The Georgia Street house, 35 years after the fact

“Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
Angels watch me through the night,
And wake me with the morning light.”

— “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep,” a much-revised prayer, the earliest form of which was penned by Joseph Addison in 1711

Phase One: Myclonic Jerk

A lingering lower-back problem has mandated in no uncertain terms that I embark upon the tedious process of procuring a new mattress. My initial investigation into the associated commerce has revealed a stunning spin on economic theory as it relates directly to a personal lifestyle equation that has pretty much been writ in stone for many decades: In order to significantly upgrade my bedding situation, I will have to shell out approximately the same amount of money it would cost me to purchase a round-trip ticket to, well, pretty much anywhere that boasts an international airport.

It’s not as though I now lay me down upon a bed of nails. My current mattress was bought from a store named something like House of Snooze. Maybe not top shelf as far as sleep system retailers go, but neither was it a yard sale taking place behind a crack house. I think the price surpassed triple digits, but not by much. Still, for the past several years, it has been a decided step up from the beds of my sordid past.

Just the other day, I drove by a hovel over on Georgia Street that I occupied in the early 1980s. That it is still standing shocked me, as it was in a state of near decomposition when it was passed down to me by a young lady — an acquaintance of an acquaintance — who was leaving town in order to broaden her vocational horizons. (She was an aspiring prostitute who found the pecuniary potential of dirt-poor Silver City somewhat discouraging.) The hovel consisted of three small, drafty rooms: a sparse kitchen that did not sport so much as a square millimeter of counter space, a bathroom so small that you almost had to sit crossed-legged on the toilet and a combination living room/bedroom.

The budding hooker, who was trying desperately to find a gullible person to relieve her of a lease that was not due to expire for some months, told me the place was furnished. Turns out, the furnishings consisted solely of a three-legged chair and a disintegrating screen door that was mounted on four cinder blocks. The woman considered the latter to be a very versatile — to say nothing of decorative (in an extremely minimalist sort of way) — piece that doubled as both couch and bed.

Since the hovel rented for only $80 a month, I took it. I placed a dissolving three-quarters-length Ensolite sleeping pad I had been given by a Good Samaritan halfway into my thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail atop that screen door and called it good. Basically, after having spent the previous several years sleeping on the ground as much as I slept on a bed, I really didn’t give a shit. I had electricity, heat, indoor plumbing, running water and a roof over my head. That was living large for yours truly in those free-floating days.

My hovel quickly became a gathering place for wayward ne’er-do-wells of all stripes.

One of the regular visitors was a young man I shall herein call Willie. Willie was a half-Native American who hailed from a small town adjacent the Mescalero Apache Reservation. He spoke fluent Tex-Mex and enjoyed making intoxicated merry perhaps a bit too much, as we all did. He was ostensibly a college student who, like many of my cohorts, received a fair amount of financial aid with the idea that, eventually, a graduation would ensue, but who, in actuality, usually finished each semester with three incompletes, a D-minus and a dropped class that never was officially dropped because he had forgotten he ever signed up for it in the first place.

As testament to how low our standards were, I learned one day over bong hits that I was something of a hero to Willie. He told me I was the only person he associated with who actually occasionally went to class and actually finished each academic year with verifiable evidence that I was making progress toward a degree. Given that I was anyone’s definition of a desultory student, I was simultaneously flattered and fearful for my future.

Willie lived a quasi-nomadic life. He couch-surfed. He often slept illegally in the basement of one of the dormitories. He camped. Occasionally — mostly at the beginning of each semester, when he was flush with cash — he would rent a room in a local flophouse.

One day, Willie, who had been squatting in an abandoned shack up near Pinos Altos, delivered to me good news. With cold weather coming, he was moving back into town. And the shack had within it an old mattress that, Willie said, was a step up from my Ensolite-adorned screen door. He scratched some rudimentary directions onto the back of a brown grocery bag that had most recently been used to deliver five-pounds of skanky ditch weed to an unscrupulous local dealer who had a well-earned notorious reputation for repackaging inferior smokeables, applying to them inappropriate over-the-top appellation — bullshit stuff like “Gila Red” and “Mimbres Dynamite” — and selling them at grossly inflated prices.

That very evening, I drove my battered putty-colored ex-UPS Ford van — which came my way in an off-the-books transaction that included a 10-speed bicycle, a 12-string guitar, eight grams of sticky black opium and $200 cash — up the rutted road scratched onto Willie’s hand-drawn map. A few miles up the hill and, sure enough, there was a diminutive cinderblock building matching Willie’s verbal description. It was obviously associated with a long-abandoned mining operation. Probably, it was used to store explosives. It was maybe 12 feet by 12 feet and had only a couple very small windows near the roofline. In place of a door was a brightly colored fake Navajo blanket hanging from two nails.

The inside was surprisingly well tended. While hardly spotless, it was clean in a Thoreau/Walden Pond sort of way. There was a broom leaning against a wall. There was a small table and two chairs. There were several candle holders and an oil lamp. The walls were decorated with badly outdated calendars sporting incongruous pictures of snow-covered mountains.

And, in one corner could be found the goal of my quest: a twin-sized mattress. According to Willie, the shack in which the mattress was located was, much like the dump I called home, bequeathed from resident to resident and had been for many years. Remote and hidden as it was, the only way anyone would learn of its existence was to be told by someone who likely planned to move on. This marked the third time Willie had lived in the shack. Thus, he knew the mattress was an integral part of the residence. This knowledge led to a multi-tiered mental wrestling match on my part.

First, I felt a bit bad about horking a resident fixture from the domicile.

Second, I recoiled a bit when I considered the biological back-story of the mattress. A visual reconnoiter did nothing to assuage my concerns regarding the mosaic of stains that covered both sides. There were unidentifiable discolorations mixed with mysterious blotches interspersed with inexplicable smudges commingling with bewildering blemishes. Basically it looked like a biker-gang-related crime scene that had transpired in a Third World meatpacking plant. It’s fair to say the DNA was highly contaminated.

Yet I was not dissuaded by my uncharacteristic revulsion. Though, given its soiled condition, the mattress was much heavier than I expected, I wrestled it singlehandedly into my van and proceeded directly to my slum, happy as a pig in slop.

Phase Two: Slow Wave

Willie’s relationship with that mattress did not end with my run to the old mining shack he had lately called home.

Willie was what I would have to call a combination of background music and wallpaper. He was often there … at a party, at a cookout, when students gathered in the arroyo next to the Eckles Hall dormitory to get high. He rarely contributed anything besides his presence, which was pleasant in an unoffending sort of way. If he had drugs, which was not often, he would share them enthusiastically. Mostly though he was one of those people you didn’t notice was gone till he came back. He would add comments to a conversation but rarely commence discourse. He was physically unobtrusive, maybe five-five, 120 tops. He had deep brown eyes and high cheekbones rising above a badly pockmarked face. He wore a faded serape that looked like it was inherited from Clovis-era ancestors, and he wore it with dignity. His straight, shoulder-length jet-black hair was parted in the middle. He wore a bright-red bandanna around his head. He would have been a perfect subject for an Edwin Curtis photogravure.

Willie seemed like an orphan who made you want to foster him but not adopt him.

Just before Christmas break, three pretty, and pretty wild, women dropped by my Georgia Street hovel for a few days. I had met one of the ladies the previous summer. She had been working as a volunteer ranger at Badlands National Park up in South Dakota when I passed through on my way from Georgia to British Columbia. We hit it off. She and her two traveling companions, all from New York City, were navigating a behemoth drive-away stationwagon to Southern California and, since Silver City was less than an hour off Interstate 10, they detoured so the ranger lady and I might reconnect.

With two unattached vixens in town, friends came out of the woodwork, giving the women a choice of local male material as we planned various daytrips into the Gila National Forest, one of which was a hike to Turkey Creek Hot Springs, one of the most magically beauteous destinations in the entire Mountain Time Zone.

Vixen number-two invited a sorta buddy of mine, who I later learned practiced grand larceny as a sideline. He had lent me a brand-new IBM Selectric typewriter, which was the same kind of machine used by none other than Hunter S. Thompson! The grand larcenist said, since he had graduated, it was gathering dust in a closet and he knew I would put it to good use. At the time, I was working off an old manual Underwood I scored at a local pawnshop for $40, so the thought of upgrading to what was then the apex of typing technology was very appealing. Months later, while cleaning the electric typewriter, I turned it over and there on the bottom was a metal label describing it as property of Western New Mexico University. It had been heisted and I was therefore indirectly complicit in a felony perpetrated upon my alma mater.

I suppose the typewriter thief was using me — and who knows how many other people? — to store his ill-gotten goods until such time as he deemed it safe to fence them. Under cover of darkness, I carried the typewriter, along with an anonymous note explaining the situation, to the campus security office, where I left it on the front step.

When next I ran into my felonious friend, I told him I had some bad news: Someone had entered my abode, which was left perpetually unlocked, and made off with the Selectric he had so graciously lent me.

“Well, I think you should pay me for my loss,” he replied lamely.

“First, I need to file a police report,” I said. “As the actual owner, you’ll probably have to fill out some forms.”

The subject was never again broached.

But I did not know about my chum’s dark side as we were planning our foray to Turkey Creek.

The third woman invited Willie, who might have been taking advantage of the fact that she was breathlessly enamored of all things indigenous by embellishing his noble-savage bonafides. (Hell, for all I knew, maybe he was — as he intimated to the impressionable damsel — a direct descendent of both Geronimo and Cochise.) Willie was so stunned, he could scarcely stammer out an enthusiastic affirmative.

So, six of us piled into the behemoth stationwagon, which, according to the drive-away contract, was not to be used for any sort of extracurricular activities and furthermore was really most sincerely not to be taken on unpaved roads, and proceeded to navigate it for a solid hour down a track that was numerous operational levels beneath the description of “unpaved.”

We crossed the Gila River twice with that stationwagon, a decision that caused a certain amount of consternation on the part of the three women whose names were etched upon the drive-away contract. I assured them all would be well. This promise I made despite an applicable experience to the contrary. A scant year prior, with me serving as obstacle spotter while sitting on the hood of an old Datsun sedan, my associates and I got stuck up past the wheel wells while crossing this exact same stretch of the Gila and had to wait till the next morning for help while the car sat in the middle of a flow that rose with each passing hour. A four-wheel-drive pickup truck eventually came by and got itself stuck helping us, which necessitated waiting several more hours for another four-wheel-drive pickup to happen by and, with all three vehicles spinning tires, grinding gears and maxing out their tachometers, we managed by the skin of our teeth to get safely to high ground.

But these three ladies from New York City did not need to hear that. So, with yours truly at the wheel of a vehicle I had no vested interest in preserving, I recklessly gunned it across the Gila without issue, or at least without issue that concerned me.

It’s a solid 90-minute hike to Turkey Creek Hot Springs, two hours if you are ingesting handfuls of drugs, which the typewriter thief, Willie and I were doing with reckless abandon. The women not only did not partake, but they were all haughtily repulsed by what pretty much everyone I associated with in those days took as a behavioral given.

Oh, well.

The typewriter thief was standoffish during the entire experience. He was a refugee from the suburbs whose only interest in this outing took the form of the lady who had invited him. He was intimidated by the New Mexico wild.

Willie, on the other hand, was having the time of his life. Not only was he in a stunning locale he had never before visited with people whose company he was enjoying immensely, but he had for once in his life been purposefully included on the guest list. And by a buxom beauty who, as she effused on numerous occasions, found him to be one of the sweetest men she had ever met. She seemingly wanted to begin the process of bearing Willie’s children as soon as it was convenient for him to whip his noodle out.

Few things in the world trump contributing to someone else’s well-deserved happiness.

We enjoyed some skinny-dipping in the hot springs, followed by a nice picnic lunch the ladies had prepared. I wandered upstream a few hundred yards to doze in the late-autumn sun. Though the creek was noisy enough that it served as an acoustic buffer, some verbal commotion interrupted my reverie. At first, I thought it was just my compadres messing around. As my attention focused, however, I could hear my name being called in a tone and at a volume that clearly indicated all was not well, that the cosmos had just taken a big nasty ol’ shit right in the middle of a here-and-now that, scant seconds prior, had been downright agreeable on all levels. My friends were flat the fuck freaking out. Hands were raised above heads like a combination of a Southern Baptist revival and a chainsaw-based horror movie. People were running willy-nilly and bumping into each other. Sandwiches were flying every which way. I dashed back and there lying on the ground was Willie in the midst of the worst grand mal seizure I have to this day ever seen. The dude looked like he had been plugged into a 240-volt electric socket at the same time he had been possessed by a particularly malevolent demon. He was jerking so badly that, even with my full body weight attempting to restrain him, he continued to flail wildly.

Foam spewed forth from his mouth like an unattended high-pressure firehouse running amok and his eyes were rolled back so far we could not see his irises, much less his pupils. Various important body parts, like, as but one random example, his head, kept banging into proximate boulders. Blood mixed with sand.

This situation was the denotation of “buzzkill.”

The three women were far too busy screaming and running into each other and dropping sandwiches to be of much assistance. And the typewriter thief just stood there, hands limply at his sides, looking lost and forlorn.

My spontaneous plan was to minimize the thrashing-based physiological damage and to try to talk Willie back to our particular skewed version of reality. Eventually he returned. He was dazed and disoriented in the extreme. He wanted to know why I was lying on his chest and why I was telling him everything would be OK in a voice unambiguously suggesting I had to earthly belief anything would ever again be even remotely OK.

This situation was exacerbated by the sobering realization that we had before us a hike across rugged terrain, punctuated with many sketchy creek crossings. Willie was wobbly. He needed two of us at his side to make any forward progress. He stumbled often and this sweet kid was fast turning seriously belligerent to the point of combativeness. He simply could not understand what was going on. He had no recollection of his seizure and argued that we were making it up just to embarrass him. One by one, the women fell away exhausted and distraught, and the typewriter thief walked ahead as fast as his pitiful excuse for legs would carry him. I believe I even saw him flapping his arms trying to fly away.

So, for much of the hike out, it was just Willie and I.

