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Ol’ Henry David wrote about sucking the marrow out of life, where life is a bone, a beef shank, or a whitetail femur, and the marrow was some terrific umami manna, a nourishing essence.
Old Jam Juice (that’s what Joyce called himself in Finnegans Wake) called the rare, special moments “epiphanies.” Those times when meaning and essence and reality were revealed, or illuminated or manifest.
Frankl described man’s conundrum clearly, in a later generation, after the death camps, after the midnight of the last century:
“No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people tell him to do (totalitarianism).”
Epiphany could come passively (be revealed, illuminated, manifested), but I eventually felt the bone was right here in front of me, and it was time to worry it, to take a more active approach. The blonde is on the dance floor. Time for a drink (or three). That’s a mixed-up metaphor.
You do the things that everyone else who assumes your role in the culture does. Or you go forth looking for rare, special moments. You go on vision quests. You go on pilgrimages. I put myself through rites of passage.
I’ve gone on many pilgrimages. None that are in the collective consciousness. Not like Holy Lands or Mecca or D.C. or Everest or Liverpool (the unholy land) or Normandy (yet). Personal pilgrimages.
When Hemingway was my idol, I killed brain cells with alcohol. “Liquor before beer, you’re in the clear. Beer before liquor, you never been sicker.” I killed my brain cells a couple times a week. I scattered my brain cells with metal and grunge. With Sabbath and the Pumpkins and Mudhoney. The next day I used Hemingway to put them back together, to make them right. I’d repair to Kilimanjaro and Paris and Italy and up in Michigan.
I scattered my brain cells less frequently as I got older but collecting them again became harder and harder. Eventually one regrets the abuse one has perpetrated on one’s mind, one’s body. One’s spirit. And I am of the opinion that the time will come eventually where things cannot be repaired. Not by Hemingway, or Dickens; nor by Peter, Paul and Mary, nor by skinny-dipping, nor by a cat or a puppy, nor by a campfire. Nor love.
I was up all the way on Lolo Pass, where Lewis and Clark had gone over, just this side of the highest point. There was a young woman next to me. It was June 10th, or 11th, or 13th or so. Call it the 13th (my lucky number; the wicked number). And it had now started snowing very heavily, with heavy, wet flakes and dark clouds settling in the saddle on the Bitterroots.
We were the second car coming up the pass, and the car ahead of us and we were stopped by uniforms, and the uniforms came up to my car window and said they were closing the pass into Idaho because of the storm. They stopped each car and talked to them as they came up behind us. In a few minutes the car ahead of us turned around and went back down the saddle, back down into Montana proper
I sat in the driver’s seat and hung my head, which I’ve always been apt to do. Then I leaned back with my head on the headrest looking at the ceiling of the car, and it was all I had.
My right hand had been on the stick, and I felt her place her hand on top of it. I looked and she was looking at me, big brown eyes. She had short, brown wavy hair. Funny, she had an Irish surname, but she’d been adopted, from a teenage mother. She smoked a lot. She was one of the girls who got me into smoking. She was smiling at me, but a little sad for me.
That is where ended my pilgrimage to Ketchum, Idaho, over that pass which went down into the yellow and green plains of Idaho. We were – had been – on a pilgrimage to pay homage to Ernesto. Who had shot himself with a shotgun in 1961 outside Ketchum, and who (I assumed) was buried down there under a gravestone someplace.
In one sense – my sense – people don’t live close with their idols; that is, they are not possessed by them. A lot of very normal people don’t even have them. My father was raised Irish Catholic, but he brought up my brother and me to be heathens. Oh, don’t be alarmed. My idolatry is nothing compared to my other transgressions.
In another sense – which I hear from people often – people live very close to their idols. Often, they reference a parent, often “my dad,” or a grandmother or a mother. I’ve always spent too much time alone for that, and with each moment I continue in that way I become more distant, so much further from close.
So, we turned around just this side of the highest point of Lolo Pass. Drove down into the Bitterroots, and she was a Montana girl, so I drove her back all the way to Hamilton, and it was summer in the Bitterroot Valley again under the mountains.
I never did pay my respects at his grave. I probably never will. There’ve been other pilgrimages over the years, and maybe a rite of passage or two (not many). And many, many epiphanies.
We didn’t take that road that day. We turned around, so close. So close. And just went on with worrying the bone. And I cannot see how it has made a difference, respects to Bob Frost.
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