Northeast out of Bakersfield it's green on the map. The kind of green I learned a long time ago to give my attention. I took off from Huntington by 10 expecting to be setting camp surrounded by sequoias by 2. A road trip's a road trip tho--so it didn't happen that way.
I detoured off the 5 because of traffic just north of LA, did a bigass square in the desert and wound up in Tehachapi. Tehachapi I hate you all your ignorant dust and heat. When I go I will come back to haunt the dreams of the ones I have loved and I will do so in order to prove one thing. Those windmills, those dreadful mechanical prisons those things are living dismal proof of aliens among us and that will say a lot, because open-spirited as people will remember me a conspirator I am not. But they hardline me a panic that runs my blood and so Sierras your foothills with those mills I drove and all the whole time I did so I screamed. Man screams to maybe get that fierce knowledge out of me. Windmills are not of this time or land I know it in my blood aww, man. Tehachapi you are not my love.
Kern River Canyon would have to be where I'd lay my head. The camp host looked me through he said Alone? You're sure? I looked over my shoulder to my back seat, I poked at my purse next to me and checked under there. Yep I said, I'm sure of it, just me. I wanted nothing but quiet I just needed green and quiet and to feel the earth breathe. But that's not what I told him when he said well what do you need? Just a place to sleep...We're full he said. Then stared a long time at me, the joker in his eye. Unless you want to go to the overflow.
He told me follow him and go slow. We drove the canyon upstream. When we parked I listened when he said get out of the car. Pablo he called to a man supervising a small tent city being tucked against a yellow and saged earth wall. This is Pablo this is his camp he says to me to him he goes this girl's alone and needs to be fed and taken care of. I laughed at this point it was too funny and I didn't care what would happen. Pablo shakes my hand and looks through my eyes to way inside too. The host goes I been working these woods 20 years I know what people need when they come here. Pablo and his family are good you can stay for free with them this weekend if Pablo says...and if you want that is. Pablo nods then calls Maria! And over comes the woman who will be my tia for the next two days. If your tias like my aunts back east are also your irreverent wild women crazy laughing friends. Who in one breath feed you homemade food that makes you cry it's so good and in the next drop cold in on the truth in your heart you only half-see or want purposefully half-hid.
I have many new tias now a whole familia in fact because that's what she wanted of me, la mama tierra madre when she used her green breath all this time to call me back. We sweat together in the 100 degree heat in Kern River stream under canyon trees all twenty of us and I spoke spanish and them english and they fed me, and took care of me, indeed. So the road yet again leads me home to me, in a twisted unexpected way when I let it, the road whose funny trickery always gives me what I need.
No comments:
Post a Comment