Hardly anyone lives in this landscape, and only a few dirt roads go in and out. The road I took ended broke abruptly on the south bank of the Missouri River, where a small sign hanging from a rusted mailbox read “Call for Service.” In the box I found a walkie talkie, and called across the river for a ride. Soon a very large man fired up the ferry and came across to pick me up.

I proceeded into the wilderness on yet another 100 mile plus trip on gravel roads without services. It was exciting and slightly intimidating, because there wasn’t anyone out here to help me if I got into trouble.

About an hour into the drive, with sagebrush covered land rolling off in all directions, I saw a spooky house set on a hill way back from the road. It was black against the brown soil, probably abandoned, and reminded me of the Edward Hopper painting called “Lighthouse Hill.” I felt nervous about going up there, but how could I not?

I searched up and down for a driveway that would lead to this spectral house. Just then, I spotted an early 1980s Ford pickup truck coming towards me, the first vehicle I’d seen all day. I nodded as they passed – two older, very dark skinned Native American men. They appeared somber and didn’t acknowledge me. I immediately became self-conscious and fearful. Was it their dark skin? Their Indianness? Their maleness? Their gun rack? Or was I just wound up from too much travel and too many conspiracy theories coming my way.

I skipped the abandoned farmhouse and headed back up the main dirt road. Within a mile I’d unintentionally caught up to the men in the pickup, so I throttled back a bit. My thoughts went wild. Now they think I’m following them, that I’m up to no good. They’re gonna pull over and ambush me. At some point they turned off into the hills. I knew I was losing it. None of my reactions made sense.

I drove into the dark part of my soul, desolate just like the landscape. So much about me was dark. So many things had happened that I could have prevented.

My emotional makeup sometimes made me cold, distant, unable to connect with people, especially those with the strongest desires for me.

I had trouble accepting love, even from my kids.

I was twisted, hard for others to understand.

I was fat.

I moved slowly.

I never earned the money a man like me should earn.

I sank, the bad emotions consuming me to the point I looked to the edge of the road where it dropped off into a canyon and thought, Maybe I should drive right off. I’d thought this only once previously in my life, just before I quit drinking when I was 26. A few days after my birthday that year I was driving drunk, with a six pack beside me, through some highway tunnels in Pennsylvania, just killing time and stewing in my personal, drunken hell after work all day writing books on an assembly line of typewriters at a book factory. Along with a loft full of other writers I wrote books about how to be healthy that sold millions of copies for the publisher. Between paragraphs I would step out on the back porch and smoke unfiltered Camel cigarettes. My eyes saw even sunny days through a dark haze. As I approached a tunnel that evening I almost pulled to the right to smash into the entrance wall.

However, there were no tunnels here, just the long, beautiful gravel road, and I was not that young man from so long ago. I pulled the truck over near a pond and set up my little one-burner stove on the tailgate. I put finely ground coffee in a Moka pot and brewed a double espresso while watching ducks swim among the reeds. The madness passed -- it had been about 20 minutes.

I was exhausted from the road, but thankful for the equanimity, even in the face of negativity, that came with growing older.

At day’s end I arrived in the rolling grasslands of the Nez Perce Bear Claw Battlefield. The low sun lent the tall grasses long shadows beneath a pale blue sky.

There were no humans near and falling into the history of this place was easy – and startling. It was a cold early October in 1877 when about 800 Nez Perce warriors and civilians held up in this gulch and low hills to rest after fleeing the US Cavalry for several months. They were trying to reach Canada, only 42 miles away, where they’d be safe from persecution. Then U.S. soldiers found them and set up to attack the encampment. The two sides had already clashed several times in previous weeks, and here the situation only worsened. The Nez Perce women and children hid in the vegetation and rocks along the creek, while the men had a standoff with the army. The leaders talked a few times, trying to figure a way to settle without warfare, but that ended in an attack that killed three top Nez Perce leaders, and dozens of others, including Army soldiers. Women and children hiding in the marshland were slaughtered. Wounded soldiers were left to bleed on the hillside overnight. About 56 people died, from both sides, and hundreds were injured. Another massacre.

The site, with its bubbling creek and golden grasses, had a sense of grace and majesty. At several points on the trail the park service had set up markers explaining what happened at that spot. At each marker, Native Americans and others had set down offerings that were meaningful to the modern Indians: sunglasses, coins, jewelry glinting in the golden sun. On a tree the Indians had tied bandanas and other cloths to help guide spirits. These memorials were powerful, and intriguing -- I couldn’t fathom the exact symbolism of the objects or the bandanas. Dead soldiers, dead horses, dead mothers, dead children, dead warriors, dead leaders. A US soldier wrote after the massacre that he never would have been able to imagine the horrors he saw take place. The theory had been that the Indians weren’t human, but he found that they were. He regretted everything. There was a line from the Nez Perce to George Floyd that we all could trace if we chose. This would always be sacred ground.

I felt a sudden coolness and descended a slough to a marshy creek where the water bubbled against the heat. A hawk flew in gentle circles above me, dropping every now and then with a cry. What is that about? I wondered. Maybe we’re connected, I thought. Maybe I am a hawk. I returned its cry with my own imitation. A few moments later the hawk dive bombed me, and I realized I was near its nesting site. This hawk didn’t want to connect with me. It wanted me to get the hell away from its chicks. I needed to swear off magical thinking, finally and for good.

At the top of the trail an indented grassy swirl marked the collapsing mass grave of the dead US soldiers. In comments on Yelp, some people said that when they visited, they didn’t feel any sympathy for the soldiers, who they saw as genocidal. Others countered that the Nez Perce were savages, who would have been unharmed if they’d just complied. I thought about all the hunting that my government had done this year. And all the hunting the protestors had done, right and left. All the ways we still couldn’t leave each other alone. The Nez Perce were chased, dehumanized, killed. So much wrong had been done, so much murder in the name of war. So much harm that lasts to this day. I felt deep regret at points along that trail. But I could see why the Europeans would have wanted this land. And when you want something, it is easy to justify taking it. And if you can justify it, then what is wrong?

