I’d like to think that I can show my erudition by claiming I listened to a certain Irish band during the longish drive from Altadena to Joshua Tree National Park. I didn’t. That musical memory only emerged a couple of days later, thanks to the not-random-at-all algorithmic nudge of a certain search engine. But I’m listening to it now and I have to admit that the flashbacks don’t come flooding, and for good reason; in the late eighties I had turned my back on rock, dug my head in the sand–under the shade of a joshua tree?–to explore the jazz universe, and missed the Irish invasion. Regrets? Nah. Not at all. If a life can have a soundtrack, a musical theme, mine would absolutely feature Monk on piano; Trane, Bird, Lacy on reeds; Dizzy and Lester on trumpet; Mingus with a twenty minute bass solo; two or three drummers: Elvin, Jack and Max; Yusef on flute; Don on clarinet; you can stop me anytime, or maybe you can’t, but anyhow…Now, they might play a beefed up version of “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” just to get things warmed up, you never know, I’d leave that up to them, I’m no musician. Actually, I’d have to slip in a request, since we’re talking about my life, my lyrical memories, and get some dangerously-slow-tempoed reggae in the lineup, “Stir it Up” maybe, and some guest appearances, like Claude singing “Tu Verras”, Abbey with “Throw it Away”, Lady Day with anything she damn pleases. You see what I mean, this could go on, and I haven’t even brought up FZ, Duke or Horace. But this isn’t my life, and the only soundtrack that accompanies these walks is that which the shitty microphone on the iphone captures, which on this glorious early spring day in the high desert, was the sound of high winds beating on everything standing. A wind that was chilly enough to be pleasant while walking in the sun, but quickly got cold while lunching in the shade of a joshua tree. A reminder that, even when this landscape is picture perfect, surviving in it is, in so many ways, a challenge. The Cahuilla managed, making thorough use of scant resources, including the notorious trees, long before Johnny Lang lost his horse, discovered the Lost Horse Mine and began digging for gold in the area.
What I’d like to know, is how long have these trees been here? They look prehistoric, or timeless, and walking among them was like walking along a procession of creatures frozen in twisty, often leaning, sometimes broken but always unique poses: an orchestra conductor, an old man bent under the years, a policeman directing traffic, a yoga instructor, rock climber, and my favorite, the one I chose to rest under, a hiker lying in the grass, legs crossed, back leaning against a joshua tree.
In conclusion, with a nod to those Irish rockers, I climbed a high-ish mountain (see next video), I ran–okay trudged–through the fields of cacti and spiky trees, but I still haven’t found what I’m looking for because what I’m looking for may be a trail that never ends, traversing ever-changing sceneries, evoking constant renewal, new and old stories of all the people, all the valleys and mountains, the oceans and rivers, the birds and the trees of the universe.Keep walking.
Leave a Reply