It took us four hours to reach the waist-deep Gila River, which we had to cross on foot to reach the stationwagon. The whole way, Willie fought me. I had to resort to every variation on the cajoling theme I could mentally muster. I encouraged him. I related stories of our various partying escapades. I lied through my teeth by telling him how much fun we would have with those three women once we got back to town. I called him a fucking pussy and disparaged every bad-ass Native American stereotype I could think of. None of it worked individually. All of it worked in the aggregate.

When we finally and thank-godfully made it back to the behemoth stationwagon, we put the seatback down and laid out Willie — who was then, like all of us, soaked from the river crossing. The three women gathered around and took turns talking encouragingly, while the typewriter thief stared glumly out the window. There was little else to do on the first-aid front during those pre-cell phone days

With the last tendrils of dusk hovering above canyon walls almost 4,000 feet deep, I inched that old stationwagon across the Gila, knowing full well that the last thing we needed was to get stuck in the middle of the river. I then drove a bit faster than prudence normally would have dictated down the rutted and serpentine dirt road that would eventually connect us with pavement outside the village of Gila, from where I redlined the car, which, by then, was sporting a few more unidentifiable rattles than it had before our trip commenced 10 hours prior.

Topping out at 100, we made it back to Silver City in less than half an hour. My goal was the emergency room of our local hospital, a long-since-demolished haunted-house-looking facility that had as much a reputation for inexplicable death as it did for restoration of health and well being. First, though, the indignant typewriter thief demanded I take him home. He had been muttering for several hours about how he could not believe what a fucked-up outing he had signed on for and how he would never under any circumstances even consider joining us for another foray, no matter how many unattached lasses we could offer as company. I told him I would drop him off at a street corner that would necessitate him walking maybe 15 blocks. He harrumphed and egressed the stationwagon without saying good-bye or even closing the door.

We were greeted promptly at the emergency entrance by two attendants, one of whom placed Willie, who was by this point bouncing between quiet detachment, overt discombobulation and profanity-laced belligerence, in a wheelchair, and one of whom transcribed my recollection of events. There were numerous questions to both Willie and I regarding types and amounts of illegal intoxicants recently ingested. I was slightly embarrassed that I could not recollect exact pharmacology and specific dosages.

“Many and much” was the best I could do.

When he was asked if had ever experienced a seizure before, Willie mumbled, “I fell down once when I was young.”

The three women returned to my Georgia Street residence. They sped away at first light.

I sat exhausted in the waiting room. Several hours later, a young male doctor came out and reported to me that they had performed several tests, which showed, yes, Willie had indeed suffered a grand mal seizure. The doctor could tell I was spent. He put a hand on my shoulder and said, in all likelihood, Willie would fully recover, but they wanted to keep him for a couple days just to be on the safe side

The doctor then whispered: “You did all the right things under the circumstances. There’s not much else you could have done. He’s lucky to have a friend like you.”

I went to Willie’s room to see how he was doing. He was heavily sedated. He looked comfortable lying, maybe for the first time in his life, on a plush mattress on clean sheets in a sterile roomful of beeping and blinking monitors with an IV bag hanging next to him and a clear hose running to his exposed forearm.

I went back to the hospital two days later. Though there was little more they could do, the doctor was reluctant to release Willie, since he apparently had no home address and no one to look after him.

“He can stay at my place till he gets better,” I heard myself saying.

Willie rested on that same disgusting mattress for the better part of a week. His nocturnal agitation was so intense, I slept out in the backyard. One morning, when I went inside, he was gone. No note. No Nothing. Just gone.

I did not see Willie for several months. As buds began appearing on the elms lining the streets of Silver City’s historic district, he stopped by out of the blue, not quite acting as though nothing had transpired that day along Turkey Creek, but almost. We smoked a joint he brought with him, talked about upcoming final examinations — which I would be halfheartedly taking and he, once again, would be missing. A few other friends came and went, but Willie extended his visit, apparently purposefully.

“Do you ever hear from those women?” he asked, casually, once we were alone.

“Nah. Seemed like that ship sailed.”

“Sorry I fell down that day,” he said, staring stoically straight ahead.

“You feeling better?”

“I don’t know.”

There was an awkward silence.

“When I woke up and you were holding me down and calling my name, I thought you were an angel,” Willie said. “Your head was glowing and you had wings.”

I couldn’t for the life of me figure how he made me out to be a member in good stead of the heavenly host. Maybe the sun was at my back, illuminating my unkempt locks. And maybe two of our cohorts were standing behind me in such a way that their bodies appeared to a man lying on his back emerging incrementally from a seizure as feathery appendages.

Either way, it marked the first time in my devilish existence I had ever been mistaken for a divine being.

After another long silence, Willie asked: “That mattress still working out?”

“Yes it is,” I said. “I appreciate you pointing me toward it.”

And, with those few allusive sentences, we both understood my mattress-based debt to Willie had been paid in full, with interest duly accrued.

I spent the summer working as a night watchman on a paddle-wheeler on the Mississippi River. Midway through the next fall semester, I realized I had not seen Willie since I returned from the humid hell of the Big Muddy. No one seemed to know what had become of him. To this day, I have heard nary a syllable about his whereabouts or his condition.

Phase Three: Paradoxical

That nasty mattress stayed with me for several years. It alternated between the floor of the various slums I called home and the back of my battered van. It was while taking refuge in that van that it absorbed additional stains.

There was a post-midterm Bacchanal scheduled for the Middle Box of the Gila River, just downriver from where I extricated Willie from his seizure nightmare. I drove to the correct coordinates and spent an appropriate number of hours engaging in academic discourse with people whose tongues were lolling out of their mouths. Somewhere between dusk and dawn, I decided it was time to part ways with my fellow revelers, most of whom, like me, were too hammered to articulate proper valedictions.

One person who was face-planted into the sand bordering the river was an amigo I’ll call Hawk, who was, even by New Mexico’s forgiving cultural barometer, a strange hombre. He was, first of all, 20 years the senior of most every student at our local college. He had opted to return to the classroom with a grey beard and arthritic hands bent into perpetual claws partially because he was tired of living a bottom-feeder hippie lifestyle and partially because he, a Vietnam veteran, qualified for generous financial aid. And, because he had a young son, he was also given a subsidized on-campus apartment, which he shared with an extended tribe of fellow Rainbow Family members, most of whom were named Moonbeam, Cinnamon and Dancing Bear.

Hawk was a talented and passionate writer who I employed to work for me at the student newspaper, which I edited for three years. We became friends, though I have to admit his omnipresent philosophical eccentricity often negatively impacted my attempts to seduce some of the coeds who then traveled on the periphery of my social trapezoid.

Hawk maintained a working still in the back of his apartment. The still was actually owned and operated by a crusty old hard-rock miner I’ll call Cactus Jack. Cactus Jack, who passed away several weeks after being thrown from a highway overpass by someone who was never identified, much less brought to justice, was an in-your-face barroom evangelist who downed boilermakers at the Drifter Lounge in between rambling tabletop invocations. He also taught me how to pan for gold, a skill I managed over the years to parlay into numerous paid writing assignments, including the first piece I ever sold to Backpacker magazine, where I ended up working as a contributing editor for more than a decade.

Hawk drank Cactus Jack’s homemade moonshine like he was trying to drown something dark. This often resulted in a loss of not only coherency but also consciousness. Which was clearly the case as the post-midterm gathering at the Middle Box was embering its way toward dissipation. Though I suspected I would later grow to regret it, I dragged Hawk back to my van by one leg and leveraged his dazed carcass onto the mattress. I tried to impart some salient information — stuff like who I was and where I was taking him — but all he could do was snore, drool and yak, adding extra layers of DNA to my already-repulsive rack.

Halfway home, I had to stop to take a leak. I pulled over near Saddle Rock, exited the van and relieved myself. As I was doing so, I shouted back, asking Hawk if he was OK. I heard a groan that sounded more or less affirmative in nature, which, in my mind, meant he was still alive, if not exactly kicking.

Twenty miles later, I parked in front of his apartment and walked around to help my sloshed chum inside, only to observe that, where I expected Hawk to be, he was not. This was more of a concern than it might have been in ordinary circumstances, since my van did not have any doors. There was no driver-side door. There was no passenger-side door. Where there were normally two side doors, there were no doors. Where there once had been two back doors, there were no doors. I had removed all six doors because they, being rusted through and ready to fall off anyhow, rattled loudly and that noise bothered me. While a lack of doors did not exactly improve the overall safety coefficient of the vehicle, it sufficiently addressed the noise issue while simultaneously providing a 360-degree vista.

Admittedly, I was not thinking all that clearly, but, still, I was able to mentally muster a plausible explanation regarding my missing muchacho: He had obviously fallen out of my van somewhere between Saddle Rock and where I now stood bumfuzzled. There was of course only one option: I had to drive back to initiate a salvage run for whatever might be left of Hawk.

I pointed my van west on U.S. Highway 180, entertaining while I did so the myriad potential negative possibilities I was facing.

First, there was a good chance I would not locate Hawk, at least until daybreak. If he had indeed rolled out the back of the van, he likely had careened off the road into the brush.

Still, it was possible he had thudded down in the middle of the blacktop, upon which case he would likely have been run over, maybe several times. While the thought of Hawk with tire tracks across his chest made me wince, those thoughts eventually wandered to potential interfaces with the judicial system. What was my culpability? Was I to blame for whatever harm might have befallen my buddy, inadvertent as my actions might have been?

What if I rounded a bend and there was an ambulance and a gaggle of sheriff’s cars, lights a-blazing, while a team of paramedics attempted to revive a moonshine-breathed man whose last words were “John Fayhee.” I myself was inebriated. My driver’s license was both long lost and long expired. I had no insurance. Because I had acquired my van under extra-legal circumstances, I had no vehicle registration.

I could be in deep mierda.

This indeed presented an ethical conundrum.

I mean, I liked Hawk just fine, but not enough to go to prison for him, especially if he was already expired.

By the time all these thoughts were bouncing around in my head like pinballs on speed, I rounded a bend and there on the shoulder was Hawk, upright, but staggering badly, headed in exactly the wrong direction. I pulled over and asked if he wanted a ride.

“Why did you leave me?” he slurred pitifully.

“I figured you needed the exercise,” I responded with faux nonchalance camouflaging a degree of relief that almost had me in tears. It was all I could do to refrain from hugging Hawk there on the side of the highway.

Ended up that, when I yelled after his well being while I was urinating, he attained something approximating functional coherency, and, as I was returning to my position as pilot of my pitiful excuse for transportation, he simultaneously got out to relieve himself. He said he was quite startled to see me drive off.

“I was pissing as fast as I could!” he exclaimed. “You should be more patient!”

True, that.

I helped him back on the mattress and took him home without further mishap.

That mattress and I parted ways when I abandoned a primitive camp way out in the desert. The mattress had been placed on the ground next to a big juniper, where I slept night after night under the stars with a dog and a cat — who added to the stain milieu by bearing four kittens upon it. When monsoon season hit full force, I was backpacking in the Gila Wilderness and the mattress got soaked beyond salvation. I left it beneath the tree, where its remnants might still lie.

As for the van, which by then hardly ran: When I moved to Colorado in 1982, I handed the keys to a man I hardly knew. I took a bus north, to begin life anew in a place where climatic reality required doors.

Phase Four: Rapid Eye Movement

Last week, with mattress-based thoughts swirling in my head, I decided to try to hunt that old shack down, the homey little place from which, with Willie’s directions, I had liberated that funky mattress. The dirt road now has a formal, though prosaic, name: Radio Tower Road — which, not surprisingly, accesses the summit of two peaks that are thick with various species of antennae, dishes, discs and, in all likelihood, electronic surveillance apparatus owned and operated by Homeland Security, which maintains a noticeable, some would say obtrusive, un-Constitutional presence in the borderland area.

When I sought that well-used mattress all those years ago, few people traveled up this road. The mining operations, the remnants of which are visible from the highway connecting Silver City with Pinos Altos, had long been abandoned and, in those delightfully primitive days, the peaks were clear of electronics. Thus, there was no reason to maintain the road. Few people drove up there. Now, with the texting needs of thousands of people depending upon the upkeep of those antennae, dishes and discs, Radio Tower Road is frequently graded and therefore is smooth enough to accommodate passenger vehicles.

I parked at the bottom and, with my dog, set out on foot, opting to combine a stroll down memory lane with some exercise.

With rain clouds forming thickly overhead, we took off toward the summit of the mountain with the most antennae. The road contoured along the face of the ridge, passing into and out of numerous side drainages.

Ahead, in the middle of some of the various mine-tailing piles, I visually acquired my target. Because of the serpentine nature of the road, it took a half-hour to get there, and, when I did, the shack was nowhere to be seen. It was either hidden by trees, or perhaps I had seen something that, from a distance, was a mirage. I continued on toward the summit, but was stopped cold with a no-nonsense no trespassing sign and a locked gate.

On the way back down, I walked more slowly, examining the lay of the land, which was dominated by trash — the bane of rural New Mexico. There was plenty of simple litter: fast-food packaging, beer and soda cans and broken glass. There were uncountable of shell casings, as this, like many areas in the sunny Southwest, is utilized with enthusiasm by people opting to bear arms without opting to clean up after themselves.

There was also a stunning amount of household refuse dumped off the side of the road. Entire truckloads of discarded appliances and furniture filled otherwise scenic side canyons. Intertwined in that refuse were several mattresses. I stood there, raindrops pattering off my hat, wondering about the stories those mattresses might tell. Few household items can trump mattresses for narrative resonance. Dreams. Lovemaking. Going to bed mad. Illness. Scared toddlers looking for parental comfort. Abandonment. Disconsolation. Fretfulness. Prayer. Death.

All reduced to garbage.

I exited the road and entered into one of the dead zones defined by deserted mining operations. While there is much to admire about the place such enterprises hold in the mythology of the Wild West — ingenuity, toughness, vision — the truth of the matter is that most long disused mine sites are ecological disasters with half-lives measured in centuries. I always tiptoe across their toxic soil with trepidation, as though the host of poisons contained therein might seep through the soles of my boots like radioactive Ebola. I breathe less deeply. I wince when viewing the unnatural coloration that defines the polluted pallet of abandoned mines.

