Beatty

June 12, 2003

It's 4:30 in the morning and I'm sitting on the front porch in Beatty sipping coffee and pecking on Ryan's laptop. It's starting to get light, and since the porch faces east I can easily see the silhouette of the eastern mountains. The sun is behind them for now, but I can tell it's back there and on the move.. the sky is brightening by the minute. The air is completely still and silent - no sounds from human nor beast, drier than dry, and chilly. I'm wearing a sweater even though it's June.

I wait for the sunrise and think about how much I never want to leave this place.. this mysterious, often breathtaking, sometimes frustrating, so very different from anywhere I've ever lived place - the great Mojave Desert and the tiny community that for more than a hundred years has somehow managed to cling to survival on its outskirts. I try to think of words to describe it all but can't.. there's just too much to describe.

I look up from typing. It's lighter now, and old rosy-fingered dawn has erased all the stars but one. I wonder if wishing on the last star of the night has the same power as wishing on the first. Sure, why not; bullshit is bullshit. I wish I may, I wish I might....

I do love it here. I thought I would, of course, but there was always the possibility I was fooling myself. I've fooled myself before about some very important stuff. Serious major committment stuff, you know - like my first marriage. At age 16 I thought it was exactly what I wanted - a lifetime with a smart, handsome, witty, educated, artistic, honest, kind, caring, sober, reliable (and so on) man, and that it would last forever. But no.. I hated it almost right away. Not him. Marriage.

Or the bookstore. Who, who loves to read, hasn't at one time or another dreamed of having a bookstore. You know, just a cozy little used bookstore, wouldn't that be cool, all those books, just sit around when you're not busy and read read read. But when the opportunity came my way and Ry and I opened our bookstore, I hated it immediately - like by the end of the first day. Both times, the marriage and the bookstore, nobody was more surprised than I to discover the unpleasant reality of the situation. I, who usually know exactly how I feel about everything, had had no inkling how I really felt or what I really wanted.

So yeah. I've fooled myself before about some very big stuff, and in the middle of the night sometimes, these past few months, I confess I've had my fears and doubts. What if it isn't what I really want. What if, after sorta talking Ryan into buying this place so far from home to live in so far in the future, I totally fucking HATED it. What if it was another Bill Hubert or another Avebury Books. That would suck so much, I cannot tell you. There's an unbelievable amount of guilt and other assorted self-inflicted emotional baggage that results from making huge errors of judgment like the marriage and the store because other people were affected by it, not just me, and on account of my mistakes those people ended up being hurt. I definitely don't want to make such a colossal blunder again in this lifetime, so I was a little bit nervous about this committment. Although now it's Ry I worry about.. he's not sure he'll be able to take the intellectual isolation of living in a remote desert after thirty years in academe. (Okay, y'all, that's enough snickering about intellectual deserts and academe.)

I look up. It's completely light now, but with all the mountains in the way I can't see the sun yet. There are a few clouds but they'll quickly burn off, and as often seems to happen once the sun rises and the temps start to climb, a breeze has come up. The breeze alternates between being cool, like the night, and warm, a taste of what's to come. The weather here has been hot, really hot. The locals say it's been more like July and August than May and June. Temps have been in the nineties or hundreds every day since we arrived. We went down to Las Vegas on Monday, and it was 107 there. And 121 in Death Valley. It was better here, though, only 103. Are you fanning yourself just thinking about it?

I look up again. I wish I could tell you how beautiful it is. The sun still hasn't popped up over the mountains, but it has lit up the bottoms of the clouds so that they're a brilliant salmon-pink, and there seem to be fewer clouds than before. I like to try to figure out exactly where the sun will come up, the precise point on the top of the mountain range that will be touched first, but the sweet spot is different every morning, and I haven't been doing it long enough to guess it exactly right. Now the salmon clouds have changed to gold, and I see more or less where I think the sun will show itself first. It's 5:30.. time for another cuppa.