Lost Again...

“We washed the dishes in the gurgling creek. The roaring bonfire kept the mosquitoes away. A new moon peeked down through the pine boughs. We rolled out our sleeping bags and went to bed early, bone weary.” From The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac....who died due to a lifetime of excessive drinking in 1969 at the age of forty seven...my mom graduated from North Sanpete High School in 1969...Japhy Ryder, a book name for the Zen poet Gary Snyder who is quoted, as having said, among other things, “I sit and smoke a pipe and drink tea and hear the wind beat the slender eucalyptus limbs like whips and cyprus windrow roars.”

The book ends with this line: The shack and the mountain would understand what that meant...

I consider Canal my "home" canyon, but Spring City Canyon also holds beauty and memory. It's not Granite Peaks or Trout Streams, there's no resorts or really any reason to go up there at all...I'd stay away if I were you...and most people do, they stay away by the thousands, and that's just the way I like it.

With the advent of the ATV twenty-some years ago, the road have become a popular trail, but it's still a road to those of us who remember what it means, what it's like, to drive on a rutted, muddy, slick-as-snot, two track...

My mom wanted some flat rocks for a flower garden she was making in her back yard, so we loaded up three, four-wheel drives and headed for the rocky hill just above Windy Point at ten-thousand feet.

Plenty of old snow up there, and on June 13th, some new snow fell as well....it's all about how SLOW you can get your truck to go...and when ever you start to slide, and your mind tells you to hit the breaks, well, that's probably when you need to give it some gas...

Even if I do join TWITTER at this point, well then, well, it's kinda like that movie Titanic. I have never in my life watched that movie (I already know how it ends) and now if I watch it I think I'll lose something, I'm not quite sure what, but something...

I took a quick jog into Canal Canyon this afternoon. Its been an unusually cool early summer in the middle part of Utah, and I don't often see the canyon in the mid-afternoon this time of year. The sun cut through the remaining rain clouds, and hit the green and fresh canyon square in the face...

I ran (when I could) and walked to recover.

I'm not doing my knee (surgeons be damned), not this year, not after all of this, so I'm gonna pretend that it's just fine...it's just fine...

So is Canal Canyon. It is as beautiful and important to me, as any other place.

The wrist operation may well be remembered as THE biggest mistake of my life.

Riddle me this, why is it that MORMON doctors can give me narcotics through my veins, mingled with my oxygen, and in pill form...

But, they look poorly on my for smoking a little something-something?

I always have a hard time sleeping the night before an adventure...

Friday night, I dreamed a dream.

I was hunting turkeys and deer in Spring City Canyon, except, Spring City Canyon wasn't ours any more. There were shops, crowds and outdoor coffeehouses in all the places I've gone all my life to find solitude and beauty.

My brother pointed to a flock of turkeys moving in and about the chairs and legs of the patrons in a crowded cafe. One of the Toms in the flock had stunning red tail-feathers.

Instinctively, I shot him with my 30-06 rifle, because I really wanted one of those red feathers to hang in my Nissan.

(The turkey feather here was retrieved from a Tom I followed up the Lower Calf Creek Falls Trail early one morning while my family slept. I followed his tracks passed some of the most pleasing desert I know of. Just prior to the falls and the pool, he left this feather for me, it had to be for me, no one else was there.)

As a waitress came running toward us, I realized how imbecilic it was of me to shoot in a amongst people. I was sick to think that I'd shoot the turkey with a high powered rifle in that situation...

In the “real” world, I'd have been dragged to jail with the waitress bawling me out the whole way...

But, she wasn't even mad, no one was. She asked me if it was I who had shot because she wasn't sure if it was me or her son who was also hunting in the area.

She then pointed over her shoulder to where her son had set up on the birds.

I woke.

Later that morning in the desert, Adam and I watched this undisturbed mother tend a nest of Eaglets.

Some how, all of this is connected...it has to be...

Then, at school I was playing tag and tripped over my own feet and fell, destroying my right wrist...

When they put me to sleep so they could re-set it, I dreamed that I had died...

I joined the light in the universe.

After a while, I began to miss my family...

As I fought the gas, I sat up a took a swing at the doctor. I didn't put him down, but then again, my right hand was broken.

The saddest moment of my life, so far, is when they put me back under. The physical and mental torture of that, of all that, will not soon be forgotten...