Right in the middle of a sea of crumbled cinder was the shack. It had seen some hard times since my last visit. One side was riddled with pockmarks left by point-blank weapons discharge. It looked like the wall of a firing squad facility. There was no colorful Navajo blanket. No candles. No table and chair. No calendars. The inside was a disgusting muddy mess, with what I guessed to be uninspired occult designs on the walls. Dark sullen dankness defined the ambiance. The thought that this place was once used as a domicile, even by people with nowhere else to hang their hat, was impossible to fathom. The thought that I once pilfered a mattress from these dreary confines made my skin crawl at the same time it made me smile.

Like many people knocking with gnarled fists upon the door of their sixth decade, I find myself wistfully mentally wandering back to days when I did not have more parts that hurt than parts that do not hurt. When my back was straight and fully able to solo wrestle a mattress from a shack into the back of a doorless van. When I crashed on whatever came between me and the cold, hard ground.

Phase Five: Awakening

Concurrent with the decision to buy a new mattress is the question of what we will do with the mattress that now serves as the setting for my slumber. I have spent more time directly connected to that mattress than I have any other piece of furniture I own. Certainly, it does not have the historic cachet of my desk, which was once owned by a famous personality. It does not have the coolness of our oak dining room table or our Victorian couch.

Still — upon that mattress, I have pulled the covers around my chin on many a rainy morning. I have taken multitudinous afternoon naps. I have played hand-under-the-blanket with our purring cat for hours on end. Upon its folds, I have dreamed of crossing mountain ridges that defied the laws of gravity. I have dreamed of sailing to Greenland through cold seas with waves as high as the moon. Upon its folds, I have lied awake at 3 a.m. attempting to fabricate a suitable denouement for a nearly finished essay. I have tossed and turned over missed deadlines. I have passed out drunk upon its glorious ridges and folds more times than I care to count. Upon it I writhed for almost three weeks when infected with the H1N1 flu virus. It is upon that mattress that my wife and I consoled each other the night we had to put our old dog down. And it was upon that mattress that I lay prostrate for a week, knocked woozy by painkillers, when I hurt my back three days before we were scheduled to leave on a trip to Cuba.

With all mattresses, there is yin and there is yang. Most of us come in on a mattress and most of us will go out on one, too.

I suspect we will take that mattress to the Habitat for Humanity Re-Store on the other side of town. We recycle the detritus of our almost embarrassingly middle-class life there fairly frequently. Last time, it was two badly outdated light fixtures placed in our house by the people who built it during the Summer of Love. Before I even passed onto the Re-Store property, a woman probably 70 years old who pulled up behind me effused about how lovely those butt-ugly fixtures were. She offered me $5 on the spot. I told her she was welcome to them and she acted the same way I did when I scored that mattress from the shack that now pockmarked with bullet holes.

One person’s trash is indeed another person’s treasure.

The mattress we will soon discard will make a good bed for someone. I hope it will see long-remembered bedtime stories and giggly slumber parties and passionate lovemaking. I hope it will provide comfort when the flu visits and on the day when the old dog is sent over the rainbow bridge. I hope it becomes a snug bastion in an unpredictable world, a world where sometimes you get a surprise invite to join three buxom lasses on a trip to a beautiful hot spring and sometimes you get left on the side of a lonesome highway while taking a piss under the deep dark New Mexico sky.

Maybe a decade ago, when my tenure at the magazine I had long edited was clearly headed down the shitter, I started, out of quiet desperation, regularly eyeballing a help-wanted website called journalismjobs.com. I am a creature of habit; once I start doing something, I usually continue until there is an overt reason to stop. (See: Amphetamines.) To this day, I still visit journalismjobs.com at least once a week.

Part of me argues (to myself) that it behooves me to stay abreast of the personnel happenings in my ill-chosen field.

Part of me interfaces with journalismjobs.com the same way some folks scrutinize obituaries. Or fatal car crashes. It’s interesting — in a horrific sort of way — to watch from afar the “digital-first” death twitches of my chosen profession.

Still, part of me thinks that, if the right gig appeared, I might actually apply, especially if 1) it pays at least one notch above starvation wages and 2) is located in an attractive place, like, as but a few recent random examples, the U.S. Virgin Islands, St. Kitts, Kenai, Alaska, and Big Sky, Montana. (There is, not surprisingly, a high degree of mutual exclusivity at play between numbers 1 and 2.)

And part of me derives amusement from the names of some of the newspapers that advertise on the site. The Searchlight. The Headlight. The Spectator. The Exponent. The Diplomat. The Champion. The Appeal. The Defensor. The Manifest.

There is of course more to my journalismjobs.com habit.

But first: Whether placed by a newspaper, magazine, TV or radio station, advertising agency or university — the ads listed on journalismjobs.com generally include:

• Often-hyperbolic pitches for the publication’s hometown, many of which are located hell and gone and are represented by the smallest municipal icons available to the cartographers at Rand-McNally. Stuff like: “Amenities include miles and miles of converted railroad trails passing by lush cornfields.” And: “Home to the Pittsburg State Gorillas.” And: “Only 95 miles SW of Indianapolis.” And “Winters made more tolerable by our heated bowling alley.” And: “Residents enjoy our annual Gravy Festival.”

• A basic description of the position. Such as: “No story is too small for us!” (Read: There are lots of small stories to choose from here in Nutrash, Texas. Matter of fact, the last time we had a story that wasn’t small was when Lyndon Johnson holed up in a local motel while passing through town with his mistress in 1961, but we didn’t dare touch that one because it was too big.”) And: “Some evening and weekend work hours required.” (Meaning: You will rarely have time to visit the heated bowling alley because you’ll be chained to your desk all the time.) And: “Drug-free workplace.” (Meaning: Pull your shriveled little pecker out and get ready to toss whatever last shred of vocational dignity you might still possess before you sign on to cover church bake sales for the Phelgm City Weekly Drivel.) And: “Potential for assignments with other newspapers in the operation.” (Meaning: In addition to your regular duties, we’ll pile on a bunch of extra work so we can squeeze a few more pennies out of your desiccated carcass to add to management’s bonus pool.)

• A list of necessary qualifications. Like: “Ability to generate stories without supervision.” (Read: Our editor is too lazy to help you out, but wait until you screw up, then the editor will rise from the dead and rip you a new asshole, probably in public.) And: “Looking for an all-around sports hound who can write and take pictures.” (Read: We downsized our photographer position seven years ago. Hope you like taking Little League team photos six times a week.) And: “This is an opportunity for an innovative and forward thinking person to make his or her mark in the newspaper world.” (Read: We know your ass will be innovating and forward thinking its way out of here at the first opportunity, so we plan to work your fingers to the bone in the interim, knowing that, as soon as you leave, we’ll be able to lasso am equally forlorn replacement in short order.) And: “Must have a reliable vehicle and a clean driving record.” (Yeah, right.)

• Sometimes a salary is listed (often $20-25,000), though in almost all the journalismjobs.com ads, the word “negotiable” appears under the salary line. Right. Basically this means the powers that be at the publication will negotiate you toward the lowest end of the pay scale while promising to arbitrarily review your performance and, by extension, your remuneration after a purely subjective probationary period while you sit there wondering if Asswad, Kansas, has a food bank. As well, the words “this is an exempt position” often appear, meaning that, despite unambiguous federal laws to the contrary, you will be ineligible for overtime pay, no matter how many hours you work.

• Then there’s the actual application process, which almost always includes a call for several professional references and either hard-copy clips or links to previously published stories.

Most interestingly for our purposes here, and the real reason we have gathered, the application process requires inclusion of a cover letter. This is where the aspiring reporter or editor lies through his or her teeth, trying to disguise their desperation at the thought of actually having to live in Cornhole, Indiana, by writing things like, “It has long been my professional desire — nay, fantasy — to live only 95 miles SW of Indianapolis in a town that has a heated bowling alley and hosts the annual Gravy Festival. I can’t wait to cover every church bake sale between Cornhole and whatever the next miserable hamlet up the road might be.”

Years ago, I read an essay by someone who amused himself by applying for jobs he never in a million years would accept under any circumstances. Jobs like country club bathroom attendant and dry-cleaning technician. I assume that essay provided the inspiration for what has become something of a puerile hobby: Sending less-than-sincere application cover letters to outfits that advertise on journalismjobs.com.

Here is a smattering. Sometimes, I actually get a personalized reply. Most times, the recipients of my communiqués choose to remain perplexingly silent.

Entity Placing Ad: University of Oregon

Position: Endowed Chair of Journalism

To whom it may concern: Though I am somewhat taken aback, to say nothing of amused, by the overt (and literal) sexism displayed in your journalismjobs.com ad, I have to admit that, when push comes to shove, I believe I am as endowed as the next person, especially if the next person is some pasty-faced academician whose notion of procreative prowess is likely found in the flaccid middle-third of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” But I digress. My main point of curiosity at this early point of the application process is perfectly justified: I wonder who will actually be conducting the interview process? Are an interviewee’s sexual preferences taken into account? And what specifically will the criteria be to verify that an applicant is sufficiently “endowed”? Are we talking erect or limp? What about length-to-girth ratios? Is pre-interview Viagra ingestion allowed? Do you apply the imperial or metric system? How do you reconcile the respective qualifications of male and female applicants? Is this information kept private? Will photos be taken and distributed to your resident sorority houses? Either way, if hired, you can count on me to maintain the straight-faced decorum such an august position mandates. Furthermore, fret not that I might be inclined to upper-case and bold-face the word “ENDOWED” on the nameplate that will be prominently displayed on my office door in 200-point type.

Entity Placing Ad: Tampa Bay Times

Position: High Energy Newshound

Dudes: Finally, people after my own true heart! Like you, I have wondered for years why print media coverage of the energy industry is so damned lame. I mean, we are after all talking about the most important industry on the face of the planet. And, like you, I’ve long thought that, if the reporters covering the oil, gas, nuclear and solar industries would just loosen up a bit by smoking a bowl or two before sitting down at the keyboard, the resultant coverage of crazy shit like fracking would surely capture a significantly larger and more diverse readership — Occupy movement protestors, graffiti artists, hip-hop performers, Comparative Lit majors et al. I mean, just think of how much more creative and expansive the coverage of the Fukushima meltdown or the Gulf oil spill or the indigenous protests against Chevron down in Peru would be if the reporter was high as a kite.

A high energy newshound would cut through the industry-sourced bullshit and get to the heartless heart of energy-related darkness. The under-reported pipeline spills. The true evil of the Koch Brothers. The environmental impacts of large, centralized solar generation plants. So, I want you to know right now that I will strive to be high every minute I’m on the clock for the Tribune, uh, the Times, yeah, the Times, except on those rare circumstances when I’m too drunk. Bad idea to mix and match intoxicants when you’re my age. Don’t want to mar any potential Pulitzer Prize material with a bad case of disorienting head spins.

Response: Mr. Fayhee: Thank-you for bringing to our attention the fact that we should have placed a hyphen between “high” and “energy” in our journalismjobs.com ad. We are actually looking for someone to cover the local school system. And we are actually a drug-free workplace. Now more so than ever.

Entity Placing Ad: Demand Media

Position: Freelance Style, Fashion & Beauty Writer

Hey: Seems like you are in the market for someone who is willing and able to speak truth to the stupid-looking shit that dominates the pages of magazines like Elle and Style and sites like TMZ and the entertainment section of Yahoo News! Just yesterday, as but one of a million random examples of suspect taste, there was a big piece titled “This Year’s Best Shoes.” Being interested in the latest footwear trends, I opened the link, expecting to view an array of ergonomic hiking books and minimalist running shoes. Maybe some captivating FMPs. Boy, was I surprised to see a stunningly large selection of multi-colored high heels with toes so pointy — to steal a line from the late fashion maven Edward Abbey — they could kick a lizard clean up its ass. On that same site, there were photos of a type of footwear called a “printed espadrille,” which looked for all the world like the mutated spawn of a sandal and a pair of Keds. Priced at $365! I doubt these abominations would last more than 30 seconds out on the trail. I, like you, think that footwear ought to be more functional than stupid, ugly, uncomfortable and overpriced. (Well, OK, ugly is fine.) I also believe that there are few things sexier than a woman wearing tight jeans and soiled Sorels while sipping a Fat Tire after making mincemeat out of a half-cord of piñon with a six-pound splitting maul.

Then there were several photos of a very strange woman named, apparently by an infant just starting to test drive its on-board vocalization systems, “Lady Gaga.” In an article headlined, “Lady Gaga Wore Nipple Pasties to Meet Prince Harry,” this woman was photographed adorned in an ensemble described by the writer as “classy-meets-kooky in a chainmail-like gown that showed ample cleavage. Her hair was pulled back into a chic chignon, with delicate earrings on her lobes. Her attempt to look semi-normal failed as soon as she added crystal eyebrows.” I don’t know about you, but, first, after viewing the photos accompanying the article, I was taken aback by the fact that Ms. Gaga looked as though she ought to have been cast as one of the more over-the-top extras in the Capital City social scenes in “The Hunger Games” movies. Or maybe the bar scene in “Blade Runner.” And, second, I was disappointed that there were no references — visual or transcriptive — whatsoever to the headlined “Nipple Pasties.”

You can rest assured that, among many other things associated with the editorial position you have advertised on journalismjobs.com, if we mention “nipple pasties” in a headline on my watch (and I think we ought to at every opportunity), then by god, there will be a photo of nipple pasties, even if we have to head down the closest titty bar with a smart phone to take a few shots of a stripper named Candee thusly attired.

Lest you think at this point that my fashion sense is too far on the walkway fringe, I note with no false modesty that I am a veritable poster child for current haute couture consciousness, in that I have forever been a prescient member in good stead of the lumbersexual revolution. I proudly sport scruffy, comfortable and contextual facial hair, wear a tattered flannel shirt and frequently don a sweat-stained baseball cap.

By now, I think you understand how valuable I would be as your go-to freelance Style, Fashion & Beauty Writer. You could count on me to lend an objective journalistic viewpoint to what clearly has become a genre defined by misleading nipple pasty teases and vapid homages to overpriced printed espadrilles that would disintegrate the very first time some drunk yakked on them in an unsavory imbibery. Together, we can raise the bar.

