Rusted Breakdown - August 19, 2008

I am told there is danger on those peaks of Mt St Helens.

August 13, 1945 a few days after the bombing of Hiroshima, when the news finally reached her threshold. News of human power, of human destruction and then fast forward to post May 18, 1980 after explosion like 500 Hiroshima bombs transformed an old growth forest into children’s tinker toys left out in the snow. I remember going to my studio on Chestnut street and seeing the papers, the photographs.

So I drove 21 miles into nowhere today, to a ghost town just over the mountain to the west. Wooden sidewalks, an old weathered church, log houses with white chinking, dust blowing down the street like some old black and white western movie or late night rerun of the Twilight Zone. I am remembering the last time I was in Montana in August 1976, just slightly passed the 200^th birthday of a nation and the 20^th of a boy/man. It was right before I was to start art school and right after high school. Yes, long story there of personal Hiroshima bombs blowing out the bridges of youth one story at a time, and of the last two years of trying to drag my sinner’s ass through the eye of a needle, and even that needle was not an answer for me.

We were all heading to Yellowstone, my father and his new young wife, my grandmother and me. We were having this conversation about the mountains, the high desert, the elevation and how thin the air was, while I’m remembering the log cabins in Medford Lakes New Jersey, Blair’s house on the lake, the dock where we used to jump from the highest point into the cedar colored water, the baseball dugout where Karen told me as she gave me the ee cummings book “somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond any experience, your eyes have their silence, even your most frail gesture”, like her silence later that night before I headed out west, traveling now across these vast wastelands of sagebrush and big skies and thin air. So thin that day in Montana that I couldn’t catch my breath. I kept taking big gulps of air and nothing would satisfy my hunger for simple air.

I read somewhere that every time you inhale, you are reminded of how much you are loved.