Durango

An afternoon shower woke me from a nap. It's cool after the shower and the Durango skies are open for sunshine and cloud shadows. Hummingbirds are at the feeder confounding me with their energy.

Bruce and I have talked literature for about three hours. We talked all day yesterday. there is no line we can see that tells us where the literature ends and life begins. There is a difference but in these early days we use the Blue Highways to avoid the interstate cliche. We want the slow route where everything comes at its own pace Literature is so deliberate. Writing is so exact. We don't need that just yet.

Life and writing offer an infinite range of possibilities but it always settles to a single option. A writer's blank page is not infinite possibility. Each single word is chiseled from nothing one word and one thought at a time. We talk in drafts, but the writing like the living is an endless stream of tiny choice. We are lucky to have a direction, let alone a map.

I drove over Wolf Creek Pass into the San Juan River Valley and Bootjack Ranch country to get to Bayfield which is located 14 miles east of Durango. Colorado. It (the mountain experience) never gets old to me. So many true things are here.

From mountain passes the only way is down. It is best to stop at the scenic overlook and capture the moment in a subconscious photograph. Use the low gear. When I fist came to the mountains, camping at the bottom of a canyon always seem to calm the angst and stress the young seem to live on. I knew the only way out was up.

This is the third day of my Walkabout. I talked with Russ the first night, after driving across Missouri, about his bypass surgery. His living is imbued now with new emotion and wet with strangely spontaneous tears. He care more about this, and less about that. He is tender to the night. We sat outside and the evening air was cool. Missouri was more than 620 miles away; home was just another star in the night sky for me. I was a mile high closer to the top of the world.

Russ said he was no longer so concerned with the perfection he had once sweated his life's blood to attain. He was joining the Navajo artists in weaving a tiny flaw into his tapestry --an escape port for bad spirits.

Scientists marvel how theories break down at the edges; and, while Quantum Physics now offers some explanation, it too is is a probabilities game and shockingly rife with error. The new holes in Russ's heart now let out the bad spirits; and in that chaos of imperfection a new and fragile sense of order is forming.

Russ showed me to my room. I had only called him earlier that day asking if I could stay. His door was open. First night out and we are talking about the stars and creating holes in the bucket list that leak out impossible expectations. Wow!


My purpose these days is to help Bruce think about his book, and offer scholarly criticism. The role of the critic is in trouble these days. Criticism is supposed to be helpful in it truest form. Today the critic is a shrill helping himself to the flaws he finds in others. Fault finding has become the national pastime while constructive criticism is almost nonexistent. Christians had a better chance with the lions than new ideas have today. Heaven forbid there be a new and creative thought. In the public sector everything that might possible be construed as new is actually termed DOA.

Bruce and I put on our walking shoes and talk. As our legs tire the boundaries broaden. We have come this far and so we can go further. His characters walk with us and we grieve or laugh with them. We find ourselves and our flaws in them, just as like we find ourselves in mountain streams or puffy clouds or the smell of pine.
Your characters have a beer fetish.
-We laugh at the thought and our stung.
That character cannot commit.
-fingers point both ways
I hope to have the book end where it began.
-We smile knowing we are old friends back in the mountains.

Finally we enter the rare air of constructive criticism. Only best best friends and cool intellects can breathe here. We are running now, going further and faster than we expected. I will be especially tired, but happy, to come back home one day.