Stories
Three Weeks in a Hospital, Part 3
Tuesday, July 12th, 2022: Stories, Three Weeks in a Hospital, Trouble.
War on Pain Relief
Thursday May 26 – Sunday May 29:
Surprisingly, just as some of my symptoms disappeared and some of the more intensive treatments ended, I was finally moved out of the cramped shared room in the 4th floor general unit, to a private room in the Progressive Care Unit on the 6th floor. My eye and head were hurting too much for me to figure out why at the time, but a nurse did explain that the PCU was a “step-down” from the ICU, for patients who needed frequent attention but less intensive treatment.
Much later, as I began to comprehend the hospital system, I realized that the move from ICU to the shared room had probably occurred because they didn’t have any other option – they needed the ICU room for a more urgent case and there was nothing available in the PCU. The whole time I was suffering next to that self-destructive kid, dreading the next painful procedure and ignored or brushed off by the harried Med-Surg nurses, my hospitalist was simply waiting for a private room to open up in PCU.
During the past week, I’d been visited on a daily basis by a tall, young female doctor who seemed vaguely of Asian descent, but had a Spanish last name. I’d never figured out her role, and she seemed to have no relationship with the other specialties. But in PCU, I asked my new nurse who she was, and learned that all along, she’d been my hospitalist – the doctor who was supposed to have oversight of my case.
So the next time she arrived, I explained my confusion and concern, and asked for a review of everything that had been done and was being done by all the specialists. She relaxed in a chair at my bedside and asked me to describe what I knew already. And then smiled and said I was correct on all points – there were only a few things she needed to add. I liked her, but unfortunately she didn’t inspire any of the confidence I’d come to have in the senior specialists who’d dominated my care so far.
From the beginning, I’d made a relentless effort to cultivate good relationships with my nurses. After nearly two weeks, there’d been so many of them! Most of the younger ones turned out to be “travel nurses” who were taking advantage of high COVID-era pay rates to sign short-term contracts at hospitals all over the country.
But it hadn’t been easy. From the depths of my brain fog, I sometimes had to summon the rusty skills I’d once used leading professional teams in the tech industry, to keep the nurses from becoming my enemies. The biggest battle I faced was for pain meds. Under pressure from our society’s campaign against opioid addiction, which patients and many doctors experience as a misguided, puritanical War on Pain Relief, my nurses started out by claiming that nothing stronger than Tylenol was available. Then when, in my friendliest, calmest and most tactful manner, I revealed that I was aware of and had used stronger meds, they immediately assumed I was a devious addict trying to manipulate them. As nurses, the approval of stronger meds was out of their hands anyway – I would have to convince them to ask the hospitalist, so it was up to someone predisposed against me to convince someone I wasn’t allowed to talk to.
When I asked for pain relief, the nurse would always demand, “But what is your pain level?” As someone suffering from chronic pain from multiple sources for decades, I’ve learned how to use the universal 10-point scale with great precision, often as a tool in recovery and rehab. So far I had felt no discernable improvement from the IV steroid. After a couple days of that, plus Tylenol, the eye pain still ranged between 7 and 8 on the scale of 10. But after a week of my best negotiating and superhuman patience, something suddenly changed. The absent hospitalist abruptly relented and approved the pain relief I needed.
At first we tried 5 mg of oral oxycodone. This helped, but only by a couple of points on the scale, so finally, I was approved for a minimum dose of dilaudid – hydromorphone, one of the strongest pain meds – via IV. That finally did the trick.
Doses could only be administered at 6-hour intervals, but I was now allowed to specify which drug I needed at each dose. New nurses continued to give me a hard time, either treating me like a criminal or claiming the meds were ineffective. But over a period of several days alternating dilaudid and oxycodone as needed, my pain level subsided from 8 to 3. After two weeks of severe eye pain and headaches, I was finally getting some relief! My head cleared, and I could actually start to think again. I could tolerate light, and read my iPad. Finally I had something to occupy me during the hours I lay awake, alone in bed!
My 70th birthday came and went. One of the specialist doctors did notice, and in passing, briefly wished me a happy birthday.
Abandoned in Luxury
Monday May 30
Nurses began dropping hints that I was going to be moved again. I told the hospitalist that I couldn’t deal with a shared room, but when someone suddenly showed up to move me later that day, I ended up in a room with two beds.
I told the orderly that wouldn’t work, and was wheeled back into the hallway, where the “charge nurse” threw a fit, saying no one had told her I needed a private room. So my bed was parked in the hall for another half hour – after which I was wheeled into a huge, luxurious private room with a wall of windows. After 2 weeks, I had returned to the same unit I’d started out in, right after leaving the Emergency Department.
But after being moved I was left alone for what seemed like hours. There was no one to take my vital signs, give me scheduled meds and hook up my IV, perform the next scheduled blood draw. The whole unit seemed almost abandoned – eerily quiet, with little foot traffic in the hallway. I kept calling for help, getting more worried each time, until finally my new nurse arrived and said this unit was for patients who needed less attention.
The rooms as well as the hallways here were decorated in soothing pastel colors, with large-format nature photos framed under glass. My room had a big modern sofa and several large armchairs in like-new condition. And I had a large private bathroom with ornate tiled walls, where I could see for the first time, in the mirror, how much weight I’d lost, how much muscle. My skin was all wrinkled and hanging from my bones.
I continued to get sporadic visits from the infectious diseases and neurology teams. Test results continued to trickle back from distant labs. Everything except the HSV2 and fungus continued to test negative. The effectiveness of the steroid was ambiguous. I believed it was another mistake that had put me at future risk. But they hinted that I might need another lumbar puncture, to rule out autoimmune disorders.
Skin-Walking Nurse
Tuesday May 31 – Friday June 3
My Asian-Hispanic hospitalist announced that she was going on break, and her replacement would take care of me from now on. And the next day, when the replacement showed up, she said she was getting ready to discharge me!
I was shocked, and said so. The specialist teams hadn’t arrived at a diagnosis that would explain all my symptoms. The antibiotic, doxycycline, had run its course, but the antiviral, acyclovir – for the HSV2 in my spinal fluid – was still being administered daily via IV. My eye pain still needed strong pain meds which would not be available at home. I was still sweating through my bedding every few hours.
The new hospitalist quickly backtracked. She would reach out to all the specialist teams, get them together for a conference, and determine what more needed to be done.
After the shift change that night, my new nurse arrived – a big man with black hair braided in a ponytail down his back. “You’re from New Mexico!” he exclaimed, reading my chart. “I’m from New Mexico!” He turned out to be a Navajo from south of Albuquerque, on contract here for another couple of months. This encounter was one of the few highlights of my hospitalization. So alone, so isolated, now I felt like I had an ally from back home. He was my night nurse for 4 or 5 nights, and he was an expert at blood draws, which continued to be scheduled throughout the day and night. One night when he woke me up for the 3 am draw, I complained that he’d taken me by surprise. “I creep around in the middle of the night,” he said. “I’m a skin walker!” – a Navajo demon.
