Troutsong

I walked up the stairs slowly, the hurried feeling within me being more intent on rapidly reaching an inner finish line rather than an external one. Though I was not surrounded by a captivated, receptive and penetrable audience, I had what the flamenco musicians called duende – the song or poem was already in the fertilization process, was already in progress, was already flowing forth from the lyrical source. The desocupados lectores would come; the space between me and them was only a question of time. The cool, smooth surface of the marble treads underneath my bare feet felt good. I mounted the winders on the balls of my feet, turning right, ascended the last few steps up to the second story of the duplex, and walked into the study. I sat down on the wicker chair in front of the laptop. The late afternoon sunlight drenched the insides of the room with a lush, golden glow. I opened the laptop and entered the PIN and opened a Microsoft Edge window. I guided the arrow cursor to the KUSC shortcut on the favorites bar and, once the page loaded, clicked play. Live from Los Angeles, my hometown.

“Amazing Grace” played on the laptop’s speakers. I looked out the window, facing north. The feelings, the initial lyrical inspiration, the bridegroom of my daemonic genius, were now fully ripe within me, sentimental fruit ready to fall from the subterranean black bough of my subconscious at the beck of a gust of true wind. I heard the neighbor’s screen door outside open and shut behind the violins of the instrumental. I began to write. The words came slowly at first, then, once they found their rhythm and step, the images became brighter and clearer as the poem yielded to the process of birth, of thought-transcription.

I’d been downstairs on the sofa, reclined, my feet up on one arm of the sofa and my head on the other, dozing in and out of a siesta. Cristina was in the kitchen preparing dinner, humming a song from an old Disney film to herself, and the smell of squash and onions and broccoli filled the house. The Proustian ghost called Time visited me during my siesta: involuntary memory and its manifold inheritance. Memories of my childhood surfaced, of the trout fishing trips with my younger brother and my father in the High Sierras of California. These memories passed nonchalantly through the salon of my languid mind. Suddenly, I started from my sluggish reverie on the sofa and glanced around the room. The television was on. Channel six. LaSexta was running a story about an old road covered in potholes in some out-of-the-way village on the Costa Tropical where the people had been trying to get through to someone at the Oficinas de Urbanismo for years, sending repeated pleas to the Ayuntamiento requesting that they fill the potholes which had burdened the main street of the village since the mid 80s. Then the news went to a commercial break: an Alcampo ad for a sale on trout flashed on the television. The slight correlation between the mild, evocative nostalgia and a quotidian external event triggered a simple yet ambivalent feeling of existential glee, an almost blue contentedness, in me, and I sighed and reclined back onto the sofa; dopamine and serotonin jangled and tapped about on the Shakespearean stage of my brain and performed their subtle, spontaneous neurotransmitter jazz riffs and danced their skull-muffled zapateado; my thoughts drifted in and out of the present. The fertile mix of mild familiarity and existential relaxation escorted further scenes and images, whole memories and tiny fragments of blurry ones, into my mind’s eye. Then the poem revealed itself, opened its eyes for the first time. All of the feelings of homesickness for a home which I had relinquished accompanied the resurfaced images of my childhood and adolescence and young adulthood, of the life which I’d left behind back in the United States, and a song took its first breath into its virgin lungs. The transparent nictitating membrane of the fabled Huxleyan amphibian blinked, and then winked; salient thoughts like stratified epithelium accompanied by a musical stroma, sans tear-ducts, quivered like a Spanish Cypress under a poor luthier’s calculated axe blows. I rose and made my way to the marble staircase.

Once I completed the poem to my liking, I sighed and leaned back in the wicker chair and reread it. The instrumental composition of the Christian hymn reached its conclusion and the evening disc-jockey, Lara Downes, sounded out a greeting and a smooth cap of a few words before playing one of Liszt’s symphonies. Outside the study window the click of the neighbor’s lighter fell and was followed by a coughing fit. The view from the study was of the neighbor’s patio, and further, of the line of duplex houses of the next street. The Andalusian sun shone out the window over the village rooftops. The odor of cigarette smoke entered the study. The neighbor’s coughing intensified. His wife, her voice gruff and her tone reprehensive, yelled something from the kitchen window. He wheezed and then spat an unenthusiastic response. The nineteen regions of Spain contained several different dialects. The Andalusian colloquial dialect was basically a guttural run of peasant Castellano; compared to the other Castilian dialects of the Peninsula’s population it was more or less an archaic conglomeration of abbreviations, exclamations, expectorations, monosyllabic grunting, and mumbling.