That’s our ethos now, and I guess it was our ethos back then, as well.

Happy to share that I’ll be speaking at AI Literacy Salon: Why Machines Can’t Be Smart (Signal and Sign)! Make sure to stop by on May 13, 120 Walker St, 3rd Floor,Chinatown, NYC

I don’t write with AI, although I have. A year ago I used Chat GPT to write a psychological thriller for women (which Chat told me was the best selling category on Amazon digital), using the pen name, Vesper Riven. I trained an AI agent on my fiction writing, including several unpublished literary novels, and then told it to write like me, if were a a writer of best-selling psychological thrillers for women.

It did an ok job of writing the novel, with my guidance. But it did a great job of making me suspicious of pure AI writing (prompt based), because AI has an amazing ability to write sentences that at first blush seem to be brilliant, but on second blush, with careful reading, don’t make sense. I believe this is because the machines are not created with built-in souls, as we humans are.

These days I spend a fair amount of time “training” machines how to write better. They’ve learned a lot! But the writing continues to be missing a spark. An ineffable human quality that can make connections far beyond patterns. I don’t know that I’d go so far as Nitzan Hermon, the big thinker who organized the AI Literary Salon, who says that “machines can’t be smart.” But they sure can be dumb.

Look forward to seeing you May 13, 7 PM, 120 Walker St, 3rd Floor, Chinatown, NYC.

Below is the cover of my psychological thriller for women. Chat told me that the elements on the cover image were going to boost the sales of this book (I haven’t checked in months, but I think it has been read a dozen times). It was a lot of fun, and I will never do it again.

The southeastern edge of California meets the western edge of Arizona in a desert that’s filled with water. Generally, I’m captivated by any flowing water. I always want to swim. I had to restrain myself here. I came across this canal in a verdant desert after leaving Calexico, California, a small border town marked by a collection of suburban homes with views of the border wall, and Mexicali beyond. All sand, everywhere. From the edge of Calexico, the canal seemed like a mirage in the distance. But then I got close and smelled it, pungent and layered, like moss on bark. This water began as Rocky Mountain snowmelt before flowing into the Colorado River, then through the Hoover Dam and, finally, into the Gila Gravity Main Canal system, in Yuma, Arizona, a few miles from where this photo was taken. I followed it into a nearby date farm (above), hoping I would encounter a date shake. Alas, the shake shack was closed.

These canals are unfenced, not at all fancy, purely utilitarian, and quite beautiful because of it. The constant movement of nearby trains is a plus. These are all tributes to American engineering, and it would be nice to see modern projects of all types that were made with these principals of simplicity and longevity. That doesn’t mean I believe this water should be funneled into the desert to irrigate lettuce, cotton, alfalfa and grasses. And that is where it is going. It’s kind of like watering your desert home garden with bottled imported spring water.

Then, during the few weeks when Arizona had the highest rate of Covid in the world, I found myself tooling around the state, talking to people and marveling at the fact that hardly anyone wore a mask. I ended up at the border, as I usually do when wandering, parked in a two story motel type place on the edge of nothing. The pool was closed due to the virus, so I passed through the crowd of geriatric cigarette smokers at the lobby entrance, and made my way to a big cemetery in town.

The cemetery felt ancient, connected to the old west and to Mexico. To Calexico and Mexicali, the two towns that straddle the border an hour down the road. I walked in the dirt among driftwood crosses, altars made of tin ornaments, concrete memorials and hand painted signs, artificial flowers and ribbons everywhere. All the dead had Mexican names. Rosario, Quiñones, Guadalupe.

And then, through a portal in a hedge, I saw an expanse of green, so bright in the desert sun. I passed through, and suddenly I was in a verdant, treeless cemetery with few baubles and no hand-painted signs. More like granite, letters carved in stone. All the names were Anglo. Heather. McNulty. Jonathan.

Oh, I realized. The story of America.

The following excerpt from my yet-to-be published nonfiction book, An American Family, tells the story of how I met these two characters, who are among my favorite people of all time.

Frankie and Sachie Are Lovers

Poking around AirBnB I found a traditional Navajo hogan for rent in the mountains outside of Chinle, Arizona. The hosts’ profile suggested they were a Navajo man and a Japanese woman. Using the tex in the app I introduced myself and asked if they’d be up to talking about their lives and the crisis they’d been living through. The virus had hit the Navajo Nation particularly hard.

“We might do that. I will talk to Frankie,” the woman, named Sachie, replied.

It’s said that all journalists are, at heart, deceivers, and manipulators.

I agree with this thought. A big part of my job is behaving in ways, different for each person, that encourage someone to trust me enough to share their story. I’ve been doing this as a journalist for 40 years. Finding pathways to invading people’s privacy is now part of my being.

The next morning my phone pinged as I power walked through the early Chinle light, a short text from Sachie.

“Frankie will be at your hotel at 10 this morning.”

It was just 7 am, so I had plenty of time to prepare.

“I’m in room 9.”

“He is a cultivated man and will not come into your room, but he will talk to you outside,” she said.

I had planned to interview him at the table in my room, in front of the window looking onto the parking lot where a white family gathered in their folding chairs. It hadn’t occurred to me that this might be improper.

Back at the hotel I said, “How’s it going?” to the white family.

“Cool,” the father said.

Who were they? I’d stereotyped them as being closed-minded right-wing types who saw me as a pointy headed city dweller with no cajones. But they could just as easily be rural Bernie Bros. Or American Romani. I had no idea. I’m sure I thought about them much more than they thought about me. I sat at my table and waited for Frankie.

