It’s been years since Gary and I were sitting in a car for a road-trip, but when he called me a few days ago saying he would be in Yuma and had to drive from there to the Bay area for a few days for some meetings, then back to Yuma, I figured, what the hell! We’ll head for Nancy & Steve’s place, and surprise Loki in the process. So, up extremely early for the four hour drive to Yuma. Pretty damn cold and plenty of snow on the road– moonset, icy fog, snow deep in the National Forest, until I drop down 3000 feet to the Sonoran Desert then it’s warmish and dry. Along with scenes of military-industrial development and other realities.

Meet Gary in a part of Yuma that is not on Google, 1000 yards from THE southern border. He had to talk me in — very strange place, hard-core crop-raising every other section line alternating with new or seemingly abandoned California-style suburbs. I drop my car at his friend’s place and we head out in a rent-a-car. West along the border, to the Salton Sea bypass (used to be only a rail access frontage, a bad one! Now it’s fully paved! Bizarre. Gary and I had last been on this stretch of Interstate almost 35 years previous. I remember it was 125°F so we sat in a MacDonalds for several hours before going to camp near the sea. Between the flies, and the earth re-radiating copious amounts of IR energy all night, it was a bad night, then we drove straight on through to Orlando Florida in somewhere between 48 and 52 hours. But that’s another story.

We have a constant conversation from the moment we cross paths. Last time crossed paths was in Missouri last year, spring with Nick, Karen, and Deb. And before that, it was years. Although we’ve talked by phone every few months. So we talk our way past the Salton Sea, through Palm Springs, Yucaipa (used to live there ages ago), Riverside, Santa Clarita, over the Grapevine and gun barrel north on Interstate 5 to the I-650 Bay turn-off to Livermore. Surprised Loki.

ed: This short note is the epilogue for the Migrating:Art:Academies: book. Otherwise because the heavy duty editorial tasks, I didn’t have time to write something more comprehensive on the ideas surrounding movement and learning, maybe next time!

Leaving when done with breakfast and cleaning and packing. A couple rituals yet — gathering some sage and some yellow Weber sandstone powder. A beautiful sojourn. The place is so rich, so un-circumscribable, no matter how many dances of words one would make around it. Best is the ability to press into the body the power of be-ing and the power of life. And Light. And the gravity of the earth. Fundamentals to the heart. The drift of cloud and shift of wider weather patterns, leaving Light on upturned face, changing all the time.

Maybe put out a call next spring to have others join. Then again, maybe not…

What changes flow into the ongoing process of life during solo retreats to power-full places? I think a lot about all the others who I know, and do wish that there were folks who would be able to join me in these places. Some folks I would like to have join me and others, I know, wouldn’t appreciate it. Everything would be different, especially the bushwhacks and the rambles; the cooking and eating, sharing meals, and just hanging out together would recall so many prior times, and the deep and satisfying fun that was had by all.

The hikes: while most attention has to go to the movement itself, as there are considerable risks to walking solo in such places, mind may drift from immediate situation and the larger questions of what has become, what does become of life. It’s more of a noisy mess, but it is easier under these circumstances to do the yogic step away and allow the chitta vritti, the thought-noise, to simply happen, knowing that being in the moment is far more important and has deeper implications than any projections onto future (and very much theoretical) situations or into re-living historical situations. The pull of the un-fettered mind into both those spaces is strong, and the best tonic for that is the risk of solo bushwhacking where there is a steep penalty for not paying attention. I do catch myself every so often, verbally, aloud, slow-down slow-down slow-down, after I make a mis-step or blunder. The most common is when traversing some slick-rock face and stepping on a small pebble. That’s all it takes, send you 10 feet or 100 feet to the next ledge down, or to the canyon floor. Doesn’t make much difference how far, an injury would be immediate life-threatening even if it was a minor sprain — if immobilized, you would have to deal with at least one night out, maybe more, with hypothermia, then dehydration being the most problematic, then the problem of becoming predator food, the problem of attracting help could be very difficult, if in a slot canyon or off the normal known trails. I carry a loud whistle, and do leave small notes in my car which would direct search parties to general areas, but the terrain is vast, and there is much topography that would make searching difficult. I think they would wait a day at least before even checking the car anyway. Unless you told someone specifically that you would be in touch. There is no phone access, and so on, uff. Well, the point is, focus and caution have to be taken very seriously when soloing. I would do things rather differently if with one other or a small group. There is immediately a sizeable extra safety factor. Not that it would suddenly make risk disappear, but an innocuous stumble on the rocks wouldn’t immediately become a life-and-death situation.

What about these time-lapse movies? What are they about? I don’t know what to make of them, but have spent numerous hours making them — 2 minutes per hour is the rate that I’ve been using — a frame every 3 or 4 seconds to make a PAL 24 fps film. I guess I’ll make a dvd or maybe a single work, but have to think of the sound-track for them, that’s difficult.

Anyway, head out, south through Rangely, down the Book Cliffs, through Loma and meet Collin and Marisa at the airport office of their business, the Colorado Flight Center, get pizza and beer, and drive up the hill to Glade Park to have dinner with Bob, their next door neighbor.

