Things Change

Life is funny, ya know?

A week ago, my life was fairly normal; laundry, dishes, cleaning up after cats and kids, reading posts on Facebook and the internet, watching the debacle of the election cycle, trying to finish some anchor replacement at the older crags in WV and making plans to hit the road for Colorado the day after tomorrow, to begin another season as staff in Pike National Forest's 11 Mile Canyon.

An hour later, I was in an ambulance with a wife who I did not know would live to see another day, holding her hand as EMTs worked on her, my heart in my throat and all plans for the future annihilated and scattered to the winds.

Late that night, the doctors at RMH told us their diagnosis; not the worst, but not the best, not by a long shot.

Cindy, a fourteen year stroke survivor and Multiple Sclerosis fighter, had suffered a brain aneurysm; a massive swelling in the carotid artery just inside her skull, like a loaded cannon pointed directly at the base of her brain. She was transferred to Richmond's Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center for more tests and scans, her condition analyzed by some of the leading neurosurgeons in the country.

On Saturday, her pain was minimal, her condition stable, and we came back to the Shenandoah Valley.

Eight years ago, I met a funny, beautiful lady with a heart of gold; taught her to climb, shared her battle with Multiple Sclerosis, supported her fight to stop using the medications that were killing her, and listened as she fought with the darkness that had been poured into her soul by demons in human form at such an early age.

In turn, she accepted me for the bipolar, sardonic, irascible, irreverent fool that I am; reached down into my well of isolation and self-pity and drew out the very best of me. If I have failed to live up to that ideal, the fault is mine; Cindy has always believed in me, no matter how badly or how often I have failed.

We have traveled the country from coast to coast, climbed and hiked, laughed and cried at the folly and loss of friends and family, celebrated victories and struggled to find a silver lining surrounding the storm clouds of our occasional defeats. We've learned more about friendship, hardship, love and life in the last few years than either of us suspected could be known in a lifetime.

Today, Cindy and I have a slightly clearer picture of a much different future, and in the light of that knowledge, we are living each day to the fullest, loving and appreciating each other, so thankful for the family and friends who have put aside their own burdens and reached out to support us in our darkest hours of need.

The Road ahead is uncertain; there are trials and storms on our horizons, without a doubt, as there are for every person living in this consensual illusion of reality that we share. But for now, we are holding each other in this safe haven, cherishing each touch, each kiss, each word, and together, we will get through whatever may come.

No matter what may transpire, each of us knows the other will be waiting, there in that forest meadow at the end of the Road; waiting and calling, "Come home".

You and me, kid; forever.

And, for now, that is more than enough.

Canna bureaucracy

Some thoughts on a snowy morning.

The cannabis question has been with us for over a century, now.  From the earliest days of the colonies, hemp was a prime crop, one which George Washington planted not only as a textile, but in hopes of supplanting tobacco as a recreational smoke. Extracts of hemp oils and flowers were used by physicians in the Royal Court and in the New World, its properties had been explored by the early rulers and scientists of China and one would have to have a completely unrealistic view of mankind to believe that no one on Earth had ever taken the time to select and crossbreed the frost and drought-resistant plants for stronger resin and larger flowers.   We’re curious little monkeys.  Gregor Mendel was just the first one to write notes about it.

Cannabis is relatively benign, but let us be honest, very little on this world is beyond abuse. No doubt over the centuries, people who have lacked motivation or fallen on hard times or suffered from underlying depression have taken to smoking too much hemp at too young an age for too long, and wound up roughly as smart as a football bat.

Fact is, people have ruined their lives with just about everything possible, cradle to the grave, since there were two of us here, according to most of the stories that have been going around since fire was new.  

None of those stories ever goes on to tell how making rules ever actually stopped people from doing those things.  The long list of punishments for breaking the rules suggests that, human nature being what it is, maybe the whole rule thing never worked out any better for them than it has for the United States and her once again tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to be free.

Prohibition, the bastard stepchild of conspiracy theory, corporate manipulation and racism, has wandered a strange and checkered road to the present, where it once again rises before us in all its complexity of ignored facts, generations of institutional prejudice and billions in federal salaries and private-sector profit, emerging scientific understanding  suppressed by the minority of sharply divided opinions for a variety of political agendas,  a struggle of cultures and values in which almost every voice of science, compassion and reason has been ignored.  Even with the example of one failure glaring from less than a century in the past, the United States Government continues to pursue a path of interdiction, instead of innovation.

And the fault does not fall at any single doorstep.

Too many of the spokespeople for both sides have too much invested personally to truly see the big picture; ego, an addiction to the limelight, or a bulldog-vicious determination to win at all costs, even the loss of allies and friends and at the price of bloodshed and destruction.  Conversely, too many on both sides see and care solely about the big picture- at the cost of any awareness of the individuals involved, save a tactical awareness of their value as images, either for vilification or promotion, distraction or filler.

Let’s be clear from the start; like Samuel Clemens’ friend Mark Twain, I wouldn’t belong to any group that would have me.  A critical thinker in the tradition of Mister Twain, Cummings, Asimov, and Heinlein,  I find no contradiction between being an outspoken advocate of absolute freedom and equality for cannabis and hemp users, providers and growers, and my beliefs in maintaining a strong intelligent military, reducing the cost and intrusion of government, reforming campaign contributions , putting an end to the welfare-poverty treadmill, preserving the Second Amendment, enforcing the death penalty, and reducing taxes. 

I am an American with personal reasons for wanting this plant returned to our use above and beyond the simple fact that the Government has no right to prohibit it.

I am not some welfare daddy trying to score free government weed without losing any of my SNAP benefits or having to actually pay the rent in the apartment where I neglect my kids while dealing crack and bath salts.

Oops… sorry, did I drop a stereotype? 

Guess what?  They don’t exist without examples.