Entity Placing Ad: CapitalStructure

Position: Distressed Debt Reporter

Dear Sir(s) and/or Madam(s): Rare has been the time in my professional career that I have been more impressed with the sensitivity of people in publications management. Yes, debt is indeed distressing, even if that debt accrued as a result of what can best be described as “indiscretions” that can best be described as “fun.” I know, I know. No one forced me to go to The Laissez-Faire Gentlemen’s Club on all-you-can-drink Kamikaze Night when the closest thing to actual pecuniary resources then in my possession was a piece of magical plastic stored in my wallet behind two smooshed medical marijuana joints purchased from a street person clearly suffering from a bad case of the DTs. Yes, yes, yes, that piece of plastic was supposed to be pulled out only in case of the most-dire emergency circumstances. But, if crippling thirst combined with all-you-can-drink Kamikaze Night at The Laissez-Faire Gentlemen’s Club does not constitute an emergency, then I’d like to know what does! Which of course, is neither here nor there, except that the aforementioned piece of plastic has now reached the dubious distinction of being maxxed out. Bright red lights flashed and sirens blares the last time I tried to use it. Suffice it to say, I have considerable experience as a reporter. I have considerable experience with debt. And I have considerable experience being distressed by both of those things. If you help by giving me this job, I know we run the risk of my debt being reduced by responsible application of my salary to my accounts-in-arrears (hardy har-har), which would in turn lower my level of distress. So, we’d have to look at this as a temporary arrangement. Unless, of course, I decide to use my wages to buy a really fast car well beyond my means. Or maybe buy an ownership stake in The Laissez-Faire Gentlemen’s Club. Upon which case, I could stay both distressed and in debt forever. A win-win situation. What say you?

Entity Placing Ad: Columbia (Missouri) Daily Tribune

Position: Food Editor

Dear Editor: Under the “Responsibilities” section of your journalismjobs.com ad, I see you are looking for someone able to “find, write and edit stories related to food, food culture and culinary arts.” I also see that your paper is located in the cholesterol-laden heart of Middle America. Not only could I live up to your lofty culinary-arts expectations, but I would surely win food-writing awards by the bucketful for the Daily Tribune. I mean, how complicated would it be to write about food in a place where almost everyone is either morbidly obese or dead because they used to be morbidly obese? This already puffball gig would be made even easier by the fact that, apparently, the residents of the Show Me State don’t give a shit about the fact that their girths are often whale like. It’s not as though they’re even thinking about doing anything about their Pillsbury Doughboy-esque physiques, so I could just jump headlong into the journalism of deep-fried lard. Hell, I could pen an entire series on Jell-O salad alone, and probably increase readership by so doing. I am giddy with the creative promise of raising meatloaf and corndogs to the level of “culinary art.” And the abject poverty in the hillbilly backwoods of Missouri opens up even more food-culture possibilities that I’d love to explore. Maybe we could even organize a contest wherein readers could contribute via social media their favorite ways to stretch Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits throughout an entire month. Taken even further, we could run a weekly road-kill-based recipe. And cornpone! We can’t forget about cornpone. I’m not even sure what cornpone is, but I’ll bet it’s a culinary favorite in your parts and, thus, I would cover the hell out of cornpone. Maybe I would even name my weekly food column “Cornpone Cravings.” Or maybe “Cornpone Droolings.” Or maybe “More Cornpone, Please!” I think from this little note you can grasp how I would turn what in lesser hands would be a cupcake department into something meaningful, something with hyper-caloric substance, something that would capture the attention of bacon-laden readers while they devour plate after greasy plate of barbecued ribs while watching “Roseanne” and “Duck Dynasty” re-runs. I await what I know will be a positive response. In the meantime, bon appétit!

Response: Mr. Fayhee: I hope you will one day visit Columbia, where you will quickly come to understand we are a haven for foodies and that, if we had a road-kill restaurant, it would be world class. We even have numerous sushi restaurants.

Entity Placing Ad: New York City Department of Correction [sic]

Position: Press Officer

Hello: Ha! You can’t fool me. I see what you did and I caught it. By including a blatant typo, by singularizing what clearly should have been the pluralized “corrections” in the headline of your help-wanted ad, you were testing the focus of potential applicants, many of whom likely breezed right by the top and delved immediately into the meat of the story. These are not the kinds of people you want to hire. I want you to know right off the bat that there is no mistake so small that my eye does not catch it. Doesn’t matter if I am reading or writing, my edit tool is perpetually engaged. Just ask my wife. Whenever we go out to eat, the first thing I do is scrutinize the menu. Not for food items. For typos! I consider it my raison d’être. Rare is the time when I do not feel compelled to bring some sort of needed correction to the attention of the waitperson. Just the other day, my favorite brewing company was listed as “New Belguim.” The young lady told me I was the first person to notice that particular boo-boo, or at least the first person to care enough to mention it. Does that make me a perfect fit for your organization or what? Of course it does! (Even though I think I heard the waitress call me an OCD asshole under her breath as she was walking away.)

By the way: What exactly does the New York Department of Correction (ha ha!) do? I assume you take responsibility for making certain that informational signage and communications throughout the Big Apple are accurate and, when they are not, you correct the situation and issue stern notices in the form of press releases and/or reprimands to the appropriate malefactors regarding proper spelling and proper grammatical construction. I imagine there’s plenty of need to talk about punctuation as well. If you let one wayward semicolon slip through the cracks, you never know what might follow; people will end up misusing that most perplexing form of punctuation time and time again. (Damned semicolon misuse recidivism!) There’s no stopping some miscreants, so it’s important to step in as early as possible. After all, incorrect placement of semi-colons is considered by many to be a gateway grammatical mistake, which can lead to more felonious syntactic transgressions. A stitch in time saves nine. Anyhow, I appreciate your time and, whenever you’re ready for someone of my skill level and dedication to step in and make a correction (or even more!), let me know. The world will assuredly be a safer place.

Entity Placing Ad: Progressive Publishing

Position: Writer to Cover U.S. Beef Cattle and Forage Production Industries

To Whom It May Concern: I read with interest your ad on the journalismjobs.com website. The timing was impeccable. Just the other day, while hiking through the national forest that dominates this part of the country, I found myself having to literally slalom my way through endless piles of cow pies. It was like walking through a minefield of fly-covered stink. Sad to report, this is not a rare occurrence where I live. For many years, I have wondered what I could do to help eradicate, or at least mitigate, the effects of the out-of-control beef cattle and forage production industries, which wield disproportionate political power in these parts. As I was yet again wiping cow caca off my boots, I entertained the notion of starting a bovine-based blog. Maybe I should start writing letters to the editor, I thought. Or stand on street corners, decrying the despoiling of my beloved West by those who, through their pro-cattle platforms, oppose perfectly reasonable laws like the Endangered Species Act. Then I saw your ad and I thought: This is a sign from On High! This is the means by which I can shout from the figurative mountaintop about how impactful the U.S. beef cattle and forage production industries are to our native ecosystems. My attached resume shows my experience. Let me show you and your readers my passion. Together, we can eradicate this four-legged plague from the face of the Earth. First, you need to hire me.

Reply: Mr. Fayhee: We are proud proponents of the U.S. beef cattle and forage production industries. Maybe you should learn to read.

Entity Placing Ad: Washington Publishers

Position: Defense Reporter

Hello: Consider this my application for your open position of defense reporter. Admittedly, my high school football experience was on the offensive end. I was an undersized and not particularly successful quarterback on a mediocre team whose only real claim to fame was that we almost assuredly smoked more pot than any of our opponents, as evidenced by the fact that, through the course of an entire season, every time we snapped the ball, it had to be on one, because, whenever we tried to go on two or — god forbid — three, some stoner tackle jumped offsides, or some tailback committed yet another illegal procedure penalty, unable apparently to count past, well, one.

I think my experience of getting repeatedly pummeled into the turf by crazed blitzing linebackers gives me a creative perspective not shared by more defensive-minded reporters. Because of the obvious deficiencies associated with my size and my inability to throw the ball more than 15 feet, combined with the buzz-based numeric illiteracy of my teammates, I had to be real creative on the play-calling front. That meant I had to be something of a student of defense. This, of course, was not exactly rocket science, since most of the teams we played had all of two different defensive configurations. Still, trying to determine how to get one of our stoned players through an 11-person fluid maze required a working knowledge of strategy, execution and real-time decision-making that will serve me well in the position you have advertised. You could play it safe by hiring a reporter who used to play safety or nose tackle. Or you can be bold and go for the interception by hiring someone with a very offensive attitude. That would be me.

Entity Placing Ad: American Bar Association

Position: Assistant Managing Editor

Skol, brothers and sisters! Look no further! You have found your man! Let me start by saying how impressed I am that the bars of America have finally overcome their geographic, cultural and operational differences to form themselves into a bonafide association. Only by organizing on a national level can retail purveyors of spirits confront the insanity now dominating the industry. How else can we fight the madness of MADD? How can we reverse legal trends that result in asinine laws that dictate how many beverages a customer is allowed to carry from the bar to the table? How can we address liability issues that rain down upon servers who rationally decide it’s a good business decision to share a shot or two with cash-bearing patrons?

I defy you to find an editor who has spent more time in bars than I have. I defy you find an editor who has given more thought to bar-related issues. I am a master of barroom storytelling. I have helped break up beaucoup bar fights, suffering several painful contusions and head lumps in the process. I have celebrated in bars and I have lamented in bars. I’ve seen a man in a wheelchair throw a cue ball at a guy who had just beaten him in a game of 8-ball. I’ve seen the hat get passed to raise money for a regular patron’s medical bills. If it has happened in a bar, I have likely rubbed intimate elbows with it.

Plus, look, I know what this position really is — it’s functionally the managing editor, because, if I can read between the lines, the current managing editor is likely often too falling-down drunk or too hung over to sit upright, much less perform his or her assigned duties. I completely understand, as I have been there. And, if you hire me, I’ll probably be there again, once your current managing editor is shipped off to rehab or is found guilty of some alcohol-related offense or passes away after a three-week bender.

Entity Placing Ad: Buffalo News

Position: Digital Engagement Editor

Hello there: I have long thought that the policy many newspapers have of printing engagement notices is, at the very least, strange. For one thing, engagement notices are almost always submitted by one of the vested parties, such as the mother of the soon-to-be bride, a source that can hardly be considered objective. Where is the other side of the story? Additionally, few if any papers edit these notices. Thus, they often come across as though they were penned by people — albeit of the often-effusive variety (I mean, who wouldn’t be effusive about the face that Billy Bob finally found someone desperate enough to marry him!) —  who ought not be allowed access to a keyboard without first going through a remedial grammar course.

Moreover, where is the editorial scrutiny? Where is the dispassionate eye that sits back and says, “Look, it’s obvious as hell that the only reason this Darlene lady has agreed to marry Dwayne is she got drunk one night and went and got herself knocked up yet again?”

Where’s the investigatory aspect of this vapid excuse for journalism? Where is the fact checking? Where is the mention of Merle’s meth-related arrest record? Where’s the follow-up? Where’s the story about the engagement getting called off because Clem got caught on camera face-planting a ten-dollar bill to a seamier reaches of a transvestite stripper’s G-string?

Where is the reporter picking up a phone to ask Madison what attracted her to a known schlub like Grayson in the first place?

Where’s the story about the annulment or the divorce, which an astute engagement editor could have seen coming a mile away?

Given the many, many oversights that would not pass journalistic muster at a high school paper in Hogsnout, Arkansas, I am heartened to see a publication in a major metropolitan area saying “enough is enough.” I would like to be a part of your groundbreaking digital engagement coverage. I am willing and able to investigate the seamier aspects of the engagement business. The unsavory sales practices of the jewelers peddling overpriced rings with poorly cut diamonds to young people who can barely afford pizza. The social pressure heaped upon young ladies during the bridesmaid selection process. The pre-nuptial counseling required by many churches before they will allow a wedding ceremony to take place upon their hypocritically hallowed grounds. Questions regarding the suitability of showing hard-core porn at bachelorette parties. And, for that matter, which should come first: The bachelorette party or the baby shower?

This is an untapped reportorial goldmine that requires a steady hand and cynical perspective. As someone who himself was once engaged, I can say without compunction that I am your man.

Entity Placing Ad: Juneau County Star Times

Position: Community Reporter

Dear Editor: I can only guess how many applications come across your desk from people claiming they have the intestinal fortitude to endure life in the Last Frontier. The darkness. The cold. The snow. Well, let me tell you, I have called home many a frosty locale. And, not only can I survive challenging climatic circumstances, but I can do so while retaining my journalistic wits. I can take accurate notes in a blizzard. I can formulate a catchy lead even as my nose hairs turn to icicles. I can interview Eskimos at 30 below. Add my experience — as outlined in the attached resume — to my desire to dwell in the land of the northern lights, and I believe you will come to the conclusion that I am the right man for the job.

P.S.: I am comfortable on a dogsled. And I have read much of Robert Service’s work. I mean, what literate person doesn’t consider “The Cremation of Sam McGee” to be a classic?

Response: Mr. Fayhee: Juneau County is actually in Wisconsin. While we have plenty of blizzards and plenty of opportunity for frozen nose hairs, we have no Eskimos. Cheeseheads, yes; Eskimos, no. And Robert Service wrote primarily about Canada, not Alaska. I believe you’re thinking of Jack London. Good luck in your quest to find a position in the Last Frontier.

Part One: Cosmic eddy

It is a small window when time meets action in New Mexico’s Gila Country. During monsoon season, the diminutive creek next to which I am walking — a regular tromping haunt — flows high, muddy and loud. Upstream campgrounds are often closed due to flash flood concerns. Soon enough, though, as the inevitable slide toward the dry that defines America’s empty quarter manifests itself, this creek, like all of the watercourses that pass through this generally parched land, will begin to diminish and will become mucky and stagnant till finally it might wither entirely until next year’s rains come … if they come. But now, in the middling days of autumn, there is water enough to maintain a flow, but not so much that it is defined by tumult and resultant opaqueness.

I stop next to a little pool, which is so clear, I can easily see the little pebbles lining the bottom. The pool is about 20 feet by 20 feet and perhaps a yard deep. On the far side lies a rock wall, 15 feet tall. Above the pool is a trickle of a chute. And my feet are planted upon a boulder that stands above the pool like a ship’s prow.

Save the gurgling of the creek, it is quiet, almost absolutely so. There is no wind ruffling the tops of the surrounding oaks and Ponderosa pines.

Even the birds are inexplicably mute.

Even my normally restive dog is sitting in rare contemplation.

