Satori

I’ve never been one to do things the easy way. I hope you don’t take me for a braggart; that statement isn’t meant to be an indication that I derive some masochistic sense of self-satisfaction from trekking the rockier valley path.   If anything, I’ve been somewhat lackadaisical in my efforts at self-advancement. I somehow made it into an MFA program despite writing most of the poems for my submission packet in the two months leading up to the cutoff date, and never even began to take it seriously until my second year. This was, to be clear, much to my detriment. I spent most of that first year growing an epically hideous beard, playing Fight Night Round 3 and limping through the most confusing breakup of my already ridiculous love life. “Catfish” is less creepy and far-fetched.     Three years ago, between those first and second years of graduate school, I needed a job. Three and a half months is a long time to go without the $1,100 per month stipend that GCSU paid but, more important than that, I felt as if I needed to jar myself out of complacency.   For better or worse, my life needed shaking up. The only way to do that, I decided, was to take a job doing something I had no experience doing. This next joke is so unoriginal that I probably owe royalties to anyone reading, but George W. Bush followed a similar career path.   And so, in late May of 2009, I found myself on a plane to Denver, Colorado. I forget how I’d found out about the job with the Southwest Conservation Corps, but it must have fallen somewhere between “random Google search” and “word of mouth.” I accepted the job offer during a phone call on a break from my writing center gig on the GCSU campus, helping undergraduates figure out what a semicolon is (joke’s on them; the semicolon was invented by bored, spiteful grammaticians).   My new boss’ instructions were as follows: bring a pair of boots, some indestructible jeans and be ready to sweat. I walked back to the writing center; my pupil had buried his lead.   A month later, I sat in the terminal at the Atlanta airport, waiting to board a plane to Denver. I was wearing worn-out jeans, a gray T-shirt, drinking a giant coffee and eating a Clif Bar. I wanted so badly to look the part.   During the flight, the unreasonably cute girl sitting next to me struck up a conversation; was this my first time traveling to Colorado, what was I doing there, etc. My natural defenses kicked in, and she didn’t talk to me for the rest of the trip.   We landed in Denver around 3:30 in the afternoon. I grabbed my hiker’s backpack and rucksack — an item I owned only because I really wanted to be able to use that word someday — from baggage claim, hoofed it down to the airport shuttle, and caught a ride to the local Greyhound station.   The attendant looked at my ticket. This bus isn’t leaving for another three and a half hours, she said. Your coffee tastes like leather and medicine, I said. I sat down in the terminal to read Robinson Jeffers’ dead dog poem and wait.   There was no shortage of stimuli: a Native American woman in a black wrap skirt and air-brushed Elvis Presley shirt drank from a two-liter of Sun Drop and scolded her twins, a boy and a girl, both sporting coal black bowl cuts. Cave stones of myriad rock types all ending in “-ite” glittered gently from the whitewashed shelves of the gift shop, as did several varieties of keepsake pencils.   I didn’t smoke, and had stopped eating junk food by that point, but I never wanted a Kit Kat or, somehow, a cigarette more desperately. I leaned against the military pack filled with spare underwear, a few books, water bottles, toiletries, Leatherman tool and headlamp, and watched the slow-motion clusters of humanity pass before me.   We boarded the bus to Salida in early evening. I rode with a mother and daughter visiting family, two backpackers and another trail crew worker bound for a different town even farther west. I sat in the middle of the bus, my packs taking up the other two seats to my left.   Denver, despite its Mile High City moniker, appears relatively level — flat, even. Driving out of the city feels no different than driving out of Madison, Atlanta, Chicago, Nashville. Even in actual mountainous regions, urban sprawl and the height of skyscrapers has a masking effect on elevation. Any city could be any other city. You have to squint at pedestrians’ baseball caps, or maybe neon microbrew signs in tavern windows to distinguish.   Nor does the sky do you any favors. The same chamomile Pollock-streaking the otherwise gray Colorado sky tinted Tennessee during the Big Freeze of 1992. Like looking at the sun through six miles of wax paper.   Outside the city, buildings, streetlights, people, anything newly reinforced melted away. Gradually, the land began to inch upward, the bus sometimes at seemingly impossible obtuse angles. I’d felt like this once before: riding a trolley suspended by a single steel cable, crawling up the side of Lookout Mountain outside Chattanooga.   Now something more powerful, yet ephemeral, seemed not just to pull or beckon, but to yank us in slow motion towards point B. I didn’t know what I was doing, and accepted it. At the outskirts of a rest area at 9,000 feet, the remnants of spring frost dotted a campground. I waved my hand over the recently stamped fire, a lingering heat all that was left to distinguish ashes from snow. You Might Also Like: