The old Wire Road is alive with ghosts tonight. A wrong turn, a curiosity to learn what is beyond the next ridge, around the next bend, and I land at Wilson's Creek Battlefield near dusk. There was about 40 minutes of twilight before the gates would be locked. I was here last a lifetime ago. I was a different man back. A noise pulls me from my thoughts. Two expensive looking cars drive by, passing into the park. I hop back in my truck and follow. "They can't lock us all in," I reason.
Somehow, since the industrial revolution of the West, compartmentalization counts. Compartmentalization of thought, of people, of ideas. Growing up a rough and wild and wooly and sensitive and bookish boy was growing up in a place in which there was simply no place. Homeschool helped, giving me a clock-ticking reprieve, a solace of books and timber forest and a barnful of critters to love. But the clock was forever ticking. "What are you gonna be when you grow up?" An inhumane question, misplaced. Despite my intelligence even then, I was like a skittish deer in the headlights, foreign thoughts hurtling toward me.
The Ray House is a sentinel, watchful, dutiful restored home on the eastern edge of the battlefield. A centerpiece of the national park, I sat on the front porch one hot summer afternoon, wondering what the future held. Split-rail fences and corn fields demarcate the space. Both fences and fields were significant during the battle, a battle that left over 2,500 casualties, beginning blood of a war that would shake and change America for the better and for the worse.
"Artist" is such a strange word, one with too much baggage and expectation. I've lived and worked in the arts since college; graphic design, writing, teaching, communicating, photographing, creating. StateoftheOzarks' first events were art events, and many still are. "He likes to draw and read," my mom would say. "But that doesn't pay the bills." My father was an engineer. His father a scientist. Reputable, firm careers, distinguished and acceptable, and often well-paid. Stratified, rarified experts in fields of esteem, far from the gritty rabble of the everyday. For years, my mom worried.
Another bend in the national park loop road, another crossing, another meadow. "Old Wire Road," reads the simple sign. I drive by slowly, staring down the old path. There is something there, something more than gravel and tree and shade. My inner being shivers, knowing, not seeing, movement, sentience, presence, moving, passing ever on. I throw the truck in reverse, backing onto the grass and get out, staring down the empty path. There's nothing there, that is obvious, but “nothing” is meaningless. There is far more down the path, watching.
The fictitious world — the one in which we believe — is made squares and cubes, classifications and titles. Simplifies things, of course, "lawyer," "doctor," "engineer." This fictitious world is, of course, the same world in which ghosts and witches are tidily relegated to the Halloween mask department and a great, soaring, troubled, beautiful alchemical world which stretches out into the cosmos is simply — ignored.
The remainder of the national park loop road was largely uneventful and at the gate, I turn right, not left. The expensive cars before me take the opposing and well-marked way instead. I meander eastward, down hard turns and old blacktop, the path of the old ghosts, and through 40-year-old neighborhoods until I find a bright light convenience store for cheap coffee and pricy gas and a blueberry turnover. And somehow in the dark, in the wind and the future and past, I am reminded, the world isn't tidily compartmented. The world, life, this strange space in the crossroads cosmos, is full of contradictions and hope, terror and tears. Reality is in unknown, in the lost stars overhead, and on old, old road, alive tonight with ghosts.
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