Transit of Utah. From west to east, along a winding trajectory from desert to forest to desert, oil drilling, wind power, gas stations, Mormon farms, gold mines, high-security military bases, municipal alarm towers scattered across the landscape — for warning the population surrounding the bases where testing of bio- and chemical-warfare devices is ongoing — warning them of impending disaster. Continuing on the isolated Pony Express Trail, then descending into populated areas. Calling ahead to Dinosaur to see about road conditions. Plenty of snow on the Uintahs, plenty! At the last minute after checking out the Green River campground on the Utah side, I get word that the Echo Park road is open. So, gas up, including the extra tank, and head in from Jensen. Excellent weather, and finally arriving, no one else around, very good. Get the pick of the few camp spaces, #5, 7, and 9 are the best for shade, seclusion, and access to firewood — though shade is not the issue at this time of year, more important would be the access to morning sunshine to warm up — but since there’s no one else around, I can use the #6 picnic table in full sun in the morning for breakfast. So, I take #7 and offload/set-up quickly: already charged at being here once again…

Finally depart, making last-minute passes across all the place. Ship-shape, single-wide shape. Good enough for the next artist coming through. Head out by around noon, tired of waiting on the road to Echo Park to open after these repeated waves of late spring storms rolling through. Head south to follow the southern boundary of the Dugway site, through Gold Hill, in that frontier mode, rough, and the mountains have all been dug up, mined out. Some tough looking abodes, apparently there are a few people who live there year-round, it’s gotta be tough. Join the Pony Express Route at Callao, head east to the Wildlife area, windy more or less, mostly more. Callao is really a frontier outpost. About 8-10 ranch families. No store, no gas, no nuthin,’ just the ranches clustered around some arable land at the foot of the spectacular Deep Creek Mountains (which are higher than the Wasatch in Eastern Utah! The Pony Express Route is an even more strange communications artifact, but one that resonated long in the US imagination, though it lasted only a couple years in actuality — made obsolete by the telegraph cable. But the idea of riding across this landscape in 12-mile spurts (a healthy horse has to stop after that distance when running full-tilt), well, it’s something.

Over night at the Dugway Geode Mines, pick around a bit in the gathering twiLight, but am pretty tired after the drive. Quiet night, though there are threatening clouds rolling through from time-to-time. It’s always tough to pick a place out there to camp at there are no accessible trees, nor even vegetation above the knees, hardly the ankles! Always have the feeling of being exposed.

Today, a group of large Winnebago’s towing large trailers descend around the Enola Gay hangar, spread their leveling legs, expand their living-room sides, deploy external camping chairs, and unfurl their shade awnings. In the large trailers are a range of amateur racing vehicles. Mostly stock cars with over-amped engines. A huge course is set up on the near taxi-way.

Meanwhile, at South Base, a contingent of active Army troops is engaged in a live-fire exercise, complete with fire-finding radar systems and a half-dozen porta-potties, everything obscured in form through the ripple of heat-waves coming from runway one and two and the old taxiways between here and there. In early evening, a contingent of UH-60 Blackhawks come in to land along with a handful MH-6 Little Bird Special Ops ‘choppers.

When a highly-ordered techno-social system meets a disordered system, what are the results? Is it similar to an osmotic membrane with more and less salty water on either side, the fresher water is drawn through the membrane to dilute the salty water? Is the energy-based order diluted and lessened through the contact? A combat situation is, itself, a hybrid sequence of events transitioning between order and disorder at many scales over time– with the different actors intent on maintaining an in-flow of energy in order to maintain their order. It is the ordered expression of collective techno-social energies with the goal of decreasing the order of the opponents system — whether at the single body scale, or at the scale of the wider techno-social infrastructure.

In the case of Afghanistan, the points at which the advanced ordered system (US) can apply weapons to increase the disorder of the opposing system (Taliban) are so limited to be almost point-less. The Afghani society has so minimal an ordered social infrastructure to be destroyed and the relation of individuals to the destruction of their own body-systems (in the case of the martyr), makes the conflict literally sense-less and not win-able in any classic way — where winning is the imposition of a critical level of disorder on the capabilities of the opposition to express concentrated energies that will disrupt the order of ones own system.

Before this chunk of the later afternoon I went down to Blue Lake Wildlife Area to check out the swimming possibilities. The water is around 80F year-round and the lake itself formed through the effects of a geothermal percolation spring. It’s frequently used by open-water scuba divers for certification, and the area shows the signs of heavy human abuse (the BLM doesn’t really ‘manage’ it much).

A forced migration to the Holy City of Moroni. Tire issues — the damaged rear cycle rim from the red clay mishap in southern Utah and the front-end alignment of the truck. Locate appropriate places to effect the repairs before coming over. A monstrous wind from the south dogs the transit across the flats of the Great Salt Lake Desert on I-80 and whips up a blinding dust storm in the middle and at the eastern fringe at the Kennecott Copper mine’s massive tailings dump.

Salt Lake City is quiet, wide empty streets, pedestrians are frequently toting suitcases-on-wheels. There are bicycle lanes and mid-block pedestrian crosswalks with baskets at either terminus with fluorescent flags for folks to carry when crossing.

Retreat when the work is done and after lousy lunch Reuben at The Bakery. Retreat looks like this:

Finally a wander over and around the east side of town, to the potash and salt mining facilities, and on to the Bonneville Salt Flats, with marvelous flat Lighting today. Everywhere, what man hath wrought. Images combined with sounds.

Spending the night in the cab of the truck is no fun, but the snow is coming so hard and fast that there is no way of getting out and setting up the back to sleep without getting soaked and cold. So, park in Milford behind a stranded Hummer. Cold and uncomfortable, but good for toughening the constitution, eh? By the way, the image links now will initiate an image album for the entire month to come, higher-rez images (900×602 pixels) and a nice presentation interface. Comments welcome!

