Sing Him of My Revelations: The Story

Sing Him of My Revelations
North, to Alaska

I was 19 that year, driving from Portland to Alaska. I'd spent the first half of winter holed up in a little town in northwestern Louisiana. There was more of us in that house than there were beds. We were fresh from our first summer working seasonal jobs and for me, fresh from leaving the confines of my parents' home for good. Everything was new, limitless, and a little scary. I didn't last longer than two or three months down there in Arklatex. I'd spent most my money on the road trip to get there. A little chunk went to that blue Dodge caravan I'd bought in Crescent City. The seller, Sleepy's “friend,” put that first hit of LSD in my gut and opium in my lungs. I'd already decided to buy the van when my heights got higher. The moon was full of course, and there was no stopping the portal opening that night. Anyhow, back to the cash. My bills kept getting traded for too much cocaine cut with god knows what from who knows where. I liked the clammy hands and the fear of dying back then. My sense of self was nonexistent other than I knew I wanted to find my edge and tease the line. I thank my spirit guides for never letting me shoot anything up back then. I wasn't in that bad of a way. I tried little bits of everything though. It's a wonder I didn't dive in with no restraints considering where I'd come from and my abrupt introduction to the world of sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll. It's a wonder I had any self control at all.

By the time I left that little parish, I was down to my last few bills. I said goodbye to the tornado air and my fistful of friends and caught a Greyhound back to Portland. I found a job washing dishes at an Italian gourmet pizza joint. I camped out in my van for the remainder of winter, waiting for April and spring so that I could drive back to Alaska. Come to find out: they wouldn't hire me back as the swaggering rag time piano player/music director at the dinner theater. Likely I was swaggering too much for their liking. I wasn't the best they'd ever had. I mean c'mon, I was 18, fresh off the boat, and definitely showed up to work tripping, high, drunk, or a mixture of all of those. Life was an adventure, and I was just trying to get amongst it. I couldn't have cared less about a bunch of rich, white tourists who wanted me to play their favorite '40s tunes at the snap of a finger.

I could fake it enough for their liking and tips. I quickly learned how to play them and it, of course, was much easier once I convinced them to order more drinks from the bar. Last call now. Liquor makes the show go quicker. That, of course, was one of the tunes I'd play.

Anyhow, back to washing dishes and living in my van. The curve was a hard one to learn. Where to shower. Where to shit. Where to park at night.

Once I learned they weren't going to hire me back on the floor at the dinner theater, I applied for a cooking position in the kitchen there instead. I wasn't going to pass up another opportunity to spend my summer there. I didn't know what else to do with myself except go back to that place and make more memories.

At this stage, I'd convinced my brother Joshua to join me. He and I were quite different, but shared a similar sense of necessity for adventure and living on some kind of edge.

Damn. We packed that van full of everything imaginable for camping and summer fun. Two mountain bikes, a BMX, camping gear, a kayak, skateboards, and who knows what else. Sleepy Brian joined us en route to the Canadian border and so began the caravan to Alaska. I think Bright Eyes' record I'm Wide Awake It's Morning had just dropped, so naturally it became our anthem. It was SO our life. “So we're parking in ally, just hoping that our shit is safe.” Definitely our story. Cheers-ing Molson on the Alkan Highway under April stars, glinting with Borealis mist. Just enough cash to get to our summer jobs, just enough fucks given to make a pathway to something tangible. Sleepy had driven this route before, so he had a few pit stops up his sleeve that definitely gave fever to the still winter crawl. It was early April with snow still on the land, but warm enough to be melting it off the roads. Slush brown burms layered the highways as we drove north, with the heat broken in my van and blankets covering our frozen bodies.

