Chapter 1: DIA

I

DIA

Right. Amoxicillin, Adderal, Risperdal, Cannabis, Dopamine, Serotonin; neurotransmitters hopping dendrites; dendrites floating helplessly in all the pharmaceutical muck. Right. An airport terminal the seat of my undoing. Two life insurance policies, three uninsured ranch trucks, 64 laptop gigabytes, six progeny, four mobile phones [if you count the unusable satellite], two Ivy-garlanded degrees, forty-seven letters of introduction, two wives, four percent's worth of shares in a venture capital collective, six deeds to real estate, and one fruitful connection to the White House; but an airline's merely routine profligate ticket bounty will reverse the loaves and the fishes and inadvertently paper the path of my doom in the lineally apportioned and balanced confines of Denver International. The disaster here would come more suddenly and resolutely, for the Denver International Airport architect seems to have adored the sun as much as he feared the ire of Native American activists in his repeating teepee mirage on the terminal roof. Glass dominates. And although legal opiates sustain my body's strained neural batteries, such hoodwink would blink before the power of dawn, leaving exposed an internal nervous circuit board aged blanched carbuncled by 6 offspring, innumerable but numbered investment accounts on two coasts, and a Bi-Polar disorder that doesn't so much steer from one pole to the other as open a tunnel through my personal earth, connecting the two poles to each other conveniently but unnaturally. Now a change in wind or fluid current will switch me from one extreme to the other with no announcement or other such politeness. Mercy is my pathetic request before the gods of circumstance, the dark ministers with the wit to stage my demise in an institution that first gained fame by virtue of a baggage carousel that, amidst the expectant gleaming faux steel walls and pleather seats, faltered sputtered and failed to earn the millions that birthed it, there establishing its similarity to my central nervous system.

Funny that the lavs here serve as Tornado shelters as well, with no door or any barrier to the cones of debris and water that rage west from the country’s midsection to crash, exhausted, right here on the Rockies' lap. Nothing to impede the tempest as it works its way around the terminal's rigid alloy corners and finds me defenseless on the sensor-flush toilet, pants down and mind preoccupied with the numerical improbabilities of gaining a seat on the 12:05 to Sea-Tac, a waiting list of 8 disillusioned Mormon missionaries standing between me and mental peace.[1] No shelter from the tornadoes, but their sinister vacuum I would prefer to the quieter violence that the sun perpetrates. No doors on the restrooms but plenty of impediments stand to thwart my progress to the serenity that otherwise awaits me on the Pacific shore. If only the secret humming locks in the plasma of the gate clerk's computer would grant passage to me and to the eternal night to the west, I could resume my role as a moral man.

Stand-by hasn't failed me yet, but it may tonight, and failure here would certainly presage my doom: the mountains lie to the west here; so the sun rolls off the plain states as menacingly as the twisters, painting the terminal in white scrutiny. The architect capped the building in immaculate plexiglass tent clusters out of partial compensation to the Indians long since routed by the forbears of the fellows who probably hired the architect himself. So although the maternal menagerie of tee-pee cones lends to more temperate travelers a faith in the structure's comforting shelter, shelter from tornadoes and baggage mismanagement and the loss of a client at the last stop and from the need to sleep-off a flight delay against the sweaty pleather and stainless steel armrests of the terminal furniture, I would be silly to seek shelter here from a nervous breakdown triggered by the sun, ultraviolet retinal psychosis that neither the Risperdal nor the promise of my young wife's soft embrace in the four-hour furlough five flights down my itinerary will ever quite tame.

I've been adept at my evasion of the sun in the ten weeks since my madness finally ruptured and spilled its Pandoran properties on my family and home. New York to Minneapolis to Portland to Fairbanks to Honolulu to Singapore to New Delhi to Constantinople to Paris then home and then the cycle repeated with shifts in the menu of cities, a phoned interplay conducted by sister airlines under the same corporately merged umbrella and between unrelated companies lacking even a shared language but still conjoined by the able tongue of fiberoptic data. And how healing that tongue has proved to my psychic wounds: 1st-class, completely horizontal accommodations on six-to-ten hour flights above the Great Lakes and the Pacific; all the while I'm careful not to succumb to the indulgence of a true rest that a JFK/Tokyo direct flight would bestow, for that foolishness would of course impale me on the ringing blade of a rising sun.

Heaven, does one miss the Winter. For a few wayward weeks early on in the adventure[2] I experimented with the Alaskan nighttime, burrowing in the flannel sheets of the Fairbanks Sheraton during the ninety minutes of the sun’s presence each day, but the theory that a home could be pitched within civilization’s borders broke as surely in that parallel as it did in the less desperate latitudes of Boston and Cleveland and Durango, where my first wife’s sheets from Macy’s and my second one’s Ralph Lauren variety similarly shriveled in the task of shielding me from the world’s stark vicissitudes. When Alaska took that disappointing turn[3] (compounded by a more desperate [and that much more dispiriting] 2-month taste of total darkness at the end of the earth in Barrow, AK), Business Manager Claudia relit the torch of the old itinerary, unquestioningly designing a mad, one-way jaunt series, memorizing my MasterCard number in the process.

Even her mighty fingers couldn’t have foreseen that Frontier Airlines’ overbooking habits would remove me so far down the stand-by list as to dispatch me to the lieu, temporary prisoner of the earlier Cinnabon and terminal bar enchilada. The gate clerk, who seems to have ravaged herself with the CVS beauty products aisle the way a driver immerses his vehicle in the liquid buffeting gauntlet of a car wash, faces two options: seat me on the Boeing 747 humming outside or address the consequences of all my angst, compressed and fermented over three decades of change, ever since 1968: what a vintage! In that year, and with generous efficiency, the first marriage buckled and sublimated, and when girls years later would cling a beat too long to my torso after coitus, the taste would appear like a wine’s oak or brass you notice only after you brush the blue off your teeth at the end of the evening. Sad. So much effort yields so much pain.

The Alaska experiment almost killed me. In the wake of the Fairbanks failure (a similar desperate attempt to exploit latitude for the purpose of a perpetuating my eternal night), I caught the bi-plane connection to Barrow on November 18, the day the door finally closes on the sun, commencement day for a yearly 66 & 2/3 dayless stretch of days in that netherworld of snow-sheathed and corrugated hangars, Birkuk Indian celebrations financed by oil-explorers’ compensation, pickup truck rentals, and guest registries boasting the signatures of the nation’s most avid seasonal ornithologists. I felt confident that I could burrow in Barrow’s King Eider Inn and return to my young second family fixed and focused, the perfect usher leading them to a better future beyond my grave.

The self-beguiling ruse succeeded at first, placing me deep in slumber about 30 minutes before the horizon’s meager sunrise at half-eleven each morning. I had packed (within my mobile pharmacy) the amount of NyQuil necessary to subdue a water buffalo, and into a watery retreat I descended after each breakfast on the edge of the world, seeking and finding the reverse CAT-SCAN cave of an ice-mirrored portal to the Antarctic ideal tomb, closing the padded clamps of forgetfulness in on my otherwise restive head. I must have palmed the nadir-ball of unconsciousness.

But a daily dose of narcotic healing ultimately immunizes the patient against the intended healing effects, doesn’t it? And so the self-deception gradually lost its magic; every day I could stick my head a little farther out of my high-latitude shell and, whiplashed by the NyQuil but no longer neutralized by it, catch a furtive flicker more of the enemy sun. My repetitive daysleep dreams of placing a house inside a chalkboard and cooking breakfast on a swaying tree limb soon fell away in the medicine’s cushioned but nonetheless disheartening decline. My eyes would dig past an afternoon’s ocular snot, would reveal the heated illumination behind the hotel room’s curtains, and then I would know my dream logic had lied to me. Neither the cleverest scheduling nor the most extreme geography nor my childish disregard for the NyQuil label’s limitations could hold down my reticular activation switch for long. Then, sure enough, the sun both ephemeral and infernal grew more comfortable in the sky and showed me the futility of practical coexistence with the waking world. The sun’s daily reveille embittered me through its pedagogic lesson that paternal breakfasts and careful management of two generations of my kids’ schooling and other fantasies would never survive a reality oaken in its irrefutability. My pistoned mind would never lay by the filial hearth.

And so sadly I returned to that failure of redemption in the Northern Rockies[4], the ranch I purchased one decade earlier with the intake from unloading a dear Manhattan apartment above the East River. 2,400 square feet of parquet and checkerboard tile metamorphosed into 10,000 acres of sagebrush, brittle volcanic rock, and white-barked aspens. The valley view is helped by such a steep descent and such clear air that mountains a vast expanse away seemed to perch minutes from the master-bedroom window, all of it creating a visual trick that erased not just the river but a nearly uninhabited 30-miles of high desert. Halfway up my half of Pohaska Mountain I had founded what I believed to be the seat of my correction. I would start a second family and disassociate my past sins from my person; I would soak my past in the healing, mineral-rich Lake Yellowstone headwaters and watch as each kernel of past harm loosened, drifted, and dissolved inside this broad outlay of a new life.