I was happy with the poem but the ambivalent feeling of homesickness for a home that no longer existed for me, the residue of the duende which had possessed and inspired me to write the poem, left a forlorn and depressive taste in my mouth. I sat there unmoving; my thoughts played in the wake of the act of writing the poem. The act of writing it down hadn’t completely expunged its essence from my consciousness the way I’d hoped it would. Though I’d executed perfectly the rematar, doused the sand with the velvet blood of the bull, something remained left undone, something was missing. But I was happy with the poem. Its content called to my mind one particular quote by H. D. Thoreau, the original hipster and one of the first poets to ever inspire me to take up the craft: “He who is only a traveler learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority.” This quote in turn summoned to the fore of my mind, among other things, the works of Ernest Hemingway, that twentieth century master of the Hispanophile Imperative. I recalled a line from his travel memoir, Green Hills of Africa: “Then you can only really follow anything in places where you speak the language … When you can’t overhear it’s no good. All you get are handouts and sight-seeing.”

I reread the poem again, more slowly this time; I tried to numb myself to my own identity as the author and read each line as if it was written by Anonymous, as if the poem weren’t written by me but by someone else, someone unknown.

I felt the touch of Cris’s hand on my right shoulder. I hadn’t heard her when she’d mounted the steps nor when she’d entered the study.

“Dinner’ll be ready soon. Tienes hambre?”

“Yes. Tengo mucho hambre.”

“Do you have your bag packed and ready?”

“I just have a few things to pack.”

“OK. I’ll make you a plate then. Estás nervioso por lo de mañana?”

“Un poco. Gracias, guapa. I’ll be down in just a minute.”

My parents were set to fly into Málaga–Costa del Sol Airport the following day. I hadn’t seen them for over five years, since I made the move to Andalusia. My brother had flown out to see me for a few days during my second year in Granada, just before I met Cris, and I had been very drunk during most of his brief visit and it hadn’t gone very well. Cristina and I were to join up with my parents and begin a three-week trip all over Spain. My heart ached at the thought of seeing them. Five years had brought much change, both to my own life and to the world. COVID-19 had ebbed into the background and disappeared, and Donald Trump had been elected to a second term in the Oval Office. I rose from the desk and walked over to the east wall of the study where I had posted a large map of Spain on the wall with scotch tape. I laughed to myself as my eyes followed the thick red-marker line which I’d drawn days prior which ran from the southern coast to just north of the Pyrenees – the trip as planned out and organized by my father. It was funny to me because, without intending to, my father had designed the general route to be very similar to Ernest Hemingway’s itinerary as presented in his The Dangerous Summer, a book which recounted his final trip to Spain and detailed the rivalry between two toreros, Luis Miguel Dominguín and Antonio Ordóñez. Hemingway began his trip in France and then made his way south, whereas we planned to begin our Iberian voyage in Andalusia and then make our way north along the southern coast before heading inland. But that wasn’t the only fact which tickled my literary gusto. The planned route which began in Granada, swerved up to Valencia, then zigzagged over to Avila and Madrid, thence to Burgos and Zaragosa, up to San Sebastian, and from there over the mountains and into France, to end in Lourdes, also stopped in all the major Spanish cities which were affiliated with the history of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, the hero of El Cantar de Mio Cid. My father had planned the trip based on the cathedrals which he wanted to see. It gave me pleasure to dress the apprehension of the trip with the legacies of these two literary and historical personalities.

Originally, my parents’ plan had been to fly in on March 4th, spend a week or so seeing the Costa Tropical, and then head to Valencia with Cris and I tagging along to spend the week of the Fallas together, at the end of which Cris and I would return to Granada and they would continue north on their Spanish cathedral hunt, to eventually end their trip in Southern France with the Sanctuaire de Notre-Dame de Lourdes. This had been the original plan because I had been a full-time cook at a fine dining restaurant in Granada and hadn’t been able to request any more time off without welcoming the threat of losing my job. Fortunately, I ended up getting fired in mid-February, a few weeks before their arrival was scheduled, due to getting into a fist fight with a co-worker. The Moroccan dishwasher at the restaurant had decided to try and get tough with me and I decided to teach him a lesson about how Americans handle their business, abroad or otherwise – à la Santiago Matamoros. As it turned out, I was more like my father than I’d thought I was. After the incident, I called my father and told him Cris and I would be free to travel with him and my mother throughout the extent of their visit. He then happily made some calls to hotels and Airbnbs, changed some reservations, and just like that Cris and I were set to enjoy the whole three weeks with my parents on the road in Spain, following in the footsteps of Hemingway and Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar.

