Sleepless Nights

There are a lot of sleepless nights as of late, and there will certainly be more to come. It has always been a problem of mine, doing my best thinking when the lights are off, hyper-aware of the most curious tendencies of night. In the Mandan basement, for instance, I woke up to a glass case of hunting rifles and two deer heads mounted on the wall. My grandmother's small house in a small town is characterized by a motion-sensitive deck light pulsing rhythmically throughout the night. There were back-to-back cold nights in the back of my car, uncomfortably fitting a 6'3" frame into 4" of space, waking at morning light to the ethereal steam of a geyser basin.

Then there are my sleepless nights back in Austin. It is my city that feels like so no matter the changing nature of friendships or the lack of an automobile to get around. I get anxious these days, wondering what I have done and what I will do and how this is all going to work out and how I will get to an interview in the middle of a city I do not want to live in anyways and how practically I could have paid a loan or even a bill when I had the chance but didn't. Then somehow my mind finds its way back to a beach in Spain or a bridge in London or a damp forest in Germany. It always does this, and I remember I would not trade it for anything, and that my very light and agile life is going quite alright. 

Cleveland

I was awoken late one night to the sound of a train horn, distantly at first until it arrived, following that predetermined route underneath the old mill, passing the run down school house now used for storage, then out into the night. The walls shook and the floors rattled. The wind blew cold and dark outside my window, and I shivered, though underneath my covers it was very warm.

I had a fascination with trains in my youth. A Thomas the Tank Engine shirt pops up in most home videos; I always felt connected due to my middle name. I remember the wooden Brio tracks and trains to which I created my own Union Pacific line stretching from Atlantic to Pacific. I have memories of hearing the same horn, no different, and running through the same little house into the kitchen, propping myself up on a stool and looking out through that small screen window, the train rumbling by.

Cleveland has somewhere between one hundred and two hundred people, and sits off interstate 94 some 25 miles from Jamestown. It is practically the geographic center of North Dakota, which means it is not surrounded by much. It's God's country, my dad would say, and I always think how painful the life of a rebellious teenager would be in this part of the world. A hundred years ago, the train and the town and the mill meant much more to Cleveland, at least in an economic sense, but the train still rattles by at all hours of the day and night and in all kinds of weather. I am happy for this, because it brings me back to a time when the details of a train, the number of cars, whether it had a caboose, were of equal importance to a job and a salary and a loan.

I laid awake for a little while after the train passed, listening to the cold prairie winds of fall that would soon carry the blinding snow of North Dakota winter. The last time I was here, my great grandmother was alive and approaching one hundred years old. People come and go, and that leaves a hole, a certain kind of emptiness, but I couldn't detect any of it there in her old room. I felt comfortable and safe in the darkness, thinking of trains and their ongoing significance, a past piece of tangible importance. Really, I think it is the consistency I long for when most things just seem up for grabs.

Texas to North Dakota

I took my car 2,400 miles from Dallas to Bismarck on an especially scenic route because it was no longer my possession and because I wanted to explore a little of my own country under a different mindset than I did in my youth. Selling my car was of course a risk given my present circumstances, but what it has created at the cost of a possession is something I doubt I will regret later on in life.

We get this sense as travelers that our trips become more accomplished the further we go. There may be some truth there, as the greater the distance the more different and perhaps difficult our situation becomes, but we often forget the beauty that exists a day's drive away. I know I surprised myself, watching the places a few tanks of gas could get you. Having been gifted a viewpoint from the outside, I can say that Americans really have little excuse for our lack of domestic wanderlust. So with a sleeping bag and a deep sigh, with bottles of water and a copy of Steinbeck's Travels with Charlie, I set off into Oklahoma and Kansas knowing it would be the last time I put my hands behind the wheel of that small blue Versa I came to know so well over the ups and downs of five years.

The first leg of the midwest I can normally do to forget, only keeping a dose of perspective passing through Norman and Stillwater and Wichita, remembering how grateful I am to not have attended those strange secluded southern universities when a cultural hotbed like Austin exists. I arrived in Lincoln feeling especially proud of that Longhorn sticker on the back of my car, and the degree to which I had sent in paperwork the day prior.