The whole Wyoming project started with a bet at a typically frivolous Sutton Place dinner party at the turn of the 90s. As of that August pow-wow of self-conscious Establishment libertines, my experience of the West had only run the two-lane stretches between airports and the ski slopes of Aspen and Sun Valley. Imagine my discomfort, then, to find myself seated next to a newly converted Western States zealot. One of those precarious acquaintances poised always on the diving board over friendship and never developing the nerve to spring into my acceptance, Hal Underterran had launched his adulthood a quarter century before by assassinating North Vietnamese politicians in a campaign kept so confidential that even its American casualties, some of them Yale graduates for Godsakes, received civilian funerals at best. The military subdued their families with fictional rationales to explain why a heroically fallen son would have to be buried alongside the duplicable, unremarkable pedestrians who had pre-deceased those Army specialists. Hal by cruel luck bypassed that fate and barreled into New York after the war with the engine of alternative fate propelling him from behind, always, driving him forward into each new auspicious investment, and all those investments filled-in the gap separating his childhood poverty in Kentucky from his Le Corbusier-designed chair at this Sutton Place dinner-setting. Now that he was nearing the far recesses of a padded middle age, his drive had changed course, ever in search of a challenge to lend meaning and pride to a life whose graces he otherwise would have to accredit, shamefully, to mindless chance.

So the propeller shifted West and landed Hal in Northwest Wyoming, at least long enough to find a storefront realtor and a sloping unlikely parcel on the south side of Pohaska Mountain, overlooking the south fork of the same river. The inspiration came wrapped, though, in the misfortune of the attached northern swath. He couldn’t seize the first half of the mountain without the burden of the other side. And there I sat in New York, his opening and his solution, leaning away from his spittle and his encroaching logic, his flapping grey forelock and his face wrinkled into a permanent leather smile above a dandruff-flecked, tailorless black tuxedo jacket: “Come in with me, Ty; the 80s hay-ride is about to dump us both on the ground with no cushion for our asses. This culture is about to turn from urban fixation to the rustic kind. Let’s secure this land while it’s still relatively cheap, you coot.”

In those last days of New York irresponsible detachment from a job, I still crafted many vital decisions out of such light caprice as whether the weather would suddenly shift over the East River or whether the cooler had broken again below the sushi shelf in the hideaway Japanese lunch spot on East 54th Street. Thus the bet I arranged with Hal that silly evening provided no less sturdy a foundation for my future than other fanciful motivators in the past.

The ex-wife of the prince of the honorary European city-state of Luxenschtein had been “visiting” the East Side for three and a half years and landed in her latest stage of New World sociological research at this unkindness of spaghetti-strapped foundation heads and brylcreamed trustees. The age of the women only showed in the vertical stripes of their emphatic neckbones but the age of their husbands was open for view along the mapwork of sunspots, scotch-reddened veins, and corduroy-like laugh lines. Princess Greta sat superficially and visually in consonance with the rest of her table row, consistent with her neighbors’ lintless fabric and burnished skin. But her preeminence emerged from more careful scrutiny [the kind I lent every woman who brushed tickling waves, anticipation waves between my legs with the fall of her buttock or the careless collapse of one arm]. Her wide-cheeked, triangular-jawed face and tautly gleaming brown hair conformed to the unwritten, unspoken expectation for female guests. But in her uncommitted smiling review of the scene, in a hunched angle that she maintained against the table as an explicit notice of her disregard for mainstream manners, and in the self-caressing criss-cross of her arms that she used to prop herself, elbows and all, and thus maintain her gentle rebuke of a posture, she forged a visual articulation in relief against the gilt tableau of her squawking companions; she achieved her distinction not through the fact of her lineaments but rather through her exercise of them. She captured the wild animal of my attention and so made herself liable to its harm.

At this stage of my life, as at all others, women held the only consistent daily position on my agenda. I had always kept a smaller 2nd apartment in the same East River tower that sat a few blocks from this Sutton Place home. I kept it for the more esteemed of my guests [and for quiet escapes from the main apartment’s parties, especially for lustful rolls with the more demure of my conquests on those raucous nights]. In that 2nd nest (a mere 950 square feet), in that sanctuary where I could indulge my darker fantasies and enjoy undisturbed rests, I had for years maintained a cast-iron wastebasket crafted from four panels held by leather ties laced through spaced holes along the panel’s edges. I changed the cellophane lining weekly, but the contents remained the same: sifted and silt-like cocaine, measured and bartered by an investment banker operating out of the cigar room in the New York Racquet Club. I would never reach the bottom of the stash, for replacing its entirety would leave my racquetteer vulnerable to the club’s sanction, and so the basket supply rotated like a purer version of the churning red sugar mulch inside the Slush Puppy machines you see at A&Ws. In the manic marathon of Studio 54’s three-year party, I would routinely bring back to that hideaway dependent feline dancers, their sequins or their rayon wet from perspiration and rank from chain-smoked Winstons. These closing-time escorts depended not on my affections nor on any thin prospect of a financed life by my side but rather on the upside-down snow fall coming out of that scratched iron basket, a tabernacle open for a ceremony held by only two total believers per night: I the priest revealing God’s chemical wisdom, she the daily-shifting lay protofemale bent over my beveled glass and ebony-legged coffee table, abandoning all the evening’s feigned chic to the blood needs of catalyst and heat.

Hal knew of this ritual and played his own priestly role in support of it on my rare night at reunions in Boston or back home in Minnesota. Yet in the dastardly manner of benefited friends who transform a favor into an onus, he used that inside track to my escape pad as the leverage for an absurd bet. “Here’s the thing”, began Hal: “You take the first go at Princess Greta here. You try to convince her to act according to the same impulses as your Studio 54 girls back in the day. I think you’ve lost your magic. When she says ‘no’ to you, I move in. If I can convince her to debase herself with me instead, you’re boarding a plane with me tomorrow at LaGuardia. Deal?” “Let me see if I have this straight.” At this point, I’m trying to slow the process down, to cut it into enough fractions so that its coherence would escape even Hal. I would then escape through the fog of his Tanqueray-sprayed confusion. Me: “I ask her to come back to the lower flat. But I can’t simply invite her in the old-fashioned way of your typical sober predator. I have to make her believe that she’s coming back for the coke, not for me, right?”

The attention of a group at a formal dinner party’s table sways in the path of a summer bee: random and unpredictable air currents will either make a given turn preferable, or the same currents may carry the scent of a bud oozing sweets, and so the bee fights the current’s strength and discards its lazy logic for the hunt of liquid indulgence. So flies the focus of privileged dinner guests. They’ll attenuate the thinnest narrative of caustic gossip as a course easier than the awkward silence of principled detachment. And yet even the imminent arrival of an interlocutor's climax to a building story won’t restrain them from whipping their heads in the direction of the most trivial overheard off-color or candid sidebar. And so Hal and I found ourselves trading verbal sidesteps within a silence sharpened by our neighbors’ sideglancing interest.

So I threw my head meaningfully to the side and we twisted out of our forward-backed, fiberglass chairs and headed into the kitchen. Dodging the mother-and-son French cooking team, we walked into the dead end of an age-old servants’ pantry, the kind with the glossy-white painted Dutch door halved by a smooth serving shelf. “Allright, let’s see if I’ve got this straight” I began, trying to slow down the confident force of his illogic, derail the train in my head and separate its cars: “You want me to seduce the Princess, but I’m not allowed to do so the easy way, with my predictably conquering charm, and so I must woo her with coke”. “Ya got it!” Hal interposed to maintain his traction, his breath and head nods riding on Tanqueray fumes. “I can’t let ya get outta this one easy, Ty. This is like the moment when the sober friend pulls the keys outta his drunk friend’s hand and against the fella’s will. Yes, it will pain you to lose this competition tonight, but you’ll thank me tomorrow when wildflowers are ticklin’ your ankles and wild coyotes are howling in the distance and your pullin’ ouchyur checkbook.” I beg him: “Slow down. I need to get my mind around this.” “No you don’t, you asshole”, and with no process or conscious segue between the pantry and the satin-wallpapered sitting room into which the party had foliated, Hal presented me, by the manipulation of my left arm, to the wary unweening visitor from Europe, her inked face expansive beneath the tight pull on her hair but her dignity shielded in a soft-focus amusement whose inside joke she shared only with herself. Me: “Now we know who eachother are and so we don’t need to engage in pleasantries, right?” I was stumbling through the moment I was born to own. “Am I right?” “You flatter me, Mister Reins, I am but an obscure haus frau slumming my way through this vast country, you know?” I had passed the point at which I could control the interchange and so every word flowed from the self-damning machine in my mind, the mechanism that, in debilitating moments of crisis like this one, simply discharged reliable lines from similar, past conquests. When a goose sees a golfball sitting in her country club nest alongside her perfect eggs after she returns dripping from an afternoon cruise down the 7th hole’s lagoon, she knows the total number of white ovals exceeds the four that she hatched last week, she knows that chicks don’t incubate inside dented, round shells, and yet she’ll still sit her warmth on the Fielding ball just as lovingly as on the legitimate hatchlings eager for the world. Here I sat on the grenade of my own folly, yielding grudgingly to the automated effrontery that had sounded so much more ingenious in the 70s, a compact array of words traveling from the rustiest panel of my overworked mental dynamo: “I want to eat coke off your clit.”

The words crumpled only for a moment the curtain sheen of her tanned and lacquered poise before she smoothed the wrinkles and reset her dignity with the demurrer “Just after such a substantial meal as well, Mr. Reins! What an insistent appetite you must maintain. I, however, have never performed well as a serving tray. Perhaps one of your more familiar ladies here tonight could perform that rôle more agreeably.” And with that disposal of my impropriety she turned to the nearest , least conspicuous escape, Hal himself. Despite my nasty curiosity, I couldn’t focus on the turns and steps of his seduction, thwarted as I was in shame’s brambles. Only unconnected details of their parley attached themselves to my jealous ear: that his wife had just passed away (untrue), that his great-grandfather founded the first and most influential Southern cotillion (impossible to disprove within the evening), that he kept a flat in East Tower (painfully false), and that he soon would quit New York forever and live the rest of his life in the wilds of Wyoming (true but uninspiring to European royalty, except when such a princess will seize on almost any meager rationale for evading a frightful retiree and the embarrassment he throws about him in place of the dust that a true cowboy would throw if the sterile gloss of modern New York high life would allow for it).

