There was this Japanese guy, Basho, well-versed in Zen, Confucianism, Asian history, Shinto – all the major players. Basho’s not his real name, but we’ll call him that.

Basho had a case of wanderlust, and takes off on the Interior Road circa 1689 or so.

Basho liked people but couldn’t understand how they thought what they appeared to think or acted the way they did, as though on purpose. Still, by the time he was 40 or thereabouts he was surprised to find that people he encountered knew his writings and respected him. He walked from place to place, eating at tables of hardworking families with modest homes and a yen for haiku. Basho and his apprentice type guy Sor whooped it up, hitting all the monasteries, ancient temples, and shrines, of which Basho knew both the location and history. He contrasted hermetic periods of intense study with blacked-out drunken oblivion, each mode its own ode to self-forgetting.

We catch him unawares on this clear night, bright with winking stars. Watch as he carefully unpacks his calligraphy works and dutifully sets about the task of spontaneous composition, searching out the right word rightly used and the satisfying click of consciousness sated.

[The whole earth is our hospital

Endowed by the ruined millionaire]

*****

At the time, Saturdays are 2 pots of coffee, time spent hiking at the Teepee grounds, random phone conversations, shaking off Friday night, contemplative moods, uncritical reading, dishes, acknowledgment of blue skies, attraction to the present here and now, stomach rumblings, late showers, wrong number callers, early trips to the post office, devotional hours to music, baking bacon, laundry, putting the phone book on the shelf, returning books to the case, driving w/o a seatbelt, trips to the Amish store to stock up on Gatorade and red beans and rice, polite exchanges with the bonneted Amish girls or the owner who has an aircast on his leg and strident Civil War facial hair, eruptive bird songs, certain hours of complacency, and a general air of solitude and above-the-fray immediacy.

You walk to the airstrip (apparently the priests used to have to get out of dodge and some of the bigger donors used to like to drop in and see their altruism in the flesh). Keep going in the same direction, following a rutted path with a dump site strewn with random garbage and cast-off chairs, mattresses, and three rusty shopping carts. Beyond that, another object graveyard, chunks of concrete and tangled rebar spears, stacks of old machinery that served phantom uses, the place where parts of the mission go to be ignobly dispatched. To the right is a hay field, with little copses of brush on the riverbank’s edge that run diagonally and eventually intersect with the path. About 100 yards from the river the brome disappears and thick patches of bluestem pitch and weave in the wind. You walk to a turnstile the height of your hips and you push through and get past the fence into the pasture where four white-faced cows sit chewing cuds and four young buffalo bull calves take turns trying to screw each other.

Winter is coming, and you will continue to get up early, make this walk, sometimes chattering at the bull calves to stave off too-close encounters. You run from one end to the other and back again, twice, because we are talking about a time in your life when you used to do that type of thing, despite the apparent futility that attends to it. It will take another decade or so before the hard-won realization sets in that apparent futility can be manufactured in a pinch to justify nothing, or just about anything.