Untitled piece from the last week or so at Pingree

Well the leaves fall as the summer just fades, with fond memories made, or had, or already remembered. I'd rather it not be over, but in fact it's a coming end, thats always been there, like a marathon's last mile, or a dying grandmother's last smile. The cooling sun blinks before slipping between our world and winter. Whatever waits outside these mountains is a vision worth seeing and in every place its worth being. Alive always. There's a burning last light left wavering over the western peaks and the backdrop to my thoughts burns alongside it. My soul is someplace on those summits, sitting cross legged and carrying the wind in my hair and in my very breaths. This six month stint becomes the center of soulful awareness, a world withdrawn but far from without. While the rest toil, the very time breaking their backs, the weight of what's expected being much too much for many. It's a madness that swarms on city streets, and sits smiling in bank accounts. It carries itself overtly across television screens and unseen through radio waves, an unwelcome whisper, a subliminal something that we need to be without. And so while its happening to hundreds, the harrowing tale of holding certain standards, I'm sitting someplace in the rockies, beneath a bare and beautifully real sky. Of breaking cloud patterns that carry something even greater than color, they carry creation. Across a blue canvas they spell novels no author might write, spin tricks that at many a steady handed magician would marvel, make cities look like scenes of scattered block. I'll sit forever beneath skies that tell stories only to be rivaled by the stars.

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Sunrise seen thru the back door of my pick up out and over the great midwestern interstate. Where big-rigs thunder past in irregular intervals the eerie morning hours of 18 wheels whining against the concrete. Burrowed deep in my goose down bag breathes rise in great steaming clouds to the ceiling. And so squinting into a new day of nebraska sun I decide on another hour or so of sleep. Someplace that same sun is setting while the great glowing white omaha moon is drawing up off of their horizons a heavenly ghost that gave fourth earlier to me the guidance of a snow drifts flow southern minnesota disappearing into fog. Our days differing only in where we view them from. The west becomes a clear eyed blue sky shimmering mirage and contrasts the cloudy mundane coverage of a minnesota i'd come to know. and on overpass a line of boxcars stretch unbroken between northern and southern horizons an antique vision of the way our american world moved originally west. Just road in the rear view a country half gone already in half days time. And there it is the horizon of jagged white peaks raking at thinning western air, trailing pluming tails of clouds from the top.

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Dirt floors cement walls and wash hanging on barbed clothes-lines

little glimpse at difficult lives lived out far beneath poverty

people sit shaded and selling oranges the only way of life able

rusted out chevrolets parked in dirt yards no doors on houses unfinished lived in still

barefooted and smiling children play too close to roadways

filled in a pot hole and asking for change

young hispanic doing laundry in the river

clothes on rocks drying in sunday

westerners use machines

entire communities completely isolation dirt and deserted

money-less pockets of worn out denim straw hats sipping cheap cold perspiring beer

these people may not prevail

if life quality is dictated by bank account balances theirs stays steady at zero

tree branch fence post worn out and lives worn thin

VZ thoughts, unfinished

Monday december 30

woke tired and dark still after the fathers knocking on my door at about twenty past five. Had made plans the night before to avoid traffic en route to the beach by leaving early and here it was already. cool enough in shorts and tshirt pour coffee into a travel mug. I look out of six story window down to rugged venezuelan streets where the rest of the group is already starting to gather. Behind schedule but only slightly, the family exits, through keyed door and steel gate, down locked elevator and exited thru similar gated door into parking lot. Foot thick concrete walls guard cars with motorized gate and electric fencing on the top. The valencian security issue is one not to take lightly, evidently seen in every structure, even semi-expensive protected with similar walls, some with big shards of broken glass embedded in the top. Others barbed wire rolls and more electric fencing. But the family pulls out into the road where everyone is gathered, standing near still-running cars excited even in early morning before dawn. My dad is designated leader. So driving through valencia in even greater heightened sense of un-security. Through red-lights where nobody stops, and intersections lay unmarked with no sense of who has right-of-way, so everybody assumes they do. The venezuelan culture is endemic of just that. An irrational selfishness that bleeds into near every aspect of everyday life. From losing money on change paid too much, gringo pricing at bars for three beers, or laughing mocking gas station attendants at dads bad accent, or simply the way they drive. Without turn signals or headlights crumbling old cars bump and burn exhaust down the shoulder of the freeway. Passing others and even swerving back into a lane, with no more warning than a hand waving out the window. Left turns from right lanes swing out and around two cars before cutting wild across intersection tires screech stop letting them through, but hold up the rest. Right turns from left lanes just pull out in front of cars. Pot holes like pock marks on the teenage face of the freeway, incredibly dangerous when hit doing 70 miles per hour, while trying to avoid the tinted window bus blaring reggatone swerving dangerously in front. But our little caravan group stays somewhat in a line and bounces along down mountains towards the beach. Venezuela is a country rich with natural beauty but impoverished with the desire to take advantage of that. Garbage litters the roadways, and stands in smoldering piles on the mountain side where just recently burned. In dry seasons whole sides of mountainous hills are burned off in huge blazing fires for no reason other than they'll burn. Apartamento structures mid-construction or mid-decay stand abandoned and crumbling amongst the city-scape. Skeleton of SVU burned out and crunched near the autopista. Children dropped candy wrappers and everything else on the ground without second thoughts. Broken beer bottles at the feet of leathery old venezuelan man drinking them at 7 in the morning on barrios-like building's front steps, with ceilings of tin cans and corrugated metal. So thru last little town at the bottom of the mountain, the vendors just beginning to get going on their stands. Setting up displays of cheap plastic bright colored goodies to attract eyes of eager beach goers. Little box shaped shacks built of cinder blocks into the rocky hillside where empenadas and arepas are made and sold, signs boasting the best in town (but in spanish of course) adorn their roofs. The guys behind us make a stop for gas, and eventually for beer, but their choices limited to about three. Cheap beer flavored water served in thirty packaged bottles in a big blue plastic square. Returnable glass. Sandaled kids wheel tricycle-like contraptions pile high with floaties and coolers, hammocks and toys hoping to makes sales someplace further down the road. Two story houses in various stages of completion along the roadside, bars across windows downstairs of shops not open yet, too early in the morning. Flyers for beer and for pepsi strung up from balconies like christmas lights back in the states. Dirt alleyways across which typically venezuelan dogs run rabid and fighting through garbage cans tipped over and spilled out, nobody to clean up. Big blue plastic containers atop houses provide running water and only as sanitary as the river, the people must be used to the water. Or some dont have any at all. We pass through town with only momentary back ups due to the slight traffic with early departure we'd avoided most of.