You Can't Go Back

[mnaz]

The road didn't feel the same.
It used to be the great jumpoff
when I was twenty years younger,
the true escapist redemption.

It didn't feel the same.
I counted too many mile markers.
The trucks were all twice as huge.
People towed houses behind them.
The "Van Life" vans were everywhere,
tall suckers by Mercedes or Ram,
bikes strapped onto the back,
out for escapist redemption.

It wasn't the same, my sacred place.
I went back to the Black Rock desert
but the playa was ripped up by trucks
sending giant dust plumes to the sky.
I ran north on a trail but dust just grew.
It broke my heart but I'm an old man
so almost everything breaks my heart.
I came to face silence but wind howled.

It wasn't the same.
Bruno's bar was remodeled.
Seven TVs babbled over marble,
but they left old pictures on the wall.
Rest in peace Bruno, I miss our talks.
Black Rock is spiritual despite the dust.

It wasn't the same.
The Denio ranch had been sold.
The couple who rented a cabin to me
passed on, and time is incurable.

But some things were new.
At the outpost I finally got a room.
I'd been shut out by hunters and such.
I played laser tease with the family dog.
On the road in the middle of nowhere
I felt like family.

And some things were the same,
like the rivers of wind through pines
in the ridges north of the high desert.
Uncanny, the sound of those currents
even if there's no motion where you sit.
Strange, soothing and primal.

[saw]

near impossible to recreate a feeling that once was
some of it is obvious. the physical alterations
but some of it just you....your eyes change with each year
your brain perceives things another way
but you can always revel in special memories
real or imagined....don't matter...you cared about it
it was special to you
places....are important
you were changed by them
and those changes will never fade away

[mnaz]

Thanks Mr. saw. Indeed. I was changed. And the places have changed. Some of it was just hard math. Bruno was 80 when I met him all those years ago. Admittedly, some of this is glorified travel journal scribbling jammed in a poem-like lament, written on the fly, late at night in a motel room with no proper edit, but it gets to the state of my state, the heart of things.

Places changed in my more seasoned eyes, but they also had been changed. The biggest shock was the playa, its presence no longer so silent, solitary and infinite, overrun by folks kicking up chalky roostertails. For two days it grew into a dust bowl as the day wore on ... I heard the British crew that set a land speed record on the playa with their jet-car back in '97 is coming back for a reunion this fall. I wonder what they'll think of the great plane in its current state. Ha...

But you're right. These places will always be with me in spirit. And at least the sound of airy treetop rivers in the pines was just as I remembered it!

[mnaz]

I don't mean to imply that it was a bad trip. It wasn't. The trail north from the dust-besieged Black Rock playa was a great journey into the silent (though wind-whipped) heart of Nevada, and at the junction I met the people who live there and they let me play with their dogs and I wanted to stay awhile but I couldn't and I gassed up and kept moving. It's always like that, isn't it?