Around 11:00, a copper colored late 80s Oldsmobile with opera windows slowly approached, like something out of a Tarantino film. As the car rolled past, the driver, masked and wearing a big hat over a blue bandana, stared intently at the unmasked parking lot partiers from Wyoming.

Someone had dipped a hand in white paint and made a handprint near the car’s opera window. An indigenous symbol of healing. This had to be Frankie.

He stopped his car, and took in the scene. Three white dudes and a lady sipping beers in a parking space and a couple of tow-headed kids running circles after a playful crow. And Frankie. He was older than I expected, with deep lines around his highly observant eyes. Fifteen seconds later, without so much as a tip of his hat he did a U-turn and drove slowly away.

What the fuck? Did the lot lice just lose me this interview?

I texted Sachie: “Does your husband drive a copper-colored car?”

“Yes, that’s his antique car,” she replied.

“I’m not sure what scared him off, but please tell him to stop by again.”

“Maybe he’ll fill up his tank and come back – wait a while,” she replied.

I gathered a cookie and a coffee from the hotel lobby. This was all I’d eaten since the night before when I’d had a cookie, chips and coffee. I checked on the Internet and found that Denny’s was the only place in town serving meals these days, thanks to the virus. I’d have to wait till after Frankie left for the pleasure of ordering a patty melt on my phone.

An hour later the copper-colored car returned and parked near my room. The Wyoming crew was down to just the grandparents, quiet and smoking in their lawn chairs. I stepped out to greet Frankie before he could run away. He looked up, annoyed, and I realized I wasn’t wearing my mask. I pulled it from my pocket. He got out of his car wearing blue jeans, leather shoes and a buttoned shirt. He had a fabric mask layered over a surgical mask, a floppy straw hat and deerskin gloves. He wouldn’t look at me, only to the side.

“What is it you want?” he said, staring down at his car.

“I want to hear your perspective on the virus, and on the state of the world in general,” I said.

My words were so stiff. What I really wanted to know was this: why do all the Navajo look so wary when I approach? Do they see that I carry the DNA of every generation that has tried to destroy them? Why am I making this all about me?

He looked doubtful about the prospects for our conversation, and I didn’t blame him. It was already 90 degrees and the sun beat down. Occasionally a car pulled in and out of the parking lot, and the loud wind carried grit.

“I don’t know,” he said, “The world is a big place.”

Each word tumbled around in his mouth, each consonant a new sentence. I. Don’t. Know. The world. Is. A. Big place.

“I lived in Japan for 7 years,” he said, “I speak Japanese. My wife Sachie is Japanese. Did you know that Japanese and Navajo have similar sounds? They are related. Japanese people and Navajo people also use similar gestures. I believe it is in the DNA. This is what I was thinking about last night. The DNA was spread between the people.”

“That makes sense,” I said. But did it?

We stood, distanced.

“I don’t know anything,” he said, out of the blue.

“Really?”

“You tell me – have you heard me say anything important?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not really looking for important. I’m looking for you.”

He was silent for a long moment.

“Ok, I’ve given you my fifteen minutes of thoughts,” he said. “Can I go now?”

We’d actually spoken for three minutes or less. I said I was hoping we could talk some more, that his wife said he had a lot to say.

He brushed that off and took our conversation in a new direction.

“I am getting good at shooting my bow and arrow,” he said.

“Oh yeah? That’s a hard thing to do.”

“After 25 years I’m finally hitting my target. I made my own bow.”

“Really?”

“Look at it,” he said pointing to the back window of his car. A hand-carved bow rested on the shelf below the window. Oak.

“It is exactly like the ones Geronimo made,” he said. The same curve. The same purpose. I studied a photo as I made this one.”

He stood back from me, nervous about the virus. He was the most socially distanced person I’d met on this trip. At times it was hard to make out his words through his masks, in one of which he’d put a double layer of coffee filters, for extra protection.

“Did you know that Custer was dead before they crossed the river?” he said referring to the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

“No, I did not.”

“That whole thing happened without him – he was dead.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

“I was there,” he said.

“You were there?”

“Yes.”

“You were there in a past life? Or you were there in a memory?”

“I do not know,” he said, “It was inspired by Sitting Bull.”

A pause. I didn’t know how to respond. Was Frankie a nut? A genius? Manipulative?

“Well, now you’ve had your 20 minutes with Frankie, I can be on my way,” he said.

It had been 5 minutes, at the most.

I asked how he felt about the virus.

“I do not like to talk about it, because so many have died. It is not to be talked about.”

I said I understood. I respected that. We were silent.

“But I can tell you something,” he said. “I feel a pull to the ocean. I might move to the beach.”

This surprised me, and I asked where.

“To the islands of Washington,” he said. “I have my own ways. I am Indian.”

“I can see that.”

He chuckled. We were silent.

“Well, now you’ve had your 30 minutes with Frankie Spencer. May I leave now?”

It had only been about 7 minutes.

“Of course,” I said.

“You know where to find me.”

I didn’t, so I gave him my number on a piece of paper.

“I don’t use the phone,” he said. “Maybe my wife.”

He got into his copper-colored Olds and pulled away.

Aspen called, rare to hear her voice rather than read it on text.

“It’s good to have Violet here,” she said.

Violet was living at home now, riding out the pandemic and working as a studio assistant to a photographer whose art she admired.

“I’m doing well, but it's good to have someone around,” Aspen said.

She told me the protests were ongoing, though she wasn’t joining as many of them. Her ideas about them – how effective they were, whether she even had a right to join a Black Lives Matter protest, what kind of future any of us had in this world anyway – were complex.

I described Chinle and told her I was finding the local people hard to strike up a conversation with, unlike in other places I’d been.

“Well, look at yourself,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said.