As most people are aware, they never let you sleep through the night in a hospital – interruptions are always scheduled, from meds to blood draws. I have sporadic insomnia at home, and was usually able to catch up after most interruptions, but the biggest challenges were to maintain a friendly, accommodating attitude when awakened from a deep sleep at 2 am to have a needle stuck in my arm, and to quickly figure out a breakfast order when awakened by the food service rep after a near-sleepless night.
Now the pain was under control, I was reading books and streaming my favorite radio stations on the iPad, actually discovering new music and adding it to my notebook. And the nurses were digging it. As much as I resent our dependence on devices, I would’ve been lost in that institutional environment without the iPad.
Vague memories of the fiction of Kafka rose up in my recovering mind, and I spent several days researching the author online. It was clear that my experience had been Kafkaesque in the popular sense, but the research gave me deeper appreciation and respect for the complex but short-lived author.
Whereas throughout most of this illness my periodic sweats had started on my forehead and spread throughout my body, they were now focused on the back of my neck and the base of my spine. If I felt one coming on and got cold packs from the nurse soon enough, I could head off most of the uncomfortable sweating.
However, during most of this hospitalization I’d lost much of my control over hygiene and grooming. Nobody ever seemed to understand that I was sweating through my bedding and it needed to be changed at least daily. Nurses had occasionally wiped me down with antiseptic pads and brought me packets with toothpaste, toothbrush, and mouthwash that I tried to use at least twice a day. Midway through that stay in the awful shared room, I requested a razor and got up to shave for the first time in over a week.
But now, with not only a large bathroom but a pile of clean towels and washcloths, I could get really clean and shave as often as I liked.
After a week’s hiatus, the Physical Therapy folks found me again. I’d lost so much weight, so much muscle mass, and was so weak I didn’t know how I would ever regain my strength and capacity. “I climb mountains!” I kept reminding the therapists, afraid nobody in this low-elevation flatland would appreciate how much I had lost and would need to recover.
Our walks were now restricted to the small area of my current floor and unit, but at the halfway point there was a luxurious visitor’s lounge with a large aquarium featuring beautiful, flamboyant tropical fish, where we always stopped for a few minutes. And I really enjoyed getting to know my new therapist, a young woman from Saudi Arabia who was completing her education here before returning home with her family. As we watched the fish milling about behind their glass she confessed she was afraid of animals, especially dogs and cats – a healthy phobia in our pet-crazed social media world.
This Is Spinal Tap
Tuesday May 31 – Friday June 3
In response to the new hospitalist, the rheumatologists returned, continuing to question me and review blood results regarding possible sarcoidosis, a mysterious inflammatory disease that can affect multiple organs. But they could never find clear indications.
The neurologists did order another lumbar puncture to test for auto-immune problems and to see if the spinal fluid had changed. Being clear-headed at last, I was even more apprehensive, which got worse as day after day doctors and nurses predicted the puncture would be done that day, only to have it postponed yet again.
When an orderly finally arrived to take me to the basement, my mom had just shown up for a visit, after another of her heroic marathon walks the length of the massive complex. I could only wave and say I’d be right back.
Instead, I was taken to a curtained alcove in a larger room, where I lay abandoned, with no explanation, as technicians huddled across the dark room, their backs to me, gossiping around a computer monitor. Eventually I asked what was going on, and one of them explained the doctor I needed was driving over from another hospital.
After I’d waited an hour, the doctor arrived breathlessly, and I was given a 2-page form to initial in a dozen places as the doctor described all sorts of terrible things that could happen as a result of the procedure. I didn’t remember any of this from before. All I could think of was my poor mom, alone upstairs with no idea what was happening to me.
Finally they rolled me into the operating room, where a kid who looked like a teenage rock drummer started preparing me while behind my back, technicians fooled around with machines.
This went on for another hour, my stress rising to the breaking point. But when it happened, the procedure itself turned out to be anticlimactic – like before, uncomfortable rather than painful. My mom had left shortly before I returned to my room. She called later in tears – what a nightmare for her!
The results of the second lumbar puncture looked the same as the first, which the neurologists said was good news – things were not getting worse.
Final Days
Tuesday May 31 – Friday June 3
The physical therapist stopped coming, and during my final days in the hospital I walked around the unit alone, going faster and completing more circuits each time.
The young ophthalmologist returned to dilate my pupils and perform a final eye exam. He pronounced me normal except for a “weird texture” on my retina, about which he planned to consult some outside experts. But the exam itself drove my pain way back up the scale. I’d stopped needing dilaudid for the past couple of days, but now I had to go back on it.
A technician came to remove the catheter – a much easier experience than getting it put in. And finally, my sweats – the last of the original symptoms – simply stopped happening.
During the past few days I’d spent more and more time out of bed, either walking the halls or sitting up facing the outside world I hoped to re-enter soon. Despite still not knowing what had caused my illness, I was finally anxious to leave this place.
When we both agreed on discharge, the hospitalist arranged final summary visits from the neurology and infectious diseases teams. Both teams said the official diagnosis would be an HSV2 infection in the nervous system, but there was still no known explanation for all my symptoms, and they were still awaiting the results of many tests that took weeks to process. I learned for the first time that the female doctor on the neurology team was a subspecialist in neurological infectious diseases, and she gave me the name of a colleague at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix for any potential follow-up. She said to continue to treat lingering eye pain with oxycodone and tylenol, and it should eventually end. And if any HSV2 symptoms recur, I should go back on the antiviral.
Return to Life
Saturday June 4
At the end, there were forms to fill out and leave with the nurse. I had prescriptions that needed to be filled at the hospital pharmacy and picked up by the nurse. I still had IV sites on both arms that I had to track the nurse down and beg to be removed. I had to change from a hospital robe into my street clothes, for the first time in three weeks, and wait for an orderly to take me to the front door in a wheelchair. I had to call my brother for a ride.
I’d been attacked by mysterious forces which might always remain unknown. Taken out of my life, I’d been swallowed by a giant institution where I was largely helpless while being studied, often painfully and sometimes traumatically, by countless strangers – specialists in infectious diseases, pulmonology, neurology, rheumatology, nephrology, hepatology, radiology.
For three weeks I’d had no future, living only in the present. The raw data from tests had been reviewed, processed and presented to the doctors by inexperienced interns, so there was no guarantee that all of what I’d heard was accurate. Now that I was being discharged, I didn’t know if I was truly over it, or if symptoms would come back after I returned home.
The pulmonologists, who’d inserted a probe in my lungs and a needle through my back, studying me intensively, had never found an explanation for my respiratory failure. As a result, their treatments had only addressed the symptoms, not the cause. But still, I’d recovered – why? Could it happen again?
The specialists in infectious diseases, neurology, and rheumatology, who’d subjected me to painful scans and dozens of blood draws, had found the Herpes Simplex Virus Type 2 in my spinal fluid – along with unidentified fungus. The virus could explain some, but not all, of my symptoms. They’d given me an antiviral, and while waiting to see if it helped, they’d tried to treat the fever with a cooling blanket and the pain with a high-dose steroid. The cooling blanket had worked but the steroid hadn’t relieved the pain, so finally I’d been given strong pain meds. The meds gradually brought the pain under control, so that after I was discharged, it remained manageable with weaker meds.
