Hundred Highways Tour #26 – 34: I-90, MT 84, U.S. 191, U.S. 20, I-15, MT 41, MT 287, MT 55 & MT 2 to King’s English Bookshop

Posted on March 28, 2016 by marcbeaudin
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On the return trip (photo by Lisa Beaudin)

Once again rolling alongside the Gallatin River and skirting the western edge of Yellowstone, back to Salt Lake. This time it’s for a reading at the King’s English Bookshop.

This is one of the great independent bookstores that you can wander and browse, losing hours (and sometimes getting physically lost as well). Room after room of great books that make you wish you had extra lifetimes just for reading.

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This was my third visit to Salt Lake City, but my first to the actual lake. There’s something quietly unsettling about a lake with no fish. Other than brine shrimp and a few other tiny critters, nothing lives in these waters, nothing else can survive. Just knowing that makes standing at its shore disorienting and trepidatious. It’s stunningly beautiful, but it’s a otherworldly beauty — lunar, alien.

And deadly.

As climate change dries the surrounding land and a growing population diverts more and more water otherwise destined for the it, the lake is disappearing before our eyes. As it turns to dust, its high levels of trapped mercury blow into the city, poisoning the people who are taking the water that, had it been allowed to replenish the lake, would have prevented the poison dust from developing. The same mercury is moving up the food chain, from brine shrimp to ducks to the hunter feeding his family. Strands of the web. It’s impossible to cut one strand without feeling the vibrations throughout the entire, interwoven structure. Or as Barry Commoner says, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

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When the lake becomes dust
& the dust enters the rivers of our blood
no fish will swim through our bodies
no birds will fly through our dreams

[Read more reports from the Hundred Highways Tour here.]

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Hundred Highways Tour #22 – 25: Northern, Western, Hummingbird & Southern Highways to Miss Bertie’s Community Library

Posted on February 7, 2016 by marcbeaudin

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A couple days after Christmas, my family and I flew into Belize and jumped into a van that took us, three hours later, to Hopkins Village, on the Caribbean coast. The drive, first on the Northern Highway, then the Western to one of my favorite names for a road, the Hummingbird Highway, finally to the Southern Highway, was an adventure of potholes, jungle-clad mountains, “sleeping policeman” (the ubiquitous, teeth-shattering speed bumps that are the only method of getting drivers to slow down) and an unending narrative of jokes, puns, history and legends from our driver.

He told us that in Belize, they’re not very creative with town names. The town with many ladies is called Ladyville. The town that sprung up from refuges of Hurricane Hattie is called Hattieville. The town with a lot of rocks is called Rockville. I asked him if there were a lot of frogs in Hopkins. … It took him a minute.

I wasn’t here for a reading, so it’s a little tricky on my part to include this on the Hundred Highways Tour. But I did visit Miss Bertie’s Community Library where Dianne had me sign a copy of Vagabond Song to add to the library’s collection (and besides, it’s my tour – I make the rules).

This beautiful little gem of books was created by “Miss Bertie,” a Peace Corps volunteer, in 2007 and has been serving both the children and adults of Hopkins ever since. It was great to visit and see the single room building full of kids after school, discovering new worlds within the pages of the mostly donated books. A library is the heart of a community. A communal gathering place where people can become stronger, more human (and humane). Where life can take on new vistas, horizons can be rendered boundless.

I hope you’ll consider helping their cause. A single book can change someone forever.

Sacred fountain in Xibalba

A highlight of the trip was floating an underground river in St. Herman’s Cave. Descending into Xibalba, the Mayan Underworld, the flickering of bats, the crystal clear water. At one point, I stopped below a shower dripping from a stalactite and allowed the holy water to wash over my face. Our guide, Vida, noticed me and said, “Getting a good Mayan blessing, huh?” He knew exactly what I was up to.

In the rainforest along the Monkey River, with Howler Monkeys filling the air with their mad whooping, I resisted the temptation to wander off from our group and become a little creature of the jungle. Maybe a jaguarundi or a paca, the “royal rat.” The immensity of green, the water-soaked air, and the glittering of sunlight through twenty-foot leaves quickly cast their spell. I was spell-bound. A month later, the charm has yet to fully wear off.

New Years Eve at the Swinging Armadillo
     Hopkins Village, Belize

Half-moon rising from the sea:
a bowl of oranges & black flowers
on a tablecloth of stars

Garifuna drummers pounding out
the final moments of the year
hearts become drums with hides stretched taut

Soon winter will feel like winter again
but for now everything is music
& waves unfold on the dock like orchids

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Photo by Lisa Beaudin

[Read more reports from the Hundred Highways Tour here.]

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I Don’t Want to Go Out, I Want to Stay In

Posted on January 11, 2016 by marcbeaudin

Rest in peace, Mr. Bowie.

It’s a rare artist who can so completely fill up a day’s worth of social media news feed. It’s a rare artist whose death can so completely fill up my emotional landscape. Right before turning out the bedside lamp last night, my wife told me the news. Thoughts and memories tumbled into dreams and I woke this morning with “The Man Who Sold the World” running relentlessly through my head.

All day, whether through our stereo speakers or just within my own skull, his masterful, eminently original music has been playing non-stop. Sadly, until his death hit me, I had forgotten how much his art meant to me. With a handful of exceptions, it’s been years since I’ve really listened to him. I used his cover of “Cactus” as curtain call music in a play I directed. I tried to show Labyrinth to my step-kids, but the lack of CGI failed to impress. I picked up a copy of Bowie at the Beeb, a compilation of his BBC recordings, some time last year and gave it a couple of listens. But that’s about it.

Until now.

A day of listening, of mourning, of celebrating the gift of his time here on earth, and the memories come flooding.

In high school, I was never popular. I never quite fit in, and mostly, that’s how I preferred it. While most of my class was listening to Boston, Def Leppard and Motley Crue (umlauts somewhere, whatever), I was in my room blasting cassettes of Ziggy Stardust and Let’s Dance. These recordings opened up a new world to me. A strange, beautiful, dangerous, forbidden and sexy world. Somehow I knew that if not liking the crap on the “rock” radio station that dominated the student parking lot made me an outsider, a weirdo, a freak, then being an outsider/weirdo/freak was a damn good thing to be.

Eventually, there were a handful of us. We wore strange clothes. We grew our hair long (and got beat up for it more than once). We listened to music that wasn’t on the radio. We pushed boundaries and found a world of relevance and authenticity beyond. It was this group of friends, gathered together by artists like Bowie, that led me into art, poetry, political and social activism, and other music beyond the mainstream – blues, folk, and eventually jazz.

Bowie never settled for safe, mainstream, normal, ordinary. In pushing beyond boundaries, he taught us all how to be artists. For that, I honor him, will miss him greatly, and will keep listening. He told us we could be heroes, we believed him, and he was right.

 

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