country
what the heck do I mean, I appreciate the country, the United States of America? well, I do, but the country I appreciate probably doesn't exist. it's some amalgam of a bunch of experiences, like a 4th of July picnic in Perryton, Texas, in 1954 attended by two little kids who only knew that if they hung on to each other and to the hands of their aunt and uncle, this terrifying swirl of people and noise would finish too. It's Halloween that same year, a kids' party with real bobbing for apples. it's riding a bicycle everywhere I could in Clovis, New Mexico, until I sorta knew the town and the lands around it. it's a young teenager walking swaths of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and recognizing that he was never going to know it on foot. it's learning to drive a car, then driving horribly, and finally driving skillfully enough to be allowed to borrow the car for dates or for riding by myself as far in Albuquerque as I had money for. it's exploring Las Cruces, New Mexico, by foot and by car. it's buying a car and rebuilding it to one more like I wanted, learning as I built. it's dating in my own car, and getting married, and moving into an apartment, then into another, and then finding out, oh my god, we were gonna have a baby! it's finishing college anyway then taking a job and driving from Las Cruces to Seattle to do that job. it's flying from Seattle to Los Angeles to work on the first Lunar Orbiter mission, then flying to Seattle to get ready for Lunar Orbiter II then flying back to Los Angeles to execute Lunar Orbiter II and repeat for III and for IV and for V. it's flying back to Seattle expecting a victory parade - we'd done the job well, hadn't we? - and finding a gaggle of managers who thought we were a problem, "now what do I do with you?" it's driving to Houston, Texas, in 1968, to work on the manned exploration of space for almost a year in which the country went nuts in it's own way. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Robert Kennedy was assassinated. cops rioted in Chicago for the Democratic Convention. people in Houston celebrated each of those like they'd accomplished something. it's selling our house there, watching people pack what little we owned into a truck, then driving from Houston back to Las Cruces to start graduate school and to learn what poetry meant from a master, Keith Wilson. it's exploring motorcycling in and around Las Cruces. it's riding a motorcycle to Denver while Sue Lynn followed me with now three kids, two cats, and a dog. it was renting a house in Golden, Colorado, and riding to work and back as late into winter as I dared. it's driving a truck carrying three motorcycles and whatever gear I had after Sue Lynn and I split - no, I didn't have three motorcycles, two guys I knew who'd moved to Los Angeles "temporarily" but had left their motorcycles in Colorado asked me please please please please please to bring them out to them - to Los Angeles. it's riding one motorcycle after another over most of southern California, up to Berkeley, and then riding 7700 miles in 35 days in 2003, partly for the Harley-Davidson Centennial, and partly for the sheer "why not?" of it, it was an odd-shaped loop across the top of the country and back through the middle of the south. and then riding another ten years before I had to quit, but you know about that. to sum it up, it's a crazy criss-crossing of the country and appreciating it mightily, as often as possible from atop a motorcycle. I saw a lot of country that way, riding some 500,000 miles in 40 years. I saw a lot of seasons in some of that riding, winter in Colorado, all seasons in southern California. so yes, I have some experience of the country of the United States of America, but if you've been following alertly, I saw it as a loner, a stranger, a foreigner. I suspect but don't know that there is a whole other experience - maybe several - as a fellow-citizen, as a member, as whatever it is that is not a loner, a stranger, and a foreigner. but anyway, there you have my experience of "country" and I hope you can tell I did and I do appreciate it.
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