Into December

When the year is written in firework displays and midnight kisses, one might look back and say it was 2012 I became a real reader. I read more books this year than any other in my life, and not just by a little. I probably more than quadruple the amount of any year prior. I never really kept track of books before -- a summary can be seen off to the right -- but here seems a delightful place to do some accounting. It is a very special way -- better than most -- to look back on a year and see what it was made of.

I sat out in the front of the Alhambra with a cute Australian -- February I think it was -- and finished Shantaram, a ridiculous story about a convict (also Australian) who escapes to Mumbai, joins a gang, and falls in love. As with other books that are supposed to inspire an Indian vacation (Life of Pi, Eat Pray Love), it did nothing of the sort for me. I still have no desire to go. I will enjoy a run around a Guatemalan volcano or sit along a beach in Nicaragua or play with a monkey in Colombia, but India doesn't resonate quite yet. Someone once told me people go there to kill their restlessness for awhile, but that is something I feel no need to kill just yet.

Sometime between my first and third visit to the Alhambra in Granada, I read Tales of the Alhambra, by American writer Washington Irving. He lived, researched, and fell in love with the place for a few months in 1829 as it was falling to decay. He traveled by mule who knows how long, from Seville to Granada, carrying a gun for protection from highway robbers. My train took a few minutes over three hours and cost 24 Euros. The Alhambra is one of the only places in the world I have ever been able to really imagine myself within a thousand year period. Somehow it is immune to the stains tourists bring hidden in their fanny-packs.

Months later before arriving in Pamplona I read The Sun Also Rises, the book that put the city and its festival on the international map. I was glad to not be there for the running of the bulls. Twenty years after his last visit, Hemingway was already fed up. He wrote in A Dangerous Summer about finding a peaceful place by a river in the woods, but not disclosing its location to the reader because he did not want to come back next summer and see 50 cars there.

I read Cloud Atlas, now a three hour movie covering 500 pages of literature, during three rainy days in Bilbao. Don Quixote was an adventure so long I can only remember reading it in Seville, a place Don Quixote never visited, but a place his creator spent time in jail.

A diary about the 1870 expedition that discovered Yellowstone, in Yellowstone. A Night to Remember around the Titanic's 100 year anniversary. An artistically written, now out of print book on Spain twice, before my first flight and after my last. Death in the Afternoon before my first bullfight. How to Be Alone when I was very much alone. Travels With Charley when I was traveling, without Charley. The Go-Getter when I was going but not getting anywhere.

What a beautiful way to define a year: adding content to a list, looking at the list and remembering the moments, looking at the moments and remembering the books. The joy, as any true reader will tell you, is not analyzing the characters and their dispositions, the authors and their pains and their gains. No, it is the hours spent alone with yourself, the wrestling with personal emotions, the rereading of passages because you know they fit somewhere, that make books a lifeline to a very real world.

I woke up unplanned at 4am one recent morning and finished the 23rd book of the year, Let the Great World Spin. The last lines stuck with me, even as I shut off the light two hours later, the sun only starting to creep in through the window.

"The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough."

And so on we spin and stumble into December.

Another Austin Interim

I found a renewed joy in the city of Austin by bike, bus, and foot. I loved the late night rides and the absence of cars on a dark road, unwinding after nine hours in a bar. I liked the rides at dusk too, speeding along a bike path blissfully as impatient faces inched ahead during rush hour. I enjoyed sitting down on a city bus alone, reading my kindle while a paid Capitol Metro employee did the driving. And I loved walking to Congress and Ceasar Chavez for a coffee, looking up at the skyline from a different angle, comparing the Frost Tower to the Giralda and a high rise set of condos to that strange phallic shaped building in Barcelona. This time, the pace of Austin was slower and it reminded me of times in my life where I walked through a city and loved it because it was new, and how you can also walk through a city and remember you love it though it is old.

But Austin wasn't what I wanted really. I came back unemployed, carless, and bar work looking hopelessly inevitable for an unknown amount of time. I worked five days straight around Thanksgiving, and it was one of the loneliest times I can remember, not because it was Thanksgiving or because I sat alone by a gate checking the identification cards of drunks young and old, but because I was surrounded be people who were much lonelier than me. Bars are terrible places, like they have been for centuries, and you see a lot by walking through them sober and picking up a dirty glass. I joked as I left this time (I have left and come back more than once now), but if I find myself there again it is for the wrong reasons and I have not done something I should have somewhere along the way.

After the Election

I sat on my couch the night of the US election, paying more attention to various Facebook posts than anything CNN had to offer. I knew Ohio had gone Obama not long after it was officially announced, ditto Colorado and New Hampshire. By adding those three together, it became clear Barack Obama would remain the 44th President of the United States.

The things people say are truly disturbing. Some become Nobel Peace Prize winning economists and talk about the coming competitive decline of America. Others suddenly become world travelers, expressing a desire for international job search, normally to countries twice as socialist as our own, as if those countries and their visa requirements would actually welcome them in at all (trust me, I know). If you want an accurate view of the world, The Economist speaks to this best in a luke-warm endorsement of our current president. Both sides had a chance to inspire a nation, and either a mediocre political system or faulty candidates, and probably both, led to the choice of one over another with a serious swamp to muck through along the way. It was messy, sure, but there was a correct choice in this election and we made it. Saying both candidates have faults, that you do not like either one, does not relieve you of a duty to decide.

I find the conversation around this election, and all the American elections I remember, to be quite sad, because the money saved between a 32% and 34% tax rate will not make you happy. Looking at government and its President has remarkably little to do with if we are better off, or happier, than four years ago. It simply doesn't. If I had to guess, I would say blaming those things are safe, they are distant, and we can talk freely about them, because actually addressing the issues that determine our happiness is something uncomfortable and best left locked in the attic.

But in so many minds, the issue is so much deeper than a tax rate. I sat up the night of the election reading messages insinuating that gays and freeloaders and the 1% and apology tours and Muslims and abortion doctors and big government and food stamps and Democrats and Republicans and the President are bringing this country down, and I want to hold up the biography of Jerusalem I am currently reading and pound it into their heads by osmosis and say, "no, my friend, history has shown that it will almost certainly be you and your obsession with your own exceptionalism, that will eventually bring this country, or any country, at any point in history, to its knees."

I am certainly proud, most of the time, to be from the United States. I defend its values to a reasonable extend abroad, will accepting its deficiencies. By most accounts, we are not the best country in the world. We aren't the richest, or the poorest, or the safest. We are just another country with freedoms, like many other countries with freedoms, that exist in the world and provide a place for people to live. The happy part is yours to create. That is that, and so, in terms of the election, now something historical -- get a grip, people.

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.