Sell your PC crap to someone who hasn’t slept in their vehicle inside the urban blight of a major metropolis for the better part of a month.

I am also not some “let’s all go save the planet” fan who has a signed copy of “An Inconvenient Truth”.  I personally think Algore is a full of shit as the rest of the talking heads pimping a cause.  He flew around in a huge jet and traveled in a limo, he lives in a mansion and his wife was the genius that decided outlawing Judas Priest would end teen suicide, remember? If George W. Bush did a decent thing in his career, it was keeping Gore out of the White House.  No one was ever delusional enough to think that Dubya was a genius, maybe because, for as many stupid things as he said, he never claimed to invent the Internet.

I know that cannabis oil doesn't cure cancer, although it has a devastating ffect on some cells and tumors some of the time.  And I know that it will take a lot more than this "seed-bearing plant" to aaccomplish the "healing of the nations" or even the restart of the American economy.

So I’m a contradiction.  In the end, the only thing I have in common with 95% of the people in the movement to end Prohibition is a desire to consume and possess the byproducts of a simple plant in a responsible fashion without fear of fine, citation, arrest, seizure or invasion of my property.  We share a common goal.  I don’t have to like them or invite them over for lunch. Many of them are zealots as bad as if not worse than the opposition.  

As a group, we have achieved some stumbling steps, in much the same fashion that the buffalo once migrated in vast numbers, traveling in a generally east-west direction across the Great Plains.  Calling it a concerted effort would have been stretching things a bit, indicating a directing will where there was only instinct and appetite.

I have watched as the “leaders” (really the spokespersons) have led this fight, mainly from the rear or the conference hall or the buffet line, in much the same way that the rutting bulls contested for dominance among those ancient wandering herds and steered their direction.  

I’ve seen them online, in pics and clips, seen podcasts and TV spots, watched hours of YouTube, seen them hobnob with famous musicians and actors, representatives and senators, film makers and glass blowers, hot chicks and tattoo artists and horticulture experts from across the globe.

I’ve seen pics of them at the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, at the Hard Rock Cafe and Colorado smoke shops, at festivals and gatherings, rallies and benefit concerts.

I haven’t seen any of them in handcuffs.

Maybe I expect too much.

Maybe I’ve read enough history to recall that very few people have ever managed a major shift in consciousness signing petitions, appearing on their own TV show online, or playing by the rules.

But in the end I am ronin.

I would like to say that I bow to no man, or creed, or banner, but I’m too cynical for that. I have folded down like an abject slave in the face of necessity and hunger and despair, surrendered courtesy and grace to anger and self-righteousness, and broken every vow of honor I ever took on my name.

I have no honor, nothing to lose, no shame left.

I stand to gain nothing by my honesty, except to reclaim maybe just a shadow of that honor.

Always a fair trade.

We are being led by fools.

On both sides.

While Moms for Marijuana walked the halls of Congress and retired LEOs LEAPed, the checks and balances system has been further dismantled around us amid the smoke and mirrors of market instabilities, the start-up of Obamacare, budget battles and disingenuously-manufactured terrorist attacks. 

While Congressmen and gubernatorial candidates smiled and made promises, corporate patents on seed stock and genetic information have placed much of the potential benefit of legalization forever beyond our reach, without a word from advocacy groups or the Department charged with protecting your right to fair Commerce practices.  

Your President and mine took the occasion of his re-election to sign the Indefinite Detention and Detainment Act into law on New Year’s Eve of that same year, while continuing to raid dispensaries, seize property, arrest seniors and kill veterans, keeping the troops in the Middle East, detaining innocent people in Gitmo, losing diplomatic personnel in Benghazi.

While attempting by every means possible to separate Americans and especially patients from their right to keep and bear arms, the Attorney General’s office and assorted law enforcement agencies lost track of hundreds of weapons.  Almost fifty of then were later linked to shootings, in some cases the deaths of federal officers. Despite rallies following Newtown and Aurora, the National Rifle Association remains silent about Illinois legislation to remove the handgun rights of medical cannabis users.

They does this because supporters of legalization who are members allow them to, and because the leaders of the cannabis advocacy groups do not call for activists to speak out on their websites and at their rallies, to demand that they truly defend the rights of ALL gun owners.

The Supreme Court has been busy defending the rights of Monsanto (the folks with the patent rights to you future crops of cannabis and hemp) to grow and sell genetically manipulated organisms without labeling, with no idea what the long-term effects of consumption or environmental impact may be.  

During the same period, the SCOTUS continued to deny American citizens the right to grow and possess a plant with a proven history of over 5,000 years of nutritional and medicinal applications; denied simple cultivation and personal consumption to law-abiding U.S. citizens, including those with pressing medical needs and chronic or terminal ailments.  

Exemptions have been granted in the case of Washington State and Colorado, but how can there geographically-defined freedom or exclusion from those freedoms inside anything that can honestly be called The United States? And yet the advocates are happily, busily taking the longest possible path to challenge this absurdity; endlessly submitting petitions and chatting on live streaming podcasts, between demonstrations on the best way to clean your glassware and a showcase of that mad Tahoe Kush.

Our government will relent and allow experiments to crossbreed the avian flu virus into humans, a potential weapon and a contagion nightmare, but North American research into the uses and true effects of the multiple components of cannabis proceed at a snail’s pace, regaining lost information in microscopic steps, while advocates judge the best pot brownies in Denver.

The Federal government placed the plant and its byproducts in the Schedule of Control Substances as a dangerous narcotic with no medical value despite the findings and recommendations of a Presidential Commission, the same Federal Government that holds two medical patents on cannabis derivative medicines, Sativex and Marinol.

And while all this has happened, we have been endlessly distracted by polls and petitions, and the breathless reporting of yet another court case.  We have smiling statements made by people in Brooks Brothers suits but nothing about a rally on the Capitol Mall, or a serious, media-covered, large-scale protest outside a Supreme Court trial, led by the people who travel around the country assuring us we are making progress when down here on the ground, evidence of that progress is pretty thin.

