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By chris Date: 2008 Mar 17 Comment on this Work [[2008.03.17.22.30.1838]] |
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Let me tell you what it is to cross from one world into another: It is, roughly, the distance between China, Texas - far down almost to where the swampy border of that state touches Louisiana - to Placitas, New Mexico. Pla-cit-as. Roll those three syllables across your tongue, enunciating the last one something like an exhalation. New Mexico. There, I would learn, the women are as beautiful as the language that is sometimes heard spoken and always present in the shadows, the periphery. The women, yeah, they're as beautiful as the desert. Looking back now, I don't know which came first. In the beginning was - what? I took that journey of 950-some miles over the closing days of the year-of-someone's-lord 1979. A lot changes when you go that way. On December 31, the day before I left, I packed everything I owned into my tiny Chevelle. Filled it so much that I worried about how I would see out of the back window. I tried moving things this way and that, but the back seat of that car turned out to be a basic lesson in geometry - a lesson in the total area of a space not changing any by rearranging what fills it. So I stopped worrying. Afterward, I walked the streets of my old hometown, under washed-out gray skies, and gave into all the disappointment that had been building up over the previous year. The thought of a new year held significance for me because 1979 had not been good. I don't think I could have explained to you exactly how it hadn't been good - no one had died or gone to the pen or anything like that - but a dissatisfaction vague as distant thunder but real as rain had been forming in my mind. 1980 had to be better. It would be the start of something. I knew this with the same clarity my Daddy knew that Jesus was Lord and Savior and the rice would always grow. Ah, the rice. The rice is what makes China what it is. "What it was," some might say, but that's neither here nor there. I was leaving - coming here and leaving there. That was all I knew. But the rice in that part of the state grows in huge fields, in the shallowest of water, and makes the whole country green and lush. On the edges of the rice fields are stands of trees (we called them thickets) filled with loblolly and slash pines and palmettos and probably a thousand other things so dense you couldn't hack your way through if you wanted to. And unless they were making a road or tracking an animal they shot, no one around there really wanted to. So I walked along the sidewalk, hearing Patsy Cline drifting out of the open doors of barbershops, smoking a cigarette and thinking. My parents weren't speaking to me because I'd just told them I wouldn't be going back to school for the spring semester at college. Rice University was the school. In Houston. I read in one of my literature books once about how once somebody's seen Paris you can't keep them on the farm. But it wasn't like that with me. No, a friend there had told me about a different place from there - not just China but all of Texas. A place where some friends of ours were building a community where we could all live and not have to worry about the things that tripped us up here. I didn't believe him for a long time, but my mind eventually got changed. Telling it now, I can't say exactly how or exactly what I believed then, but that was the direction I was going in. No stopping for no twisters on the horizon or dead armadillos on the road - and there would be plenty of each. |