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Fast Green Emma goes to Arcosanti, 1978

2/21/2011

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Summer of 1978, I drove Fast Green Emma southwards from Vancouver with Noah, my then-9 year old son, riding shotgun.  

Emma was a 1950 Chev half-ton pickup with opera windows. Instead of a back bumper, she had a steel bar across her back side on which there was a trailer hitching knob I don't recall ever using. She had vacuum-advance windshield wipers - close to useless going up a steep hill in a snow storm, not much better on a flat stretch in rain. No heater to speak of. A faulty catch on her passenger-side door. A perilously problematic tranny - a story all its own. 

Enough cachet to stop old men and a few young ones in their tracks, swoon when they saw her go by, a youngish woman with long dark hair piloting her.  (Twenty-twenty hindsight is so useful. So 20-20.) 

I didn't know she could do more than 40 mph until a highway cop stopped me, offered me a speeding ticket for exceeding the 55 mph limit on the interstate. Not to put too fine a point on Emma's cachet, he was quite mollified when I truthfully explained  I'd simply had no idea she was capable of it, thanked him for noticing, promised to be more observant of her capability. 

I'd bought Emma with the assistance of my pal Risto Hartikainen, who is (although I did not know this, back when we spotted her parked on a street near my apartment on Alder Street in Vancouver, BC) a fine carpenter. A *very* fine carpenter. 

The plan had been: build a camper, put it on her, drive her to Mexico. All three (3) of us: Risto, me, Noah. Lovely plan. 

"Mann plannt und Gott lacht." Didn't I say that before? Yes, I did. 

Risto and I saw Emma on the street and bought her. That would have been the summer of 1977 and although Risto is patient to a point; when I took on building sets and costumes for a show in Vancouver at the Firehall, he got tired of waiting for me to finish my tasks, for the show to open - whatever was keeping us from getting it together, getting in the truck and driving south.

His frustration was understandable but his getting tired of waiting did not impel me to throw over what I felt were responsibilities that
 I could not forego. That was fair enough and since he's a fair guy, he signed Emma over to me, split for Mexico by himself. Without building the camper, without me and the kid. Some time after which, I drove south in her, the kid riding shotgun. All the way to Mexico, stopping in Denver to see my parents, attend the wedding of the daughter of family friends who'd given up NY for the mountains of Colorado.

In the mile-high city of Denver, I picked up a newspaper, spotted a classified ad announcing a job on the Navajo reservation in NM, applied for the job and - by golly, was invited to interview. When I got to the interview, I was hired on the spot, shown to a company-store-type-house to live in, right on the school's grounds. 


I was super-excited about the job but asked one small concession: Could I please go to AZ for the long weekend so I could attend the Festival at Arcosanti? 

My boss was not completely thrilled, I'm sure, but I was, after all, a belaga'ana (literally, the white meat of an apple; meaning, to any Navajo, an Anglophone, a white person) and therefore I could be expected to behave oddly. Come to think about it, was it unlikely or surprising she didn't want to start the school year without her newly-hired native English-speaking teacher (aka English language role model) in place? Her Jill-on-the-spot hired to impart English language skills to the class of kindergarten kids innocently gathered? 

She did let me go, bless her heart. I packed up the kid and me for a long weekend road trip, drove from NM to AZ, arrived at Arcosanti. Colly greeted me happily, ordered me to park Emma up near the vaults. Simplicity itself. I was so happy to see her that it never occurred to me to protest, to insist on parking Emma down in the second field where the many visitors' cars were being ushered. 

Lucky me. Oh, very lucky me. Because as it happened, taking advantage of my privilege turned out to be very, very fortunate. For Fast Green Emma and, for that matter, for me. 

The Festival was a wonder. Great music, great visual stimulus, wonderful weather, terrific company. Old friends to see, to schmooze with, new ones to get acquainted with. A fine time was being had by all...until the sounds of popping, audible over the miked instrumentalists performing, melded with clouds of grey smoke rising. Distant but not nearly distant enough. 

