My brain doesn’t stir up a lot of memories these days. The easy excuse is that my brain injuries have erased, or rather blocked access to a lot of memories..
It’s an easy excuse… like most fables there is truth to it, but it is not the entire truth I am sure. Sometimes not having memories is a good thing. Sometimes they mask things that have been lost so that we can move in the present.
When I was growing up, my father would take me hunting. We hunted for the best….. or at least the most ancient of reasons: To feed ourselves.
We were quite poor. It wasn’t because my father didn’t have options. Certainly he had potential and brains and drive to steer his life in many different ways. He chose to help people. So that meant we were poor.
He had an old shit brown ford galaxy. You know the type; brown vinyl seats accompanied with brown carpet that grew mushrooms when it got too wet. The cracked brown vinyl dash was virginal, as it had never been penetrated by the manufacturer to install an am radio. That option was an unjustifiable extravagance.
Dad always wanted a Jeep… he desperately wanted to be an outdoorsman, but truth be told, he was too much of a scholar. He used to buy field and stream magazines and lust after all the gadgets and locations and antlers.
But that day, we would settle for some snowshoe rabbits.
I don’t even know if those particular kind of dirt roads exist in Colorado anymore… I suspect most of them are now paved to ease the penetration of pampered California hipsters as they document all the secret places on overflowing instagrams.
The pictures capture everything but the ghosts of dead Indians and mountain men scratching their heads over the existence 600 dollar sleeping bags.
How intensely ironic it is that I will probably post this on Instagram.
The bald tires of the shit brown ford galaxy churned the dust, which poured into the open windows and covered our tongues and the cracked dash with wild earth.
I remember the taste… I have tasted many other dirt roads, and have been thrown into the dust in many countries, but there is nothing like the taste of Colorado dirt road.
It tasted like dead cowboys and stardust,
I peered out the window, watching the sagebrush slowly creep by as Dad drove the shit brown Galaxy through gullies and rises. That car had absolutely no business being where it was..
And maybe neither did we. Even back then, I had a sense that there are places that should extract pain for the privilege to see. Some places shouldn’t be so easy to see and feel and taste..
This was long before I read anything Edward Abby wrote, but I know now that we tasted the same dust and, in some ways, had the same thoughts.
I was around 8 years old. I had just figured out how to make babies from the copious books and encyclopedias Dad always kept around.
Normally, these hunting trips had a certain rhythm to them. Dad would drive the shit brown Galaxy, and I would yammer incessantly about very important nothings. He would nod and comment at the appropriate times.
When Dad found the right nondescript juniper tree, or the perfect unnamed game trail, he would pull the creaking shit brown Galaxy off the “road”. We would get out, shake the Colorado dust off, and grab our gear.
Dad had a 12 gauge. I had my precious .410 with no shells.
My job was to scramble into the junipers and masses of sagebrush to flush out our quarry. The rabbits would panic, Dad would shoot them, We would thank the animal for it’s flesh, and take their gutless bodies to be eaten, thanking God that he deigned to make us apex predators.
There is a comforting simplicity to such acts.
This time was different somehow. We were riding completely in silence. Something had shifted between us, and I didn’t know what.
Maybe it was because I knew what girls were used for now. Maybe it was because I was tired of trampling through sage brush with an impotent shotgun. Maybe it was because the incessant childhood prattle was slowly being pushed out of my head. I don’t know..
The Dust tasted the same, but the air between us didn’t,
Dad eased the front left tire into a washout, gunning exactly at the right time to keep enough momentum for the Shit brown Galaxy to avoid being high centered on the bank.
He looked at me, and said nothing, waiting for me to prattle like a child.
I didn’t. I didn’t feel like a child anymore. I had seen dead men, and knew what that meant. I had torn the guts from deer and rabbits, hot blood coating my hands, and thanked them for their flesh. I had thrown a boy through a glass door because he made me mad. I had felt the sweet crunch of a boy’s nose under my fist. I had suffered from someone else’s righteous indignation.
I didn’t feel like a child anymore, but the Wild Colorado Dust couldn’t have cared less. Neither did the shit brown ford Galaxy.
Dad looked at me. Apparently he had found the right unmarked pile of dried tumbleweeds and stopped the creaking carcass of the brown machine. He turned the key off, and it sighed in it’s own unique way; as if it felt every mile separating it from it’s birthplace in Louisville Ky with absolute clarity.
Without a word, Dad reached over to the glove box, and took out a box of .410 shells. He handed me the box.
That was how I became a man.
I miss the incessant prattle of childhood. I miss the bosom of my mother and the long-suffering amusement of my father. I miss that shit brown ford galaxy and the Colorado dust and the sickly sweet blood of rabbits and righteous simplicity.
But he made me what I am, and kept me from being who I would have been. We are not the same, and yet will always be the same.