I examined my hand. Long, strong fingers, wrinkly knuckles, liver spots and red blotches and veins just below the pink and pale skin. An old White guy.

“I wouldn’t want to talk to you if I were a Navajo in Chinle right now, trying to avoid the virus.”

“Yeah, the virus levels here are pretty scary,” I said. “But I can’t infect anyone – I don’t think.”

“Just be yourself,” she said.

Aspen knew all about finding herself. I admired her for that.

“Do that and people will want to talk. You’re very likable,” she said.

I loved receiving advice, for a change, rather than giving it.

That night Sachie texted:

“Frankie liked talking to you.”

This was a surprise, as Frankie had seemed eager to get the hell away from me.

“He says to come to our home tomorrow,” she wrote, “Drive to Tsaile, to the T and turn right. You’ll see a big tree on the left. Keep going. When you pass two boulders on the right, you’ll see three big trees on the left, look for Frankie and he’ll take you to where we live.”

Approaching the T, I saw the chrome nose of his Olds poking forward from a gas station parking spot and pulled over. He motioned me to follow and roared out of the gas station. So, he was a rule changer, I decided, reliable and unreliable at the same time, agreeing to meet me but then changing the meeting spot without warning. I followed him down the two-lane at 75 miles per hour and then onto a dirt road up the mountains to 7,200 feet. His rutted driveway led down to a trailer, a pickup truck with no hood, a few very furry dogs and an eight-sided hogan made of logs notched and fitted and sealed with chink. There was red dirt everywhere.

“You will not see the inside of our hogan,” Frankie said. “The hogan is a special place.”

A large dirt lawn was dotted with a fire pit, an old wood stove, a sweat lodge made from willow branches, tipi poles without a tipi and several old tires suspended on stakes. Frankie said the tires kept people from being hurt by the upright stakes, but he never explained why the stakes were there in the first place

.

Sachie came over. She was diminutive, middle-aged, and spoke with a Tokyo accent.

We sat outside on folding camp chairs around the rusted wood stove which vented about five feet towards the vast blue sky. Was this plein air stove meant to heat the whole mountainside?

“I’m fixing it up,” he explained.

Sachie leaned forward with her hands clasped. She said she first met Frankie as a tourist at an Arizona dance hall in 1989 and they’d danced together ever since.

“I came here because I was interested in Indians, what it is that makes an Indian tick,” she said, “It’s a spirit from a long time ago that went into hiding and now comes up.”

“Everyone wants to know what that spirit is,” said Frankie, “Especially now.”

I nodded.

“You too,” he said.

He was right. I, for sure, was a tourist among the Indians, with my thoughts that grew out of myths and cliches passed down from my 17th century ancestors who’d invaded Naumkeag lands, to the 19^th century ancestors who farmed Kanza land in the territory they called Kansas, to the present moment, a small, unkempt homestead where I tried not to be the guy who inquired as to the secrets of the magical Indians. Keep your ears open, I told myself. Frankie has something to say.

A few years after meeting, Frankie and Sachie left Arizona for Tokyo. Frankie practiced silversmithing in a traditional Japanese atelier, and they lived there together for seven years.

“When I heard Japanese people talk, the sounds to me were like someone speaking Navajo backwards,” Frankie told me, “I felt a connection to Japanese culture.”

I pictured Frankie walking tall along Tokyo sidewalks. I lived in Japan for a while when I was 24 and had been struck by how passionate some Japanese people were about meeting foreigners. Frankie said he did feel bit like a celebrity in Tokyo at times. Eventually, they returned to Arizona. Frankie fixed up the hogan on land that his great grandmother had homesteaded long ago, wrangling a title out of the government. They worked at this and that, translating documents, Airbnb, whatever would make a living. Frankie, in particular, is not a fancy person. Work shirt, jeans, boots, bandana, and a hat. At home, they often spoke Japanese, because Sachie still felt uncomfortable with her command of English and Diné.

Frankie held the bow he had made, along with three arrows he’d bought at Walmart before modifying the shafts with chopsticks to which he attached new, more lethal tips.

“Walmart?” I asked.

“Yes, Walmart has good feathers,” he said, lilting up the end of his sentence to indicate that I had a few things to learn about the world.

“Chopsticks?”

“You do what you do,” he said.

He wasn’t an expert bowman, by any means. He could hunt rabbits with the fancy compound bow he had in the house, but he’d never much used the type of bows Geronimo used. He was teaching himself.

“I need to use my third eye or my long-ago DNA, and maybe I can strike the target. I can access the skill from my ancestral past. It’s been asleep for 7 generations right now. We’ve been living on this damn reservation for a long time and it's about time we use the bow.”

I was beginning to decide that Frankie wasn’t wacko. Rather, he was someone who thought and spoke completely in metaphors, similes and, sometimes, fantasies. Not crazy, for sure, but I had to keep my brain loose to follow what he was saying, basically: we humans are in a very bad spot and we Indians have it worse than most. If all of us don’t learn from the ancient systems soon, we’re screwed.

“You, Stephen, need to write that down,” he said.

To survive the pandemic, he and Sachie had isolated themselves on this mountainside. I was their first visitor in months. They hid, they hibernated, they stoked the fire when the temperatures dropped. They wore masks and imagined how they might survive in the future. For Frankie, the virus had reinforced the value of learning the old ways.

When he was a child, the government sent him away to an Indian boarding school.

“All of us – every one of us children,” he said, “We are used to what the government does to us. We lost a lot of our culture in those schools.”

He was working to get it back.

Frankie wore a lime green plastic glove on one hand for protection, the other hand was bare. He waved his green hand slowly in front of his face to indicate the virus. He believed the virus was airborne, and it was awfully windy in his yard. The virus could land on his gate. It could land on the door. It could land on the tip of your nose.