At Linda Leas cafe in Kanab, locals, non-Mormons pursue another religion, worship of java, across the street from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. After the first night out. Wishing for a 4-wheel-drive vehicle to give a greater degree of risk possible. Snow or rain threatening in forecasts, and bentonite clay roads are impassable when wet. The guy working the BLM desk, old, over-weight, tobacco stains his white mustache brown, makes the warnings. He has to talk to foreign tourists and downstreamers a lot, surely. Folks who haven’t a clue about how it works out here. The Grand Staircase – Escalante National Monument is so large, and the country so unforgiving, surely they have to scrape up the dessicated or flash-flood saturated remains of folks every year. On the other hand, this is no monkey-wrench territory anymore, it’s just a place for cheap virtual entertainment via wheeled vehicles with windows. Maybe some stars glimpsed, a whiff of juniper blossoms firing off tart pollen.

Typing like I can’t get over it. Wanting to find something to use, utilize, make happen, profit from, in this movement, this travel, across these space. Spaces that have so little to offer in transit, and less to offer when living, settled, in them. Nothing arrives. Nothing comes. Even with some caffeine enhancement via cappuccino. (Cappuccino here, wondering about the spread, propagation, of cappuccino across Amurika). In territories defined by the dominance of thin and watery drip-grind served by waitresses named Flo or Blanch, in stainless diners. Now, instead, cafes with multi-colored chalk menus on the walls, starting with espresso, then cappuccino, then lattes, and so on, with as many permutations as the local consumers demand to enhance their sensibilities. Retro interiors: Naugahyde, Formica, Vinyl, Linoleum, garage-sale vintage, cluttered.

Accident intrudes on the evening hunt for a place to camp. Again the bentonite clay plays a significant role. Up from Paragonah, into the National Forest a few miles along Red Creek Canyon, and the road starts to get wet, then snow-covered, no match for my vehicle, reach a zenith and decide to backtrack. With no turn-around except back a quarter-mile, I start backing, and a bit too fast, get caught in some old tracks in the mud and bingo! In the very muddy ditch up to the axle, with an overhanging branch almost completely ripping the bike rack off the roof. Shiite! Climb out the passenger side window, shaken, cursing, looking at the graying sky and approaching dusk, and knowing the forecast for bad weather.

Heading out on a three-month road-trip. Tailwind across the reservation at least part of the time. Embarkation for slickrock and slot canyons, salt pans, playa, and rotated fault-blocks. Heavy tailwind expected, along with winter weather for the rest of the week across the entire west. Hope to appear, unscathed, at the other end in Wendover.

The road fills the head with eye-blink disorientation. Transient fragments of thoughts thrum along in no order, no rhythm, as unconnected as any sequence of fated events: reflecting fated events in mind-eyes. Too much seen outside the window, beyond the amorphous silica barrier. And too much not apprehendable because of that attenuated presence versus the full immersion. (Virtual) movement. Looking for roadside memorials this time. Something to lock the thoughts into the reality of mortal coil. Find a few. Stopping for them is always a bit tricky, especially with a 65- or 75-mph speed limit. I drive a bit slow with this old vehicle of mine, and slower still so that once I spy a cross of some sort, I can safely stop on the shoulder. To die on the same stretch of road somehow would not be auspicious; under the wide silent sky and red cliffs, stars, with the smell of spring sage in the air. Wind passing through shredded plastic bags caught on the barbed-wire fence. A small golden bell tinkles vacantly, tied to a wreath of plastic flowers shivering in the wind.

What is the difference between that which is containable in the reduced tracing of recorded, reproduced, recreated image or sound and that which resists the reductive process with an impassive tenacity, no, a passive and eternal persistence. The difference lies in what the observer brings to the reductive process and what the hearer, viewer brings when consuming the reduced trace. It has little if anything to the originary energy of the thing, das Ding, das Ganze, itself. The emanations affect the reduction, there is a direct correlation, but in the technique, the process of reduction is deeply tied to the techno-social. No way to decouple that. (Or is there?)

All the way from telling stories to making movies to painting canvases to building houses.

What is the advantage of shunting the energy of a situation through more and more of the techno-social domain? Or does it matter at all? Compare (telling) stories in person about an experience (sono-linguistic reductions) with posting digital photographs online (visible radiation reductions). In principle a reduction is a reduction is a reduction. And when compared the the situated phenomena itself, any and all reductions are not the thing itself.

The dam at Lake Powell, as with the Hoover, a high-security zone, protected by hired guns. No bags allowed in the visitors center. Celebrations of all that the techno-social can bring to the merely social, along with a big-screen overview of the lake at 59-percent-capacity with a fat white bathtub ring contrasting the red rock cliffs. German tourists debate the advantages of the Best Western versus the Quality Inn motels.

Upheaving, upheaval. Testing dependence and independence. Just when the path looks stable, where the knowns gradually coagulate to staunch the in-and-out-pouring stresses of un-knowing; the flow is not turbulent, the road is straight and wide, with interesting terrains somewhere up ahead. Then one finds a dip, through a desert wash, unseen just a short distance away. In this dip is a mess of flash-flood debris, and a double-fork in the road: change comes along with deep choices to be made between diverging pathways. One is obscured by the morning fog of oracle’s lack, so that what lies ahead cannot be distinguished; the other way may be seen, but with curves that carry it quickly out of sight. The third apparently climbs out of the one dip, and is the road that one perceived from a distance to be the straight and wide, but turns out that there are many dips, as when crossing a wide alluvial fan spreading out from the base of a mountain canyon.

Then there is the idea of the bush-whack. A process that forgets the roads and launches out into the countryside, a self-determined goal in sight or hinted at by the terrain to cover. The bush-whack presumes a base, often, with measured forays out on a daily basis, rather than a continuous and wearing, un-remitting confrontation of the unknown. It is the frontiersman, one who stays at the edge of stable regions, the fraying or un-formed edges. One foot in, one foot out. Solitary. Progress not determined by forward motion, but rather by the growing determination to remain in motion at all. That is progress, in the Light of how life comes and goes, the determination to continue is a hard kernel around which to wrap the discoveries that occur along the way.

