamed as I walked, imagining a distant fictitious time on the ground upon which I stood, where an ocean raged above me, and the grasses and flowers around me were sea flora, with all kinds of invisible ancient marine life swimming amongst us.
A bird chirped; a fly buzzed about me and sensed the moist humidity of my being. The dry hot air smelled of the dust that sometimes precluded summer thunderstorms, with dark browns, red browns, and shadows of the impending afternoon consciously forming in the unraveling landscape before us. The breeze was suddenly soft again and reminded me of the girl I used to know.
That long, sweet guitar riff and Greg Allman’s familiar song of “Melissa” moved back into my head; the memories of sweet Colette roamed comfortably in my soul.
We found our way back to Highway 70 and drove ninety quick miles into Colorado. The mountains got bigger, and then booming greens suddenly appeared everywhere. Trees as I once knew them filled the surrounding hills.
This was the upper Colorado River Valley. We joined the great river as it passed through a small town along Interstate 70 called Fruita. This was the mighty Colorado, I thought, as it raged beside us in the opposite direction; this was the river that would eventually cut through the great canyons of Utah and Arizona in order to get down to the gasping sands of Baja, where it would drip-drip into the Gulf there. I wandered in and out of a half sleep while this greenish, murky river ruffled like a ribbon beside us. It was a hot summer day.
I floated out of the moving car for a moment and up into the thin atmosphere. It seemed as if I was attached to a giant rubber band, a tethered umbilical cord. I saw the surfboard atop the tiny Fairlane below me; the magnificent Rockies were ahead of me. I saw the snow-veined mountaintops reflected in the surfboard’s yellow fiberglass shell. I saw our three lost souls beneath the yellow shield meandering through the valley of the great river and Aspen bound. I snapped out of my sleep.
The 1969 road map we were using didn’t list some of the sparse towns along the interstate like Silt and New Castle on our approach to Glenwood Springs. At Glenwood Springs, we picked up Highway 82 and headed east to Aspen. We drew within the hour to Luke’s sister’s house.
“How about those Mormons!” Lucas spoke with feigned intonation. He was bored. “It’s all an illusion, Mike, isn’t it? John Smith found golden tablets out in the forest after wandering around when he was twenty-four years old? It’s an illusion, right?”
“Wild mushrooms will do that to you!” Declan laughed. “He ate them right before he probably found those tablets!”
Lucas read a lot of stuff written by people like Krishnamurti and Richard Bach. He often wondered aloud if the past was nothing more than an illusion to all of us that never lived there.
“Everyone’s looking in from all these different angles,” Lucas mused. “And everyone’s point of view is individually so different. Whose point of view writes the school textbooks? I think it’s sad that history is written by the conqueror with the poor people who are conquered left only to be suppressed and either blended in or eventually exterminated. Therefore, don’t you guys agree that the past is nothing more than an illusion?”
“What if Hitler had won the war that your dad fought in?” he asked me.
“I’d still know the truth,” I said.
“But what about your children? The history books would all be different if Hitler had won, and those that knew the real truth would eventually die and be forgotten,” Luke said.
When I was a kid, my father told me his war stories over and over again. He talked of the children in France bumming cigarettes from their liberators. “Cigarette pour mama?” and the Chinese trading tattoos, embroidered dragons and beautiful swords for cigarettes from the sailors like Frank who walked the streets of Shanghai.
My father, Frank Hogan, had served on a minesweeper with the U.S. Navy. During the war in the South Pacific, he told me, they once docked on a deserted beach and saw the heads of U.S. Marines cut off at the neck and nailed to the palm trees. Ghost beach, he called it, he had seen this horror firsthand. This gave him nightmares for the rest of his life.
“Okay, but then, how were the thousands of scrolls that eventually became the Bible preserved if the Christians were the persecuted, Luke?” I said.
“They were secretly hidden away, I think,” Declan spoke up. “Some are probably still hidden, you know.”