“If I dip my arrow in horse manure and shoot it, that’s germ warfare,” he said, “I think the Navajo nation was picked out for this virus because we are black – meaning we are red. They also picked certain types of White people to infect.”

“The government did?” I asked.

“I have no idea.”

“What?”

Back in March, when it all began to get really bad, he heard a sonic boom in the sky above his hogan. Then another. It was a missile, he said, they were test-firing something. Then he saw a B1 bomber that he thought looked bigger than a 747, fly over. He’d never heard the boom or seen the plane before. Coincidence? Who knew? Maybe not. Could be. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

At times Frankie seemed to be speaking in Zen Koans. But this was just the way his mind worked, like the old video game Pong, but slightly on the fritz. I had been pretty good at Pong, years before.

Sachie pointed out a 7-foot-tall pile of gray ash behind their hogan that Frankie called Mt. Fuji. Ash from all the times they’d cleaned out their wood stove over the last ten years, it was a clock showing the passage of the seasons.

“Our neighbors laugh at it,” said Frankie, “But you don’t need a clock unless you believe in the future.”

“So, you have hope for the future?”

“Yes, I have hope.”

Then, much to my surprise, he invited me inside the hogan. He said he wasn’t quite sure why he wanted me in there, but maybe he trusted me. The three of us stepped into the cathedral ceilinged space, a rustic octagonal interior with dark wood kitchen cabinets and a table, a desk with a computer, and a room off to the side where the couple slept.

“For us, the hogan is a sacred place,” he said.

I felt honored.

Out of the blue, he asked me to explain why the new version of Microsoft Word required a yearly subscription.

“Oh, I see,” I said. “You just invited me over for tech support.”

He laughed.

“I think you were sent here to spread the word to the larger world,” he said.

“Word?” I asked.

Sachie spoke up:

“He asked me this morning ‘why am I telling this guy to come to our house,’” and I said, ‘because you feel you should.’”

“It just dawned on me that’s why you are the first person we have invited here since the whole thing began. You are a voice for my thoughts,” said Frankie.

It turned out that when he pulled up to the hotel the previous day the Wyoming people had spooked him. Bad energy. No masks. Lots of beer. So, he drove up above Canyon de Chelly to scope out a cave where he thought we might be able to talk in peace. But the cave didn’t seem right, so he returned and spoke to me, warily, as the Wyoming family watched.

“I knew I wanted to talk to you,” he said. “But I couldn’t with them around.”

“What is the word you want to share?” I asked.

“That hope that I mentioned. Hope. That’s it.”

His father had fought in the Korean War. But not as a Navajo, Frankie said. He’d fought with everyone to survive together as American people. Frankie thought that same sense of unity would reappear in this country. Some day. That people would work together. The country would be better. “I have hope as long as the grass is green,” he said, standing in his denuded yard.

Sachie, as usual, nodded politely.

The afternoon had gone into evening and soon the sun would set. It was time for me to go, to beat the Navajo Nation covid curfew back to my hotel. As I gathered my backpack to head out, Frankie told me to wait a minute. He opened a drawer on the other side of the room and came back with a small gray crystal, about an inch and a half long.

“My mother gave that to me,” he said, folding it into my hand. “It will help protect you until we see you again.”

I held it tightly, with hope.

Driving down the mountain I stopped to look at a small herd of horses jumping about at the edge of a spring – a roan, a white pony, a dark stallion. The meadow was green, the heat of the day lifting. I tucked the crystal into a small drawstring bag and eased it into a spot on my dash. At the highway I turned left, heading south into the virus.

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In the morning I headed down dirt roads through a desolate canyon towards the Mexican border. It was 114 degrees at the border, bright, dusty and bleak, and I didn’t encounter anyone besides a store clerk who sold me cold Topo Chico mineral water and some spicy peanuts. Driving along the border wall, I was grateful for my four-wheel drive truck, which could take me almost anywhere. Compared to the Best Western motels I often stayed in, or even to my single-person tent with its broken rain flap, I felt at ease, always, in my truck. It was my home, for now. I tried to keep it orderly, with only enough fetishes – a feather hanging from the rearview, a pinecone on the dash – to protect me from evil. But not so many that I became the leader of my own cult.

At one point, I passed two white and green Border Patrol trucks parked on the side of the road. About a mile further down I pulled over to sign in to my weekly group therapy appointment, that had gone online because of the virus. My phone opened to five other people in their various rooms, me in my truck. I turned my camera so they’d see a bit of the barren landscape as we discussed our fears, fantasies and families for an hour and a half. I did this once a week, no matter where I was. Now, I was about 30 miles from the nearest paved road staring at my phone screen when a Border Patrol officer rapped on my window. Fuck! I dropped my phone and fumbled for my mask.

I rolled my window down.

“Where are you headed?” he asked, his deep voice muffled by his own mask.

“El Paso,” I said.

“Where you coming from?”

“Marfa, then the border and now here. I just stopped for a Zoom meeting.”

“A what?

“Work call.”

“Are you an American?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He leaned in my back window and scanned the bags and cooler on the back seat.

“Ok, you’re free to go – or finish your call or whatever.”

Wow, I thought. He didn’t even ask for my ID.

I watched his truck in the rearview mirror as he pulled out. Then I saw my own face – sunburned, white hair, blue eyes, the wizened features of an old white guy. That’s privilege, I thought, pulling back on the highway.

“Gotta sign off,” I said to to the group, as I made my way along the border to El Paso.

I had not been in El Paso since I was 19 years old, but the downtown area didn’t seem to have changed. My room in the Gardner Hotel, built in 1922, right after the last pandemic,  reminded me of my great grandmother’s house in Jewel City, Kansas: cast iron bed, ancient empty picture frames on the wall, no TV and no AC. My bed was draped with a brown quilt over brown patterned sheets. The window trim and baseboard also were brown. A noisy 1950s swamp cooler labored in the hallway to push slightly chilled air through the transom left open above my door. The fresh air would help keep the virus at bay. I loved the place.