I sat back down in the wicker chair, checked my e-mail, and responded to an editor of a small but fast-growing Art and translation magazine which I sometimes wrote articles and translated poetry from Spanish to English for. I’d been in communication with the editor about my new plans to visit the Prado at the end of March, and she was interested in me writing an article for the magazine’s next quarterly.

I went downstairs. The living room was filled with the smell of vegetables and fried eggs. I sat down before the small coffee table and Cristina and I ate our dinner as we watched the news. The vegetable puree with fried eggs was delicious. Hurricane Regina had hit the Peninsula just yesterday. The Canary Islands seemed to have taken the brunt of the hurricane. The Alcampo trout ad flashed on the scene again, 4,17 € a kilo; again, my mind allowed itself to fall back into images from my childhood, trout fishing in America.

After dinner and after watching about twenty minutes of our favorite reality TV show First Dates, I walked upstairs to our bedroom, the room adjacent to the study, and packed my clothes for the trip. Then I went for a walk. The full moon hung overhead, Lorca’s blanca tortuga. Cris and I lived in a rented duplex in a suburb about eight kilometers west of central Granada. I walked toward the lights of the city, enjoying the crisp spring night air and the liquid shimmering of the lights off in the distance. I thought about the camping and backpacking trips which I took with my father all those years ago.

One memory stood out to me as I walked along under the full moon, of the night my father and I sat by the edge of a lake somewhere along the John Muir Trail; we stayed up late sitting side by side on a great dead log at the edge of a large alpine lake, frying trout over a small campfire and enjoying the beauty of the full moon.

The John Muir Trail was a 211-mile long-distance trail through California’s High Sierra, stretching from Yosemite Valley to Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the contiguous United States (14,505 feet). Most of the trail was above 8,000 feet, crossing six major high elevation passes and climbing approximately 47,000 feet in total elevation gain.

I’d been eighteen years old when my father and I hiked the John Muir Trail. During that year I was rapidly growing out of my AC/DC and video games and pornography addiction phase, and beginning my Bob Dylan and jazz and anti-capitalism and anti-establishment and socialism and Buddhism and girlfriend and literary dilettante (via the Transcendentalists and the Beat Generation) and marijuana addiction phase – a massive shift. Young manhood. The focus on the individual rather than on society and the prioritizing of intuition over empiricism of the Transcendentalists, and the ecstatic freedom and philosophical experimentation and bohemian beatitudes of the Beat Generation all deeply appealed to me. To my newly opened eyes, to my budding self-awareness and crescendoing rebel identity, there was a great connection between all of these new themes, topics, lifestyles and interests, especially between my affinity for jazz music and any anti-establishment sentiments. Being a child of the 90s, the political ideas which I’d imbibed amounted to a particular collection of ideals; these ideals I kept to myself and they only existed to me in so far as they could reinforce a contextual foundation upon which I would be able to build a more revolutionary and individual sense of self – I deeply mistrusted all parties and affiliations. I mistrusted the entire scheme of American politics and had promised myself upon my eighteenth birthday never to enter a voting booth. I was introduced to the magic of jazz through Jack Kerouac’s work, and thereafter immersed myself in its extensive and indefatigable heritage and discographies. I bought myself an old portable Groov-E AM/FM radio recorder and cassette player and prowled the record stores all over Los Angeles, buying all of the one-dollar jazz cassettes I came across, and compiled quite the collection. I listened to jazz so often that my thoughts sometimes began to take on the forms and rhythms of syncopation and arpeggio, especially after a few evening cups of coffee. Thanks to my charisma, my height, my passionate energy and my fake-ID, I became the youngest regular attendee at the best jazz bar in Los Angeles, the Blue Whale, which was located in the east corner of a little plaza in Little Tokyo. The Blue Whale threw great jam sessions every Friday night.

My father had been planning the trip for over a year. He’d organized the renewal of his CDFW fishing license, and had applied for and then was, luckily, granted our Wilderness Trail Permits, which were given out on a lottery. He’d organized the food shipments to the restock stations along the trail, and bought new boots for the both of us in the months leading up to the trip. We’d spent the last few months breaking in the boots, hiking up to Henninger Flats every weekend.