And so I lost Princess Greta to Hal and lost the bet in the same tragedy. At the time, I felt the first loss more excruciatingly, viewing the second as just an absurd inconvenience. I lay that night in the duplex six floors above the two of them, chastising myself for the competitive animus that broke my will before Hal’s spittled drive. Much more nettlesome than the early alarm-clock I would have to honor, the imagined percolation downstairs ran mountingly rattling laps in my head, visions of gyrations by that uncouth roustabout inside the surely satin and perfumed recesses of Continental mystique, and all within my home, my labor-born wood and brass, my own crenellated door frames and turnstile-lobed water faucets, but most especially upon my silk-sheeted couch cushions or RL Home flannel plaid bed sheets or, Heaven tell me no, upon the light-absorbing white slopes of my propulsion-jet hot tub.

Agony didn’t enjoy its usual freedom of movement within me, for within hours Hal had hauled me onto a Northwest Airlines flight that after two Midwest stops deposited us at a cottage-sized Montana airport, a shed surrounded by two borderless spheres: the flat one of the ad infinitum tarmac and the convex one of the blue dome above us, tear-triggering in its vibrating solar nudity. My previous ski trips to Colorado and Idaho had not hinted at the vistas uninterrupted and barren that flanked the rental car on our trek from the airport to Hal’s putative paradise in Wyoming. Two-wire black fencing ran with straight precision for dozens of miles on both sides of the county-to-county-to-state route, and I wondered what precious commodity kept the fences in place, for the landscape behind them alternated between two seemingly barren geographies: dust-painted brush surrounded by grass roasted into a brown finality by two months of summer sun on flat acreage, and mottled and lumped sheets of grey rock jigsawed into horizon-hugging fields, some of which sloped up to peaked boulder formations in the near foreground before splaying again into the wide expanse of chipped and podded stone stretching out beyond vision’s reach. Where did the grassed and rocky properties end? Did fences delineate borders on the other end? Did another end exist? Mountains did sit darkly and vaguely far behind the land to our right, their ridgelines crossing cloud bottoms so often and so irregularly as to leave my mind skeptical of their reality. Only as we approached the coterminous with Wyoming did the shifting vertebrae of mountains twist close enough to the road to make their existence emphatic and primary. Could the fences possibly surround these noble monsters? Where did the human domains begin and end? To what economic purpose could any owner possibly struggle with such formidable and lifeless terrain? How could the fencing make the task any easier?

Hal either didn’t know the answers to these questions or didn’t feel that the answers mattered, for he responded to my curiosity with completely unrelated previews of the imminent visit to the mountain for sale across the border. The sweaty earnest force with which he blindsided me on Beekman Place propelled him still, as if his dissipation with the princess hadn’t really happened or hadn’t actually dissipated him, a pajamaed child focused only on opening the Christmas present of the West.

We sped through the town of Cody, similar to some Colorado former mining towns I had seen, the brick saloons and limestone banks turned into restaurants and gift shops, tourists listing on their heels in contemplation of every postcard rack and glass t-shirt display shelf. These polished and licit reconfigurations of once soot-swept and recalcitrant cowboy haunts did not perform any role in Hal’s narrative tour. His words and his mind orbited only the two-sided property sitting 30 miles west of the town. In the midst of his effusions on the subject, he neglected to switch on his headlights in the tunnel vacuuming travelers from the gridded infrastructure of the town into the unreined unfolding openness of rock water and sky on the other side. During our passage, only one other vehicle appeared in view, a Winnebago whose AC roof unit seemed to barely clear the lamps that amounted to our only lighting. I looked over and saw the flying succession of perforated yellow illuminations strafe Hal’s face as his exhortations grew in anticipatory emphasis. Once we cleared the tunnel, even he knew his words could only mire his cause in inadequacy, for the sloping foundation of the mountain bellybuttoned by the tunnel gradually but swiftly unfurled its close cliffside of pale jagged stone to reveal a flat simmering reservoir to the left and a mountainous vista straight ahead that inspires innumerable landscape paintings that never actually seal in the airy and strange light that carries distant peaks to you, making them as present to you as if vertical and horizontal planes lay vulnerable to the same annihilation that fells weather and time.

Such voice-numbing apparitions had attached themselves to my imagination already in my Colorado jaunts, but I wasn’t prepared for the shock of the terrain in between the reservoir and the seemingly rotating profusion of peaks on the horizon, for that blue shelf of water and that forested assembly of mountains, for all the apparent nearness and continuity of the two landscapes, actually separated as if along edges in a Mad Magazine fold-in gimmick picture. The country rising from between those folds wrapped ragged and sometimes in defiance of gravity for fifteen miles more, a permanently wrinkled infinity of stone sloping up away from both sides of the road on first mild and then steep corresponding inclines that faced eachother across the narrow valley formed by the silent river to the left of our rental. In the current relative placidity of my system, (the agonized consciousness of Hal’s conquest with the Princess only haunted me for the duration of the tryst, after all), Hal’s nearly violent eagerness for the day’s objective hadn’t penetrated the semi-reliable pharmaceutical gel sheathing my nerves, but the sudden apparition of barren surrounding unrelenting stone dragged me from the curiously pleasant time in the car and shook the healing lotion of my prescriptions from my mind. I found myself the prisoner of a visual, perpetual, brightly lit soul shock. I tried to pull my eyes into a narrow focus upon the dotted yellow line of the roadway. A double course of cardiogram lines still lifted and dropped incongruously on the left-right periphery of my vision while I looked forward, having first snapped my head away from the stark, harsh panoramas along the road, trying to ignore the horrifying dry dust-painted rock land beneath those wavering lines. The dust in fact didn’t seem to threaten an airborne assault should we alight from the car anytime soon. No, the dust seemed to dwell not on the rock surface and not upon the tips of the sagebrush bursting randomly in clumped vertical life and isolated horizontal death but rather within the dark veins lapping the rock and inside the small repeated points of the sagebrush leaves. The dust didn’t cover or obscure the landscape; the landscape seemed rather to hail from the dust, its child and agent.

After Hal, resuming his pitch, turned the car without notice and in mid-sentence across a river-spanning bridge and onto a gravel road posted “6FU” in yellow markings on a governmentally blue sign and skidded to a stop several miles beyond, I learned the truth of my fantasy: when I stepped into a ditch and separated a stem of sagebrush from its base, the only matter that dislodged with the sprig was the clinging witch’s ammonia of the plant’s smell. The dust remained inside the leaves, as stolid and unyielding as the Byzantine contortions of rock stretching away from the other side of the road. Although Hal had seemed confident in choosing to stop at this particular spot along the road, the land before and after seemed completely inhospitable to human domesticity or even architectural scheme. As I faced down the road, to my immediate left and right lay the sort of dirt ground so deeply cracked as to merit shadows and elicit pity when shot for late-night charity television marathons. While the field to my right ended in a greener defensemens’ line of trees and shrubs shoulder-to-shoulder along the river, Hal now faced the less friendly but more stunning topography to the left as he continued his monologue of salesman's logic even with his back turned to me.

Me, plaintively and in a desperate attempt to derail his chugging verbal express: “Certainly the plot includes this piece up to the riverbank.” Hal continued with a few more lines of his presentation, past my plea, but he slowed down now, inserting more dead air between his apparently pre-rehearsed words while turning his head gradually to me and raising one unruly eyebrow. At long last he ceased, dropped his incipiently wrinkled chin, and allowed a whitening forelock to fall perhaps unconsciously before one sweat-ensconced eye: “We’re not building a motel, Ty. And we’re not founding a chapter of the Audubon Society. This trip is a test of our daring. In fact, I’ve already passed that test. It’s a test of your daring. Are ya ready to listen, y’asshole?”. Lifting off from that invocation of masculinity, Hal proceeded to the masterstroke of his presentation, literally stroking the air with a limp hand in demonstration of his inspired find. With the sun still high but positioned firmly to the west, the rising cliff faces and peaked formations grew shadows in their folds and hideaways. Small chunks of tan rubble made easily distinguishable the borderland between parched dirt and impenetrable stone. As the land rose beyond that line, the stone grew less fragmented, smoother and whiter before shifting darker again and appearing (at the stage where the surface turned heavenward entirely) redder and more brittle, corrugated and pockmarked. The lighted strips of that highest rock shone positively febrile in contrast to the fixed blue surrounding them as if the sky chose to ignore their heat and chalked combustibility.

“Yes, Ty, if you and me were typical effete Easterners, we’d very well limit our buy to that stretch” (a dismissive finger sweep; into the disposal heap of the impossible falls the approachable, habitable, hydrated field); “We’d split the capital on a dude ranch for careful middle-class tourists from Maryland and New Jersey. Yeah, we’d contract out for t-shirts as part of our marketing strategy and get the tamest foals in Cheyenne and Ft. Collins, raising them just right under careful Eastern bottoms. Just picture it. Teaching 5-year-olds how to feed the stock without fear; making sure their parents first sign a release so that you and I don’t get sued when a bad seed from downstate takes off a morsel of Junior’s pinky-finger. No. You and I are destined for something greater. Let’s face it, Ty: you and I aren’t like the crowd we schmooze in New York, are we?”.