Liard Hot Springs. If you ever get the chance, go there. It might the first hot springs this Bear ever touched. The scene is too good to forget though. Steam rising from the waters after a long walk down a wooden pathway. La luna rose to greet our youthful wonder, and my body began to tingle with the water's healing massage. And then as if to peek us into another dimensional trip, the sky began to wisp and swirl. I nearly spit out my beer. There she was. In all her glory. Miss Aurora Borealis. Damn, she fine. My eyes could barely hold back the water. It was surreal. Like I was in a movie I grew up fantasizing about. As if there were beings giving us a light show before they took us back to Taurus. So, I took another sip of Molson. Got neck deep in that sulfuric mineral bath and gave in my mystical imagination. What a world is this!

By the time we crossed the Yukon border, my brother and I were properly frozen in our seats. If I'd had a mustache at the time, it would undoubtedly have had icicles on it. We parked at a turnout that night, facing out to Lake Teslin. As per usual, we awoke to frost and my own breath crystallizing in front of me. This morning was different though. This morning the fuel line would explode. Soon as turned the key, gas began spraying everywhere. My heart sank.

It took what seemed hours for a AAA rep to find someone in Teslin to come up to the turnout and take a look at the damage. This classic, callused old native fella in his overalls pulled up in a four-door Camry, a cigarette hanging out his mouth. It was a cold morning. He took a few looks, made a few calls on his flip phone, and turned back to me shaking his head. It would take days to get the part in, and it would cost me more than I had in my pocket, and that was all I had to get to my job. I had no choice but to ditch the van. So, we dumped some clothes and a bike into Sleepy's Volvo and waved goodbye. Posting up on the side of the highway in the snow, we waited. The look on my brother's face was priceless. I'd been through some helpless moments before, but this was a whole new level of excitement, dread, and a test of our youthful perseverance. We managed to hitchhike nearly a thousand miles to Denali in three days. We slept on park benches and bus stations, which were basically someone's front yard. By the time we reached Denali, we were a piece of work. I think my brother had had enough of my style of traveling. He disappeared into the abyss of the resort. We worked different shifts and areas of the resort, and didn't see much of each other that summer. It wasn't long after we got there that we got the news from home; dad had been diagnosed with cancer. That same summer, my sister went through multiple miscarriages as she tried to birth her first child. My brother was less fortunate than I with his hand at drugs and I remember my parents pleading me to look after him, for fear he would not return. My way at that time with him was my own type of tough love. Show him the way to freedom, but he had to carve his own path from there. He had wanted out, and I gave him the ride, but I couldn't be responsible for him after that. I felt guilty for years. He eventually came around and got his life together. It was a hard year for all of us until then.

My father went through some pretty serious treatment after that summer. We weren't sure if he would make it past winter, but he ended up living for another five years. At the time I wrote this song, I had yet to make peace with the man I called dad. There would be many years to follow where I tried to come to terms with him and his ways, my birth father, and his ways. Looking back, I never respected my dad the way a boy should. There was a window as a child where I did look up to him. But it was short lived. It took the years leading up to his passing for me to understand him, let go of my reckless anger. To find peace in who he was and adoration for what he stood for.

I can still hear the angst in the last verse of this song, as I take an outside perspective in the storytelling to say “Laying in his cell confined to just euphoric, painless memories in mind. The nurse can't seem to tell if he's alight, there's silence form his wife. IV sends him dreaming of his children, does he really even know them? There's no pain, but this cancer can't be good, so I am hanging on his every word, pleading 'You've done the best you could.'” You can sense me softening a bit even there. I wanted to see the world as I was beginning to see it. I wanted to know why I was so angry, yet the resolve to that anger came at a later time, in a song that had yet to be written.

My reconciling with Creator is so evident here as I didn't yet know what to call that which gave life to all things. To me, the cycle of life was dark and horrible, but in the same breath, I sought the magic of nature to calm my ferocious appetite for understanding. So, I called the Creator a beast. Humans, nature, religion. It was all too complex for me at that time. I had no teachers; I sought no text. I wanted to see it with my own eyes. To believe it. To touch it. To bleed for and with it. There was no other way. And, I got what I wanted. Through sacrifice I found connection. Through ceremony I found purpose. This story, however, is far from over. I've always wanted to say it, so here it is, my dear reader: to be continued.