My dear friends, let me sing you the song of solitude. Without solitude there is no suffering, without solitude there is no heroism. But the solitude I have in mind is not the solitude of the blithe poets or of the theater, where the fountain bubbles so sweetly at the mouth of the hermit’s cave.

From childhood to manhood is only one step, one single step. In taking that step you break away from father and mother, you become yourself; it is a step into solitude. No one takes it completely. Even the holiest hermit, he grumpiest old bear in the bleakest of mountains, takes with him, or draws after him, a thread that binds him to his father and mother, to the loving warmth of kinship and friendship. My friends, when you speak so fervently of people and fatherland, I see the thread dangling from you, and I smile. When your great men speak of their “task” and responsibility, that thread hangs out of their mouths. Your great men, your leaders and orators, never speak of tasks directed against themselves, they never speak of responsibility to destiny! They hang by a thread that leads them back to mother and to all the cozy warmth that the poets recall when they sing of childhood and its pure joys. No one severs the thread entirely, except in death and then only if he succeeds in dying his own death.

Most men, the herd, have never tasted solitude. They leave father and mother, but only to crawl to a wife and quietly succumb to new warmth and new ties. They are never alone, they never commune with themselves. And when a solitary man crosses their path, they fear him and hate him like the plague; they fling stones at him and find no peace until they are far away from him. The air around him smells of stars, of cold stellar spaces; he lacks the soft warm fragrance of the home and hatchery.

Zarathustra has something of this starry smell, this forbidding coldness. Zarathustra has gone a long way on the path of solitude. He has attended the school of suffering. He has seen the forge of destiny and been wrought in it.

Ah, my friends, I don’t know whether I ought to tell you any more about solitude. I should gladly tempt you to take that path, I should gladly sing you a song of the icy raptures of cosmic space. But I know that few men can travel that path without injury. It is hard, my dear friends, to live without a mother; it is hard to live without home and people, without fatherland or fame, without the pleasures of life in a community. It is hard to live in the cold, and most of those who have started on the path have fallen. A man must be indifferent to the possibility of falling, if he wants to taste of solitude and to face up to his own destiny. It is easier and sweeter to walk with a people, with a multitude — even through misery. It is easier and more comforting to devote oneself to the “tasks” of the day, the tasks meted out by the collectivity. See how happy the people are in their crowded streets. Shots are being fired, their lives are in danger, yet every one of them would far rather die with the masses than walk alone in the cold outer night.

But how, my young friends, could I tempt you or lead you? Solitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen. Solitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny. Many, far too many, have gone out into the desert and led the lives of herd men in a pretty hermitage beside a lovely spring. While others stand in the thick of the crowd, and yet the air of the stars blows round their heads.

But blessed be he who has found his solitude, not the solitude pictured in painting or poetry, but his own, unique, predestined solitude. Blessed be he who knows how to suffer! Blessed be he who bears the magic stone in his heart. To him comes destiny, from him comes authentic action. — Hermann Hesse

If everything now becomes about the Road: it all falls along that infinitely converging line, that pavement rising to the foot, hard, on occasion scraping the nose, the knees, or the palms; it is both that which is down-trodden, and the means to get there. A path for social flows, climbing, gathering, consuming, dispersing. Freedom, indeterminacy, hydrocarbon wastage, imperial protocols, signage, regulation, safety, danger, possibility, newness. On the road, carrying the old with oneSelf, in a worn knapsack, that which is old, known, important, very important.

So, three or four threads: 1) the Self on the road; 2) the encounter with the Other on the road; 3) the road as an expression of the techno-social context for human relation; 4) what to do on the road that cannot be done elsewhere or under other conditions — what the road proffers to life, how one gets there, that and imagining the end of the road (Oz! to meet the Wizard (or Sorceress) hehe, from the Yellowbrick Road to Oz, now ain’t that whacked!).

In that moment I was able, so to speak, to place myself in a future which may one day be realized. I saw not only what I might one day be able to do, but also I saw this — that the anticipation of the event was an augur of the deed itself. Suddenly I realized how it had been with the struggle to express myself in writing. I saw back to the period when I had the most intense, exalted visions of words written and spoken, but in fact could only mutter brokenly. Today I see that my steadfast desire was alone responsible for whatever progress or mastery I have made. The reality is always there, and it is preceded by vision. And if one keeps looking steadily the vision crystallizes into fact or deed. There is no escaping it. It doesn’t matter what route one travels — every route brings you eventually to the goal. “All roads lead to Heaven,” is the Chinese proverb. If one accepted that fully, one would get there so much more quickly. One should not be worrying about the degree of “success” obtained by each and every effort, but only concentrate on maintaining the vision, keeping it pure and steady. The rest is sleight-of-hand work in the dark, a genuine automatic process, no less somnambulistic because accompanied by pains and aches. — Henry Miller, “To Paint is to Love Again”

Writing on the road. The translation of movement and sensual input to text. Learning what filters to apply, what social protocols to apply, what protocols to transcend, what to hold, what to release. Discipline.

Leaving aside the refined mapping of experience-once-removed. And instead, gathering experience first hand, in the moment, where circumspection is wistful, wasteful, or even dangerous.

Music on the road. Traveling minstrels, buskers, harmonica-playing hobos. playing for people on the road, or playing whilst on the road. Meeting at the roadhouse. Beyond the city limits. What goes down when humans engage beyond the control of the proper social order. What goes on outside the ordered flows of town. Interstitial in the sense that between towns lie the open roads. bandits, women and men of loose moral fortitude, and wild animals. The space of chaotic flow.