Why does it seem as if NORML, the Marijuana Policy Project, the Campaign for the Restoration and Regulation of Hemp and most of the rest of the advocacy groups are competing with each other?  Why fight for the spotlight?  

What does it matter if Steve Elliott interviews someone on the other end of the country from the Capitol Building, the only place where anything that truly matters is going to happen now that Colorado and Washington have managed to vote in legal cannabis, albeit in much different forms?

We have half a dozen advocacy groups, most founded around and by lawyers, and yet no one in them seems able to read a government text, or sort out the legalese of the Acts in question. We are asked to ask congress to ask the President to sign an Executive Order in direct contravention to the checks and balances system, then asked to tell the President to tell a Congress (who should have been listening to we, the People for the last three decades and have clearly not been) that they need to ignore the short-term millions from pharmaceutical and faith-based super PACs and private prison contractors and vote for us, the folks who have no choice but to pay them for ignoring us.

We attack the office and person of the Attorney General, and alternately demand and plead for him to show us mercy, as soon as he is done firing the head of the DEA, changing the rules for the OCNDP, freeing the cannabis prisoners and expunging all their records, reforming immigration, arresting and charging his boss with treason and pulling monkeys out of his butt.

Really?

No, not really.  I made up the part about the monkeys.

We’ve had a Constitutional, bi-cameral, capitalist government for quite a while now.  It functions in a limited number of ways, when it comes to making and repealing laws, adding and removing things from lists, etc.  It is a maze, but it is a maze with a limited number of entrances and two possible exits, winners and losers. 

Inexplicable is the fact that it has so thoroughly baffled the people who claim to be “working for change from the inside”, who have been admired and celebrated for “fighting the good fight” since the day Nixon’s ink dried, but none of whom seem to have a clue how to get from Point A (Prohibition) to Point B (Legalization) without creating a mountain of paper, a mass of online traffic, and a massive top-heavy lobbying machine with twelve million drivers and no clear map.

Why is this?

Marx had a simple way of breaking down most social questions, and it was a fairly valid one.

Who profits?

What happens if government simply surrenders?

Yes, we all know that it won’t happen, but what if?

What if tomorrow you were free to walk out on your front porch and light up the fattest joint you could roll? 

What would happen if you could walk over to your girlfriend’s house and spend the afternoon watching “Bones” completely baked on brownies?

What would really change in the world if you could grow your own tomatoes and cucumbers and cannabis right there in your garden, for yourself, or to trade to your 18-yr-old-or older neighbor for some cucumbers or melons or carrots?  What if you paid for a simple vendors’ license and a spot at the farmer’s market and sold it as-is, let the buyer beware, and if caught, let the illegitimate seller beware as well?  What if big growers could sell and ship their products under the same tax codes as alcohol and tobacco, or, in the case of hemp, the same rules and protections as corn and soybeans?  What if every insurance company agreed to accept cannabis as a legit medicine?  If bars could once again offer smoking sections that for the first time included a tasteful selection of cannabis?

What if the intoxication levels and penalties for cannabis DUI were the same as alcohol?  If bars, convenience and liquor stores, tobacco sales and adult novelty sales all had to be 1,000 feet from schools just like bud bars and dispensaries?

What would the people who spend their days and nights making speeches and standing in front of cameras and making up the news any way they want do for a living then?  What would they be without the identity of advocates?

What benefit is it to them if the rest of the world is free?

Free to forget them?

Because face it, we aren’t talking about inspiring people here.  Mason Tvert is a smart guy, he writes good copy, but he looks like one of his favorite lines is “Super-size it!” Mister T wasn’t exactly leading the charge, nor was Steve Elliott bellowing a call to war while waving a copy of Hemp News and a slice of pepperoni  at his side, when Obama failed to even mention cannabis in the State of the Union Address, despite early predictions and broad hints on the MPP page and Hemp News that the Choom Boss would do so.

Let’s face it, once the big bang of legalization is over, working through the smaller stuff like how we are going to regulate quality and chemicals and certify organic is going to be B-O-R-I-N-G. No one is going to read the last Weedblog post about how determined delegates hammered out acceptable levels of nitrogen in shake, loose, outdoor grown, Kush (to be used for baking only) or which company failed to win an organic certification, except the kind of people who still read Mother Jones or the Christian Science Monitor.

Not the people who are going to invite you to smoke some badass Lebanese with their stripper girlfriend, or get you kick-ass seats to a game or concert.

So things get dragged out, just a little longer than they might necessarily need to be.

More petitions, more rallies, more fundraisers and podcasts.

Just a little more of that sweet fame, the most addictive and ephemeral rush of all, made all the more sweet by how little most of the bigger names truly deserve to be famous or admired.  They may have shaken a lot of hands and kissed a lot of ass, raised a lot of money, and hosted a lot of dinners, but who are they, and where have they been?

Even those who have done great things tend to lose sight of the goal, to begin mistaking themselves for the cause.  Maybe because they have nothing truly invested. 

I bet less than a hundred members of NORML could name the President, or CEO, or whatever it is you have over there… I don’t pay much attention myself, in truth.  But he looks good in a polo shirt and sweater.  Bet he plays a mean game of golf, or tennis…

Bet he never met arranged to meet someone from a bulletin board business card and a phone call, with his heart in his mouth and a fistful of wrinkled twenties in hand for a bag of unknown buds.

Or wondered if his truck was being broken into by the crack whores outside as he watched his wife walk through a door into another room with a guy carrying two Glocks and a handful of prison tats that said bad things about his past, with two more guys who could have been his brothers riding shotgun (literally) at the bullet-scarred street door to the dispensary, while a meth head muttered and raved to your left and a tinfoiler on your right tried to explain the connection between fluoride, HAARP, chemtrails, 9/11, the Jews, the Vatican, the Borgias and the World Health Organization.