I realized that it was Declan that said this. Decky, the same guy that had streaked through a Christian Revival tent during a service in the big park across from our house in Huntington Beach just a few weeks before we left California.
Don’t get me wrong. Declan’s Catholic faith was rock solid, regardless of how crazy he got like running naked through that tent. Declan believed.
“Your faith is a gift,” I said back to Declan in the car as we wove our way down Highway 82 toward Aspen. Declan felt real good. He smiled and nodded his head in affirmation.
Maybe Luke was right. Even my childhood seemed mostly an illusion to me now. I barely remembered anything that happened in my first five years of life, I got to thinking, yet I still existed. I remembered when JFK was shot. How could anyone forget that? I remembered all of my teachers crying at kindergarten at the Tenth Street School on the day that it happened; my grandfather and my mother waited for me outside the classroom in that giant shiny hardwood floor lobby. I saw it all again; all of the classes were dismissed and all of us little people spilled out into that great big room to wonder why our mothers were there waiting for us. I knew something was different that day. My mother never came to the schoolhouse to get me. My grandfather was the city engineer that inspected all of the public buildings, so he was at the Tenth Street School a lot. On the days he came to school, my teacher, Miss Lansing, would be all smug when he walked in. But Miss Lansing was crying on the day that JFK was shot, even with my grandfather standing there. My grandfather died real soon after that, at the age of sixty-two. He had a massive heart attack in the middle of the night. It was crazy. JFK and my grandfather both dying around the same time, and Miss Lansing crying that day in the hallway. Somehow, I thought they were all related. What happened to my grandfather was that he awoke in the middle of the night with this terrible pain and asked my grandmother to get him two shots of whiskey to help him get back to sleep, so she got him the whiskey, but he never woke up after that. I remembered at suppertime he used to love eating those big hunks of butter.
As I thought more about kindergarten, I remembered Ethan Rigby who pointed behind me on April Fools’ Day to say, “Look, there’s a horsey in the window!” That was kind of lame even for those times, but Ethan always was a little different. But what had happened to all of those months between JFK’s death and April Fools’ Day? They were gone. I envisioned all the other memories as the lost scrolls, slowly suppressed by the conquerors.
And right after that, God suddenly fell silent.
Luke, Declan, and I stopped just outside of Aspen to refuel and find a phone booth. Still thinking about my grandpa, I washed the bug-splattered windshield with a wet squeegee sponge at the gas station while Lucas went into a phone booth to call Kerry, his sister, but when the operator asked him to deposit one dollar and thirty cents more in coins, he frustratingly hung up the phone and clamored back to the car. He didn’t have that much change on him. Declan ran up and jumped into the booth now, pushing back through the accordion door, to suddenly call our friend Ingrid; he remembered to tell her about the check for UPS that he had mailed to her earlier from Utah.
My memories of California were still alive, of course, but slowly fleeting. On the day we dropped off our boxes at Ingrid’s house in Newport Beach, she had served us chocolate chip cookies, raw macadamia nuts, boysenberry juice, and ripe, sweet figs from her beautiful tree. Ingrid’s bungalow sat in the shade of her sacred fig tree just like the tree in Hesse’s classic masterpiece Siddhartha. I remembered sitting on Ingrid’s comfortable sofa that night. I wanted to gulp the purple juice down so fast that it might even pour over the sides of my mouth and drip all over my shirt to stain it. I wanted to drink in all of this sudden sweet freedom of life.
“I am sad to see you all go off, but I want you to know that you will always be like sons to me,” Ingrid told us with a tear in her eye.
It was that night that Ingrid and Lucas talked about the crazy theory that the Apollo missions had stopped because there was already another life-form up there mining the moon’s precious metals.
“Come on now, you don’t believe that, do you?” I asked.