The hotel’s literature suggested that the dark El Pasoan writer Cormac McCarthy loved it too -- he’d checked in a few times to write his novels. And John Dillinger used one of these rooms as a hide-out from the law. That first day I absentmindedly left my room without a mask and ran into a hotel housekeeper who backed away in fear. On the streets of El Paso, everyone was masked.

I’d always wanted to go to Marfa, the locus for art in West Texas, and a pandemic visit seemed like a good idea — there wouldn’t be any other tourists. I set up my tent for a few days at a psychedelic cowboy glampground named El Cosmico, at the edge of town. I chose a spot under a scrubby oak not too far from the showers, but far from the two other tents in the vast field. At the perimeter, a village of empty air-conditioned tipis and yurts and a collection of period trailers painted in the pastel shades of a B-52s video, all for nightly rent. An odd and delightful place. Across the road, at the local headquarters of the Border Patrol, the Texas flag flew higher than the American flag.

For dinner, I ate a taco salad at the Dairy Queen, which had indoor dining. All the other restaurants in Marfa were closed for quarantine, and this one was vacant except for me and a couple of high school kids. I hit my tent early and slept well in the desert air. In the morning I got a biscuit and coffee at the convenience store and went in search of the art that Marfa was famous for. I found almost none. All the museums and galleries were closed. Through one window I saw a large, beautiful John Chamberlain sculpture made from a crushed automobile.

Art! I came across this conceptual earthwork by Anonymous, above, in an alley downtown.

Not many people will experience an artless Marfa, I thought. It was a magnificent place. The absence of art might even have made it more interesting. I felt fortunate for the pandemic. There were old grain elevators, empty warehouses, general stores, and a massive coral-colored county courthouse to look at. There was an improbably green golf course for the rich art collectors, and a vast hydroponic tomato factory for the rest of us. I fell in love with the place. In a store on the main drag, just around the corner from the Instagram pink fire station, I bought a straw hat. It was a half size too small, but I wanted to will it onto my head, so I bought it. I ended up giving it to my daughter, Bolivia, in LA, who also has a big head, though not quite as big as her father.

I followed one street to its end at the edge of town and realized how artificial the boundaries that humans make really are. Directly across the street was the outback. There was no interstitial connector. It was astonishing. And the outback went on for a hundred miles. On a side street a beautiful old warehouse had been transformed into a shop and restaurant called Sentinel, geared for the Marfa art mafia.

I scanned their QR code and ordered a $7.50 latte (including an extra shot of espresso) and a 12-dollar granola parfait. The young white woman wearing white jeans at the pick-up table was dismissive and unhelpful. The young white man she worked with gave me a puzzled look when I asked for a spoon. He also wore white jeans. I was triggered by the white jeans. I’d always seen them as proclamations of privilege. Who but a wealthy person could afford to keep white jeans clean and bright in a world of dust, blood, and stains? You’d need a support staff. This culture of specialness repelled me. I was glad the art was closed, because Sentinel showed me how insufferable Marfa must be when there was no virus around to keep the white jeans away.

Dinner that night was at the Dairy Queen, again. I noticed that the Spanish speaking fry cook wore white jeans. No grease stains. No blood. I couldn’t make sense of it. Another personal theory shattered. Maybe I’ll get white jeans, I thought, deciding that the cook’s pair, with their strategic rips and bleach marks, looked cool.

In the morning I headed down a dirt road through desolate canyons towards the Mexican border. It was 114 degrees at the border, bright, dusty and bleak, and I didn’t encounter anyone besides a store clerk who sold me cold Topo Chico mineral water and some spicy peanuts. Driving along the border wall, I was grateful for my four-wheel drive truck, which could take me almost anywhere. Compared to the Best Western motels I often stayed in, or even to my single-person tent with its broken rain flap, I felt at ease, always, in my truck. It was my home, for now. I tried to keep it orderly, with only enough fetishes – a feather hanging from the rearview, a pinecone on the dash – to protect me from evil. But not so many that I became a cult.

At one point, I passed two white and green Border Patrol trucks parked on the side of the road. About a mile further down I pulled over myself, because I had to discuss a work project on Zoom with some people in New York and San Francisco. I was about 30 miles from the nearest paved road, sitting in my truck with the AC on, staring at my phone screen and answering questions about my upcoming work availability. I didn’t notice the Border Patrol officer until he rapped on my window. Fuck! I dropped my phone and fumbled for my mask.

I rolled my window down.

“Where are you headed?” he asked, his deep voice muffled by a black cloth mask.

“El Paso,” I said.

“Where you coming from?”

“Marfa, then the border and now here. I just stopped for a Zoom conference.”

“A what?

“Work call.”

“Are you an American?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He leaned in my back window and scanned the bags and cooler on the back seat.

“Ok, you’re free to go – or finish your call or whatever.”

Wow, I thought. He didn’t even ask for my ID.

I watched his truck in the rearview mirror as he pulled out. Then I saw my own face – red from sunburn, white hair, blue eyes, the wizened features of an old white guy. That’s privilege, I thought.

The road to Fort Davis crossed vast, flat pasturelands flanked in the far distance by gentle mountains. In a little canyon of live oak, I spotted a couple of austere houses made of corrugated sheet metal. Curious, I pulled into this community, which seemed empty. The dirt road wound around and around as I realized there was an astonishing number of these structures, each one a little different, 2 stories here, a screened porch there, and all completely empty. The houses and dining halls were a cross between the galvanized metal farm buildings used to store tractors, animals and supplies and the new farm vernacular architectural movement of metal homes with fake silos filled with couches from Restoration Hardware. Some were shiny new metal, others old and dirty. Clearly, the buildings were loved, and purposeful. Thousands of people could live here at one time. I got lost in the tangle of roads and driveways, sidetracked by dirt tracks that dead ended in groves of live oak.  Not a person in sight. The virus, I assumed. I felt at home in the empty civilization. I thought I could live here for a good long time, reading and walking along the shady paths in the cool morning air. But this village wasn’t mine.