And upon that unjustifiably effective positive-ion-to-positive-ion seduction, Hal swung back to unveil the dry stone wall face before us, a wildly etched, many-peaked edifice as intricately detailed in its tessellations as the facades on Eastern European parliamentary buildings, just absent the regularity: perforating lines disappearing and reappearing unpredictably in a dry prehistoric heated mirage when I swept my eye over them, their stately wrinkles making the frozen, scalding, petrified volcanic mass too brittle (I would later learn) to serve as toe-holds for the rockclimbers who would proliferate here in the West in later years. But Hal wasn’t selling this rock stack to me as a climbing wall but rather as my personal Saturn, the closest approximation to our unreachable sister planets that I’d find on earth, you know?

"Can you imagine actually owning it, Ty? Not paying for a ticket to see a spoonful of it under glass in a D.C. museum. Not a five-minute stop on a tour with retirees in a National Park. No, it can be ours. We could wake up in the morning, walk up to that cave up yonder, and actually touch the walls of it. Us the only folks who could do it without permission. Think about it.” His thoughts had clearly moved beyond the sales-pitch now, for his cheek and forehead wrinkles had faded into a smooth, kind of juvenile version of his face. He must have been fixed for the moment by the prospect of actually owning the landscape, not held back by the barrier that the government throws down between general folks and the West’s wonders. He saw himself in a future where he would engage with the land, right?, become not just a limited enthusiast but an empowered participant, righting the imbalance of awe between him and the panorama he now beheld. I knew better than to challenge Hal’s move to camp right there for the night, at the base of the volcanic frieze. I knew better than to agitate such a sincere zealot with the whiny domestic preferences of a pre-convert (me). So we cleared cereal-like messes of rubble from the near ground, and after a rushed trip back into town for a steak dinner and a pup-tent purchase, we made the hard-dirt pad our home for one night, without any survey of the rest of the ranch’s expanse. Strange, but Hal seemed to look at the tent not as a break from a full tour that would continue the next day but rather as closure on a triumphant argument. After I had claimed my portion of the tent, he sighed and grunted his way in, a “two-man tent” my ass. He seemed to recline not with the claustrophobia keeping me awake but rather with a contentment that could only mean the deal was sealed in his hyper-focused mind, even though he’d shown me only 20 of the 20,000 acres up for grabs. From his mind's eye he saw a few million of my dollars, a smaller bagful of his, all of it an already aging fact and the paperwork only standing between us and Western euphoria now.

As I just said, the close press of the tent delayed my sleep but also supported a climate inside the nylon folds distinct from the steadily less pressurized one outside, and so I didn’t catch notice of the swirl of air outside or the abrupt advance of cloud. My mind instead fixed on all the sensory distresses that a rational traveler at rest (maybe even Hal?) could ignore and bypass on a quick drop into sleep: the thick smell cooked by our flesh mass and exhaled breath, the tight press of the nylon folds over our shoulders and feet, the grunts and wheezes that ran with our settling and adjustments. My jealousy of the snoring peace with which Hal disregarded these annoyances only worsened my insomnia. I felt like I was trapped inside the recording studios where we used to run voice-overs for films once principal production wrapped, back in my movie studio days. Yes, I felt like walls of the tent were made not from nylon but from corkboard or a wool tapestry. All the smallest noises stayed trapped alongside me, like they were bugs upset by aerosol spray. Yes, like they were looking for shelter in my ears, Hal’s breaths and grunts bouncing off my eardrums. Of course, I only drifted off once I gave up my focused attempt at rest and traded it for despair. When after a half-night’s sleep I awoke inside the same ricochet of noises, the compressed air inside had not been ameliorated by a little grey morning light. At that point in my life, early morning light actually calmed me, but even back then the charm would wear off once the sun actually rose. But on that morning I didn’t even feel that momentary relief because as soon as I started to shift about I felt a strange granulation beneath me, hard grains and as clumps they mysteriously yielded in stages of a few seconds apiece. In his crazy scramble to hoist the tent before sundown, Hal with his flapping forelock must have pulled the stake loops too far apart and so left a gap of air between the ground and the tent bottom. Yet any sand or dirt that would’ve blown beneath and wouldn’t have been compacting and disappearing the way these grains appeared to do on the other side of the nylon tissue. So I unzipped the tent’s entrance, letting free the canned air about me and what sashays down in zigzag falling steps but a frozen chip of snow.

August, folks. August in a high desert. I couldn’t fucking believe it. I pushed my head out into a sky suddenly pushed close and grey, not the galaxy chimera backless sky from the night before but a close grey hovering blind on everything beyond a football field’s length. Snow. In August. Those three words gave all the ammo necessary for the rage that that had me instantly kicking and prodding Hal, waking him violently from his crooked sprawl. Just as his spittle and rush had pushed us out to this strange land, so my fury carried us back onto a re-scheduled, early return flight without the scantest glimpse of the other 9,750 someodd acres of the Saturn property behind us. So I didn’t get the horseback tour of the Aspen grove girding the parallel ravines that separated “our” mountain from the neighbors, and so I didn’t even see the very view of the valley and the Montana mountains beyond that would’ve been poor Hal’s centerpiece, his closing argument for buying the place and getting our Western future on.

Only when I reached East Tower and settled into my nice camel-hair chair overlooking the river in my quiet dark living room did I pause long enough to let my mind review the offensive vision of summer snow. A more careful prospector than me would’ve agreed to Hal’s initial suggestion but would’ve also insisted on delay, on time to prepare. Time to stop by Bretano's Bookstore on 5th Ave. and pick up a tourist's guide to Wyoming, a well-indexed warning that certainly would have advised the well-organized sojourner of the possibility of winter weather during any random August in the Northern Rockies. Right: I take trips differently. The sane stay safe while the mad grow lost. As on many another occasion, resolutely I placed my feet in the direction chosen by the spinning, possessed weathervane of my fancy, even the disagreeable fancy smacked onto the Beekman Place dinner table with Hal's spittle. But now the demon piston my mind had become slowed to a spent silence in keeping with the slanted gold weak-spirited sunlight through the window and with the rivuleted and red-neon cursive Coca-Cola sign staring back from the edge of the East River's eastern bank, huge and unblinking.

Within the clarity that the silence and the rationed light birthed, amidst the open air sent forward between the birthing legs of the East River's two banks, the necessity of the land purchase seized me. Not the preference for it, as in a greed for it or even a far more likely whimsical fancy for it, but a necessity, an imperative as strong and cruel as the compulsion to inspect a highway disaster as you pass by slowly in your lucky unscratched sedan, an imperative as inevitable and sad as the wholly de-hormonal desire to sleep with the aged, fat, wretched, repulsive stranger who crashes your high school reunion in desperate search for a community your limited compassion can only provide to her for one night. The incongruous vision of manna-curve snow upon dry sagebrush had hauled me out of Wyoming and now invited me back in, an invitation optional, yes, but optional only in the way the embossed paper of a real invitation leaves you the option to RSVP in the negative when really the host and you share an understanding that obviates the embossed paper and the pre-stamped return envelope: an understanding of the ruin that would follow your absence from the event: the alienation and self-loathing that would (did!) follow your (my) absence from your (my) daughter's wedding. But perhaps Wyoming was playing the role of guest and I the host; maybe Wyoming's dissonant meteorological affront placed the ranch in the character of the unannounced house guest and maybe I just didn't want to face the subsequent red-ant, suicidally maddening curiosity that overtakes me when I close the door on an inconveniencing dinnertime supplicant. But really I wanted to return to the summer snow and sagebrush surrealism not to solve a scientific mystery but actually (and more humbly, right?) to reside in the mystery's midst, simply and reverentially, its pilgrim and its neighbor. I crossed the hall and called Hal.

And so my Wyoming dominion happened, unfurling like a life-sized map whose southern lip landed gracefully if in jags along the northern lip of Hal's, two empires joined at a mountain ridgeline propped by God's hand 9,000 feet above sea level. Before I moved onto it, the northern half of the mountain offered only one man-made structure amidst its limestone bulwarks, Aspen circumference, and sagebrush-corsaged crags: a single homestead cabin warped and chinked by 360 changes of season. How a whole family survived and maintained a filial bond in a structure not quite the size of my bathroom in New York vexed me when I first toured the ranch properly on the signing date. The greater mystery lay beyond that shack within a low dry ring of tall weeds and natural gravel that might not have moved since 1915: the simplest of wagons, crafted apparently so as to prevent the slightest feeling of comfort, other than the freedom to sit, cushionless, over innumerable rock and pothole jolts, with nary a wheel shock or inch of air-filled rubber to buffer one's ass from the Oregon trail's geological effrontery. Yeah, even greater than the shock of the cabin's poverty, the wagon's own prosaic challenge truly confounded me: I couldn't imagine how the family managed to carry their needs to town and back on this uncovered, eight-foot, wooden-wheeled raft.

