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THE HAIRY BUM
Ugly day here. Rain coming down, point blank, a girl
talking to herself in the job center. Curious, she was. She began to laugh like
there was a clown playing for her and only for her, got jealous, but her
laughter was so funny that I had to repress me bursting in laughing. No big
deal. I took a soft painkiller to fight back the wet. Got me couple of movies
to help me conciliate the sleep. Anyway, this is Germany, this is the place
where a southern man don’t want to be. Feeling good, though. My train takes its
time to come, and in the meantime am making peace with my soul.
I wish there was a Heaven point somewhere, I miss
getting that high. There is nothing like getting “creational high”. I call it
so. Some other may call it … whatever. There are many Heaven Spots all over the
Earth. The first time I fell in one High Spot it occurred to me by chance, as
everything that happens to me. Well, I was in the Peloponnesus for the orange
season. In winter time there is no other place in Europe where I want to be. It
is absolutely delicious there, all around the entire Peninsula is gorgeous, Nafplio, Argos, Kalamata, Patras, Sparta, Corinthos, every
single town you go it is another gift from Heaven to Earth. The only problem is
the Language, but if you manage to babble some Demotic you are welcome,
anytime, they appreciate a lot that in a foreigner. They are pretty used to the
hairy Europeans. Weird to find in the country a hairy Greek; some in Athens,
though. However, during my first winter in Peloponnesus I ended up in Nafplio, mostly dragged down there by the legendary fame of
Argos. For that fact Argos got the legend and Nafplio the beauty.
Just as many towns of the Peloponnesus Nafplio has a castle on the top of the hill at which feet
the town spread its body. I postponed paying it a visit for one reason or
another. Until one day my soul got me by the neck and located me in the little
rocky path leading to the top of the hill. The castle wasn’t a great thing.
Greeks had been under the yoke of the Turks by centuries, and the Turks, as
most of the Arabs Nations, are born with a blank historical mind. For those
people the Past is not even History, but a demonic memory from which, thanks to
Allah, they have been saved by Mahomet. Accordingly all the remains from the Past
meant nothing for them. We, the Europeans, are the demons who came from the
West to unburied Nineveh, Babylon, Accad, Ur, and so on and so forth. You just
got to think in the Sphinx and the Pyramids, until good old Napoleon did not
come around that Wonder of the World was nearly buried in the sand. The more so
a castle built by the Franks who conquered Peloponnesus and ruled the Peninsula
in the years after the Crusaders. Not that I'm stigmatizing the Arabs, God
forbid. We have but to follow Washington Irving to Spain in the days of the
Nineteenth Century to find a same retarded behavior of the people towards the
richness of their Past. Washington Irving found that Jewel of the World
History, the Alhambra of Granada, nearly in ruins, falling in pieces before the
eyes of the Spanish Empire. Anyway, during my trip around Turkey I saw and
slept by the walls of many old crusaders castle already in ruins. I knew, also,
that the Acropolis of Athens, believe it or not, was turned into a powder
military store by the Turks, and one day during one of those revolts of the
Greeks, the store was blown up, and with it that Wonder of the World History
was turned into what it is today, rubbles. Contrary to this rule the Castle of Nafplio was rebuilt and was pretty much in extraordinary
conditions. In Malaga we have one like that too. Nothing to compare with the
Castle of Nafplio; Malaga’s is bigger and older, but
in total ruin. I headed up to the top of the hill. Get you a picture.
Nafplio is
a Mediterranean Town with the same whether of Malaga. Malaga was founded by Greeks,
probably from Peloponnesus. The day they arrived there they felt home and
called the place “Malaca”, a word which in ancient Greek probably meant
something very different, given that its meaning in Demotic, or Modern Greek,
is “Wanker”.
The alleys are just Andalucian, which may cause not wonder thinking that the
Spanish by the name of Catalans were around for some time.
And here is the view of the
castle
There is where I dragged myself, right to the top. I
made the round of the walls, found me a place to sit in front the open sea. And
there I sat in one of those Heaven's Spot that will live always in my mind.
First is the illusion. And you know it is an illusion, as when you are sitting
in a train in the station and suddenly you feel moving, but the train is not,
it is the train leaving on the track beside which is moving on. It takes few
short seconds to level the senses. It last until you dismiss the illusion. But
in this case, I didn't dismiss the illusion of being flying in open space upon
the Earth. For that matter, if you forget what is on your back, the castle, you
may say that you are in the middle of the sea, in an island. It comes straight
to you from the dynamics of the wind and the seas. The entire mass of waves
move in circle around the hill. As in the train illusion, your mind feels that
is the hill which is moving. It was up to me to break it or let my mind go. I
left my mind go. And as I did so hill and the waters became one with the entire
Planet flying through the blue sky.
