The 'core' of discovery....

These changes we make...

My friend Kevin asked me once what I would have seen myself doing right now if you had all the choices in front of you (he's an old mate with 20 years of history with me, and I couldn't have ever predicted he would create and conduct a Grammy-winning boychoir). I told Kevin that I would have been a cultural anthropologist and archeological writer, excavating old ruins and writing their history, being the scribe on many an adventure into the most unknown territory and telling its present story, engaging civilizations everywhere and linguistically unearthing their histories and telling their story to the world. And then there are all the acting roles which Will Ferrell took from me. We both agreed that each was valid and plausible. I am not either of those things. However, when I travel and write about my adventures I am really fulfilling my own version of my dream job, only a different manifestation of it. Often I romanticize about what that linguistic/archeological/anthropologic world would have been like, and definitely I know I would have owned a cool worn-in safari hat all the time. Yet, I also am my worst critic when it comes to the current choice of words in my blog, journals, emails, editorials... when really, perhaps I am just now beginning to realize my own version of my dream job. At 32, is it really possible that I am only now getting it?

What history begs us to do is create more of it, now and today, to take the experience that happened yesterday or a hundred years ago and make this moment the beginning of something similar. Every story we begin is something that will have its own life in our memory eventually for us to unearth it later or savor it just after it has passed. Or we can write about it now and be the present chroniclers for a later time, for our older selves, for our descendants or others we don't yet know. We should look to the idea of potential and the story to come because individuals, nature, incoming voices and new environments are waiting for us and beg our appearance, asking us to engage them to whatever end, if only just to engage.

Nothing grows backward, it just fails to grow over time. So each story begins with its own hope for a future, and some come with a soundtrack or a series of images in mind or eye. But life and its stories are not all wrapped in a warmth like that in a Ken Burns documentary.

Washington = Home

I faintly remember something about writing a blog a day for April. Did I say one PER day? Maybe I meant READING a blog a day... Yeah, that's it.... yeah...

No matter, it seems life got busy leavin' and now it's no less busy arrivin'. I began to physically move to Seattle over a week ago, leaving San Francisco on a Sunday afternoon and camping off Lake Shasta that evening, myself and my as-yet-unnamed chevy sedan following and leading Kelli and Rosie on a meandering five-night journey up the left coast of America. The four of us camped and trolled ourselves through Oregon very slowly, stopping for waterfalls and thai food, following rivers which cup the road for miles into national forest land and uncountable trees. We waded down into the bubbling source of a clear river we had never heard of after camping on its beautiful shores the night before. We foraged for wood off the side of the road so we could cook burgers in the dark at 11pm and still had the forethought to cook up a spare pair up for the next morning's breakfast burritos, eaten with salsa on the rocks of the river bank. We grooved to Steve Kimock and John Hartford, hiked into deep woods to rest our atrophied driving muscles in hot springs, and swam in a wide tree-lined lake while a pair of bald eagles above engaged in a long and sweeping dogfight with a young hawk for the fish it had in its talons. Fish was dropped, we were floored, all was silent again.

And all of this has led us into the metropolitan area of Tacoma and Seattle, where the sound of trees and whooshing of birds' wings in flight overpower the low and constant hum of interstate traffic. I currently have multiple homes (on the couches of friends) and I am fortunate for all of them. One of my homes doubles as my car, where a few boxes of clothes make up the ultimate in low-frills closet couture, along with camping stoves and sleeping bags and multiple cozy blankets, not to mention all those sweet music cds, and of course my smiling buddha statue turned to face the passenger door diagonally, good Feng Shui requires this.

So, last night I met a homeless man about 14 years older than I outside the bar and grill I was using as my internet hotspot. As we talked together about his circumstances he was obviously educated but also extremely bitter over the life he had been dealt, and he had given up and was secure in taking at least half of everything he ever earned and using it for drugs to get by, the other half to invest in drugs to make more money to get by. His subsistence each night dangled on multiple back alley deals going just right so that he might get just a little food money, and everything he relied on carried an 'if' with it, but he had workable skills and he could tell his story with quiet eloquence. He had simply given up hope in himself to get off the streets.

As I talked to him I somehow let the words slip out that I had no home either, and before I could realize my audacity he gave me genuine sympathy for that, even though he knew I had cash and a computer and a car to drive me away that night. I am not homeless, I told you I am home-FULL! Yet I also envisioned myself without my car, sleeping next to him that night on University Ave in Seattle, in the cold, and wondering what in God's name I would be thinking that night if I wasn't as lucky as I truly was that night... it all felt weirdly closer to reality than I thought I was capable of experiencing, and it freaked me the hell out. So, I gave him some food and bought him a pack of cigarettes, and then went back into the bar and grill, like that would just make me normal...

There I met another man from Homer, Alaska, who couldn't believe that I had been there once (when I was 11) and was buying drinks for everyone at the bar over and over with fresh $100 bills while he waited for his buddies from one of the crabbing boats from the Discovery Channel's "Deadliest Catch" to show up, which they never did.

All that cash flowing for drinks for strangers and the man outside who had lost hope and was resigned to his life on the streets, and me with my car feeling a little like both of them.

So this morning I'm dirty and my car smells like bacon cheeseburgers and old wood smoke and the sage I burned when I got back into my car and almost recoiled from the mixture of the first two smells. Life simply is not always pretty and never makes itself understood without some digging. I feel this is a slightly stiffer and different Washington than the free-love and open one I left back in'01 - for obvious reasons if you know Holden Village - as I begin to make my roots here with new people and a few years of life-altering experiences behind me, preparing to rediscover the country I still feel is one of the most beautiful regions in North America.