Bet he’s never assumed the position.

No, most of these guys look like the guys who acquired Microsoft stock about the time it got to be worth something, who couldn’t or didn’t get a foot in the door with lobbies and PACs, who wanted something a little edgy, a little different from a stint as a public defender, with all the legalese but with no real risk. Like one day, fresh back from Cancun or South Padre, they looked around and said “Hey, the trust fund is running a little low… but I hear advocacy pays pretty well!”  With that decided, they probably put the game on the flat screen, cracked another microbrew and called their escort service to have her deliver a quarter of whatever sounded funky and cost the most, that week.

I know that’s judging by appearances, but that’s the impression these guys give; a little hipper, a little smoother, with a little more on the ball than you and me, and in no particular hurry to take the fight to the wall.

Players. 

Insiders.

Imagine what working-class Joe thinks, watching people who don’t have the conviction to actually put themselves on the line, preaching to him about rights he sees slipping away every day as he tries to earn enough to eat and pay the bills, while they fly from convention to interviews to TV spot.

Think of the curious people who surf through our discussions and comment sections online, who read the illiterate frenzy and fantastic stream-of-consciousness ravings, the scam or sting ads to order drugs through the mail or internet, the profanity and the posing thug-lovers and the hundred other forms of human trash on display.  Why do these things stay up on websites for days?  The users no longer care about the integrity of the movement, because the leaders have no true personal involvement, and integrity is a luxury in the age of the backroom deal. 

How can we be accepted as being any better, when so little of what we show the world is any better?

Try to see us through the eyes of a church-going grandparent, living in what was once a small town now overrun by spoiled college kids and arrogant money, filled with lies but confronted again and again by people who seem bent on becoming the embodiment of every drug stereotype.

 What of the veteran, on the fence, living on a pittance from a government that would rather forget, just another forgotten face who sees just how little the talking heads at the top actually give a damn, be it the top of the Veterans’ Administration or of the reform movement, about the brothers and sisters in arms slain and incarcerated in this lost war.  Once the rally ends and the petition is signed, how many legalization crowds give a thought to the plight of those same veterans?  How many offer a word, a meal or a ride? 

Think of the hundreds of thousands who have not spoken, yet.

There are so many applications for hemp, and so many uses for cannabis and its extracts.  Let us not allow those potentials to be stolen by blind trust in our representatives, or by ignoring the eternal greed and treachery of Prohibition’s offspring, the pills-punishment-incarceration-and-rehabilitation complex.

The polls predict success and increasing acceptance, among people who cared to respond. 

That headline was true a week before Reagan won the election.  Two years later, Nancy and her celluloid cowboy rode into history by restarting a billion dollar drug war, while Oliver North was arming twelve-year-olds and establishing coke routes into the United States from South America. 

Victory is a certainty when it is written into both law and history books.  Until then, it is just a convenience of perspective.

Look at how the herd moves.  Decide if the direction we are headed is correct, and if the speed at which we move is satisfactory.

If not, do something. 

Yourself.

Write a real email, not a form letter, to your state and federal representatives.  If you are in D.C., go look up your congressman or woman and tell them what you care about.

Emotional social media posts change nothing in the real world, and waiting for someone else to look after your best interests is accepting that someone else will decide what those best interests are and where they lay.

For every victory, there is a cost.  Count on it. Your enemy does.  

Time to grow up and accept the terms of this fight, even if the smiling faces online don’t want to see the storm ahead.

The tide is turning, according to the people who get paid to tell you exactly that.

I still say, Question authority.  Any authority. 

Even the cannabureaucracy.

Even mine.

But remember who has been there, on the line, and who has not.

Tides go in and out, and a wise person does not build too close to the sea on the advice of those who have never sailed deep waters.

A Ronin Looks at 50

Mother mother mountain
you have seen it all
wanted to climb
your stony reaches
since I was just three feet tall

You've seen it all...
you've seen it all.

Watched the crowds who climb you
go from outcasts to mainstream
without a clue of your hidden treasures
your forests and your valleys and streams
livin' the dream, just living the dream

Yes I am a ronin
four hundred years too late
The world's gone crazy
the climbing crowd is lazy
I'm the pioneer they all love to hate,
Cuz their egos got bent
one hundred fifty first ascents!


And I have been climbing
for over thirty years
aided, drilled and fallen
been through lots of tears and beers
But my ass has been draggin'
Gotta go craggin'
Get back to the source again
With just a few friends
just a few friends...

Mother mother mountain
After all my years I've found
that the dreams I've chased
across a thousand faces
were all answered back down here on the ground
Sometimes things come around
Things come around...

Cudmudgeon Protocols

Tired of the backchatter.

Fed up with the endless questioning of my memories, the denial of routes stolen and access lost by the coffee house icons of Seneca Rocks, and sick of the ease with which three decades of travel and hardship, discovery and loss, experience and knowledge across the North American continent are dismissed by the armchair experts and hard persons of NoVA and D.C. who come running to the defense if the faintest whiff of unpleasant truth disturbs the rosewater of their illusions.

Common sense would dictate silence, retreat in the face of overwhelming numbers, perhaps some compromise in a stance that draws a line in the sand without option for negotiation.

I've never had much use for that kind of common sense.  I suppose, after all these years of walking it as I talk it, whenever I can, in every aspect of my life where I have a choice, compromise of that sort sounds too much like a good cover story for surrender.

And who would ever accept sweet reason from me after all of the toes on which I have stomped, all of the egos bruised, all the carefully-polished reputations spat upon and exposed for the thin varnish they truly were?

Besides, what in the world would I do for fun if not toppling brass idols with feet of clay, slaughtering sacred cows, advocating chlorine in the gene pool and cannonballing into the status quo?

