There was a trail that led up from the van into the hills and I walked on that trail up the hill until I came to a wooden ladder over what might have been an electric fence. I stepped over that, walked out into a field, and in the middle of this field I came to the proverbial two roads diverging. Actually they were two trails diverging, an unused fire road and a smaller trail worn into the hillside grass.
Normally it wouldn’t have been a question. I would have just picked a trail and kept walking. But I’d been thinking about desire and the twin poles that comprised desire: want and need. There was moment-to-moment craving on the one hand, and on the other, something that led to long-term satisfaction and fulfillment. Like everyone else, I believed I wanted satisfaction and fulfillment, so I stood at this junction, looking at the two roads, one less traveled than the other, and I knew it wasn’t just the two roads, it was the meaning of the two roads. I somehow imagined that my choice would determine, not only where I went, but by virtue of that choice, what my world would be. It wasn’t that one road was Anne and one road was Feather; both roads were going in the same direction. It was merely a question of knowing what it was I needed, and based on that, where I needed to go.
When Blake said that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, he didn’t say how long the road would be, or which road it was, and so I stood, not transfixed, but not moving forward, looking at these two brown roads.
I’d read in a book one time that a way to break through a barrier is to talk to yourself, in a mirror, on LSD. I had no mirror, but I stood in this meadow, a green grassy meadow. Clouds were obscuring the moon but there was light enough to see, and there was one big tree sitting in the middle of this meadow and I went up to this tree and started talking. Not talking. I knew the tree couldn’t talk, but I tried to imagine, if it did, how would the tree communicate? I tried to talk with the tree. I stood in front of the tree, sending signals, sending vibrations, trying to receive something, or hear something, to have the tree, not tell me what to do, but show me, so that I might know. And because it was spring some seeds were falling, and one seed came down like a whirligig and landed on my head. I brushed it off. That wasn’t what I wanted. I was trying to communicate. I was trying to communicate with this tree.
Although the tree was probably sending me loads of signals or vibrations, nothing was getting through. There was a skin between the tree and me, a membrane separating us, and my strategy was to tear at the fabric of the membrane. I knew the membrane was a mental construct, and that all I had to do was step through that mental construct. I knew my decision about the two trails was not about the trails, but about how I walked on whatever trail I took.
And maybe I would have acted on this knowledge, except I was distracted by the rain that was starting to fall. Also by the thunder and the lightning strikes that were moving their way across the eastern horizon. I didn’t think about the danger of standing on a hillside in an electrical storm. I thought about the lightning, and the different kinds of thunder. Chief Joseph was named after a kind of thunder, and I thought about cracking thunder and brittle thunder and howling thunder and vibrating thunder — and also the rolling thunder that I imagined had been rolling for a very long time across the great midwestern plain to get to me. By counting the seconds between the flash and the thunder, and dividing that by some number, I might have estimated the lightning’s distance. But instead, I stood there, a light rain falling against my face, waiting for the next burst of light, and then waiting for the sound of the light. I stayed on the slope as the rain stopped and the thunder moved away. I waited to see, when the clouds parted, if I could see any sign of the waning moon.
I didn’t see any moon because the clouds never completely parted, but as I was waiting, that’s when I remembered the gas station in New Jersey. I remembered the car, the dark Mercedes turning at the last moment, but not before hitting my car, my maroon car. Anne had said, “Get something to drink,” and I was coming out of the convenience store. She’d pulled up to the door and I’d stepped off the curb. I was opening the car door, turning my body to sit down into the car, when I saw the flash of darkness, and then I felt the collision. Not a big collision, but I felt it. I got out, looked at Anne who was looking straight ahead, arms on the wheel, in shock. The other car was still moving, and as it pulled out of the gas station onto the Palisades Parkway I ran after it and watched it merging into the larger road.
When I got back to the car Anne was shaking. She was nervously talking and I didn’t notice the tears in her eyes because I was thinking about the damage and the people who caused the damage. I wanted to see what they’d done to my car. I wanted to see the dent they’d put in the side by the fender. The dark paint of the car had scraped away and replaced the old maroon color, and the wheel well was bent slightly. But that was about it. And I was reassured that that was it. I was alive at least, and Anne was alive.
5
The next morning I went to the now-deserted house and sat on an overstuffed chair on the porch. The air was full of the sounds of animals and birds and trees swaying. Pine resin was warming in the sun. I didn’t find any coffee to make so I drank water. I drove into town and spent the morning driving around, looking for station wagons. I was fairly methodical in my walking up and down the various streets, undaunted by my lack of success. The Mercury Tracer wasn’t a popular car so not that many were made, and there weren’t that many — none maroon — on the streets of Boulder.
Sometime in the late afternoon I wandered into the pedestrian mall. On a side street off the mall I discovered, in a large community building, a poetry class in progress. I was tired so I sat in a chair in the back of the room, listening to people talking about Beatniks, and about various poets. A man, with a beard like Allen Ginsberg’s, standing beneath an uplifted basketball backboard, began talking about William Carlos Williams.
Apparently there’s a poem by William Carlos Williams in which a man stops his car, lets his kids off at school, then drives to where the road ends, and from there walks down to the edge of the river. Even in the city there still is some mud, and there still are some flowers growing in the mud, and some weeds are still down there. He knows the names of the flowers by heart, and so for him to see these flowers growing in the mud takes him outside of what he normally calls himself. There are no windows down by the river, he doesn’t look through any window, but there is a membrane there, the membrane between his ordinary world and another world. When he crouches down and touches the petal of a white flower with his fingertip, he enters that other world.
Then, like a door shutting, a sound, say a honking, wakes him, and he turns around, walks back to his car, and drives away from the river. But not away from the other world. He thinks he’s left the other world but the other world has come with him, and in fact if he would look in the passenger seat he would see it.
But he’s driving now.
Later, at night with his wife … No, before that. He’s driving his black sedan. He’s a doctor making house calls, and he’s calling on the sick and dying. Everyone around him is dying and he watches them die, and he knows that death is the end of one world and the beginning of another world and he tries to see what that other world is. He thinks he’s standing outside of that other world.
At night, in bed with his wife, with the comforter pulled to their necks, he lies on his back and sees in his mind all the people he’s seen dying. Everyone he sees is dying. He looks at his wife and she’s dying. He actually sees her skin losing its elasticity and folding into itself like a forgotten piece of fruit.