A Calling Will Drown Everything Else Out

The wind rose, testing us with rain and severe winds. Dust blew as if from God’s hand scoring windows and choking birds. Something biblical was in the air and it made me think of a "religious experience" I had a decade earlier. I was supposed to be in Portland for two weeks but stayed for three months, the town got in my cells and I did what I could to stay. I was living out of a small, red suitcase that I had borrowed from my mother. During those three months I realized that I could be happy having very little: That suitcase. Some sort of pallet. A handful of books from second hand shops. Art supplies from the dollar store. I didn’t need a big place or furniture or an oversized television, I didn’t even have anything to watch movies on during those first months in Portland. Realizing how little I needed to be happy was huge, it’s a cliche but an apt one: It was like a religious experience, something powerful and freeing—and guiding.

In the end I was unable to get a job in 2012. I returned to California for several months of misadventures including being forced to sell my beloved, old Mercedes. I returned to Portland in February of 2013, the idea or ideal of a spartan sort of life still forefront in my mind, in my goals. I saved up and bought a dilapidated 1992 Ford conversion van. The plan was to spend half the year in Portland doing sustenance gigs and half the year down someplace like Tucson or Quartzsite living in the van full time. If I had enough to keep me happy in that carry on bag I could surely be happy in a seventy square foot van—

And then I met the woman who would become my second wife.

We needed to provide a home for Sophia’s teenaged daughter while she went to school and I was fine with that, I could do the stick and brick thing for four years. Sometimes Sophia seemed open to living a sort of piecemeal life on the road or maybe I forced myself to believe that because I loved her and the idea of losing her was unthinkable. The reality was that my wife needed a real home with walls, work that provided financial security, well furnished rooms—

And I was on another path. I had seen the light or at least the light I was supposed to follow and, as hard as I tried, I could not do the city life with the big mortgage and the long term career.

So, my marriage ended.

Looking back two years my wife and I divorced still made me sad but it had been inevitable. Ten years before I visited Douglas, I had fallen in love with a city with very different weather and had come to understand something about myself and the way I was supposed to spend however many years I had left. I fell in love with my wife and hopedl that depth of love could distract me from what has to be referred to as a calling, but callings are much stronger than we realize. I was trying to hold off a winter sea with a wall made of sand. I packed that sand down, packed it down as if my life depended on it—and nature still knocked it down and washed everything away.