By far the biggest asset I own free and clear is that lot down there, and today I’m considering the possibility that it’s actually a liability.
A dream that is now past its sell-by date. A dream that seems free but isn’t. Like the Festival itself now.
I still think Silver is the last best place and I guess I always will, even though no one else does.
More than once I tried my own best, to make it my place, but it never quite has been and maybe it wasn’t meant to be.
What if I’m already living in my rightful baseCamp?
***
Careful readers will know that I personally, and no one else, call the town that camp is in: SandRock.
For movie reasons.
The first real-life white-man name it ever had was: HorseHead Crossing.
As in a river crossing.
At most half a mile south of this BaseCamp.
‘Everyone’ knows that, but very few people know that in white-man geography, the crossing is also a confluence, of two rivers with different names. These streams join together right under the latter-day bridge over the floodplain at State Route 77, which runs up from Tucson, starting at a place they call the Miracle Mile.
The palefaces, as is often the case, are badly confused, blinded by their own fictional interpretations of things.
There is, in reality, only one river.
With two forks.
And the first whites, the Spanish, thought it might be a good idea to call the river: the Flax.
Only they said it prettier, because Spanish is a poetical language.
Rio Lino.
It rolls right off the tongue and in my opinion that makes it better.
***
I live in the Desierto Pintado.
At the fork in the Rio Lino.
That’s where my primary camp is, and where my horseless carriages are parked.
Is that a shame? There are many reasons to think so. The sewer is choked with roots, again. The roof is beginning to leak more aggressively. And the cop who moved in next door dragged his girlfriend in to shack up with him, and she dragged her dog along, and the dog is loud and stupid and I pretty much hate all three of them on a daily basis, and I curse them loudly and often.
There’s issues with the water heater too, but those issues are way, way down the list of shames, and I will thank you to kindly shut the fuck up about them, no matter who you are.
There are too many cats here.
And yet.
All the problems, in some twisted way, make it somehow better. No, not better.
Just more … right, in much the same way that calling it the Rio Lino is more right.
More congruous with The Narrative and the ‘Self’, to the limited extent that even those mean a damn thing.
Also.
The gnarlsome ugly baseCamp is halfway to anywhere good.
By which I mean: Chama, Alamosa, Salida, Del Norte. The freshly undrowned canyons of the Glen. Ajo as the prototype for winter.
And Silver itself.
I might be better off here, no, not better; I might be more right here.
***
This is a story about where I put how much of my mental energy.