Walk Like Water - Pt 1

Pre-Covid we went walk about

Way back in September 2019 - in the before times - before Covid, before insurrection, before uprooting, before Mom and Ray - Yogini Dawn and I drove car camping cross country for no other reason than we felt like it. This is the journal of that epic trip. It was originally published in chap book form, but nobody ever read it. Seems a shame that, so here it is on Substack, presented in three or four installments.

Pre-Flight

The news is bad this morning. Televisions flicker, computer screens glow, and telephones blurp updates. Truth is dead, honor belittled, mercy jailed. War, terror, violence, and fear are everywhere. Bombs kill babies, plastic fills oceans, hatred screams at hatred, a wicked and vicious wind howls.

In these days of miracle and wonder.

Have faith weary ones.

It is but a digital illusion of the real thing. The digital flicker is imaginary, has no boundaries, no place – no there – exists only in our heads. We spend hours glued to dithering screens projecting man-made images and values onto our retinas and into our brains. The signals suck us down into a vortex designed to grab our attention, hold it and sell us things we don’t need. The signals are specifically designed to hold us in a smoke-and-mirrors pseudo-reality. We suffer locked inside a pernicious, dangerous, and pornographic illusion.

There is a solution to this suffering.

The earth - this planet - created your human body – and equipped it with multiple spectacular and efficient sensors to detect, interpret and enjoy the real, sensuous, wild world. If we listen to our bodies, if we shut down the constant chatter of mindless fantasy, we find ourselves immersed in the real world, an exuberant four-dimensioned wild world - full of joy, love, time, and beauty.

The ancestors knew this.

Look around you now - turn from the screen and look out the window. Quiet your mind, turn from the words spinning like clouds across your brain, and settle into your body. Feel your toes, your knees, your hips, your arms, your heart. Feel your breath sliding in and out - relax. Pay attention to just one small part of the milieu outside your body. Listen for birdsong, hear the rain patter on the roof, smell the dusky smell of dirt, see the dragonfly hover over the marigolds, watch a cloud form and reform. Turn off your inner voice and simply be. This is the world, this is reality, this is where you belong. Entangled in an incredible shimmering web of life – alive on this glittering blue planet.

After a mundane summer spent resisting the karma of all kinds of horrible illusions, Yogini and I longed for an outside adventure and exploration antidote. We longed to go a-wandering together – somewhere – anywhere. We find our peace and solace in wild, sensuous places, and so she and I set out willy-nilly on an epic thirty-day road trip from our house on the Georgia coast to the great mountains and canyons of Colorado and Utah.

We had no idea what or who we would find out there.

An eagle, soaring above the marsh, saw our truck depart and let the ancestors know we were coming.

We whirled out of benighted Georgia in a hurry to get gone. Two months ago fifty pilot whales made frantic by deafening sonar beached on the south and east shores of the island. Two days ago a massive ship carrying 4500 cars rolled over and oiled the sound. Today, a threatening hurricane hovers in the too-hot water offshore. Enough! It’s time to go.

We ran fast north-west up to the heights of the Blue Ridge. In the mountains, we camped in a piney wildflower meadow paradise next to a gravelly creek and walked up an old farm road into the recovering forest spotting pungent blue, white, red, and grey mushrooms. The next day we slipped over the ridgetop and down its long woody back, among the hollows and vales bound west through Tennessee, Kentucky, and Illinois. At Cape Girardeau, we crossed the industrial Mississippi River into Missouri.

Poor Cairo Illinois - former river boat mecca, metropolis, Union Army stronghold. Headquarters for Grant and Farragut when they cut the slave-holding confederacy in two for Mr. Lincoln. Now a ghost town fortified against the river by massive - and ugly - 8-foot high concrete walls adorned with gibberish graffiti protecting what is already gone. Massive barge convoys propelled by huge diesel push-boats roared slowly upriver against the current or slipped quickly downstream.

We stepped into the cold water, tasted it, and took it into our souls. The river bides its time, alive, constant, magical, and untamed despite the mechanical activity and walls along its shores. We camped that night in a grassy verdant field on the banks of the Big Muddy surrounded by Cherokee ghosts and separated from the river by railroad tracks roaring with monster 300-car coal trains. There was no sleep that night for Yogini and me.

We escaped industry and slavery the next day in the land of the Comanche - Comancheria - The Empire of the Summer Moon. We were far out on the golden plains aside a sunny fall lake in the rolling Flint Hills of Kansas. We visited the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, an abandoned cattle ranch with a massive stone barn and house built on Comanche land by ambitious squatters in the 1880s. Native grasses and buffalo are here now that cow killing has gone bust.