Word about what was going on, the reasons for the odd sounds, the puffs and clouds of smoke, quickly reached the crowded amphitheater's audience. Fire in the lower field, where all the cars had been parked. In a matter of minutes, tons of that steel and rubber, those engines, those car chassis - tons of it, gone.  Gone. 

But not Emma. Emma, parked next to the vaults, had been miraculously spared. The irony of it amazed me then. It amazes me still, to this very day. 
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The first return: 1963

2/7/2011

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The summer of 1963, I made my way across the country after I'd given up the chance to apprentice at Williamstown's summer theatre, with drama heaven beyond since Wiliiamstown was known to be a surefire shot to Yale. I hadn't decided theatre wasn't important but I'd decided I had to go back to Arizona instead of sinking my teeth into the waiting, succulent flesh of professional theatre life as I'd imagined I would since my early childhood.

So rather than hie me to Massachusetts, I enrolled in a summer School of Education course in AZ at ASU: Creative Dramatics with Viola Spolin.
I did that because Viola Spolin was the doyenne of improvisational theatre and I wanted to know more about creative drama per se: my elder cousin the psychoanalyst in Paris and her colleagues were experimenting with drama therapy, which intrigued me. I also did it because Tempe is near Paradise Valley, north of Scottsdale, where Cosanti is, and after I stumbled into Cosanti in 1962, staying on as a $40-a-month-plus-lodging "apprentice" in the practical arts of silt-cast bell-making, of model-making of beautiful bridges and dams that would be constructed so as to incorporate urban life into their actual elemental form, my course had changed.... 
     
I'd vaulted over creosote bushes, loving their scent. Overcame a lifelong fear of heights so I could trim olive trees. I'd discovered - what? 
   
I didn't know what the "what" was that I'd discovered but figured if I went back, I'd find out. 
On the way to AZ from NY, I managed to get myself put off a freight train. Didn't know, when I got on the flatcar, there were already two people on it, a couple of young guys - nice guys - who had more melanin in their skin than I did. South Texas was still very much Dixie, the South, in 1963. The freight train ground to a halt in the middle of nowhere, a guy in a white pickup truck with a bunch of long guns on a rack in the cab made all three of us get off the flat car. Threatened me with jail, them with lynching if we thought his statement was worth arguing about. 
   
We did what he told us to do. Got off, not together. I wish I knew what happened to those guys, Joe and Little Brother, so I could thank them for their amiability.
Maybe someday I will get to do that. (Ya never know: It's getting to be quite a small world. If I'm lucky, which I consider myself to be, maybe at least one of them will appear....) When I got to Tempe, the tree outside my friend Marilyn's apartment was ripe with figs. At Cosanti, I fell immediately in love ("at first sight") with a sweet guy who'd come for the first Silt Pile workshop.      
   
Love was confusing, out there in Paradise Valley under the burning eye of the desert sun. An omen things were not going well: dropping a Superfly-sized bottle of Arpege - an extraordinary gift under any circumstances - onto the concrete sidewalk in front of Marilyn's place when a tarantula scuttled out from nowhere. (To this day, an unexpected tarantula spooks me.)  By the time summer school and the first Silt Pile workshop ended, I'd managed to let myself get so dehydrated, literally and figuratively, that I'd turned myself into a ready candidate for auditory and visual hallucinations. (An awfully simple way to make yourself quite ill is forgetting to drink enough water, especially in a climate as arid as Arizona's.)
   
We flew back to NY, 'my' young man and I. He went home to his family upstate, I went home to mine on Long Island. Love quickly got, in the mysterious east, even more confusing than it had been in the desert clime of the southwest.  He returned to Long Island to visit just before he left for Honduras to begin his two-year Peace Corps stint. (I had applied to go with him but was rejected: he'd finished his university studies; I had not.)
   
