The Furious Spinner

Midday I was still hurtin' for certain, so I took a drive to Mother's Market in Hood River. It's a beautiful perfect autumn day, but I barely noticed it. I thought about the sixteen years I've lived in the Columbia River Gorge. I thought about how much pain I was in now, about how I could not remember what it felt like to be healthy, to feel good. I passed a car on Hiway 14, then drove for a little bit at 80 m.p.h. It felt great! I turned up the radio. This morning when I first got up and was in so much pain, I put on soothing music, music which is supposed to heal, but after a few minutes I said, "Screw it," and put on Break the Cycle by Staind and turned it up loud. And even louder when they started singing, "It's been awhile since I could hold my head high, since I could stand on my own two feet again." I needed a little 20-something angst. I have tried so many things in order to get well. Not much has helped. So maybe I should just revert to the kind of life that comes naturally to me: speeding down the road listening to Led Zeppelin so loud my ears bleed!

I slowed the car as the highway changed from a straightaway to a snake. Still I went too fast. I was a menace. I'm rarely a menace. I'm always thinking about the consequences of my actions. I'm always anticipating. (I would make a great accident reconstruction person. Because I can walk into almost any place or situation and tell you how it could go bad and go bad quickly.) Slowin' down made me think of the blues. Not sure why. Martin Scorsese's The Blues is showing on PBS all next week. I was looking forward to that. I was made for the blues. I was born in the deep south; my father was in the service at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana at the time. I do believe the blues must have been playing when I popped out of my momma's womb and took my first breath. I'm sure at that moment I breathed in the blues and voodoo dust. So I believe in the blues, and I believe in voodoo magic.

The blues can be summed up in one song. Listen to Robert Johnson singing "Drunken Hearted Man," and you will understand the blues. "I'm a drunken hearted man, my life seem so misery," he sings with a passionate quavering voice, "and if I could change my way of livin' it t'would mean so much to me." The blues are not romantic. The blues are about the fact that life is hard, and then we die. I can relate!

With Robert Johnson in my head, I glanced in my rearview mirror and saw two police vehicles with flashing lights coming up on me fast. I thought, "How'd they find out I was speeding? I'm going the limit now." When I looked back at the road, a coyote was crossing right in front of the car. I put on my brakes—I had enough experience on this twisted road dodging deer, elk, bear, and cougar to know enough not to slam on my brakes—and that gave her enough time to cross the road. But she slowed down as she reached the other side and watched me. She seemed to be looking for my gaze—trying to catch my eye, as it were. But I had two cops barrelling down on me. I had to get out of the way. And suddenly I was past the coyote, and the cops raced by me.

Coyotes are prevalent here. I sometimes hear their howls in the distance as I fall to sleep. When I lived away from town, I used to see them regularly, around dusk. But seeing a coyote in the middle of the day, at noon, was very unusual. If I'd been looking for signs, I might have wondered. But I knew this coyote had not been put on the Earth to run in front of my car to give me a sign. Yet just like the Woman in White I had encountered in the morning (see earlier post), the coyote was appearing at a rather odd moment. I remembered a recent scene I had written for my book Forks in the Road. In my fiction I rarely write about myself (or anyone like me) but in Forks in the Road, the main character, Bel, is very much like me. In the scene below, she's alone in Santa Fe late one night:

I stared at a Day of the Dead skeleton playing guitar in a window near the Los Alamos courtyard. When I looked up, a coyote sat on the sidewalk not twenty feet from me, watching me.

I glanced around. I was alone—humanwise. I folded my arms across my chest and looked at the coyote.

"I don't believe in you," I said. "You haven't helped me. None of you. I still suffer. And suffer. You know earlier, I said I didn't want Roderick to be sick, but I wondered why I was. Well, I've changed my mind. He should have suffered. Some people deserve sickness and suffering. Some don't. And I fucking well don't deserve nearly two fucking decades of suffering. And you show up here as this grand symbol of what? What?"

The coyote still stared.

I wondered if it was hurt.

Or rabid.

Or really there.

The bell tolled on the cathedral. I glanced toward the sound and shook my head.

"No, I don't believe in that either. Definitely not. I don't think I believe in anything. The only thing I know to be absolutely true is that suffering exists. Isn't that a terrible thing to know? And I know—" My voice caught in my throat. "—I know why my grandfather killed himself. I know that eventually people reach the limit of what they can suffer. Even if that suffering seems slight to someone else. You know what I mean?"

The coyote got up and padded away. I stared into the darkness after it.
----

It was interesting to me that a coyote showed up in my life in the daylight hours a few days after I had written this scene. As I kept driving, I thought, "Well, that was Bel, not me. I still believe in you." I believe in the coyotes, crows, trees, river. I don't believe they can cure me any more, I suppose. But they're a part of my life. The magic part. Just as the blues are part of my life.

I crossed the bridge and went to Mother's. They had brown bananas. Oh joy! When I got home, I'd freeze them—just like ice cream. On the way home, I turned up the radio loud and went the speed limit. I watched for coyotes but saw none. It didn't matter. I felt better. A day with coyotes and the blues couldn't be all that bad—even if it was laced with pain. And I knew at home, Mario was waiting for me. Blue Magic. 0 comments

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