The small buffalo herd is a relic of the millions of animals that once roamed free, 4000 fenced acres are for them and their lush prairie. I imagined the wild shrill song and the rhythmic thud of buffalo hide drums; remembered that once there were no fences from Mexico to Canada.

The sun set over Comanche Kansas in a blaze of gold, mauve, pink, orange, and blue.

The Yogini smiled, stripped naked, and jumped into the lake. I followed. Eagle patrolled the far bank of the lake and turtle raised its head for a near-sighted look around. As the sun disappeared, brother coyote yipped his goodnight as a full moon rose silver over the lake.

We don’t have to live the way we do - slaughtering, polluting, extracting, hating. We can save ourselves - we can live with love, respect, and dignity. Paradise surrounds us, waits for us, and provides all we need - we only have to accept its gift.

I inhaled deep, exhaled my gratitude to Earth - “Thank you for all this.”

We rolled southwest across Kansas - along the old Santa Fe trail and through sad Dodge City.

The city is a failed tourist trap, and relies on its reputation as a gunslinging, heroic frontier town to skim tourist dollars. It conceals its past as the terminus of buffalo slaughter and extinction.

Convenient.

It was Yogini’s birthday and we paused in tiny Trinidad Colorado for a celebration. We found a humble Mexican restaurant on the ground floor of a restored Victorian building on Trinidad’s main street for dinner. Trinidad is perched between the flat arid plains and the mountains and guards a Southern route into the high country but it is not much more than a gas and water stop along screaming I-25.

Old Trinidad was a boisterous way station on the Santa Fe trail known for carousing and non-stop consumption of alcohol. Our celebration was somewhat less than boisterous - there is not much inspiration in Trinidad anymore.

I didn’t know why the Yogini came on this madcap adventure with me, especially after such a disappointing birthday - but I loved her deeply for it.

Mountains! The Sangre de Christo mountains to be exact. We skirted the south end of them thru tinder-dry farms and forest headed for Great Sand Dune National Park. We saw the dunes long before we arrived at the park. Some 400000 years ago, dust and sand from a dry lake bed swirled into a cove on the west side of the mountains. There it was trapped and settled. Now, a massive sand dune covers 30 square miles and reaches 700 feet high – the largest in North America. We hiked up the sand slope far onto the dune and heard its vast silence. Ute and Navajo Indians knew this place and passed through the valley below on their own wanderings.

For the Navajo - Mount Blanco - just South of the dunes - marks the Eastern boundary of their homeland. For the Utes, the valley was a summer refuge and hunting area full of bison, elk, and deer.

It is said that the ancestors were created from the underworld when they emerged into this world from the lakes and springs that lie to the west of the Dunes. The shamans called the world outside the underworld on this side of the lakes and springs the “Glittering World”.

Spanish padres trudged this valley too, pioneering a path from Santa Fe to Los Angeles by foot and mule. Fremont, Gunnison, and Pike explored its water, grass, and minerals and opened the floodgates to ranchers and miners. The squatters used up the land, fenced in the prairie, mined all the minerals, and left the poison and the tailings. The valley is a severe place and commerce has always – and still - struggles here.

I biked down a sandy track bordering the dune and hiked to a small creek undercutting its flanks of sand. There were abundant tracks of coyote, raccoon, and deer along the creek and I climbed from its banks up into the dunes. They stacked to the sky, like ocean waves frozen in time. The silence was a solid thing, the sound of eternity.

Yogini and I hiked along a ridge above the creek and dunes. The setting sun cast a tawny glow among the grasses and flowers of a meadow. Wrens, finches, and butterflies surrounded us and flitted through the air as we strolled en-lightened by thick golden sunshine.

The campground was crowded with tents, RV’s, trucks - everyone with a huge fire blazing in a steel fire ring. I slipped away from our prescribed spot for a stroll down the slope toward the dune in the star shine. The campground receded and the night sky bloomed. The milky way spun overhead and Arcturus gleamed bright, Jupiter and Saturn chased the Sun. There was a constant low bellow from the campers. Why do some think it is OK to be rowdy and noisy when crammed together in a campground while the whole universe pinwheels alive and sparkling above? Why are they not star-struck silent in wonder?

Two days later, at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. we stood atop the Painted Wall - 2000 feet of vertical black, rose, and cream-striated tortured rock laid bare by the river. Indians stayed away from this place as the canyon was the portal to the underworld. For them, the river carved the Gates of Hell and they might be right.

