Friday’s Story #6 — Part 2
Continuation from Memorial Part 1
My teacher taught me transcendentalism in high school, and I realized the hypocrisy of it all that night in the desert with the Pueblos, and Scott and Larry did too. Our professors talked about questioning authority and the value of our intuition, and then they graded our papers and told us we were thinking wrong. I was sure we, including the pueblos, were all thinking quite wrong. The drugs wouldn’t wear off until morning, and driving was totally out of the question, and we were stuck in the desert miles from anything. The lights of Santa Fe were to my right, and an expanse of desert was to my left. The sun had set, and the ground where I sat was cooling. The 10 of us sat without saying a word. Two empty bowls lay before me that, earlier, had contained the ground peyote liquid. There were no clouds in the sky. The faded blue to black sky to the west was revealing new stars every few minutes. Soon it would be totally black. Was it dangerous to sleep in the desert? Probably it was.
The beauty of the experience, as I realized when I woke up before sunrise freezing and sore after sleeping on rocks and bumpy earth, was not in the drugs. The drugs, and the desert, and people I didn’t know, and the night of restless sleep, and the cold, the cold is what woke me up. The beauty of the experience was the unexpectedness of what would follow. Scott woke up, but the Pueblos kept sleeping. We suspected they had done this before. The two bowls were sitting where we left them the night before and they were dry. Bits of dried peyote clung to the insides.
“You want to go now?” Scott said.
“I guess, yeah. Do you want to keep going or go somewhere else?” I did not want to go back to school. We were both cold so we got up and went to the van. Larry had migrated there sometime in the night and we found him curled up on the back bench underneath our duffel bags. Scott and I got in the van and started it, but we didn’t go anywhere. We waited to see if the Pueblos were going to wake up so we could thank them and say goodbye. Larry woke up and dumped the bags on the floor.
“Hey! Are we leaving?”
“We’re waiting to see if the Indians wake up.” I said. “I don’t think they will.”
“Me neither. I think we should just go.” Scott said.
“What about last night? How do you guys feel?” Larry wanted to talk.
“Mmm.” Scott didn’t know what to say, and neither did I. We both thought maybe we shouldn’t say anything. Larry didn’t sound sure of his question anyway. The Pueblos didn’t look like they were going to wake up, so we drove away.
We continued west for half an hour. Then I pulled over at a dusty gas station. “Did either of you Learn anything last night?”
“No, not really.” Larry said. “I wanted to learn something, but I didn’t. I thought I would learn something, but I didn’t.” Scott felt the same way, and I did too. How could we have learned so much then? There was nothing to put a finger on. We had all learned what it was like to actually know something without knowing anything. The drugs had washed away our college pretention for long enough that we saw, within ourselves, the true us. We learned what we were, and how we were, and we didn’t ever want to forget it. We were afraid that if we did the peyote when we didn’t absolutely need it that it would jade the experience and we would never be able to get it back. We had to make sure that our next trip to that side would be meaningful. We all had the same question because we all sat there in our seats looking dumb. How can we keep from forgetting?
That was when we made the promise. It was something we kept to ourselves for the next 20 years and never talked about between us. We finished school because we were supposed to, and the promise was the reason Larry and I were driving across the country. We were driving to find out if Scott had made provisions for his part of the deal. The deal was simple. When each of us died, the surviving among us was to take the ashes of the deceased and try to find the same spot in the dessert and consume peyote at sunset in remembrance of our time during spring break those years ago and to try, again, to see our untarnished selves one last time. Then we would bury the ashes and wait for someone else to die. When, in the future, two urns found their ways to the desert one of us would be doing peyote at night in the desert alone. Larry and I drove on listening to the Spanish music and not talking.
Scott had been lost at sea. I wondered if we would be able to recover something of him.
Read the continuation on Part 3 and The End
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I’m torn between anticipation and dread of it ending. It is one of those stories that comes alive in my mind as if I have lived it.