In this environment I encounter many birds I can’t yet identify: stellar and Clark jays in addition to magpies, much less the common raven I’d thought a crow. Meanwhile, the cardinals, warblers, and finches I knew back east are memories. Even this landscape contradicts my usual referents.

The mailman delivers a long letter from a friend who confesses that sometimes an hour passes before he puts his first word down on paper — something I’d never guess, for his lines flow so naturally. I assumed they originated effortlessly. But to know otherwise?

Don’t force it, as Kokopelli cautions. Wait for the energy to gather.

Keep the pathway clear.

For more insights from the American Far West and Kokopelli, click here.

This is desert. And logging country, too, where the best place to find loggers is in a bar, any bar. Just listen.

“When I’m real loose, I like t’dance t’country-westron music. Out seven nights a week, then a month without any. Can’t work anyplace but woods. Done everything but hemlock. Started skidding horses in Colorado. Now driving a diesel Ford. Not much time for thinking. Slick roads, sharp corners, dumb ladies in the way.”

Here’s how it works, as Kokopelli and I play along.

“Aim a load down logging roads and then highway t’ the mills. A thirty-, fifty-mile stretch each way, four to six times a day while the CB chatters.

“Every spring when the ground’s too wet, the Forest Circus shuts ya down, the heavy equipment breaks the roads.

“That’s our vacation, three months off, taking unemployment.

“Head for Hawaii, Reno, or Vegas. There’s no money in mud. So ya take care of yard work, fix the house, prune the orchards.

“Successful loggers have expensive hobbies like race cars or airplanes. Mechanics, anyway.

“The drought will cut our pay in half. They’ll keep us out. Fire hazard.”

As they say.

Kokopelli tells me doors define a room, more than walls and roofs. Tells me to see their potential. An opportunity to spy or exit at will. Or interrupt. Doors with keys invoke power. Ownership. Think of all the doors in Versailles.

For me, the greatest freedom comes outdoors or while playing a dance with Kokopelli. Now the cat wants out.

Decisions are doors, too. Take style and size. Standardization leads toward smallness. Once, they were French-doubled or twelve-feet tall. Bronze portals to cathedrals. Red doors and oak doors. Lacy castings for an office. Frosted glass at the bank. Now they’re internationally uniform. The small millwright goes under, as well as local characteristics.

When the cat went out, my wife came in. Everybody seems to like her. But I see her other side, when she’s really destructive. I want to scream.

Instead, I blurt out, “To hell with the dark stupidity of their Christian indoctrination! Bring on wild goats! Pan pipes! My roaring conch will shake the walls of this slumber!” I have no idea what prompts that thought. Why Christian, other than the fact it’s the predominant religion in this country? Just where would a person start without any teaching? Most likely, I meant dogma, which I see repeated with only a superficial understanding. But that could apply to any faith tradition, couldn’t it? So just what am I fleeing? And what do I really hope to find?

Maybe it’s a door. Or a corridor. A cavern. A current of water. A trail. A strait gate with a narrow way.

Choose one. And then enter.

I want full awareness. Experience, rather than theory. Ecstasy, especially. For whatever reasons, I veer away from the Judeo-Christian prophetic stream and toward the shamanic traditions, wondering whether the Siberian word shaman arises from the Pali samana, for holy man. I accept the argument that meditation grew out of primitive hunting, the waiting for the game, the belief that game is supernatural, requiring supernatural aid. I must remember to thank the trapped bear, if the time comes. “Boy, do the local elk hunters have a lot to learn,” I whistle — me, who’s never gone hunting.

Kokopelli raises one arm as if he’s holding a rifle. Then, with his other hand, he pulls a trigger. I think he felled what he wanted.

“Yes, hunting antedates farming,” I whisper to no one but him. “See that, Cain and Abel!”

Maybe that’s why I’ve come so far west, just to see the sunrise.

But just as there’s light, there’s also darkness. Trust and distrust.

List the names of deities. As for a supernatural trickster, Mara or Maya seems to relate to Satan, who in turn relates to Coyote. Now for Pan!