We camped along the edge of the precipice, dizzy and thrilled. The wind howled and we hiked out to the rim for a view of the depths. We watched as spidery climbers on the far rim worked their way down the immense face connected by a thread of rope. The climbers were tiny, immaterial - their efforts trivial and pointless against the expanse. It is a quiet and awesome place - this north rim of the Gunnison.

Indian legend says that a great chief mourned the loss of his beloved so much that he asked great spirit Ta-Vwoats to open a path for him to see her again. Ta-Vwoats rolled a great stone boulder that crushed the mountains and mesas and opened a channel from this life to the underworld. The stone ball was followed by a ball of fire to clear the debris and melt the cliffs solid and so the channel was open for the chief to journey to the underworld and see his wife was safe and happy. When he returned, Ta-Vwoats told the chief he could never go down the path again but Ta-Vwoats knew that others would want to make the same journey. Ta-Vwoats then filled the bottom of the channel with water - a boiling impassable river - to make sure no man could ever make that journey again.

Science says the surrounding mesas were uplifted after the river was established and the river cut its way down through the solid rock as it was being lifted - and thus the canyon.

Yeah...maybe, but Ta-Vwoats rolled that boulder too.

I walked out to the rim during the night to capture its essence in the dark under a quarter moon. The scrub oak along the trail waved weirdly in the night and the wind blew as the canyon breathed deep. The edge of the cliff was softer in the night than in the day – beckoning, treacherous.

Oh, the canyon in the ghostly moonlight! Mystic shadows played along the walls and crags and buttresses. Ghouls, goblins, and spirits lived there. The river roared below bouncing off rocks and cliffs tumbling headlong toward the underworld. The air was clean and fresh, the warm vegetable smells of the sunlit scrub along the rim blown away by moon-shine.

We hiked out to Exclamation Point and danced next to the precipice - not too close but close enough for a thrill. Dead pinon pine logs littered the top and sitting on one of them I could see up the canyon miles to the East, the river below tumbling and cavorting over the rocks and boulders and ledges. To the West, the canyon walls closed together less than one hundred feet apart – a deep, narrow, dark cleft – the true gates of the Underworld. One-quarter mile away - on the south rim - a line of oblivious cars and RVs snaked along the road like a herd of elephants holding each other’s tails. The canyon wind blew their noise away, and the sun spangled to infinity from their shiny chrome, steel, and aluminum.

We are certain we know how these places were created as though we were not or are not part of their creation. We hold ourselves separate from the object and stand in awe of the immense natural forces that did the construction not realizing that those same forces are working on us.

Seeing deep into the cosmos beside the great sand dune, peering over the precipice of Black Canyon, the thought occurs - what if this is all alive? What if instead of inanimate rock, water, sand, and sky the whole shitaree is alive vibrating, jostling, and humming to itself? What if I am a part of the whole shebang? What if the trees, rocks, clouds, wind, rivers, and mountains are alive and participating with us in creating this whole beautiful expanse? What if I am immersed in a brilliant Earth-mind - a small part of a larger consciousness?

Another thought hits like a sledgehammer - what if the earth - the planet itself - is not just alive - but also loves. The living skin of the Earth, atmosphere and all, is less than four miles thick. Everything that lives exists within this fragile envelope of air, water, dirt, and rock. What if the planet consciously brings forth this splendor - creates this wonder - for us to play in, explore and enjoy? What if the planet expressly creates the conditions necessary for life in order for it to coalesce and condense into a vibrant iridescent web of relationships?

I know this is how the first people – the ancestors thought - this is what the Commanche, Ute, Sioux, and Cherokee thought too - what if they were right?

After Sand Dune and Black Canyon I was flabbergasted, amazed by the wildness creating us, the wildness hiding in plain sight, within every tree, bush, rock, bear, and human. That the planet - Earth herself - created this exuberant splendor because she loves us – loves her creation - was staggering.

On the edges of the Black Canyon, at the gates of hell, I saw heaven.

Two days later, we camped outside Ouray in a magnificent campground with a tremendous view of the big peaks across the valley. There was some notice of bear activities when we checked in - a sow and two cubs plus a male were in the area - but we never saw them. The mountains ringed the town in a spectacular amphitheater. Below us, the Million Dollar Highway began its serpentine route up the headwall of the amphitheater past the old mines in the high mountains above. In the 1880s silver was discovered here and thousands flocked to the area to dig their fortunes. They honeycombed the mountains with tunnels and shafts connecting the mines and followed strains of cold dead ore - silver, lead, zinc, copper, and gold. The ore played out in the late 1970s and they left mounds of tailings, acid run-off, busted houses, and ghost towns – and the road – originally a narrow gauge railway hauling supplies and ore.