We suspect that even though travel in the modern world seems to have been taken over by the Commodity — even though the networks of convivial reciprocity seem to have vanished from the map — even though tourism seems to have triumphed — even so — we continue to suspect that other pathways still persist, other tracks, unofficial, not noted on the map, perhaps even “secret” — pathways still linked to the possibility of an economy of the Gift, smugglers’ routes for free spirits, known only to the geomantic guerrillas of the art of travel.

As a matter of fact, we don’t just “suspect” it. We know it. We know there exists an art of travel. — Hakim Bey, Overcoming Tourism

What is the nature of what is feared outside the purview of human controlled flows? Is it merely nature? It is the presence of (or the risk of) death — that singular element that lies completely beyond human control, for ever? It cannot be erased from the wild kernel of being. Some seek the thrill of facing it, some hide in states of paranoid control to keep it as far away as possible, backing away only to fall over a precipice unseen behind. Religion is the construct that irrationally rationalizes the presence of the unknown, of death, and of corrupt social order.

… back to the road …

The body of speed. (hunt and/or be hunted). Movement is the first escape from death. Running to safety, to the nearest tree. Running to fetch the weapon that you left at home. Running for the crowd so that the odds of getting eaten are marginally lowered. Running fast. Running to change places. Running to make a moving target. Running for help! Running to the Library!

The Book as fuel for keeping warm and The Book as weapon: dictionaries and encyclopedias work best for both purposes. Book as pillow. Book as door-stop. Book as object sensed orbiting centers of cultural gravity. Textual asteroids and debris. Escape that field.

The Book as tool for enhancing procreative potential and staving off death. Rather, Books on how to enhance procreative potential and how to stave off death. Reading about how to enhance procreative potential and how to stave off death. Reading-while-driving. Speed. And then it comes. uuuuuhhh.

nah. gotcha, I’m outta here, step on it, hit the gas, burn some rubber, spray some gravel in ‘is face…

viam munire. Stretching my Latin. The Road for Munitions? Or, Road of Fortification or Road of Security. Homeland Security? Interstate Defense Highway System. Autobahn. All roads lead to Rome.

Gazing out the window, not driving, watching the world pass, attenuated, virtual, transitory, and it’s gone.

As long as man’s wants and his desires for military conquest were confined to petty hostilities between individuals or tribes, the necessity for roads other than mere pathways or trails was not felt. With the beginnings of land commerce and the spirit of conquest between nations, there arose the necessity of ways better adapted to the changed needs and conditions, and with the growth of trade and military operations successive improvements in the character of the ways and the means of transportation were made only to give way to others with new conditions made a change imperative. — Charles Whittle in “Ancient and Modern Highways”

We were not a wealthy Nation when we began improving our highways… but the roads themselves helped us create a new wealth, in business and industry and land values… So it was not our wealth that made our highways possible. Rather, it was our highways that made our wealth possible. — Thomas H. MacDonald, Chief, U.S. Bureau of Public Roads

the creation of pathways onto which energy flow is restrictively directed/sanctioned is primarily for the benefit of those who occupy the nexus of power within any particular system. all roads lead to Rome.

death strewn on the highway. roadkill. carnivore, herbivore, amphibian, insect: getting to the other side of the road is just part of the inexorable (natural) systemic flow. Roadkill represents one intersection of human-defined flows and naturally-existing flows. The result of this fundamental intersection is near-death or absolute annihilation, a rapid reduction to component complex molecules. from the thathunk of meatier species to the simple fluttering splat of the butterfly. Leathery carcasses that persist for days despite the brutal pounding of truck tires and hard-to-remove stains on the windshield that resist even the most vigorous squeegee scrubbing whilst filling-up the tank.

Insects with a low weight-to-surface-area ratio can sometimes avoid liquidation by the slipstream effect which will carry them up and over the vehicle. But trajectory is all, and the meatier bugs, the swarming locusts and grasshoppers, have too much mass in their sagging torsos to experience this sanctified reprieve and thus become one with their maker in a soul-wrenching milli-second that can be a marvel of colorful abstraction a-la Pollack.

Along one stretch of the UFO Highway in Nevada, red locusts were on the march northward along a specific pathway that they were intent on following without regard to individual survival. At 60 MPH, the dynamic was such that their flight reaction to the approaching truck got them only a couple feet off the ground, not over the height of the hood, so, the lower grill was a mass of dessicated carcasses by the time we got to the Grand Army of the Republic Highway, a hundred miles away. Many more were simply crushed by the wheels, leaving greasy red-greenish stains on the road and in the wheel-wells: their natural trajectory on the ground was clearly discernible where it intersected with roads. I noticed in the gas station parking lot in Ely there was a small flock of birds who were picking over the the resulting detritus on the ground, and when they could manage, actually hanging onto the grills and directly harvesting the carnage, ‘burp!’ What would the evolutionary outcomes be? Birds that can smell idling cars? Locusts who tunnel for 40 feet underground when they encounter traces of heavy hydrocarbons, with luck, getting to the other side.

Larger animals, the mammals are the worst, though, when encountered at any speed. Moose and elk torsos will behave something like the old paper-straw-through-the-raw-potato trick — inertial physics at its most fundamental. The front bumper of the car will take out the long spindly legs whilst the massive quarter-ton of body-meat, at just the right height to clear the hood, will simply stay where it is. But where it is relative to the speeding windshield means that it will simply obliterate anything in the front seats of the vehicle. At low speeds, this can mean a struggling, injured animal in the laps of struggling, injured humans, gah.

