Of Spanish Fork: Journal

Like forever before and forever again, I throw west.

Stretching far from my adopted home in Massachusettsland, the opportunity came to reunite my more foreign home, down in the dust-kicking valley, where the savage sheriff’s been released, and brown children roam.

So beige and scathing that place. Hostile, inhospitable, uncaring. Come the summertime the hundred-fifteen degree heat makes it all seem so hateful and cruel; step outside and it’s a peel-your-skin-off kind of dry…Too hot to handle…Everything-ought-to-die kind of dry. Some would say it’s not fit for man, an unreasonable affront to nature; its existence entirely predicated on the commodification of A/C and Hohokam canals and water robbery. Shit… guess they’ve got that right. Some would say it’s a hellish, lifeless, godless place well I’d tell them you’ve got the wrong god — because look everywhere and divine creation is there. Seeping over the land in those rejoiceful mornings…in those color-crying sunsets…through those wide and spanning skies. And still my home is like remote from Earth entirely. Earth of typically vivid, verdant, lush terrains…All this was scoffed at and brave ancients cradled it in the pockets of the Sonora mountain range. Only Earth in name, but surface like Venus…heat as mad as Mercury. And yet there the fiber of my being was woven together, and months swept on…and then in spring, I surfaced. Second to last second of the last century.

There, in that city scorching in defiance, searing in its impossibilities, I was nurtured and raised twelve years: That sunbleached city of Phoenix AZ.

But presumptuous to illustrate the city like I am already there. I am long ways whole states away from there. Yeah I got the family down there but honestly no purpose to go. No business. No reasoning. — Only to throw my tangly-hair mortality heap across the drying lands and see what feels the fine on my feet before I go on sinking into them. Family’s enough of a reason, of course. ¿Pero valdrá la pena? Because Lord knows, the road down there…it’ll take some maneuvering. A little fight, a lot of luck, because I’ve never done this before. The flight I am waiting for now is indirect. Instead, in these accelerating days before the holidays, I will first land down in Salt Lake City, take the train to Provo, and stay at the newfound home of my older brother, Jacob. A couple days there and then I will force myself to begin… that ludicrous attempt to hitchhike from Provo to Phoenix, and make it safely to my family in time for Christmas. Now, right now, I’m left with nothing but great brave uncertainty to dwell upon. This is either the obvious end of me, or the advent of a life entirely new.

All across today, mostly spent in the uncomfortable hours of flight from Boston to here, this sleek transamerican purgatory Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport; I’ve struggled within myself to lay any sort of claim to confidence. I sit here now on a stool at the terminal McDonalds, waiting for the second and final leg of my itinerary; the plane that will take me to Salt Lake City. I try not to lose balance in maintaining confidence, even if it is certainly woven of some fantastical, blindsiding ignorance. I have never stepped foot into Utah before, but making it there is not my concern. After all, it’s only the City of Salt Lake and second-city Provo. It is Mormon country, Romney country. Harmless seeming. Harmonious certainly. Built below perpetuating mountains, besides dwindling waters; wide, vacillating, wild terrain. My concern is more making it out of Utah. I cannot force that visual from my head; that vision of the future creeping closer and closer: me, guitar and case and thumb, walking beside a horizon-bound highway, trucks and cars dribbling south. My face pleads in words not spoken, towards anyone, “Send me towards the valley and the sun.” I admit, the thought must be a bit romanticized.

In truth, and with full intention, I must face the cold concrete facts that will guide my journey. Salt Lake and Provo, they intrigue me but cannot contain me. Because soon as daybreak December 22nd (my favorite number, coincidentally) comes around — danger makes my law. My little brown journal will make my bible. My fists and wits my only weapon. Should I end up supremely inconvenienced so that my livelihood and landing in Phoenix are threatened, I have only self-reliance, only me — only Daniel to turn to.

I watch as the airport people all pass by. I can almost swear I’ve seen many of them before. All the faces mistaken, mixed-up, in hazy memories spanning a lifetime. I realize quick that each and every face is not so incredibly changed; every grimace, feature, forehead. All the eyes so indiscriminate in half-second fleeting glances. If fate spawned me to other parents, other circumstances, I’d surely know some of them, understand some of them, look long and hard into their eyes and learn to love some of them. A stranger is the most equalizing condition, because a stranger is each and every one of us. In a sense I feel I have died long ago. Like it was already too late to start, even eons before I was born; like this little existence is in vain. So many spectacular lives pass me by and I barely see their faces five, maybe fifteen seconds, and then never again. Phone-lookers. Baby-carriers. Earbuds. Earrings. Funny hats. Waiting faces. I see a man walk by with boxing gloves and it reminds me of my promises. At the far end of the terminal seating plays CNN, lugging along that perpetual tragedy that is the news: another promise.

At least I have this: the scarring page. Why would I even be, if not to write? Here on this Earth to write — but mighty more than that. I am here to unsettle, attack the lands, and make outrageous proclamations. These are only the natural rhythms of a man like me. I have allocated already the in-between hours of my time in Utah to finalizing and publishing my “Appeal to the American Millennial (in between hours of which I anticipate many). I’ve also taken my lefty guitar, which would, in its absence and our cross-country separation, render any sort of westward pursuit songless and my life rather valueless. Without my guitar, my white dove, my signifier of innocent musicianship, I’d be naked; only a whacko vagabond on the side of the road, maybe holy, maybe evil, my intentions unclear.

In reflecting upon my recent circumstances, my windowsill life back in Boston; all-night reading, writing, strumming strings, making love — I know there is much to survive for. I can’t trivialize newfound love, the way this girl has made me feel or the hopes we have ahead. I can only say that in my lover’s absence I pain; and in her presence, I find the treasures too rare to modern man those priceless diamonds Peace and Tranquility. I know too that should I return to Boston in one piece, I have college to realign with. After a sorry expulsion from school and a semester-long, often-purposeless-feeling hiatus from the classroom; it would be only right to enroll in community college for the spring semester, and try and cool these rambling bones with the remedy of knowledge and diligence and higher education. I am on this world to learn, after all, even if my capacity fails me; even though this tiny mortality will someday erase it from me. What’s left in this world for me otherwise? What’s this mind even for?

And now we are beginning our descent. And I am so far away from leafy college gates and the classroom desk. The chalkboard and all the walls have transformed, into Mormon temples and mountains of snow. Salt Lake lights glisten below, down the train line is Provo, where my brother Jacob waits. Past that, in a few days time, is Spanish Fork. I’m here for the first time, alone, to learn maybe the most decisive lesson of my life so far. All under the fiery eye of my indigenous teacher, the desert West.