But enough sleepless nights, enough angry debates with myself.  Time to step back, to dig deep, to give a little gift to myself and for the small group of people who agree with my perspectives and share something of my vision.

Recent rains have left much of the rest of the Gypsy Wall dripping with run-off from the long band of cliffs angling slowly down the hill to this final panel of rock above a winding back road.  Gypsies and Shaved Scamper, my two moderate bolted lines on this wall, are both streaked with runnels of water trickling down the pocketed, fossil-sewn grey stone to my right.

The left end of the wall overhangsabout eighteen inches in forty feet and is almost entirely dry, despite a short rainshower.  As the sun comes out and breezes shake the budding leaves of spring, driving back the mosquitoes and biting flies if only for a moment, I stack rope and drill gear, paired aiders and a variety of hooks, daisy chains and cams on a massive finger of stone that rests at the base of a steep initial panel of rock, eight feet of stone devoid of the pockets so common in the layer above.

A loose flake or two the size of laptop computers come off with gentle tugs, and one six inches thick and as long as my arm yields to the stronger persuasion of a prybar,  dropping like a guillotine blade to bounce between my madly-dancing feet, followed by a steady rain of 'potato chips'.  Unlike a lot of the folks who have put up routes here recently, I control the rock fall and limit damage to the surrounding environment, building up the base, keeping debris out of the road below. 

Finally, the face is clean and I pause for a sip of water before shouldering the Beast, slipping on sunglasses and bouldering up into the first clip stance.  Raising the Bosch Litheon into position, I call out, "Fire in the hole" and pull the trigger.  Behind me, I hear Cindy acknowledge as the motor growls to life and rock dust flies from the 3/8 inch bit. 

And so it begins, again.

The metamorphic limestone is dense, and it takes almost a minute and a half to drill a full-depth hole, during which I am reminded of my reduced physical activities of late and my unceasing love of my wife's cooking and southern food in general.  Deer flies and gnats take advantage of my lack of free hands to reduce my blood levels, as hopeful buzzards dip and swoop above, eyeing this potential meal.  Cindy laughs and calls out the old refrain, "It's just his feet!"

Pulling the bottomed bit free, still spinning, I release the trigger and step down from the holds.  My lovely assistant Cindy takes the drill and I boulder back up to insert one end of the blow tube into the freshly-drilled hole.  A puff of fine grey powder blasts out of the hole, the shifting breeze ensuring that most of it falls towards my face, but I have already shut my eyes in anticipation of this and feel only the sifting on my eyelids.    A three mile-per-hour breeze negates the effectiveness of safety glasses every time, and will invariably blow in your face only when it will bring dust, rather than respite from biting insects or burning runnels of sweat.

Occupational hazards.

I boulder back down blind, lean over, remove my glasses and carefully brush the dust off my eyelids before opening my eyes again.  Interesting the first few times you try it, it gets annoying after a while, but it's all part of the price for doing things by the protocols, instead of taking the easier route of rap-bolting.

Back up to the hole, the 3/8 inch Hilti bolt with Fixe hanger sitting nicely in the hole as the three pound hammer swings once, twice, three times.  Pause to back the nut off right out to the end of the threads for full depth, another tap, and I swap hammer for wrench; three good turns and the nut comes under tension, guesstimating the torque is second nature after placing well over a thousand such bolts in my careers of carpenter, rigger and climber.

Back down to the belay, a last shot of coffee and a bit of granola, flame to brass and a kiss for the lass as I step into the soon-retiring Black Diamond harness and thread daisies, clip on chalk bag and tie in the rope, thread the free end through the Wall Hauler and tie into the drill for ease of access and drop free gear lifting, add a dozen draws and runners, hooks and some DMM cams to balance my #1, 2, and 3 Camalots, step into my beat-up Evolvs and pull on my battered Petzl helmet.

"Good knot and buckle." I mumble, almost on auto-pilot as I scope out the moves above the first bolt and ledge.

"I have you on a good system, " Cindy answers, "Go get some."

Good call.  When surrounded by jackals and posers and fools, goaded by idiots and has-been with convenient memories and undeserved reputations, then pushed to the point of despair by the sight of the blind leading the deaf, stick with what you know.

Curmudgeon protocols; harsh, but honest, to a fault; self-aware without being self-serving; calling it the way I see it, and holding myself to the strictest standards of all.  Accepting total responsibility for my own words and actions, with the priceless reward of complete freedom.

Like a teetering hook on a great line, not what you might have hoped for, but good enough; you learn to work with what you get.

I guess I can live with that.

No Place Like Home

The sink is leaking.  The tub drain stopper doesn’t work.   The toilet leaks.  The gutter pours more water on our doorstep than the storm does when it rains.  There are no screens and the walls and floor were filthy when we moved in.  

The landlord and his son are a pair of tragic comedians without meaning to be so, displaying more stupidity and ineptitude in one day of “maintenance” than I have witnessed in twenty years on construction sites.

But the floors are hardwood, a mix of local pine and cherry, mismatched, but swirled with gorgeous grain.  Our apartment is actually part of state history, an old classroom in what was one of the first schools for Negro children in Petersburg.  From the back window the Allegheny mountains roll away to the northeast, where blossoms of sarvis, redbud, apple, cherry, peach, and locust have begun to touch the dark grey-blue hills with color.

Another city, another epiphany of beauty in the midst of the rush and confusion, the grinding impatience and frustration, the endless waiting and sheer nonsensical hilarity of this thing called life.

There’s no place like home.

I must be thinking out loud again, because Cindy smiles that incredible smile and says one of those things that take my breath away.

“As long as I’m with you, I am home.”  She looks down at slender, graceful hands, one balancing a book, and nods as Dire Straits swings like sultans in the background of our tiny apartment.