Arcane teachings. I consider delving into palmistry, followed by astrology, Tibetan texts, more deeply into Tantra, and back through meditation. If only my paying job didn’t requiring more and more of my time, I might pick up the thread from hunting, tracking holiness through food traditions. The balance of feasting and fasting. The importance of prohibitions as strengthening the ability to say NO as well as reinforcing a group identity. “So what kind of vegetarian are you?”

Kokopelli reminds them this is desert. If it weren’t for irrigation or berry-picking trips to the high mountains, you’d starve.

For more insights from the American Far West and Kokopelli, click here.

My wife, meanwhile, has her own perspective. “Many people think this valley can prosper in isolation, but let me tell you, the local museum indicates otherwise. It’s filled with Pennsylvania long rifles, Ohio flint, a New Hampshire stagecoach, antique cars from Michigan, pianos made in Indiana, Connecticut pistols, even Illinois farm implements. Everybody came from somewhere.” In her case, South Carolina.

Taking her up on the invitation to tour the exhibits, my wife paid special attention to local Indian basketry and beadwork. “Over time, their artistry was pathetically stripped down to resemble coloring books,” she told me afterward. “The gift shop sells greeting cards from Iowa and crafts from what the sales clerk said was ‘Berea, Virginia.’

“Virginia? I replied.”

“The college there.”

“Oh, you mean Kentucky!”

“‘Kentucky, then,’ she said, as if it’s all the same.”

I understand the scowl. “I notice, around here ‘Easterners’ seem to come from such ‘seaboard’ states as landlocked Nebraska, Kansas, and Illinois.”

“That’ll be news to them,” she grins. “Bet they never thought of themselves as Easterners, either!”

Infinite misunderstandings continue, tit for tat.

“Even so,” I say, “this is big sky and cowboy spreads. Even these treeless foothills ignite something in my airy nature. I hope this elation never ends.”

An elation, at least, when I’m out of the office.

I look forward to tonight’s gig with Kokopelli.

For more insights from the American Far West and Kokopelli, click here.

Our landlord explains his own decision to relocate in the valley: “Cities embody man’s attempt to be supreme over all. You tire of the power games, the competition rather than harmony. The back country I love emphasizes what’s greater than man. There I’ll endure avalanches, sliding roadways in mountain passes, storms, grizzlies, even cougars. The city relies on institutional religion, second-hand versions of Great Spirit codified to support the System. No, that’s not for me. My back country upholds individual revelation. Wilderness raises fresh opposition against everything that binds artificially. The back country leads me closer to basic understanding. You need to accept whatever Absolute there is, whatever portion of the Mystery you can chew off at the moment. It makes me recognize how much more there always is. The city’s linear, controlled. But back country is circular, like wave motions. It’s feminine, robust and soft all at once. Its give-and-take reminds me of Emma.”

And, as I also knew, the land can be as hard and unforgiving as rock.

For more insights from the American Far West and Kokopelli, click here.

Approaching thirty years of Aquarius, I consider what happens when the office finally hushes. Despite the line bells and the whine of an engraving machine in adjoining rooms, I’m the only one at a keyboard while the police dispatcher mumbles about deranged prowlers, unwanted guests, a prostitute overdosing with the hypo still in her arm (though she later claims she never uses the stuff, as they all say). Sometimes, pretending I no longer care, I sit and read as blue smoke swirls toward fluorescent tubes.

I wish Kokopelli were here, even with one of his stinky cigars. Or the pipe, the one he plays for music or the one he fills with leaf, either one.

Instead, I ponder ways this place differs from Long Pond and its Mafia hit men out of New York and Philadelphia visit to drop a corpse in icy brambles. A nearby restaurant serves poached venison year-around. Another hit happens near a stone mason’s hunting cabin above Devil’s Hole, on mountainside still fire-scarred where his father had built it like a dock. I’ve been both places. Two hits in one place out of many.

When I step outside for my dinner break, I observe a doll holding a cigarette at nose level, as if waiting for some night bird to perch. While she stares through smoke as if she desires me, I wondered how many have fallen for her tricks. I scan her hand and fingers and spot the glittering emblem. I buy a cheap cigar — for later, whether Kokopelli shows up or skips.

At heart, though, I sing for a restoration of America. A healing of fields, of fish, of human integrity, of Eden’s ideal. I want to live free in the Holy Spirit. “May we turn it,” I pray silently. Be it so!  Genuine repentance. Turning. Always turning toward what’s holy.

