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Postcards to the Future

By Michael Wolcott

Found in: | Inside | Books |

The plastic milk crate under the bed is stuffed with journals - small spiral notebooks, ornate cloth-bound diaries, smudged, tattered memo pads once carried in a sweaty shirt pocket through Grand Canyon or the San Juans or Sonora.

All told, these logbooks chronicle about two decades. They're not daily records, more like scrapbooks full of odd snippets of life and thought and words-for-their-own-sakes. Journals are full of things that seem important at the time.

Keeping a journal is a relatively harmless habit. It can alleviate anxiety and causes less damage than a chemical addiction or a slot machine habit. It's cheaper than psychotherapy and it's socially acceptable. Journals are also useful mnemonic devices. Fresh details may be stored and served up years later, good as new, not falsified by time.

I pick up a six-by-nine spiral notepad and check the dates written inside the front cover: April. 23 - Sept14, 1995. I thumb through scraps of a time far gone: teaching yoga classes, waiting tables, other things I don't do any more.

There's a brittle exchange with a stranger in a Flagstaff coffee shop (she was getting a tarot reading - wanted me to change tables so she would be "more comfortable"). I recall her daisy-print peasant dress, the silver in her curls, the ice in eyes. (And all I had said was, "Hey, I'm comfortable. Maybe you should move.")

Six pages are filled with an exhaustive account of losing $37 one morning in the San Carlos Apache tribal casino. In 1995, the Apache Gold Casino was new, reeking of hope for something better. I was new to gambling. And the "New West" was not yet old.

On that early fall day my truck was loaded with a week's food and 12 gallons of water. I had just driven through the weary mining town of Globe (immortalized in one of Ed Abbey's essays as "Glob"). The Apache Gold was a lovely rest stop, a patch of glitter and thin promise in a world of creosote, sage, and hardscrabble mountains.

The dirt parking lot was crammed with sagging brown LTDs. My rig, with its deer-crunched front end, fit right in. The only new vehicle in the lot - a sparkling red Dodge Ram dually - was trailered at a rakish angle by the casino's main entrance. Next to the truck stood a larger-than-life chrome sculpture: the Apache brave astride his rearing horse. Arms lifted, he drew my gaze up, inevitably, to a fluttering six-by-eight foot plastic sign, red letters on white. "Win Some Wheels!" it said.

Thumbing forward a few pages, a new scene arrives from the past:

I'm 50 miles from the casino, in the desert three miles off pavement, sitting on a rock outcrop 20 feet above an old stock tank. Sipping coffee, staring. Two of the windmill's fins are broken. The thing creaks uselessly.

The journal informs me that the early-autumn day was cool and windy. The dammed San Carlos River far below was silver, the desert green. Cloud shadows raced across the basin, west to east. I read some more:

"A few minutes ago, sitting up on this knob, I reached for a rock wedged in the cracked cliff face - it looked interesting, a swatch of black against a beige background. Just before touching it, inches away, I realized this was not a rock, but the fist-thick midsection a rattlesnake. The snake's body was loosely coiled between the parallel faces of cold rock: the snake was torpid. So were the others.

"It's a snake den," the journal reports. "I'm in the presence of one of the few North American snakes that can actually kill a man. And I'm outnumbered. From this seat I can see five western diamondbacks, some coiled, some sprawled, at ease in the pockets of rock. They're all three feet or longer. I better show some respect."

I christened the place "Viper Knob" and camped there for two nights. The snakes and I kept company. They basked, I wrote in a journal. Today this mail from my past arrives and I remember. A story slips through a crack in time.