Tiny Lights
Contest 2010
page five
I set off by the early morning coach before it was yet light, and was out in the open country where the day came creeping on, halting and whimpering ad shivering, and wrapped in patches of cloud and rags of mist, like a beggar. Charles Dickens Great Expectations
Third Prize: $200
The Other Walk by Richard Jay Goldstein
Connie Mygatt
I
can‘t sleep. I‘m awake and it‘s barely morning. I try to write, but it‘s no go. I surrender, lace on boots, and head up the hills behind my house—bony hills, dry, strewn with skeletal rocks, limestone haunted by the ghosts of fish. Light the color of old pearls drifts across the hills. I steer between lizard-barked piñon and juniper, breathing their fragrant breath: dust and sugar. I turn in midhill and look out over what I have just climbed above. I see a sere oceanic vista of distant mesas, volcanic mountains. Just below my feet is my little brown house, perched amidst it all. I love New Mexico, this dry land, its bright and spare soul, have loved it since I wandered here in 1969 in my smoky hippy van. I climb on. The rattle of stone under my boots— quartz, feldspars, sandstone, limestone: a rich mix of geologies, sedimentary and metamorphic and igneous. A stew of processes which are mutually exclusive, sea-bed mingling with magma bed. Which would I rather lie down in, impossible heat or darkest cold or unimaginable pressure? Why does transformation require such extremes? I want none of those. I don‘t want to lie down at all. This is my hill I‘m climbing. I own it. I have papers to prove it, but I don‘t have them with me. I hope nobody asks. Of course, this hill of mine appears to be something solid and eternal, but in reality it is slowly slipping down itself and wending its way to the mythic sea. My goal is the knobby rock outcrop two hills beyond, past my boundaries, so to speak. We call it Castle Rock, and who wouldn‘t? There‘s a view from there, as we say, disregarding the fact there is a view from everywhere, providing there are eyes and a mind. Everything visible is a view. But my walk is haunted. What haunts this and every walk I take is that other walk. A walk I didn‘t take, many years ago.
Here‘s the story. It‘s 1966. I‘m a hippy, replete with long hair and beard, traveling with Betty, my belovéd du jour, in a VW microbus we have tricked out to live in. The name of the bus is painted on the side in psychedelic-modern day-glo letters: The Collective Unconscious. There is also a sign in the back window: Turn On, Tune In, and Drop By. We leave San Francisco and wind up in upstate New York via a route unknown to Automobile Club mapmakers. Looking for gainful fun, we sign on to be extras in a psychedelic movie being filmed at the Hitchcock Estate, which is just outside the village of Millbrook, upstate near Poughkeepsie. The Hitchcock kids are heirs to Gulf Oil and the Mellon Bank. They‘re pretend hippies. Their estate— what seems like thousands of wooded acres, full of streams and deer and mysterious old stone buildings—has been turned into an illusory commune by the League for Spiritual Discovery. The LSD. A kind of bizarre 4-H club for chemical explorers, presided over by psychologist-turnedguru Timothy Leary. The forests on the estate are interesting because, as you walk through them, every so often you realize the ancient pines are in perfectly straight lines. The movie falls apart from the weight of its own paisleys, but we‘re invited by the LSD to stay on for a while, so we do. All the regular hippies live in the estate‘s main mansion, but the Hitchcock sibs live in what they call ―the Bungalow,‖ a huge rambling manor house, a couple of miles away. Separating the two dwellings are two roads, one paved and straight, the other dirt and winding. One night the Hitchcocks have a party at the Bungalow to which all of us are invited. It‘s a party of the times, with sacraments of the times—brownies of amazing grace, smokes filled with mystic incense, lunatic wine. Music trembles the air. A silver patina creeps over all things, and time grows languorous. We sing. We read our poetry to each other. Then it‘s time to go. Inspiration fills me. Instead of catching a ride home on the paved drive, as we‘d planned, I will walk the winding dirt road back to the mansion, just as I am, my mind flapping like a banner in a spiritual wind. Betty will ride, but I will walk, alone. And alone, in the seething night, I will see things, come to know things I do not know. The darkness will come alive with ancient green light. My life will change forever. A simple transformative walk, such as any seeker of truth might take. All walks have this potential. I explain my plan to Betty. Then Ted says, ―Can I walk with you?‖ Ted is a guy who is also staying at the mansion, who happens to be gay, though I don‘t think we‘ve started using that word yet. I really really don‘t want company. My plan requires solitude. And I don‘t want Ted to think I‘m interested in him sexually. But I hear myself saying, ―Sure.‖ I‘m a very polite person.