A sign by the road read:

BLOYS CAMP MEETING

Held each year since 1890.

Founded by Rev. W.B. Bloys, a

Presbyterian. His camp pulpit

was an Arbuckle coffee crate.

First campers, 48 people from

remote ranches and towns, slept

In tents, wagons, family groups

had chuck-box meals, sharing

with guests. Some 1,500 attend

mid-August meetings today. Still

nothing is ever sold in camp.

Baptists, disciples of Christ,

Methodists and Presbyterians

incorporated the cowboys’ camp

meeting in 1902. Site, Skillman

Grove, has been a campground

since the 1850s. Elevation is

about 6,000 feet.

(1966)

Every August for 130 years, Christians of various stripes had gathered at the camp for prayer, reflection and learning. Leaning against my truck under the shade of a big tree I poked through the camp’s digital archive on my phone. It was a remarkable collection of drawings, old school notebooks filled with scribbles, and photos of chickens recently killed for supper. Thousands of documents spanning more than a century, with one illustrating that campers sometimes got up to more than simple prayer. Old typewriter marks on yellowed scrap paper described an earthly devotion:

“On this mountain which is the south end of the Bloys Cowboy Camp Meeting grounds many of the west Texas cattlemen made love and proposed to their present wives. There is hardly a spot in west Texas where more proposals and acceptances to marry have been made.”

Unfortunately, this Christian coupling wouldn’t happen this coming August 2020, as reported in the Jeff Davis Mountain Dispatch of June 18:

“Bloys Camp Meeting bell to remain silent for first time in 131 years due to COVID-19.

The bell out at Skillman Grove will be silent for the first time in 131 years this August, as the executive committee of Bloys Camp Meeting Association met June 14 and decided to cancel the annual Christian gathering west of Fort Davis on State Highway 166.”

I’d noticed that pious people often came across well – clean cut believers, austere, especially out here. But I knew better than to trust them without consideration. Once, in 7^th  grade, I smoked a joint in a park in downtown Lawrence, Kansas with my friend Susan, and then we walked along Massachusetts Street, just wandering. Passing a Pentecostal church we heard chanting, and, giggling at the thought of the believers, decided to look inside. We walked down a brown carpet towards the source of the sounds. The air smelled dusty, when suddenly the doors opened to a large chamber with an altar and a crowd of ten or fifteen people in a circle surrounding a light-haired teenage girl lying on the floor with her wrists bent back like a forest fawn.

A man stood over her speaking nonsense words, sputtering and exclaiming and throwing his hands in the air! The only word I could make out was Jesus! Over and over.

Suddenly, the man caught sight of us and a group of them came over and pulled us in close. Jesus, I thought, and not in a good way.

“Do you know Christ?” someone said.

We didn’t answer. Susan gave me a look that said “Run!” But they shoved us to the ground and surrounded us, many of the believers sputtering and splashing us with droplets of spit as they called the Devil out and the Angels in.

I was terrified.

What if they were right? What if I had the Devil living in me?

Only seconds passed and I looked at Susan and she looked at me and nodded and we jumped up and ran out of that church as fast as we could and down the block and by the time, we reached the Safeway where we could buy some cigarettes we were laughing and mocking and feeling very free.

I never told my mom about the afternoon at the church. Sharing it didn’t cross my mind. I tried to imagine all the situations my own kids had been in, growing up in New York City, that I knew nothing about. So many. The ones I knew about were sometimes perilous enough. In a way, I was glad they had kept their own counsel.

Up one of the dirt lanes in the distance I saw the Camp Bloys maintenance truck, and a guy doing something with a barrel. I didn’t want to talk to him, not even for a second. The wind had picked up and last year’s live oak leaves swirled in a little twister in front of my truck as I hit the asphalt and continued on my way. In Fort Davis, an exquisite, small mountain town filled with flowers and bright colors, The Fort Davis Water Corporation had a pro-gun sign on its front door. The sign read:

We support the 2nd Amendment and the constitutional right to carry arms.

We encourage people to carry concealed weapons.

We encourage people to carry concealed weapons when they come inside our offices.

As I read the sign, masked people who might have been carrying concealed weapons walked up to the door and into the office. This peaceful town was the last place in the world I could imagine needing to carry a gun. At least they wore masks. I got in my truck and continued into West Texas.

A brief drive through the Ninth Ward, Houston. All photos and videos by Stephen

Texas was a couple of hours south, and I took the Interstate 35, for a change, after having driven only two-lane roads for the last few weeks. The rhythm of the interstate was like techno in Ibiza compared to the rambling front porch guitar of the rural roads. I fell into a trance of imagination, deep in my own history as I headed down the wide highway on cruise control. Often, this summer, my memories were of the moments in my own life when I had acted in racist ways, realized only in wincing hindsight. These memories were distinct, and blistering reminders of how race consciousness had been my constant companion for much of my life. I had been taught not to be a racist, but I had also been taught that the world was made of us and of them. This latter teaching was the reason for the former.

This was found in the way some of my relatives and others in my white childhood community might whisper “Black” when talking about someone on the news or gossiping about a neighbor or someone at the store. They didn’t want to make a thing out of the thing they were making a thing of.        

