To market, to market, to buy a fat pig,
Home again, home again, dancing a jig;
To market, to market, to buy a fat hog;
Home again, home again, jiggety-jog;
To market, to market, to buy a plum bun,
Home again, home again, market is done.
— Mother Goose

It was a cool 55 when i left Flagstaff just before six. Tom Suby came out to dump some trash from the house above my studio and we said goodbye again. While we were talking, i commented i smelled smoke and there was a smoky haze. He said it was the Kendrick fire, about 10,000 acres. When he realized i didn’t know about the fire, he was incredulous. “You really have been doing anything but writing, haven’t you?” he asked.

Yes, i had isolated myself that much. No television. No news except the exchanges with friends of the Fitzgerald collision, something we Navy surface types will be talking about for a long, long time. But that and some Facebook exchanges. After all, i was trying to get to somewhere.

Friday morning, i had found somewhere i wanted to be and i was taking it home.

It was old Jewell traveling again. My little Mazda 3 was packed pretty full, not jammed like i have traveled many other times, but full. i rolled onto old US 66 and shortly hit I-17, down, down, down the mountain. The vistas of pines in the rolling mountains was beautiful. And rolling down those curves, the highway folks had put up one of those temporary flashing signs that warned, “Look out for Elk.” i took that to mean meeting an elk on the two lanes down could be imminent. i had this thing in me that wanted to pull off at a safe spot and go look for elk. Of course,  i didn’t. Just kept rolling like i always do.

By the time i got to Phoenix, she was rising (okay, who makes that connection?). i called and told her i was coming home and i had found somewhere. By now the mountains and the hills and the pines were but hazy visions on the horizon. The landscape of Arizona is varied and always interesting. If only i could slow and study it some more. Of course, i didn’t. i just kept rolling. As always.

i cut west on state route 101, maybe there a long time but now a four-lane escape from Phoenix traffic, going south to I-10, then a quick jog to state route 85 to I-8 in Gila Bend, the land that i…, no i don’t love it, but i have had a number of adventures featuring Gila Bend, and i’ve always been amazed anyone would choose to live there and now even more amazed because it’s growing.

Now, i was in familiar territory: I-8, the ribbon of highway to San Diego. Been on this crazy route more times than i can count. 80 miles per hour, maybe more if i think the highway patrol isn’t hiding in the bushes somewhere west. Not much there to Yuma except exits to towns that don’t even have dots on the exit signs: Smurr, Theba, Piedra, Tarton, Stanwix, Aztec, Dateland, Mohawk, Tacna, Ligurta. Maybe a gas station and convenience store for the travelers, a couple of houses, most with no vegetation, a couple with tree breaks. That’s it. Not much to El Centro and ’bout the same until the road begins to climb just west of Ocotillo where i had to turn around once and spend an extra night (in El Centro where i dined at a Thai place run by Mexican-Americans, nice folk but their fried rice had a hint of salsa). Then up the mountains past Dos Cabezos until you feel like you just might be on the top of the world, that ribbon of highway launching across spans of nothingness looking down into valleys so deep you can’t see the bottom and looking up to the sky so close it feels like you could touch it. Then down, down, down where the names look familiar where there are now a grunch of casinos on the reservations until i hit the eastern edges of the city and the traffic looks familiar as i jockey for position to get the hell off this ribbon of highway gone lunatic and jiggety jog to home.

“Market is done.”

i’ve found somewhere, and i am home.

My little Mazda has done good. It will get a detail tomorrow. i was beat, worthless for the evening. Maureen puts up with me and we eat tapas down the hill, watch a bit of the ballgame recorded earlier and go to bed.

This morning, i arise and launch into old routines with the additional unpacking, organizing, washing. You know. Then before Maureen comes out of the bedroom, i assess where i’ve been. The trip home beat me down a bit more than before. But i am older. Someday in the future, i will have to stop such power drives to somewhere.

Somewhere? i found it. It isn’t exactly what i was expecting to find. The sequestered sojourn was not exactly the way i planned. But it did accomplish what i wished to accomplish. i know where i am. Somewhere. i’ll be a bit different now. i’m not sure exactly sure who that will be, but it will be different.

And i’m fine.

After all, when i walked out the kitchen door to fill Maureen’s garden water pail, i found this:

It’s good to be home, jiggity jig.

It is a lovely place, this someplace i have found.

Since i’ve found it, i’m moving on, back home where i belong.

i’ve checked out the car to leave a day early, early in fact tomorrow morning.

i’ve checked the car fluids, etc. as my dear bride asked me to do. i knew they were okay, but one of the primary drives in my life is to make her not worry. i’ve enough gas to get within a half-hour of Bonita, but i’ll stop somewhere after a couple of hours to fill ‘er up and go the rest of the way non-stop. My kind of driving. Just under 500 miles, seven to eight hours through the desert at its hottest. Done it too many times to remember them all. Do recall the old Toyota Corona station wagon through Arizona in July when i had to turn on the heat to keep it from overheating in 120-plus temperatures and then stopping in El Centro around 6:00 in the evening, thinking how cool it was only to see a bank sign thermometer reading 118. May get something of a repeat as the Southwest between Fredericksburg, Texas and El Centro, California is relishing in heat way above 100 degrees.