And even more rare: The ever-present chainsaw-wielding Tasmanian devil that spends all but a few seconds of every year frenetically bouncing between my tympanic membranes apparently has run out of gas.

It is still.

I auditorily perceive the tinkling of water over rock but I do not let my attention flow in that direction.

I am normally unsettled by stillness. My native habitat is movement, and, when I remember, which is not always, I make myself stop for five measured minutes during my wanderings and look and smell and maybe even see.

Rarely is this successful. Here and now, it is so.

Yet.

In the middle of the pool below me is a lone grasshopper fighting for its life. This mortal battle between insect and water is not occurring out in the peripheral provinces, where it can be ignored or subconsciously relegated to the realm of afterthought. It is front and center, aligned perfectly with two pupils that mere seconds prior had been impressionistically unfocused. I try to push the cognitive reset button, to ignore the plight of the grasshopper, which only gets me thinking about the plight of the grasshopper even more.

The wind picks up.

Jays and ravens start squawking.

My dog expresses her boredom with a long, theatrical sigh and begins rooting through the thick riparian underbrush.

The Tasmanian devil stirs.

Damn!

I throw in the towel and intently gaze upon the flailing grasshopper, at first as though its undeniable troubles are not about it and its place in the drink, but, rather, about me and my place in the cosmos. Then I gaze upon the grasshopper as though its imminent interface with eternal rest is an abstract concept rather than a palpable life-and-death struggle occurring right before eyes that had recently been comfortably glazed over. But this was no abstraction. This was a creature in some seriously deep caca.

The Tasmanian devil gives the starter cord of the chainsaw a good, strong yank.

As far as I can tell, the grasshopper is in no way exceptional. I have seen some seriously psychedelic examples of the order caelifera during my tropical forays. Shit that looks like a hallucination, or a nightmare, shit with long multi-colored antennae and neon stripes and bright red legs and big eyes that glow in the dark. This was not like that. Seemed pretty much like a generic grasshopper. Faded green fading fast. No phantasmagoric characteristics I could make out.

And it was not even rare in its ordinariness. It wasn’t some otherwise blasé type of grasshopper that supposedly lives only in eastern Bhutan but, this one had inexplicably defied all odds by landing in a small pool of water in southwest New Mexico. Far as I could tell, it was but one of the 500 million exactly-the-same grasshoppers that populate my home turf. It is a member in good stead of whatever the exact opposite of an endangered species is.

There was no reason whatsoever for me to pay it the slightest heed. Mother Nature was clearly taking her often-cruel course. What business would it be of mine to intercede in any manner save staring, pondering life’s transience, then walking on to the same place I always walk to when I follow this particular path, a point with a long view toward distant summits?

After two or three more pulls, the Tasmanian devil successfully got the chainsaw started.

Truth of the matter is: I find myself inexplicably transfixed.

By the time I pull up a figurative chair to watch this foregone conclusion unfold, the grasshopper is listing badly to starboard. But it (since I have no idea how one identifies gender in a grasshopper, I’ll stick with the impersonal pronoun) had not given up the ship. Its relatively massive rear legs, legs that, were they attached to human bodies, would have us leaping tall buildings in a single bound, were still working hard. Perhaps by this time, it was autonomic reflex, but those legs kicked alternatingly, propelling the poor insect in the worst direction possible: right toward that 15-foot-tall wall. But a navigational miscue was functionally irrelevant, as the pool in which the grasshopper found itself was essentially a slow-moving eddy. Even had the hapless creature been pointed toward a shore that was receding farther and further with each kick in the wrong direction, it would have simply been pulled back into the heart of the pool. And it would have had added to its already wretched circumstances false hope, which some may argue is better than no hope. But not much.

Perhaps this grasshopper had already arrived at a point where it was comfortable with what little remained of its corporeal journey.

Perhaps its kicks did not amount to an effort to reach safety.

Perhaps it was in a middle-ground dream state — halfway between this life and whatever is next — with its merciful mind taking it back to its halcyon days, back when, with the most mere flick of its rear limbs, it could sail through the sky, seemingly forever.

Perhaps it was thinking of the first time it found love, and how it and its beloved hopped together through the tall New Mexico grama.

Perhaps the faces of its children, long since hopped off to greener pastures, were flashing by like a slow-mo slideshow.

I have heard it said that people who are drowning enter into a state of bliss and, that, if they are rescued at the last second, they often fight the efforts of those trying to save them. Who says such bliss is the exclusive domain of humans?

Though it is almost impossible to view a creature with one foot in the grave in any way save thinking that overt distress is part of the experience, for all I know, this grasshopper understood fully that its fleeting time on Earth was up and took the plunge intentionally, not necessarily as suicide, though it might well have been that, but the same way native legends that make their way to non-native listeners tell how the old Indians, when they decide to no longer burden their tribe, walk off alone into the deep forest to become one with the hungry wolves.

I have no idea if grasshoppers are able to survive winters at 7,000 feet. I have no idea what the natural lifespan of a grasshopper is. I have no idea how grasshoppers normally die. Maybe this one opted to sidestep the inevitable withering away, or freezing to death or getting eaten by a bird. Maybe it said to hell with it, I’m going out on my own terms!

Of course, maybe it simply fucked up big time. Maybe it lost its train of thought while hopping along and, next thing it knew, it was up shit’s creek sans paddle.

Or maybe it was an extreme-athlete grasshopper that thought the world would somehow benefit if it did something ridiculously stupid and insignificant, like trying to jump across the pool that lays beneath my feet. If so, there were clearly gene-pool implications, which ought to play out of their own evolutionary volition.

The grasshopper by now had stopped kicking. It was completely at the mercy of the elements, either to be pulled downstream by the current or recycled back through the eddy. It was clearly time to resume my hike and return to my usual vapid ponderings. But, well, truth of the matter is, I hate watching shit die. Even shit with six legs, exoskeletons and brains the size of pinpoints.

Had it been a puppy or a kitten or a bird, there would have been little hesitation to not only save it but probably bring it home.

But this was just a lowly bug.

Bereft of self-awareness.

Bereft of heart and soul.

I decided that, if the current took it downstream, I would remain dispassionate. If, however, it was moved toward the shore by the eddy, I would intervene. There was a delicate moment of balance, when the grasshopper’s fate hung by a thread it had no idea was dangling. It teetered. It wobbled. It could not affect its own destiny. Then, with no discernible physical impetus, it slowly started drifting toward the shore. It was back in the eddy. I stepped down off the rock and picked up a stick. When the grasshopper came within reach, I placed the tip of the stick next to it. It was now up to the grasshopper to either save its own life or go with the flow.

I held the stick there for a few seconds, then, just before coming to the conclusion that my half-assed effort was for naught, the middle of the three appendages on its right side reached out and made tentative contact with the stick, like it could not believe it was actually feeling something solid. Then the front leg followed suit. Then, with what must have been the insect’s very last energy reserves, it showed that, faced with a choice of life or death, most organisms will rally back toward the land of the living. It pulled itself bedraggledly onto the stick, which I then picked up and placed on the shore. The grasshopper just sat there, clearly spent. And if I can read body language that, when push comes to shove, is not species specific, but, clearly universal, that grasshopper was right then about as nonplussed as an animal could possibly be. It had been snatched from the jaws of death by … what? Were it to relate this unlikely story of survival to its grasshopper compadres later, what would it say? “There I was, 60 seconds from the bright white light, when, suddenly, a big stick descended from the sky and pulled me from the raging waters and set me gently upon the dry ground.” Would the other grasshoppers snicker and roll their eyes? Or would they all hop down to the shoreline next to that little pool and stare in wonderment as the grasshopper pointed to the stick and said, “See! There it is! I’m telling you, it just came down out of the sky! It was as though it was wielded by some omnipotent being that held the power over life and death! And it choose me!”

Would the rapt grasshoppers then be tempted to test the waters themselves, to personally experience being saved by the power and magnanimity of the Big Stick?

As I walked away, I wondered if the grasshopper I saved was now a born-again prophet for a new grasshopper cosmology: Big Stickism, which, once codified and institutionalized, will espouse as part of its fundamental rubric allegories about Big Stick benevolence, which would of theocratic necessity be counterbalanced by frightful tales of Big Stick wrath wrought against unrighteous and unholy grasshoppers.

I wondered which direction the grasshopper would next hop.

Part Two: Poker face

A couple days later, I was hiking along a completely different, and different kind of, trail, several miles away from the grasshopper pool.

My dog and I had not gone far when we heard a whirring sound emanating from the desiccated thigh-high grass though which this rocky trail passes. Perplexed, I stopped. And right then, finger-snap-like, a cloud of grasshoppers rose from the field. It was like Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds,“ except it was “The Grasshoppers.” Visions of the more poignant plague-and-pestilence parts of the  Old Testament, which pretty much covers the entirety of the Old Testament, played in my head as the insects swarmed. I would not have been the least bit surprised right then had frogs started falling from the sky.

Scads of the little buggers bounced off my head, pinged off my thorax and ricocheted off my abdomen. Several got temporarily tangled in my locks. One flew into my agape buccal cavity, where it T-boned my uvula, before it executed a perfect bat turn and launched off the tip of my tongue like an Army paratrooper jumping from the back of a plane.

Then they, in seemingly choreographed unison, flew off as one to the northeast, in the very direction of the grasshopper pool.

It suddenly became very still.

The plague lasted a short enough time that, as I was getting ready to re-commence my forward momentum, I wondered if it had really happened. I looked down at my dog, whose noggin was tilted in abject bewilderment, and only then did I notice that, on the front of my T-shirt, was parked a cadre of residual grasshoppers.

The laws of coincidental thermodynamics would argue that, given the large-scale grasshopper chaos that had just transpired, these stragglers, which ended up numbering 12, would have at least been facing in different directions. This was not the case. They were all aligned in parallel fashion, as though they constituted the fascist wing of the grasshopper nation. Thing is, they were not uniformly facing down or off to one side. No, they were, rather, all pointed directly upward, directly toward my tilted-forward face. They formed a modified arc — meaning that all 12 of the grasshoppers had unimpeded views of what I’m certain at that point was a denotatively perplexed visage.

It’s not as though I had anything to fear from the assembled grasshoppers. It’s not like a gang of Japanese hornets had landed on the front of my shirt. Grasshoppers do not bite or sting. All they do is dribble out of their mouths what we in our youth used to call tobacco juice, and, in the pantheon of truly funky biological material I’ve interfaced with in the backcountry over the years, they could spew that shit like “Exorcist”-level projectile vomit and it wouldn’t even register on my Richter scale of recoil.

Nonetheless, there I am with a dozen grasshoppers on the front of my shirt ogling in unison, as though they were expecting me to utter words of wisdom. Or maybe give a motivational speech. Or a sermon.

Which is weird.

I figured, if I started walking, they would likely light.

I did, and they didn’t.

Then I figured, if I grabbed hold of the untucked bottom of my T-shirt and shook it vigorously, again, they would take the hint and depart en masse.

They only dug in deeper.

I scrutinized their expressions and determined in short order that these are not entities you would want staring at you from across a poker table. You could exhaustively research the etymological origins of the word “inexpressive” — root, prefix, derivatives, fraternal and coincidental synonyms and antonyms, the whole linguistic shootin’ match — and not begin to approach the level of inscrutability displayed by those grasshopper mugs. There were no twitches. There were no pupils to dilate. No eyelids to squint. No eyebrows to scrunch. No lips to grimace or smile. You’d have to be a pretty damned dedicated entomologist to suss out the mental machinations of a grasshopper and consequently predict its imminent behavior based solely upon facial cues, or lack thereof.

Thing is, now that I think about it, you could round up a representative cross-section of the drunkest people at the lowliest imbibery and you could get a 99-percent rate of accuracy predicting imminent grasshopper behavior: They’re probably going to hop, and probably through grass.

These, however, appeared to be members in good stead of the remaining one-percent; they seemed moored for the long haul.

I started entertaining the unpleasant possibility that I might have to smote the entire congregation in one fell swoop.

Before doing so, though, I instinctively channeled my favorite smoter: Gandalf.

“Fly, you fools, fly!” I exclaimed to the assembled fellowship.

And fly they did.

Now, given the orderliness of their shirt-front docking pattern, I would have assumed they would vamoose in a similar methodical manner, like a tactical fighter formation. I would have assumed incorrectly. A professor of trigonometry could not have designed a more haphazard dispersal pattern had he or she worked his or her entire career on a unified theory of random tangential egress.

They literally flew off into an indiscriminate combination of fate, the four winds and the cardinal compass points — the holy trinity of overlapping tidal forces — supernatural power, serendipity and physical orientation — that guide and sometimes misguide all journeys worth taking.

Now, where was I?

Here.

Still.

Addendum: Many years ago, I was hiking with a group of six or eight friends not far from here. One of these friends was part mad scientist, part nerd and part psychopath. At one point, he reached down and picked from the ground a grasshopper. He held it by the tip end of its ass, as though he actually knew the proper scientific way to hold a grasshopper. He raised it up in front of the group for all to see. We awaited some taxonomic terminology intertwined with some arcane biological minutiae. Instead, he said, “I wonder what would happen if I did this.” He then proceeded to reach around with his other hand and pull the grasshopper’s head from its thorax. All jaws, save the one owned and operated by the man now holding and examining a disembodied grasshopper head and the headless grasshopper body, simultaneously dropped. I guess here would be a good time to add that any time that particular group of friends went together into the hinterlands — which was often — there was always some combination of pot, mushrooms, acid, speed, opium, hash and alcohol involved. Most likely, all of those things. Which added a psychedelic veneer to what had suddenly become a surreal scene. “Put it back,” one of the stoned women in our group, a sensitive artist type, wailed abjectly. Verily, the grasshopper’s lobbed noggin had attached to it what well could have been its spine, except that I don’t believe insects have spines. Whatever it was, it looked like a pointed peg. It looked like my lunatic compadre could have easily reinserted it and all would have been well and forgiven. The mad scientist looked closely at both segments before dropping them unceremoniously into the dirt. He walked off while the rest of us remained frozen, gobsmacked, mandibles still fully distended in utter astonished disoriented disbelief. I have heard that, after being guillotined, the human head can retain something approximating consciousness for five to 10 seconds, a fleeting period of time that I’m certain is defined by a remarkable degree of disorientation.  I shook my head and lowered my boot onto the separated head and body. Something about putting it out of its misery. The last thing that grasshopper saw, if, indeed it was still able to see, was a size-11 Vibram sole descending from the heavens. Then its world went still.