I took no such risks on my own journey west. When the map of my domain unfurled over the mountain's north side and along the river plain below, the new scheme didn't simply replicate the old one. No, the spinning, disrobing map scroll of my new home instead thrust up plans for four new houses, two cabins, a lodge house, and, assembled in a cluster near the last, twenty tent platforms and a yurt. At three of the major edifices would be built outdoor hot tubs, the main house sheltering a fourth one inside. When those plans came to life, I thus could offer a home not far from the river for the ranch manager's family and dog, a humbler modular house nearby for a pack of younger ranch hands, a riverbanked cabin for any miscreant ranch hand who needed the housing version of a timeout room, and for everyone the flat, compacted-dirt space on which to keep pickups and flat-bed trucks, hay trailers and ATVs. And so I could also provide, on the seemingly eternal upward slope of the mountain, a guest house for visitors within my social fold, a dude ranch for less fortunate VisaCard-wielding folk, and for me and any second chance family that may have arisen at any time in the future, a deceptively modest log-cabin home: a pine khaki extension of the pitched khaki earth beneath it, easy for the eye to miss from the exterior, but serving any lucky eye inside to multiple wall-size, paned (and, yes, in a way, pained) views of the Absaroka links in the Rocky chain, the unblemished visual magic show I threw at you earlier, a technically distant but sensually close panorama of snow-sashed mountain peaks and, lower, precipitous walls of baking clay, the shoulder of any discrete mountain overlapping the next in forward perspective, opening-fan bulwarks of rough elegance, walking right into my bedroom and living room and dining room vantage point, without the moral impediment of the human struggles churning down between the view and me, down on Route 16[5], in the river valley, below the perfectly calibrated lower lip of the window frame and thus out of sight. No, up on my Pohaska Mountain arcadia, every transparently polyurethaned pine-log beam and pre-surveyed turn in the gravel ranch road had been designed so as to fashion, simultaneously, both the feeling of exposure to the open elements and the illusion that humans and their follies claim no role in that natural arena, the fantasy that indeed humans aren't wild at all.

I extended this landscaping alchemy to the outer borders of the property as well, particularly in the form of the woodpole fence separating the ranch road from the precipice overlooking a new Spanish-tiled house that a Californian exile had erected down deep in the hollow of two cliffs to the east of my own property, towards town. The pole fence had been constructed with the philosophy that had infused such care into the measurements for the main house's window frames: the poles, banded together in a single-file spine and sharpened at top into the kind of spikes that protected Colonial forts, seemed thereby to have so stood since the era of the homesteader cabin further up the road. The spikes and the subtle khaki woodstain and the matte polyurethane dimly but regally capturing the sunlight with the natural ease of wet stone all enhanced the picture of artless Western authenticity. Most importantly, though, the fence deleted the Californian neighbor's Latin eyesore from my cherished graceful curved drives down the studiedly sashaying switchbacks of the ranch road. With the carefully measured fence in place, the basic structure of my asocial citadel of proprietary escape had reached completion.

And so, unlike the homesteaders, I carried with me from the East as many of the accoutrements and comforts of my charmed lustrous life as could be carried or recreated, not just the hot tubs and the preponderantly black sheen Suburbans but just as importantly (in due time) the combination shower and steam sauna in the master bedroom, the trampoline by the side deck of my house, the stand-alone cabin for my business manager (looking from the outside much like the earlier homestead cabin but humming inside with the glowing green indicator life of PCs, photocopiers, and fax machines)[6], the pack of purebred dogs whose breed no Wyoming ranch manager had ever seen before, and, most perfectly and imperfectly of all, as incongruous as the snow on sagebrush, a raised clay tennis court, encased in quadric frames of transplanted shrubbery and, within that improbable green buffer, a tall chain-link fence, wrought as inconspicuously as possible in matte-finish black paint. But nothing could be more conspicuous or implausible than the red court itself and its grey border, an impeccable stage for affluent sport amidst a rocky dusty terrain that calls only for Sisyphean homesteader strife or, if sports there be, then only the gritty sport of elk hunters led by mountain-savvy outfitters and the dubious sport of water thieves amok on BLM[7] territory, redirecting runoff with white hardrubber tubes or with even the less genteel tools needed for draining man-made ponds. No matter the Western diversion proper to the cracked slopes of Pohaska Mountain: no such adventure would feature the Izod shirts and Reebok sneakers that graced the clay on my red and gray indulgence beneath the main house. I even pushed the surrealism farther by installing tall, sun-powered halogen lamps so that my friends from back East and I could play at any hour, including after a midnight trip to the digitally monitored wine cellar. I savored many a preposterous 2 AM on the fastidiously maintained court, letting my eyes and my humor dwell on the Williams-Sonoma wine glasses sitting in fence-shouldered corners, bejeweled in the ruby light cast from the mixture of sliding sheets of Port neglected by my competitive pals in the sweat sheen final sets of a match and the bug-haloed glow from the arched and peaked lamps looking down on our sophomoria like robotic gods. Maybe my aggressive insertion of unnecessary and dissonant pleasures like the tennis court served (no pun, really) as my negotiating offer to the Biblical vision of the sagebrush shrub cloaked in August snow. Maybe alternatively I just needed the hot tub water and the sauna steam and the sound of a tennis ball softly and soothingly deflecting off the red clay to still and level the vibrating balance between the non-addicting prescription drugs and the otherwise unpredictable ill humors bubbling within me. Either way, I found that in the few months of every year (the warm ones) that I spent on Pohaska Mtn. (in the early 90s, before the place became my steady home), the gamble, the negotiating offer actually worked: before the second family came along and before I gave up coke, I made peace between the incongruity within me (the incompatible spirited consciences, the soft and the dark one) and the incongruity of the snow bush, by erecting a third incongruity: fashionable sneaker squeaks and tennis ball ricochet echoes through a daylight-strong halogen corona right there among the coyote howls and mountain-absorbing darkness of the wild forsaken reaches of the continent. No transition space ever appeared between the two halves of each of these incongruities, no segue of substance or texture. No intermediary substance could be seen between smooth snow and course sagebrush. No border of twilight stood between the court's pyramid of halogen glare and the neighboring mesquite-scented dark: the light and darkness shared the same edge, straight and concrete. If I had stood on the outer limit of the court's foundation, outside the unassuming black fence, and stretched my racquet out to that shared edge and beyond, the darkness would have swallowed the racquet as resolutely as hydrochloric acid would have. So ran the border between my two selves: no compassion or effort lightened my depressive stages, and no caution or wisdom seeped into my manic ones. And so the expanse of juxtaposition that I created for myself in Wyoming suited my spirit and even provided some calming spiritual nourishment in the later years, when I had given up the drugs (at least the illegal ones) and settled into permanent residence on the mountain with my new family. For a few years unknowingly finite in the early and mid 90s, I found peace in all the ranch's absurdities natural and artificial.

And so, later on down the line, earlier this year[8], when the Alaskan experiment fell apart and no darker habitable location presented itself, I fell back to the mountain with foremost in my mind memories of that unlikely beast and foremost in my quaking chest the desperate hope that a place's propensities persist more reliably than a person's, that when a man and his God collaborate at such great effort expense and patience in a project that succeeds so admirably in its goal of bringing peace to a troubled blood pulse, that such a well of peace could never possibly run dry. But when I arrived back, I saw that in my long absence my second wife had not managed the ranch and its staff with the competence and attention that would've characterized my first wife's performance there. The lid for the hot tub on the main house's side deck had been left off too many times and so Aspen leaves and sediment from the airborne dust had settled into the niche along the bottom perimeter; the tennis court's halogen illumination that once cut a ruler's edge through the darkness from inside plexiglass boxes clear as diamonds now struggled through the black turbidity of trapped bug carcasses; and most sadly of all, the spiked-pole fence blocking the Spanish-tile provocation had lost several poles to a truck-skid on the icy turn of the ranch road where the fence commences. About six of the poles had fallen into the depths next to the importunate villa, and the several poles previously adjacent to them stuck helplessly out into space, tenuously connected to the remaining pine structure and traitorously pointing directly to the now visible slate and adobe of the tasteless Californian's intrusive manse.

So the colorful magical fiction of mountain solitude, of Eastern comfort seamlessly transmogrified onto the rough frontier terrain of Northwest Wyoming with each Manhattan accoutrement sewn into the Pohaska fabric stitch by invisible stitch, now buckled in incipient ruin, the seams not just showing now but fraying as well. Still, I spent most of my two-week return attempting the same old atmosphere of incongruous serenity, in between long spells of dream-laden sleep. When my attempts succeeded in appearance but failed spiritually, when the restored fence and filtered hot tubs and wiped halogen lamp boxes failed to still the vibrating hum of my hanging steel balance dish, I resorted to imagination and memory, laying long hours in my ostentatiously rough-hewn pine bed (the four posters as thick and unadorned as harbor pilings), closing my eyes to the changed reality around me, and thus I tried to center myself in the enchanted Pohaska air of the early 90s. But the audible world that had since taken root inside my erstwhile retreat wouldn't let me so center or so re-enter the fragile propped bachelor arena of what was. My second wife had given me two subtly freckled Aryan beauties as children: Bill and Heidi, who routinely woke at 5 AM and turned on the television immediately: Sponge Bob Squarepants and Rugrats; Animatronics and Nickelodeon Kids' Place. Although the daily cycle of childhood noise would pause for the school day's seven hours, during that would-be respite my wife would unconscientiously make loud social and home-improvement arrangements over the phone, truncating the velvet path that would have led me under my imaginary front ranch arch to the real-world Pohaska Mountain juxtaposed retreat whose concoction had cost me money, peace of mind, and some of the last naturally (non-medicinally) supplied remnants of my youth. No cosmetic efforts, no effort of husbandry or of the mind would cure my solar affliction. Maybe another man would have found hearth-warmed peace not just amid the needy noise of his children and the strident whirl of a community-wedded wife but because of those daily distractions. Maybe a better, more stable husband and father would embrace domesticity's percolating susurrus and rest as soundly in its current as an overfed child in a ballpark's upper-deck, dozing upon the soporific ebb of the crowd's collective patter. Such well-padded sleep would have resolved the sun madness, would have made the Alaska fiasco and my other diurnal tinkering all a laughable and distant memory. But my precarious tricks of balance, my hair's-width tension of a life pendant on one side of the balance with spontaneous self-gratification and pendant on the other dish of the balance with warm domestic recuperation, the Pohaska paradox of unkempt rock sidled with a manor-house gentility, this throbbing balance could no longer hold together; the magician of my imagination now failed before the audience of my nervous system. [9]And so I buckled under a springtime demise of my hope, under the rubble of the dream that peace and familial happiness could be mine; I could no longer work towards the goal of waking reliably each day into a softly lit and manageable consciousness. Not money nor daring nor ambition would ever foist a bridge between my psyche and daytime poise. Chaos became my ineluctable vocation.

