Almost exactly one year ago I was standing on these train tracks in the early hours of the day in San Miguel de Allende in central Mexico, a beautiful cobblestone town in the heart of Mexico with lots of little cafés, bars and galleries and rooftop restaurants. I was there for ten days and early into the trip found out about the history this town shared with the Beat Generation writers and fore figures. Particularly Neal Cassady who had passed away there in 1968. Cassady being the inspiration to countless stories, most famously as the character Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. This was sensational!

I had read On the Road for the first time when I was about fifteen or sixteen and it has been with me ever since. I see Kerouac as part of why I chose to change continents and move from Germany to California. And here I was in the town in which, as the myth has it, Kerouac and Cassady drove around in a green Mercedes with a naked girl called Sunshine in the backseat.

I started doing some research and discovered that Cassady had supposedly attended a wedding party near the train station in February of 1968 and after leaving the party decided to walk the tracks south towards the town of Celaya only dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. He only made it about two hundred feet down the tracks and some workers found him in the morning in a coma. The cold night, it was February at an elevation of about 6000 feet, must have got him and he died in a nearby hospital hours later.

So one morning I got up early and took a cab down to the train station. The cab drivers name was David and he was very excited when I told him that this was my second name. He barely spoke English and I had close to zero Spanish for him. He told me his son was a mechanic in town, repairing suspension. I pointed at the cobblestone roads and replied: “Perfect job!” Now David was really entertained. His daughter, he kept explaining, was living in Modesto, in California and she was going to school there for something I forgot but he insured me that she was very smart. We drove down Canal Street towards the train station, Sunshine was peeking over the mountains and I was on my way to look for a dead man around the train tracks at the outskirts of this Mexican little town that had seen so much of what I had been exposed to in writing.

I asked David to wait for me for thirty minutes while I was looking for Cassady. I walked down to and past the old train station, crossed the road which was intersecting with the tracks and walked south. Right around two hundred feet from the train station Sunshine was peeking over the hills and shacks and there Cassady was. He said hello and told me to keep wandering. I acknowledged and we both turned to continue on our path.

David was sitting in the cab. “Go now?” “Yes,” I said and the engine started. David wanted to show me the best view of San Miguel on the way back so we drove into the hills off Canal to the north. We stopped and looked east. I believed him that this was a magnificent view for sunset but at this time of the day Sunshine was blinding us and we kept driving. I asked him to drop me off at Bar LaCucaracha and smiling he agreed.

This great white shark grew up in a small pond
Or maybe it wasn’t so small, that pond
The shark just grew too large

define direction

I encountered this tree while on a hike through the Rockies in Vail recently. I stopped and could not believe how this simple change of alignment completely questioned all my accumulated understanding of direction. Context is everything!

Large cloud
Why?
Do you want to steal my sun

guy in VW bus
born in Hamburg
his girlfriend waving and laughing at me

all by myself
getting drunk
by the fire

Bird -
you can’t have
my cheese and salami

Oh – wine
my friend
all red

Riyadh
you hole
I escaped

One shaved leg
I have
below my hip

Birds!
Find a worm -
This is my burger

big watercockroach
climbing cliff
with bare feet

walked a while
sat a while
made a pile

the wind
who I thought an enemy
now a friend