The Twenty Second Day in America....

And between Texas and Arizona, we got lost and drove for twelve hours across burnt out mountains and saw only three colours for a hundred miles; the deep blue of the sky, the stark white of the clouds and the black smoldering remains of the forests, like someone had stuck millions and millions of giant sticks of charcoal into the darkened ground: And we drove into that night until there was no colour or life or any future anymore that we could see in that long darkness ahead.

And down on the ranchlands folk said it was the worst fire for two hundred years and an old woman refused to leave her town and sat through all the combustion and the evacuated, empty homes, waiting out the fire and smoke in the middle of a football field, throwing buckets of water over her own head. And she lived. And a man who loved rattlesnakes, one six feet long and seventeen years old he'd raised from when it was a baby, had also stayed.

And they all lived. Though more creatures than anyone could speak of, or even think of, did not.

Then in the darkness and smoke we found a paved road and jumped from our blessed Wee Nissan and danced the Grateful (to be alive) Dance in the headlights and kissed the ground and the bonnet of the Wee Car a hundred times and came down into the town of Alpine before dawn to the light of a motel. And the whole heavens lit up with every known star could not have glowed more for us, and we opened the door that said OPEN to a welcome from a wonderfully gracious and beautifully aged Hippy girl, gentler than any flower you could ever imagine from the song, and her cowboy-hatted and battered-booted old Biker companion (too wrecked, he told us later with beer in the morning sun, and too often broken-boned to ever ride again), like they'd been waiting for us and would have hugged us, and cried to see us, the long-lost, and us them even more so, our saviours, our home, except that we'd never seen each-other before or even imagined or suspected each-other's existence until then.

And when we woke that same day we washed our clothes in the log-cabin launderette and Andy, maybe disappointed to find us both still alive that morning, drove again into the mountains looking, he said, for horses to ride. But the horses were still considering that Winter was not yet over, that we were a month and a half early. Instead, in the woods, we met three old turkey hunters who explained to us the secrets of their trade and the sexual obsessions of male turkeys that makes them vulnerable to illusion, enthusiasm and death. Then we were, all five of us, four of us for a longer time (being old) and one of us (Andy) for shorter time (being young) brought to a silence as we compared our own relationships and life stories to that of the turkeys that we planned to kill.

We drove back down into Alpine, Andy demonstrating the invincibility of the Wee Nissan by doing slidies at sixty miles an hour on the edge of three hundred foot drops, and at the Bear Tooth Diner we ate much more than well, but not turkey, though it was there on the menu.

This empathy with turkeys has, for me, even now, three months later, like some kind of depressing sexual career assessment, hardly worn off at all.