 

“When we were out west, we talked about ‘home’, or-” she smiles and looks up at me over her glasses, “-’back east’ as you started calling it when we were trying to settle in.”  

Twin vertical lines appear between her eyes as those dark windows focus back over the last two years, and clouds drift over that sunny smile. 

“But we’ve gone so many places without finding a ‘home’, no matter how hard we tried.  Then we came home, but it wasn’t home, ever, not in the way we wanted it to be.”  She sighs, pushes hair away from her eyes.  “We’ve met so many people and lost touch with most of them and we kind of made ‘home’ where ever we both were.” 

Another smile, and she looks down at her hands again, my slender brown Madonna, curled like a cat in a rocking chair made in Nicaragua, wrapped in a black cotton khaftan from the opposite side of the world. 

“I like it that way.”

As do I, my love.

Thousands of miles of displacement, to so many places, doing such an assortment of things in a determined effort to make a home, the lessons learned and truths witnessed in a quest that never coalesced into that elusive prize have changed all the rules, perceptions and definitions. 

We’ve lived (as ‘extended houseguests’) in luxury and dwelt in the definition of austerity (a 12 by 24 foot studio apartment in a decaying hotel), fought rush hour traffic and bedbugs and black mold, crack head neighbors and ossified bureaucracy, camped in metropolis and on the edge of the wilderness, on moss and snow and sand and grass.  We’ve pulled cactus spines and lichen and a wide assortment of spiders from our persons, clothing, bedding, and tents, learned to sleep with the sound of trains and freeways and coyotes and bears snuffling through camp, and eaten more rice and beans than some locals in Nogales.  

We’ve memorized the basic street layout, rush hours, public transit, trash services, bad neighborhoods, recreational opportunities, area and zip codes of five major metro areas and a dozen outlying regions in which we routinely traveled, volunteered or camped.

We survived crossing the continent aboard Greyhound Bus Lines, twice, and if I ever find myself aboard another Greyhound, I will know that I have indeed died and gone to the deepest circle of Hell.

We have the run from east coast to west dialed, down to the day and the dollar; miles per gallon (25), miles per hour (65-75), hours per day (8-12), miles to destination (4027.6), power drinks, water, coffee and snacks in the cooler, everything it takes to cook, camp, and conduct the basics of daily life packed into a 4-by-5-by-7-foot space behind the cab and an endless supply of topics to discuss, even after all these miles and what is hard to believe has only been five years since I met this amazing woman and began the process of detachment and surrender that led to this Journey in the first place.

And now we find ourselves home, but without a home.

We have found shelter, and for that I am truly grateful as the storms of spring bring the heat and insects of summer.  I can see that Cindy has blossomed over this past year, making an amazing assortment of jewelry, hiking for miles in some pretty astounding terrain, on full days even I found to be a test, setting and surpassing personal goals in her climbing and keeping a positive energy through so many trials.

But I know she is tired.  As am I; tired, a little road worn, slightly disillusioned, and low on enthusiasm for sacred cows and cliché perspectives.

Well it’s rainin’ out in California

And up north it’s freezin’ cold

And this livin’ on the road

Is getting’ pretty old.

Or is it believin’ in just livin’, that’s such a hard way to go?

We’ve fought with the apathy of bureaucracy, the inner demons of anger and control and depression, battled together against Cindy’s Multiple Sclerosis with natural medicines augmented by lots of love and laughter and adventure, with good music, great food and an assortment of books for the rest days.  Our journey has led through an amazing cornucopia of natural wonders on public lands, stumbling across a vast, lost history that slumbers along the byways, tiny milestones of our heritage unseen in the race to the horizon.

We have shouted in too many deaf ears, listened to too many false promises and danced to the tune of too many repetitive, predictable rationalizations.  Too many people filled with envy for what they see as our 'leisure' (instead of determination and sacrifice) to live a dream the envious would not dare follow.

The perception may exist that we are ‘homeless by choice’, that Cindy could have remained here and stayed in standard treatment and I could have found work in the Valley, at the mill, retrained for employment, et cetera.

That conceit suffers from two fatal flaws: the first; that I could sit idly by and watch the woman I was falling in love with slowly die from the experimental drugs and narcotics that did nothing to treat her disease, only to mask its effects.

The second; that we would long remain free and outside the walls of a federal penitentiary given the zeal with which the war on Americans known as the Drug War was pursued by RUSH Task Forces and other acronym-laden police arms of Prohibition.

We had to leave, quite simply, so that we could remain free long enough for Cindy to heal.  Here in the East, disinformation and prejudice about medical use of cannabis has been deeply ingrained in people that routinely use opioids without a thought, people who are admittedly addicted to their assorted anti-depressants and pain relievers, who regularly vote for harsher penalties on cannabis users.

But the availability of medications for fighting Cindy’s disease and for use as a general sleep aid, performance enhancer (forget Red Bull and Viagra!) and guaranteed effective-every-time analgesic turned out to be just a foot note in the adventure, albeit a welcome one.  Thanks to our friend Sheri Erickson, Cindy was introduced to lion’s mane extract, a natural fungal extract created by Fungi Perfecti, the company owned by Paul Stamets, one of the world’s leading researchers into the uses of mushrooms and fungus in ancient cultures and as modern medical alternatives.

With regular ingestion of cannabis s and lion’s mane extracts, the change in Cindy’s health and functionality was revolutionary.  If this had been a product produced by one of the large medical companies, we would be on every talk show in America and writing the book and screenplay by now.

Instead, we kept track of the changes, as her nerves regenerated and the spasms in her legs and arms stopped.  The burning and tingling under her skin at the slightest pressure faded, as surface sensitivity, long overwhelmed by the static of overload, slowly returned.  She woke up better and faster, functioned more clearly, and showed improved memory, energy and reflexes. With the cannabis, she was able to eat and rest on “bad days” or after extreme exertion, usually recovering in two days instead of the week it had taken when we first met. 

