Powell and Cody, Pt. I

 Man, curious man, you were once that which lifted your eyes over the rock, stood like a statue and watched as the swallows nestled or flew like sparks from holes in the sandstone slabs. There was no road, no path, just a jumbled landscape of stone and desert. You left a thin trail in the dust when your foot left the soil on the riverside. It stayed for a moment until wind and weather scraped your traces from the dirt. Only a few light feet wandered this way before, abandoning the isolation and loneliness that everyone felt when together. You listened to the stories spun round the fire, and something floated ephemerally through the spaces between the words and thought, evaporating in the smoke as it went to the stars. There is a bigger thing about than us, a thing that heeds only to a deeper insight than vision or sound or touch can relate. Your eyes have never beheld it. But if sought by the grasping will, its presence was affirmed, but it was not known. Never would it be known. You go in search of it however you can. Every pilgrimage gives something new. This is what made you leave: to find it and to feel it. The hints of the stories were fleeting like smoke, but to witness that thing for a moment was to transcend being and time, to affix yourself in eternity.

The swallows and clouds farther up flit about my head while I rode, thinking all disconnected thoughts, the question 'how soon will the town come?' floating beneath the rest. Powell was ahead of me somewhere. My dad had told me that his friend John lived there, friend from the California days when they'd worked for a theater outfit together. I'd apparently met him in my third winter, but I couldn't recall it now. So much is lost in the haze of childhood. They used to poke around in the subgroups of post-60s San Diego, figuring out what God was and doing whatever asceticisms they thought they needed to at the time.

A river passed under me with an irrigation canal running from it, branching into the dry fields before a bend in the road brought me into the ramshackle lines of the town's first buildings. I settled into silence at the town's library to write while waiting for John to ring on my phone. Somehow he couldn't get through and thought to try calling the library. A girl came up to me while I sat there typing, “Are you Nathaniel? You have a call at the desk. Somebody named John?” I followed her and picked up the phone where it lay on the counter.

He'd be home from work later on and had told me he would call me on my phone this time. It had rained sometime, and puddles were left in the streets. I pedaled my bike around and found an empty park at which to read at a sheltered table. Gray and blue clouds were mixing above, their layers shifting against one another. A sudden, powerful wind heaved the air east and grew wild, blowing rain on me. Shielding my eyes with my arm, I moved to the leeward side of a shed to keep from the weather. The sun was wiped away, and a constant rhythm of rain rapt against the shed's wooden panels. I sat in the grass and waited.

Across the street, a man in a fenced corral trod with a horse, hunched forward, tilting his hat against a cyclone whipping dust high about them. He went on with his chore. The rain faded, leaving the howl of rushing winds through the empty streets. Filings of gold settled to the bottom of the clouds and, for the briefest moment, the color was taken on by all the town, as if it came from somewhere within. Through the skin of the trees as they waved, and the grass, the light posts, the shimmering streets and the homes, I saw everything like some forgotten ideal.

Daylight darkened and the town faded away. Still there was no call. I took up my bicycle and walked it to the street, ready to find a discrete place nearby to sleep. I looked down the street. The headlights of a car, reflected in the puddles, turned and came toward me before slowing to a halt at the curb. From the window a man's voice hollered, “Nathaniel?”

I jogged up to the car. John's face was in darkness. He explained to me, “I guess I still have a digit wrong in your number! I thought I'd drive around, keeping an eye out. I just asked myself, 'Where would I go on a rainy night?'” He said he'd drive slowly so I could follow to the house. “I assure you, you are welcome. Stay as long as you need.”

In the morning I stayed in the blankets for a moment, drifting back from sleep to the soft sound of a guitar in a far room. John was strumming out chords, placing his lyrics to their notes as he wrote. He seemed pleased when I had come out of my room, and he took me to the kitchen, waved me into a chair at the table and set two muffins on a plate before me. I could see him clearly now in the morning light, with his soft, obliging face. A stoicism, that time will teach to some, ran beneath his casual humor. We sat in adjacent chairs talking. His wife, Holly, entered the room briefly before leaving to her job for the day. She had gone about the kitchen returning a few dishes to their rightful places and had wiped the counter tops with a towel in a calm, if somewhat removed, manner. Through each evening I'd come to know her son, CJ, over supper, an articulate dark-haired boy of about my age.

John was telling me memories of my father which had been stirred to the surface of his mind recently, just now shed of their dust. He recounted stories, the events of which had swayed my own formulation even before my birth. They had the import of my own experiences, only once removed. After all, we're nothing but tapestries woven of our parents' fabric. I was grateful to hear and to try to understand, but the time soon came for him to depart. There would be more opportunities to learn. I returned to the room and fell onto the bed in the quiet, empty house, staring up at the white of the ceiling. In this quiet I spent the next few days, writing, before I moved onto Cody.

On the final day, John took me into Cody with him. A package would be delivered to the post office for me, and I had to wait until it was. With my bike disassembled in the rear of the car, he parked at the store's back door. It was a boot store on the main street strip downtown. He walked before me, guiding me in and showing me his work area. Leather scraps were strewn on the floor, brushed to the foot of the walls. Cowboy boots stood in lines, set on the floor in pairs with tags, waiting for repair. Some drooped or were tarnished; others were hardened and cracked by stirrups and the trudging through the dirt of ranches. John shuffled between the machinery and stands, carving soles, or gluing and nailing fresh heels, working his hands efficiently over the leather and stitches, instructing me in whatever he was doing as he went about it. While he spun a knob, pressing a pair of black boots in a vice, he fell into a rhythm of work and began talking about other things. He deviated from boots to the philosophies of Nietzsche and the other “dead philosophers”, who were trying to feel their way in the dark, as he saw it. That's what we're doing, groping in the dark. The mast is open, and there's a dark sea in every direction, but we don't know what fantastic thing might be swimming right below us.

Photograph albums: 1, 2,  3, and #4.