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| Click the graphic to hear Charlie Musslewhite blowin', "Chicago Sunset." |
[Back story: Warren is
going to the Car Grave Yard deep in the woods in Fish Hawk country. With the
help of some friends he is going to push his old broken down 55 Chevy Nomad Wagon, purple with yellow doors, down to the
Fish Hawk River and ride on its roof to old Omer Anderson's to offer it up as parts
for services already rendered.
Upon leaving his house, Warren discovered a strange yellow capsule with gray-green flecks in it on the table. He figured his girl friend Sally left it there the night before. On his way out the door he swallows the capsule, which contains dried ginkgin powder, a powerful substance once revered by the ancient Osqua Indians who inhabited Fish Hawk country long before the whites muscled their way into those mountain woods. … We return to our story in progress as Warren heads to the Car Grave Yard … ]
If you didn't know this steep stretch of road, you might slide right by the Car Grave Yard. But Warren knew to dig his work boot heels into the forest dirt and catch the almost hidden path to his right. A long narrow darkened path cut ahead of him through the timber.
The darkness threw back a sound. Some kind of weird woods music. A high pitched sad twang with the reverberation of a Jews harp, but higher pitched. It came at him as if out of a tunnel.
He saw creamy orange tubes gently zig-zagging at him! Some were open-mouthed, some pinched and puckered. They swerved in curvy patterns and undulated, arching and weaving back and forth, moving with the rhythm of the music.
MaChigghhh-AWWW-WAWH-RAWWWH.
Some tubes shot forward and stopped a beat as if they forgot something and they eased back from where they came (reversing the same up-down, sideways movements), only to sashay forward again, but this time slower in a confident syncopated vamp. Some curled around one another, twisting and turning, vibrating with an edgy nasal tone.
Naw-awwh! Brrr-hmmm-brummmp! Aw! Naw-naw-naw-heee-bump!
They aimed right at Warren's face! And the sound from out of the woods reverberated through the twisty tubes. Half-suppressed squeak, half-whiney rasp.
MaChigghhh-AWWW-WAWH-RAWWWH. Chigghhh-AWWW- WAWH -RAWWWH! RAWWWH-NAWWWH! RAWWWH-NAWWWH! RAWWWH-NAWWWH! WAH-WAH!
They were up in front of his eyes now! A line of them weaving and bobbing! Warren saw gray green specks inside the tubes, darting and hitting the sides and bouncing off, knocking into each other and shooting in another direction. What chaos within the seducing rhythm of the gyrating cylinders!
He stopped. He blinked and the tubes that were up against his eyes, almost touching his lashes but not quite, vanished. But more in line sauntered forward.
He stopped. He blinked and the tubes that were up against his eyes, almost touching his lashes but not quite, vanished. But more in line sauntered forward.
The sound was coming from Harris’ blues harp. He was blowing and sucking in on two reeds at once, causing a hoarse wheezing sound. The pitch rose and fell, the stops creating a railroad beat.
Warren was fixated on the gray green specks bombarding each other inside the tubes. They played havoc games within the "take-it-easy" drifting tubes.
Mmmm-hip-hip-hip! Mmmm-brrrr!
He swatted at the tubes. That cleared way for him, but more were coming! The sound wasn't quitting. He batted them with his palms! And the sound cylinders quivered and kept coming!
He fisted them as he shadow-danced into the Grave Yard.
Warren saw Harris first, or more accurately he saw the music from Harris' harmonica. A cluster of those cartoon tubes huddled around Harris' head, circling his shoulders. They swarmed up into the trees.
Harris blew his harp! He was getting whiny elongated notes to push those tubes out and up!
When he saw Warren, he stopped blowing and sang out:
Every morning
N
Every night
Warren jumped at Harris, leaping and knocking down a bunch of orange tubes as he flew in the air, simultaneously throwing out his own lyrics -
I tell myself
Ya gotta do right
I tell myself
Ya gotta do right
Ha-ha! Harris! Warren cried out. You harp-blowing fool!
His eyes followed the trace of orange cylinders floating up into the cool tree air. They fell on Mel sitting crossed-legged on top of an ancient pick up.
His eyes followed the trace of orange cylinders floating up into the cool tree air. They fell on Mel sitting crossed-legged on top of an ancient pick up.
Waddaya doing up there, Buddha-boy?!
Good morning, Warren, Mel said softly.
Mel - his straight long brown hair around his shoulders, sitting on top of the rusted roof of the pickup, the rust circling out from the center of the roof in various colors of brown and black - Mel took in the scape of the Car Grave Yard.
It was a darkened tree-crowded clearing just off the Old Logging Road. Hemlock and Douglas Fir squeezed out the sky. Sword ferns, three leaf clover, and huckleberry bushes crowded the ground.
The cars and trucks had come to rest in peace in this place - in peace or in pieces. They were slowly decomposing in the dampness and from winter freezes. They were a mangled mix of long-forgotten "vehiculers," as Warren called them - cracked and crashed and crumbled, in various stages of rot.
The Car Grave Yard was a mess of massive clutter. Your eye did not want to distinguish the shapes and the parts at first. There was too much jungle-jumble to inventory. But Mel's awareness as the result of long periods of sitting meditation and openness to the transpersonal had heightened his perception.
He saw each rusted out smashed-in chassis, the dry crusted moss covered radiators, dusty worn tires, hunks of motors, bent torn-up grills and bumpers, mufflers and exhaust pipes protruding out at all angles and stages of rust looking like an abstract painting drawn by someone with a muscle disorder. And hubcaps! Hubcaps strewn everywhere. Forgotten metal Frisbees piled up and tilted in disarray, thrown there by some unseen vagabond who had disappeared long ago into time's cloudy prism.
Most of the vehiculars gawked with dark gaping holes where windshields and windows had once protected them from the outside. The windows had long ago shattered, their pieces swallowed by the forest floor. The insides, seats and floors, were coated with tiny glass shards mixed with pine needles.
Mel sat cross-legged on the roof of the pickup, smiling benignly. His hair was shiny and long. He was bare-chested, and like the strands of chin hair that pretended to be a goatee and his wispy mustache, the hair on his chest was dark and sparse. He felt the cool damp air against his skin.
Warren watched the last of the gyrating tubes vanish in the air above Harris' head. Gone in the silence when he quit playing his harmonica.
The morning sun light forced an intrusion on the clearing, streaking light through the trees. The light fell on Mel's shoulders. But Warren did not see it. He was thinking about Sally.
[Watch for future installments of Warren and the Nomad's adventures on the Fish Hawk River!]
[Watch for future installments of Warren and the Nomad's adventures on the Fish Hawk River!]
