It is said that everyone has a skeleton or two in their closet. I have a graveyard in mine. Open my door, and the bones of years turning down wrong alleys will come rattling out and lay at your feet, like brittle branches of a tree slowly dying. The maps and designs of how those skeletons came to be, are buried in more than a hundred places through out my path. I began writing when I hopped my first freight train back in June of 1964.
I began burying my thoughts in that month, in that year. It was a fleeting thought which became a personal ritual. I wrote all of what I seen, felt, and experienced, then found a proper place to bury it. There was no thought of preserving it. I didn't find an air tight box, or anything to protect my restless ramblings, that was not my intent. My thoughts were to dig a hole, sometimes I would make it like a burial site, rigging a cross of sticks and weeds, scattering stones, to mark it.
But, many times it was just a hole dug with the edge of an empty can, papers folded tightly, shoved to the bottom, then just covered, with nothing to mark it's place. It was kind of my "Kilroy was here," scrawl, except in the ground, instead of on some filling station s**t house wall. Most of what I buried was written in some empty diner's corner booth, or under a bridge tressel, or under a highway overpass. Most of it was crap, quickly scrawled notes about a bizarre or dangerous encounter from a guy who picked me up, or just the emotions felt being alone and hungry while in search of the unknown.
That's why I loved the boxcar. An open boxcar door was like a w***e standing in a doorway, or on the street corner, just waiting for the lonely sex starved salesman who just wanted to ride her out, just for a while. An like the w***e, you had a price to pay. There's no free rides on the road. My heart and soul is buried everywhere, in every state the path took me. I wish to hell I could go back and read my soul, once more. Somewhere out there I might have buried the secret to life. Some place, buried a half foot down in the soil, lies the decayed, decomposed, rotted remains of the dreams and schemes of a restless soul, that may hold the secret to what this whole damn thing is about.. and I buried it.
Sometimes, I do wonder what I wrote and left behind. Must have written something good, sometime. From the wild and straight RT 66, over and through the Colorado mountains, and State Rt 40, I suppose I have buried me in a hundred spots. My foolish thoughts will live forever in the earth of this country. That's something no published author can say. It is also fitting that my writing's decayed and melted back into the ground where I'm destined to do the same. Maybe someday my ashes will mix with the withered and forgotten feelings of the young man that once thought it profound to leave himself in the ground. Perhaps, someone will remember me, and that I once passed this way.
I don't know what comes after all this, I don't even know what any of this thing they call life is about. I just know that after all these years of living, I haven't learned a damn thing. Everything I've ever learned, I buried in the ground a long time ago.
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