West through Nebraska into South Dakota is worth doing once as you slowly watch the flat green breadbasket of the United States turn into the Badlands President Roosevelt loved so much. There is something about a full tank of gas and an open road, rain or snow or shine, from this point on that is good for the soul.

You are also exposed to the most peculiar arrangement of small town museums. The signs line the roads attempting to draw people into areas that just got missed and just could have been. I wondered if I made a terrible mistake by not venturing into everyone of of these, but I did make a list that grew progressively longer as the miles ticked away. They range from the questionable to the bizarre, and usually employ a very loose interpretation of the word "national."

National Wrestling Museum
Sandzen Old Mill Museum
Wizard of Oz Museum (Kansas)
National Orphan Train Museum
Republic Country Historical Museum
Museum of the Prairie Pioneer
Plainsman Museum
Heartland Museum of Military Vehicles
Robert Henri Museum
Fort Robinson Fur Trade Museum
Petrified Wood Gallery
National Presidential Wax Museum
National Woodcarving Museum
Texas Trail Museum (Wyoming)
Range Rider Museum
Frontier Gateway Museum
Dinosaur Museum (Montana)
North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame

One museum I did visit and that does speak to the American condition lies thirty miles outside Rapid City, South Dakota nestled in the middle of the Black Hills. The National Museum of the Native American will one day lie at the base of Crazy Horse, the carved mountain monument ten times the size of Rushmore. The distinction between the two is equally as great, and a pity to be overlooked in a way symbolic to the last 150 tragic years of American obliviousness and arrogance.

Crazy Horse was a Lakota warrior, largely responsible for the Indian victory at the Battle of Little Bighorn and thus commemorated today as a great American hero - at least in the sense that got him on a 13 cent stamp. He has a famous quote, said as a white man condescendingly asks where his lands are now. He responds, in a sort of beautiful sadness only native americans can muster, "my lands are where my dead lie buried."

The story of the monument provides further understanding. Shortly after the completion of Rushmore in the 1940s, the last surviving elders from the Battle of Little Bighorn approached a then well renown sculptor asking him to build a similar monument to "show the white man the red man has heroes too". Korczak Ziolkowski began work alone on a giant slab of granite, living out of a tent for the first few years, knowing the entire time he would not be alive to see such an extravagant piece finished. He twice turned down government funding in a tradition that still exists today, believing private interest alone should spur the project to completion. It also seems there might be a principle there, not accepting money from the catalyst to Indian destruction. Since his death in 1982, his entire family has kept up the work. Here shows a small statue depicting the finished product, along with current progress on the mountain in the background. By comparison, Mount Rushmore could fit in Crazy Horse's hair.

Lack of acknowledgement impedes the healing process, and in american history, that tragic inability to acknowledge the level of atrocity our government ordered upon its native population plagues us to this day. At Wounded Knee Creek, american calvary exterminated hundreds of women and children. Leaders, Crazy Horse and others, were stabbed in the back with a bayonet while in military custody. Formal treaties were promised and repeatedly broken -- the Black Hills for example, upheld simply until gold was discovered. The early 1600s saw around eight million Native Americans from Atlantic to Pacific, while today the population struggles along at 250,000. That is our holocaust, the Trail of Tears our Auschwitz, and while Germany hammers away their brutal past into its youth, we continue to bellow patriotic jargon about freedom and the greatness of our country at monuments like the four heads 11 miles up the road. If it could, a overly metaphorical country song plays in the background as we travel along the winding roads watching for deer.

I will never forget a National Geographic article about the Lakota Indians of the Great Plains. Their struggle to maintain the traditions of their elders, the spirit of Crazy Horse, in a hopelessly modern world, facing high rates of suicide, alcoholism, and domestic violence. One of the Lakota leaders spoke of Rushmore. "It's an insult," he said. "They came onto our most sacred land and carved the faces of those who broke every treaty and left us destroyed as a people." That is sure as hell a Rushmore we don't hear about.