In its heyday, Ouray was a boisterous, ramshackle mining town. Now it is a touristy drink and lunch spot along the Million Dollar Highway lifting money off tourists who come to see its killer views and quaint architecture.

The town was named for Ute chief Ouray - broken-hearted negotiator who gave away millions of acres of tribal land to nefarious whites for mines, ranches, and towns. He grieved for his family, his land, and his people - “The agreement an Indian makes to a United States treaty is like the agreement a buffalo makes with his hunters when pierced with arrows. All he can do is lie down and give in.” He presided over the dissolution of millions of acres of Ute homeland.

The Utes came into the valley in the summers to hunt game and worship spirits in the hot springs and waterfalls. After silver was discovered, they were forced from the valley forever. Cigar chomping money men stole the land from Ouray's people, then named the town after him.

North of town, Orvis Hot Springs bubbles from a small fissure in the ground and is piped to a series of artificial pools in a garden setting behind a wooden palisade and chain link fence. The spring is surrounded by good pasture and plentiful wood - a place where the Utes rested and healed in its magic water.

Imagine this: in 1875 a Ute band comes to the spring on horseback trailing their travois, holding children and accompanied by dogs. They stop in front of a rude cabin built next to the steaming pool. The cabin was built the previous summer, now it has a corral and barn and some cows too. A woman in calico, hair awry, hands chapped and worn, steps on the porch fingering a shotgun. Politely, the head of the band - in perfect English - says:

“This is our land. When are you leaving? You stay here with your cows, now the deer and elk are shy and the spirits stay in the underworld. Why do you stay so long? When will you leave?”

She doesn’t answer but allows the band to camp nearby without incident. Eventually, the Utes move on while she stays – shotgun still close at hand.

Her family turned the springs into a private resort where visitors pay cash to experience the healing waters the Utes visited for free.

I hiked alone above our camp 4.5 miles to the ruined bunkhouse of the Ouray Silver Mine - abandoned and perched on the edge of a cliff near a 200-foot waterfall. It was a steep hike switchbacking up to the old mine. Hard, cruel men dug silver and gold out of these hills until it was gone. It was terrible work climbing this trail with tons of mining equipment on your back or on your mule. The old mountains, ancient and wise, overlooked the trail bemused at both our antics. The real treasure - the waterfall and the view - remains forever free.

Along the way, I met a pretty young lady hiking alone and recording her trek via Instagram videos on her phone - have podcast, will travel she said. I passed her as she sat cross-legged on a rocky outcrop in the sun. Later, on the way down, I came upon her again sitting on a log over the creek just above the waterfall. She was blond, slender and filmed herself with her phone. I left her speaking to her followers via the internet, oblivious to the real world, seeking "Likes" from the digital world.

Below us, Ouray cashes in on its fading charm. Opulent Victorian architecture - once the height of elegance and style, built on the sweat, blood, and lives of miners, remains as tourist bait. One building - The Wiesbaden Hotel - was built over another magic thermal spring emanating from a cave about 20 feet below ground. The water seeping from the side of the cavern is hot - 112 degrees - and the air inside is sauna-like. We sat in the dark cavern pool below the seep absorbing the mineral-laden heat, the relaxation near total.

We took a day trip around the San Juan mountains from Ouray to Telluride. It is an expensive place, is Telluride, trendy with that ski mountain vibe. Yogini and I had a good yoga session there upstairs in a restored building on the main street on the solar equinox. The message of the practice was about dissolution and preparation for the planted seed, the equinox being a time to let summer go and prepare for winter and the following spring. "What seed is planted?" I wondered.

The mountains around Ouray and Telluride are full of light, freedom, inspiration, and promise. The towns are surrounded by stunning natural beauty and crowded with tourists seeking beauty they can touch and feel. They crave the real and the tangible, but only stop long enough to take a picture or post a tweet. Digital addicts - they pay attention to their phones and tablets and flickering computer screens as though they were real and the mountains are an illusion.

Far above a bear nuzzles through the brush for late-season grubs. Icy water spumes over the knife edge of a granite ledge to splash one hundred feet below. The first snow dusts the high peaks. A doe and her fawn look for easy food in a garden.

The ancestors smile sadly from beyond the gates of the underworld.

To be continued…..