Dinner with Buddha (28 page)

Thirty-six

We had lunch in the town of Green River, which billed itself as “Utah's Desert Treasure” and was, in fact, located in a kind of oasis. The oasis had seen better days. Along the main drag stretched a row of small stands selling melons, but many of the stores and eating places were closed up and exhibited a forlorn look. One of the only surviving establishments, a place called Ray's Tavern, resembled a biker bar from the outside but wore a sign saying
THE PLACE FOR EVERYONE
, so Rinpoche and I went in. At Ray's we enjoyed a fine lunch of slightly overcooked pork chops, thick as the phone book, coleslaw, fries, and a decent draft beer shared between us by the ratio of 11 to 1. There was a glassed-in collection of T-shirts on the wall, as exotic as those from Ivy League rowing teams and as mundane as one from a local construction company; behind the bar a man stood over a grill, flipping burgers that bore no resemblance whatsoever to the thin strips of so-called meat in the fast-food chains. As we ate, a gaggle of bikers did, in fact, come through the door, but they wore jackets saying
COMBAT VETERANS AGAINST CHILD ABUSE
and had gray beards and gray ponytails and were the last thing from threatening. I asked the waiter, as diplomatically as I could, what had happened to Green River, why the closed-up shops, the quiet streets?

“Used to be a missile range here,” he said. “That's closed now, but what really hurt us was when the highway got built.” He waved an arm to the south. “People used to drive through town and stop to eat or get gas. Now they just go right on by.”

It seemed so sad. Here was a place with character, with homemade coleslaw and a welcoming air, and it had been cast aside in favor of highway rest stops with paper-thin hamburgers, chemical additives, interior design that was as bland, upbeat, plastic, and inoffensive as some consultant in Chicago could make it. For a little while it seemed to me that all the blood and zest were being siphoned out of the American landscape in the name of convenience and low prices. We eviscerated whole towns, fed our kids with less care than we fed our cattle, put people in uniforms and set them to work for eight bucks an hour. And we called that progress.

Maybe I simply didn't want any kind of high-speed modernity just then, on the heels of our conversation by the side of I-70. Maybe I was seeing America through the lens of my own drama: I didn't want the house in Bronxville and my life there to be “finish.” A fine film of nostalgia had wrapped itself around me. Against all hope and reason, I still wanted to be husband and father, the guy kicking the soccer ball in the back yard and washing the dishes after dinner. Even as I saw, so clearly, that Rinpoche was right, a part of me still wanted him to be wrong.

We finished our food and hit the road again.

Just past Green River was a sign:
NEXT SERVICES ON I-70 106 MILES.
It was that kind of place, empty land, eyed lustfully by the makers of missile bases and the dumpers of nuclear waste. Soon we turned off the highway and headed southwest through another wonderland of rock formations. In Goblin Valley State Park the stone hills, layered in horizontal grays and reds, looked like big slabs of steak stacked on their sides. The plains were dotted with tufted grasses, sagebrush perhaps, burnt sienna in color with hints of pale gray-green. One half expected to see saguaro cactus against the crumbling hillsides. We passed a place called Temple Mountain, which looked like nothing so much as a dry castle rising from the desert floor. Off to the south we saw the bottoms of clouds being tugged toward the earth in bands of gray vapor, and my phone started giving off an alarm that severe weather was close. Rain. Flash floods. Caution was urged. As if fleeing just as Noah was finishing the ark, pickups raced past in the opposite direction, many of them towing speedboats. Lake Powell lay to the south of us. It was Saturday. Vacation was over and people were heading home.

The windshield had ceased to be an insect burial mound. Nothing lived here.

For a hundred more miles we went along like this, the landscape watered very lightly by the edges of the storm, small towns like Hanksville and Caineville, with trailers, horses in pens, junked pickups in fields. Out Rinpoche's window now was a vista of bluish mountains behind gray stone fortresses that had never been occupied. It was a world made by the children of some sand-castle-champion god.

Now it changed again—a green field, sudden, packed with Angus cattle. Then dusty gray slopes, veined with rain runoff, looking like manmade piles of slag, and then stone that appeared to be bleeding from maroon veins. A sign on an abandoned cement mixer read,
UTAH VOTE
NOT
FOR HILLARY
, as if, summer of 2013, she'd already declared her candidacy, the primaries were in full swing, and there was one chance in a billion that Utah might
not
vote NOT for Hillary. The rocks had turned pink again now, closer to what we'd seen in Moab. In Capitol Reef National Park there were Swiss cheese holes in the cliff sides, and pellets—armchair sized—of dark pebbles strewn on top of the sandstone, like crumb-cake crust.

I was hungry.

Soon, we were ascending into the clouds, literally, the scenic overlooks on State Route 12 of little use because of a dense fog, though we stopped long enough at one of them to read a placard saying that this was the last part of America to be mapped.

Of all the places on this vast section of the continent, we were standing in what was arguably the last American place left alone, in the shadows, in mystery, undeveloped, unused. Free.

The idea of that seemed strange and wonderful to me. I felt then that I had entered unmapped territory myself, though it was interior territory. This new place in me was unspectacular, not suitable for any particular designation, nowhere that would attract hordes of tourists, and yet, in its mystery and anonymity it felt like a door to some secret room. It was as if I'd parked the car and walked off into the wilderness, but there were no dangers, no rattlers or wolves, just peaceful Alpine fields where one might walk or camp anywhere one wanted.