Was the pain now manageable because it was due to HSV2, and the antiviral was finally having an effect on the infection? No one could tell, but the infectious diseases neurologist warned that a recurrence was possible.
Leaving that hospital and riding to Mom’s house felt so strange – like being reborn, but as a much weaker and more vulnerable person. Would I survive? If so, how would I continue to change? Would any of those outstanding test results eventually come back positive, explaining my illness and raising new questions about my future?
I stayed at my mom’s house for 3 full days, resting and taking short walks, before taking on the daunting, all-day effort to travel back home alone. On those walks, I felt like a husk, a leaf, a feather, like a gust of wind could blow me away.
My 2020 house fire, and the continuing struggle to get everything back on track, should’ve proved that my life was largely out of my control, and could be ended without warning at any time. But apparently I needed still another, and more urgent, reminder.
Life is a miracle – let’s not waste it.
Wednesday, August 3rd, 2022: Fire, Restoration Projects, Stories, Trouble.
Shed in the Hills
I’ve described before how the rising cost of living in California had driven me relentlessly from larger lodgings, where I originally had room for art and music studios, into smaller and smaller places, finally ending up in a tiny studio apartment with all my creative work and equipment far away in storage. It wasn’t until I moved to this remote small town in New Mexico that I could afford enough space to get all my work and gear together, and it still took me years to pull a lifetime of art and music out of boxes and set up studio space to continue that work after the dismal hiatus of struggling to survive in California.
Part of that process was finding a readily accessible way to store my thousands of works on paper and canvas – by me and others. For a decade and a half most of those paintings and drawings had been packed away in boxes, portfolio cases, and mailing tubes and stashed in various basements or garages. I needed a big flat file.
I was registered on an online community forum maintained by a couple of older men, 60s hippies who were fixtures in the local progressive subculture. At the end of July 2008, I posted my need for a file, and immediately got a response from one of those guys. It turned out his ex-girlfriend had left him a big flat file made by a local cabinetmaker from local pinewood. But it was stored in a shed way out in the mountains, an hour’s drive from town, and he didn’t have a vehicle that could move it.
So I bought it from him and drove him out there in my pickup truck. It took all day – we had to stop first at a rural settlement on the river to pick up a key, then we slowly drove for miles, winding back into the hills on a rough, narrow gravel road, finally reaching the shed. The file was so heavy that we had to remove all the drawers first to lift it into the truck.
But of course, once I got it home, I was faced with how to get this big wooden box into my house by myself.
First, I borrowed a dolly from a neighbor, and improvised a ramp from a sheet of plywood so I could roll the cabinet off the truck. Then I had to take my front door off the hinges and unscrew all the weatherstripping from the jamb in order to just barely scrape the file through the doorway.
Once I’d walked the awkward thing past my vestibule, put it back on the dolly, and rolled it into place, I could carefully reinstall all the drawers into their ball-bearing slides.
The cabinetmaker had put a huge amount of work into this file – precisely cutting, planing, and joining the pine planks for the sides, building the drawers from scratch, cutting perfect rabbet joints at all the corners. But for some reason he had neglected to finish it, leaving it topless, so John had given me a heavy sheet of particle board to put over it. I covered this with a Mexican blanket so it wouldn’t look so shabby in my living room.
After the Fire
Just as it was hugely liberating and inspiring to get my music, instruments, and recording gear out of storage after all those years, it was a revelation to rediscover my art. And soon I began a new series of work, filling the drawers of the file to the brim.
But my house fire in August 2020 put another stop to my creative work. I had to quickly remove those thousands of art works, re-pack them in boxes and portfolio cases, and move them back into storage.
Contractors moved all my furnishings out of the house in preparation for interior cleaning and repairs – all except for the file, which was too much of a hassle. It wasn’t until almost a year later, when the flooring subcontractor prepared to refinish my oak floors, that we absolutely had to get the flat file out of the house. So I again removed the drawers, took off the house’s front door and weatherstripping, and with a couple of young construction workers muscled the big thing out of the house and into a tight space in the already nearly full casita in back, in between my bed frame, fridge, and gas range.
In the process, one side of the cabinet was chipped. I salvaged the wedge-shaped piece of wood and quickly stashed it somewhere I thought it would be safe and retrievable, for however far away in the future it would take to fix this thing and get it back in the house.
Working Around It
The flat file and its separate drawers were now taking up space in the casita, along with most of the other furnishings of my house. I had moved back into and was camping out in the main house, but it was now the middle of winter, and I needed at least one room of that casita as a workshop, to start completing the interior of the house and make repairs to items like the flat file.
I cleared out the workshop as much as possible, but the flat file cabinet had to stay there while I put in the wiring – it was too big to fit through the casita’s other doors. So I worked around it, moving it from place to place as needed.
Repairing the Chip
Finally, at the end of March, I was ready to start fixing up the flat file. But by now I’d completely forgotten where I put that missing wood chip. I looked everywhere but couldn’t find it – I would simply have to fabricate a new piece and glue it in. But how to match the original knotty pine? Knotty pine is no longer available, especially here.
Fortunately I had an old piece of scrap pine hanging around that had similar grain and color.
Refinishing the File Cabinet
The body of the file was quite worn, not to mention smoke damaged. But getting the old finish off took two days of heavy sanding, and in the process I discovered it had never been sanded to begin with – the surface was extremely rough under the finish the cabinetmaker had applied.
Like many things around here, it was paradoxical – the unfinished, imperfect product of a lot of obsessive labor.
I also found out early that sanding in the workshop raised far too much dust, and applying the finish indoors generated too many fumes. So I rolled the cabinet outside on my new dolly and applied three coats of polyurethane, sanding between each coat, covering it with plastic every night and uncovering it every morning.
Making Feet & Corner Guards
The base of the cabinet was the crudest part of it – inconsistent with the rest of the thing, the base was made out of rough, construction-grade two-by-fours. I wasn’t going to have that sliding around on my newly refinished oak floors, so I had to make feet, to which I would attach protective felt. I made these out of scraps of oak from another project, plus I cut corner guards to protect the vulnerable bottom edges of the cabinet, where the chip had come off earlier.
Moving It Back Into the House
Like a fool I was determined to get the cabinet back into the house by myself, and it did not go well – after taking off door and weatherstripping again, there was still only about 1/16″ clearance between the sides of the cabinet and the door jamb, and I ended up scratching up my new finish in a few places. But those were easily repaired.
Installing the Feet & Corner Guards
Reinforcing the Cabinet
I spent weeks puzzling over how to make a top for this cabinet. It would have to span over a yard of open space without warping, and there was no room to add bracing within the existing cabinet – the top would have to be framed above the existing front, sides, and back.
Plywood wouldn’t do – it should be solid wood – equivalent, if not superior, in quality to the expertly joined sides. But I didn’t have access to a broad selection of cabinet-grade wood – our local lumber yard only stocks a limited selection of “project boards” in poplar and oak up to 12″ wide. And I didn’t have the tools or setup to match the joinery of the sides.
Meanwhile, I realized that the top would need to be removable! A fixed top would prevent access to the drawer slides inside the cabinet, and they are mechanical parts that can wear out and break and need to be replaced. I decided to make the top hinged at the back with a continuous piano hinge.