We piled all the bags and gear in his white 1987 Jeep Cherokee one Monday evening and took off the next morning for Yosemite, the usual way of doing the trail for first attempters, from the north to the south, as it began on the lower altitude side and ended on the peak of Mount Whitney. I was excited, but was also somewhat irritated as the trip would take me away from the enjoyment of lazy days at my friend’s house playing guitar and smoking joints and late-night sessions at the Blue Whale and sweaty midnight dog-hump sessions at my girlfriend’s house. My mother waved at us from the front porch of the house that Tuesday morning with the somber eyes of a mother saying goodbye to her husband and her beloved eldest son as they depart on a big trip. We got to Yosemite come the late afternoon and drove in on California State Route 41 past the droves of tourists taking in the view just outside the Wawona Tunnel of Bridalveil Falls, Half Dome, and all 914 meters of El Capitan, and we made our way to the parking lot designated for John Muir Trail trekkers beside Backpackers’ Campground, just across the foot bridge north of North Pines Campground. We set up camp and walked over to Village Grill for some cheeseburgers. We ate our burgers and enjoyed the scenery and the colorful variety of tourists.

We filled our time during each day’s stretch of trail whistling, sometimes talking, but mostly listening to the roaring silence of the High Sierras and the sound of our footsteps. Our conversations along the trail happened in spurts, geyserlike and usually short and sweet and to the point, for my father was never a very social person nor a big talker, that is, unless the conversation was on a topic which deeply interested him; I was the same way. We talked sporadically about U.S. history and American politics. We didn’t agree on every level nor share musical nor political affiliations and tastes, but we respected each other for the knowledge we each had and considered each other to be harmlessly ignorant of the real truth. This barrier between perspectives and ideas, I knew, was typical of intergenerational exchanges and disputes in the United States since the 1960s. I’d recently read Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davves’ Global Nightmare, Seymour Hersh’s Chain of Command, and Jonathan Neale’s What’s Wrong with America?, three books which had been published in 2004, five years before our summer backpacking trip. These three books alongside Howard Zinn’s quintessential A People’s History of the United States provided answers to the questions I was then asking. One topic my father and I fully agreed on was the degree and value of the works of Mark Twain. Whenever the conversation along the trail strayed too far into one-sidedness, I’d remonstrate with a quote from Thoreau: “One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.”

During one of the nights we camped by a lake, we fished with our spin reels which we’d brought along and each caught three rainbow trout of varying sizes, after which I wrote a haiku.

We’d arrived at our destination that day earlier than usual – the middle lake of the Rae Lakes in the King’s Canyon section of the trail – which came to us as a surprise because we were both the worse for wear. We usually didn’t have enough energy nor enough time to do much fishing and were in the habit of cursing ourselves for packing our spinning rods and the cylindrical jars of fauvistic PowerBait and the tiny split-shot weights. We took our time cleaning our fish, and we watched the mountain peaks’ sharp faces fade from deep orange to purple to dark gray to black. Then the full moon rose over the peaks. We sat side by side on a great dead log and my father began to fry the trout over our fire.

He flipped over one of the smaller trout in the frying pan. Then he rolled up the right leg of his cargo pants up to his thigh and took off the bandage which he’d wrapped his knee with just a few days before, after he’d slipped and fallen on the trail, and put on a new bandage. His knee was no longer swollen. The stars were bright and glistening, and the full moon floated brightly overhead, a great wise and ever-silent voyeur and provocateur.

“The moon is beautiful way out here,” he said.

“Yeah, it sure is.”

My father was strict but he was humble and he was aware of our differences and the limits they imposed on him as a father, and I was aware that he was aware of the limits. This made things awkward at times, but it also added an essential sense of authenticity and of simplicity, of humanity and of truth. We sat there and ate our trout in silence under the full moon by the lake and soon after that went to sleep.

A few days prior – about a week into the trek – my father had stopped and taken off his pack and pointed to some heavy-looking grey clouds to the south. We were passing through Red’s Meadow, making our way to the switchbacks which would take us over Mammoth Pass, and we were only three miles into our twelve-mile quota for the day.

“Those could mean trouble. It might be a good idea if we stopped.”

“But then we’d have to make up for the mileage tomorrow. You don’t think we can make it to the next camp in time to put up the tents and everything?”

“Storms can come just like that [he snapped his right finger] at this high elevation. We might be better off stopping here for the day and getting up extra early tomorrow and doing a double day.”

“Really?”

“Well … Let’s try to make it over the pass. But it might mean trouble for us, that big, ugly cloud over there above the peaks.”

