Straw Bale Peace & The Dirt Police February 14, 05 [Part One of a new series likely never to see a Part Two, titled: America On-edge: The prolific & poetic reportage of an American traveler, of a man ill at ease with corporate consumer culture, disgusted with government, but very much in love with his country.] Arizona-- Around here all the houses have names that start with "The." The Post Card Room. The Pallet House. The Straw Bale House. For the moment, I live in the Straw Bale House, the brain-child of big-hearted Bisbee legend Kathleen Pearson and her husband Greg. The Straw Bale is a kind of temple far out in the sagebrush and fortified with bale-thick walls and a sacred floor of ancient bricks arranged by her son that spiral toward the center. Of all the places I've visited in recent months, this is by far the most spiritual, the most womb-like, the most like home for me, a man with a post office box in California and lots of invitations, but no firm address. I cherish its space, though I know it is not mine. It is only on loan to me. But such is the case with everywhere I dwell. Such was the case with the Appalachian Trail, where I readily accepted leaving one place of profound peace and beauty everyday to travel to yet another. Happily settling in here in this barren plot of desert a stone's throw from Mexico, I begin tonight to wonder if I shouldn't leave tomorrow, throw the BMW 535i into high gear and roar toward New England. It is Valentine's Day, a shitty day for me four years running now, yet consistently meaningful in that it is the birth date of my oldest friend from childhood with whom I still communicate as often as my vagabond life allows. Tonight I called to wish him happy birthday. I'd been feeling psychically "off" all day, and had declined social invitations out of some inexplicable discomfort. Now, my intuition was answered. The voice on the phone informed me that John had been hospitalized for attempted suicide. Luci last year, he an unparalleled success with a shotgun in his mouth. Nash two months ago made the cry for help at least, and got it. Now John, my childhood chum who never left the house he grew up in, my stalwart pillar of normalcy and security, the very anchor of my Peregrine wanderer life, the voice of simple sanity and the memory of my entire existence, had gone and pulled a Ginsu on himself and been cuffed and hauled off to the psych ward. Just like.. marijuana leads to heroin. I mean, me. Just like me in `01. But before I go any further with any of that dreary shit, let me tell you about heartache and the loss of God. No, really. Let me tell you about The Straw Bale House of which I am proud and an honored guest. She's a one-room dome of sorts with the dimensions of a carousel and the Feng Shui of a diamond. Located in a remote area of southern Arizona desert about one statute mile from Mexico, the nearest neighbors would have to be.. well, the border patrol, I guess. No, there are real neighbors, too, not just weirdoes with guns living in Ford Broncos. The nearest, I noted recently while driving by, are a family living in trailers, and boy do their dogs bark when I drive by. These, my closest neighbors, are so far away I cannot hear the dogs bark. So, if you don't count the post-911 preponderance of border patrol agents and sundry other spooks in unmarked cars playing hide and seek in the hills in this narrow corridor between the U.S. and Mexico, there is simply no one else around. And in my mind cops, any brand of bugger with the tenacity to wear a badge and a gun, are not people. They're just.. cops. Turning that "Blade Runner" line back on itself, "If you ain't cop, you're little people, Pal!" Well you ridiculous Recent Virus of the Border Region and general all-around indicator of the success of media-transmitted paranoia, I say if you ain't little people, you're cop. Anyway, back to the subject at hand. The dwelling I'm ensconced in is octagonal in shape, roughly forty feet in diameter, with a cone shaped ceiling reaching perhaps fifteen feet high at its apex. The walls of the house are entirely of straw, chicken wire and stucco. To the novice, this must sound absurd, but is in fact a fairly common and ancient form of construction that, contrary to what one might think, reduces the risk of fire to almost zero and increases the insulation factor far beyond any conventional insulation. A straw bale will no sooner catch fire and burn than a closed phone book exposed to an open flame. Fire needs oxygen, and straw bales are simply too tightly packed. Rising up in the center of the bale house are two stout pillars, trees in effect, stripped of their bark and employed to support the roof and the loft bed in which I now sit writing. Below the loft, the room is completely open and floored with a puzzle-like assemblage of hundred-year-old bricks salvaged from an old building in a mining town south of Bisbee called Douglas. Seen from above, if the space overhead were a pie, then the loft in which I sit would represent naught but one slice of the pie, an eighth of the circumference at most. The rest is open-air high ceiling. Their are three doors and five windows looking out on pristine desert and the mountains beyond, both in Mexico below the town of Naco and the Dragoons to the west. There is no electricity here, nor phone. Water comes from rain runoff collection. There is a tub out in the desert a ways from the house beneath which one builds a fire to heat water from the rain runoff tank and, in essence, bathe beneath the stars. There is a picnic table down beneath me, beneath the loft. It is here that I mostly sit and do my work. There are two straw bales left hereabouts as kind-of couches. One I have covered in an old sleeping bag and pillows upon which I sit during my ritual morning chicory coffee and Pop Tart. There is a deep cell marine battery which I took to have charged and was told was beyond charging, dead as it were. It is currently running an old car tape deck wired to