The car is stuck, sighed, and resigned. Its engine trapped helplessly on a bank, the tires sprawling without contact. I was trying to turn around.

Later, skin soft and covered with dust, quiet footsteps down the silent dirt road, Laura and I came to a homely wooden shack. Pitbulls outside, junkyard outside, overweight youngsters outside. The Natives too have lost their eco-system.

We ask if someone might have a jack, if someone might be able to give us a lift back up. We’ve been walking an awful long time, we explain. Jessica, it turned out her name was, the leader, her face pockmarked, her body rotund and slouched. “Get me the cordless,” she commanded to the other girl, also about 20, who covered her beauty with too-much-make-up and years of extra value meals, super sized. There was also a kid. Couldn’t’ve been more than 12, but already with a grown man’s beer belly, who they called Perez.

“Perez, keep watching the dogs!” Jessica would yell threateningly.

She said she’d call for someone to help us. As soon as someone picked up on the other line they delved immediately into conversation without the hellos and how-are-yous. I listened to what there were saying while Laura and I talked here and there about nothing so as not to appear like we were snooping.

“That’s not true. I just talked to him yesterday in jail to tell him I’m still having the baby.” She spoke into the receiver, not a flinch of emotion. I looked down at her bloated stomach.

Then she explained to us that the campground was only open on the weekends and that they raised the price, $25 now a night. “But if anyone says anything, you just tell them that your friends with Jessica and that I said you could go up there.” All up and down her body were tattoos of feathers and Dreamcatchers and symbols I didn’t recognize. Tattoos above her knee caps read “Los” and then “Coyotes.” Indian Pride, it could be called.

“Hey Perez, see if there’s a jack under there,” pointing towards the mound of junk that has collected under their porch. He went right to it, navigating through rusted tire rims, old tools, and what probably once was an exercise machine of some sort. He explained, his voice sure but shy, that it was missing a part and that I’d have to use this screwdriver, handing it to me, to raise the jack.

Laura and I said thank you, probably a few too many times and they waved us off looking embarrassed for us that we were so grateful. “If my car gets back here before night, I’ll come up to the campground to drive you guys out there,” Jessica shouted after us.

“Oh, that’s okay, we can walk back out tomorrow morning, but thank you.”

Then ten steps later, “you sure you guys don’t wanna come in for a cold drink?” In harmony, Laura and I: “Oh, we’ve got plenty of water back at the camp, but thank you so much.”

Why did I (we) do that? Why do I always say no whenever a stranger invites me in for a drink of out to lunch or whatever. Of course I would’ve loved a cold drink. And I woulda loved talking to the three of them, finding out more what life on the reservation was like. Plus! we didn’t have any water at the campsite. The three bottles we brought with us were all empty and the only water available came from a pipe with a hanging tag which read “non-potable water.” I am sure, by the way, that there have been tens of thousands of people who have drunk non-potable water for not knowing what potable means.

Coming back from the dilapidated cabin and its plastic windows, the summer sun was falling, accelerating behind us. And the hills in front of us, though still dry and spotted with pines, strewn with boulders, began to turn yellow and orange and indigo. Slowly the world turned monochrome, every object a unique shade of the same color, but I couldn’t decide what color that was. A grayish, greenish, bluish sepia though that of course isn’t a color at all.

Before this though, when each object still had claim to its own range of lightwave frequency, a black and orange fuzzy tarantula crossed our path. Initially – maybe instinctively – I felt threatened, but then seeing how slowly it crossed the dirt path, I began to feel bad for it, wanted to offer it a ride home in time for dinner.

A few hundred feet ahead and I noticed something move out of the corner of my eye. That, in fact, is all we can notice out of the lesser evolved corners of our eyes. I scanned the hillside and amongst the swaying heather I finally saw them, just two at first, and then later the entire family. They were brown spotted deer, only their outlines recognizable from the background. I pointed them out to Laura who finally caught sight of them when one startled, moved its head. Eventually they all pranced away. Headlights now, no longer bows and arrows, I thought to myself as we continued back to camp, the pine somehow more fragrant now.

Back at the campground and the candles are lit and I’m reading through the Gary Synder Reader while Laura reads Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, which is badly translated as La Importancia de Llamarse Ernesto, and we are both tired, but happy tired. I read through some of Synder’s poetry including one entitled, This Poem is for Bear and then delved into some excerpts from his journal.

Synder’s writing about his time in Ladakh, in the state of Jammu-Kashmir, India. It makes me miss Chris Werner who stayed a good while in Ladakh and who told me I would love it there. I wish I hadn’t lost touch with Chris … we had some good times over the years.

The journal was filled mostly with Synderesque observations on Buddhism, nature, and culture in the Indus River Valley, but then I came across one of the most bizarre parenthetical statements. I’ll include the paragraphs before and after:

Next morning, mindful of walking; haul of the lungs, articulation of the ankle, heels, and toes, and the knee bending back, and the weight carried forward on the hip joints. Heartbeat rhythm, somehow tangled with breath, and eyes not straying from the trai, staying on the beat.

(Islamic and Christian fundamentalism can be seen as teh desperately sincere but somewhat witless effort to establish a bulwark against the world, which is to say, against the institutionalized forces of green and commercialism in the larger society. The Buddhist answer would be non-attachment: at its best an attitude giving full recognition to the intrinsic worth of things, including even crummy consumer items, but with a clear grasp of where real values lie.)

Now up here ony a few minutes from teh Pass are Blue Gentians, in bloom. In bloom at the end of September – what a cycle. Approachingthe crest, I go tenderly slow down a little, don’t breathe too fast, be gentle, and approach the crest, gently to the top.

Now mind you, this journal entry was written in September of 1992, a full nine years before the NYC terrorist attacks and before the chorus of political commentary saying the exact same thing. But Synder bringing up Buddhism to contrast the radicalism that has saturated all the semitic religions, I found fascinating. And, as you can guess, it was my thesis of the week: A comparitive analysis of the Islamic, Christian, Jewish, and Buddhism reactions to global consumerism.

We fell asleep snug in our sleeping bags listening to the scratches and footsteps of the our squirrel neighbors.

To be continued …