Chapter 1: The Flashback

12

In my first thirty years of life
I roamed hundreds and thousands of miles.
Walked by rivers through deep green grass
Entered cities of boiling red dust.
Tried drugs, but couldn't make Immortal;
Read books and wrote poems on history.
Today I'm back at Cold Mountain:
I'll sleep by the creek and purify my ears.

--The Cold Mountain Poems, Han Shan, translated by Gary Snyder

The afternoon of August 20, 2008, I was walking south on First Avenue in Seattle. Just past the corner of Columbia Street in front of a parking garage, I felt the presence of something internal and immediately indescribable, a deep sense of strangeness, a sense of being invaded by something unrecognizable.

Walking further on First Avenue toward Pioneer Square, I began to recall fragments—images of shops and hotels buried beneath the streets and sidewalks of Pioneer Square. What event might have created these intense feelings? Then I remembered that, in the 1890s, the neighborhood was the haunt of sailors on leave from ships docked in Seattle—full of rowdy bars, whorehouses, and cheap hotels, Seattle’s red light district and skid row. The old skid row was now literally buried underground. In fact, the epithet skid row derived from this very Seattle neighborhood.*

Oddly, it had not occurred to me previous to or during the 2008 Seattle trip until that moment that, not only had I been to Pioneer Square before, but that the last time I had been in that location in 1969 was a turning point in my life. My personal history was buried there as surely as the old skid row neighborhood.

Slowly a sense of the intense exhilaration I felt that day in August came back to me. I had been exhilarated because I had felt free to choose my life—who I would be, what I would do, where I would go—to a degree that I had never felt before. Ever.

A few months later I heard a song** that I still associate with the freedom I felt then:

Out of college, money’s spent,
See no future, pay no rent,
All the money’s gone, nowhere to go….
But oh that magic feeling,
Nowhere to go,
Oh that magic feeling,
Nowhere to go,
Nowhere to go.

One sweet dream.
Pick up the bags and get in the limousine.
One sweet dream.

Soon we’ll be away from here,
Step on the gas and wipe that tear away.

One sweet dream
Came true
Today
Came true
Today
Came true
Today
Yes, it did.

I was out of college, out of my birth family, out of VISTA, and out of the Vietnam War. I had ideas about what I wanted to do, nurtured by reading Henry David Thoreau, Jack Kerouac, and Gary Snyder. I wanted to get out onto the road and into the woods. I wanted to learn their ways and to let them have their way with me. I felt free to enter that new life.

Mingled with this heightened sense of individual freedom and personal autonomy was my concern that I live as cheaply as possible. I had very little money. I saw the necessity to earn enough money to survive was a threat to my newfound freedom. Another sense leavened my exhilaration: an edge of loneliness. I was free of intimate relationships, but I also sought intense encounters with lovers, friends, fellow travelers, and the world.

This collection of feelings and memories came flooding back to me as I walked on First Avenue in Seattle again in 2008. From that August day in 1969, I was determined to find my own way in the world, and on that day I felt fully capable of it.

______________________

*  “The original Skid Row was in Seattle; the term referred to a street owned by Henry Yesler, a local lumberman. Yesler used this byway to get logs to his mill at the bottom, and it was originally referred to as ‘Skid Road.’”  Slayton, Robert A. "Skid Row." Encyclopedia of American Urban History. 2006. SAGE Publications. Accessed 3 January 2009 at <http://www.sage-ereference.com/urbanhistory/Article_n396.html>.

**  Excerpt from “You Never Give Me Your Money,” Abbey Road, The Beatles. [released in the U.S. on 1 October 1969]