Out of the Smoke

The curative for my major anxieties, the relatively minor ones will always be there, is simply that I’ve done this before in a different form. Several years ago I moved here, to Flagstaff, from across the country. I had meager savings. I had no prospects, no living arrangements. I had no source of income. I wanted to do it and sick of being in situations in which my life controlled me and not the other way around. I reserved some storage thirty miles out of town, loaded the moving truck and took off with few regrets.

I stopped at a hostel in Santa Fe, NM and even from that distance I could see several large plumes of smoke from the horizon. The Southwest was suffering its worst wildfire season in a long time and I was driving straight through the maw of it. A large black cloud loomed closer as I crossed the Arizona border and I was in the thick of the haze soon after. I was wheezy and fully cured. I tasted of ham. As soon as the road lifted out of the basin and climbed over the Mogollon Rim I also rose above the low lying plume to the clear mountain air of Flagstaff.

I looked for an apartment while squatting in The Grand Canyon Hostel for two weeks. The hostel television switched between World Cup Soccer and coverage of the inferno that several hundred thousand acres of the White Mountains had erupted into. I secured an apartment and a temp position that turned perm in the nick of time, right before I ran out of funds.

I don’t recall ever being in a panic. In fact this was one of the happiest times of my life. I set out to do what I want for once in my life and I was doing it. I felt an uncharacteristic bravado. I was realizing the truth in the idea that if you simply do what you want with your life the rest will eventually come into place. And its true. Its not just the plot of the feel good movie of the year. So I will take that flimsy logic into the coming months and straight into the glaciers of Patagonia.
Written 4/10/06