At breakfast, I begin: “Praise the hunger that brings us together.”

Kokopelli takes a second helping.

I meditate as befits a stone sitting in water.

I gain bearings in addition to the mountain. Some are also barriers. Nuclear reactors, to the southeast. To the north, Army maneuvers. To our west, the Indian reservation. All posted: DO NOT ENTER.

For more insights from the American Far West and Kokopelli, click here.

On the late-night swing at the office — the one my coworkers call the “presidential death watch,” standing by just in case something major develops — I wait for the product to churn. When it does, I hear once more the locomotives rolling into Union Station overhead, their rumbling through concrete walls as my grandmother returns from Detroit or Fort Wayne. It’s the same rolling thunder I hear later in Manhattan, in the pavement of Lexington Avenue, under the taxis and human footsteps. Tonight these trains roll along spider webbing.

Although I now live in desert, my office resembles offices everywhere. In the morning, chubby wheeler-dealers strut into the room and bark orders. In this case, they’re Texans clad in polyester and strings ties. More gyrating rolls spit out headlines under the ceaseless deadline.

At times I long for an appointment as serene as a winter pond. Make an offer. The owners want more. They grin and demand, boy. Watch the shit.

I ask Kokopelli, “Why do people avoid bare truth? What virtue is found in complication? Why can’t I simply stick to the steps of the Way? How much opportunity slips away when entanglements dim my view of my Guide? What will be my first big break? Or three?”

“How the hell should I know,” he grins.

He knows, all right. No doubt about it.

~*~

When I arrive home, she greets me with a mischievous grin: “I’ve only lied once or twice in my life and this is the third time. Welcome to the split-pea patch of my existence.”

For more insights from the American Far West and Kokopelli, click here.

Initially, I regard the mountain as another slumber-induced fantasy. Its climax appears pristine, boundless, haughty, mesmerizing, even eerie. Over time I behold its hideousness and terror as well. Such beauty may suddenly turn fatal. Timberlands netted with trails and campsites, plus unfettered wildlife, extend from its ivory helix. These opportunities are my primary rationale for migrating to this corner of the nation. But these woodlands border desert, and none of my maps alert me to the consequences. Not even Georgia O’Keeffe’s brilliant renderings of New Mexico, artwork I long admired, hint at its harsh thirst. Rather, the paintings emerge as another kind of dream to be savored, confined to a gallery or oversized pages. Besides, my definition of desert would have required camels, or at least organ barrel cactus, neither of them found in the cheat grass and sagebrush foothills surrounding my new home and workplace.

A glacier-glad mountain resembles a foaming waterfall. It is, after all, an endlessly frozen cataract. Below it, in late spring or early summer, breastworks are laced with plummeting streams racing toward September irrigation in desert to the east. On the clearest days, Rainier’s ice sparkles; its beacon flashes sixty miles to the orchard where we dwelled. At sunset the inactive volcano’s shadow is a finger reaching toward the rising full moon. It points as well to places we’ve abandoned.

The predominant mountain is also the moodiest feature of the vista. Everything’s arrayed in reference to this pillar. To observe it over time is akin to regarding one’s beloved. Neither the zenith nor one’s honey is as immovable as one presumes. They are not the divinity. They’re more accurately repeated dreams, where some episodes fade out over the years while others intensify. Sleep visions of the soul, having one foot in the dreamer’s past and the other in the present, dance on water. Sometimes they drown. Even a mountain.

You should see the way Kokopelli makes it dance before sunrise.

For more insights from the American Far West and Kokopelli, click here.

On scattered reservations, a few elders rise before dawn each day and summon the sun to return. Don’t scoff. When I, too, get up in the dark and meditate, I feel my own self-confidence rising. Watch the world awaken. Light a wood fire, something I sit beside and watch for hours, its flames more imaginative than television. Bask in the radiant warmth.

Kokopelli, night owl that he is, still slumbers.

My wife, in another room, rolls toward the wall and finally rises to join me.

There’s a science, and then there’s an art. In the pyre, paper first chars, then shrinks, and finally explodes. Only then do flames engulf it. “Consider the bomb a ream would create,” I grin at her.

“Now who would you want to bomb, Buzzard?”