The road-as-pathway is a channel for the flow of energy. It is defined by socially-constructed standards and protocols: a web of socially-applied energies follow the limitations and directedness of those protocols. Roads are a human construct in response to the existence of natural blockages that divert from desired trajectories, that expend communal life-energies and threaten the control of energy resources.

The road is perhaps a synthesized mirror for the human-navigable river, that directed natural space of flow, or the ocean which is the cumulative and spatial confluence-of-all-rivers.

Practically all natural landscapes have some form of blockage as to cause a deviation to even slow and deliberate human passage. So, when there is a lack of free and easy passage, first a foot-path evolves, or is established through troddden effort. This is a trajectory for the body, with the foot leading. Seeking a pathway on foot requires vigilance and concentrated attention in many environments, though this condition is necessarily eliminated from daily life in the developed world — almost completely through the efforts to flatten, level, grade, and pave large swaths of the Terran surface.

When working in Colombia, in the eastern Llanos, for Big Oil, we hired trocha crews who would cut paths in the jungle for the geophone lines to be laid along. Armed with machetes they would hack a one-meter-wide swath along the surveyed lines, leaving short protruding sticks of vegetation cut at an angle — treacherous when struggling along the lines up steep slopes and down. One slip and you would be impaled, and in that country, any break in the protective skin could mean serious infection problems. Walking was never so high-risk: never fall down. It was a choice of absolutely impenetrable jungle on either side, or the possibility of forward/backward movement along these lines. Helipads for extraction were cut in the jungle every 5 clicks or so.

At any rate, the foot is connected to a membered body, so the whole embodied system is implicated in the formation of the pathway. With senses correlating from memorized resonance previous ways taken and the outcomes, choices are made what immediate and final trajectory the body takes. This trajectory is anchored with the planting of the foot and the establishment of balance on that foot. The four corners of the foot root momentarily with the earth. One foot following the other, and that embodied motion precisely driven by the flow of energy entering the senses. Breaking trail can be exhausting, making a way for someone else’s body to pass across the terrain. Following someone else’s path is easier.

Animals make pathways: I am following the cloven tracks of a deer, several of them. I can lope along the game trail at a fair clip, despite the altitude which stretches lungs to a pant, judging how fresh the tracks are by how they desiccate along the edges in the dry western air. But how many hours since passage does half-a-centimeter of crumbled track mean? What happens if I catch up with the deer, if they have stopped to rest or eat? What happens if there’s a mountain lion, an ambush predator, hanging around along this pathway, waiting for an easy mark? I don’t think about it, but keep running as fast as the uneven terrain allows, watching carefully for ankle-twisting roots and rocks. Hooves on a game trail tend to break up the damp soil into loose chunks which make high boots an ankle-saving necessity, though they slow me down, and don’t allow the foot to feel the ground as accurately. I run until I have to stop, sucking the air in with fast but controlled gasps. There they are, 200 yards ahead, traversing a steep slope of piñon, upwind. Okay, today, with a bow, I would have survived a few more days with protein-stuffed belly. The path defined as an enriched flow of food energy.

a brilliant day, 70 F at least. Nick takes the day off and we (Nick, Deb, and I) head out to the Katy Trail at Rocheport (located in Missouri’s Rhineland which was settled by Germans from the Gießener Auswanderungsgesellschaft in the 1830′s). we do a leisurely twenty mile ride southeast along the Missouri to Huntsdale and back. then a nice aprés lunch at the Les Bourgeois Vineyards. the entire area around Columbia is a classic karst landscape of Mississippian Burlington/Keokuk Limestone forming deeply excised drainages, caves, and springs, along with damp soil caused by the limestone weathering to a sticky clay. all along the Missouri River floodplain where the Katy runs are high bluffs of the limestone. the Katy came about as a Rails-to-Trails park and is built on the former Missouri-Kansas-Texas (MKT) Railroad corridor.

Interstate-70 slices across the river, through the deep karst, into the sky, with death-rattle sounds and falling gravel.

Do the rest of the drive, feeling on edge — that the conditions at Flagstaff are deteriorating by the minute. No leisurely road-trip photos, only images from the road, social mind floating on radio scanning instead of ipodding. Doing I-40 west from Albuquerque as fast as possible, unfortunately, as the Light is always stimulating across this corner of Arizona and New Mexico. There are serious winter road condition issues in Flag, as expected, and it’s always hairy to be rocketing down the road at speed on ice, not pavement. It’s been worse, but when it’s worse, the interstate is then closed. Very marginal. Very stressful. A relief to finally drop down the Mogollon Rim 3000 feet where the snow turns to rain.

The verdict is that the truck handles very well in winter conditions — with some weight in the back and marginally decent tires.

Truck buffeted by winds all night, then the snow starts, this propels dreams into fitful scenarios of drifted doom, a winter spent among the dunes. Unable to proceed, popsicled. Up early, road is wind-cleared, but only locally. Weather threats drone on the radio, and whiting-out proceeds. Pack up and head out. Pass the ranger, give a wave, and don’t even stop at the Center, only a mobile image or two fired off. South and west is where the bad weather is. Wolf Creek Pass is closed. Have to call Richard and Holly to check in from the messy Safeway parking lot in Alamosa, they are completely snow-bound in Durango, and Richard is pretty sick, so, head more south than west. But SR-285 continues to degrade and traffic drops off to nothing. A foot of packed and drifting snow on the road, and more coming every minute. First I was bummed at the pick-up truck in front of me going pretty slow, but after a while, I was happy that there was someone else who was on the road and directly ahead of me to at least get some idea what was happening up there. Plows were not making much progress against the snowfall and for a time I thought that I’d end up in a drift, but it gradually tapered off towards Santa Fe. Hands aching from gripping the wheel.