But it’s time to go. i spent today spinning wheels. i finally realized the sequestered sojourn to somewhere was over. i mean i got somewhere. i know where it is now, and i’m damn tired of the sequestered part. i was gonna gut it out through tomorrow. Then i talked to Maureen. That did it. i missed her. Flat missed her.

As for the writing retreat as i have called it, i got done what i needed. It’ll be a book sometime. It may or may not be published. Some folks will get a copy regardless. We’ll see.

It was good for me, this somewhere.  i will take somewhere with me when i leave tomorrow, but i’ll leave behind a wonderful workout/walk/interval training/run thing in the mountains. i think the introductory photo captures it.

But it’s time to go home.

This morning as usual, i read “The Writer’s Almanac” in my daily email. One item struck me. Today is the birthday of Erich Maria Remarque, the German who at twenty was in the trenches during World War I. He’s the guy who wrote All’s Quiet on the Western Front. If you haven’t read it, you should.

As i read the item, i was struck with similarities between now and the time of Erich’s quote and the time of the item’s description of the later reaction in his home country of Germany. i have my vision of how it relates to now (and it wasn’t just ISIS), but i’ll let you come to your own conclusions about who, what, and how:

Remarque’s quote:

I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow.

The excerpt from the article:

The novel sold more than a million copies in Germany in its first year of publication. Nazis were beginning their rise to power at the time, and they hated the book because it portrayed World War I as misguided and pointless. It was one of the books they publicly burned in 1933. When the film version of the book premiered in Berlin, Nazi gangs attacked the theater. Remarque lost his German citizenship in 1938 and eventually moved to the United States.

i found the similarities terribly sad. Why can’t we learn from the past?

Please, please, please, as James Brown, the hardest working man in show business, used to scream, please, please please don’t tell my wife about this post.

This, obviously, will take some explaining.

You see, i am up in these mountains attempting to be reclusive, monk style, and write. i am surprised i’ve been pretty damn good at it. But there were a couple of things causing me…okay, okay, it was my choice…to wander from my monk-hood discipline of writing with walk/hike/runs breaks and otherwise isolation. As most of you already know, my last column was published in The Lebanon Democrat today. And one of my best friends ever, the Shreq of the Shreq and Donkey duo of which i was…yep, Donkey, Pete Toennies came home from the hospital today after shoulder replacement surgery yesterday. Pete, if you don’t know retired as a Navy SEAL captain. He and i met on a legendary 1979-80 deployment to WESTPAC.

So i thought i would celebrate a good run with my hometown paper and honor Pete.

Now there are many ways i could do this. If i thought hard enough, i could have probably conjured from the originally overstocked and fast dwindling groceries in the refrigerator and the cupboard. So i assessed. And i remembered. The assessment function revealed i still had a package of ground beef i had not touched in the refrigerator. i remembered a dish Pete and i revel in. Unfortunately, neither of our wives are thrilled with its nutritional value. Mine is downright revulsed.

In the early part of this decade, Pete and i were marketing to the Navy a product that made a lot of sense, would have helped the Navy meet some requirements, and would have saved a lot of money. So of course, the stakeholders eventually decided they didn’t want it. After all, it would be treading on their territory and they might (which they never did) figure out a way to do it in house. But in the course of our marketing, our old friend and shipmate in that long ago deployment, OW Wright, arranged for the two of us to brief a whole bunch of Navy security types in Pearl Harbor.

Pete and i flew in  and rented a car the day before the brief. It was past midday and we were hungry. We tried to find the monkey bar in Pearl City, but it had been quite a while and we couldn’t locate it, if it still exists, which is not likely. Not finding it was probably a good thing because someone later told me PETA or some other well-intended but misguided organization had gotten rid of the monkeys (hmm, wonder if they used one of those relocation services). Finally, we stopped at a a place advertising great food. It turned out to be a bowling alley restaurant on the overhanging balcony of the lanes. We checked the menu and weren’t particularly impressed. But we both wondered about the special, Loco Moco. The waitress described it, and we didn’t blink an eye ordering Loco Moco.

You see, Loco Moco is  a modern local Hawaiian dish on a bed of rice covering a dinner plate. Then there is a half-pound or more of cooked ground beef. On top of that is one or two fried eggs (you can get three eggs if you let the waitress know that’s what you want). All of this is covered with a shellacking of brown gravy. i now know why there are a lot of really big native Hawaiians.