A removable top added even more complexity to a project that just seemed to keep growing. And whereas a fixed top would reinforce the whole cabinet, a removable top would place stress on a structure that didn’t seem to have enough bracing as is. The top front crosspiece was so flimsy you could bend it up and down with one hand.
So I cut a couple of oak boards as cross braces for the body of the cabinet – they would just barely fit above the top drawer, and would stabilize the cross member in front, as well as to prevent warping of the sides. They would also need to be removable to facilitate getting your whole body inside the cabinet to work on the slides!
Building a Top for the File
We didn’t have any cabinet-grade wood panels available locally to cover the entire top, but I finally figured out a way to combine two different woods without more expensive tools. In addition to the oak boards, the lumber yard had a few 24″x48″ cabinet-grade pieces of birch plywood with a nice surface grain, and I was lucky to find two pieces that were book-matched.
I used the oak as edge binding and to join the two pieces of plywood down the center. I still didn’t have long clamps, but I managed to get enough pressure using bungee cords, and a doweling jig, to get reasonably fine joinery.
Being all hardwood, the top ended up really heavy.
Installing the New Top
Once I’d decided to hinge the top, I worried for weeks about how to align the hinge. Both the cabinet and the top were really heavy pieces, and the hinge would need to be attached with the top open, in such a manner that the top would be aligned with the cabinet when closed.
And the fit was not perfect – the original cabinetmaker hadn’t cut the sides perfectly straight, and I hadn’t thought to plane them earlier. Ultimately, searching online, I found adhesive-backed felt tape to line the interface between top, sides, and front. This would help keep dust out. I ordered it the week before I left for Indiana, and it was waiting for me 6 weeks later when I got back from the hospital.
To align the hinge properly was extremely complicated and took three tries, drilling a few holes at first, mounting a few screws, setting the whole heavy thing upright, relocating some holes and screws, lowering, removing and reattaching, etc.
And finally, I discovered that my house floor is uneven, and the cabinet flexes as it’s moved around the floor, so that in some positions, the hinged top is out of alignment, whereas in other positions it’s perfectly aligned. So I gave up and accepted imperfection.
I also realized that the cheap piano hinge from our local Ace is not really sturdy enough for the weight of this top. But it took me so long to install it, I’ll leave it as is for now, letting the next owner worry about that.
Refinishing the Drawers
I kept thinking I was almost done, until I realized the drawers still needed to be sanded and refinished – all 8 of them.
First I had to remove the wooden pulls – they were originally unfinished, and I decided to spray paint them black.
Refinishing the drawers took over a week, partly because I first sealed them with Danish oil to deepen the color, and I had to wait a day and sand between each coat. I had to keep moving them from place to place after each of the 4 coats, to keep them from running and sticking together, and to keep them free of dust from another project I was starting in the shop.
Installing the Drawers
Finally the drawers were ready! I assumed the project was done – what a huge relief! The last big piece of furniture repaired and restored to my house, almost two years after the fire!
I carefully carried each drawer from the casita, up onto the back porch, through the kitchen, and into the living room. When they were all there, I started by inserting the bottom drawer into its slides. These drawers have always been a tight fit, needing several firm pushes to get all the way in. But after the second firm push, one of the drawer slides exploded and ball bearings shot out across the floor.
I wasn’t finished after all. And thank god I’d made that top removable!
So I order a new set of slides for the bottom drawer, and waited another week for it to arrive. And meanwhile, I finally found that missing chip from the side of the cabinet. It was in the bottom of one of the drawers. If only I’d found it months ago, I would’ve saved a couple days of work fabricating a new patch, and the cabinet would’ve ended up looking better. So it goes.
But how to prop up the hinged top so I could work inside the cabinet? I hadn’t included that in my design yet, and there wasn’t much room to work with inside the cabinet. After a few days of design experimentation, I came up with the solution you see below, which works great.
I knew I had to prop the “lid” of the cabinet up in some way. This could be done either with a metal rod – like on the hood of your car – or with a wooden dowel, or a wooden “strut” with a rectangular cross-section. I wanted to avoid metal, which would come with its own challenges. Initially I figured a rectangular strut would be best, because I could attach it to either the underside of the lid or the top of the cabinet with a hinge. But the hinge would have to have a flush profile when the lid is closed, and mortising to achieve that would add work.
Also, I’d need to design some kind of socket to secure the loose end of the strut. Ultimately I realized a removable dowel would be the most elegant solution with my limited resources. I could easily fit an upper socket into a corner inside the lid so it would be flush. The lower socket would simply be a hole cut into the front cross-member of the cabinet, with a metal plate on the underside forming the bottom of the socket. When not in use, the dowel strut could sit in brackets attached to the middle cross member of the cabinet – a neat solution that would keep it inside the cabinet without interfering with the top drawer. I would make these brackets by carefully bending metal mending straps that I already had in my collection of surplus hardware.
Wednesday, October 5th, 2022: Restoration Projects, Stories, Trouble.
April 3: Limping Home
At dusk, near the end of a 2-hour drive back from hiking in Arizona, I hit a deer head-on, about 10 miles south of town. My little 4wd Sidekick managed to limp home, as I took back streets to avoid drawing attention to the smashed headlights. But only a block from home, engine temperature reached critical and smoke started pouring out of the engine compartment.
April 8: Surveying the Damage
I’d killed a large animal, with the vehicle I rely on to get to my land in the desert, and to go hiking in the mountains every week – some of the only things that make my life worth living. I was in shock, literally traumatized, for days afterwards. But there was still coolant in the radiator, and I was able to drive across town to the local body shop.
Unfortunately, they couldn’t source most of the necessary parts for my old vehicle, but they estimated that if they could, repairs would cost $4,200, more than the vehicle is worth.
Most people I know drive late-model vehicles and maintain collision and comprehensive insurance for situations like this. But I haven’t been able to afford those luxuries for decades, and in any event, you don’t carry anything but liability insurance on a cheap 27-year-old vehicle. And unlike my more “successful” friends and family, I can’t afford to replace my vehicle with something new every few years.
So I was pretty depressed. Finally I began pulling things apart, surveying the damage, and doing my own searches for parts.
The deer was sideways when I hit it, its body stretched across the width of my vehicle, so the damage was fairly uniform across the front. The upper part of the front end, which had been convex, was pushed inwards. The grille exploded, the headlights and A/C fan were smashed, and the A/C condensor and radiator were driven back towards the engine, where the cooling fan housing impacted the fan belt.
I initially thought the radiator was okay, but later found there was a slow leak, probably from impact against the condensor.
In my 20s and 30s, I worked on my 1965 VW Beetle, rebuilding the engine and the front end. But I hadn’t tackled anything like this before!
April 8 – April 13: Straightening the Frame
Of course, I was able to find a few helpful YouTube videos on repairing this kind of damage. I’ve always kept a come-along – a hand winch – for my desert trips, and I picked up some heavy-duty nylon straps at our new Harbor Freight. Luckily I had an invasive elm tree along my driveway in back that I could use as an anchor. I’ve since had it removed, so I better not hit any more deer!
