by Richard Jay Goldstein

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

Ican‘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.

I will keep America moving forward, always forward—for a better America, for an endless enduring dream and a thousand points of light. Speechwriter Peggy Noonan for President George Bush 1988

So we walk, Ted and I. I hurry along. I hardly know this guy. I‘m worried he‘ll come on to me. I‘m worried I‘ll offend him by not being interested.

The shadows are silent. We cross over a muttering creek on a log bridge. No naiads call to me with liquid voices.

That‘s it. We arrive at the mansion in short order. All is safe. Betty is waiting for me. Ted and I hug briefly, and the walk is over. My chance for ecstatic satori is gone.

My life changes anyway, over years and decades, because lives always do.

Betty waits for someone else now, if she‘s still alive. I haven‘t heard tell of her in a long time.

But every walk I take afterwards is a shadow of that walk as it should have been. Oh, some walks these days are powerful enough. Occasionally I even take dangerous walks, in high places, or down deserted alleys. I sometimes catch a glint of how things are. I may hear voices in the wind. But I always wonder: What would I have seen, what would I have heard, on that particular lonely walk I didn‘t take?

I scramble up the last steep slope, and I am on Castle Rock. Santa Fe spreads out before me like a gas station map.

This other walk that haunts me, what is it now, what has it become, after so many years? An imaginary path overlying the real path I‘m on? A pair of shades too dark for the twilight of these latter years? A goathead in my sock?

Robert Frost knew. Two paths diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

Yogi Berra noticed it too: If you come to a fork in the road, take it!

I toss stones into the windy void. My thoughts are a parallel windy void. I climb down off Castle Rock and head down the back of the saddle. I‘m making a loop, taking the long way home. There‘s a new trail back here, put in by dogooder forest-savers, leading past a little spring, which formerly very few people knew about. Well, this land isn‘t mine, and I don‘t have papers to prove it.

Here‘s the spring. This time of year it doesn‘t flow out, but just curls up in its round rocky nest, a liquid eye watching the spinning sky. The ojo frío sits in a microvalley, the confluence of two arroyos. In springtime the place is thick with horsetails and mint. Right now, if you squint, you can just see the ghost of summer green overlaying the late winter brown. Squint the other way and you can see silent snow lying here, the eye of the spring burning through it. There are ghosts everywhere, always. We walk dry together through ancient seas.

I so wanted once to be holy, sagacious, poetic. And I knew in my cells that the other walk would lead me there, that somewhere on it wisdom would congeal from the cold shadows and pierce my heart with hot knowledge. Or perhaps it never happens like that. Still, my fear now is that I missed the stellar conjunctions completely and forever which would have powered and incarnated my dreams, and I‘m too old now to hear those mystic voices. Could it be that angels and demons whisper every night beneath my window, and I‘m too settled, too clogged, to hear them?

We need a new science, a physics of memory. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle would apply. Analyzing the meaning of any nostalgic moment alters the meaning even as you analyze. Every memoir contains Schrödinger‘s cat. If I fall over in the forest, and there‘s no one to hear, do I write an essay anyway?

I follow the trail down from the spring, along the edge of the arroyo. The trees here are thick, big piñon, heavy ponderosa, dense willow, a few pioneer cottonwood. It‘s shadowy and smells damp. My wife Polly doesn‘t like this spot. She thinks it‘s creepy here, wonders if there is a body buried nearby, someone who died murdered in fear and dread.

I trust her judgment in such matters. When we were courting, thirty-some years ago, I gave her a beautiful little dried owl wing. In those days I used to collect raptor roadkill, and this was a wing from a young sawwhet owl I found in Colorado. Polly was horrified. In her SpanishIndian tradition owls were often the vehicles for brujos, witches and sorcerers, and even if they weren‘t, they were probably up to no good anyway. Too bad, because owl feathers are the softest things in the world, designed to be silent in the air, so owls can sneak down on creatures who specialize in keen hearing. But Polly knew best, and still does. Thank goodness that wasn‘t the end of our courtship. She excused my ignorance.

This part of the trail isn‘t public. It crosses private land, and was made years ago by a crazy Vietnam vet named Organic Joseph who used to squat up here. My neighbors and I maintain it. It snakes up over a couple of hills and through a couple of arroyos and winds up at my house. I‘m almost home. Another walk almost accomplished.

I cross an arroyo on a bridge made of a railroad tie. Polly and I put this in ourselves. If this were the other walk, would a mini-troll emerge from under the mini-bridge, and, in a squeak, demand the answer to an impossible riddle—a kind of troll-booth? And what would I have to fear from a mini-troll, even if I couldn‘t answer the riddle? I have plenty of impossible riddles of my own. I would demand solutions from him.

Yes, I am haunted by the other walk. I will always be haunted by it. Haunted by what it was, and also what it wasn‘t. Being haunted is good. Keeps you from becoming too sure of reality.

I look back out over the rumpled hills I‘ve just crossed, covered with their fuzz of juniper and piñon. There is no other walk. I‘m haunted by illusion. I walked that other walk. I am still walking it. It led to this moment, and leads on.

Here‘s my house. I‘m home. Polly is waiting.

Transcendence in our lives doesn‘t demand the miraculous, or the intrepid, or even the foolhardy. The inside is bigger than the outside.

Good walk.

Richard Jay Goldstein, retired ER doc, has written fiction and nonfiction for about twenty years, and has published forty-something stories, essays, and poems in the literary and fantasy/sci-fi/horror press. He and his wife, percussionist Polly Tapia Ferber, live in the mountains east of Santa Fe, NM, where it‘s nice and quiet, thanks. He‘s had two Pushcart nominations.