Deep Breath
Message in a Bottle
Juan del Llano stood outside and stared, dumbstruck by New Mexico. The flood of golden light across the hills would only last a moment. To his mind it was the best excuse and holy ritual combined. He had no answers anyway, and being only him, it seemed that no one cared. A few days later he decided this was true but deviously clever of the Lord. There wasn’t one, he knew, but compassion and relief required thanking. And there was still so much to do.
“I’VE NEVER PAID ANYWHERE CLOSE TO THAT for a single instrument,” said Roger the consummate pro… Juan knew the feeling, but that was what they cost and lo the deed was done. It also smashed an ancient template. The super jumbo Gibson1 gleamed like pure forgiveness. Its glorious growl and resonant bark compelled him to play. The beast was so much more than just the best guitar he’d ever played: it symbolized the end of fear. His eyes and ears and fingertips drove sparks into his brain from which the whole damn Universe exploded. Juan felt he belonged to the Earth and all its ages, bathed in love, his final assignment living like he stole it for the crazies and the kids and all who knew reality was light and spirit bending to desire. How powerful we are, he thought, when we are letting go…
Under his desk sat his great-grandmother’s rattan covered wooden stool from West Virginia. On it he kept the sling pack for his camera and assorted photo gear. One night as he was writing, Juan thought he noticed movement and glanced down at the stool. These days visual hallucinations were mainly floaters, but deer mice, chipmunks, lizards, birds, and snakes had all once found their way inside. He’d also seen coyotes, dogs, cats, squirrels, skunks, rabbits, gophers, loose bulls, and even a peacock right there in the driveway. A sane man would’ve looked of course and Juan did anyway. The camera was on his desk which meant the pack was empty. What if something had crawled inside? As he stared hard at the bag it seemed as if the canvas sides were “breathing” in and out around a living thing or maybe several. True as hell in the dim light by his feet, though when he bent down low to look real close the moving stopped. He even poked the canvas with his finger half expecting to hear a squeal but there was nothing.
Juan wished it were the bull snake though. Weeks before, he’d last seen the five-foot reptile in the bathroom as it disappeared into the wall…2 He was kneeling in the dark beside the sink, holding onto two feet’s worth of writhing snake with both hands. The rest of the animal was already behind the boards that were supposed to hide the cinder blocks and wasn’t coming out for any man. If only there were someone with a camera here, he thought, because no one would believe this. If the snake got loose back there, heading east would take him to an inaccessible corner behind the bathtub with a dirt floor. Surely that’s how the mice get in, he reminded himself, probably using gopher tunnels—and then Juan slowly realized that he’d been blessed. As he eased his grip the thing went slurp-thwitt out of sight the way a six-year-old inhales spaghetti. No one ever saw the snake again or any deer mice either for a long, long time. Nothing lasts forever though, and now he missed him.
But why was he still here, Juan wondered—and why did doing the right thing often seem so hard?3 It obviously varied though, and he was sometimes in the moment like a god. Two days after Christmas he threw open the dusty Mexican blanket curtain in front of his desk and saw the first rays of the sun evaporating an overnight dusting on the peaks. He watched in wonder as the vapor seemed to pour out from the very rocks and trees, coalescing into long strips of clouds that flowed along the contours of the slopes and jumped the valleys in the blasting icy wind. A minute later he was standing in the dirt road on the ridge above the house, furiously snapping photos in his slippers while he picked his way through clumps of cactus backlit by the sun. That fate had put him there on orders was never more apparent and the man could do no wrong.
When Juan dropped out in ‘71 and lit out from Austin for the Arkansas Ozarks in his red-and-white ‘62 VW bus with the souped-up 1500 cc engine and 50 pounds of brown rice, a white German shepherd named Lady, a guitar, and a little book by a yogi entitled “How to Know God,” life was definitely simpler.4 He and four of his friends had bought 170 acres of forest, fields, and waterfalls in Madison County for $50 an acre and the locals laughed that they’d been swindled because the going rate was $35. They had a flag, though. Juan ordered a Whole Earth flag from the Whole Earth Catalog [natch!-Ed] and tacked it to the top of the longest pole that he could find. The publication was life-giving and provided hours of reading in the light of his kerosene lamp. In the process he learned of the venerable Ashley stove, much favored at the time by hippies moving to northern New Mexico. Imagine his surprise over 30 years later when he rented the old adobe he knew so well now and found one in the corner, ready to use.
Use it he did, too. Though it looked like hell, the damn thing worked. “You can throw a stump in there,” he was fond of saying. After Christmas ‘24 while he was on a cleanup binge, a woman of substance suggested he “polish the wood stove.” Oh sure, he thought, but then realized he could easily buy a bottle of stove black and set to work. To his great surprise, the treatment was transformational. Every day since then he’d walked past the 60+ year-old stove and marveled. Just to gaze on it made him feel proud and lifted his weary spirits in the age of the dictators. How many cords of “piñon and mixed” had passed through that door, he wondered? How high would the pile be if he could bring them all back? Would they blot out the sun?
Probably, he thought, and ordered another cord to make sure.
The way the snake got in is obvious. All the photographer had to do was close the door but he did not!
Note: this is not the right thing…
Please watch for more on that subject in future newsletters.