Spirit Flogging in the Frozen West

I hope that wherever you are, you find yourself convinced, as I am, that you live in the best place. Before I tell you about where I live or the place I recently visited, which reminded me of just how splendid a locale my home base truly is, I must tell you that I come from Mississippi.

I invoke my Mississippi heritage to illustrate two things: One, I am NOT a native Californian. Two, I have no natural claim to the elevated nose snobbery of the Marin County resident I’ve become. In other words, I’m not a fancy person by nurture or nature. I’m just barely not a redneck.

But, having daily breathed the rarified air at the base of Mount Tamalpais for so many moons, I now find it hard to give even the beautiful State of Colorado its due. A state, I might add, I dreamed of living in when I was a boy – my mostly empty head hazy with visions of the bookstore in which I would both live and work in the city of Durango. I must also add that what I am about to say of the state of Colorado has nothing to do with any of the people who live in it; especially the ones I know and love. The matter is more nuanced…sort of.

To be perfectly honest, I find it mildly offensive to be in Colorado at all. And it isn’t just the dryness of it. It’s not even the driving snow, the uncalled-for elevation, the snake egg fortune cookie wisdom of the parched hippies, or the generally fleece-lined Kansas-adjacent flogging of the wind and cold. The issue is elemental, focused, primordial - hard to explain. It’s less of a dislike of a place than the result of a ceaseless whistling twitch in my veins, driving a commanding urge to dig my redneck turned soft-neck fingernails into the delicate and danger-free redwood fluff of my new neighborhood. Just to feel a little of its moisture in my parched and frozen hands would soothe both body and soul.

So why, then, if Marin County is so lovely and the Aspen-lined state of Colorado so distasteful, did I ever leave those piney shores? Death, of course. Death made me do it, specifically, a death in my family. And now I can’t stop thinking about certain things - being dead forever, no matter what the experience of living was like, and all the maddening changes you’ll avoid once you’re gone.

As I age and those around me die, I’m beginning to understand the human lifespan in ways that are novel to me but certainly not new to the human experience. I can’t shake the idea that life - a roughly 80-year trick of time and occupied skin - must be brief. This brevity keeps the wolves of existential dread from howling us into premature madness. It occurs to me that the more prolonged the life, the less able it is to tolerate the rate of change. A rate which, if you could consult a single member of the generation that existed 100 years before you, would make the mind howl back at the wolves with equal menace.

I use the word “trick” specifically, as I believe we are easily lulled by good health, agile minds, and good living into forgetting that we don’t belong here indefinitely. As we spiral down the drain of existence, we must largely ignore the great toilet flush of birth. If that ain’t a trick, I don’t know what is.

This death in the family and a long-form audio editing project involving the deceased (my uncle, my mother’s eldest brother) have given me powerful reasons to consider this trick/joke/test of perspective with fresh and observably temporary vigor.

For sure, the high and dry meanness of Colorado did its best to make me more mindful of the horror of passing time, but what really has my parched gears grinding is the aforementioned audio editing project - A total of 6 hours of audio, recorded over three days spent with my terminally ill uncle a few months before his passing. It took me a solid week to clip, cut, splice, polish, and edit the thing into digestible portions, subheadings, and story-specific chunks. I enjoyed every minute of the task. 

The topics of conversation ranged from memories of his midwestern boyhood to time spent as a military advisor in a small town along the Cambodian border of Vietnam in the late sixties. Mixed in were tales of his parents, siblings, and his own family. But what gripped me most were the stories and depictions of his paternal grandmother, a woman who, for me, was all but a fictional character from my family’s shared mythology. Through my uncle’s memories, an overlay of context and story, I was able to humanize the grainy photos and cookie recipes that previously held the idea of her in the time and space machine of my consciousness. It was weird enough to imagine that, from birth, she carried in her womb a portion of the genetic information that would eventually be compiling these clumsy sentences. Learning more about her taste in music, her political leanings, and her quirky sense of humor was satisfying in a way I didn’t realize was unfulfilled.

As I flew into Denver on an airplane with more than a few people who seemed to be wearing pajamas, I considered my great-grandmother. She would be as gobsmacked by the weirdness of that scene as she would have been to catch the milkman eating grub worms from her garden. I can almost picture her puzzlement, witnessing the shabbily dressed hordes staring at their hands, necks bent at unnatural angles, faces lit by tiny computers. How would she react when I told her that most of those tiny computers were delivering a mix of bad news and nearly meaningless images chosen explicitly by the holder? And what about her great-grandson looking like a lumberjack who left, not just the lumber, but all his muscles in the woods? Where is his sportscoat? Where is his hat? Her now ancient mind smartly avoided these possibly crazy-making bits of scenery by leaving the land of the living when it did.

On the other hand, my uncle, a man who lived on this planet for nearly nine decades, would only have been slightly more irritated by it than I was, but not shocked. At least, he would not have found the scene as far-fetched and dystopian as my great-grandma would have.

So what, then, is this imagined rate of change that troubles me so? Would it only be noticeable to someone who left and came back, the same way a nephew changes to an uncle who hasn’t seen him in years? Or is it more like watching one’s children grow and change, only noticing the transformations when looking back at old photographs and videos? Is 80 years sufficient? Is 100 too many? Sometimes, 45 feels more than enough (I’m currently 44 and realize how absurd/stupid that sounds).

I don’t know the ideal length of human life, but I think my uncle did fine at 86. For what it’s worth, I wish my cousins still had their father. I’m certainly glad that their aunt (my mother and their dad’s sister) is still suffering through weird airports, questionable fashion choices, and the horrible news drawn in by her pocket computer. But I am glad my great-grandmother is free of those horrors. I’m also pleased that her daughter, my grandmother, is similarly relieved of duty. I suppose I’m especially happy that neither of them passed away in Colorado in my lifetime, as my California-softened hands, irritated sinuses, and worry-savaged psyche would not exactly relish the experience.