“Golf is deceptively simple and endlessly complicated.”

— Arnold Palmer

Among my greatest accomplishments is the fact that I never had the slightest interest in taking up golf. And it’s not as though opportunity has not knocked. I worked for a couple summers running the very modest tennis program in Grand Lake, Colorado, a mountain town that is home to one of the most highly regarded public courses in the Rockies. The tennis courts were close enough to the links that, occasionally, a frantic “fore” would echo through the pine woods just as a rock-hard golf ball landed seemingly from outer space in the midst of a match. Thankfully, to the best of my knowledge, no one ever got doinked on the noggin by errant Titleists, though the threat of proximate golf was ever present, on several levels.

Because I was employed by the same quasi-governmental entity that owned and operated the golf course, I could, like all employees, play for free. Not once did I even ponder the notion of taking advantage of that opportunity. When duffers learned of my aggressive indifference toward golf in general and the Grand Lake Golf Course in particular, they would scratch their pates, jaws agape, and wonder aloud what sort of fool my mother had raised.

I would then relate a story that might border on allegory. I was sitting on the deck of the Grand Lake Golf Course clubhouse enjoying a beer. It was early evening, an idyllic hour during mid-summer in the Colorado High Country. The deck boasted an unimpeded view of the lower half of the doglegged ninth hole, which ended on a central-casting green pretty much right below where I sat sipping my beverage.

Making their way down that hole was a middle-aged couple whose marriage I guarantee did not last much past the point where, after 200 years, they finally putted their way to freedom. The husband’s effort was comedy of errors punctuated by invectives that had much farther reach than any of his shots. It literally took him 20 or 30 strokes to make his way down the hole to the clubhouse. And, like I already said, I could not see the upper half of the hole, so I assume it took him 20 or 30 shots to arrive at the point where I could spectate his acute case of abject inability.

Some of his shots sputtered only a few inches. Some were lost in the clouds of clumped dirt and grass that accompanied them as they flew completely in the wrong direction. The few that actually were hit forcefully ended up way back in the forest, in the general direction of the tennis courts. A couple even managed to defy the foundational laws of physics by traveling backwards. And every vector-challenged shot was followed by some sort of assault being waged upon the guilty club, which was either tossed, thrown, slammed, snapped, spat upon, cursed or wrapped around innocent trees.

The entire time, the wife made her dutiful and silent way by hitting shots that zigzagged at 89-degree angles to the orientation of a green that, to this couple, must have seemed at that point to be as mythical as the Emerald City was to Dorothy as she was being assailed by the Wicked Witch of the West along the Yellow Brick Road. The wife’s shots always seemed to land a few inches, but only a few inches, in the rough. Her next shot would cross the fairway, making one-degree’s worth of positive progress in the general direction of the green, but, once again, it would land a few inches off the fairway. It finally dawned on me that this stoic woman, who uttered nary a syllable this whole time — verily, her facial expression never even hinted at her emotional state (as opposed to her spouse, who looked like his entire head was about to explode) — was intentionally doing her best to not show up her red-faced, sputtering spouse. She — apparently a very competent golfer in a very weird sort of way — was calmly trying to take as many shots as possible to complete the hole. It was a marital horror show on public display for all to attest.

And, at the root of this display of abject misery, which was painful in the extreme to even watch, was golf.

This spectacle etched in stone my desire to avoid direct interfaces with golf courses at all costs. Life is frustrating enough without trying to navigate a dimpled little white ball into a faraway little cup. I have otherwise not-too-insane amigos who contend that one of the main attractions of golf is that it helps one overcome frustration, which would be a perfectly valid argument except for the fact that the frustration you’re trying to overcome is spawned by the very activity you’re using to try to overcome that frustration. I do not believe this strategy for overcoming frustration would withstand serious logical scrutiny unless, perhaps, one were inclined to overlay some sort of ambiguous Zen koan mentality onto a game played by people wearing bright-red checkered pants. And it would damn sure work in reverse were it ever applied to me personally. I would have to begin each round with three sets of clubs, for I, like the man I had watched on the ninth hole of the Grand Lake Golf Course, would, nanoseconds after sending a ball into a sand trap or water feature, become a serial golf club abuser. My blood pressure would skyrocket. My orbs would shoot out of their sockets like zits squeezed by pliers. Steam would spew forth from my ears.

“Well, then,” one of my linkster chums told me, “at least golf’s a game where you can drink while you’re playing.”

OK, that’s a plus, except that I have also learned how to drink while not playing golf. And it has long been my experience that applying alcohol to an athletic undertaking rarely achieves a positive outcome, unless you consider increasing one’s ineptitude factor to be positive. Think: bowling after the third pitcher.

A few years back, a magazine assignment took me to Roslyn, Washington, the town where the critically acclaimed TV show “Northern Exposure” was filmed. The timing of my visit was not coincidental. Right then, a hideous monstrosity called Suncadia, the biggest amenities-based development in Washington State history, was being built right on the outskirts of rough-and-tumble Roslyn, and, naturally, there was contention, as there always is when hideous monstrosities come to town. Many locals lauded the development for providing jobs in an area that had suffered economic hard times since the last coal mine closed in the early 1960s. Other locals predictably lamented the passing of Roslyn’s humble and hardscrabble existence. There were well-justified concerns about the deleterious long-term effects of suddenly having strangely attired urban-dwelling rich people descending upon an erstwhile pleasant dirt-poor hamlet.

The main selling point for Suncadia was and continues to be the three golf courses that anchor its adjacent real estate components to recreation-based unreality. The marketing people I had been interviewing for my story knew that I — then living in the biggest ski county in the country — was not easily swayed by the usual promotional bullshit arguments in favor of developments designed specifically for patrician wallets, but, to their credit, they tried to make the best of my skeptical presence. One of the ways they did so was by inviting me to attend the dedication ceremony for the development’s first golf course. And that ceremony would include a presentation by the course’s chief design consultant: none other than the legendary Arnold Palmer, one of the few professional golfers I had actually heard of. I gladly accepted the invite.

A few months ago, Palmer was much in the news, which is what got me mentally re-visiting my experience at Suncadia, way up in the Evergreen State.

First, I saw a Yahoo News link on the world’s 50 richest athletes. At the top of the list, with a net worth of $1.5 billion, was a creature who looked to have been used as a test subject for a plastic surgeon on acid named Vince McMahon, known for promoting various Wrestle-mania-type events. Number-two, with a net worth of $800 million, was Michael Schumacher, a German racecar driver whose name, not surprisingly, rings no bells with me. Third on that list, with a net worth of $675 million, was Arnold Palmer, which I found surprising. I would have guessed that Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Magic Johnson, A-rod or David Beckham would have been well ahead of Palmer, if for no other reason than the quantities of dinero athletes made back when Palmer was in his prime pale by comparison to the stunning sums they make today. Still, Palmer won 62 PGA events, including 10 championships, and was considered the first star athlete of the TV era. And I guess he invested his prize money wisely.

Second, a three-part series on Palmer was set to run on the Golf Channel, which I would normally not have known about, since, to the best of my knowledge, I do not receive the Golf Channel, and, even if I did, I would rather whack myself in the nuts with a putter than watch golf on TV. I only learned about it because the series was being advertised ad nauseum on ESPN and CNN, two channels I do watch.

When I showed up at Suncadia, I was immediately intercepted by numerous security personnel before I had even fully egressed my beat-up VW van, which sort of stuck out against the backdrop of late-model BMWs, Mercedeses and Lexi that otherwise dominated the parking lot landscape. Given that Suncadia had just opened, these security personnel had not yet become jaded by the demeaning nature of their gigs. They were, at this early juncture, enthusiastic and thorough. The realization that these are pretty much the only types of jobs at Suncadia that will be available to the citizens of Roslyn —minimum-wage, dead-end, part-time, bad-benefits, non-union, ungratifying — had apparently not yet taken hold. They looked totally shocked when I presented my official invitation, as though they had based the entirety of their vocational expectations upon the photos of the well-coiffed target demographics presented in Suncadia’s glossy promotional literature.

I followed a throng numbering perhaps 200 through a polished bar that looked like it was designed by the same aesthetically challenged bean-counters who had conceived the Bennigan’s and TGIF chains. It, being brand new, sported nary a scuff mark on the tables, nary a drink stain in the plush carpet and nary a vibe of amusing debauchery. It was my guess that, should I return in 15 years, the scuff/stain/debauchery factor would not be much improved, unless, of course, the resort went tits up, something we can only hope for.

The throng and I followed a golf cart track to a tee box set at the top of a terraced hill. The expectant crowd formed a horseshoe around the tee, next to which was a pyramid-shaped stack of golf balls that numbered, I was told, 144.

Despite the fact that where we now stood until recently was home to a nice stretch of Pacific Northwest evergreen forest that had been obliterated to make way for fake ponds, groomed greens and cart paths, the scene was quite pretty. Since it was high summer, verdancy, albeit of the artificial variety, dominated the viewscape. Distant rolling hills provided backdrop for perfectly manicured, heavily fertilized fairways that had been discovered by gaggles of giant geese. Numerous Suncadia employees, who, it’s my guess, were right then coming to understand the true nature of their employment situation, had been tasked with shooing the geese away, which was almost as funny to watch as the husband-and-wife golfers I had watched in Grand Lake all those years ago.

Palmer was running a bit late, so I took the opportunity to scrutinize my fellow invitees. The ages ranged from teens to those putting their way through their golden years. Most were part of mixed-gender couples. There was a lot of blue hair. Definitely not the most physically fit people I have ever seen. Totally Caucasian. Not a scraggly beard among them. Definitely no bongs. Dressed in the height of tacky golf fashion. And clearly pants-pissing excited to be standing where they were standing.

I had no idea until that moment where Arnold Palmer ranks in the pantheon of golf gods. Come to learn, he is Zeus. Even if Tiger Woods had strolled up, I doubt he would have drawn an iota of worshipful attention away from the spot where the man whose nickname is “The King” would soon enough stand.

One of the main reasons for Palmer’s wild popularity (and for this, I had to refer to several biographical websites) is that he was one of the first world-class golfers to grow from non-aristocratic roots. Born in working-class Latrobe, Pennsylvania, in 1929, Palmer went to Wake Forest University, which, while hardly a community college, is not Ivy League. He even served in the Coast Guard for three years, not a common career trajectory for one of the best golfers ever to swing wood. Palmer is considered a blue-collar golfer, an “every man” in a sport perceived— accurately or not — as decidedly upper crust.

Why these people, with their flawless grooming and attention to fashion detail, gauche though it might be, would revere a man from the other side of the tracks, I could not guess. Seemed counter-intuitive to me, but I had no desire to spend any mental effort whatsoever trying to dissect the group psychology, or the group psychosis, of this particular socio-economic subset.

When Palmer finally arrived — along with a retinue of handlers, assistants, hangers-on and groupies — it was, of course, via a golf cart. It had the same vibe as the papal entourage, except with miniature electric vehicles adorned with the Suncadia logo. Though it seemed to me that it would be hard to make a dignified entrance via golf cart, Palmer’s fans broke into raucous, worshipful applause when he pulled up, even though his cart, which he was driving, almost clipped an elderly woman before coming to a less-than-graceful stop inches from a gent whose head, as a result of the near miss, snapped back so violently that his tacky toupee fell off and landed on top of a plastic beverage cup held by a man who was standing directly behind him.

Faces lit up as The King, then 77 years old, walked from cart to tee, greeting people, shaking hands and slapping backs the whole way.

There are few things I know enough about to make absolute comment, but one of those things is this: I know from intimate experience when someone is near-terminally hung over. Palmer, to his eternal credit, did not commit the sin of trying to pretend like he was not suffering mightily from bottle flu. He fessed up right away. “Last night, I was introduced to a beverage called Ketel One,” Palmer grimaced, referring to a brand of mid-shelf vodka for which he now serves as a promotional spokesman.

As wrecked as he looked, and apparently was, his spirit was high. He was in his element and on his game. He walked over to the bag of clubs that had been placed for his use next to the pyramid of golf balls. I honestly do not remember whether he started out with the wedges or the woods, but, whichever it was, Palmer proceeded to embark in orderly fashion upon the most astounding athletic display I have ever witnessed.

Actually, my jaw dropped before he ever took his first swing. Let’s revisit the afore-referenced pyramid of golf balls. I wanted to buy shots for whoever it was who managed to erect this impressive feat of engineering. Me? I could spend the rest of my life trying to stack 144 golf balls thusly and would never manage to progress past the foundational layer. And, if by some miracle I were able to construct a golf ball pyramid, I would have to avoid contact with my creation forevermore lest one molecule of my finger make contact with one molecule of a stacked golf ball, which would without a doubt cause all the rest of the balls to scatter far and wide, like atoms do during a nuclear explosion.

Yet Palmer, while scarcely even glancing at the pyramid, reached with the business end of his club and, without so much as nicking its neighbors, flicked a ball off the stack and onto the ground. He would do this same thing time and time again over the course of an hour. I would have paid good money just to witness that part of his presentation, which ended up consisting of three distinct, but intertwined, elements.

First, he would relate a few war stories about such-and-such a tournament, opponent or golf course. Then he would fire off a few shots down range. Then he would answer questions posed by audience members, who were very well versed in Palmer legend and lore. (This is when I learned that he apparently had risen to the top of the world of golf utilizing a swing that was repeatedly referred to as “idiosyncratic.”) Then he would replace the club he had been using, get the next highest (or next lowest … again, I can’t remember), nick another ball off the pyramid and start over.

Palmer was a great storyteller, a personality trait I respect as much as any other. His delivery was well honed, his timing impeccable, his anecdotes amusing, even to a non-golfer. The rapt crowd hung onto his every syllable. This dude could have shit his polyester pants right on the spot and that final act of digestion would have been greeted with a raucous clapping of hands. What was most weird was that I, the most golf-illiterate person for miles, seemed to be one of the few there gathered who was actually watching his golf shots.