We continued and we reached the peak in no time, where there was a stone hut which had been there since the Solomons and Muir days. We considered passing the night in the hut, but we wanted to get off the peak so as to not get fried by alpine lightning so we started down the trail and as we did it began to pour buckets before we could breach the tree line. We took our bags off and pulled out the ponchos and put them on and continued, the both of us remarking that maybe it would’ve been a better idea to pass the rest of the night in the stone refuge on the peak. As we crossed the tree line and made our way down the trail and into the valley the trail transformed into a river and we trudged on with water up to our ankles, our boots soaked, our legs exhausted. Then, trying to step over a particularly deep-puddled section of trail, my father slipped and fell. He bashed his knee pretty bad. I muttered under my breath a line from Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, “You can’t fall off a mountain.” What a bunch of Zen bullshit, I thought, disillusioned. About 80 meters down the trail was a gigantic boulder under which there was enough room to make a moderately dry camp with our two tents. I helped my father over to the dry cavelike area under the boulder and he assessed his wounds as I went back for his bag and then mine and then I set up our two tents as he cussed himself to pieces and I asked incessantly if there was anything I could do to help. I felt somewhat guilty for having suggested that we continue over the peak in order to try and get in the day’s mileage. I thought ironically and despondently of Thoreau’s lines: “There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has his senses still. There was never yet such a storm but it was Aeolian music to a healthy and innocent ear.” My father had lost his state of robust health and mobility, and I didn’t feel innocent in the matter. We both thought those first hours after his fall that the injury was pretty serious. His right knee had swollen to the size of a cantaloupe.

Come morning it was all blue skies and green alpine canyon and creek gurgles. The injury wasn’t as bad as we’d thought it was; the swelling was beginning to go down, and we still had around 150 miles to go if we were going to continue to Mt. Whitney as planned and complete the whole trail. My father ate a good breakfast of protein bars and trail mix and I munched on some oatmeal and asked him are you sure? and he was sure so on we went.

Slowly but surely, over the next two weeks of 10-12 mile days, we made it to the peak of Mount Whitney, 14,500 feet of pure glory, two weeks later and right on schedule. Then we made our way down to the Whitney Portal campground where there was a small dirty pond which was stocked with small ugly brook trout which seemed to be as lifeless and artificial as the soul of the civilization which we were about to re-enter. I likened this experience in my mind to that of Thoreau’s when he left his pondside cabin and re-entered society – the harsh experience of re-entering an unfeeling society as an enlightened human being after having immersed oneself in nature for a while. Uncle Tom, who wasn’t really my uncle but my father’s best friend whom he’d known since his Police Academy days, was there at the trail’s end in the Portal campground parking lot waiting for us. Uncle Tom looked exactly like Charles Bronson; everyone always said so. My father looked exactly like Mark David Chapman; no one had ever said so as far as I knew, but I thought he did. He really did. My father and I were happy to have completed more or less successfully the John Muir Trail together – he seemed to be relieved but at the same time sad; I, however, was ecstatic, as happy as can be. My father’s limp had gotten better over the past few days but he still walked with a slight right-leaning wobble. Our feet were miserably webbed with massive blisters. We climbed into the Scout and departed Whitney Portal for Lone Pine. My father and Uncle Tom chatted about politics, mainly about President Barack Obama’s defects – according to them he had many, but to me he seemed to be doing OK and I was partial to his Hawaiian gait – as we drove down into town where we stopped for a bite to eat at the first restaurant we came across. My father ordered a steak dinner and I ordered a cheeseburger. It was the best cheeseburger I’d ever eaten.

Across the plain the city lights of Granada flickered evocatively and dimly like taper candles around the altar of the Alhambra. I reflected, I am a poet thanks to my mother, and I am a writer thanks to my father. I strolled along, continuing westward, and enjoyed the brisk night air and admired the softness of the sound of the Andalusian wind through the ornamental orange trees, and then turned south and eventually looped around, drifting through the quiet streets of the neighboring village, and made my way back to the duplex. I entered the front gate, took out my keys, inserted the front door key with the green rubber key cap, opened the door, entered and walked upstairs to the bedroom. Cris was fast asleep.

I sat down at the edge of the bed by the window and quietly took off my loafers. I’d worn the old loafers without a pair of socks, as was my wont, and my feet had a sheen of silvery dust on them, a sandy discharge which was caused by the slow-disintegrating faux leather tongue and some leftover loam from my regular walks along the Genil River; they looked like the Tin Man’s feet under the soft light of the moon. I undressed and climbed into bed with her. Sundry memories of my mother and father danced through my mind and I drifted into sleep afloat on their bittersweet nostalgia and wonder.