For the simultaneously familiar and surprising cyclical exchange of exhausted passivity for restive kinesis would resume even under the young reign of pharmaceuticals and even in this nostalgic seat of past baronial peace, padded and indulgent as ever. Air travel wouldn't solve the problem but would keep it from slowly and cloyingly overtaking me. The speed and exterior chaos of baggage retrieval and gate changes would separate me from the creeping black tar of my internal mental chaos the way an industrial fan keeps flies at bay through an invisible but impregnable buffer of throbbing air. In the crazed itinerary of repeated circumnavigations that would now become the substance of my daily life, I dared not hope for peace but perhaps for the nearly therapeutic, hyperkinetic distraction necessary to mute the now howling neural trumpets in my head.

And so out I ran again, leaving desperately attentive notes for my young business manager, Nathan McKinley: longhand notes that illegibly delegated to him, implicitly and for an indefinite period, the education and welfare of my children and the upkeep and solvency of both the working ranch below and the dude ranch above. My ex-model current wife Kristina conducted her life and young family with even less discipline and responsibility than the jumpy teaspoon of each such virtue evident in her teen years spent coursing down runways and street shoots in Milan and Munich; and the careful supervision of the cleaning lady and the ready repair of fences and generator sheds and hot tub covers also diminished and died in the tornado swirl forming Kristina's rendition of married life, a frenzied routine of photography classes at a community college an hour away, drop-in visits to the kids' lessons and practice sessions for ballet guitar hockey football, and myriad dawn-embracing parties for the museum, for the hospital, and most commonly for less honorable, occasionless bacchanals in the hottubs and upon the dark-stained decks of the main house, even the plane tickets for the New York and California guests wantonly reimbursed just so that she could recreate the gleaming metropolitan life we led before moving West, and how could I blame her for echoing my own similar earlier attempts?

So back onto the engine-whirr air propulsion I mounted, a whiplashed jockey of the air flow lines wrapping the world in intersected overlapping thatch. And so Nathan's predecessor as business manager, dear Claudia Mulreagh, recently deactivated, previously beleaguered, and barely recuperated, I brought back out of semi-retirement, pulling her from her hard-won seasonal cottage on a Vermont rounded mountain's lakeshore back to the flat grid of the Minneapolis suburb where she kept the computers and (actual hard paper) files, the credit card numbers and travel accounts, the phone number archive and digital calendars that she had abandoned only a month before, all so she could resume the quiet, long-suffering husbandry that her service to me assumed. Now she would again endure my frenzied late night and early morning phone calls removing, reassigning, revising, or even repeating plans, as when I frequently think I'm changing a previous leg of the itinerary but actually just reinstate it while Claudia impressively and convincingly acts as if my delusion were reality, to the point of even clicking her keyboard's keys in fictional industry, for she knows me too well: she knows I'll be listening despite my absent-mindedness, that my hearing will attach to the silence, to the lack of commotion on her end that would alert me to her artifice; she knows me well enough to extend her fiction to any stimulus or detail within my senses' ubiquitous purview. Thus the Claudia Mulreaghs of this land stay with me forever, their dry kindling hair plaited back inconspicuously and the print blouses with tiny rowed flowers hiding the person beneath, while any employee with enough awareness of his own identity and human significance to protest (or even negotiate with) my scattered style finds himself jobless within months.

And so into the peripatetic entropy that now would overlay my every hour stepped the fast fingers and color-coded spreadsheets of Claudia the Flexible, providing the structure and the attention necessary to keep me in the darkness at all hours. I've become a perpetual citizen of the dark half of the globe, running in place to keep up on an equatorial, gravitational treadmill. Mind you, she's needed to keep one eye on solar/seasonal changes as well as one eye, simultaneously, on flight routes, cancellations, and delays. And just as two eyes must combine two distinct sets of stimuli into one coherent image, poor Claudia has to juxtapose all the flight information against regional sunrise and sunset times, complete with adjustments related to where in given time zones given airports sit. Mere knowledge of flight schedules won't help me if Claudia were to assume that the sun must surely be set in Lisbon by 10PM on a mid-August evening. And so Claudia has found the right sites online to make sound estimates of where the sun lays its poison and where it hides on any point on the globe, at any moment. Her mind has become a marketable resource replete with three-digit time data and minutely shifting calendar notations. Sure, her thoughtful science of solar tracking has not perfectly predicted whether light or darkness would greet me in particular cities. Last week I averted my eyes when the bluish dark of Kandahar's hanging mosquitoenet dawn pixilated into an open banner of searing AM light. Although my plane at that moment was taxiing out and therefore had reached a stage of prohibition against any passenger's use of the aisles, I fabricated for the flight attendants a urinary emergency as my explanation for a quick shelter in the windowless restroom.

But success in my Dracula tomfoolery has outpaced my failure at it. [10]I haven't fallen prey to the schizo-subjugation of the sun's knifepoint since that last breakdown in Wyoming, where the buffalo-hide blanket and elk-skin curtains ultimately fell short of their purpose. Yes, where the alpine homestead failed in its more general but no less vital purpose. The whole point of restoring the battered estate to its early-90s perfection was to coat me in a psychic myelin sheath of artificial comfort and natural awe. The buffalo fur and elk skin in the bedroom served for a while in shielding my senses from the damning sunlight, but only as a successor to the to the would-be spiritual shield of the tennis court/limestone shelf balance, and when that magical pseudocosm collapsed, when the millennial-era technological embellishments to the balance failed to preserve the illusion, when the new computerized temperature control in the main house's glass-enclosed wine cellar and the moisture monitor inside the portable humidor failed to rejuvenate or even solidify the magic of a comfortable domesticated nest within a solitude of wilderness, even after the software updates on the main-house office computer obviated my physical presence at the venture capital firm's biannual board meetings in Boston and San Francisco by allowing me to teleport my headset voice and webcam visage over mountains and time zones, when even that manna of microchip hyperreality failed to secure the illusory balance between nature's rough absolution and a domicile's sucrose indulgences, when that heavily financed and "insured" set design fell cracked ripping and molten into the now attenuated pall from the flood lights, when the mountains' Elysian natural distractions and the hot tubs' palliatives both attentive and onanistic no longer conspired to slay the inner dragon and so free me from its hold, the carefully and deceptively stitched buffalo duvet and elk curtain became my last shield, a desperate bulwark far less subtle and sophisticated than the ranch-wide configuration of steam rooms and high-stacked open decks and computerized artificial telemeetings and televisits and outdoor showers installed on three-sided, Italian-tile patios, the fourth side left open to a valley & mountain view unadulterated by man's constructions. After that latter concatenation of ingenious blueprinted accoutrements failed to sustain my soul's ease, I turned to the mere 500-square-foot bedroom, the sanctuary within that 10,000-acre fantasia, for my last hope of mental peace, for homebound spiritual triage. If the sacrificed skins of Rocky Mountain animals couldn't keep the sun out, I'd have to submit my retirement to the strangeness and angst of perpetual air transit.

But the hides did keep the sun out! They worked! What little residue of light the curtains emitted from their edges during the late morning and early afternoon met with the blanket's furry opacity and so never reached me, for I always set the alarm in time to bury my head inside that final defense. And the defense worked! I simply, in the end, couldn't avoid a sad truth: thick dressings can deny the appearance of day, but not the knowledge of its crude and incorruptible presence.

And so here I run again in an escape with the same purpose as the earlier exiting experiments but with a tactic, a strategy entirely different: Instead of fleeing to one fixed fortress of darkness on the map where I can burrow in a bunker buffered from the sun’s battering, I now hop from longitude to longitude around the globe to dodge perpetually the sun-lamp glow in which otherwise all my destructive inclinations will incubate germinate and flower. I can only protect myself, my business partners, and my families of kin and kind from the self-proliferating behavioral poison with which God has tagged me by flying from airport to airport under the singular imperative of living only on the earth’s rumbling but fairly predictable dark side. Some fellows protect their home and their livelihoods by standing their ground. I do so by racing away from it.

