Wes the Violet Cowboy

Wes the Violet Cowboy is emblazoned in block letters with a Sharpie marker across the back of Wes Kramer’s yellow shirt. He’s standing outside the back door of the Frederick J. Sigur Civic Center in Arabi, just outside of New Orleans proper, where dinner is being served as rain clouds move in. The front of the building is still battened up with sheets of plywood, and only about half of the businesses along Judge Perez Drive look like they’re still in business, but here  the kitchen is running and the great room is filling up with people. There are more volunteers with their white t-shirts than those seeking meals, and most eyes fall on Wes as he walks into the room that echoes with the sound of voices. He props up his guitar against a chair while he goes to get a plate of turkey and fixings. The guitar was given to him by his Aunt Sue more than forty years ago, and it is bordered with Mardi Gras doubloons nailed into the wood and identical to the ones woven into his belt. He sits down to eat, his daughter across the table from him, and her son next to her. The boy has his earphones in, but he watches every move his grandfather makes, and smiles each time his grandfather makes someone else smile, which is often.

Wes has never left his home in Violet in St. Bernard Parish but for two years in the Army, when he was stationed at Fort Dix in New Jersey in 1961-2. He is happy that he was too late for Korea and too early for Vietnam. He was content to ride out his service in the North and return home to a house that made it through all the storms before Katrina.

“All the hurricanes that passed could not take the tin off that house,” he says, olive eyes set in a weathered face. He has a toothless grin that comes easily and only once disappears, as he tells me about his house filling with water – he holds his hand up to chest level – and that he wanted to get to the nursing home where his mom was, but he just couldn’t, he just….

He thanks God for his daughter, who has taken him in. He thanks God for giving him the ability to write songs that make people laugh. At sixteen, he picked up the guitar. At 46, the parish voted in his song, “Hearts of St. Bernard” as the official parish song. At 71, today, he steps up to the mic and plays the song to the several hundred people who are eating their Thanksgiving meal. The room fills with applause when he finishes the song. And then he plays another that he sings when blessing the shrimp boats. His grandson, earphones still plugged into his ears, sings along, mouthing each and every word.

There will not likely be a revolution. But a shift did happen on Tuesday night. I join the world, less those who despite all evidence to the contrary believe things were going swimmingly, in a collective sigh of relief. And revel in the miraculous ability to still be moved by the power of words spoken by a – gasp! – politician.

Down Parkside, Bedford, and Winthrop, the line does wind.

Jess & I fixed some tea and headed to the polls right at 6 am, when they opened here in New York. While it seems that everyone I know in other parts of the country already voted long ago — early voting, mail-in ballots — it’s today or nothing here. People were streaming in from all directions to join the quickly growing line that went around the corner, and around the corner again. An hour and a half later, I was in the solid metal booth, strangely reassured by the old-school machine being used in the 63rd precinct. And not reassured that the other booth for the same district was already out-of-service. I stepped in. I cranked the red lever to the right. I voted. I pulled the crank back to the left, and with a resounding THUNK, my vote was cast. I believe. I do believe. If one doesn’t believe, then there is nowhere to go from here. I fear my cynicism runs deep, yet still I hope we are on the brink of some paradigm shift we are long overdue to make. Age of Aquarius anyone?

The odometer read 10,859.1 miles when I turned onto the cobblestones that mark the beginning of my street in Brooklyn. If I ignore the pile of reporter’s notebooks, the infinite hours of audio recordings that need to be transcribed, and the stack of books I’ve amassed in this two-month trip, the things that I’ve collected could fit in my hand. They rode with me in the little carpeted nook next to the gear shift. I started with a soapstone carving of Ganesh, a token of the gods I have carried with me for longer than I can remember. He’s led me along the ribbons of highway in safety; maybe it was his presence that kept me from sideswiping that guy in my blind spot in California, and being sideswiped by the lady whose blind spot I was in in Montana. The elephant god who, along with audio books, Radio Lab, This American Life and gallons of caffeinated beverages, kept me alert and mostly at the speed limit.

There is an acorn, small and dry enough that it rattles when you shake it, that Jim Weaver stopped his truck and got out to pluck from the dwarf desert oak plant. He waded through the waist-high grass to get it, handing it to me as he told me of the Indians that once roamed this New Mexico plateau, when a bumper crop of the acorns would “beat the hide off your shins,” the plants were so thick with them. “They say,” he told me looking across the endless stretch of flat land over the steering wheel of his truck, “that Bonnie and Clyde hid out here.” Burrowing owls stood like sentries among the sand sage as we bumped along in the ruts past them.

There is a shiny copper bullet that has been shot through ballistics gel, causing its tip to flare into an O’Keeffe-like flower, four-petaled and deeply grooved. Peter Jenny of the Peregrine Fund handed it to me as I sat with him and Tom Cade at the Fund’s World Center of Birds of Prey in Boise. It’s weight is solid and in it lies the hope that condors can fly free again in the places where men now hunt with lead ammunition, mushy and toxic and most unflower-like in its firing.

More copper. A penny, year 2005, found face up on the threshold of a Super 8 motel in Salt Lake City like some lucky charm telling me all was right with the world despite word of an economic collapse in some far-off place with tall buildings. In two months, I only needed or wanted to stay in a hotel less than seven days. I camped when I could, in my brother’s backyard, in the shadow of Mt. Shasta, overlooking the canyon of the Colorado River. To everyone who put a pillow under my head, fed me and let me use their washing machines and bathtubs, I thank you. The people who had to smell me after I visited you thank you also. The generosity was as boundless and welcome as the western skies I traveled under.

I took a bit of the earth with me. A rock from a dried up tributary that I ventured into with a friend as we climbed down to the edge of the Colorado River, wide and determined as it headed toward the Grand Canyon. I hold the image in my mind of our two shadows contoured to the red desert rock, two forms instead of one. We passed a couple returning, leaning heavily on their walking sticks as the shadows grew longer, who warned us that it was tough going ahead. We scrambled onward into the fading light, confirming our mutual belief that the idea of waiting until you retire, until age has leached the motion from your limbs, to see all the magnificent, magical and nearly inaccessible places in this world is a waste indeed. Every person I have interviewed, every friend I have visited with on this trip, seemed to me to hold this belief like some core guiding light.

Add a small bough of cedar to the dashboard.

Add a sprig of sage, pungent and hopeful.

Then there is the invisible, collected along the journey as well, the reason for the road, the stories of the people I had planned for months to see, and those who were an unexpected surprise. Their words filled in the blanks in my mind, their faces took shape in my memory, the way they held themselves, their reserve or openness when faced with my notebook and recorder and onslaught of questions. We talked of subspecies variation within Falco peregrinus, about migration and movement and breeding and believing, but we also talked about the books they read as boys that led them to go out and trap their first red-tailed hawk. The impact of a Disney movie or a National Geographic article. Scientists,  biologists, zoologists, geneticists, toxicologists, falconers, all people with questions that drive them forward in inquisition. They seek answers, but I think that more than that, they seek the next question. They make statements knowing they can shift. That it’s all a work-in-progress.

And intertwined in the travels were friends and family, precious and scattered across the continent, and the joy and despair in learning about the latest chapters in their lives. Of lives that are just beginning and others that are reaching their end.

I am now the keeper of these tales, and all I can do is try to pass them along, to share them with those who care to listen. In the stories we remain. In the stories life persists.

summer falls

I drove into autumn, leaving the warmth of Texas behind, seeing Arkansas for the first time, traversing the breadth of Tennessee and arriving in Roanoke, Virginia with the trees ablaze.