The front cross-member that was bashed in is called the upper radiator support. It’s not a structural member, nor does it actually support the radiator – it just spans the space between structural members on each side, and holds the horn and the hood latch. But because it was smashed in along with the structural parts it bolts to, I had to straighten it all in place. It’s normally convex, and I used the straight edge of a board to determine how much I needed to pull it back out, winching successively at a few different points to approximate the original shape.
The impact with the deer drove it back a maximum of 3 inches, and I was able to pull it back out about 2-1/2 inches. The vehicle has a tube frame, and the longitudinal tube on one side was slightly compressed by the impact, which made it impossible for me to completely pull the crossmember all the way back out.
As you can imagine, bending all this steel was extremely difficult, and took several days of blocking my tires, setting the handbrake, winching and letting the vehicle sit for hours under tension. Then releasing it, checking the displacement, and starting all over again. But the amount of restoration I was ultimately able to achieve was adequate for everything inside to fit and function properly.
April 13: Straightening the Hood
In a big city, a person with modest means trying to fix this kind of damage would head to a junkyard for salvage parts. But here, the nearest yard is a 2-hour drive away – with a decent selection almost 3 hours away in El Paso – and any body parts I found would be in the wrong color. I wanted to try bending and beating things back into shape as best I could.
The hood was really tricky – light gauge metal but stiffened by welded cross-bracing – so I had to try a series of different wooden “jigs”, using a sledge, clamps, and my body weight, to straighten out the compound curves that had been deformed. The impact had broken a bolted-on hinge, and I was able to find that online, along with everything else that I couldn’t fix.
April 14: New Headlights
The formed sheet-metal framing around the headlights had been pushed in, and had to be pulled back out. But new headlights were readily available online, and when they arrived, the hardest part turned out to be aligning them. The screws were really hard to adjust, and I didn’t have a level space facing a wall to shine them on, and compromised with my sloping driveway and the front wall of the casita.
I live in the middle of nowhere – it’s not like most people around here are going to notice the difference…
April 19: New A/C Fan
I replaced the fan before discovering the radiator leaked, thinking I might be almost done! And then I got sick…
June 29 – July 14: New Radiator
After I got out of the hospital, and began to recover my strength, I ordered the new radiator.
A radiator is a tight fit! It took a lot of wiggling and jiggling to get it to slide all the way down in its channels, between the A/C condensor and the stiff plastic fan housing. Everything around my old engine is slathered in oil, so working with mounting bolts and hoses underneath was a messy job. And there was a lot of stuff in the way, resulting in bruised and scraped knuckles.
Meanwhile, I realized I should replace the thermostat too, so I had to put everything on hold until that arrived.
Then, I had to flush the cooling system, which took another couple of days. Unbelievably, everything I replaced worked right off the bat, and there were no leaks in the cooling system. The new thermostat even seemed to fix the engine surging problem I’d had for years!
July 14–15: New Grille
The new plastic grille was one of the cheapest parts – $30. After I screwed it on, I realized the hood needed some more work – the panel gaps at the sides were annoyingly big. I used a ratchet strap to bend it down a little more. Then I really thought I was done.
October 4: New Horn
The use of car horns is strongly frowned upon here – it’s considered the height of rudeness. And traffic is blessedly light anyway – most of my driving is out on the open highway, where I can go a half hour or more without even seeing another vehicle. So it was a while before I realized my old horn wasn’t working. No surprise – it took a direct impact in the collision. Like other parts, hard to pick the right one online, but easy to install.
October 4: Good Enough for Now
As you can tell, I was only able to work on this project sporadically over many months. I had a lot of time to reflect on what I was doing, what others weren’t doing, and what I might rather be doing with my time.
I often thought I would rather be working on my visual art project, or my music, or my book. But I realized that, although I grew up in a culture that valued craft and manual labor, at this point, I don’t know a single other person who would consider repairing their own vehicle. Not a single person – correct me if I’m wrong!
Most people I know have newer vehicles that are so automated and computerized that many of their components can’t even be repaired by specialists, and must be completely replaced when they fail. But even if their vehicles could be repaired, most people have long renounced the necessary skills and tools, perhaps believing that their superior intellects and educations entitle them to live off the manual labor of others – the proletariat romanticized by the highly educated Bolsheviks.
Even when I’m not working on the old Sidekick, I’m aware that everyone else in my unusually diverse neighborhood has newer vehicles – except the old hippie couple down the street, who cover their windows with insulating panels to save energy, and drive a dilapidated van from the 80s.
The fact is, I don’t want an automatic transmission, or power windows, or cruise control, or GPS, or cameras on the outside of my vehicle – and especially not a damn touchscreen!
I’m sure some of my neighbors are embarrassed by the old, obviously damaged vehicle sitting in my driveway. I’m glad I don’t need to rely on an automotive status symbol to prove that I’m a success. And even at my advanced age, I can agree with the young Harlan Hubbard that “I wanted to do as much as I could for myself, because I had already realized from partial experience the inexpressible joy of so doing.”
Friday, July 7th, 2023: Stories, Travel.
Emotional Rollercoaster
My visits with family in Indianapolis are always emotional rollercoasters. We grew up in the farming country south of there, and visiting always reconnects me, not just with family baggage, but with those childhood roots, and the memories flood back, both bad and good.
I’ve seen a lot of changes over the years, I saw a lot of the city on this trip, and I had a lot of time to think about what I’d seen. My observations should resonate with anyone who’s spent time in other old Rust Belt cities, like Baltimore, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Columbus, Detroit, Cincinnati, Chicago, Milwaukee, St Louis, and Kansas City.
Aging in Exile
I never got to know our state capital until my mom and stepdad relocated there in the mid-1990s. First renting a studio in an old factory building alongside other artists and small entrepreneurs, they then bought a renovated Victorian carriage house in an old inner-city neighborhood that was becoming a cosmopolitan mecca. They opened the first fine art photography gallery in the state, and became prominent members of both the art scene and the small business community, meeting regularly for happy hour at the neighborhood dive bar where young artists served drinks as small business people unwound after work. Contrary to the state’s media image as a racist redneck backwater, their community was politically progressive and every bit as diverse in gender and race as my West Coast milieus.
The closing of the gallery, widowhood, COVID, and the aging process have exiled my mom from that community. She misses her old friends but, like me in my remote small town, seems reconciled to isolation. Her home is her memory palace – on the walls of every room, she can see work made by her, the internationally-known artists she studied with, and the local people who were once her friends.
Single-Family Homes
At home I’m blessed with a wilderness three times as big as the county Indianapolis is part of, in a national forest twelve times as big, with mountains ranging from 5,000 to nearly 11,000 feet. So forgive me if I start to lose my mind in the congested cities and plowed cropfields of central Indiana. The closest undeveloped area is over an hour from my mom’s house, a state forest featuring a sandstone rockshelter and hills up to 250 feet tall (!), and I always drive down there for a day hike. On this trip, with a drive lengthened by freeway construction that seems to have been going on for at least a decade, I only had time for an 8 mile walk through the lush hardwood forest.
The grounds of the art museum include a nature preserve with a lake and a loop trail that I always walk – a little sanctuary in the city where I can get away from the noise, traffic, and stress.