“I could feel the core of the Earth like you feel the
engines of your car. The Earth was my car, I was flying the open space, not an
illusion. We can’t feel the Earth moving because our attitude of not letting
our mind go. Earth was part of my body, I was her head, I was not anymore a
little piece of rocky cosmic dust lost in the immensity of the universe, but
the actual traveler-passenger carried by planet Earth from Sun to Heaven. Pure
energy filling my soul, reaching my mind, fueling my blood, rising me up to
meet my Creator, right there, with a smile in His eyes whispering to my soul :
“Hi there, son”. There was one word left to me : “Father”. This is what I call
a heaven's Spot!”
Jim looked at me with cool eyes and said.
“Well, if that is what you want, I'm going to drive
you straight to one of those of Heaven’s Point of you”.
“Surprise me!”, said I.
I had been driving nonstop from New Orleans to El
Paso. My pleasure. Night driving through Texas beneath a starry skies was
enormously constructive. As Highway Ten pass through Houston it becomes what I
call an intelligent road; it bends up and down according the turn, making the
high speed driving looks like you always drive along a straight line. To add
beauty to this impression Highway Ten breaks into the heart of Houston and pass
the city on a high Bridge from which the Downtown Lights fills the eyes with a
herd of Van Gogh's diatonic colors.
Day came and still I was on the wheel. But as I left
behind El Paso, entering in the State of New Mexico a patrol highway thought my
speed a little bit high and gave me halt. It was the time to play hard. To
reveal that I had no driving license was out of question. My European accent
and my passport could confirm me saying I left the driving license back home.
To back up my story the patrol cop was a Spanish speaking American. I spoke to
him in plain Spanish and the story was bought. But Jim had to answer for me and
pay the bill. He said it was OK. He got the wheel.
As we passed Bowie and before Willcox,
Jim drove left.
“Yeah, 666, the road of the Devil” , said Jim, joking.
No joke, there it was.
From the pocket map in my head I knew Arizona to be
home to the Grand Canyon :
“Much better”,
said Jim.
For that matter he did not turn right at Safford but
kept heading north on the 666. Sometime after, the Tucson Desert began to get
green, the dusty southern cowboy plain to give way to hills covered by old
Indian forests. Few hours later we were driving through Paradise Hills, the
White Mountains.
Actually the bigots call the 666, at this day, 191. It
really doesn’t matter. It was one of most beautiful sites I had never seen. And
not so much for the variety of paysages as for the
hundreds and hundreds of miles Nature has for her to grow and remember herself
when she was young. From Safford to the Four Corners there is no city, some
villages here and there, people from old born there, somehow preserving the
ancient traditions of their Indian Killer Fathers. Jim pulled off in one of
those little tiny villages with a dozen huts on the hill in the middle of the
Indian Forest Mountains, to get us some water. Man, I tell you what, the only
thing missed by those guys there it was the old Winchester. Jim was from
Chicago and his accent was an insult for those old fellows living in the
romantic ages of the Killing Indian times. Jim’s car, Jim’s look, and Jim's
hairy companion was for them an invasion of a privacy exclusively open to the
classic tourist, mummy and daddy and their holy children buying beers and
candies and arrows from Sitting Bull and even a scalp from one of the Sergeant
Pepper Lonely Heart Club Band.
“Shit, man. Let's get out of here”, said Jim.
Myself I could not stop laughing at the whole scene.
They sold us what we wanted but if they had said a hundred dollars for a bottle
of water from their dicks, man, you get it and you run. Just like in the
movies. Their accent sounded like a roaring from their asses. And they meant
it, “get on your fancy car and get the hell out of here, Chicago Boy, and take
with you your hairy bum, before with peel him off”. Man, I kept laughing till
we arrived to the Petrified Forest.
There we were. From the absolute, marvelous green hills
of the White Mountains Indian Reservation to the red hilly desert, like jumping
from on planet to another planet. For that matter the White Mountains cut the
Southern Desert Plains in two, Tucson and Phoenix in the South and Grand
Canyon, the Petrified Forest and Death Valley to the North. Why they call it
the Petrified Forest?
Strange thing to say, there is no answer to tell. The
trees became rocks just like that. One day they were threes, and next they were
stones. I had never seen any other in the world. The Sahara Desert got none.
And Sahara is old than the world. Where they came from these stones? Let me
show you a photo:
And they are all over the place. The mystery is on the
table still. How did trees become stones? A volcanic eruption? But fire turn
the trees to ashes. What natural force made possible this miracle? The trees
died and become food for the other trees, and the insects too.
We must to guess that the mass structure of the cell
of those trees was not of the same nature of the actual trees. What was their
Nature? And to solve this questions most probably we better travel back in time
to the origin of the Earth. But this is a journey the scientists give up by
rising their words to the Nature of the Word of God. Einstein has spoken. Word
of God! Darwin has spoken. Word of God! I mean, when Science became a Religion?
NASA says there are planets with cores made of one single rock of diamond as
big as the Moon, and all the newspaper of the world proclaim loud the good
news. To me NASA is the greatest brain washing machine ever invented. The
mystery is there, in their backyard. How could a tree become a rock?
We sat there and drank the bottle of water paid so
dearly.
“Where are we heading now?”.
“Death Valley, of course”.
“I thought so”.
“Not surprised, then?”.
“I don't know. You may have something better in mind”.
“Good boy“.
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