The Gulf

The clouds are losing, but only for a little while.  They got reinforcements creeping up over the south desert, dragging long trains of rain over the old sea mud of what used to be the Great Cretaceous Seaway.  It’s hard sometimes to think like that.  To think of the differences in sea levels, but also to think of a world where Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, New Mexico, et al. were ever at or below the sea.  It’s hard to think of a Colorado, The West in general, as a  littoral gulf.

There were days when the water looked like mercury.  The stillness of the shallow and warm water had not a single knot of wind blowing over it.  The water settled down into a flat and rippleless silver stretching away into the invisible horizon.  You couldn’t tell the hot silver sky from the cool silver water.  In the dark forest green translucent ripples branching away from the bow, you could see into the ocean.  you could look through the water as it tilted toward you in waves cutting out V’s into the edge of oblivion and see the sea snakes and the jelly fish, all enormous, and every so often a shark prowling.  But where the water was flat, it reflected only the silver sky, all the blue burned out of it.  The wake gave the only indicator of horizon, an unbroken green line terminating somewhere far away and always behind.  

The Persian Gulf is a rift.  The basin is pulling apart and may some day be an ocean in its own right.  Around the corner, past the Straits of Hormuz, the Gulf of Oman is cold and deep.  The water is rolling and blue, like the sea should be.  But part of me will always love The Gulf, the name it is known by among those who have had to live it and breathe and go across it trailing silver and green on into the silver oblivion.  

My head is hurting, rifting due to minor tectonic fluctuations among the mostly fixed joints in my skull.  Or from too much good beer.  It is not all the way wrong that good beer leaves you feeling the worst.  I find my Scout, embarassingly abandoned in the middle of the parking lot, a man left behind.  The brewery is emptied out now, only a few cars are in the parking lot, all left standing alone.  There is something viscerally appealing and shameful about seeing a car parked in an otherwise empty lot, obviously put there when it was not the only vehicle in between the cat’s cradle of yellow lines.  

I get in and it fires up, even dead cold, after three cranks from the starter.  As the oil pressure builds, I move my seat back a little to accommodate my somewhat shaky system more comfortably.  Once the pressure hits about 100 PSI, I know the engine’s warm and ready to go.  The old Borg Warner model nine three speed clunks into gear.  The transmission doesn’t know it, but it is short for this world.  When the kit comes in from Kansas, I’m rebuilding a larger and more reliable Chrysler 727 to take its place.  The spell of warming and maybe a little burnt transmission fluid lets me know this is a priority.  While I sit waiting for the nickel steel heart of the scout to pull us out of the lot, I put my hands to my face.  My skin smells like vanilla and IPA and almost exactly perfectly not like my own.  

And I remember the other skin, the skin that smelled like girly soap, good hopped beer, vanilla and a little like me.  And I feel good.  My head hurts and my stomach burns and my body aches.  But I know I have a few bad decisions left in me.  It would seem I am not alone in that.