I guess spring is coming early this year. When I drive the eight miles of my increasingly constricted world between home in the woods and bookstore in town the patches of snow along the road grow everyday less while between the occasional threat or promise of oncoming storm the sun emerges into a clear blue with wispy fleeting clouds. Winter is in retreat, or maybe it just detours, as reports I get from my contacts in the wider world talk of temperatures at unimaginable degrees below zero and untimely blizzards in places like Seattle and Cleveland. My wood pile stays at a healthy level and I won't likely have to stop and talk to the wood sellers parked at the side of the road on the way back from town any time soon. 

Not that I've missed winter altogether. A couple of weeks ago I made plans with my son for a vacation expedition up to Vancouver to visit my brother, the 'joint citizen', who gets to vote for both liberal Canadians and Obama via mail on the ballot for his former home in Brooklyn, NY. Gabriel and I set out with the sun shining all the way up through Colorado, beyond the megalopolis beneath the Front Range until we passed mesas covered by vast fields of wind turbines on the borders of Wyoming. Only then did the the snow begin to come down. Soon the road became treacherous and it was getting dark and we made it only as far as Green River, where took refuge from below zero temperatures holed up in a cheap motel run by an Asian family where the smell of incense and curry issued from behind the front desk manned by a dark skinned teenager. The next day, after tallying our mileage and looking at the weather maps we decided to abandon our quest to the north and turn south toward Salt Lake City and the southwestern deserts. The freakish record breaking winter storm followed us far into the south, almost all the way into Nevada. We finally descended out of the winding canyons of Utah into the long desert night and eventually found ourselves in a city of lights and traffic, where we got channeled to a casino near the warehouse district of North Las Vegas.  

The next day we spent walking through the scented atmosphere that fills the casinos along the strip. More than twenty years later it isn't quite the Las Vegas of Hunter S. Thompson's vision, but is in may ways the perfection of that vision. Here is on display the absolute outer limits of the American Dream for which Fear and Loathing is in many ways an epitaph. The drugs and booze that saturated Thompson's journey are no longer necessary in a city that has become itself, by design, the perfect drug. The predominant feeling that floods the wanderer is nothing less than an overwhelming desire to surrender to the whole spectacle, to abandon the inner life and get lost in a world where every sense is indulged as in some gigantic pleasure dome like Kubla Khan's Xanadu where, "...gardens bright with sinuous rills, where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree...". Dancing fountains, erupting volcanoes and pirate battles beneath the pulsing choruses of light brought to you by MGM, a great adult Disneyworld replicating themes of every great city and every great empire that has gone before. Here at the intersection between highway and desert is indulged a human predilection to loose ourselves in the presence of something so much bigger than ourselves. An objective always taken on by religions, as in the making of great temples and cathedrals dedicated to gods and angels. Here the task is given over to Hollywood and the true vision we worship, the dreamworlds of our own imagination. When archeologists uncover these ruins they will doubtlessly conclude that here was the center of our spiritual life, where cavernous temples were erected to commemorate civilization's great achievements and architectural fancies, where people came from all corners of the world to stand in awe. There is nothing holy here in the conventional sense, but in this is the full and perfect manifestation of the avarice of empire, and there can be no more fitting shrine to the extreme contradictions of a society lost in its own reflections.     

What is worshiped here is hardly the highest aspirations of the race, but something much darker, something that Hunter Thompson's book  tapped directly, as his own state of all out excess became metaphor for a nation's abandonment to the total demands of greed and paranoia. Yet, Thompson's journey was only at the midway curve of an ascent into complete self delusion that swept away all restraint and opened Americans to the absurd assumption that life is without limits, that all truths are possible and that the world outside is not relevant to our needs or desires. The dopers dream come true, exceeded perhaps only by the Jihadist dream of an ultimate reward in paradise. Of course the American Dream and the dreams of the Muslim Brotherhood built to a crescendo that came together in one spectacular collision of concrete and glass and flame and flesh at one supreme moment of human folly and contradiction on September 11, 2001. 

All around here is the desert. The roads plunge through canyons like the surface of Mars. Checkpoints everywhere to make sure we don't blow up any bridges or dams. On the way back we cross over the Hoover Dam where concrete raises its great challenge against the natural world, and the power to fuel the fantasies of Las Vegas and the West Coast is manufactured and broadcast outward and across the dry earth and sand and stone. 

To the east and north are the sacred lands of the Navajo and Hopi, the Apache and Comanche, Grand Canyon and the Petrified Forest, Monument Valley and the Painted Desert. Eventually we join up with Interstate 40, a road that carries the parade of commerce coursing endlessly in huge tractor trailers between Los Angeles and New Jersey. 

My son was born and grew up in these landscapes. I can't really know what kind of picture this gives him of the world. My own life unfolded mostly in three cities, Cleveland, Denver and Santa Fe. While Cleveland is the cradle that gave shape to who I am and Denver was the stage upon which my sense of self unfolded, I often think that I will never really touch the soul of Santa Fe. Being a big city boy, and having run from the city toward the majestic and parched landscape of the west I now find myself in what has come to feel like a backwater suburb of a suburb, extremely picturesque but fairly bleak in terms of human contact.

Now when I go into town and sit in the cafe to read and write I look at those around me huddled over their books and laptops and they all look more or less like tourists. I drink my coffee and sit isolated, plying the hermit trade, hoping to break through this dialogue with myself somehow and in some way that can reach others. My fellow citizens appear to me like people on a commuter train going nowhere in particular, everyone talking on cell phones, hoping to scare up the realization of their particular fantasy. Meanwhile the life of survival here can be as brutal and unpredictable in its way as in the old wild west, where only the fittest could find a place to survive. Sitting over my own work it sometimes feels like I'm running in some kind of competition with all of the earnest and hungry presences around me. 

Santa Fe is a town of merchants and bureaucrats. Beneath the rustic and romantic image provided by very strict building regulations converting a ramshackle old western town into a fanciful vision of the old west, the place is a cross between an amusement park and a shopping mall. The city is cleanly divided between the wealthy who create their own increasingly exclusive culture that rises up into the foothills, and a servant class who inhabit what's left of the barrios and the low cost housing at the outer boundaries, near where the plateau descends sharply toward Albuquerque. Like every other small American town the real center of urban life collects around the Walmart and the shopping strips out near the freeways. The old downtown around the Plaza is mostly relegated to tourists. Ironically, with all of the art laid up in museums and expensive galleries the city can't even support its only art school, and the culture of the street feels mostly like its dead or dying. The kids who aren't heirs of inherited wealth and property can't wait to leave and make their lives in a place with a real heart. Not so different from every other small town and suburb in America. 

My son speaks often of wanting to leave and go to the east, to the big cities. For him that's the lure of adventure where lies the unknown world of magic and dragons and promise. I sometimes wonder how and In what way this place where he was born is home to him. Will he always come back to it, or will he finally relegate it to the ashes of memory, like I've mostly done with my own Cleveland of long ago? 

For me these rugged and beautiful mountains and deserts reflect back to me my own thoughts and fears and projections and there is no place left to escape to. I suspect that's the real secret of the desert and the mountains. Whenever I get lost in my own desperate life of guilt and regrets and complications I can always go outside and look up, at the hills and the plain and the incredible skies. Like the homes I've left behind me this place called Santa Fe is made up of people and of memories, not of buildings and commerce and landscapes. As I get older there are fewer and fewer people to come home to, so I let them go, one by one, running through my fingers like falling sands.