Lucas talked on about the electrical physicist Tesla, who, at the turn of the century, was ridiculed in the United States because of his crazy inventions and ideas. He said that this guy Tesla had a laboratory that had some of the most amazing inventions of the century in it, inventions that had uncovered many of the electrical laws of the universe, but the government never believed in his work and labeled him as mad. One invention when raised to a certain level even caused the human body to urinate.
“Isn’t that invention called beer?” Declan asked.
“It’s always a paradigm,” Ingrid said to Lucas. “All new theories are usually dismissed by the authorities as those of lunatics and skeptics, until the masses of our humble humanity eventually discover them and bring them to the front of public awareness. It is only then that thought and reason shift.”
Declan and I were invisible to them both.
Ingrid was Ingrid, and Lucas was Lucas, and without them, the world would never be complete. If they were the yin, then Declan was always the yang, pulling me back from the more spiritual existence to the rigidity of Catholicism. I was always hopelessly lost somewhere in the middle, though, swinging like a pendulum, back and forth, always searching for an acceptable answer.
One cool evening, Ingrid and her older friend Howie were huddled under her fig tree like two crazy teenagers and caught me looking out at them from the window of our upstairs apartment. “Why, hello, Michael,” Ingrid called up to me when she spotted me, never failing to embrace Howie as I tried to duck away.
“Hello,” I waved sheepishly, pretending to fix something on the shade of my window.
“Don’t be afraid!” Old Howie yelled up to me. “Fear only exists in our heads! Life is too great, too beautiful! Don’t ever try to lose a minute of it!”
Youth may always be fleeting, but seeing those two like this helped me to realize that the soul had the ability to stay forever young, enduring everything. Our bodies were just a means to get us through this world, like a car going zigzag across the country, with eternal spirits inside for the duration of the trip, but at the end of it all, able to transcend to a place called heaven.
In Newport Beach, Ingrid had introduced Lucas to a controversial book called Seth Speaks. Jane Roberts wrote it in a trance, channeling this spirit named “Seth” while her husband sat there and recorded the whole mad dictation on tape. Lucas read Ingrid’s copy of the book first and then passed it on to me several weeks before we left California. Although I didn’t finish it, I tried to read as much as I could before returning it to Ingrid.
Seth seemed to have a rational explanation for everything. Science and religion fit together in his narrative; Seth even talked about Jesus. According to Seth, we can create our own reality. That’s where Luke got his whole “everything is just an illusion” theory from. The present moment is the place where we can effect change. It is also where we have the ability to create the future. Every action, every choice, every random thought that is acted on is how we do it.
I wondered if it was Jane Roberts who believed this, or was it really the spirit Seth? Was Seth real or just a convenient alter ego? Was Jane Roberts the wizard behind the curtain?
“That stuff is just too crazy for me,” Declan stood his ground.
Sitting there in the car outside of Aspen, I wondered if all of the religions and theories on life had a common thread. What if Jesus did come to America? What if there was a truly peaceful afterlife for all good people of the world, both religious and nonreligious; a place where there was no more fighting, just beautiful, warm, comfortable beaches with picturesque sunsets and everyone we ever loved with us forever? That would truly be heaven for me. Perhaps even the sandpipers were there.
It seemed funny that all the religious skeptics seemed to always blame the zealots for the sins and the faults of faith. But it was actually our own free will that was the wild card that got every one of us into trouble. Anyone who died in bloody battle in the name of Christ did it on their own time, not God’s time. Gosh, it wasn’t Jesus Christ’s idea. People blamed the Crusades on religion, but it was men themselves and their own warped interpretation of the Bible that led to the Crusades and the Inquisition and all of mankind’s crazy wars. Why was everyone always blaming God for everything?
“It is people who kill people. God doesn’t tell them to do it!” Frank would say at the kitchen table. “God is peace. He gives us free will to make the right choice. How you react is a test of your faith. It’s an absolute sin to think any misfortune is God’s fault!”
