Don't Tread

This one is from memory, so forgive me if the details are fuzzy: It's July 2007 -- the Fourth, I think. It's a weekend and the weather is nice, so as usual I'm on a mountain somewhere. This time it's the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary just ouside of Hamburg, Pa. The sky is a soupy gray, clouds melting into each other. I'm lost in my head, a dark place with lots of locks, oil torches and splintered slabs of red rock. There should be cobwebs in the corners but aren't, from what I can tell. But I'm getting off track already.

My smile is absent as my heavy boots skip from one boulder to the next. I haven't seen anyone in an hour. And that's OK. Believe me, that's OK. It's preferred, actually. Unless there's a problem. If there's a problem I want the Coast Guard there. And those guys from the phone-company commercials I can't remember. (Sorry to say you wasted your advertising dollars on me, Phone Company I Can't Remember.) But what bad can happen on the top of a mountain, I wonder. The natural world, even when something goes wrong, is much safer than the one we live in every day. Everything finds a way of falling into place.

I spend a few minutes getting familiar with a few black vultures, creeping closer than I ever have before. I can smell their feces -- that chalky white goop that covers rocks, tree limbs and pretty much every other surface they frequent. But I'm not all that into birds other than the swiftest and sleekest of raptors: hawks, eagles, falcons, etc. So I move on, looking for something to rip the pathetic frown from my face.

The valley unfolds to my right as I leap onto the knife edge of a boulder. My eye catches a familiar shape. My brain wants to believe it but doesn't. So I look again. This time my eyes convince my brain they weren't kidding. Yep, it's a rattlesnake. (That's him in the photo above.) It's a decent-sized timbler rattler waiting for a sun that apparently has better things to do than show its blinding face. I snap photos from a good distance: 15 feet or more. But that's not good enough. I creep closer, to within 10 feet, maybe closer. How do I know when I've gotten to close, I ask myself. I know the answer, but common sense won't prevent me from having a good story to tell and the pictures to prove it.

My peripheral vision catches movement. I'm already on edge, having stumbled upon this sucker, so my eyes dart to this new thing: another rattler. Unbelievable! Thirty-four years and I've never seen a rattler in the wild, and today I find two. This one is colored much differently than the first. Butterscotch I'd call him compared to the first one, which I'll call Rocky Road. Butterscotch (that's him, below) slithers closer, down a rock ledge, toward a clutch of branches. I get even closer. More photos are necessary to capture this momentous occasion. I suddenly forget about Rocky Road. I look down to see him to my left, probably no more than four feet away.

I don't really feel like dying today, I tell myself. Not today. I don't feel much like losing a limb either. I back off and climb up a rock or two to put some distance between us. Still, I don't feel like I got the full experience. I must get closer. So I do, snapping photo after photo till it happens: Rocky rattles his tail! I love snakes, but the sound goes right through me, chills me. I'd heard it before on nature shows and in the zoo, but it's much different when the venomous serpent a few feet away is tacitly telling you, "Stop screwing with me, you idiot." So I oblige. With the memory card in my camera full, I leave Butterscotch and Rocky Road to their respective lichen-speckled rocks.

Whether I want to admit it or not, I place my steps much more carefully on the way down the mountain.

Meatless in Seattle

I didn't like Seattle the first time I went there in 2002. It was not long after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and I awoke one morning to learn of a plane crash off of Long Island that appeared to be terrorism-related. Also, it rained the whole time and I got accosted by too many homeless people for my liking. Plus I was stuck in a boring hotel in a not-so-great part of town, sitting through meeting after meeting of pompous businessmen and lawyers discussing price fixing among oil companies and other topics for which I cared very little.

I returned to the Emerald City last week, and this time my experience was 180 degrees from my 2002 trip: The weather was cool and the scenery beautiful; the homeless were few and, dare I say, pleasant; and I actually got to see much of the city, as well as Mt. Rainier, from a distance. Trees that seemed too tall for their own good enclosed the roadways, creating natural tunnels. Oh, and no terrorist threats to dampen the day.

After a day of meetings and workshops, I participated in an "Amazing Race" knockoff sponsored by my company, accompanying 10 people I didn't know to places such as the Seattle Aquarium, Pike Place Market (home of the first Starbucks and the infamous fishmongers, pictured) and the Space Needle. The highlight wasn't so much the weather or the sights but the people I was with -- again, people I barely knew.

After completing the race, which my team "won," we headed to an Asian-fusion restaurant called the Wild Orchid or something similar. The menu served me -- the sole vegetarian among throngs of meat eaters -- well. I sat next to two gentlemen in much different phases of their lives: both fathers, far along in their business careers. One of them had been a writer, like me, but ultimately his path took him to the helm of a business for which I have no stomach. I also spent time, happily, with a married mother of two, a sweet woman in her mid-40s who liked to touch my arm when she talked. She put me at ease immediately, but kept telling me to have children, telling me how wonderful the experience was, how it had changed her life and would surely change mine for the better. We traded jokes about the Dalai Lama. She kept asking if I had had enough to eat, mothering me.

I ended the night in a biker bar along the waterfront, meeting up with two women in their late 40s to early 50s, and one of their husbands. They talked of shaved genitals, among other things. One showed her breasts to a biker named Dave who looked remarkably like Jabba the Hutt with a handlebar mustache. I am still amazed at how irresponsible some people act when they are away from home and embolded by the spirit of a few drinks. Throughout the night I laughed. I cringed a little. I traded stories and revealed tattoos.

I started walking back to the hotel, alone, at 11:00 p.m. Seattle time. As always, I was happy to be by myself. The streets reminded me of San Francisco: not vertical but by no means flat. The buildings reminded me of Chicago. As I turned right onto the street that my hotel called home, I thought I could do well in a place like this.