Shut down driving systems at 1400 a bit north of Albuquerque at the Motel-8 parking lot in Bernalillo, too late to do the run all the way to Prescott today without pushing my throbbing head through several glass, brick, and stone walls. Check in with a couple right jolly Pakistani guys running the front desk. Long hot bath. And lying in somebody else’s bed watching enough cable teevee to get my money’s worth. Free wifi, regroup for the next storm coming through tomorrow morning.

Long day after another long day after another long day. Seeing faces materializing out of time and time and times again This is what the road brings, a movement into memory. Blizzard happening across most of the western mountains and plains. Driven by Pacific storms rolling in and intersecting with Arctic air masses. Colorado is no exception. Waking at Steve and Gaan’s place, a quick peek out the window shows flurrying snow piling up. And cold temps. Around 15 F. We hang for the morning, chatting about other friends, and life pathways. And politics and nations and economies and on.

Their place is perched on a small mesa, surrounded by juniper and piñon. Gaan had photographed a bobcat in the garden recently. The view was unbroken north to Pikes Peak and west to the Wet Mountains. Mmmm. They had to leave on short notice to meet the guys coming through the blizzard from Denver to clean the grease trap at the restaurant, so I packed up the truck and headed out as well, over to Bill’s place. It was snowing heavy, and Rt. 50 Was already bad, but I made it over where I dropped off the black walnut lumber (missing three pieces that were buried in the bed of the truck). It’s the remaining slabs of wood from the tree that I helped Dad topple and send out to a lumber mill in Frederick. Bill’s going to make a coffee table for me from the wood. We hung out for a couple hours — I gave him a couple 16×20 prints and we talked about plans for the coffee table. Around 1430 I figured I had better head out so I would at least have a chance to make it into the San Luis before sunset.

I-25 south to Walsenburg was nasty, and just out of Pueblo, a couple cars went ripping by me, three minutes later, one of them had launched across the deep median ditch and head on into opposing traffic, three other cars were involved. Two of them completely destroyed. All the windows were gone in the one that passed me and no sign of anyone in the car. Six or seven cars had already stopped, and I felt sick to my stomach, why am I throwing myself down this iced-over road at 55 mph? Why? I slowed and started to double-flash the on-coming traffic who could not yet see the accident, hoping to slow them down before they came on the site. I doubt some of them could stop. Another life done gone. Ambulances passed about 15 minutes later. A bit further down towards Walsenburg the road dried out, the flurries stopped and the clouds allowed some weak sunshine through. The sick stomach feeling persisted for awhile. Made phone calls, it’s Sunday, free minutes. Turned off onto Rt. 160 West to La Veta pass and the Valley. Temps, never high, dropping continuously. Made the far side of the pass right before sunset with some electric views. Stopped repeatedly to shoot with my substandard SLR. Through Fort Garland, following the circular roots of Blanca, the Valley clear, dry, and cold. The Crestones showing chill gray ahead approaching the Dunes. Then darkness. Empty campground. A ranger cruises through in his truck and we chat a bit. He promises to check on me around 10 am tomorrow.

The Milky Way slashed across the sky. A few Geminids, Jupiter and Venus setting a couple hours after sunset. Cold. Heat up a pot of chili that Bill gave me last night, mmm. Just the thing to be eating under these conditions. Arrange things in the back so I can make tea with cream in the morning without getting out of the bag. It will be brutal in the morning with a clear night at 9000 feet up and wedged between two sets of 14,000 footers. No sun before late morning at the earliest. Hanging in the cab writing this text. So far behind on the log. So many things gone down, so many people crossed paths with. So many stories told and heard.

It’s not just on the sidewalks, but even on the streets, too. Because of special local environmental conditions, a particular phenomena that I have come to label chicorus nordicus. Local variations are especially intense here in Bergen. Because of the tempering action of the marine climate, there are not such extreme cold temperatures in the center of town. Two hundred meters up the sides of the fjord, there are heavy snow accumulations, but in the center, streets and sidewalks stay relatively clear, most of the time as a slushy mess. The local city street-keepers have made the decision to use salt as the primary street clearing device: it is effective and with the volume of rain that falls here, probably does not cause any undue environmental damage. Most towns in these northern climes — those to the north and east of Bergen, away from the balmy marine influence have totally different climates that require the use of crushed rock of one type or another to keep people and automobiles moving safely on icy and snowy ways. Abrasion from studded tires on the street reduces the surface to a double-tracked wagon-way by the time springtime comes and the law that dictates the end of the studded-tire season gives the street-keepers six months of respite to repair the seasonal damage. Here in Bergen, though, things are different. Without the wholesale use of abrasives on the sidewalks, another thrilling visceral and visual manifestation presents itself. Wandering around, even the most casual visitor will notice the ubiquitous distribution of one-to-three centimeter diameter circles in a variety of pale or pastel greens, vanilla, and off-white colors pressed into the sidewalk surface. The statistical distribution has nothing to do with the material matrix — cobble stone, asphalt, stone slab, concrete. And there are occasional concentrations to such a degree that every five centimeters there is one of these expectorated exclamation points. Chewing gum. Too cool and wet for it to stick to the sole, and never too warm in the summer to regain its tack. It stays and stays. No wonder that old wives tale — that if you swallow too many pieces over a time, they will get stuck in the appendix and you’ll end up in the hospital, doubled over and ripe for surgery. Hey, it’s tougher than asphalt!