It was as if the mere mention of Blackness could get them in trouble – they were afraid of being judged racist for mentioning race, but also afraid of not mentioning a person’s race, because they believed that Blackness meant something – power, victimhood, brilliance, poverty – that they couldn’t quite grasp. The very thought of their own race consciousness frightened them.

“He was,” their voice would suddenly drop to a hush, “Black,” the last word dropping off a cliff into the ether. Maybe a knowing nod and glance around to be sure no one had misinterpreted them. My mother would do this. She didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that she was race conscious – she would have felt ashamed. But neither did she want to emphasize that she wasn’t. And it wasn’t just my mother, it was all the liberal people I knew as a child. These were do-gooder white people, and their relationships with black people were, for the most part, awkward and unnatural. The key was not to be labeled as race conscious (or, God forbid, a racist) when that is exactly what you were.

In middle school my friend Timothy, who was [whisper] Black, you know, and I were considered troublemakers. Our alliance inflamed people everywhere we went. We smoked pot and cigarettes, wore t-shirts featuring upside down American flag images and thought we were the coolest people in the world. Maybe Jimi Hendrix was cooler, but not for long. One afternoon after school we were playing video games and goofing around at a bowling alley when the manager called the cops on us – two 13 year olds.  The officer made fun of Timmy’s spectacular afro and I called him a pig and he handcuffed me and took me downtown.

Curiously, that night my mother was the social worker on call when juveniles were detained, and when she saw me, she burst into tears.

For some reason two white cheerleaders at our school, West Junior High, liked me and Timmy. We liked them, too.  Within days of our relationships going public, the adults stepped in. The girl who liked me was told to stay away because I wore Frye boots and chambray shirts every day and smoked Camel Tall cigarettes. The girl who liked Timmy was not told to do anything. Instead, they told Timmy to leave her alone, as though he were a spell-casting shaman. True to form, we all ignored the freaks who ran the school and continued to see each other in secret until we all got bored.

Timmy and I drifted apart later that year. It was no big deal. We both understood that Black and White friends in Lawrence in the 1970s inevitably split along racial lines at about age 14. The tribes coalesced and excluded outsiders. Mixing the groups became uncomfortable. I didn’t think much of it, and it didn’t surprise me when it happened. We still hung out once in a while.   

In 1973, when I was 15 years old, Timmy, out of the blue, invited me to hang out. I hadn’t seen him in months when he pulled up in a car with a friend of I’d never met. We drove through the streets of Lawrence, sipping Mateus sweet wine and listening to The Isley Brothers. I was in the back seat; Timmy drove and his friend was in the passenger seat. Their big Afros framed the setting sunlight as we passed the Indian College, headed out into the countryside to cruise the farm roads. They talked and shot the shit and called each other the N-word.

I’d been hearing that word a lot recently, used among Black people, and it threw me for a loop. I’d been raised not to use that word practically under penalty of death and I didn’t understand the protocol. In the car, Timmy and his friend kept using it in a playful, insider way and I wanted to be included in whatever they were up to. At the same time, my gut told me no. I tossed the word around my mind, should I? Shouldn’t I? I was desperate to join the club they had in the front seat. I waited a few minutes and then took a leap. I threw the word out. A second passed, then the car jerked to the side of road and all hell broke loose. I thought they were going to beat me down. The Isley Brothers swirled around me. “Hear me calling out to you, ‘cause that’s all that I can do, your eyes tell me to pursue, but you say look, yeah, but don’t touch, baby, no no no don’t touch,” circled my ears as Timmy and his friend threw me out of the car.

Now, driving towards Texas in June, 2020, a truck horn blared, and I swerved back into my lane and continued towards the state line. Driving my truck was like driving a memory machine.

I crossed the Texas state line on the holiday of Juneteenth.

In recent decades, more Texans and Oklahomans of all stripes had begun to celebrate the day and there was talk that it would become a national holiday. Yet, for many, even simply acknowledging that enslavement had been damaging to the enslaved was becoming more problematic. A white man on a radio talk show argued, with seemingly rational intellectual fervor, that enslaved people had been well cared for.

“They just hadn’t been paid,” he said.

I arrived in Houston knowing very little about the place, although I did know that before the Civil War this land was home to a number of plantations built and maintained by enslaved people. I found myself driving around the largely Black Third Ward, trying to get a sense of how this dynamic, incredibly diverse city worked. “George Floyd” was written in black across several walls – he lived in Houston before he was murdered in Minneapolis. Near a group of small early 20th century houses, I heard the Houston hip hop star Z-Ro blasting from a block party:

All eyes on me like I'm TuPac

I got mine I don't give a fuck what you got

It was so loud that my truck hummed with the bass. I turned onto a narrow street to face a crowd spread across two vacant lots and the asphalt itself. I slowed to a crawl as people made way for my truck. The music felt louder. I felt whiter.

There was a tented bar and a small stage with a DJ. Behind him giant speakers. I drove slowly through the crowd. Young men, mostly, but a few women, wearing jeans and muscle shirts or no shirts and baggy shorts. I wanted to park and get out and talk, see what was going on, find out what they were celebrating, as I’d already done so many times on this trip. Was it Juneteenth that brought out the music? Was there any room for me? The only person paying me any mind was myself. I was The Other, nervous in the presence of so much Blackness. What right did I have to intrude on this party? I couldn’t even figure out the right place to park.

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The music faded behind me as I rounded a corner to face the words spray painted on a house:

Covid 19 is a scam!

Resist the lie!

A block over, a 20-foot-tall comic-style portrait of George Floyd featured his name in giant green letters, plus Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor written in elaborate script.

In a bike store I tried to make random conversation. No interest. In a park, a couple of men my age had no desire to engage. For an intense few hours I openly observed without really being seen. The Other had arrived, and everyone chose to ignore him. On June 19, 2020, in the state of Texas, no one said a word to The Other about Juneteenth. Somehow, that felt about right.