But after that, I just walked the streets around my mom’s house, almost every morning.
All of these old industrial cities feature the opposite poles of old money and a rooted but increasingly desperate blue-collar working class. The old-money mansions line a narrow corridor northwards from downtown, while the shabby, soot-stained single-family homes of blue collar neighborhoods form a ring around the city elsewhere, and it seems that at least one house on each block is abandoned and boarded up. The conservative middle class and those with children mostly live in the distant suburbs, while more cosmopolitan and childless professionals choose gentrified inner-city enclaves like my mom’s neighborhood, again in single-family homes on streets shaded by giant hardwood trees.
Rainbow Flags and Strollers
The focus of Mom’s neighborhood has always been the commercial street to the south, so at first I instinctively headed north through residential neighborhoods to avoid traffic. But my way was soon blocked.
After the industrial collapse of the 1970s, the city eventually recovered into a state of constant reconstruction. Despite attempts to create “greenways” and more walkable neighborhoods, the massive freeways surrounding downtown and spreading outward keep getting bigger, noisier, and dirtier – hence the soot from vehicle tires falling on everyone from rich to poor. As the home of the Indy 500, the “Racing Capital of the World”, it’s a driving culture, with drivers conditioned to treat freeways and streets alike as race tracks, unconsciously reckless and mostly oblivious to pedestrians, yielding an ever-increasing rate of traffic fatalities.
Enduring the hammering din of overhead traffic through a dark, filthy underpass, I meandered northward through a preserved historic enclave where stately three-story Victorians set back in big lawns share shaded streets with generic postmodern townhomes. As a Westerner raised on visions of organic Midcentury design and enlightened by indigenous lifeways, I find both traditional Euro-American and postmodern architectures repugnant. But every yard is lovingly landscaped, every lawn manicured by dark-skinned gardeners, many of whom were working as I passed. And to counterbalance the state’s right-wing reputation, every other property bears rainbow flags and posters promoting diversity and tolerance.
The farther north I went, the less ostentatious the homes, and the more I encountered nannies, and occasionally young parents, pushing babies in strollers.
Postmodern Apartments and Cobblestone Streets
Midway through the Old Northside, I passed a cheap-looking high-density development that was under construction twenty years ago. It must’ve been designated for low-income residents, because it’s already turning into a little slum amidst all the spotless middle-class properties, graffiti spreading across its courtyard walls and trash filling interior corridors.
In the following week I explored south, where, twenty-some years ago, a few disused multistory factories were converted to “lofts” – not the DIY artists’ lofts I knew in coastal cities in the 1980s, but upscale condos for affluent young professionals. Lowrise commercial buildings in this area have since been rapidly replaced by postmodern apartment complexes for the millenials who’ve been attracted to most of these Rust Belt cities by emerging tech jobs. Here, the big employer is Salesforce. It’s hard for me to imagine young people who would aspire to a career surveilling and manipulating consumers, but apparently schools are churning them out by the millions.
I could only walk a few more blocks south before I ran into light industry, but just before that I encountered the tiny, quaint enclave of Lockerbie, with a cobblestone street and the brick Victorian home of James Whitcomb Riley, the “Hoosier Poet” and a literary pop star at the turn of the Twentieth Century. Alongside more sophisticated fare, I was raised on his homely works – “Little Orphan Annie” and “When the Frost is on the Punkin” – which can still evoke our shared roots.
Sponsorship City
Next, I headed west on the Cultural Trail, a work of landscape architecture partly designed by my mom’s former friends and neighbors who have spearheaded the city’s ambitious greenway corridors. Like sidewalks, all these corridors are used primarily by riders rather than pedestrians – cyclists, riders of e-bikes or e-scooters – so people who walk need constant vigilance to avoid getting run down. Cities are getting more and more dangerous for pedestrians – cyclists and riders of e-bikes and e-scooters almost universally disobey laws prohibiting them from sidewalks, and laws go unenforced. Cyclists at least have the excuse that sharing the streets with cars and trucks is suicidal.
Wheeled transportation is necessary because despite gentrification, cities like this have evolved away from walkability. In New York and San Francisco, you’re never more than a few minutes’ walk from a bodega or corner store, and most neighborhoods still have hardware stores. Corner stores and neighborhood groceries are long gone from Indianapolis; my mom’s supermarket and pharmacy are each a mile away in opposite directions.
On my five-mile round-trip across downtown to the historic canal with its ducks and geese and the big river with its rim of flood debris, I was reminded that like the professional sports it’s crazy about, this is Sponsorship City. It seems that every public building, monument, sidewalk, stairway, wall, and overpass is permanently engraved with the names of rich white sponsors.
Several of my friends, like the designers of the Cultural Trail, have accepted philanthropy as an integral part of their institutional careers, but I find it deeply troubling that poor people face constant reminders that their environment belongs to the rich. Philanthropy, sponsorship, and the private naming of the public environment are just more examples of our obscene wealth disparity and the fundamental injustice and unfairness of our society.
With its early auto industry, Indianapolis was a major destination in the Great Migration of Black folks from south to north, hence its reputation as a breeding ground for jazz sax players. Its population is now half nonwhite and 30% Black, but you’d never know it from the sponsors’ names inscribed in the urban landscape.
My mom’s neighborhood has changed dramatically with high-density development and the influx of thousands of young office workers. Most of my friends in West Coast cities live in single-family-home residential neighborhoods which haven’t changed visibly since they moved there decades ago. I suppose one reason Indianapolis has changed so much is that the economy was so depressed for so long, and when it began to recover, inner-city neighborhoods were in ruin, but the old low-density pattern was no longer profitable for developers.
Digital Experiences
For decades, the city’s art museum, a few miles north of my mom’s neighborhood in a park on the banks of the river, was my refuge. Many works in the permanent collection moved or inspired me, they occasionally hosted impressive temporary shows, and there were a couple of contemplative contemporary installations that could always calm my troubled soul. But as usual, I was apparently in the minority. They were losing membership, attendance, and revenue, and like most urban museums, they’ve transformed the entire vast property, first to prioritize entertainment over art, and now to “add wokeness” to their collection. The art museum is now just one component of a sprawling family recreation complex.
I was shocked and saddened when they replaced an entire floor, a third of the exhibition space containing all the contemporary works I loved, with the kind of generic “immersive digital experience” that’s become popular with Instagrammers everywhere. Whereas the old galleries offered hundreds of eclectic works by hundreds of diverse artists, the digital experiences feature a single old white artist – household names like Van Gogh or Monet. At the same time, they closed the small but excellent Japanese art gallery and the Renaissance and Medieval European galleries. The latter eventually reopened featuring yet another immersive digital experience.
Museum of Curation
The other European galleries have been replaced with a big roomful of works by a local Black collective, and a series of smaller rooms where a more limited selection of European and American works are surrounded by curatorial content to educate the viewer on their historical and colonial contexts such as slavery, imperialist looting, urban redlining, etc. Since my last visit, this curatorial content had been enhanced by another underrepresented, marginalized collective including LGBTQ artists and scholars as well as people of color.