But I also know how difficult igniting that ream would be, and how difficult to keep it burning. Watch carefully and misconceptions turn to ash.

In the continuing drought of that fall and winter, I explore national forest well into February. Areas that should be buried in a half-dozen feet of snow are instead bare. Atop one mountain, I look over a cliff. “I think it’s dolomite.” Maybe it isn’t. Maybe the identification isn’t earth-shaking important, but learning the names of places and their minerals, fauna, and flora adds dimensions to a place. Improves your chances of survival, too, if put to the test. For now, I scramble on the scree and realize that white painted stones at the cliff’s edge marked out a heliport. Far below my feet, a table of forest spreads into basins that are invisible from my vantage, and other places I’ve already been. I trace Forest Service roads, such as they are — 1707 from Raganunda to the top or 601 down to Willy Dick’s. “Keep elk gate closed,” the sign reads when I came out, passing a few back country ranches to the highway’s rush and debris. Far above all that, I sing out: “God bless a bloody rib cage above gray fuzz. Perhaps we’ll have rain in the morning! We shouldn’t be kicking this dust.”

In a zero-degree fog, the sun rises as white as the moon.

“Let our liquid flow again despite this desiccation!” I cry in my dreams. “Why is it so difficult to recall the thoughts rainstorms instilled?”

“You put too much value on sorrow,” Kokopelli tells me. Even in my sleep, that old guide’s still at work.

For more insights from the American Far West and Kokopelli, click here.

Someday I’ll learn the identities of clouds. Buy the chart, memorize their qualities and forms, and then watch the flowing sky afresh. This is, after all, yet another strand of mapping.

From childhood, I’ve absorbed maps. Mind travel. Concepts augmented by photographs and writings, which have often furnished a sense a such familiarity that when I arrive in a new place, strangers stop me to ask directions, even on my inaugural visit. Foliage, waters, buildings, and people fill in the lines of his maps as they stretch toward some new border. But this move, with its desert, has been an exception. Nothing’s been predictable or particularly comforting. Besides, I experience a vague agitation when venturing to the edge of my known universe. If possible, when visiting new locale, I push out a few miles further, to determine what’s over the next ridge or river — or at least down the road — as if to anchor myself within some context, rather than remain at its periphery. Curiously, I feel more secure when placing that border at some shoreline or rise — countryside, at the least — rather than within seemingly endless tracts of housing, factories, stores, and pavement. Even a round earth has places where monsters may lurk. Gaps exist in any map. Consider the clouds. Everything is, after all, changing. Even that rock, where Kokopelli is sitting.

For more insights from the American Far West and Kokopelli, click here.

Any workplace holds confidences you can never reveal. Not that you don’t want to expose company secrets. Then, considering the office computers, fax machines, and photocopiers, you realize they’re incapable of guilt. They simply do their job — and you might find that unsettling.

Whenever I do manage to tap genuine emotions regarding this employment, no one’s more shocked than myself. Take something as simple as a pane of glass between my desk and the trees outdoors. Even on my job in Appalachian mountains, I wanted a window. One the size of a book would suffice, although a picture view would be preferred. I’ve always appreciated a panorama, a sense of precisely where I fit into the weather of a particular day. Instead, I feel trapped underground, half-buried in regulations and routine. Only a band of natural light at the far end of the fluorescent-and-steel expanse hints of sun, moon, sky, or clouds — and even that aperture is tinted. Why are my hours on the job so cut off from the rest of life? “We may as well be coal miners in carbonized veins or muscular razorbacks sweltering in midnight foundries. Is it only the sun we miss? Examine the calendar. Check on the moon’s phase.”

I could just plot my escape. I am surrounded by desert. Trek there alone. Right to the heart.

He recall the words of another friend who spoke of the paradox of Zen Buddhist freedom: the very limitations the practice imposes also lead to an extraordinary freedom. An individual who’s free in the Spirit can be placed in prison and yet not be captive — persecuted and yet unbowed — denounced and still spotless.

The Dedicated Laborious Quest, as my Teacher taught, is a truly free way.

Free, yes, with the labor.

I pick up the phone and hear Kokopelli’s whistle. He wants us to get going. Then tells me of the dance where we’ll be playing.

For more insights from the American Far West and Kokopelli, click here.