23 Days in the USA
Written by Doug Stuber
My family set off from North Carolina and traveled through West Virginia, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, California (and stayed in Ukiah, right next to the Mendocino Complex fire that is the largest fire in California’s history), Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Tennessee. A total of 9,700 miles by Jeep.
Photos and poems were inspired:
Wild
Gruesome thoughts: a tumble, slip, scream, fall, such a
Long fall onto the canopy towering atop Richardson Grove
On the Redwood Highway, Route 101, up to Eureka, Arcata, edging
The burning Mendocino Beano Complex. Ukiah refugees everywhere
From shelters to the Hampton Inn. Eighty-eight multi-colored trucks
And hundreds of staging firefighters from eleven countries:
Lightning strikes to arson inflame steep Sierra Nevadas,
Inferno eternal, smoke drifts to New York, the desert, a fog.
Loops and interfaces of man interlock with ancient coral to form
Arches that hang precariously, like 1950s designer Nordic furniture:
Shapely, then painted deserts, geysers blasting forth, petrified
Wood, canyons (Glenwood was a pleasant surprise) and S-curves.
Rising maturity comes in the form of expectations ruined, but taken
In stride, and the precise skills gained to navigate the entire country.
Diner
Ever stepped into the Olympic Café, on Geary Street
a couple of blocks up from Union Square? For free
you can wallow in the back-and-forth of a retirement-aged
waitress and the octogenarian cook. Ten seats at the counter,
one, a backless stool, and twenty booths welcome a father
scolding his 30-year-old child, tourist families, those who
collected $10.00 in change on the street and one fat poet,
high off the fumes still resonating at City Lights Books.
“What is it Sweetie” rings from the waitress: half the duo
that mans the entirety of potentially 60 customers, as
the Jewish father laments, rues, is saddened by his son’s
inability to attain autonomy. These hills, unlike Moab or
Reno, are dotted with architecture from all movements.
This era’s lot is heavily homeless, reflecting the capitalist
disconcern for the unproductive. The ones who meander
in at 5 a.m., clearly sad, with coffee warm-up money, get
the best treatment, as a hackneyed Greek/English mix
spews forth from the open-format kitchen that welcomes
all to watch an 80-year-old cook diverse meals rapid-fire,
ten hours straight, six days a week. Four Dutch tourists eat.
Complex
Diana Rigg, in the opening credits of the Avengers, then in cat-
quick reactions, the better part of the action, added sensuous
to spy characters: a shot of female moxie akin to James Bond. She
blasts into my brain while breakfast muffins crumble. This fidgety
twenty-six-year-old, with arms of a farmer, or auto mechanic: her
eyes focus on eight random things, none of them any of nine fellow
humans in the room, gulping coffee, perhaps running behind,
or like the loud man in the corner, his home southwest of Ukiah,
in the process of burning in the Mendocino Complex fire. A jamboree
of fireman gather, a few in RVs that will bed the many who have
volunteered for this deadly, impossible task. A charged chorus of
agreement bounces back and forth as “Dream a Little Dream of Me”
ploughs sultry into the rich, sad soil culled from the Colorado: desert
to oranges, almonds. Add the millions of gallons Nestle sucks out, and
Pleasant Valley dries up, blows away, goes dust-bowling with the Dude.
Then burning lady swoops in and splatters paint, absorbed; or lands on
Mesquite tips or Junipers, invisible to the naked eye-level looker, but
visible as a Lily Pulitzer from ten to forty feet above. From fifty feet
and up, it’s a black and white portrait of a white cop killing a black man.
The piece Diana titles “Noblesse Oblige,” demonstrations at eleven.
Cowboy Social Club, Near Price, Utah
Perfect nesting holes,
eroded dots, line up like
train windows
ready to pull out,
down the canyon to
Glenwood Springs,
hauling basalt and
gypsum, sulfur and
copper in
trade for Doc Holiday’s guns.
Two hundred train cars
worth of ore for one dead
slinger’s guns,
but that’s what it’s worth
to retire weapons,
old or new,
wild, wild, West, indeed.
Crazy old lady
Winchester
spent her gun money fixing
a haunted
house in San Jose over
and over,
to drive away ghosts
from all the guns her
father made
that killed souls, good and evil,
buffaloes
(not just Springfields) and
ushered in our mess.
The Lost Village of Scotus, Wyoming
White freshwater pelicans swim between Tetons,
appear to be lost albinos three hundred miles east
of the closest coast, Salt Lake refugees seeking fresh fish?
Wyoming: more shepherds than skiers, Cheneys than Denvers,
where the legend of Jackson Hole far outreaches the influence
of local wildlife art peddlers, or resurgent senior pot hippies.
New Orleans, Disney-fied, and Detroit’s not John Muir-ified. One
flooded, one foreclosed. High stakes bank boys gambled, remainders
lost. Car owner commands a mid-teen three-pack that wander.
An entire culture vanishes under gentrified propaganda, totalitarian
capitalism, racism, nay white supremacy, that fires dragon talons from
behind the precipice of foul laws and like-robed Supreme Courters.
It’s the type of “courting” young courters do that’s groping rape.
But will this red Herring effectively hide Brett’s record the way a
coke can and legit Hill harassment snuck Clarence in the “back door?”
Wonks, compliant ideologues, sure to be political: not constitutional
scholars, but apologists of greed. Deep billed pelican glides, stuns
transient visitors who had no idea they migrate up from the Gulf.
The Author
Doug Stuber is a retired Chonnam University professor, artist, musician and poet. His 12th book of poetry “Chronic Observer” will appear from Finishing Line Press in February. His last major exhibit was at Crypt Gallery, London, last summer.