car speakers, which with the aid of a cassette-to-peripheral adaptor is radiating an endless array of music to fill the bale house from my 20 gigabyte mp3 player, also run on rechargeable batteries. I charge the batteries of my iMac laptop and my mp3 player via the cigarette lighter and the battery in my BMW. I keep the latter on a slant lest it run out of juice and need to be rolled to a bump start. I drive daily 12-miles into Old Bisbee to access the Internet, another miracle unto itself. With a wireless "airport card" I need plug in nowhere and merely pick up web "WiFi" signal here and there between coffee houses and the web cafe, even in St. Elmo's and Hot Licks, two saloons in the Gulch, as one would pick up a station on the radio. I have perhaps one shopping bag full of canned goods and dried noodle dinners, crackers and cereal. It shouldn't look like much to the average observer, but after hiking the Appalachian Trail from end-to-end in one season, I am anything but an average observer. If the roads flooded out tomorrow in a flash flood, I could survive out here a month without leaving, easy. I crawl now into my REI 20 degree sleeping bag, the same bag I have slept in for nearly a year. It is a womb to me, in the same way this temple, this shrine of straw, is also a womb. I am most grateful for being invited to stay here awhile and write. I am a very lucky man. I just wish I could reach out and help my friends. I wish I were a rich man with the resources to fly on a whim at the sound of a friend's cry for help. But I am not. I knew John was in crisis. I should have flown to him weeks ago. But I did nothing. Why? I suffered EXACTLY the scenario that John just endured. He lived, as did I. We, Johnny, Nash and I, had less conviction than Luci and his 12-gauge. But I carry with me a 9mm bullet that should, by all laws of chance, have entered my skull on Valentine's Day `02 and sent me into the next world but that the gun jammed. Again, I suppose, I am a very lucky man. Where are we going with this, you ask? Ha! Of course, we are going toward Death. Why are we in such a hurry? Oh, yeah. Boredom. The kind of boredom that comes of knowing about all the horror in the world and surrendering to a game of miniature golf instead of taking action. Because who can take action? Where does one man start on the road to curing world hunger? How does one begin to "bring the boys back home!" as Pink Floyd & a whole chorus behind them so passionately belted out in The Wall? Ach! Du Liebe. Fuck Death. I'm already in Heaven. Total peace, all to myself. I took a bath outside in the open desert the other day by lighting a fire under the aforementioned old metal tub and filling the tub with rain water gathered from the roof of the Pallet House (another story altogether) and stored in a giant tank. Never having done this before, I made too big a fire. I got bored waiting for it to heat up, went inside, came back out ten minutes later and the half-full tub was BOILING! I had to add a lot more cold water and scatter the coals to kill the fire. I then found some plywood sections to sit on, but I still managed to burn my butt a little on the hot metal tub. It was the first and only time I've ever sat in a bath and not been disappointed by its getting colder. On the contrary, because of the coals, my bath got hotter and HOTTER until lobster-I SCREAMED and leapt out of the pot. [Footnote: I must add that I took great pleasure in waltzing around naked in full view of the border patrol boys. Aside from encountering them in their trucks out on the highway, one cannot see them. But make no mistake: they're out there. Like Mr. X-File Molder's ever-present aliens, the Line-in-the-Dirt Cops are out there, and they're watching. With their night-vision goggles and high-powered binocs, they're watching. What are they watching for? Beats me. And why? Osama's boys flew in and flew out of Our Country Tis-of-Thee through portals in the sky like invisible Jedi. And what dead-icated Jedi! Dead men tell no tales. What terrorist would be daft enough to waltz across a heavily fortified line like this? None, I tell you. None. Fuckers like that either get into the United States on Lear Jets, or they hike across Mojave-like deserts past abandoned outposts or through killing snows where no border patrols will ever go. Am I suggesting MORE patrols in more remote areas? NOOOOOOOO! I am, however, calling a spade a spade. And the spade I drive by every night at Mile Marker 127 on Highway 80 in Arizona is a BAND-AIDE! These are some very expensive Band-Aides you're paying for, American Taxpayer. And there are a LOT more of them down here since 9/11. Residents claim there are more cops than people down here, and though an exaggeration, this certainly has its roots in the truth. They eat, drink, sleep, shit and laugh all the way to the cop bank, they do. I'm told they receive $1100/month housing stipends. $1100 bucks! Down here in BumFuck Egypt Bisbee USA in a town fulla neo-freaks and graying hippy artists where rents SHOULD (and still do if you're in "the know") range around $300/month. Ha! Ah, Hell. Pay away, Citizens of Americreditcardica. I'm sorry for bumming your "no-interest-for-a-year" high. If it makes you feel any better, I just made the boys work for their money. I just drank several bladder-loads of beer and went around pissing in a huge circle around the Straw Bale, you know, to mark my territory. But it took hours, hours in which they had to be surveilling me constantly and filling out reports in triplicate. That and I was waving my uncircumcised night stick all over the place in the marking, which had to frighten the Dirt Cops at least A LITTLE BIT! Point: tonight anyway, they earned their pay. America, you may sleep sound. The Scrub Brush Police have certainly seen to it that tonight.. YOU are SAFE from ME!] God Bless Us All, and the Towelheads, too. -RSM   Copyright 2005 Richard McKinney All Rights Reserved (Just ask & I'll likely let you reprint anything!)