the next day. shopping, late wake up, well, 0800, which is relatively late. shopping makes me feel terrible, or maybe it is being in Helsinki, looking at every face in the passing crowd to see if I will recognize it. packing bags, reading old texts, finding that I could not be productive at all in the office, just putzing around, time dribbling along, no stopping it. and this evening a party at KuvaTaide Akademie. going to an art students’ party seems something that I shouldn’t be doing. but Solveig called and invited me, so, to see her I’ll definitely go. something about ports and storms. completely behind in email. a hundred more-or-less urgent messages stacked up, and I just don’t have the energy to deal with it. perhaps it’s only the time of year, but it seems that crisis dogs my steps too much of the time. the Lightness in my being drains parallel to time, cutting a groove in the rock of being. weathered. and leaving no thing in its wake, but the groove. danceable? perhaps, but maybe not. shuffle. all is still possible, but it seems so difficult. and I also realize that if I can’t crank up the intensity and tone of this work, it is destined to crash and burn very soon. it is bereft of images, no audio, and the texts are listless and flat. I don’t want them to be tawdry, too revealing. so, the form needs shifting as they are definitely too boring. like there needs to be a alter ego interface. the Other Self, the Real Self.

The unfortunate image of a “road” to which the human mind has become accustomed (life as a kind of road) is a stupid illusion; we are not going anywhere, we are sitting at home. The other world surrounds us always and is not at all at the end of some pilgrimage. — Vladimir Nabokov

Leonids over and gone, clouds here, and the only fireworks were online. met Kaisu for dinner before her exodus to Mexico City tomorrow. culture shift. the week of teaching ended with a small experimentation into Socratic methodologies with the small class I had at the Fine Arts Academy. it was interesting. clearly there were advantages in that kind of focused attention, but how to sustain the level? it is exhausting. I was quite tired after each day of teaching this week, of course, with the level and intensity of things happening in other sectors, maybe no wonder, but, well, I think I just go crash now. gotta send a months’ notification about giving up this flat, too, ANOTHER thing to do. heading back out on the road once again, for several months.

Driving across Colorado yesterday, a very short visit to the Center of the Universe, car full of possessions. Burden-bearer. Arriving at Lenny and Mel’s place in late afternoon. The drive threatened to be under winter-storm conditions but ended up being accompanied by blue sky, dry roads, and sunshine. So much for the Weather Channel on cable teevee. Eye-in-sky-sees-all mentality just fails to bring anything more than another illusion of control to life. There is no such thing as control, control is an oppressing concept of those who wish to oppress. First they teach that oppression is part of life, then they oppress, then they teach the impressionable to oppress.

Blue Spotted Horse said that we all walk two roads in our life. One is the Red Road of spirit that begins in the place where the sun lives. It runs across the world to the place where the Great White Giant lives. The other road is the Black Road of life, the hard road of difficulty, that begins in the place where the sun rises and all the days of people begin, and runs across the world to the place where the Black Thunder Beings live and all the days of people end. Blue Spotted Horse said that the Tree of Life grows in the place where the roads cross. That is the tree we must find and water, so that it will bloom and fill with singing birds. — Eagle Walking Turtle

Life walks many strange passages. Here in Durango. Moving into new worlds, old worlds. Always straddling two roads. Spirit and Life. Loki being a trooper, dealing with changing beds, changing altitudes, changing weather, changing houses, bathrooms, kitchens, people. Names, toys, rules. The constants are a small bag of toys that he accumulates through gifts from people he visits… Mary Ellen offered to do an acupuncture treatment late in the afternoon of the 20th. Lenny and Loki and I with some of their friends with kids spent awhile at the Trimble Hot Springs soaking in the hot waters there.

short-timing yesterday, it was the Solstice

a pilgrimage made to a hill-mountain a hundred kilometers away to think for the sun to fall dormant

it never does but only hovers far above the horizon for hours and with full moon weighing the other horizon in a tense and perfect balance of gravity and Light that leaves us in wonder and burning with a quiet energy of sight and vision and being and each spinning a particular way within the self of body-walls Finnish tangos and arias and beers and drunks and dances and mosquitoes and the Light

the Light

fir trees and aspen-birch branches in full green leaf used for fans to keep bloodthirsty humming at bay from body

a tower to climb we occupy it for a time and time again with occasional tourists Sweden and Australia and Finnish lovers who I see twice, once at the top of the tower then in the Lappish teepee they crouch near the fire hands and bodies entwined loving the others presence and the night that was all the darkest in that teepee with reindeer skins on logs around the skirting and two reindeer out back moulting with pink blood-close skin on their antlers

I stare at the sun so long that it makes a hole when I look at the moon, lacing it with fire and spots while the chill north wind blows I make my muscles relax to allow pulse to travel to extremities to bring heart-warmth

then driving a Mercedes van packed with travelers who came to this place at this time to marvel at the sun-ring-rainbow sky dancing with cloud and Light and rain and a blue sky that reflects in the eyes of many here who look at it even the ones who hardly pause to let it all seep into head through the clear wet lenses the green leaves that just exploded in the change time of spring that is only a week happening like one morning and there it is with the birch trees an empty landscape only green from evergreens and then comes the green from the new things growing greening everything and the new flowers planted in the cemetery with the ravens above in the trees being harassed by the little birds afraid that they will devour their nestlings so that same cemetery around the quiet wooden church is noisy

old ladies filling watering cans and talking gently to the dead when no one is near

is it that old ladies inhabit these spaces naming the old names and the days when those names stopped being when they moved themselves to that part of us that is called memory and is that part of mind memory which drives us more to what we are than any other part of us when nothing else is left?