The rain finally came and the ash-swept valley gurgles with sighs of relief. The mountain is all hazed away and the locals sit out strumming with fans while the hobos and and gypsyfolk make bonfires and play kickball with beers in their hands. I've found paradise, but it's not yet the pair of dice for me. But still I hear them all (Please click on the title to this entry to get the music in my head in your head) - ukeleles and banjos, harmonicas, and stringsong strumming. Always strumming.
I left Princess and came down to T-town, Talkeetna, the town Northern Exposure was based off, and began a new life as a traveling bum. I've begun introducing myself as Theo (though a handful of people around met me while I was still going by my old name, so I'm stuck in a strange nomenclatural limbo) but I usually fail to respond at first when people call that name out. I think it will take some adjusting.
Now I wear overalls with no shirt, sometimes a straw hat, but sometimes bareheaded, and $5 Blues Brother sunglasses and I prefer to be barefoot. My first night I slept with the bums out on the island in the middle of the Susitna river that we had to wade for 10 minutes through waist deep, ice cold water to get to. But mostly it's been sleeping when and where I feel and grooving with chance encounters in a small town with no police where weed is bought and sold in the park in the center of town and beers are drunk everywhere. Last night we played kickball with the only "rule" being that if you are on the field, you've got to have a beer in your hand at all times. As night rolled in, the ball faded and competition spilled it arbitrary smats like the sloshed of beer from cans as balls came flying at faces.
We had a dance party down on the river's edge and the sun comes and goes but the light still never fully leaves us. I believe the stars will finally return in a week and a half or so (I've heard late July or early August). Been sleeping in tents and as I stumble about town, old co-workers from Princess spot me and buy me beers for the sake of our short-term friendships of the last month. Twigs is covered in tattoos with long bleeched dreadlocks, anarchic stories of prison, travelling, and protests, a swash of literature, and a general groove that doesn't surprise me Mara fell in love with him at first sight. Johnny Lungs, in overalls as well, a 5 year travelling gypsy, bushing beard around a spherical head with sparkling eyes under a farmer hat with anarchy pins: a real hitchhiker with hugs and open arms. Feet bouncing and rounds bought all round. Twigs bought me ice cream on food stamps.
By the river I meditate and watch time pass in all its fierceness. This is a state so fast and wild, while the hearts of the locals groove with love and the pace they need, which is barely that of the clouds, the world around us goes from 20 feet of snow to a lung and bounding summer back to snow in a blink of an eye. Storms churn, rivers run faster and fiercer than any I've ever seen, the mountains scream into the sky with a desperation matched only by the diving talons of the eagles and the swarms of the state bird: the mosquito. Everything that isn't human is so desperate to grow and flow and eat and fly and burn out like a roman candle across the swiftly dying summer air. And the people are just mellow and weird and groovy and this is one of the great Republican strongholds of America but the most socially liberal place I've ever seen. It's not about public opinions here, it's about silencing tyrants and letting the free live alone and untouched like the mountains and villages north of Fairbanks and west of the highway (the equivalent of all the states west of the Mississippi with, oh let's say Texas and Oklahoma cut out for good measure).
I've been pretty drunk a lot of the time, but I swear it's not my fault. I've been fed and flirted, conversed and considered, the time has come and the time has gone and so long as I've kept my ears open, I've heard stories of survival and places I've never been, descriptions of techniques and dreams that are gradually growing a commoner ground from and for all. I hear them all I hear them all I hear them all.
All my love,
Theo
No comments:
Post a Comment