It all reminds me of that day in Alice Springs, watching drunk Aborigines stumble around lost in their own true country. You wonder why we did the same things again and again on every corner of the globe; it's a very disturbing pattern and insight into human nature.

490 miles and one state trooper later (guys get warnings too), I arrived in Yellowstone National Park. The Black Hills flatten out at the border and the grass turns yellow for a time until you reach the snow capped peaks of the Rockies. You pass many of the small towns made famous by the iconic characters of western lore: towns like Deadwood and people like Sitting Bull and Sundance Kid and Buffalo Bill Cody. Then there is Emblem, Wyoming, population: 10. Those towns all ended with Cody and the mountainous buildup for Yellowstone began uninterrupted and with much anticipation.

Yellowstone is an active volcano, one of the largest on Earth, and I say that because I do not think many Americans realize the devestating time bomb a majority of the continental United States sits on. It last erupted 640,000 years ago and spread ash to Mexico. In some future generation it will do this again and I felt that subtle voice from inside the caldera, praying it would not be this generation on this day,  though the view will be spectacularly catastrophic.

Until then, the volcano makes its presence known with 10,000 steam vents, geysers, mud pots, and boiling pools, all heated from magma three miles below the surface. Science is mind blowing at times. I was tempted to dub the various attractions as fake, as man-made exhibits, the geysers all fountains with man made pumps. I had to remind myself at times of the volatility, the danger, and how it is a marvel we can fit so many people into this volcanic zone every season. People have paid the price for stupidity and neglect many times since the park's discovery by gold miners in the 1800s.

I had such a good day with myself in Yellowstone, a day of freedom to explore with a mind turned off in some ways and on in others, like the human the brain more active asleep than awake. I found the various displays of heat therapeutic, as if by watching the earth breathe and cough and sneeze we are somehow aligning ourselves with its natural pulse.

But perhaps the most humbling thing is that it is unpredictable. Even old faithful is not accurate to the minute, and over the last century it has progressively slowed down. One geyser erupts every 2.5 to five hours. Another depends on the eruption pattern of a nearby geyser since they share the same underground water source. There is another, my favorite, the was active up until the late 1800s, shooting water 300 feet high. There are only old sketches depicting it. Then one day it stopped, was dormant for almost a century, until an Earthquake in 1959 sent it roaring back to life.

I starred into a steaming pool for a long time, taking in my last few hours silently on a bench, watching the brightly lit blues and oranges and yellows highlighted by bacteria thriving in extreme and alien conditions. It was an ominous scene, straight from a prehistoric earth. Looking at primordial pulp, as it was for a billion years, makes a single human lifetime seem short and its trivialities that much more unnecessary. Humbling would be the best word to describe Yellowstone in the end.

And so I left the greatest of the national parks heading North into Montana, the mountains mellowing out into the plains of North Dakota, pro-life signs and meth help numbers lining the highway, thoughts of geysers and indians overshadowed by an excitement to see family I waited far too long to see again.

Another One, Again.

There came a time on my last night in Austin, where someone asked what I wanted to do. I didn't need anything dramatic, or cumulative, and don't much care for what the masses would do anymore. As long as three or four key people were there, I didn't matter how we passed the time.

Over my week I visited key areas, or those that once were: that intersection of Fifth Street and Lamar, always parking on one side and crossing over to the other; the tapping tapping tapping of my feet running along the gravel of Town Lake in the morning light as low clouds held on tightly to the tops of the highest skyscrapers. I did those things and more and realized that they just aren't the same these days; its a curious sense, like revisiting a dream.

Saying goodbye was hard this time around, especially when arriving in Dallas and walking up the stairs into a familiar room, but I have gotten used to goodbyes and hellos. There have been many over the past few months, and more over the past few years. If they teach you anything, it is that all has a beginning and an end and the comfort lies in knowing, even when not stated explicitly, that a new beginning comes without regard for our plans or our apprehensions or our fears.