Several years later, Pete and his wife Nancy began to have us join them on a Kauai vacation. It has become an almost every other year tradition. One reason is the four of us are good golf partners. Also Pete and i like to play when the women are pursuing more cultured activities. Our favorite course in Kauai is Kiahuna. There are short lava rock fences supposedly created by the Menehune, a Hawaiian version of Leprechauns. On the back nine between fairways is the remains of the rock home of the Portugee, a guy who became like an overseer of a good chunk of the island. The remains of his rock tomb vault is several paces behind the home ruins. Fascinating but off point.

However, on a day when the ladies were being cultural, Pete and i stopped for lunch in between a day of two rounds. And there on the menu much to our surprise (delight) was “Joe’s Loco Moco.” i am happy to report Joe’s is just as good if not better than the bowling alley version.  Of course, that could be influenced by the fact we washed Joe’s down with two mai tai’s, another thing Joe is very good at.

So tonight, i went back to the grocery and bought some packaged microwaveable rice and ready to mix and serve brown gravy. i made a dent on that refrigerated ground beef and decreased the number of way too many eggs and made my version of Loco Moco. It wasn’t bad and absolutely of no real nutritional value. So of course, i loved it, wished for Pete and hoped to god, Maureen wouldn’t find out.

It wasn’t quite as good as Joe’s on Kauai because i washed it down, gulp, with Pellegrino, not a mai tai.

In the last couple of days, i wavered on my intended mission in the sequestered sojourn to somewhere (Thank  you, Maren Hicks: i like the added adjective). But i’m back on task. And exactly somewhere has begun to reveal itself. Today, i will not blaming myself for taking breaks from writing my book. You see, the timing of this sojourn had some difficulties, some built in interruptions.

i suspect i will write more on this but my last column, number 500, appeared in The Lebanon Democrat today. i wrote and submitted it last week, an interruption to the sojourn i didn’t mind at all. After reading it this morning, i’m taking some time to digest something being part of my life being no longer a deadline to meet, no longer a topic to determine, no longer memories to fill out and clarify.

i thought the College World Series might require me to go off-line to watch Vanderbilt chase a dream of mine again. But Vandy quickly lost to Oregon State in the Super Regionals and the CWS no longer required my attention.

Then there was Father’s Day. And it really should be called “Father’s Days.” Recognition of dads began mid-week last week. Mine took up parts of three days.i had to, had to stop for that.

i also discovered even though i can write fairly solid for two weeks with walking/running breaks included, it’s damn near impossible for me to write on one thing for more than a work week. i can’t explain that except for it being in my nature. So i’m back to considering where i’m at while i’m going to somewhere.

But here is a continuation about where i am really:

i introduced Leopard in the last post. Yesterday, i found out he’s a neighbor’s cat who has taken up part time residence here.

i thought there was another solo act attracted by the birds and the feeders. A squirrel i called Orion.

Brave little fellow. While i was sitting less than four feet away, he would ignore me to chow down on what the birds had spilled from the feeder above. But it turns out Orion isn’t a solo act. Juliana, a friend of the owners of this Air B&B studio, came by to water the plants and fill the bird feeders. She pointed out some of the magnificent pines. They are dead and dying. Why? Squirrels. They are eating the new growth. As we talked, about a half-dozen of these brazen guys start running around pell-mell on patio rails, jumping from tree to tree. So Orion is really a bunch of these guys. Juliana talked about a service to catch them and remove them to another location. That doesn’t make sense to me.

i was happier thinking there was just one Orion living off of dropped bird seed.

So after i unpacked, and settled in, and met Leopard and Orion, i went on a suggested walk. An “Urban Trail,” Arrowhead Trail to be precise, winds up, and i mean up, for slightly less than two miles, probably an average incline of about eight degrees, and in one spot, a twelve degree grade. The path is about the size of a wide one lane road back home in Tennessee or a two-lane road with a turn lane in Ireland. Some views:

At the top is the tableland and “Buffalo Park.” There’s a bronze sculpture of a bison at the entrance with a plaque explaining the park. It says the park began as land dedicated to a game refuge populated with bison and antelope. Since i’ve been here i’ve only seen deer. i think they decided it should be more of a people trail place and the bison would be a danger to the new interlopers so they had them removed to somewhere else (sort of like the squirrels killing the pines). It hasn’t been crowded but there always at least fifteen, sometimes as many as thirty cars parked at the entrance. The trail system is expansive.

Did i mention this place is up high. This photo is of the higher mountain. It’s mid-June. That’s snow. It’s high up.

Below is a doe on the trail up, and below that is her fawn in the woods. i’ve seen about a dozen deer on my walks, nothing rare these days unless you live in a city like San Diego. i don’t understand why they are prevalent elsewhere like where i grew up when there were none there when i grew up and not any deer at our house in Bonita where coyotes, bobcats, foxes, and snakes abound. Perhaps they used a deer removal service.

It’s time to get back on that sojourn to somewhere. This has been a nice break.