It has been my pleasure to have witnessed some top-tier athletes in action. I saw, from a behind-the-basket, court-level seat, Magic Johnson leading a “Showtime”-era Lakers fast break, with Michael Cooper and James Worthy manning the wings, against the Alex English-led Denver Nuggets in McNichols Arena during the 1985 NBA playoffs. I was a line judge during a men’s final match between Ilie Nastase and Jimmy Connors when they were the top-two-ranked players in the world. I’ve watched pro skiers and snowboarders rocketing down the mountain. I’ve seen a martial artist fire off four devastating kicks with one jump. I’ve watched the Tarahumara Indians run on their home turf in Copper Canyon. I watched Steve Carlton mow down the Cubs in Wrigley Field the year he went 24-9 and won the Cy Young Award. Perhaps most impressively, when I was in my early 20s, I watched a 65-year-old tennis player, who sometimes coached me and sometimes was my doubles partner, fire off 10 consecutive impressively accurate serves — five in the deuce court, five in the ad court — with his eyes closed!

But I had never seen anything like a hung-over 77-year-old golfer launch shot after shot, while telling stories and answering questions, and not even come close to a mis-hit. Every swing Palmer took resulted in a ball flying straight as an arrow way the fuck down the fairway. There was not the slightest hook, slice, shank or dribble. His divots consisted of maybe one or two blades of well-coiffed grass being slightly disturbed.

I’ve seen Magic miss passes. I’ve seen Connors double fault. And of course it can be and should be argued that Palmer was not right then dealing with the pressure of competition. There were no vagaries caused by challenging course design. The weather was perfect. But he also did not have the focus that competition mandates. He did not have the pin-drop silence that defines golf tournaments. He had a loud crowd scant feet from the tee. And he had the kind of killer hangover that would have laid me and my most reprobate drinking buddies up on the couch for a solid 14 hours.

Yet … every … single… shot sailed distant and true. I moved around to eyeball those flawless trajectories from several angles, to see if my uneducated eye was missing anything. Ixnay. Every goddamned shot was perfect. The people who were peppering him with questions about his amazing comeback at the 1960 U.S. Open — played at Denver’s Cherry Hills Country Club — would have given a kidney to occasionally hit a single shot that took the form of every shot Palmer hit as he stood there casually mixing jocularity with astounding athletic proficiency. I’m sure a learned linkster could have pointed out flaws. Perhaps some of Palmer’s shots would not have set up the next shot very well, a concern for sure when you’re playing an entire hole. Perhaps those shots did not travel as far as they should have.

Still …

I didn’t know what I was witnessing, because I had never seen anything like it. Meditative consciousness being physically manifested by an elderly man who had been drinking vodka till the wee hours? A textbook example of muscle memory in action? The end product of Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-hour hypothesis, times a million? An ability to move seamlessly, imperceptibly, into and out of focus? A life that never, under any circumstances, loses its focus? Luck? Sleight of hand? Smoke and mirrors?

Whatever it was, Palmer did not miss a single shot, and he took perhaps 100 swings. It remains the best example of athletic prowess I have ever witnessed. That I will ever witness.

When Palmer had finally made his way to the last of his clubs, with the pyramid of balls down to its foundational building blocks, he, to a thunderous ovation, thanked everyone for coming, then stood patiently as every single audience member walked by and shook his hand and tried to, I’m certain, say something not too stupid, something that had not already been said to The King many times before, something that would maybe register. Me included. When confronted by my unkempt, way-out-of-context self, he recoiled ever so slightly, but still took my hand firmly and asked, of all out-of-the-blue things, about my handicap, which, I learned later, is a measure of how bad a golfer is, rather than an observation about my obvious physical and/or mental shortcomings. He seemed both bemused and perplexed when I responded by saying, “For years, I tried to overcome it. But now I just live with it.”

I had anticipated before the fact that my visit to Suncadia would amount to no more than a pleasant diversion, one that I could share with my soon-to-be-jealous golf-playing amigos. (All four of them, including my brother.) “Hey, guess who I hung out with the other day?” I would ask those amigos matter-of-factly. I assumed that, 12 seconds after leaving, I would give my superficial interaction with Arnold Palmer little in the way of subsequent thought. Yet, as I drove my beat-up van toward Marko’s, a bar in Roslyn that allows dogs inside and that boasts a ping pong table, I could not help but feel there was some sort of salient and applicable lesson that was dangling right before me, ripe for the picking, if only I could move myself past the stereotypes I had possessed about golf and golfers and golf courses and golf-course-based developments forever and ever.

Maybe something about the power of focus and dedication to one’s craft. Maybe something about the harnessing and honing of motivation, whether that motivation is based upon coming from the wrong side of the socio-economic tracks or from a myopic desire to stand atop the podium.

Try though I might, though, I did not succeed in coming to any conclusions regarding Arnold Palmer and his ability to hit balls straight down a fairway while dealing with a bad hangover. At least no conclusions that applied even slightly to mere mortals like yours truly. I sipped a few pondiferous pints while my dog cavorted with a crew of local curs. Then, a lightbulb lit up over my dimwitted noggin. Of course, thought I! To gain enlightenment, one must occasionally turn directly to Scripture.

Joel Fleischman, the main character in “Northern Exposure” (played by Rob Morrow), was himself an avid golfer. As such, he delivered many links-based lines during the show’s six-season run in the early 1990s. Among his many golf-ish bons mots were:

• “Golf isn’t a game; it’s a choice that one makes with one’s life.”

• “There’s something intrinsically therapeutic about choosing to spend your time in a wide-open, park-like setting that non-golfers can never truly understand.”

• “It’s the union of mind and body, the interconnectedness. You know what I mean?”

• “Don’t rush your swing. Just let the power radiate from you core to the club head.”

• “Keep your senses open. Let your instincts calibrate with each new factor.”

• “It’s the focus, the attention to detail, the head, and the heart.”

These lines were not delivered by a character traveling in the same lofty linkster realms as an Arnold Palmer, of course. They were not even delivered by a character with fantasy-based aspirations of traveling up where the golf-club-bearing snow leopards dwell. Which is good, because those lines are thus able to resonate with a member in good stead of the hoi polloi at he sits in a dark bar nursing an even darker beer.

Taken individually, it is easy to categorize Fleischman’s lines as the worst kind of vapidity: That which is cloaked in faux profundity. But, viewed in the aggregate, they rise above the sum of their superficially trite parts. (At least they do after a few pints.)

It is tempting to deduce from Joel Fleischman’s witticisms that one must love an activity in order to excel at that activity, whether it be golf, tennis, rock climbing, playing the piano or knitting. And that, even if you do not excel, then you still love that activity and strive to be better. And, with enough love, you will get better, whatever that means. And, even if you do not, you love the context of the activity — the splendor of the rock face, the banter of your knitting partners, the contrast of a yellow tennis ball against the deep blue sky, the lush green of the fairway — enough to keep coming back for more. And, most importantly: If you’re really focused, and maybe a bit lucky, your love of an activity can bleed over to other aspects of your life. Maybe the patience one must master in golf helps one become a better boss or father.

After a while, a few ping pong players showed up, and I took particular pride in schooling them on the ways of spin reversals and strategic misdirection.

One of my vanquished opponents — who was required by bar protocol to buy me a beer — asked: “So, how did you get so good at ping pong?”

“Don’t really know,” I replied, not quite honestly. “I just enjoy it enough that I look forward to practicing as much as I do playing games. I get into the psychological drama that’s part and parcel of every match. I like the balancing act between passivity and aggression, between offense and defense. And I am confident enough in my abilities that I am able to relax and just go with the flow when I’m playing. I don’t have to try too hard.”

Many months later, as I was organizing my notes, I realized that what I had described was less about myself as a ping-pong player and more about myself as a yarn spinner.

“One day, I’ll figure out how to do that,” my opponent said, as we clinked glasses and toasted the beauty of movement and the beauty of the day.

A few miles outside town, over toward the Suncadia resort, I might have faintly heard someone yell “fore,” followed by what sounded for all the world like a guilty golf club being wrapped around an innocent tree.

“What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive.”

— Arnold Palmer

“Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

— Bible, New Testament, Galacians 6:7

The system of cairns appeared out of nowhere in the middle of nowhere, with no discernible connection to anywhere else, as though they had been planted by a disoriented Johnny Cairnseed before last autumn’s record rainfall. This did not seem like prime cairn country and I could not for the life of me comprehend what inspired the guilty party to start schlepping rocks to pile atop one another in hopes of establishing a more-formalized route in a place that, since I began traipsing around these parts well nigh 38 years ago, has remained wonderfully wild, or at least wonderfully wild feeling. There were so many cairns, and they were so big, that it took me several visits in order to restore this lovely area to its natural condition. My civic duty sufficiently completed, I opted to wander around a bit atop a path-less and, now-cairn-less, mesa so beautiful and rugged it alone would be reason enough to call the beautiful and rugged place where I hang my hat home.

After an hour or so of pleasant destination-free zigzagging, my peripheral vision latched onto an out-of-place object stuck in the branches of a mature alligator juniper tree that was growing sideways out of a small cliff face. It was bright blue and about the size of a football. To access it, it would take a bit of the kind of effort that, in this, the ancestral homeland of Geronimo and his tough-as-nails Chiricahua Apache brethren, often results in scrapes, contusions and bruises to both the physiology and the ego. I limbo’d under a blown-down ponderosa pine with a wide array of protruding, pack-grabbing branch stubs. I shuffled over boulders that were strategically placed in such a way as to dissuade advance. I slalomed through a sea of fully mature agaves. I busted my way through outward-facing juniper branches that did not seem even slightly inclined to yield any sort of right-of-way. And, with floral remnants in my hair and minor wounds decorating my exposed shins and testifying to my focused stupidity, I finally arrived at the out-of-place object, which turned out to be, of all perplexing and incongruous things, a cylindrical, one-gallon Rubbermaid water cooler.

Now, how this cooler came to be resting in a tree branch way out here in the glorious back of beyond, I could not guess. Given the challenging access of its resting place, I deduced that it must have been tossed out the window of an airplane that had been passing overhead, which seemed highly unlikely on several levels, given that, from a cursory examination, the cooler looked to be structurally uncompromised. Whenever something appears out of place in Gila Country, one normally concludes that the forces of raging floodwaters have come bear. But, given the geomorphology of the proximate terrain, such a causal link would have defied the foundational laws of physics.

I held the polymer-based mystery in my hands, perplexed. I shook it gingerly and could hear and feel that it held loosely packed contents of some unknown sort. Then it dawned on me: Numerous times in a backcountry career that has spanned more than a few years and miles, I have come across supply caches left by hunters or survivalists or long-distance backpackers or folks who envisioned some future circumstance when and where they might find themselves in need of surreptitiously placed supplies, a la Seldom Seen Smith in “The Monkey Wrench Gang” when he was on the run from the law. It is an operational axiom of backcountry travel that is simultaneously unwritten and writ in stone that one does not disturb another’s cache. But this inexplicable vessel did not seem substantial enough to actually be a cache, at least in the traditional sense.

Perhaps it held the ashes of a passed-away compadre, a backpacking amigo or a beloved dog.

Perhaps it contained hidden drug money!

Or, better yet, hidden drugs!

Perhaps it contained a treasure map!

Or a bomb!

Or a bombshell!

Curiosity getting the better of me, I slowly unscrewed the top and found within the container a small notebook and several miscellaneous items: two cheap ballpoint pens, a couple books of matches, some buttons, a Mardi Gras bead necklace, some pennies, two spent CO2 cartridges and a few Band-Aids. The contents did not exactly lend illumination to the enigma I now held in my hands. Then I examined the notebook and only then came to realize that what I possessed was in fact something I had only ever heard about but had never witnessed in the flesh: a geocache. Give all the possibilities that had just seconds prior been swirling around in my head, this was a disappointment in the extreme.

For those of you who may not be acquainted with this form of outdoor-recreation, geocaching is game wherein participants place items that boast little in the way of monetary value — such as CDs, pages torn from comic books, gum-wrappers, postcards, whatever — within waterproof repositories — such as military ammunition boxes, Tupperware containers or bright blue gallon-sized Rubbermaid water coolers — which are subsequently hidden somewhere out in the boondocks. Descriptions, directions and/or actual GPS coordinates to the site are then posted on the various geocaching websites. Those inclined to participate in such a vacuous activity proceed to attempt to locate the geocache they are seeking. If they succeed, they sign the logbook that all geocaches contain, place an item in the cache, perhaps remove an item that will eventually find a new home in some geocache up the road (this is apparently called “hitchhiking”) and, I guess, scratch their nuts and pop a celebratory, self-congratulatory cerveza.

Though geocaching can trace its roots back to a 150-year-old game called “letterboxing,” which evolved (where else?) in the British Isles, it was birthed only in the year 2000, when the U.S. military released its stranglehold on the kind of detailed GPS technology we all now take for granted as we are trying to navigate our way along highways and trails by relying upon an electronic device rather than relying upon our own senses.

The first geocache was placed in Oregon in 2000 by a man named Dave Ulmer, who now apparently holds Yoda-like status in the geocaching world. Since the first cache — which contained software, books, a little money, videos, food and a slingshot stashed in a half-buried plastic bucket — was established, logged and located, geocaching has expanded and spread like a particularly virulent case of crab lice. It has morphed to include numerous variations, such as virtual caches, geodashing and stratocaching, the latter of which actually involves airflight (making my original thesis regarding the Rubbermaid water cooler I now possess being dropped from a plane seem more plausible).

As well, numerous groups, such as geocaching.com, opencaching.us, Groundspeak and the Geological Society of America, have jumped into the geocaching game. There are locationless, webcam, Chirp, Wherigo and reverse caches. There is a geocaching-specific line of gear and clothing. There is a “Geocacher’s Creed” (more on this later). There have been deaths associated with attempts to find geocaches. There have been instances when bomb squads have been called when a geocache has been found in a public place. Various legislative and regulatory entities have addressed geocaching by passing laws prohibiting the placement of caches in public parks and in cemeteries.

It will surprise no one that, when geocaching first hit the outdoor media shortly after that first cache was placed in Oregon in 2000, I rolled my eyes. The late-’90s and early-aughts seemed like an especially ripe time for concocted forms of outdoor recreation.

In short chronological order, we had the birth of:

• Highpointing — the goal of achieving the high points within the boundaries of some artificial political or administrative construct, like Rocky Mountain National Park, a county or, in the case of the State Highpointers, the entire country.

