Wandering America: The White Album

Everyone I meet is in transition. The spaces are never one’s own, merely borrowed for a moment – campgrounds, hostels, gas stations. I catch everyone, in some way or another, in their own story, in the ebb and flow of their grand journey elsewhere. I wonder what we all think we’re doing here.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phatasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Joan Didion, The White Album

“Can we talk, for just a moment?” He pokes his head down from the top bunk. He is wide-eyed like a young doe, youthful innocence under gray hair.

“Yeah, what’s up?”

“Oh, nothing.” He turns away and looks down at the floor. He had found someone to talk to but nothing to say.

A deep breath. He wants to move here, to Santa Barbara, he tells me. Bring his wife and kids out from New Jersey. He speaks solemnly, reverently, as if in confession. He tells me how he loves the city and how he wants to experience it all. All of it, he stresses, meeting my eyes.

“Be careful out there,” the ranger says. “Some of the sign posts out towards the end of the trail fell over.” I had long since passed these but thank her for the warning – the bright orange poles with black spades on top like playing cards, nearly all of them had fallen into the sand against the heavy desert winds.

I knew the posts had fallen because I had been watching the man in front of me, always at the edge of the next dune, as he tried to raise them back up. Every one he passed he’d pick up, dig a bit further down where it had been posted, and shove it into the sand. He’d walk away in victory, having done a good deed, only for the post to tumble behind his back.

Every hundred yards another post. I followed his trail of failed attempts.

“If you don’t see the next sign, it’s probably time to turn around. Out here, the wind will blow away your footsteps.” She sweeps her hand through the air. “No trace.”

“Yeah we’re just waiting for Greg, want to take his place? You can be Greg.”

The two were stretching their legs at the trailhead. I wasn’t sure who Greg was or how to be him. All I knew was that he was late for their hike. The man on the right was handsome in an almost unsettling way. Strong profile, wavy hair unmoving in the mountain winds. Any moment of silence plowed through with banter with almost psychopathic intensity.

“Oh and we were thinking of going to the church service just up the road. At 6, if you want to join us.” They tell me all about a Greek Orthodox hermitage a short drive away, tell me how beautiful it is in its humility.

“And here’s the crazy thing,” he says. “It’s a nunnery. They’re all nuns.” He leans on the words as if they were impossible.

“Isn’t that just wild?”

Across the campsite, two boys are choreographing a sword fight. This is a film set, for them – they run through the routine again and then stop to talk, deciding on some modifications. The younger boy had a mullet, and from a distance his round face hardly looks boyish at all. He looks like Arya Stark after her hair was cut short.

The two had whittled the bark from their swords, blades of pure white wood. They paced around each other in a circle, swinging their weapons in full circles by some imaginary hilt.

The older of them thrust his arm to the side, KkTschzzzzzzz. This time he had a lightsaber. The younger brother looked up and nodded. He began singing “Duel of the Fates”: Dun dun dadila, dun dun dadila. He sang, faster and faster, and went in for the kill.

These images stick themselves in my mind. Sometimes I imagine myself seeing like the eidetic Tralfamadorians from Slaughterhouse-Five, seeing all time as all time: “They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.”

But I’m glad that I don’t see this way. I’m glad that each moment exists as a flash, not bound to a known end. I’ve never understood why people read the plots of movies before they watch it. Moments like these are precious: uncut diamonds.