For example, the museum has long featured paintings of Black folks by Black artists. To these, the collective has added detailed commentary on the injustices endured by the artists and subjects, sometimes in the form of additional paintings or poems of their own.
The net result of all these reforms is that most of the art formerly on display has been moved to storage and replaced by curatorial content – including wall-sized panels of explanatory text and dubious “interactive” experiences where visitors are encouraged to document their reactions to what is now more curation than art. The few works of art returned to the galleries have been selected to address curatorial themes, rather than based on their value as art. Artists and art that played no role in social injustice are now implied to share the blame. The result is what should really now be called a museum of curation.
One-Sided Dialog
I was sympathetic with the new collectives and found their work competent and sometimes poignant. But the museum’s new curators, by selecting work from the collection on the basis of themes they’ve learned in academia, have relegated the collection’s most mysterious and challenging art to storage in favor of the didactic – work that can easily and instantly be explained to the undereducated viewer.
As a precocious white artist growing up with the privileges of my race, I was inspired to make mysterious work that challenges the viewer, rather than being primarily representational or decorative. But even purely representational or decorative work can raise questions. Instead of leaving the viewer to ask those questions – because they may be entrenched in a biased worldview – the curatorial content both asks the questions and provides answers for the viewer. It’s a false, static, one-sided dialog.
The viewer may end up being educated, but the original art tends to recede into the background as its mystery is explained. And what I consider the most important functions of art in society – to challenge and inspire – are sometimes lost in the process. The curators are unintentionally foregrounding their egos and careers, and the previously marginalized commentators are colonizing the galleries, but with reactionary rather than original work.
Who Knows Where It Will Lead?
As I was studying one of these “enhanced” exhibits, an elderly white docent came over and asked for my reaction to the new galleries. I briefly told her where I was coming from and how I’d followed the reforms over the years, put off at first but now understanding the direction they were taking. She nodded with a broad smile. “Don’t you just love it!” she enthused.
“It’s a start, but who knows where it will lead? Once they’ve started in this direction, the museum could turn into something completely different,” I replied. She seemed shocked and perplexed.
What I meant was that as an art museum, it represents a century and a half of selective collecting by rich white folks. The very idea of an art museum is a European institution which has been a tool of imperialism and colonialism for hundreds of years. For me as an underrepresented, marginalized white artist, the museum’s collection was a place of inspiration and solace. The biased and looted collection can’t simply be reformed to provide a similar experience for underrepresented minorities – it will have to be replaced by a different type of institution. All we can do is wait and see what that will be like.
Consumer Playground
Toward the end of my visit, I finally, reluctantly entered the massive new mixed-use real estate development near my mom’s home. They started by transforming a former low-rise art-deco factory – a soft-drink bottling plant – into a complex combining hotel, restaurants and food court, shopping, office space, and recreation. In rapid succession, they’ve added a cutting-edge virtual reality arcade, a taller office building housing a high-end restaurant and multiplex movie theater, and are now completing a high-rise apartment building. Having preserved the retro facades of the factory, they’ve appealed to both fashion-conscious millennials and nostalgic boomers. The complex has become a consumer playground, with a captive market of young people drawn by tech jobs to the thousands of new apartments that have turned this formerly quiet, single-family neighborhood into one of the most congested parts of the city.
This is the kind of culture I and my artist colleagues were rebelling against in the late 1970s and early 1980s – shallow hedonism amid the rampant collapse of the larger society, that inspired punk rock and transgressive performance art. It’s interesting to contrast this yuppie mecca with the new galleries at the art museum. I’m always mystified when women aspire to soul-killing jobs invented by men, when gays and lesbians aspire to destructive institutions – like marriage or the military – that have caused so much suffering among heterosexuals, and when people of color aspire to colonial institutions, like galleries and museums, developed by European imperialists.
Proud Hoosiers
Indianapolis is just the capital city for the state, which mainly consists of crop fields and small farm towns. Growing up in one of those, my friends and I had Black classmates and were shocked when one of those, a teenage girl, was stabbed to death in a nearby town which had been the national headquarters of the KKK. As rebellious young artists, my best friend and I couldn’t wait to get away from this backward place where there were no opportunities for us, but when we reached the West Coast we discovered our small-town Midwest origins – and especially the Hoosier state of Indiana – gave us a sort of awe-shucks authenticity the coastal people envied. So for decades, we freely confessed our Heartland heritage. After all, Abe Lincoln himself spent his boyhood and youth in our home state.
Then by the end of the 90s, politics had polarized everyone and everything, and our homeland emerged as a horrific backwater of racism and general intolerance. We had to rebrand ourselves as proud urbanites and Westerners, rejecting and suppressing our shameful redneck roots.
But now, our Hoosier friends are proud of the lives and freedoms they’ve been able to carve out in the midst of this state that’s condemned by the distant coasts. I’m proud of them, and especially of my heroic family as they struggle to survive, isolated in the midst of massive changes, the outcome of which no one can predict.
Thursday, May 16th, 2024: 2024 Trips, Artists, Arts, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips, Stories, Trouble.
Katie
Now we approach the main event of this ceremonial trip to the desert, which I’ve been hinting at obliquely, because it was too immediate, too painful, and there were others involved whose privacy I need to honor.
Remember this is only my version – others will differ. Why do I share such personal stories? Is it even appropriate? For me at least, sharing and hearing your responses helps me process these difficult experiences.
Forty years ago I began exploring, discovering, and falling in love with the desert with Katie, a fellow artist, musician, and writer. A mutual friend had shared his discovery of a magical place, a small basin lined with boulders and surrounded by cliffs, and my partner and I turned a boulder pile there into a home away from home – The Cave. Katie was the one who first found artifacts from the indigenous people who once camped all over that area. Those sparked our curiosity, inspired our art and music, and set me on the path I’ve followed ever since, as I broke away from my colonial Old World legacy to become a student of indigenous cultures. All in all, we explored the desert Southwest together for eight years.
At our home in the city, she was my bandmate and songwriting partner. We were ambitious, we worked hard, we competed. We were leaders in a fast-evolving, unstable community facing one crisis after another. Neither of us set limits to what we wanted to accomplish – as our music gained followers and admirers, we both continued to write and make art, and Katie experimented with new genres and media, learning to reproduce prehistoric pottery and rock writing, building assemblages from materials found in the desert.
She was a force of nature, challenging everyone around her. She changed the way I live, making me braver, more confident, more proactive. She could’ve coined the Nike motto, “just do it”.
But her dark side included anger and violence, and in the midst of all that ambition, all that work, all that turmoil, our relationship fell apart. We tried to remain friends, making trips to the desert together in the new decade, but Katie began to struggle with inner demons that drove me away and eventually destroyed her.
By the time they did, I hadn’t seen or spoken to her for 24 years. None of her many old friends and admirers had, and few even knew where she was. Her surviving family chose me to lead a memorial ceremony at our cave in the desert, believing that our time together there had been the happiest period of her life. And as the date approached, I was forced to revisit the trove of her creative work that survived in my personal archives, and to review the experiences we shared in the desert.
I discovered a file of song lyrics Katie had written before and during our time together, and decided to try putting them to music. It went well, and in the process I awakened to the nature and significance of her talent, and came to see her and her work in a new light.
