we will rocket the sky.

ryan adams. "la cienega just smiled;" currently my favorite song. sitting in a park outside the cedar city shakespeare theater, watching the students walk by. the pinkish-red hills off to the east, lit by sun. spiders with long legs, walking delicately across a man's tired arms, attached to a body with legs more tired than the arms. the spider drifts to the red bench and crawls beneath. oh, what a brilliant song. seek it out i say, seek it out. "raise my glass, 'cause either way i'm dead..." how strange it is to emerge from the desert, and a mere day or two later, the comforts return. the clean skin and cut nails. scabs that heal. hair that does not smell so poorly. food, from somewhere other than a gas station. oh, thank god. the laughter, a bit less maniacal.

so yesterday we rested. and rested and rested and rested and rested. and we are blessed. blessed with sun and a light breeze, and grass to lie upon and nap. black licorice ice cream at a drugstore where we sit to order, feeling lost to another era. a grocery store with terrible produce, which reminds me of how amazingly spoiled i am.

i call eterprise to rent my car to drive to salt lake and the far from affable gentleman tells me that they do not rent one way vehicles. i tell him this is absurd. i call avis. same deal. i call u-haul. far too much money. i call the 800 numbers for the rental companies, which proves useless. the brain turns. is there any way i can ride the 300 miles to salt lake by friday morning to catch my flight? possible, but doubtful. do i buy a used car and sell it when i get there? no, too risky. i call the cedar city travel beaureu and find my path. an airport shuttle from st. george {a city south of here} that will retrieve me thursday morning. ahhhhhhhhhhhhh.

as we laze about on the grass, a woman approaches and asks where we're headed, the most common of questions these days. "maine." "are you staying here tonight?" we reply "yes." she offers her home and dinner and an evening with her husband and daughter.

oh, the gifts of the universe.

lannie and erin and the 18th month old addison whom is described as "grave." adorable, but grave. we walk to their home and pick wild raspberries in the back yard. addison's nose runs rivers. it drips from her nostrils, over her mouth, down her chin, and onto her chest. she cries, shatters the sky really, until lannie rides his own bike off to the hardware store with her screaming along behind in a trailer. we hear the piercing drifting away, as we chop spinich. for dinner we will have chips and homemade salsa, salad, and calzone. beer. it feels so amazing, to sit here in this back yard {on a chair for fuck's sake} and talk about music. bicycles. camping trips. fresh fruit. their friend paul is there, whom addison seems to be absolutely smitten with. she does not eat all evening, until paul feeds her. she stares at him endlessly with her endless blue eyes and puffy cheeks.

i call my mom to wish her a happy birthday, nearly missing it as i just can't seem to keep track of the date out here. she apologizes for leaving the phone abruptly days ago, but said that she got so sad, and worried and missed me so much that she couldn't take it. she wanted to cry out, "jeff, just come home...we'll go out and try on hats and have lunch like we did when you were ten." her love brings tears. oh how quickly we all grow, how quickly life runs by.

we sleep like kings. on beds in a house. we wake and have tea and coffee {respectively} in a kitchen. lannie has gone to work. erin, addie, mike and i drive up the canyon and hike for a few hours. the water is stunning. cold, cold, water, running down from the mountains. we jump rocks, and soak our feet in the running ice, the frigidity of it shaking the bones.

again, in the park. writing. reading. gerardo nunez arrives in the headphones. and i move north, which will send me even further north. across skies and borders and into arms. the bikes rest in a shed, awaiting our bodies. our lust. the pushing of our legs.

a highway littered with cars. 4 lanes each way. the first since sacramento, ca. i am amazed by the number of people on the earth. the number of places. i sit in the shuttle van from cedar city to salt lake, a van full of white haired women and a few younger by a decade. we talk about the strange culture of polygamy. the sickness, that they marry off the 13 year old girls to 50 year old men. nothing new i suppose, as it has happened for centuries, millions of years really, the world over, but it burns me nonetheless. feels wrong. i think about moving to canada, and marvel at the fact that there are people there too, living their lives. people, all over the earth, living their lives. loving and dying. suffering broken hearts. riding bicycles. the woman in the front seat, tells of fishing in canada with her one-legged husband. i want to ask how he lost his leg, but can tell that she will not speak of this. they caught halibut. 400 pounds of it. took it home for the freezer. "we got so damn sick of that stuff. my god. finally just threw it all away." she laughs. i do not think this is funny.

these women do not like the fact that i do not "walk with jesus." the woman with the hawaiian husband understands. sharon. the women speak of the traffic. they despise the traffic. why is there so much obsession with traffic? they also dislike the fact that i am moving to canada~ "no way...i would never leave the home of the free," the woman in the front seat with the one-legged husband says. the white haired woman to her right adds, "the home of the brave!" i shake my head. they complain of the road construction. i comment that they appear to be adding lanes to lessen the traffic. "why can't they do it at night?" they all chime in with a buzzing of "yeahs."

alas, how selfish we can be. the road moves quickly. my dizziness begins {i happen to have a rather sensitive equilibrium}. i will close the computer. watch the cars. listen to my growling belly. be patient. i imagine that man, hobbling along on crutches, the air blowing past where a leg once was. a knee and a shin and a foot. i grab my own calf and massage its tired muscle. it is a string, a path, a river unto my hip. it is all connected, all tied together like the days of the desert. a plane that leaves at 6am will hold this leg of mine. both of them.

we will rocket the sky, a big shiny mess of metal, that moves a great deal faster than a bicycle. amazingly fast. relentless. stunning.

Posted by jeff pitcher at June 26, 2004 08:51 AM

....................................