Last night I returned from a dizzying 8 day, 2,000-mile road trip from N. California to Southern Arizona to visit my Dad in the Tuscon VA hospital where he is counting out his last months on earth in hospice. I feel a lot of ways about it but one thing that struck me is how comfortable he is regarding death itself.
I come from a paternal line of desert dwellers. Not folks born to the desert but who willingly went there to live out the latter halves of their lives. It’s in my blood it seems, these stark plains and craggy nooks. I find some sort of solace in things sharp and forbidding. I allow myself to be bent and shaped by the extremes in weather. Contemplatively sheltering in the heat of the day and briefly blossoming like a flower made of meat whose fragrance is reminiscent of gin and salt, in the precious demarcation of evening in which the indifferent frozen and sparkling blanket of endless night is pulled over the sky to quietly lull the suns angry head to sleep.
My Dad passed his 37 acre patch of desert in Eastern Arizona to me years ago and I spent some time marinating in its pristine silences and walking upon its iron red sands after seeing visiting my Dad. There is nowhere better to process than in a desert solitude. My Dad and both of his parents ended up there. Perhaps to contemplate their younger lives- to let their previous incarnations wither in the heat to be born anew with wisdom, mirth and thorn. I always thought that I too would end up in the desert. But now, with my daughter a quadriplegic, I can no longer look too far into the future lest it take even an ounce of my attention from the present and to her care. The desert though, she calls to me. Even as I write this from our home amongst the ancient Redwoods of Sonoma county and along the wandering brown ribbon of the Russian river, I hear her whispers. I would not have been able to make another desert trip such as this under any other circumstance and so I choose to milk from it a melancholy sort of gratitude. My friend Ferniculous came with me, and we slept in all of our old desert haunts along the way. Our only roof a starry black sky. The wind, our walls and the sun a mistress both caressing and cruel. But that’s a story for later, I still haven’t unpacked my damn truck.
My Dad though, he’s always conveyed a relaxed and even blasé attitude about dying which I consider a remarkable thing for someone without any sort of belief system which involves heavens or hells or astral realms. Even when I was a kid, I remember asking him “Oh can I have that (this thing or that) of yours when I grow up?” Inquiring about some possession of his I deemed cool. “Yep, you can have it when I’m dead” he would say with a smirk and a twinkle.
Traveling through the desert doesn’t lend itself to writing but it is rich in subsequent realizations. For now, though, I present this poem I wrote a couple years ago. It is a compilation of some of my favorite desert spots and speaks to a subject that is now even more in my mind than usual. But more importantly I share this for my Dad as it is one of his favorites. He is not a religious man, he is more like a Daoist desert monk in his sensibilities, and I think the message of merging with the desert tickled him as it does me. If you watch carefully- Dad makes a brief cameo.
I suppose I’ve put off dealing with my dusty laundry and gear burdened truck long enough. Whilst I re-hydrate, I hope you enjoy “Desert Demise”
Toodaloo