Her Multiple Sclerosis episodes became infrequent, then virtually non-existent, beyond some occasional tiredness, usually on bad weather days when the titanium buried throughout her body ached in time to her arthritic spine and knees.  On those days, it was hot cannabis tea for breakfast, or pancakes with special butter, or the simple expedient of a deep lungful or two of some Indica strain that would level the boom on the pain.  Brownies or Ronin’s Rational Pasta Sauce for lunch, when the chef definitely exposed himself to the dangers of second-hand smoke, and then whatever milady might need til it was time to call it a night.

We went on websites and chat rooms and forums and shared this miraculous transformation on Facebook and Blogger.  No one wanted to know, beyond the people who already knew, who had relocated to cannabis-friendly states to avoid going to prison for being sick.  Our families operated in a frenzy of avoidance, trying at any cost to steer around the topic.  The cure for several of the most devastating diseases on earth, including cancer, had been found, and no one wanted to talk about it.

We gathered in, tightened down, cut away the dead weight and honed our art.  Life assumed a simple rhythm of rest and work, sleeping and eating, reading and sending emails and news, gathering and recycling the tons of aluminum and glass scattered along the highways of this country, tending to assorted chores during irregular forays into town, exploring the incredible array of mountains and canyons, forests and rivers in which we found ourselves traveling and camping.  Packing gear and making snacks, mixing energy drinks, to rise early and drive or hike out after it on some sweet chunk of stone either unknown or just unoccupied, or not, sharing the dawn with whatever other hardy souls have come out to greet the sun, stringing ropes and setting gear, clipping bolts and pulling until your flesh surrenders to the distance between desire and mortality.  Listening to the deep silence as it seeps into the inner spaces of your heart and stills the raging seas.

We have watched with the rest of the country as our elected representatives have lied and stolen, cheated and lost control, destroyed and covered their tracks, justified tyranny with security, wrapping their sins and errors in the flag, as did those in whose shadow they stand, in whose tracks they have walked.  Without the daily distractions of milk for the cat, vet appointments, kids’ plays, house payments, an ailing water heater, road work on the daily commute, office politics as usual, or reality TV, we’ve absorbed more than our share of raw data as our leaders have dismantled the country’s most basic and sacred safe checks and institutions, and as sensible people have supported demagogues whose only interest lay in the mirror.

We cranked out new lines and old, repaired and hiked trails I’d laid a decade ago, ate lots of citrus and local red chili burritos, camped under the stars of Apache Leap and talked about what America was becoming, from where we stood. 

In the west, where there was progress towards ending the pointless war on cannabis, we dealt with shady dispensaries, shifting city ordinances and political games between corrupt law officials and over-zealous supporters of legalization.  Meanwhile, knock-off oxycodone and hydrocodone and high grade methamphetamines were pouring in courtesy of the cartels. 

In the gorgeous desert where we camped and climbed, a huge multinational mining operation was threatening, no, actually, they were promising to destroy or render unusable land of incredible significance to both national and climbing history.  Resolution Copper was looking to save a few pennies on the ton for the vast wealth they were digging out from under the gorgeous plateau of Apache Leap, by using practices that no American mining company could legally employ, and they were (and still are) doing so with the support of Congress members who had sworn to defend this country and its interests and ideals.  Recreational users had fallen to infighting and squabbling over old feuds, and the classic areas had been beaten to dust as the tide of development and involvement simply turned away, leaving Queen Creek and Devils Canyon to their own fates. The advocacy groups which claim to represent climbers had only this year put a field operative in place, after this issue has gone on for most of the last decade.

It made you want to ask people what they were smoking, because cannabis does NOT make you that stupid.

Meanwhile, back in the city, in microcosm of the rest of the nation, pro-cannabis advocates tried to reconcile thug-lovers and trustafarians with Baby Boomers and middle-class grandmas, much the same way a man might attempt to herd cats with a badminton racquet, while the people who made millions waging the war on drugs just kept pushing the same old stereotypes and disinformation we had seen in the east.

It got old.

Damned old.

We had built trail, hosted events, and fed the homeless on a pittance, and we watched organizations and communities with millions in resources and massive PR machines pretend that they had no grasp of how to deal with obvious problems and realistic solutions.  Government and the advocacy groups clearly did not want to find solutions when they make a career out of searching for them, and the puppets who fund both deny the strings that jerk them around. Government officials tasked with providing volunteers with tools and missions are too burned out, under-funded, or unmotivated and clueless to have anticipated the next sunset.  Climbers were too caught up in the next Rendezvous, climbing DVD, pub crawl or gym session to do more than post on Facebook when we tried to share the truth, too focused on ‘the scene’ in exotic locations to find time to explore the wonders right at their doorstep.

We prayed, we meditated, we tried so hard, and in the end we simply stopped giving a damn on a lot of levels.  The price of making this our new ‘home’ seemed too high; crime, bureaucracy, wasted work and money while the real needs went unanswered, and the endless headache of dealing with hundreds and thousands of people going about the business of hating their very existence. 

Far worse were the givers.  Most of the people who seemed interested in our stories or offered any kind of job or help were like bad fairies out of an old Grimm tale; they either stung like scorpions out of sheer kindness, or we could not get rid of them, and/or they were mad as bloody hatters. 

We kept digging for those precious nuggets; loving the adventure and yet dumbfounded as our assorted friends donated to, supported, and promoted the stories of much better funded people who were doing the same thing we were, living on the road, but doing so with a film crew and corporate sponsors, without building trail or replacing hardware or putting up new lines, without the complications of Multiple Sclerosis, an empty bank account, and no fall-back to which one could retreat if things went astray.  Hot chicks in a new truck with a shiny Airstream are apparently more of what ‘soul climbing’ is about than two people in their fifties living out of a 6 x 8 foot tent, nursing a twelve-year-old truck across the country on a wing and a prayer.  

