Austin Pick — TEXT— MAINFRAME

April 2005—"fire my bones in the furnace of daylight"

text & photos by Austin Pick

Coming in low over the desert, from Phoenix headed for Joshua Tree, we'd just crossed the California border by about 20 miles when a back-of-mind buzz from the engine-box spoke up and pitched to a heated whine, the floor vent coughing up a few sad gasps of smoke, funerary incense of failed rubber, the awful noise rising in distress as we neared a rare rest stop —the first and last for 50-miles— riding the exit ramp curve and the engine cuts out as we enter the parking lot, leaving us with a shrinking momentum that carries us, is just enough and carries us coasting at a slow roll finally into the slender white arms of an empty parking space, our highway yacht run aground after all these thousands of miles, beached in an ocean of smoldering sagebrush and altering the old aphorism to read: "California AND Bust," for we'd made it, after all.

Three days stranded in the desert town of Blythe, sleeping in the van where she rested in the Goodyear parking lot, awaiting the arrival of a working alternator. Burning off our breakdown karma, which we must have owed the road after months of good fortune, after a month of running the van hard in the mountains and deserts, the high forests and low boulder-brained canyons of Colorado, Utah and Arizona—the American Southwest...

Leaving our lovely friends in Colorado Springs, we passed through the rangy foothills and river canyons of south-central Colorado before ascending into the venerable and thickly snow-crusted heights of the Rocky Mountains. Bright and beautiful days in the mountain playground town of Crested Butte, snow-shoeing steep slopes amidst the Ruby Range, the soft repose of these stone giants in their robes of grey aspen and mottled evergreen belied by the crisp treachery of unbroken white, our every step an effort, an exhilaration.

Two days later and we're down in the desert, exploring the dry striated canyons and ancient cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde, where the sheltered ruins of a lost people continue to add dimension and fullness to the austerity and reaching openness of the high plateau, despite the bustle and blurbery of tourists. Are we tourists too? Perhaps we're all tourists, visitors in the harsh and uncompromising wilds of the high deserts and canyonlands, but I feel more like a pilgrim, come to open myself and be saturated by the realized purity of the elements in an incidental harmony, cradling the cadence of eons.

And so we go into the vast furrowed landscapes of southern Utah and northern Arizona, their uncountable canyons, signatures of invisible rivers; impossible monuments of lumped and congealed sandstone; elephantine lips of calcified crème; temples of terraced, broken sea beds; goblined buttresses and towers; the streaking brilliance of mineral color; alien forms of cactus, twisted juniper, yucca afire with blossoms; the patchwork abstraction of crusted lichens; cloudstack and endless azure; the scuttle of lizards and inquiry of owls; our own footfalls in the hot sand; the sigh of the shade; the cool glaze of moonlight; the silence; the sun --- we rush and rush forward, spindling sentences too flimsy to sling around the roaring locomotive of life come shooting through the canyons of our minds, my head spins in the highway's crackling gatling barrel of post-mississippi America, the skin of the earth raging in multiform permutations of the buddha-dharma's most excellent exclamation: everything impermanent and momentously expressive of the same organic algorithms that structure this consciousness now newly clarified by the staggering beauty and tectonic scale of grand planet in a crumbling show, for no bullets of thought can puncture or shoot down the abiding genius of Gaia revealing even the slightest turn of thigh --- we meditate daily and vagabond along the emerging vectors between the locations of friends and family, dhamma centers, cathedrals of wilderness, bursts of weather in the big empty

"sabbe sankhâra anicca" said the buddha. Everything flows.....

Viscously, through the arid heat, the mud and rain, ever only as fast as our feet would carry or our wheels would spin, we passed through some of the most remarkable places on the planet. Such was the month of April, an extended sojourn through the freakish beauty of the American Southwest, the glowing lonesome naked earth heart of the continent --- I couldn't have known, will never fully know the true scope of this great land, and all the squirmish writhing and song of civilization, all the heated surge of humans and concrete, all the reach and rapaciousness of this nation-state seems trifling and burlesque, a momentary noise of flys, a brief tremor of sensation in the resting body of calm, eventually to pass away...

"That thing made it all the way from Maryland?" said the ranger at Canyonlands National Park, looking us over in our dusty bug-splattered stegosaurus van, two hubcaps missing, gone to who knows where. "And she's gonna make it back again?" he quipped, jokingly skeptical. Oh she made it back alright. But coming in low, from Phoenix headed for Joshua Tree, and the desert refused our efforts to leave, held us for a few more days in the furnace of her wide-open skies, at least one more lesson, boys, patience and time for reflection. I know my own aridities better now. Amazing the fluctuations a single personality makes among strange attractors, shifting contingencies and meanings, tumbling in time within the sandstorm sanctuary of this particulate pageant --- we abrade, are abraded, eroded, worn and refined by the way of the world and each other, shaped and shaken down to a shimmering essential crystalline shot blown through the cannon of cosmos, casting long question marks into the canyons of consciousness, and drifting, drifting, often obscured but occasionally cusping the brink of things, miles and miles on the long-gone road, hidden observatories of our inner geometry, millstones grinding fine

YOURS with LOVE, A

07.03.2005

I know that part of the certainty in my aim is an anger that will not allow the rolling woodlands and hilltop pastures of my psyche to be bulldozed by TV, non-nutritional food, fabricated news, tweed socialization, pedantic file-cabinets of knowledge, or loyalty rallies to leaders, states, gods, and licensures. —Paul Fleischman

Live with gratitude for food and thankfulness also for any difficulty, pain, or sudden disappointment, seeing those too as grace. —Bahauddin