You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘utah’ tag.
1. I’m visiting my grandma and grandpa (in reality, deceased,) on their ranchette. The house has a sprawling, organic shape, grown from so many sheds and add-ons, which itself not unlike the house they lived in. But this one is different. You enter through a large sheet metal bay that might be a defunct home fabrication shop. The whole spread is sunk at least ten feet into the ground, and bright green weeds and suckering bushes spill down the slopes toward the structure. I am there to help them with recycling. In this dream world, that includes human waste, which you must haul yourself to a transfer station. My grandparents transport theirs in a huge, rectangular tank– steel with white lacquer– that fills the trunk of their station wagon as well as the space created by folded-down backseats. I am there to drive the car and hopefully prevent a spill. I navigate suburban streets slowly, evenly, tensely– by all means I’m trying not to pop the clutch, which is as hard as not tripping over your own feet when you’re thinking about it. Layered with this morning chore is the fact that my high school friends are converging on the place for a reunion, and with that, of course, my histories with their various personalities, in the present and the decades preceding, along with the changing group dynamics of spouses and growing families.
2. I’m shadowing a Big Lebowski-type character, a locally famous character of the nearby ski hill. His snowboard is his trademark feature. In some very loose sense it is in the shape of a penguin. The front end looks like two diverging ski tips; the middle is chunky thick with an animal-in-top hat silhouette; and the rear is incongruously long, skinny, and rectangular. He won it in a Batman movie promotion. He tells me it moves very slow and that’s the point. He can point straight downhill without having to make turns, and that way he doesn’t have to go so far, and it’s not as much work, so the reasoning goes. He is out of shape and morbidly chemically-dependent. We visit a dispensary that only deals in pills. Despite his dirtbag frugality and limited means he shells out two 100$ bills for what will be our afternoon together; I’m writing a sort of character piece about him for the local newspaper. I feel compelled to buy something too– contribute, as it were– and spend way too much on what looks like candy (Runts). It comes in a ziplock bag that doesn’t seal and the pills spill out of my pockets and onto the slushy ground. That leads to the discovery that the ground is covered in drugs from other clients, who were sold similarly malfunctioning ziplock bags, and I start grabbing up the less soggy ones, thinking I’ll make a nice profit if I find a way to sell them. We are at a stand made of folding tables and white tarpaulin in the parking lot of a downtown historical district. The environment has both indoor and outdoor elements that confuse me in the manner of a very large mall atrium. There’s a parallel, subconscious narrative that it’s almost Christmas; my parents and sister will soon arrive; the four of us rent a storefront nearby that we keep decorated with antique furnishings. A women’s weightlifting clinic is next door and in a daring moment I peek at them around the edges of the venetian blinds. They are fit in a thoroughly threatening way, their movements are fast and powerful. In some mixup my dumbells ended up in there– I plan to steal them back but it won’t be easy. My vocation has to do with music fandom. Even when I’m talking about something else, I am silently and simultaneously extolling the virtues, the supremacy, of the Ramones. My mother shares this particular passion.
3. I am revisiting the split-level home in Bozeman where I grew up. No pretext. There is a lot of commotion at a house two doors down. In real life, I have no memory of this house or its occupants, but in this dream it’s the dumpy one. The front yard is filled with discarded stuff and no fewer than seven vehicles (this quantity provided, fact style, by the logic of the dream), including a pickup almost buried in dirt that is being removed with the help of a small excavator. The house is up for sale. I stand on the sidewalk in front, no self awareness, watching for hints of squalor from the world within. I see the male occupant walk out with a stack of items that, I imagine, have long cluttered the kitchen table; uppermost is a large serving bowl of apples that have each been bitten once or twice and then returned to the bowl, these bites scattered along a spectrum of the ages of brown. But when I see the couple standing together I am struck by how interesting and appealing they are. Late-middle age, their clothes and hair and weathered faces suggest a rich and storied past. Then I learn: the man is a world famous mountaineer with impossible accomplishments from a generation or two before. I know his name and a few of his exploits but I didn’t know he went on to become a computer whiz, let alone a professor at MSU. (There are at least a few real-life characters that I suspect influenced for this dream, among them Louis Reichardt and Ray Jardine.) He has a patent on the flash drive and a load of money that he has ignored until now. His face is permanently tanned and its lines are exaggerated, dream-style, into the cracks of mud or riven earth. His hair is as short as it can to still be disheveled. A party for him is being held by the up-and-coming climbing community of MSU, his young disciples. I go inside and join them in a large, low-ceilinged, laminate-floored room on the lower level. The cyber den where he did so much of his important, later work. We shuffle around, poking our heads into emptying rooms, which have the vacuous, soiled quality of a lived-in place emptied of all worth keeping, juxtaposed with a few streamers of crepe paper, red keg cups, and the idle socialization of the attractive and well-dressed. We’re looking around in awe bordering on idolization– keeping an eye out for relics to pilfer?– our host is in and out of the room, completely pre-occupied, not feeling put on the spot, not awkward and definitely not social; climbing stories mean so little to him at this stage of life. There are piles of old computer cords in Microsoft-gray; power strips plugged into power strips that, when disturbed, leave shadows made of the dust that is somehow greasy, and out one of the ground-level windows, a view that gives me pause: I can just see the familiar willow tree of my parents’ backyard, in a perspective I have definitely never had before.
(two weeks on the Green River)
“You can become impatient here, willing to accept any explanation in order to move on. This appears to be nothing at all, but it is a wall between you and what you are after. …moving on is not important. You must wait.”
“I appeared completely detached. I appeared to be smelling my hands cupped full of rocks. I appeared to be asleep. But I was not.
…It will occur to you that these tasks are silly or easily done. This is a sign, the first one, that you are being fooled.”
–Barry Lopez
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
–Leonard Cohen
an embarrassment of riches
the tea cannery 