When I was a wee lad, maybe 12 or 13, I remember thinking about starting a band and living out of a van, it sounded much better than subscribing to corporate drudgery.
I grew up in abject poverty, going as many days without food as with, and violence was always around the corner. Even in an immigrant ghetto I was poor, I grew to be resentful of people at large, being ostracized from birth, I would need to be a far bigger person than I am to take it any other way.
So I didn't desire an ordinary life as we know it in the US, though opportunity and privilege was there by the time I reached manhood.
At that time, I left my girlfriend, college, and home, to go West with my bandmate. We rented and worked hard doing manual labor to get by, but life was good and always a little better.
Eventually we fell apart, for a hundred reasons, and I couldn't stand working like a dog for scraps anymore, it was never my intention in the first place, just what I did to make things work, and to keep up appearances.
In my mid twenties, I moved out to the high desert and reconnected with family, spending a year or two living in the basement, living a quiet life without work, only teaching and performing... really some of the best seasons of my life, though it was too small of a town to make it stick.
Or maybe I just had wanderlust, I had already traveled the country extensively, driving with the band or taking greyhounds from city to city.
It was time to hit the road, so with a head full of Kerouac, Guthrie, and Sufi poetry; I decided to make a little beginning, a small trip up to the mountains.
With a far too heavy pack, and really shitty boots, I headed out early in the morning, walking trails I had biked a hundred times out of town, down along the Colombia river, ever up the hills.
The first ride I got was in the back of a truck, with half a dozen seasonal laborer, likely up from Mexico just for the harvest, which is the norm in the valley.
We rode in silence for a few miles, but they were friendly, nothing needed to be said. When they dropped me off, they offered to have another crew take me further up the road, but I wanted to walk, so I thanked them and continued on foot.
It was a hard hike, I really fucked up with all the gear, from my alice pack, to my heavy tent and giant sleeping bag. The worst of it was my shoes though.
But as the sun was setting, I found myself up in the canyon which I had sought. It was beautiful, and all the sweeter for the work which got me there, sweeter still for the prospects of the future.
A clumsy beginning, with a hundred fuck ups to come, but I've made a good life for myself, better than anything I could have imagined as a starving, beaten down child in the concrete jungle.
Now a decade later, I still work, but not with my hands, and I feel that my labour goes further than lining some oligarch's pocket.
I think of that first camp now, so beautiful I won't attempt to grasp at it with words, and find that the promise of that evening has been fulfilled a hundred times over.
I grew up in abject poverty, going as many days without food as with, and violence was always around the corner. Even in an immigrant ghetto I was poor, I grew to be resentful of people at large, being ostracized from birth, I would need to be a far bigger person than I am to take it any other way.
So I didn't desire an ordinary life as we know it in the US, though opportunity and privilege was there by the time I reached manhood.
At that time, I left my girlfriend, college, and home, to go West with my bandmate. We rented and worked hard doing manual labor to get by, but life was good and always a little better.
Eventually we fell apart, for a hundred reasons, and I couldn't stand working like a dog for scraps anymore, it was never my intention in the first place, just what I did to make things work, and to keep up appearances.
In my mid twenties, I moved out to the high desert and reconnected with family, spending a year or two living in the basement, living a quiet life without work, only teaching and performing... really some of the best seasons of my life, though it was too small of a town to make it stick.
Or maybe I just had wanderlust, I had already traveled the country extensively, driving with the band or taking greyhounds from city to city.
It was time to hit the road, so with a head full of Kerouac, Guthrie, and Sufi poetry; I decided to make a little beginning, a small trip up to the mountains.
With a far too heavy pack, and really shitty boots, I headed out early in the morning, walking trails I had biked a hundred times out of town, down along the Colombia river, ever up the hills.
The first ride I got was in the back of a truck, with half a dozen seasonal laborer, likely up from Mexico just for the harvest, which is the norm in the valley.
We rode in silence for a few miles, but they were friendly, nothing needed to be said. When they dropped me off, they offered to have another crew take me further up the road, but I wanted to walk, so I thanked them and continued on foot.
It was a hard hike, I really fucked up with all the gear, from my alice pack, to my heavy tent and giant sleeping bag. The worst of it was my shoes though.
But as the sun was setting, I found myself up in the canyon which I had sought. It was beautiful, and all the sweeter for the work which got me there, sweeter still for the prospects of the future.
A clumsy beginning, with a hundred fuck ups to come, but I've made a good life for myself, better than anything I could have imagined as a starving, beaten down child in the concrete jungle.
Now a decade later, I still work, but not with my hands, and I feel that my labour goes further than lining some oligarch's pocket.
I think of that first camp now, so beautiful I won't attempt to grasp at it with words, and find that the promise of that evening has been fulfilled a hundred times over.