And so, right, here I am at DIA, the latest red-tack point on Claudia the Organized’s wall-wide world map (bordered on top and bottom in charts with particular times posted under vertically columned suns and horizontally lain moons), DIA of course a plexiglass but familiar pocket amidst a global sojourn whose nature and substance should only evoke alienation and homesickness, depending on what you call home. On this leg of my specialized perpetual tour strictly along the Earth's dark topography, I'm 2/3 of the way from my last stop (Atlanta's nucleus-and-cell design) to my next (Seattle's tufted 21st-century exaggerated pod), two of the few American cities completely unknown to me and thus consistent with my trip's unwelcome but necessary themes of dislocation and strangeness, locales just as foreign as the earlier stops of Algiers and Istanbul, Bangalore and Kuala Lumpur. For although the airports of developing countries look like they'll never catch up to the post-1980s synthetic and monolithic polish of their U.S. counterparts, the stress that travels with me in a surrounding cloud akin to Pigpen's dirt-halo blinds me to the impacted vent-grill dirt and narrow, elongated, fluorescently forlorn terminals that distinguish a 3rd-world airport from a Western one. Usually, at and within this insane reckless stage of my air-travel life, only one kind of sensory input penetrates those invisible body-hugging layers of anxiety over making the correct gate in time and confirming that I've run into the correct terminal; right, only one reality breaks through and registers with me: the outside air's vague but vital indication of whether the surly sun will take me down at last, the warning codes labeled in hues far less distinct and explicit than the coded colors of a pregnancy test but also far more reliable and threatening, the climatic and climactic airborne harbinger of a birth dark and poisonous for me and mine, displayed in avid reality up against the plate glass windows that any city's airport offers, regardless of the penury or opulence that characterizes the rest of the building. And so only an airport that dominated my pre-madness routines and memory as resoundingly as Denver's could jolt me into the dreamlike spiritual dissonance that I now feel in pursuing my anonymous lonely escape within an arena so intimate with my consciousness.

But of course nothing lends familiarity to a given locale as surely and effectively as the normally happy if tense possibility that you could very well encounter a friend or warm acquaintance. Even though
DIA lies about 500 miles away from my home in Cody, the airport's role as a connecting hub for that little town in northwest Wyoming gives rise to more such encounters than you might predict. And, right, don't such unanticipated reunions acquire an even more festive air just because of the very distance that makes them seem so odd at first? Shouldn't I feel the tribal fondness that marks the meeting of any two neighbors who stumble upon eachother while far from home? Well, I used to. Really. But not now. Not now when my positioning at a higher place on the standby list matters more to me than hunger, excretion, or love. Not when the face I apprehend suddenly belongs to Hal Underterran, a face more naked and nakedly importunate than ever before in its heat-seeking and heat-giving advance on my pleather Judas Chair, now that ten years have pulled his hairline much farther north and have left over his forehead just a few stubborn strands of the forelock that once bobbed in sweaty enthusiasm for Pohaska Mountain but now makes pointed knifelike jabs with every step in consonance with the icepick maneuvers of his attorney in the lawsuit that has been turning our bold original Western dream into a papered, paper-cut assault on friendship, on the principle of a peaceful retirement, on repose.

Hal's henchmen have been trying for months to serve me in person now that my lawyer found a way for me to dodge the procedural bullet. Under the law of any American state, a lawsuit defendant (me) can't be forced into the proceedings unless the plaintiff (Hal) serves him "properly". Since Wyoming law requires a lawsuit plaintiff (Hal) to serve the summons and complaint either in person or at the defendant's home or business, my absence from Pohaska and Cody since the commencement of my current photophobic journey has left Hal only with the trickier recourse of serving me at home or work. The only "work" I still perform consists of my erratic telecommuting discourses with my venture capital partners whose Boston and San Francisco offices would never qualify for Hal's purposes because not one square foot of either building has been assigned to me. That slick state of affairs has left Hal with only my domiciles, which my lawyer and I have quietly detached from my name through the postmodern art of trusts and false deeds. And so Hal has been forced into the desperate mission of trapping me in a public place should the opportunity ever arise, a goal whose achievement even he in his manic overconfidence must have realized would never arrive, even as he folded into his cracked brown leather jacket the shorter version of a summons and the summarized, abbreviated complaint that Wyoming law allows provisionally in place of the longer affair, and even as he transferred that dogeared bundle a few months later from his jacket to the lighter vest of khaki safari pockets that he wore in the warm season. I can't know for sure, but I'd bet he always kept his senses alert to the possibility of my presence, whether at indoor rodeo nights on Billings weekends or more recently at the party held at the Shoshone Ranch Lodge to celebrate the annual spring opening of Yellowstone's East Gate. Right, he must have been contributing far less to cocktail-fumed conversations that he once did and perhaps fumigated himself with those drinks far less than he used to just so that he could maintain his litigious vigilance. And so what execrable joy must now be filling him up behind the red-wrinkled frown with which he approaches me and under which he presses the now bedraggled mess of legalese against my chest with only the words "Get in touch with one of us soon" to serve as salutation and valediction both.


STATE OF WYOMING ) IN THE DISTRICT COURT
) ss
COUNTY OF ____Park____ ) ____1st____ JUDICIAL DISTRICT
Plaintiff:_______Henry E. Underterran__________,)
Civil Action Case No. ___61236___
vs. )
Defendant:__Tyranaeus L. Reins___

SUMMONS AND COMPLAINT
COMPLAINT
ACTION FOR DECLARATORY AND INJUNCTIVE RELIEF AND DAMAGES
Case No. CAC-01-61236


Alan P. Ellrey (Lic. #160029)
ELLREY LAW FIRM
1050 Yellowstone Dr.
Cody, WY 86540
Telephone: (307) 587-4250

Attorney for Plaintiff

)
)
COMPLAINT FOR DECLARATORY AND INJUNCTIVE RELIEF AND DAMAGES; VIOLATIONS OF WYOMING REAL PROPERTY CODE §§ 17200 ET SEQ., VIOLATIONS OF WATER USE ORDINANCE §§ 216.79 FOR PARK COUNTY, FRAUD, NEGLIGENT INFLICTION OF EMOTIONAL DISTRESS, BREACH OF CONTRACT

Plaintiff Henry Underterran brings this action on behalf of himself and in the interest of
the general public. The allegations pertaining to plaintiff are made upon personal knowledge, information and belief, and formed after an inquiry reasonable under the circumstances.

I. INTRODUCTION
1. This action arises from the Defendant's contractual relationship with the Plaintiff and from the Defendant's misuse of property in violation of the agreements formed in the course of that relationship. Plaintiff and Defendant agreed to buy a 20,000-acre parcel of land as tenants-in-common in August 1990. Under the terms of a written agreement signed by both parties at the time of that purchase, the parties agreed to share access to any BLM land that adjoins the tenancy and that either party leases, for any purpose, including the grazing of livestock, outfitting tours, and any hunting of in-season game by duly licensed hunters who pay consideration for enrollment in any such outfitting trip.

2. Another section of the parties' written agreement concerned the exercise of the defendant's riparian water rights…


And so on and so forth, a 43-page bitchfest of muted aspersions and restrained contempt when Hal really could have scribbled a two-page note in his inconsistently slanted but miraculously legible hand, a simple card that would serve the same purpose as the lawsuit: to decry and mourn my withdrawal of my friendship. But rich older fellows at the turn of this cellophaned-steel millennium don't write the dueling challenges that their landed forebears sent with seconds at the turn of two centuries prior or even the lace-wrapped and less directly menacing notes sent with messengers by the well-fed gilded human links in the non-genetic but rather socioeconomically evolutionary chain just one century ago. Our current gentry, rather, engage their enemies with legal papers, yeah? Subpoenas and summonses; interrogatories and notices, all under the pretense of a reluctant warrior who pours hell into his adversary's life not gleefully but only as a last resort to principles far higher than the apparent petulance of the written Complaint, right? When really every such lawsuit shares much more spirit and content in common with the most primal and unregulated of Bull Mastiff or pit-bull dogfights than with the vaunted legal stances of Noah Webster or the NAACP. So let's cut the shit, right? Yeah, he had acted pissed when I refused his Cody buddies hunting privileges, but even his rural Kentucky roots couldn't justify his professed rage, for while he loved reciting at Labor Day ranch-parties from his obviously botched memory of Robert Service's cowboy poems, frankly the convincingly leathern face and unruly tangle of manly white arm-hair concealed a hyper-aware consciousness that, like mine, absorbed encyclopedically all the Eastern sensitivities while we lived back there, including the 80s-era growing concern for animal habitats and food-chains. He never succeeded in fooling me like he fooled our initially skeptical Wyoming neighbors. I never duplicated Hal's game of pretending to be a Westerner, and in keeping with my proud individuality I did indeed break with the ostensibly noble but doubtfully proud Wyoming tradition whereby major ranch-owners allow entry to any hunter who has previously volunteered his help with haying or fencing or some such. I didn't take such an unpopular stance out of what Hal called effete Easternism but rather out of the private personal selfish drive to preserve the delicate psychic balance that would have rattled and fallen far sooner than it did had I ever during a serene trailride up the hillside above the Aspen line and sibilant creek happened upon a messy circle of blood and whatever other ghastly remains where the carcass of an elk or a deer or a wild ram had been hauled from its violent ruin between a sage clump and a limestone boulder. And, yes, I denied the ever-thirsty and gargling Hal the unfettered and partially redirected flow of water that he'd expected from that very same stream, but how could I possibly maintain the therapeutic necessity of that sibilance and the placid vision of the lake below if I drained the upper creek[11] to the depth of a silent current?

