I’m trying to resist the temptation of feeling like we have been set adrift. Falling hither and yon.
Adrift … set adrift by me. Or worse, is it just me drifting and Roxanne is being pulled along by force … such a terrible thing to do to the love of your life. I hope it is not so.
We spent our first two and some years in Tucson – I working one full time job and together we worked on Frank Gohlke’s archive. My full time job was a dead end gig – meriting the loathing and squirming it engendered in me each and every day I had to subject myself to it. Working with Frank’s archive was just about as marvelous as a job could get. Together they made for a dangerous cocktail of self flagellation and escapism, of perturbation and delight. If it had not been for Franks friendship, and for how much Roxanne and I gained from delving into his life’s photographic work, we would have left much sooner than we did.
But yea, the time came when my job was simply so unbearable to continue performing (it was not in itself a terrible post, but it was not the kind of work I could do without doing damage to myself) that I jumped.
Where we landed is where I am writing from presently – Clarksville, Arkansas.
It is a place I’ve known once before. Long ago I went to a university here and left behind a few contacts. It was with one of my old friends who I took up work – something much more aligned with my abilities and disposition. So we moved. I dragged Roxanne here, from the desert to the rolling hills and forests of Northwestern Arkansas.
Arrived, we embarked on enjoying our new surroundings, and so we did. Rivers, forests, the rolling green hillocks coated in grass, the briars and bramble that close off the edges of the forest exposed by the road’s cuts. The rain, we’ve especially enjoyed the rain, and green. Green in every shade and tint, every hue and of every saturation. Green fills the senses here, pouring in through your eyes, through your nostrils with each breath, embracing your feet with every step, even – if you let it – onto your tongue when you give it a chance.
Arkansas, we have discovered, is almost exactly what we are looking for in terms of … well, not so much wilderness, but of outdoor engagement. What has been most important is that we’ve discovered that we love being a bit away from town, well out of ear-shot from our neighbors and three good stone’s throws away from the two-lane road.
There are, we’ve also learned, some things about being here that fall short of our needs. Of course, it took going without those things to find out that they were actual needs, and not merely niceties and artifacts of our previous locale, of which we partook lightly. We miss people. We miss people who’ve traveled, and we miss people who care about art. Me miss people who care about eating organic – eating vegan – eating locally grown – eating things not distributed by brands like Wal-Mart and Tyson, Kraft, et. al. We miss being around other people who do consider how they present themselves before the world prior to walking out the door. We miss being around people who’s lives don’t revolve around television, or sports, or hunting. We miss being able to engage with art, artists, and being able to walk into a space that has been designed for how it should attend to your senses, not merely how effectively it will dispose of a quantity of product. We miss being able to access the world online at with some reliability and at rates faster than dial-up.
In terms of the job – it’s a two sided blade. The line of work is vigorous, well remunerating, and challenging in ways that bring rewards when well performed. The co. I am with, however, is not large enough to accommodate two managerial styles – and as it happens I’m the junior manager.
So it is that we are planning our exodus from the garden of not-quite-Eden.
Roxanne and I have been clear in our thought that we are ready for a place to establish a semi-permanent home. Something we can call our own, and return to gladly from being abroad. I’d hoped that we would find this gigantic hilly garden that is Northwest Arkansas suitable to our needs – but neither it or we are able to bend and meet in the middle.
We’ve hardly begun our search for a house to land in and a job to report to. We know where on the map we are going, just not exactly how we will sustain our endeavor once we arrive.
Wish us, wish us the kind of grace that only the universe can bestow; those wild moments of serendipity where things fall into place in ways far too unexpectedly for it to have been the machination of man, that is what we need.
