PRISONER EXPRESS

Life, perceived with five senses, experienced and reduced, stowed on the filament of our memory, reviewed up the minds great Silver Screen. For me music is synonymous with trips. One song can flip a script into action and people and places become real as the day of the original production. With this, I would like to exemplify how music goes hand in hand with my favorite trip.

In my years of truck driving, there isn’t a whole lot of this country I ain’t seen. With the song, “Sunday in the South” I smell the smoke of Gettysburg. I heard the battle cries and I heard the last breaths of those that still die on a forgotten land.

Eighteen wheels pounded the pavement as I crossed the Alabama state line. It was a sweet home for Skynard and still is for the country group Alabama. The lights of the Big Apple seemed brighter with Hughie Lewis. No one can argue about how the “Moonlight Feels Right on the Chesapeake”. Out on the West Coast, the sound of the fifties are engrained in the free spirits of surfers, beach bunnies and “Hot Rod Hearts” One can’t travel with out the adventure being immortalized by music. Although I’ve hundreds of trips I often recall while donning a pair of headphones, the most memorable trip had to be in a place called Guadalupe State Park

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Just One Scene

Loaded with six gallons water and fanny packs full of granola bars and trail mix, we, my then wife Suzy, friend Roy and myself began trekking toward the base of Guadalupe Peak. This would be mine and Suzy’s 3rd try. The previous two attempts had been interrupted by severe weather. Of the four trails, we chose the next to hardest trail designed more for horse and mule than man. This tortuous nine point seven mile trail zigzagged to and from on the southeast slope then vanished around a cliff into Bear Canyon. This trail of 8,749 feet would take ten to twelve hours on ascent and a four hour descent without breaks. At the second mile mark we were standing about fifteen hundred feet, high enough that the three acre asphalt parking lot looked like a jigsaw puzzle piece. The barren Llano Estacado could be seen just beyond the mountain side. Straw mounds of bunch grass and assorted types of cactus pock-marked the stony slope. At a switchback curve we took a break. Ray fired up a doobie. John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High” seemed to echo off the mountain’s rocky side.

The trail seemed to go down as much as up. Sometimes I could reach out and touch the path we tracked. On entering Bear Canyon, a sense of universal awe set upon me. There at four thousand feet, the wind began to dive through the pass. A forest, once hidden to me, lay within the canyon. Pockets of snow in dark shadows remained untainted. At around seven thousand feet, the trail meandered through the wind gnarled cedar just above the pine tree’s line, rounding the passes inner wind polished wall, the mountain dropped out from below us, the wooden bridge filled the airy gulf. Small clouds drifted directly at us.

At eighty seven hundred feet, you find out just how small we really are, standing atop Guadalupe Peak looking straight down into the western canyon. Overwhelmed by the height, clouds drifted about the mountain, the earth below oblivious to them. Suzy and I looked at the sun above the next mountain range sixty miles away. Roy fired up a doobie. Drifting in smoke like the clouds around us, I recalled the verses of Denver’s Song, “He climbed Cathedral Mountain. He saw silver cloud’s below. He saw everything as far as he could see, and they say that he got crazy once and tried to touch the sun. He lost a friend, but retained their memory.” I could have reached out and touched the sun. Just a step of faith over that cliff. That was close I stood from eternity and Heaven’s Gate.

There is a metal box at the base of Airman’s monument. Inside this box is a register for all visitors to sign. Along with your name you can write a little thought, how you feel? What did you do when you stood on top of the world? Friends come and go. They aren’t mountains. How-be-it, the loss of a friend can be a mountain we cant’ get over. Roy was a friend in passing lost to a wind gone by. Suzy was my best friend. We are lucky if we find just one friend. So what do you do when you lose your best friend and have only memory? You climb a mountain, sign your name. Then go take that step of faith try to touch the sun. Music to life is life. A chronological rhythm of sights to our sounds.