And so now that he has dropped his months-heavy single-spaced burden on me, the bull-chested and satyr-legged Hal must be hovering to my rear in DIA's millennial ambience of tempered steel rubbed in muted light, loitering by the pendant vintage bi-plane in a feigned nonchalance belied by the tense angle of his hunter's posture, waiting for me to board the Gate A7 flight for which I appear to be booked but that in reality keeps hovering just beyond my reach, out above a now smaller but no less frustrating handful of latecomer passengers who should just fucking give up the struggle to reach the airport in time and let me free to dodge the sun for another day. Yes, Hal is probably back there pacing in a strained orbit around the WWI Hellcat fighter-plane hanging in display at the round juncture of two terminals, hoping to see me hunch forward in forehead-gripping despair over the wrinkled doom of the legal papers. I can't grant him such an early victory but I surely do feel a nauseous weary chagrin in recounting mentally the many, many past opportunities when seemingly small gestures of neighborly friendship would have prevented this current mess: lonely nights when Kristina had brought the kids into town for a play date with the governor's grandchildren and when I therefore could easily have called Hal up for a few wine cellar toasts, Saturday afternoon Chief Joseph Scenic Highway motorcycle rides whose mountainview whiplash spiritual purification would only have been slightly diminished by Hal's presence, et cetera. But really when your psychic stasis relies on the most delicate of monetarily and sexually and medicinally spun spiderweb patterns, the slight deviations from the routines of one's personal peace-maintenance that Hal's companionship would bring pose a danger far more lethal than any annoyance to be experienced by sounder souls. And so I suppose I must endure the toll of lawsuits and still more effronteries if I wish to reconcile with happiness the neural dystrophy assigned me by God. And so Hal must pursue his hunt through my life as his lawyer sees fit.

Which thought reminds me of another papered matter awaiting my attention in the outer zip-pouch of my laptop briefcase:

borsodi, franklin, & greable, llp
202 Madison avenue
new york, N.Y. 10016
(212)686-7517
May 23, 2001


Mr. Tyranneaus Reins
269 RD 6FU
Wapiti, WY 86540


Dear Mr. Reins:

I hope that this letter finds you well. I am writing to inform you that your daughter Didi[12] has retained our firm to represent her in the matter of your estate. As I am sure you can appreciate, Didi is concerned about your wife Kristina's newly discovered intention to make New York your marital home once again, particularly since this state's estate laws favor a current wife much more dramatically than do Wyoming's. Although the law obviously allows a testator and his wife to move where they please, Didi understandably is worried that the imminent move indicates more general maneuvers on Kristina's part to secure the latter's financial advantage. Didi's concerns have only been exacerbated by the recent news that Kristina plans to have certain objects of your personal property (paintings, automobiles, first-edition books) transferred to her own name upon the move to New York. Since such maneuvering would obviously harm the interests that Didi has enjoyed for years and upon which she relies for her future well-being, our firm would like to meet with you as soon as possible to prevent any unnecessary legal developments.
Such a meeting is made even more imperative by two other recent and troubling reports. The first is that your other three grown children have begun legal proceedings to enjoin both your transfer of the personal property described above and your similarly inter vivos assignment of certain securities and financial interests to your wife. The second unsettling development is that your neighbor in Wyoming is apparently suing you under contract and property law. With your financial and familial affairs in such a state of evident uncertainty, now would be a good time to sit down with us and establish a plan whereby both your needs and Didi's may be satisfactorily met. Please call me at the number listed above so that we may schedule a meeting within the next month.

Respectfully,


Hillary Rye


During this wait for a miracle at Gate A7 I have been reading both these searing legal bulletins that perhaps surprisingly do shame me and a number of pulmonarily perfervid e-mails from young Nathan McKinley, not just diplomatic albeit breathless questions as to how an Easterner such as he should manage the 10,000 acres, three Reinses, 19 vehicles and eleven staff that Borsodi, Franklin, and Greable have no idea I've just left in his care but also his contrastingly calm responses to sections of this chapter of memoirs that I've been sending him in the form of page-length e-mail attachments, truncated according to the strict rhythm of one page per chapter regardless of the difficulty and confusion such sentence amputation must press upon the poor lad's mind. Here I've left him with problems probably far too varied and even too individually dramatic for the limits of his state university education, not because I necessarily believe in his ability to succeed in jigsawing the jagged and burning pieces of my life together in my absence but rather because his soft heart and utter innocence make him the only human I can trust in the overcrowded web of my familial social and professional spinneret lines: if my domestic and financial life back home should come acrumble, at least I'll know in my heart's chagrin-prone recesses that the fault lay in God's cruel will and not in the devious will of a smiling provocateur whom my better judgement should have eschewed at the outset. And so right during the maelstrom of legal disputes, property seizures, internecine aggression, and surrogate child-rearing into which I have cast Ingenuous Nathan and, right, in between his polite but urgent e-mailed requests for guidance in performing his magician-apprentice's tricks in grounding and taming that storm, he somehow shows the calm mental focus necessary to edit a madman's memoirs whose contents resemble much more the oral hieroglyphs of Evangelicals speaking in tongues during a spiritually passionate rolling roil on the linoleum of a corrugated steel warehouse church than the stately logical circumspective written presentation of my old public memoirist "chums" from the Nixon Administration. Yes, I envy Nathan's ability to find a lucid peace amid the bedlam: he's inoculated against cognitive dissonance.
OK, his primary criticism, of course, is my lack of clarity, and he wants me to spell out what he calls "indispensable facts", preferably in a "bulleted" format. I like the idea of sending a few bullets back away from life instead of always enduring them. The bullets I've witnessed only know one direction, right for my neural nexus. Nathan, I'm happy to oblige you, boy:

1. I've attained 71 years spent budding in the Midwest, blossoming in East Coast academe, venturing/acquiring/supplanting/selling all over the country, indulging in New York, and, as you have already seen, recuperating (and restoring?) in the West. I used to look like a young American god, but now I look like one of those lanky rich creeps you see cross-legged and lurking in a corner table at a Parisian café with no longer even the concern that the co-eds passing by will note his scanning eye on their asses: all the hairs that once bestrode my pate in a golden saunter must have transferred to my eyebrows nose and ears and, right, surely must have lost their matinée luster in the process; cheeks and eyelids that once rode high soft firm and buoyant on a wingtip-shape's perfect boneframe of a face now hang flaccid even during laughter in furrowed flapping abandonment. I've taken such pride in my preservation of a boarding school-era waistsize when really the flab has grown around that 30-inch marvel the way urban overdevelopment will grow up around a perfect and mowed but ever more beshadowed public park. Although my skeleton hasn't yet shrunk with the arched devolution to which so many elderly folk are subjected, I can no longer maintain the 90° relationship I clearly enjoyed with the earth for at least the span of the two photos that Andover published in an alumni magazine a few years back: the black-and-white shot of my Captain-year Andover football squad and the color one of my Iran/Contra-era smiles with Vice President Bush in his official residence's front hall. I slope, I hang, I slouch, I buckle, and the only two features that have stayed loyal since youth can be found in (a) my slightly protruding and wildly shifting but consistently agleam eyes, and (b) a mouth that that stands ever ajar in an arch of the lower lip and a benevolent sneer of the upper, continuously poised for mirth and volume.

2. I raised one family in the Midwest and abandoned it in its youth-sap prime. I've since started a second family in Wyoming whose current youth I'm trying desperately not to sap now that I have this second chance to do right.

3. If you didn't catch the message before, I'm bi-polar, one pole for each family, each wife, each half of the country, each of my two young kids, and each half of the globe: not the top and the bottom but the dark and the light. I've also been diagnosed (practically posthumously) with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. No one has diagnosed my photophobia but I'd like to do so now, and really if the preceding 34 pages of text and 65 kilobytes of memories near and far don't convince you, nothing will.

4. The medications don't always work, and I don't always take them.

5. The mailbox and fax machine belonging to my lawyer, a Wyoming ex-Governor's son, will soon foist upon him such a deluge of letterhead antipathy that his own political goals will seem easily attainable by comparison.

6. Before my Alaskan folly and at Boston's McLean Hospital during my last attempt at external treatment (instead of the self-arranged kind that my current airline perambulation constitutes), my psychotherapist "teammate" of my psychiatrist told me that to achieve psychic peace I must choose which family I would support and stay loyal to, that a man of my age and neurological makeup cannot possibly support two families emotionally and in any other way that will keep them both happy. I had to choose, I have to choose, I can't choose, and like Romeo I'm making of my day an artificial night, the tempered steel and plexiglass-sealed kind.


And Nathan, Claudia, and even Hal and Hillary: thank you all, yes, even you, Hal, for diverting me with your anxious missives and variably polite demands on my time, for your distractions have carried me through over and past two hours or so that would have otherwise plagued me with the worst blood flood flashes of anticipatory fear; and so as if those hours never happened and as if I never needed to worry about preserving my perpetual nighttime, the gold-hoop earringed and mousse-fry permed airline agent for Gate A7 calls out to me with the a report of this night's only evidence that the God I worshipped as a child, the One with whom I shared a self-effacing and warmly witty understanding for so many forward-looking years of youth, actually exists after all: "Yes, Mr. Reins, sir, yes, come forward, please Sir. Yes, a pilot who was scheduled to board this flight as a passenger has changed his plans, Sir. We have a seat for you, OK? You'll be arriving in Seattle in time for your 1:45 connection to Honolulu, OK?"
O.K.






[1] 2001
[2] 2000
[3] 2001
[4] 2001
[5] 1991
[6] 1992
[7] Bureau of Land Management, a federal agency that licks its ice cream on both ends of the cone: sequestering almost boundless land swaths on the same basis as National Park prerogatives but then leasing off parts to private ranchers for the extra cash, fuckers.
[8] 2001
[9] 2001
[10] 2001
[11] Called Breteché Creek by any outsider reading its name off the large glossy red county-by-county atlas sold in gas stations on the road between the airport and Yellowstone but pronounced "Britisher" and with a hard rrrr by all the proud native locals who sidestepped effete Easternism at every available opportunity and even created some otherwise unavailable opportunities to in order to demonstrate a deep anti-sophisticate aversion not feigned like Hal's but quite genuine, really.
[12] Whose wedding I skipped years back without justification.