The Taco Traveler

Sometimes when I’m in a jet, 35,000 feet above the earth, and I happen to look out the window, I make it a game to pick out the most likely body of water – the lake, the river, the neighborhood pool – that I’d shoot for if the plane suddenly burst and I were sent into the sky with no plane around me. I know what you’re thinking, and yes, I absolutely know that at 35,000 feet, at 500 miles per hour, at like negative fifty degrees, I’d not have much of an opportunity to “direct” myself towards that water anyway. So while the fatalistic side of me sees a possible, gruesome (but very, very unlikely) ending, part of me feels like those stupid thoughts, that fatalism – planning my landing pool from 35,000 feet – makes me feel, when I land, that much more committed to living life to its fullest, here and now.

James Dickey’s “Falling” is the single greatest “falling from the sky” poem ever. Show me another? Okay, like 80 different versions of "Icarus." Show me another? Sexy and brave, our heroine is Angelina Jolie with a sky cap. The 60’s era stewardess falls from a plane when a broken door comes open and pulls her into the night:

      …if she fell
Into water she might live      like a diver      cleaving      perfect      plunge
Into another heavy silver      unbreathable      slowing      saving
Element: there is water      there is time to perfect all the fine
Points of diving      feet together      toes pointed      hands shaped right
To insert her into water like a needle      to come out healthily dripping
And be handed a Coca-Cola      there they are      there are the waters
Of life      the moon packed and coiled in a reservoir

We’re so affected by its absence or presence, its shallowness or depth. Sail on it. Drink it. Put it in a balloon and throw it at a friend. Eat its residents with a mango salsa or maybe just some clarified butter. Brew it with beans. Pour it on some dirt and grow some vegetables. Light some candles and make love in it. Just a couple months ago a friend of a friend dove into it though the sun had obscured its depth and that young man is still in the hospital, trying to get used to life all over again from a completely different perspective.

Maybe there was a hint of that “falling from an airplane” fatalism when I was younger. The diving practice where the difference between the perfect dive and a regular dive could be the difference between heroism and death. Standing on the dock, I’d sometimes pretend the water was only a few feet deep but of course people were watching and maybe there was a drowning toddler to save or something, so I was going in anyway. I’d arch my back right after hitting the surface, my belly – I mean the ripped ridges of my taut belly – brushing the lakebottom grasses and then I stand, triumphantly, in the shallows. Another child saved. Another tragedy averted. Another single mother or, better yet, beautiful, single aunt thankful. All bones of my vertebrae intact.

If this were an essay rather than a blog entry than it would need a lot of work, because I can’t seem to come around to what I really want to say. I’m not sure I really have anything to say, but I’m just trying to say that nothing in an interesting way. It’ll have something to do with living in the here and now. Taking risks after first, hopefully, evaluating those risks against the rewards. I may reference a friend’s quote when he told me as I was contemplating asking a girl out: “How long ya gonna be dead?” Maybe I’ll make some perfect connection that will wrap this up nicely, but I can’t seem to do it now. I’m too busy scrubbing bilges, cleaning tanks, stowing gear, fixing and installing electronics on Chemistry in preparations for September 17th, when I will head out, over the water, to start my journey to the other side of the continent.