A True-Enough Fable

The years since 1975 have been a very interesting time for me. The years, there must have been millions of them, grew part of me up and wore part of me down.

First, I got lost in the wilderness for what seemed like a thousand years or so. Then I found a spring on the side of a mountain. I think it must have been an enchanted spring. I drank deeply of the water from the spring, and at that very instant I met a lady who taught me how to speak a new language.

While I learned this new language, I hauled rocks. Every day I hauled several tons of rocks from the mountain, by hand and in my wheelbarrow, and piled them in a pile. After what seemed like several centuries, I had hauled away so many rocks that the mountain was no longer a mountain anymore, and my pile of rocks had become a new mountain.

Then I discovered a wild computer living at the top of this new mountain. It was afraid of me. I had to sneak up on it, because I knew it would run away if it saw me coming. I pretended that I didn’t see it. Every day, while I was piling the last few hundred tons of rocks near the top of the new mountain, I slowly worked my way closer. The computer just sat there and eyed me suspiciously. Finally I got close enough that I could lasso it. I used a lasso woven from strings of words from the new language I had finally learned to speak from the lady at the spring.

My newly-captured computer was afraid of me at first, but finally I made friends with it. Eventually it allowed me to ride it wherever I wanted to. The first place I wanted to ride to was Rimfire Territory.

It seemed like so long ago that I was there last. I remembered it well, but it felt like another lifetime. It was a magical place, I recalled, filled with spiny cactus and sacred blue mountains, howling coyotes, brimming irrigation ditches, orchards heavy with fruit, water rustlers and goat walkers, bosque river valleys, sunset mesas, sparkling canyon streams, old adobe houses, springtime dust storms, creaking windmills, bounding tumbleweeds, shooting stars and faraway galaxies, gardens fat with corn and cantaloupes, billions of creosote bushes from here past the horizon, coveys of quail scurrying under the mesquite bushes, cottonwood leaves dancing in the twisting wind, mystical moonrises, singing saltcedar trees, and wise healthy people who always seemed to give good advice. That was where I wanted to return to, and my computer took me there at the speed of light.

The instant I arrived in Rimfire Territory, I knew I was home again, and I felt a gratitude I had never felt before. Home! I had never quite known what home really was until I had left it and lost it and finally found my way back. I knew then that I would never have to leave home again.