Together, we’d been too competitive, and I was too insecure. Katie lacked the experience to set her own lyrics to music, and as time went by, I’d resented the competition and refused to help her. Now, too late, I realized that while I was writing from my head, she’d been writing from her heart, her eyes, her ears, her nose, her skin. Her lyrics lacked the irony, the sophisticated vocabulary and clever turns of phrase admired by critics and hipsters – they seemed simple or even juvenile, but that’s because they were economical. They clearly and honestly evoked the strong feelings of childhood and youth and the sensory experiences of engaging with our beloved desert. I realized, too late, that she’d been the only lover who’d ever truly shared my passion for the desert and its native cultures, the only fellow artist who like me had found her greatest inspiration in the magic of the desert. And I realized, too late, the talent that we’d lost, and that she’d never been rewarded for.
Climbing the steep trail
Indian summer
Following ancient feet
Up to the hunting grounds
Where are the mountain sheep?
I keep looking around
Writing on the rocks
Said I would find them here
After we broke up, Katie continued working on music and art for only a few more years. Her demons took over, and as she lurched back and forth across the country trying to find work or shelter, she lost all her old music, art, and writing. My archives preserve the only significant holdings of her creative legacy, so before heading out to the desert, I turned them into digital files and printed scrapbooks to share with her family at the ceremony.
Day Five: Reunion
I usually hate to leave my land, but after yesterday’s hike I felt ready. Driving out the mouth of the big wash onto the alluvial fan, I got a signal, reached Katie’s family, and made a plan to meet them at their rental in town. I had a long drive ahead – I decided to avoid the washed-out, abandoned highway and take back roads for about 45 miles to the next highway. Those roads would be maintained, but were sure to be heavily washboarded. They drop 2,000 feet in elevation and cross much starker habitat.
The backroads gave me views of other beautiful, remote ranges. But my lightweight vehicle’s MacPherson struts made driving that washboard an ordeal. And as I approached town after three hours of stressful driving, I discovered where all the wind from the forecast had ended up. The entire valley was beset by towering dust storms, including the house my friends had rented. We hadn’t seen each other in decades, they had adult kids who hadn’t been born back then, and we spent hours catching up as the dust swirled and blasted around their compound. I used their wifi to book a room at a nearby chain hotel where I could get points. The place was rundown, but I was still exhausted from yesterday’s hike, and slept well anyway.
Day Six: Ceremony
Yesterday’s wind and dust storm had vanished by morning. I’d assumed we would drive and hike to the cave, do what we needed to do, and leave. But in the morning, it became clear that they intended to spend the entire day out there. So I led them all in a caravan across the desert. As I said, I had no plan, but I’d brought ingredients.
We parked and loaded our packs for the day. I’d briefed them in advance on the dangers of the desert: sunburn, dehydration, cactus spines and catclaw thorns. Now I told them the hardly believable story of how I’d first discovered and fallen in love with this beautiful place – the start of the greatest love affair of my life, and the only one that has lasted.
I led them to the Cave, past fanciful boulders and flowering cacti, and they each took a look inside, and assured me that they now understood why it’d been so important to Katie. Then I led them over to the larger rockshelter nearby where we could assemble in shade for the rest of the day.
My artist friends and I had originally fallen in love with the desert partly because in this place it had largely belied its nature as a harsh wasteland. Although it could get cold in the winter and on occasion the wind would drive us away, in general it was a really comfortable place to camp out. And that’s what we found today. It was warm enough that we could shift back and forth between sun and shade, from the intimacy of the big cave to the spacious view of the ledge in back. I’d worried that we might be spotted from the road and interrupted by authorities, maybe even forced to leave. But traffic was unusually light; few stopped and no one seemed to notice us.
I always prefer to enable a group to lead itself through consensus, and that’s what I tried to do here. I began by sharing my gifts, starting with the scrapbooks I’d spent the past week preparing. Throughout the day, they all studied them carefully. A childhood friend had brought sage bundles and set one burning. And I set up a boombox playing tracks of Katie’s music, so we were surrounded by her voice and her bass lines for the next two hours.
We made lunch, and part of the group moved out back for some sun.
After a while, one of the women asked if we could regroup to share our stories of Katie, so we gathered in a circle in a corner of the big cave. I was asked to begin, and I tried to tell the story of my time with Katie. We were all overcome as I described how I’d failed her – how the world had failed her, had never found a way to handle her talent, her brilliance that had destroyed her in the end. Then her younger sister struggled to express how much she’d loved and admired Katie – like Katie herself, the feelings we were bringing out were too hot to handle.
I was especially moved to hear how the younger generation had only seen Katie’s positive side – the loss was greater for them, to discover her work after they’d lost her forever. How strange that while she’d lived a long life, we were only honoring such a short period of it, saying that was the best. Had the rest of her life really been wasted? Apparently not for her nieces and nephews. So sad, so seemingly pointless that we were only celebrating her now, after she was gone. I was feeling worse and worse, guiltier and guiltier, that I hadn’t been able to help her, to save her.
The sharing of stories devastated and depleted all of us, and we were rising to disperse when Katie’s younger brother asked me for some songs. Of course, I’d brought my guitar – as leader, I was basically on call for this group all day – but I wasn’t sure I could do it.
I stumbled through the two songs of Katie’s that I’d put to music in the weeks before. The first was the song in which she shared the experience of discovering the desert and its cultures. By the chorus of the second song, the one she’d addressed to me personally, I was breaking down, and that’s how I finished. And then we all moved out back, into the sun. One of the other elders had brought a boombox with a mellow playlist, and as we talked, we became aware of a big male chuckwalla, the largest lizard in the desert, perched on the tall boulder pile fifty feet away.
He made his way down toward us, and clambered into a flowering shrub where he began eating the blooms – they’re vegetarians, but I’d never actually watched one doing that. They’re usually shy, but some of our young ones approached within eight feet, and he ignored them. Then he moved even closer to our group, seemingly to observe us. As the young people said, “This is his home – we’re just passing through. He feels safe here.”
The sun was sinking toward the western cliffs. We’d spent seven hours out there together. Again, one of the women came and asked me to lead them in the final phase. So we packed up again and walked over to what would now be known as Katie’s Cave.
The women surrounded me outside the Cave and we conferred and agreed on the details. Then they followed me inside and formed an arc around the sister and me, who would perform the ritual. At this point, we were all overwhelmed.
And afterword, we hugged, and kissed, and thanked each other. A solitary jackrabbit sat on its haunches nearby, watching us.
We hiked back across the desert to our vehicles, and said our goodbyes.
I called ahead to the reservation, and my friend arranged a room at the tribal rate. It took almost three hours to drive there, and I hadn’t eaten since lunch. The restaurant was closed, but the staff, generous as ever, hauled a microwave and silverware to my room so I could warm up a frozen dinner from their freezer.
While eating, I looked something up online. After the ceremony, I’d recovered a vague memory of a similar ritual held prehistorically by this tribe. Based on the ethnographic record, it sounded much like the ceremony we’d invented on the spot. The place, and its memory of the ancestors, had surely guided us.
What to do with my grief, my guilt? That would be the work of the following days and weeks.