The Little Prince is the best hundred pages I can remember reading. It is time well spent in those precious moments after a hug and a wave, feeling as though you have come from something and that you are going nowhere soon.

"Goodbye," he said.
"Goodbye," said the fox. "Now here is my secret. It is very simple. It is only with one's heart that one can see clearly. What is essential is invisible to the eye."
What is essential is invisible to the eye," the little prince repeated, so as to be sure to remember.
"It is the time you lavished on your rose which makes your rose so important."
"It is the time that I lavished on my rose..." said the little prince, so as to be sure to remember.

The Art of Leaving

I was once asked to say something I was exceptionally good at, one refined skill I had crafted that most people could not do as well. Some might say writing and others might say treating illness and others might say running a company and still others scrapbooking. Arguably not all skills are created equal, but I found it a fair question to ask because it offers another pivotal chance to be real with ourselves. Life provides plenty of opportunities to lie -- to say that a wasteful television program is only a television program, and that we all die of something so smoking is nothing -- and we can usually get away with it. Unavoidable questions that force a splendid moment of silence have a way of exposing it all in a flash.

I decided then my skill would be adaptation. It's a vague skill, yes, but it's the only way I am able to explain going from Spain to France to Germany and all the other little realities of my life with constant ease, feeling very much at home in all of them. That was the essence of my last few weeks, exiting Spain to the French Riviera, cuddling up with a dreamlike Argentine girl in Montpellier, hiking quiet green World War II battlegrounds on the German border, looking down upon poor Anne Boelyn's jail before her beheading, kissing a beautiful Italian under Big Ben to the sound of the Thames, and other seemingly chaotic impossible moments that happened as simply as they did. 

Landing in the United States after so much time away is always a peculiar feeling, and the silence then exists regardless of noise or commotion. Yet it was easier after leaving Spain in all its finality, its entirety, and I was ready to get the next part of life moving. Perhaps the skill is not adaptation but leaving -- the art of leaving, we'll say -- being ready, flexible, aching, excited, anxious, willing always for what comes next.

So Long, My Friend

There were moments as my time in Spain came to an end where I wondered who the hell I was anymore. I was going through all the same motions, having the same relationships, in every sense, exactly like I had my entire life, only sometimes now the words were different. Carlos and I would go to a discoteca and it could have been any night back in Austin long ago, except Spanish came out of my mouth and I was able to flirt and talk and do things. I said goodbye to my mother and father like I did my real mother and father eight months ago at a terminal in DFW International Airport. I sat there next to that Argentine girl  in Tenerife and talked about the same tough things -- why smoking is bad and sex important, and what's next in life -- and none of it was hard. If I am asked why Spain was important for me, I would say nothing of old buildings and far off lands; there are old buildings and different cultures everywhere. I would say that I can now live and operate in two different worlds like they both were mine to begin with.

When I think about eight months it feels both long and short, too much and too little. Leaving is always painful, but I have many homes now, many places to go, and I will come back if I decide to. The day before I left Spain, the cycle came to fruition: a new American arrived in the house. All of us ate lunch, and I watched him curiously. He struggled and did not understand as my family and I laughed and talked like Carlos and I had been fighting for mom's attention in diapers. I saw him sitting there with a blank stare, and it was me in a different time.

I think back often to Washington Irving's last words as he said goodbye to Granada. He was summoned back to the US in 1829 for a new job, and had to leave his paradisiacal escape. His words are tragic, and bittersweet, and show both gratitude and sorrow.

"The setting sun as usual shed a melancholy effulgence on the ruddy towers of the Alhambra. I could faintly discern the balconied window of the Tower of Comares, where I had indulged in so many delightful reveries. The bosky groves and gardens about the city were richly gilded with the sunshine, the purple haze of a summer evening was gathering over the Vega; every thing was lovely, but tenderly and sadly so, to my parting gaze.

"I will hasten from this prospect," thought I, "before the sun is set. I will carry away a recollection of it clothed in all its beauty."

