The Same River Twice by Chris Offutt

ever been lost. He answered no, but that he’d once been bewildered for three days. I knew exactly how he felt.
    Buried beneath my sleeping bag lay dinosaur bones mixed with bison, antelope, and Sioux. The barometer of intelligence is the innate ability to adapt, to tame for the conqueror. Maybe wild and dead was better, like bison, Crazy Horse, and wolves. I watched the sky, wondering if I was living at the edge of adaptability, cherishing the residue of death.
    I thought of Bill’s belief that America’s greatest contributions to world culture came from the West.
    â€œThe all-night diner,” he’d said. “And the billboard. You can get coffee and talk at any time you want. The billboard always tells you where you are.”
    â€œTime and space. Cowboy science.”
    â€œThat’s what I like about you, Chris. You’re so damn dumb you don’t know you’re smart. Like Mr. Charles in the Nam.”
    He turned his head slightly away, enough so that I knew to avert my gaze. The tears were coming down his face. His breathing was normal and he didn’t sob. It was as if his head was so filled with sorrow that it had sprung a couple of leaks. When it passed he looked at me, his eyes hard and ancient as a trilobite’s. “The West wasn’t tamed,” he said. “It was corralled for slaughter.”
    I woke early and on the move, despising Nebraskans for their cultural politesse. A man couldn’t buy a pack of smokes without being offered a lighter, exhorted to have a good day, and in general made to feel inferior for not being aggressively cheerful enough. Nebraska was symmetric as an equation, the pathetic result of living on land emptied of buffalo. Prairie dog towns had been reduced to tourist attractions.
    I tarried hard in the West, eager to find a home. American boys are raised knowing that a horse between your legs and a low-slung pistol are a guarantee of manhood. It worked for Billy the Kid, who shot seventeen men in the back before he reached legal age. Montana was a beautiful state, but lacked employment. I met a guy with a graduate degree who felt lucky to have work mending fence. A waitress told me that if I planned to settle there, I should bring a woman with me. I was unable to find work in Wyoming either, which made me want to stay, believing that the citizens shared my propensity for freedom. The difference was that they had places to sleep. The people were open to strangers, perhaps because they saw so few. Instead of viewing me with eastern scorn or southern suspicion, they recognized me for what I was, more or less a damn fool.
    In Colorado I got a job chipping mortar from bricks with a hammer and chisel. I sat in the dirt beside a pile of brick, making a new pile in a primitive form of recycling. The wage was fourteen cents a brick. After two days of squatting in the sun, my hands ached from gripping the tools, and my fingers were scabbed from mislicks with the hammer.
    I collected my pay and moved south, crisscrossing the Continental Divide, trying to find the actual border. Rivers run east on one side, west on the other. My goal was to straddle it. Since we are three-quarters water, I figured that the simultaneous tow of both oceans would rip a hole in my soul for something worthwhile to enter. Black Elk said the central mountain is everywhere. From my vantage alone in the Rockies, centrality always seemed elsewhere. More and more, I depended on my journal. It was organic, I believed, even sentient. I came to regard the process of recording a lived life as the only material fit for writing. Somewhere in the Rockies, this shifted into a belief that the journal was my life, and the rest of existence only a fiction.
    After two days of walking south, I was lucky enough to catch a ride to Flagstaff, and from there found -a job washing dishes at the Grand Canyon. The administrative staff took my photograph and sent me to a lightless cabin with no water.