As we traveled, and in the many camps we had set, Cindy made some truly fine jewelry from native stones we found on our hikes, for which I created a webpage which was showered with praise and attention and Facebook ‘Likes’ by people who then turned around and bought their birthday and holiday gifts from strangers with a good sales pitch.

Faith is a gift we receive, if we are blessed, at a young age.  Losing it is a terrible battle, sometimes, or the stroke of a bolt out of the blue.  Trying to recall the exact moment at which you first felt that loss is like trying to catch hold of the retreating tide; it rushes away… it all rushes away.

But I stop, and put out my hand, and Cindy looks up from her book and smiles as I touch her cool skin, putting a finger in her book to close it as she reaches out to cover my hand with hers.

“What?”

And I know, again, how we have made it, so far, through so much, and how there always seems to be something to hold on to. 

Love.

Love levels all preconceptions of  your own heart, or what it can take, how many times it can break, and heal, and rise up to beat on. Love lifts the glory of the morning mountains and rolling clouds out of the rain, finds the tiny flowers that thrive along the shore of the flood, silences all of your laments against the song of a billion billion stars in a desert sky. 

Love fills an empty belly better than food, holds back the chill of night better than the warmest wrap, casts light into depths no lantern can plumb.  Love finds courage when the battle is long since lost, strength when there is no further to go, laughter to greet the arrogant advance of despair, and hope, to rise up, each one of us, all broken anew and remade, to try, once again, to forge dreams into days. 

Love is hearth and home in the midst of the wastelands.  Love is the unique note, echoing forever between two people, struck at the right time and in the right way to resonate, just so, a harmonic only they can taste, but which fills the world and souls around them with light and laughter.  Love connects families across the miles and beyond this veil of tears.  Love is the unspoken knowledge that true friends remain friends, even through the silence of years.

The bittersweet truth is that you cannot go home again, for ‘home’ is a shadow on the grass, a moving shape in the clouds, a whisper on the winds.

Home is not where the heart is.  Home is what the heart is.

We traveled thousands of miles to return to the place where it all began, only to find that the place we sought was gone with the winds that had first taken us away.

The sink is dripping.  The tub drain stopper doesn’t work.   The toilet leaks.  The gutter pours more water on our doorstep than the storm does when it rains, and it looks like rain. 

No worries.

We have enough love to weather any storm.

With love, there is no place like home.

Superstitions Christmas

Ravens dancing in the wind above the fisted red volcanic stone, frosted in verdant green, saguaros stretching green arms towards a sky full of wind-torn clouds, Cindy laughing at my stupid jokes as the massive sentinel of the Superstition Mountain casts long shadows across the timeless, ever-changing landscape. Snow highlights the distant bastion of Four Peaks, a lenticular cloud stretching to the horizon, with flakes drifting to the barren, grateful desert denizens below.

We bump down a dusty road of trailers and adobe and cinderblock which will, with the coming of dusk, be transformed into an avenue of flashing, glittering holiday color and lights, saguaros and palo verde, acacia and palm trees standing in for their evergreen cousins in most, with the occasional traditionalist displaying their proud Scotch Pine or hilariously scraggly high-plains cedar. The madness of inflatables does not translate well into cactus country, so we are spared the more garish displays of holiday overkill, but the department stores and radio stations make up for any lack.

Driving times and nights around the camp table, talk inevitably drifts East and we reminisce about the Blue Ridge, the deep forests and green hills, the snow and the cold and the storms; our first hike, through 7 inches of fresh snow, with temps in the 20s and winds topping out at 45 mph, laughing in the lee of a fallen tree while sharing a smoke and a cup of hot coffee from the thermos; camping on the North Fork the Christmas my love decided to become Cindy Gray, proposing over a four course meal and drinks in the midst of a driving snowstorm; sipping Irish cream and hot chocolate beside the woodstove, while Prairie Home Companion took us through another two hours of music and comedy and the snow piled up past three feet for 28 days in a row, from December 18 through the first weeks of the new year. 

Comparisons are made, between this year's camp, living out of a 8 x 10 tent tucked in the folds of the Apache Lakes and Superstitions, to last year's crime-surrounded, bedbug-infested apartment in Flagstaff, and we have spent more than a few hours finding hilarious similarities and striking differences between operations at the non-profit Flagstaff Family Food Center and the fairly upscale Canyon Lake Restaurant and Cantina where Cindy is charming the community as a hostess and I am currently slinging burgers and Philly cheese steaks as a line cook.
  
Hearing reports of weather to the north, I think of the long hours spent in the tiny cab of a Bobcat, pushing snow all night through some of Flag's worst storms to earn a buck, piloting the little blue truck through conditions that were immobilizing huge 4x4s and returning saddlesore and exhausted to the warm hugs and hot food that always greeted me at the door to our little nest.  Cindy tells me stories of the weeks of holiday preparations and celebrations among the Mennonite families she grew up in and knew as a child, and of the Christmases spent in South America. 

Mostly, this time of year, we think of and pray for our far-flung families, and our amazing friends, and thank God for our incredible blessings and continuing fortune, the greatest proof of which is those very precious souls who grace us with their wit and charm, their foibles and sorrows, small talk and big doings and pet peeves.

If the world should end tomorrow (and I very much doubt that it will), no man or woman was ever given more grace and bounty in the way of wondrous, informative, generous spirits to light our way along the Path.

May the holidays and the coming year bring you laughter for every day you shake your head in bewilderment, sunshine to follow your every cloud, a hug for every hour you walk in doubt, and the priceless gift of love, shared among yourselves, filling every cup to overflowing. 

May we all find it within ourselves to give back more than we are given, to live IN THE NOW, true to our highest selves and beliefs in the face of adversity and change.