Living Again

I sometimes forget how full my adult life has been. I get caught up in the same “woe is me, not enough hours in the day, life sucks” B.S. that most people use as an excuse to waste the time they’re given. But I don’t want to do that anymore. I don’t want to waste another minute, even though I will because I’ve convinced myself I’ve got more days than have been allotted.

I want to live again. This is my reminder.

I saw Alcatraz and the Alamo. I visited what had to be the country’s most beautiful lake (Martin was its name) on the outskirts of Montgomery, Alabama. I drove the California coast, skirting the edge of the Pacific, as Rufus Wainwright lamented a “Vicious World” from the speakers of a dinged-up rental car. I wrinkled my nose at the dual aromas of piss and beer on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. I found God in Miami but lost him on the way to the airport. I fell asleep in the middle of an ice-covered field in a bucolic Pennsylvania town on a wintry Sunday morning, pondering my tenuous future as I faded. I shared falafel with a punk rocker, a vegan skinhead who kept chickens as pets and a man named Mohammed on the streets of New York City at 3 a.m. I had a glass of cabernet amongst the bohemians in San Francisco on a warm fall afternoon -- a Tuesday, I think. I crossed (small) rivers, climbed (small) mountains, scaled (small) canyon walls, traversed (small) deserts and reached into the canopies of (not so small) swaying trees.

I spent a night, sleepless and alone, in my shoes and with the lights on, in a haunted Civil War-era mansion on the Florida-Georgia border. I thought I might die at a “horror hotel” in Kingston, Rhode Island, with no heat, a squeaky bed, stains on the carpet and shitty cable access. I wasted the loneliest night of my life at a La Quinta Inn in Dallas and choked down a bachelor’s dinner at the Denny’s next door. I saw the most brilliant stars, dotting the blackest skies, from the backseat of a Town Car in La Crosse, Wisconsin. I faced the Rio Grande. I slid two-hundred feet down an ice chute in Alberta’s Banff National Park. I skipped stones across the Mississippi. I spent the night (two, actually) watching human ants from a perch in one of the nicest hotels in Manhattan’s Times Square.

I saw my reflection in “The Bean.” I awaited Mothman’s attack from the floor of a van in a cold, dark corner of Delaware. I drove the Trans-Canada Highway and Route 66. I rolled through the small town of Sikeston, Missouri, infamous for its role in a public lynching from the 1940s. I visited Millennium Park, Columbine High School, Okefenokee Swamp, the Great Salt Lake and Louisville’s Chainsaw World. I watched a lightning storm from the 98th floor of the Hancock Building. I saw the most breathtaking view of the Las Vegas Strip, had cigars and brandy at an all-night bar in Montreal, and got snowed out of Buffalo. I skied off the edge of an untouched mountain in western Canada. I had a glass of cheap merlot at a revered (for some reason) hole in the wall in subterranean Chicago, and it tasted great (for some reason).

I got drunk with multimillionaires. I witnessed magic being made first-hand by Wayne Gretzky on the ice and Hulk Hogan in the ring. I bowed before Jake “The Snake” Roberts (that's him in the photo, of course), only to learn years later that drugs already had their hooks in him. I got a foot “massage” from a semifamous black man named Mel. I had my face signed by Glenn Danzig. I crossed paths with Lex Luger at a Flash Foods convenience store in Yulee, Florida. I got tattooed by a toothless man claiming to be a former member of Corrosion of Conformity; he spat on my bare back as he carved the design into my skin. I outran the cops more times than I care to admit. I saw a man collapse from a heart attack at a post-wedding party; the EMTs wheeled him out of the reception hall wrapped in a sheet. I won two (or was it three?) events in a fitness competition at Penn State University. I saw Air Force One take off from a Florida runway as the sun faded on the evening of September 10, 2001, taking a piece of me with it; I’m different now.

I got my name in the newspaper for something other than being born or dying. I had a Vegas tarot-card reader tell me, “Now don’t freak out,” as she conjured the death card when manufacturing my future. I received two six-figure job offers, something I never thought would happen even once in my lifetime, and turned them both down. I shared a microphone -- and the stage -- with punk-rock legends. I got trapped on an eight-inch-wide ledge of a rock wall 60 feet above the ground, hyperventilating as I wondered how I would keep from falling to my death. I watched the original Japanese version of “Godzilla” (“Gojira!”) in a small, crowded theater in downtown Philly; who cares if it happened 50 years after the film’s initial release? I had a catheter for two days too long; I imagine there are much worse things than dreaming you’ve had a catheter removed only to wake up and find its tail dangling from a hole in your hospital gown -- I just don’t want to know what they are. I had a friend tell me, “You have to be nice to me. I have raw sewage on my pants.”

I saw a bear in the woods, rattlesnakes on a mountaintop, alligators in the swamp, and a man with a loaded rifle protecting his riverside property, upon which I had mistakenly trespassed. I touched the scales of a live cobra. I got bitten and squeezed by a pissed-off Burmese python. I stalked spotted salamanders in an isolated marsh … with a dying flashlight ... on an early May night … in a cold rain ... knee-deep in muck … wearing schoolbus-yellow boots … wondering if I had unknowingly wandered into a yet-to-be-filmed episode of “The X-Files.” I snorkeled among barracudas, squids, octopuses and moray eels, ever mindful of what else lurked in the deep blue beyond. I picked up a bullfrog and got peed on. I grabbed a water snake by the tail and let its bowels empty onto my shoes.

Through everything that has happened, regardless of who was with me at the time, I did it all alone. My mind has become a prison -- years and years of solitary confinement. Even so, I still know how it feels to laugh and smile. And I actually do those things every so often.