My worn and dusty shoe dangles Above a billion years Three thousand feet of history Just beneath my sole
The river’s cut is steep But the fall is not my fear Instead the eons stacked in shades of red Countless to a squint Each the span of all of human history But not fissure, crack or grain of sand To mark my desperately important life Humility here is cast in stone
Clear sky night Mirror to infinity My quarrelsome curiosity persists What chance I am now? What chance I am here? And because of me, who is not? By what chance me instead of they?
Reflecting on infinity There is no chance that I exist My carbon chain evolving Since long before Amoeba fucked amoeba And for all time since Through famine, drought and war Flings and rapes Disease and rarely peaceful bounty The chance of me Ten thousand eons beyond the one
The other then Who if not for me? In the star-light blue it’s clear There must be none but me My parents parents parents lay upon themselves And their parents parents parents lay upon themselves Through all of time And I became inevitable
And you, Dear, became inevitable And these words became inevitable And this moment became inevitable And you and I became the resolve of all of history We are impossible to be We are impossible not to be Yet the eons insist That we take this our moment With and without our will To enrich the sediment of having been And become a part of our own grand and deep canyon Our rich and colored geologies Celebrated by futures hence
Remi (brown poodle brat) and I are driving to Death Valley to take pictures of the Geminids meteor shower. We left Saturday morning. We spent Saturday night at a truck stop in Valentine Nebraska, our camper truck parked in a line of idling semis, a sort of bring-your-own-sleeper-cab bunkhouse. The truck stop had a McDonalds and I had an Egg McMuffin. I didn’t tell Remi, although I think he was suspicious.
We left Valentine at 5:30 Sunday morning headed west driving Nebraska Highway 20 which runs along the state’s northern border. Good road, cliffs and buttes and curves in unlikely juxtaposition to movie-set ranch scenes and vastnesses where the prairie meets the horizons all around. It’s a beautiful, beautiful part of our country.
But in the morning, driving into the western dark, you can’t see the towering sand and stone geologies or the grazing cattle in the pine-treed and hilly distances or the snowy, hay-bale dotted expanses, all you can see is the headlight tunnel and the road and the hood and the blue, white and red gauges.
For many miles Sunday morning, the planet Mars, thirty degrees above the horizon and winking red, aligned exactly with the dashed white center line of west Highway 20 and the furthest reaches of our headlight beams while in those same moments, I watched in my mirrors as the eastern sky behind us turned red to blue. And the only sound was the murmur of the diesel and the gossipy whispers of the tires to the asphalt.
In the quiet, I thought about life being so quick and jerky and that it’s in these moments when fate and good fortune put us between the stars and the sun, that joy and peace are relearned.
Covid killed Todd Yannayon in September. He was 59 years old. I stopped to take pictures of his abandoned store and Gina came out of her trailer. She lives alone across the Trail of Tears from the store with dogs and chickens. She lived in that trailer with Todd for 14 years. He was her fiancé.
She gave me a copy of Todd’s funeral program. It includes a picture of Todd on the motorcycle they rode together. She misses the riding. The program includes her as “girlfriend” in a list of kids, sibs, steps and in-laws. It includes a page dedicated to a poem that Todd wrote when he was in high school. Gina’s grief sits between two comas.
The store includes five or six ancient wooden buildings deteriorating rapidly. She has asked his sons to help, they’re in their thirties and living their lives. It’s theirs, not hers, and they don’t have time but she lives across the road.
There is barely noticeable concrete bridge that crosses a tiny stream just down the hill from the store. Gina lobbied the state and the bridge is now the Vincent “Todd” Yannahon Memorial Bridge.
It was her willingness to be vulnerable with a stranger, her gentleness with the dogs, her overwhelming loneliness that make Gina such a wonderful subject to write about. She deserves better words than mine.
Following the Indian Removal Act of 1830, a group of Indian nations consisting of the Cherokee, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Muscogee and the Seminole (the “five civilized tribes”) were forcibly relocated from their ancestral homes in the southeastern United States to areas west of the Mississippi by the United States government. Along the way, thousands died of exposure, disease and starvation. I rode parts of the Trail of Tears.