With these thoughts I pursued my way among the mountains. A little further and Granada, the Vega, and the Alhambra, were shut from my view; and thus ended one of the pleasantest dreams of a life, which the reader perhaps may think has been but too much made up of dreams."

Teide: Revisited

I went back to Teide, and the Canary Islands for that matter, because it gave me something I knew I could not find in Rome, Berlin, or Vienna. I am not sure what that was and I might not ever know but at 12,918 feet above sea level, freezing in a high-altitude wind, wearing too few clothes, watching the sun rise slowly above ocean and clouds and islands, I managed to find something.

It was around five in the morning with sleep in my eyes and the darkest dark I had ever seen that I turned on a small black flashlight and began the last hour of hiking to the crater of Teide. There were a few people in front and many behind, but they grew farther behind as I went farther ahead. It was ominous, scary almost, hiking dried lava blindly with nothing but your light and the stars and a sliver of the moon. Sometimes a star fell, as part of the almost finished meteor shower and sometimes I shut off the light and just stood to catch my breath. Other times the movement of shadows behind lunar rocks startled me. It was a great place to embrace a feeling of vulnerability, knowing there is little you could do to prevent just about anything from happening, and then remembering that nothing will except the next step forward on a well marked trail.

Huddled together for warmth at the top, around fifteen of us sat under the stars until the first light crept up over the horizon and one by one the stars melted away. They were German, French, and Spanish, and not a single person spoke English well. We were silent anyways, listening to the wind and the sound of our own shivering. The common bond atop a dormant volcanic crater, watching a sunrise from another world, all went well beyond language. We all knew what everyone was thinking.

Thirty minutes below, at the first habitable point beneath the crater, there is a cable car station. Everyday at 9:08am sharp, the first round of people are brought up from 1800 meters below. I didn't stay long enough to watch this happen, and I don't think I could bear seeing five hours of sweat covered by eight minutes of technology. Things happen faster now but the fifteen of us who climbed the peak in the dark and climbed hours before to get there, we saw much more and it was not because we were in the right place at the right time but because we were in many places at many times.

I left the station promptly for a four hour trek down the other side of the mountain, through a landscape that could have been Mordor or Mars. I let nothing cheapen it and enjoyed the pain in my legs and the sun even more as it got warmer and my hands thawed. I enjoyed the small lizards who ran across the sand and under a dry bush, scared of by the sound of my footsteps. I enjoyed the rocks people stacked, outlining difficult parts of the trail for as far back as the trail existed. I enjoyed looking up at the peak and being amazed by how far we can go in a short time. I enjoyed all these quiet things a lot.

The lava fields of Siete Cañadas ended two weeks in Tenerife. By the time I arrived at the base, nine hours had been hiked, one hour had been slept, and four hours had been spent on buses. I thought about a lot of things during that time, but I often thought of nothing at all; it was good to get that break from myself. Sometimes I get caught up in the fact that if one thing does not happen, ten things never will, and every little decision will change everything, but it's silly to think like that. I met a stunning Argentine girl after our flight together, and five days later we fell asleep on the side of a volcanic cliff falling 200 feet to the ocean. A meteor shower lit up the sky above us and when we woke up tucked away in that small protected cave, hugging each other, the sun was coming up over the Atlantic. Some things are so perfect, divine really, and fit for a film, that you could not question them if you wanted to. Since those kinds of things are happening all around me it would be silly to think about anything at all.

And it would be silly to miss them. She got on a ferry and is gone, the road trips and beach time all behind us, and I hiked down the different colored rock, watching one prehistoric explosion overlap another, the boulders turn to rock and sand, until it all fell dramatically into the sea.

Sitting at the base of the mountain and looking up, a Spanish man from Tenerife sat with a coffee. His wife and mother sat with him in no hurry, watching the tourists pass. I asked him as we sat looking up at Teide, when it will go off again. He said he didn't know, but one of two things will happen. The island will grow very quickly, or it will go away completely, and it will all be very bad for you and I. Shortly after, I got on a bus and looked out the window at different parts of the volcano, at different angles, from further and further away.