After he left, I found myself slipping into a void so huge I could find no boundaries. Not for time, not for space. I saw the energy-field of the unidentified Chinese potter whose over six-foot tall vase sat (glowing! it was radiantly glowing!) encased in glass in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I heard the energy-echo of the writer-translator whose words of power appeared in my Heiligeschrifte Bible, I detected the whine of tension in the coiled springs of the mattress beneath my restless body when I tried to lay me down. I vibrated in consonance with the droning, zapping buzz of the NYC streetlights. The world around me was awash with noise from objects I'd always assumed were still and silent. when all of them were suddenly, stunningly, started to clamor loudly and implacably for attention. 
   
My gentle parents did their best to cope. My mother farmed me out to a friend of hers who worked as an anaesthesiologist at the local hospital. Jeannie's useful house rule for guests was that the bed one slept in had to be made in the morning before one left one's room. Good habit to get into. Aside from that, she had no rules for me and was at work the afternoon of the day I tried to rescue a bird, a fledgling that had fallen from its nest. The terrified creature shuddered and died despite my silent wailing hope for its salvation. 
   
Jeannie let me go home to my folks at the end of the week and I don't recall ever seeing her again but bed-making was simply never much of an issue after that although I never thought to thank her for her conscientious rule-setting. Too bad!
   
I'm not sure the psychiatrist I agreed to see was quite as conscientious. A nice-enough fellow, I suppose, but one I must say I was singularly ill-equipped to handle. When he took out a cigarette, a habit I had come to think of as odious and was loathe to tolerate in anyone, he was history. Especially since he was a medical guy who, presumably, ought to know better. How could anyone - me, in this case - trust a doc who was addicted to tobacco?

That particular form of arrogance has stayed with me, but I've learned to be forthright. I temper my distaste with an admission to whatever poor bloke I'm accosting so my rant now goes something like: I'm a strong-minded broad  - or dame, depending upon whom I'm addressing - who wants health and happiness for all. So why are *you* doing that?

Occasionally, believe it or not, this tactic has proven successful: the person confronted by self-righteous me has actually managed to give up smoking. Ha! But I digress. To get back to where we were:

Overall, I didn't socialize much that fall although I did manage to hold conversations with a few friends: Barbara, whom I'd met at CCNY; Ben, who'd been in the Silt Pile workshop at Cosanti and came to NY from LA to visit. Most all my old pals from high school had pretty much moved away and I was not in the mood to seek out and meet new people. I didn't think I was avoiding people but I had nothing simple or straightforward to say to anyone, preoccupied as I was with a hyper-reality most people did not seem to be conscious of. 
 
"The stopping of Becoming is Nirvana" I heard myself saying, one day. Now, where had that come from? I had no idea. 

I'm not sure exactly when my hyper-state abated, but it did. When it did, I packed myself up and once again headed west.  



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Photos used under Creative Commons from FaceMePLS, nedrichards, qtschlepper, M_Schimmel, fihu, Abulic Monkey, Space][rucker, David Jones, --Sam--, saamiblog, hr.icio, robertkillmer, Vanderelbe.de, runran, Melody Ayres-Griffiths, BiblioArchives / LibraryArchives, LoopZilla, Space][rucker, Cambridge Cat, Tomás Fano, Jonathan Lumibao, srqpix, exfordy, a minha menina, Piano Piano!, loufi, Gwydion M. Williams, TheeErin, Jo Naylor, Ben Sutherland, ratanx, Rome Cabs, tara marie, Joe Shlabotnik, Chrissy Olson, Mavroudis Kostas, postal67, Ryan Dickey, Amanda Niekamp, Paulimus J - moved to: ipernity.com/home/paulj, qtschlepper, qtschlepper, Arria Belli, gedankenstuecke, qtschlepper, Wolfgang Staudt, exfordy, OakleyOriginals, bixentro, 드림포유, RileyOne, kuhnmi