This is the eighth installment of a series about the Mountain Dude, a wandering guy with an ESP-like “gift”.  The Mountain Dude, some readers may recall, made a few enigmatic appearances in JJ in the 21st Century.

I camped in the transition zone, the dune apron, between the dunes and the mountains. A Medano Creek ran along the base of the first tall dunes. I sat on the bank and watched the strange pulsing water move along the sandy bottom. The water has a kind of tidal rhythm as little sand bars are formed upstream then suddenly erode sending a quiet surge of water downstream, every twenty seconds or so, a condensed version of so many cycles. Aren’t we all forming and holding on against the pressure, then breaking down and letting go? Over and over and over again. At least I am.

The suck of the past.

There was a time when I thought I would be someone. A famous writer or thinker or public intellectual. Do public intellectuals even exist anymore? Are they just those dumbasses on tv holding forth on the latest utterings of cruel politicians? Or partisan bull-shitters swimming in some toxic think tank?

Anyway, there was a time when I wanted to be like Emerson, sharing my original personal not-handed-down experience of the world, self-reliant with the knowledge that great men wrote those great books sitting and struggling as I was trying to write a great book. Grandiose? The unrealistic dreams of youth?

Of course!

I wrote a short story in a college writing course about a group of young men, one of whom would die by gunshot. I was very proud of the story. It had a wallup. It was austere. It was a black and white interior photo of some uncluttered room, a good well-balanced photo of young men at a table laden with beer bottles and playing cards that left you wondering about the fate of such young men as these. One of them shows the others a gun which, by the Chekhov rule, means that someone has to get shot by the end of the story. In my story, there is no obvious conflict but, after the card game ends, one of the men, the one who showed the gun, tortured by an unnamed occurrence in his past, parks his car on the way home and shoots himself in the head.

That’s it.

I was very proud of this story. It had flowed out of me after a period of not having any ideas, of losing a girlfriend and hating my roommate’s hippy girlfriend ( and then my roommate), of being confused and alone in the world.

The writing “teacher” and most of the other students were not happy. I was accused of emotional ambush, of treating the reader with disdain, of minimizing suicide. They did not hold back and I was not capable of receiving criticism. I sat there and took it, but on my way back to the dorm I stopped in a little grove of trees and sat down on a bench. I decided that I would not be a writer anymore. There was no fight in me, just resignation. In fact, I resolved to leave college that day and pursue my own education, on my own, future be damned.

Someone had followed me from class to the little grove. A woman from the class. Clara or Clarise or Cherise. I hated her writing but she was kind and sensitive. She was a little heavy, hair dyed black, dressed all in black, and had this way of displaying her cleavage like, “I reject all color and levity!  Now look at my boobs!” I appreciated that.

I wanted to wallow. I DID NOT want to feel what she was feeling. I tried to shut off the valve of the sensing. Too late.

Sadness pulsed toward me. But also firmness, bedrock below the typical sadness and loneliness of most humans. An image of a mountain rising beyond a foggy lake. She was solid. Sad and solid.

“They were pretty harsh,” she said.

“Yeah. Fuck ‘em.”

“Are you coming back?”

“No.”

“So what are you going to do? Wander the earth?”

“Hmmm. Yup.”

“And write about it?”

“I’m done with that.”

She leaned over and put a hand on my arm. She was earnest and really cared and I tried so hard to look at her face and not down her shirt. I think I may have succeeded.

“Don’t stop writing,” she said. “Don’t ever stop no matter what you do.”

Ummm…okay.

But I still left college that night.