• Orienting — a thankfully short-lived activity wherein participants would attempt to precisely follow a given compass bearing no matter what obstacles or environmentally fragile areas (and here I think mainly of cryptobiotic enclaves) might come between bullshit manufactured point-A and bullshit manufactured point-B.

• Creeking — another short-lived activity wherein adherents would follow a creek from mouth to source. The goal was to stay entirely within the creek — and here I mean actual boots or sandals in the water — the entire time. I have no personal experience with this particular scientific demographic, but when creekers were padding about with frigid tootsies, apoplectic limnologists were emerging en masse from wherever it is they normally hang out to vociferously condemn creeking, creekers and anyone who might have ever known a creeker. The furor regarding the potential negative environmental ramifications of creeking resulted in this “sport” dying an ignominious, and justified, death.

If forced to speculate a decade ago, I would have guessed that geocaching would have been a fast-passing trend, more like orienting and creeking than highpointing, which shows no signs of fading away.

I would have guessed wrong.

According to geocaching.com, the self-proclaimed “official global GPS cache hunt site,” there are now almost 2.4 million registered geocaches spread throughout the world, and as many as six million people scurrying around seeking those caches out.

And, I would learn in short order, there are, stunningly, a serious shitload of geocaches located in areas where I regularly tromp.

Which, at this point, is neither here nor there, because, right now, I am faced with something of a minor-league moral quandary: I am standing way back in the Gila National Forest holding what amounts to a piece of trash that was left in a place where trash ought not be left. Ordinarily, I would, without hesitation, tote that trash with me as I made my way back to civilization, where it would be unceremoniously tossed into an appropriate receptacle, a no-nonsense process that would likely be accompanied by an invective or two hurled toward whatever nameless person or persons it was who left the offending piece of rubbish in a tree branch back in the woods. But I did not. I returned the Rubbermaid water cooler to its perch. I suspected I would soon come back to take some remedial action, but in the meantime, I had some research to do. As well as some cogitation.

When I got home, I immediately began scouring the Internet for pertinent skinny relating to geocaching, an online hunting trip that eventually yielded most of the data presented in this screed. More than that, though, I much desired to try to hunt down the specific origins of the geocache I had just found. It was surprisingly easy to do.

On the geocaching.com website, I learned that the bright-blue plastic Rubbermaid one-gallon water cooler was placed in 2001 by two fellow Silver City residents I do not know (or at least I do not think I do), who I’m sure are very nice, sincere, well-meaning people. The geocache even had a proper name, which for obvious reasons I will not herein share. The website contained a fairly detailed set of directions, along with some GPS coordinates, along with what looked to be a code cipher of a species usually associated with a Cold War passing of national secrets. Here is an example: ybbx sbe n pnvea bs ebpx ba gur yrsg naq tb gb nabgure pnvea bs ebpx ng. Ordinarily, I would think such seeming gibberish would be a computer glitch or a mistake of some easily explainable sort. But the other geocache websites I visited contained similar cryptic letters.

The description of the geocache I had stumbled upon included a total of 42 logged visits from people who had attempted to locate the Rubbermaid water cooler. About half of the people had located the geocache and about half had not. The last person to have successfully located the bright-blue water cooler had done so scant days before I found it.

There was also a gallery of photos of people who had succeeded in their quest. Everyone pictured looked like the kinds of folks I either drink with, hike with or regularly run into while I’m out and about on the trails of Gila Country. That is to say: Not as young as they used to be. Rattily attired, with nary a stitch of current Patagonia or The Northface attire procured from REI. Beat-up daypacks. Scuffed boots. One guy was sitting smoking a cigarette. Another guy was drinking a can of Budweiser. Superficially: Kindred spirits.

All told, I’m sitting there in front of the flickering computer screen thinking, “What the fuck, these people seem OK.” Ergo: What they are doing out in the woods by extension must be OK too. What’s wrong with me?

But one big thing caught my attention most while I was eyeballing the website: The geocache I had found was not where it had been originally placed! Its original home was under a rock overhang I have visited on numerous occasions. Someone had moved it a half-mile or so to the juniper branch I had chanced upon. Thus, I concluded, someone else had experienced the same moral quandary I was now facing. Or perhaps moving a geocache, but not moving it far, is some sort of geocaching humor. Or maybe there are antagonistic relationships between the various geocachers operating in the same area.

Either way, I clearly needed to revisit that bright-blue Rubbermaid one-gallon water cooler, where my choices would be: to return it to its rightful place under the rock overhang, to leave it where it lay in the juniper branch or to carry it out of the woods.

Since some bonehead had removed the aforementioned system of cairns, it took me longer than I would have expected to re-locate this wayward geocache. After a languid hour of meandering to and fro, I came to think that whoever had moved it from the rock overhang to the tree branch had come back to finish the job. But, eventually, its bright blueness became visible through the dense brush.

I had not formulated any sort of criteria upon which I would base my eventual decision regarding the geocache’s immediate fate. Perhaps if I just sat and held the Rubbermaid water cooler for a few minutes, some sort of heavy-duty message would percolate though its insulated shell and travel through my fingers and arms all the way up to my brainstem. Maybe the very land upon which I trod would speak to me and direct my mentally muddled self to the morally correct course of action. Maybe I should just smoke some hash and see if I even remembered why I was where I was.

When I first interfaced with this unattractive urn, I had paid only cursory attention to the words scribbled in the notebook it contained by people who were successful in their geocaching quest. This go-round, I opted to scrutinize those words carefully, in hopes that, by so doing, appropriate action would be forthcoming.

There were a total of 72 entries over the course of 13-plus years, with many of those entries covering more than one visitor. Since the space allotted for “remarks” was small, there were not many of the kinds of loquacious ruminations often found in registers located atop mountain summits. (Thank goodness for small favors.)

Here are a few of the entries:

• Just found out about geocaching yesterday, so this is my first find. Great fun, easy directions, beautiful location. Took deck of cards.

• Just came by for a second visit to this cache. On my way for a day of exploring the area.

• Visiting from California. Out for an adventure. Great fun!

• Tried to find this past May — unsuccessful. Great hike. Really used our GPS. Thanks.

• Tough hike. No trail for us. Had fun. Great adventure.

• I like it here. Totally quiet.

• Very hot. Forgot the water. Found plenty of cactus. How do we get out of here?

• I was here as a child and now as a child again.

• Took Buddha (for luck). Left baseball cap.

• Must have taken the hardest route to cache!

• Take a right where?

• What an ordeal!

OK, now how can anyone be so haughty as to find anything wrong with those entries, with the people who penned those entries or with the inspiration and impetus that brought those people to this undeniably special place?

There is no doubt that I tend to glance askance at contrived reasons for venturing forth into the great outdoors. When someone opts to unicycle to the top of a Colorado Fourteener, or when someone tries to set the record for running up and down Mount Elbert, or when someone uses one of those stupid goddamned devices that keeps track of how many vertical feet you ski in a day, I find myself rolling my eyes, shaking my head and wondering what the fuck ever happened to just walking through the woods light and unfettered. This is not to say that I believe the only acceptable modus operandi for backcountry forays consists primarily of sitting under a tree pondering Thoreau or Muir while searching frantically for deep metaphors regarding the lamentably short lives of caddis flies.

But, well, sometimes contrivedness gets a bit out of hand and, as a result, I feel that the Big Picture — the preservation of the backcountry and the resultant spiritual benefits for visiting the backcountry — are more and more getting lost in a sea of lists and experience-enhancing technology.

But when I have chatted with people about their quest to “bag” the highest peaks in every state or their desire see how many vertical feet they can ski in a day or their attempts to break the speed record to the Appalachian Trail, there will generally be positive-sounding commonalities. They will say things like, “It gives me a good excuse to travel to places I ordinarily would not visit.” Or: “Having attainable goals helps me focus on getting in shape.” Or: “I enjoy being part of a community that shares my passion. I’ve made a lot of good friends while [fill in the blank].”

Again: What could possibly be wrong with any of those perspectives?

Well, personally, I think they stifle the natural, and beneficial, predisposition mankind has toward goal-less wandering. I think they represent a herd mentality. And I think, in the end, that not everyone thinks like me — which, in most circumstances, is a reality I would argue that’s a blessing for both me and the rest of humanity.

Besides, who’s to say that the people who enjoy recording their vertical ski feet or chasing around geocaches do not spend plenty of time sitting under a tree pondering caddis fly lifespans? Judging from the entries in the notebook located within the geocache I found, there seems to be at least as much nature-based contemplation associated with their geocaching exploits as there is with me and my ne’er-do-well muchachos as we make our willy-nilly way across the great wilderness expanses that define our local horizons.

Besides, it’s not like geocachers are dumping plutonium into pristine rivers.

Everyone and their dog could enthusiastically take up geocaching tomorrow, and the resultant negative ramifications would be a bump on a gnat’s ass compared to the environmental disaster that is the downhill ski/resort/real-estate industry. As it is, geocaching ranks well below even the groomed cross-country-ski-area industry when it comes to adverse impacts. It less impactful than even bird-watching.

All things considered, I would certainly rather people take up geocaching than paintball or golf.

Sure, perhaps because of geocaching there are a few more warm bodies traipsing through territory I would much rather have all to myself, but, truth be told, only one time have I ever come across another soul in the area where I found that Rubbermaid geocache. It’s not as though the huddled masses are suddenly eschewing malls and descending into the woods in search of one-gallon water coolers that hold ballpoint pens and Mardi Gras necklaces. And, even if that were the case, it could well be argued that the world would therefore be much better off if such were actually the case. More people would come to love the outdoors. People would be less stressed. People would lose weight. And on and on.

Additionally, it’s my guess that a significant percentage of geocaches are placed in parks in urban Ohio rather than in the relatively untrammeled lands of the West. And, further, it’s my guess that most geocachers live in cities in the East and maybe even in foreign realms. So, again, the number of geocache participants claimed by geocaching.com notwithstanding, it’s highly unlikely that a tsunami of GPS-toters will be descending upon my blissfully unpeopled home turf anytime soon.

Still, I am old enough that I remember when mountain biking did not exist. Then, there were a few hippie-looking dudes pedaling through the backcountry on klunkers. Now, mountain bikers form the dominant trail demographic throughout the nation. I don’t think geocaching will ever approach mountain biking in popularity, mainly because there’s a palpable top end on potential gear sales, but, hey, in a world where more and more people measure skiing acumen via the number of vertical feet they descend in a day, you never know. In my time, I’ve seen some mystifying shit come down the trail. Nothing surprises me any more.

The logical underpinnings of my negative reaction to this one little piece of trash being left unattended out in the Gila National Forest were fast eroding and, consequently, the self-righteousness that is part and parcel of my personality was losing its customary inviolate center.

Then, in near desperation, I started reading some of the fine print in the little notebook that had so recently caused chinks in my sanctimonious psychic armor.

Numerous of the entries had lamented the lack of a trail to the geocache that had originally been placed under that overhang. One of the entrants wrote that he had started clearing a trail. And another wrote that he had started … placing a series of cairns to help people more comfortably access the geocache. Yes, the very system of cairns I had spent so much time returning to their natural state was birthed as a result of this geocache! Here my self-righteous sanctimoniousness regained its solid footing, much like how one recovers during a sparring match in Tae Kwon Do after your opponent has landed a strong but glancing kick to your midsection.

While I get having goals and looking for excuses to visit places you ordinarily wouldn’t, I do not get, and I never will get, the desire to modify the environment through which one passes — especially when that modification transpires in a place that, before your passing, was pretty much off the map. And even more so when that modification will result in more and more people following your footsteps.

We have precious few wild areas left. In my warped little world at least, wild trumps access, and wild trumps use, and it damned sure trumps games. Every time.

Count me among those who argue that we ought have less trails, less trail signs, less detailed maps of wilderness areas and damned sure less GPS coordinates and Google Earth images. Let people wander and get lost and maybe found and maybe not. Let them be surprised by abysses and rivers impossible to cross. I understand we are pretty much stuck with trails, trail signs, detailed maps of wilderness areas, GPS coordinates and Google Earth images for no other reason than those things are institutionalized components of The System.

Geocaching damned sure is not.

Though its worldwide numbers are substantial, relatively speaking, geocachers represent a negligible percentage of those inclined to wander through the woods. But, given the number of geocaches that apparently exist, if even a handful of people seeking those caches out (and there’s one in every bunch) opt to start building illegal and most likely poorly designed access trails and/or cairn systems, the impact could easily become disproportionate on numerous levels. Erstwhile-unvisited fragile areas might start seeing bootprints. Erosion will assuredly increase. Impacts on populations of animals that avoid human contact will increase. And, well, the sense of exploration, faux that it might be in these dark, over-civilized days, that comes hand in hand with wandering through what little trail-less land remains will be further diminished. We need more disorientation, not less.

The Geocacher’s Creed that I alluded to earlier states, among other activity-specific axioms:

• Obtain the best possible coordinates for your cache to reduce unwarranted wear on the area.

• Avoid leaving tracks to the cache.

• Leave the area as you found it or better (e.g. pick up litter).

In my view, a geocache itself is litter. And, if the Geocachers’ Creed unambiguously states that leaving tracks and unwarranted wear on the area is a no-no, then surely the process of building a system of cairns to a cache is a violation that merits the death penalty.

According to geocaching.com, what I then decided to do is considered a crime. Verily, there’s an entire system of geocaches in another part of New Mexico that apparently was recently completely removed by a person or persons unknown. The man who established that system of heisted caches — which numbered more than a dozen — filed a complaint with the Forest Service, which is apparently actually investigating the case. The complainant contends that the geocaches are personal property, even though they are intentionally left unattended and without permit upon public lands. He contends that he ought to be compensated for the value of the geocaches and for the time spent placing those caches.

Well, this is not exactly the first time that I’ve stood proudly at odds with the legal system. That bright-blue Rubbermaid one-gallon water cooler now sits upon my desk, scant inches from where these words are being penned. It will soon be placed into the recycling bin, from where I hope it is resurrected into something useful, or at least benign. Its contents will be placed in my trashcan. And I will soon start eyeballing the appropriate geocaching websites with the idea of expanding my public-service horizons to include as many geocaches as I can locate and remove.

It’s good to have goals.

And this quest will give me an excuse to travel to places I would not otherwise visit.

Not sure I’ll make many friends. But you never know.