The simple mention of the word “sin” would scare me silly too. Irish Catholic guilt always weighed heavy on my conscious when I heard that word “sin.”
But I had to keep asking questions until it made sense to me though; the giant riddle needed to be solved. I needed to figure it all out before I died, for the wrong choice might not sit too well if I missed out on those big pearly gates of forever. And forever sure seemed like a really long time.
When I was twelve, my father and I had an intense battle at the kitchen table one night debating how Jonah could even breathe if he was sitting in the belly of a whale. Frank would get so mad when I threw science back at him; his face would get all bloody red. That night, while we were both immersed in the heat of the argument, we suddenly heard my mother and my sisters scream from the living room. A terrified bat had flown out from the front hallway and through the living room straight into the kitchen where we sat. My father jumped up from his seat immediately to get on the trail of the thing. He dashed over to the broom closet in the pantry to grab a broom in order to swat at and chase the erratic flying bat from one side of the kitchen to the other. When the bat finally tired and took cover in the corner behind a vertical radiator pipe, Frank took the handle of the broom and whacked at him, pummeling the poor creature to death. He killed it clean and then picked it up by the wing to throw it out with the garbage. The event had ended the argument, and I often wondered after that what the meaning of it all was. Surely it all had to mean something when a bat flies right into the middle of an argument.
Luke, Declan, and I pulled into Aspen in the late afternoon. Aspen was everything I had always imagined it to be as I looked out now at the small, quaint, Hollywood setlike town with all kinds of friendly looking shops everywhere. We cruised down Main Street surrounded by a postcard mountain backdrop that breathed fresh, clean air and beckoned to us to roll down all of the Fairlane’s windows. The pristine mountains were reaching for the heavens all around us it seemed, rising from an already-established base of about 7,000 feet high.
Lucas made another attempt at calling his older sister Kerry, but still got no answer at her house.
“She’s probably still at work,” he came back to the car shaking his head in frustration.
We tried a place that Luke thought Kerry’s office might be at, but it wasn’t there anymore. A cleaning lady told us that someone by the name of Kerry had worked there three years before our arrival, but she had no idea where the office had moved to. We stopped at a Greek deli and had shaved lamb on pita with salad while Tina Turner sang from the jukebox. There were travel posters of Greece hanging all over the walls inside of this deli. We looked up at them as we sat there and marveled at the true blue color of the Aegean Sea. We fathomed lying on the pristine beaches and exploring the whitewashed buildings on these hillside posters someday. We talked about how these pueblo-like dwellings seemed to fill up and cover all of the rolling bumps of these beautiful Mediterranean Islands while the picturesque Rockies secretly looked back at us through the large restaurant windows the whole time.
When we walked out of the deli it began to rain. The fresh smell of rain on pavement came up and took me; it hit me and triggered more memories. Hah! It was a paved street in Paradise. I thought of past times again, to the summers I had spent so long ago at Paradise Beach, New Hampshire. I remembered running from the beach with Linda O’Toole in the sudden summer rain with those same fresh rain smells, with bare feet and soaking wet towels and both of us jumping the puddles of those everlasting beach streets, dripping wet, without a single care in our ever-widening world. I remembered the simple comfort once again of a crackling fireplace in the living room of Mrs. MacNamara’s boarding house at the end of a beautiful simple day. This was the whole world to me, I realized. I wanted to live from day to day again and to be in love with that single breathing moment. But just like Colette, Linda O’Toole had left me too, and it took a long while before I ever got over it. Crazy, mad love . . . Why’d it always have to hurt so bad?
Lucas made a few more calls to Kerry, but still had no luck, so we decided to cruise the streets some more until she got home. We momentarily stopped while Declan grabbed all of our sandwich trash only to jump out in the rain in his crazy loud pink-patterned California board shorts to throw it all away. Right at that very moment, Kerry and Sam passed by on their drive home and noticed the shorts and the crazy spiky hair of Declan Brady.