A strange side effect of all this was that I didn't want to look at Rinpoche. I don't know exactly why. We were descending now, coming down out of the clouds beneath an unsettled sky that showed flashes of blue. Three deer stood nonchalantly beside the road. Then sunlight streamed through, lighting up a carpet of yellow wildflowers as if setting them ablaze. I knew that my wise companion had led me to this interior place, through years of small nudges and larger shoves, books, comments, meditation tips, and, mainly, by his example. But now that I'd arrived in this happy unmapped territory, I didn't want to look at him. I was worried he might tell me,
No good, Otto. Do not stay in this place.
And I wanted to stay there.

We left Dixie National Forest, passed Anasazi Indian Village State Park, saw llamas in a field to our right, and palomino ponies grazing there. It was late afternoon, the temperature back up in the low seventies, and we were curling along a canyon bottom now, looking up at rocks that reminded me of light-tan cake batter poured into a pan and not yet touched with a spoon. There were dead trees here—the arthritic hands of tortured souls—and then we found our resting place, the Slot Canyons Inn, and were still for a while.

Thirty-seven

At the Slot Canyons Inn our host went by the unusual name of Joette Marie. She showed Rinpoche and me to a two-bedroom suite just off the wraparound porch. Jacuzzi tub. Fireplace. King bed for me with a large-screen TV, and a separate room for Rinpoche behind the curtain. On our various road trips together, we'd developed a routine: Upon checking in to a new place we left each other alone for half an hour or so, settled in, read, meditated, sent e-mails or texts. It was our way of giving each other a respite from our constant, if good, company.

I flicked on the TV for a few minutes, just long enough to hear more about the Syrian government's chemical attack on its own people, then opened my computer and read through a few new e-mails. There were notes from Anthony and Tash. And, from my wonderful sister, the following:

Dear Brother, We've all been tracing your route on the map on the kitchen wall and wish we could be with you. We are well. No need to worry. I have a favor to ask you. I'd like you to take my beloved husband to Las Vegas. Though I don't think Rinpoche will like it much, I think it's important for him to see that part of America. Would you do that?

My response:

Dear Seese, I'm glad you are all okay. I miss all of you very much. But I have to tell you I think the Vegas idea is the worst one you've come up with in a long time. And that's saying something. You know how much I love and admire your husband—more each time I take a trip with him—but I have to tell you that it seems to me he might have a little gambling addiction thing going on. I haven't confronted him about it but it worries me. Taking him to Vegas would be like taking a reformed alcoholic to a bar. I was thinking more along the lines of Taos or Sedona.

Her reply:

Otto: I had a vision, a very, very strong vision, that you should go to Las Vegas.

I held myself back from writing this:
You had a very strong vision that we should go into the mountains, too. We did. And absolutely nothing came of it.
And out of a calmer, kinder place, wrote:

How about Salt Lake City as a compromise?

Neither my sister nor I are the compromising type:

Brother, really. This isn't the kind of vision to ignore. I'm not worried about the gambling.

I'll make a deal with you: If you go to Vegas I'll pay for Natasha to fly down there as a birthday present. It's supposed to be more family oriented than it used to be. You can see a show, swim in the hotel pool. Natasha is dying to spend time with you. Please!!!!????

I reclined on the king bed with my head propped on the pillows and the computer on my lap and felt an old big wave of aggravation rising up over me.
Story of my life
was the phrase that came to mind. Or
our
lives, at least. For as long as I could remember, my sister had been shunted this way and that across the continent by various visions, ideas, boyfriends, jobs, notions, gurus, offers, enthusiasms, and wacky plans. One time she settled in northern California, in the college town of Chico, simply because she'd pulled off the road to get gas there and a man selling flowers from a roadside stand had smiled at her! She was a gorgeous woman. At the time she'd been in her mid-twenties. Men smiling at her was not a rare occurrence, but she took that particular smile as a sign, and she rented an apartment, and found a job, and stayed almost a year.

Out of this vapor of lunatic notions she would periodically contact Jeannie and me and ask us to do this or that. It was never about money—Seese had always paid her own way—but these requests usually involved some minor inconvenience. She wanted me to send her a particular photo of us when we were kids; she wondered if Jeannie could possibly make a batch of cookies and deliver it to her spiritual friend in Queens; was there any chance we could house-sit two of her cats for a year while she sailed to Jamaica with her new boyfriend; could we please help her find a good lawyer for Jake, who'd been wrongly accused of selling speed. Etc., etc., etc.

Since she'd married Rinpoche these requests had all but disappeared, but now here was another one. Las Vegas of all places. I'd been there twice for book conferences and once as a college student on a crazy road trip and I had never quite managed to see the appeal of the place. People I knew went to Vegas on their honeymoons, or saved up all year for a week of slots, shows, and buffets, or chose it as a place for a family reunion. I associated it with noise and alcohol, with mindless distraction and moneymadness; in short, the polar opposite of the types of things I considered spiritual.

So, naturally, after pondering for a while, I wrote back and said:

Okay, sure. Two nights maximum on the condition I am able to spend time with my daughter. . . . But you owe me.

Dear Brother! The best brother of all time! No wonder Rinpoche says so many good things about your spirit-heart!!!!

Spirit-heart,
I thought. That was perfectly Cecelia. I signed off with love, as always, but at that point it wasn't my spirit-heart I was concerned about; it was my spirit-stomach.