No Lizards Outside the Gates of Eden

One of my favorite blogs is: “Old Fools Journal”, and out of curiosity, or some primal urge to scourge myself like Los Penitentes, I decided to Google ‘Bayou Blue’, his home town, not to dream but to get a feel for where he lives. Just as I expected he lives near a lot of water. I’m sure it is not the water we have here in the dismal, dark, mouldy, mossy, acidic northwest, but a vigorous, warm, exciting, living kind of water, filled with life, good and bad, the amniotic liquid we spent the first few months of our short lives dreaming in. And seeing so much water on the map, and what looked like a lot of sparsely or uninhabited swampy land I was transported back to my early teenage years in El Monte, California, where I collected, studied, bought, sold, traded and talked snakes, lizards, turtles and other reptilian wonders with youthful dedication. What a treasure house I thought. It’s impossible now of course, and perhaps rightly so, but in those days, the fifties, I could buy, sell and trade these magnificent creatures with little or no government or environmental criticism or interference. I would exchange printing (my father owned a print shop where I realize now I caused more grief than happiness) for reptiles. I would print, at my father’s expense, even occasionally, on the difficult jobs, getting him to do the printing for me, the business cards, letterheads, envelopes and brochures that were required, and then, exchange those products for leaf-nosed, shovel-nosed, glossy, and various rattlesnakes. And the lizards: Collared, Leopard, Chuckwalla, Skink, Spiny, Iguana, Fringe-toed, Whip-tailed, and the Horned. I treated them all with the deference I would have accorded a brother. At times I would trade these desert specimens for more exotic specimens like Gray, Red and Yellow Rat snakes, various water snakes, hognose snakes, racers, coachwhips, king and, my favorite, the Indigo snake, all from the southeast. I even hatched snake eggs in my bedroom, which, despite my concerted effort at force-feeding with milk-soaked ground beef, or bread, never survived for more than a few weeks. I took no more snake eggs in trade. Perhaps it is good that in the thirty-seven years we have lived here I have never seen a lizard anywhere near. Or are the lizards trying to tell me something?

The Most Recent Strange Peregrination of F. S. Whinkla

. . . being an honest recollection of events as they occurred on the last leg of his return journey to Kleadrap from Dallas, Texas after wandering several months in and around the Orient.

Part IV

I drove, rather dreamily, to the grove of cottonwoods and made camp, and as rain seemed unlikely simply unrolled a small tarp and fluffed-up my down-filled mummy bag. Then, after urinating in the dry wash, spelling my name, except for the last “la”, I built a small ring of stones and gathered enough twigs and small branches for an evening fire. It was quiet, very quiet, as I boiled the last of my water, on the two-burner propane stove I had bought in Dallas, for tea. I poured the heated water over the dark Camellia sinensis leaves, leaned my back against the thick, deeply fissured bark of one of the larger Poplars and opened ‘The Old Coyote of Big Sur’, a book about Jamie de Angulo, and began to read.

I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I remember was darkness, an empty tea cup, a closed book in my lap, and the distant lament, or exaltation, of a coyote somewhere high in the surrounding hills, and even though it must have been later than five in the afternoon I was immediately reminded of Lorca’s “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías”, but don’t ask me why, I do not want to think about it.

Larry, when I opened my eyes a warm wind washing down the canyon had picked up the golden cottonwood leaves and set them dancing in a dozen dervish-like spiraling cones. I suddenly felt the essence of Σαλωμη (why did Whinkla use the Greek for Salome?) before me and hoped I was not to become a surrogate ‘John the Baptist’. The trees swayed in the quarter-moon moonlight and I thought they might be singing, singing or chanting, like a disciple of Pope Gregory the 1st. Conversely I felt I might just as easily encounter an aroused Oberon or Puck prancing along the bed of the stream, I sensed something magical afoot, but when I stood and stretched my limbs the colourful whirlwinds melted into the sand and the breeze died like a dying man’s last breath.

I walked over to the Odyssey, refilled my glass with Cabernet, and decided to light a fire and broil an Esposito’s cheese and parsley sausage or two for dinner. It was then I realized I had no water to cook the pasta I wanted and would have to return to the house to fill my bottles.

The moon and the milky way provided enough light so that I could clearly see the darker, geometric outline of the building, so, leaving my wine glass next to the unlit pyramid of twigs next to the fire ring I took two empty gallon plastic jugs and walked toward the house.

To be continued